Pleasant Tally Monday

Well, the votes are tallied, and the winner has been announced: Derek Landy’s SKULDUGGERY PLEASANT has won the ‘Irish Book of the Decade’ award. No mean feat, when you consider that the novel was up against the likes of John Banville, John Connolly, Anne Enright and Sebastian Barry, to name but a few. And pretty damn amazing, to be frank about it, when you consider that Landy’s novel is a YA title featuring a dead / skeletal private eye. A hat-tip to Irish Publishing News for the nod …

And The Beat Goes On …

The Irish Times published a ‘Crime Beat’ round-up of crime fiction last Saturday, featuring eight novels of Irish and international interest, including three rather fine Irish debuts. To wit:

Three radically different debuts suggest that Irish crime fiction is in a rude state of health. Set in Cork in 1920, Kevin McCarthy’s PEELER (Mercier Press, €10.99, pb) finds the RIC and the IRA pursuing the same killer against the backdrop of the War of Independence. Strong on historical detail and assured in its plotting, PEELER is delivered in an economical style with occasional poetic flourishes. McCarthy hasn’t made things easy for himself in choosing for his protagonist a RIC sergeant who is a veteran of the Great War, and who works alongside Black-and-Tans, but it’s to McCarthy’s credit that Acting Sergeant Sean O’Keefe emerges as a sympathetic character in a compelling narrative.
  Niamh O’Connor’s IF I NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN (Transworld Ireland, €12.99, pb) is equally authentic, the setting here being the mean streets of contemporary Dublin as Detective Jo Birmingham investigates a series of murders that appear to be the work of a serial killer with a grudge against Dublin’s gangland. A crime correspondent with the Sunday World, O’Connor invests her pacy police procedural with gritty detail, although Birmingham’s struggle to balance the demands of her professional life with her personal circumstance as a single mother raising two boys is as integral to the plot as the traditional crime fiction tropes. Birmingham’s one-woman campaign on behalf of victim’s rights gives the novel its moral ballast.
  Moscow faces into the chilly winter of 1936 in William Ryan’s THE HOLY THIEF (Mantle, £12.99, hb), in which a number of horrific murders coincide with the start of Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’. Militiaman Detective Korolev is assigned to investigate, and soon finds himself caught in a web of intrigue involving the NKVD, the Orthodox Church, and Moscow’s infamous Thieves. Korolev, a religious man secretly faithful to the Old Regime, makes for an unusually spiritual crime fiction protagonist. Ryan’s stately style belies the page-turning quality of the novel, which compares favourably to Rob Smith’s CHILD 44, not least in terms of Ryan’s evocation of the claustrophobic paranoia of Stalinist Russia.
  Meanwhile, two titans of the contemporary crime fiction novel offer hugely satisfying reads. In 61 HOURS (Bantam, £13.99, hb), Lee Child’s ex-military drifter Jack Reacher fetches up in a South Dakota town during a blizzard, and is quickly pressed into service by a police force besieged by a drug cartel bent on eliminating a murder witness. Terse and laconic in style, the novel’s tale owes a significant debt to the classic western High Noon, but the deadpan Reacher is a charismatic and endlessly resourceful protagonist. The hero’s status as a noble loner reeks of James Bond-style male fantasy, but if you’re willing to suspend your disbelief, 61 HOURS is an expertly crafted entertainment.
  Scott Turow’s INNOCENT(Mantle, £17.99, hb) is a sequel to his best-selling PRESUMED INNOCENT (1987). Now 60, and long after being acquitted of the murder of his mistress, appeals judge Rusty Sabich finds himself being investigated by his old adversary, Tommy Molto, when his wife dies in unusual circumstances. Blending Sabich’s first-person account of events with third-person narratives, and featuring an elliptical structure that jumps back and forth in time, INNOCENT is a mature and insightful exploration of the psychology of crime that makes a mockery of its title, and a gripping thriller to boot.
  Venetian policeman Commissario Guido Brunetti returns in Donna Leon’s A QUESTION OF BELIEF (William Heinemann, £12.99, pb), in which domestic and professional concerns compete for his attention as he investigates the apparently random murder of a court clerk during a sweltering heat wave. Brunetti’s emotional intelligence is both his most effective tool and charming attribute as he negotiates his way through the labyrinthine corridors of power in his search for the truth. While the compassionate Brunetti makes for enjoyable company on his morally complex quest, Leon’s 19th offering lacks a quality of urgency that might have given it a telling edge.
  Donna Moore’s sophomore offering, OLD DOGS (Max Crime, £7.99, pb), is a crime caper that centres on two scheming ladies of a certain age, Letty and Dora, who have decided to steal a pair of jewel-encrusted Tibetan dog statues from a Glasgow museum. Pursued by a ruthless killer, the duo inadvertently gather around them a teeming multitude of scammers, blaggers and thieves, all of whom are inept to a greater or lesser degree. Liberally sprinkled with salty Glaswegian vernacular, the manically twisted tale reads like a contemporary but unusually bawdy Ealing comedy.
  With only three novels under his belt, John Hart has already won two Edgars, the crime writing equivalent of the Oscar, the most recent of which was awarded last month to THE LAST CHILD (John Murray, £9.99, pb). Set in a small American town where a number of young girls have gone missing never to be seen again, it features two protagonists, Detective Clyde Hunt and Johnny Merrimon, the 13-year-old twin of one of the missing girls. Their intertwined investigation provides Hart with a propulsive narrative momentum, but this is a complex tale that explores concepts as diverse as the abuse of power, paedophilia, domestic violence and the consequences of slavery. While THE LAST CHILD is first and foremost a compelling police procedural, Hart is a subtle author who is in the final reckoning concerned with excavating the best and worst of the human heart. THE LAST CHILD is as fine a novel as you’ll read all year, crime or otherwise. - Declan Burke

  This article was first published in the Irish Times.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Erin Kelly

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 CUTTING ROOM by Louise Welsh left me breathless. It’s tartan noir at its most deft, dark and literary. She really is a master storyteller. It tells the story of Rilke, a dissolute auctioneer who finds a cache of disturbing erotic photos in a house clearance. She takes a character who was in the gutter to begin with and sends him into a downward spiral.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I have no guilty pleasures, only deeply unfashionable ones; once every few years I chain-read Virginia Andrews’ Dollanganger saga.

Most satisfying writing moment?
The day I realised THE POISON TREE was finished and I had actually written a novel. I almost didn’t care if no one read it. (This lasted for about a week. Then I cared again, a lot.)

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I’ve loved both of Tana French’s novels, IN THE WOODS and THE LIKENESS; gritty and tender, for me they absolutely capture the dark side of Dublin during the boom.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE LIKENESS (see above) was rich with young, sexy, intriguing characters and the Wicklow mountains are the perfect film backdrop.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The freedom and power of creating new worlds is pretty intoxicating for a control freak like me. Plus, it’s fun; I can tell when I’m writing something good because it doesn’t feel like writing, it feels like reading. The worst thing is the physical discomfort. I know, I’m not exactly working down a mine, but sitting at a desk all day, getting RSI and watching your ass go square slowly impacts your vertebrae and crushes your spirit.

The pitch for your next book is …?
It’s about Paul, a young man who acts as the ‘eyes’ for his childhood friend Daniel, who is illiterate, angry, loyal and charming. Gradually Daniel’s protection turns into a desire for control that threatens to ruin Paul’s life until one night, Paul makes a split-second decision that will get Daniel out of the way for good. With Daniel’s father out for revenge, Paul escapes to build a new life in a different part of the country. There he begins a relationship with Louisa, a woman who has even darker, more dangerous secrets than he does. Who will catch up with Paul first?

