The Other Marian Mysteries

So there I was last week scribbling about how this is a strange but fascinating time for Irish crime fiction, and I didn’t know the half of it. For lo! Word filters through that Marian Keyes, the runaway bestseller of women’s fiction and most recently the author of the wonderfully titled how-to book SAVED BY CAKE, will publish a private eye novel next month, THE MYSTERY OF MERCY CLOSE. Quoth the blurb elves:

Helen Walsh doesn’t believe in fear - it’s just a thing invented by men to get all the money and good jobs - and yet she’s sinking. Her work as a Private Investigator has dried up, her flat has been repossessed and now some old demons have resurfaced. Not least in the form of her charming but dodgy ex-boyfriend Jay Parker, who shows up with a missing persons case. Money is tight and Jay is awash with cash, so Helen is forced to take on the task of finding Wayne Diffney, the ‘Wacky One’ from boyband Laddz. Things ended messily with Jay. And she’s never going back there. Besides, she has a new boyfriend now, the very sexy detective Artie Devlin and it’s all going well. But the reappearance of Jay is stirring up all kinds of stuff she thought she’d left behind. Playing by her own rules, Helen is drawn into a dark and glamorous world, where her worst enemy is her own head and where increasingly the only person she feels connected to is Wayne, a man she’s never even met. Utterly compelling, moving and very very funny, THE MYSTERY OF MERCY CLOSE is unlike any novel you’ve ever read and Helen Walsh - courageous, vulnerable and wasp-tongued - is the perfect heroine for our times.

  So there you have it, folks. Is Marian Keyes about to become the Irish equivalent of Stieg Larsson and drag the rest of the Irish crime writers kicking, screaming and spitting cake-crumbs into the publishing stratosphere? Only time, that canary-type stool-pigeon, will tell …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (18s)
David Fincher has directed some very good crime films during his distinguished career, including Se7en (1995) and Zodiac (2007), but it’s unlikely The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (18s) will feature on a show-reel of his finest moments when the Academy finally gets around to presenting him with a lifetime achievement award. A remake of the Swedish film of the same name from 2009, and remarkably faithful to both it and the Stieg Larsson novel that serves as its source material, the story finds disgraced journalist Mikael Blomqvist (Daniel Craig) commissioned by a wealthy industrialist, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), to investigate the disappearance of the man’s niece some forty years previously. Blomqvist is aided in his search by Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), an unorthodox investigator who specialises in computer hacking. The fatal flaw in the film, however, is that while Salander is by some distance the most original element of the tale, the story doesn’t actually require her presence in order for Blomqvist to solve the mystery. Meanwhile, her originality should not be confused with plausibility: shockingly rebellious, and with good reason, Salander’s memorable physical appearance is the antithesis of the successful investigator’s ability to blend in to the point of invisibility. Moreover, a crucial plot twist, in which she meekly submits to a sexual predator and so sets in train most of the secondary plot, is entirely out of character. That said, Mara is bracingly forthright as the unlovable Salander, and Craig puts in a solid if largely unmemorable performance. Fincher crafts a handsome-looking film which offers a beautifully bleak Sweden, and presents us with a formidable cast (Robin Wright, Stellan Skarsgaard, Steven Berkoff and Joely Richardson all have meaty roles), but ultimately the story, which is essentially a creaking old Agatha Christie-style ‘locked-room’ mystery, defeats even this most inventive and idiosyncratic of auteur directors. - Declan Burke

  This review first appeared in the Irish Examiner.

The Gospel According To Marklund

I had an interview with Liza Marklund (right) published in the Sunday Business Post last weekend, and a very enjoyable interview it was to do, too. Marklund, who is a journalist and filmmaker, and goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, as well as being a novelist, is a very savvy media operator, and knows how to spin a very quotable story, and she was very personable company to boot. Anyway, the opening runs thusly:

It’s becoming a bad joke. Virtually every Scandinavian writer who emerges onto the international stage is immediately branded the new Stieg Larsson, with cover stickers on their books to prove it. Liza Marklund, author of the Annika Bengtzon series of novels, is delighted by the comparison.

  “I love Stieg’s books,” Marklund says. “I didn’t know him, but we’re both from the north of Sweden, and we covered the same topics and our heroines are quite similar: larger-than-life, obnoxious women. But I’m so grateful that he wrote those books, and the success they’ve had is phenomenal.” She glances skywards. “So thank you, Stieg.”

  Marklund, at least, has earned the comparison. Bengtzon is a blend of Larsson’s most famous characters, the feisty heroine Lisbeth Salander and the crusading journalist Mikael Blomqvist, and Marklund’s persistent theme is also violence against women (the original Swedish title of Larsson’s THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO was MEN WHO HATE WOMEN).

  However, her Bengtzon novels represent neither homage nor copycat cash-in. The first story, THE BOMBER, was first published in 1998, and four more Bengtzon novels arrived before Larsson’s debut appeared in 2005 …

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

A Very Black Hole

I met with Jo Nesbo (right) last month, to interview him on the publication of the latest Harry Hole novel, THE LEOPARD. The result read a lot like this:

The cover of THE LEOPARD, the eighth in Jo Nesbo’s series of Harry Hole novels, bears a sticker saying, ‘The next Stieg Larsson’. This is not something that has Nesbo, a Norwegian, jumping for joy.
  “I guess every writer doesn’t want to be compared other writers,” he shrugs, “and it’s not like I’m enthusiastic about it. I’m thinking okay, you want to use that sticker, it probably could have been worse. It could have been ‘The next Dan Brown’ (laughs).”
  When we meet in the plush surroundings of the Westbury Hotel, Nesbo appears to have little in common with his most famous creation. Harry Hole is a morose character, a hard-drinking loner and a self-destructive detective with the Oslo Crime Squad who pursues and is pursued by demons in equal measure. Nesbo, on the other hand, is a lively interviewee, outgoing and articulate.
  Both men, however, share a fascination with evil.
  “I remember when I was going to school,” he says, “and there was this guy who sat in the window row. And he would catch flies on the window-sill, and he had brought a tweezers, and he would pull off one wing and two feet, something like that. And part of me, as kids always are, was fascinated as to what would happen to the fly, but what made me more fascinated was that this guy would do this thing day in, day out, and that he had brought the tweezers. Just the idea of him being at home in the morning, planning it - ‘Oh, I’ll bring a tweezers, so I can torture a fly.’ I thought that was really evil. And I wondered, could that be me? Or is this kid just a mean character, and I could never be anything like that? Or is it just coincidence that he’s killing flies and I’m not? Has it to do with upbringing? Are you born that way? And that’s really what I’m writing about - those kind of people. Why do they do it? What’s in it for them?”
  As a boy, Nesbo had a very catholic taste in literature.
  “From a very young age, it was Mark Twain, when I read TOM SAWYER. And later, Charles Dickens, who I only started reading some years ago, but I had OLIVER TWIST read to me when I was young. Later on it would be Norwegian writers like Knut Hamsun, and then some American writers, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, the Beatnik generation … Ernest Hemingway was a big influence. And a lot of Norwegian writers (laughs) that you probably haven’t heard about.
  “My mother was a librarian, so she would bring books home. My father was also a keen reader, so there would always be lots of books around where I grew up. And later on, many of my friends would be planning to become the next big European writer. So we would gather in this café, dressed in the long coats we had bought from the Salvation Army, and sucking in our cheeks to look hungry (laughs), and discuss literature. Dostoevsky and Hamsun, y’know, although we hadn’t actually read them … But I think that milieu at the café probably stopped me from starting on my first novel, because all my friends started, and they would brag about it, but they would never get around to actually doing it. They all had writers’ block at the age of 19. So maybe all that discussion about literature put me off from sitting down to do it, because you couldn’t bear failure. And I can still see that in my friends, that the fear of failing is probably greater than the eagerness to succeed, because it means so much to them.”
  Oddly, for a writer who is so closely identified with Norway, Nesbo’s first two novels were set on the other side of the planet.
  “The first one, THE BAT MAN, is set in Australia because I was going to Australia for five weeks, and I just needed a backdrop for the story. So I took Harry Hole to Sydney, and I was doing research while I was writing. Actually, I didn’t see much of Australia (laughs), I spent most of the time in a small hotel room in Sydney, in a red-light district, just running out to grab a meal and then back to the room to write. It was that and visits to the museum, where I collected aboriginal tales, that was also some of the backdrop to the novel.
  “For my second novel … I’d also read Ray Bradbury, the science-fiction writer, when I was young. I really liked his stories set on Mars, this red desert that had been colonised, so it was really familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. And I liked the idea that he could create a place where nobody had been before, and was completely his own universe. So I thought, is there a city in the world that has that quality, we know it’s there and we have some general ideas about it, but we don’t really know it, and to me that city was Bangkok. So I went to Bangkok and stayed there for two months, and that’s where the second novel is set.
  “But then, for my third novel, I knew I was going to write the novel that my father never got around to writing. And that was about his war-time experiences, in THE REDBREAST, which is very much a novel about Norwegian society and the formation of a young nation. I mean, Norway won its independence only in 1905, and so it’s always been very important to the Norwegian self-image of the idea of Norway resisting the German occupation during the war. Which I understood, from my father’s side of the story, was only part of the story about that period.”
  The nature of good and evil isn’t just a concept for Nesbo. THE REDBREAST features the stories his own father told him of fighting for the Germans who occupied Norway during WWII. Was it difficult to write about such a personally painful episode?
  “In a way it was easy,” he says after a lengthy pause, “because I had lived with these stories for so long. Actually, some of the stories, the ones that sound the most fantastic, they’re actually just my father’s stories. The bigger story, which was about how a young man living in Norway at that time could choose to fight for Hitler … I mean, I didn’t know about my father fighting for the Germans until I was 16. I’d grown up with the same view as everyone of those, y’know, evil Nazis from hell, but then I had to imagine my father … Just the image of him wearing that German helmet, y’know? It was a shock to me. But at the time, the way they saw Europe, the old democracies were bankrupt, and it seemed like the ‘strong men’ of Europe at that time were Hitler and Stalin. So you had to make a choice between Germany and Russia, and my father decided to go with Hitler rather than Stalin.
  “But what I tried to do when I wrote THE REDBREAST,” he insists, “was to not make it simple, to say that everyone who fought the Germans were the good guys, and that none of them had a motive for, say, receiving favours for fighting alongside the Germans. Because that brings a greater complexity than the stories we grew up with when I was young, about the few ‘bad apples’ collaborating with the Germans.”
  By comparison with Nesbo’s previous novels, THE LEOPARD is more complex offering that engages with Norwegian society on a number of levels. Was that a deliberate approach, or was it simply what the story required?
  “It’s always about the story. I don’t have any other agenda than the story. Writing about Norwegian society … If it helps the story, I’ll use it. But my focus is always on the story and the characters. I mean, I spend quite a lot of time working with plot, and I love that, but the difficult part for me, and the part which has to be right, is the characters. Especially the motive of the killer. That’s the most difficult thing, to make it credible that a person has motive enough to kill somebody. I find that hard. I have to believe in my characters, and I have to believe in their motives logically, that this person would kill another person because it adds up, but it has to add up emotionally too. And that’s hard, because killing is such an extreme act. And what happens in a lot of stories, you tend you end up with serial killers who kill just because they’re mad, y’know?”
  A best-selling crime author and excavator of the darkest aspects of the human psyche, Nesbo is equally proud of his children’s novels, the latest of which was awarded the 2010 Norwegian Critics’ Prize for Literature for Best Children’s Book only last week.
  “It’s more fun,” he says of the ‘Doctor Proctor’ series. “In many ways, I find more pleasure in writing children’s books. It’s still hard work, but I feel better at the end of the day, when I go to sleep, having worked on my children’s books. The crime novels go more into a dark universe, so it’s place that … well, I have to take breaks from Harry Hole, and that’s one of the reasons why I write children’s books as well as adult novels, or novels for adults …’ He grins. “I guess, ‘adult novels’, that would be a sex story, right?” He shakes his head. “The English language, it’s hard to master.”

  Jo Nesbo’s THE LEOPARD is published by Harvill Secker.

  This interview first appeared in the Evening Herald.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Ruby Barnes

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO by Stieg Larsson, of course. Money, money, money. Except I don’t want to be dead, so any of Colin Bateman because I love his combination of crime and absurd humour. I’ll pick DIVORCING JACK because that’s the first time I discovered him. Or there’s THE BROKEN SHORE by Peter Temple for its great Aussie tones. I’d like to have written them all. Ken Bruen. Help! I’m a compulsive reader.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
That’s more straightforward. Without hesitation, Thomas Covenant, White Gold Wielder. He’s the impotent leper with reluctant magic powers from THE CHRONICLES OF THOMAS COVENANT THE UNBELIEVER by Stephen Donaldson. I chose white gold for my (first) wedding band in the belief that I might follow in his steps and walked my golden retriever under the Sun of Pestilence. Wow, that’s opened up a whole fantasy reading history that I’d completely forgotten about. How much am I paying for this therapy session?

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
My indulgence reading is the macabre, the grotesque. Patrick McGrath’s SPIDER and his THE GROTESQUE, Patrick Susskind’s PERFUME, Patrick McCabe’s THE BUTCHER BOY and his WINTERWOOD. Anything by blokes named Patrick.

Most satisfying writing moment?
That was during Christmas 2010. I had worried about how I could feed the monster whilst crowded by family and managed to ring-fence a couple of hours per day. A chapter of my current project emerged and I knew as the words appeared on the screen that it was something special. Two escaped lunatics making love in a castle ruin. The first group review of 2011 and the stunned silence of the members had me close to tears. They hated it! Then they began to applaud. I’m tearful at the memory. Pretentious, moi?

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Actually, I’m not a huge crime reader as my tastes are cross-genre. If I have to give an answer then THE MAGDALENE MARTYRS by Ken Bruen was my first discovery of his writing and I’ll put my honest vote on that one for now.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I’m not a movie buff and don’t usually do that see the film of the book thing. THE GROTESQUE by Patrick McGrath but wasn’t that done with Sting and it isn’t really crime. Haven’t seen it.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The best thing about being a writer is the purpose that it adds to life. It’s a purpose and a goal that you, as author, don’t explicitly know is missing until you embark upon the journey. I felt the same way when my daughter was born. Until then I had been hollow, a shell of a man passing through life, picking up the trappings of society and treading the mill towards an uncertain end. Her coming into being put sense and meaning into everything and helped me fill the emptiness. Writing is a constant articulation of hopes, lusts, loves, fears and fantasies. It feels like a vocation. Where’s my wimple? The worst thing about being a writer is that it can consume you. Sacrifices have to be made, threatening the balance of work, family and guitar playing. Self-doubt and its shadowland colleagues of luck and fate threaten to mock your endeavours as futile. The support structure needed to write well, continuously and successfully has to be embedded in and wedded to all that you hold dear, otherwise terrible choices threaten. Not feeling good now. I need a mug of tea.

The pitch for your next book is …?
THE BAPTIST is my next project and I’m about two thirds through. It’s mostly delivered first person: a serial killer driven by deluded religious zeal. As with PERIL, Detective Inspector Andy McAuliffe is in pursuit of the perpetrator. Here’s the pitch from John Baptist himself:

To deliberately drown your brother in a bathtub is a terrible, if clean, thing. Might it not be excused, if he’s the manifest son of Satan? But that wasn’t the view of the Authorities, when they committed me to Fairfield Mental Institution. I didn’t appreciate the drug-induced fat suit, but it wasn’t all bad; they let me keep my hair long and I met Dirty Mary. We loved, we lost and left. Thank God for Care in the Community. I don’t think Joe McCarthy would agree with that last sentiment; stoned to a watery death when the devil’s mock sun blazed red upon his head. But the last prophet must wander, cleanse. I am not the One. I am merely sent to prepare a way for the One. I am The Baptist.

Who are you reading right now?
A bit of classical fiction: BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh. I developed a taste for the classic several years ago whilst in-between jobs and it’s good to savour from time to time. Like Marmite.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
He’s a cruel and vengeful God, offering such black and white choices. I would rather make offerings to a grey-scale God. Very well. I choose to write as in writing I experience all the emotions of the character when they first commit their evil deeds, have their wicked ways, are surprised to find love and lust and ultimately endure their fate. I get from writing what I get from reading.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Volatile, surprising, satisfying.

Ruby Barnes’ PERIL is available as an ebook via Amazon UK and Amazon US.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE LEOPARD by Jo Nesbo

Suffering the professional fall-out from his last case, when he tracked down the serial killer known as the Snowman at great personal cost, Oslo Crime Squad detective Harry Hole has absconded to Hong Kong, there to wallow in the squalor of an opium haze. When fellow Crime Squad detective Kaja Solness finally tracks him down, she has bad news: not only is Harry’s aged father dying, but another serial killer appears to be at large in Norway. Can Harry find it within himself to rise to the occasion once more?
  THE LEOPARD is the eighth of Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole novels, and the first thing to be said about it is that it’s a very big book indeed. At 624 pages it’s rather more than a door-stop; it’s a small suitcase, and will account for most of your carry-on luggage should you decide to take it away on holidays for a beach read.
  If you do take it away, it’ll make for a very good beach read indeed, albeit a rather dark one. Nesbo sets up THE LEOPARD in the initial stages as a conventional serial killer novel, with Hole in pursuit of a particularly fiendish murderer. Indeed, there’s a quasi-gothic feel to the opening section, in which the opium-raddled Hole (shades of Sherlock Holmes) investigates murders which have been enacted by a device called a ‘Leopold’s apple’, which originated in the colonial days of the Belgian Congo. A metal ‘apple’ is placed in the victim’s mouth; when a string is pulled, 24 spikes shoot out of the ‘apple’ and into the victim’s head. Death isn’t necessarily instantaneous; one of the victims, for example, drowns while choking on her own blood.
  There’s a disjointed feel to the opening 100 pages or so, as Nesbo re-establishes Hole in Oslo. This is in part because there’s a political aspect to the novel, as the very existence of the Crime Squad is threatened by Kripos, led by Mikael Bellman. Bellman, for reasons not fully explained, wants Kripos to take over all the murder cases in Norway, and Bellman becomes as much of a nemesis to Harry as the killer he is investigating.
  Another reason for the stop-start momentum in the early stages is Nesbo’s insistence on mythologising Harry. Hole is already a legend in Norwegian policing, the man who brought down the terrifying Snowman, along with other high profile criminals, as established in previous novels. To a large extent, Hole is a conventional protagonist in the police procedural sub-genre: a loner, a rebel against the system, a hard-drinking addict to justice for its own sake, a man wounded by life and carrying a torch for a lost love, a man not noticeably handsome yet irresistible to women. On page 91, for example, the world-weary Harry finds himself attracted to his co-worker, Kaja Solness:

It was pathetic, but his heart had been beating a bit faster while he waited for her. Fifteen years ago that would have annoyed him, but he had resigned himself and accepted the banal fact that a woman’s beauty would always have this modicum of power over him.

  There’s something irritatingly trite, almost adolescent, about Nesbo’s insistence that one of the fundamental drives of any man should be ‘banal’, and that beauty has only a ‘modicum of power’ over him. Harry believes he should be above what he perceives as the petty messiness of life and love; Nesbo wants us to believe that Harry is a kind of super-man. Again, on page 63:

Harry jumped up so quickly he went dizzy, grabbed the file, knew it was too thick, but still managed to tear it in two.

  Another aspect of the early stages of the novel that’s a little hard to swallow is Harry’s relationship with Katrine Bratt, a former fellow police detective with Crime Squad, now in a mental institution after her brush with the Snowman in Nesbo’s previous novel. Naturally, there is a sexual attraction; what’s less convincing is that the recovering Bratt proves to be something of a whizz at uncovering essential information on the internet whenever Nesbo needs the plot to move forward, despite the fact that she can only access a communal computer in the mental institution’s day-room.
  Once the novel settles into its stride, however, and providing you’re happy to accept Harry’s high-falutin’ notions of himself, THE LEOPARD quickly becomes an enjoyable sprawling epic. It’s a globe-trotting tale too, moving from Hong Kong to Norway and on to the Congo and Rwanda, although most of the action and investigation takes place in Norway. Nesbo delights in unleashing a whole shoal of red herrings, although to be fair he does put the reader on high alert from the early stages, when a character we believe to be a sinister sociopath, and possibly a killer, turns out to be a victim. From that point on it’s wise to take nothing for granted, and Nesbo even goes so far as to have the great Harry himself deceived on a number of occasions.
  It’s to Nesbo’s credit that THE LEOPARD is a hugely ambitious novel; given his success to date (five million books sold, and counting), the easy option would have been to simply repeat his formula. Yet THE LEOPARD offers much more than the conventional police procedural; while the investigation itself is realistically pain-staking, and subject to a number of reverses, there are other dimensions to the story, such as Harry’s relationship with his dying father. That relationship, almost inevitably, given Hole’s persona, is characterised by conflict, but it also adds a poignant touch that at times borders on the sentimental, and provides a neat counterpoint to the rigidly professional way Harry goes about his investigation.
  His relationship with Kaja Solness offers another aspect, although this one is less convincing. Solness is hauntingly beautiful, as fictional policewomen tend to be, and is an interesting character in her own right, given that her own motives and ambitions don’t always chime with Harry’s. It’s probably not giving away too much to reveal that Harry and Kaja are drawn to one another, and the conventions of the novel almost demand it; that said, their attraction, when it finally blossoms into the white-heat of lust, becomes too emotionally intimate and profound to be convincing. Again, there’s the sense that Nesbo is shoe-horning his characters into a particular situation in order to move the plot along.
  That said, THE LEOPARD is largely an enjoyable read. Harry eventually exerts the gravity of a black hole, providing you’re willing to play along with his self-reverential opinion of himself; the characters are for the most part well drawn and fully fleshed, although Harry’s policeman nemesis, Mikael Bellman, is a little too crudely constructed, being a philanderer and potential if not actual sexual deviant, and a man willing to betray all and sundry in order to further his career. Meanwhile, large chunks of the novel take place in the ‘wastelands’ of northern Norway, a virtually lawless place reminiscent of the old Wild West, and Nesbo’s descriptions of the physical landscape are brilliant at communicating their bleak, haunting beauty.
  The cover of THE LEOPARD comes complete with a stamp declaring Nesbo ‘the next Stieg Larsson’, a statement that may well be true in terms of Nesbo’s future popularity, although even the most casual reading will confirm that Nesbo is by far the superior writer. THE LEOPARD is easily as complex and ambitious a novel as any of Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, but it’s a much more enjoyable read, not least, I suspect, because of the excellent work by Don Bartlett, a regular translator of Nesbo’s work novels. Personally, I preferred THE SNOWMAN, Nesbo’s previous offering, on the basis that it was tauter and more streamlined, but there’s no doubt that fans of Stieg Larsson will find plenty to enjoy here. - Declan Burke

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: 1222 by Anne Holt

A train crash high in the Norwegian mountains leaves the train driver dead and the passengers marooned in the small village of Finse, 1222 metres above sea level and accessible only by rail. One of the passengers is Hanne Wilhelmsen, a former policewoman who retired four years previously, after a bullet severed her spinal cord, and is now confined to a wheelchair. A worsening blizzard means that immediate rescue is out of the question for the passengers, but events take a lethal turn when a charismatic priest, Cato Hammer, is shot dead on their first night in the hotel. A second murder, of Hammer’s close associate, quickly follows. Can Hanne Wilhelmsen discover who the murderer is? And who are the mysterious men in black who have barricaded themselves into the hotel’s upper floors?
  Anne Holt has been described as ‘the next Stieg Larsson’, which appears to be a label attached to every Scandinavian crime writer these days. She probably has a very good chance of becoming the next Stieg Larsson, not least because her publishers are putting a huge push behind this novel, with further translations to arrive in 2011. Holt not only has eight novels in the Hanne Wilhelmsen series behind her, she also has a second series, the Vik / Stubo series, of which there have been four novels to date (latest one published in 2009).
  Holt has an insider’s eye for issues of crime and punishment. She worked with the Oslo Police Force from 1988 to 1990, which earned her the right to practice as a lawyer. She started her own law practice in 1994. She served as Minister for Justice from November 1996 until February 1997, a very short period which was ended by illness.
  I was initially sceptical about 1222, as it seemed to me to be very derivative. The fact that Hanne is confined to a wheelchair should make her a fascinating character, as she must depend on her cerebral rather than physical efforts in order to impose herself on the situation in which she finds herself. Unfortunately, the character reminded me very much of Ironside, a wheelchair-bound Chief of Detectives who featured in a TV series starring Raymond Burr which ran in the US from 1967 to 1975.
  It’s also true that Hanne isn’t the most empathic character I’ve ever read. A reclusive character, she neither seeks nor celebrates human contact other than that of her lesbian partner Nefis and her beloved daughter Ida. In fact, she actively rebuffs people’s attempts to get to know her, and has withdrawn into herself ever since her accident. It’s fair to say, and something of an understatement, that Hanne does not suffer fools gladly. She is, not to put too fine a point on it, a difficult character to dislike.
  Happily (!), the murder of the priest Cato Hammer slowly reawakens Hanne’s old policing instincts, and her experience of being forced into company gradually thaws her frosty nature.
  A second murder quickly follows the first, at which point - given the circumstances Hanne and her fellow travellers are in - I started thinking of Agatha Christie’s AND THEN THERE WERE NONE. To be fair, Holt acknowledges this, and goes so far as to reference Christie’s novel on pg 124:

I thought about Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.
  I immediately tried to dismiss the thought.
  And Then There Were None is a story that doesn’t exactly have a happy ending.

Of course, by pg 124, there are 118 guests locked into the hotel wing with Hanne, so it might have been something of a whopping novel had she engaged with bumping them all off one-by-one …
  Having said all that, it’s more than a month since I’ve read 1222, and it has stayed with me in a way I didn’t expect it to. One factor, I think, is that Holt is particularly strong when it comes to describing the atrocious weather conditions that buffet the hotel, and does a terrific job of enhancing the mounting tension by referencing the ever-worsening weather. In fact, each chapter is prefaced with a reference to the Beaufort Scale, and the impact on the human being of snow-driven winds.
  I also found the novel interesting in the way it used the trapped passengers to present a cross-section of Norwegian society, and at times it can read as a kind of social realist critique of Norwegian societal tensions, most of which were new to me. Holt is at times very critical of the Norwegian people, or at least certain aspects of the Norwegian mentality. Her criticisms largely stem from the fact that, according to Hanne Wilhelmsen at least, Norwegians can be docile sheep, but can be moved from docility to hysteria in a very short period of time. This, to be fair, is probably an accurate criticism of any group of any one nationality.
  The passengers do embrace a wide swathe of society. There are priests, and some older, religiously inclined, lay people. There are businessmen, a teenage sports team, and a group of older teenagers on their way to a rock concert. There are a few foreign nationals. There are doctors, on their way to a conference. There are also some locals trapped in the hotel, including the manager, a lawyer, and a mountain man. There is a feminist TV personality. All told, Holt appears to have covered quite a few of society’s bases. Few of the minor characters behave admirably in times of crises.
  There’s also a strong religious thread running through the novel, and particularly a theme of discredited religious institutions, which offers another layer to the conventions of Hanne attempting to discover who the murderer is. The two priests in the novel, Cato Hammer and Roar Hanson, both end up murdered. Early on, there are blatant signs that the clergy is not universally respected. A teenager, Adrian, swears forcefully at one of the priests in public, and yet he is not overly rebuked for his action. In general, the clergy and their small flock are more to be tolerated and pitied than admired.
  Equally interesting is the minor character Kari Thue, particularly in terms of her ability to foment fear and discord, and her representation of right-wing intolerance. Hanne herself is fascinated with the character of Kari Thue. She despises what Thue stands for, as the minor TV and media celebrity gathers around her a small retinue and protests about the living conditions - by which she means, implicitly, the fact that she’s expected to share space with two characters who are believed to be Muslim, possibly Kurdish (and again, religious tensions surface). In fact, Hanne so despises Kari Thue that she finds herself wishing that Thue had murdered Cato Hammer, and begins to bend the facts in order to point the finger of blame at Thue.
  Hanne Wilhelmsen’s lesbian partner, incidentally, is a practicing Muslim called Nefis. There’s a very nice long paragraph on pg 145 which describes Nefis’ beliefs, which begins:

For Nefis, Islam is the strict love of her father and the sound of the soles of her brothers’ shoes on the floor as they laughed and chased her around the palatial house where she grew up …

  Overall, 1222 is a solid example of the reluctant detective protagonist in crime fiction, even if Hanne Wilhelmsen a little too derivative for my liking (although I did get the impression that Holt was paying homage to the conventions of the classic mystery novel). Holt is also a little too fond of strewing red herrings through the story - the sub-plot about the mysterious men in black on a floor overhead is unnecessary, for example. The writing itself is workmanlike, although that may well be as a result of its translation than Holt’s own style, while the backdrop to the novel, the glimpse we catch of a cross-section of Norwegian society and how it behaves under pressure, is actually more interesting than the main plot itself. - Declan Burke

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books

The good people at Quercus are offering three free copies of THREE SECONDS by Roslund and Hellström, said pair being a journalist and creator of Sweden’s number one cultural TV program, Kulterkanna, and an ex-criminal who founded a criminal rehabilitation program in Sweden, respectively. First, the blurb elves:

Piet Hoffman is the best undercover operative in the Swedish police force, but only one other man is even aware of his existence. When an amphetamine deal he is involved in goes badly wrong, he is faced with the hardest mission of his life: to infiltrate Sweden’s most infamous maximum security prison. Detective Inspector Ewert Grens is charged with investigating the drug-related killing. Unaware of Hoffman’s real identity, he believes himself to be on the trail of a dangerous psychopath. But he cannot escape the feeling that vital information pertaining to the case has been withheld or manipulated. Hoffman has his insurance: wiretap recordings that implicate some of Sweden’s most prominent politicians in a corrupt conspiracy. But in Ewert Grens the powers that be might just have found the perfect weapon to eliminate him ... Intelligent, gripping, brutal, THREE SECONDS is the latest thriller from Roslund and Hellström, the heirs apparent to Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell as masters of Scandinavian crime.

  To be in with a chance of winning a copy, just tell us what your fantasy crime-writing duo might be. James Ellroy and Janet Evanovich? John Connolly and Michael Connelly? Ken Bruen and Stieg Larsson? Elmore Leonard and Patricia Highsmith? Quirkiest, most apt or simply the funniest entries go into the hat, with bonus marks for a quick synopsis of your fantasy duo’s novel …
  Entries in the comment box below, please, and the closing date is noon, December 23rd. Please include an email contact address, using [at] rather than @ to confuse the spam-munchkins. Et bon chance, mes amis …

What’s Up, Docx?

Edward Docx (right) had a piece in Sunday’s Observer, in which he pointed out that Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson aren’t much cop when compared to literary geniuses. He won’t get much argument about that here, but Docx then went on to trash pretty much all genre fiction, and claim that literary fiction is innately superior to any other kind of fiction, but crime fiction in particular, on the basis that genre fiction is constrained by conventions that must be adhered to by the genre writer, whereas the literary writer is free to write whatever he or she likes.
  Predictably enough, the crime fic spectrum of the blogosphere is up in arms about Docx’s temerity in dissing crime fiction. And, as always, I can’t help but wonder if the virulent reaction to the piece isn’t ever so slightly coloured by some kind of inferiority complex. I mean, it’s not as if we haven’t heard variations on this theme countless times before, and yet every time some self-proclaimed literary writer mounts this particular hobby horse, the peasants are out en masse waving torches and pitchforks. Really, shouldn’t that sore spot, so often rubbed up the wrong way, have developed a callus at this stage?
  It’s only my opinion, of course, but I reckon the only reasonable response to Docx’s piece, and to the next one, and the one after that, etcetera, ad nauseam, is this:

*yawns*
*scratches oxter*
*wonders why literary writers get so het up about crime fiction if it’s so crap*
*thinks about boiling kettle*
*wonders why genre writers don’t get so het up about literary fiction, and if maybe it’s because they’re too busy writing*
*yawns*
*scratches oxter*

The Digested Read: THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE by Stieg Larsson

I can’t remember the last time I got into a taxi in which the cabbie was reading a novel (if ever, but then I don’t take a lot of taxis), but I did so today and - quelle surprise - he was reading a Stieg Larsson book. Liking it a lot, too, although - oddly enough - he’d skipped DRAGON TATTOO and gone straight to THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE.
  Anyhoo, apologies for the Stieg Larsson overload this week but we haven’t had a Digested Read in quite a bit, and I quite liked the movie version of THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, which should be screening at a Cineplex near you. To wit:

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE

They were the best of men, they were the worst of men. Actually, thought Lisbeth Salander, scratching the left wing of her tattoo with the dragon-scratcher app on her iPhone 6g, all men were sadistic pig-dog rapist scum.
  All apart from Blomqvist, she thought some more.
  Why is that? she thought a little more, wonderingly.
  Well, one thing was certain, she thought to herself, and herself only, as she lit a fresh cigarette with the cigarette-lighter app on her new iVolvo 7g, she would find out by hacking the mainframe of the hidden supercomputer built by sadistic pig-dog Russian sex traffickers. And then they would all die. Die! Diiiieeeee!!!

Blomqvist left the office of Millennium magazine after bringing down the latest government with yet another searing exposé of how the Minister for Umlauts had snaffled an extra Swedish meatball during last Saturday’s trip to IKEA. He was bored, now. What he really needed was to meet a few sadistic pig-dog rapists to prove what a good man he was, by comparison.
  But stay! Was that a message coming through on his Dangleberry 9000e? It was! Don’t believe the media (except Millennium), he read without speaking aloud, I didn’t kill those pig-dog rapists. I am innocent. Your endlessly resourceful alter-ego, Lisbeth.
  Blomqvist smiled a wryly smiling smile. Mothers, he thought, lock up all your sadistic pig-dog sons.

Salander came to in a shallow grave near Brännellsgrytängenvoldemortenskällengen, just down the road from Töp. Her pig-dog Russian sex-trafficker father and pig-dog Bond villain half-brother had neglected to kill her all the way, she thought. The fools! Now she would run away and live to fight another - No! Wait! Why not attack them both, just as she was, shot and bleeding and nigh-on dead?

Blomqvist tenderly lifted Lisbeth into the Sikorsky S-76C+ iHelicopter. I have a dream, he thought thoughtfully, a song to sing, to help me cope, with anything. Except pig-dog rapists, of course. That’s Lisbeth’s gig.

The End, he thought with a wry smile.

THE DIGESTED READ, IN A LINE: HE was a mild-mannered journalist, SHE never outgrew her sullen Goth phase: when they met, it was MÖIDER!

  This article first appeared in the Evening Herald.

The Girl With The Midas Touch

Stieg Larsson, eh? “I LOVE HIM!” “BUT I HATE HIM!” Etc, ad nauseum.
  But what do crime writers think of Stieg Larsson? I had a piece published a couple of weeks ago in the Irish Examiner, in which I asked Val McDermid, John Banville, Colin Bateman, Stuart Neville and Eoin McNamee why they believe Stieg Larsson became such a runaway phenomenon, and what they think of his work themselves. It ran a lot like this:

The Girl With the Midas Touch: The Stieg Larsson Phenomenon

Ask any tattoo artist and they’ll tell you that demand for dragons has gone through the roof. The reason, of course, is the phenomenal success of Stieg Larsson’s ‘Millennium’ trilogy of novels: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, and THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST have sold almost 30 million copies in over 40 countries.
  Larsson’s popularity is about to go truly stratospheric, however. The second movie based on the travails of investigative journalist Mikael Blomqvist and computer hacker Lisbeth Salander opens August 27th, a Hollywood adaptation of the first novel will star Daniel Craig, and there are rumours that Larsson’s former partner, Eva Gabrielsson, is currently writing a fourth novel based on an unfinished story Larsson left behind before his untimely death.
  As has been the case with best-selling crime authors Dan Brown, James Patterson and John Grisham, however, Larsson’s work has sharply divided his fellow writers. Some hail the Millennium trilogy as a new departure for the crime fiction genre, while others dismiss it as derivative, clunky and overblown.
  “I read the first volume when on holiday and found it ‘very readable’, which as well as an encomium is a sort of insult, in my lexicon,” says John Banville, who writes crime novels under the nom-de-plume Benjamin Black, the latest of which, ELEGY FOR APRIL, is published this month. “I thought it greatly over-written - it could have fitted very nicely into 175 pages or so - and simple-minded in its plotting.”
  Val McDermid, who recently won the ‘Diamond Dagger’ for lifetime achievement awarded by the Crime Writers’ Association, and whose latest offering is TRICK OF THE DARK, places the ‘Millennium’ trilogy in the wider context of best-selling novels. “What I think Larsson has done is similar to what JK Rowling did so spectacularly well,” she says, “he’s synthesised the most successful elements of other people’s writing into something that has the ability to reach a mass market. There’s nothing especially revolutionary about his work - it’s unusual to see a man writing with such strong views on misogyny, but women thriller writers have been doing that for a long time now without generating such amazement.”
  “I think the trilogy succeeds despite itself,” says Eoin McNamee, whose ORCHID BLUE will be published in November. “The work is rife with banalities and clichés - the major plot lines clunk, the male protagonist is a twitching bundle of liberal political fancies, and illiberal sexual fantasies, sometimes sad and sometimes deeply uncomfortable. You find yourself stopping dead at points and wondering how an editor could have let particular sequences through.”
  Meanwhile, Stuart Neville, whose sophomore novel COLLUSION was published last month, is not impressed by Larsson’s reputation as a campaigning novelist. “I’ve seen the screen version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO,” he says, “and listened to the audio book, and I’m not a huge fan of either. In particular, I find it hard to square what I’ve seen and heard with Larsson’s rep as a liberal feminist. Lisbeth Salander seemed more like a schoolboy fantasy to me, and there were parts of the film that struck me as out-and-out misogyny.”
  Colin Bateman, himself a perennial best-seller, is less critical of the film. “I started the first book and didn’t get anywhere with it,” he says, “but I can say that about a lot of books. Then I saw the first movie and quite enjoyed it, though to tell you the truth subtitles tend to lend an intellectual quality to movies they probably don’t deserve - it could quite easily have been an extended episode of a British cop show, with added S&M.”
  So why have the novels been so phenomenally successful?
  “The books,” says McNamee, “have the quality that distinguishes great crime writing - atmosphere. It’s not so much the physical as the psychic landscapes evoked. The air of fatigued Calvinism and social progressivism gone past its usefulness. The themes of sex and family that you find in the genre from John D. McDonald to James Lee Burke. Beneath the sometimes overwrought architecture of the books, there’s a feeling of real harm abroad, of transgressive whispering in the shadows. You have the sense of an absent God, innocence abandoned, of children being sinned against in the darkness.”
  “I think he’s a terrific storyteller,” says McDermid, “and he’s created a pair of protagonists who really have the power to make us care what happens to them. I like his ideas, and I wish he’d lived to explore further the issues he was clearly so passionate about. I also wish he had lived long enough to work with an editor to make the books sharper and less baggy. What I think is excellent news for crime writers is that it has woken up a wider audience to the power of the contemporary genre.”
  “I think it’s based on a reversal of genders,” says Banville, “the hero is a feminine type but acceptable to men, and the heroine is far more ferocious than any man, but justifiably so. Also, she is the irresistible nemesis that we all secretly long to be. And, of course, the back-story is one of horrifying and almost unimaginable violence, which is something we glory in. Future generations may dub ours the Age of the Wests, Fred & Rose, and wonder at our taste for vicarious blood-letting.”
  McNamee also identifies Lisbeth Salander as the crucial element in Larsson’s success. “You can almost hear the gear change in the first book as Larsson realises that she’s much more interesting than the male protagonist,” he says. “The character manages to rise above the hovering banalities of the spiked and tattooed punkette, and raise a skinny fist against an indifferent universe. She’s not Marlow or Lew Archer but she has the gravitas of those solitary, compromised figures, moving easily from the bed-sit world of misfit computer hackers to the shadowed big houses of the well-got. That’s the genius of the trilogy - it’s all very modern, very Calvinist, very noir.”
  Bateman, whose latest ‘Mystery Man’ novel DR YES is published later this month, has a typically idiosyncratic take on the Larsson phenomenon. “With all their ‘Blumquists’ and ‘Rhomohedrons’, the novels aren’t always an easy read,” he says, “so I suspect they are THE BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME of crime novels, purchased but not always read. Whereas I’m just not purchased.”

  This feature first appeared in the Irish Examiner.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: JS Waters

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
THE GODFATHER. I loved the richness of the characters. It made you wish you were born Sicilian. I liked the diversity between and humanization of the ruthless.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Stephen Dedalus, PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. I loved this book. Absolutely. James Joyce is why I wanted to be a writer.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Stephen King, Clive Barker, Charlie Huston and Snorri Sturlson. I love horror and violence. It allows me to appreciate the peace and calm of my life. I’m an absolute freak about Norse culture and society. The old Viking sagas are violent, contemporary and give us a glimpse into the politics of 9th century life and how similar that is to our current state in some ways.

Most satisfying writing moment?
The smell of the printed pages the first time I opened the box of my new novel. I have been writing for over sixteen years. I started with role-playing games and transitioned into film and screenwriting. But there is just something different about a novel. A commitment of time, energy and plot that is the marathon of storytelling.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
THE GUARDS by Ken Bruen.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD [by Declan Hughes] would definitely be my top candidate.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing about being a writer is I need absolute peace and quiet to work. I miss time with my children when I’m really locked into a session. Distractions break my cycle and I either have to stop all together or miss out on all the fun my family has in my absence. But the best reward for me is to entertain people. I love the fact that something I created in my brain that poured through my soul and out the fingers moved someone. I have the best job in the world. I get to watch the world and comment on what I see. I get to create anything in my world and make it reality on paper.

The pitch for your next book is …?
The disavowed son of a fallen angel conspires to kill the Antichrist, finding redemption and his humanity along the way.

Who are you reading right now?
Stieg Larsson, Stephen King, Craig Larson and Henry Perez.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
WRITE. I can always find someone else to read to me. I would be miserable without my ability to tell stories. When I’m not writing, I’m talking. I’m always creating.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Violent, raw and entertaining.

JS Waters’ THE MODERN PRIMITIVES is published by Draeconis.

Go Nord, Young Man

I had one of those pieces on ‘Nordic Writers Wot Aren’t Stieg Larsson’ published in the Sunday Independent last week, which featured contributions from Jan Costin Wagner, Yrsa Sigurdardottir and Hakan Nesser. It went a lot like this:

The Thrillers Who Came In From the Cold

With the second movie of the ‘Millennium Trilogy’ coming at the end of August, a Hollywood remake of the first movie starring Daniel Craig and (rumour has it) Scarlett Johansson already in the works, and the discovery of a fourth Blomkvist-Salander novel on his computer, it’s fair to say that the publishing phenomenon that is Stieg Larsson has some way yet to run.
  Aficionados of the genre, however, are aware that Scandinavian crime writing has much more to offer than Stieg Larsson. The Sweden-set ‘Martin Beck’ series of novels written by husband-and-wife team Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö are considered a milestone in the evolution of the realist crime novel, while Henning Mankell is a household name, particularly for his Kurt Wallander novels.
  A whole new generation of Scandinavian crime writers have emerged in the last decade, however. While the sub-genre has its roots in Sweden, the crime novel is now indigenous to Norway and Finland, Denmark and Iceland. Writers such as Karin Fossum, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Jø Nesbo, Jan Costin Wagner, Karin Alvtegen, Håkan Nesser, KO Dahl, Camilla Lackberg, Leif Davidson, Arnaldur Indridason and Gunnar Staalesen are hugely popular not only at home, but increasingly so abroad too.
  The conventional theory has it that the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986 had a seismic impact on the Swedish psyche, one consequence of which was an explosion in crime writing. Given the seriousness of the catalytic event, the crime novels were taken seriously by the Swedish literati, resulting in an ever-increasing quality of writing and criticism.
  Swedish author Håkan Nesser, on the other hand, takes an irreverent approach to the question of why there has been such a boom in Scandinavian crime writing.
  “When I’m in my most optimistic mood I tend to answer, ‘It’s due to the fact that we are such damned good writers,’” he says. “Right now we probably have the world’s largest number of good crime writers per capita, but please be aware of that we also have the world’s largest number of bad crime writers!
  “There is no such thing as a ‘Swedish way’ of writing a crime story,” he continues. “We are all different. The only thing we have in common is that we write in Swedish. Any reader who reads a book by Stieg Larsson, a book by Karin Alvtegen and a book by myself will realise this immediately. We all have different styles, different plots, different aims and agendas.”
  German author Jan Costin Wagner, who sets his novels in Finland, agrees. “Basically I think that every author has to find their own language,” he says, “their own key topics, characters and ways of approaching a story. And, of course, not each Scandinavian crime novel is a good one. But apart from that, I think that many Scandinavian crime writers understand how important it is to be serious and committed to their story and their characters.”
  Icelandic author Yrsa Sigurdardottir believes that Iceland offers a unique setting for the crime novel.
  “Iceland, with its 300,000 inhabitants, is a whole lot smaller population-wise than most countries,” she says. “As a result, the atmosphere here is still quite similar to that of a small town, despite our attempts at becoming cosmopolitan. This allows for complex interactions and ties between characters that differ greatly from those one expects in stories that take place in a big city. Another ingredient of the social fabric that differentiates us from other western countries is an unusually high belief in the occult and the supernatural, which adds an element that would probably strike a false note in crime stories based elsewhere.
  “Also,” she continues, “old secrets, vendettas and misdeeds might lie dormant here but they are never fully forgotten - or forgiven. When the social aspects just described are coupled with the smorgasbord of eerie scenery my geologically active country has to offer, Iceland thankfully has the makings of a wonderful backdrop for good, fun and creepy murders.”
  While Sigurdardottir highlights the physical and social aspects of her settings, Wagner identifies a more psychological appeal.
  “I don’t feel committed to a ‘school of writing’,” he says, “because I want to stay committed to my own inner movement: that is most important for everything I write. I feel close to the Scandinavian crime writing because Scandinavians quite often stay focussed on the inner, maybe hidden, life of a story and a character. I like novels which surprise the reader by finding their way beyond cliché. I like the silent moments, the words that are hidden behind the lines; I also like the silent showdown and not so much the bombastic one, which is based on a kind of formal, expected resolution.”
  The idea that the modern Scandinavian crime novel offers a blend of social realism and a more introspective take on the traditional crime narrative is echoed by Håkan Nesser.
  “Ingmar Bergman is a cineastic icon around the world,” he says, “and for most people a Bergman character is the true essence of a Swede: gloomy, depressive, suicidal, tragic, silent and deeply, fundamentally unhappy. But interesting, somehow.
  “I like to think that the above is not an accurate description of our national character,” he says, “but in all clichés there is an element of truth. And actually – though I find it a little hard to acknowledge – such stereotypes might be good material for characters in a crime story: morose men and women who can store grudges inside themselves for half of a lifetime, and then one day take desperate but calculated action like a bolt out of the blue.” - Declan Burke

  Håkan Nesser’s THE INSPECTOR AND SILENCE is published by Mantle.
  Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s ASHES TO DUST is published by Hodder & Stoughton.
  Jan Costin Wagner’s SILENCE is published by Harvill Secker.

  This article first appeared in the Sunday Independent.

  Incidentally, I finished Jan Costin Wagner’s SILENCE last night, and it’s a terrific piece of work. Highly recommended.

The Fallacy Of Millions; Or, How Ledgers Have Become The Publishing Industry’s Preferred Reading

Laura Miller wrote a piece on e-publishing for Salon.com during the week, during the course of which she railed against those aspiring authors who are already celebrating the impending demise of the traditional ‘gatekeepers’ - agents, editors, publishers - of the publishing industry.
  The ‘gatekeepers’, she argues, perform an invaluable service to readers by filtering an occasional diamond from the vast numbers of manuscripts that constitute the ever growing slush pile. In abandoning the traditional publishing model and going straight to (electronic) print, she says, authors are simply exposing readers to the slush pile. The net effect of ‘civilian’ readers being so exposed, she says in a rather apocalyptic finale, is one of “crushing your spirit instead of refreshing it … How long before you decide to just give up?”
  As it happens, I broadly agree with Laura Miller on e-publishing. Any business conducted without some form of quality control won’t be in business for very long.
I did take exception, however, to one word in Miller’s piece, and it’s contained in the following excerpt:

“Digital self-publishing is creating a powerful new niche in books that’s threatening the traditional industry,” a recent Wall Street Journal report proclaimed. “Self-published books suddenly are able to thrive by circumventing the establishment.” To “circumvent” means, of course, to find a way around, and what’s waiting behind all those naysaying editors and agents, the self-publishing authors tell themselves, are millions of potential readers, who’ll simply love our books! The reign of the detested gatekeepers has ended! - Laura Miller

  That word, as you’ll probably have guessed given the title of this post, is ‘millions’.
  Before I started this blog, back in 2007, I knew no more than a handful of writers. At this point, I probably know hundreds. Some of them have had one book published, others are bestsellers.
  I also have friends who are aspiring writers. In fact, I met two of them on separate occasions during the last week, and while we talked about other stuff, as you do, just to be polite, the general thrust of the conversations centred on books and writing.
  The theme was largely one of frustration: not being able to find time to write (pesky children); not being able to find an agent; not being able to get our books published. The usual war stories. And then there’s the other frustrations: the idea that won’t behave itself and sit quietly on the page; the virtues, or otherwise, of excessive plotting; the words that come, okay, but like Yeats’ peace, dropping slow; the conflict between establishing a compelling pace while still maintaining quality on a word-by-word basis. And all the other issues of craft that tend to pop up when you’re spitballing over a cup of coffee.
  Here’s the thing, though: in all the years I’ve been listening to writers, publishing or aspiring, small, big or mid-list, I’ve never once heard the phrase, “I’d love to sell a million copies.” Neither, for that matter, have I ever heard a reader say, “I want to read a book written by a writer who’s sold a million copies.”
  Maybe I’m hanging out in the wrong coffee shops, but the writers I know talk about interesting ideas, about different ways of telling a story, about phrasing and style, about the use of language.
  Readers - and I’ll always be more of a reader than a writer - tend to talk about good books, interesting characters, moral dilemmas, beautiful writing.
  The industry, meanwhile, is at another table, very probably in another coffee shop, talking about bottom lines and sales figures and marketing and promotion and million-selling behemoths.
  I’m not naïve. I understand publishing’s economies of scale. And I do appreciate that we’re living through a global recession. But it seems to me that there’s an ever-widening disconnect between the publishing industry and the people - writers and readers - it depends upon.
  Good books are still being published, certainly, but there’s no getting away from the fact that the quality control ‘gatekeepers’ are these days more interested in maximising profits from the likes of Dan Brown, James Patterson and Stieg Larsson than they are in investing in novels and authors that are unlikely to sell a million copies per book.
  Yes, I understand that such writers finance a publisher’s speculative investment on an unknown writer. But the inexorable logic of the current model is that more and more funds must be pumped into the brands and franchises to keep the ledgers balanced, with the result that investment in aspiring, new and mid-list writers is drying up. If you don’t believe me, ask Charlie Williams.
  Rob Kitchin, himself an aspiring author, blogs about yours truly over at The View From the Blue House. In effect, he’s bemoaning the fact that CRIME ALWAYS PAYS, the sequel to THE BIG O, is only available via e-publishing. Which is nice, but Rob isn’t really writing about me. He’s writing about authors who are, as he says,

“ … marginalised by an industry that is increasingly seeking to de-risk their investment by judging authors and their works against a narrow set of criteria, rather than nurturing and supporting them. There are plenty of authors and bands who have worked away producing acclaimed work for years, perhaps not making mega-bucks but nonetheless not losing anyone money, before going stratospheric. If a condition of a writing career is immediate success then there is every danger of producing an entire generation of one book authors, killed off and demoralised before they’ve had chance to blossom into mature, successful writers with an established reader base. It’ll also work to reproduce a certain kind of formulaic writing and stifle creativity and risk-taking – think of Hollywood film making at the minute.”

  Laura Miller is correct to suggest that a lack of regulation, or quality control, is likely to bedevil the coming boom in e-publishing. By the same token, the evidence of bookstores - and certainly the bigger chains - suggests that when the publishing industry uses the phrase ‘quality control’, it’s control rather than quality that’s uppermost in their minds.
  If the industry is truly concerned about readers giving up on reading, then its big problem is not e-publishing. It’s the wall-to-wall bullshit lining bookstore shelves from New York to Sydney.
  Lashing out at scapegoats might temporarily deflect attention away from the fallacy at its core, but if the industry truly believes that stamping its feet on the little people represents progressive thinking, then we’re all - readers, writers and ‘gatekeepers’ alike - in bigger trouble than anyone imagined.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Gerry O’Carroll

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT by Dostoevsky, it embodies to me the two ingredients of the story of a villain. It personifies that a criminal can run but can’t hide, the inevitability of his punishment. It’s a profound insight into the dark soul of a criminal.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Jack Rebus from Rankin’s novels - I see in him a lot of the darkness of myself and the weakness of human nature.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I go back and go back and go back to Charles Dickens’ TALE OF TWO CITIES and Victor Hugo’s THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO. And of course J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When I got to writing the last line of the last chapter of THE GATHERING OF SOULS.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
John Connolly’s EVERY DEAD THING. I love Connolly’s style and his encroachment into the supernatural that seems to accompany his books. I’m very much an aficionado of the paranormal thanks to my own personal experiences.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Brian McGilloway’s border thriller GALLOWS LANE would adapt to the screen very well. There’s a richness in his style and tapestry that would suit the movies. But especially it is the depth of his characters – in particular Inspector Ben Devlin - and the scale of the plot that includes suspect arms finds and shadowy MI5 figures that would keep you on the edge of your seat.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is that I’m lazy, and it’s an absolutely ordeal – I’d have to be handcuffed to the chair. The best thing is probably getting the first copy hot off the press that will make up for the blood sweat and tears. I’ve always been more of the outdoor type, and that need for discipline hamstrings me.

The pitch for your next book is …?
I wouldn’t want to dig too deeply into that yet, but it’ll probably go further into the exploration of Quinn’s and Doyle characters, set in Ireland’s gripping world of crime, which extends right across the globe (as seen in recent happenings in Spain), and which we all live in. There will be a certain international element in their next case.

Who are you reading right now?
Stieg Larsson - I just finished the last novel of his tremendous trilogy, THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS’ NEST. For me, Stieg Larsson is the most original contemporary crime writer, almost the revelation of crime writers in the last twenty years. My breath was taken away when I read the first book. It is a much abused world he depicts, and I just couldn’t stop, I was blown away.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Read. It is the last refuge and comfort of old age.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Authentic. Heartfelt. Uncompromising.

Gerry O’Carroll’s THE GATHERING OF SOULS is published by Liberties Press. The image is used courtesy of the Evening Herald.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Andrew Gross

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Cookbooks and the obits.

Most satisfying writing moment?
First seeing my name atop the NYT bestseller list. (Though it followed James Patterson’s).

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst: touring. Best: the commute. (Okay, fan mail! Actually, people checking in from my past who have read my books.)

The pitch for your next book is …?
A doctor looks into the suicide of his brother’s son, discovering it may not be a suicide after all, but the latest in a string of revenge killings for a youthful betrayal that took place forty years ago.

Who are you reading right now?
Stieg Larsson 2, HELTER SKELTER on Manson (for work), latest Linwood Barclay.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Hands down - I’d write.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Pace, reversals, heart.

Andrew Gross’s RECKLESS is published by William Morrow.

Lawks, ’Tis A Successful Irish RISING

The Irish Times’ commitment to reviewing Irish crime fiction continues apace, with Peter Cunningham’s review of Brian McGilloway’s THE RISING featuring on yesterday’s op-ed pages. Cunningham picked some holes in the novel, but the gist runneth thusly:

Devlin is a good cop with a clear sense of justice, a sharp brain and a big fist. When his personal life and the crimes he is investigating begin to merge, as we know they will, our sympathy and respect for him, never in doubt, become acute. The climax of this well-paced story is left dangling enticingly.
  Having just slogged through the Stieg Larsson trilogy, mostly with enjoyment, it was nonetheless something of a relief to come upon a police thriller which is told in a bare yet skilful way and which does not lurch every hundred pages or so into political history.
  Garda investigation and forensics techniques are well researched and written, but not bludgeoned home.
  McGilloway has a healthy respect for his readers’ intelligence.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Incidentally, Peter Cunningham is himself a purveyor of quality thrillers, such as THE TAOISEACH and WHO TRESPASS AGAINST US, so he knows of what he speaks. His latest offering, CAPITAL SINS, is due in mid-June, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

Ireland, 2006. Financial hysteria grips the nation. No one can speak of anything but the price of property - it is impossible not to make money. Developers gorge on massive loans. Bankers, egged on by politicians, trample over each other in the stampede to lend more and more. Millionaires are created every day as the stock market soars and Ireland audaciously becomes one of the world’s wealthiest nations. But at the heart of this unholy multi-billion euro alliance between developers, politicians and bankers lies a hideous truth: the whole empire is built on sand. Two men face each other over the dark divide. One, Albert Barr, a developer, has everything to lose; the other, Lee Carew, a struggling journalist, suddenly realises that he has stumbled upon the story of a lifetime. And for the bankers, the developers and Ireland’s Celtic Tiger, time is rapidly running out. With devastating accuracy and savage humour, Peter Cunningham’s novel tells the story of the final year of the Celtic Tiger as it has never been told before.

  Nice. But will CAPITAL SINS measure up to Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND? Only time, that irrepressibly gossiping canary, will tell …

Gonz, Baby, Gonz

A strange old week, folks. First off, heartfelt thanks to everyone who left a comment on the post below, and those of you who got in touch privately, promising to pledge money should I decide to go ahead and self-publish BAD FOR GOOD / A GONZO NOIR. The reaction was, for me, phenomenal: I’d have been delighted with twenty or so responses, and over the moon with thirty. To achieve more than double that gives me serious pause for thought, especially as so many people made multiple pledges (or pledged for multiple books). What began as a whimsical notion is now a practical option. But there’s more to it than hard cash. For someone struggling to have themselves heard, as most writers seem to be, that kind of support is literally invaluable.
  What I need to do now is spend some time researching the project meticulously, ensuring my figures are right, investigating the amount of time and energy the project will consume, and – most importantly – ensuring that there’s no possible glitch that could result in someone making a pledge and not receiving a book.
  I also need to take on board more experienced voices than I, some of whom have cautioned against the amount of work involved in self-publishing, which will by necessity eat into my own writing time; some have very kindly suggested that BAD FOR GOOD / A GONZO NOIR is too good to ‘waste’ on self-publishing; while others have stated in no uncertain terms that self-publishing at this point in my ‘career’ (koff) would prove hugely detrimental in the long term. Now, I’m not sure how much more detrimental a self-published book could be when compared with no published books at all, but the advice was well-intentioned and has been accepted as such. I’ll keep you all posted as to how it’s panning out; and again, many thanks for all the support.
  Meanwhile, in a not-unrelated matter, John McFetridge has taken my tentative suggestion about starting up a writers’ co-op and given it legs. In fact, he’s started a writer’s co-op, established a website, and already there seems to be a real buzz building around it. Seems to me that the real gonzo noir could well be coming together as we speak; I’ll be getting behind the project 100%. For more details, clickety-click here …
  Finally, I got an early look at ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ movie this week. I’m one of the very few people, apparently, who wasn’t overly impressed with the novel (I didn’t make it past page 120), but I tried to set that aside for the duration of the movie. What struck me most forcibly about it was how quaint it all seemed, if not old-fashioned: the wealthy industrialist Vanger commissioning Blomkist to investigate the disappearance of his niece was in effect the opening chapter of THE BIG SLEEP; the island where the disappearance took place has only one bridge in or out, making it a locked-room mystery; at one point, Blomkvist is called into a drawing room before the extended Vanger family, and I half-expected the (Nazi) Col. Mustard to be denounced as the killer, the foul deed taking place in the library, with a spanner. Apparently Stieg Larsson dotted the novel with references to Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, et al, which suggests that the book is intended as an homage to the Golden Age of mystery writing; that’s all very well and good, but it hardly makes for cutting-edge fiction, nor movie. Michael Nyqvist, playing Blomkvist, is a terrific actor, and acquits himself very well, but I found it hard to believe in the chemistry between he and Lisbeth Salander; indeed, I found the character of Salander entirely artificial, an impenetrable and unlovely IT idiot savant given sullenness, body piercing and chain-smoking in lieu of any real rebellion. For a movie that runs almost two and a half hours (quite long for a movie thriller), there’s precious little by way of depth of characterisation; meanwhile, the most interesting aspect of the story, the establishment of a pro-Nazi organisation in neutral Sweden during WWII, was given only a cursory nod, just enough to taint the bad guys with evil. The story also suffers from the usual faults associated with the gifted amateur sleuth: despite the fact that the local cop has spent 40 years obsessing on the disappearance of Vanger’s niece, for example, Blomkvist finds a new lead almost immediately on taking the case; and it still makes no sense that an obscenely wealthy man, who could afford any investigator on the planet, would choose to employ a man whose name has been very publicly disgraced for getting his facts wrong. As for the more modern aspects of the movie: there’s a nasty and graphic scene involving Salander that leaves a bad taste in the mouth, all the more so that it’s unnecessary in terms of establishing character; and there’s far too much emphasis (not to mention trust) placed on the internet as a source of ‘clues’ whenever the story needs to be shunted along.
  And that’s my two cents.

  This week I have been mostly reading: CLOUD ATLAS by David Mitchell (superb); THE MERCHANT OF VENICE by William Shakespeare; NAMING THE BONES by Louise Welch; and EARTH IN UPHEAVAL by Immanuel Velikovsky.