Yes, Cinderella, You Shall Go To The Ball …

And so dawns the day of the ball, during the course of which this particular Cinders is hoping that a crack squad of Fairy Godmothers will appear and sprinkle him with the necessary fairy dust. Yep, it’s the Irish Book Awards, and as all Three Regular Readers will be aware, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL has been shortlisted in the Crime Fiction section, alongside A DEATH IN SUMMER by Benjamin Black, TABOO by Casey Hill, BLOODLAND by Alan Glynn, THE BLOODY MEADOW by William Ryan and THE RECKONING by Jane Casey. The event takes place in the salubrious surroundings of the Concert Hall at the RDS, aka The Royal Dublin Society, and in truth I’m feeling mightily conflicted.
  Why so? Well, for starters, the event is black tie. I’ve never worn a tuxedo before, for a variety of reasons, but mainly because the sight of a load of blokes crammed into ill-fitting penguin suits always looks a bit ridiculous. There’s also the fact that said suits are generally ill-fitting because most blokes have rented their tuxedos, which kind of defeats the purpose. The whole point of a tux is that it’s an expensive bit of kit, and the whole point of wearing one is to announce to the world at large that you’ve got the wherewithal to afford such an expensive piece of kit. Renting one seems to defeat the purpose, no? And then there’s the dicky-bow, which is by some distance, I think, the most preposterous piece of apparel ever invented. Not that that will be an issue for me. I absolutely refuse point blank to wear a dicky-bow. If it’s a black tie they want, then it’s a black tie they’ll get. And if that means that I turn up looking like I’m attending a funeral, then so be it.
  I’m a little bit nervous too, if I’m honest. I’ve been shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards before, some years ago, for my debut offering, EIGHTBALL BOOGIE. That year the competition was every bit as tough as it is this year, the shortlist being comprised of Ken Bruen, Michael Collins, Ingrid Black and yours truly. Naturally, I didn’t win. I don’t expect to win this year, either; for what it’s worth, my gut instinct tells me that Casey Hill will walk away with the award, although it might also be worth watching out for Jane Casey, given that this is her second year in a row to be nominated. Mind you, I’ll only be really surprised if AZC wins; the shortlist really does comprise a fine body of writers. And I think it’s fair to say that had the shortlist been composed of an entirely different six authors, it would have been equally strong.
  But this is where I’m also a little conflicted, because the prize will be awarded according to a public vote. Which essentially means that the award will go to whoever it is on the list has the most friends. I did my best to play along with the concept, letting people know at every opportunity that they could vote for their favourite book / writer, etc., but to be honest, my heart wasn’t in it. I think I’d have much preferred it had the shortlist been decided by public vote, and the award itself decided by a panel of judges. There’s a big difference between a book being the best book and the most popular book. Not that I’ll be complaining if by some chance my half-assed marketing campaign propels AZC to the top of the pile; all the same, I’d much prefer it got there on merit, as opposed to my persecuting people I know to vote for me.
  Mostly, though, I’m feeling conflicted this morning because I’m currently working on a follow-up to AZC; although the conflict arises partially because the book isn’t a follow-up or any kind of logical follow-on from that book. ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, for those of you who don’t know, isn’t a conventional crime novel, playing as it does with meta-fiction and multiple narratives, and generally being more than a little bit bonkers as a hospital porter sets out to blow up his hospital. The current book, which I’m redrafting, is actually a sequel to EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, currently rejoicing in the working title THE BIG EMPTY, which follows former research consultant (aka private eye) Harry Rigby as he finds himself, yet again, up this oxters in illicit drugs and nefarious characters. Which is to say, it’s a comparatively straightforward crime novel narrative, even if things are rarely straightforward when Harry Rigby gets involved, and I really don’t know if it’s a good idea to follow an unconventional book like ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL with a conventional tale like THE BIG EMPTY.
  It’s been something of a slog, this redraft, I have to say. Matters are not helped by the fact that this is the sixth redraft, or thereabouts, which means that virtually every page feels as flat as a map of canals. In fact, practically every line feels dust-dry, dead. Which is usually a good sign, and means that I’m rapidly getting to the point where I’ll have to let the book go; in fact, late last week I sat down at the desk and opened up the file, and got the old familiar feeling of my guts sloshing around. When reading your own stuff makes you feel physically sick, then you know it’s coming time to let go.
  I passed the sixty-thousand word mark earlier this week, which means the beast’s back is broken; and even though I know I need to write an entirely new ending, of roughly fifteen thousand words, the end is in sight, and I should - all going well - have this draft finished in time to take an actual holiday over the Christmas period.
  Will it be any good? My head says yes, this on the basis that people seemed to like the previous books; my heart says no, on the basis that I always think that this book is going to be the time I’ll be found out as a charlatan and spoofer. Conflicted? Oh yes.
  So that’s the context in which I’ll be heading to the Irish Book Awards this evening, knowing in my heart, no matter what happens, that I’m a charlatan and spoofer. The only consolation there, I suppose, is that most of the writers I meet tonight will be feeling exactly the same thing.

