Ochi Day: Nay, Nay And Thrice Nay

On October 28th, 1940, the Italian ambassador to Greece, Emanuele Grazzi, delivered an ultimatum to the Greek prime minister (and erstwhile dictator) Ioannis Metaxas: Greece allowed the Italian-German Axis forces to occupy strategically important Greek bases, or suffer the consequences.
  1n 1940, Greece was no more an international powerhouse than it is today. Metaxas knew with certainty that were he to refuse Grazzi’s ultimatum, the consequences would be dire. Even if the Greeks managed to repel Mussolini’s invading army, which they did in some style, the Germans were waiting impatiently, jackboots tapping.
  Legend has it that Mextaxas offered a single, laconic ‘No’ (‘Ochi’). What he actually said was, ‘Alors, c’est la guerre.’
  Nowadays October 28th is celebrated in Greece as ‘Ochi Day’ - ‘No Day’.
  The Guardian runs an editorial today on the Irish referendum on the EU Fiscal Treaty, summing up the Yes and No vote as Fear and Anger, respectively. It’s not quite that simple, but it strikes a chord.
  It certainly strikes a chord when the Irish Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan, who disgracefully dismissed Ireland’s links with and concerns for Greece as no more than a waning appetite for feta cheese, attempts to bully the electorate into voting Yes.
  Today I think Ireland will vote Yes to the Fiscal Treaty. It will vote Yes because it is afraid, and it is afraid because it is being bullied, and because it has been conditioned by 800 years of colonial oppression to take bullies seriously, and because the Famine still haunts the darker shadows of its subconscious.
  Today, and despite the fact that Sinn Fein are urging a No vote, I’ll be voting No. I’ll be voting No because I refuse to be bullied and to live in fear and to accept that I must live the rest of my life to the rhythm of impatient jackboots tapping and according to the whims of the utterly inept gamblers of the international markets, those laughably self-styled ‘Masters of the Universe’.
  I’ll be voting No because dignity matters.
  I’ll be voting No because Fine Gael, Labour and Fianna Fail - all of whom have miserably failed this country since its Independence, and will continue to do so for as long as we give them a mandate to do it - want me to vote Yes.
  I’ll be voting No because, contrary to what the Fat Fool Noonan might believe, I have far more in common with the vast majority of the Greek people than feta cheese, not least of which is a very healthy suspicion of the ruling classes, this on the basis that a desire to rule should be in itself sufficient reason to bar any man or woman from ever taking power.
  I’ll be voting No in solidarity with the Greeks on the basis that if you tolerate this, then your children will be next.
  Ochi, Ochi, Ochi, Ochi.
  I’ll leave you, if I may, with a soupcon of WB Yeats:

What need you being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till,
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Jeffrey Siger

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?
Though one might not think of it as a ‘traditional’ crime novel, I’d have to say BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy. There’s none better to my way of thinking.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
No question about it. Sherlock Holmes, original version. Golden Victorian prose and none of that DNA detecting stuff to clutter one’s tiny attic of an investigative mind.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
The plays of August Wilson, he’s a master of dialect.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When my new Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis novel, TARGET: TINOS, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Although I’ve received similar reviews for earlier works, TARGET: TINOS was a particularly long haul to complete; indeed I had to write two books to come up with just one. I’d written the first one in 2010 and it was scheduled to come out in January 2012, when out of the blue its central storyline and later my primary bad guy came to life and played out across the world as independent, front-page headline news events. What I’d put forth as an original story line now seemed hopelessly derivative and my publisher and I agreed to kill it. Writing the novel that replaced it was not a pleasant experience … for all the while I had an eye on the headlines, praying events I imagined would not again be overrun by reality. As things turned out they were! But by then I was smiling ear-to-ear for the first reviews were in, calling TARGET: TINOS, “another of Jeffrey Siger’s thoughtful police procedurals set in picturesque but not untroubled Greek locales”—The New York Times, “superb…a winner”—Publishers Weekly, “complex portrait of contemporary Greece to bolster another solid whodunit”—Kirkus Reviews, “fast paced…interesting and highly entertaining”— Library Journal, “throbs with the pulse of Greek culture…an entertaining series”—Booklist.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Excluding my host’s novels, which must be included at the very top of any such list, and since I’m being pressed to answer, I’ll say IN THE WOODS by Tana French.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst: you can very easily forget about your obligations to the rest of your life. Best: you can very easily forget about your obligations to the rest of your life.

The pitch for your next book is …?
“Honest, it’s almost done.” Oh, you don’t mean to my editor. Then I’d say: “Life as we know it is changing in the West. Forces of occupation no longer come with armaments, but with pens, promises, and lots of cash.”

Who are you reading right now?
Believe it or not, Samuel Beckett. Just finishing up WAITING FOR GODOT for the zillionth time.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write. Although I think it would be in everyone’s best interest that I be allowed to read my work for editing purposes.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Authoritative, compelling, authentic.

Jeffrey Siger’s TARGET: TINOS is published by the Poisoned Pen Press.

Charlie’s Angels

I don’t get excited about covers as a rule, but the artwork for John Connolly’s latest Charlie Parker novel, THE WRATH OF ANGELS, is rather impressive. Shades of the cherubim taking up station east of Eden, methinks, although if memory serves there was a flaming sword involved in that particular imbroglio as opposed to a pair of burning wings. Quoth the blurb elves:

In the depths of the Maine woods, the wreckage of an aeroplane is discovered. There are no bodies, and no such plane has ever been reported missing, but men both good and evil have been seeking it for a long, long time. What the wreckage conceals is more important than money: it is power. Hidden in the plane is a list of names, a record of those who have struck a deal with the Devil. Now a battle is about to commence between those who want the list to remain secret and those who believe that it represents a crucial weapon in the struggle against the forces of darkness.

  The race to secure the prize draws in private detective Charlie Parker, a man who knows more than most about the nature of the terrible evil that seeks to impose itself on the world, and who fears that his own name may be on the list. It lures others too: a beautiful, scarred woman with a taste for killing; a silent child who remembers his own death; and the serial killer known as the Collector, who sees in the list new lambs for his slaughter.

  But as the rival forces descend upon this northern state, the woods prepare to meet them, for the forest depths hide other secrets.

  Someone has survived the crash.
  SOMETHING has survived the crash.
  And it is waiting . . .

  So there you have it, and there really isn’t much point in me saying much more. I’m ridiculously comprised in relation to John Connolly’s work, partly because I’ve been a fan for years, but mainly because (a) he launched my own tome last year and (b) he and I have co-edited a title, BOOKS TO DIE FOR, which will appear in August. All of which means that anything positive and/or complimentary I say here about John Connolly can be considered deeply suspect, and perhaps rightly so.
  Happily, John Connolly needs no such big-ups from yours truly, and would continue to sell books by the freighter-load were this blog to burn down, fall over and sink into a swamp.
  What I can say without fear of contradiction is that John Connolly’s Charlie Parker stories combine all the essential elements of a great novel - character, story, style and theme - and deliver them in a unique blend. I won’t be shocked if he doesn’t win the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, because there’s a very strong field on the longlist this year; by the same token, I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised if he did win, on the basis that he’s as fine a crime novelist as has emerged from these islands in the last two decades.
  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is yours truly’s two cents.

On Winning The Goldsboro ‘Last Laugh’ Award, And Failing Better

I genuinely did not expect ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL to win the Goldsboro ‘Last Laugh’ Award at the Bristol Crimefest, not least because the shortlist included two of my all-time favourite writers - Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen - along with a slew of very good contemporary authors, among them a previous winner in the shape of the very gracious Len Tyler.
  In fact, I’d been in touch recently, by email, with Elmore Leonard’s PR guy and right-hand man, and had told him that if Elmore was to win, I’d be more than happy to pick up the award for him, given that I’m travelling to the States in the near future and would love an excuse to visit Elmore Leonard.
  Then David Headley of Goldsboro Books read out the shortlist of nominees, and the winner, and I was halfway to the podium and still in a state of shock when I realised that the only winner’s speech I had prepared was one on behalf of Elmore Leonard. Hence the blithering idiot (the non-Jeffery Deaver guy above, right) who bumbled his lines in front of an audience of wordsmiths, their publishers and agents.
  I do remember saying something about how my wife, before I left, told me not to bother coming home unless I won (which sounded vaguely like the Spartan mother’s blessing, ‘Come home behind your shield, or on it.’), so that winning was something of a pity, because I was really starting to warm to Bristol …
  I’ll write a longer post during the week about the Crimefest weekend in general, but for now I have to hit and run. Suffice to say that I was very pleased indeed to be sitting beside my good friend Peter Rozovsky when the winner’s name was read out; had he not been there to shake my hand, and confirm that it wasn’t some deranged acid flash-back hallucination, I may well have remained sitting in my seat all night, getting more and more paranoid that everyone was staring at me. And thanks too to Brian McGilloway, who took the photo above, and was kind enough to broadcast it to the world on the night.
  I’m still not the best of it, mind. I was very tempted to check out of the hotel early on Sunday morning, in case they’d made a mistake.
  Anyway, I’m back home now, and the prize is taking up pride of place on the office windowsill, and I’m slowly starting to descend from the improbable high of it all. It feels good, it really does.
  One final word, which occurred to me late on Saturday night, and which might be of use to any writers out there who are finding it difficult to find a publisher: ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL went through fourteen publishers, all of whom said no, before finding its place with Liberties Press. To paraphrase Sammy B: fail, fail again, fail better …

The Troubles We’ve Seen

Following on from Friday’s post on Anthony Quinn’s post-Troubles, Northern Ireland-set debut novel, and at the risk of giving the impression that anything approaching consistent thought goes into this blog, I had an interview with Stuart Neville published yesterday in the Irish Examiner, during the course of which Stuart spoke about Northern Ireland as a setting, and how ‘the Troubles aren’t the most commercial topic in fiction these days’. To wit:

When he sat down to write his third novel, however, the recently released STOLEN SOULS, Neville was aware he could well be painting himself into a corner.   “Well, COLLUSION is probably the most political of the three books,” he says, “and STOLEN SOULS is very much a reaction against that, a move away from that. Because there is the danger that you could get bogged down in the Troubles, and post-Troubles politics, and all the rest of it. And it’s true, with my commercial head on for a moment, that the Troubles aren’t the most commercial topic in fiction these days (laughs). So if I want to be purely mercenary about it, then it’s a good idea to move away from the politics.”   Neville is in the vanguard of a number of authors who are engaged in writing about the newly transformed Northern Ireland, a cohort that includes Colin Bateman, Adrian McKinty, Eoin McNamee and Gerard Brennan.   “I know other writers are working in different directions on this,” he concedes. “I’ve just finished reading Adrian McKinty’s new book, THE COLD COLD GROUND, in which he dives headlong into the thick of the Troubles and the hunger strikes, which is admirable, I think. I do think the Troubles will be quite fertile ground for writers the further we move away from them, and the freer we are to write about them with a more dispassionate gaze.”

  What say you? Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST) made a huge impression when it first appeared, and Adrian McKinty’s THE COLD COLD GROUND has been garnering all kinds of wonderful reviews since it was published earlier this year. But is it the case that Norn Iron and its ‘Troubles’ are a turn-off for most readers?   More to the point, perhaps: should writers give less than a fiddler’s fandango for what readers want, and simply write the books that need to be written?

On Literary Festivals And The Lesser-Spotted Irish Crime Writer

Hearty congratulations to all involved in ‘Bloody Scotland’, aka Scotland’s International Crime Writing Festival, the inaugural edition of which takes place in Stirling this coming September (artist’s impression, right), featuring the likes of Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Peter James, Allan Guthrie, Denise Mina, Ann Cleeves, Tony Black, Karin Fossum, William McIlvanney and - oh yes! - the erstwhile Gregory, John Gordon Sinclair.
  It’s a very nice line-up indeed, and the best of luck to the Festival. Here’s hoping it’s the start of many a fine year’s skirling and, well, whatever it is the Scots do when there’s no one around to keep manners on them.
  A similar, Irish-themed event was run in Dublin a few years back, featuring the cream of Irish crime authors plus some interesting international guests, but it was pretty much a bust. It didn’t help that the event coincided with what turned out to be the only weekend of sunshine that summer, but even beforehand the advance sales had been sluggish. Is there an appetite among Irish readers to sit down and listen to writers talk about writing and books? Is it simply the case that Irish crime writers aren’t interesting enough to Irish readers to draw the crowds?
  There are two literary festivals taking place in Ireland in the next couple of weeks. The Listowel festival kicks off on May 31st, while the Dublin Writers Festival begins a week later, on June 4th. Unless you’re prepared to consider Aifric Campbell and Kevin Power crime writers - and I don’t think either author considers themselves a crime writer - then there isn’t so much as a whiff of cordite to be had at either festival.
  That’s a pity, because there’s some very interesting Irish crime writers publishing novels roundabout now: Conor Fitzgerald, Jane Casey, Tana French, Brian McGilloway, Niamh O’Connor, Conor Brady, Michael Clifford … But there’s more - or rather, less. Because the Dalkey Book Festival runs from June 15th to 17th, and crime writers are again conspicuous by their absence. Yes, the excellent Eoin McNamee will be in attendance, but running the eye over all the other contributors suggests that the organisers would be horrified to discover that McNamee is considered a crime writer in less than salubrious places; and Derek Landy is taking part, but I’d imagine that that’s on the strength of his success as a children’s author, as opposed to Skulduggery Pleasant being a wise-crackin’ undead private eye-type.
  And then there’s the West Cork Literary Festival, which runs July 8th to 14th and which is entirely devoid of Irish crime writers. It does, however, feature husband-and-wife team Nicci French, and another husband-and-wife team, Edward Marston and Judith Cutler. A pity there was no room for the Irish husband-and-wife writing team Kevin and Melissa Hill, but there you go, there’s no sense in being parochial about such things, is there?
  Meanwhile, and back to the Listowel Writers Festival, where there is a panel discussion on Thursday night, May 31st, titled (koff) ‘Towards a National Strategy on Literature’. To wit:

A panel discussion with The Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Jimmy Deenihan, author Colm Tóibín, Sinéad MacAodha, The Irish Literature Exchange and Sean Lyons, Chairman of Writers’ Week. It is time that we develop a national literary and strategic policy in Ireland. We will take a step forward, evoke ideas, delve into where we are and where we are going … ask controversial but fundamental questions …

  ‘Delve into where we are and where we are going …’
  I could be very, very crude about where literary Ireland is right now, and cruder still about where it’s going. But that won’t solve anything.
  The knee-jerk reaction is to suggest that Irish crime writers should hold and host their own festival next year, along the lines of Bloody Scotland, or Harrogate or Crimefest in England, or the Bouchercon in the US; but Ireland is a small place, and there’s the very real danger of confirming the status quo, of reinforcing a ghetto mentality; like the standalone Crime Fiction category at the Irish Book Awards, it suggests that Irish crime writers need to be corralled off from real books, from proper fiction, and given a special award and a pat on the head.
  The irony is that it’s Irish crime writers who are ‘delving into where we are and where we are going’ as a nation, but it’s a real Catch 22 scenario right now for Irish crime writers: if you demand attention, you’re accused of special pleading; if you shrug and grit your teeth, you’re ignored.
  So what to do?
  Over to you, people. I’m all ears …

Romantic Ireland's Dead And Gone ...

… and living on a ghost estate, apparently. Only sixty more sleeps before Tana French’s latest novel, BROKEN HARBOUR, is published on July 21st, gorgeously eerie cover and all. I’m looking forward to it, I have to say: French is one of those writers blessed with a number of gifts, offering substance by way of an intriguing plot set in the here-and-now of modern Ireland, with her elegant prose providing the style. Quote the back-page elves:

In BROKEN HARBOUR, a ghost estate outside Dublin - half-built, half-inhabited, half-abandoned - two children and their father are dead. The mother is on her way to intensive care. Scorcher Kennedy is given the case because he is the Murder squad’s star detective. At first he and his rookie partner, Richie, think this is a simple one: Pat Spain was a casualty of the recession, so he killed his children, tried to kill his wife Jenny, and finished off with himself. But there are too many inexplicable details and the evidence is pointing in two directions at once.
  Scorcher’s personal life is tugging for his attention. Seeing the case on the news has sent his sister Dina off the rails again, and she’s resurrecting something that Scorcher thought he had tightly under control: what happened to their family, one summer at Broken Harbour, back when they were children. The neat compartments of his life are breaking down, and the sudden tangle of work and family is putting both at risk . . .

  The novel has already attracted some very nice encomiums. To wit:

“Broken Harbour is better than whatever’s going to win the 2012 Man Booker. It’s better than the novels that are going to win the Costa and Orange prizes, and if it doesn’t win the Gold Dagger for best crime novel, the injustice might drive me to go and sit in a tent for a while, even though I hate camping. Tana French is a genius.” - Sophie Hannah

“I’ve been enthusiastically telling everyone who will listen to read Tana French. She is, without a doubt, my favourite new mystery writer. Her novels are poignant, compelling, beautifully written and wonderfully atmospheric. Just start reading the first page. You’ll see what I mean.” - Harlan Coben

“Tana French is one of those rare novelists who combine a gift for dialogue and characterisation, with suspense, intrigue and fabulous plotting. And she’s a beautiful writer, to boot. A real treat.” - Kate Mosse

  Very nice indeed. Finally, here’s a promo vid in which Tana French makes what appears to be a crime writing queen’s speech to Canada - roll it there, Collette …

Caveat Emperor

Over at the Facebook Irish Crime Fiction page, Joe McCoubrey has made a valiant stab at nailing down a comprehensive list of Irish crime scribes. It isn’t definitive, but then Joe’s cause isn’t helped by the fact that debut Irish crime writers are popping up like mushrooms these days. Still, it’s impressive list.
  One name that isn’t on the list is that of Ruth Dudley Edwards (right), aka ‘Cuddly Dudley’, possibly because she’s been busy writing non-fiction titles for the last few years. But lo! The Ruth Returns this coming October with KILLING THE EMPERORS, her 12th crime fiction title, with the blurb elves wibbling thusly:

Sir Henry Fortune, celebrity curator, has vanished. So too has his partner in love and money, disreputable art dealer Jason Pringle. Panic spreads throughout the London art world when more people go missing. No one can locate Anastasia Holliday, sensational Abject artist; Jake Thorogood, the critic who catapulted her into stardom; or Dr. Hortense Wilde, notorious for having influenced generations of art students to despise craftsmanship.
  Hysteria hits the media when it is found that the common link between the victims is that their careers blossomed when they embraced newly fashionable conceptual art. Could it be that they are hostages? If so, why? Ransom? Revenge?
  Who will be next? Will it be Sir Nicholas Serota, mighty overlord of British temples of the avant-garde, or the internationally renowned young British artist Damien Hirst, whose dross became platinum? Is danger in store for Charles Saatchi, mega-rich husband of a TV cook and the genius who took talentless young people and turned them into a winning brand?

  Given that Ruth Dudley Edwards has pretty much slaughtered an entire herd of sacred cows in her blackly comic crime fiction, I’m going to take a wild guess here and suggest that the ‘emperors’ of the title are some kind of nod to the emperor’s new clothes. Or maybe not. Is it possible, do you think, that Ruth has (koff) mellowed a tad since the publication of her most recent title, MURDERING AMERICANS …
  No. Me neither.

No Apostrophe? Now That Is Peculier

I’ve been more than a bit baffled over the last few years about the fact that John Connolly never seems to be nominated for the plethora of crime fiction awards. I wouldn’t mind so much if Connolly had, like so many successful authors before him, hit a plateau in terms of ability and ambition and was simply churning out the same book year after year. Anyone who has read his last two novels in particular, however, will testify that this is not the case; indeed, I’d argue that John Connolly is now writing the best fiction of his career. THE BURNING SOUL, especially, struck me as a very special novel, so I’m delighted to see that it has been recognised as such, and long-listed for the ‘Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year (a much-coveted title, despite (cue pedantic harrumph) the criminal absence of an apostrophe in the title of a writing competition. If you tolerate this, then your children will be unpunctuated, etc.
 

I’m equally delighted to see that Stuart Neville has also been nominated for said prize, for COLLUSION, which is to my mind the finest of his three novels to date, notwithstanding the fact that everyone else seems to prefer his debut, THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST (aka THE TWELVE). COLLUSION has previously been nominated for the LA Times Crime / Mystery Novel of the Year, an award Neville won with THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST, so the book has pedigree in this kind of thing.
  Either book has a very strong claim to actually winning the prize, although they’ll have to survive the shortlist cull first, which takes place on July 5th, I think; but they’re up against some very strong opposition, including novels from Val McDermid, Robert Harris, Denise Mina and Ian Rankin, not to mention last year’s most wildly overrated crime novel, BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP by SJ Watson.
  For the full long-list line-up, clickety-click on the venerable It’s A Crime (or a Mystery) …

Review: George Pelecanos, Casey Hill, Leif GW Persson

George Pelecanos was researching a novel on the Watergate scandal when the story of Raymond ‘Cadillac’ Smith caught his eye.   A violent young man who cut a swathe through Washington DCin 1972, Smith is reborn in Pelecanos’s 18th novel, WHAT IT WAS, as Red Fury Jones, a man who “aimed to leave behind a name that would be remembered. That would be something. Maybe the only thing. The one way you could win”.   WHAT IT WAS is a kind of ‘origins’ novel for one of Pelecanos’s series characters, the private eye Derek Strange, who first appeared in RIGHT AS RAIN (2001). A young black man sporting a Richard Roundtree moustache and outrageous bell-bottom flares, Strange has an insider’s dope on DC’s urban ghettoes that the police, represented here by veteran cop Frank Vaughn, simply can’t hope to match.   Commissioned to find a precious piece of jewellery, Strange quickly realises that Red Fury Jones has stolen it. So far, so good, but tracking down the fast-moving killer will prove a little more difficult, especially when Strange would need to be suicidal himself to attempt to retrieve the goods from a man who is on a kamikaze-style mission to live fast, die young and leave a legendary corpse.   Fans of Pelecanos -- who was an award-winning writer-producer on the seminal TV crime series The Wire, and is currently working on HBO’s Treme -- will recognise some of the author’s trademark riffs: the DC setting, the funky soundtrack, the pop culture references that embrace music, movies, clothes and cars. Despite the stripped-back prose and turbo-charged pace, however, WHAT IT WAS is infused with an unusually sombre and almost elegiac tone (the story is told by an ageing Strange to another of Pelecanos’s series characters, Nick Stefanos), particularly when Pelecanos is writing about the doomed Red Jones: “Jones had grown up in one of DC’s infamous alley dwellings, way below the poverty line. No father in his life, ever, with hustlers in and out of the spot, taking the place one ... All of them hungry, all the time. Being poor in that extreme way, Jones felt that nothing after could cut too deep ... “   Despite being something of a bonus offering to fans, arriving little more than six months after 2011’s THE CUT and priced to reflect that fact, WHAT IT WAS bears comparison with the finest work of George Pelecanos’s distinguished career.

  The Quantico-trained, Dublin-based Californian forensic investigator Reilly Steel returns in Casey Hill’s sophomore novel TORN, in which a particularly perverse serial killer is dispatching his victims in a series of diabolical murders that have their roots in one of the great works of world literature.   It’s not a particularly plausible plot, but despite the cutting-edge technology on display here -- at one point Reilly uses an iSPI (Investigative Scene Processing Integration) device to help her reconstruct crime scenes -- Casey Hill is in the business of creating old-fashioned mystery stories that have much more in common with the puzzle-solving games played by Golden Age doyennes Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, et al, than they have with the gritty realists of contemporary crime fiction.   Indeed, the reader is encouraged to have some fun acknowledging the tropes. “Are you really surprised that he didn’t take you straight to his home territory so early in the game?” asks a character of Reilly in the latter stages. The authors -- the wife-and-husband writing team of Melissa and Kevin Hill -- even allow Reilly a tongue-in-cheek run-through of the serial killer genre’s conventions as she comments aloud on the case in hand: “Meticulously planned murders,” she observes, “no effort too great, lots of research on the victims needed, the method of dispatch excessive, grotesque even ... “   That said, and while accepting that TORN leans heavily towards the escapist end of the crime/mystery spectrum, an existential quality emerges as the story thunders towards its finale.   What’s the point? Reilly & Co ask themselves. Isn’t catching a killer once the murders are already committed an exercise in stable-door bolting? And who can guarantee the investigators, who put their lives on the line, that the judicial system will vindicate their efforts and not botch the prosecution?   Given the conservative nature of the crime/mystery novel, this is a quiet but impressively radical departure. There’s little of the usual cant about justice and redemption on show here; in TORN, the punishment very aptly fits the crime. In the guise of ostensibly escapist mystery fiction, Casey Hill asks a valid but rarely asked question: do readers have the stomach for a truly gritty reality, in which some crimes, no matter how terrible, simply go unpunished?

  ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER LIFE, by Leif GW Persson, takes a historical event as its jumping-off point, opening with the taking of the West German embassy in Stockholm in 1976 by a group of Baader-Meinhof terrorists. A siege ensues, lives are lost; the world turns, and files are consigned to dusty folders. A decade or more later, an apparently insignificant loner is discovered stabbed to death in his apartment. Who killed him? And, crucially, why?   “Nothing’s the same here since they killed Palme,” observes one of Persson’s characters. The common consensus on Scandinavian crime is that it has developed as a reaction to the assassination of the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986, but Leif Persson seems to be suggesting that things have been somewhat less than perfect in Sweden for quite some time now. In part a police procedural story, and partly a spy tale, the novel expands beyond the borders of Sweden to take in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ultimate fate of the East German secret police, the Stasi.   It’s an unconventional crime novel in that it reads like a blend of history lecture and classic paranoid thriller, but it is also reminiscent of a Swedish version of James Ellroy’s reconfigurations of official history, as fictional characters interact with historical figures. Its structure, cynicism and characterisations won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it’s a bravura re-imagining of what the crime fiction novel can be. - Declan Burke

  This feature first appeared in the Sunday Independent.

Far Away, As Close

Over the last few years or so we’ve been getting regular communications from New York here at CAP Towers, and specifically from one Seamus Scanlon, each new mail announcing, if a little diffidently, that said Seamus Scanlon has just won another short story competition.
  So it really shouldn’t come as any great surprise to learn that the Cairn Press will be publishing a collection of Seamus Scanlon’s short stories. To wit:

We are happy to announce the forthcoming publication of Seamus Scanlon’s remarkable short story collection, AS CLOSE AS YOU’LL EVER BE. Due for release in July, 2012, Scanlon’s collection is what can only be described as literary noir. Blood and memory fuel the elegant prosody that meanders between the spartan and the poetic, and the violence of Ireland is something that cannot be left behind.

  Intriguing, no? I met with Seamus Scanlon in September of last year, when a rabble of Irish crime writers toddled over to New York for the launch of DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS, and were so wonderfully received at Ireland House in NYU. At the time, if memory serves, Seamus was in something of a dilemma; keep writing the short stories he was so obviously good at, but which don’t necessarily sell very well as collections; or abandon the short stories for a novel, a form in which he wasn’t entirely confident of his ability. I’m delighted to see that Cairn Press had the foresight to follow through on Seamus’s natural ability as a short story writer, and not try to shoehorn him into something he isn’t. That said, he recently distinguished himself as a playwright too …
  Anyway, an ARC of AS CLOSE AS YOU’LL EVER BE is on its way to CAP Towers as you read, and as always, I’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, clickety-click here for the Kindle-friendly taster, ‘My Beautifully Brash Beastly Belfast’ …

A Blume By Any Other Name

The latest Irish Times ‘Crime Beat’ column was published on Saturday, featuring short reviews of the latest titles from Elmore Leonard, Claire McGowan, Barry Forshaw, Hesh Kestin and Lyndsay Faye. It also included THE NAMESAKE by Conor Fitzgerald. To wit:

Commissioner Alec Blume returns in Conor Fitzgerald’s third novel, THE NAMESAKE (Bloomsbury, £11.99), although the usual Rome setting quickly gives way to southern Italy as Blume investigates the murder of an apparently innocent man and discovers that the victim shares a name with a magistrate intent on prosecuting a high-ranking member of the Ndrangheta, or Calabrian mafia. As with Claire McGowan’s novel, THE NAMESAKE is as much an exploration of the social, cultural and political factors that led to the rise of the Ndrangheta as it is a conventional police procedural; indeed, the book has as much in common with a spy novel, as Blume joins an undercover agent as he penetrates the Calabrian heartland.
  Exquisitely written in a quietly elegant style, and dotted with nuggets of coal-black humour, THE NAMESAKE is a bold blend of genre conventions that confirms Fitzgerald’s growing reputation as an author whose novels comfortably straddle the increasingly fine line between crime and literary fiction.

  Elsewhere, over the last few days, Eilis O’Hanlon reviewed the debut offering from Michael Clifford, GHOST TOWN; and Eamon Delaney reviewed yet another debut Irish crime title, Conor Brady’s A JUNE OF ORDINARY MURDERS.

The Troubles We’ve Seen

Following on from Friday’s post on Anthony Quinn’s post-Troubles, Northern Ireland-set debut novel, and at the risk of giving the impression that anything approaching consistent thought goes into this blog, I had an interview with Stuart Neville published yesterday in the Irish Examiner, during the course of which Stuart spoke about Northern Ireland as a setting, and how ‘the Troubles aren’t the most commercial topic in fiction these days’. To wit:

When he sat down to write his third novel, however, the recently released STOLEN SOULS, Neville was aware he could well be painting himself into a corner.
  “Well, COLLUSION is probably the most political of the three books,” he says, “and STOLEN SOULS is very much a reaction against that, a move away from that. Because there is the danger that you could get bogged down in the Troubles, and post-Troubles politics, and all the rest of it. And it’s true, with my commercial head on for a moment, that the Troubles aren’t the most commercial topic in fiction these days (laughs). So if I want to be purely mercenary about it, then it’s a good idea to move away from the politics.”
  Neville is in the vanguard of a number of authors who are engaged in writing about the newly transformed Northern Ireland, a cohort that includes Colin Bateman, Adrian McKinty, Eoin McNamee and Gerard Brennan.
  “I know other writers are working in different directions on this,” he concedes. “I’ve just finished reading Adrian McKinty’s new book, THE COLD COLD GROUND, in which he dives headlong into the thick of the Troubles and the hunger strikes, which is admirable, I think. I do think the Troubles will be quite fertile ground for writers the further we move away from them, and the freer we are to write about them with a more dispassionate gaze.”

  What say you? Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST) made a huge impression when it first appeared, and Adrian McKinty’s THE COLD COLD GROUND has been garnering all kinds of wonderful reviews since it was published earlier this year. But is it the case that Norn Iron and its ‘Troubles’ are a turn-off for most readers?
  More to the point, perhaps: should writers give less than a fiddler’s fandango for what readers want, and simply write the books that need to be written?

In Like Quinn

Another week, another debut title by an Irish crime writer. This week it’s Anthony Quinn, whose DISAPPEARED is published by Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Press / Open Road Media in July. Quoth the blurb elves:

DISAPPEARED is a poignant and haunting tale of Northern Ireland’s history. Perceiving two mysterious incidents as a sign of something much larger, Inspector Celcius Daly knows an old hatred is resurfacing, and a bloodbath broods ahead. Until now, Emerald Isle experienced its first taste of peace, and it is up to a Catholic detective (in a Protestant land) to restore that peace and solve a murder, digging deep into the garish history of a land stained red with blood.

  ‘Garish history of a land stained red with blood.’ Doesn’t sound very promising, does it? Then again, those blurb elves can’t always be trusted. I read the first few pages of DISAPPEARED on pdf, and they read nowhere as luridly or clunkily as the synopsis above might suggest; in fact, it was all very deftly put together. There’s an ARC on its way to CAP Towers as you read, so I’ll keep you posted …

The Comfort Of Strangers

Niamh O’Connor’s third novel, TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT (Transworld Ireland), is due early next month, and bears an intriguing strap-line. To wit: ‘Would you trust your neighbour with your life?’
  Quoth the blurb elves:

A woman’s body is found in Ireland’s most notorious body dump zone, an area in the Dublin mountains where a number of women disappeared in the past. The victim is from an exclusive gated development in the suburbs - where the prime suspect in the vanishing triangle cases, Derek Carpenter, now lives. It looks like the past is coming back to haunt the present. But DI Jo Birmingham doesn’t believe the case is open and shut. Her husband Dan was part of the original investigation team; is she trying to protect her own fragile domestic peace? The one person who could help her crack the case, Derek’s wife Liz, is so desperate to protect her family that she is going out of her way to thwart all efforts to establish the truth. Can both women emerge unscathed?

  I’m looking forward to this one. Niamh O’Connor is a crime reporter with the Sunday World, and she doesn’t try to pretend that her novels aren’t influenced by her day job. Indeed, there are times when they dig very close to the bone. She has been compared to Lynda LaPlante, and her previous novel came with a very nice blurb from Tess Gerritsen on the cover.
  It’s a very fine couple of weeks for Irish crime writing, actually. Casey Hill’s TORN, Jane Casey’s THE LAST GIRL, Michael Clifford’s debut GHOST TOWN, Brian McGilloway’s THE NAMELESS DEAD, Conor Fitzgerald’s THE NAMESAKE … It’s early days, I know, but already it’s looking like the Irish Book Awards’ crime fiction title will be a pretty hotly contested category come the end of the year.
  Meanwhile, here’s my review of Niamh O’Connor’s IF I NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN, which was her fiction debut (she has also published a number of non-fiction titles); and here’s a review of her second offering, TAKEN.

Review: George Pelecanos, Casey Hill, Leif GW Persson

George Pelecanos was researching a novel on the Watergate scandal when the story of Raymond ‘Cadillac’ Smith caught his eye.
  A violent young man who cut a swathe through Washington DCin 1972, Smith is reborn in Pelecanos’s 18th novel, WHAT IT WAS, as Red Fury Jones, a man who “aimed to leave behind a name that would be remembered. That would be something. Maybe the only thing. The one way you could win”.
  WHAT IT WAS is a kind of ‘origins’ novel for one of Pelecanos’s series characters, the private eye Derek Strange, who first appeared in RIGHT AS RAIN (2001). A young black man sporting a Richard Roundtree moustache and outrageous bell-bottom flares, Strange has an insider’s dope on DC’s urban ghettoes that the police, represented here by veteran cop Frank Vaughn, simply can’t hope to match.
  Commissioned to find a precious piece of jewellery, Strange quickly realises that Red Fury Jones has stolen it. So far, so good, but tracking down the fast-moving killer will prove a little more difficult, especially when Strange would need to be suicidal himself to attempt to retrieve the goods from a man who is on a kamikaze-style mission to live fast, die young and leave a legendary corpse.
  Fans of Pelecanos -- who was an award-winning writer-producer on the seminal TV crime series The Wire, and is currently working on HBO’s Treme -- will recognise some of the author’s trademark riffs: the DC setting, the funky soundtrack, the pop culture references that embrace music, movies, clothes and cars. Despite the stripped-back prose and turbo-charged pace, however, WHAT IT WAS is infused with an unusually sombre and almost elegiac tone (the story is told by an ageing Strange to another of Pelecanos’s series characters, Nick Stefanos), particularly when Pelecanos is writing about the doomed Red Jones: “Jones had grown up in one of DC’s infamous alley dwellings, way below the poverty line. No father in his life, ever, with hustlers in and out of the spot, taking the place one ... All of them hungry, all the time. Being poor in that extreme way, Jones felt that nothing after could cut too deep ... “
  Despite being something of a bonus offering to fans, arriving little more than six months after 2011’s THE CUT and priced to reflect that fact, WHAT IT WAS bears comparison with the finest work of George Pelecanos’s distinguished career.

  The Quantico-trained, Dublin-based Californian forensic investigator Reilly Steel returns in Casey Hill’s sophomore novel TORN, in which a particularly perverse serial killer is dispatching his victims in a series of diabolical murders that have their roots in one of the great works of world literature.
  It’s not a particularly plausible plot, but despite the cutting-edge technology on display here -- at one point Reilly uses an iSPI (Investigative Scene Processing Integration) device to help her reconstruct crime scenes -- Casey Hill is in the business of creating old-fashioned mystery stories that have much more in common with the puzzle-solving games played by Golden Age doyennes Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, et al, than they have with the gritty realists of contemporary crime fiction.
  Indeed, the reader is encouraged to have some fun acknowledging the tropes. “Are you really surprised that he didn’t take you straight to his home territory so early in the game?” asks a character of Reilly in the latter stages. The authors -- the wife-and-husband writing team of Melissa and Kevin Hill -- even allow Reilly a tongue-in-cheek run-through of the serial killer genre’s conventions as she comments aloud on the case in hand: “Meticulously planned murders,” she observes, “no effort too great, lots of research on the victims needed, the method of dispatch excessive, grotesque even ... “
  That said, and while accepting that TORN leans heavily towards the escapist end of the crime/mystery spectrum, an existential quality emerges as the story thunders towards its finale.
  What’s the point? Reilly & Co ask themselves. Isn’t catching a killer once the murders are already committed an exercise in stable-door bolting? And who can guarantee the investigators, who put their lives on the line, that the judicial system will vindicate their efforts and not botch the prosecution?
  Given the conservative nature of the crime/mystery novel, this is a quiet but impressively radical departure. There’s little of the usual cant about justice and redemption on show here; in TORN, the punishment very aptly fits the crime. In the guise of ostensibly escapist mystery fiction, Casey Hill asks a valid but rarely asked question: do readers have the stomach for a truly gritty reality, in which some crimes, no matter how terrible, simply go unpunished?

  ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER LIFE, by Leif GW Persson, takes a historical event as its jumping-off point, opening with the taking of the West German embassy in Stockholm in 1976 by a group of Baader-Meinhof terrorists. A siege ensues, lives are lost; the world turns, and files are consigned to dusty folders. A decade or more later, an apparently insignificant loner is discovered stabbed to death in his apartment. Who killed him? And, crucially, why?
  “Nothing’s the same here since they killed Palme,” observes one of Persson’s characters. The common consensus on Scandinavian crime is that it has developed as a reaction to the assassination of the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986, but Leif Persson seems to be suggesting that things have been somewhat less than perfect in Sweden for quite some time now. In part a police procedural story, and partly a spy tale, the novel expands beyond the borders of Sweden to take in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ultimate fate of the East German secret police, the Stasi.
  It’s an unconventional crime novel in that it reads like a blend of history lecture and classic paranoid thriller, but it is also reminiscent of a Swedish version of James Ellroy’s reconfigurations of official history, as fictional characters interact with historical figures. Its structure, cynicism and characterisations won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it’s a bravura re-imagining of what the crime fiction novel can be. - Declan Burke

  This feature first appeared in the Sunday Independent.

No Name, There Is None

Some people like their crime stories to be up-to-date and rooted in reality; others prefer a more escapist read. Brian McGilloway’s latest Inspector Devlin novel, THE NAMELESS DEAD, is very much in the former camp, revolving as it does around the discovery of a body by the ‘Commission for Location of Victims’ Remains’. Quoth the blurb elves:

“You can’t investigate the baby, Inspector. It’s the law.” Declan Cleary’s body has never been found, but everyone believes he was killed for informing on a friend over thirty years ago. Now the Commission for Location of Victims’ Remains is following a tip-off that he was buried on the small isle of Islandmore, in the middle of the River Foyle. Instead, the dig uncovers a baby’s skeleton, and it doesn’t look like death by natural causes. But evidence revealed by the Commission’s activities cannot lead to prosecution. Inspector Devlin is torn. He has no desire to resurrect the violent divisions of the recent past. Neither can he let a suspected murderer go unpunished. Now the secret is out, more deaths follow. Devlin must trust his conscience – even when that puts those closest to him at terrible risk . . .

  Sounds like an absolute belter. THE NAMELESS DEAD, by the way, sounds very much like an Ian Rankin title to me, but it’s Peter James who provides the encomium on the front cover. To wit:

“McGilloway has created a truly human and original police officer, flawed, maverick and vulnerable.” - Peter James

  Very nice indeed. For those of you wondering when said tome will be available, Brian launches THE NAMELESS DEAD in Derry’s Central Library next Wednesday, May 9th, at 7.30pm, with all welcome. If you can’t make it, you can pre-order a copy of THE NAMELESS DEAD here …

On Spooks, Crooks And The Gutter’s Books

The ever vigilant Critical Mick directs us toward the Gutter Bookshop website, and their upcoming attractions, wherein lurks the news that Michael Clifford will be launching his debut tome GHOST TOWN (Hachette Ireland) on Tuesday evening, May 8th, at 6.30pm. An intriguing prospect: Michael - or Mick - Clifford is one of Ireland’s best known and well regarded journalists, currently writing for the Irish Examiner and the Sunday Times, and not a man known to tuck an acerbic opinion about Ireland Inc. under a bushel. Which suggests that GHOST TOWN could be a very entertaining read indeed. Quoth the blurb elves:

Once they had everything to gain ...

A Dublin gangland king pin on the chase. A corrupt property mogul on the run. A hungry crime journalist determined to put his destroyed career back on track. And the return of ‘the Dancer’ - Joshua Molloy, small-time Dublin ex-con, recently out of prison, off the booze, determined to stay on the straight and narrow. When Molloy hires Noelle Higgins, a solicitor and boom-time wife with a crumbling personal life, to help find his young son, both are soon drawn into a web of treachery and violence, where Ireland's criminal underworld and fallen elite fight it out to lay claim to what’s left from the crash: €3 million in cash, in a bag, buried somewhere in the depths of rural Ireland.

Now they have nothing to lose ...

From Dublin to Spain and finally a debris-strewn ghost estate in Kerry, GHOST TOWN is the fast-paced and tightly written debut thriller by leading Irish journalist and commentator Michael Clifford.

  So there you have it. Incidentally, the Gutter Bookshop has twice won the Independent Bookseller of the Year gong (2011 & 2012), so if you ever need a book, or even if you just want to say hello, drop them a line here: info@gutterbookshop.com. And feel free to say the CAP elves sent ya …