Angels In The Architecture, Spinning In Infinity

Some books, like some people, just click with you. Such was the case with Jon Steele’s debut, THE WATCHERS, which was in my not-always-humble opinion one of the best novels of 2011. To wit:

“Reads like ‘Paradise Lost’ by way of John Connolly, although Steele, formerly a war reporter, brings hard-edged modernity to this timeless tale as he roots his depiction of evil in the contemporary world. Clever, stylish and epic in scale, it’s a tremendously satisfying debut.” -- Irish Times

  The sequel, and the second in what is now ‘the Angelus Trilogy’, is ANGEL CITY (Bantam). Quoth the blurb elves:

Jay Harper, one of the last ‘angels’ on Planet Earth, is hunting down the half-breeds and goons who infected Paradise with evil. Intercepting a plot to turn half of Paris into a dead zone, Harper ends up on the wrong side of the law and finds himself a wanted man. That doesn’t stop his commander, Inspector Gobet of the Swiss Police, from sending him back to Paris on a recon mission ... a mission that uncovers a truth buried in the Book of Enoch.
  Katherine Taylor and her two year old son Max are living in a small town in the American Northwest. It’s a quiet life. She runs a candle shop and spends her afternoons drinking herbal teas, imagining a crooked little man in the belfry of Lausanne Cathedral, a man who believed Lausanne was a hideout for lost angels. And there was someone else, someone she can’t quite remember ... as if he was there, and not there at the same time.
  A man with a disfigured face emerges from the shadows. His name is Astruc, he’s obsessed with the immortal souls of men. Like a voice crying in the wilderness, he warns the time of The Prophecy is at hand ... a prophecy that calls for the sacrifice of the child born of light …

  My advice, for what it’s worth, is to read THE WATCHERS sometime in the next month or so, and then dive straight into ANGEL CITY. If it’s a rollicking good read you’re after, you won’t be disappointed.

And So To Bristol

If I’m perfectly honest about it, the only reason I go to Crimefest in Bristol is to meet the fabulous Donna Moore (right). She can be a bit of a recluse, Donna, and doesn’t venture outside her front door very often – the occasional gig, a rare excursion to buy shoes, the opening of an envelope, that kind of thing.
  Anyway, I’m off again to see Donna (and do the whole Bristol Crimefest thing) again this year, and I’m hugely looking forward to it. I’m taking part in a discussion called ‘Making Us Laugh About Murder’ on Friday afternoon, alongside Ruth Dudley Edwards, Colin Cotterill, Dorothy Cannell and moderator Lindsey Davis; and on Saturday afternoon I’ll be hosting a discussion on ‘Books to Die For’, featuring contributors to the BOOKS TO DIE FOR tome Barbara Nadel, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Colin Bateman and Brian McGilloway.
  On Saturday night, there’s the Gala Dinner and Awards Presentation, at which I hope to be seated beside Peter Rozovsky, because he’s the only one who can stop me throwing my broccoli out of my high chair. BOOKS TO DIE FOR is up for an award on Saturday night, along with some very fine books indeed; and SLAUGHTER’S HOUND has been shortlisted for the Goldsboro ‘Last Laugh’ gong, an award I was lucky enough to win last year (at least, I’m pretty sure I did – it might well have been a particularly vivid fever-dream).
  Apart from the various events, panels and official events, though, the best part of the weekend is catching up with people you tend not to see from one end of the year to the other. Much coffee will be consumed, and perhaps a glass of sherry or two, and quite a bit of hot air generated. Even the weather is promised fine. Should be a cracker. For the full Crimefest programme, clickety-click here ...

Lock Up Your Stained-Glass Windows

It isn’t due until March 2014, unfortunately, but I’m already looking forward to THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE (Henry Holt) by Benjamin Black, aka John Banville, writing in the style of Raymond Chandler about Philip Marlowe. Confused? Well, if Black / Banville adopts Chandler’s haphazard approach to plotting, there’s a very good chance you will be. There’s precious little information available about said plot so far, but as soon as we hear you’ll be the first to know …

Review: PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR: AN ADVENTURE by Artemis Cooper

If Artemis Cooper’s book was a novel rather than a biography, you’d never believe the story.
  Born in London in 1915, Patrick Leigh Fermor - Paddy to family and his legions of friends - was arguably the greatest travel writer working in the English language in the 20th century. Insatiably curious about other cultures, his ornately elegant writing style reflected his fascination with languages, and particularly their etymology. Fluent as a speaker and reader in eight languages, Fermor was a cultural magpie, delighting in the shiny, the rare and the unique.
  But Paddy Fermor was no donnish wordsmith. He was a decorated war hero for orchestrating the abduction of a German general from the island of Crete in 1944. He took part in the last cavalry charge to take place on the European mainland. A renowned ladies’ man, he had a prolonged affair with a Hungarian countess, and yet, craving solitude, was often to be found holed up in remote monasteries. He wrote a novel as well as his travel books, found himself the subject of a blood feud vendetta on Crete, swam the Bosphorus in his sixties as a homage to Lord Byron, and lived the life of the renaissance man to the full.
  When he died last year Paddy Fermor was mourned equally in England and Greece, although the most common reaction to the news of his death was, ‘Has he finished the third volume?’
  Born into a reasonably prosperous middleclass family, Paddy was expected to achieve a respectable education and become an engineer, lawyer or doctor. Instead the young boy found himself expelled from a number of schools, as his fizzing imagination and irrepressible spirit refused to conform to rules and regulations. A magnet for trouble, he was a sponge for poetry and literature, for history, geography and philosophy. At the age of 18, living a dissolute ‘miniature Rake’s Progress’ in London as he waited to join the army at Sandhurst, he was struck by a fantastic notion: he would walk across Europe, from England all the way to his beloved Greece.
  Setting out in December 1933, Fermor tramped across the continent against a backdrop of rising Fascism, walking through Holland and Germany, down through Hungary and Romania, and on through the Balkans to Constantinople. In the first book recounting his travels, A Time of Gifts (1977), Paddy tells how he would sleep in a hayrick one night, a castle the next, as he marched from Holland to Hungary. The second instalment, Between the Woods and the Water (1986), follows on as Paddy walks deep into the Balkans, and the third instalment - well, we wait still.
  Long before A Time of Gifts was published, however, Fermor had established himself as the pre-eminent travel writer of his generation, with his debut The Traveller’s Tree (1950) an insightful account of Caribbean cultures, and the twinned Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966) both fabulous accounts of life in the Greek Peloponnese. His feeling for the Greek character was honed by his wartime experiences as a SOE operative, when he parachuted onto Crete and spent years behind German lines liaising with the local resistance groups, or andartes, an experience that culminated in the storied account of how Paddy led the abduction of General Kreipe in 1944, at the time a propaganda coup for the Allies. Dirk Bogarde played Paddy in the film made about the abduction, Ill Met By Moonlight (1957).
  Artemis Cooper is a family friend of Paddy Fermor, and knew him as a young girl. If the book reads in large parts as a breathless Boy’s Own adventure tale - indeed, it is subtitled ‘An Adventure’ - she can hardly be faulted, given the extent to which Fermor spent his life constantly in search of the next challenge, the next curiosity. By the same token, the book is more biography than it is hagiography. The fabled account of how Fermor took part in the last cavalry charge on European soil, for example, is here presented more as a story about how a precocious teenager took advantage of his gracious host while in Hungary, and stole a horse so that he could gallop along at the ragtag end of the charge. Fermor’s womanising is not glossed over, and neither are the consequences, particularly in terms of how it impacted on his long-suffering life partner, the Honourable Joan Rayner (there’s also an extensive quote from a funny but revolting letter from Fermor about the latest invasion of pubic lice).
  Cooper also digs into the legend of Fermor’s time on Crete, raising questions about the practicality of the famous abduction of General Kreipe, especially given the German penchant for ruthless reprisals against the Cretan population. She also details how Fermor wasn’t universally revered among the Cretans, due to the fact that he had accidentally shot and killed one of the andartes during the war. On a return visit long after the war, she writes, Paddy would be received with great celebration in a village, while those who maintained the blood vendetta waited beyond the village borders, guns cocked.
  The man who emerges from the pages of Cooper’s biography is without doubt a fascinating one, a flawed, brilliant throwback to the warrior poets of yore, a man of letters and a man of action. It’s a page-turning story right to the end, although it’s arguable that Fermor is such a ripe figure for biography, his life so dense with incident and adventure, with contrast and contradiction, that simply listing the bewildering number of his various accomplishments soaks up all Cooper’s time and effort. Beautifully researched, particularly in terms of the way Cooper points up the discrepancies between Fermor’s actual experiences and the poetic way in which he renders his memories, this biography is a solid addition to the canon of work which exists on Fermor. It may not provide very much in the way of startling new revelations for Fermor fans, but it’s an outstanding introduction to the man’s life and writing for those who have yet to make his acquaintance. – Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Norn Iron In The Soul

There’s a very interesting interview with Adrian McKinty in the Wall Street Journal, in which McKinty speaks about the influence of his childhood and growing up in Northern Ireland on his new series of novels, ‘the Troubles Trilogy’. To wit:

“Imagine if you had a bombing like [the Boston Marathon attack] every week for 30 years,” says Mr. McKinty, 45. The novelist grew up during ‘the Troubles,’ the euphemism commonly used to describe the decades of bloody sectarian violence that ravaged Northern Ireland throughout his childhood in the 1970s and ’80s. “That’s what it was like back home. I was born the year the Troubles began, in 1968. That world of violence was all I knew—people murdered, maimed, kneecapped, bombed. I don’t remember a time without a major atrocity of some kind every week.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

“Publish Or I’m Damned.”

So spake Karlsson, a hero-of-sorts of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, a novel published by Liberties Press in 2011. Ironically, given that the tale incorporates a writer’s struggle to get published, Karlsson and AZC had been rejected by a whole slew of publishers – to the point where I was roughly six weeks away from self-publishing the story – before Sean O’Keeffe of Liberties Press stepped in.
  The novel, described as a cross between Raymond Chandler and Flann O’Brien by John Banville, was subsequently shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards in 2011, and won the Goldsboro ‘Last Laugh’ award for comic crime novels at Crimefest in 2012.
  So it’s entirely apt, I think, that yours truly, Sean O’Keeffe and Liberties Press’ marketing manager Alice Dawson will be talking about the tricky path to publication at the Dublin Writers Festival later this month. To wit:

Publish and Be Famed
You’ve slaved away over your keyboard for months, if not years. You’ve researched and imagined, reworked and revised and now, at last, your book is finished. But what happens now? Who guides you down the path to publication? How is your book designed, edited, marketed and promoted? In association with the Dublin Book Festival, Dublin Writers Festival brings together Declan Burke, author of the Harry Rigby Mysteries and one of the most innovative voices in Irish crime fiction, with key personnel from his publishers, Liberties Press, to look at the process of publishing a novel from first idea to the printed page. For anyone interested in unpacking the mysteries of publishing, this event is a must.

Venue: Smock Alley Theatre
Date: Friday May 24th
Time: 1:05 pm
Tickets: €10 / €8

  For all the details, clickety-click here.
  The full programme for the Dublin Writers Festival can be found here.

Review: COLD SPRING by Patrick McGinley

‘No one lives in Leaca anymore,’ begins Patrick McGinley’s provocative novel, but even in 1948, the year in which the novel is set, Leaca was dying on its knees. Scrubbed bare by sea and wind, gutted by emigration, the tiny Donegal village had always taken pride in its sense of community – until the day their venerable elder, Paddy Canty, is discovered strangled to death. When the gardaí fail to apprehend the killer, the men of the village take the law into their own hands.
  Cold Spring, then, is framed as a revenge thriller, although it is considerably more complex than such novels tend to be. For one, the reader is as ignorant as to the identity and motive of the killer as are the villagers are, which makes Cold Spring a pleasingly intricate blend of ‘whodunit’ and ‘whydunit’. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Patrick McGinley asks penetrating questions about the nature of justice, and the reader’s complicity in creating fiction’s illusion of justice, as the villagers plot to avenge their murdered neighbour.
  McGinley’s Bogmail (1978) is one of the few Irish crime novels to bear comparison with Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1967), but Bogmail’s whimsical and absurdist treatment of the genre has been replaced here with a gimlet-eyed obsession with truth and righteousness. Can murder ever be justified? The novel’s arc incorporates a kind of Socratic dialogue between the avengers’ ringleader, Muriris, and the unbiddable Tom Barron, fleshing out the arguments with references to an Old Testament-style eye-for-an-eye retribution, the difficulties faced by the State-sanctioned executioner Albert Pierrepoint, folk memories of the murder of an absentee landlord’s feckless agent, and a rather radical interpretation of Brehon law.
  If Cold Spring is to some extent a novel of ideas and simultaneously a vigorous interrogation of the genre, it’s also a lament of sorts, a paean to a time, place
and people that no longer exist. The recently arrived Englishman Nick and his partner Sharon – a failing writer and successful artist, respectively – are our eyes and ears, reporting back on the hauntingly stark beauty of mountain, lake, bog and shore. On one level, McGinley convincingly paints a portrait of a long-lost idyll derived from Rockwell Kent and John Hinde, but this particular vision of a quasi-mystical Ireland has been poisoned by insularity, history and hubris.
  Don’t be fooled by rural Donegal setting: the fatalistic tone is one of pure noir. – Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Independent.

  Over at the Irish Times, COLD SPRING was reviewed by George O’Brien.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Chris Allen

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?
A STUDY IN SCARLET by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (and then every other Holmes/Watson excursion). I just love the style of his writing, the way in which he captured the time - the courtesy, the camaraderie, the thoroughness and dedication. This story really set up the principle characters, their partnership and the tone of the series that he maintained so well throughout the many years that he created these stories. I’m a huge fan and would love to write the way that he did. Sadly, I can only aspire to that standard ... but, I live in hope!

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
The character I would most like to have been is Dr John Watson. Far from being Sherlock’s sidekick as was portrayed in old movies and some treatments on television, Watson was a medical man with an outstanding military service record. He had enough wit to be Sherlock’s loyal intellectual companion, along with sufficient brawn to be his protector at the appropriate time. I would have loved being involved in the solving of those now iconic cases, and all the insight they provided into the human condition.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
There’s a great local writer here, a Canadian/Australian named Tara Moss who writes great contemporary crime fiction from a decidedly female perspective. Very strong. Great stories. I really enjoy them.

Most satisfying writing moment?
After writing my first book, DEFENDER, over a period of ten years - which I began on my return from East Timor in 2000 - the most satisfying moment was completing my second book, HUNTER, in just six months on a deadline for my publisher. I guess it was just great to prove to myself that I was able to churn out the story as fast as my clumsy two-fingered-typing style could achieve. By that stage, the story was so much in my head that I had to get Alex Morgan’s latest adventure onto the page.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
In all honesty, I am yet to knowingly read an Irish crime author. That said, the one that I currently have on my TBR list is Borderlands by Brian McGilloway. I’ve always been intrigued by the contemporary history of Ireland, North & South, and so I am looking forward to discovering McGilloway’s work.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst: The uncertainty of if/when all the hard work will actually pay off. Best: Those rare days when you can really feel that all the hard work and sacrifice is starting to pay off.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Alex Morgan has taken on gunrunners in DEFENDER and fugitive war criminals in HUNTER. Now in AVENGER he’s taking Intrepid’s first female agent into the centre of hell as together they bring to justice the masterminds of a global human trafficking cartel.

Who are you reading right now?
I find it really hard to read other action novels when I’m writing one. So I actually prefer to watch movies in my down time – sometimes it’ll be classic war movies like A Bridge Too Far or The Eagle Has Landed; sometimes it’ll be my favourite Bond action sequences, the new Hawaii-50, or the latest contemporary take on Holmes & Watson such as the BBC’s Sherlock or the US treatment Elementary. That said, I do enjoy returning to a story or two from Arthur Conan Doyle’s collected works or when I really needed inspiration I turn to Ian Fleming time and time again.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write. As long as others can read my stories, then I’ll be content just getting them out of the lumber room, my mind, and onto a page.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Contemporary. Action. Realism.

Chris Allen’s HUNTER is published by Momentum.

Memories Are Made Of This

It isn’t due until August, but I’m already looking forward to the latest offering from Conor Fitzgerald, whose police procedurals are set in Rome and feature Commissioner Alec Blume. Blume is an American-born naturalised Italian policeman, which gives him an outsider’s eye and an insider’s cynicism, and Fitzgerald’s tersely lyrical style is deliciously readable.
  The forthcoming tome, THE MEMORY KEY (Bloomsbury Publishing), will be Blume’s fourth outing, and the blurb elves have been busy:

On a freezing November night Commissioner Alec Blume is called to the scene of a shooting.
  The victim is Sofia Fontana, the sole witness to a previous killing. Blume’s enquiries lead from a professor with a passion for the art of memory to a hospitalised ex-terrorist whose injuries have left her mind innocently blank; from present day Rome’s criminal underclass, to a murderous train station bombing in central Italy several decades ago.
  Against the advice of his bosses and his own better judgement, Blume is drawn ever deeper into the case, which looks set to derail his troubled relationship with Caterina ...

The Best Things In Life Are Free Books: THE BIG O

It occurred to me during the course of the last book giveaway, Mark Sullivan’s CROCODILE TEARS (the winners of which will be notified in the next couple of days), that the ‘free book’ offer was pretty much limited to this blog. I could mention it here, on Twitter and Facebook, certainly, but the word was still going out to a relatively limited number of people.
  Of course, the point of the exercise was twofold. One, put a copy of a very good book in readers’ hands. Two, make as many people as possible aware that the book is available.
  With that in mind, I’m going to try a little social media experiment for the next giveaway, which is for three signed hardback copies of my own humble tome, THE BIG O. If you’d like to play along, please do. First the blurb elves:

Karen can’t go on pulling stick-ups forever, but Rossi is getting out of prison any day now and she needs the money to keep Anna out of his hands. This new guy she’s met, Ray, just might be able to help her out, but he wants out of the kidnap game now the Slavs are bunkering in. And then there’s Frank, the discredited plastic surgeon who wants his ex-wife snatched - the ex-wife being Madge, who just happens to be Karen’s best friend. But can Karen and Ray trust each other enough to carry off one last caper? Or will love, as always, ruin everything?

  To be in with a chance of winning a signed hardback copy of THE BIG O, just link to this giveaway on Twitter, Facebook, Google + or your blog, or anywhere else you like on the Web (feel free to click on the buttons below this post). If you use ‘Declan Burke’ on Facebook or the Twitter handle @declanburke I’ll know you’ve entered, but you can also email me at dbrodb[at]gmail.com to confirm. Et bon chance, mes amis …

Here Comes The Hurt

It isn’t due until November, but here’s an early glimpse of Brian McGilloway’s next title to whet your appetite. HURT (Constable & Robinson) is the sequel to Brian’s LITTLE GIRL LOST, with the blurb elves wibbling thusly:

Late December. A sixteen-year- old girl is found dead on a train line. Detective Sergeant Lucy Black from the Public Protection Unit is called to identify the body. The murdered girl, Karen Hughes, having a father in prison and an alcoholic mother had no choice but to live in residential care and DS Black soon discovers the only clue to the girl’s movements are her mobile phone and social media - where her ‘friends’ may not be all they seem.
  Meanwhile, Black is still haunted by Mary Quigg’s death in a house fire over a year ago. Her pain is then intensified when she finds Mary’s grave vandalised - Black is deeply upset and spurred on in her pledge to find the man she knows is responsible for the fire. But Lucy has to tread carefully: with a new DI to contend with, and her fractious mother, the Assistant Chief Constable, looking over her shoulder, she can’t afford to make a mistake...
  The stunning sequel to the number one bestseller LITTLE GIRL LOST, HURT is a tense crime thriller about the abuse of power, and how the young and vulnerable can fall prey to those they should be able to trust.

I Bring Grave News

I had a crime fiction column published in the Irish Times last weekend, featuring new titles from Alan Glynn, Aly Monroe, Anne Holt and Carl Hiaasen. The review of Alan Glynn’s GRAVELAND (Faber and Faber) runs like this:

Alan Glynn’s fourth novel, Graveland, opens with the apparently random murder of a Central Park jogger. When a second man is shot dead in the street, and an attempted murder is botched in a similar attack, a pattern emerges: the targets are Wall Street high-flyers, representatives of the self-styled ‘Masters of the Universe’ who have ruined lives and destroyed the US economy.
  Thus the scene is set for a frantic manhunt for vigilante killers – or would be, if Graveland was a conventional thriller. The third of a loose trilogy that began with Winterland (2009) and continued with Bloodland (2011), the novel incorporates the search for the vigilantes and the investigation of their motives, and certainly proceeds at a rattling pace. Glynn, however, crafts a complex tale in which a host of disparate characters – among them a pair of radicalised brothers, a bereft father, a crusading journalist and a Wall Street kingpin – are skilfully interwoven, creating a story that is both a contemporary take on the timeless clash between the powerless and the powerful few and a commentary on the perception, interpretation and manipulation of the narratives that shape our lives.
  On the one hand an invigorating slice of conspiracy noir, Graveland is simultaneously a heartbreaking account of the human cost of corporate greed.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

“They have roughed the language around as Shakespeare did …”

I came across a very nice website yesterday, via Twitter, which features Raymond Chandler on the subject of writing. This jumped out at me:

“The best writing in English today is done by Americans, but not in any purist tradition. They have roughed the language around as Shakespeare did and done it the violence of melodrama and the press box. They have knocked over tombs and sneered at the dead. Which is as it should be. There are too many dead men and there is too much talk about them.”

  For more in a similar vein, clickety-click here …

SLAUGHTER'S HOUND: “Everything You Want From Noir.”

I was clearing out some old files over the weekend, and I came across this - the blurb Tana French was kind enough to write for SLAUGHTER’S HOUND, and which I never got to use in full. Seems kind of a waste just to throw it out, so here it is:

“SLAUGHTER’S HOUND has everything you want from noir – a plot that switchbacks fast and furiously enough to give you whiplash, a desperately damaged investigator trying to hold on as the last threads tethering him to his humanity are ripped away, a cast of slippery and ruthless characters playing a high-stakes game, a dark and ambiguous moral heart – but what makes it something special is the writing: taut, honed and vivid, packed with phrases that I read over and over because reading them was a sheer pleasure.” – Tana French, author of BROKEN HARBOUR

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Chris Pearson

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?
SHUTTER ISLAND by Dennis Lehane. I couldn’t stop reading it – my life ground to a halt – and the ending completely got me. A superb premise, brilliantly executed.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Bond. No, wait … Bryan Mills – Liam Neeson’s character in Taken. I love his skill set and determination. His unaccountability is enviable in a world with so many rules. He’s one cool Northern Irishman.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I’m a natural hedonist, so the pleasure is guilt-free. The geek in me tends towards articles and books on the cosmos and our place in it all – Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan and Simon Singh are very accessible. I’m also fascinated by anything that explores the role of emerging technologies in the future evolution of humans. Sometimes it seems like science fiction, but it’s all too real. Be afraid.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Typing “The End” in size 72 whenever I finish a manuscript. Someone should invent a bigger font.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
IN THE WOODS by Tana French is high on my “to read” list. I can already feel the hairs on my neck prickling.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I need to read a few more Irish crime novels to answer this question. I will certainly be scrutinizing the next ones for their filmic future!

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is that writing is an obsession. If I am deprived of writing for too long, I begin to slip into Crazy – a place where you’re more likely to find some of my unsavoury fictional characters. The best thing is that you can be anyone, go anywhere and do anything, anytime, and no one can stop you. That’s Freedom.

The pitch for your next book is …?
A conspiracy/race-against-time thriller that will change your perspective on modern society and get your blood pumping. I wish I could tell you more, but it’s under wraps!

Who are you reading right now?
S.J. Watson – BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP. A novel so accomplished it belies Watson’s status as a debut author. I’m hooked.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Firstly, I would question the premise on which mutual exclusivity was based. I would point out that it doesn’t have to be like this. Man can’t choose between eating and breathing. If that failed, I would propose a compromise: to do only one at a time. When writing, I would dictate. When reading, I wouldn’t have ideas flying around inside my head. If that failed, I would turn to bribery and offer the souls of my literary victims. If that failed, I would choose writing, and tell the world the story of my extraordinary negotiation with God. I’m sure it would be a bestseller.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Pacy. Compelling. Thrilling.

Chris Pearson’s debut novel is PROOF OF DEATH.

The Naked And The Stiffed

I do like the set-up to Rob Kitchen’s STIFFED (Snubnose Press), which sounds like the kind of crackerjack black comedy Eoin Colfer is bringing to the masses. To wit:

Tadhg Maguire wakes to find himself spooning a dead man. The stiff is Tony Marino, lieutenant to mobster Aldo Pirelli. It doesn’t matter how the local enforcer ended up between Tadhg’s sheets, Pirelli is liable to leap to the wrong conclusion and demand rough justice.
  The right thing to do would be to call the cops.
  The sensible thing to do would be to disappear. Forever.
  The only other option is to get rid of the body and pretend it was never there. No body, no crime.
  What he needs is a couple of friends to help dispose of the heavy corpse. Little do Tadhg’s friends know what kind of reward they’ll receive for their selfless act – threatened, chased, shot at, and kidnapped with demands to return a million dollars they don’t possess.
  By mid-afternoon Tadhg is the most wanted man in America. Not bad for someone who’d never previously had so much as parking ticket.
  If he survives the day he’s resigned to serving time, but not before he saves his friends from the same fate.

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

The Best Things In Life Are Free Books: CROCODILE TEARS by Mark O’Sullivan

I’ve gone on record saying that I’ll be very pleasantly surprised if there’s a better Irish crime fiction debut this year than Mark O’Sullivan’s CROCODILE TEARS, and I’m delighted to offer readers the opportunity to snaffle a free copy of said tome. First the blurb elves:

DI Leo Woods’ life is a mess. Work keeps him sane. More or less. On an ice-cold winter morning in an affluent Dublin suburb, he stares down at the bloodied corpse of a property developer. Dermot Brennan’s features, distorted in terror, are a reflection of Leo’s own disfigured face. Life does that kind of thing to Leo. Makes faces at him.
  With the help of ambitious but impetuous Detective Sergeant Helen Troy, Leo uncovers a frosted web of lies, where nobody is quite who they seem. But who ever is? A host of suspects emerge: Brennan’s beautiful but aloof wife, Anna; their estranged son; two former business associates bearing grudges and secrets; a young man convinced Brennan has ruined his life; an ex-pat American gardener; and an arrogant sculptor who may or may not have been having an affair with the dead man’s wife.
  As ice and snow grip Dublin, Woods and Troy find themselves battling forces as malevolent as the weather: jealousy, greed and betrayal. Can they identify the murderer before things get even uglier?

  To be in with a chance of winning a copy of CROCODILE TEARS, just email me at dbrodb[at]gmail.com, putting ‘Crocodile Tears’ in the subject line and including your name and postal address in the body of the email. The giveaway is open until noon on Friday, May 18th. Et bon chance, mes amis …

The French Detection Connection

Here’s an intriguing proposition for those of you with academic ambitions. ‘Clues: A Journal of Detection’ is taking submissions for an issue themed ‘Tana French and Irish Crime Fiction’, with the gist running thusly:

Tana French and Irish Crime Fiction
(theme issue of ‘Clues: A Journal of Detection’)
Guest editor: Rachel Schaffer (Montana State University Billings)
Submission Deadline: August 1, 2013

The number of Irish crime writers and books currently in print is a clear indication that the popularity of Emerald Noir, aka Celtic crime and Hibernian homicide, has never been greater. Ireland—with its economic boom and bust, child abuse scandals, and growing problems with drugs, gangs, and murder—offers a wealth of material to authors looking for rich veins of mystery and crime themes to mine. One of the most popular of these Irish writers is Tana French. Her popularity and critical acclaim have grown with each book, but, to date, there have been few serious academic studies of her work in print. Therefore, Clues seeks previously unpublished papers about Tana French in particular, as well as about Irish crime fiction and writers in general.

Topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:
  Essays on Tana French or other Irish crime writers, individual or comparative
  Trends in Irish crime fiction
  Comparisons of Irish crime fiction to that of other nations or cultures
  Connections between social, cultural, or economic issues in Ireland and crime
  Connections between Irish history—past, present, or future—and crime
  Connections among Irish identity, stereotypes, or mythology and crime

Submission details
Submissions should include a 50-word abstract and 4–5 keywords, and be between 15 to 20 double-spaced, typed pages (approximately 3,300 to 6,000 words) in Times or Times Roman font with minimal formatting. Manuscripts should follow the MLA Style Manual, including parenthetical citations in text and an alphabetized Works Cited list. Please confirm that manuscripts have been submitted solely to Clues.

Submit essays to Janice Allan, Clues executive editor, at j.m.allan@ salford.ac.uk; inquiries may be directed to Elizabeth Foxwell, Clues managing editor, at clues@elizabethfoxwell.com.

  For more details, click on the ‘Clues: A Journal of Detection’ website.

A Peculier State Of Affairs

It’s turning into a week of awards and short- and longlists here at Crime Always Pays. Today it’s the turn of the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, which issued a 13-strong longlist yesterday. It’s a very strong field, but I reckon the two Irish writers, Gene Kerrigan and Stuart Neville, have a pretty decent shot at making the shortlist, and maybe even winning the award outright (Gene Kerrigan’s THE RAGE, of course, has already won the CWA Gold Dagger). To wit:

The Guilty One – Lisa Ballantyne (Piatkus)
Finders Keepers – Belinda Bauer (Transworld)
Rush Of Blood – Mark Billingham (Little Brown)
Dead Scared – S J Bolton (Corgi, Transworld)
The Affair – Lee Child (Transworld)
A Foreign Country – Charles Cumming (Harpercollins)
Safe House - Chris Ewan (Faber and Faber)
Not Dead Yet - Peter James (Macmillan)
Siege – Simon Kernick (Bantam Press)
Prague Fatale – Philip Kerr (Quercus)
The Rage – Gene Kerrigan (Vintage)
Birthdays for the Dead – Stuart MacBride (Harper)
The Dark Winter – David Mark (Quercus)
The Lewis Man – Peter May (Quercus)
Gods And Beasts – Denise Mina (Orion)
Stolen Souls – Stuart Neville (Vintage)
Sacrilege – S. J. Parris (Harper)
A Dark Redemption – Stav Sherez (Faber and Faber)

  The heartiest of congrats to all nominees. The shortlist will be announced on July 1st, by the way; for all the details, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, and on the subject of awards and the winning of, a big shout-out to Adrian McKinty, who has won the 2013 Spinetingler Award for Best Novel with THE COLD COLD GROUND. Quoth Adrian:

“I’m really very touched. I put a lot of my heart and soul into that book. It was both harrowing and strangely fun journeying back to the 1981 of my imagination and reliving those childhood days in Victoria Estate in Carrickfergus. I don’t find writing particularly easy and I’m not one of those 1000 words before breakfast types but occasionally during the writing process of this book I did feel that I was firing on all cylinders the way a top notch writer presumably feels all the time ...”

  For more on Adrian and THE COLD COLD GROUND, clickety-click here …

The Hound Of The Laughtervilles

I’m very pleased indeed to announce that SLAUGHTER’S HOUND has been shortlisted for the Goldsboro Last Laugh award at Crimefest. As all Three Regular Readers will be aware, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL won the Last Laugh gong at Crimefest in 2012 – I was genuinely stunned on the night in question, and very nearly left speechless, and it remains one of the proudest moments of my writing career to date.
  That’s only one of the reasons why I don’t have a hope in hell of winning the Last Laugh this year; the other is the superb quality of the other nominees. To wit:

- Colin Bateman for The Prisoner of Brenda (Headline)
- Simon Brett for The Corpse on the Court (Severn House)
- Declan Burke for Slaughter’s Hound (Liberties Press)
- Ruth Dudley Edwards for Killing The Emperors (Allison & Busby)
- Christopher Fowler for Bryant & May and the Invisible Code (Doubleday, Transworld)
- Hesh Kestin for The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (Mulholland Books, Hodder & Stoughton)

  Congratulations to all nominees, in all of the Crimefest awards categories. All the details can be found here …
  Finally, I note in passing that three of the six Last Laugh nominees are Irish. What that might or might not say about the Irish attitude to crime and / or crime fiction is anyone’s guess. But I’d love to hear your theories …

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books

UPDATE: A quick thank you to everyone who took part in the Tana French / BROKEN HARBOUR competition – the response was fantastic. The winner is Linda Callaghan of Glasnevin in Dublin, Ireland. Stay tuned for another competition later this week, when I’ll be giving away copies of Mark O’Sullivan’s CROCODILE TEARS.

As you may or may not know, Tana French’s BROKEN HARBOUR won the Best Mystery / Thriller Award at the LA Times awards last weekend. A splendid achievement, I think you’ll agree, and fully deserved – BROKEN HARBOUR is a wonderful book.
  To (modestly) celebrate Tana’s win, I’m giving away a copy of BROKEN HARBOUR to one lucky reader. First, the blurb 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 . . .

  To be in with a chance of winning, just email me at dbrodb[at]gmail.com, putting ‘Broken Harbour’ in the subject line and your name and postal address in the body of the email. The closing date is noon on Friday, May 3rd, and I’ll draw the winner’s name out of a bobbly hat on Friday afternoon. Et bon chance, mes amis …

UPDATE: Just a quick reminder, folks – some of the entrants to the competition have neglected to include their name and postal address in the body of the email. If you’re taking part, please remember to include your name and address as part of your entry. Thanks kindly.

The Agatha Awards: BOOKS TO DIE FOR

I’m delighted to announce that BOOKS TO DIE FOR, edited by John Connolly, Clair Lamb and yours truly, has won the Agatha Award for Best Non-Fiction at the annual Malice Domestic convention.
  The Agatha Awards, for those of you unfamiliar with them, ‘honour the “traditional mystery.” That is to say, books best typified by the works of Agatha Christie as well as others.’
  It’s a considerable honour, and I’m particularly thrilled for John and Clair, but also for all the writers who contributed to BOOKS TO DIE FOR – it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that this award belongs to every one of them as much as it does the book’s editors.
  For all the Agatha Awards shortlists and winners, clickety-click here.
  It’s been a real roller-coaster week for BOOKS TO DIE FOR. We were hugely honoured to be shortlisted for Thursday night’s Edgar Awards, and naturally we were disappointed not to win. That disappointment was offset on Friday by the news that BTDF has been shortlisted for the HRF Keating Award at Crimefest, where the book will find itself, again, in some very fine company. To wit:

Declan Burke & John Connolly for BOOKS TO DIE FOR (Hodder & Stoughton, 2012)
John Curran for AGATHA CHRISTIE’S SECRET NOTEBOOKS (HarperCollins, 2009)
Barry Forshaw (editor) for BRITISH CRIME WRITING: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA (Greenwood World Publishing, 2008)
Christopher Fowler for INVISIBLE INK (Strange Attractor, 2012)
Maxim Jakubowski (editor) for FOLLOWING THE DETECTIVES (New Holland Publishers, 2010)
P.D. James for TALKING ABOUT DETECTIVE FICTION (The Bodleian Library, 2009)

  Incidentally, I’ll be hosting a panel at Crimefest on BOOKS TO DIE FOR, featuring contributors Peter James, Yrsa Sigurdardottir and Brian McGilloway. If you’re going to be in Bristol that weekend, we’d love to see you there.

Poe Is We, Part II: The Edgar Awards

The more eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that when I mentioned earlier in the week Jane Casey has been longlisted for a CWA ‘Dagger in the Library’ award, I neglected to mention she was also in the running for an Edgar award later this evening.
  Of course, that – in the grand tradition of the crime novel – was a classic case of dissimulation from an unreliable narrator, and not (koff) the schoolboy error it might appear on first glance.
  But I digress. For lo! Jane Casey is shortlisted for an Edgar Award this evening in the Mary Higgins Clark category with THE RECKONING. And that’s not all – Alan Glynn is also shortlisted, this time in the Best Paperback Original category, for BLOODLAND. And – a muted trumpet parp there, maestro – BOOKS TO DIE FOR, edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke (and the wonderful Clair Lamb) is up for consideration in the Best Critical / Biographical category.
  So there it is. It’s very satisfying indeed, I have to say, to be nominated for such a prestigious award, and in such august company too. The very best of luck this evening to everyone on the various shortlists, which can be found here.

UPDATE: News just in comes via Jane Casey, who tells me that Hank Phillippi Ryan won the Mary Higgins Clark gong, which was awarded last night. Hearty congrats to Hank …

UPDATE ON THE UPDATE: Woe is we, for lo! The Irish writers came away empty-handed from the Edgar Awards last night – unless we’re prepared to claim Dennis Lehane, who won Best Novel with LIVE BY NIGHT, and James O’Brien, who won the Best Critical / Biography category with THE SCIENTIFIC SHERLOCK HOLMES. Anyway, the heartiest of congratulations to all of the winners at the Edgars – the full list can be found here – and commiserations to everyone else. There is, as they say, always next year …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Mark O’Sullivan

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?
DARK PASSAGE or THE BURGLAR, both by David Goodis. On the surface, his style was typically noir – hard-bitten, compact prose; taut, streetwise dialogue. But that’s just his kicking-off point. The writing is lifted with a quirky take on life, on logic and occasional surrealist touches. A character, for example, can be obsessed with the colour orange – clothes, furnishing, car – to such an odd extent that the novel begins to feel like some kind of surreal hand-tinted noir. Another character has a three-page conversation with a bloodied corpse. And, for me, the last chapter of THE BURGLAR can’t be beaten. An extended metaphor that sums up of all that has gone before, that’s in no way pretentiously literary, and is cinematic in its visual and visceral power.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Bernie Gunther in Philip Kerr’s superb Berlin noir novels.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Football bloggers, particularly those devoted to the team I support, Fulham FC – like
HammyEnd.com. We never win anything but we’re philosophical about the true value of failure and the illusory nature of success (especially Chelsea’s success).

Most satisfying writing moment?
Ruth Rendell has said that ‘the writer’s job is to stay confused for as long as possible’. It’s nerve-wracking but staying confused is the only effective antidote to predictability and lazy writing. The moment when that cloud of confusion begins to lift is more than satisfying – it’s a kind of ecstasy (without the thirst and the hyperactivity).

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
To be perfectly honest, I’m not sufficiently up to speed on the new Irish crime-writing wave to answer this one – or the next. I very much look forward to playing catch up though.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
As above.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst thing – If I was a plumber, I can’t imagine anyone arriving at my door and asking me to come take a look at a job they’ve just completed and how they might improve it – for free. Best thing – For some reason, a line from Leonard Cohen’s ‘Going Home’ occurs to me here: ‘He’s a lazy bastard living in a suit …’

The pitch for your next book is …?
A missing Goth girl, a hacker, a Libyan rebel fighter, a gangland casualty, a West Belfast Armenian, a woman betrayed, a mother seeking revenge – and the accidental nature of life and death. Confused? DI Leo Woods is too – but he’s working on it.

Who are you reading right now?
As always I’ve got too many books on the go. Right now I’m re-reading Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen series, which I love. I’m also nearing the end of Edward St. Aubyn’s AT LAST – the final Patrick Melrose novel. The only real freedom is the freedom from delusion, he concludes. Too right. In between times, I’m dodging in and out of John Gray’s STRAW DOGS – forget existentialism, this is real noir philosophy, stark but compelling and best taken in small doses.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
If I can write, I can read, but not vice-versa. Your move, God.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
I’ve read worse.

Mark O’Sullivan’s CROCODILE TEARS is published by Transworld.