Fair Thee Well Then, ‘Good Writing’, I Hardly Knew Ye

Uber-agent Darley Anderson was profiled in The Bookseller last week, with this snippet appearing near the end of the piece:

What authors need
For fiction, he wants his agency to look for character first and plot second among the over 1,300 submissions it gets monthly. “Good writing is the last thing, and we can work with authors on that.”

  The first thing to say about that is Darley Anderson’s clients sell. Lee Child, Martina Cole, John Connolly … these are writers that any agent would be delighted to have on their books. The second thing is that, if Darley Anderson’s position in publishing’s pyramid is somewhere near the apex, yours truly is pretty much buried away in the rubble of said pyramid’s foundation. But a cat, as they say, can look at a king, and I hope you’ll pardon me if this cat looks askance at his particular king.
  When I read a novel by choice (as opposed to reading it for review, or as prep for an interview, say), I read it first and foremost for the quality of its writing. Two of Darley Anderson’s clients, John Connolly and Tana French, make a good case in point. Now, it’s worth say that ‘good writing’ takes many forms, whether that’s the prose poetry of Lawrence Durrell or the hardboiled staccato of James M Cain, the brutalised rhythms of James Ellroy’s recent work, the refined elegance of John Banville, or the heightened formality of Mary Renault. ‘Good writing’, for me, is writing that is persuasively authentic to the story it is telling. To paraphrase @allanguthrie’s tweet yesterday, plot and character are bound up in ‘good writing’.
  This notion that ‘good writing’ is somehow a decadent luxury, or an anachronistic optional extra, is an insidious one, and the phenomenal success of the likes of Dan Brown, John Grisham and (particularly) James Patterson suggests that it’s already too late to stamp it out. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M Cain weren’t just ‘good writers’, they were great writers for whom the medium was very much the message. When they employed a pared-back, direct style it wasn’t for fear that some feeble-minded reader might be jolted from his or her feverish page-turning, it was because the style created a mood and atmosphere vital to their stories.
  Anyone who has read either of my books (hi, Mum) will know that I’m unlikely to ever win a literary prize for the quality of my prose. So this isn’t me railing against market forces on behalf of my fragile, sensitive, elegant wordsmithery. What I’m railing against is the absurdly reductionist attitude that novels can be reduced to character and plot, (mangled metaphor ahoy) with ‘good writing’ finessed onto a framework once the meat and bones have been tossed into the pot. I mean no offence to screenwriters or graphic artists, or computer game programmers for that matter, when I say that a novel is not simply another mode of storytelling. The reductionism is the equivalent of eating a stew by picking out only the pieces of meat. It may be tasty, but it won’t be very satisfying in the long run. It won’t be very healthy, either.
  I’m offended, too, by the idea that the Darley Anderson agency ‘can work with authors on that’ when it comes to ‘good writing’. A good agent is a good editor, and I’ve been lucky enough to work with two good agent-editors to date. But editing is not writing. For that matter, plot and character (if I may belabour the ‘stew’ analogy one more time) have more to do with the preparation of ingredients than they have with actual writing. Good writing, for writers and readers alike, is an ineffable magic, or should be. A good writer is not simply a flesh-and-blood computer into which we feed ‘plot’ and ‘character’ and then print off the results.
  The Darley Anderson quote above was/is the single most depressing thing I’ve read in the two and a half years since I started this blog, and I include in that the email I received telling me that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt weren’t picking up the second book of the two-book deal they’d agreed on signing THE BIG O. A knock-back is one thing, and small enough beer in the grand scheme of things, and as often as not a matter of the opinion and taste of one person. On the other hand, the idea that Darley Anderson is making pots of money (for his agency and his writers, it must be said) according to a philosophy that explicitly states that ‘good writing’ is the least of his or his writers concerns, suggests that the race to the bottom just hit Mach speed.
  I love crime writing. It’s why I write crime novels, it’s why I run this blog. But no kind of writing can be reduced to plot and character without losing the unquantifiable essence of why we read.
  A couple of months ago, John Banville was pilloried at length by crime writers and readers for suggesting that he writes his Benjamin Black novels faster than he writes his John Banville novels. Banville’s slur, or so some suggested, was that crime novels didn’t require the same level of craft as his literary novels. Will those who pointed the finger at John Banville for denigrating crime writing now point the finger at Darley Anderson? Somehow I doubt it.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Mike Nicol

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?
James Ellroy’s LA CONFIDENTIAL.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Boone Daniels in Don Winslow’s THE DAWN PATROL because he’s such a damn good surfer.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
George V Higgins, Elmore Leonard, Don Winslow, Peter Temple, Ken Bruen, James Ellroy, Walter Mosley, Anthony Bourdain.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When the plot resolves itself unaided.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
You think I’m crazy, you think I’m gonna say anything other than THE BIG O?

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Have to say THE TWELVE by Stuart Neville – partly because I read it recently, am still raving about it, and reckon it could be set in South Africa.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst – when I answer the phone after six hours work and the caller apologies for waking me up! Best – when I head off to the beach in the middle of the morning.

The pitch for your next book is …?
I need to paint the house, please buy my novel, PAYBACK.

Who are you reading right now?
SA writer called Andrew Brown whose book REFUGE contains one of the best sex scenes ever and a jail rape that out Bunkers Edward Bunker.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Read. I’m assuming that God would oblige and take away the obsession.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Ever so cool.

Mike Nicol’s PAYBACK will be published in January by Old Street Publishing.

EVERYBODY KNOWS That The Dice Are Loaded …

Get out the ceremonial kazoo, maestro: John McFetridge announces that the paperback of EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE will be published on November 1st, which is all kinds of good news. It’s not just that it’s a terrific novel, which it is; it’s that, for a quite a while, and for reasons bound up in the byzantine nature of the publishing industry, it looked as if the paperback of EKTIN wouldn’t appear at all. McFetridge is a mate of mine (although he wasn’t when I gave vent to the purple prose below), but leaving that aside, the paperback edition is a tiny triumph of quality over quantity, of good writing besting a system in which the dice are loaded in favour of the bottom line. Nice.
  John explains the tortuous route the paperback took to publication over at Do Some Damage; meanwhile, here’s the review I wrote, which somehow ended up, in its entirety, on the inside flap of the Canadian hardback edition of EKTIN, which was also nice. If you’re looking to pamper yourself this Christmas, reading-wise, then pick it up, and then DIRTY SWEET and SWAP too. Trust me, you’ll love yourself for it.

Easy now. This is the good stuff. Too much and you’ll be reeling around the room, blissed on the possibility of how good John McFetridge might get. Set in Toronto, EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE features an ensemble cast from both sides of the law, most of them spokes radiating out from Sharon, a single mother operating a low-level dope-growing operation. Gangs of Italians, South Asians and Angels, all grafting for a heavier slice of Toronto’s new prosperity; a Native American cop and his recently widowed partner investigating an apparent suicide while sitting on the powder keg of an internal affairs probe about to blow the Toronto force apart; Ray, a new face on the scene with an offer Sharon can’t refuse; Richard, the old flame now a power broker in the world of Canadian crime. A heady brew, but McFetridge marshals all the elements in a fluid tale that weaves in and out of various narratives in a manner akin to Elmore Leonard with a brevity of delivery that is almost an abbreviated form of style: “Canada, so generous to take them in. Thran’s father and his two uncles looking like scared refugees in front of the nice white people, got right to business doing exactly what they’d done back home. Pretty soon they had a nice little distribution network up and running. Didn’t even have to kill that many people.” But it’s the backdrop that makes the story. Toronto, much like the novel itself, is rapaciously ambitious, swaggeringly assured, brash beneath its cultured veneer, ripe with opportunity and tottering on the brink of anarchy. Sharon, her city and her country are in a state of flux that mirrors the ever-changing and ever-challenging nature of criminality itself, which the crime novel by necessity mirrors in its turn. For those with eyes to see, EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE is a shining moment of clarity in our confused grasping after some purpose in the chaos. – Declan Burke

The Gospel According To John

Oh, to have John Connolly’s air-miles. Last week JC (right) turned up at Ireland House, NYU, to give a talk on Irish crime writing. Seamus Scanlon was on hand to make feverish notes on behalf of Crime Always Pays, although he neglected to mention whether or not Irish crime writing’s Noo Yoik guardian angel, aka Joe Long, was in attendance. Mind you, I’m guessing trained polar bears wouldn’t have kept Joe out … Anyway, on with the review:



Last week, John Connolly gave an erudite and scholarly review of Irish crime fiction at NYU’s Glucksman Ireland House. Dr John Waters, Director of the Undergraduate and Graduate Irish Studies Programs at NYU, recounted how John attended a literature workshop at Ireland House a few years ago, and not only were the students impressed but he was himself, much to his surprise - by the level of John Connolly’s insight, intensity, intelligence and literary knowledge.

  Dr Waters acknowledged that crime fiction by Irish writers had been ignored within academe until very recently, and he included himself in this category, but he is impressed by its vivacity and power and stylistic exuberance.

  Dr Waters told an anecdote where, in typical Connolly style, John brought a box of his crime novels to the workshop. In subsequent weeks the faculty was slightly alarmed that students were neglecting prescribed texts and reading John Connolly. Eventually they were able to restore the balance!

  John Connolly then delivered an entertaining and cogent analysis of crime fiction - the essential elements, its history, why it was slow to develop in Ireland, why it flourished in the US, why his own sub-specialty of supernatural crime is marginalized by the crime fiction establishment, while crime fiction itself is marginalized by the mainstream critics and academics.

  Since the literary establishment’s dogma in Ireland even in the late 1990s was that Irish writers needed to engage in the Irish experience (whatever that was), it had no resonance for him – so setting books in Ireland or discussing Irish issues were not on his agenda, and as a result John Connolly was not on the literary radar.

  He picked Maine as the setting for his books because the place had an immediate resonance for him - it reminded him of Ireland in some senses, but it had sharper changes in seasons which he liked, nobody knew him, there was no constraints on subject, it had great landscapes and great bleakness, it was the home of strange characters, it had a long history (it was settled early) and it had a deeply ethereal dimension to it that he did not find elsewhere in the US.

  He outlined how the great crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M Cain and Ross Macdonald was so masterful, impeccable and imbued with integrity that their literary credentials cannot be doubted.
  He displays great humour but his work ethos and writing ethos are tight and steadfast with an almost blindside to any concerns once he is writing. On tour he is generous with fans and hosts. I saw him warmly greet the NYU bookselling staff on the night as well as warmly embrace Bonnie and Joe the owners of the now defunct Black Orchid bookshop. He even had a warm welcome for me, even though I was wearing sandals (it was balmy October night). He has a hang-up about sandals and cat detectives!

  He argued that crime fiction in the US is very strong because it is a logical extension of the essence of the frontiersman - essentially the Wild West motif. You cannot rely on the establishment to solve your problem – the law won’t rush to your defence – sometimes you have to rely on a lone man (usually flawed himself) to restore equilibrium and make sense of the world.

  As a general rule, the police and courts in the UK and Ireland are regarded as the de facto defenders of the common man – citizens tend to think that eventually the police and courts will do the right thing. This inner mindset (largely propaganda and largely incorrect) creates an inherent inertia which stymied the development of detective fiction in both countries. This mindset is deeper in Ireland. Another mitigating factor was that the rural ethos of Ireland prevented the development of noir or detective fiction because urban precincts are the natural backdrop where human interaction and conflict are a daily reality.

  The natural antipathy of the Irish literary world to those who did not engage in the meaning of Irishness (mentioned above) was also a major constraint.

  All of the above factors are changing. The first scholarly analysis of Irish crime fiction is in preparation and Ireland is morphing from the effects of globalization, urbanization, gangland crime, travel, economic progress and decline, isolation, corruption, clerical abuse and political abuse into a complex, ambiguous moral landscape that provides the flux and tension where crime fiction can develop.

  Although this is the first time I suspect that Maeve Binchy will ever be mentioned in this blog, John acknowledged that she and others demonstrated to UK publishers that Irish authors could sell significant numbers of books. (John and Maeve are probably Ireland’s two biggest selling authors.) But the current growth in Irish crime fiction is endangered because Irish people tend not to buy it (nor do the English) and authors cannot rely on US audiences alone. The number of indigenous readers has to increase to maintain the interest and viability of the genre.

  John’s delivery was animated but serious. He instils loyalty and enthusiasm for crime fiction. His favourite maxim from Salman Rushdie, that a writer is someone who finishes writing a book, is simple, but Connolly takes it seriously. With every book he writes (13 so far, 10 million copies sold in 28 languages) he still always falters between 20 and 40 thousand words, doubting his writing and its impact. He gets through it though, and that is good news for the rest of us.

  Thanks to Dr Eileen Reilly, Associate Director at Glucksman Ireland House, and Dr John Waters and all Ireland House staff, for inviting John to speak and welcoming us. - Seamus Scanlon

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Shane Hegarty

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?
Cormac McCarthy’s NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. Economical prose, gut-twisting narrative and no concession to the reader’s need for a satisfactory ending.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
When I was young, I wanted to be Pete, the all-action one in The Three Investigators. In reality, I was Bob, with his glasses and dodgy legs.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Not sure if it’s a guilty pleasure as such, but I’m rediscovering science fiction at the moment, old and new. Olaf Stapleton is linguistic LSD.

Most satisfying writing moment?
The purity and potential of the original idea. It’s downhill from there.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
THE THIRD POLICEMAN by Flann O’Brien, even if it’s a genre all of its own.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Gene Kerrigan’s DARK TIMES IN THE CITY, but it needs to be made now before Dublin shakes itself out of its current in-between existence.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing: it’s very bad for your back - I ended up in a CT scanner while writing this one. The best thing: the rare, but lovely, moments when you feel as if you’re writing well.

The pitch for your next book is …?
I’m still trying to figure that one out, but it may be fiction of some sort.

Who are you reading right now?
I’ve just picked up THE TURING TEST by Chris Beckett.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Read. At best, I could write one book every two years, but I could read a hell of a lot in that time.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Ha ha. Interesting.

Shane Hegarty’s THE IRISH (AND OTHER FOREIGNERS) is published by Gill & Macmillan

Is This A Dagger I Don’t See Before Me?

Gosh, but it was a busy old weekend in the world of Irish crime fic letters. John Boyne and Stuart Neville commandeered an entire page in the Irish Times review section to write about Alan Glynn and James Ellroy, respectively (see below), and then Ruth ‘Cuddly’ Dudley Edwards (right) penned a billet doux to Gene Kerrigan, in the Sunday Independent. Gene, y’see, lost out in the Dagger awards, so Ruth (quite rightly) took umbrage, with the gist running thusly:

“As a long-time inhabitant of the crime-writing world, I can report that although his publishers force Gene to make an occasional public appearance, he is one of those self-effacing writers who clearly would rather die than go in for what we in the trade call BSP (blatant self-promotion). Think of the opposite of Jeffrey Archer and you’ve got some idea of Gene Kerrigan as a public figure. He answers questions, tells the truth and then goes home. Heaven forfend that he should hang around schmoozing, or recommending people to buy his books.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Elsewhere in the Sunday Independent, Eilis O’Hanlon (aka one half of the pseudonym ‘Ingrid Black’), took issue with the phenomenon of Book Clubs. To wit:

“Getting beaten up, intellectually at least, is an integral part of the book club experience, as evidenced by the row which erupted last month in the pages of the Irish Times after poet Mary O’Donnell wrote a sniffy piece on “the horror of book clubs”, citing as Exhibit A one woman on The Tubridy Show book group who apparently said she didn’t like to be disturbed by her reading material.
  O’Donnell unwittingly reinforced the impression of the critics of book clubs as elitist snobs who don’t want the hoi polloi storming the gates of literature. She seemed to regard it as a badge of honour for certain writers to alienate readers, and to see the breach as the fault of those readers. That is giving writers too much reverence. Personal intent ceases to matter once the book leaves their hands. The finished work has to fight its own battles …”

  Stirring stuff on behalf of the Wine Clubs, but then O’Hanlon goes further:

“That the vast majority of book clubs are still dominated by women (up to 80 per cent, according to some estimates) is no coincidence. They remain important forums for female friendship and interaction. Fay Weldon’s LETTERS TO ALICE ON FIRST READING JANE AUSTEN is a key text in understanding how women have used books as emotional maps though difficult terrain in their lives.
  But there’s still a suspicion that book clubs, however admirable, have led to a homogenisation of fiction, with preference given to novels which can easily be broken down into their constituent elements, allowing a blander discussion of the various “issues”. Readers can breeze through, ticking off the boxes one by one. It doesn’t make for better books, but it certainly makes for better book club books.”

  So there you have it – book clubs are good for publishers, but bad for writers. Any takers?
  Finally, it matters not a whit in the grand scheme of Irish crime fic letters, but the Crime Always Pays blog passed the ‘200,000 page impressions (aka ‘hits’)’ mark at some point over the weekend, having taken two and half years to get here. Not really a moment for trumpet-blowing, it’s true, but I think I’ll allow myself a faint parp on the ceremonial kazoo all the same, and thank everyone (aka ‘all three regular readers’) who come back day after day to wade through the mindless wittering for the sake of the occasional nugget provided by better writers than I. Much obliged, folks.

The Glynn Edge Of The Wedge

A couple of very nice reviews for Alan Glynn’s forthcoming WINTERLAND this weekend, with the Irish Independent proclaiming it, “A brilliant Dublin noir thriller by a writer with real international potential.” Nice. Not to be outdone, the Irish Times drafted in John Boyne to review WINTERLAND, who gave it the full half-page treatment and concluded thusly:

“WINTERLAND takes its place as the first contemporary Irish novel to explore the disastrous effects of the property boom and the damage it has done to countless Irish families. For that, and for this thrilling, brilliantly written novel, Alan Glynn deserves enormous praise.”

  Well said, that man, and I’d imagine that those reviews are only the start of something Very Big Indeed. Meanwhile, and staying with the Irish Times, Stuart Neville reviewed James Ellroy’s latest, BLOOD’S A ROVER, throwing caution to the wind in the process. To wit:

“It’s a rare writer who can tell a story of such emotional weight that genre becomes meaningless. That’s why James Ellroy is the best crime writer in the world.”

  So there you have it. “James Ellroy, the best crime writer in the world.” Any takers?

Sweet Little ’16

Not too long to go now to the centenary of the Easter Rising of 1916, in which a tiny army of Irish rebels led by Padraig Pearse and James Connolly rose up against the might of the British Empire in a bid to slough off the shackles of oppression that had lasted 800 years. It helped, of course, that the mighty British Empire was otherwise engaged at the time, and looking the other way, bogged down as it was in the trenches of France.
  Nonetheless, the Rising failed miserably, unless the objective was to see Dublin’s city centre levelled, and only belatedly became a success after the perfidious Brits, instead of recognising the courage-bordering-on-insanity of the men who took on the British war machine, had most of their leaders executed for treason and then incarcerated the rest in what would become a University of Insurrection at Frongoch in Wales.
  History being, in large part, the science of revisionism, the lead-up to the centenary celebrations of Easter 1916 will be a feast for Irish fans of propaganda. The battle for possession of the Rising will be fought on a number of fronts, most pertinently the silver screen, and it appears that the opening salvo will be sounded by LA-based Marathon Pictures. To wit:

Nicola Charles of LA-based Marathon Pictures has confirmed that principal photography is set in Ireland for the end of April 2010 on Jason Barry’s debut feature ‘Easter Sixteen’. It stars Gary Oldman as James Connolly (The Dark Knight, Leon), Guy Pearce (LA Confidential, Memento) as Patrick Pearse and Ian Hart (Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy) as Thomas Clarke, Chris O’Donnell (Kinsey, Scent of a Woman) as Ross, Elaine Cassidy (Felicia’s Journey, The Others) as Nora, and Anthony La Paglia (The Salton Sea, Sweet and Lowdown) as Spindler.
  Originally from Dublin, Jason Barry has acted in a dozen movies including Titanic. As well as directing he will briefly feature as Roger Casement in the movie.
  “There has been much speculation about the identity of Jason and my first choice for the role of James Connolly,” says producer Nicola Charles. “But for us there has only ever been one actor for this role. Gary Oldman.”

  Which begs the question: why?
  Gary Oldman is a fine actor, as are Guy Pearce and Ian Hart, but – at the risk of sounding parochial – would it have broken their hearts to have an Irish actor or two in amongst the leading lights of the cast? It’s not as if the talent isn’t there – Brendan Gleeson, for example, has put together a cast that includes Colin Farrell, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Cillian Murphy and Gabriel Byrne for his directorial debut, an adaptation of Flann O’Brien’s AT SWIM TWO BIRDS, which is due next year. And it’s not simply a case of the horrors shivering down the spine at the idea of Oldman, Pearce et al mangling the Irish accent, begorrah, as they go about their business (seriously, is the Irish accent really that difficult to get right?). It’s more that the Easter Rising was (my crass interpretation above notwithstanding) a complex, nuanced glorious failure, akin in its own way to the Spartans’ stand at Thermopylae in that the main players knew they were doomed before they began, and words such as ‘complex’, ‘nuanced’ and ‘glorious failure’ don’t play so well in Hollywood.
  On the positive side, one of the writers, Brendan Foley, is a Belfast man, and the director, Jason Barry, was born in Dublin, although the fact that the other writer’s credits include writing the TV spectaculars ‘Forbes 20 Most Expensive Celebrity Weddings’ and ‘America’s Junior Miss 2002’ doesn’t bode well.
  Maybe, as I say, I’m being excessively touchy and parochial about this, but I don’t think I am. Can you imagine the reaction in France, say, were Chris O’Donnell slated to play Georges Danton in an epic about the French Revolution, written by Bartlesby O’Bonkers, whose previous credits included ‘Best Irish Tinkers Wedding Brawls’? Or if Cillian Murphy were mooted to play George Washington in a movie written by the author of ‘One Hundred Great Sweet Sixteen Party Hummer Limousines’?

Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes

I don’t know if literary Dublin is a sexy city or not, but certainly James Joyce wasn’t averse to sticking in (oo-er, missus) some rumpy-pumpy whenever the mood took him. Anyway, a very reputable man in the publishing field gets in touch to tell me he’s putting together ‘a set of four city-based anthologies, in the literary erotica field’, and wondering if I know of any writers of literary erotica. To wit:

“Dublin has so far evinced very few submissions, and it looks as if I’m going to be short of stories. Are there any Irish writers whom you might recommend who might be interested in attempting a sexy/erotic story set in Dublin? Would be quite happy to formally commission a story on basis of a paragraph or so outline.”

  So there you have it. If you write literary erotica, or think you could do a good job of writing Dublin-based literary erotica, drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch. The money’s good, by the way.
  Oh, and McKinty? You’re barred.

He’s Not The Messiah, He’s A Very Naughty Boy

I was emailing someone today about what constitutes a crime novel, as you do, and I offered up my theory, which runneth thusly: If you can take out the criminality and the story still works, then it’s not a crime novel. And vice versa, obviously. Which means, as I’ve said before, that the likes of Hamlet, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, Oedipus, THE UNTOUCHABLE, and – if you want to piss off Declan Hughes – THE GREAT GATSBY are all crime novels. THE TRIAL is an exception to this rule, having no crime but being a superb crime novel all the same.
  Anyway, that got me thinking – who’s the most famous criminal of all time? I’m guessing Jesus, from a story point of view at least, given that he was crucified for being found guilty on a charge of sedition, although whether you believe the sedition was of the secular or religious variety is up to you. Crucifixion, as you probably already know, was the form of execution the Romans reserved for common criminals, although that does beg the question of why, if he was considered important enough to try and execute for sedition, Jesus would have been considered a common criminal.
  Either way, crucifixion was / is a horrible way to die, and might be an interesting place to start a novel. Also, Jerusalem at the time was a city of political and religious intrigue, a city fermenting in the kind of passions that would see catastrophe visited on it in the very near future. And it’s true that if you take the crime out of the New Testament the story collapses – without a crime to be arrested for, Jesus cannot be tried and executed.
  I think the legal aspect of it is interesting. If the authorities wanted Jesus done away with, they could have had him bumped off quietly, and the body disposed of, as Nikos Kazantstakis suggests early on in THE LAST TEMPTATION, when Judas visits Jesus in the desert with the intention of slitting his throat. But the authorities, secular or religious, were so keen to go by the book that Jesus found himself shuttled back and forth between various institutions, each one hoping that another would be the one to find him guilty of a crime.
  Anyway, Jesus was killed. Shortly afterwards, his body went missing from a tomb guarded by Roman soldiers. At this point – and this is where the novel I’m thinking about gets interesting, to me anyway – all of those responsible, directly or indirectly, start worrying about who has stolen away the body, and why. Concerned about the propaganda value of the corpse, and particularly that of a vanished corpse, the various authorities need to discover (a) the whereabouts of the body and (b) who stole it from the tomb. They need to do so quickly and discreetly. Who better to call upon than an impartial observer, for example an Ephesian Greek leading a diplomatic trade mission to Jerusalem, to make discreet enquiries among his contacts in Jerusalem as to the whys and wherefores of Jesus’ disappearance?
  There is no mystery here for Christians, of course, given that they believe that Jesus, being man and god, was resurrected, or resurrected himself, in order to redeem mankind. But Jesus, according to the Acts of the Apostles, did not ascend into heaven until 40 days after his body vanished from the tomb, which gives our Ephesian Greek plenty of time to play with.
  So: the most famous criminal of all time, a political cover-up, a missing corpse, a city fermenting in violent passions, and a reluctant private eye who is heir to the Socratic tradition of questioning logic – sounds like a story to me. Has it been done before? And if not, are there any takers?

Jack Taylor: West Goes West, Sadly

Hmmm, just as I suspected … Crimespree Cinema brings us the news (via CSNI’s Gerard Brennan) that Dominic West won’t, in fact, be playing Jack Taylor in the TV series of Ken Bruen’s inimitable private eye. Apparently, Iain Glen has stepped up to the mark, and filming began yesterday, under the watchful eye of director Stuart Orme, who has previously directed episodes of Inspector Morse. With all due respect to the craggily handsome Glen, he looks a bit too young and craggily handsome to be playing the Jack Taylor we all know and love. Sounds promising, though …
  Meanwhile, the equally inimitable (?) Critical Mick continues to champion Irish crime writing above and beyond the call of duty, focusing most recently on Paul Charles and Sam Millar. There’s a review of Paul Charles’ latest offering, FAMILY LIFE, here, and an interview with said Paul Charles here (you can find other reviews of FAMILY LIFE here and here). For Sam Millar material, the Mickster has reviewed THE DARK PLACE here, and interviewed Sam here. And if that isn’t enough for you, Brian McGilloway’s BLEED A RIVER DEEP gets nominated for the prestigious ‘Best Book Critical Mick Read in 2009’ award here.
  Crikey. When Yon Mickster hits his stride, he’s wearing seven-league boots …

The Witchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

Eoin Colfer (right, just after stepping out of the Total Perspective Vortex) is currently on the road promoting AND ANOTHER THING …, which is the sixth in the increasingly improbable Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. The pic comes courtesy of the Bookwitch (and by ‘courtesy of’ I mean ‘borrowed without asking’), who was in attendance when Eoin did his schtick in Manchester earlier this week, when – among other things – Eoin announced that his first impression of THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY was ‘Monty Python meets Pink Floyd, in space’. Hyper-jump on over to the Bookwitch for lots more in that vein …
  As for yours truly, and acknowledging that you care not a whit about my opinion, I’m about two-thirds of the way through AND ANOTHER THING … and enjoying it immensely. It’s close enough to Douglas Adams’ style that it’s a bona fide Hitchhiker’s book, and yet it has enough of Eoin Colfer to make it more than slavish imitation. And Eoin Colfer, although it shouldn’t need to be said, is a very funny man.
  The only downside is the continuing absence of Marvin, the Paranoid Android, who gave voice to what is probably my favourite line in all sci-fi: “Why stop now, just when I’m hating it?” Oh well, you can’t have everything. But if you are in the mood for some depressing whining to get you through the weekend, here’s Radiohead with a particularly mournful live version of Paranoid Android. Altogether now: “When I am King / You will be first against the wall …”. Roll it there, Collette …

Declan Hughes: Must He Throw This Filth At His Kids?

Rachel Petzold was kind enough to review Declan Hughes’ latest offering, ALL THE DEAD VOICES, over at The Feminist Review. She didn’t like the book, which is fair enough, because we’re all entitled to an opinion, especially feminists. The review concludes thusly:

“Declan Hughes is a Shamus Award-winning author, a husband, and a father of two girls. I hope he never lets them read his work.”

  Now, the ‘Shamus Award-winning author’ bit I get, but I’m not entirely sure what Declan Hughes’ marital status, or his being a dad to two girls, has to do with the quality or otherwise of the novel. Besides, given that the two young ladies in question will very probably grow up to become exemplary feminists, how the hell is Declan Hughes supposed to stop them from doing whatever they want to do, reading his very fine novels included?
  Ladies, I know you’re out there. I’d very much appreciate your thoughts on this matter.

