DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS

Published by Liberties Press, DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS: IRISH CRIME WRITING IN THE 21st CENTURY is a collection of essays, articles, short stories and interviews by Irish crime writers on the subject of the phenomenal rise of Irish crime fiction.

  Contributors include John Connolly, John Banville, Tana French, Eoin McNamee, Stuart Neville, Arlene Hunt, Alan Glynn, Adrian McKinty, Ken Bruen, Jane Casey, Gene Kerrigan, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Brian McGilloway, Declan Hughes, Cora Harrison, Paul Charles, Colin Bateman, Alex Barclay, and many more. Michael Connelly provides the foreword.

  To purchase a copy at the Liberties Press website, please click here.



  Praise for DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS:

“An admirably thorough compendium … It’s everything you want to know about (Irish) crime fiction, its roots and varied influences, but it also offers a vivid insight into the dark heart of modern Ireland.” - Alison Walsh, Sunday Independent



“Notable for its compelling and accessible history of crime fiction in Ireland … an obligatory title for serious fans of Irish crime fiction - and there’s also enough here to hold the interest of the casual reader.” - Alex Meehan, Sunday Business Post



“An anthology … filled with brilliant ideas and surprising points of view, an examination of Irish crime literature by those who now write it, packed with verve and humour that sparkles, a treasure chest of emerald noir.” - Richard L. Pangburn



“[A] compelling new collection of essays, interviews and fiction from an unrivalled collection of crime writers ... An enticing cyanide-laced confection of everything from comic capers to urban noir.” - The Newsletter



“A fascinating collection … a timely and insightful examination of a homegrown literary scene that has quietly produced a formidable canon of work.” - Hot Press



“It is by turns discursive, instructive and entertaining, and is never less than fascinating. This needs to be in every crime writing fan’s library.” - Crime Squad

All’s Fair In Love And Escaping The Slush Pile

Following on from yesterday’s post on ‘advice’ (koff) to aspiring writers, here’s an intriguing development: the Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair, a gathering planned for next March at which unpublished writers can pitch their novels to a selection of agents, editors and publishers. To wit:

The inaugural Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair for first-time novelists will take place on March 10th, 2012. The Novel Fair aims to introduce up-and-coming writers to top publishers and literary agents, giving novelists the opportunity to bypass the slush pile, pitch their ideas and place their synopsis and sample chapters directly into the hands of publishers and agents.
  A judging panel of experienced industry professionals will be asked to select a shortlist of successful entries, presented to them anonymously. There is no limitation on style, genre, or target market, the only requirement being that the writer has not published a novel before.
  Publishers and agents will be invited to come along on the day to the Irish Writers’ Centre and meet these writers in person. Each writer in attendance will have a stand at the Fair with copies of the synopsis of their novel, the finished novel itself and biographical material.
  Representatives from Penguin Ireland, Transworld, O’ Brien Press, Lilliput Press, Hachette Books, Liberties Press, Little Island and Arlen House will be present on the day. Literary agents such as Marianne Gunn O’Connor, Yvonne Kinsella, Emma Walsh, Ger Nichol and Paul Feldstein will also be present.
  This is an incredible opportunity for first-time novelists.

  A couple of interesting things. One, it states nowhere in the terms and conditions that said writers need to be Irish, although perhaps that’s a given. Two, the closing date for Novel Fair submissions is November 11th; if your entry is accepted, you’ll need to have the novel completed by mid-January. That being roughly six months hence, it’s quite a nice deadline to impose on yourself.
  For all the details, clickety-click here …

On Writing, Love And Quantum Physics

In the run-up to the publication of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, I’ve been offered some very nice opportunities to promote the book, and very grateful I am too. Unfortunately, some of those opportunities have come framed as requests for writing advice, and in particular advice for aspiring writers.
  The problem is actually twofold. One, I’m neither popular or successful enough to be in a position to give anyone advice. Secondly, I have no idea how I write.
  About all I know is that I generally get an idea for a book, as often as not from a setting. ‘Ooooh, this is a nice place, I’d like to write a book set here.’ Then along comes a character, or two, and once they’ve arrived you need to give them something to talk about it. After that, or so it seems to me, there’s an interminable amount of fiddling, scratching and progress stymied by excessive use of the backspace button, virtually all of which is subordinate to my sense of ‘feel’ for that story. And then there’s a book.
  Not much by way of advice, is it?
  Being the (occasionally) responsible type, I did try to write something that looked like advice to aspiring writers, but - as always - I got sidetracked into a number of tangents. The result comes below, but if you’re an aspiring writer, then I suggest you skip it and take the only solid piece of advice I’m in a position to give any writer: if you ever find yourself on a panel with Declan Hughes, read first or go home.
  And now, on with the show …

On Writing, Love And Quantum Physics

1. Writing is a lot like love and quantum physics. If you think you have the answer, you probably haven’t understood the question.

2. This is a good thing. It means there are no wrong or right answers to that question you probably haven’t understood.

3. This is because writing is largely a matter of ‘feel’.

4. The bad news is that this ‘feel’ is earned the hard way. Writing can no more be taught than love.

5. That said, love is its own teacher.

6. Which is to say, it’s a love of words in their best order that will drive you to master the basic components of grammar, syntax, punctuation, etc.

7. Learning how to bend and break those rules to suit your own particular need is what makes writing a matter of ‘feel’. And the better you get, the more it becomes about ‘feel’.

8. More bad news: there is no magic formula. Yes, there are tricks and cheats you can employ to fool the reader into believing you’re a competent writer. Ultimately, though, you’re cheating yourself.

9. Ernest Hemingway believed that a writer should have put in 10,000 hours writing before he or she is first published.

10. In one sense writing is a bit like physical exercise. You need to burn off the fat, boil off the toxins, before you get down to the solid muscle.

11. In a lot of ways, though, writing is a lot like love.

12. I’m talking about actual love, not romantic love. And neither am I talking about the unqualified love you give your children.

13. I mean a 10,000 hours kind of love. The way you love your wife, husband, intended or partner. The hard-earned love, the kind that remains and endures long after the tummy butterflies have gone to tummy butterfly heaven.

14. Just think about your most important non-child relationship for a moment. Every couple needs to master the basic grammar and syntax of relationships, and then go on to bend and break those rules for their own particular needs.

15. Every relationship, and on a daily basis, depends on both partners being capable of adapting to a whole range of very fluid elements, be they physical, emotional, psychological, etc.

16. Imagine, for a moment, that your partner comes home from work in a funk about who said what to who. Your attempt at empathy is rebuffed, and you say, ‘But honey, I said the exact same thing yesterday, and that made you happy.’

17. Start digging up bones, because you’re headed for the doghouse.

16. Ultimately, as with writing, love comes down to ‘feel’.

17. We can define ‘feel’ as instinct wrung from experience. It’s as simple and complicated as that, and about as easy to pin up over your desk.

18. More bad news. Call it instinct, intuition, hunch or ‘feel’: each time you apply it, you’ve about a 50% chance of being wrong.

19. Worse, you won’t always realise it straight away.

20. If you want to be a writer, get used to digging up bones.

21. Here’s where quantum physics comes into play, and particularly the Uncertainty Principle and Schrödinger’s Cat.

22. For the purpose of this tortured analogy, let’s pretend that words are the particles that churn through the chaotic maelstrom at the quantum level.

22. At the quantum level, and according to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, you can observe a particle’s position OR observe its direction and momentum. The more you focus on a particle’s position, the more fuzzy becomes its direction and / or momentum.

23. This principle, incidentally, can also be applied to your wife’s mood in the wake of a fractious water cooler incident.

24. In the thought experiment known as Schrödinger’s Cat, meanwhile, Schrödinger came up with a wheeze in which an unfortunate moggy is placed inside a box, and due to engineered circumstance is both dead AND alive while the experiment is ongoing, its fate to be revealed only once the box is opened.

25. When you’re immersed in a story, you’re hewing sense out of chaos. Actually, you’re creating something out of nothing, which is a whole different quantum theory, but for the sake of this argument we’ll agree that every writer begins with the most basic particles we have, the alphabet.

26. Every writer has access to those particles. How you assemble those particles in order to make sense from chaos, applying your unique ‘feel’, is what makes you a writer.

27. As to whether you’re a good writer, well, the cat in the box is both dead and alive. And you won’t know until you lift the lid.

28. It’s also true that you might not recognise a dead cat when you see one. A vivid imagination is a blessing but it can also be a curse, particularly when it’s so vivid that it imagines live cats where only dead cats be.

29. But here’s the kicker: this dead cat is your dead cat. And Schrödinger and Heisenberg may not have believed in God, but that cat is dead in a world you created out of nothing. And what’s the point of being God if you can’t indulge in a little resurrection once in a while?

30. I like to call this process ‘redrafting’. Think of it as loving the very same words in a different way, of adapting your ‘feel’.

31. It’s worth repeating that there’s no magic formula. There is hard work, and then more hard work; and if you work harder at it than you’ve ever worked at anything before, harder than you believed you could ever work, then there is the tantalising promise of magic and meaning.

32. It’s elusive, ephemeral and nebulous. But trying breaking love down into an algebraic equation, or discover love’s equivalent of the Higgs’ boson. You might even manage to do so. It won’t be much of a substitute for a good hug when your wife needs a bit of a cry just to flush out the system.

33. Yet more bad news. You’ll never know if you’re a good writer. Even if God Almighty taps you on the shoulder one morning, as you redraft a paragraph for the fortieth or four hundreth time, and says, ‘Y’know, that’s not bad.’

34. ‘Listen,’ you say, ‘no disrespect, but I’m busy. I think the cat might have a pulse.’

35. ‘No,’ He’ll say, ‘seriously, I’ve read a lot of stuff, and that’s pretty good, considering.’

36. And you’ll say, ‘By your standards, maybe.’

37. Depending on whether He’s the Old or New Testament God, the conversation could go either way after that.

38. Providing you haven’t been struck by actual lightning, though, you won’t hear any of it.

39. Because you’ll be listening to yourself. Wondering, always wondering, how your unique ‘feel’ might be best employed for the benefit of others. The truth of writing is the truth of love.

40. As for what’s going on down there at the quantum level, well, who cares so long as it all works up here?

On Loving Colin Bateman, One Inch At A Time

How do I love thee / The artist formerly known as Colin Bateman / Let me count the ways … Yup, we’re up to nine reasons and counting, folks, for lo! A new Dan Starkey novel is on the way, said tome bearing not only the understated title NINE INCHES, but also the subtitle, ‘The Butcher, The Barmaid and The Brothers From Hell’. Oh, and an image of a false leg. Or prosthetic limb, if you prefer. Anyway, the blurb elves have been wittering thusly:

Dan Starkey, the ducking and diving hapless investigator, takes centre stage again in this brilliant new novel by the master of comic crime. Radio shock-jock and self-styled people’s champion Jack Caramac is used to courting controversy - but when his four-year-old son is kidnapped for just one hour, and then sent back with a warning note, he knows he may have finally gone too far. Jack has no choice but to turn to Dan Starkey for help. Recently chucked by his long-suffering wife Patricia, Dan has finally given up on journalism and is now providing a boutique, bespoke service for important people with difficult problems. Dan resolves to catch whoever kidnapped Jack’s son - and very soon finds himself in the middle of a violent feud between rival drug gangs, pursued by jealous husbands, unscrupulous property developers and vicious killers as the case spirals ever more out of his control ...

  Yep, it’s Bangor’s answer to … actually, scratch that. There’s no question in the world that might provide a logical, reasonable answer to the lunacy that is a Dan Starkey novel. Are we happy? Well, yes and no. It’s nice to know a Dan Starkey is on the way, but the book doesn’t hit the shelves until mid-October. Boo, etc. Still, NINE INCHES delayed is NINE INCHES increased, as our sainted Great Aunt Petunia always said …

You Wait Two Thousand Years For A Messiah To Arrive …

… and then you realise there were two all along. Glenn Meade doesn’t get as much play on these pages as he should, largely because his high-concept thrillers aren’t set in Ireland, or have very little to do or say about the place. Of course, you can say the exact same thing about John Connolly’s novels, so I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I’m a lazy sod who needs to get his radar tuned to a different frequency. (Can you tune radars? Do they even work on frequencies?)
  Anyway, Glenn Meade’s latest offering, THE SECOND MESSIAH, sounds like a cracker; Publishers Weekly certainly took a shine to it. To wit:

The Irish-born author (SNOW WOLF) teeters on the edge of genius and sacrilege with this thriller about a subject known since the time of Christ. When archaeologist Jack Cane discovers ancient documents that point to the existence of another messiah, he also quickly finds out that both Israeli and Catholic authorities have reason to possess, or suppress, such documents. Racked with the pain of personal loss, he meets up with an old friend, Lela, who is part of an Israeli police team investigating multiple crimes, including a cold case involving the possible murder of Cane’s parents—also archaeologists—20 years earlier. Some who have avoided Christian fiction or only dipped in will find this departure from the mould refreshing, even while some regular readers of Christian fiction may find certain passages revolting. Fans of Davis Bunn or Dan Brown won’t bat an eye at Meade’s unblinking look at the Vatican and the religious secrecy that fuels such novels. With a plot that screams, a controversial edge, and characters with attitude and something to prove, this has all the makings to be the next DA VINCI CODE. - Publishers Weekly

  Incidentally, there’s a growing trend for Irish crime writers to set their novels beyond these shores; John Connolly, as noted, has always done so, and most of Adrian McKinty’s novels are set in the US; Alex Barclay’s most recent offerings have been set in the US; forthcoming novels from Arlene Hunt and Ava McCarthy are set in the US and Spain, respectively; Eoin Colfer’s PLUGGED was set in New Jersey; Ken Bruen began writing about London settings, and has since set his non-Jack Taylor books in the US; Conor Fitzgerald’s novels are set in Rome; William Ryan’s books are set in Stalin-era Russia; Jane Casey’s novels are set in London.
  Meanwhile, the whispers filtering down from the higher echelons of publishing is that Ireland, despite producing a significant number of very good writers, is ‘too parochial’ a setting to be commercial. Exactly where that leaves the best-selling Tana French, to name just one example, is anyone’s guess.
  But back to Glenn Meade. There’s a very nice interview with Glenn over at Laurence O’Bryan’s blog, which kicks off with Glenn explaining how he was bitten by the crime bug at a very young age, when he found himself hiding under a table with an escaped prisoner. Great expectations, indeed.

