We Love Lucy: Brian McGilloway’s Lucy Black On BBC Radio 4

I’m reliably informed that BBC Radio 4 will be broadcasting a short story by Brian McGilloway next Friday, March 8th, at 3.45pm. It will feature DS Lucy Black, who first appeared in Brian’s standalone title LITTLE GIRL LOST, and the gist runs like this:

Three new short stories, specially commissioned by BBC Radio 4 to celebrate Derry~Londonderry’s status as UK City of Culture, from some of the city’s leading literary figures. Seamus Deane, Jennifer Johnston and Brian McGilloway each bring us a new short story, recorded in front of an audience in the city’s Verbal Arts Centre.

‘The Sacrifice’ by Brian McGilloway
Grianan of Aileach is a prehistoric ring fort sitting atop Grianan hill, barely ten miles from the centre of Derry~Londonderry, yet in a different jurisdiction, a few miles over the border in the Irish Republic. So when a dead body is discovered there, bruised and half-naked, DS Lucy Black is summoned over the border to investigate how it ended up in the middle of nowhere and why.

Writer
Brian McGilloway is author of the critically acclaimed Inspector Benedict Devlin series. He was born in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1974. After studying English at Queen’s University, Belfast, he took up a teaching position in St Columb’s College in Derry, where he is currently Head of English. His first novel, Borderlands, published by Macmillan New Writing, was shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger 2007 and was hailed by The Times as ‘one of (2007’s) most impressive debuts.’ Brian’s fifth novel, Little Girl Lost, which introduced a new series featuring DS Lucy Black, won the University of Ulster’s McCrea Literary Award in 2011. 2012 saw the paperback release of Little Girl Lost and the launch of the new Inspector Devlin mystery, The Nameless Dead.

  For all the details, and the audio of the story from Friday onwards, clickety-click here.

Review: THE NAMESAKE by Conor Fitzgerald

Commissario Alec Blume returns for a third time in Conor Fitzgerald’s THE NAMESAKE (Bloomsbury, £11.99). Blume is American-born, but has lived in Italy since his teens, which gives him an unusual take on the country: he retains his outsider’s eye for Italy’s beauty and foibles, while at the same time he is embedded enough to be fully aware of its social and cultural intricacies.
  The novel opens with the apparent kidnapping of a teenage girl, and Fitzgerald sets the tone with his very first line: ‘Before we begin,’ said the magistrate, ‘I want you all to know that there is no chance of a happy ending to this story.’
  Shortly afterwards, an insurance agent is found murdered - an insurance agent who has the great misfortune to have the same name as a magistrate who is investigating a high-ranking member of the Ndrangheta, or Calabrian mafia.
  Blume’s own investigations into the case, alongside his subordinate and lover, Caterina, are hampered when he is contacted by one of the many shadowy Italian secret service agencies. It appears that the Ndrangheta is investigating Agazio Curmaci, a Calabrian operating in Germany, and is doing so in tandem with the German secret service. Blume is asked to travel to the south of Italy with a rogue Italian agent who is tracking Curmaci, and who may well be intent on personal vengeance.
  THE NAMESAKE is as much an exploration of the social, cultural and political factors that led to the rise of the Ndrangheta as it is a conventional police procedural, and it is dense with detail about an organisation that is far more secretive than the mafia, yet has vast power and reach. For example, the book suggests that in 2008, when the credit crunch struck Italy with surprising speed, it was to the cash-based organisation the Ndrangheta that the authorities turned for the liquidity required to keep the economy on an even keel.
  There’s a playful quality to the form of this novel, as evolves from a police procedural into something of a spy novel when Blume joins an undercover agent as he penetrates the Calabrian heartland. This may well offend those crime and mystery purists who don’t believe in genre cross-fertilisation, but it works very well in context, particularly as Blume himself is very much a secretive, taciturn and self-possessed operator.
  Exquisitely written in a quietly elegant style, and dotted with nuggets of coal-black humour, THE NAMESAKE is a bold blend of genre conventions that confirms Fitzgerald’s growing reputation as an author whose novels comfortably straddle the increasingly fine line between crime and literary fiction. - Declan Burke

When In Rome, Change Your Name

An Editor Writes: Conor Fitzgerald’s THE NAMESAKE arrived in the post yesterday, which got me all fired up to write a post about it - and then I realised I already had, last November. Bummer. Oh well, I guess I can take the day off now, and go lounge in my gold-plated hammock with the diamond-encrusted hookah …

It’s only November, but already 2012 is shaping up to be yet another very fine year in Irish crime writing. I’ve already noted that Adrian McKinty’s latest, THE COLD COLD GROUND will be published in January, with Brian O’Connor’s MENACES to follow in February.
  One novel I’m particularly looking forward to is Conor Fitzgerald’s third offering, THE NAMESAKE, which is due in March. Quoth the blurb elves:

When magistrate Matteo Arconti’s namesake, an insurance man from Milan, is found dead outside the court buildings in Piazzo Clodio, it’s a clear warning to the authorities in Rome - a message of defiance and intimidation. Commissioner Alec Blume, interpreting the reference to his other ongoing case - a frustrating one in which he’s so far been unable to pin murder on a mafia boss operating at an untouchable distance in Germany - knows he’s too close to it. Handing control of the investigation to now live-in and not-so-secret partner Caterina Mattiola, Blume takes a back seat. And while Caterina embarks on questioning the Milanese widow, Blume has had an underhand idea of his own to lure the arrogant mafioso out of his hiding place ...

  I’ve been a fan of Conor Fitzgerald since his first outing, THE DOGS OF ROME, and I thought that the follow-up, THE FATAL TOUCH, was sufficiently good to propel him to the first rank of crime writing, Irish or otherwise - if memory serves, I was moved to compare that novel with John Banville’s THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE. If THE NAMESAKE represents a similar improvement on THE FATAL TOUCH, then God help us all …
  Incidentally, it’s interesting that Fitzgerald, who writes under a pseudonym, and is the son of noted Irish poet Seamus Deane, is here playing with notions of identity, and the truth (or otherwise) of names. Post-modern meta-fiction flummery, or simple coincidence? You - yes, YOU! - decide …

A Blume By Any Other Name

I was mightily impressed with Conor Fitzgerald’s debut, THE DOGS OF ROME, when it appeared last year. Domiciled in Rome for the past few decades, Fitzgerald writes about Commissario Alec Blume, an American-born, Rome-based police detective who has the insider’s track on Italian crime and an outsider’s eye for the good, bad and ugly in Italian life. A terrific thriller, THE DOGS OF ROME was notable for the elegance of its language, so it wasn’t a huge surprise to learn that Conor Fitzgerald is a pseudonym for Conor Deane, who is the son of the noted Irish poet, Seamus Deane.

  THE DOGS OF ROME, by the way, was last week shortlisted for a John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger by the Crime Writers’ Association.

  I sat down with Conor Fitzgerald a few weeks ago to interview him for the Sunday Independent, this to mark the publication of the second Alec Blume novel, THE FATAL TOUCH, and a very pleasant couple of hours it proved too. First let me say that, as fine a novel as THE DOGS OF ROME is, THE FATAL TOUCH represents something of a leap forward for Fitzgerald, even if it is only his second offering. My review of it is here, with the gist running thusly:

“Beautifully written, the story proceeds at a stately pace which disguises an exquisitely complex plot, as Blume delicately negotiates the labyrinth that is Roman policing. Fitzgerald has an elegant, spare style that straddles both the literary and crime genres, and the style is perfectly pitched to reflect Blume’s own world-weariness.”

  Marilyn Stasio, writing in the New York Times, liked it too; clickety-click here for more …

  Anyway, what was particularly interesting about the interview, for me at least, was Conor Fitzgerald’s comment on how his writing career was influenced by his father, the poet - although not necessarily in the way you might expect. To wit:

“My father’s an extremely clever man, he really is,” says Conor, “but at some stage in his life he decided that the only things that were really interesting were detective novels and football […] In the pre-Amazon days, he used to send me books in the post. With poetry, for example, he’d always say, ‘This guy is very good, but ...’ and he’d make some observation, which could be political, or academic, literary, or simply in bad taste. With the crime novels, he’d just say, ‘This is brilliant’.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

The Jury Remains Out: CAL by Bernard MacLaverty

Acclaimed as literary novels, they are steeped in crime – but is it kosher to call them Irish crime fiction novels? YOU decide! Or, y’know, don’t! This week: CAL by Bernard MacLaverty

“Cal’s mother died when he was a child and he and his father, who works in the local abattoir, are under threat to get out from Loyalists who are itching to coin the phrase ethnic cleansing a decade or so early … What lifts CAL above its almost satirically grim subject matter is MacLaverty’s deliciously precise detailing and his dedication to his main character … not the least pleasure of reading it is to rediscover in Bernard MacLaverty another Northern Irish writer who can stand toe to toe with the rest of them, and with the great Brian Moore in particular.” John Self, Asylum

Comedy and humour are not among the stylistic features one would readily associate with Bernard MacLaverty’s works. CAL, for instance, his most famous book (which was also successfully filmed), is a haunting study of a nineteen-year-old Catholic in the midst of the Northern Irish Troubles and his desperate attempt to break away from this violent background—an attempt doomed to failure. On the surface, his writing seems a brilliant example of Seamus Deane’s hyperbolical dictum: “If there is anything more depressing than Ulster fact it must be Ulster fiction.” – International Fiction Review