What Do You Call A Man With A Sheet Of Paper For A Head?

Russell. Or, if you wanted to be particularly cruel, Jack Russell. All of which is a non-sequiturish way of announcing (trumpets there, please, maestro) that The Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman releases his sequel to MYSTERY MAN on November 12th, said offering being THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSELL, a title so tongue-in-cheek we’re afraid that said cheek might in fact be a buttock. Quoth the blurb elves:

The Small Shopkeeper With No Name is back. Hired to find the vandals responsible for spraying graffiti on an aspiring insurance magnate's advertising hoarding, he soon finds himself up to his ears in intrigue and battling to solve murders which echo in the corridors of power. With MI5 getting involved and everyone on the hunt for a missing Jack Russell, can Our Man Behind the Counter stay alive as well as keep his world renowned but criminally ignored No Alibis mystery bookshop afloat?

  I finally made it as far as the ‘world renowned but criminally ignored No Alibis mystery bookstore’ last weekend, but it was a Sunday morning and the place was locked up tight. There I stood, criminally ignored and not even the crumb of being world renowned to comfort me. Mind you, I only discovered it when I nipped out mid-breakfast for a sly smoke from the café next door, so I suppose I shouldn’t take it personally. Oh, and did I mention that No Alibis is hosting James Ellroy at Belfast’s Waterfront on November 7th, with Stuart Neville providing the Qs in a Q&A? No? Well, maybe I’ll give that a plug tomorrow, then …

A Tale Of Two Titles

Apologies for the confusion, but I can’t make out if Alex Barclay’s new offering is called BLACK RUN or TAINTED – Amazon is calling it BLACK RUN but the title on the book is TAINTED. If anyone out there can confirm what the official title is, I’d be so grateful I’d probably faint. What we can say for certain is that the book will be published on November 26th, and that the blurb elves have been wittering thusly:

Twenty years ago ... A woman lies battered and bleeding to death beneath the gaze of her killer, her head bludgeoned, glass in her face, coughing blood with her last breaths. With a final, shattering blow, she is gone. Present day ... Special Agent Ren Bryce is in trouble. After the brutal murder of her trusted friend and therapist, Dr Helen Wheeler, and the curious alteration of her psychiatric records, she finds herself fighting for her innocence of the heinous crime she did not commit. With a dark connection to a savage murder committed two decades earlier, conflicting evidence, and the return of an old enemy hell-bent on Ren’s destruction, she must battle for the answers she needs to clear her name and find the real killer, whatever the danger, whatever the cost.

  BLACK RUN / TAINTED, by the way, is the follow-up to last year’s BLOOD RUNS COLD, which won the inaugural Best Crime Novel at the Irish Book Awards earlier this year. Will BLACK RUN / TAINTED secure Alex a second gong? Only time, that notoriously impolitic tittle-tattler, will tell …

Is This Thing On?

Further to CAP’s modest and very probably short-lived campaign to put the fun back into publishing (see John Connolly post below), and as an antidote to all the for-and-against Kindle pieces popping up, here’s a gigglesworth I haven’t seen anywhere else …

  As for Kindle, international or otherwise, it ain’t gonna break out. At least, not until all e-readers are multi-format, and the gizmo itself is multi-platform – i.e., that it allows you to play video / film, listen to music, watch TV, surf the web (properly), etc. The Kindle (or Sony e-reader, or any of the e-reader variations) isn’t competing with the book, it’s competing with the laptop / notebook / tablet, the palm-held, the mobile phone, etc. Would you buy a mobile phone that didn’t have a good camera built in? Or that didn’t allow you web access?
  Meanwhile, the Kindle-only CRIME ALWAYS PAYS is currently languishing at # 44,813 on the Kindle charts, which suggests that the above is a severe case of sour grapes. Boo, etc.

You Never Show Me Your Funny

Off with yours truly and my good lady wife to Belfast on Saturday, only to discover that John Connolly had been in to No Alibis on Friday night to launch THE GATES. Boo, etc. No doubt a good time was had by all.
  I read THE GATES a couple of months ago, and loved it, and what I liked best about it was that it represents yet another string to Connolly’s bow. I’ve always loved William Goldman for his ability to write terrific stories regardless of genre – MARATHON MAN, THE PRINCESS BRIDE, the screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – and for his ability to play it straight when required, but to mix it up and have fun whenever he gets the chance. To date John Connolly has written straight crime novels (BAD MEN), crime blended with the supernatural (the Charlie Parker novels), a collection of short stories infused by the classic fairytales of Charles Perrault (NOCTURNES) and the mythology mash-up of the superb THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS. THE GATES blends Satanism, quantum physics and good old-fashioned fun in a tale that put me in mind of THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY. It really is one for all the family.
  These days, of course, it’s tough to write in more than one genre, because publishers believe that a writer shouldn’t confuse the oh-so-easily confused readership by offering them anything that deviates from the established brand. Connolly, who writes his non-crime offerings out of contract, is to be celebrated not only for taking a gamble with his time and energies, but for having faith in his readers. Yes, it’s entirely probable that THE GATES will not sell in anything approaching the numbers that the next Charlie Parker novel will. By the same token, it’s also very likely that the publishing house will more than recoup its investment.
  I don’t care, particularly, about the profit margins and bottom line of any publishing house, but if THE GATES does sell well, then there’s a good chance we’ll get another novel featuring the dauntless Samuel Johnson and his faithful daschund Boswell (there’s rumours of a possible three-book series). Which means, and this is my bottom line, that we’ll get another fun book. Remember when you read for fun? Gosh, those were the days …
  Maybe it’s just me, but it can often seem that the publishing biz takes itself far too seriously, writers included. Yes, there are bottom lines to attend to, and in these straitened times there are jobs at stake when a potential best-seller fails to meet expectations. But even taking all that on board, there’s no reason in the world why books – some of them, at least – can’t be fun to read. In fact, in times like these, the industry might do well to play to (and profit from) people’s need to laugh, for the childish (in the best sense of the word) impulse to find fun in the most improbable of places. And John Connolly is a funny guy. Were I a publishing exec, in this day and age, I’d be tickling his funny-bone and hoping it’d get his fingers busy on a keyboard.
  Meanwhile, beg, borrow or steal (or go crazy, and buy) a copy of THE GATES. You owe yourself some fun.

Things That Get On My Tits # 1,249 (Vol. III): ‘It Was All …’

Further to Dave White’s post on blogs, wherein he lists the usual crap you can find on most blogs, he neglected to mention the ‘Totally Random Rant’, in which someone – your humble host, say – goes off at a tangent that has nothing to do with anything, really. To wit: today I came across the latest in what seems to be the latest and most irritating cliché of any kind of writing, the descriptive sentence that begins with, “It was all …”.
  I’ve probably been guilty of this myself, by the way.
  Anyway, rather than describe a kitchen properly, for example, a writer will say, “It was all chrome and black marble.” Now, it patently wasn’t – if the kitchen was ‘all’ black marble and chrome, no one would be able to get into it, seeing as how the entire kitchen would be composed of black marble and chrome. In effect, you’d have a cuboid of black marble and chrome where your kitchen is supposed to be. That’s helping nobody, but especially not the reader who has just visualised said cuboid.
  I’m being a pedant, obviously, but it never fails to set my teeth on edge. Any other takers?
  The place I saw it today, funnily enough, was in the otherwise balls-achingly brilliant BLOOD’S A ROVER. Every time you read a James Ellroy you think, well, at least he won’t be able to top that. And then he does. Damn his beautiful eyes.

