Craic In The USSR

I had an interview with William Ryan published in the Irish Examiner last weekend, to mark the publication of his third Alexei Korolev novel, THE TWELFTH DEPARTMENT (Mantle). It opened up like this:

Of all the writers in the new wave of Irish crime fiction, William Ryan has a strong claim on offering the most interesting setting. THE TWELFTH DEPARTMENT is the third novel in a series featuring Captain Alexei Korolev, a police detective operating in Moscow during the 1930s, a period dominated by Stalin and overshadowed by the Great Terror.
  “Crime fiction is all about truth and justice and morality, and these are all things that were manipulated in the Soviet Union,” says Ryan. “They didn’t necessarily mean what you thought they meant. Back then they had the concept of ‘bourgeoisie morality’ – you know, what we now consider to be a valid morality would have been frowned upon in Stalin’s Russia. Right and wrong were all subordinate to the political will. So when you have a detective who is basically looking for truth and justice, these are things that don’t really exist in the way we understand them.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …