Zaney Is As Zaney Does

Zane by name, Radcliffe by nature. Yep, that’s Zane Radcliffe (right), people, author of THE KILLER’S GUIDE TO ICELAND, BIG JESSIE and LONDON IRISH. What do we know of him? Very little. Happily, our resident private dick elf was on the case like skin on custard. To wit:

Zane Radcliffe was born in Bangor, Northern Ireland in 1969, the year the Troubles started. The day he moved to London in 1994, the IRA declared a ceasefire. Typical.
  The undoubted highlight of Zane’s advertising career was writing the world’s first topless radio ad, voiced by glamour model Jo Guest. Bizarrely the ad was banned when listeners complained about such flagrant nudity on the airwaves.
In the summer of 2001, Zane penned his first novel LONDON IRISH, a black comedy concerning a disillusioned Ulsterman living in London who is forced to flee the city and ends up in Edinburgh. Spookily, life then imitated art, and Zane moved to Edinburgh six months after the book’s publication.
  LONDON IRISH went on to win the 2003 WH Smith ‘People’s Choice’ Award for New Talent. It was followed in September of that year by BIG JESSIE, a novel described by FHM as ‘ funny, absurd and memorable … the Peace Process written by The Fast Show.’

So there you have it. A prize-winning Irish crime fiction author, and we only heard about him last week. Doesn’t do an awful lot for our claim to be the third-most relevant interweb presence for Irish crime fiction, does it? In fact, we don’t really know why we bother. If it wasn’t that the blummin’ towers are so tough to erect again once you’ve packed them away, we’d have folded our tent long since …