Alors! C’est Ken Bruen!

“Two Grand Prix are awarded each year,” says Peter Rozovsky over at Detectives Beyond Borders, in his post about Ken Bruen (right) winning the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere 2009 for PRIEST, “one to the best crime novel, and one to the best international crime novel in France. They’ve been awarded since 1948, which suggests the French got onto this international crime fiction thing before many of the rest of us.”
  The post-WWII period being when Cahiers du Cinema dubbed film noir, well, film noir, Mr Rozovsky may have a point. And, of course, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, first published in 1841, is regarded as the ur-text when it comes to crime fiction. Can it be mere (and retrospective) coincidence that the story is set in Paris?
  Erm, yes. But that’s not the point. The point is that, with two novels out this year, including TOWER, the collaboration with Reed Farrel Coleman (and a rumour that the chaps are going to collab on a musical next (!)), two movies of his novels in the pipeline, and a French gong in his back pocket, 2010 will probably be the year in which Ken Bruen ascends into heaven in a flaming chariot.
  All kidding aside, and leaving all else aside, Ken Bruen’s annus mirabilis will please no end of people, but chiefly, I’d imagine, the legion of wannabe aspiring scribes (yours truly included) whom Ken Bruen has so generously and selflessly lent a hand to over the years. I don’t know if I really believe in karma, but if it doesn’t exist, then it’s a beautiful symmetry / coincidence that good fortune has showered Ken so extensively in 2009. Allez, Mr Bruen, et bon chance, mon ami.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS by William Boyd

A chance meeting in a London restaurant gives climatologist Adam Kindred the opportunity to become a Good Samaritan, when his distracted new acquaintance, Dr Wang, leaves his briefcase behind. On delivering the briefcase, however, Adam discovers Dr Wang knifed and dying. Moments later he is running for his life; within hours, pursued by Dr Wang’s killer, he is the subject of a nation-wide manhunt and embroiled in the corruption behind a multi-billion dollar scandal.
  William Boyd is a much-decorated writer, winning the Whitbread Award in 1981 for ‘A Good Man in Africa’, and the Costa Award in 2006 for ‘Restless’, along with numerous other prizes, and securing a pair of shortlist nominations for Booker and IMPAC for ‘An Ice-Cream War’ and ‘Any Human Heart’, respectively. A prolific screenwriter and film director, he has always maintained a sharp distinction between his film work and that of his novels, but ‘Ordinary Thunderstorms’ offers a propulsive, cinematic narrative. Certainly the novel, despite its deceptively sedate pace, has the page-turning quality of a genre novel, which suggests that Boyd was aiming yet again for crossover appeal – ‘Restless’, for example, bore all the hallmarks of the spy thriller.
  To the crime fiction fan, and particularly those familiar with the work of David Goodis and Gil Brewer, Adam Kindred’s plight will be a familiar one. Intelligent, urbane and highly educated, he nevertheless finds himself skulking in the shadows and reduced to a primitive quality of living as, in a desperate bid to render himself anonymous, he foregoes the props of contemporary life – credit cards, mobile phones, cash, etc. – to live rough in the very heart of London. The theme touches on the alienation intrinsic to the modern city, of our inability, whether willing or not, to successfully interact with those around us. Boyd’s protagonists invariably explore how a quintessential Englishness contends with an unfamiliar landscape, be that Africa, Los Angeles or the Philippines, but here the homeless Kindred (the name is ironically instructive) is a stranger in a land that should not be strange at all, and is yet utterly, and horrifyingly, foreign.
  Kindred’s exploration of his underground world is fascinating in itself, but Boyd surrounds him with a host of characters, some malevolent, others benign, most simply thoughtlessly callous in their own pursuit of whatever it will take to make it through the day. As the characters gradually flesh out, there is a suspicion that Boyd is simply toying with the genre tropes, as a policewoman, a company CEO, a prostitute, a lord and a killer-for-hire all emerge to engage with Kindred on some level. But even the minor characters get their full due here, and some of the main players, such as the prostitute who drugs her son with a ‘happy-mix’ of rum and pills before going out on the game for the night, are simply heart-breaking.
  The style is equally pleasing. There are few of the conventional cliff-hanger endings to chapters, and Boyd’s prose is for the most part resolutely deadpan, eschewing tension-building pyrotechnics for a faith in his readers’ ability to empathise with his characters. He does, on occasion, digress into purple prose, which can be irritating, especially when offered by characters who wouldn’t have access to such language, such as an illiterate prostitute or an ex-solider hitman, but these are few and forgivable lapses, as are the occasional deus ex machina plot-twists that rely too heavily on coincidence.
  Those caveats aside, ‘Ordinary Thunderstorms’ is a powerful, brooding novel of ideas with the compulsive readability of a straightforward thriller. Sturm und Drang, indeed. - Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Sunday Business Post

All Of These Kids Are Doing Their Own Thing

Funny how these kinds of things come in clusters. This week, friends and family are bustin’ out all over with creative stuff – the pic above is swiped from Niall Fennessy’s new blog, The Life in My Days, which details his work as a wedding photographer. He’s won awards for other kinds of photography too – well worth checking out.
  And while we’re on the subject of photography, my sister, Kathy, is no mean snapper too. To wit:


  Leaving the photos behind, it’s on to writing – long a friend of this blog, and a good friend of yours truly, Claire Coughlan graduates from the UCD MA Writing Class of 2009 this week, and the class is marking the occasion with the publication of A CURIOUS IMPULSE. The official launch takes place at 5.30pm on Wednesday, October 7th, with a wine reception at the Clarence Hotel (there’s posh). The authors include Claire, Susan Stairs, Jennifer McGrath, Jamie O’Connell, and the delightfully named Mariad Whisker. “The stories, poems and memoirs in this volume display uniformly an impressive maturity of insight and control of language,” says Kevin Power, author of the rather fine BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, while author James Ryan will be doing the introduction honours. All are welcome, folks …

  Shay Bagnall, another mate, is also a writer – his first novel, a crime tome, has attracted an agent, and is currently out under consideration – but his contribution above is as a combo ukulele / movie-maker genius. Not sure what THE BIG O is doing in there lurking in the background, but roll it there anyway, Collette ...
  Finally, and speaking of THE BIG O, my brother Gavin (right) has finally succumbed to the Dark Side (aka script-writing) and yesterday submitted to the Irish Film Board the script he has adapted from THE BIG O. Polite mutterings of approval have been heard emanating from the IFB in the wake of exploratory submissions, so you never know … Keep your fingers crossed, people – Lily needs new shoes. No, seriously she’s already outgrown her first proper pair of shoes. Looks like a weekend’s overtime down the salt-mines beckons for yours truly …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Stuart Neville

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?
AMERICAN TABLOID by James Ellroy. It’s just the sheer scale of the thing, the ambition of it. It’s a tie for my favourite novel of all time with Tom Wolfe’s BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I collect old movie novelisations. The cinema in Armagh closed when I was a kid, so the only way I could experience things like ET or Raiders of the Lost Ark was by reading them in book form. Even today, I search charity shops for hidden gems. Some novelisations are very good (Poltergeist by James Kahn, Fort Apache: The Bronx by Heywood Gould) and some of them are bloody awful. Freebie and the Bean, for instance, is possibly the worst book ever written. While the source material for that was pretty poor, the novelisation of Dirty Harry had a great story to work from, and it was still bloody awful.

