Who Reviews The Reviewers? # 2,012: Piss-Poor Journalism, Oz-Style

All three regular readers of CAP will know that I think Squire Declan Hughes is a rather tasty writer, a man who’s doing very fine things with the private eye story, not least of which is the fact that Ed Loy is a believable and compelling means by which Hughes, a man with interesting things to say about Ireland, gets to say interesting things about Ireland.
  Teri Louise Kelly at Australia’s Independent Weekly doesn’t agree. Her review of ALL THE DEAD VOICES runs thusly:

It seems to me that when it comes to the current crop of crime/thriller writers, there might just be a tendency to pen with a television series forefront in the author’s mind. Understandable, I guess, but writing in a way that is easily transferable to the small screen somehow detracts from the hardcopy novel itself.
  All the Dead Voices is a case in point. Declan Hughes' latest foray into investigation for his character, Ed Loy, is set in modern Dublin, but, haunted by ghosts of an IRA kind, it never really catches into the kind of fire one would hope, given the setting and all of its obvious intricacies.
  It’s a murky world of old meets new for Loy, but not quite murky enough for a seasoned reader. Looking into a 15-year-old cold case, which the newly established police cold case unit has dismissed as solved, Loy begins to unravel a not-so-tangled web of old grudges, scores and affiliations, all dog-eared by abundant locale and landmark topography.
  In many ways, Hughes has written a standard story, topically contrived, with sufficient “past” to perhaps interest those from that era, but unfortunately, not for those interested, but lacking adequate knowledge. This is what I meant when I referred to writing for serialisation on the giggle-box, where, a la Taggart, Rebus and every other small-screen crime-fighter, the plot is simple enough to retain short-term attention, but rarely over-complex.
  In the end, I would probably prefer watching the Ed Loy stories on television – so maybe Declan Hughes is right. Or maybe we are just saturated with crime fighters and their stereotypical foibles?

  Leaving aside the piss-poor journalism of the first paragraph, which blends generalisations, lousy opinion, erroneous supposition and Homeric ignorance (not to mention an implied affinity with the genre Ms Kelly patently lacks), the review misses the point by a distance roughly that of the distance between Oz and Ireland. What Ms Kelly fails to realise is that ‘the ghosts of an IRA kind’ haven’t gone away, you know, if I can paraphrase Gerry Adams for a moment, and that ALL THE DEAD VOICES has for one of its subplots the rather important theme, and not just for Ireland, of what happens to paramilitary organisations when their criminality is finally shorn of its political fig-leaf. Ironically enough, given Ms Kelly’s verdict that Squire Hughes has ‘written a standard story, topically contrived, with sufficient “past” to perhaps interest those from that era,’ a number of serious incidents, some of them fatal, were perpetrated by dissident Republicans in weeks before ALL THE DEAD VOICES was published a month or so ago, which suggests that the novel is certainly topical, although no more contrived than the best fiction tends to be.
  I could go on, and get bitchy about lines like ‘it never really catches into the kind of fire one would hope’, but, being (almost) a gentleman, I won’t.
  I could also point out that Declan Hughes spent almost two decades writing plays for the stage before he started writing novels, something that Ms Kelly could have discovered with the bare minimum of research, which is perhaps why she believed she detected a desire to write for TV between the lines – presuming, of course, she didn’t come to write the review with that prejudice already in place.
  It would be incredibly annoying if this was (yet) another case of lazy journalism dismissing a genre / writer / novel on the basis of prejudice and / or stupidity. What makes this one worse is that Teri Louise Kelly is an author. “As a chef,” claims the blurb for her book, “Teri Louise Kelly strutted the line in big kitchens with a cocky impudence and girlish hips; as a writer, she brings to the page a furnace-like blast of candidness coupled with an eye for detail sharp as a sniper’s.”
  And good for her. Maybe next time she’s reviewing someone else’s work, she’ll bring along that sniper’s eye for detail and leave the supposition, guesswork, half-baked opinions and crass generalisations at home.