Rum Punch Drunk: Yep, It’s Another Elmore Leonard Comparison

Those precious few among you who have read CRIME ALWAYS PAYS - how few! how precious! - will be aware that it is an ebook release, and a sequel-of-sorts to THE BIG O. The reasons why it’s an ebook release are so complicated, pathetic and boring that even I’m sick to the back teeth of them; suffice to say, even if you don’t own an e-reader, the novel is now available to download straight to your desktop computer. So far it’s garnered very little by way of review, mostly because I don’t have the time to go promoting it the way I should, but those that have come in have been very gratifying. The latest is from Sean Patrick Reardon, a relatively recent addition to the ranks of readers of this blog, and the gist of his review runneth thusly:

“CRIME ALWAYS PAYS is a continuation of the cleverly written, fast paced, and gut-busting romp, THE BIG O …
  “The story is not so much a sequel as it is a continuation of the lives of the awesome cast of characters, how their lives intersect, and all of the resulting action, mishaps, and follies that result. There is enough ‘flashback dialogue’ to get the gist of what happened in THE BIG O, so reading it is not mandatory, but I highly recommend doing so for the sheer enjoyment, and it does help when reading this instalment.
  “Mr. Burke has a unique talent for creating characters and dialogue, and coupled with the solid story, CRIME ALWAYS PAYS delivered on every expectation I had before I started.
  “The comparisons to Elmore Leonard’s style are warranted and deserved, but Mr. Burke has managed to put his own unique spin on it. As an avid reader of Mr. Leonard, I can honestly say that I have never laughed out loud as much when reading his novels as I did when reading both of Mr. Burkes. Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of suspense throughout the story, but it is so damn funny at times.
  “For anyone looking for some escapism, a great read, and a lot of fun, CRIME ALWAYS PAYS is for you. The style of narration, dialogue, characters, and the situations and how they play out in the story, are to me reminiscent of Guy Ritchie’s crime capers.”

  I thank you kindly, Mr Reardon.
  Meanwhile, if you glance to your left, you’ll see that the venerable Glenn Harper of International Noir had this to say:

“CRIME ALWAYS PAYS is part road movie and part farce, reminding me sometimes of Elmore Leonard, sometimes of Allan Guthrie, sometimes of Donald Westlake and sometimes of the Coen Brothers – sometimes all at once.”

  And if you scroll down a little further, you’ll see that the equally venerable Colin Bateman recently had this to say over at the Guardian blogs:

“If you want to find something new and challenging, comic crime fiction is now the place to go … Declan Burke [is] at the vanguard of a new wave of young writers kicking against the clichés and producing ambitious, challenging, genre-bending works.”

  So: if you’re intrigued by new, fresh, smart and subversive writing, clickety-click here for a free sample.
  If you’re not, fuck away off somewhere else and stop clogging up my bandwidth.
  And have a nice weekend y’all, y’hear?

The Collusionist

That cradle and lair of all things Irish crime fiction, Belfast’s No Alibis, hosts the official launch of Stuart Neville’s COLLUSION tomorrow, July 30th, with the details running thusly:

No Alibis Bookstore is pleased to invite you to the launch party for Stuart Neville’s second novel, COLLUSION, on Friday 30th July at 6:30PM.
  Stuart Neville has been a musician, a composer, a teacher, a salesman, a film extra, a baker and a hand double for a well known Irish comedian, but is currently a partner in a successful multimedia design business in the wilds of Northern Ireland. COLLUSION is his second novel, the follow-up to the hugely successful and award winning THE TWELVE.

  In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST) came complete with a blurb from none other than James Ellroy (“THE TWELVE will knock you sideways. This guy can write.”) and scooped the LA Times’ Mystery / Thriller of the Year a couple of months back. Not bad for a debut, but THE TWELVE has also been nominated for a Best First Novel gong in each of the Anthony, Barry and Macavity awards, to be announced at this year’s Bouchercon.
  I mentioned a couple of weeks back that COLLUSION is a finer novel than THE TWELVE, not least because it’s rather more cynical than its predecessor about joining the dots between ‘the Troubles’ and post-conflict Northern Ireland. Here’s another snippet:

Did anyone live here now? He searched for signs of someone, anyone, making a life on this street. Not a soul. Less than a mile away, millions were being pumped into brownfield sites, building apartments, shopping centres, technology parks. Just across the river, property was changing hands for prices never imagined just a few years before. One-bedroom flats sold for a quarter of a million, snapped up by investors looking to make a killing out of Belfast’s peace boom, desperate to get rich before the bubble burst, as it surely would. And here, not ten minutes away, stood two rows of empty houses with generations of memories rotting away along with the mortar and woodwork, all because small-minded thugs couldn’t see beyond the world of Them and Us.

  In my humble opinion, COLLUSION is a very fine novel indeed. A good old-fashioned page-turner of a thriller, it should be required reading for those Ivory Tower types who bemoan the paucity of novels addressing social and political flux of contemporary Ireland, and the lack of post-ceasefire literature concerning itself with Northern Ireland.

Peeling Back The Layers

There was an interesting piece on Kevin McCarthy’s PEELER from Henry McDonald in last Friday’s Belfast Telegraph, which reviews the novel in the context of Ireland’s voluntary amnesia when it comes to the Royal Irish Constabulary. To wit:

The RIC was airbrushed from the Republic’s consciousness for 80 years. Artists have a role to play to ensure it doesn’t happen again, says Henry McDonald

Kevin McCarthy’s brilliant first novel, PEELER, rescues from the margins of Irish history a group that the future Free State and Official Ireland airbrushed from national memory: the Royal Irish Constabulary.
  When I was taught Irish history at grammar school back in the 1970s, this force was only referred to by a single and dismissive sobriquet -- they were merely the “eyes and ears” of the British Army which Michael Collins had so ruthlessly blinded and deafened in the War of Independence.
  At the time we knew nothing about what these officers were actually like, how the vast majority of them were Catholic Irish and what happened to them once the state was created and Ireland partitioned.
  In fact, compared with the details of fratricidal brutality wrought by the subsequent Civil War, students were given next to no information about the RIC, its casualty rates, its fate and the future for its members.
  PEELER fills that knowledge-gap. The story of its central character, RIC acting Sergeant Sean O’Keefe, was not just a hugely enjoyable read, but also socially and historically illuminating.
  McCarthy has turned these shadowy, ghostly figures relegated in history as the “eyes and ears” to fully-formed flesh and blood characters, whose lives were as complex and rich as the men in the Flying Columns who hunted them down.
  PEELER is, first of all, a detective novel, a hunt for a suspected serial-killer who has brutally murdered a young woman and abandoned her mutilated body in the remote West Cork countryside at the height of the war.
  While trying to survive one of Collins’ assassination squads, O’Keefe and his colleagues now find themselves searching for a murderer who has left the word ‘Traitor’ on the young woman’s body.
  That word prompts the British military-political establishment to think that the victim has been singled out by the West Cork IRA who suspected she has been passing on information to the RIC and the Army.
  Meanwhile, the IRA has set up its own parallel murder inquiry and has appointed West Cork Brigade intelligence officer Liam Farrell to head up the investigation.
  Farrell represents the coming power in the land, the guerrilla on the verge of taking over law and order, the republican poacher turning Free State game-keeper.
  To McCarthy’s credit, both O’Keefe and Farrell are sympathetic characters with deep internal lives. Farrell is tortured by the necessities of war, of its brutal imperatives.
  O’Keefe is also a victim, a mentally scarred veteran of the First World War, who witnessed his regiment being slaughtered at Suvla Bay by the Turks.
  Yet it is not just the two main rival Irish figures pitted against each other in a race to catch a serial murderer that are multi-dimensional characters.
  McCarthy even evokes sympathy for the English demobbed soldiers hastily drafted into an auxiliary military force to curb the armed insurrection or as they are more notoriously known, the Black and Tans.
  As a veteran whose brother fell beside him under Turkish machine gun fire, O’Keefe regards some of these men as brutes and others simply as brutalised by war and crushed into service in Ireland through poverty.
  McCarthy’s book indirectly provokes bigger questions about the legacy of Ireland’s violent past -- especially for those of us in Northern Ireland.
  At present, the devolved administration at Stormont and the British Government at Westminster are grappling with various notions of how to confront what happened in the north over the last 40 years.
  The approach thus far has been piecemeal with selective inquiries, the appointment of four Victims’ Commissioners and the Eames-Bradley process.
  It has been, in essence, confusing and misdirected probably because in the end any exploration into the past, let alone the ‘truth’ of the Troubles is to going to be politically loaded.
  Northern Ireland seemingly faces two options in terms of truth and reconciliation: it can go down the Spanish road towards the ‘pact of forgetting’, when all of Spain post-Franco agreed to put the crimes of the civil war aside, re-enter Europe and move on; or it could adopt a South African Truth and Reconciliation process, an official ‘national cleansing’ in front of the cameras, open to all.
  The reality is that there is going to be some cobbled together compromise, a third way of muddling through.
  While the victims and their families as a whole might receive some retrospective compensation, or even psychological help and support in a new Troubles-Trauma centre, there will neither be Spanish-amnesia or South African-style collective catharsis. The answer to questions such as ‘what or how did that all happen?’ cannot be properly offered by officialdom in any shape or form.
  Perhaps the only positive way to explain where we have come from will be in the guise of novels, plays, films, poetry, documentary and so on. (Time, by the way, for broadcasters -- particularly the BBC -- to lift the unofficial ‘embargo’ on Troubles-related themes and give artists the space and the support to explore some of the most important events of our lives over the last 40 years through the medium of film and drama.)
  Shelley once declared that poets are the unelected legislators of the world; they can also be their truth-tellers.
  Let’s just hope that all those untold stories of our conflict just past won’t have to be told eight decades later the way the narrative of the forgotten RIC have been finally brought back into public consciousness by Kevin McCarthy’s dark, brooding, multi-layered, morally complex masterpiece. - Henry McDonald