I Will Arise And Go Now, And Go To Innisfree …

J. Sydney Jones (right), author of REQUIEM IN VIENNA and THE EMPTY MIRROR, was kind enough to host an interview with yours truly over at his blog, Scene of the Crime. The gist of Sydney’s interviews concern themselves with settings, and how a particular setting influences a novel. I talked mostly about my home town, Sligo, the setting for EIGHTBALL BOOGIE and THE BIG EMPTY. To wit:

“Historically, Sligo town is a fascinating place. There are records of the ancient Greeks trading at Sligo port; Sligo Abbey was founded in 1252. It’s an old town, then, and the centre of the town reflects that: the streets are narrow, and there are plenty of interesting alleyways down which a man might wander who is not himself mean. The modern town incorporates many sprawling suburbs, some of which are more salubrious than others, which again makes for an interesting juxtaposition. In certain parts of Sligo, literally crossing the road can make the difference between real estate selling for €80,000 and €400,000. That in itself creates a certain tension.
  “There’s a saying in the West of Ireland that the Celtic Tiger never learned in swim, which is why it never crossed the Shannon into Connacht (said Tiger, presumably, being too dim to use one of the many bridges that cross the Shannon). Sligo was one of those towns that didn’t benefit hugely from the boom years, although it has transformed itself in the last decade or so. Today it’s a brash, progressive place – you can sip your café mocha on the remodelled riverfront with the best of them – but there is a sense that many of the changes are superficial, and you don’t have to go very far from the centre of town before you notice the shabby and threadbare corners, the boarded-up shop-fronts. All in all, I find it a fascinating place – but then, I’m biased. I love it.”

  Not that you’d know it from the excerpt Sydney posts from THE BIG EMPTY, a Harry Rigby private eye novel of mine currently out under consideration. To wit:

It was better out in the suburbs, and it was mostly all suburbs, but the town was a heart-attack of concrete and chrome. Old streets, high and narrow, arteries that had thickened and gnarled so the traffic trickled or didn’t move at all. The light a frozen glare shot with greens and reds, blinking pink neon, fluorescent blues. Boom-boom blasting from rolled-down windows, the deep bass pulsing out muscles of sound.
  On a bad night it took fifteen minutes to crawl the two hundred yards along Castle Street into Grafton Street. The mob shuffling out of the chippers wore hoodies over baggy denims, the dragging hems frayed. Night of the Living McDead. The girls in cropped tops over bulging bellies with hipster jeans showcasing cheese-cutter thongs. In case someone might think they weren’t wearing any underwear at all, maybe.
  I skipped O’Connell Street, heading east along John Street, turning north down Adelaide and then west at the new bridge onto Lynn’s Dock, a grapefruit moon hanging low above the quays. Finn playing The Northern Pikes, Place That’s Insane. On along Ballast Quay to the docks proper, a spit of land jutting out into the sea, maybe forty acres of crumbling warehouse facing open water. Behind the warehouses lay a marshy jungle of weeds. Once in a while there was talk of turning it into a nature preserve, a bird sanctuary, but no one ever did anything about it. The birds came and went anyway.
  Down at the breakwater the Port Authority building was nine stories of black concrete, a finger flipping the bird to the town. Sligo’s Ozymandias, our monument to hubris, built back in the ’60s when Lemass had all boats on a rising tide and the docks were buzzing, a North Atlantic entry point for Polish coal, Norwegian pine, Jamaican sugar, Australian wool. Oil tankers moored down at the deepwater. Russians slipped ashore and never went to sea again. The first African, a Nigerian, was a celebrity. They called him Paddy Dubh and he never had to pay when he bought a pint of stout.
  Then the ’70s slithered in. Crude oil went through the roof. The coal stopped coming, then the sugar. The channel silted up. Paddy had to buy his own stout. Things got so bad the Industrial Development Authority had to buy the PA building and then lease back two of the nine stories to the Port Authority. Even that was a farce, the IDA loaning the PA the money to pay the lease.
  Then the ’80s, a good decade to be a weed or a rat. Everyone forgot about the docks, or tried to …”

  For the interview in its entirety, clickety-click here ...

THE GHOSTS Of Christmas Presents

It’s been a terrific year for Stuart Neville. Superb reviews of his debut novel, THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST); interviewing James Ellroy at the Belfast Waterfront; and last weekend – in case you missed it – a lovely write up from Marilyn Stasio in the New York Times, in which TGOB was the lead review. All of which is very nice indeed, but then Stuart is a very nice bloke indeed, as you’ll see for yourself in this video interview with Keith Rawson. Roll it there, Collette …
  And while we’re on the subject of nice blokes, there was a marvellous turn-out for Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND launch at Dubray Books last Tuesday night, which was cunningly timed to coincide with the official turning on of the Christmas lights on Grafton Street. Among the writerly types in attendance were Declan Hughes, Peter Murphy, Professor Ian Ross, Cormac Millar, Ava McCarthy, Critical Mick and John Boyne, and at least one Booker Prize winner, Anne Enright. Which goes to show how highly regarded Alan Glynn is across the writing spectrum, and deservedly so, because WINTERLAND is a wonderful novel.
  Anyway, you may well be wondering about Christmas gifts at this point. For the reader in your life, you could do a hell of a lot worse than give them THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST or WINTERLAND. Or, better still, both. They’re both beautifully written novels that are page-turning thrillers, but they also do what the best crime writing does: they remind us who we really are and how we live now.
  Incidentally, in a very good week for Irish writing, hearty congratulations to Colum McCann for scooping the National Book Award for LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN.
  Finally, and in contradiction to erroneous information provided here by yours truly, it appears that my latest opus, THE BIG EMPTY, has only gone out for consideration to publishers this week – last Monday, to be precise. I really should pay more attention to such things, but I was under the impression that the book was already under consideration. This is both good news and bad news: good in the sense that the book is still a live grenade, in a manner of speaking, and bad in the sense that the waiting begins all over again. And, given the fact that editors generally have an already existing pile of submissions to work their way through, and that it’s already more than halfway through November, there’s a good chance that we won’t hear how it’s faring until well into the New Year.
  It is, of course, the hope that kills you in the end, but as all three regular readers of this blog will know, I last week went public with my decision to quit writing. So I feel curiously detached from THE BIG EMPTY – although there’s a strong possibility that I feel that way because it’s by far my most personal piece of writing to date, and I’m simply steeling myself against the inevitable rejection letters (hey, not everyone’s going to like it, or love it enough to publish it; that’s just the way things work). Having said all that, I wouldn’t be human if I wasn’t feeling just the tiniest frisson of anticipation, or trepidation: in effect, I’ve submitted my baby to a beauty contest, and she’s now at the mercy of factors beyond my control, and depending on the kindness of strangers.
  As for the story, it’s a Harry Rigby private eye tale, a sequel to EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, of which the ever-generous Ken Bruen had this to say on its publication:

“I have seen the future of Irish crime fiction and it’s called Declan Burke. Here is talent writ large – mesmerizing, literate, smart and gripping. If there is such an animal as the literary crime novel, then this is it. But as a compelling crime novel, it is so far ahead of anything being produced, that at last my hopes for crime fiction are renewed. I can’t wait to read his next novel.”

  For what it’s worth, I think that THE BIG EMPTY is a better book than EIGHTBALL BOOGIE – but then, I would say that. The fact of the matter is that, when it comes to THE BIG EMPTY, my opinion no longer matters. To belabour the baby metaphor, I’ve done all I can to prepare her for the big, bad world, and can do nothing more to protect her from its harsh realities. All I can do is pray she gets a fair hearing and is treated kindly. Here’s hoping.
  If some kind soul does pick it up, then it would actually jibe quite well with last week’s decision, given that there are another two Harry Rigby novels already written, the rewriting / redrafting of which would allow me to keep my hand in at writing, without requiring the full-time commitment I’d have to make to write a new novel from scratch. In a perfect world, that would be the perfect scenario – although you don’t need me to tell you that neither you, I nor Harry Rigby lives in a perfect world. Anyway, upward and onward: bon voyage, THE BIG EMPTY, and a fair wind …

Killing For Kicks

I Q&A’d Mike Nicol (see below) last week, and Mike was kind enough to return the rubber-hose favour over at South Africa’s Crime Beat, with an excerpt running thusly:

Crime Beat: What’s the average kill count in your novels?
Declan Burke: Pretty low, I have to say. I’m not a fan of gratuitous murders, and I especially hate killing for the sake of advancing a plot, or to get rid of an inconvenient character, or to invoke some undeserved pathos. I think two people died violently in my first novel, EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, and none at all in the second, THE BIG O. Actually, THE BIG O was in part conceived as a fun exercise in how authentically I could write a crime novel without any killings and the bare minimum of violence. I had a friend who died young, and violently, so maybe that’s one reason I don’t take lethal violence lightly.

  That was a question that got me wondering: what’s an acceptable ‘kill count’ in a novel? Should I be killing off more people in my books? Are there people who put down books when they’ve finished, disappointed and muttering about the lack of corpses, the way some people complain about a lack of sex in a novel?
  There’s a character in a book that’s out with publishers for consideration right now (a Harry Rigby story, THE BIG EMPTY), and he’s a fairly repulsive character, and at one point I so badly wanted to kill him off – except it wasn’t absolutely necessary that he had to die. So, while the guy took a bit of beating, he got to live … Now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t have just gone ahead and slotted him.
  Maybe it’s because the story takes place in Sligo, in northwest Ireland, where a murder, or any kind of violent death, is still a very big deal, as it is anywhere else in Ireland. In that context, the context of the story and its setting, it’s hard to justify anything more than the absolute essential in terms of corpses. But there’s something more to it, too: the idea that, in a world where life gets cheaper by the day, and I include Ireland in that, there’s a kind of responsibility that goes with writing about violence and death. I definitely think that people (and I eventually come to think of characters as ‘people’) shouldn’t be slaughtered for the sake of ‘entertainment’ and vicarious thrills. As for the ‘torture porn’ that masquerades as some kind of social commentary, in which an author is so concerned about (say) the rape, torture and murder of women that he / she recounts said rape, torture and murder in intimate detail – I just don’t buy it, literally or figuratively.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE BIG EMPTY by Declan Burke

God bless the interweb, I say, where a man can have a novel reviewed even though it’s never been published. Corey Wilde over at The Drowning Machine was kind enough to request a Word document of THE BIG EMPTY, a sequel to EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, when I mentioned in passing that I was planning to upload it to Kindle. As it happens, I decided while giving the story one final proof-through that I wouldn’t upload it to Kindle, that I’d release it into the wild to do some scavenging and see if it mightn't bring home any bacon. I’ll keep you posted, although I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you …
  In the meantime, you’ve no idea of exactly how good life would be right now if Corey Wilde was CEO of World Publishing. To wit:

SYNOPSIS: Ex-con Harry Rigby drives a cab, mules a small amount of grass, and now and again he acts as father figure to his young nephew, Ben. An odd kind of a father figure, because Harry killed his brother, Ben’s father. That’s how Harry got to be a con in the first place. When Harry delivers some grass to an acquaintance named Finn Hamilton, he’s just in time to witness Finn’s nine-floor swan dive. Suddenly everyone wants something from Harry: the cops, Finn’s shyster lawyer and accompanying goon, Finn’s sexually combustible mama and his more-than-a-smidgen dysfunctional sister with the long claws. For Harry, keeping himself alive while trying to get his hands on Finn’s much sought after laptop and gun is one thing. Protecting the one person he loves most, that’s a whole different problem.

