Dead Men Tell Good Tales: GRAVELAND by Alan Glynn

Those who have been following Alan Glynn’s career will appreciate the symmetry that sees his latest offering, GRAVELAND (Picador USA), set in New York – which is where it all started for Alan Glynn, with the superb THE DARK FIELDS. The concluding chapter of a loose trilogy incorporating WINTERLAND and BLOODLAND (which won the crime fiction gong at the Irish Book Awards in 2011), GRAVELAND is released on May 23rd, and shapes up a lot like this:

A Wall Street investment banker is shot dead while jogging in Central Park. Later that night, one of the savviest hedge-fund managers in the city is gunned down outside a fancy Upper West Side restaurant. Are these killings part of a coordinated terrorist attack, or just coincidence? Investigative journalist Ellen Dorsey has a hunch that it’s neither. Days later, when an attempt is made on the life of another CEO, the story blows wide open ...
  Racing to stay ahead of the curve, Ellen encounters Frank Bishop, a recession-hit architect, whose daughter has gone missing. The search for Lizzie and her boyfriend takes Frank and Ellen from a quiet campus to the blazing spotlight of a national media storm - and into the devastating crucible of a personal and a public tragedy.
  Meanwhile, lurking in the shadows once again is James Vaughn, legendary CEO of private equity firm the Oberon Capital Group. Despite his failing health, Vaughan is refusing to give up control easily, and we soon see just how far-reaching and pervasive his influence really is.
  Set deep in the place where corrupt global business and radical politics clash, Alan Glynn’s GRAVELAND is an explosive and hugely topical thriller.

  For a review of BLOODLAND, clickety-click here.
  For a review of THE DARK FIELDS, clickety-click here.

In Like Glynn

Not naming any names or nowt, but as events this week in Ireland have proved, you can’t be too paranoid about the likely consequences when the worlds of business and politics collide. That’s a theme explored in ‘Limitless’ (see review here), the movie adapted from the novel THE DARK FIELDS written by Alan Glynn (right, in full-on Kenneth Branagh mode). As he explains in an Irish Times interview published today, it’s a theme Glynn further explores in the novels WINTERLAND (2009) and the forthcoming BLOODLAND (2011). To wit:

“People Do Get Away With Murder”

A writer of dark, thoughtful thrillers, Alan Glynn waited 10 years for his first novel to get the movie treatment. But when your hero Robert De Niro is starring in it, it’s worth the wait, he tells Declan Burke

“The idea of there being a ‘quick fix’ for everything in your life is one that’s current in the culture,” says Alan Glynn, author of THE DARK FIELDS, from which the film ‘Limitless’ is adapted. “There’s a drug for everything, there’s a quick diet, you can make yourself over, all these kinds of things. So it was a question of taking that notion and reducing it to a simple pill - if you take this one pill, you can have the world, but it’s going to cost you your soul.”
  ‘Limitless’ stars Bradley Cooper, who plays struggling New York writer Eddie Morra. Once Eddie is introduced to a new super-drug, NZT, his life is changed utterly. Productive, insightful and surpassingly intelligent, Eddie is soon making a fortune trading stocks. But every drug has its side-effects, and Eddie’s come-down involves paranoia, betrayal and the distinct possibility of an early death.
  Right now, Alan Glynn’s adrenaline rush has no need of artificial stimulants.
  “Before the movie started,” says Glynn of last week’s New York premiere of ‘Limitless’, “the director, Neil Burger, stood up and said he wanted to introduce a few people who were involved in the movie. And he said, ‘This all started with the book,’ and introduced me first (laughs). I hadn’t expected that, and I thought it was lovely, because after that he went through Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper, all the rest. So that was very gratifying.”
  What made it even better was that De Niro was sitting three rows behind in the theatre. “He was a hero of mine, as he was to a whole generation,” says Glynn. “If you had told me when the rights for THE DARK FIELDS were first signed [in 2001] that I’d have to wait another ten years to see it made, but Robert De Niro would be in the movie, I’d have taken that.”
  In a neat touch, the title of the book Eddie publishes in ‘Limitless’ is called ‘Illuminating the Dark Fields’. In the real world, THE DARK FIELDS has been re-released under the title LIMITLESS.
  “I’m not so happy about that,” he says. “Obviously, I’m very attached to the original title, it’s from the last page of THE GREAT GATSBY, and it has thematic resonances throughout the whole book, while the title ‘Limitless’ is the product of a marketing testing system. But the book has been re-released here and in the US, it was in the shops in the US before the movie opened and selling quite well. I mean, even before the movie has been released, the book has sold more copies now than it did on the entire run of its first publication.”
  Glynn, who lives in Dublin with his wife and two sons, lived in New York from 1985 to 1989, but only started writing THE DARK FIELDS after he moved back to Ireland from Italy in 1999. “That was around the time of the dot com bubble, and in the book there’s this whole section about the biggest corporate merger in American history, which I based on the Time Warner / AOL merger of the time.”
  The Faustian pact Eddie enters into is a theme Glynn subsequently explored in WINTERLAND (2009). Set in Dublin just as the property boom is going bust, and hailed as remarkably prescient on its release, it explores the shadowy nexus where the worlds of politics, business and white- and blue-collar crime intersect.
  “In anything I’ve ever written,” he says, “there always seems to be a dark, malign power figure at the heart of the story. It seems to me that the modern incarnation of that malign power in society is the CEO, who’s almost like the Machiavellian Prince figure. A politician or even a monarch might have a sense of responsibility to go with that power, but the CEO has a responsibility solely to his or her shareholders, so it’s almost an amoral power. In that sense it’s a very modern pure form of power, which can even be more evil in its consequences, with no regard all for any community or human value whatsoever.
  “I go into that in BLOODLAND as well. WINTERLAND is about the property boom in Ireland, but BLOODLAND has a broader, more international setting. Part of it has to do with the illegal mining of coltan in the Congo, and the lack of accountability there in the supply chain between the metals extracted illegally and high-end consumer products that are found in the First World. Coltan is essential for use in capacitors in the electronic equipment we use all the time - it’s in every mobile phone, every game console, that we use. But there doesn’t seem to be any moral connect between that and the conditions in which this stuff is extracted in the Congo, and which has in part been responsible for a war that’s been going on for nearly 20 years, in which five to eight million people have been killed. I mean, it’s covered intermittently, but the scale of it is mind-boggling. But because it’s not about oil, it flies under the radar, strategically speaking. I don’t want to sound polemical or that I’m pushing an agenda, but I’m using that to explore the kinds of power figures who control that trade, from the upper echelons of corporate America. That’s one strand of the story, and there’s a political aspect, and military contractors, and the privatisation of war as a business.
  “What I’m planning for the next book,” he continues, “which is called GRAVELAND - it’s the third in a loose trilogy - is to go back into the past, back to the 1870s in America, when the railroads were being built. There’s a character called James Vaughn who features in WINTERLAND, the old American corporate guy, he’s also in ‘Bloodland’ and he’ll feature largely in GRAVELAND - it goes back into his family history, almost like exploring a Kennedy-like dynasty.”
  Glynn was first inspired to write by what he calls the ‘great paranoid thrillers’ of the 1970s. How does ‘Limitless’ compares as a conspiracy thriller to that Golden Age?
  “It’s obviously different to the classic conspiracy thrillers,” he says, “the tone and the feel of those movies was so specific to the times, y’know, Watergate, Vietnam, and that paranoid, claustrophobic feeling can’t be recreated authentically. And it’s definitely not in this movie - there’s a lighter tone to this film, there’s a knowing, satirical edge to it that you didn’t get in the classic conspiracy thrillers.”
  While the movie ends on an upbeat but morally complex note, the novel THE DARK FIELDS has a very bleak and noir finale.
  “It’s not the book up there on screen,” Glynn concedes, “but you expect that. There’s always more depth in a book. In the movie, Eddie doesn’t get the really fuzzy end of the Faustian pact he gets in the book. But then, cinema is a whole different medium, there’s a totally different energy to it. The movie is the book’s story edited down to the bone.”
  That didn’t stop the author from enjoying the movie, which topped the US box office on its release last weekend.
  “To be perfectly honest, I grinned like a loon the whole way through,” he says. “I was anticipating feeling ambivalent, or even horrified, possibly, and afterwards there was such a sense of relief that I’d enjoyed it so much. I met Neil Burger two minutes after it finished, and I was able to shake his hand and say, ‘I loved it.’ Which was a great relief (laughs). To be able to speak positively about it is great. It’d be a strange position to be in otherwise, to have to either (a) lie about it or (b) tell the brutal truth. But I don’t have to do either of those, which is great.”
  Despite the themes of power and corruption, and the criminal activities in which his characters tend to dabble, Glynn is in no hurry to pigeonhole himself as a particular kind of writer.
  “I don’t really care about the labels. When I say I don’t see myself as a crime writer, I don’t mean that to sound judgemental. I love crime fiction, but that’s not in my head when I’m writing. I wouldn’t consider myself a literary writer either, I just do what I do.”
  The innate conservatism of the crime novel, where order almost inevitably emerges from chaos, is an unnecessarily restrictive constraint.
  “There is that element of conservatism and morality that exists in a lot of crime fiction, the idea that the wrong has to be set right. But some of the stuff I’ve done has almost been a cynical conclusion that right doesn’t triumph, that the harsh reality is that it often doesn’t, and that people do get away with murder.
  “I mean, by the end of WINTERLAND, the bad guy isn’t caught and held accountable, but he does die according to his own weakness. There’s a certain amount of wrapping-up there, but it’s a bit more complex than just the bad guy brought down by the good guy.”

Alan Glynn’s Top Paranoid Thrillers

‘Chinatown’ (1974)
“With its sun-drenched 1930s LA setting, a brilliant script by Robert Towne and unforgettable score by Jerry Goldsmith, Polanski’s ‘Chinatown’ is the ultimate study of power and corruption. It looks back nostalgically to the classic noir era, but it also roots itself in the malaise of the 1970s – because never before had a big screen American hero been so casually crushed by malign, unaccountable forces.”

‘Three Days of the Condor’ (1975)
“The ending is brilliant, it’s an ending they’d never use today. The Robert Redford character is standing outside the ‘New York Times’ offices, and he’s telling this guy he’s about to blow the story, this conspiracy, wide open. And the guy is saying, well, go ahead, but do you really think it’s worth it, every day for the rest of your life looking over your shoulder? And it all ends on a very dark, paranoid note …”

‘All the President’s Men’ (1976)
“Even today, it really stands up. I saw it again recently and it’s just fantastic. What’s great about it is the way it cuts out before the whole thing about Nixon really goes off, they’re typing away - tchk-tchk-tchck- it’s up there on the screen, it’s fantastic. And that kind of ending requires the audience to know what happened next, to be intelligent enough to make their own leap. That doesn’t happen a lot these days.”

‘Marathon Man’ (1976)
“I love Marathon Man. I saw it when it came out first, I was still a kid, and I absolutely adored it. Especially the music, by Michael Small. You can’t get it anymore. None of his scores are available, and he’s one of the key ’70s composers of music for paranoid thrillers - ‘Klute’, ‘Marathon Man’ and a couple of others.”

  ‘Limitless’ goes on general release this weekend. Alan Glynn’s BLOODLAND will be published by Faber & Faber in September.

  This interview first appeared in the Irish Times

On Illuminating THE DARK FIELDS

‘Limitless’, the movie version of Alan Glynn’s THE DARK FIELDS, gets its release in the US on Friday, and in the UK and Ireland on March 23rd, and very enjoyable it is too - a seductive tale of drug-induced super-human intelligence that quickly spirals out of control into a paranoid conspiracy thriller. To wit:

Limitless (15A)
Struggling writer Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) has his life transformed when an old acquaintance hooks him up with NZT, a drug so new it hasn’t been patented. The super-drug allows Eddie to access 100% of his consciousness, as opposed to the 20% used by non-NZT users, and suddenly Eddie is wooing back his ex-girlfriend Lindy (Abbie Cornish) and moving into the world of high finance as he beats Wall Street at its own game. But ever drug has its come-down, and NZT’s is particularly vicious - soon Eddie finds himself embroiled in violence and murder, and facing a very early death. Based on Irish novelist Alan Glynn’s THE DARK FIELDS, the movie comes charging out of the gate as if its makers themselves were on some kind of super-drug, a fast-paced, smart and engaging thriller that exerts a fascinating grip - who, after all, wouldn’t want to turn into a world-beater overnight, and at the drop of a tiny pill? Cooper is in particularly fine form as Eddie, convincingly downbeat in the beginning, when he looks like a hobo, but equally believable as a super-human font of all knowledge, and he gets strong support from Cornish, even if her character tends to flit in and out of proceedings. Meanwhile, Robert De Niro, playing financier Carl Van Loon, is rather laidback here, although it’s still his most enjoyable performance in some years. The movie starts to lose focus once Eddie begins to experience time-slips and blackouts, and while the creeping sense of drug-induced paranoia is effectively done, the screenwriters attempt to cram too much story onto the screen, which results in plot digressions, red herrings and half-finished storylines. Overall, though, it’s a hell of a trip. ****

  Incidentally, THE DARK FIELDS has been re-released as LIMITLESS to coincide with the movie’s release, and it’ll come as no surprise to learn that the book is a superior experience to the movie (watch out, by the way, for the neat touch in the film when Eddie publishes a book called ILLUMINATING THE DARK FIELDS). Meanwhile, clickety-click here for Alan’s account of the tortuous process of watching THE DARK FIELDS slowly wend its way towards the silver screen …

