Winner Alright

Irish Times’ racing correspondent Brian O’Connor got a nice bonus a couple of weeks back, when the dear Old Lady published an extract from his very fine debut novel, BLOODLINE. In the extract, our hero Liam Dee has just arrived at the yard where he works as a jockey, and where the body of a Ukrainian stable-boy has been discovered with the back of his head smashed in. Now read on …

Murder on the Curragh

THE ONLY SOUNDS came from crows lazily gliding over the yard to examine the flashing blue lights that still had enough power in the morning gloom to make you blink. But there wasn’t a murmur where there should have been the snorting clatter of keyed-up horses emerging from their night’s sleep and the shouts of frozen lads trying to keep them under control.
  After the initial frenzied arrival of police cars and an ambulance, there was an eerily mundane hour when little seemed to happen. The crime scene was sealed off and so was the stable yard. But then things seemed to stand still in the wait for specialists to show up. Rocky, Bailey and myself told a couple of detectives what we’d seen. Rocky said he’d been in the tack room when he thought he heard someone running outside. He figured his ears were playing tricks on him at first but went out to have a look and saw the box door in the alley open. That was when he saw the body, turned on the lights and tried to call the guards. But he’d heard an engine gunning outside the yard as well – like a motorcycle, he said.
  I told them how I’d encountered someone on a motorbike who’d tried to run me over.
  “What did this person look like, sir?” the detective asked.
  “I’d guess he was about my height, but it’s only a guess. He was wearing a helmet so I couldn’t see his face. Apart from that, nothing really – jeans, a leather jacket, boots. It was all so quick.”
  “What make of bike was it?”
  “It was one of those trackers, like they use for racing on mud.”
  He asked me what I was doing around the place so early.
  I explained that I had just driven from Dublin. He asked if anyone could verify what time I had left Dublin. I told him there wasn’t but I’d stopped for petrol soon after leaving Sandyford and the people in the station knew me.
  “And what were you doing here, sir?”
  “I was coming down to ride work. I’m Mrs McFarlane’s jockey. My car skidded and hit the railway bridge so I ran the rest of the way here.”
  “So you work here every day?”
  “No. I usually just ride out one morning a week, or come for schooling.”
  “Schooling?”
  “Getting horses to practise their jumping.”
  The detective told me to stay around and I assured him I wasn’t going anywhere. It all felt completely unreal. Such things didn’t happen in the middle of the Curragh. The bald, flat plain contained more horses than people, and most of the villains had four legs. Anything to do with horses could be dangerous and sometimes people were killed – but from a flailing leg or a bad fall: this was terribly different.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: Blatty, Hill, Gran, Lackberg, Mankell

William Peter Blatty’s THE REDEMPTION (Piatkus Books, £7.99, pb) is an unusual thriller, as you might expect from the author of THE EXORCIST. Opening in Albania in the 1970s, the story focuses on a man being tortured on suspicion of being an enemy agent of the State. The atmosphere is redolent of a John Le Carré Cold War thriller, albeit one with supernatural overtones - the tortured man, Dimiter, remains effortlessly unbroken, and is spoken of in whispered tones as ‘the agent from Hell’. The setting then switches to Jerusalem, where a local police detective investigates a number of strange murders, and the supernatural tone gives way to a more philosophical enquiry into the politics of revenge, salvation and redemption. Blatty’s prose is starkly rendered, a minimalist style that adds momentum to the propulsive plot. There are occasional poetic flourishes, however, which leaven the story’s hard-headed realism, just as Blatty’s hints that Dimiter may be a creature more exotic than a mere spy lend the thriller format an element of quixotic speculation. The net result is a haunting tale that remains thought-provoking long after the final revelation.
  TABOO (Simon & Schuster, £6.99, pb) is the debut offering from husband-and-wife writing team Kevin and Melissa Hill. The latter is better known as the author of a series of best-selling women’s fiction titles, and here she creates the ultra-feminine feminist Reilly Steel, a California-born forensic investigator seconded to the newly founded Garda Forensic Unit, based in Dublin. The narrative employs for its spine a series of perverse murders that all appear to transgress social taboos, although the plot itself is secondary to the establishing of Reilly Steel as a credible Irish alternative to the international popularity of CSI-related investigations. In this the Casey Hill writing team is largely successful: Reilly Steel is a broadly drawn but likeable character, smart but not omnipotent, entirely capable but vulnerable too. The presence of a Quantico-trained FBI investigator on the mean streets of Dublin is plausibly achieved, and the novel derives its page-turning quality from the rapid pace of events as the investigation gathers momentum. The frenetic pace, however, results in a lack of psychological depth when it comes to characterisation, while the machinations of the fiendish killer are revealed to be disappointingly clichéd at the finale.
  CITY OF THE DEAD (Faber and Faber, £12.99, pb) is Sara Gran’s fourth novel, and the first to feature the private investigator Claire DeWitt. Commissioned to find a missing man in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, DeWitt applies her unique brand of investigation style. This echoes the modus operandi of classic private eyes such as Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, but often appears counter-intuitive due to DeWitt’s devotion to the theories of legendary French detective Jacques Silette, as espoused in his sole publication, ‘Detection’. Searching in the least likely places, working off instinct and hunch, DeWitt trawls the devastated New Orleans in pursuit of a truth she explicitly acknowledges does not exist. The tale has strong echoes of Ken Bruen’s post-modern take on the private eye novel, in which the case being investigated is less important than the self-invigilating investigator; as is the case with Bruen’s Jack Taylor novels, in which his native Galway looms large as a character, New Orleans, and the lack of response from the Bush administration to the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Katrina, provides Gran not only with her setting but also her theme. The result is a tour-de-force. Mock profundity blends into brilliantly detailed description on a line-by-line basis in a novel that deserves to be read in tandem with James Lee Burke’s magisterial THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN.
  THE GALLOWS BIRD (HarperCollins, £12.99, pb) is the fourth in Camilla Lackberg’s Patrick Hedström series, which is set in the relatively sedate backwater of Tanumshede in Sweden. Opening with what appears to be a straightforward single-vehicle drink-driving fatality which subsequently proves to be something rather more sinister, the novel broadens out to accommodate a number of narratives which run parallel to Hedström’s initial investigation. Chief among these is the murder of a contestant in a TV reality show being shot in Tanumshede, although Lackberg also invests the story with domestic detail in the run-up to Hedström’s impending marriage to his partner, Erica, who is herself struggling to cope with the demands imposed by her sister’s depression. Lackberg is one of Sweden’s best-selling authors, but THE GALLOWS BIRD is a curiously disjointed police procedural, its frequent digressions into the domestic minutiae of the protagonists’ lives creating a frustratingly halting tale that lacks narrative drive.
  THE TROUBLED MAN (Harvill Secker, £19.99, pb) of Henning Mankell’s latest offering can only be his perpetually self-questioning police detective Kurt Wallander. In this, his last case, Wallander is more troubled than ever, and not only by the disappearance of the future father-in-law of his daughter, Linda; Wallander, unable to ignore the protests of his aging body, is contemplating his own mortality and casting a cold eye over his career. What unfolds is a novel that works on a number of levels: a compelling investigation into a Swedish Cold War spy ring, a philosophical assessment of the nature of policing and its function in society, and a very personal evaluation of a person’s worth in the grand scheme of things, as Wallander opens a ledger on his own life’s profit and loss. Written in Mankell’s downbeat style (beautifully translated by Laurie Thompson), the fatalistic tone is entirely fitting for the final testimony of one of crime fiction’s great protagonists. The result is a hugely satisfying novel that ranks alongside Mankell’s best, a heartbreaking tale of descent into despair and darkness that serves as a totem for what great crime writing can achieve.

  Declan Burke is the editor of the forthcoming collection DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS: IRISH CRIME WRITING IN THE 21st CENTURY (Liberties Press).

  This column first appeared in the Irish Times.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Casey Hill

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?
SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. There has never been a more perfect rendering of a psychopath than Harris’s brilliant Hannibal Lecter.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Jeffery Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme - he’s super-smart, very cool and never has any problems getting a parking space in Manhattan.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Katie Price aka Jordan - she has the best story ideas. Nah, no such thing as guilt when it comes to reading anything.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Bringing our daughter Carrie into a book shop and seeing TABOO on the shelves for the first time. She was only nine months old but think she looked quite impressed.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Difficult question but would have to go with John Connolly’s THE WHITE ROAD, though his brilliant writing almost transcends genre.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Casey Hill’s TABOO, of course. Failing that, any one of John Connolly’s would transfer well to the big screen if the director could properly capture the supernatural elements.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Best: Being able to set your own hours and work from anywhere. Worst: Being able to set your own hours and work from anywhere.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Reilly Steel hunts down another gruesome murderer using street smarts and shiny new forensic equipment.

Who are you reading right now?
Chuffed to have been offered a sneak preview of Declan Burke’s fab new tome ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, which is actually very cool indeed.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
First, I’d beg him to let me write just once more before choosing to read. Then I’d ask Himself for an exclusive interview about his life story, write about it, then read away to my heart’s content on the Caribbean island I bought with the royalties.

Casey Hill’s TABOO is published by Simon & Schuster.

EIGHTBALL BOOGIE: The Val McDermid Verdict

Another week, another dollar - or $0.99c, to be precise. EIGHTBALL BOOGIE garnered some very nice readers’ reviews over the weekend, with a certain Val McDermid popping up on Facebook on Friday to lend her considerable reputation to our on-going scheme to obliterate the mortgage one ebook at a time. To wit:

“I can’t remember the last time I got so much pleasure for 86p. I’d have paid at least 95p for it. But all joking apart, there’s a lot to like in Declan Burke’s debut, including some cracking plot twists. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants an entertaining way to spend a few hours. And doesn’t mind a bit of blood and gore along the way.” - Val McDermid

Meanwhile, over on Amazon US, John ‘I Am Spartacus’ Kane left a short-but-sweet review that runs thusly:

“I could not put this down. Raymond Chandler meets Ken Bruen. Surprising to the end and some really dastardly bad guys. A great work of Emerald Noir!!”

Chandler and Bruen? My metaphorical cup runneth over, metaphorically speaking. Many thanks, folks - the good word is deeply appreciated.
If anyone wants to investigate further, all the info - including how to get a free EIGHTBALL BOOGIE in hard copy, plus P&P - can be found here …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE BOOK OF LIES by Mary Horlock

If the novel has taught us anything it’s that killers come in all shapes and sizes, and that the unlikeliest murderers are often the most charming.
  Cathy Rozier is a Guernsey teenager, an overweight history geek befriended by the blond, vivacious Nicolette. The friendship is doomed. “It’s been a fortnight since they found her body,” Cathy announces on the very first page, which opens in December, 1985, “and for the most part I’m glad she’s gone. But I also can’t believe she’s dead, and I should do because I did it.”
  Mary Horlock’s clever conceit is to make Cathy both protagonist and antagonist, the killer upon whom we rely to excavate the truth behind Nicolette’s death. THE BOOK OF LIES is not a ‘whodunit’ but a ‘whydunit’, a first-person psychological exploration of the mind of a murderer.
  In this it has much in common with Jim Thompson’s classic noir ‘THE KILLER INSIDE ME, the first-person confessional of Lou Ford, a sociopathic killer who is an outwardly friendly small-town sheriff.
  Horlock, as Thompson did before her, makes powerful use of the local vernacular, employing an indigenous patois and an ostensibly languid style to lure the reader in to what appears to be an easygoing backwater. Once we’re under the skin of the place, however, Guernsey is quickly revealed as a festering hotbed of secrets, lies, betrayals and murders.
  Arguably the most important ‘character’ in the novel after Cathy, the apparently idyllic Guernsey is portrayed as a prison of sorts. Yet the island exerts an inexorable pull on its inhabitants. “Why is it we find this little rock so hard to leave?” asks Charles Rozier when dictating his life’s testimony to Emile Rozier, Cathy’s father.
  The answer to that question is ‘History’ (Cathy, whose narrative takes the form of her own testimony, has a habit of capitalizing the words that are most important to her; Horlock, meanwhile, read History and History of Art at Cambridge). As her account progresses, we realise that Cathy, the daughter of a historian, understands that an appreciation of history is a double-edged sword. Cathy thrives at school as a result of her excellence in the subject, and yet that success leads to her being bullied as a nerd and a teacher’s pet.
  On a deeper level, Cathy also appreciates that what we understand to be History is simply the Official Version of Events, one which doesn’t necessarily explain the truth of what actually happened.
  This applies to Cathy’s own version of the death of Nicolette, as recounted in Cathy’s journal, in which she implicitly admits that she is, by dint of being our only witness to the events described, an unreliable narrator.
  This in turn funnels into the parallel narrative of Horlock’s tale, in which Emile Rozier, via his brother Charles, gives his version of the events of the German occupation of Guernsey during WWII, in which Emile’s actions as a callow resistance fighter led to the death of his own father. Emile’s take on history gives rise in turn to other versions, as the historian Charles seeks to verify the truth, or otherwise, of Emile’s account.
  The result is a satisfyingly complex story which is entirely at ease as it shifts between the recent past and Cathy’s present and deftly excavates the layers of betrayal and treachery that have settled on Guernsey since the German occupation. The chief delight is Horlock’s winning way with language, as she creates in Cathy an irreverent stylist who delights in offbeat digressions and quirky phrasing, and whose status as a loner and observer gives her a disconcerting facility for unearthing rough diamonds from the dross of her day-to-day life.
  That said, the quirkiness can prove an irritation, particularly when it diverts attention from the intensity of a rapidly developing scenario. Late in the novel, with Cathy potentially in peril, Horlock can’t resist unnecessary insertions: “When we got to Saumarez Park I didn’t smell a rat (i.e. her). I didn’t want to look a gift horse (i.e. two-faced cow) in the mouth.”
  Meanwhile, Horlock’s account of the events immediately preceding Nicolette’s death feels surprisingly rushed and contrived, and lacks the poise that characterises the rest of the novel.
  Those caveats aside, THE BOOK OF LIES is an assured debut, and Horlock’s irreverent style marks the arrival of a distinctive new voice. - Declan Burke

  Mary Horlock’s THE BOOK OF LIES is published by Canongate.

  This review first appeared in the Sunday Business Post

In Like Glynn

Not naming any names or nowt, but as events this week in Ireland have proved, you can’t be too paranoid about the likely consequences when the worlds of business and politics collide. That’s a theme explored in ‘Limitless’ (see review here), the movie adapted from the novel THE DARK FIELDS written by Alan Glynn (right, in full-on Kenneth Branagh mode). As he explains in an Irish Times interview published today, it’s a theme Glynn further explores in the novels WINTERLAND (2009) and the forthcoming BLOODLAND (2011). To wit:

“People Do Get Away With Murder”

A writer of dark, thoughtful thrillers, Alan Glynn waited 10 years for his first novel to get the movie treatment. But when your hero Robert De Niro is starring in it, it’s worth the wait, he tells Declan Burke

“The idea of there being a ‘quick fix’ for everything in your life is one that’s current in the culture,” says Alan Glynn, author of THE DARK FIELDS, from which the film ‘Limitless’ is adapted. “There’s a drug for everything, there’s a quick diet, you can make yourself over, all these kinds of things. So it was a question of taking that notion and reducing it to a simple pill - if you take this one pill, you can have the world, but it’s going to cost you your soul.”
  ‘Limitless’ stars Bradley Cooper, who plays struggling New York writer Eddie Morra. Once Eddie is introduced to a new super-drug, NZT, his life is changed utterly. Productive, insightful and surpassingly intelligent, Eddie is soon making a fortune trading stocks. But every drug has its side-effects, and Eddie’s come-down involves paranoia, betrayal and the distinct possibility of an early death.
  Right now, Alan Glynn’s adrenaline rush has no need of artificial stimulants.
  “Before the movie started,” says Glynn of last week’s New York premiere of ‘Limitless’, “the director, Neil Burger, stood up and said he wanted to introduce a few people who were involved in the movie. And he said, ‘This all started with the book,’ and introduced me first (laughs). I hadn’t expected that, and I thought it was lovely, because after that he went through Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper, all the rest. So that was very gratifying.”
  What made it even better was that De Niro was sitting three rows behind in the theatre. “He was a hero of mine, as he was to a whole generation,” says Glynn. “If you had told me when the rights for THE DARK FIELDS were first signed [in 2001] that I’d have to wait another ten years to see it made, but Robert De Niro would be in the movie, I’d have taken that.”
  In a neat touch, the title of the book Eddie publishes in ‘Limitless’ is called ‘Illuminating the Dark Fields’. In the real world, THE DARK FIELDS has been re-released under the title LIMITLESS.
  “I’m not so happy about that,” he says. “Obviously, I’m very attached to the original title, it’s from the last page of THE GREAT GATSBY, and it has thematic resonances throughout the whole book, while the title ‘Limitless’ is the product of a marketing testing system. But the book has been re-released here and in the US, it was in the shops in the US before the movie opened and selling quite well. I mean, even before the movie has been released, the book has sold more copies now than it did on the entire run of its first publication.”
  Glynn, who lives in Dublin with his wife and two sons, lived in New York from 1985 to 1989, but only started writing THE DARK FIELDS after he moved back to Ireland from Italy in 1999. “That was around the time of the dot com bubble, and in the book there’s this whole section about the biggest corporate merger in American history, which I based on the Time Warner / AOL merger of the time.”
  The Faustian pact Eddie enters into is a theme Glynn subsequently explored in WINTERLAND (2009). Set in Dublin just as the property boom is going bust, and hailed as remarkably prescient on its release, it explores the shadowy nexus where the worlds of politics, business and white- and blue-collar crime intersect.
  “In anything I’ve ever written,” he says, “there always seems to be a dark, malign power figure at the heart of the story. It seems to me that the modern incarnation of that malign power in society is the CEO, who’s almost like the Machiavellian Prince figure. A politician or even a monarch might have a sense of responsibility to go with that power, but the CEO has a responsibility solely to his or her shareholders, so it’s almost an amoral power. In that sense it’s a very modern pure form of power, which can even be more evil in its consequences, with no regard all for any community or human value whatsoever.
  “I go into that in BLOODLAND as well. WINTERLAND is about the property boom in Ireland, but BLOODLAND has a broader, more international setting. Part of it has to do with the illegal mining of coltan in the Congo, and the lack of accountability there in the supply chain between the metals extracted illegally and high-end consumer products that are found in the First World. Coltan is essential for use in capacitors in the electronic equipment we use all the time - it’s in every mobile phone, every game console, that we use. But there doesn’t seem to be any moral connect between that and the conditions in which this stuff is extracted in the Congo, and which has in part been responsible for a war that’s been going on for nearly 20 years, in which five to eight million people have been killed. I mean, it’s covered intermittently, but the scale of it is mind-boggling. But because it’s not about oil, it flies under the radar, strategically speaking. I don’t want to sound polemical or that I’m pushing an agenda, but I’m using that to explore the kinds of power figures who control that trade, from the upper echelons of corporate America. That’s one strand of the story, and there’s a political aspect, and military contractors, and the privatisation of war as a business.
  “What I’m planning for the next book,” he continues, “which is called GRAVELAND - it’s the third in a loose trilogy - is to go back into the past, back to the 1870s in America, when the railroads were being built. There’s a character called James Vaughn who features in WINTERLAND, the old American corporate guy, he’s also in ‘Bloodland’ and he’ll feature largely in GRAVELAND - it goes back into his family history, almost like exploring a Kennedy-like dynasty.”
  Glynn was first inspired to write by what he calls the ‘great paranoid thrillers’ of the 1970s. How does ‘Limitless’ compares as a conspiracy thriller to that Golden Age?
  “It’s obviously different to the classic conspiracy thrillers,” he says, “the tone and the feel of those movies was so specific to the times, y’know, Watergate, Vietnam, and that paranoid, claustrophobic feeling can’t be recreated authentically. And it’s definitely not in this movie - there’s a lighter tone to this film, there’s a knowing, satirical edge to it that you didn’t get in the classic conspiracy thrillers.”
  While the movie ends on an upbeat but morally complex note, the novel THE DARK FIELDS has a very bleak and noir finale.
  “It’s not the book up there on screen,” Glynn concedes, “but you expect that. There’s always more depth in a book. In the movie, Eddie doesn’t get the really fuzzy end of the Faustian pact he gets in the book. But then, cinema is a whole different medium, there’s a totally different energy to it. The movie is the book’s story edited down to the bone.”
  That didn’t stop the author from enjoying the movie, which topped the US box office on its release last weekend.
  “To be perfectly honest, I grinned like a loon the whole way through,” he says. “I was anticipating feeling ambivalent, or even horrified, possibly, and afterwards there was such a sense of relief that I’d enjoyed it so much. I met Neil Burger two minutes after it finished, and I was able to shake his hand and say, ‘I loved it.’ Which was a great relief (laughs). To be able to speak positively about it is great. It’d be a strange position to be in otherwise, to have to either (a) lie about it or (b) tell the brutal truth. But I don’t have to do either of those, which is great.”
  Despite the themes of power and corruption, and the criminal activities in which his characters tend to dabble, Glynn is in no hurry to pigeonhole himself as a particular kind of writer.
  “I don’t really care about the labels. When I say I don’t see myself as a crime writer, I don’t mean that to sound judgemental. I love crime fiction, but that’s not in my head when I’m writing. I wouldn’t consider myself a literary writer either, I just do what I do.”
  The innate conservatism of the crime novel, where order almost inevitably emerges from chaos, is an unnecessarily restrictive constraint.
  “There is that element of conservatism and morality that exists in a lot of crime fiction, the idea that the wrong has to be set right. But some of the stuff I’ve done has almost been a cynical conclusion that right doesn’t triumph, that the harsh reality is that it often doesn’t, and that people do get away with murder.
  “I mean, by the end of WINTERLAND, the bad guy isn’t caught and held accountable, but he does die according to his own weakness. There’s a certain amount of wrapping-up there, but it’s a bit more complex than just the bad guy brought down by the good guy.”

Alan Glynn’s Top Paranoid Thrillers

‘Chinatown’ (1974)
“With its sun-drenched 1930s LA setting, a brilliant script by Robert Towne and unforgettable score by Jerry Goldsmith, Polanski’s ‘Chinatown’ is the ultimate study of power and corruption. It looks back nostalgically to the classic noir era, but it also roots itself in the malaise of the 1970s – because never before had a big screen American hero been so casually crushed by malign, unaccountable forces.”

‘Three Days of the Condor’ (1975)
“The ending is brilliant, it’s an ending they’d never use today. The Robert Redford character is standing outside the ‘New York Times’ offices, and he’s telling this guy he’s about to blow the story, this conspiracy, wide open. And the guy is saying, well, go ahead, but do you really think it’s worth it, every day for the rest of your life looking over your shoulder? And it all ends on a very dark, paranoid note …”

‘All the President’s Men’ (1976)
“Even today, it really stands up. I saw it again recently and it’s just fantastic. What’s great about it is the way it cuts out before the whole thing about Nixon really goes off, they’re typing away - tchk-tchk-tchck- it’s up there on the screen, it’s fantastic. And that kind of ending requires the audience to know what happened next, to be intelligent enough to make their own leap. That doesn’t happen a lot these days.”

‘Marathon Man’ (1976)
“I love Marathon Man. I saw it when it came out first, I was still a kid, and I absolutely adored it. Especially the music, by Michael Small. You can’t get it anymore. None of his scores are available, and he’s one of the key ’70s composers of music for paranoid thrillers - ‘Klute’, ‘Marathon Man’ and a couple of others.”

  ‘Limitless’ goes on general release this weekend. Alan Glynn’s BLOODLAND will be published by Faber & Faber in September.

  This interview first appeared in the Irish Times

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: Rewind

Rewind (15A) ****
Karen (Amy Huberman) has a past she’d rather hide from her husband, businessman Simon (Peter Gaynor). Unfortunately for Karen, her ex Karl (Allen Leech) is out of prison and determined to pick up the pieces of his life - even if that means shattering Karen’s life in order achieve it. A compulsive and thoughtful film set for the most part in the suburbs of Dublin, Rewind offers a credibility that’s rare in Irish movies. PJ Dillon’s direction is sharp and clear (Dillon also co-writes), an arrow-straight narrative that offers an emotionally nuanced tale that make Karen’s plight utterly believable as she attempts to shed herself of the blackmailing Karl. There’s a palpable sense of menace in a fine performance from Leech, as Karl ups the ante and turns the screw on Karen, although Huberman - who won the IFTA award for Best Actress for her role here - steals the show with her compelling turn as a recovering addict trying to cope with her worst nightmare coming true. All in all, a gritty, downbeat and pleasingly authentic Irish noir. - Declan Burke

  Rewind goes on nationwide release on March 25th. For the trailer, roll it there, Collette …

Cometh The Hour, Cometh The Mankell

I had the very great pleasure last month of interviewing Henning Mankell (right), whose latest novel, THE TROUBLED MAN, will be the last outing for Mankell’s iconic protagonist, Kurt Wallander. The interview ran a lot like this:

Forget Stieg Larsson. Henning Mankell, the author of the Kurt Wallander novels, is the man who put modern Scandinavian crime writing on the map.
  With 30 million books sold worldwide, Wallander is one of fiction’s great police detectives. And yet the biggest mystery surrounding Mankell’s latest novel, THE TROUBLED MAN, is why he would choose to kill off Kurt Wallander.
  “Well,” says Mankell, “the truth is that ten years ago I decided that the Wallander novel I was writing would be his last case (laughs). But in the last number of years I started to feel that there was one more story in him, but that this story would be about Wallander investigating himself and his own life. And you can see, when you finish reading the novel, that there’s really nothing more to be said about him, that he has nothing more to say about himself. So this is why it must be the last Wallander story.”
  Despite his fame, the award-winning and best-selling Mankell is unassuming and quietly spoken, a serious but self-deprecating man with a neat line in dry humour. In fact, it’s tempting to believe that Kurt Wallander bears more than a passing resemblance to his creator.
  Mankell laughs aloud at the suggestion. “Well, I believe Wallander is a cheerful person. It is not true that Wallander is a mirror to myself, but perhaps he is a mirror in one respect, and that is that I too have a cheerful personality.”
  A ‘cheerful personality’ is not a trait a fan would automatically apply to Wallander, especially those who have seen the rather glum Kenneth Branagh play the part during the recent Wallander series. Mankell, on the other hand, believes that of all the actors to play the detective, including those in his native Sweden, Branagh comes closest to capturing the essence of Wallander.
  “Very much so,” he says appreciatively. “I was very pleased when Kenneth Branagh came to me about making the Wallander films, because he is a very serious actor and director. And of course he has that experience of directing Shakespeare, which is perhaps why he made such a success of the films. I liked them very much. Actually, [the producers] might be annoyed with me for saying this, because it might be a secret, I don’t know, but Kenneth Branagh will be making more Wallander films in the near future. I think his films really capture the spirit of the books. They seem to strip away everything and make them bare, in the way that Shakespeare could strip back a stage to its bare essentials.”
  Mankell, who is also a playwright, and who writes teleplays for TV, published his first novel in 1977, although it would be 20 years later before the first Wallander novel, THE FACELESS KILLERS, appeared.
  “Well, I didn’t set out to write crime novels,” he explains. “In the 1980s, I left Sweden to travel and live abroad, to get a sense of how life is lived beyond the Swedish way, to broaden my mind as a writer. And when I came back again, a spirit of xenophobia seemed to have taken hold in the country. And xenophobia, to me, is a crime, so it made sense to address that by writing a crime novel. So the subject came first, and then the way of writing about it came after.”
  Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, the Swedish husband-and-wife writing team who created the Martin Beck series, were early influences.
  “Oh yes, very much so. They published their first novel when I was 17, which is a very formative age, and I thought the first four novels were very, very strong. After that I thought they got a little weaker, but that is perhaps understandable, as Wahloo was in poorer health. He died just a year after the first novel was published.
  “But I think if we talk about the influence of crime writing,” he says, “I think it is an old and ancient thing. Take the classical Greek theatre, look at Medea. That play has a woman who kills her two children for the sake of jealousy. If that’s not a crime story, I don’t know what is. And Shakespeare too, he knew the value of writing about crime. And Dostoevsky, he had much to say about crime in society.”
  When it comes to specifically Swedish crime fiction, some theorists have pinpointed the murder in 1986 of the then Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme, as the catalyst that sparked the phenomenon. Does Mankell agree?
  “No. Absolutely not.”
  Nonetheless, Mankell acknowledges that Palme’s death had a convulsive effect on Sweden. In THE TROUBLED MAN, for example, the possibility that Palme was in reality a Russian spy is brought up on a number of occasions.
  “There was an element in society that believed that,” Mankell says, “a right-wing conservative element. But then, at the time there were all kinds of attempts to discredit Palme. For instance, there was a rumour that he was mentally unbalanced, because he visited a mental institution so often. Well, yes, he did - because his mother was living there at the time. People would tell him he needed to address these rumours, but he didn’t seem to care. He was a brilliant man. I think that Sweden would probably have changed if he had not died when he did, but I believe that it would not have changed so dramatically, or in the way it did.”
  A moral desire to explore the wrongs undermining Swedish society underpins much of Mankell’s work, but he is not content to play the armchair warrior and simply write about a commitment to righting wrongs. For many years now he has been working, unheralded, as a writer and director of a theatre in Maputo, in Mozambique. He also donates a sizeable portion of his earnings to charity, has co-founded a publishing company dedicated to unearthing young Swedish and African writers, and last year he was on board the MS Sofia as part of the flotilla attempting to break the embargo on the Gaza Strip.
  Given the opportunity, it’s a journey Mankell would be only too happy to repeat.
  “Oh yes, most definitely,” he says enthusiastically. “I believe that if you have a political conscience, then it’s not enough to write about it, it’s important to act. Of course, the trouble is that I am banned from entering Israel for the next ten years as a result of last year’s flotilla. But then, I wasn’t attempting to enter Israel, I was trying to enter Gaza, and I think it’s important to remind people that the Israeli blockade is illegal. It helps such things if there are people involved whose name is known, and if I am one of those people, then I will do all I can do to help.”
  Previous to THE TROUBLED MAN, Mankell’s novels were more literary offerings such as KENNEDY’S BRAIN (2007) and DANIEL (2010). With Wallander exiting stage left, is Mankell leaving crime fiction behind?
  “If you look at the books I’ve written,” he says, “only twenty-five per cent or so are crime novels. And I would never say that I will never write another crime story. If the idea arises, and it is a crime story idea, then that is what I will write.
  “In the past I have written about Wallander’s daughter, Linda, she was the main character in one novel [BEFORE THE FROST (2005)]. Perhaps it’s possible that Linda could come to the fore in future novels, and that her father would be there in the background. That’s certainly a possibility.
  “All I can tell you now is that my next novel, the one I’m working on now, is set in the 19th century in Mozambique, about a Swedish woman who ran the biggest brothel in Maputo. Where did she come from? One day she was the biggest tax-payer in the city, the next she was gone. Who was she? My account is purely fiction, and I couldn’t say even with the subject matter that it’s a crime novel. But after that, who knows?”

  Henning Mankell’s THE TROUBLED MAN is published by Harvill Secker on March 31st.

  This interview first appeared in the Evening Herald

Life, The Universe And Everything

It’s my birthday today, according to Facebook, and if Facebook says so then it must be true. The best present of the day actually arrived last night, when I went in to check on the sleeping Princess Lilyput (right), and discovered that, like her silly ol’ Dad, she just doesn’t know when to quit on a good book.
  Elsewhere, Mrs Lovely Wife presented me with a Kindle to mark the occasion. A strange feeling: why should I feel like a traitor for liking my birthday present so much? Anyway, the early signs are good, and the actual reading experience was so positive that it was only afterwards I realised I’d had no issues with reading off a machine. Unsurprising, perhaps, when I spend 10-12 hours per day reading off machines, but I was worried that the Kindle might somehow make the reading of books a more mechanical or clinical experience than reading good old-fashioned dead trees. Not so.
  Naturally, the first ebook I downloaded was EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, mainly because I’ve been plugging the bejasus out of said tome for the last few weeks, and I wanted to make sure it looked the part, and that no one is being cheated when they fork over their hard-earned $0.99c or £0.86p.
  The readers’ reviews suggest that they’re not, and pardon me for a moment while I dust down ye olde trumpet and give it a lung-bursting blast. There have been four readers’ reviews to date, which isn’t a lot, but I’ll take quality over quantity any day, and they’ve all been five-star big-ups. Here’s the skinny from Kindle UK:

Eightball Masterclass *****
“You want a book with heart, humour and brains then look no further than EIGHTBALL BOOGIE … I am quite frankly in awe of Declan Burke’s ability with a sentence. His writing is at turns lyrical and succinct; his dialogue snaps in your ear and his characters are so real they stay in your head long after you’ve turned the last page. Simply can’t praise this writer enough. Get yourself a copy now!” - Michael Malone

Boogie On Down *****
“Harry Rigby. Great protagonist. Wish I had his knack for one-liners. They’re a defining feature of the novel. I didn’t do a formal count, but there has to be at least a couple of wisecracks on every page. Wise mouth, cocky attitude, low self-esteem … I loved the book.” - Gerard Brennan

An Irish Crime Classic *****
“Much has been written about the new wave of quality crime fiction coming out of Ireland at the moment and arguably, EIGHTBALL BOOGIE is the novel that kicked it all off. EIGHTBALL is a blistering amalgam of hardboiled, Irish noir reminiscent of Chandler, Hammett, Willeford or Elmore Leonard but wholly unique and wholly Irish at the same time. In EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, Burke is one of the first writers to recognise just how ‘noir’ life can be in Irish towns - Ken Bruen is another … What elevates EIGHTBALL BOOGIE to its status as a small classic of Irish crime writing, however, is its prescience. In its portrait of an Ireland at the height of its slow, self-satisfied orgy of consumption - of cocaine, dodgy property deals, dodgier sex, Mercs and facelifts (EIGHTBALL does them all well and more) - it is as if the novel was written with the coming crash in mind. EIGHTBALL BOOGIE is witty, hilarious at times, violent, biting social commentary which also manages to be a little bit sad and brilliant at the same time. An outrider for the sub-genre of Irish crime fiction and a small classic of the genre. Buy it.” - Kevin McCarthy

  And, over on Kindle US:

Noir at its Finest *****
“At times the book is like a phantasmagoria, with vivid characters and lurid scenes appearing out of the murky Northwest Ireland winter, and fading again. The dialogue sparkles with one-line zingers, the exposition (descriptions of snow, ice, winter) is perfect, and the sense of menace is all-pervading. A scintillating read -highly recommended.” - Frank McGrath

  I thank you all kindly, folks. Meanwhile, if you’re of a mind to dip a metaphorical toe into EIGHTBALL but don’t own a Kindle, there’s always the option of getting a paperback copy for free (plus postage & packaging). For more, clickety-click here …
  So there it is. The title of this post will give most of you a fair idea of how old I am, although I have to say I’m a tad disappointed that the wisdom of the ages and / or cosmos has yet to seep through. Maybe that comes after the cake.

The CANDY Man Can

TS O’Rourke is one of the unsung heroes of the current wave of Irish crime writing. A pioneer when it was neither profitable nor popular, he was writing hard-boiled police procedurals in the mid-’90s; as was the case with Ken Bruen, his first novels, featuring DS Dan Carroll and DC Sam Grant, were set on the mean streets of London. GANGLANDS (1996), on the other hand, was set in Dublin, as the lethal Costello brothers make their bid to control the burgeoning drugs scene.
  He dropped out of sight, publishing-wise, for some years, but now O’Rourke is back with an ebook novella, CANDY SAYS KILL. Quoth the blurb elves:

When a stranger pulls into a roadside bar and motel he gets an offer he can’t refuse from a wily femme fatale intent on murder. Can she be trusted to keep her side of the bargain? Is anything ever what it seems?

  Short and very probably not in the slightest bit sweet, CANDY SAYS KILL can be found here …
  Meanwhile, O’Rourke has also e-published the Carroll and Grant novels - DEATH CALL and DAMNED NATION - as a two-for-one collection, again available as an ebook. For all the info, clickety-click here …
  As for recommendations, some whippersnapper called Declan Burke obviously approved. To wit: “As blunt and effective as the average anvil, TS O’Rourke’s prose was hardboiled, pickled and left out to dry under a post-apocalyptic sun.”
  Nice. All together now: “The Candyman can ’cos he fixes it with love and makes the world taste good …”

Can We Fit Just One More E Into PEELER?

It’s going to be a lot tougher to keep up with Irish crime fiction now that writers are bypassing the traditional structures and going directly to the e-market - see Alexander O’Hara here, and Ruby Barnes here. And that’s on top of the writers who are conventionally published but are also availing of the e-option, such as Kevin McCarthy, whose debut novel PEELER is now available in electronic form.
  Here’s a quick review of PEELER I contributed to January Magazine’s end-of-year round-up of the best books of 2010. To wit:

PEELER by Kevin McCarthy

Eoin McNamee, Benjamin Black and Cora Harrison are among those who write historical Irish crime fiction, and Kevin McCarthy’s PEELER (Mercier Press) deserves to be mentioned in the same breath. Set in Cork in 1920, during the Irish War of Independence, the novel has for its main protagonist Acting Sergeant Sean O’Keefe, a man who is not only a policeman with the hated Royal Irish Constabulary, but also a veteran of the Great War. McCarthy has made things doubly difficult for himself by choosing such a man for his hero, as Ireland’s relationship remains conflicted even today with the men who served in the RIC and fought for Britain during WWI. It’s a testament to his skill as a storyteller, then, that the complex O’Keefe - who considers himself as Irish as the next man, and is considered suspect by his superiors for that very reason - is such a sympathetic character as, aided and abetted by the despised Black-and-Tans, he pursues a killer who is also wanted by the IRA. McCarthy’s historical detail is excellent as he weaves a backdrop of black ops and blacker propaganda, with O’Keefe often a lone voice of reason and law-and-order while about him move squads of killers, both rebel and state-sanctioned. The pace and tension are expertly handled in what is a traditional page-turner of a thriller, yet McCarthy invests the novel with occasional poetic flourishes that highlight the bleak environment in which O’Keefe operates. All told, it’s a remarkably assured debut. - Declan Burke

  Don’t take my word for it, though - check out the rather impressive array of readers’ reviews PEELER has already generated at Amazon US, and here at Amazon UK …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE by Aimee Bender

I thought was going to hate THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE. The title makes it sound like stereotypical Book Club bait; the quirky hook, that of Rose’s ability to taste emotions in food, sounded twee.
  As it happens, Aimee Bender grounds the quirkiness of that hook in a very plausible reality. Perversely, and despite the strangeness that pervades the novel, there is very little that is not determinedly realistic about Rose’s experience. Her unusual talent is simply a means to an end, which is the excavation of the profound emotional nuances which shape our day-to-day lives.
  Whereas most novels tend to concentrate on emotional extremes - and logically so, as these provide dramatic opportunities for writers to exploit - Aimee Bender is more concerned with the minutiae of everyday life, and the gradual accretion of more humdrum emotional responses to the tiny triumphs and failures of our lives. It’s a very effective approach.
  The main protagonist and first-person narrator is Rose Edelstein, who is nine years old when the novel opens (later stages of the novel take place when Rose is twelve, and in her early 20s). A very likeable character, she blends an unassuming public persona with a sharp eye for detail in her interior monologues.
  Apart from her unique ability to taste emotions, Rose is an unremarkable child who achieves decent grades in school and is not a problem for her parents. The reader may wonder at Rose’s facility for language at a young age, and question the veracity of her insights, given that she is so callow. By the same token, Aimee Bender writes with such panache that it feels begrudging to question Rose’s maturity; Rose is neatly drawn as a child, particularly in terms of her self-questioning as she approaches puberty. It’s also true that the narrative arc of the novel offers, by the finale, a Rose who is in her 20s, so it’s possible to argue that the young Rose, despite the first-person narration and the immediacy of her observations, is actually written by the older Rose.
  Rose is one of two siblings, and lives very much in the shade of her brother Joseph, who is the recipient of a very different kind of love from their mother - while their mother loves Rose, she is obsessed with Joseph. This is in part because Joseph was her first-born, but also because Joseph is something of a prodigy, particularly in terms of speculative physics.
  Oddly enough, and despite the fact that Joseph is an insular person who makes little effort to connect with the world at large, Bender makes him an utterly compelling character, even before the revelation that Joseph has a talent that is even stranger than Rose’s. As the novel progresses, and Joseph grows even more uncommunicative, he becomes ever more compelling, to the point where his story assumes tragic proportions. Despite the various emotional ups and downs of the Edelstein family, as documented by Rose, Joseph’s is the most heartbreaking.
  Rose’s mother is another complex character, and one superbly drawn in all her strengths and failings. Despite the fact that Rose tells us that her mother loves her less than she does her brother, we get no sense that Rose is unloved - indeed, the pair seem to have a strong mother-daughter bond. It’s this very bond, of course, that makes Rose’s discovery of her talent for tasting emotions all the more profound, when she discovers that her mother’s much-loved lemon cake is shot through with frustration, loss and despair.
  Later, again through tasting her mother’s food, Rose discovers that her mother is having an affair at work, at the co-operative where she is employed as a wood-worker. The discover impinges very little on the Edelstein household, and not only because Rose keeps the secret to herself; Rose’s mother has always been somewhat distant, not fully cut out for the job of motherhood, in part because her own relationship with Rose’s Grandma has always been a strained and distant one.
  Rose’s father and Joseph’s friend George are also prominent characters in the novel. Rose develops a crush on the latter, who is also something of a science prodigy, but both George and her father remain frustratingly out of reach for Rose for most of the story. As with all of Bender’s characters, however, both are plausibly drawn and fully rounded, and play their part in the developing parallel tales of how Rose and Joseph come to terms with their unique talents.
  The quality of the writing is exceptional. Bender quickly establishes a style that is light and conversational as Rose narrates the unfolding events, an offbeat and deadpan tone that always contains the potential to divert into more poetic digressions and keen observations on the human condition:

“I could feel the tears beginning to collect in my throat again, but I pushed them apart, away from each other. Tears are only a threat in groups.” (pg 29)

  And again:

“I felt such a clash inside, even then, when she praised Joseph. Jealous, that he got to be a geode - a geode! - but also relieved, that he soaked up most of her super-attention, which on occasion made me feel like I was drowning in light. The same light he took and folded into rock walls to hide in the bevelled sharp edges of topaz crystal and schorl.” (pg 57)

  Bender’s parallel career as a writer of short stories is evident here, given the finely observed characters, the poetic intensity of the prose, and a story that has the capacity to slip into another dimension entirely on the turn of a phrase, or an apparently innocuous narrative development.
  One of the most pleasing aspects of the novel, aside from the narrative itself, is Bender’s evocation of Los Angeles. Again, her physical descriptions have a poetic quality, particularly when she writes about light and its changing moods, and the impact that those changes have on the city around Rose.
  This novel reminded me very much of a novel by Alison MacLeod called THE WAVE THEORY OF ANGELS, a beautifully written tale which also blended an earthy realism, a very likeable heroine and speculative physics.
  All told, THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE is a hugely satisfying novel, poignant and uplifting, sad but elementally true to life. Heartily recommended to anyone who enjoys fine writing, layered and complex plotting, and a uniquely distinctive authorial voice. - Declan Burke

  THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE by Aimee Bender is published by Windmill Books

Guest Post: Russel D. McLean’s Top 10 Crime Novels

So Declan Burke has foolishly agreed to let me set up camp here at CAP for one day during my inaugural, recession-beating “blog tour” (i.e., I couldn’t afford flights to do a physical one) for the US release of THE LOST SISTER. But as I explained to Dec, I didn’t want to make the whole tour about “me me me” because I’d very quickly run out of things to say. And I don’t want to be constantly shilling the book (although the whole point of this tour is to get spread the word – so if you’re in the US you can go buy a startlingly nice hardback from those fine people at St Martin’s, and if you’re in the UK the book’s in handsome paperback from the lovely chaps at Five Leaves Publications). So Dec suggested I could talk about other people’s books.
  “How about,” he said, “One of those top ten crime fiction lists? The books you love?”
  Which sounded a great idea in principle. Except for the fact I had far more than I wanted to talk about and every time I started writing one book down, another popped in my head. So what I’m saying is, perhaps the number 2 and number 1 slots aside, this list is always in flux, but I composed it using the novels that had made me fall in love with the genre or that I just keep coming back to. The ones that made me look at the genre with fresh eyes or that people tell me I won’t shut up about.
  Some of the choices might be predictable (despite some folks’ moaning, there’s a very good reason why certain texts should be considered classics – they’re just bloody good, end of discussion) and some texts people will wonder why I excluded but in the end you have to compose these lists based on how you feel. And while some of the books may have people raising eyebrows, in one or another they had a huge effect on me when I read them… they evoke certain times and places in my reading life.
  So here it is: Ten Books that have had an effect upon your humble guest blogger’s writing and reading practices:

10) ONE FINE DAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT by Christopher Brookyre.
Brookmyre’s epic and gut-bustingly funny standalone novel is at once funny, brutal and unsettling in a way only Brookmyre seems to be able to manage. Think Die Hard. On an oil rig in the middle of the north sea. Only instead of John McClane, we’ve got Scotland’s answer to Bill Hicks. And instead of a corporate party we’ve got a Glaswegian school reunion. It’s a blisteringly funny book and you’ll never look at action movies the same way again once you’ve finished it. This was one of the first crime novels I read (other than Anthony Horrowitz’s Diamon Brother’s books when I was a nipper) that made me realized you could do comedy and crime together. And its one of the few books to raphsodize over Die Hard 2 and its wonky Bullet Deadliness Quotient. That’s gotta be worth something, right?

9) RIDING THE RAP by Elmore Leonard.
Yeah, there’s a lot of other Leonards that are, perhaps, considered more classic, but this is the one that burned its way into my teenage brain. I first read it laid up with a fever, and when I was better I came right back to it to see if I’d maybe just imagined how damn good it was. I hadn’t. Written during the period where Leonard seemed the coolest writer on the planet, it also features one of my favorite psychopaths Bobby Deo. The scene where Deo practices his draw so he can take on Raylan Givens in a gun battle is a classic piece of dramatic misdirection and a scene that still remains in my head decades later.

8) THE HACKMAN BLUES by Ken Bruen.
So many people choose THE GUARDS as their favourite Bruen, but this one spoke to me with an immediacy I hadn’t encountered before in a UK-based novel. Controversial on its release, with a heart of darkness I’d never really encountered before, especially from a novel set in the UK, I’d say THE HACKMAN BLUES is required reading for anyone interested in Brit noir (and yes, Bruen’s Irish, but the novel’s set in London, so there: it counts as a UK novel due to setting)

7) DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS by Walter Mosely.
Mosely is a writer who just pulls me in every damn time. His debut novel is not just a damn good crime novel, but also an evocation of a place I could never have known. It’s a testament to Mosely’s skill that he makes the black LA of the 1940’s feel utterly universal. I’ve used this book now a couple of times with reader’s groups and every time the discussion flows about moral choice, about class, about prejudice and so much more.

6) IN THE ELECTRIC MIST WITH CONFEDERATE DEAD by James Lee Burke.
ELECTRIC MIST (as we shall shorten the title to) was the book that made me fall in love with Burke’s lyrical prose. With its hints of the supernatural, there’s an air of slight surrealism to the novel that serves perfectly well to highlight the flaws in the fascinating detective Robichaux. Not everyone digs Burke, some citing his literary style as being a bit too full-on, but if you only try one I’d usually say ELECTRIC MIST is the way to go.

5) SLAYGROUND by Richard Stark.
Again, as with Leonard, there are probably better Stark novels, but I’m going for the ones that affected me here, and this is the first Stark I remember reading. Set entirely in a fairground, this finds professional thief Parker using his environment to his advantage when a job goes wrong and he finds himself trapped in the fair being chased by cops and gangsters. Like all Stark novels, this is the closest we get to an action movie on the page. It’s tight, controlled and really rather inventive.

4) A DANCE AT THE SLAUGTERHOUSE by Lawrence Block.
Matt Scudder has remained a constant in my life since I started reading crime fiction (even though there are a few that fall short of excellent, he hits better than any other series protagonist I’ve read). It’s hard to choose just one of these novels, but DANCE AT THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE was one of the first books that really kicked me in the head, both with its perfect prose and its dark plot. For me, Scudder provides the link between the old school of hardboiled eyes and the new. He’s the point where the genre regained a sense of realism from the two-fisted adventure stories it had started to become mired in.

3) THE BLACK DAHLIA by James Ellroy.
A lot of people go for LA CONFIDENTIAL, and while it’s an amazing book, THE BLACK DAHLIA’s where my dad started me on Ellroy and where I tend to direct newcomers to the man. The hallmarks of Ellroy’s distinctive style are all in place here, and the story is a blistering and brutal evocation of time and place that leaves it marks long after you close that final page. An incredible and deeply personal novel. Just, please, for the love of God don’t watch the movie, which seems to become an unintentional black comedy thanks to the increasingly bizarre directorial decisions of Brian De Palma.

2) THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett.
Still stands up amazingly well to the test of time despite the impersonal distance of the prose from the characters’ internal states. Seriously, takes a bit of getting used to when you’re so used to being close to characters’ motivations and thoughts. But it’s a tight, brilliantly controlled novel with a brilliant central character. Required reading for anyone who even thinks about writing a private eye novel.

1) THE BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler.
Yes, yes, I know, *yawn*, predictable choice, but the fact remains that I can’t get enough of Chandler’s writing. His control of dialogue, his brilliantly witty metaphors, all of that stuff that seems so clichéd now would never have become so without Chandler getting in there first. THE BIG SLEEP is just a damn perfect novel and while Chandler maybe couldn’t rein in his plots (who did kill the chauffeur?) he more than makes it up for that with his cast of characters and, of course, Marlowe, one of the finest PIs ever to walk the mean streets. Without him, I think many of today’s crime fiction protagonists would never have come to be.

Russel D McLean’s THE LOST SISTER is published by St Martin’s Press.

Origins: COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!! by Alexander O’Hara

Editor’s Note: In a rather pleasing development, the sub-sub-genre of Irish crime writing seems to be throwing up some writers who are either maverick geniuses (genii?) or permanently bombed out of their gourd. The first such to come to my attention was the redoubtable Captain Joseph Barbelo with BARBELO’S BLOOD; the latest crazily shining rough diamond is Alexander O’Hara, aka Darragh McManus. To wit:

Origins: COLD! STEEL!! JUSTICE!!!

Okay, this might get a little confusing. My name is Darragh McManus and I’ve just published a comic crime novel called COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!! Except the author is actually called Alexander O’Hara, and the book was originally called The Nutcracker. And wasn’t a book at all, but a movie script.
  Sorry. Let me start over. COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!! has just been self-published by me (as in Darragh) as an e-book at Amazon.com for Kindle and Smashwords.com for other formats. I used the Alexander O’Hara nom du guerre to differentiate “funny me” from “serious me”; as has been discussed here before, the “industry” doesn’t like eclecticism in writers. So I thought, what the hell, I’ll just invent a new writer altogether.
  The bumpf – written either by Darragh or Alexander, I actually can’t remember anymore – goes something like this: “COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!! is a rollicking, rocking riot of raw, roaring reading, about renegade detective Christian Beretta, his resurrected-from-the-dead sweetheart, his partner with an over-eating problem, and the evil Mayor who wants control of the drugs trade – and wants Beretta deader than dead… In Paradise City, all hell is about to break loose!”
  And the whole thing of the film script? Our story begins – and the story began – all the way back in 1999 during downtime in my first real job. There was a lot of downtime, and The Nutcracker was a lot of fun to write. (The title, by the way, refers to our hero’s trademark method of “interrogation”: squeezing the baddies’ testicles in a tourniquet. It gets results, dammit!).
  I basically took every cliché I could think of, from every piss-poor, straight-to-video 1980s cop movie I’d ever seen, and played around with them. End result: something like The Naked Gun crossed with The Simpsons crossed with Monty Python crossed with that drunken conversation in the pub one night about which Z-list actor you’d cast in a remake of Bloodfist 9: The Killening.
  So you’ve got a loose cannon cop who’s been kicked off the force for – yes – being “just too violent”. And a grizzled Italian Chief of Police, feisty and beautiful journalist girlfriend, tubby black sidekick who’s a solid family man, sleazy Mexican drug lord, camp European assassin, deranged media billionaire, huge-toothed chat-show host, insanely sexy femme fatale who wears rubber cat-suits quite often, and so on and so forth.
  For Beretta, I wanted a guy who looked, sounded and acted more-or-less like Dirty Harry having an especially bad goddamn day. But better-looking, and considerably dumber, and probably a wee bit more warm-hearted, underneath all the macho bluster. His name had to reflect that, so I picked something both tough (Beretta, as in the pistol) and soft (Christian, or Chris as he’s known to loved ones – this sounds like the name of a tousle-haired little boy, or that cuddly, bespectacled man in your office who always wears a colourful tie with short-sleeved shirts.)
  Then I took all these eejits and started writing about them; it was pretty much as simple as that. Of course, I needed a storyline of some sort, on which to hang all the surreal lines, slapstick gags, amusing non-sequiturs and self-referential in-jokes. So I thought to myself, what are these dreadful movies always about? Answer: a big drugs deal, generally involving “the merchandise”.
  That was about it, and that was about all I needed. The plot, amazingly, made some sense by the time I’d finished; it had structure and pacing, things happened in a vaguely chronological order, there was a beginning, middle and end. Too many spoofs, I’ve since been told, concentrate on japery at the expense of an actual storyline; The Nutcracker had one, albeit the most daft and ridiculous storyline you’ve ever encountered.
  You want a mad Kerry-born Mayor who wants to televise the trial and execution of criminals? You got it. An army of castrated international guns-for-hire, led by a man called Englebert who bears a disturbing resemblance to a young Julian Sands? You got that, too. A conversation between our heroes that lasts for fifteen minutes, during which they’re continuously taking the longest pee in history? Sure, why not. A flashback scene where Beretta enters a moment of Zen totality and shoots six ducks from the sky without looking? What the hell, let’s throw that in there as well.
  Eventually, the thing was written. I sent it to Roger Corman’s long-time associate, Frances Doel; she was charming and friendly on the phone and I never heard from her again. A few other producer types had nice things to say about it, but I kind of realised after a while that The Nutcracker, as a movie, fell uncomfortably between two stools: too stupid to be respected, too clever to sell to a stupid movie audience.
  Readers, though, are a different kettle of fish. Despite what the “industry” might presume, readers like all sorts of things from books. They like to be challenged. And when it comes to comedy, they don’t necessarily want all the jokes teed up 15 minutes beforehand, then quickly followed by canned laughter, real or metaphorical, to really hammer the point home. They’re okay, I think – I hope? – with a book that’s dumb but clever in its dumbness but dumb in its cleverness but simultaneously clever and dumb.
  So I took the original script and fleshed it out as a novel, adding descriptive prose, more dialogue, inner monologue, character motivation, and about eight thousand fresh jokes. Well, when I say “fresh”, I mean “not in the original script”. They’re not fresh in the sense that I – and, indeed, other writers – haven’t used them before. More than once.
  Finally, I changed the title. The Nutcracker was a bit vague and allusive; it made sense, and was amusing, to me, but I didn’t know that everyone else would get it, or like it. At least not until they got to the actual nut-cracking part, round about the end of Chapter 5. So I racked my brains for something that captured the dumbness, crassness, obviousness and weird obsession with exclamation marks that characterise all my favourite rubbish ‘80s cop flicks. You know, masterworks like Unkillable Bastard!, Rampage of Destruction IV!!, and of course, Gutz ‘n’ Bulletz 2: The Return of Fat Larry!
  The end result was COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!!: the book of the movie of the comic of the book of the screenplay of the movie of the game of the TV show. Of the book. And it’s funny: DEAD FUNNY. Guaranteed, you will laugh at least once per paragraph. That’s right, PER PARAGRAPH – no mealy-mouthed “per page” promises here – or your money back. (Note: guarantee is not a guarantee. CAP accepts full responsibility for any disappointment caused. Caveat emptor, terms & conditions apply, exit on your left, etc etc etc.)
  And so here we are: me, Alex, Christian, India the fiery girlfriend, Spud the tubby sidekick, O’Flannigan the crazy Mayor, the castrated assassins, the Oedipal-fixation Mexican gangster who gets incinerated in his own car to the strains of Herb Alpert playing The Girl from Ipanema … and hopefully a whole bunch of you, the paying customer.
  Welcome to Dice City, everybody. Where justice walks tall, quips smart, busts shit up on a regular basis and totes a hand-cannon so fucking enormous that the toting itself carries a minimum ten years. Cold! Steel! Justice!!!: sooner or later, everybody gets delivery of theirs. Fuck yeah!!
  Thanks for listening, Darragh. (PS: I mean Alexander. I think.)

  COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!! by Alexander O’Hara is published on Kindle.

DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS: A Cead Mile Failte From Ireland

“I didn’t want to write about the mean streets until we had them,” Ken Bruen once said, when asked why he had set his early novels in London rather than Ireland. “But by God, we’ve got them now.”
  That we have, and one consequence is DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS: IRISH CRIME WRITING IN THE 21st CENTURY, which will be published by Liberties Press in April. Quoth the blurb elves:

A fantastically detailed book consisting of essays, interviews and short fiction regarding Irish crime writing in the 21st century. Contributors include distinguished crime writers such as John Connolly, John Banville, Tana French and Alex Barclay. This book suggests crime fiction is now the most relevant and valid form of writing that can deal with modern Ireland in terms of the post-‘Troubles’ landscape and post-Celtic Tiger economic boom. The book takes a chapter-by-chapter approach, with each chapter and author discussing a different facet of Irish crime writing; for example, Declan Hughes discusses the influence of American culture on Irish crime writing and Tana French reflects on crime fiction and the post-Celtic Tiger Irish identity.

  The collection is something of a Who’s Who of contemporary Irish crime fiction, with contributions (in order of appearance) from John Connolly, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Kevin McCarthy, Cora Harrison, Adrian McKinty, Cormac Millar, Alan Glynn, Eoin McNamee, Jane Casey, Declan Hughes, Alex Barclay, Colin Bateman, Paul Charles, Niamh O’Connor, Gerard Brennan, Ingrid Black, John Banville, Stuart Neville, Gene Kerrigan, Gerry O’Carroll, Arlene Hunt, Andrew Nugent, Brian McGilloway, Neville Thompson, Tana French and Ken Bruen. It also features a foreword by Michael Connelly, an introduction by Professor Ian Ross of Trinity College, an appreciation of crime narratives in theatre and film by Sara Keating and Tara Brady, respectively, and an afterword by Fintan O’Toole.
  Given the constraints of space, and the relatively slow pace of publishing and the much more rapid rate at which Irish crime writers are appearing, the collection can’t claim to be comprehensive. As editor, I’d have liked to have included writers such as Garbhan Downey, Ava McCarthy, Bob Burke and Rob Kitchin. Meanwhile, debut novels from Brian O’Connor, Casey Hill, Gerard O’Donovan, William Ryan and Conor Fitzgerald have only appeared in the last nine months or so.
  That said, GREEN STREETS is as comprehensive and contemporary as was possible given the constraints mentioned, and I’ll be delighted to see it land on the shelf next month. Relieved, I think, more than anything else, not least because there were times when it seemed as if the collection would never see the light of day, but very proud too. Although I should say, I feel proud on behalf of the writers involved rather than for myself, because I have no sense of ‘ownership’ of the book, in the way I would if the book was a novel of mine. The collection belongs to the contributors, who chose their own speciality topic, or preference, and I hope that the collection will go some way to ensuring that a body of very fine writers finally get the kind of credit here in Ireland that they already enjoy in the US, the UK, and further afield.
  Ireland is a pretty small place, it’s true, but even at that there’s no community of Irish crime writers per se, no single cohesive theme running through the body of work, no regular meetings of like-minded folk (or if there is, they’re not telling me about it). What I hope the book marks, other than the obvious development of a distinct body of Irish crime fiction, is the sheer diversity of styles, themes and tones: historical fiction, high-concept thrillers, police procedurals, private eyes, comedy capers, gritty noir, post-modern investigation, paranoid conspiracy, serial killers, post-‘Troubles’ novels, and more. Indeed, the diversity is such that some of the writers have no interest at all in rooting their novels in Ireland.
  So there it is: DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS: IRISH CRIME WRITING IN THE 21st CENTURY. If there are any bloggers and / or reviewers out there interested in receiving an ARC, just drop me a line at the usual address or leave a message in the comment box, with the appropriate contact details. And a céad míle fáilte, aka a hundred thousand welcomes, to you all from CAP Towers on St Patrick’s Day …

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books

He may be one of the best in the business, but Adrian McKinty hasn’t forgotten his roots. No sir / ma’am. All the way from Australian comes the generous offer from said McKinty of free copies of his latest novel, FALLING GLASS, for readers of Crime Always Pays. Quoth the blurb elves:

An old associate of regular hero Michael Forsythe, Killian makes a living enforcing other people’s laws, collecting debts, dealing out threats. Forsythe sets Killian up with the best paid job of his life. A prominent, politically connected Irish businessman, Richard Coulter, needs someone to find his ex-wife and children. Reluctant to take it, but persuaded by the money, Killian takes the job. Once on the trail, Killian discovers the real reason Coulter’s ex is running, and helps her take refuge amongst his people - a community of Irish Travellers, who close ranks to look after them. McKinty is at his continent-hopping, pacy, evocative best in this new thriller, moving between his native Ireland and distant cities within a skin-of-his-teeth time-frame.

  Sounds tasty. David Park, writing in the Irish Times, liked it a lot. To wit:

“McKinty is a streetwise, energetic gunslinger of a writer, firing off volleys of sassy dialogue and explosive action that always delivers what it has promised the reader. The story is skilfully constructed, and the pace is always full throttle forwards. There is one violent scene in Mexico involving a chainsaw that is definitely not for the squeamish, but it would be unfair to think of the author as someone exclusively reliant on external action. There is, for example, an interesting psychological exploration of Killian’s re-embracing of his half-forgotten roots and the cultural values of the Traveller community. Even the dark figure of Markov, the Russian hitman, gets layered and lightened with some psychological subtleties that are the product of his relationship with his partner, Marina, and experiences of the war in Chechnya that continue to haunt him.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, to be in with a chance of winning a free copy of FALLING GLASS, just answer the following question:

What actor, and why, should play McKinty’s ‘unfuckingkillable’ hero Michael Forsythe when the inevitable movie happens?

  Answers in the comment box below, please, leaving a contact email address (using (at) rather than @ to confound the spam munchkins) by noon on Monday, March 21st. Et bon chance, mes amis …