REVIEW: I miss having a photo of a book jacket to post at the top left of my review. That’s because there is no book jacket for THE BIG EMPTY. I’m sure the publishers put it down to the recession that they haven’t found a place for this sharply funny, jaggedly violent tale of a man walking a tightrope above a twisty canyon of family deceit and dirty money. Whatever the reason, recession or otherwise, it’s a shame. Declan Burke writes with a razor wit so fine that the reader feels the sting of a thousand cuts by the end of Harry’s journey ...
  Burke creates a palate of characters to root for or against, or even just to marvel at. The late Finn’s femme fatale mother is a devious creature whose literary ancestry hearkens back to female characters produced by Raymond Chandler and Tennessee Williams. Solicitor Gillick, Finn’s shyster, conjures up images of Orson Welles in ‘Touch of Evil.’ Ben is no cardboard child; he’s a breath of fresh air, being both as smart and aware as only a 10-year-old can be, and at the same time as naive as one would expect (or at least hope for) from a child his age; slightly rebellious but still more obedient than he will be at fifteen. He’s a kid you can love because he’s genuine, being neither a plaster saint nor the demon seed. And that’s true of Harry as well. The reader can believe in Harry as much for his failings as for his strengths. And when Harry has been pushed to his limits, when he finally is bent on payback, prefixing ‘Dirty’ to his name would not be a misnomer. He does some things I’ve myself wanted to do to a lawyer or two. And it doesn’t hurt that Harry cracks wiser than Philip Marlowe.
  The pace and tension ratchet up with every complication or obstacle Harry encounters. And the author wisely opted to give Harry enough native wit to parry and sort out the tightly knitted problems and mysteries rather than relying on chance or the one lone missing miracle clue that suddenly ties it all together. Life is not so neat as Jessica Fletcher would have her viewers believe. Some of the mysteries and puzzles may be solved by this story’s end, but no one’s life is ever going to be as it was, and some mysteries may never be solved. Beyond the wisecracking and the hot tempo, this book has a heart easily wounded. Harry Rigby is that heart. The reader, and Harry, are left in no doubt that where there are wounds, there will be scars.
  Can it really be recession that’s keeping a fast, witty work of crime fic like this off the bookstore shelves? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe Harry Rigby, or someone like him, should have a little talk with the publishers. - Corey Wilde

Publishing: If It Was A Dog, You’d Shoot It

I’ve been feeling a bit off about the whole writing bit lately, which is maybe a consequence of finishing a draft of a novel before I went on holiday. I’d planned to Kindle said novel, THE BIG EMPTY, and wanted to give it one last quick polish before I released it into the wild. Except 20 or 30 pages in I was thinking, ‘Actually, this isn’t as bad as I remember’ (it’s about five years since I wrote it). By the end I was fairly consumed by the story, and decided it needed a serious bit of work, but that it was worth it. Right now it’s out there in the tender care of some people I respect, and an opinion or two has started to waft back through the ether … mostly positive, happily enough.
  So maybe that’s why I’m feeling a bit drained and take-it-or-leave-it right now. And maybe the ennui has to do with the fact that there’s a couple of novels out there doing the rounds, THE BIG EMPTY and BAD FOR GOOD. Trying to maintain positive karma on behalf of both of them could wind up sucking me dry, and ruining the engine entirely, so maybe my subconscious has decided to temporarily promote the ‘don’t-really-give-a-shite’ defence.
  There are other reasons, though. The naked greed and gross stupidity of the industry in which I want to thrive is one of them. Another is the ongoing and relentless confirmation that the writing industry is not the meritocracy I’d always presumed it to be. Another is the daily confirmation of the fact that quite a lot of writers today aren’t writers at all, but simply businessmen (and women) with typewriters, who are far better at the business side of things than they are at the typing.
  Incidentally, today was the day I realised that the very fine website Crime Spot positions this blog in the category ‘The Business of Writing’, as opposed to the category ‘The Art of Writing’. It’s not that I think that my writing is art; it’s that I never thought of getting into writing for the sake of business. And I know that a goodly chunk of the output here is about promoting other writers … but is that necessarily ‘Business’ as opposed to ‘Art’?
  Anyway, by a pure fluke, I subsequently came across the Taint website, which was rating Irish blogs. And lo! Crime Always Pays comes in 43rd in the Top 100 Irish Blogs, which cheered me up no end. But lo-lo! It comes in 21st when the blogs are rated by ‘In-Bound Links’. I don’t really know what ‘In-Bound Links’ means, although I’m guessing it has to do with other websites et al linking to CAP …? Either way, I’m presuming it’s good.
  Cheered immeasurably by the news, I promptly went and ‘valued’ Crime Always Pays, and discovered that the blog is worth anywhere between $40k and $132k, depending on which website you believe.
  Bugger that ‘Art’ malarkey, we’re back in ‘Business’. Right?
  Erm, not really, although if anyone wants to make me an offer, I’m listening … Seriously, the best news I heard all day came via Ray Banks on Twitter, which directed me (eventually) to the video below. It’s a mission statement of sorts on behalf of publishing newbies Tyrus Books, which appears to take its philosophy from Ty Cobb, which is all sorts of alright with me. If we had even a tiny amount more people like this in the publishing industry, people, the world would be a hell of a better place. Or, for that matter, people like Stona Fitch, who was kind enough to send me a copy of his rather excellent novel SENSELESS recently. Roll it there, Collette …

Running On Empty

Last week I rather rashly posted up the opening snippet from my work-in-progress, aka THE BIG EMPTY, which is a sequel to my very first novel, EIGHTBALL BOOGIE. It features Harry Rigby, erstwhile ‘research consultant’ and now, after serving the best part of five years in prison for manslaughter, a taxi-driver (not pictured, right), on the basis that killing your own brother is a pretty good way of making yourself the least private eye in town. Anyway, I said last week I’d post up the rest of the first chapter of THE BIG EMPTY, so here goes.

1.