One Pill Makes You Larger …

Good news, bad news. The good news is that there’s a very nifty trailer for the adaptation of Alan Glynn’s THE DARK FIELDS doing the rounds, said trailer featuring Bradley Cooper in an ‘infomercial’ about the radical new superdrug, NZT. The bad news is that the movie has been re-titled ‘Limitless’, which makes a certain amount of sense in terms of the movie’s content, but is nowhere as interesting a title as ‘The Dark Fields’. Anyhoo, the movie also stars Robert De Niro, Abby Cornish and Anna Friel, and is slated to open (in the US, at least) next March. In the meantime, roll it there, Collette …

Origins: Alan Glynn

Being the latest in what will probably be yet another short-lived series, in which yours truly reclines on a hammock by the pool with a jeroboam of Elf-Wonking Juice™ and lets a proper writer talk about the origins of his or her characters and stories. This week: Alan Glynn (right), author of WINTERLAND. To wit:

“Origins? It seems to me that that’s just a fancy way of asking the dreaded question: where do you get your ideas from? (A question second only in dread to: what’s your book about?). Whenever I’m asked the first question I try hard to answer it, but I generally end up feeling like a bit of a fraud, as though I’ve made an answer up on the spot just to keep things moving. Because the thing is, by the time I arrive at the end of a book I usually find I’ve forgotten how it got started, its origins obscured somewhere in memory and almost inaccessible now through thickets of notes, outlines, obsessive but often unnecessary research and a seemingly endless process of re-writing.
  “Thinking back on answers I’ve given, though, a pattern emerges. The account I offer will either be fine-sounding and rational or slightly random and mechanistic – left brain, right brain stuff. Both do the job, and neither, I suspect, is actually untrue. It’s just that I can never be sure which came first . . .
  “For example, when asked about my first novel, THE DARK FIELDS, I would say either one of two things. I would say that it arose from an interest in the scandals of the late ’90s regarding performance-enhancing drugs in sport, and that it was a sort of ‘what if . . .’ story – what if there existed a performance-enhancing drug for lawyers or businessmen or politicians? Out of which came questions about that very American theme of the perfectability of man and the notion of a latter-day Gatsby, whose impulse for self-improvement has been reduced to a pharmaceutical commodity.
  “Or I would say that it arose from . . . not much at all, from a desperate scrambling around inside my own brain for SOMETHING TO WRITE ABOUT. So . . . a situation. Maybe two guys who bump into each other on the street. One is a bit desperate (like I am at the time) and he meets . . . who? His ex-brother-in-law? Someone he hasn’t seen in nearly ten years? Yeah, that’s the ticket. But now that I have them together what are they going to talk about? What have you been up to? Still dealing? Not exactly. How about you? Still a loser? One thing leads to another and before you know it they’re having a conversation. Possibilities are opening up. And – quite literally – the whole book comes out of that.
  “With WINTERLAND I would say that I was fascinated by the idea of a skyscraper that had an in-built structural flaw and of having that represent the greedy aspirations of a society spinning out of all moral control. Or . . . I’d say that the book started with the disconnected image of some people sitting in a beer garden having to listen to a car alarm outside, and slowly realizing that the car belongs to a young gangland thug sitting in their midst who refuses to go out and switch it off.
  “With my new novel, BLOODLAND, was it reading Michela Wrong’s IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF MR KURTZ and wanting to explore the direct line from ivory and rubber extraction in the Congo over a hundred years ago to the extraction of coltan today? Or was it simply wanting to kick-start a whole novel with just these two words: ‘Phone rings.’
  “Well? Was it?
  “As Rocky Balboa once said, “I don’t know, you know, who knows?”
  “It’s a weird process and Edgar Allen Poe describes it best in an essay called ‘The Philosophy of Composition’. He suggests going behind the scenes of a work-in-progress and taking a peep, ‘at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought - at the true purposes seized only at the last moment - at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view - at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable . . .’
  “Ouch. But it sounds about right.
  “Having finished BLOODLAND, it won’t be long before I’m heading back once more into the thickets. But every time I do this, I try to convince myself that there must be a form of insurance policy you can take out to guarantee safe passage to the other side, that there must be some help available – a GPS system for novelists, say, or at the very least a how-to manual that actually works . . .
  “It’s amazing how much time you can devote to this sort of stuff – and for devote, of course, read waste. I think what happens is that one day you realize you have started, you’re somewhere, and the only way to go is forward. By the time you’re secure enough to look back the starting point will invariably seem distant and fuzzy.
  “But then, when you get asked about it later on, you can always come up with something – a handy retrofit based on what eventually emerges . . . either that or a half-remembered fragment, a shard, dreamlike but telling, that might very well be the actual starting point, that might very well be the truth. But hey, one way or the other, who’s going to contradict you, right?” - Alan Glynn

Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND is published by Faber and Faber.

The Dark Art of Paranoia

The publication of the paperback edition of Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND is as good an excuse as any to reprint the interview with him I had published in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times’ Culture section a couple of months ago. To wit:

It started on the late, late shows. While most boys in the early ’70s were trawling the late-night TV channels in the hope of glimpsing some illicit flesh, the teenage Alan Glynn was getting off on a more potent charge: paranoia.
  “I think that the stuff you ingest as a teenager is the stuff that sticks with you for life,” says Glynn. “When I was a teenager in the 1970s, the biggest influence was movies, and especially the conspiracy thrillers. What they call the ‘paranoid style’ in America – Klute, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, Three Days of the Condor, and of course, the great Chinatown. There was a societal thing going on, they were examining the whole paranoia thing in American politics at the time, which seemed exotic to me when I was catching late-night movies on BBC2. It was exotic back then, but now we’ve got it. We’re all paranoid now.”
  ‘Follow the money,’ urged Deep Throat in All the President’s Men. Sage advice for those trying to understand why and how Ireland’s boom went bust; or it might be, were there any money left to follow.
  Written while the economy was still thriving, Glynn’s new novel, Winterland, nevertheless gets under the bricks and mortar of post-boom Ireland. Noel Rafferty is a consultant working on a building development on Dublin’s quays. His nephew, also Noel Rafferty, is a gangland hard man. When both men die on the same night, Gina Rafferty, sister and aunt to the men, suspects there is more to the deaths than mere coincidence. As Gina asks questions of those in authority, however, the novel broadens its remit to investigate the connections between blue-collar criminality and those who inhabit the white-collar worlds of politics and business, the latter with fortunes to lose if their building development fails.
  Is there a danger that there will be little new in Winterland, at least in terms of newspaper headlines, for contemporary readers?
  “There has been a tendency for people to say that this is a very prescient book,” he says. “But none of it was consciously written to be prescient. It’s not an economic polemic, or a political polemic, so the specifics of the story detail and how they run parallel to where we are now aren’t all that important.”
  Established as a paradigm by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the theme of linking street-level crime to those in positions of authority abusing their power is virtually axiomatic in crime fiction. Glynn, however, is interested in taking that paradigm onto another level (“I haven’t read a lot of it, really,” he says. “I’m not an expert on crime writing.”) In common with such recent Irish novels as Gerard Donovan’s Julius Winsome, Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Blackrock, or Gene Kerrigan’s Dark Times in the City, Winterland expands beyond crime and punishment to explore those junctures where the personal becomes the political. Fuelled by bad blood and paranoia, the novels investigate the nature of justice itself.
  “Gene Kerrigan is much more knowledgeable about the specifics of this, because of his career in journalism,” says Glynn. “And I think ‘crusade’ would too strong a word, but juxtaposing street crime with the kind of crime that happens in politics or business, I think that highlights on a moral level the question, ‘Where’s the difference?’ Not to be heavy-handed about it, but in Winterland, certain people get away with things in a way that people from a lower economic class wouldn’t get away with.”
  In person amiable and self-deprecating to a fault, Glynn is a far cry from the hard-bitten anti-heroes of ‘the paranoid style’, although he is every bit as single-minded when it comes to following his instincts. Born in Dublin in 1960, and educated locally, he decided very early in life that he had a vocation to write.
  “There was never anything else, ever, on the radar. I have a photograph of myself when I was about seven, sitting at a desk with a pen and a notebook. I only came across it recently, and I was amazed, but it’s completely consistent with what I remember as a kid.”
  He went to Trinity College to read English, where he met his wife Eithne, with whom he has two sons. He then spent five years in Verona teaching English, and then went to New York, returning to Ireland in 1992, when he took the decision to write full-time. His first novel, The Dark Fields, set in New York, was published in 2002.
  “It’s insane,” he says of the writing process, “it’s painfully, painstakingly slow. If I have to write a note to the milkman it’ll take me half-an-hour and three drafts. Not that it’ll be any better in the end, but that’s just the process I have to go through. And that’s a disadvantage in some respects.”
  The main disadvantage is that, as a father of two, and despite working as a full-time writer, Glynn has produced only two published novels in eight years. A third novel, The Paloma Stripe, was rejected in 2005.
  “The reason I was given basically boiled down to ‘likeability’, they had a ‘likeability’ issue with the main character. And that’s a very subjective thing.” It’s also an issue more relevant to commercial fiction, whereas Glynn’s ambitions are more literary. “Look at Humbert Humbert, you wouldn’t call him a likeable character. Or Macbeth.”
  With the publication of Winterland and a Neil Burger-helmed Hollywood adaptation of The Dark Fields due later this year, Glynn’s personal circumstances have hugely improved. His themes, however, remain the same.
  “It’s called Bloodland,” he says of his current work, “and it’s not a sequel to The Dark Fields, but it develops a minor character from that novel and turns on similar themes of power and corruption and the abuse of money and position. The character is an investment banker, and he’s involved in a series of companies which are involved in illegal mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I’m fascinated by this idea that the scramble for Africa, and the plunder of its natural resources, is as big or bigger today as it was when Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness. Then it was ivory and rubber, and the exploitation was on a massive scale. Today it’s coltan, and other precious metals that are used in consumer products, like mobile phones and games consoles and that kind of stuff.”
  Again, the personal meets the political.
  “Well, absolutely. It’s about responsibility – taking responsibility or not taking responsibility, and the broad consequences individual actions can have throughout society.”
  Winterland’s abiding symbol is a tower being built in Dublin’s docklands, proposed to be Europe’s highest building if only those individuals with their hands on the levers of power can apply enough pressure in the right places. Such projects, whether flawed by engineering or overweening ambition, are now considered monuments or mausoleums to the boom years.
  “I was writing this when everything was fine, economically speaking,” says Glynn, “although in saying that, if you looked ahead you knew there had to be something coming down the tracks. People saying, ‘This time it’s different,’ and ‘The Irish model is different.’ We knew then that that was insane. But I was conscious even then that this flaw in the building could symbolise in some sense the hubris that existed, that there was an in-built, invisible fatal flaw in this whole economic boom. Originally the flaw was just a technical issue, an engineering problem, but it quickly became apparent that it was symbolic. I didn’t want to push that too heavily, or be heavy-handed about it, but it was there.
  “Now, in the context of the economic collapse, it makes more sense. It’s clearer to me now than it would have been then. The organic development of those kind of ideas … Sometimes it’s hard, because you’re not quite sure of where it’s bringing you. I think that’s a very important part of writing, to learn to go with that instinctual feel for an idea. You have to trust that.”
  ‘That all is not what it seems’ was once described by the great creative writing teacher John Gardner as the quintessential narrative hook, and it’s an instinctive philosophy that Glynn cleaves to as he gives voice to a distrust of authority that is by no means confined to Ireland.
  “It’s the only sane position to hold,” he says. “This whole idea that we’re being presented with what’s going on, but that behind that again there’s something else happening. Not to be a loopy conspiracy theorist, but just to voice the sense that there’s a disconnect. And we’ve had plenty of evidence of that over the last two decades that things simply were not as we were told they were.”

  This article first appeared in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times’ Culture section.

World Book Day, 2020

The more eagle-eyed among CAP’s three regular readers will have noticed that I’ve recently changed the format of this blog ever-so-slightly. It’s not a particularly radical move; it simply involved moving the book covers (pictured left) up the blog from where they were previously buried away. The object of the exercise is to give people the opportunity, if they’re so inclined, and haven’t done so already, to buy one of my books – if you click on any of the pics, you’ll find yourself in the wunnerful world of Amazon.com, where copies of all three books can be found for no more than a dollar or so.
  Obviously, if you’re buying a copy of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, say, for a dollar, my return on your investment is going to be minimal, to say the least. But making money isn’t the point. The idea is simply to get the stories to the maximum number of people possible, because – and this is something that has been exercising me lately – the whole point of writing a story is that it’s read. Certainly, there follows from that issues of ego, self-esteem, remuneration both financial and emotional, etc., but fundamentally, any and every story is written first and foremost to be read, regardless of how it is published or in what format it comes.
  Being ludicrously disorganised, I can’t claim that I reformatted the blog in anticipation of World Book Day; but while I was doing so, it occurred to me the extent to which, in the seven short years since I published EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, the publishing world has changed dramatically. EIGHTBALL was published in an entirely conventional manner, being pitched by an agent to a publisher, who paid an advance for the privilege of publishing it, and lo!, out it came on a shelf, as if by magic. THE BIG O, by way of contrast, was co-published with Hag’s Head a few years later, the co-publishing aspect involving me paying half the costs of getting the book to the shelf, and claiming half the profits (which, I should say, provided a return of roughly 500% on my initial investment). The third book, CRIME ALWAYS PAYS, was last year self-published as an e-book, an option virtually unimaginable to all but the most romantic idealists when EIGHTBALL BOOGIE first came out.
  So here’s the Big Q on this World Book Day, 2010: given the way the industry has changed so quickly in such a short space of time, how are things likely to look in 2020? What will have changed? What will remain in place? What in the current model of publishing is indispensable? What is utterly useless? Will books even resemble the books on your shelf right now?
  The floor is open, people …

  In other news, Variety is reporting that Robert De Niro has signed on to star opposite Bradley Cooper in the movie of Alan Glynn’s THE DARK FIELDS. Alan? I’ll be around later on for my tincture of Pimms …

In Like Glynn

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: 2009 is shaping up as a terrific year for Irish crime writing. One of the reasons to get excited is WINTERLAND from Alan Glynn (right), which isn’t due until November but has already attracted quite a glittering array of big-ups. To wit:

“This is the colossus of Irish crime fiction – what MYSTIC RIVER did for Dennis Lehane, WINTERLAND should do for Alan Glynn. It is a noir masterpiece, the bar against which all future works will be judged … It’s as if Flann O’Brien wrote a mystery novel and laced it with speed, smarts and stupendous assurance.” – Ken Bruen

“Both a crime novel and a portrait of contemporary Ireland caught at a moment of profound change, WINTERLAND seems set to mark Alan Glynn as the first literary chronicler of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Timely, topical, and thrilling, this is Ireland as it truly is.” – John Connolly

“A thrilling novel of suspense from a new prose master.” – Adrian McKinty

“WINTERLAND is crime fiction of the highest order – smart, vivid, meticulously crafted, and highly entertaining. Alan Glynn has written a flat-out classic.” – Jason Starr

“WINTERLAND is a powerhouse of a novel whose pacy, character-driven narrative scrutinises Ireland’s underbelly, offering new meaning to the notion of corruption in high places. Glynn’s grasp of the big picture is as immaculate as his attention to detail. This is an exceptional and original crime novel, convincing at every level.” – Allan Guthrie

  Nice, nice and very, very nice. Quoth the blurb elves:

In the vein of films such as Michael Clayton and Syriana, WINTERLAND is a fast-paced, literary thriller set in contemporary Dublin. The worlds of business, politics and crime collide when two men with the same name, from the same family, die on the same night—one death is a gangland murder, the other, apparently, a road accident. Was it a coincidence? That’s the official version of events. But when a family member, Gina Rafferty, starts asking questions, this notion quickly unravels.
  Devastated by her loss, Gina’s grief is tempered, and increasingly fuelled, by anger—because the more she’s told that it was all a coincidence, that gangland violence is commonplace, that people die on our roads every day of the week, the less she’s prepared to accept it. Told repeatedly that she should stop asking questions, Gina becomes more determined than ever to find out the truth, to establish a connection between the two deaths—but in doing so she embarks on a path that will push certain powerful people to their limits ...

  I’ve read it, I love it, and it’s even better than THE DARK FIELDS, which is saying quite a lot. To book your advance copy, shufty on over here …

LaBeouf: No Beef

Good news and bad news for Alan Glynn, people. The bad news is that Shia LaBeouf has had to pull out of the movie version of THE DARK FIELDS. The good news is that Glynn is on the Fox News radar. To wit:

LaBeouf was supposed to star in director Neal Burger’s new feature, “Dark Fields”. Burger, the man behind “The Illusionist” and “The Lucky Ones”, was supposed to start shooting this fall.
  But the shoot was postponed because LaBeouf had smashed his hand in a car accident last July. He had hand surgery, according to reports, and the injury was worked into “Transformers 2”, which was held up for a month while LaBeouf recuperated.
  Burger had signed him for “Dark Fields”, in which the 21-year-old star of “Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” was supposed to play a man who stumbles on a one of a kind smart pill. The screenplay, by Leslie Dixon, is based on a novel by Alan Glynn.
  But now I’m told that LaBeouf has withdrawn completely, and the search is on for a new leading man. “Shia’s hand is totally shattered, it’s much worse than anyone thought,” says a source, indicating the area around the thumb needs more surgery.
  So stay tuned, as all the young actors in Hollywood line up to take Shia’s place.

  Meanwhile, and staying with Alan Glynn-related malarkey, I’m about halfway through his second novel, WINTERLAND, and it’s living up to all the hup-yas so far …

Now Is The WINTERLAND Of Our Discontent

Don’t be fooled by his boyish good looks and cherubic charm – Alan Glynn (right) is something of a criminal mastermind. Yours truly was well impressed with his debut, THE DARK FIELDS, and there’s a rather impressive buzz building around his second, WINTERLAND, which is due early next year and appears to have nailed the second-rate circus that is contemporary Ireland. To wit:

“This is the colossus of Irish crime fiction – what MYSTIC RIVER did for Dennis Lehane, WINTERLAND should do for Alan Glynn. It is a noir masterpiece, the bar against which all future works will be judged … It’s as if Flann O’Brien wrote a mystery novel and laced it with speed, smarts and stupendous assurance.” – Ken Bruen

“Both a crime novel and a portrait of contemporary Ireland caught at a moment of profound change, WINTERLAND seems set to mark Alan Glynn as the first literary chronicler of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Timely, topical, and thrilling, this is Ireland as it truly is.” – John Connolly

“A thrilling novel of suspense from a new prose master.” – Adrian McKinty

“WINTERLAND is crime fiction of the highest order – smart, vivid, meticulously crafted, and highly entertaining. Alan Glynn has written a flat-out classic.” – Jason Starr

“WINTERLAND is a powerhouse of a novel whose pacy, character-driven narrative scrutinises Ireland’s underbelly, offering new meaning to the notion of corruption in high places. Glynn’s grasp of the big picture is as immaculate as his attention to detail. This is an exceptional and original crime novel, convincing at every level.” – Allan Guthrie

  Mmmm, nice. So what’s it all about then?

The worlds of business, politics and crime collide when two men with the same name, from the same family, die on the same night – one death is a gangland murder, the other, apparently, a road accident. Was it a coincidence? That’s the official version of events. But when a family member, Gina Rafferty, starts asking questions, this notion quickly unravels. Although she’s devastated, especially by the death of her older brother, Gina’s grief is tempered, and increasingly fuelled, by anger – because the more she’s told that it was all a coincidence, that gangland violence is commonplace, that people die on our roads every day of the week, the less she’s prepared to accept it. Alan Glynn is a Dublin-based writer whose first novel, THE DARK FIELDS, is soon to be filmed, starring Shia LaBeouf.

  All that, and depressingly zeitgeist-y too …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE DARK FIELDS by Alan Glynn

Given Wall Street’s current woes, I couldn’t have picked a better time to read THE DARK FIELDS. With the help of the ‘smart drug’ MDT-48, Eddie Spinola goes from being a dysfunctional bottom-feeder to master of the financial universe in just a few months, playing a crucial role in brokering the biggest corporate merger in US history.
  Of course, there are side-effects to taking MDT-48, an as-yet unproven experimental drug. Eddie suffers from blackouts, during the course of one he may or may not have assaulted a woman badly enough to put her in a coma. And coming off MDT-48 doesn’t just result in a bad case of cold turkey – it’s lethal.
  Told in a deceptively casual conversational style, Alan Glynn’s debut is assured, inventive and polished. Its occasional sci-fi touches are reminiscent of Philip K. Dick or William Gibson, although the depth of cynicism to Glynn’s dystopian vision doesn’t reveal itself fully until the last page. The novel was first published in 2001, but given the events of the last eight years, it can now be read as black farce, chilling prophecy, or a combination of both.
  Glynn’s subtle touch extends beyond a deft way with plot and characterisation, however. THE DARK FIELDS swaggers like a crime novel, and it has its fair share of criminals, violent deaths, illicit dealings and rampant paranoia, but the criminality is subservient to the narrative. MDT-48 is not a proscribed substance, for example, so Eddie is not breaking any law by taking it, nor by prospering as a result. And, given his black-outs, and the first-person narration, the reader is never entirely sure as to whether Eddie is responsible for the violent assault that charges the narrative.
  Eddie does engage in overtly criminal acts as the story moves towards its climax, but taking these explicit crimes out of the story would by no means render it pointless. Further, there’s a palpable sense of ambition at play here, an application of crime fiction’s tropes to a philosophical end, crystallised when Eddie cuts to the nub of the story: “If human behaviour was all about synapses and serotonin, then where did free will come into the picture? Where did personal responsibility end and brain chemistry begin?”
  A beautifully written thriller that is a compelling and at times profound exploration of the human condition, it’s no surprise that THE DARK FIELDS is prefaced with a quote from THE GREAT GATSBY. The novel represents my kind of holy grail, that quality of storytelling that erases the artificially contrived and / or supposed differences between genre and literary writing. Erudite, thoughtful and entertaining, it is a novel to be treasured. – Declan Burke