Who are you reading right now?
THE WILDING by Maria McCann. It’s a deceptively thrilling literary novel about Civil War, sex and cider. What’s not to like?

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I’d plea-bargain my soul to be allowed both. If that didn’t work ... well, I write one book a year, and read maybe sixty, so it has to be reading.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Up all night.

Erin Kelly’s THE POISON TREE is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: 61 HOURS by Lee Child

Lee Child’s 14th offering reads like High Noon blended with the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, in which our strong, silent hero finds himself stuck in a blizzard-trapped town, reluctantly helping out the beleaguered local police force.
  Child is an unusual thriller writer in that his novels - which all feature the same protagonist, Jack Reacher - are sometimes told in the first person voice, others in the third. 61 HOURS is a third-person narrative, which affords an emotional distance from Reacher. This is not strictly speaking a necessary device, as Reacher is an impassive character who is rarely if ever given to emotional displays.
  That said, Reacher is himself a likeable character. Although he has been compared to James Bond, his status as a drifter (albeit an ex-military man) precludes him from carrying weapons in 61 HOURS. He proves himself very resourceful in other ways, however, and his eye for detail - and Lee Child’s impressive research - is frequently entertaining.
  On the downside, the fact that he is a series character lessens the tension somewhat, given that Jack Reacher will inevitably reach the end of the story in one piece, regardless of how high are the odds stacked against him. Mind you, 61 HOURS ends with an explosive climax, from which it’s difficult to see Reacher escaping. (We’re promised another Jack Reacher novel in six months’ time, so you would have to assume that he survives.)
  Child also creates a number of interesting secondary characters, chief among them the local deputy of police Peterson. A hardworking, blue-collar guy, Peterson represents the morality of the piece, along with Janet Salter, an aging librarian who has witnessed a murder and is under police protection. The Chief of Police, Holland, is potentially a more fascinating character, given that his moral compass is skewed, but Child tends to create characters who are either all good or all bad. A Mexican drug lord called Plato accounts for the latter in this novel; again a potentially interesting character, his story becomes little more than a litany of ruthless and often lethal actions as the narrative progresses.
  61 HOURS is neither emotionally nor morally complex. That may well be the price readers of high-concept thrillers pay, but there are clear hints that Child is capable of far more complex work than is evidenced in this novel. Despite the attention to detail, and the fact that Child roots the story in an utterly plausible reality, there’s a cartoon quality to Jack Reacher and his world in terms of its black-and-white depictions of good and evil.
  For that reason, 61 HOURS demands a suspension of disbelief from the reader that can be hard to sustain. As a kind of trade-off, Child maintains a blistering pace throughout, employing brevity when it comes to chapter length, with each chapter ending on a cliff-hanger.
  The caveats are minor, though. This was my first Jack Reacher novel, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Child’s style is terse and economical, and while the book is a page-turner, the swift pace never felt rushed. - Declan Burke

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: The Killer Inside Me (18s)

Sheriff Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) is a soft-spoken, well-mannered Southern gentleman as he patrols his small Texas town, but Lou is not all that he seems. Ordered to run Joyce (Jessica Alba), a local prostitute, out of town, Lou batters the woman to death, then shoots dead the man infatuated with her - even though Lou himself was having an affair with Joyce.
  Based on a Jim Thompson novel, The Killer Inside Me is told through Lou’s eyes, and features a voiceover from Affleck that offers a chilling insight into the banal evil of a man who is a homicidal psychotic. Affleck’s understated performance is perfectly pitched, creating a sympathetic portrayal of a character who is utterly repulsive - the scene in which Affleck beats Alba to a pulp is harrowing, even by contemporary cinema’s standards. And yet the audience can perfectly understand why Lou’s sweetheart, Amy (Kate Hudson), might fall for him: he is tender, intelligent and well-educated.
  The director, Michael Winterbottom, recreates the small-town Americana of the 1950s with an unerring eye, giving the movie a dreamy quality that regularly flips over into nightmare whenever the switch flips in Lou’s head. A good cast provides excellent support, with Ned Beatty, Elias Koteas, Simon Baker, Bill Pullman and Brent Briscoe all paying the price, in one form or another, for attempting to thwart Lou’s plans.
  Be warned that this is not one for the faint-hearted, as the violence has a perversely intimate quality to it that makes it utterly shocking. That said, as a crime thriller and a forensically telling psychological exploration of psychosis, The Killer Inside Me is a viscerally engaging experience. **** - Declan Burke

Hit And Myth

Just how timeless, exactly, are the themes of noir? That’s a question implicitly explored by Gerard Brennan and Mike Stone, co-editors of REQUIEMS FOR THE DEPARTED: IRISH CRIME, IRISH MYTHS, a collection of short crime stories which draws on Irish mythology for inspiration, and features Ken Bruen, Arlene Hunt, Adrian McKinty, Brian McGilloway, Garbhan Downey and Sam Millar, among others. The book gets an outing in the Arts pages of today’s Irish Times, with the intro kicking off thusly:

Star-crossed lovers on the lam. It could be Red and Mumsie in Geoffrey Homes’ BUILD MY GALLOWS HIGH; Doc and Carol in Jim Thompson’s THE GETAWAY , maybe Bowie and Keechie in Edward Anderson’s THIEVES LIKE US, or any number of classic noir tales.
  But Diarmuid and Grainne?
  REQUIEMS FOR THE DEPARTED: IRISH CRIME, IRISH MYTHS is a compilation of contemporary short crime stories based on Irish myths and legends.
  “There are many parallels between contemporary crime tales and Irish mythology,” says Gerard Brennan, who is co-editor of the collection, along with Mike Stone.
  “Consider one of the most powerful icons of crime fiction: the femme fatale. Seductive, irresistible and deadly . . . this description hangs well on the great queen and Irish war deity, Morrigan, who amongst her many adventures steals from the mighty Cúchulainn, offers him her love, and when spurned, engineers his death.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

We Need Kevin To Talk About Kevin

If you’re in Dublin tomorrow, May 26th, you could a lot worse than toddle along to the launch of Kevin McCarthy’s PEELER, which takes place at the Gutter Bookshop in Temple Bar with festivities kicking off at 6.30pm. For what it’s worth, I’ve read the novel, and I think it’s a terrific debut. Meanwhile, the blurb elves have been wittering thusly:

West Cork. November 1920. The Irish War of Independence rages. The body of a young woman is found brutally murdered on a windswept hillside. A scrap board sign covering her mutilated body reads ‘TRATOR’. Traitor. Acting Sergeant Sean O’Keefe of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), a wounded veteran of the Great War, is assigned to investigate the crime, aided by sinister detectives sent from Dublin Castle to ensure he finds the killer, just so long as the killer he finds best serves the purposes of the Crown in Ireland. The IRA has instigated its own investigation into the young woman’s death, assigning young Volunteer Liam Farrell - failed gunman and former law student - to the task of finding a killer it cannot allow to be one of its own. Unknown to each other, an RIC constable and an IRA Volunteer relentlessly pursue the truth behind the savage killing, their investigations taking them from the bullet-pocked lanes and thriving brothels of war-torn Cork city to the rugged, deadly hills of West Cork.

  Hats off, by the way, to Kevin McCarthy for doing it the hard way. In Ireland, attempting to create a sympathetic character from an RIC Sergeant - who works alongside Black-and-Tans - is a hard sell, even today. But then, Sean O’Keefe is a complex character. A police officer upholding law and order on behalf of the Crown, he’s nonetheless a proud Irishman and Catholic - and that’s before you get into the ramifications of a story in which the Crown and the IRA are after the same killer. It’s a volatile mix, and Kevin McCarthy does it full justice. I’m already looking forward to seeing his next offering …

Nobody Move, This is a Review: ELEGY FOR APRIL by Benjamin Black

John Banville’s alter ego is back with a fourth Benjamin Black novel, the third in the Quirke series. This time, the pathologist has been in situ at an institution called St John of the Cross, drying out. When he comes home, his daughter asks him to investigate the disappearance of her best friend, April Latimer, a well-connected junior doctor at the same hospital where he works.
  April is independent-minded and is considered to have something of a ‘wild’ reputation in the conservative social atmosphere of Dublin in the 1950s, dictated by a patriarchal Catholic hierarchy which is headed by Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, who pops up fictionally as a confidante of April’s family. (Other real-life characters of the time also find their way into the story, which can, at times, feel like over-embellishment).
  Quirke humours his daughter, and quickly gets to work doing what he does best: poking around, conducting post-mortems on people’s buried secrets and asking questions in an intensely claustrophobic city where a scandal can be hushed up with one phone call from a government minister’s office to a newspaper editor. What he eventually uncovers is deeply unsettling and, combined with Black’s superb characterisation and sense of place, ELEGY FOR APRIL will insinuate itself into the dark crevices of your mind like the novel’s ubiquitous Dublin fog. - Claire Coughlan

Jack The Giant-Killer

Another year, another CrimeFest. I didn’t make it to Bristol this year, unfortunately, given that I couldn’t justify the trip on the basis that I haven’t had a book published since God was a boy, and I have to say that I missed the buzz. Not least of which is the anticipation of gaping in amazement at Donna Moore’s latest epic adventure in footwear. Ah well, maybe next year.
  Anyway, the good news is that The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman scooped the Last Laugh Award for THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSELL, said gong being awarded for ‘the best humorous crime novel first published in the British Isles in 2009’. The win is hugely deserved - TDOTJR isn’t just laugh-out-loud funny, it’s also a clever deconstruction of the crime narrative. Quoth yours truly:

THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSELL is the whimsical title to Bateman’s latest offering, and the second title in a year from a new Bateman series which features a hero who goes under the moniker of Mystery Man. I use the word “hero” advisedly: Bateman’s protagonist is the owner of a Belfast bookshop specialising in crime fiction, and a man who likes to dabble in puzzles and the solving of crimes unlikely to put him in any serious danger. He is a whinging hypochondriac, a coward and misogynist, a bookworm nerd who nonetheless gets the girl and saves the day. He may well turn out to be Colin Bateman’s most endearing creation …

  Well done, that man. Incidentally, it’s appropriate that the news of Bateman’s win came to me via The Rap Sheet, which venerable organ (oo-er, missus, etc.) is today celebrating its fourth birthday. Drop on over and blow out Jeff Pierce’s candles (oo-er, missus, etc.) …
  As for my own weekend, I spent it muddling about in the garden. The weather was terrific (apparently we’re promised, according to the BBC’s meteorologists, the best summer in 130 years - woot!), the barbie was dragged out and dusted down, and much mowing, planting, seeding, pruning, clipping, digging and generalised mooching about was indulged in. The results (see below) mightn’t be as impressive as Bateman’s gong (oo-er, missus, etc.) or Donna Moore’s shoetastic adventures, but humble as it is, it’s mine own, etc.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: Trafficked (18s)

Alone, frightened and unable to speak English, Tayo (Ruth Negga, right), a young Nigerian girl who has been trafficked into Ireland, escapes from the back of a van in a Dublin alleyway. Picked up off the streets by street-level Mr Fixit Keely (Karl Shiels), Tayo finds a place to stay, work in a lap-dancing club, and the possibility of happiness - which in Tayo’s case means earning enough money to allow her twin sister to come live in Ireland. But Tayo has reckoned without Keely’s capacity for double-dealing, the persistence of her would-be pimp to see his ‘property’ returned, and the relentless nature of a malign fate.
  Written and directed by Ciaran O’Connor, Trafficked is the closest Irish cinema has come in many years to a bona fide film noir. Although made almost eight years ago, and as such is something of a period piece examining the seedy underbelly of the Celtic Tiger, its subject matter is timely, and indeed timeless.
  While the classic noir trope of expressionist lighting is absent, and Tayo far removed from the glamorous femme fatale, the film contains many of the noir staples: bottom feeders scraping a living from the mean streets, star-crossed lovers on the lam, the depressingly inevitable sense that fate will have the final say despite the best efforts of the protagonists.
  O’Connor’s seedy Dublin is convincingly portrayed, although there is a preponderance of self-consciously poetic shots of the grim setting, while Negga and Shiels are convincing as a mismatched pair thrust together by circumstance, with the latter in particularly fine form as the charismatic lowlife Keely.
  That the couple manage to scrape some tenderness from their brutal lifestyle adds to the film’s appeal, but this is in the final reckoning intended as a slice of gritty realism, and diehard noir fans will revel in an ending that pulls no punches. *** - Declan Burke

  This review first appeared in the Irish Mail on Sunday

Newsflash: Ruth Dud In ‘No Dud’ Shocker!

Yesterday’s CWA nominations for best crime writing threw up very few Irish nominees, surprisingly enough, given that 2009 was a particularly fertile year for Irish crime fiction, although the New Blood, Ian Fleming Steel and Gold Dagger nomination lists won’t be published until later in the year, so hopefully we’ll see a nod or two when they appear.
  In the meantime we’ll have to console ourselves with the news that Ruth ‘Cuddly’ Dudley Edwards has received a nod in the Non-Fiction category for her monumental work, AFTERMATH: THE OMAGH BOMBING. The book also made the longlist for this year’s Orwell Prize, but didn’t make the shortlist, so here’s hoping the CWA peeps do the right thing.
  Meanwhile, it’s hearty congratulations to Declan Hughes and Brian McGilloway, who yesterday made the long-list for the Theakstons Old Peculier ‘Crime Novel of the Year’ Award, for THE DYING BREED and GALLOWS LANE, respectively. Strange to say, but these award nominations are a little frustrating, given that both Hughes and McGilloway have published new titles in the last month or so, both of which are - in my rarely humble opinion - superior to their previous offerings. In other words, and fine novels though THE DYING BREED and GALLOWS LANE undoubtedly are, you’d rather see the chaps judged on where they are now rather than where they were then. Anyway, it looks like it’ll be a pretty tough competition: also making the longlist are Val McDermid, Mark Billingham, Ian Rankin, Peter James, Peter Robinson and Simon Kernick, among others. For more, clickety-click here …
  Finally, the paperback release of Gene Kerrigan’s DARK TIMES IN THE CITY gets a nice big-up from Arminta Wallace in today’s Irish Times, with the gist running thusly:

“Gene Kerrigan’s third novel, following LITTLE CRIMINALS and THE MIDNIGHT CHOIR, is another intelligent, highly readable instalment of the kind of urban neo-noir that is fast making Dublin as recognisable to readers of crime fiction worldwide as is Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Downloads

All three regular readers of CAP will be aware that John McFetridge (right) is a terrific writer, or at least good enough to be dubbed ‘the Canadian Elmore Leonard’, which is good enough for me and should be good enough for you too. His current novel is titled SWAP or LET IT RIDE, depending on which jurisdiction you find yourself, but he’s also just released a long short story via Smashwords, called ‘East Coast’. It’s free to download to the viewing mechanism of your choice here, with the frammis kicking off thusly:

Bangor, Maine

They called it the New England States-Maritime Provinces Narcotics Officers Drinking Club, a couple hundred cops taking over the entire Days Inn off the I-95 just outside Bangor for the weekend. By Saturday night they had a barbeque set up by the pool, the no glass rule was long gone and the saunas were co-ed. Music blasted, country mostly, a little R’n’B when the Fed from Boston got near the system.
  The idea was an informal exchange of information. Rumours, innuendo, which dealers were on their way up, who was bringing in larger shipments, who was the biggest pain in the ass, who was most likely to get killed. All that stuff that couldn’t go in official reports, stuff that wouldn’t ever see the inside of a courtroom but stuff that would be good if the cops on both sides of the world’s longest unprotected border were aware.
  In room 202 Staff Sergeant Jerry Northup, the highest ranking RCMP officer on the trip, laid his cards on the table and said, “Even in Canada we call that a full house.”
  “You got a lot of time up there to play cards, don’t you?”
  Northup pulled in the chips and winked at Sherriff Cousins from Worcester, saying, “Oh yeah, you know us, we’ve got no crime we just sit around in our igloos practicing moose calls and playing poker.”
  “You’re in my backyard now.”
  Jerry said, you know it, and dealt another hand. The room’s bed had been pushed out into the hall to make room for the table brought up from the restaurant, six cops sitting around it, maybe a thousand bucks would change hands. It was all in fun.


One floor down a naked Constable Evelyn Edwards was on top of a DEA guy from Portland, Maine, both of them very close, and her phone started beeping and the DEA guy said, “Whoa, you’re not going to answer that,” and she said, yeah, I have to, “I’m on duty.”
  “You’re five hundred miles out of your jurisdiction, you’re in another God damn country.”
  She was beside the bed then pulling her phone out of her jeans in the pile of clothes on the floor saying, we couldn’t all get the weekend off, then into the phone, “Edwards ... Yes, un-huh, wow, really?” She shook her head and the DEA guy knew they weren’t going to finish any time soon.
  Edwards pulled on her sweatshirt and jeans and took off barefoot out of the room saying she’d be back and the DEA guy saw her bra and panties on the floor beside her running shoes and thought, hey, maybe they would finish.


In the poker room Sheriff Cousins was raking a pot, a big one, saying he knew his luck was going change when Edwards walked in out of breath, all the guys looking at her messed up hair and she said, “Sergeant Northup,” and Jerry said, “Hey Ev, you looking to lose some money?”
  “No sir, it’s about, it’s Superintendent Bergeron.”
  Jerry looked at his cards and said, Henry? What now, “Did he lock himself out of the office again?”
  Cousins laughed like he knew all about that kind of boss and Edwards said, no sir.
  “He died, sir.”
  Jerry leaned back in his chair and looked at her. Shit.
  Party’s over …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE DEVIL by Ken Bruen

John Connolly has long used supernatural elements in his crime novels, and last year Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE employed the device of an ex-paramilitary killer haunted by the ghosts of his victims. Where both writers have tended to leave it to the reader to judge whether their protagonists are bedevilled by manifestations of evil or a tortured conscience, Ken Bruen has taken a more literal approach in his latest novel, when his series private eye, Jack Taylor, confronts the Devil himself.
  Galway private detective Taylor has appeared in seven previous novels, making his debut in THE GUARDS (2001). A casual glance suggests that he is a conventional genre creation, a tarnished white knight tormented by past failures, his addiction to alcohol and the spectres of those he has been unable to help. On closer inspection, Taylor reveals himself as unique. Most literary private eyes are bent on parsing the culture they spring from, examining society through the prism of their own morality in the guise of investigating a particular case. If this conceit represents a literary fourth wall, however, Bruen’s post-modernist approach has long since blown it down. Even events as serious as murder happen at the periphery of a Jack Taylor narrative, in which everything that happens is subordinate to the needs of Taylor himself.
  THE DEVIL opens with Taylor at Shannon Airport being refused entry into America by Homeland Security. Back home in Galway, he is approached by the mother of a student who has gone missing. Can Jack find the boy? He can’t, as the lad turns up a few days later horribly mutilated, with a dog’s head thrust into his entrails. Rumour suggests that the student was heavily influenced by the malign Carl, who bears a strong resemblance to a Kurt whom Taylor met at Shannon Airport. Soon Taylor has met Carl, and comes to believe that the man is Satan incarnate. As more young people die, Taylor resolves on a showdown that will rid the world of evil.
  This is, on the face of it, a preposterously implausible storyline, yet readers would do well to bear in mind that Bruen is a multiple prize-winning author in the US, Germany and France, and that he holds a doctorate in metaphysics. The fact that Taylor embarks on a Jameson-and-Xanax binge after being refused entry to the US may also be a factor in the narrative, which grows progressively more outrageous as Taylor indulges in his indefatigable nemesis, the demon drink.
  It’s also worth bearing in mind that the backdrop to THE DEVIL is that of a country in the throes of economic downturn, and the havoc the recession has wreaked on individual lives. Time and again Taylor refers to the inequality of the suffering, sketching out the devastation in a line or two of his trademark spare style. The crucial line arrives when Taylor asks his friend Vinny if he believes in the Devil. “Look at the state of the country,” answers Vinny, “and whoever is stalking the land - it ain’t God.”
  Bruen gives himself a get-out clause with the implicit suggestion that Taylor’s peculiar brand of self-loathing narcissism, fuelled on drink and drugs, has conjured up the ultimate foe. That said, the novel dares the reader to seriously the notion that evil isn’t just the absence of empathy, as John Connolly recently claimed, but a tangible entity bent on persecution. Told in bright, broad and luridly cheerful strokes, the novel lacks the kind of subtlety to be expected from a doctor of metaphysics. By the same token, Bruen’s radical reimagining of the private eye genre has long earned him the right to challenge our perceptions of how a story can or should be told. - Declan Burke

  This review was first published as an Irish Times ‘Book of the Day’ pick.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: PD Brazill

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?
Donna Moore’s OLD DOGS. A sweary Ealing comedy.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Matt Helm.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Well I did enjoy THE DA VINCI CODE, but I don’t feel guilty about that. Ian McEwan - he makes me feel all sensible, which is never a good thing.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Any time someone ‘gets’ what I do! Working on the edit of a story with Anne Frasier gave me a real ego boost, mind you.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Adrian McKinty’s Michael Forsythe Trilogy would be great in Paul Greengrass’s hands.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst: It doesn’t pay well. Best: it beats working.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Battered bodies and battered Mars Bars.

Who are you reading right now?
I’ve just finished Danny Bowman’s cracking The Windowlicker Maker. Today, I’ll be catching up on stories at BEAT TO A PULP.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write, because then I wouldn’t know how crap my stuff is.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Ad hoc, slapdash, twoddle.

PD Brazill writes the serial WARSAW MOON. His pic was taken by Kasia Martell.

The Fowl Skulduggery Of Lovers In The Woods

Or, your chance to vote for Irish crime fiction. Voting for the Irish Book Awards’ Book of the Decade ends on May 27th, and you - yes, YOU! - can vote for the best Irish book from the last ten years. Of the 50 titles, two can be considered adult crime titles - John Connolly’s THE LOVERS and Tana French’s IN THE WOODS - while there are two young adult crime titles: Eoin Colfer’s ARTEMIS FOWL and Derek Landy’s SKULDUGGERY PLEASANT. Meanwhile, at a stretch, there are two titles that could be considered literary crime: Edna O’Brien’s IN THE FOREST and David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER. You know what to do, people: your democratic duty calls here …
  Elsewhere, there was a very nice interview with Declan Hughes in yesterday’s Irish Times, conducted by Arminta Wallace, in which Squire Hughes answers with good grace the perennial question of why crime fiction isn’t taken seriously by those who really should know better. Quote Dec:

“Anyone who reads a page of Chandler and doesn’t realise that it’s better prose than 95 per cent of writers of any kind . . . it’s weird, I think. It’s ignorance, too.”

  Well said, that man. For the rest, clickety-click here …
  In other news, Stuart Neville has got himself a stalker. Jeez, what does a guy have to do to get a stalker around here …?
  Finally, the Only Good Movies blog was kind enough to link to Crime Always Pays in a round-up of crime fiction blogs that review crime movies, so I’d better do the decent thing and review one. To wit:

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (18s)
As the title suggests, Lieutenant Terence McDonagh is not a good man. He spends his days apparently investigating crimes, while in reality he’s busy shaking down civilians to feed his drug, gambling and sex addictions. On occasion he offers flashes of morality, taking the lead on an investigation into a drug-related execution-style killing that claimed the lives of men, women and children, but even that investigation simply opens up opportunities for McDonagh to get his hands on illicit drugs. Crippled physically by back pain, and morally by his addictions, McDonagh begins making the kind of mistakes that even a corrupt police department can’t ignore. With time running out and good and bad guys closing in, McDonagh has big decisions to make about his immediate future - if he has one. Set - superficially - in the wake of the hurricane that devastated New Orleans, this finds Nicolas Cage taking on the mantle of Harvey Keitel, who starred in the original Bad Lieutenant (1992), which was a genuinely unsettling tale of human degradation directed by Abel Ferrara. This remake / reimagining, which is directed by Werner Herzog, shows flashes of the original’s brilliance, not least when McDonagh starts hallucinating about iguanas while about to confront a houseful of potential killers. By the same token, and despite a gripping tale, this version lacks the scuzzy quality that made the original so compelling. Cage’s performance is an archly knowing one, and despite his many personal and professional handicaps, it’s hard to believe that he suffers the same quality of spiritual torment that Keitel brought to the screen. Similarly, Eva Mendes is rarely less than luminous playing McDonagh’s prostitute girlfriend. A strong cop thriller, it lacks the authenticity that might have made it great. ***

Mi Casa, Su Casa: Kevin McCarthy

Being the latest in a very occasional series in which the Grand Vizier reclines in his hammock with a jeroboam of Elf-Wonking Juice™ and lets proper writers have a say. This week: Kevin McCarthy (right), whose debut novel PEELER is published next week. To wit:

A Debasing Pastime;
or, Notes from a Darkened Room (On FA Cup Final Saturday)

“The funny thing about having a novel published is the number of people who you would categorise as friends—close friends even—who had no idea you wrote novels in the first place. It’s not something you tell people, when they ask you what you did at the weekend. Good weekend? Oh, yeah, I spent it in a darkened room by myself making stuff up.
  “I laughed aloud in recognition when I read a recent Guardian interview with novelist Nicola Barker. In it, she says, “Writing is kind of a debased pastime ...” It is, I thought. You slink off, alone, to a darkened room to engage with fantasy. You spend sunny weekends—and early mornings before work and every weekday afternoon and early evenings at it. You sometimes skip dinner to do it. You ignore the sprouting weeds and chipped paint and dysfunctional bathroom fan to do it. You feel guilty when you do it too much and terribly guilty when you don’t do it. Truly, debased.
  “So you don’t tell your friends that you spend your free time wallowing in the guilt ridden, guilt driven pastime that is novel writing until, that is, you want them to know about it so they’ll buy your book and make all that reclusive, brain-chafing effort, somehow worthwhile. And in that sense, when you’ve finally had a novel accepted for publication—over a year and a half ago and PEELER will finally hit the shelves next week—it’s as if you are coming out of that darkened room for the first time. Revealing something vaguely shameful about yourself. Dude, your friends say, you don’t strike me as the type to … you know. Write books. Can you hear the music? ‘I’m coming out, I want the world to know…’
  “The second thing, inevitably, your friends—or anyone, for that matter—asks when they discover you’ve written a novel that is about to be published is: What’s it about? To this, over time, you come up with a summary of sorts, that reduces the three years of work to a pitch line straight out of Altman’s The Player. It’s called PEELER. It’s about the brutal murder of a woman during the War of Independence. A good cop, an RIC man, a wounded veteran of the Great War, investigates the murder while the IRA investigates it from their side.
  “Sounds cool, your friend says. I didn’t know you studied Irish history…
  “I didn’t. But I did to write this book. Researching an historical novel is the fun part. It is where you take your general knowledge of a time and place in history, and read out from there and then, read in—primary sources, first hand accounts, police reports, diaries, letters—narrowing the focus until you get inside the heads and the hearts of the men and women who were living through it. How they acted. Why they acted. What they felt. In this, you get beneath the skin of the accepted versions we’re taught in school. Get to the underbelly, so to speak.
  “The accepted version is what you are, in essence, reading against and if you read enough, you find that this version merely skims the surface of the truth of history at best. Skims the surface wielding a large brush and bucket of green paint at worst. The interesting thing for me has always been the parts that this conventional, accepted history leaves out.
  “JG Farrell, the Liverpool-Irish novelist, renowned for his historical fictions and who died, too young, only a few miles from where I set PEELER in West Cork, wrote: ‘History leaves so much out … It leaves out the most important thing: the detail of what being alive is like.’ The best in popular history strive to uncover this ‘detail,’ lately, more and more. John Keegan, Anthony Beevor, Stephen Ambrose, John D Brewer, Dermot Ferriter, Michael Hopkinson, Peter Hart among others. It is a recent (and lucrative) and much needed step in the democratising of non-fiction historical narrative. But the best historical fiction has always done this. From Robert Graves to Stephen Crane to James Ellroy to Alan Furst. All of these writers scouring the margins, scraping and prodding at the underbelly of the time and place and characters they’ve used and invented to recreate the ‘detail of what being alive is like’—in Imperial Rome or a Civil War battlefield or wartime LA or wartime Bulgaria. With the exception of Graves, they write about the bit players in the larger historical dramas as if they were the grandest players on the stage of history and this is exactly how it should be, because this is how history is to every one of us as we are living through it. It is what I have attempted to do, in my no doubt flawed and modest way, in PEELER.
  “Get beyond the accepted version and the War of Independence becomes one fought at close range. More men were killed with revolvers than any other type of weapon. Shotguns were often used, again at close quarters. More often than not, killers knew their victims personally. A war of gangland style, tit for tat murders rather than pitched battles. A war of hitmen and death squads on both sides, hunting marked targets and targets of opportunity. It was a war mainly fought in alley ways and ditches and country lanes.
  “The version we are taught in school is one of set piece battles and masterfully planned ambushes; of outnumbered Flying Columns sending hardened British Army troops fleeing in retreat. These things happened, I learned, but rarely. The alley way, the darkened lane; the assassination set up in the brothel used by Crown troops, prostitutes tipping off gunmen and ‘donating’ money for the IRA arms fund. The underbelly.
  This is where the War of Independence was fought; this is also, it would seem obvious, where crime novels are set. It seemed only natural to go into the darkened room and come out with a crime novel about a PEELER trying to do his work as a policeman while dodging bullets and yearning openly for an end to the killing and an independent Ireland at the same time. This is how most RIC men felt, you learn in your researches. Charged with defending the Crown, most Peelers desired independence for Ireland. They were rightly terrified by the campaign of murder being waged against them by the IRA and yet felt only disgust for most of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries brought to Ireland to help with ‘policing.’ Brilliant contradictions that are so human you can’t not write about them.
  “So you narrow the focus, writing now against the accepted version. Using what you have learned in your research, you find you have to write of such things because you are amazed when you read about them and want other people to know.
  Still, even in the darkened room, outside life intervenes. Making the ‘debasing pastime’, on occasion difficult, but more often than not, enriching it. As I sit here now (debasing myself!) I can hear the burping rattle of light and heavy machine guns from a live firing exercise at Gormanstown Army barracks, a couple of miles up the coast from my home. Throughout the writing of my new novel PEELER, this was often the case and oddly appropriate, given the subject matter of the book. There is one line in the book, in fact, that I wrote—not an important one, just a small line of atmospheric detail—just because I happened to hear the gunnery exercise that day when I was writing the scene. It is a post curfew prowl through the war ravaged streets of Cork city for the protagonist. In it, RIC sergeant, Séan O’Keefe … ‘made it back to the Daly house without seeing another soul in the streets, sticking to the shadows, using alleys and laneways when he could. Damp pavements. Shot out streetlamps. The distant roar of revving engines, bursts of machine gun fire.’ Of course, I have taken my description of war time Cork from any number of contemporary accounts, but I’m not sure if I would have included that last bit, the ‘bursts of machine gun fire’ had I not heard, just then from outside my window, the sustained, mechanical pop-pop-pop, stu-tt-tt-tter of the gunners in Gormanstown. The outside world intruding.
  “Before one even gets to the darkened room, however—forces him/herself there when the sun is (rarely) splitting the proverbials or the local is showing an Arabic broadcast of Man United on a wet Saturday afternoon that begs for the high stool and warm fire—it is outside life that determines what novel you will begin to write in the first place.
  “Time between novels—I had written three other as yet unpublished novels before PEELER—is like this: a restless, half-waking state where ideas for new projects come to you with all the promise of a sure thing and are tossed aside like crumpled betting slips before the initial elation has even faded. You find yourself staring blankly at Late Night Poker on the TV, thinking how you would have folded those eights, when suddenly you’re sitting up, scrabbling for pen and paper and scratching out lines of dialogue, scenes envisioned, plotlines, possibilities. Generally, it’s not long after you’ve done this that you realise you’ve just outlined the plot to HEART OF DARKNESS or LONESOME DOVE or DOG SOLDIERS or GOSHAWK SQUADRON; those favourite novels that lie dormant in the mind and influence, in some way, everything you write. But one day, you sit up and scratch out your ideas and say, Yeah, hold on. There’s something here…
  “Like all novels, I imagine, PEELER came from a serendipitous convergence things and events. For me: books stumbled upon, snippets of conversation, a plaque on a bridge.
  “With PEELER, I chanced upon Myles Dungan’s IRISH VOICES FROM THE GREAT WAR in the local library returned books stack. Entering the library, I always make my way to this pile first, for some reason and always have since I was a child, anxious to see what others have been reading. More often than not, it’s self-help and the driver’s theory test or Harry Potter novels, but the odd time, a gem like this one reveals itself. Halfway through the reading of Irish Voices—first hand accounts of WWI on all its fronts from the diaries and letters of those who fought, brilliantly compiled and contextualised—it occurred to me to write a fictional account of the bloody assault on V Beach by the Dublin and Munster Fusiliers in the Dardanelles in which over a thousand Irishmen died in a single morning. Fortunately I didn’t write it, as the book I outlined on the back of an envelope was strikingly similar to Sebastian Barry’s book, A LONG, LONG WAY which appeared halfway through the second draft of PEELER. But a seed was planted.
  “Luck would have it, however, that a second book landed in front of me at roughly the same time, courtesy of my mother-in-law’s research into her own father’s service in the Royal Irish Constabulary. Your father was an RIC man? I thought he owned a shop? He did, after he retired from the Peelers … He’s listed here, in this book …
  “Jim Herlihy’s THE ROYAL IRISH CONSTABULARY: A SHORT HISTORY AND GENEALOGICAL GUIDE is a fantastic history and compendium of the names and details of service of virtually every man who once served in the RIC. Reading this, I discovered that many RIC men had volunteered to serve in the Great War and returned—if they returned at all—to another more personalised sort of war in Ireland in which they were the primary targets of the IRA campaign for independence. I had known this. I had read of this before, but after having read the stories of the men who had fought in the trenches and beaches of Europe and the Dardanelles in Dungan’s book and now the story of the RIC men returning to home to another war, the story was slowly shifting and reshaping in my head. Questions arising, conflicting with my previous assumptions. Irish men killing other Irish men for the sake of Irish Independence? That was the Civil War, wasn’t it? No, not yet. It wasn’t just the IRA vs. brutal Black and Tans and the British Army? No. Yes. There is more to this, I felt. Dig deeper, go wider to the margins and then hone in, find the detail of what being a copper, a gunman, a Black and Tan was like.
  “Then, there was the plaque on the bridge in a nearby town. It is outside of a pub I drink in and I pass it every time I enter the pub. It reads: Near this spot Seamus Lawless and Sean Gibbons were Brutally Done to Death by British Forces while in their custody. September 20, 1920. An deis de go raib a n-anam.
  “It is well-known locally, that these Occupying Forces were trainee members of the Black and Tans based at the training depot at Gormanstown Aerodrome—now home to the Irish Army and the live firing exercises I can hear from my room—who sacked the town in revenge for the killing of an RIC man who had just been promoted to District Inspector. This RIC man had been drinking in a local bar with his brother, also an RIC man, to celebrate the promotion, when they became involved in an argument—politics, no doubt—with some members of the local IRA company. Drink had been taken, so the story goes—as do most in the crime reports from the local newspaper today—and a pistol was produced, a man shot dead, the town burnt to the ground and two men tortured, then bayoneted to death and left in the middle of the road at dawn amidst the smouldering ruins. What, I couldn’t help but thinking, were two armed policemen—men with a bounty on their heads throughout the country—doing drinking in a bar with armed republicans? What was it like living, drinking, working in a town where virtually anybody could be armed and there were more police per capita than almost any country in the world at the time and yet, common crime was rampant? What kind of war was the War of Independence?
  “It was the kind of war, I discovered, where the most violent and bloody of killings were carried out by men who then organised ceasefires for race meetings and market days. It was a war where women were targeted, tarred and feathered, stripped and raped and daubed with red and blue paint and sometimes murdered for associating with members of the Crown forces. It was a place where innocent men were dragged out of bed by members of an occupying army and shot dead ‘while trying to escape.’ It was a war fought by damaged men fresh from the slaughterhouse of the Great War unleashed at a pound a day upon the people of Ireland. It was a war fought by brave, idealistic, articulate and intelligent men on both sides; men who hated war fighting and policing alongside other men who weren’t living unless they were killing.
  “This is, really, what PEELER is about. But enough now. It’s sunny outside, for once. The FA Cup final is on the TV. Time to go back into the darkened room. Back to debasement!” - Kevin McCarthy

  Kevin McCarthy’s PEELER is published by Mercier Press.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Michael Harvey

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?
Hmm ... I can think of three and can’t pick between them. THE LONG GOODBYE, THE GREAT GATSBY, THE SUN ALSO RISES.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Sam Spade ... is there any other answer?

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Clive Cussler, Eric Ambler, Homer.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Chapter 41 of THE CHICAGO WAY. Not sure if it’s my favourite passage, but I remember writing it and feeling it in my bones.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
RESURRECTION MEN by Ian Rankin. Scottish, but close enough. (BTW, don’t say that too loud in Glasgow.)

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
RESURRECTION MEN by Ian Rankin.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The best thing is that it’s just you and your characters. The worst thing is that it’s just you and your characters. Make sense? It’s not supposed to. The bottom line is that writing a novel is one of the purest human endeavours anyone can undertake. It uses up no natural resources and creates something out of nothing. Not magic ... hard work ... but pretty damn cool.

The pitch for your next book is …?
A sequel to THE THIRD RAIL. It starts up a week after THE THIRD RAIL ends and all hell breaks loose.

Who are you reading right now?
Got a few going. Cormac McCarthy, Albert Camus, Aeschylus, Alan Furst and Daniel Silva.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Yikes ... I’m Irish Catholic. We don’t like to tempt fate and we don’t like these questions. If I were still a child, I’d say read. Right now, I guess I’d say write.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Physical, cinematic, honest.

Michael Harvey’s THE THIRD RAIL is published by Knopf.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE WHISPERERS by John Connolly

In a recent Arts Lives documentary on RTE, John Connolly suggested that evil is the absence of empathy. That’s an interesting notion in itself, but even moreso in the context of his own work, which features private detective Charlie Parker in an ongoing series, of which THE WHISPERERS is the ninth offering.
  Parker’s conscience is even more tortured than is the norm for literary private eyes, a consequence of the guilt he experiences over the murder of his wife and child in Connolly’s debut, EVERY DEAD THING (1999). That gruesome double murder also means Parker has an empathy for murder victims that is unusually fine-tuned. But Parker is haunted by more than his own failure to protect his wife and child: the backdrop to Connolly’s novels teem with ghosts, spectres and demons.
  Until recently it was left to the reader to decide whether Parker’s otherworldly experiences were manifestations of his guilt or glimpses of something more sinister. However, his previous offering, The Lovers (2009), was unambiguous in revealing that Parker is bedevilled by entities bent on doing evil. That theme is further explored in THE WHISPERERS.
  Commissioned by a mourning father to investigate the circumstances of his son’s suicide, Parker finds himself uncovering a smuggling operation run by ex-soldiers who served in the Iraq war. Exactly what they’re smuggling across the Canadian border into Maine is difficult to ascertain, but the contraband has attracted the attention of a number of concerned parties. These include a Mexican drug lord and the smuggling kingpin who unofficially regulates the illegal trafficking that crosses the north-eastern border. But even more sinister elements are gathering in the shadows: Herod, the Captain, and the Collector …
  The appeal of Connolly’s novels lies in his ability to successfully integrate two storytelling traditions. The first is a relatively recent one, that of the tarnished white knight of private eye lore, where a detective investigates a particular case in order to shed light on the society in which the character finds him or herself operating. This requires a clear-eyed assessment of contemporary mores and grittily realistic representation of the modern world. Connolly, in examining the consequences of war on individuals, and in particular the increasing numbers of ex-military men who are taking their own lives (and on occasion the lives of others), here explores a phenomenon that has become a silent epidemic in the US.
  The second tradition he employs is that of gothic horror, a style popularised by Edgar Allan Poe, who is also credited with penning the first detective story in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841). Connolly’s supernatural creations, however, predate literary tradition. The various spectres and dark manifestations that populate his novels have their roots in prehistory, and they - or what they represent - appear in the earliest cultural tracts. Here Connolly taps into that timeless appeal by invoking demons who first made their appearance during the Sumerian civilisation, one of the earliest of the ancient civilisations of the Middle East, on which the modern political entity of Iraq is built.
  It would be reductive to suggest that THE WHISPERERS is a thrilling page-turner simply because Connolly blends the crime and horror genres. He does so, of course, and in this case the join is seamless, not least because his deftly detailed prose and meticulous research creates a voice of compelling authority. With the Charlie Parker series, however, Connolly has tapped into something larger than commercially successful genre-bending. He understands that all literary investigation is an attempt to come to terms with the abiding presence of evil, its source and its consequences; moreover, he understands that mankind’s time-honoured fascination with evil is itself the ultimate investigation.
  Crucially, Connolly understands that the horror Kurtz finally reveals to Marlow, for example, is a McGuffin; what matters is Marlow’s pursuit of the truth and the parallel, perverse journey made by Kurtz. But then, all great novels are more concerned with journey than destination. THE WHISPERERS is Connolly’s most ambitious novel yet in that it makes explicit the notion that, for Charlie Parker at least, horror is but a lurid companion on his journey towards the ineffable quality that nests in the heart of darkness. - Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Sunday Business Post

An Orthodox Approach

There’s a nice interview with William Ryan over at the Pan Macmillan interweb portal, in which William expands on the whys and wherefores of plot, character, setting, etc., in his debut THE HOLY THIEF. The historical setting is particularly interesting, being Moscow in the mid-1930s, when Comrade Stalin was just starting to flex his genocidal muscles. To wit:

Q: Why did you choose to write your book set in the midst of Stalin’s ‘great terror’?

A: “I think it’s a fascinating period of history. The gradual shift away from the early ideals and hopes of the Revolution to the absolute oppression of the thirties was a tragedy for many Soviet citizens, and one that was repeated around the world from Albania to Cambodia. I find it amazing that the Orthodox religion, despite its savage persecution, has emerged possibly stronger than ever in Russia, so Korolev, the main character in the novel, was intended to reflect that undercurrent of religious belief that always existed even at the height of the Terror. He’s an ordinary person living in an extraordinary time, trying to make sense of the world he finds himself in and doing his best to survive without compromising any more than he has to.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Incidentally, Barry Forshaw likes it ...

“Ryan demonstrates considerable skill in evoking this benighted period, along with a deftness at ringing the changes on familiar crime plotting moves. The auguries for a series, of which The Holy Thief is the first book, are very promising indeed.” - Barry Forshaw, Daily Express

  Meanwhile, I’m curious. The plot of THE HOLY THIEF revolves around a missing religious icon of the Orthodox Church, the quasi-mythical Kazanskaya, and it’s not often you come across a crime fiction protagonist exercised by a strong religious faith, as Korolev is. Anyone have any other suggestions?

A Minister For Propaganda Elf Writes …

As all three regular readers will be aware, most CAP readers only stop off at this blog in order to click through to Lilyput’s World, which blog contains the continuing adventures of a little girl’s quest to pack as much fun into each and every day as is humanly possible. The more eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that I’ve taken down that link, and those of you who are regular visitors to Lilyput’s World may also have noticed that you’ve been blocked out. There are no sinister reasons behind the change, I’m glad to say; it’s just that the Princess Lilyput has started to get a little fussier about who gets to visit her court. If you’d like to be added to the VIP list, please feel free to drop me a line at dbrodb[at]gmail.com, and I’ll be delighted to do so. In the meantime, boopy-doop.

Here We Go O’Carrolling …

I mentioned Niamh O’Connor during the week in terms of authenticity and her antipathy to the criminals she meets given the nature of her day job as a crime correspondent, and lo! Up pops another debutant author with even stronger claims to authenticity and antipathy. To wit:

Gerry O’Carroll was one of Ireland’s leading serious crime detectives. Born in the west of Ireland, Gerry trained in Dublin and was central to the investigation of over 80 murders. He was the first Irish detective to carry a firearm and has appeared at the top of IRA and gangland murder lists. He personally arrested Ireland’s longest-serving prisoners, the serial killers John Shaw and Geoffrey Evans, and was involved in the pursuit of John Gilligan, responsible for the murder of Veronica Guerin. Gerry was first on the scene when the IRA murdered notorious gangster Martin Cahill.

  Co-written with Jeff Gulvin, O’Carroll’s debut is titled THE GATHERING OF SOULS, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

This gripping debut introduces series characters Detectives Moss Quinn and Joe Doyle in a race against time to find Quinn’s abducted wife. A touch Denis Lehane meets Joseph Wambaugh, this suspenseful, contemporary Irish thriller looks set to join John Connolly and Alex Barclay’s books as an international bestseller. A year to the day after the death of their son, Moss Quinn’s wife Eva Marie has been abducted. He is Dublin’s star detective, investigating the disappearance of five women and the murder of another the year before. Moss’s number-one suspect walks free from the subsequent trial amidst allegations of police brutality meted out by Quinn’s partner, Joe Doyle, an old-school cop. Quinn’s world is in turmoil, his marriage is a mess, his reputation after the trial is in tatters and now his wife has been abducted. Somewhere out there, his wife is lying bound and gagged, she has been left to die of thirst. In 72 hours she will be in a coma or dead, and there is a voice on the phone telling him the clock is ticking and that the clues to his wife’s whereabouts are in his past ... Building to a heart-stopping finale, with a cast of credible and colourful characters from the criminal underworld and police ranks alike, THE GATHERING OF SOULS is an authentic, dark tale of obsession, revenge and redemption.

  O’Carroll, by the way, published a non-fiction title, THE SHERIFF: A DETECTIVE’S STORY, in 2006. Meanwhile, there’s a short interview with Gerry over at The Metro, with one snippet reading thusly:

Q: You were involved in dozens of high profile cases over the years. Which arrest and conviction are you most proud of?

A: “Probably the case of John Shaw and Geoffrey Evans, two English career criminals-turned-murderers. They were convicted for robbery and sent to Mountjoy in the 1970s. But because of a blunder they were convicted under false names and later released. They went on a murderous rampage and killed two women, Mary Duffy and Elizabeth Plunkett. These were the most sickening deaths ever afforded to two human beings. People think killers like these go round with the mark of Cain on their foreheads but they were two ordinary looking guys. After we caught them I was handcuffed to Shaw, and he turned and said to me: ‘Gerry, I’m glad you caught me.’ ‘Why’s that?’ I replied. ‘Because we were going to kill one a week.’ That was one of the most chilling remarks ever made to me. They’re now the longest serving convicts in the history of the state.”

A Little French Fancy

God bless Tana French and her fanciful notions. Obviously the various prizes and gushings of critical acclaim that accompanied IN THE WOODS and THE LIKENESS have gone to her noggin, because over at the Penguin interweb portal she’s yakking it up about breaking down the ‘ridiculous imaginary barrier’ between mystery fiction and literature. To wit:

Q: Your novels have won critical acclaim, a broad public following, and a well-deserved sackful of awards. What would you still like to accomplish as a writer?

A: “I don’t have a long-term plan. Actually, I still find it hard to think ahead even as far as the end of the book I’m working on-the idea of writing a whole book seems so ridiculously huge that I just focus on the next little section, or I’ll freak myself out. At the moment, I’m working on the fourth book (Scorcher Kennedy, who shows up in FAITHFUL PLACE, is the narrator this time) and my only goal as a writer is to get this one right!
  “On a broader scale, though . . . I hope someday soon we’ll get to the point where “mystery” and “literature” are no longer seen as mutually exclusive. There have always been crime novels that are every bit as beautifully written and as thematically complex as the finest literary fiction, and there have always been literary novels shaped around a crime framework. But there are still a few people (apparently people who’ve never read, for example, the courtroom drama TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD) who have real difficulty with the idea of things not fitting neatly under one label, so they still think of genre fiction and literature as utterly separate, unconnected and unconnectable. More and more crime writers are rebelling against that, and I’d love to be a small part of the force that finally crumbles that ridiculous imaginary barrier.”

  For the full interview, clickety-click here …

On Choosing Your Favourite Child

Craig Sisterson over at Kiwi Crime was kind enough to point his 9mm at me (oo-er, missus), said 9mm being a quick-fire interview consisting of nine questions, one of which runneth thusly:

CS: Of your books, which is your favourite, and why?

DB: “Now that’s a tough bloody question. It’s like asking which of your kids you love most. And the honest answer is that I love them all equally, and I’m including those that haven’t been published when I say ‘all’. EIGHTBALL was magic because it was my first, and I’ll never replicate that shining, incandescent moment when I first held the book - an actual book, written by me - in my hands. It happened on a street in Galway, and I believe I kind of blanked out for a few seconds. I’d waited a long, long time to see that book … THE BIG O I love because it was a co-published deal with Hag’s Head, I and my wife put our mortgage money where my mouth was by paying 50% of the costs, and it ended up a modest success, from a co-published little effort (880 copies in Ireland) that ended up getting a pretty decent deal in the States, and allowed me go to the States for a road-trip to promote it. BAD FOR GOOD (which is currently out under consideration) I love because it’s radically different to the previous books, and I’m still not sure where the voice came from, or where the notion of having a hospital porter blow up his hospital came from. But even the books that will never see the light of day, I love them too, because they’re me at my most me. Which is the main reason why I write, I think.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Actually, it was only after I’d seen the piece published that the sheer audacity of that question struck me. Not that I might have a favourite among my books, but the fact that there books out there that are ‘my books’, and enough of them published - the bare minimum, as it happens - to allow me choose a favourite. Some days you forget how far you’ve come relative to where you began … If you had told me 20 years ago that I’d have one book published, let alone two, I’d probably have had you consigned to a home for the terminally bewildered.
  It’s far too easy to get caught up in the bullshit that goes with writing - sales figures, publishing deals, not getting publishing deals, the near misses with commissioning editors who love your stuff but can’t get it past the bean-counters … All of which can be very frustrating, it’s true. Once in a while, though, it does no harm to lean back and glance up at the shelf where I’ve stacked the Irish crime fiction titles, and see ‘my books’ nestling in there (alphabetically, natch) amongst novels from proper good writers such as Colin Bateman, Ken Bruen, Paul Charles and John Connolly. I’ll probably never shed the notion that offerings are interlopers on that shelf, but hey, at least they’re there …