At the inquest they reckoned Finn punched down through the Audi’s boot from nine floors up. The boot concertina’d, puncturing the petrol tank. Shearing metal sparked.
  Ka-boom …
  The explosion blasted out the Audi’s windows. Mine too, front and back, jolting the cab off its front wheels. The airbag absorbed most of the flying glass but it punched me in the chest so hard it damn near broke ribs.
  My fault, of course. I wasn’t tensed up expecting a guy to plummet nine floors into an Audi’s petrol tank. I was just sitting there smoking and tapping the steering-wheel to ABC, When Smokey Sings. Wondering if it wasn’t too late to swing around by The Cellars for a late one, maybe a game of pool.
  Then, ka-boomski, I was semi-conscious, pain grating down my left side. Maybe I even blacked out. The heat got me moving, reaching around the deflating airbag to turn the key in the ignition, rolling the cab back until it was out of range. Then I squeezed out from behind the airbag and staggered to the Audi.
  The heat was fierce but I was still half-dazed, so I dived in and grabbed his ankles. One of his moccasins slipped off as he came free and at first I thought I’d ripped him in half. Then I thought he’d dropped a dwarf on the Audi. Strange the things you think about when you’re trying not to think at all.
  I dragged him away from the flames. That left a trail of blood and frying flesh stuck to the tarmac. The smell set my guts heaving, a sickly-sweet stench of burning pork. Then I realised why he seemed so short.
  The impact had driven his head and shoulders back up into his torso. If you looked closely enough, there was still some remnant of what had once been his neck. But the head had smashed like pulpy melon.
  I rang it in while globs of grey matter spat and shrivelled on the Audi’s glowing metalwork.


How it began was a balmy night, twenty past ten, the caller ID flashing Finn-Finn-Finn. I put down the book, turned on the radio to check his mood.
  Not good. Tindersticks, Tiny Tears.
  I picked up anyway. ‘How goes it?’
  ‘Not bad. You busy?’
  ‘Nope.’
  ‘How’s the weather?’
  ‘Balmy. You off on holidays?’
  ‘Hoping to.’
  ‘For how long?’
  ‘Three weeks if I can do it.’
  ‘You deserve it, man. See you later.’
  ‘Sweet.’
  I rang Herb.
  ‘Yello.’
  ‘Finn was on.’
  ‘What’s he looking?’
  ‘Same as last time.’
  ‘Alright. Give me ten minutes.’
  ‘It’ll be that by the time I get there. Put the kettle on.’
  I switched off the cab’s light and eased out of the rank, turning right onto Wine Street towards the Strandhill Road. At the lights Tiny Tears segued into Take Me Out, Franz Ferdinand. He followed that with The Jam, Town Called Malice. By then I was turning off Strandhill up into Larkhill and zapping Herb’s gate.
  Finn played good music but you had to be in the mood. Some nights he went off on a jag: Cohen, Drake, Walker, Waits. Santa Claus with a straight razor in his mitt, black dogs howling down the moon. Spend long enough driving a cab listening to Finn, you’ll wind up with a Mohawk cruising underage whores, trying to think of a politician it’d be worth the bullet to plug.


Herb was out back in the greenhouse, his mop of curly red hair just visible above staked rows of green. I ambled on down.
  He looked to be receiving communion: hands together, palms up, a jagged leaf trapped between his thumbs. I waited as he drew his palms up along the length of the leaf in a delicate operation: too much pressure and the leaf breaks off, not enough and the oil stays put. Herb could’ve done it on the back of a jet-ski.
  When the leaf slid away, he began rubbing the heels of his palms together. A long brown needle appeared.
  ‘Finn’s same again,’ he said.
  ‘What about it?’
  ‘That’s three bags, right?’
  ‘Yep.’
  ‘He got three last month too.’
  Herb didn’t do half-measures. Primo bud, 50-gram bags: sweet as Bambi going down, a kick like Thumper dreaming snares.
  ‘He has his guy down in the college,’ I said.
  ‘Except now it’s May and the students are gone home. Who’s he dealing to, the janitors?’
  ‘Want me to have a word?’
  ‘Don’t make like it’s a big deal. Just suss him out.’
  ‘Can do.’
  We headed up to the house. I made the coffee. Herb built a jay, just the single brown needle in a couple of skins. He never touched the grass he sold on. That came in from Galway to be cut with the oregano he grew in the greenhouse alongside the tomatoes, chilies, red and green peppers. In among the legit flora was Herb’s homegrown, a cross-pollination it had taken him two years to get just right. It’d been worth the wait. If you ever see a levitating rhino, you’re smoking Herb’s brew. Or the rhino is.
  He sprawled in his Ezy-Chair flipping channels, the sound down. ‘How’re the idiots?’ he said, handing the joint across.
  Herb didn’t get out a lot. It wasn’t a phobia, he just didn’t like people. Herb’s credo: always assume everyone’s an idiot.
  He’d been a photographer once, a good one, hooked up with an agency. We’d been a team freelancing local news and syndicating to the nationals. I did the hack work while Herb combined shutterbug with digging up background material on the web.
  Then Herb got his face stove in. Someone had told someone else that Herb had a photograph the someone else wanted. I was the someone who’d done the telling. Inadvertently, as it happened. Not that the who mattered. The bruisers were still walking around, free to stove at will. Herb stayed home, his complexion pasty, skin doughy. The way it can get when most of both jaws and one cheekbone are underpinned by steel plate.
  They’d wrecked his computers too, his dark room, everything worth anything. So Herb had the house torched, cashed in the insurance. Moved out to Larkhill, installed security gates, CC cameras. Invested in a little grass. Now he was a local player, freelance, paying subs to the Morans and clearing two or three grand a month.
  Chickenfeed, for some. And Herb could’ve been doing treble that, multiples, if he’d gotten into coke and E, maybe even smack. But Herb liked it steady, sure and under the radar. The way he saw it, no cop was busting his hump for Public Enemy No # 1,027.
  The cab was an idea I’d picked up inside. A front to get him onto the Revenue’s books and keep them sweet. So no one got the urge to pick up the phone and ring the Criminal Assets Bureau, wondering how no-income Herb could afford a four-bed on its own grounds out in the burbs. The little tax he did pay he claimed back in VAT, running expenses, all that, with the bonus of the cab being good cover for punting deals on to his regulars.
  ‘Had a guy in the back earlier on,’ I said. ‘He reckoned he could get me a gun.’
  ‘You ask him if he could get you a gun?’
  ‘Nope.’
  ‘Fucking idiot. By the way.’ He fumbled with his cell phone, tossed it across. He’d called up a text message: Herbie – cn u remind Hry he has Ben’s PARENT-TEACHER mting tmoro 2pm? Ta, Dee.
  ‘Shit,’ I said.
  ‘Will you make it?’
  ‘Have to. Dee reckons she has a stock-take on at work.’
  ‘So when are you supposed to sleep?’
  ‘My zeds wouldn’t be one of Dee’s priorities, Herb.’
  He shrugged and switched off the TV. Turned on the stereo, tuned it to Finn. Nick Drake, Black Dog. One of Finn’s favourites. We listened in silence. Herb cracked first.
  ‘I got some Motown in there,’ he said, pointing at his CD rack. ‘I want you to bring it down to the docks, tie that part-time fucking philanthropist to his chair and tell him he’s getting no more score until I hear Smokey.’
  ‘Will do.’ I nodded at the TV. ‘Anything good on later?’
  ‘You coming back?’
  ‘Might as well stay up after I knock off. Want me to grab a DVD?’
  ‘Something black-and-white,’ he said. ‘The kind where they crack wise and smoke a lot.’


I swung around by Blockbusters and picked up Duck Soup, Groucho on the cover tipping ash off his cigar. By then the orange light was showing, so I crossed town to the all-night station on Pearse Road, filled up.
  It was better out in the suburbs, and it was mostly all suburbs, but the town was a heart-attack of concrete and chrome. Old streets, high and narrow, arteries that had thickened and gnarled so the traffic trickled or didn’t move at all. The light a frozen glare shot with greens and reds, blinking pink neon, fluorescent blues. Boom-boom blasting from rolled-down windows, the deep bass pulsing out muscles of sound.
  On a bad night it took fifteen minutes to crawl the two hundred yards along Castle Street into Grafton Street. The mob shuffling out of the chippers wore hoodies over baggy denims, the dragging hems frayed. Night of the Living McDead. The girls in cropped tops over bulging bellies with hipster jeans showcasing cheese-cutter thongs. In case someone might think they weren’t wearing any underwear at all, maybe.
  I skipped O’Connell Street, heading east along John Street, turning north down Adelaide and then west at the new bridge onto Lynn’s Dock, a grapefruit moon hanging low above the quays. Finn playing The Northern Pikes, Place That’s Insane. On along Ballast Quay to the docks proper, a spit of land jutting out into the sea, maybe forty acres of crumbling warehouse facing open water. Behind the warehouses lay a marshy jungle of weeds. Once in a while there was talk of turning it into a nature preserve, a bird sanctuary, but no one ever did anything about it. The birds came and went anyway.
  Down at the breakwater the Port Authority building was nine stories of black concrete, a finger flipping the bird to the town. Sligo’s Ozymandias, our monument to hubris, built back in the ’60s when Lemass had all boats on a rising tide and the docks were buzzing, a North Atlantic entry point for Polish coal, Norwegian pine, Jamaican sugar, Australian wool. Oil tankers moored down at the deepwater. Russians slipped ashore and never went to sea again. The first African, a Nigerian, was a celebrity. They called him Paddy Dubh and he never had to pay when he bought a pint of stout.
  Then the ’70s slithered in. Crude oil went through the roof. The coal stopped coming, then the sugar. The channel silted up. Paddy had to buy his own stout. Things got so bad the Industrial Development Authority had to buy the PA building and then lease back two of the nine stories to the Port Authority. Even that was a farce, the IDA loaning the PA the money to pay the lease.
  Then the ’80s, a good decade to be a weed or a rat. Everyone forgot about the docks, or tried to.
  Bob Hamilton came in like the cavalry. He’d pretty much dry-lined every last square inch of Thatcher’s London, and when they finally kicked out the Iron Lady, Big Bob took that as his cue. Came home in ’91, sniffed the wind. Liquidated every last asset of Hamilton Holdings and diversified into Irish real estate. Joined the Rotary Club, the Tennis Club and damn near every other club in town bar the Tuesday night chess in the Trades. Turned up on the board of the local IDA about four months before he bought up sixteen acres of docklands, which included the PA building and not a lot of anything else.
  A rumour went around that Big Bob was insider trading: investment on its way, a port rejuvenation, Bob all set to make a killing. No one believed it. Not the bit about insider trading; no one gave a Jap’s crap about that. It was the one about investment that got the lines all a-chortle over at the brew.
  The investment never did arrive, although there was a killing of sorts three years later when Bob’s brand new Beamer wound up in the deepwater late one January evening, Bob still at the wheel. Finn told me the official verdict was death by misadventure but the inquest failed to offer a satisfactory reason as to why the Beamer’s windows might have been open down at the deepwater late one January evening.
  There were few lights still working down at the docks. The quays lay open, no guard rail, the sheer drop interrupted only by rusting containers, trailers of mouldy timber, piles of abandoned scrap metal. I tooled along the quays in second gear, the tarmac pot-holed and cracked, verges crumbling. If you squinted, the road looked like a Curly Wurly. High weeds lined both sides of the road, clumping in the bricked-up doorways of the warehouses. The day had been hot and it was still warm, the acrid hum of melting tar thickening the air.
  I turned into the PA’s yard and saw a sleek maroon Saab gleaming under the single bare light over the door. Finn’s pirate station was a one-man show and DJs playing Leonard Cohen don’t get groupies since John Peel passed on, bless his cotton socks, so I crossed the yard in a wide arc and eased in behind Finn’s battered black Audi, parking tight to the wall.
  The Saab flashed me. I waited. Nothing else happened, so I got out and locked the car, strolled around to the PA’s door.
  The driver got out of the Saab and put a hand up, palm out. ‘Far enough, pal.’
  ‘How far wouldn’t be enough?’
  ‘Just about there.’
  He was built like an upside-down cello. A straight jab to the chin would need to set up base camp on his sternum before making its final assault. Out back a short ponytail compensated for the balding on top. He wore a white shirt, a thin black tie. Through the Saab’s open door I could see a black peaked cap on the passenger seat, its peak shiny patent leather.
  I pulled up six inches shy of where I guessed his swing would land. ‘I’m expected,’ I said.
  ‘Not by me you’re not.’
  ‘True.’
  The trouble there is, if one guy gets to thinking he can tell you what you can do, it’s only a matter of time before the rest start feeling the same. Then you’re on the skids. And I was already on the skids.
  ‘I’m going up,’ I said.
  ‘Fine by me, pal. Just not yet.’
  I craned my neck to glance straight up at the ninth floor, the window’s yellow glow. ‘He makes you wear a hat?’ I said.
  That didn’t work him at all. ‘You know what I like?’ he said. ‘Cars, threads and quim. This way, I get paid to drive and wear good suits.’
  ‘Two out of three ain’t bad.’
  ‘I make out.’ He up-jutted his chin. ‘Finn’s expecting you?’
  ‘Yep.’
  He looked meaningfully at the cab. ‘Something wrong with his Audi?’
  ‘Other than it’s not a Porsche?’
  ‘Too fucking right. Jimmy,’ he said then, by way of introduction.
  ‘Rigby.’
  He leaned in, sniffed the air, making a point of it, letting me know he’d marked my cards. ‘Stay useful, Rigby.’
  ‘I’ll try.’

  © Declan Burke, 2009

Everything Goes Better With An E

All three regular readers of CAP will be aware that I’m planning to upload a book to Kindle in the very near future, so I’m more exercised by the whole e-book / e-reader phenomenon at the moment than I generally would be. Still, even the luddest of Luddites should be intrigued / alarmed / horrified by a couple of interesting pieces that popped into my email this morning. The first was from the Guardian:

In the first Terminator movie he tried to extinguish all human life. Now, as governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to make textbooks history in favour of digital formats.
  Schwarzenegger, trying to plug a budget hole of $24.3bn (£15bn), thinks he can make savings by getting rid of what he decries as expensive textbooks. The governor is serious about an idea that might make Gutenberg turn in his grave. He appeared in class yesterday to push an idea he set out in the San Jose Mercury News newspaper.
  “It’s nonsensical and expensive to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form,” Schwarzenegger wrote. “Especially now, when our school districts are strapped for cash and our state budget deficit is forcing further cuts to classrooms, we must do everything we can to untie educators’ hands and free up dollars so that schools can do more with fewer resources.”

  The second piece was from Reuters:

The recent Book Expo publishing industry convention held in New York accelerated the impression that the industry is rapidly embracing new technology. Many attendees remarked that e-books pervaded every discussion they had on the convention floor. “It has tipped,2 tweeted Todd Sattersten, president of Milwaukee-based 800-CEO-Read, an influential online source of business books. “Buckle in for the ride.”
  Indeed, the last few weeks have seen a flurry of announcements across the book-to-technology spectrum. Amazon (AMZN) informed users of a small-but-meaningful tweak to the Kindle that now allows users to export their reading notes. Google (GOOG) revealed its own e-book distribution system, publishers launched book-specific iPhone apps in the United Kingdom, and computer makers unveiled new ways to incorporate e-ink technology into highly portable but robust computing devices [ … ]
  So with all of this fast-paced activity, are we hurtling into a brave new reading world where authors deal directly with their readers and keep more of the profits? Not yet. For all of the publishers’ fumbling with e-books, they retain one important advantage highlighted by all of this activity. There’s a blizzard of standards out there that only a big company can manage. Without an established standard, size matters in the supply chain. Publishers have it; authors don’t.

  Dang, there goes another get-rich-quick scheme.
  Speaking of get-rich-quick schemes … I’d no sooner announced that I was thinking of uploading THE BIG EMPTY, the sequel to EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, to Kindle, when a publisher stepped in and asked to see it before it goes to Kindle. Which was nice. And this morning, I got a call from a movie producer guy saying he’d read THE BIG O, and was keen on optioning it, and was I free to sit down for a meeting next week …?
  Guess I’ll have to postpone washing my hair next week ...

Neville Gazing

Stuart Neville (right) has just kicked off a marathon blog-per-day series over at his very fine Adventures in Novel Writing blog, which will peak and climax with the publication of THE TWELVE in roughly a month’s time. Yesterday he blogged about finally receiving the finished book, and how it felt – which, sadly, wasn’t particularly earth-shattering, according to Stuart. To wit:

“Holding the book in my hand wasn’t the earth-shattering, life-altering, choirs-of-angels-sing-while-the-world-is-bathed-in-white-light moment I thought it might have been two years ago. Don’t get me wrong, it's a truly wonderful feeling, but ever since bagging my agent, the journey to this stage has been a long series of victories, and the occasional defeat. There wasn’t one definable moment where I crossed the threshold between hope and actuality. Rather it has been a steady climb to this place where I can call myself an honest-to-God published author.”