Cool, Baby, Cool

Well, it’s here. Finally arrived. Yesterday was something of a Red Letter Day for yours truly, folks, as ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL arrived back from the printers, and I’m still a bit giddy. In fact, so giddy was I that I nearly ruined the day entirely by smooching the lovely Alice Dawson of Liberties Press in the lobby of the Guinness Enterprise Centre, and this before she’d even had the chance to show me the book. No wonder editor Dan Bolger hot-footed it out of the building at the first opportunity …
  Anyway, the book is now a book. No big deal in one sense, because there’s far too many books published every day, but ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL is a bit special for me. For one, I wrote the first draft of it about nine years ago, and it’s been a long, winding and tortuous road ever since. If there was ever a lesson in not giving up, a lesson for myself or for any other writer out there with a bad case of concussion from banging their heads against brick walls, AZC is it. And if that wasn’t enough, Liberties Press have done me more than proud with a very fine book indeed. I thank you all kindly, folks.
  In fact, there’s a whole host of people I need to thank, most of whom are covered in the acknowledgements in the book. For our purpose here today, however, I hope it will suffice for me to quote from those acknowledgements. To wit:

“I would also like to thank the writers and readers who, through the pages of the blog Crime Always Pays, have been so blindly optimistic on my behalf over the last number of years. You are too many to name, but be assured that I am very grateful indeed.”

  And yes, that ‘you’ means YOU. Ladies and gentlemen, take a bow …
  Finally, the good news in practical terms means that the book is now officially available on sale. Those of you interested can order it direct from the Liberties Press website; failing that, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL will be in all good bookshops from tomorrow onwards.
  The book will be officially launched on August 10th, by the way, in the Gutter Bookshop in Dublin’s Temple Bar. If you think you might like to get along, just scroll down for all the details; and if you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, feel free to clickety-click here …

Play Ball

Many, many moons ago I read Bernard Malamud’s THE NATURAL, and fell head-over-heels for baseball. So profound was the experience that I’ve been unable to read another Malamud to this day, on the basis that, to the best of my knowledge at least, none of his other books are about baseball.
  Of course, it was a young man’s love. By which I mean, I fell in love with the idea of baseball, with its lore and language and what it represented, and particularly its mythic status as America’s national pastime. And so, over the years, I’ve watched plenty of baseball movies, and read some books, in the process putting together a very sketchy understanding of the game its great names, among them Di Maggio, Ruth, Robinson, Mays, Williams, Jackson, Gehrig, and the gloriously despised Ty Cobb. And then there are the team names; the Cubs and the various Sox, the Cardinals, the Tigers and Pirates and Indians and the perfidious Dodgers; and the ball parks themselves, from Fenway to Candlestick.
  It’s impossible to engage with American popular culture and not be infected by baseball by a process of osmosis. One of my favourite novels, for example, William Goldman’s MARATHON MAN, is steeped in the game; the game’s argot is pervasive, seeping into the language of film and novel and play, of casual conversation and political speech. I understood the audacity of stealing a base before I knew what base-stealing was; I could contextualise curveballs and pinch hitters and double plays and the bottom of the ninth long before I understood their technical meaning.
  Fast forward to many moons ago, when I spent a very pleasant week in Atlanta in the company of a very pleasant young woman, who very kindly showed me the town, the highlight of which was a tour of Turner Field. That was in March, unfortunately; still, it was nice to finally step into a ball park.
  But it wasn’t until about a month ago that I actually sat down to watch an entire game of baseball on TV. I have no idea why I did so; these days I don’t even have time to watch a full game of hurling, and I couldn’t even tell you who was playing that night. It took about two innings before I was hooked. Given that most live baseball games run three to four hours, and that most games shown here are on ESPN around midnight, I’ve developed the very bad (i.e., time-consuming) habit of recording a night’s game and watching it the following evening. I’m not rooting for any one team; to be honest, I don’t even care who wins, or the score. I’m just fascinated by what these guys are doing, their technical proficiency in a game of millimetres. And I’m less interested in the Hollywood plays, the booming homer to the second tier, as I am by the more mundane plays; my favourite, as it happens, is the third baseman or short stop picking up an infield drive and rifling it across to the hungry glove on first base. Overall, and contrary to what I would have believed from watching baseball movies, and as thrilling as it is to watch a guy lean back and smack the pill into the middle of next week, I’m far more interested in watching the pitchers than the batters, and the fielding, and particularly that of the infielders.
  When I opened Dennis Lehane’s superb THE GIVEN DAY last week, and discovered that the opening chapter was a beautifully written fictional account of the Babe stepping down off a stalled train to go play ball in a field in the middle of nowhere, it’s safe to say that Lehane was pushing at an open door.
  Which brings me to the point of this post. I have THE NATURAL lined up for a long overdue re-read, but I’m open to suggestions about other books about baseball. I’ve read SHOELESS JOE, and it’s probably a bit too soon to go back to it; but if anyone can suggest a novel about baseball, I’m all ears (suggestions on college baseball particularly welcome). Short stories would work too, given the nature of the game. And if anyone can recommend a good history of baseball, preferably one containing potted histories of the great players and teams, that would be a bonus.
  Finally, I have a Baseball Reader around here somewhere, which I’ve been looking for in vain for the last couple of weeks, one which contains Ty Cobb’s letter to the Hall of Fame detailing his Greatest Team. If anyone can tell me which book that’s in, I’d be very grateful.
  Play ball …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Jarrett Rush

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?
It would be great to have my name on any of the classic hard-boiled stuff, but if you make me choose one I’ll take THE MALTESE FALCON. There’s a twist at the beginning of the book that sets up the entire book. I read it on the train to work and when I got to that point in the book I was like a runaway boulder. I was reading every spare moment that day and for the next few days afterward. I ate it up. I read more Hammett after that, and it was good. I enjoyed his Continental Op, but nothing compared to THE MALTEST FALCON.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Any surprise here that it’s THE MALTESE FALCON’S Sam Spade? Weber Rexall, my main character in CHASING FILTHY LUCRE, isn’t a Sam Spade copy, but they are similar. They both have a determination to stick to their convictions that I admire. Despite the tough things they’ve seen, they still try to do what they think is right.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
My wife teaches sixth grade. I help her out by reading some of the newer YA books to find stories that would appeal to the boys in her class. I’ve actually really enjoyed some of the stories. The Percy Jackson series is great. My favorite books, though, have been the Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer (hey, he’s Irish). They are the story a of a boy genius who uses his smarts to become a criminal mastermind. The antagonist is a fairy named Holly, so there are some fantasy elements to it. It’s a great series that’s all action from page one. That’s one thing I’ve noticed and enjoyed about young adult books, they don’t waste any time. From the very first page the story is moving and going somewhere. They don’t take a lot of time to assess their feelings or stare at trees.

Most satisfying writing moment?
That would have to be finishing the first draft of CHASING FILTHY LUCRE. I thought I had something that was good. I knew it needed some work in the editing, but I thought I had something with good guts. It took a little polishing to get it where I thought it was ready to be unleashed on the world, but in the end I think I was right. I’m happy with, and proud of, my novella. Judging by the reviews, others seem to be enjoying it also.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
I guess the answers here all depend on who you are and why you write. The worst thing is the rejection. Whether it’s an editor saying that your story isn’t good enough or readers just not connecting with your work, being rejected hurts. I don’t care how thick you think your skin is, or how many times it’s happened. Even the personal rejections that tell you your writing is great, that project just wasn’t for them. They all hurt. It may get a little easier to take, but the sting is always there. Ask me what’s the best thing about being a writer every day of the week and you’ll likely get seven different answers. That’s how often I think of something new that I love about writing. Today, however, the best thing is making a connection with a reader. Having someone leave a message for you at one of the social networking sites or through email saying they liked something you’ve done, is pretty awesome.

The pitch for your next book is …?
I’m working now on Book 2 of the New Eden series. We pick up the story a few months after the end of Book One. Berger and Rexall, our heroes, are in the middle of investigating a kidnapping, looking for missing girl and also trying to stay a few steps ahead of Roma Corp security forces.

Who are you reading right now?
I’m nearing the end of FOLLOW THE MONEY by Fingers Murphy, and I love it. There’s something about the voice in the book that I connected with almost immediately. There’s a casual authority to the main character that I really like. I’ve never been much for the characters that bang cymbals and blow horns trying to get all eyes on them. FOLLOW THE MONEY doesn’t have that. Next up is some Allan Guthrie. I’ve got two of his novellas on my Kindle ready to go.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
If God is making me choose, then I’ll take writing. I’m not one of those writers who says he ‘has’ to write. I just enjoy it too much to want to stop. It’s too much fun taking these trips with characters that I’ve created. Seeing where they want to go then following along. I love reading. I love finding a good book and getting lost in it. But if you are telling me I can only do one, give me writing. It’s much more fun.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Fast-paced, tightly plotted, and hopeful.

Jarrett Rush’s CHASING FILTHY LUCRE is available now in a range of e-formats.

On Dennis Lehane And The Emperor’s New Clothes

I would have loved, at about 9.50am yesterday morning, to be able to travel back in time about 25 years to let my 17-year-old self know what my schedule looked like yesterday. Yes, I know it breaks all the time-travelling rules to meet yourself, and interact and thus change the future, but 17-year-old me was just about to leave school in the recession-hit 1980s, and was facing emigration and the building site as an almost certain career path; he also wanted to be a writer, and failing that, a journalist of some stripe, journalism being a pretty decent second best to actual writing when it comes to earning a living, although at the time I might as well have wanted to be an astronaut for all the likelihood of my becoming either.
  As it happened, my 17-year-old self eventually did emigrate, and worked for a time on a London building site, and not a bit of harm it did me. Fast-forward to yesterday morning, 10am, when I was sitting down with Dennis Lehane to interview him for a newspaper, this at a time when I had roughly 300 pages left to read of Lehane’s magisterial THE GIVEN DAY, about which the worst you can say is that it’s only 702 pages long. If you haven’t read it yet, do yourself a favour and put away your current reading and pick it up. If it’s not the best novel you read all year, you’ll be having a very good reading year indeed.
  The good news, by the way, is that Lehane is currently at work on the second part of what is intended to be a ‘Given Day’ trilogy.
  Dennis Lehane, I’m delighted to report, is as engaging as he is down-to-earth, which shouldn’t really have been a surprise, given that (a) he hails from South Boston, and (b) it’s a rule of thumb in the crime fiction community that, with very few exceptions, there appears to be some kind of weird ratio in which talent equals a good heart. Odd but true.
  That interview done and dusted, I headed out to Stillorgan, there to interview CJ Box, an equally pleasant man who is on tour promoting both his latest offering, the second Cody Hoyt novel BACK OF BEYOND, and the fact that Corvus are in the process of publishing his back catalogue of Joe Pickett novels at a rate of one per month.
  Then it was back into town, first to loll about reading 150 pages of THE GIVEN DAY, and then on to Eason’s of O’Connell Street, where I sat down with Dennis Lehane again, this time to quiz him for public interview. It was one of those evenings that could have gone on for hours: we ran 10 minutes over the allotted time for the interview, and even at that I didn’t get to wedge Lehane’s work on ‘The Wire’ into the conversation.
  Off then to Wagamama on the Quays for a very nice plate of noodles washed down with Asahi beer, in the company of Dennis, Dave O’Callaghan of Eason’s, the wonderful Margaret Daly, and the lovely Ciara Doorley.
  All told, a very good day indeed, and all this in the context, as All Three Regular Readers will know, of my own novel, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, appearing in three weeks time, said tome bearing blurbs on the front and back from John Banville and Ken Bruen, respectively.
  Maybe it’s just as well I can’t time-travel. Had I been able to tell my 17-year-old self all of that, he would have broken down in tears and / or had his head explode.
I guess every writer has his or her own motive for writing. Some want to be the best prose stylist ever read. Others want to tell stories. Some get into it to make their fortune. Some just want to be famous, rich or otherwise. And on it goes.
  When I was 17, my ambition was to write books that other writers liked. It was as simple as that, and as complicated. It’s no less complicated or simple today. That might well be a bad thing - I can’t think of any other ambition I had at 17 that hasn’t been abandoned or changed, mostly as a result of good sense or reality intruding - but you can’t lie to yourself. I still don’t want to get rich from writing, and I have no particular desire to be famous; maybe I should know better, but really, all I want from writing is for other writers to like my books.
  These days, that ambition is a little more pragmatic than ego-tickling; if those readers who became writers like my stuff, then there’s a pretty decent chance that those readers who aren’t writers might too.
  What I wouldn’t have told my 17-year-old self, had I been able to time-travel yesterday, is that even 25 years on, I’d still feel like a fake. That when I sit across a table from Dennis Lehane, say, and shoot the breeze about ‘the work’, and how all that matters is what’s produced, rather than the whys and hows, I’ll feel like a charlatan, a spoofer, a con artist. Matters aren’t helped right now by the fact that I’m finding it very difficult to gain traction on a new story I’ve started, which is almost always the case, but right now it feels like a very serious case of amnesia when it comes to writing two sequential sentences that are even remotely interesting to me, let alone anyone else.
  But even at the best of times, when I’m writing a thousand words and more per day for four or five days in a row, there’s always the nagging doubt in the back of my head, which manifests itself physically as something slimy slithering around in my guts. Maybe it’s as straightforward as an inferiority complex; maybe it’s a little bit more complicated than that, and derives from the audacity of wanting to rate my own books against those of, say, Dennis Lehane. Ultimately, though, I think it’s probably a fear of being found out, of a good writer one day pointing the finger at me and without malice or any agenda, announcing that I’m the worst case of the emperor’s new clothes he’s ever seen.
  Because here’s the conundrum. I want good writers to like my books, which means I need first to be a good writer; but in my heart (and gut) I know my books aren’t good enough for me, never mind anyone else.

Suffer, Little Children

Taoiseach Enda Kenny crossed the Rubicon last Wednesday, when he made a powerful speech in the Dail about the Cloyne Report and the Vatican’s attempt to frustrate the latest inquiry into child sex abuse by members of the Catholic Church. He did not mince his words. To wit:

“The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation’ … Far from listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal with St Benedict’s “ear of the heart” . . . the Vatican’s reaction was to parse and analyse it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer … This calculated, withering position being the polar opposite of the radicalism, humility and compassion upon which the Roman Church was founded.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  As it happened, Tom Phelan’s NAILER arrived in the post on Wednesday, and on the face of it, the novel couldn’t be more timely. Quoth the blurb elves:

Ireland, 2007. In the midland counties of Laois and Offaly, two former members of the religious Order of Saint Kieran, which once ran Dachadoo Industrial School for boys, are murdered within weeks of each other, their bodies found nailed to the floor. Detectives Tom Breen and Jimmy Gorman are assigned to track down “Nailer,” as the killer is nicknamed. They warn local clerical outcasts that Nailer may be working off a list. The editor of the national newspaper The Telegraph, delighted Ireland seems to have its own serial killer, dreams of a huge spike in revenues. Meanwhile, investigative reporters Pauline Byron and Mick McGovern are put on the story. As Nailer continues to kill, Pauline surmises that he may be getting revenge—or justice—for something that happened in Dachadoo decades earlier. As the past is uncovered and the pursuit for Nailer heats up, the shocking truth about the Church-run industrial schools is revealed.

  Tom Phelan, incidentally, is a former priest, which may well give NAILER a potent authenticity. More to follow …

ZERO Hour # 2: That All-Important ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL Update

First off, and as some of the Three Regular Readers will be aware, I got in touch last week with the crime fiction community, craving a boon and asking that they might give my forthcoming tome a mention, if it wasn’t too much trouble. As always, the response to such a request has been little short of humbling, and if you’re a regular visitor to the on-line network of crime and mystery blogs, I apologise here and now if you’re already sick to death of hearing about ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL.
  By the same token, the small but perfectly formed Liberties Press is competing on the same playing field as publishing behemoths with literally millions to spend on promotion and marketing, so I really can’t afford not to throw myself upon the kindness of strangers. Should I feel embarrassed about relentlessly plugging AZC? Perhaps. Do I? Not in the slightest.
  Because here’s the thing. I can’t guarantee you that you’ll love or even like AZC, but I can guarantee that it’s fresh and different, and ‘unlike anything else you’ll read all year’, as Ken Bruen says on the jacket cover. In other words, I’ve worked very hard to create a crime novel that doesn’t trade on the usual conventions and tropes, that doesn’t feature the latest world-weary and cynical boozy PI, or morosely introspective Scandinavian, or quasi-Bond hero defeating the forces of evil via one interminable helicopter chase after another. I can’t say it’s the best book you’ll read all year, and I can’t even say that you won’t have come across a similar story before; what I can say is that you won’t find in AZC what seems to me to have become, if I may be so bold as to make sweeping generalisations, the defining characteristic of the vast majority of contemporary crime novels, which is, however well written any book is, the simplistic pieties of some liberal sadist masquerading as an authentic exploration of modern society, but which is first and foremost designed to ring bells on cash registers.
  Anyway, and back to my original point: a heartfelt thanks to all of you who have responded so positively to my request for a plug or a mention at your own on-line lairs. I thank you all kindly …
  Meanwhile, I’ve been interviewed over at Speaking Volumes, and good fun it was too. Here be an excerpt:

Which fictional character would you most like to meet? What might you say / ask them?

“Jesus Christ. Which isn’t to say that Jesus of Nazareth is a fictional character per se; as far as I know, He did exist. What I’m fascinated by — and I’m not religious, or spiritual — I’m mostly fascinated by the narrative process and how Jesus of Nazareth became Jesus Christ. And I’d like to sit down with Him and find out what His real story was, what it was He hoped to achieve. Did He believe Himself at the time to be the Son of God, or is the metaphysical aspect of his mission and message the most potent case of historical revisionism ever written? And if so, to what extent?
  “I’d love to know what Jesus of Nazareth Himself believed. Was He simply trying to reform the Jewish religion of the time? Was His message hijacked for political purposes? I think that would make for a fairly interesting conversation.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Finally, the ever-radiant and very fine writer Arlene Hunt was kind enough to go the extra mile whilst plugging AZC, with the gist of her considered opinion running thusly:

“Laugh-out-loud funny in places, Twin Peaks-tastic in others, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL kept me up a number of late nights snuffling and tittering as Billy Karlsson dragged me from one jaw-dropping scene to another … A cracking, adrenaline-popping rollercoaster of a novel. I heartily recommend it.” - Arlene Hunt

  I thank you kindly, ma’am …
  For anyone wondering what all the fuss is about, feel free to click on this link here …

Here, Baby, Here

If you’re not doing anything else this forthcoming Friday, July 22nd, and you’re in Dublin, you could do a lot worse than wander into Eason’s on O’Connell Street, where the justifiably revered Dennis Lehane (right) will be in situ. The author of the celebrated Kenzie and Gennaro series of novels - the most recent of which is MOONLIGHT MILE - along with standalones MYSTIC RIVER, SHUTTER ISLAND and THE GIVEN DAY, Dennis Lehane is a rare beast, a critically acclaimed bestseller with the artistic licence and ambition to repeatedly push himself out of his comfort zone.
  He may also be the most successfully adapted novelist of his generation: GONE, BABY, GONE, MYSTIC RIVER and SHUTTER ISLAND have all transferred brilliantly to the silver screen, courtesy of directors Ben Affleck, Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese, respectively. And if that wasn’t enough, Dennis Lehane has also won awards for his writing for HBO’s epic series, ‘The Wire’.
  There’s a downside to Friday’s event, of course, and it’s that yours truly will be ‘in conversation’ with Dennis Lehane, aka skulking just out of the spotlight and hoping that my questions don’t cause him to fall off his stool laughing and / or as result of being rendered comatose with boredom. Still, I promise to keep out of the way as much as possible, given that this is a rare opportunity for readers to meet with a writer who has become a living legend at the tender age of 46.
  For all the details on how to book tickets, clickety-click here …

There’s No PLACE Like Home

Boo. I was under the impression that Tana French’s new novel, BROKEN HARBOUR, was due later this summer, but my ever-reliable moles in the industry (aka a quick squint at Amazon) tells me that BROKEN HARBOUR won’t be appearing until next March.
  That said, there’s a lot of Tana French around at the moment, most of it celebrating the release of the paperback of FAITHFUL PLACE, with Michael Malone leading the charge over at May Contain Nuts. An excerpt runs thusly:

MM: Your bio reads that you spent much of your childhood travelling - has this impacted on your ability to have a “Faithful Place” of your own?

TF: “I think my international-brat childhood played a big part in shaping FAITHFUL PLACE. You’re always fascinated by what’s alien and inaccessible to you, and I’ve always been fascinated by people and places whose roots go deep – people who are part of a centuries-old, tight-knit community where every relationship is shaped by generations’ worth of interaction and knowledge. That’s not something I’ll ever have, and that’s the world where FAITHFUL PLACE is set: the Liberties, an inner-city neighbourhood that’s one of Dublin’s oldest.
  “At the same time, though, Dublin is the nearest thing I’ve got to a home. I’ve lived here since 1990; it’s the only city I know inside out, all the accents, all the short cuts, the sense of humour and the best pubs. In a lot of ways FAITHFUL PLACE is a love song to Dublin, with all its flaws.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, over at Milo’s Rambles, Tana French is interviewed by, erm, Tana French. You know what to do …
  Finally, the inestimable Shotsmag has an intriguing piece, again from Tana, in which she offers her five favourite novels that deal with blood ties. One click and you’re there …

CaSI: Dublin

I mentioned last week that Benny Blanco, aka Benjamin Black, aka John Banville, will see his Quirke novels adapted for a TV series in the UK, and lo! Hardly had the dust settled than another TV series has been announced for an Irish crime writer, or more accurately the pair of Irish crime writers known as CaSI, oops, Casey Hill. Quoth the PR elves:

TV rights to TABOO, the debut thriller by Irish bestselling author Melissa Hill and husband Kevin, have this week been snapped up by a leading UK production company.
  The husband and wife team (who write under the pseudonym Casey Hill) have signed a lucrative TV deal with Ecosse Films, the production company behind hit UK TV shows such as ‘Mistresses’, ‘He Kills Coppers’, ‘Raw’ and films ‘Brideshead Revisited’ and the Anne Hathaway-starred ‘Becoming Jane’.
  Ecosse will produce a CSI-style TV series based on Reilly Steel, the feisty American forensic investigator from TABOO, who comes to Dublin to work alongside the Gardai in order to track down a twisted serial killer who is dispatching citizens at a frightening rate. The book is said to be along the lines of Patricia Cornwell’s popular Kay Scarpetta series, and is the first in a planned series of novels featuring Reilly Steel.
  It is another major coup for the writing pair, who last year secured a six-figure pre-empt from major UK publisher Simon & Schuster for their debut novel, and went on to achieve further translation deals in a string of international territories. Upon its release in Ireland earlier this year, TABOO stormed straight into the bestseller list at No 2. It has just hit the shelves in the UK, and with the story now poised to hit TV screens the book’s popularity is set to soar.

  Hearty congrats to all concerned, especially as even a solidly performing TV series could well translate into millions of potential readers. Given that TABOO and its mooted sequels are set in Dublin, the news should prove a welcome boost to the domestic filmmaking market too.
  Melissa Hill, of course, is already a bestselling author of women’s fiction, and her current tome, SOMETHING FROM TIFFANY’S, is still selling gangbusters after parachuting straight in at No 1 in the Irish fiction charts earlier this summer.
  So there you have it. I never thought I’d write a post containing the words ‘Melissa Hill’, ‘Brideshead Revisited’, ‘John Banville’ and ‘Something From Tiffany’s’ and ‘He Kills Coppers’, but it’s mutating into a funny ol’ world, this Irish crime writing lark …

Happy Birthday-Ish, Holden Caulfield

I had a piece in the Irish Times during the week, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the publication of JD Salinger’s CATCHER IN THE RYE, which featured contributions from authors Sarah Webb, Ed O’Loughlin, Eoin McNamee and Belinda McKeon. It opened up a lot like this:

“If you really want to know about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap …” - J.D. Salinger, ‘The Catcher in the Rye’

Routinely hailed as ‘the great American novel’, J.D. Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ offers a story that is on the face of it modest in ambition and scale. First published on July 16th, 1951, it follows the disaffected Holden Caulfield on his perambulations around New York city late in December, 1949, in the wake of his expulsion from an upmarket prep school. Intended by Salinger for an adult readership, Holden’s intensely first-person tale of his experiences amid the snobs and ‘phoneys’ of his social set has fired the imagination of generations of adolescents ever since.
  “God, I loved that book,” says Sarah Webb, herself an author of young adult novels, and who first read ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ at the age of 15. “I read it in one all-night sitting, gobbling up every page. The next night I turned back to Chapter 1 and started all over again. I remember slowing down towards the end, distraught to be coming to the end. I wanted the reading experience to last forever.”
  Holden Morrisey Caulfield first appeared in the short story ‘I’m Crazy’, which was published in Colliers in 1945 (a previous version had been accepted in 1941 by The New Yorker, but not published, as it was thought too bleak in tone). A reworked version of ‘I’m Crazy’ would eventually provide the material for the first chapter of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, establishing Caulfield’s expulsion from Pencey Prep, and also the unfussy, stream-of-consciousness first-person narrative that seems to bypass the critical faculties to speak directly to the teenage heart.
  The novel sells roughly 250,000 copies per year, with total sales topping 65 million …

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Zero Hour: An Invitation To The Launch Of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL

Zero hour approaches, folks. The date for the official launch of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL (Liberties Press) has been set, and it’s August 10th, at the award-winning Gutter Bookshop, Temple Bar, Dublin. The Dark Lord, aka John Connolly, has been good enough to agree to crack a metaphorical bottle of champagne against AZC’s bows, although given the extent of the Dark Lord’s dominions, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he didn’t have to rush off somewhere in the meantime to suppress an uprising by disaffected minions, and thus miss out on the dubious honour of being personally associated with yours truly’s humble tome.
  Anyway, August 10th at the Gutter Bookshop, with John Connolly sprinkling his inimitable brand of fairy dust, is the plan for now, and here’s hoping it all comes off.
  It should go without saying, of course - although I’ll say it anyway - that you are all invited along. If you can make it, I’d be delighted and humbled in equal measure.
  For those of you new to these pages, the back-page blurb of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL runs thusly:

Who in their right mind would want to blow up a hospital?
  “Close it down, blow it up – what’s the difference?”
  Billy Karlsson needs to get real. Literally. A hospital porter with a sideline in euthanasia, Billy is a character trapped in the purgatory of an abandoned novel. Deranged by logic, driven beyond sanity, Billy makes his final stand: if killing old people won’t cut the mustard, the whole hospital will have to go up in flames.
  Only his creator can stop him now, the author who abandoned Billy to his half-life limbo, in which Billy schemes to do whatever it takes to get himself published, or be damned . . .

  “ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL is unlike anything else you’ll read this year … Laugh-out-loud funny … This is writing at its dazzling, cleverest zenith. Think John Fowles, via Paul Auster and Rolling Stone … a feat of extraordinary alchemy.” – Ken Bruen, author of AMERICAN SKIN

  For a variety of other writers’ opinions on ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, including those of John Banville, Reed Farrel Coleman, Melissa Hill, Colin Bateman, Deborah Lawrenson, Adrian McKinty, John McFetridge, Scott Philips and Donna Moore, clickety-click on the AZC cover to your left.
  And there you have it. Here’s hoping I’ll see you all on August 10th …

An Absolute Masterpiece Of Crime Fiction

I should declare an interest before writing this post, because John Banville (right) was kind enough to write a very generous blurb for my forthcoming tome ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. So you may want to take my opinion with a Siberian mine-sized pinch of salt. That said, I find his mischief-making contrarianism hilarious. Here’s some excerpts from his recent interview with the LA Times:

A DEATH IN SUMMER finds dour, bumbling pathologist Garret Quirke trying to get to the bottom of the apparent suicide of a Dublin newspaper owner. Banville tells readers, only partly in jest, to expect an “absolute masterpiece of crime fiction.”

  And, later:

“My books are better than anybody else’s. They are just not good enough for me,” he said.

  And here he is on bog-standard crime fiction:

Banville said he is turned off by graphic depictions of violence both in crime novels and in Hollywood movies. He derides the hugely popular Stieg Larsson novels as crude stories “written with the blunt end of a burned stick.”

  Mind you, for a man who gets regularly pummelled by crime fic fans for his snotty attitude to his mystery writing, which he writes under the open pseudonym of Benjamin Black, Banville appears to be working a two-way street:

“Black was able to help Banville,” he said over breakfast at the Knickerbocker Club on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, explaining that the Banville novel he just completed, ANCIENT LIGHT, was improved by his crime fiction. “Black has got used to doing plots and keeping all that balanced, and Banville has learned some of that from him,” he said.

  For the full interview, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, Benjamin Black is spreading like a virus throughout the US. I mentioned last week that Janet Maslin was full of praise for A DEATH IN SUMMER in the New York Times, but the raves are piling up elsewhere. To wit:

The Daily Beast on ‘The New Master of Noir’;
A review from the LA Times: ‘a beach read for the brainy’;
The Chicago Tribune: ‘some of the most beautiful sentences this side of heaven's rewrite desk’;
Irish Central: ‘utterly delightful’;

  On the other side of the pond, the UK reviewers are also queuing up to lavish their encomiums:

Mark Lawson in The Guardian on ‘a fascinating addition to the ranks of the defective detective’;
Barry Forshaw in The Independent: ‘a highly professional and engaging piece of work’;

  So there you have it. Benny Blanco, on a roll. Hark, do I hear the sound of axes grinding?

All About Eve

I’m way behind the curve on Deborah Lawrenson’s latest offering, THE LANTERN, which has already been chosen as a TV Book Club pick in the UK. Still, better late than never, eh? To date Deborah Lawrenson has written historical dramas spiced with mystery - THE ART OF FALLING, the Lawrence Durrell-inspired SONGS OF GOLD AND BLUE - and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed both. THE LANTERN is being pitched as a Gothic take on the historical drama, with the shadow of REBECCA falling across the Provence landscape. Quoth the blurb elves:

When Eve falls for the secretive, charming Dom, their whirlwind relationship leads them to purchase Les Genevriers, an abandoned house in a rural hamlet in the south of France. As the beautiful Provence summer turns to autumn, Eve finds it impossible to ignore the mysteries that haunt both her lover and the run-down old house, in particular the mysterious disappearance of his beautiful first wife, Rachel. Whilst Eve tries to untangle the secrets surrounding Rachel’s last recorded days, Les Genevriers itself seems to come alive. As strange events begin to occur with frightening regularity, Eve’s voice becomes intertwined with that of Benedicte Lincel, a girl who lived in the house decades before. As the tangled skeins of the house’s history begin to unravel, the tension grows between Dom and Eve. In a page-turning race, Eve must fight to discover the fates of both Benedicte and Rachel, before Les Genevriers’ dark history has a chance to repeat itself.

  THE LANTERN was published last month in the UK, and will be published in the US in August. If it’s anything like Lawrenson’s previous offerings, it’ll be a cracker. You have been forewarned …

A 51st State of Mind

When I was putting together DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS, I thought Declan Hughes would be a shoo-in for an essay on the history of the crime narrative in Irish theatre. Dec Hughes was, of course, a critically acclaimed playwright before he turned to writing the Ed Loy series of novels, and there are many - yours truly among them - who hope that he might yet be persuaded to return to the craft, just so long as it doesn’t interfere with his writing novels.
  Anyway, Dec Hughes declined to write about the Irish theatre and crime, preferring instead to pen an essay on the American influence - and particularly the troika of Hammett, Chandler and Ross Macdonald - on the contemporary Irish crime novel, and fascinating reading it makes too. The essay is up on Scribd, with the opening running a lot like this:

Irish Hard-boiled Crime: A 51st State of Mind
By Declan Hughes

Irish people can be especially prone to magical thinking, to put it at its kindest. We seem extremely reluctant to relinquish our belief in phenomena that neither experience nor reason will justify. The most notable and poignant example of this is our relentless credulity regarding the existence and quality of the Irish Summer.
  Although year after year, a solitary sunny day is followed by unending weeks of overcast skies and squally rain, hope springs infernal. In my case, this belief, or “superstition”, took root when I was thirteen, during the (genuinely) long hot summer of 1976. Every morning I would assemble a lunch and spend the day on Whiterock beach in Dalkey, alone or with friends. I swam and read and looked longingly at girls in bikinis and wondered how that, and everything else, was going to go. And that’s pretty much how I spent my subsequent teenage summers, often in delusional defiance of the weather. I never got a job, because I didn’t drink back then, could get all the books I needed from the library, experienced a certain amount of success in finding out more about those mysterious bikini-wearing creatures, and didn’t want anything else money could buy as much as I wanted to be on the beach and in the sea, even if the rain fell and an east wind tested your faith in the Irish summer to the limit.
  There was music in the air during that time, of course, and for all that punk rock had happened and post punk followed in its wake, and for all that I had developed a ferociously puritanical line in rock snobbery which permitted me to like virtually nobody except the Clash and Bruce Springsteen (which was convenient, since I could barely afford their records, let alone anyone else’s), the soundtrack I still associate with Whiterock during those years was the Eagles’ Hotel California. (You didn’t have to buy Hotel California: in the late ’70s in South Dublin, it played for free from every shop doorway and bedroom window). Cowboy boots and flared Levis and plaid and cheesecloth shirts and droopy moustaches and long hair were the order of the day for the half-generation ahead of me, and their musk of patchouli oil and dope smoke seemed like an intoxicating promise, a hazy benediction from alluring adepts of a laid-back cult I longed to join. The cult did not just dream of America, and more specifically, California; it seemed to believe it was already living there. And as I gazed out to sea on whichever blue sky day I could find or recall, I knew I was worthy of confirmation in their faith, for that was where I believed I was living too. The Ireland that presented itself to us day-to-day in the ’70s was still run by priests and nuns and decrepit old bogmen in tweed suits, and claimed by murderous bigots intent on shooting and bombing everyone who disagreed with them into a fantasy vision of the glorious republican past; nobody who dreamt of truth, beauty, youth and love could tolerate either as a reality ...

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, those of you who missed the podcast of Declan Hughes and your humble scribe shooting the breeze about GREEN STREETS on RTE’s Arena programme should clickety-click here …

UPDATE: Richard L. Pangburn reviews DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS over at Little Known Gems, suggesting that the book is, “An anthology … filled with brilliant ideas and surprising points of view, an examination of Irish crime literature by those who now write it, packed with verve and humour that sparkles, a treasure chest of emerald noir.” With which we are very well pleased. We thank you kindly, sir …
  For the rest, clickety-click here …

A Rum Do And No Mistake

“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest / Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum …” The Somali pirates are popping up all over the place these days (although mostly off the coast of Somalia, it has to be said). Elmore Leonard and Stella Rimington are two authors to have set their novels against a backdrop of Somali piracy, and now sometime Dublin resident Stephen Leather is adding his pieces-of-eight’s worth with FAIR GAME. To wit:

Kidnapping is one of the cruellest crimes - lives are put at risk for cold, hard cash. But when Somali pirates seize the crew of a yacht off the coast of Africa, they bite off more than they can chew. One of the hostages has friends in high places and Spider Shepherd is put on the case. He goes deep undercover in an audacious plan to bring an end to the pirate gang’s reign of terror. But as Shepherd closes in on his quarry he realises that there’s much more at stake than the lives of the hostages and that the pirates are involved in a terrorist plot that will strike at the heart of London.

  FAIR GAME, by the way, is Leather’s eight Spider Shepherd novel, and his 25th in total, by my reckoning. Prolific stuff. “If I get any spare time I’ll be working on a new thriller set in the United States,” says Leather on his blog, “using Richard Yokely, who appears in several of the Spider Shepherd books. And I really want to do a sequel to PRIVATE DANCER. I just wish there were more hours in the day.”
  Settle down there, squire. Leave a little paper in the rain forest for the rest of us working chumps …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: The Guard

The Guard (15A)
Brendan Gleeson stars as Sergeant Gerry Boyle, a Connemara-based Garda whose feckless existence is compromised when FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) appears in Galway on the hunt for a gang of international drug smugglers. Written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, brother of the award-winning playwright Martin McDonagh, The Guard employs the narrative structure of a conventional police procedural to unleash a wickedly black comedy of manners. The culture-clash between the focused and driven Everett and the irreverent and occasionally criminal Boyle is sharply observed, with Cheadle (who co-produces) content to play the straight man to Gleeson’s foul-mouthed stream of non sequiturs. Both actors are in fine fettle, and the rest of the cast - including Liam Cunningham, Larry Wilmot and Fionnula Flanagan - are happy to cruise along in their slipstream and heighten the surreal sense of humour, which is rooted in a very Irish resentment of authority in any form. The latter stages flatten the characterisations as McDonagh sets in train a manic finale, which is a little too derivative of the comedy-crime caper staples to be truly satisfying, but for the most part The Guard is one of the funniest comedies of the year to date. **** - Declan Burke

This review first appeared in the Irish Examiner

The Very Best In Nasty Sex, Sorta

Pray silence for the Kindle-only publication of Allan Guthrie’s modern classic, TWO-WAY SPLIT, a debut novel which won the Theakston’s Old Peculier award in 2007. If you haven’t stumbled across Allan Guthrie before, this was Crime Always Pays’ take at the time:

“The holdall sat on the bed like an ugly brown bag of conscience.” Fans of classic crime writing will get a kick or five out of TWO-WAY SPLIT, and we’re talking classic: Allan Guthrie’s multi-character exploration of Edinburgh’s underbelly marries the spare, laconic prose of James M. Cain with the psychological grotesqueries of Jim Thompson at his most lurid … The result is a gut-knotting finale that unfurls with the inevitability of all great tragedy and the best nasty sex – it’ll leave you devastated, hollowed out, aching to cry and craving more. – Declan Burke

  For more in the same vein, clickety-click here …
  And if you don’t believe me - I wouldn’t - then how about these two encomiums?

“Seek him out and buy his book.” - Ian Rankin
“Excellent.” - George Pelecanos

  So there you have it. TWO-WAY SPLIT for 99p on Amazon UK, or 99c on Amazon US. Buy it now, or Big Al will come around and bat his eyelashes at you … Or is it that if you do buy it, Big Al will come around and bat the eyelashes? I can’t remember. Doesn’t matter. Just buy it. You won’t regret it.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: David Peace

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 GLASS KEY by Dashiell Hammett.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
George Smiley.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t really think like that; if it’s good, I keep reading and if it’s bad, I stop.

Most satisfying writing moment?
1977.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Top three today would be: THE THIRD POLICEMAN by Flann O’Brien; THE ULTRAS by Eoin McNamee; THE GUARDS by Ken Bruen.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Any book by Eoin McNamee, or THE TWELVE by Stuart Neville.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Every day I thank God I can still write; so nothing bad, everything good.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Japan, 1949; One God. One Devil. Two men: THE EXORCISTS.

Who are you reading right now?
HOW LATE IT WAS, HOW LATE by James Kelman.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Reading and writing is the same act for me; so both or neither.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Not finished yet.

David Peace’s ‘Red Riding Quartet’ is now available on Kindle.

It’s A Long Way Back To Tipperary

Shades of Eoin McNamee in Carlo Gébler’s latest offering, THE DEAD EIGHT, which is a novel based on a historical true crime. Quoth the blurb elves:

On a wet November morning in 1940, Harry Gleeson discovered the body of Moll McCarthy in a field near the village of New Inn, Co. Tipperary. Moll McCarthy had been shot twice with a shotgun, once in the face - Carlo Gébler’s novel is an attempt to explain how the local police fabricated their case and fitted up Harry Gleeson, and why an entire community looked away as the Irish judicial system prosecuted, convicted and condemned to death an innocent man. Albert Pierrepoint (the hangman) executed Harry Gleeson in Mountjoy in April 1941.

  THE DEAD EIGHT isn’t the first time that Gébler has dipped his quill into old blood: W9 & OTHER LIVES, THE CURE and HOW TO MURDER A MAN have all dabbled in crime narratives, although Gébler - who also writes memoir, children’s stories and non-genre fiction, as well as being a playwright - is critically acclaimed as a literary author.
  Anyway, THE DEAD EIGHT is winging its way towards me as you read this, so we’ll soon see whether it qualifies as a crime novel. Or not, as the case may be. Not that it matters: a good book is a good book, end of story.
  For those of you interested, and leaving aside the author’s intent and execution, my theory as to what constitutes a crime novel runs as follows: if you can take the crime out of the story and it still stands up, it’s probably not a crime novel; but if you take the crime away and the story collapses, then it’s a crime novel.
  If anyone has any other suggestions, the comment box is open …
  Incidentally, is it just me or is there a striking similarity between the cover of THE DEAD EIGHT and Gene Kerrigan’s non-fiction collection from 1996, HARD CASES?

Black In The Pink

The New York Times has a bit of a jones for Irish crime scribes these days. Yesterday I mentioned Marilyn Stasio’s review of Conor Fitzgerald’s THE FATAL TOUCH; not to be outdone, Janet Maslin weighed in with a fine appreciation of Benjamin Black’s latest, A DEATH IN SUMMER. The gist runs thusly:

“Benjamin Black, whose fourth book is A DEATH IN SUMMER, started out as the escapist alter ego of John Banville, who won the Man Booker Prize for his 2005 novel THE SEA. But his Black persona has been such a success that he looks increasingly like the Superman to Mr. Banville’s more literary Clark Kent. His books about the dour Irish pathologist named Quirke have effortless flair, with their period-piece cinematic ambience and their sultry romance. The Black books are much more like Alan Furst’s elegant, doom-infused World War II spy books than like standard crime tales.” - Janet Maslin

  Mind you, Ms Maslin does report that Mr Black does succumb “to the occasional fit of verbosity. At one atypically overripe moment the author manages to use “miasmic,” “ether,” “teeming,” “bacilli,” “succumb,” “writhe” and “tender torment” in the same sentence.”
  I have to say that I didn’t notice that particular sentence when I read A DEATH IN SUMMER, which I enjoyed very much, not least because there’s a palpable sense of John Banville settling into the Benjamin Black persona and - whispers, now - actually enjoying it. For my take on the novel, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, Eithne Shortall in the Sunday Times (no link) brought us the news that the Benjamin Black novels are to be made into a TV series for the BBC, to be filmed in Dublin by Tyrone Productions and Element Pictures. To wit:

Banville … set out to create a detective series for television, and when the project was shelved he converted it into a novel. Nine years later it is about to complete a roundabout journey to the screen. […] Each of the first three Black books will be turned into a 90-minute drama, and if they prove successful the fourth instalment will also be adapted.

  So that’s Black in the pink, and Banville in the black. Nice.