Origins: Stuart Neville

Once in a while here at Crime Always Pays, I like to hand the reins over to an actual writer who knows what she or he is talking about. ‘Origins’ is a (very) occasional series in which an author talks about the inspiration - character, plot, setting, whatever - for their latest novel, in this case Stuart Neville on Galya Petrova, the heroine of STOLEN SOULS. To wit:

“For every crime, there’s a victim. Sometimes many victims. How those victims are portrayed is a weakness of crime fiction. Too often they are simply cadavers, pieces of meat on which the story feeds. They are rarely human. They seldom have lives that precede the moments of their deaths. They exist only to be crouched over by detectives or dissected by coroners.
  “When I first started writing the character Galya Petrova I was determined she would not be a victim. She would not be a body on a slab. She would not wait passively, in fear, for a man to come and save her. If she was to survive STOLEN SOULS, it would be by her own efforts. The Damsel in Distress is a thriller trope that’s far too easy to fall back on, and I’m guilty of doing so myself in previous books. Galya is indeed a damsel, and in distress, but that trope does not stand without a white knight charging to the rescue.
  “Jack Lennon is no white knight. Galya’s on her own with only her will to survive. Every aspect of her background and personality feeds into her fight for life. I wanted to create a character who might have fallen prey to some despicable people, but who’d never be a victim. I hope I’ve achieved that with Galya Petrova.” - Stuart Neville

The Craftsman Cometh

As all Three Regular Readers will be aware, Stuart Neville’s current offering is STOLEN SOULS, and a very fine thriller it is, too. I reviewed it as the lead title in this month’s Irish Times ‘Crime Beat’ round-up, which can be found here …
  Meanwhile, I interviewed Stuart a couple of weeks back, and he had this to say about his next title:

“My next book is called DWELLER ON THE THRESHOLD, and it’s set primarily in and around Dublin in the weeks before JFK’s visit in 1963. It’s a bit of a globetrotter of a novel, seeing as it stops off in Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Germany, France and Uruguay along the way. It focuses on some interesting people who were resident in Ireland at the time, and features several real historical figures as characters, including one of the most notorious Irish politicians of the late twentieth century. The protagonist is Albert Ryan, a young G2 officer, who first appeared as a much older man in my story The Craftsman, a short film of which is currently in post-production.”

  Sounds like an absolute cracker. That story, The Craftsman, by the way, appears in DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS: IRISH CRIME WRITING IN THE 21st CENTURY (Liberties Press). And, as Stuart announced over on his Facebook page a couple of days ago, there’s a short film being adapted from The Craftsman, with the trailer looking a lot like this. Roll it there, Collette …

The Craftsman from Adam Bowler on Vimeo.

The Troubles? We Don’t Need No Stinking Troubles

Good vibes for Stuart Neville’s latest tome, STOLEN SOULS, which appears to be stealing as many hearts as it does nebulous spiritual manifestations of the human spirit, or souls. This review comes courtesy of Denise Hamilton in the LA Times, which kicks off in no uncertain manner, declaring in the standfirst that STOLEN SOULS is ‘a masterpiece of hard-edged, fast-paced Irish crime fiction’. Crikey. But stay! There’s more! For it opens thusly:

“The Irish crime fiction wave rises to new heights with Stuart Neville’s third novel, the tight, telescopic thriller STOLEN SOULS. The writing here is mature and assured: there are no extraneous words or characters, no discussion of Northern Ireland’s long and sorrowful ‘Troubles’. We are beyond politics, beyond the Celtic Tiger and its financial meltdown, mired in a crumbling 21st century Belfast wasteland where Lithuanian gangs bed down with Ulster Loyalists and Republicans as law enforcement looks the other way.” - Denise Hamilton

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, if you’re in the mood to be soothed by Stuart’s dulcet tones, he was interviewed about STOLEN SOULS last week on Ireland AM. Roll it there, Collette …

Souls For Sale

Get ’em while they’re hot, they’re luvverly, etc. Stuart Neville will be in Dublin on Tuesday, October 25th, to launch his latest tome, STOLEN SOULS, and a fine night it should be, too. Few writers of recent times have had such a vertical ascent to stardom - THE TWELVE, Stuart’s debut, as all Three Regular Readers will be aware, was a runaway bestseller, and nabbed the LA Times’ gong for Best Crime / Mystery Novel for that year. He followed that up with COLLUSION, which featured DI Jack Lennon, and Lennon returns for STOLEN SOULS, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

Galya Petrova travels to Ireland on a promise that she will work for a nice Russian family, teaching their children English. Instead, she is dragged into the world of modern slavery, sold to a Belfast brothel, and held there against her will. She escapes at a terrible cost—the slaying of one of her captors—and takes refuge with a man who offers his help. As the traffickers she fled scour the city for her, seeking revenge for their fallen comrade, Galya faces an even greater danger: her saviour is not what he seems. She is not the first trafficked girl to have crossed his threshold, and she must fight to avoid their fate. Detective Inspector Jack Lennon wants a quiet Christmas with his daughter, but when an apparent turf war between rival gangs leaves bodies across the city, he knows he won't get it. As he digs deeper into the case, he realizes an escaped prostitute is the cause of the violence, and soon he is locked in a deadly race with two very different killers.

  Nice. The launch of STOLEN SOULS takes place on Tuesday, October 25th at The Gutter Bookshop, Temple Bar, with festivities kicking off at 6.30pm, and those of you impressed by such things will be duly impressed to learn that the novel carries an encomium from one James Ellroy. And if it’s good enough for James Ellroy, etc. I’ll see you there - but do be careful, and keep a tight grip on your souls. The Gutter Bookshop will take no responsibility for eternal damnation, etc.

He Steals Souls

I interviewed Stuart Neville a couple of weeks back for an Irish Times interview, during which Stuart had this to say about his forthcoming novel, STOLEN SOULS, his third offering after THE TWELVE and COLLUSION:

“STOLEN SOULS is a much more streamlined thriller. Because the first couple of books, whether it was intentional or not, both have this very strong political slant, I really wanted to make a very definite step away from that. And I wanted too to give a nod to some of the thrillers I really enjoyed reading when I was younger. I was a big fan of those thrillers that were maybe 200 pages long and were just punch-punch-punch, that go full tilt from first to last page, no flab. So STOLEN SOULS really does hit the ground running, and doesn’t let up until the last page. There are far fewer organisations with three-letter acronyms, for starters (laughs). It can be hard to keep track of that kind of thing. It’s much more of a ticking-clock kind of thriller, and I hope that it’ll work for readers.”

  Intriguing stuff, with Stuart citing ’70s-set novels such as William Goldman’s MARATHON MAN as one inspiration. For the full interview, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, Stuart has contributed a short story, ‘The Craftsman’, to DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS. As I said to him at the time, if ‘The Craftsman’ is indicative of his new direction, we’re in for a defter, more subtle novel than the propulsive THE TWELVE and COLLUSION. For an audio version of ‘The Craftsman’, click here for the BBC iPlayer …
  STOLEN SOULS, by the way, is published in October by Soho Crime.

It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Soul

It won’t be published until October, but already Stuart Neville’s STOLEN SOULS is shaping up to be one of the novels to watch out for in 2011. The winner of the LA Times’ Mystery / Thriller award in 2009 with his debut THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST, and in the running for the same gong this year for COLLUSION, Neville’s third novel comes freighted with expectation. Mind you, the blurb elves suggest that STOLEN SOULS will deliver. To wit:

Detective Inspector Jack Lennon of the Belfast Police has watched the developing cooperation between Northern Ireland’s Loyalist gangs and immigrant Lithuanian criminals with unease. The Lithuanians traffic women from Eastern Europe and Asia for the Loyalists’ brothels, and they’re all making big money in spite of the recession that has stopped Northern Ireland’s peace boom in its tracks. Lennon has a more intimate knowledge of the city’s brothels than he’ll ever admit, but the surge in trafficked girls makes him question his lifestyle, especially considering he has his daughter, Ellen, to care for now.
  When a Lithuanian trafficker turns up dead on Christmas Eve with a shard of glass embedded in his throat, Lennon’s plans to spend the holiday with Ellen are put in jeopardy. The dead man was the younger brother of a ruthless Lithuanian crime boss, Arturas Strazdas, and the young Ukrainian woman who killed him has escaped her captors. Now Strazdas holds the Loyalists responsible and won’t let up until everyone involved has paid. A bloody gang war erupts across the city.
  Meanwhile, somewhere in Belfast, Galya, the Ukrainian girl, is running for her life, alone and scared, clinging to the darkest corners as the frozen streets empty for the holiday. Galya’s captors told her how the police deal with illegal immigrants, that she is a criminal in a foreign land, and the law will not help her. And now she is also a murderer. She cannot be discovered by anyone, not the cops, not the gang who held her prisoner. There is only one person she can go to: a man she met on her first day as a prostitute, a friend who gave her a crucifix and an address to run to if she ever got away. He’d saved four prostitutes before her, he’s told her, and she can be his fifth. But when Galya arrives at the address, she finds something more evil than she had ever imagined.

  Sounds like a cracker. Mind you, I was putting the final proofs for DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS to bed this week, and while proofing Neville’s contribution, a short story entitled ‘The Craftsman’, it struck me that, as propulsive as he is as a thriller writer, it’s in the quieter moments, the emotional connections, that Neville truly excels. I can’t say much more than that or I’ll spoil the story; suffice to say that beneath the bearded, hard-boiled exterior Neville presents to the world, there lurks the soul of a poet. And, if the subtleties that underpin ‘The Craftsman’ is a measure of how Neville has developed as a writer since the publication of COLLUSION, then STOLEN SOULS promises to outstrip his previous novels by some distance. It’s a tantalising prospect.