  A noble sentiment, it has to be said. And Stuart seems to be the kind of bloke who keeps his feet on the ground. He seemed that way last year, when I met him in Dun Laoghaire at the Books ’08 Festival, even after a dry sherry or five. I met him again a couple of weeks ago, and he seemed entirely rooted, earthy and balanced. Chthonic, really. I mean, if it’d been me that got that big-up from James Ellroy? They’d still be scraping bits of me out of the chandelier.
Not Stuart, though. Fair play to him, he’s modest as well as everything else.
  I remember the first time I was handed a copy of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE. I remember it like it was yesterday, and it was the finest moment of my life right up to the moment Lily was born. It really was one of those dizzying, shining, dazzling moments – my agent at the time, Jonathan Williams, handed me a copy on a Galway street, and I floated. It was magic, really. I felt like a child at Christmas, and all growed up at the same time. You’ll excuse my innocence, I hope, but as far as I was concerned at the time, I was finally in the gang – the gang that had Hemingway and Chandler and Salinger and Durrell and Conrad …
  Seriously, though – I’d been waiting twenty years for that moment, and when it finally came it was even better than I thought it might be. There’s not a lot of times in life when you can say you feel utterly fulfilled, but that was certainly one for me.
  I’m redrafting the sequel to EIGHTBALL BOOGIE now, as it happens. It’s called THE BIG EMPTY, and it picks up with Harry Rigby recently out of prison, where he served five years for manslaughter after being convicted of killing his brother, Gonzo, in self-defence, and now driving a taxi as a front for a dope dealer. It starts like this:

At the inquest they reckoned Finn punched down through the Audi’s boot from nine floors up. The boot concertina’d, puncturing the petrol tank. Shearing metal sparked.
  Ka-boom …
  The explosion blasted out the Audi’s windows. Mine too, front and back, jolting the cab off its front wheels. The airbag absorbed most of the flying glass but it punched me in the chest so hard it damn near broke ribs.
  My fault, of course. I wasn’t tensed up expecting a guy to plummet nine floors into an Audi’s petrol tank. I was just sitting there smoking and tapping the steering-wheel to ABC, When Smokey Sings. Wondering if it wasn’t too late to swing around by the Cellars for a late one, maybe a game of pool.
  Then, ka-boomski, I was semi-conscious, pain grating down my left side. Maybe I even blacked out. The heat got me moving, reaching around the deflating airbag to turn the key in the ignition, rolling the cab back until it was out of range. Then I squeezed out from behind the airbag and staggered to the Audi.
  The heat was fierce but I was still half-dazed, so I dived in and grabbed his ankles. One of his moccasins slipped off as he came free and at first I thought I’d ripped him in half. Then I thought he’d dropped a dwarf on the Audi. Strange the things you think about when you’re trying not to think at all.
  I dragged him away from the flames. That left a trail of blood and frying flesh stuck to the tarmac. The sickly-sweet stench of burning pork set my guts heaving. Then I realised why he seemed so short.
  The impact had driven his head and shoulders back up into his torso. If you looked closely enough there was still some stump of what had once been his neck, but the head had smashed like pulpy melon.
  I rang it in while the Audi’s metalwork glowed a dull red and globs of grey matter shrivelled and spat …

  © Declan Burke, 2009

  If I get the time, I’ll bang up the whole first chapter sometime next week. Meanwhile, get ye hence to Stuart Neville’s blog and buy THE TWELVE. If you don’t, he’ll come around and get all reasonable and sensible on yo ass …

Publish And / Or Be Damned

Further to yesterday’s post, I’m thinking seriously about publishing to Kindle …

The Upsides:
One less manuscript in the bulging manuscript drawer;
An opportunity to explore a new medium;
Increased word-of-mouth (theoretically);
Increased profile in the industry (even marginally);
The possibility of a traditional publisher picking up the book for traditional publication and – theoretically – an actual money-shaped advance;
People reading the book, and giving feedback (hopefully);
It’d be another caper.

The Downsides
There isn’t a lot of money to be earned;
Your potential readership is limited to Kindle owners;
Erm, that’s about it, really.

  At the moment I’m looking at uploading the second Harry Rigby novel, which is a sequel to EIGHTBALL BOOGIE and is called THE BIG EMPTY, probably in about a month’s time. There’s also a chance I might get to upload CRIME ALWAYS PAYS, the sequel to THE BIG O, although that’ll depend on permissions from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Feel free to start a petition …
  Meanwhile, and while we’re on the topic of e-publishing, this sounds potentially intriguing …

Google appears to be throwing down the gauntlet in the e-book market. In discussions with publishers at the annual BookExpo convention in New York over the weekend, Google signalled its intent to introduce a program by that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google. The move would pit Google against Amazon.com, which is seeking to control the e-book market with the versions it sells for its Kindle reading device …
  Mr. Turvey said Google’s program would allow consumers to read books on any device with Internet access, including mobile phones, rather than being limited to dedicated reading devices like the Amazon Kindle. “We don’t believe that having a silo or a proprietary system is the way that e-books will go,” he said.
  He said that Google would allow publishers to set retail prices. Amazon lets publishers set wholesale prices and then sets its own prices for consumers. In selling e-books at $9.99, Amazon takes a loss on each sale because publishers generally charge booksellers about half the list price of a hardcover — typically around $13 or $14.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …