Those Whom The Gods Would Destroy …

… they first make mad. The publishing industry can be a cruel one, folks. A few years back, I was talking on the phone with the publisher of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, and he casually mentioned that the book was about to be published in Russia. “Criminy!” says I. “I’ll send you over a few copies,” says he. He sent one. It wasn’t EIGHTBALL BOOGIE. Had he put the wrong book in the post? No, he’d just confused it with another book he was publishing. An easy enough mistake to make, given that the title of the novel, OVERNIGHT TO INNSBRUCK, was rendered in Cyrillic – although the author’s name, Denyse Woods, wasn’t.
  Such moments teach us humility, if little else. I hope Denyse Woods sold a million copies in Russia …
  Anyway, as all three regular readers of CAP will be aware, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt late last year declined to publish the sequel to THE BIG O. Which was a bummer, especially as the deal was a two-book and HMH had specifically asked for a sequel. It must have been a close-run decision, though, because it seems as if someone in there had at some point seriously committed to the book, to the extent that it got an Amazon slot (as ‘Untitled Crime Novel’ by Declan Burke), and an ISBN number. Well, it’s that or the ‘Untitled Crime Novel’ was actually intended to be the paperback version of THE BIG O – although, in that case, they’d simply call it THE BIG O (pb), wouldn’t they?
  Either way, knowing how close the sequel, aka CRIME ALWAYS PAYS, came to being published is heartbreaking, because what its not being published by HMH means is that no one else will touch it with a barge-pole, especially as it’s a sequel. This despite the fact that, in my not-entirely-humble opinion at least, CRIME ALWAYS PAYS is a superior read to THE BIG O, being faster, funnier and slightly shorter, and being set for a goodly bit in the Greek islands, which is always a bonus. All of which matters not the proverbial whit – the book, poor unwanted orphan that it is, will only ever see the light of day if I decide to self-publish. Which I might well do, just for giggles …
  But back to ‘Untitled Crime Novel’ by Declan Burke. It’s cruel enough that it’s sitting out there in cyberspace, mocking me, but here’s the kicker – right now, at the time of writing, THE BIG O’s sales rank on Amazon.com is 858,436. Meanwhile, the phantom ‘Untitled Crime Novel’ by Declan Burke has a sales rank of 320,829.
  Sometimes, if you didn’t laugh, you’d have to cry …

Semantics, She Wrote

One of the benefits of running a books blog is that you get sent free books all the time, which is absolutely terrific. I received a copy of Aifric Campbell’s THE SEMANTICS OF MURDER last year, when it was first published, but – the demands on everyone’s reading time being what they are – I simply didn’t get around to reading it. Happily, circumstance has forced my hand, as I’m moderating a panel at next week’s Dublin Writers’ Festival, doing my best not to get myself blinded as Aifric Campbell, Ed O’Loughlin and Peter Murphy dazzle their audience.
  Anyway, being the consummate pro that I am (koff), I read THE SEMANTICS OF MURDER this week, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Nice to have a right good novel-of-ideas to mull over, the kind that you’d read in two days if only you weren’t breaking off to stare out the window every five minutes going, ‘Hmmmm, that’s interesting …’. Example thereof:

“The truth was that creative writers were more qualified to explain humanity than psychiatrists and philosophers. This was what Levi the chemist had eventually realised, that he would have to resort to fiction and poetry to communicate the horror of Auschwitz. The psychologists and psychoanalysts who had staked out their territorial claim knew no more than the great novelists …” – Aifric Campbell, THE SEMANTICS OF MURDER

  I’m currently a third of the way through Peter Murphy’s JOHN THE REVELATOR, and enjoying that hugely too. There’s a beautiful narrative voice that puts me in mind of Pat McCabe’s THE BUTCHER BOY, and a whimsical note that suggests a tincture of Flann O’Brien. All of which is most excellent …
  As for Ed O’Loughlin’s NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, clickety-click here …
  That panel, by the way, takes place next Wednesday, June 3rd, at 6pm at the Project Arts Centre. Tickets are €12 / €10. Of which, sadly, I don’t see a red cent. Boo …
  In other Dublin Writers’ Festival News, the impossibly gorgeous Arlene Hunt moderates a panel composed of Val McDermid and Kate Summerscale on Sunday, June 7th, at 5pm at The Abbey, which is quite posh for crime writers, but there you go. Val McDermid is plugging her latest novel, whatever that happens to be, while Kate Summerscale will be talking about THE SUSPICIONS OF MR WHICHER, which I’ve yet to read but I’m hearing great things about … Again, tickets are €12 / €10, which is a bargain for The Abbey. Plus, you get Arlene Hunt, and very possibly Val McDermid on a feminist rant. What more could any red-blooded male want?

Boys Will Wreck Your House, Girls Will Wreck Your Head

How good is John Connolly, really? Well, apparently he can even make Kevin Costner look good. JC is currently suffering for his art somewhere in Maine, although the early news on The New Daughter, based on the NOCTURNES short story of the same name and starring Costner (right, spooky kid in background) and Pan’s Labyrinth starlet Ivana Baquero, should take the sting out of the not-so-splendid isolation. Quoth JC:

The New Daughter, the first movie to be made from my work, is nearing completion. Last week, John Travis, the movie’s very talented screenwriter, saw it for the first time in a small screening room, or at least saw 98 per cent of it, as the last fine-tuning is still being done.
  John, who is a harsh judge of his own work, emerged hugely enthused. I’m sure that he won’t mind some of his comments being reproduced here:

“It’s an adult, very well acted and directed, beautifully shot movie with a real sense of dread the whole way through ... In fact, it’s almost a little Spanish.” … Or “… maybe it’s like David Cronenberg directed it. It’s kind of like A History of Violence, but with monsters instead mobsters ...”

  A Spanish psychological horror flick directed by David Cronenberg? Colour us intrigued …

Git Along, Li’l Dogie: Ye Olde Monthly Round-Up

Being a pick-‘n’-mix of CAP posts for the month of May. To wit:

Alex Barclay’s (right) BLOOD RUNS COLD wins the crime writing prize at the Irish Book Awards.

Alan Glynn’s forthcoming WINTERLAND gets very impressive pre-pub blurbs from Ken Bruen, John Connolly, Adrian McKinty and Jason Starr.

Why don’t Irish crime-and-thriller readers read Irish-set crime and thrillers?

John Banville calls Declan Burke’s currently-under-consideration novel BAD FOR GOOD “a cross between Flann O’Brien and Raymond Chandler”, causing said Burke to spontaneously combust in oleaginous flames of smug self-congratulation.

Ken Bruen is making more movies: ONCE WERE COPS has been optioned, and – whisper it – possibly AMERICAN SKIN too.

John Connolly wins the inaugural Sexiest Irish Crime Writer Award, whether he wants to or not.

LOCK DOWN will be Sean Black’s debut when it’s published in July. How come all the pseudonyms are ‘Black’ these days?

Great Scott; and, A Cannes-Do Attitude

I’ve mentioned before in these pages that I’m a fan of Scott Phillips (right), and that THE ICE HARVEST was one of the finest books I read last year, of any type or stripe. Anyway, Scott was one of the writers I picked (on) to send a manuscript of The Novel Formerly Known As A GONZO NOIR (we’re calling it BAD FOR GOOD from here on in), and he got back to me yesterday with this:

“BAD FOR GOOD is a harrowing and yet hilarious examination of the gradual disintegration of a writer’s personality, as well as a damned fine noir novel about an evil hospital orderly and his even more evil twin orderly. Burke has outdone himself this time; it’s a hell of a read.” – Scott Phillips, author of THE ICE HARVEST

  Which is all kinds of nice. But then, after meeting him at the Baltimore Bouchercon, Scott Phillips was all kinds of nice too. I picked up a copy of his COTTONWOOD in a second-hand bookshop last week, it being impossible to get first-hand here in Ireland, and I’ve tucked it away with two or three others for my holiday reading next month. Because you know how it is – with space and time so short, you don’t want to bring any dud books on holidays, you want to know the books you have with you will deliver …
  Anyway, the story with TNFKAAGN / BFG is that it went out to some publishers late last week, so if you have any spare chickens lying around, and a predilection for the occasional outbreak of voodoo, this would be a good time to start sacrificing livestock and rattling dem bones and whatnot …
  In other news, I received a rather intriguing text message last Sunday morning, which ran in its entirety thusly: “Hi Declan. In Cannes reading books and scripts. Loving THE BIG O. Who has the film rights? You?”
  Now that’s what I call a Cannes-do attitude. And then I awoke from a feverish dream and … Actually, no. I really did get that message. All the way from Cannes. I know the guy – obviously, or he wouldn’t have my phone number – but he really is a commissioning editor with a film production company. Which is nice.
  Incidentally, I’m sure other writers get the kind of vibe that runs along the lines of, “Hey, I read your book, it was really cinematic.” Like the biggest compliment you can pay a book is that it reads like a movie. I usually say, “I know, I wrote it that way.” And they go, “Really?” And you think, God, why wasn’t I born with a sick compulsion to stack supermarket shelves instead?

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

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

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
THE BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Mr Kurtz.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Viz comics.

Most satisfying writing moment?
The joke which only you get, and which you subsequently, regretfully, cut out of the final draft.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
DRACULA by Bram Stoker.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE THIRD POLICEMAN by Flann O’Brien.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Don’t know yet – I’m still new.

The pitch for your next book is …?
The desperate race to retrieve a weapons-grade washing machine from inside a near-future dystopia.

Who are you reading right now?
Anne Enright.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write – if God appears to you, you’re a prophet, and prophets make top dollar in the self-help market.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Online discounts available.

Ed O’Loughlin’s debut novel is NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND

Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Espresso Machine

As all three regular readers of CAP will know, I’ve been off the smokes since Sunday, which is the longest period of non-smoking I’ve had for at least 20 years – although I am using nicotine replacement patches, so I feel like a bit of a fraud. Anyway, the point being, I may not be thinking all that clearly at the moment, so bear with me if this post is ludicrously naïve …
  I’ve just been writing a newspaper feature on the Espresso Book Machines (right), which are destined to revolutionise bookselling by virtue of their print-on-demand simplicity. You walk into a bookstore, ask for a particular book, and the folks there don’t have it? No problem, they’ll just print it off for you while-u-wait (and have an espresso, possibly). As I understand it, the quality of book that results is top-notch …
  At the moment, EBMs are retailing at €120,000, so it might be a while yet before your friendly independent bookstore gets one in. The flip side of the cost is that, once you have an EBM installed, then your storage / warehousing costs are cut to virtually nil, you’ll never have to send a customer away empty-handed again, and you are – in terms of stock, at least – finally operating on a level playing field with the chain-store operators.
  Happy days for indie bookstores, and especially those with an extra €120,000 lying around.
  Here’s what I’m wondering, though. If the EBM takes off – and it should, really, and not least because it’s environmentally friendly, reducing transport costs, and book pulping, etc., – then it’s very much the case that mainstream publishers will be making their books available to the public at large via print-on-demand EBMs. Correct? And if this is the case, then what will be the difference between, say, Random House and Lulu?
  There’s the quality issue, of course, because self-published / vanity published books tend to lack a certain rigour the discerning reader expects. But this isn’t always the case. I co-published THE BIG O with Hag’s Head back in 2007, paying half the costs, which is as close as it gets to vanity publishing without putting an actual mirror on the cover, and yet – if the reviews detailed down the left side of this page are any measure – the quality was fine and dandy-o by most readers.
  So, leaving aside the quality issue for a moment, what will be the difference between Lulu and Random House once the print-on-demand EBMs gain a foothold in the market?
  I mean, if I’m a writer, with a novel ready to go, then what’s to stop me establishing a tiny publishing house (Hubris Books, say), publishing the novel via Lulu, and then selling it through a combination of Amazon and EBM? Yes, I’m absorbing all the costs – but then, look at all the costs I’m side-stepping (printing, transport, distribution, returns, pulping). Plus, once Lulu prints off its first copy, it need never print off another copy again, leaving the heavy lifting to the EBMs.
  What you’re lacking, of course, is the kind of promotion and visibility an established and respected publishing house, like Random House, can bring to the table. But then, these days most writers are like me anyway, generating whatever limited publicity they can themselves, while the likes of Dan Brown and John Grisham hoover up the advertising spend.
  Of course, the new technology isn’t going to put big publishers out of business, which is a good thing, because good publishers bring good books to market, which is just fine by me. But the new technology might well foster a DIY spirit among writers akin to that which fuelled the punk movement in music circa 1975, which allowed independent voices be heard, voices that had something relevant worth saying that the mainstream at the time wasn’t listening to.
  The music industry hasn’t changed a whole lot over the last 30 years or so, although it is quickly adapting now to the new technologies, but I find it hard to believe that, without the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Buzzcocks and Joy Division, for example, we’d have got (for example) the non-mainstream sounds of some of my personal faves, such as Tindersticks, the Pixies, Antony and the Johnsons …
  Will the new technologies allow for more independent voices to emerge from the publishing industry? Will the industry celebrate and nurture such voices? Will it be a confrontational, adversarial relationship? Or is there a mutually beneficial balance to be struck between the established presences of mainstream publishing and their more indie, left-field brethren?
  Only time, that notoriously doity rat, will tell …

UPDATE: Lightning Source today revealed its new EBM strategy for Books Expo America – clickety-click here for more details. Or you could just roll it there, Collette …

A Harsh Touch Of FROST

A busy chap, yon Eoin McNamee. Not only does he write tough crime narratives under his own name, and thrillers under the psuedonym of John Creed, he also finds time to write ‘The Navigator’ YA novels. THE FROST CHILD is the third and concluding part of The Navigator Trilogy, with the blurb elves wibbling thusly:

Twice the Harsh have tried to destroy time, and twice Owen and the Resisters have banded together to stop them. In CITY OF TIME, Owen killed the Harsh king, and now the Harsh are hungry for revenge. Their massive fleet is ready to set sail on the sea of time and hunt down the wily Navigator. In this third and final adventure, the Navigator and his friends use every last ounce of bravery and endurance to fight the toughest battle ever. As Owen searches for a solution, he travels through time to meet his father and grandfather, and discovers that the mysterious Frost Child holds the key to the power of the Harsh.

  Given his publishing schedule, it’s no wonder McNamee wants the Harsh to destroy time. If those Harsh chaps ever need a safe haven while they figure out how to finally annihilate time, or at the very least squeeze an extra hour or two into the day, they’re welcome at CAP Towers any time …

Black Is The Colour Of My True Love’s Pseudonym

Yet another week, yet another Irish crime fiction writer … Sean Black’s debut LOCK DOWN is published by Transworld Ireland in July (smashing cover, right), and already it’s attracted some heavyweight big-ups. To wit:

“Sean Black writes like a punch in the gut. Funny, tough, and furiously paced, LOCK DOWN explodes off the page.” – Jesse Kellerman

“A thrilling debut that locks you in and loads up the tension.” – Simon Kernick

  Mmmmm, nice. So what’s it all about, then? Quoth the blurb elves:

It may be Christmas in New York, but for ex-soldier turned elite bodyguard Ryan Lock it’s business as usual: his mission is to protect one of America’s most ruthless businessmen. A bloody shoot-out - suddenly gunshots ring out. People run for cover. Innocent people are mown down. Amid the chaos, Lock’s hunt for the killers turns into an explosive game of cat and mouse. A deadly secret - Lock’s search for the truth takes him from the rooftops of a New York skyscraper to a heavily fortified warehouse on the Hudson where he confronts one of the world’s most dangerous women. As the clock ticks towards midnight on New Year’s Eve, all routes into and out of Manhattan are sealed, and Lock realizes that not only is his own life in terrible danger but so are the lives of millions of others ...

  Sean Black isn’t actually Irish, as it happens, and he isn’t even ‘Sean Black’, but he lives here, he sounds as if he could be Irish, and we’re not overly fussy and / or pedantic about such things, especially since the Good Friday Agreement pretty much says you can be Irish if you close your eyes and wish to be Irish whilst clicking your red kitten-heels together.
  Anyway, that’s Sean Black, Benjamin Black and Ingrid Black … all Irish crime writers, and all pseudonyms. Isn’t it time we had a pseudonymic White? Eh?

Down Those Green Streets A Man Must Go …

I’ve quit smoking, folks. It’s been on the cards for quite a while, but I finally took the plunge yesterday, and at this point it’s been almost 36 hours without a smoke. Not that I’m counting … Actually, I feel pretty good; I’m guessing there’s a euphoric feel to it in the initial stages that keeps you buzzing. But apart from some craving pangs and the occasional brain-slip where I find myself reaching for the makings without really thinking about what I’m doing, I’m okay with it all. In fact, I feel pretty damn good about it. I’m sure that won’t last forever, though … If there’s any ex-smokers out there with any advice and support to offer, I’d love to hear it.
  In other news, I’ve been thinking strongly about starting a new blog. Crime Always Pays, as all three regular readers will know, started off as a blog about “the latest news, reviews, gossip and slander about the dicks, dames and desperados of (mostly) Irish crime fiction”, said news et al providing a platform for some news of my own once in a while.
  Lately, though, and you’ve probably already noticed this, Crime Always Pays has become very Declan Burke-heavy, which really isn’t very fair at all. Not that anyone’s getting fat off the three molecules of oxygen publicity that CAP provides, but still, fair’s fair. Anyway, what I’m thinking of doing is banging up another blog, called Green Streets, as in, “Down those green streets a man (or woman) must go …”, and making that one the news / gossip / slander venue for Irish crime writing, while I toddle on with Crime Always Pays as a personal blog.
  It probably all sounds a bit messy, but in the long run I want to establish Green Streets as an on-line magazine, and a proper website, for Irish crime writing – novels, movies, journalism, non-fiction / true crime, and theatre.
  As it will mean more work for yours truly, I’d hugely appreciate it if anyone out there wants to volunteer to lend a hand. Also, if you’re a writer with a functioning blog or regularly updated website – Dec Hughes? Updates once a year do not a blogger make – drop me a line with the url at the usual address, or in the comment box. If you’re an Irish crime writer with an idea for a blog post / regular feature, please feel free to get in touch. Put it this way – if every Irish crime writer out there at the moment was to contribute a single post, I wouldn’t have to lift a finger for about two months.
  One post every two months? Surely everyone’s capable of that …

Ken They Do It? Yes They Ken …

There’s a story about Sir Kenneth of Bruen (right) that may or may not be apocryphal, even though he tells it himself, about the time he did a reading alongside a well-known British author. The lady in question was first up on the podium, and held up a copy of her latest novel, and a copy of Ken’s, which latter was noticeably slimmer than her own doorstop. “That,” she said, indicating her novel, “is what I call value for money.” Cue hoots of laughter, the jape being done in the spirit of joie de vivre, etc. Ken being up next, he held up the same two books, and indicated the well-known British author’s novel. “That,” he said, “is what one of my books looks like before I take out all the crap …”
  Ken’s books are, of course, so stripped down they’re in danger of being done for public indecency. Which may or may not explain why he’s bagged so many movie options recently: the novels are so sparely written, they are – c.f. James M. Cain – practically movie scripts even before some cack-handed screenwriter gets his grubby mitts on them.
  As Gerard Brennan reports over at CSNI – where he scoops me yet again, natch – Ken’s ONCE WERE COPS has just been picked up by yet another Tinseltown outfit, which makes it three novels he’s got in the movie pipeline now: BLITZ, with Jude Law on board; LONDON BOULEVARD, with Colin Farrell and Kiera Knightley; and ONCE WERE COPS. I’m also hearing rumours that an Irish production company have picked up THE GUARDS, and have optioned the entire Jack Taylor series, with a view to committing the battered bard of Galway to celluloid.
  The Big Question: Has the long overdue arrival of the Jack Taylor novels on the movie-making scene come too late for the man who was at one point so hotly tipped to play Taylor, David Soul?
  The Bigger Question: Who should play Jack Taylor in the movies?

UPDATE: a little bird gets in touch all the way from Galway to say that I should keep my shell-like to the ground for news on AMERICAN SKIN getting a movie deal … in, like, the next day or so. Crikey! They’ll have to invent a new Oscar at this rate. “And the Oscar for Best Movie Adapted from a Ken Bruen Novel is …”

That Pesky ‘Sexiest Irish Crime Writer’ Poll: The Envelope Please, Whoopi …

I’m away this weekend, so I’m writing this post in advance, so bear with me if the details are just a bit skewy, but with John Connolly leading the field by about three lengths (Oo-er, Missus, etc.) with only a day’s voting left, it’s safe to say – trumpet parp please, maestro – that Lord John Connolly (right, in louche mode) is officially the Sexiest Irish Crime Writer!
  Now, between you and me, there were sharp practices underpinning the win, given that Lord JC linked to CAP from the John Connolly interweb-forum malarkey, suggesting that forumites might want to vote for him (and me, as it happens, although precious few did, the ungrateful sods) – but there was nothing in the rules to prevent anyone from utilising the interweb to boost their vote, so we have no choice but to award JC his gong. The official presentation may or may not take place at The Dublin Bookshop, Grafton Street in Dublin, on June 24th, when JC officially launches the latest Charlie Parker novel, THE LOVERS, or at No Alibis in Belfast on June 26th, when JC launches THE LOVERS with Stuart Neville, who’ll be launching THE TWELVE. (For details of all John Connolly’s Irish and UK tour dates, clickety-click here …)
  Anyway, the rather manly Adrian McKinty was second in the Sexiest Crime Writers poll, with a very creditable 17% of the vote (by comparison with Connolly’s 42%), while the gorgeous Alex Barclay came in third with 12%. At the time of writing, Your Humble Host was in fourth place, with 8%, mainly because I couldn’t work out how to multi-vote for myself, while the delectable Arlene Hunt and the equally delectable Brian McGilloway were tied on fifth with 7%.
  So there you have it. John Connolly is the inaugural winner of the Sexiest Irish Crime Writer Award. Three cheers, two stools and a resounding huzzah! Of course, things could have been very different had ‘Dreamy’ Gene Kerrigan not ruled himself out of the running early on …
  That Gene Kerrigan, eh? Sigh …

The Right Kind Of BLOOD

Another week, another Irish crime fiction writer. Sunday World crime correspondent Niamh O’Connor’s best-selling non-fiction book THE BLACK WIDOW goes out in paperback next month, with an update on the story of ‘the life and crimes of Catherine Nevin’, but a little birdie cheep-a-cheep-cheeps to the effect that Niamh will be publishing her first crime fiction opus next year, when IF I NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN arrives courtesy of Transworld Ireland. No details as to plot et al just yet, but I’m hearing rumours of Lynda LaPlante-style shenanigans. I’ll keep you posted …
  As if that wasn’t enough, Niamh has another non-fiction true crime book arriving later this year, when BLOOD TIES hits the streets.
  I was on a panel with Niamh a couple of months ago, alongside the über-glam* Alex Barclay, so I got in touch with Niamh earlier in the week, to see if I couldn’t pick her brains about a character I’m working on in a new story. She was incredibly helpful. “Anything you want to know,” she said, “just ask.” So I said, “Okay, my character is radiantly gorgeous. How does a girl manage to pull that off and be brilliant at the same time?”
  It was all downhill from there, really …

* (that umlaut’s for you, Ms Witch)

Suffer, Little Children

Those of you who have read Ken Bruen’s THE MAGDALEN MARTYRS and perhaps thought that Ken was, as writers tend to do, exaggerating the horrors of the ‘Magdalene laundries’ for dramatic purposes, might be interested in the findings of the report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, published earlier this week. The report details systematic abuses – including physical and psychological brutality, gang-rape and torture – on an industrial scale, all of which were perpetrated by members of the Catholic Church’s various bodies. Yesterday’s Irish Times editorial, under the heading ‘The savage reality of our darkest days’, had this to say:

The key to understanding these attitudes is surely to realise that abuse was not a failure of the system. It was the system. Terror was both the point of these institutions and their standard operating procedure. Their function in Irish society was to impose social control, particularly on the poor, by acting as a threat. Without the horror of an institution like Letterfrack, it could not fulfil that function. Within the institutions, terror was systematic and deliberate. It was a methodology handed down through “successive generations of [Christian] Brothers, priests and nuns”.
  There is a nightmarish quality to this systemic malice, reminiscent of authoritarian regimes. We read of children “flogged, kicked . . . scalded, burned and held under water”. We read of deliberate psychological torment inflicted through humiliation, expressions of contempt and the practice of incorrectly telling children that their parents were dead …

  For the full editorial, click here …
  Those inclined to defend, rebut, apologise for or otherwise try to contextualise the horror by way of the ‘one bad apple in a barrel’ argument should realise that some apples are bad going into the barrel, some apples are made bad by the barrel, and some barrels are better than others at creating bad apples.
  Last week I mentioned that the Minister for Justice, Mr Brian Lenihan, is pressing ahead with his plans to put the crime of blasphemy on the statute books in Ireland. Given the findings of the report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, he might make better use of his time by banning religions, and particularly those who make a virtue of deviant sexual practices, such as celibacy.

A GONZO NOIR: One Step Closer To Garnering Nappy Vouchers

Okay, so you’ve probably had it up to your proverbials with A GONZO NOIR blurbs this week, but I really couldn’t resist this one. All three regular readers will be familiar with moniker of ‘Benny Blanco’, it being CAP’s nom-de-plume for Benjamin Black, the crime-writing alter-ego / open pseudonym of John Banville (right). As it happens, and as I only discovered in the wake of interviewing John Banville a couple of weeks ago, the protagonist of Banville’s first novel, NIGHTSPAWN, is called Ben White. So I guess the joke has been on me all along …
  Anyway, I took the liberty of getting in touch with John Banville to see if he’d take a squint at A GONZO NOIR, with a view to perhaps providing a line or two that might nudge the book in the direction of garnering some nappy vouchers. To my surprise, he said he’d take a look at it, and he came back yesterday with this:

“A genuinely original take on noir, inventive and funny. Imagine, if you can, a cross between Flann O’Brien and Raymond Chandler.” – John Banville, Booker Prize-winning author of THE SEA

  Which is very, very nice indeed. Actually, I’m still a bit dizzy … But then, it’s been a very-nice-indeed kinda week, given the feedback I’ve had on the book (scroll down for verdicts from Adrian McKinty, Reed Farrel Coleman, John McFetridge and Ken Bruen), and especially as I’ve never been as unsure of a book as I am with A GONZO NOIR.
  I’ve said it before but it bears repeating – the extravagant generosity of the crime writing and reading community is a joy to behold. God bless you, every one …

BOG’s Standard Raised Again

The late, lamented Siobhan Dowd’s BOG CHILD won the Bisto Book of the Year in the Children’s Book Awards, the second year running one of her books has found itself aboard the gravy train. Quoth the Irish Times:

IT IS “disturbing and disappointing” that the Department of Education has cut the school book grant to schools and libraries in a move that will “limit young people’s access to books”, the chairwoman of Children’s Books Ireland has said.
  Jane O’Hanlon was speaking at the announcement yesterday of the winners of the Bisto Children’s Book of the Year Awards.
  She described the department’s move as “retrogressive”, said it would “impact heavily on already overstretched schools and libraries”, and called for the decision to be reconsidered.
  Yesterday’s ceremony in Dublin marked the 19th year of the Children’s Book Awards.
  The top award for 2009 – the Bisto Book of the Year – went to the late Siobhan Dowd for BOG CHILD. The award was accepted by her sister Oona Emerson.
  Dowd died in August 2007 at the age of 47 after a long illness.
  The €10,000 prize money will be donated to the Siobhan Dowd Trust, which she established to help disadvantaged children improve their reading skills.
  BOG CHILD is about a boy, Fergus, who while digging turf finds the body of a child in the bog.

  In other news, while we’re on the topic of YA crime fiction, Rafe McGregor and Adrian McKinty (right) had a fascinating exchange over at Rafe’s blog. To wit:

  Rafe: “What project are you currently working on?”
  Adrian: “I’m working on a Young Adult novel provisionally called DARK ENERGY about a skateboard punk kid who moves to Colorado Springs.”
  Rafe: “Your crime fiction is clearly aimed at an adult audience, so I was surprised to see that you also write YA. Can you tell me about your work in this genre and how you came to it?”
  Adrian: “I had an idea for an initial novel about an emotionally damaged child who comes to Islandmagee (an area in Ireland very close to my heart) that I knew wasn’t appropriate as a crime novel so I wrote it as a YA and the one book eventually became three. The new YA however is a crime novel. It’s about a serial killer in a small town in Colorado, I’m calling it a YA noir. God alone knows if there’s a market for something like that, but that’s the story and I’m just telling it.”

  YA Noir? From Adrian McKinty? Colour me intrigued, squire …

A GONZO NOIR: Reed All About It, Etc.

I’ve mentioned the Holden Caulfield impulse before on these pages, the Holden Caulfield impulse being the one where Holden says that sometimes when you finish a book you’d like to be able to call up the author and tell him what a great book it was. Thanks to the interweb, I’ve been able to act on that impulse a couple of times over the last few years. One of those times was shortly after I read Reed Farrel Coleman’s (right) THE JAMES DEANS, which I read in one sitting out on a balcony on a rainy day in Croatia while my beloved went shopping: just me, coffee, cigarettes and Moe Prager. A damn fine day it was too, rain or no rain. Anyway, I dropped Reed Farrel Coleman a line to tell him how brilliant I thought the book was, and one thing led to another, and he ended up writing me a very generous blurb for THE BIG O. Which was nice.
  What was nicer was, at last year’s Bouchercon in Baltimore, I was at the bar with John McFetridge when I spotted Reed Coleman. “Hold on,” says I, “there’s Reed Coleman. I need to buy that man a drink.” Except Reed Farrel Coleman went, “No, man – I’m buying you a drink.”
  As Holden Caulfield might say, albeit without the sarcasm, the man’s a goddamn prince.
  All of which is a long-winded preamble to saying that Reed Farrel Coleman has been kind enough to blurb A GONZO NOIR. To wit:

“Stop waiting for Godot – he’s here. Declan Burke takes the existential dilemma of characters writing themselves and turns it on its ear and then some. He gives it body and soul … an Irish soul. If you want to think while you’re being entertained, read this book.” – Reed Farrel Coleman, two-time Shamus Award-winning author of EMPTY EVER AFTER

  Like I say, the man’s a gent …
  In one of those lovely twists of fate the universe offers up once in a while, the aforementioned John ‘Fetch’ McFetridge (right) chipped in with his two cents early the following morning. As with Adrian McKinty, the man’s a mate, a good bloke and a terrific writer, and not necessarily in that order. Anyway, quoth John:

“In this era of formulaic, pre-fab, test-marketed, focus-grouped, pre-packaged, no-risk sequels, remakes and the same-old same-old all over again, A GONZO NOIR is shockingly original and completely entertaining. Post-modern crime fiction at its very best.” – John McFetridge, author of EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE

  Two things I’m liking about the reactions to A GONZO NOIR. Well, three, given that I’m chuffed people seem to like it, obviously. But one thing I do like is how quickly the reactions are coming back, given that the manuscripts only went out about 10 days ago; and another thing is that the people who’ve been so generous already, namely Ken Bruen and Adrian McKinty, and now Reed Farrel Coleman and John McFetridge, are writers who don’t stand to benefit anything by doing so. I’ve raised the spectre of log-rolling already, but I’m only flattering myself when I do that – these guys have nothing to gain by lending me a hand, because a bottom-feeder like me is no position to return the log-roll favour. I can write about them on Crime Always Pays, of course, but that amounts to about three molecules of publicity oxygen …
  Anyway, you can analyse these things too closely. The bottom line is that terrific writers seem to like the book, and that they’re prepared to say so. All hopes of publication and / or earning nappy vouchers aside, that kind of reaction is priceless …

THE SCARECROW: Outstanding In Its Own Field

I was shocked, horrified and on the verge of calling the Culture Cops when Gerard Brennan announced a few weeks ago on CSNI that he’d never read a Chandler novel, although – as is the case with most people, I suspect – there are more gaps in my own reading than there is reading. I’ve only ever read one Sherlock Holmes story, for example, that being THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, and it didn’t really do it for me. Should I be tarred and feathered?
  Anyway, THE SCARECROW is the first Michael Connelly novel I’ve read, and I very probably wouldn’t have read it had I not been reviewing it for the Irish Times, which continues to fly in the face of the global trend for cutbacks in print newspaper book review trends with its laudable ‘Book of the Day’ review on its Op-Ed pages. Appropriately enough, THE SCARECROW features Jack McEvoy, last encountered in THE POET, a journalist who is ‘pink-slipped’ by the LA Times as the novel opens, a device which gives Connelly plenty of opportunities to sound off about the decline and fall of newspaper journalism. To wit:

  Eschewing linguistic pyrotechnics, Connelly writes as McEvoy would, as a responsible journalist recording facts rather than a hack bent on exploiting vulnerable people for the sake of a headline. It’s a fine line for a thriller writer to walk, but Connelly pulls it off with aplomb.
  Where there is authorial intrusion is in Connelly’s account of the worm’s-eye view of the evisceration of American journalism.
  Clearly appalled at the ongoing downsizing of newspapers, and the resultant shrinkage in quality journalism, Connelly puts his words into the mouth of the cynical McEvoy: “Like the paper and ink newspaper itself, my time was over. It was about the internet now. It was about hourly uploads to online editions and blogs. It was about television tie-ins and Twitter updates. It was about filing stories on your phone rather than using it to call rewrite. The morning paper might as well have been called the Daily Afterthought.”

  Zing, etc.
  For the rest of the review, clickety-click here …

Bristol 2009: Natural Born Shillers?

I was a bit ambivalent about the Bristol Crime Fest this year, I have to say. On the one hand, it’s always terrific to meet up with people you only see once or twice a year, if you’re lucky, some of whom dandered out for a bite to eat on Friday night (L to R: award-winning blogger Peter Rozovsky (sans beard), Vincent Holland-Keen, Donna Moore, Ewan (aka Donna Moore’s other half), Cara Black, Chris Ewan, Rafe McGregor, and Your Humble Host). A good night was had by all, although some appetites were rather ruined by Ewan’s mention of Donna’s party piece, which she was gracious enough not to showcase …
  On the other hand, events / conventions aren’t really about the business of writing, but much more about the business of marketing. I shouldn’t really grouse about that fact, given that I was privileged enough to be asked to sit on two panels, one of which took place on Friday and was moderated by Donna Moore, alongside Chris Ewan, Steve Mosby and Kevin Wignall. The panel went well enough, in that none of the panellists were chucked out any windows for boring the audience to tears, although I did find myself explaining why, exactly, I’d hijacked a mini-bus at the age of 15. Gosh, you get a bad rap and The Man never lets you forget it …
  But I only attended one panel I wasn’t involved with all weekend, and that for about 20 minutes, and that only because I got caught up in Ali Karim’s gravitational pull and he was already headed that way. The panellists were all interesting people, and two of them had published novels set in Greece (Paul Johnston and Anne Zouroudi), which is something I have a personal interest in, given that I’ve been working on-and-off on a novel set on Crete for the last five or six years, but … well, I don’t know. It’s hard to feel that you’re not really discovering anything you wouldn’t from reading between the lines of a back-page biog, I suppose … which isn’t to criticise the writers, because all the panellists I saw were pro-active and engaging. Maybe it’s just the case that writers talking about writing just isn’t very interesting, much in the same way as porn stars talking about sex isn’t very interesting. Or so I imagine …
  By the same token, and maybe it’s just that the dry sherries were in, the various conversations on Friday night were much more fun.
I had a particularly good one with Steve Mosby and Ali Karim (right) about a whole range of subjects – which is to say, of course, that Ali talked while Steve and I nodded occasionally. Still, there was a couple of fascinating topics, not least of which is the new demand in the US for companies which will maintain your on-line persona after your death, updating your Facebook, emailing your buddies, and even keeping your game-playing avatar hale and hearty while you sleep the big sleep. Perverse? Yes. Pointless? Yes. Chunky material for a Phil Dick-style book? Most certainly.
  Anyway, Friday was a good day, given that I bumped into Karen Meek and Norm Rushdie, and Dec Hughes and Brian McGilloway, and Ruth Dudley Edwards, and Maxim Jakubowski and Paul Johnston, and spent a very enjoyable couple of hours bitching about the publishing industry with Rafe McGregor, gentleman that he is. All of which went some way to off-setting the embarrassment I should have been feeling at attending Crime Fest with no book other than THE BIG O to promote, which was first published two years ago, and – technically speaking – has never been published in the UK. For shame, etc …
  Which brings me back to the whole being-marketed-at issue. Would I have been happier with the weekend if I’d had a book to market? Not really. And I should say that I’m not dissing Crime Fest here, because I think it’s a terrific experience, and brilliantly run, and I’ll be back again next year to hook up with like-minded folk. But, to be honest – and I’m probably shooting myself in the foot here – the whole issue of selling / marketing books is simply a necessary evil that follows on from the privilege of being published in the first place. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d imagine most writers would much prefer to live in splendid isolation, tossing a manuscript over the wall of their mansion every year or so to a waiting editor, leaving the whole business of promotion and generalised shilling to people who are trained and / or have a vocation for the selling side of things.
  Hey, maybe there’s a market for a company that could maintain an electronic avatar-style version of writers, 3-D simulations who go on the circuit and promote the books, while the real writer stays home and writes. Any takers?

Sheila, Take A Bow

I was on my way to take part in a panel on Saturday at Bristol’s Crime Fest when I met Sheila Quigley (right) on the stairs, coming back from the swimming pool. “You’d want to get downstairs for a swim, son,” she says, “you look like shite.” Nice.
  I’d come across Sheila’s name before, and presumed with a moniker like that she was an Irish crime writer, only to find she’s a Sunderland lass going back generations – it’s her husband who brings the ‘Quigley’ element to the party. Anyway, as of last weekend, I’m officially adopting Sheila Quigley as an Irish crime writer under the ‘married-to-bloke-who-has-an-Irish-grandfather’ rule, mainly because she’s so shy and retiring and seems to need someone to speak up on her behalf (koff) …
  So – the business end of things. Sheila’s current novel is EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE, but THE ROAD TO HELL is due in November, from indie publisher Tonto Books, which has this for its manifesto: “To help support and nurture writers and value them as an integral part of the publishing industry.” Y’know, it’s so damn crazy it might just work …

A GONZO NOIR: In Which The Log-Rolling Dilemma Rears Its Ugly Log

As all three regular readers of CAP will be aware, my latest opus – BAD FOR GOOD: A GONZO NOIR – is being sent out to publishers for the by-now traditional mass rejection. Notwithstanding the fact that it may never be published, I’ve already started asking other writers for blurbs, which is a necessary evil in this day and age. As all three regular readers of CAP – one of whom, I’m reliably informed, is Adrian McKinty (right, currently topping the ‘Who is the Sexiest Irish Crime Writer?’ poll) – will also be aware, I think Adrian McKinty is a terrific writer. I got in touch with him after reading DEAD I WELL MAY BE, which is as good a novel of any stripe as I’ve ever read, and we’ve stayed in touch since. As well as being a top writer, he’s a good bloke, and at this stage he’s a mate.
  In saying all that, I asked him to read BFGAGN as part of my ongoing bid for world domination because he’s one of my favourite writers – his latest, FIFTY GRAND, is in my not-entirely-humble opinion one of the best novels published to date this year. Anyway, the point of telling you all that is that you may or may not want to take what he says about BFGAGN below with a Siberian mine-sized pinch of salt. To wit:

“What happens when the voices in a writer’s head come to life? In Declan Burke’s funny and intelligent A GONZO NOIR we find out. Burke has written a deep, lyrical and moving crime novel about the difficulty of writing a crime novel. Dangerous fictional creations and real people and fictionalised real people battle for a writer’s soul in an intoxicating and exciting novel of which the master himself, Flann O’Brien, would be proud.” – Adrian McKinty, author of FIFTY GRAND.

  I’m not questioning the man’s integrity, you understand. I’m just saying, it’s best to be up-front and honest about these things. It’s a small matter of principle …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Rob Kitchin

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

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
LA CONFIDENTIAL by James Ellroy (tight, tense and multi-layered) or THE BIG OVER EASY by Jasper Fforde (the intertextuality is very clever and the story has great imagination and humour).

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
There are loads of great characters out there, but I’m particularly partial to Bernie Gunther, Jack Irish, Harry Bosch and Frost (the novel character rather than the pale TV version) but I’m not sure I would like to be them! I think being Serge A. Storms from Tim Dorsey’s Florida crime capers would be interesting.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I’m very partial to Tart Noir – which I’ve heard referred to, more than a little unfairly, as chick lit on steroids. Anything by Katy Munger, Lauren Henderson, Janet Evanovich, Jessica Speart, and co.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When a passage just unfolds in one graceful arc and needs practically no editing save typos.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
DIVORCING JACK by Colin Bateman. I don’t know how many people I’ve lent that book to, but whoever the last person was, can I have it back?

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I can imagine EVERY DEAD THING by John Connolly on the silver screen. I’m a little indifferent to the book, but I’m sure someone must be considering putting Benjamin Black’s (John Banville’s) CHRISTINE FALLS to celluloid – historical piece, social mobility, family rivalry, Catholic Church, scandal, etc. I think Gene Kerrigan’s THE MIDNIGHT CHOIR would translate well to a TV drama.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst is rejection letters! I have two best things – you get to find out the ending before anyone else, and when someone tells you they enjoyed reading something you’ve written.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Title: ‘The White Gallows.’ Tag line: ‘The past never dies …’ The pitch: ‘In post-Celtic Tiger Ireland the murder rate is soaring and the gardai are struggling to cope with gangland wars, domestic disputes, and drunken brawls that spiral into fatal violence. To add to Detective Superintendent’s Colm McEvoy’s workload are the suspicious deaths of two immigrants – an anonymous, Lithuanian youth and an elderly, German billionaire. While one remains an enigma, the murky history of the other is slowly revealed. But where there is money there is power and, as McEvoy soon learns, if you swim amongst sharks, you’d better act like a shark …’

Who are you reading right now?
I have a habit of reading more than one thing at a time. At the moment I’m just finishing James Lee Burke’s CADIALLAC JUKEBOX. I’m also halfway through Uki Goni’s THE REAL ODESSA about the wartime links between Argentina and Nazi Germany and the subsequent flight of Nazi war criminals south across the Atlantic.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Can one edit instead?

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Up for discussion …

Rob Kitchin’s debut novel THE RULE BOOK is published on May 26th.

It Was The Darkest Of Times, It Was The Even Darker Of Times …

Don’t know how I missed it, but last week the Sunday Independent ran the first chapter of Gene Kerrigan’s latest opus, the rather terrific DARK TIMES IN THE CITY, which opens up thusly:

On that part of the street, at this hour of the evening, only the pub was still open for business. Near the middle of a row of shops, between the flower shop and the hairdressers, it offered the street a welcoming glow on a chilly winter’s night. There were two entrance doors, one to the bar and one to the lounge. The windows were small, high on the wall and barred. The pub front was recently painted off-white. The blue neon decoration high on the wall was a bog standard outline of a parrot. The pub was called the Blue Parrot. It was owned and managed by a man named Novak.
  This was a neighbourhood place and most of the younger set travelled into the city centre or favoured local pubs that featured entertainment. Novak didn’t believe in pub quizzes, pub bands, comedy nights or DJs. He just sold drink and provided a venue for companionship.
  On the other side of the street, it was all terraced houses with well-tended front gardens. They were of a standard municipal design that was duplicated throughout the Glencara estate and across similar council-built estates throughout Dublin -- Finglas, Cabra West, Drimnagh, Crumlin, Ballyfermot. Small and narrow, most of the houses now bristled with extensions. Many had colourful cladding or fanciful embellishments -- columns flanking the front door or tiled canopies overhanging the windows.
  From the far end of the street a motorbike made its way towards the pub. Traffic was light here, far from the main routes through the estate, but the motorbike was taking its time, easing gently over the speed bumps installed to discourage joyriders.
The passenger was first to dismount at the pub. He took something from a saddlebag. At the entrance to the lounge he paused and gestured to the driver to hurry up.

  © Gene Kerrigan, 2009

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

And so to Bristol …

I had a ball last year at Ye Olde CrimeFeste (statue erected in my honour, right) and I’m looking forward to more of the same this year. What’s terrific about these conventions is that you get to stroll around for a couple of days pretending to be a bona fide writer and no small boy points his finger at you and says, “Oi, yon emperor-type ain’t wearing no clothes.” It’s a wonderful thing, pretending to be a writer … but then, pretending is what writers do best.
  The other great thing about conventions and festivals is meeting up with the people you only tend to see at such events. Writing being (in theory, at least) a solitary pursuit, and regarded by something of an anti-social affliction by those nearest and dearest who don’t write, it’s nice to chow down with like-minded folk. As always, it’ll be great to hook up with Irish scribes the likes of Declan Hughes, Brian McGilloway and Ruth ‘Cuddly’ Dudley Edwards, and also some people I’ve met on my travels over the last couple of years, including Paul Johnston, Martin Edwards, the uber-glam Donna Moore, Ruth Downie, Chris Ewan, and a few more. And then there’s my fellow members of the bloggoratti, being Maxine, Karen, Norm, Ali and – possibly – the Book Witch and Rhian, although I’m not sure they’re going to make it this year. And, of course, we’ll all be in awe of the award-winning blogger, Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders, who’ll be doing his Uncle Travelling Matt impression in Bristol.
  Anyway, it’ll be dry sherries all round, so here’s hoping the old liver holds out. For those of you interested, I’ll drop a line on Monday or Tuesday (depending on the volume of dry sherries) to let you know how the panels went. I’m on two: Friday at 1.30, for ‘I Was A Fugitive From A Chain Gang: Writing About The Bad Guys’ alongside Chris Ewan, Steve Mosby and Kevin Wignall, with Donna Moore moderating; and Saturday at 3.30, for Natural Born Killers: Maxim’s Picks, alongside Cara Black, Paul Johnston and – hurrah! – Donna Moore, with Maxim Jakubowski moderating.
  All in all, fun times ahead …

  UPDATE: The ‘Who Is The Sexiest Irish Crime Writer?’ poll is now open for business, people, in the top-left corner of the blog … The results will be skewed, naturally, given that Gene Kerrigan has removed himself from consideration, but what can you do?

Taboo Or Not Taboo, That Is The Question

UNCAGE ME is the follow-up to 2007’s EXPLETIVE DELETED, being a collection of short stories about taboos and the breaking thereof, and edited by the ultra-glam Jen Jordan (right). Among the very fine writers contributing are Scott Phillips, Allan Guthrie, J.D. Rhoades, Simon Kernick, Patrick Bagley, Tim Maleeny, Nick Stone, Martyn Waites and Maxim Jakubowski. It also features a thoughtful piece by John Connolly in its introduction, in which JC muses at length about the history and nature of transgression. To wit:

To paraphrase Cole Porter, in olden days a glimpse of stocking might have been considered shocking, but now, quite frankly, almost anything goes. I say ‘almost’ because, of course, Porter was wrong to conclude that there were no longer any limits on behaviour, although we can forgive him because he was less interested in making an irrefutable statement than in fitting words to a good tune. It’s probably asking a lot to expect him to be more than broadly socially and philosophically accurate as well.
  Boundaries and limits - legal, moral, national, aesthetic, sexual, racial, and physical - still exist, but it is a facet of the modern (or even post-modern) world that they are being challenged at an ever accelerating rate. But those challenges are not entirely negative in their connotations; rather, they can be seen as an effort to establish the nature and extent of those limitations. Thus, acts of transgression should not be viewed as destructive by nature. To approach them in this way is to misunderstand them, for their relationship to the society that gives rise to them is far more complex than might at first appear.
  The word ‘transgression’ enters the English language for the first time in the 16th century, but it comes weighted with negative spiritual meaning. Perhaps the first great act of transgression is the decision by Adam and Eve to eat forbidden fruit, thereby violating their pact with God. Yet with this act comes a certain liberation, albeit at considerable cost. Admittedly, the Church fathers did not see it in this way, and so transgression becomes associated with evil, with St John telling us that ‘Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God’ (2 John 9).
(It is worth noting, in passing, that Eve bears the primary burden for disobeying God’s will, and subsequently tempting her partner. Here, the seeds are sown for an abiding distrust of women, and the demonic associations that came to be made with feminine qualities. Thus it was that the female body, by the time of the Renaissance, was the subject of constant surveillance, and was regarded as, in a way, grotesque. It was a body which potentially exceeded any boundary or limit, and was thus regarded as transgressive by its very nature. Something of this sense of the threat posed by the feminine mystique survives in the femmes fatales of film noir, who are, in their way, all descendants of the lady Eve.)
  As time progresses, though, some of those earlier spiritual connotations fall away, and ‘to transgress’ becomes more general in its meaning, covering any kind of deviation from the norm, as well as non-physical acts of aggression against the person. Finally, it begins to refer to the crossing of boundaries, whether moral, legal, or, indeed, artistic and aesthetic, which is where we should perhaps locate it for the purposes of this volume.
  In fact, creative and artistic endeavours provide an apt proving ground for notions of transgression. As the writer bell hooks puts it: ‘Art, and most especially painting, was for me a realm where every imposed boundary could be transgressed.’
  The use of the word ‘imposed’ raises an interesting question. Are constraints entirely imposed from the outside? If we transgress, do we do so purely against some external authority, whether human or divine? I would argue that we do not, that there is a personal element in our responses to moral imperatives, an element of subjectivity that brings with it a desire to transgress, even a necessity to do so. Societies find a way to channel and express this desire: mythologies are one such channel, acts of mockery another, or what Bakhtin described as ‘the laughter of the carnival’. Such laughter is collective, universal, and ambivalent, but it is not destructive, and here is where our relationship with the notion of transgression becomes really interesting.
Transgression is both an act of affirmation and denial. It recognizes the existence of a certain limitations or boundaries, even as it seeks to overstep those marks. In fact, it requires the continued existence of such boundaries for its effect. If the act of transgression shatters the boundary entirely, then what is left? As St Paul put it, ‘Where no law is, there is no transgression’ (Romans 4:15).
  Transgression is not the same as disorder. It does not invite chaos. Even Georges Bataille, the 20th-century writer whose work is perhaps most closely associated with the notion of the transgressive, for whom erotic transgression was the archetype, the sine qua non, of all transgression (albeit linked, by violence, to death), understood the necessity of suspending, rather than removing, sexual constraints. A taboo might be violated, but not terminated. ‘The sacred world’, wrote Bataille, ‘depends on limited acts of transgression.’
  One might argue, then, that transgression is not in itself necessarily subversive. It seeks to question boundaries and limitations, not destroy them. It is not an overt challenge to the status quo; it is instead an interrogation, a questioning. In that sense, it is complicit in that which it critiques, but it is not blindly accepting of it. Instead, it recognizes that every limitation contains within it the possibility of its own fracture. The instruction to obey carries with it the potential for disobedience. In cultural terms, it prevents stagnation by forcing us constantly to reassess the rules governing our society, while at the same time reaffirming the necessity of those rules. It may lead to a reordering, but not to the absence of order at all.
  Still, the tension between what may be perceived by one side as legitimate questioning that may possibly lead to change, or even just a different perspective, and by another as a threat to the established order, goes some way towards explaining why the relationship between art and the law is so fractious. It’s worth recalling the furore that initially greeted Howard Brenton’s play The Romans in Britain when it was staged by the National Theatre in London in 1980. Intended, in part, as a commentary on the situation in Northern Ireland at the time, it included a scene of homosexual rape that led a ‘moral guardian’, Mrs Mary Whitehouse, to take a private prosecution against the play’s director for procuring an act of gross indecency. (Mrs Whitehouse declined to view the play herself, fearing corruption of her soul. Sir Horace Cutler, by contrast, who was a board member of the National Theatre, walked out in disgust, informing a journalist that his wife had been forced to “cover her head” during the scene in question, although nobody seemed entirely sure how, precisely, her concealment was achieved.) The trial was eventually halted with both sides claiming victory: the Attorney General was said to have ended the case because it was not in the public interest to proceed, but the judge did rule that the Sexual Offences Act could be applied to events on a stage, and to simulated acts of indecency.
  When the play was revived in 2007, critics reflected nostalgically on the earlier controversy, but no comparable outcry greeted the revival. Time, and the emergence of an even more permissive society, perhaps both played their parts in this, but there was also, I think, a recognition that the law had no further role to play in this discussion.
  The law is rarely successful in its attempts to police art. The tension between law and art is too great. A moralist will argue that art has no special privilege, and art that transgresses against, for example, the laws of decency should be punished. Artists, according to the moralist, have no right to greater licence than any other section of the population. Artists, generally, beg to differ.
  The nature of transgression in art, as in life, is intensely problematical. It has been argued that one of the roles of art is to conquer taboos, which brings with it the assumption that such taboo-breaking is always good, and anyone who objects to it is automatically narrow-minded, misguided, and guilty of oppressing the artistic imagination. Yet not all restrictions are necessarily bad in themselves, just as not every act of transgression is worthy of note simply by the fact of its existence. Bad art does not enlarge the imagination, and an artist or writer who creates it is open to censure. Offensive and transgressive are not the same thing. Similarly, finding a piece of art objectionable is a perfectly valid critical response to it; seeking to suppress it on that basis is not.
  Yet transgression in art is not limited to questions of moral or sexual license, although the subject is most frequently raised in public in such contexts. Literature is subject to certain constraints, some physical and material, others related to the nature of the form. Can we not look at Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and say that, in its questioning of the received notions of storytelling and its steadfast refusal to abide by what was expected of the novel in the middle of the eighteenth century, it is a profoundly transgressive work, a post-modern novel before there was any ‘modern’ to be ‘post’ about? Or what of B.S. Johnson’s 1969 novel The Unfortunates, which was published in a box containing 27 separate chapters, one of which was marked first, one last, with 25 others that could be shuffled around as the reader wished? It is experimental, certainly, but is it not also transgressive in its attempt to overcome the limitations on the formal structure of a printed work? In other words, for the writer, as for any artist, transgression may not merely be a matter of subject, but of form. The transgressive abhors that which is self-enclosed, and rejoices in openness. It rejects the notion of purity, and instead revels in mongrelization. It is the art of the hybrid, of broken things.
  More recently, there was the controversy over Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, first published in 1988, which led to a fatwa, a sentence of death, being declared on Rushdie by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini because of the novel’s perceived slighting of Islam (and arguably Islam continues to be the single most significant cultural, religious, and social boundary that artists may transgress, even at peril of their lives). Looking back, what is fascinating about the Rushdie controversy is the variety of responses it provoked from Rushdie’s fellow authors. Their support for him was far from universal, with Roald Dahl and John le Carré being among the loudest of the dissenting voices. Clearly, it seemed, transgression was not something to be defended on principle, even by one’s own peers.
  There is one significant act of transgression that I have deliberately left until the end of this introduction, precisely because it is so relevant to some of the authors that follow, and that is crime. A number of the contributors to this volume are best known as mystery writers, but there are some difficulties in presenting crime as a purely transgressive action. In part, this is because the definition of an act as ‘criminal’ is a matter of law, but at the same time it is difficult to deny the element of choice involved in the commission of certain crimes, or the fascination, even appeal, that criminal behaviour may hold for us. A crime of passion is not necessarily transgressive, even if one might take the view that it breaches the taboo of unjustly taking a human life, because it lacks control, or perhaps planning and intent. It is born out of a rush of blood, an excess of feeling. Similarly, a starving woman who steals a loaf of bread could be considered to have done so out of necessity in a moment of weakness governed by blind appetite, not will.
  But those criminals who chooses to kill, to steal, to break, who, in the words of J. Katz in Seductions of Crime (1988), ‘take pride in a defiant reputation as ‘bad’’, are of a different breed, and their actions resonate with us precisely because they are a dark shadow of the desire that lies within each of us to breach, however occasionally, the constraints imposed upon our behaviour, and glimpse for a moment the possibility of the infinite. To quote Katz again: ‘Perhaps in the end, what we find so repulsive about studying the reality of crime . . . is the piercing reflection we catch when we steady our glance at these evil men.’
  There may be stories in this collection that you find difficult to like, or of which you may actively disapprove. There will be stories that may remind you of your own past acts, and stories dealing with acts that you believe you could never commit. Yet each of them touches upon the basic human urge to transgress, and in this you will find a certain sense of commonality, however uncomfortable it may be. Remember, after all, the words of Terence, which were inscribed upon the ceiling of the great essayist Montaigne: ‘I am a man: nothing human is foreign to me.’

  Taken from UNCAGE ME (ed. Jen Jordan, 2007, Bleak House Books). Republished with the kind permission of Bleak House Books.

And ‘The Sexiest Irish Crime Writer 2009’ Is …

Y’know, sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in the detail and lose sight of the Big Picture (detail pictured, right). Forget to remember what’s really important. I mean, sure, books are important, and well written books are even more important, and it’s nice that there’s so many terrific Irish crime writers out there these days that you’d need at least two adjoining phone boxes for the AGM, if such a happening were ever to come to pass.
  But waffling on about such obscure minutiae blinds us to the really important questions, and the kind of tough questions this blog isn’t afraid to ask. To wit: Who Is The Sexiest Irish Crime Writer?
  Some names for your consideration:

(The Artist Formerly Known as Colin) Bateman
Alex Barclay
Adrian McKinty
John Connolly
Arlene Hunt
Declan Hughes
Tana French
Brian McGilloway
Ken Bruen
Ava McCarthy
Gene Kerrigan

  Naturally, modesty and / or fear of getting no votes at all prevents me from including my own windswept-but-interesting features. Oh, and I’m voting for Dreamy Gene …
  Anyway, I’ll be hoisting a poll in the usual top-left position over the next few days, so if you think I’ve left out any sexy writers who should be included, please let me know …

God Due To ‘Finally Give A Crap’ Next Week - Official

Apologies to all three regular readers of CAP for the rather hysterical headline, but with Ireland on the brink of making blasphemy illegal, I thought I’d get my retaliation in first. Quoth the Irish Times:

Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern proposes to insert a new section into the Defamation Bill, stating: “A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding €100,000.”
  “Blasphemous matter” is defined as matter “that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion; and he or she intends, by the publication of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.” […]
  Labour spokesman on justice Pat Rabbitte is proposing an amendment to this section which would reduce the maximum fine to €1,000 and exclude from the definition of blasphemy any matter that had any literary, artistic, social or academic merit.

  Now, it’s not that I’m especially irreligious or anything – mainly because I don’t believe in God (above right), or gods, and it’s hard to get worked up either way about something you don’t believe in – but I am a fan of free speech and fair comment. If people want to believe that there’s a nebulous creator-type out there who takes a personal interest in their lives, then that’s okay with me, just so long as they don’t try stuffing it down my throat.
  The problem is, the throat-stuffing is on the rise world-wide, and Ireland – in the person of Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern – is joining ranks with other (koff) less progressive regimes. Mr Ahern claims that what he’s doing is actually making it impossible for anyone to be convicted of blasphemy in Ireland, which no one has in living memory, if ever, which kind of raises the question as to why he’d try to fix something that isn’t broken. Is it too cynical to wonder at the timing of the new legislation, given that Mr Ahern’s party, Fianna Fail, are about to get seven bells kicked out of them at the polls in the forthcoming local and European elections?
  Anyway, the good news is that the penalty for blasphemy – if you somehow manage to convince a jury of your peers in a modern democracy in the 21st century that you’ve managed to offend the sensibilities of a god so heedless of human affairs, and all the suffering wrought in its name, that it can’t be arsed to turn up for five minutes one day and say, ‘Whoa! The Hindus are the only ones getting it right,’ – anyway, the penalty is a hefty fine ‘not exceeding €100,000’. Which beats the hell out of a the rack, a stint in the Iron Maiden and being fried alive. Which, I guess, is progress, and at least we’re not living in Afghanistan or the Sudan. Three steps forward and two back, and all that.
  Incidentally, I saw Angels and Demons last week, and one of the characters, a cardinal, had a nice line. “God answers all prayers, my son – but sometimes he answers no.”
  Finally, if you hear on the grapevine in the next few days that I’ve been struck down by lightning / boils / a plague of frogs, then pick a god, any god. Better safe than sorry, eh? Even if you pick the wrong one, you’ll probably get a B+ for trying.