Woe To Live On

Back in September I had the very great pleasure of reading alongside Daniel Woodrell (right) during the Mountains to Sea Festival in Dun Laoghaire. Even more enjoyable was the couple of hours before the event, when we sat down for a chat over some lunch, conducted an interview for the Irish Times, and then sat around some more, talking books and writing and whatnot.
  He’s a good guy, Daniel Woodrell. Understated, funny, with no affectations. The kind of quietly spoken that comes with carrying a big stick - or in his case, a big, big talent. I liked him a lot. And then, last week, after the interview finally appeared in the Irish Times, I received an email from him to say thanks, he liked the piece. A classy touch, and a pleasant surprise, but not really surprising, if you follow my drift.
  Anyway, here’s an excerpt from said Irish Times interview:

Despite announcing his ambition to be an author as early as the third grade, Woodrell turned his back on writing in his teens. “I dropped out of school when I was 16, when I gave up on the idea of being a writer, but I came back to it when I was 21,” he says. “I thought, No, I’m gonna sink or swim. I’m going all-in, see if I can do this or not. Which was good. I needed something severely challenging that I was willing to give myself to. I’d run a little wild around then. But that’s what those years are for, right?” Yet another throaty laugh. “So long as you don’t get too long of a sentence, you’re alright.”
  After a period in the Marines, Woodrell moved from the Ozarks to San Francisco and settled in to learn his craft. “As a high-school drop-out, I knew I wanted to write, but I wasn’t overly confident that I was going to be writing anything serious. I was happy enough with the idea that I could be a penny-a-word guy and survive.”
  At that point he wanted to write about anything – or any place – that wasn’t home. “Well, I was trying to survive as a writer and I knew that the nation in general doesn’t care about what happens in the Ozarks. I mean, I don’t want to be callous about it, but we all seemed to get over the Oklahoma bombing pretty quickly, and we’re never going to get over 9/11. Y’know? And so all of us out there are aware that you have to really be into writing about it, because there’s no advantage to it.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Get It On, Bang A Gong …

The warmest of congratulations to all the authors shortlisted for gongs at the Irish Book Awards launch last Thursday. It’s no easy thing, writing a book; and it’s harder still these days to get a book published. To write it well enough that it is recognised as worthy of a prize is certainly worth celebrating.
  It’s fair to say, I think, that the books nominated in the Crime Fiction category caused a number of finely plucked eyebrows to be raised at CAP Towers. Herewith be the list:

VENGEANCE by Benjamin Black.
SLAUGHTER’S HOUND by Declan Burke.
BROKEN HARBOUR by Tana French.
THE ISTANBUL PUZZLE by Laurence O’Bryan.
TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT by Niamh O’Connor.
RED RIBBONS by Louise Phillips.

  Some of the crime fans I’ve spoken with have expressed surprise that two debut novels - by Laurence O’Bryan and Louise Phillips - made it onto the list, especially as there is a category dedicated to Newcomer of the Year, although I’d be inclined to applaud the fact that the judges were prepared to include books by newly minted authors (I was lucky enough to have my debut, EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards when it came out in 2003). Besides, it looks like 2012 might well go down as a particularly quirky year for the Irish Book Awards - the Best Novel category, for example, contains no less than three collections of short stories, by Emma Donoghue, Joseph O’Connor and Kevin Barry.
  It might also be argued that Keith Ridgway’s HAWTHORN & CHILD and Marian Keyes’ THE MYSTERY OF MERCY CLOSE should have been nominated in the Crime Fiction category rather than Best Novel and Popular Fiction, respectively.
  Back with the Crime Fiction category, there are some glaring absences - although to be fair, I have no idea if any of the following books were even submitted for consideration. That said, a potential alternative shortlist would be a rather impressive thing, comprised of the following:

BLOOD LOSS by Alex Barclay.
A JUNE OF ORDINARY MURDERS by Conor Brady.
THE LAST GIRL by Jane Casey.
THE NAMESAKE by Conor Fitzgerald.
THE NAMELESS DEAD by Brian McGilloway.
THE COLD COLD GROUND by Adrian McKinty.

  There were also very fine novels this year from Michael Clifford (GHOST TOWN), Claire McGowan (THE FALL), Casey Hill (TORN), Matt McGuire (DARK DAWN) and Anthony Quinn (DISAPPEARED).
  As for the actual Crime Fiction list, I was particularly pleased to see Niamh O’Connor finally receive the recognition she deserves. I was also very pleased to find my own name there, as you may imagine, especially as SLAUGHTER’S HOUND is a very different book to my previous offering, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, which was also nominated last year. Mind you, I’ve said all along this year that it’ll take a hell of a book to beat Tana French’s BROKEN HARBOUR, and given that the only Irish crime novel capable of doing so - Adrian McKinty’s THE COLD COLD GROUND - hasn’t been shortlisted, I’d imagine that Tana French will be scooping the gong on November 22nd.
  So there it is - my two cents on the IBA Crime Fiction shortlist. If anyone has any thoughts, the comment box is open …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE PRISONER OF BRENDA by Colin Bateman

The fourth of Colin Bateman’s ‘Mystery Man’ novels, THE PRISONER OF BRENDA (Headline), features for its protagonist an unnamed man who is the proprietor of No Alibis bookshop in Belfast and the most unlikely hero in crime fiction. A puny specimen, Mystery Man is a coward, a flake and a hypochondriac who suffers from brittle bones, and yet he finds himself dragged into solving mysteries time and again on the basis that he has read every crime and mystery novel worth reading, and thus understands the criminal mind to a degree that no other detective could.
  Here Mystery Man is approached by Nurse Brenda, a psychiatric nurse, to help out with establishing the identity of a man who has been incarcerated in Purdysburn mental hospital. Known only as ‘The Man in the White Suit’, the man has apparently suffered a nervous breakdown and refuses to speak, even though he has been accused of a brutal murder.
  Mystery Man, who was previously a patient of Nurse Brenda, takes on the case against the better judgement of his girlfriend, Alison, who fears that he will suffer a relapse and find himself being dragged off to Purdysburn. But Mystery Man has the scent of a good mystery in his nostrils - and besides, someone is prepared to pay him to investigate, which is very good news given that the book industry is dying on its knees.
  The Mystery Man novels are on one level a humorous spoof of the crime and mystery genre, or at least the more extreme and clichéd crime and mystery novels. Told in the first person, so that we have access to Mystery Man’s deluded ramblings as he goes about his investigation, they are a distant (and possibly addled) cousin of the Raymond Chandler / Dashiell Hammett private eye novels, with the added bonus of Mystery Man’s knowing commentary on his own actions as he explains the various clues and avenues of investigation.
  Of course, Colin Bateman is a veteran of 22 crime novels for adults at this point, so he wraps his apparently ham-fisted spoof of the mystery novel inside a cleverly constructed mystery narrative. All told, it’s terrific fun.

Normal Service Will Probably Not Be Resumed

Apologies to the Three Regular Readers, yet again, for how slack the service has become on Crime Always Pays. Right now my brain-space is being colonised by a couple of writing projects, one of which is a rewrite, the other a whole new book.
  I’m very wary of the rewrite, because at the moment I’m thinking that it won’t take a lot of work, more of a spit-and-polish job, and whenever I find myself thinking that way I tend to be very disappointed indeed, and up to my oxters in pulling the story apart and stapling it back together again. So there’s that.
  The whole new book, of course, is a terrifying prospect. It’s at times like this that I find myself glancing to the right of the desk, where a little shelf holds my previously published novels, and telling myself, ‘Well, you’ve obviously managed to write a book before. Just do what you did the last time.’ Except you forget what you did the last time. I think it’s a similar process to how the body has no physical memory of pain. Or maybe it’s because no two books are written the same way. It might help my case if I was writing a similar kind of book to the last one, or the one before that, but this book is something new for me (it’s a spy novel, of sorts). Matters aren’t helped by the fact that I haven’t written any fiction for about six months, so it feels like I’m emerging from hibernation - sluggish, stiff, yawning. And on top of all that, I have an either-or decision to make about the main character which will have huge ramifications on how the story is told, and I’m reluctant to dive into telling it in case I realise, 30,000 words later, that the other option would have been the better choice.
  And yes, I do appreciate how much that all sounds like procrastination. But due to other commitments, it does look like this new book will have to be written between the hours of 5am and 7am, as was the last, and I really don’t know if I have the physical stamina for that kind of regime.
  The flip side to that, of course, is that if I don’t do some proper writing in the very near future, I’ll end up a basket case and an absolute bear to live with. And that ain’t good, either.
  Anyway, that’s where I’m at, and why the service has been so slack. I’m off for most of this week, travelling to do the IWC Peregrine Readings in Waterford and Cork, but hopefully things will return to normal when I get back. If you don’t hear from me, just presume that I finally made that crucial decision and started the new book, and that the writing is going incredibly well. Or that I finally tumbled into the Pit of Despair. Bonne chance, mes braves …

On Chandler, Proust And Spliff

I’ve had a busy old time of it lately, what with all the demands that I sprawl on couches the better to be fed grapes and ambrosia and nectar and whatnot, so I’ve been a little neglectful of SLAUGHTER’S HOUND (Liberties Press), which has been picking up some rather nice reviews over the last couple of weeks. To wit:

“Burke tells his darkly propulsive tale in a fine-tuned, staccato-like narrative voice … bleakly engaging.” - Sunday Business Post

“Tight, witty, sharp as a nail and stunning … SLAUGHTER’S HOUND is just an absolute pleasure to read.” - Ayo Onotade, Shots Magazine

“It’s not easy to bring something new to the private-eye novel but Declan Burke rises to the challenge with panache in SLAUGHTER’S HOUND … The book opens with what may well be the longest sentence in crime fiction — where Proust meets Chandler over a pint of Guinness, with a large spliff on the side. Burke is an author who takes risks, makes you laugh and writes like an angel with a devilish sense of humour.” - Andrew Taylor, The Spectator

  All of which is, as you might imagine, hugely satisfying to my insatiable ego.

Meanwhile, BOOKS TO DIE FOR, which I co-edited with John Connolly, has also been picking up some very nice reviews following its publication in the US, with the gist running thusly:

“An engaging, erudite and substantial anthology about the ‘world’s greatest mystery novels.’” - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“This volume is indispensable … an absolute must for everyone’s personal library.” - Book Reporter

“Delightful … it serves as both a primer on the evolution of the genre and an escort into its remoter corners.” - Kirkus Reviews

“A sumptuous exploration of some of the best mystery authors of our time that showcases their passion for writing and their heartfelt tributes to their fellow writers. It is a resource readers will want to keep for decades.” - Miami Herald

  I really am delighted to see that BTDF is being so well received, given that it was such a labour of love.
  In other news, I’ll be taking part in the Irish Writers’ Centre ‘Peregrine Readings’ series alongside Arlene Hunt this coming week, which should be a lot of fun. The dates and venues are as follows:

Tuesday 23rd October, Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, 7.30pm
Wednesday 24th October, Tramore Library, Co. Waterford, 7pm
Thursday 25th October, Triskel, Christchurch, Co. Cork, 8pm

  If you’re likely to be in the vicinity of any of those venues this week, I’d love to see you there …

Sheer Geneius

I was absolutely delighted last night when word filtered through that Gene Kerrigan’s THE RAGE had won the Gold Dagger at the Crime Writers’ Association Awards. I thought it was a superb novel when I read it first, all those many moons ago, and I’m very pleased indeed to see it, and Gene, get the credit they deserve.
  Mind you, a certain Stuart Neville won’t be at all surprised. During the course of an interview waaaaaay back in April of 2011, I asked Stuart if he’d read anything recently that he’d like to recommend, and his response ran thusly:

“The new Gene Kerrigan book, THE RAGE, is absolutely terrific. It captures that sense of Ireland on the down-slope of the rollercoaster, he’s done that very, very well. But also, his journalistic background makes it seem like there’s almost a documentary feel to it. You feel like you could be reading an actual description of a crime in it, as opposed to a fictional crime. It has a real core of authenticity to it. It’s very impressive. I’d hope that the Irish Book Awards win last year, and the CWA nomination, will help raise his profile. He’s a terrific writer.”

  Indeed he is. For the rest of the CWA Awards nominees and winners, by the way, clickety-click on the very fine blog It’s A Crime …

The Curious Case Of Wilkie Collins And The Dry Old Tart

Interviewing writers can be a bit of a tricky business these days. No longer is it good enough, apparently, to take five minutes beforehand to strategically dog-ear a few corners in their latest tome and then plonk it down on the table and ask them earnestly where they get all their wonderful ideas. These days, for some odd reason, writers expect you to have read at least one of their books before the interview commences, and preferably the current one. Strange, I know, but there it is.
  Anyway, I’m reading the latest Mystery Man offering from The Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman, aka THE PRISONER OF BRENDA (Headline, published October 25th), and very funny it is too, studded with some very nice digressions on the nature of crime fiction and not a few opinions on the quality of the books Mystery Man stocks in his crime fiction bookshop. To wit:

“He probably didn’t know that Sergeant Cuff was one of the first and greatest of fictional detectives, appearing in 1868 in Wilkie Collins’s THE MOONSTONE - a book, incidentally, hailed by Dorothy L. Sayers as probably the very finest detective story ever written. Dorothy was no slouch herself, if a bit of a dry old tart.” (pg 62)

  A pithy appraisal, I’m sure you’ll agree. And there’s plenty more where that came from, although fans of the Scandinavian crime novel may want to gird their metaphorical loins before cracking the spine …

Nobody Move, This Is a Review: WHAT RICHARD DID

Richard Karlsen (Jack Reynor), the handsome young hero of Lenny Abrahamson’s What Richard Did (15A), is almost too good to be true. A schools rugby captain and the alpha male of his peer group in the leafy environs of south County Dublin, Richard is also thoughtful and sensitive, ‘the male equivalent,’ as one of his friends declares, ‘of the Rose of fucking Tralee’. Loosely based on Kevin Power’s novel Bad Day in Blackrock (2008), which was in turn inspired by the media coverage of the brutal death of a Dublin schoolboy at the hands - or feet - of his peers, What Richard Did is a character study of an intelligent young man who kicks his golden future apart in a moment of booze-fuelled jealous rage. It’s a thought-provoking film that offers its teenage protagonists no mercy as it pries into their intimate lives, but it’s refreshing too to watch a film that allows young men and women be who they are on their own terms - it’s a kind of Irish Less Than Zero (1987), in which the pretty young things prove to be pretty vacant when the first real stumbling block to their gilded passage through life drops out of the sky. Reynor is superb as Richard, an apparently effortless performance that grows impressively intense and anguished as he tries to come to terms with his tragedy, and he gets very strong support from fellow cast members Roisin Murphy, Sam Keeley and Fionn Walton. As if dazzled by Reynor’s performance, however, the filmmakers allow the true tragedy of the story to slip away - Richard is here the perpetrator, after all, rather than the victim - in favour of wallowing in persuasive but ultimately hollow existential self-questioning. Then again, this is a story that has its roots in the Me-Me-Me Celtic Tiger era, so perhaps focusing on Richard’s grief at the loss of his privileged existence is the most cutting satirical side-swipe at that benighted time Campbell and Abrahamson could have devised. ****

This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.

On Ill-Fated Gull-Winged White Elephants

I mentioned a couple of weeks back that I believe the Ireland AM Crime Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards will be something of a coin-toss between Tana French’s BROKEN HARBOUR and Adrian McKinty’s THE COLD COLD GROUND, and nothing has happened in the interim to change my mind. The sequel to THE COLD COLD GROUND is I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET (Serpent’s Tail), which will be published in January, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

Sean Duffy knows there’s no such thing as a perfect crime. But a torso in a suitcase is pretty close. Still, one tiny clue is all it takes, and there it is. A tattoo. So Duffy, fully fit and back at work after the severe trauma of his last case, is ready to follow the trail of blood - however faint - that always, always connects a body to its killer. A legendarily stubborn man, Duffy becomes obsessed with this mystery as a distraction from the ruins of his love life, and to push down the seed of self-doubt that he seems to have traded for his youthful arrogance. So from country lanes to city streets, Duffy works every angle. And wherever he goes, he smells a rat ...

  As is the case with COLD GROUND, SIRENS brilliantly captures the atmosphere of paranoia and barely controlled fury of 1980’s Northern Ireland, but it also comes with the added bonus of being - to the best of my knowledge - the first crime / mystery novel to feature the notoriously ill-fated gull-winged white elephant (aka the DeLorean car) as an integral part of the tale. Of course, I may well be revealing the depth of my ignorance here. If anyone can point me at mystery novels featuring DeLoreans, I’d love to see ’em …

No Port In A Storm

Tana French’s BROKEN HARBOUR (Hachette Ireland) is one of my contenders for the best Irish novel of the year. Set in 2009, it’s a police procedural that gets under the skin of the post-Celtic Tiger years, investigating the extent to which the Irish economic meltdown had a brutalising effect on Irish society. I had an interview with Tana published in the Evening Herald yesterday, which opened up a lot like this:

Tana French is talking about killing again.
  “I really don’t believe in this borderline that exists between genre fiction and literature,” she says. “It shouldn’t be an either-or situation. Just because you kill somebody off, that shouldn’t mean it’s perceived as a particular kind of book.”
  The book in question is BROKEN HARBOUR, French’s fourth novel. Employing the framework of a police procedural crime novel, the book is a thought-provoking social commentary which explores the damaged mind of a psychologically complex anti-hero as a metaphor for a broken country.
  Set in the wake of the economic crash, BROKEN HARBOUR has a lot to live up to. French’s debut, IN THE WOODS (2007), won every available American crime writing prize - the Edgar, the Barry, the Anthony, the Macavity. She has been twice shortlisted for the LA Times Crime / Mystery Novel of the Year, for IN THE WOODS and FAITHFUL PLACE (2010). The latter was also nominated for the Impac Award earlier this year. French’s novels are perennial New York Times best-sellers, and tend to receive the kind of glowing reviews more associated with the John Banvilles and Julian Barnes of this world.
  In short, Tana French is one of modern Ireland’s great novelists. BROKEN HARBOUR isn’t just a wonderful mystery novel, it’s also the era-defining post-Celtic Tiger novel the Irish literati have been crying out for.
  “That wasn’t deliberate,” says Tana. “I wasn’t going for a state-of-the-nation kind of book. It’s just, when this is permeating the air around you, it seeps into everything.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Wham, Bram, Thank You Ma’am

The Bram Stoker Festival takes place in Dublin from October 26th to 28th, featuring all things Dracula-related. One of the highlights will undoubtedly be the appearance of Patricia Cornwell, who will argue that the serial killer is literature’s contemporary take on the vampire. To wit:

Patricia Cornwell, whose bestselling novels have elevated her to the highest rank of international crime writing, will discuss ways in which the serial killer has become, in some sense, a modern-day equivalent of the vampire. Fear is the currency of the contemporary crime writer just as it was for the writers of Victorian gothic fiction. Bram Stoker’s DRACULA exploited the Victorians’ dread of the supernatural just as the crime thriller excites our fear of sudden murderous violence. By comparing characters, plots and stories to her own Scarpetta books, the author will illuminate those dark corners of the human psyche which, regardless of time and place, harbour and nourish our deepest human fears. Patricia Cornwell’s latest novel in the Scarpetta series, BONE BED, is published in October and she will be signing copies of the book after the event.

  That event takes place on Friday 26th October at the Edmund Burke Theatre, Trinity College, at 7.30pm. For all the details on how to book tickets, and the rest of the events planned for the Bram Stoker Festival, clickety-click here …

I Bring Grave News

It isn’t due until next April, unfortunately, but if the third in Alan Glynn’s ‘loose-trilogy of conspiracy thrillers’, GRAVELAND (Faber & Faber), is on a par with WINTERLAND and BLOODLAND, we’re all in for a treat. Quoth the blurb elves:

In the final part of Alan Glynn’s spectacular loose-trilogy of conspiracy thrillers, someone is assassinating the most powerful players in the global financial markets.
  A Wall Street investment banker is shot dead while jogging in Central Park. Later that night, one of the savviest hedge-fund managers in the city is gunned down outside a fancy Upper West Side restaurant. Are these killings part of a coordinated terrorist attack, or just coincidence? Investigative journalist Ellen Dorsey has a hunch that it’s neither. Days later, when an attempt is made on the life of another CEO, the story blows wide open ...
  Racing to stay ahead of the curve, Ellen encounters Frank Bishop, a recession-hit architect, whose daughter has gone missing. The search for Lizzie and her boyfriend takes Frank and Ellen from a quiet campus to the blazing spotlight of a national media storm - and into the devastating crucible of a personal and a public tragedy.
  Meanwhile, lurking in the shadows once again is James Vaughn, legendary CEO of private equity firm the Oberon Capital Group. Despite his failing health, Vaughan is refusing to give up control easily, and we soon see just how far-reaching and pervasive his influence really is.
  Set deep in the place where corrupt global business and radical politics clash, Alan Glynn’s GRAVELAND is an explosive and hugely topical thriller.

  If you haven’t read either of the previous two novels, by the way, I can heartily recommend both - BLOODLAND, of course, won the Ireland AM Crime Novel of the Year at last year’s Irish Book Awards, and deservedly so.
  Incidentally, the cover of GRAVELAND - the image above suggests that it’ll be the US cover - carried a very nice encomium from a certain George Pelecanos, who declares the novel to be, ‘A terrific read … completely involving.’ So there you have it - if it’s good enough for George Pelecanos, etc.

The Lost Girls

Claire McGowan’s debut THE FALL caused something of a stir when it was published earlier this year, prompting no less an authority than Peter James to declare that, ‘Claire McGowan will undoubtedly become a major name in crime fiction.’ Her follow-up novel, THE LOST (Headline), will be published in April of next year, with the blurb elves wibbling thusly:

Not everyone who’s missing is lost.
  When two teenage girls go missing along the Irish border, forensic psychologist Paula Maguire has to return to the hometown she left years before. Swirling with rumour and secrets, the town is gripped by fear of a serial killer. But the truth could be even darker.

Not everyone who’s lost wants to be found.
  Surrounded by people and places she tried to forget, Paula digs into the cases as the truth twists further away. What’s the link with two other disappearances from 1985? And why does everything lead back to the town’s dark past - including the reasons her own mother went missing years before?

Nothing is what it seems.
  As the shocking truth is revealed, Paula learns that sometimes, it’s better not to find what you’ve lost.

  THE FALL was set in London but THE LOST is set in Claire’s native Northern Ireland, making it another title to add to the growing list of post-Troubles narratives that are set in the present but keep one eye on the past. In unleashing a forensic psychologist on the pathologies of 1980’s Northern Ireland, Claire may well be akin to pointing Pandora towards a firmly sealed box - especially as, in Northern Ireland, the words ‘lost’, ‘missing’ and ‘disappeared’ are interchangeable to a chilling degree. All in all, it’s a tantalising prospect.

Top Katz

The Irish edition of the Sunday Times Culture section has become a terrific source of new Irish crime and mystery novels of late, and yesterday they carried another review of a debut Irish crime writer, John O’Keeffe’s SEARCHING FOR AMI (Red Rock Press). The gist runs thusly:

“O’Keeffe, a Dublin GP, adeptly handles the nuances of the political situation in Israel / Palestine … The bulk of the book - a pacy page-turner - focuses on Harry’s quest to find Ami dead or alive … O’Keeffe is to be commended for a polished debut, which maintains its tension and has some fine passages.” - Ciaran Byrne, Sunday Times

  So there you have it. SEARCHING FOR AMI is published by Red Rock Press, whose blurb elves have been wibbling thusly:

In the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, an American woman and her daughter Ami are caught up in a brutally efficient guerrilla attack on a Jewish settlement. The killings leave a trail of bloodshed, bodies and a mystery: where are the remains of the little girl who has disappeared without trace? What has happened to her? Her father – intelligence officer Harry Katz – refuses to believe that his beloved daughter is dead. He begins an extraordinary journey to uncover the truth and her whereabouts. Harry’s odyssey takes him from the near medieval savagery of Southern Lebanon, through the sleepy suburbs of Zurich and Ulm, culminating in a gripping drama on the streets of Dublin. His pursuit of the woman who stole his daughter draws him into the pitiless world of international intelligence services and the stark realities of modern day terrorism. Shifting allegiances, casual betrayal, deception and murder are the day-to-day realities that Harry must confront in his desperate search to find Ami. A gripping suspense thriller, Harry’s journey and ultimate redemption makes for a compelling narrative that races along at a cracking pace with the assured touch of an accomplished storyteller.

  For more on John O’Keeffe and SEARCHING FOR AMI, and a pdf of the first three chapters, clickety-click here …

They Shoot Homophobes, Don’t They?

I’m not entirely sure of the protocol when it comes to declaring a writer a debutant when said author has already released another novel under a pseudonym, so let’s just say that EVEN FLOW by Darragh McManus is a debut novel from Darragh McManus and leave it at that. Quoth the blurb elves:

New York City: a man hangs upside-down outside a skyscraper. He is being punished by three vigilantes and he is just the first. The 3W Gang are regular guys. They believe society needs balance enforced karma through selective, brutal punishment of misogynists and homophobes. Wilde, Waters and Whitman are inspired by revolutionaries and feminists, art and irony. They are the grunge vibe made flesh and made angry: cool, witty, sexy ... and dangerous. Hunting them is a gay detective, determined to see justice done but getting more morally ambivalent as he’s drawn into their world. It is time for an EVEN FLOW.
  EVEN FLOW is an action-packed novel, cinematic, funny and provocative. It is a fable wrapped inside a thriller, Germaine Greer crossed with Kurt Cobain crossed with Dirty Harry.

  An intriguing prospect, no? It certainly can’t be faulted for ambition, originality and lunacy, all of which, I think, are to be celebrated in a genre that has been known to err on the staid and conservative. Will it find a readership that is sufficiently energised by originality, ambition and lunacy? Only time, that notoriously rat-fink canary, will tell.

On Intelligent Reading

I had an interview with Howard Jacobson published today in the Irish Examiner, in which he speaks of intelligent reading as a dying art, which put me in mind of John Boland’s review of SLAUGHTER’S HOUND a few weeks ago in the Irish Independent. At the time, I mentioned that John didn’t much care for SLAUGHTER’S HOUND; and it should go without saying, although I’ll say it anyway, that John is as entitled as anyone else to dislike any book; moreover, being a reviewer commissioned to express his opinion, he is duty bound to say so as honestly as possible.
  In fact, all Three Regular Readers of this blog will know that I have for some time been an advocate for a more rigorous quality of review when it comes to crime and mystery writing, and the review in the Irish Independent certainly provided that. Not only was the reviewer afforded plenty of space, the review itself was quite detailed. Having established that the protagonist, Harry Rigby, is inherently implausible on the basis that he is both capable of thuggish violence and a basic grasp of poetry and philosophy, John concludes as follows:

“Indeed, more persuasive is the response of teenage Grainne, who midway through the book tells Harry: “You’re a horrible human being” -- a judgment the reader had already made after noting the abuse he had just meted out to his ex-partner and to the troubled son he professed to care about.
  “There’s no reason, of course, why the principal character of a book has to be endearing or even likeable (Richard Stark’s icily amoral killer, Parker, comes to mind), but there’s no indication here that the author finds his vengeful anti-hero inherently repellent or that he wants the reader to judge him in any negative way.
  “Matters aren’t helped by the fact that every single other character is just as aggressively unpleasant. The result is as bleak a picture of contemporary Ireland as you’ll encounter -- though undermined by the reader’s sense that the author has nothing interesting to say about such an Ireland and that it’s all merely being served up for lurid thrills. On that level, the book is brutally efficient.” - John Boland, Irish Independent

  Now, I’m not going to suggest that John Boland’s overall verdict on the book is wrong. That is his opinion, as I say, and given that I review books myself, it would be hypocritical of me to engage in special pleading on behalf of my own. I am, however, going to suggest that he misread SLAUGHTER’S HOUND.
  The word ‘abuse’, for example, is a loaded one, particularly as John uses it to set up his claim that the reader will have already judged Harry Rigby a ‘horrible human being’ by the time young Grainne delivers her verdict. The word ‘abuse’ often comes prefaced with ‘domestic’, ‘emotional’, ‘psychological’ or even ‘sexual’, whereas Harry Rigby is guilty of engaging in bitter arguments with his ex-partner, Denise (she is his ex-, after all), arguments Harry invariably loses given that Denise is smarter and more pragmatic. As for his son, Ben, the ‘abuse’ there consists of verbal tough love when Harry discovers that 12-year-old Ben is indulging in substances not appropriate for any 12-year-old. Certainly, Harry Rigby will win no prizes for sensitivity. A ‘horrible human being’, on the other hand, would simply walk away from complex emotional scenarios rather than try to engage with them in his clumsy, inarticulate way.
  Grainne’s judgment of Harry, incidentally, as a ‘horrible human being’ may well be true by the time it is delivered, by which point Harry has been well and truly slapped around by life; it’s as true a judgement as when she tells him, some pages later, “Fuck, you’re cold.” The crucial line in the book follows on directly from this comment, when Harry says, “I wasn’t born this way.” By this point, squeezed on all sides and physically and emotionally drained, bent out of shape by forces beyond his control and trapped in a vice between cops and ex-paramilitaries, it’s perhaps understandable that Harry Rigby has little time for the social niceties.
  But the crux of the review, I think, and the misreading, comes with John’s assertion that, “there’s no indication here that the author finds his vengeful anti-hero inherently repellent or that he wants the reader to judge him in any negative way.”
  SLAUGHTER’S HOUND is not about my finding Harry Rigby inherently likeable, or about providing a scenario in which readers might judge him in a positive way. A character is a product of his or her story, just as a person is a product of his or her time and place, their culture and society. If Harry Rigby is perceived as inherently repellent and negative, then I’d suggest that he becomes that way as a result of his experiences, most of which impact on him personally in a negative way. He wasn’t, as he says in one of his few sentimental statements, born that way.
  The author has nothing interesting to say about a bleakly pictured contemporary Ireland, reckons John, but he may have misread Harry Rigby: by turns thuggishly violent and capable of poetry and philosophy, of sentimental self-pity and delusion, of self-wounding hypocrisy, a desperate, ruined figure who finally erupts in a terrible rage when he is systematically stripped of all hope, he is intended as a symbol for modern Ireland in these benighted times. I certainly didn’t aim for ‘lurid thrills’ when writing the book, but then, any book belongs as much to its reader as it does to its writer, and perhaps I simply didn’t write it well enough to clarify such issues.
  All of which is a (very) roundabout way of bringing me to that Irish Examiner interview with Howard Jacobson. Well, it was ostensibly an interview, but given that his new book, ZOO TIME, is a black comedy about a failing writer, with which yours truly was able to empathise with a little more than I’d like to admit, the interview pretty much amounted to a series of increasingly entertaining digressions about the state of writing and reading today.
  At one point the notion of a character’s ‘likeability’ came up, this in the context of one of ZOO TIME’s themes, the slow death of the intelligent reader.

To wit:

Winning the Booker Prize has not mellowed him, nor changed his unfashionable view — which gets hilarious treatment in ZOO TIME — that intelligent reading is a dying art.
  “If you’ve ever been invited to a book club reading,” [Jacobson] says, “you’ll have encountered this notion about the hero being ‘likeable’. People saying that they can’t identify with the hero. Likeability?” He rears back, as if startled. “What is this? Where did this come from? I don’t remember this when I was first writing books.
  “Certainly, when I was a young man reading books, ‘likeability’ was not a criterion. Or ‘identifiability’. In fact, non-identifiabilty was a criterion. ‘I am not Raskolnikov, therefore I am interested in Raskolnikov.’ You used to read to experience something that was not you. Now it’s a complaint.”

  For the rest of that interview, which is published today in the Irish Examiner, clickety-click here …

[Insert Quirkey Headline Here]

And still they come, the indefatigable legions of debut Irish crime writers. It won’t be published until January 2014, apparently, but I TRY TO BE GOOD (Penguin Ireland) by Liz Nugent (right) sounds like a debut worth waiting for. Quoth the blurb elves:

Everybody thinks they know Oliver Quirke, the internationally successful and charismatic children’s author and loyal husband to Alice, but when Oliver savagely beats Alice into a coma, it becomes clear that nobody knew him at all. Oliver’s history is revealed through the eyes of others: his love rival, an old school friend, his gay admirer, a former lover and his ex-employer, as we slip back in decades to a Catholic boarding school, a French vineyard and a leafy south Dublin avenue, but it is Oliver himself who gradually discloses the full tragic and dark truth behind what makes up a thoroughly modern monster. I TRY TO BE GOOD is a gripping and beautifully controlled debut, an exploration of a random act of savagery that marks Liz Nugent as a vivid new talent in psychological fiction.

  Actually, that sounds terrific, possibly because it’s putting me in mind for some reason of a Patricia Highsmith novel. It may also be because - as John Connolly so pithily puts it - character is life’s great mystery.
  Incidentally, it’s a brave move to offer up a lead character called Quirke in an Irish crime novel when Benjamin Black might have reasonably expected that he had already staked an irrefutable claim to said moniker.
  But who, I hear you cry, is Liz Nugent? Over to the blurb elves again:

Born and raised in Dublin, Liz Nugent was attracted to literature and drama from an early age. Liz had an early career as a stage manager working in theatres in Ireland and touring internationally. For the last ten years, Liz has worked as a story associate for ‘Fair City’ in RTÉ, co-wrote a six-part children’s adventure series for TG4 called ‘The Resistors’ and a radio play for RTE Radio 1 called ‘Campus’. She has been shortlisted for the Francis McManus short story competition and has written children’s stories for the edification of her fifteen nephews and nieces.

  So there you have it. The picture credit, by the way, goes to my good friend (and superb photographer) Beta Bajgartova, whose website can be found here.

Through A Glass, Brightly

I am a fan and a friend of Adrian McKinty, maybe even in that order, so I’m delighted be able to say that his award-winning novel FALLING GLASS will finally be published in the U.S. next week. Waaaaay back in June of 2011, I had this to say about said tome:

McKinty is a very fine writer, as many have pointed out before (he is currently on the longlist for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year for his previous offering, FIFTY GRAND), and he invests his hardboiled prose with a muscular poetry that lends itself to deliciously black humour (Chapter Six opens with the memorable line, “The place stank of dead Mexicans and no one was even dead yet.”). All of which would have made for an excellent crime novel, and the Pavee’s nomadic lifestyle provides a neat backdrop for Killian’s peripatetic wanderings; but as always with McKinty, there’s more: his novels are as much novels of ideas as they are page-turning thrillers, and here he provides a rare insight into the world of the Pavee, its traditions, mythologies and language.

  There’s a lot more in that vein, you won’t be at all surprised to learn, around about here. But for a more up-to-date take on FALLING GLASS, try next week’s Booklist review, the gist of which runs thusly:

“The mystical and marginalized Pavee subculture is molded brilliantly by McKinty into the perfect pivot for a novel exploring the concept of honour outside the law. A sure bet for Lee Child’s crew, but there’s also a scratchy whisper in McKinty’s voice calling to George Pelecanos’ fans.” — Christine Tran, Booklist

  So there you have it. Lee Child meets George Pelecanos. What are you waiting for?

BOOKS TO DIE FOR: It’s Officially ‘Indispensable’

I mentioned last week that the U.S. edition of BOOKS TO DIE FOR, edited by John Connolly and yours truly, launches at the Cleveland Bouchercon this coming Friday with the help of a cast of thousands, almost, but yesterday was in fact its official publication day. Three cheers, two stools and a resounding huzzah! etc.
  Those of you wondering what all the fuss is about can find said tome here, along with a sample chapter, the excellent J. Wallis Martin on Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Dupin Tales’. Meanwhile, over at The Rap Sheet, Jeff Pierce was kind enough to declare BOOKS TO DIE FOR one of ‘Pierce’s Picks’, in the process quibbling about some of the names that aren’t in the book. That quibbling is a sound, I’d imagine, we’ll be hearing a lot of in the coming months - indeed, half the fun of such books is the arguments they provoke about who and what did or didn’t make it in.
  As I mentioned previously, I won’t be making the trip to Cleveland for this year’s Bouchercon, which is very disappointing. I also feel rather guilty, given that John Connolly is embarking on a Homeric road trip to promote BTDF after B’con, incorporating venues in Oakmont and Harrisburg PA, New York, Washington DC, Richmond VA, Pittsboro NC, and Boston and South Portland in Maine. For all the details on John’s trip, which will see him talking about BTDF in the company of fellow contributors to the book, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, back on this side of the pond, the Daily Telegraph provided one of the pithiest reviews of any book I’ve ever seen, in the process declaring BOOKS TO DIE FOR ‘indispensable’. Which is nice. I’m also reliably informed that - for Irish readers - BTDF will be the subject of a featurette on The Works on RTE1 on Thursday night, October 4th, at 10.45pm. That’s waaaaay past jammys-time at CAP Towers, of course, but maybe we’ll make an exception for the night that’s in it.

A Murder of Crowe’s

I don’t know what they’re putting in the water in Northern Ireland these days, but we’d hazard a guess that it’s a lot more potent than fluoride. Tony Bailie’s third novel A VERSE TO MURDER (Ecopunks Fiction) sounds like a trippy, kinky murder mystery, if the blurb elves are to be believed:

When police find Northern Ireland’s leading poet with a noose around his neck and his trousers around his ankles they assume it is a case of death by sexual misadventure. However, when Sunday tabloid hack Barry Crowe looks into the dead poet’s background he uncovers blackmail, an erotic trio of muses and experimentation with psychedelic drugs … he also gets off with a foxy PSNI woman with a handcuff fetish. Sex, drugs, violence and some damn fine poetry combine to make Tony Bailie’s third novel A VERSE TO MURDER a stylish, comic and rather kinky read.

  So there you have it. If you were one of those readers complaining that FIFTY SHADES OF GREY could have done with less handcuffs and much more murder, comedy and poetry, this could well be the one for you.