Most satisfying writing moment?
The first time I actually managed to type the last words of a full honest-to-God novel. It didn’t matter that it turned out to be not very good; I had proven that I could actually climb that mountain, and that was a huge step forward psychologically.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I think I’d have to say Bateman’s DIVORCING JACK, simply because he blazed a trail for Northern Irish crime writers.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I recently read Gerard Brennan’s THE WEE ROCKETS. I think it’d make a really good TV serial with its urban setting and big cast of characters.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is that panicky feeling when you’ve invested a huge chunk of your life in something and you don’t know if it was any good or not. Conversely, the best thing is finding out you hadn’t wasted your time after all, and someone thinks it’s worth reading. The second best thing was a couple of days ago when a pretty checkout girl in the supermarket asked me in a hushed tone if I was “that author from the papers”. That was pretty good.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Belfast cop Jack Lennon starts digging into an apparent Republican feud when he realises his former lover Marie McKenna and their daughter Ellen were somehow involved and are now missing. As he delves deeper he discovers it might not have been the feud the authorities claimed, but when he challenges his superiors, he is told to leave it alone. When someone starts picking off survivors of the feud, Lennon knows he must act.

Who are you reading right now?
I’m reading AFTERMATH by Ruth Dudley Edwards. It’s an account of the Omagh bombing, and how the families of the victims fought for justice through the civil courts when the criminal system let them down. Some of it is so harrowing it’s very painful to read, and I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been to write. I’ll be on a panel with Ruth at this year’s Bouchercon inIndianapolis, which will be interesting.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
This is kind of a Catch 22; I couldn’t write if I didn’t read, so I think I’d have to choose the egg over the chicken. Or something.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Hard, fast, brutal.

Stuart Neville’s THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST is published in the U.S. by Soho Crime

In The Name Of The Father

Rosita Boland had a rather poignant interview with John Connolly (right) in yesterday’s Irish Times to mark the publication of THE GATES, in which Connolly touched on the death of his father, and how the loss has impacted on his writing. To wit:

When Connolly left Dublin Corporation to study English at Trinity College, he had money in the bank, and a renewed vigour for education. On a summer student job in the US soon after, he called home one evening from New York and discovered his father had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He flew home the next day, and his father died soon afterwards. The cancer he died from has since become a recurrent symbolic motif in Connolly’s work: people’s bodies being horribly consumed by something they cannot control. “I think because of what happened to my father and the way he died, I have an absolute loathing and fear of that disease. I just think it’s so insidious and so appalling. It occurs in the books again and again. ‘The Cancer Cowboy Rides’ [a story in NOCTURNES] is the most explicit version of it, but again and again, with people in my books, there is this image of cancer or of being eaten from the inside.”
  Recurrent also in the books is the theme of fathers – fatherhood, absent fathers, dead fathers, men who don’t know whether they want to be fathers. “I think all young men are trying to prove something to their dads,” he says carefully. “I think his whole idea was he worked so that at some point, he didn’t have to work any more, and that work was a kind of chore he got through as a prelude to retirement, when he could do all the things that he planned on doing. And then you know, work kind of had the last laugh, because he died while he was still working.
  “He was not impressed by me wanting to be a writer, or to be a journalist. And I suppose part of me becoming a journalist and part of me going to college and doing something like English was a kind of way of saying to him, well actually, what you want is not what I want. The awful thing is, having done all that, had he seen what I do now, he would have been immensely proud.” Earlier, he said his father had a distrust of the “kind of freelance existence” that journalism and a career as a writer offered. It’s not hard to see where the roots of Connolly’s drive and work ethic came from.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

CRIME ALWAYS PAYS: That Crucial First Week In Full

It was only last week that CRIME ALWAYS PAYS went live on Kindle, and already there’s so, so much to report. For one, CRIME ALWAYS PAYS knackered Mack Lundy’s Kindle mid-flight. Sorry about that, Mack. That blip was supposed to be a dry-run for my cunning plot to activate the virus I’ve coded into the text of CRIME ALWAYS PAYS in order to knacker the entire Kindle system on October 28th ...
  Sales-wise, it’s fair to say, things could have gone better. CRIME ALWAYS PAYS entered Amazon’s Kindle charts at # 8,245 and soared almost immediately to # 1,235 before it promptly plummeted out to # 13,889. On a chart, the graph would resemble the orbit of Halley’s comet. So that’s not good.
  On the other hand, the book did get the latest in its many write-ups from the lovely Book Witch. Quoth Ms Witch: “It’s simply a very amusing and mad crime novel, which any crime fan should enjoy.” So that’s good.
  Then Duane Swiersynski announced on Twitter that he’d bought a copy, which was good, but there’s been radio silence ever since, which is not good. Duane? I operate a value-for-money payback guarantee, so if it didn’t buzz your bajingas, just let me know where I should send the cheque.
  And then … Actually, no, that’s it. Just as well, really. It was all getting a bit frenetic there on Monday, and I am, to be quite frank about it, a parcel of vain strivings, loosely tied, methinks, for milder climes than these. Or words to that effect …
  In a nutshell, then, the week was a pretty fair reflection of the amount of work I put into promoting CAP, which amounted to little more than a blog post and a couple of tweets on Twitter. Now, it’s still early days, and the UK Kindle is coming this month, apparently, so that might make a difference – but even at this early stage it looks as if my avant-garde experiment in laissez-faire promotion is paying off handsomely. What I’m trying to prove in this experiment is something I already know, which is that it’s impossible to achieve a working wage in the publishing industry without having to work ten times as hard as you would in a job that pays minimum wage. Even the fact that I’m talking about writing books as ‘the publishing industry’ is fairly damning. The fact is, though, that it is an industry, and as with all industries, it’s the best capitalised endeavours that will rise to the top. Which is to say that, generally speaking, publishing a book these days is a pointless endeavour, if your aim is to reach the maximum number of readers possible for your particular kind of book, unless you’ve got pretty explicit incriminating photographs of the guy or gal behind the advertising budget. Forget quirky titles, and great stories, and viral marketing, and book trailers, and blogs and word-of-mouth and every other one-off fluke success story you’ve ever heard – as far as I can make out, it’s all about the promotional spend.
  Apart from the paltry few hours it took me to write CRIME ALWAYS PAYS, the spend on the book has been pretty minimal – about $20, or thereabouts. Which is why it is currently languishing at (checks Amazon Kindle listings on Friday night) # 5,711. Which is, okay, better than it was earlier this afternoon, but still not causing Dan Brown any sleepless nights.
  Meantime, I’m using the time that I’m not blogging / promoting / shilling to write. It’s going well, thanks for asking – I’m having fun screwing around with conventional notions of ‘story’, ‘novel’ and ‘book’. If I’m honest, I’d have to say that it is by a country mile the least commercial story I’ve ever written, and if I’m totally honest, I’d have to say that that’s deliberate. One reason for that is because, in the last year or so, I’ve had three books picked up by an editor at a pretty reputable U.S. publisher, and three times he has failed (no fault of his own) to get them past the bean-counters. Two of the three were straightforward enough, being a crime caper and a PI story, while the third was (to be fair to the bean-counters) rather more unconventional. The problem for me is that it’s the unconventional one that I found to be the most fun to write; and, if I’m not going to get published anyway, then I might as well keep writing, in the scarce few writing hours I have every week, the stuff that’s fun.
  It’s also, I think, a bit of a reaction to an industry that is becoming increasingly sterile and homogenous. There’s no getting away from the fact that that’s a very subjective take on things, and obviously it depends very heavily on the books I’ve been reading. I’ve read some terrific novels this year – Gene Kerrigan’s DARK TIMES IN THE CITY, Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST), Robert Wilson’s THE IGNORANCE OF BLOOD, Ed O’Loughlin’s NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, John Connolly’s THE GATES, Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND, Scott Philips’ COTTONWOOD, John Banville’s THE INFINITIES – but apart from re-reads – James Ellroy’s LA CONFIDENTIAL and Raymond Chandler’s FAREWELL, MY LOVELY – the only books that truly blew me away were GENIUS, a biography of Richard Feynman by James Gleick, 1974 by David Peace, and I AM ALIVE AND YOU ARE DEAD, a biography of Philip K. Dick by Emmanuel Carrère.
  The Richard Feynman biography was mind-blowing because it incorporates a history of 20th century quantum physics, which, as is always the case when I dip into quantum physics, is akin to leaving my brain behind on a roller-coaster to fend for itself – I don’t know much about what’s going on, but it’s a hell of a ride. The same, I suppose, applied to 1974, but what I particularly liked about that was David Peace’s ability to bypass my eyes and lodge his words directly in the cerebral cortex – I’d imagine it’s the way a trained composer, say, ‘reads’ music off the sheet. What I liked about the Philip K. Dick book was the way Carrère screwed around with the biographical form, blending Dick’s professional and personal fictions and fantasies to the point where they became something of a double-helix, and it was virtually impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
  I have no idea of how well, or otherwise, the three books sold when they first appeared. I do know that all three, if not exactly life-changing reads, had the capacity (had I read them at a more impressionable age) to change the way I perceived books: to re-evaluate what a book can deliver, and the way in which a story can be told. I’m not trying to say that they were ‘unputdownable’ (the Feynman book, especially, required putting down on nearly every second page), or that the writers were such slick craftsmen that the pages seemed to turn on their own, so that I found myself transported to a world of the writer’s creation, blah-de-blah, nor offer any of the absurdly reductionist opinions that the commercial publishing world seems to value so highly. I don’t read to be ‘swept away’, or ‘entertained’, or distracted from my commute or to while away the hours on a beach – I read to be challenged and provoked, to be goaded into a greater awareness of my place in the grand scheme, etc. Most books these days, and fiction in particular, seem to want to be the literary equivalent of either Valium or Viagra, but life’s too short, and the world too wide, to waste it on third-rate knock-offs of stories that were already old by the time Aristophanes got around to spoofing Athenian intellectuals with CLOUDS – of which, I should say, bringing us full circle, CRIME ALWAYS PAYS is a fourth-rate example, which may well account for why it is currently (checks Amazon Kindle rankings on Saturday morning before uploading post) languishing at # 14,199. Hence the new departure.
  All of which is a roundabout way of saying that, if I’m going to be a pathetically failed writer, then I’ll be a pathetically failed writer on my terms, not the industry’s. Yes, that ‘clunk-click’ you hear is yours truly bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted – and yes, you’re perfectly entitled to wonder whether I’d be so critical of the industry had one of my books being bought for a tidy sum in the last year or so. The answer, I’m pretty sure, is ‘Yes, I would’ – although I wouldn’t be blogging about it. I’d probably just bitch about it in private, and then go and write something similar to fulfil the contract, and put the interesting story that I’d really like to write on the back-burner, for another year at least.
  I guess I’m pretty lucky. I’m happy and healthy, I like my job, I can pay my bills, and I can – given that very few people in the publishing industry care either way – write whatever the hell I want to write. I’ll probably end up publishing the new story to the web next year, to the electronic equivalent of a few embarrassed coughs, but hey, it’s mine own. Life is good.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: FEVER OF THE BONE by Val McDermid

I met Val McDermid at last year’s Bouchercon, introduced by Marian at the Sleuth of Baker Street desk. Neither of us gushed, exactly, possibly because neither of us had read the other’s books, but probably because Val McDermid meets more wannabe writers on a daily basis than she could shake a metaphorical razor-studded dildo at. Which is to say that, while her literary reputation precedes her, FEVER OF THE BONE is my first McDermid read. The review runneth thusly:

THE CHARACTERS of DCI Carol Jordan and Tony Hill will be familiar to many people who have never read a Val McDermid novel. Jordan and Hill were the double-act at the heart of the UTV series Wire in the Blood , which ran from 2002 until it was cancelled earlier this year, in which Jordan (for the first three series, at least) played a tough cop to Hill’s sensitive, complex psychological profiler.
  The pair take centre stage again in Fever of the Bone , the sixth in McDermid’s Jordan-Hill series, and her 23rd novel in total. Opening with a teenage murder victim discovered in Worcester, the story soon reverts to Jordan and Hill’s fictional stamping ground of Bradfield, in Yorkshire, where a number of sexually mutilated teenage corpses are discovered. The pressure quickly builds on Jordan to find the serial killer, but this time she has to work without her trusted confidante Hill, as her new boss, suspicious of her motives in employing the freelance profiler, has decreed that she must use internal police resources.
  Hill, for his part, finds himself in Worcester, partly at the behest of a local police force keen to use his unique talents, but also to tidy up the estate of his late father, a man about whom all Hill ever knew was that he had abandoned his son at an early age.
Val McDermid is renowned for her compulsively readable police procedural novels, in which she takes pains to get right the detail of real police work (or “old-fashioned coppery”, as one character describes it).
  One of the pleasures of Fever of the Bone , for example, is McDermid’s description of mutually suspicious police forces reluctant to give up any scrap of information that might give a rival force some glory, and the politicking that goes on both within a particular police force and between competing forces, a frustratingly tiresome process that has, of course, ramifications for any officer investigating crimes that straddle jurisdictions.
  McDermid is also celebrated for her willingness to engage with contemporary issues (the murdered teenagers, for example, all come into contact with their killer on Bebo-style internet site called Rigmarole), and her ability to explore convincingly the darker end of the crime-writing spectrum.
  Not only do her detectives investigate the kind of murders that haunt the darkest of nightmares, but her profiler, Tony Hill, takes the investigation – and the reader – a crucial step further by inhabiting the minds of sick and twisted killers, who often have a sexual motive.
  That’s an explosive combination, if not particularly original, but McDermid the writer has one more trick up her sleeve.
  Unlike many of her best-selling peers, McDermid understands that it’s the internal workings of her characters that make a novel tick, as opposed to their implausible feats of detection and a superhuman ability to give and take physical punishment. There are times, in fact, when Fever of the Bone reads like a soap opera rather than a thriller, as McDermid deftly introduces a host of characters from the previous five novels, and then proceeds to broaden their experiences.
  The most poignant example of this is Tony Hill’s slow and painful exhumation of the man his father truly was, as opposed to the caricature he’d had rammed down this throat by his vindictive mother.
  Touching, gripping and entertaining by turns, Fever of the Bone is a hugely satisfying novel. There are caveats – it seems unlikely, for example, that a serial killer would spend months carefully grooming a series of victims, and then strike at them all within a short space of time, and continue to do so even knowing the police are hot on the trail – but those caveats are minor indeed. – Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times