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: TINKERS by Paul Harding

The cliché has it that a man’s life flashes before his eyes before he dies. Paul Harding’s remarkable novel, the first debut to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 10 years, burrows into the heart of this truism in search of the truth of the human condition.
  The story opens as the unwitting memoir of George Washington Crosby, who, Harding informs us in the very first line, ‘began to hallucinate eight days before he died’. George has been dying for some time, and is surrounded in the family home by his wife, children and grandchildren. A solid citizen, George has lived a quietly successful life, indulging in his spare time a love for tinkering with old clocks that has come to define who and what he is:

“When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the [grandfather] clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart.”

  As George grows progressively more feeble, and his mind wanders farther afield, Harding introduces another character: Howard, George’s father, a travelling salesman from the turn of the century who peddled his wares in the back woods from a mule-drawn cart. Where George, as an horologist, is fascinated with the art and science of measuring time, Howard is prone to epileptic fits that not only disrupt and distort his perception of day-to-day life, but eventually erupt into an event that shapes the lives of future generations.
  Aptly enough, Harding’s parallel narratives proceed by fits and starts, with time a fluid and often contrary element as the story advances. George’s mind flutters back and forth through time, alighting on moments in his family’s extended history and observing with a poet’s facility for detail whatever here-and-now he happens to find himself in.
  At one point, Howard covertly watches the young George build a boat to set sail on a pond in the woods:

“What of miniature boats constructed of birch bark and fallen leaves, launched onto cold water clear as air? How many fleets were pushed out toward the middles of ponds or sent down autumn brooks, holding treasures of acorns, or black feathers, or a puzzled mantis? Let those grassy crafts be listed alongside the iron hulls that cleave the sea, for they are all improvisations built from the daydreams of men, and all will perish, whether from ocean siege or October breeze.”

  Harding is a consummate wordsmith, and the novel is studded with such prose-poems. Delicious to read, and reread, they do raise the question of how George and Howard, neither one particularly well educated men, become so fluently and instinctively poetic in their interior monologues.
  That said, the novel opens with George beginning to hallucinate, so perhaps it’s best to simply accept the novel in its entirety as a feverish dream. Besides, and despite the rigorously unsentimental tone and its occasional flourishes of sobering realism, the novel is equally invested with surreal moments, and even hyper-realism. Harding, for example, interrupts the narrative with frequent excerpts from the Rev. Kenner Davenport’s treatise The Reasonable Horologist (1783), a fictional and often hilarious account of the history of time-pieces. None of this, we are being warned, is to be taken too seriously.
  That warning, it appears, extends to life itself. Are we to depend for the truth of three generations of family on the wanderings of George’s enfeebled mind? Are we to depend, when it comes to measuring out our lives, on clocks and watches, when all attempts to come to terms with time, space and the universe at large must in the final analysis be considered ‘improvisations built from the daydreams of men’?
  In invoking the Rev. Kenner Davenport, and the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment in which his fictional treatise was published, Harding also invokes the belief that the universe is a vast piece of machinery. One day, runs the theory, we will understand everything, if only we apply logic and reason to its cogs and gears. In the context of this novel, however, we are being persuaded to believe this courtesy of George’s dying ramblings and the poetic fancies of Howard’s epileptic mind.
  The notion that we can distil reason and meaning from the universe if we simply apply the correct tools - memory, thought, words in their best order - is revealed in Harding’s hands as the fallacy it has always been. What does the universe know, or care, of the tiny implements horologists use to pin time in its place?
  Short enough at 191 pages to be read in one sitting, TINKERS is a superb novel that deserves and demands a more measured reading experience. Part prose-poem, part philosophical investigation, it is a wholly satisfying excavation of limited lives lived to their fullest capacity. - Declan Burke

  This review first appeared in the Sunday Business Post

Hill, Thrills And Bellyaches

Some days it seems like I’m always the last to know, etc. Further proof that we’re staring into the abyss of an economic apocalypse, if any were needed, comes with the news that best-selling Irish chick-lit author, Melissa Hill, has turned her hand to writing thrillers. To wit:

  Bestselling Irish chick-lit author Melissa Hill has switched to thriller writing.
  A new book she has co-written with her businessman husband Kevin was bought this week for a six-figure sum by Simon & Schuster in the UK and big money deals have also been done for other countries.
  The forensic crime thriller is called TABOO and represents a major literary crossover for Melissa whose eight chick-lit novels to date have all been bestsellers.
  TABOO was snapped up by publishers in several countries within 24 hours of being offered by Hill’s agent. It’s the first in a series she and Kevin will be penning together under the name Casey Hill. - John Spain, Irish Independent

  So wot's it all abaht, then? Quoth Irish Publishing News:

TABOO, the first of a six-figure, two book deal, will be released in Spring 2011 and will feature the character Riley Steel – a Quantico trained forensic investigator who comes to Dublin to head up the GFU, a new state-of-the-art Irish crime lab.

  Riley Steel, eh? In a way it’s almost too neat for words. Chick lit celebrated the shopping-and-fucking excess of the Celtic Tiger, most of it the literary equivalent of shiny, tacky bling. Now that the party’s over, and everyone’s wondering who paid for it on the never-never, crime fiction steps in to investigate.
  Hey, maybe Amanda Brunker will slip a mickey finn into her next Champagne novel.
  So: am I going to bellyache about the chick-lit brigade stomping all over the crime scene in their six-inch stilettos? Nope. Could. Not. Be. Arsed. The best of luck to Melissa with her new venture, and here’s hoping it’s not a one-way street. I, for one, would pay big bucks to read Gene Kerrigan’s chick-lit tale of a former Dublin gangster who has gone all Gok Wan and hit the runways of Paris and Rome modelling Armani briefs, but only as a front for his undercover role as a globe-trotting hitman. Gene? You know it makes sense …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: MY FRIEND JESUS CHRIST by Lars Husum

Danish 13-year-old Nikolaj - aka Niko - is orphaned when his parents die in a car crash. Reared by his older sister Sanne - aka Sis - Niko becomes dependent on Sis’s love, and resorts to self-harm and violence to ensure the dependence is mutual. The downward spiral into self-loathing culminates in Niko’s battering his girlfriend, Silje, the consequences of which eventually cause Sis to commit suicide. At the lowest moment of Niko’s life, a strange man appears in his living room, claiming to be Jesus Christ …
  Lars Husum’s debut is similar in tone to early work by Bret Easton Ellis (especially Less Than Zero) and Chuck Palahniuk. His protagonist, Niko, is a wilfully abrasive character intended to challenge conventional mores, as the potentially provocative title suggests. While his circumstances, and particularly the death of his parents at such a formative age, lend themselves to the reader’s sympathy, Niko is a bland kind of sociopath. A peeper and a stalker, he regularly provokes fights and mutilates himself.
  All of this is perversely designed to strengthen the bond between Niko and his older sister, Sis, and Husum is effective in the early part of the novel at achieving his aim. The fact that Niko appears to lack the courage of his convictions, however, make him an irritating protagonist.
  The fact that Niko’s mother was a much-loved pop star in her native Denmark plays a significant part in the story, especially near the end. It’s also quite convenient for Husum, given that Niko, who has in part inherited his mother’s fortune, has plenty of free time in which to indulge his navel-gazing.
  In effect, we are presented with a bratty, self-absorbed rich kid with virtually no redeeming features other than his brutal honesty about his emotional and psychological shortcomings. This honesty, however, only reinforces those characteristics of Niko that were unlikeable to begin with.
  Niko’s downward spiral into utter self-loathing finally reaches rock bottom when he batters his girlfriend, Silje, into a coma. When his long-suffering Sis hears the news, she finally gives up on Niko - and herself. Despite the fact that she is herself in a happy relationship, and has recently had a baby son, Sis commits suicide.
  Shortly afterwards, Niko wakes up one morning to discover a hairy, sandal-wearing man in his apartment. The man tells Niko that he is Jesus Christ, and has come to help. Tough love is the order of the day.
  In order to help himself, Niko must first help others. On Jesus’ advice, he leaves Copenhagen behind to move to Tarm, the rural part of Jutland where his mother grew up. Embraced by the locals, Niko establishes a team, or ‘family’, that will assist him in his ultimate goal - to rehabilitate the broken Silje.
  Husum’s style is pleasingly direct, and not without a coarse but very effective black humour. The idea of dropping a Jesus Christ figure - Husum never confirms if the character is real or a figment of Niko’s imagination - into a modern city in a Western, secular world is a bold stroke, and throws up all manner of fascinating potential narrative strands.
  Unfortunately, Husum fails to capitalise on the idea. The Christ character engages only fleetingly with Niko, and the conceit seems only half-realised. While the Christ character tells Niko that he is the Christ who ‘came with a sword’, for example, there is never any sense that there will be consequences for Niko if he fails to take Christ’s advice.
  For that matter, and despite some superficial changes, Niko’s character hardly changes throughout the novel, a fact confirmed by the rather squalid finale. Nonetheless, and despite his reprehensible behaviour, and admitting to such, he appears to be universally loved by those he meets.
  Niko isn’t particularly handsome, and he’s far from charming. Neither does he squander his money on his friends. In fact, we are given no good reason as to why people might want to spend time in his company, let alone actually like him.
  It’s possible, of course, that Husum intends the novel to be a parody of the liberal Christian culture of contemporary Western civilisation. Hence the biker-style Jesus, and the Pollyanna characters who take the violent and self-absorbed Niko at his word when he asks for forgiveness. But while the novel is undoubtedly archly contrived, it lacks the persuasiveness of satire. Husum paints in broad strokes, and few of his characters have the kind of depth that might make them convincing acolytes to Niko’s very narrow definition of what constitutes redemption.
  Another irritating aspect of the novel, the number of coincidences it contains, could also be considered an element of an archly contrived satire, and it’s probably best to steer clear of accusing a writer of MY FRIEND JESUS CHRIST of introducing deus ex machina. Unfortunately, this novel thrives on coincidence. Denmark has a population of roughly five million people, but Niko regularly bumps into characters on the street, or in wine shops, or finds that they have friends in common. The fact that Silje is a singer with a band would be sufficient to establish a meeting of minds when she and Niko first meet, given the fact that Niko’s mother was a famous pop singer; but Silje is not just a singer, she is the singer in a band that do cover versions of Niko’s mother’s songs.
  MY FRIEND JESUS CHRIST is a potentially subversive conceit swamped by a self-indulgent and repetitive narrative. With a stronger editor on board, the novel could well have said important things about liberal Christianity in Western culture, and the West’s attitude to religion in general. At the very least it might have been an entertaining novel. As it stands, however, MY FRIEND JESUS CHRIST is a heavy-handed satire that lacks the wit and depth to truly offend or inspire. - Declan Burke

  MY FRIEND JESUS CHRIST is published by Portobello Books.

Top O’ The World, Ma!

Aka, ‘Top O’ the World, Omagh’. Via the ever diligent Peter Rozovsky comes the news that feisty whippersnapper Ruth ‘Cuddly’ Dudley Edwards scooped the CWA Non-Fiction Dagger at Harrogate for her monumental work AFTERMATH: THE OMAGH BOMBING AND THE FAMILIES’ PURSUIT OF JUSTICE, and hearty congrats to her. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer lady. Word has it that Stuart Neville was on hand to manfully handle the obligatory jeroboam of champagne, and that a good night was had by all.
  Incidentally, I finished Stuart Neville’s COLLUSION during the week, and the good news is that it’s a better novel that his award-winning debut, THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST), which I remember Ruth Dudley Edwards praising to the skies for its compassion early last summer. Ah, serendipity.
  Meanwhile, and in a not particularly impressive showing for Irish writers, William Ryan was shortlisted for the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger for his debut THE HOLY THIEF. I liked that one a lot, too.
  Elsewhere in Irish crime fiction this week, Maxine Clarke reviewed Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND for Euro Crime, with the gist running thusly:

“WINTERLAND is a brilliant book … There are just so many things to like about this book, which is exciting, gripping and perfectly structured as well as having great emotional depth and insight. If you only read one book for the rest of the year, make it this one.” - Maxine Clarke, Eurocrime

  Nice. And Bernice Harrison was impressed with Arlene Hunt’s BLOOD MONEY over at the Irish Times. To wit:

“Hunt is a skilled crime writer, able to build and sustain suspense – but never at the expense of credibility – and her dialogue zings with authenticity. The clever plot is carried by a cast of deftly drawn characters, who are all as recognisable as the Dublin locations Hunt puts them in. And there’s humour here, too, mostly in Quigley’s realisation that he’s in danger of becoming a sad, lonely loser and, if he’s not careful, a cliche of a private investigator. He’s a character worth watching out for in future.” - Bernice Harrison, Irish Times

  Speaking of Arlene Hunt, she was on the Ireland AM couch over at TV3 last week, alongside Declan Hughes, chatting about Ireland AM’s Book of the Month, Bateman’s THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSELL. This week it was the turn of The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman himself, who reckons that his speciality subject, were he ever to go on Mastermind, would be Liverpool Football Club rather than crime fiction. Yep, I always knew the man had impeccable taste.
  Oddly enough, co-presenter Mark Cagney suggested that while “you could throw a rock out that door and hit a female Irish crime writer,” there seemed to be a lack of male Irish crime writers once you get past Bateman, John Connolly and Benjamin Black.
  Erm, well, there’s the guy you had on last week, Mark, called Declan Hughes. And Brian McGilloway, who’s been on the show at least twice, and possibly three times. And then there’s Ken Bruen, Adrian McKinty, Paul Charles, KT McCaffrey, Alan Glynn, William Ryan, Gene Kerrigan, Eoin McNamee, Stuart Neville, Kevin McCarthy, Garbhan Downey, Rob Kitchin, Gerry O’Carroll, Robert Fannin … and they’re just the writers who’ve published a novel in the last year or so. Mark? Sack your researcher, post-haste.
  For the vid of Bateman in all his glory, clickety-click here …

It’s Not Quite Dead Yet

I don’t know about you, but I like good books. I’m not too demanding: a gripping story, fascinating characters and an inventive use of language are generally enough to make me happy. Like, say, Adrian McKinty’s debut, DEAD I WELL MAY BE, which at the time I read it seemed not entirely unlike a Bourne novel rewritten by Cormac McCarthy.
  The folks at National Public Radio seem to like it too, given that the novel has been chosen as one of its ‘Killer Thrillers’ - “the 100 most pulse-quickening, suspenseful novels ever written”, according to the NPR.
  Marvellous news for McKinty, and for Tana French and Ken Bruen, both of whom are also flying the Irish flag. Or so you’d think. Quoth McKinty over at his interweb lair:

“Somehow DEAD I MAY WELL BE has been long listed as one of National Public Radio’s ‘Killer Thrillers’. I say somehow because unlike every other book on the list DEAD I WELL MAY BE isn’t even in print anymore.”

  Now, between you and me, the fact that DEAD I WELL MAY BE went out of print isn’t just a disgrace, it’s something of a metaphor for how rotten is the state of Denmark, if we can in turn accept ‘Denmark’ as a metaphor for ‘the publishing industry’. In fact, so disgraceful is it that I can’t muster the requisite anger and indignation - it’s kind of bone-crushingly depressing, to be honest. I can rant and rave about the fact that I can’t get published, and people are perfectly entitled to say, ‘Listen, mate, you’re actually not very good - get over yourself.’ They can’t say that to McKinty, because the man is a brilliant writer, and has the critical kudos and awards to back him up.
  What to do? Well, you can vote for DIWMB over at the NPR site here - the poll closes on August 2nd. And once you’ve done that, you can hoppity-skip-jump over here, because it appears the good folk who decide such things are reprinting DEAD I WELL MAY BE. And not a moment too soon, even if it is (or appears to be) a POD edition.
  God bless your cotton socks, NPR.

The Boy From Atlantis

Yon Eoin Colfer’s a busy man these days. Not only did he launch the latest Artemis Fowl novel by ‘virtual live’ webcast on Tuesday, he was yakking it up at Harrogate this morning (Thursday) and then zooming across to Dublin to launch ARTEMIS FOWL AND THE ATLANTIS COMPLEX at Eason’s at 6.30pm. Has Eoin learned a thing or two from Artemis about time-travel, the art of bi-location and sundry other handy tips ‘n’ tricks? Or is Eoin so stinkingly rich these days he can afford his own private Lear jet? Personally, I’m hoping it’s the latter …
  Anyhoo, ARTEMIS FOWL AND THE ATLANTIS COMPLEX. What the jiggery-poo is all that about, then, blurb elves?

ARTEMIS FOWL’S CRIMINAL WAYS HAVE FINALLY GOT THE BETTER OF HIM . . . Young Artemis has frequently used high-tech fairy magic to mastermind the most devious criminal activity of the new century. Now, at a conference in Iceland, Artemis has gathered the fairies to present his latest idea to save the world from global warming. But Artemis is behaving strangely – he seems different. Something terrible has happened to him . . . Artemis Fowl has become nice. The fairies diagnose Atlantis Complex (that’s obsessive compulsive disorder to you and I) – it seems dabbling in magic has damaged Artemis’ main weapon: his mind. Fairy ally Captain Holly Short doesn’t know what to do. The subterranean volcanoes are under attack from vicious robots and Artemis cannot fight them. Can Holly get the real Artemis back before the robot probes destroy every human and life form?

  As always, I’m going to go out on a limb and say, Yes, she very probably will …

Origins: Garbhan Downey

Being the latest in what will probably be yet another short-lived series, in which yours truly reclines on a hammock by the pool with a jeroboam of Elf-Wonking Juice™ and lets a proper writer talk about the origins of his or her characters and stories. This week: Garbhan Downey (right), author of THE AMERICAN ENVOY. To wit:

“I never base my characters on actual people – apart from one, which I’ll get to in a minute. But I do accept that now and again my heroes and villains unwittingly adopt attributes of punters I’ve met in real life.
  “Five years ago, for example, a retired IRA man asked me to sign a copy of OFF BROADWAY – a book of short-stories set in the North’s post-ceasefire underworld. I looked at him deadpan and wrote, “To X, an inspiration”. I then handed the book back to him, saying nothing. In fairness, he had the grace to burst out laughing – and told me he was away to ring his lawyer.
  “It would be silly to deny that life inspires art. The Barkley family – a gang of dirty businessmen who appear in all six of my novels – share many traits with the rash of carpet-baggers who infest modern Ireland. “Sparkly”, “King-Size” and “Darkly” Barkley have each been responsible for shed-loads of scams, which are thinly disguised accounts of real-life cons I was never to expose as a newspaper editor.
  “Sparkly runs a host of quasi-legal shop-fronts for the Boys; King Size is a race-fixing jockey with sidelines in property development and blackmail; while Darkly is a consultant or, if you’d prefer, “the type of guy who stands in front of the brothel and offers to sell you your photo back”. And though I never met a triumvirate quite so crooked in my day job, I’m sure there are a few out there who will occasionally wince with recognition – and perhaps even a little pride – as they’re reading the books.
  “Unlike in the real world, however, I have taken great care to spoon out proper retribution to my Barkleys: suspending one from a window-ledge; affixing another to a bunny-boiling wife; and infecting a third with a vicious STD. None of them, you’ll be pleased to learn, live happily ever after – indeed, two don’t live at all any more ...
  “The Hurleys – who are central to both RUNNING MATES and THE WAR OF THE BLUE ROSES - are a mostly-decent republican clan, representing those in Northern society who struggle valiantly to put the old ways behind them but occasionally fall back into bad habits. Or, as they’re more often referred to nowadays – “the government”.
  “The Hurleys, as you’d expect, are known as “The Hurlers” as a tribute to our national sport and a formerly-preferred method of chastisement. But it is important too that characters develop with the changing times. Hence, Harry the Hurler, the family patriarch, becomes entangled with a glamorous senior police chief; his brother Gerry gets himself a “late-learners degree” and becomes an MLA in Stormont; Jimmy Fidget, the youngest, has a guilt-induced breakdown before setting up his own security company; while Donna, the white sheep, shacks up with the Taoiseach. And again, I would insist that the Hurleys are certainly not based on real people, despite several claims to the contrary (and two unproven lawsuits).
  “Lou Johnston, aka Letemout Lou, the leading lady in several of my books, is a bossy and beautiful lawyer-turned judge, who - despite her cranky shell - is kindness itself. I would stress for the record, however, that although I myself am married to a beautiful lawyer who is kindness itself, any and all resemblances are purely coincidental. (Note to editor – I took great care to drop “bossy” from that second clause...)
  “The identities of my players are very important to me – I have to have a firm grip in my head as to who they are, when I’m writing them. So it helps if the names are obvious and pertinent: Tommy Bowtie is a solicitor; Shakes Coyle is a dried-out drunk; Getemup Gormley is the failed bank-robber; Time-Gents is a barman; Hate the World is a hitman; Nora Tora Tora has a bad temper; Ruth Ball, the man-eater, becomes “Buster”; Chiselling Phil is a barrister-turned-negotiator; Stammering Stan is a not-very-confident newsreader; the priest who “cures” homosexuals is Fr “Bend-em-Back” Behan; and the Taoiseach’s intelligence expert is John the Bugger.
  “Derry people, I believe, are particularly talented at summing up people in a single word or pithy phrase. They work hard at it. I once asked in a pub why a particular man was known as “Jimmy Choo-Choo”, to be told that he had taken part in a training course at the railway station 20 years previously. It always makes sense. A prominent Glasgow republican, now living in Derry is, naturally, known by locals as “Taff”.
  “My late brother was an artist at it. He was never bested for the mot juste – so much so that I once even dedicated a story to Rónán “Give Everyone a Middle Name” Downey. I remember sitting with him as we listened to a very stoned friend attempt to sing “Just a Gigolo”. Rónán immediately dubbed him John “I Ain’t Got No Body” Smith*. The name stuck.
  “On only one occasion did I directly transpose a real person into a novel. He was heavily fictionalised, though for obvious reasons I am happy that he will never out himself as my muse.
  “I have to confess it was Mark Durkan, the Foyle MP, who put the idea into my head. We were swapping yarns in Radio Foyle one morning, when Durks started chatting about a constituent who, when asked to leave his office, went down on all fours and ran around the desk, barking like a dog.
  “I couldn’t resist it. In my first novel THE PRIVATE DIARY OF A SUSPENDED MLA, I just had to give him a cameo role. A man whose mission in life is to torment rising political stars. A man who breaks the wing-mirrors off your car, if you don’t come quick with the bail money. A headcase among headcases. The nemesis of all would be young Kennedys. The curse of all Camerons.
  “Step forward Mister J. “Bite Me” O’Boyle. You know who you are.” - Garbhan Downey

  * Identity changed to protect the victim.

  Garbhan Downey’s THE AMERICAN ENVOY is published by Guildhall Press.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: J. Sydney Jones

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?
Can we stretch it to thrillers? HARRY’S GAME, by Gerald Seymour. He can do dialogue and pacing like no other. Or perhaps Le Carré’s A MURDER OF QUALITY. Ditto the dialogue. You can almost taste it.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Prince Myshkin. He runs under the radar.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Guilty as accused: mysteries and thrillers.

Most satisfying writing moment?
I’ve published a dozen books over the years, but getting my first royalty check for my narrative history, HITLER IN VIENNA, thirty years after publication was definitely a high point. No lie. That book was sold I don’t know how many times from the German original, translated, sold in revised editions (without my blessings) and I never saw a dime. Only financials for years were the photo rights I had to pay for with each new edition. But patience pays out. I now can afford five bottles of plonk.

No. On second thoughts, I believe I will frame the check.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst is promotion - endless, ceaseless (is it even productive?) promotion. The best is that feeling of getting it right, nailing a scene or character with exactly the right words.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Here’s for book four of my Viennese Mysteries series, set around 1900: THE KEEPER OF THE HANDS is a murder mystery that quickly morphs into a thriller of assumed names, false identities, and internecine turf battles between espionage arms of the state, employing the technology and tradecraft of a century ago. It is also a work of social and political commentary in which the demands of state power trump the privacy of its citizens, a scenario that is prescient of our own times.

Who are you reading right now?
Perhaps this is my guilty pleasure: I always have several books going at the same time, fiction and nonfiction. Nabokov’s SPEAK MEMORY, THE AGE OF WONDER by Richard Holmes, and Jonathan Littel’s THE KINDLY ONES.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Neither. Don’t believe in God.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
I’m breaking the rules (so I can’t count, so sue me) and quoting from Kirkus about my last novel, REQUIEM IN VIENNA: “Sophisticated entertainment of a very high caliber.”

J. Sydney Jones’ THE EMPTY MIRROR is published by Minotaur Books.

The Gravy Train Is Leaving The Station

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times … Back when I was still young, dynamic and bearded, I lived in Portstewart in Co. Derry, doing my level best to avoid lectures at the nearby university of Coleraine. Of marvellous assistance in my endeavours to avoid toil of any kind were my housemates and fellow Panucci Brothers (above) - l-to-r: Davy ‘the Reader’ Panucci, Dec ‘the Alibi’ Panucci, Barry ‘the Hat’ Panucci, and Mik ‘the Orange’ Panucci, and Barry ‘De Niro’ Panucci. And, yes, we were all old enough to know better, even back then.
  Anyway, we got some bad news last year about Davy Gray, aka Gravy Day. I’ll let Gravy pick up the story:

“In February 2009, two weeks before my 36th birthday, I collapsed in work and was taken by ambulance to Belfast City Hospital. The next day following an MRI scan I was given the devastating news that the scan revealed a significant tumour on the right side of my brain. To say this was a shock is obviously a huge understatement. I had not experienced any of the symptoms associated with a brain tumour, and had led what I considered to be a fit and healthy lifestyle.
  “After a few days I was moved to the neurology unit of Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital but after performing a biopsy the neurosurgeons at the Royal told me they considered the tumour to be inoperable - in their opinion the risk of causing brain damage during surgery was too high.
  “Despite this setback, I decided to get a second opinion and was referred to a surgeon at The Beacon Hospital in Dublin. After examining my case, the surgeon in Dublin told me that, in his opinion, surgery offered "no significant risk" and he agreed to operate on me. In April 2009 after a major operation, my tumour was successfully removed. In June I began a 6 week course of concurrent radiotherapy and chemotherapy at the Northern Ireland Cancer Centre. This was followed by 6 months of chemotherapy, the last dose of which I received in January this year. To our enormous relief, a scan at the end of January was completely clear and showed no sign of disease.

THE CHARITY - “Every year in the UK, 16,000 people are diagnosed with a brain tumour and more people under 40 die of a brain tumour than from any other cancer. Despite these statistics, brain tumour research is woefully under-funded and lags significantly behind other cancers.
  The Samantha Dickson Brain Tumour Trust is the leading adult and childhood brain tumour charity dedicated to scientific research and patient support in the UK. To date the charity has spent £5m on innovative, world class research projects led by top UK and international scientists.
  “The charity’s aim is to raise awareness, significantly fund brain tumour research and to give support to brain tumour patients, their friends and family, and to give hope to brain tumour patients in the future. Further details at www.braintumourtrust.co.uk

THE EVENT - “The 26th annual Warrior’s Run takes place on 28th August 2010 in Strandhill, Co.Sligo. It’s a gruelling 15km run from the beachfront in Strandhill to the peak of Knocknarea mountain, around Queen Maeve’s Cairn and back down to the beachfront again. The race is classified as a road and hill race or multi-terrained - nine of its kilometres are on paved roads, but six kilometres in the middle include a 700 foot climb through fields and along loose gravel and heather paths. I have competed in the race several times in the past and always find it a huge challenge but great fun too! Further details are at www.warriorsfestival.com

HOW TO DONATE - “To donate online please go to www.justgiving.com/warriorsrun. Donations are in sterling, but for those of you in the eurozone or elsewhere on the globe, justgiving.com accepts payments by all major credit cards and by PayPal.

PLEASE DIG DEEP AND DONATE TO THIS VERY WORTHY CAUSE!”

  Much as I hate to use this here interweb yokeybus to flog anything but my own paltry tomes, I’m agreed with Gravy that this is a worthy cause. Over to you, folks …

The Thin Blue Blood

Kevin McCarthy points us in the direction of Edward Conlon, scion of a long line of Irish-American cops, and recommends BLUE BLOOD, Conlon’s memoir of his time as an NYPD cop. Sounds like a right corker - here’s the intro to Brian Schofield’s excellent review of the book in the Sunday Times:

In the unlikely event that you should ever shoot a New York police officer, it might be helpful to know the lengths to which their colleagues will go to catch you. In one particularly dogged pursuit, the force bought a nightclub and populated it entirely with undercover officers posing as mafiosi. Night after night, for months, a young wannabe wiseguy called Henry Vega socialised with the mock mobsters, chasing an invitation to become a “made man”. Eventually, he sought their trust by bragging about the time he shot a cop — only to discover, in a blur of badges and guns, that he was the star of his own personal Truman Show.
  That might sound like the overcooked plot of a TV police series, but the source is BLUE BLOOD, Edward Conlon’s memoir of seven years as a New York policeman, which oozes a credibility that’s beyond question. This ribald, unsparing description of life in the NYPD blue was a publishing sensation when it hit bookshops in America in 2004, garnering fans from Jay McInerney to James Frey.
  But at that time it was considered too detailed and parochial for British tastes. Then came The Wire, a television show that proved that a fanatically accurate portrayal of American cop talk, drugs trafficking and police office politics could draw a small but manically dedicated UK audience. So now Blue Blood has crossed the pond — but this gritty, grimy epic is no cheap cash-in, more of a high-water mark of realism and insider knowledge, against which the television shows have to measure up …”
  Conlon’s advice to anyone who’s watched too many cop shows on television is strident: “You want to know what my job is like? Go to your garage, piss in the corner, and stand there for eight hours.” - Brian Schofield, the Sunday Times

  For the review in its entirety, clickety-click here …
  Apparently Conlon has now written a novel, called RED ON RED, which is due to be released early next year. Could be a cracker …

Ohmigod They’ve Shot Kenny, Etc.

Des Kenny has long been one of Ireland’s most respected booksellers, and is still regarded as such, even if the iconic Kenny’s Bookshop in Galway is now largely a web-based business. The video below has Des Kenny waxing lyrical about Ken Bruen’s latest, THE DEVIL - Ken Bruen, of course, being only slightly less famous than the bay itself when it comes to Galway landmarks. I don’t know who shot the vid, so apologies for leaving out the credits … Roll it there, Collette:

  Incidentally, long ago, when I was still young and dynamic, and Ken Bruen was kind enough to launch my debut EIGHTBALL BOOGIE in Galway, Des brought me into Kenny’s Bookshop, gave me a guided tour and had me sign a number of copies. Thrilling enough for the callow scribe I was then, but Des capped that by saying, “I’ve only one question. How the hell are you going to top EIGHTBALL BOOGIE?”
  Erm, Des? The good news is that I haven’t, so you’re not missing much.
  Meanwhile, and for a different kind of viewing experience entirely, Declan Hughes and Arlene Hunt (right) appeared on TV3’s Ireland AM last week.They were there, ostensibly, to chat about the programme’s book of the week, Bateman’s THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSELL. As you’ll see if you clickety-click the link, poor old Bateman hardly got a mention, as the conversation veered off almost immediately into exploring the whys and wherefores of the explosion in Irish crime fiction. Still, it’s a good chat, and anyway yon Bateman is rich as Croesus, and doesn’t need any unnecessary plugs from mere mortals.
  Rounding off this less-than-comprehensive round-up of crime fic doings in Ireland this week is an interview with Stuart Neville over at that bastion of all things Irish and manly, Joe.ie. For those of you still unaware of the fact that Neville’s COLLUSION, which is the follow-up to THE TWELVE but not strictly a sequel, will be appearing on a shelf near you next month, it’s a nice little refresher as to how the bould Stuart’s debut took on all comers last year and ended up as the LA Times’ Mystery / Thriller of the Year.
  I’m about halfway through COLLUSION right now, and it’s terrific stuff. All the pace and punch of THE TWELVE, but with a snarkier edge, particularly when it comes to detailing the more squalid aspects of The Troubles. To wit:

‘Everybody knows it all, but no one says anything. Look, collusion worked all ways, all directions. Between the Brits and the Loyalists, between the Irish government and the Republicans, between the Republicans and the Brits, between the Loyalists and the Republicans.’ Toner ran out of breath and his face reddened. He pulled hard on his cigarette and coughed. ‘All ways, all directions. We’ll never know how far it went. All the small things, all the big things. Loyalists supplying Republicans with fake DVDs and Ecstasy tablets. Republicans wholesaling laundered diesel and bootleg vodka to Loyalists. Feeding off the hate, letting on they’re fighting for their fucking causes when all the time they’re making each other rich. And the killings. How many of our own did we set up for the Loyalists to take out? How many of their own did the Loyalists set up for us? How many times did I get a taxi to some club or other on the Shankhill with a name in an envelope, and two days later, some poor cunt from the Falls gets his head took off?’

  Stirring stuff. Let’s hope no Loyalist / Republican sympathisers go rushing over to Amazon to give COLLUSION a negative review on the basis of that little lot, eh?

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Kevin Power

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?
I suppose everyone says THE BIG SLEEP, don’t they? It’s THE GREAT GATSBY of crime fiction. And I like to think that I’d be just slapdash enough to forget, in true Chandleresque style, who killed that chauffeur.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
James Bond. I remember being very impressed, as a kid, when I read GOLDFINGER and learned that Bond concealed his Walther PPK in a book called THE BIBLE DESIGNED TO BE READ AS LITERATURE. I think that was when I realised that true style is in the details.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
The Spenser novels by the late, great Robert B. Parker. Starting with THE GODWULF MANUSCRIPT in 1973, Spenser evolved into one of the great heroes of American popular fiction. Spenser isn’t really a noir protagonist in the true sense – he never compromises, and he’s always right. The Spenser books are basically romances in which the questing hero always triumphs, which I reckon is what makes them so satisfying.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When I was about thirty pages from the end of BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, I suddenly knew what the last paragraph would be, and I scribbled it down then and there. The most satisfying moment was realising everything else was done and I could finally type that final paragraph.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Declan Hughes’s Ed Loy novels are turning into a running commentary on the state of the nation, using the PI genre as a hook. I suspect Ed is the first fictional gumshoe ever to find himself in negative equity. And Hughes can really write, too.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE KILLING KIND by John Connolly. Because of the villain, mostly: Mr. Pudd, the unbelievably creepy arachnophile psychopath who kills people by jamming their mouths with chloroformed black widows. You could traumatize a lot of people by putting Mr. Pudd on screen.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
I can’t see much of a downside. The best thing is when you know you’ve got something right – a sentence, a paragraph, even a section title.

The pitch for your next book is …?
I have to write the bleedin’ thing first.

Who are you reading right now?
In my non-writing life I’m supposed to be doing a PhD on Norman Mailer, so I’ve just read a memoir called MORNINGS WITH MAILER by Dwayne Raymond, who was Mailer’s personal assistant for the last four years of his life. What amazed me was the account of Mailer’s work ethic. The man revised everything five or six times, even if it was just a Christmas card.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I think if God appears, I’ll have bigger problems ...

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
I aim for clarity, honesty, and what you might call “flow” – I want people to turn the pages.

The paperback edition of Kevin Power’s BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK is published by Pocket Books.

Origins: Arlene Hunt

Being the latest in what will probably be yet another short-lived series, in which yours truly reclines on a hammock by the pool with a jeroboam of Elf-Wonking Juice™ and lets a proper writer talk about the origins of his or her characters and stories. This week: Arlene Hunt (right), author of BLOOD MONEY. To wit:

“I grew up on a steady diet of crime fiction. From the rough and tumble streets of Hill Street Blues to the verdant lushness and academic spires of Morse in Oxford, it mattered not the location. Once there was murder and mayhem involved I was a captive audience. I devoured every crime novel I could get my hands on, reading Wambaugh and Chandler alongside Jackie magazine and Just 17. I could think of nothing I enjoyed more than a rainy afternoon sprawled out on the sofa, my nose buried in a PD James or Agatha Christie novel.
  “Stemming from this base it seemed entirely natural that I might one day grow into a crime fiction author. There was just the small matter of how to go about it.
  “Before I developed QuicK Investigations I pondered long and hard over who I wanted as my ‘good guys’. I wanted a team, I wanted them to be as real as possible. I did not want a cerebral genius like Morse or Holmes, nor a tough guy like Pike or Marlowe. I did not want a melancholy alcoholic, or a prim snoopy old lady. What I wanted was someone to whom I could relate. Someone who has to slog hard to get to the truth, someone flawed, someone who would make mistakes, someone with secrets. Someone with trust issues. I wanted a novice, willing to put the work in, willing to try.
  “Someone like me.
  “With this as my blueprint I set to scribbling and within a week I had my rookie detectives, John Quigley and Sarah Kenny. The offices of QuicK Investigations, located in a rundown building on Wexford Street, had opened for business.
  “John Quigley is a heart a thoroughly decent man. He is not the brightest, or the most driven, but at his core he is the sort of person to whom the troubled turn. If John can help you he will. Sarah Kenny was a more complicated creation. She would need to be the counter balance to John’s slightly work shy attitude and his cockiness. She would be the brooder, the one mired in a personal battlefield that required her to be sharper and more serious. Though I did not want her to come across as a harpy, she has to be the one to rein in the impulsive John. She is also the person with the maturity to handle the mundane day to day running of the office, making sure the bills get paid on time and the insurance is up to date. Y’know, all the boring stuff that John has little interest in.
  “They were to be the yin and yang of the QuicK agency. They each bring different skills to the table, as individuals they have weaknesses, as a team they are stronger. John and Sarah have evolved over the course of the books. Older now, more cynical, they are almost as real to me as flesh and blood people. It tickles me greatly when I get emails from readers asking what they are up to now, expressing dismay over happenings or sympathy for them. Sarah Kenny and John Quigley, once a daydream and a slice of wishful thinking, have become a reality.” - Arlene Hunt

  Arlene Hunt’s BLOOD MONEY is published by Hachette Books Ireland.

I Will Arise And Go Now, And Go To Innisfree …

J. Sydney Jones (right), author of REQUIEM IN VIENNA and THE EMPTY MIRROR, was kind enough to host an interview with yours truly over at his blog, Scene of the Crime. The gist of Sydney’s interviews concern themselves with settings, and how a particular setting influences a novel. I talked mostly about my home town, Sligo, the setting for EIGHTBALL BOOGIE and THE BIG EMPTY. To wit:

“Historically, Sligo town is a fascinating place. There are records of the ancient Greeks trading at Sligo port; Sligo Abbey was founded in 1252. It’s an old town, then, and the centre of the town reflects that: the streets are narrow, and there are plenty of interesting alleyways down which a man might wander who is not himself mean. The modern town incorporates many sprawling suburbs, some of which are more salubrious than others, which again makes for an interesting juxtaposition. In certain parts of Sligo, literally crossing the road can make the difference between real estate selling for €80,000 and €400,000. That in itself creates a certain tension.
  “There’s a saying in the West of Ireland that the Celtic Tiger never learned in swim, which is why it never crossed the Shannon into Connacht (said Tiger, presumably, being too dim to use one of the many bridges that cross the Shannon). Sligo was one of those towns that didn’t benefit hugely from the boom years, although it has transformed itself in the last decade or so. Today it’s a brash, progressive place – you can sip your café mocha on the remodelled riverfront with the best of them – but there is a sense that many of the changes are superficial, and you don’t have to go very far from the centre of town before you notice the shabby and threadbare corners, the boarded-up shop-fronts. All in all, I find it a fascinating place – but then, I’m biased. I love it.”

  Not that you’d know it from the excerpt Sydney posts from THE BIG EMPTY, a Harry Rigby private eye novel of mine currently out under consideration. To wit:

It was better out in the suburbs, and it was mostly all suburbs, but the town was a heart-attack of concrete and chrome. Old streets, high and narrow, arteries that had thickened and gnarled so the traffic trickled or didn’t move at all. The light a frozen glare shot with greens and reds, blinking pink neon, fluorescent blues. Boom-boom blasting from rolled-down windows, the deep bass pulsing out muscles of sound.
  On a bad night it took fifteen minutes to crawl the two hundred yards along Castle Street into Grafton Street. The mob shuffling out of the chippers wore hoodies over baggy denims, the dragging hems frayed. Night of the Living McDead. The girls in cropped tops over bulging bellies with hipster jeans showcasing cheese-cutter thongs. In case someone might think they weren’t wearing any underwear at all, maybe.
  I skipped O’Connell Street, heading east along John Street, turning north down Adelaide and then west at the new bridge onto Lynn’s Dock, a grapefruit moon hanging low above the quays. Finn playing The Northern Pikes, Place That’s Insane. On along Ballast Quay to the docks proper, a spit of land jutting out into the sea, maybe forty acres of crumbling warehouse facing open water. Behind the warehouses lay a marshy jungle of weeds. Once in a while there was talk of turning it into a nature preserve, a bird sanctuary, but no one ever did anything about it. The birds came and went anyway.
  Down at the breakwater the Port Authority building was nine stories of black concrete, a finger flipping the bird to the town. Sligo’s Ozymandias, our monument to hubris, built back in the ’60s when Lemass had all boats on a rising tide and the docks were buzzing, a North Atlantic entry point for Polish coal, Norwegian pine, Jamaican sugar, Australian wool. Oil tankers moored down at the deepwater. Russians slipped ashore and never went to sea again. The first African, a Nigerian, was a celebrity. They called him Paddy Dubh and he never had to pay when he bought a pint of stout.
  Then the ’70s slithered in. Crude oil went through the roof. The coal stopped coming, then the sugar. The channel silted up. Paddy had to buy his own stout. Things got so bad the Industrial Development Authority had to buy the PA building and then lease back two of the nine stories to the Port Authority. Even that was a farce, the IDA loaning the PA the money to pay the lease.
  Then the ’80s, a good decade to be a weed or a rat. Everyone forgot about the docks, or tried to …”

  For the interview in its entirety, clickety-click here ...

French Kissies From The USA

It’s a karma thing, probably. The dastardly French cheat Ireland out of their place at the World Cup finals in South Africa, and then crash and burn to a humiliating first-round exit. Meanwhile, Ireland’s very own Tana French is getting all the good vibes going, particularly from US reviewers. To wit:

“While it is a basic readerly instinct to trust the first-person narrator, especially when he’s a police detective, in Ms. French’s novels, the detective-narrators are as much the sources of mystery and danger as they are bringers of light, order and law to the dark world of crime, and the endings are not tidy returns to peace and order. Those who read for the plot may be disappointed by FAITHFUL PLACE, but those who value psychological complexity and vivid characterization, who aren’t afraid to have their generic expectations turned inside out, who like their thrillers with a strong regional and literary savour, owe themselves the pleasure of Tana French.” - The Washington Times

“Some thriller writers burst onto the scene in a sudden blaze of hype, while others bubble under the level of mass awareness for years before gaining a significant following. Two authors who have been steadily attracting fans—but not much fanfare—are Tana French and Dennis Tafoya. Both are likely only to widen their audiences with their latest work.” - Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal

  Erm, Tom? ‘Not much fanfare’? Do try to keep up …
  Elsewhere, the Courier-Journal had this to say:

“FAITHFUL PLACE is Tana French’s best book yet (readers familiar with IN THE WOODS and THE LIKENESS will recognize this as an incredible feat), a compelling and cutting mystery with the hardscrabble, savage Mackey clan at its heart.”

  Meanwhile, Myles McWeeney at the Irish Independent reckons that the novel is “more a sprawling inner-city Dublin family saga than a thriller in the strictest sense of the word. But that in no way takes away from the power of this enthralling and wonderfully nuanced book. Rosie and Frank’s story, told in flashback, hooks the reader from the beginning, the characters are masterfully drawn, and the author’s ear for Dublin dialogue is pitch-perfect.”
  And here’s Adam Woog in the Seattle Times: “Irish writer Tana French hit the big time with her stunning cop-drama debut, IN THE WOODS and followed it with an equally brilliant book, THE LIKENESS. Both demonstrated French’s gift for merging the best traits of the crime genre with the compassionate insights and nimble prose associated with ‘serious’ literature. A third dazzler, FAITHFUL PLACE, puts Detective Frank Mackey, a supporting actor from THE LIKENESS, front and centre.”
  If you want to hear Tana’s dulcet tones, clickety-click here for an NPR interview conducted by Lynn Neary …
  … and if you fancy reading an excerpt from Chapter One, here’s a flavour courtesy of the New York Times, which kicks off thusly:

My father once told me that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for. If you don’t know that, he said, what are you worth? Nothing. You’re not a man at all. I was thirteen and he was three quarters of the way into a bottle of Gordon’s finest, but hey, good talk. As far as I recall, he was willing to die a) for Ireland, b) for his mother, who had been dead for ten years, and c) to get that bitch Maggie Thatcher.

  Needless to say, Janet Maslin at the NYT gives “Tana French’s expertly rendered, gripping new novel” the thumbs up …
  So there you have it. FAITHFUL PLACE. What are you waiting for?

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: REQUIEMS FOR THE DEPARTED, edited by Gerard Brennan and Mike Stone

REQUIEMS FOR THE DEPARTED is an audacious exercise in joining the dots between Ireland’s mythological heritage and the current explosion in contemporary Irish crime writing. Basically, Gerard Brennan and Mike Stone have commissioned a number of modern crime stories based on Irish mythology. Contributors include Brian McGilloway, Arlene Hunt, Ken Bruen, Adrian McKinty, Una McCormack, Garbhan Downey, Sam Millar and Stuart Neville. Among the myths invoked are those of Diarmuid and Grainne, the Children of Lir, Queen Maeve and the Brown Bull of Cooley, the Hound of Cu Chulainn, and the Banshee.
  What editors Stone and Brennan have attempted to do is draw parallels between the narrative tensions of an ancient and modern form. Much is made, for example, of the female characters in the myths, such as Queen Maeve and Grainne, as forerunners of the manipulative and often deadly femmes fatales of crime fiction.
  It’s also true that narrative fulcrums such as greed, sex and the lust for power are timeless, as most of the stories here confirm.
  Arlene Hunt’s ‘Sliabh Ban’ is a modern take on the Queen Maeve story, in which revenge plays a considerable part in motivating the main character, whose husband has not only run off with a younger woman, but taken her prize racehorse with him. Hunt’s story is perfectly pitched between myth and modern story, particularly in terms of the tragic ending.
  On the other hand, Adrian McKinty’s story ‘Diarmuid and Grainne’ makes few concessions to the myth that inspired it. While acknowledging the elopement element of the myth, it is to all intents and purposes a hard-nosed tale of an undercover cop on the Border between the Republic and Northern Ireland making a fatal error of judgment while investigating dissident Republicans. Gritty and brutal, it belongs in the category of contemporary story, and shies clear of indulging the mythological aspects.
  John McAllister’s ‘Bog Man’, on the other hand, reverses McKinty’s approach almost entirely: his protagonist is Tarlóir, an enforcer of the peace who goes up against the Morrigan clan in the years immediately following the arrival of St Patrick. McAllister drenches his tale with ghosts, gods and the superstitions of pre-Christian Ireland. In effect, McAllister frames the ancient tale with the modern concept of the police procedural. Where McKinty takes the myth and looks forward, McAllister takes the contemporary form and looks back. Both are equally persuasive.
  Less persuasive in terms of style is Neville Thompson’s ‘Children of Gear’, a riff on the ‘Children of Lir’ story. Thompson sets his story in modern Dublin, yet uses the ancient names for his characters in a tale of a family lost to heroin. The net result is that the story never allows the reader to accept the story as fully myth or modern crime story, but that unsettling aspect contributes to the fact that Thompson’s forceful and unadorned reworking of the myth is a haunting one.
  Some stories have only a tenuous connection to Irish mythology and legend - John Grant’s ‘The Life Business’, for example, offers a couple of glancing references to St Patrick in what is otherwise a compelling coming-of-age tale. Others, such as Ken Bruen’s ‘She Wails Through the Fair’, which takes the myth of the banshee for its inspiration, are entirely suffused with by the story’s inspiration.
  Two stories, both police procedurals, are faithful to the mythology to an almost simplistic degree, yet both are the most successful at drawing out the timelessness of the myths. Brian McGilloway’s ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ and Garry Kilworth’s ‘Hats Off to Mary’ seem to skim the surface of the source material: entirely contemporary, they both convey the apparent simplicities of the mythological narratives, while also sketching in the often crude motivations that lie beneath what we often simply skim ourselves when rereading mythology.
  REQUIEMS FOR THE DEPARTED doesn’t always reach the standards set by its audacious concept. By its very nature, and the nature of the material from which the stories take their inspiration, the tone is uneven, with some stories trading in black humour, others in irreverent revisionism, and some striving too hard to locate what is essentially a prehistorical morality in a contemporary setting.
  That said, the collection is for the most part a vibrant reimagining of a body of literature that is in danger of being preserved in the literary equivalent of aspic. It is at worst a long overdue shot in the arm for Irish myths and legends, and deserves to be taken seriously as a courageous attempt to revitalise a tradition that is in danger of being smothered in academic dust. - Declan Burke

  Meanwhile, here’s a link to a piece on REQUIEMS I had published in the Irish Times last month.

  Lately I have been mostly reading: MY FRIEND JESUS CHRIST by Lars Husum, ORCHID BLUE by Eoin McNamee, SPIES OF THE BALKANS by Alan Furst, BAD INTENTIONS by Karin Fossum and FALLING SLOWLY by Robert Fannin.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Kevin Brooks

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

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

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Travis McGee (from the John D MacDonald books).

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t feel guilty about reading anything.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Publication of my first book, MARTYN PIG.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Depends how you define ‘Irish crime novel’. Does John Connolly’s THE REAPERS count?

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE REAPERS (if allowed).

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Best thing – all of it. There is no worst thing.

The pitch for your next book is …?
London, 1976, the long hot summer, the birth of punk rock, and a young Irish boy known as Billy the Kid.

Who are you reading right now?
Christopher Hitchens.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I’m an atheist, so neither (and even if I wasn’t an atheist, I’d just tell Him to go away).

Kevin Brooks’ iBoy is published by Puffin.

The World: Gone To Hell In A Hand-Basket, Apparently

I had a piece published in the Irish Times yesterday, the gist of it concerned with the development of the crime novel in settings and countries not necessarily associated with the traditional haunts of crime fiction. To wit:

How the World Became One Big Crime Scene

From the Palestinian Territories to Mongolia and beyond, crime writers are using international locations to tackle global themes

The popular perception of crime fiction is that it’s the foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, black sheep of the literary family. Unsurprisingly, it’s quite popular with the ladies, perhaps as a result of the broad mind it has developed on its travels.
  The success of Stieg Larsson’s Sweden-set ‘Millennium Trilogy’ has alerted mainstream readers to the fact that the crime novel has an existence beyond its traditional enclaves of America and the UK. Larsson, of course, is following in the footsteps of his countryman Henning Mankell, while ‘foreign’ settings for crime novels are nothing new for aficionados au fait with the groundbreaking works of Georges Simenon (France) and Sjöwall and Wahlöö (Sweden), and latterly the likes of Andrea Camilleri (Italy), Colin Cotterill (Cambodia), Michael Dibdin (Italy), Jo Nesbø (Norway) and Deon Meyer (South Africa), to mention but a few.
  Three years ago, writing in the New Yorker, Clive James celebrated international crime fiction offerings from Ireland, Scandinavia and Italy while simultaneously deriding the limitations of the genre’s form. “In most of the crime novels coming out now,” he said, “it’s a matter not of what happens but of where. Essentially, they are guide books.”
  What James failed to recognise is that the crime novel, by virtue of engaging with issues of law and (dis)order in a timely and relevant fashion, tends to be at the cutting edge in terms of addressing society’s fundamental concerns and broaching its taboos.
  Per Wahlöö, for example, claimed that the motive behind the ten-book Martin Beck series written with his wife was to “use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideologically pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type.”
  Peeling back layers of cant and perceived wisdom is a theme that writers are currently exploring in settings as diverse as Canada, Poland, the Palestinian Territories, Brazil, South Africa and Mongolia.
  “Toronto has been proud of its label as one the most multi-ethnic cities in the world for the past twenty years or so,” says John McFetridge (right), whose Let It Ride is set in Canada’s great melting-pot city. “There’s been some great literature written here, but there hasn’t been much written about crime. And there’s been plenty of crime. Almost everything in my books is inspired by real events, from the closed brewery turned into a giant marijuana grow-op to the beauty queen pulling armed robberies at spas, to eight members of a gang killed in one night. I wanted to write what I saw going on in my city that not many people were talking about.”
  Mike Nicol, the author of Killer Country, is one of a new breed of South African writers inspired by Deon Meyer. “During apartheid the only fiction was literary fiction,” he says. “It was believed to have the seriousness that our political condition demanded. So there was no crime fiction – or almost none, although there were some very good novels from James McClure and Wessel Ebersohn.
  “After the end of Nelson Mandela’s presidency in 1999 it became obvious that the new government wasn’t terribly different from the old government. Apartheid was gone but the politicians remained politicians. There was widespread cronyism, fraud, corruption, embezzlement within government, collusion between cops and gangsters, a collapse in the education system, a collapse in the health sector as AIDS denialism became a national policy, and an unhealthy relationship developed between the private sector and the public sector that was a mixture of threat and bribery. As a crime writer, I felt I was back in business.”
  Matt Benyon Rees (right), a journalist, sets his Omar Yussef series of novels in the Palestinian Territories in order to humanise the newspaper headlines. “I wanted to show the Palestinians - whom we all think we know from daily news reports - as they are and to make readers realize that they didn’t really know them at all. Detective fiction is perfect for such a manoeuvre because it requires readers to examine very closely what’s happening in the story - there’s not much room for gloss. When it’s placed in a foreign culture, the reader’s attention has to be that much closer and the writer has to look again at every element of his descriptions.
  “Fiction, strangely, is a much better way of getting at the truths of a foreign culture than political analysis,” he continues. “Politics and journalism are based around liars and those who observe liars at work but often neglect to point out that the liars are lying. Fiction can’t lie.”
  The classic dramatic conflict between have and have-nots forms the backdrop to Leighton Gage’s Chief Inspector Mario Silva novels, which are set in Brazil.
  “Brazil is a rich country,” he says, “but it’s still a developing country. As such, it continues to have highly inequitable income distribution. That’s changing, and changing rapidly, but it’s still true that this country’s taboos (unlike the ones Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler et al had to contend with) can vary immensely depending upon where you stand in the socioeconomic pecking order. Forcing one of your children into prostitution is repugnant, for example, but there’s no taboo against it if the alternative is to let your other children starve.
  “That’s an extreme case, obviously, but Brazil is full of societal issues that don’t arise in so-called First World countries. Liberation theology, for example, has been condemned by the Princes of the Church, but many of Brazil’s poorer priests practice it. Excessive concentration on the promise of reward in heaven, they say, often propagates social injustice on earth. So, at one end of the scale, a defence of liberation theology is taboo. And, at the other end, not embracing it is equally taboo. How could I possibly live here, be a writer, and not want to tell people what a fascinating place this is?”
  Michael Walters sets his Nergui novels in the former Soviet satellite of Mongolia.
  “I’m not exactly exploring ‘societal taboos’,” he says, “but writing about a society which is still in the process of trying to work out exactly what its values (and therefore taboos) ought to be. The relationship between ‘legality’ and ‘morality’ is sometimes far from clear. In my first book, for example, I was trying to work out the links between individual murder and corporate crime, and the way in which, in a society desperate for economic growth, the corporations can sometimes, maybe even literally, get away with murder. In my second, I was looking to explore the difficulty of trying to establish legitimate law enforcement in a society where corruption is endemic and, historically, the word ‘police’ has usually been preceded by the word ‘secret’.”
  “In a pretentious mode,” Walters says, “I’d quote the line from Gramsci: ‘The old is dying, the new is struggling to be born and in the period of interregnum there arise many morbid symptoms.’ That’s a pretty good description of some aspects of Mongolia. The ‘morbid symptoms’, of course, make perfect material for crime fiction.” - Declan Burke

  This feature first appeared in the Irish Times.