Reviews: Gerald Seymour, Louise Phillips, Dominique Manotti, Conor Fitzgerald

Gerald Seymour’s Vagabond (Hodder & Stoughton, €20.85) opens in contemporary Northern Ireland, with MI5 shadowing a dissident Republican group trying to buy weapons from a Russian arms dealer. In France, the former British Army intelligence agent-handler Danny Curnow – call sign ‘Vagabond’ – is now employed driving tourists around the historical sites of the Normandy Landings. When Malachy Riordan leaves Tyrone for Prague in the company of double agent Ralph Exton, Danny gets the call he has dreaded for two decades: come in from the cold, there’s dirty work to be done. Seymour’s multi-stranded narrative of dark deeds and black ops is fuelled by an exhilaratingly bleak cynicism. Here the ambitiously self-serving prosper, and the traditionally noble virtues of loyalty, friendship and patriotism are so many exploitable weaknesses. The pace is funereal and the tone elegiac as the story draws together a number of strands of recent history, with ‘Desperate’ Dan Curnow at the heart of the tale and emblematic of the novel’s overall thrust in his beguiling blend of pragmatism, brutality and unswerving faith in the notion of sacrifice on behalf of the greater good. Seymour, who debuted with Harry’s Game in 1975 (this is his 30th novel in total), tends to be overshadowed by John le Carré as one of the great British post-Cold War novelists, but Vagabond confirms that he deserves to be seated at the top table.

  Louise Phillips’s The Doll’s House, her second novel, won the crime fiction award at the Irish Book Awards in 2013. Last Kiss (Hachette Books Ireland, €14.99) is Phillips’ third novel to feature Dr Kate Pearson, a Dublin-based criminal psychologist who assists the Gardai in investigating their more perplexing murders. Here Dr Pearson attends a bizarre murder scene, in which the male victim is discovered laid out in what appears to be a homage to Tarot card scenario. By then the reader has already met the killer, an unnamed character who offers a first-person insight into her motives. It’s an unusual and deliberately unsettling narrative gambit, as the first-person voice affords the killer a chilling intimacy (“I kill people,” she states in the opening chapter) that somewhat distances the reader from Dr Pearson’s third-person account, and the truth and justice she pursues. Nevertheless, the blend of first- and third-person narratives gives the story tremendous pace as Dr Pearson is dispatched to Paris and Rome in the company of DI Adam O’Connor, their personal and professional lives overlapping as they try to build a profile of the killer from her previous murders. The recurring Tarot card motif and references to archetypal European folktales serve notice that Phillips is engaged in exploring the dark matter of damaged sexual identity, and while the third act veers off into potboiler territory, the abiding impression is of the empathy Phillips evokes on behalf of her anti-heroine, who is as fragile as she is lethal.
  The fifth of French author Dominique Manotti’s novels to be translated into English, Escape (Arcadia Books, €11.99) opens in 1987 with a prison break in Italy. Filippo, a petty criminal, and Carlo, a former leader in the Red Brigades, immediately go their separate ways; but when Carlo is subsequently shot to death during a bank raid, Filippo makes his way to Paris, claims refugee status, and writes a novel about his experience. The book’s blend of fact and fiction makes it a literary sensation in France, where Lisa, an expatriate Italian journalist, and Carlo’s former lover, realises that Carlo’s death was a murder designed to cover up political corruption. “People don’t do politics any more in Italy, they do business, it’s the grand ball of the corruptors and the corrupt,” Lisa tells one of her friends, which gives a flavour of the bracing cynicism that underpins Escape. Translated by Amanda Hopkinson and Ros Schwartz, and rooted in the radical Italian politics of the 1960s and 1970s, it’s an unconventional tale more concerned with the unintended consequences of writing a political crime novel than pandering to the genre’s traditional pursuit of justice. Indeed, there may well be an autobiographical aspect to the character of Lisa, as Manotti – who was herself a union activist during the 1960s – charts Lisa’s growing awareness that fiction rather than fact may prove the more effective long-term strategy in ‘the battle to salvage our past’.

  Rome-based police detective Commissario Alec Blume returns for his fifth outing in Conor Fitzgerald’s Bitter Remedy (Bloomsbury, €13.99), although it’s a rather offbeat police procedural, given that Blume – recently a father, and apparently suffering something of a nervous breakdown as a result – is taking a sabbatical in a picturesque mountaintop village in order to study herbal remedies. Approached by a local nightclub owner, Niki, to investigate the whereabouts of one of his employees, the missing Romanian dancer Alina, Blume reluctantly agrees, and finds himself dragged into the sordid world of people-trafficking. The American-born Blume has an outsider’s eye for the quirky detail in Italian culture (and particularly its policing), which is given an added dimension here with Blume out of his jurisdiction and the comfort zone of his beloved Rome. There’s an element of the old-fashioned ‘Golden Age’ mystery investigation at play here, with Blume something of an amateur sleuth bumbling his way around a picture-postcard setting, trying to lay to rest some of his own ghosts even as he excavates some long-buried skeletons. As always, the incorruptible Blume’s attempts to locate the truth is given a blackly comic sheen courtesy of the detective’s spiky, morose personality – the deadpan dialogue is often hilariously abstruse – but the comedy is invariably contrasted with the brutality of the crime being investigated, via the missing Alina’s parallel narrative, which details the harrowing experience of being trafficked into prostitution.

  This column first appeared in the Irish Times.

Publication: BOOKS TO DIE FOR, ed. John Connolly and Declan Burke

I’m delighted to say that BOOKS TO DIE FOR, originally published in 2012, will be reissued in trade paperback by its UK publishers, Hodder & Stoughton, on September 25th. Quoth the blurb elves:

Winner of the 2013 Agatha, Anthony and the Macavity Awards for Best Crime Non-Fiction.

The world’s greatest mystery writers on the world’s greatest mystery novels.

With so many mystery novels to choose from and so many new titles appearing each year, where should the reader start? What are the classics of the genre? Which are the hidden gems?

In the most ambitious anthology of its kind yet attempted, the world’s leading mystery writers have come together to champion the greatest mystery novels ever written. In a series of personal essays that often reveal as much about themselves and their work work as they do about the books that they love, more than 120 authors from twenty countries have created a guide that will be indispensable for generations of readers and writers. From Christie to Child and Poe to PD James, from Sherlock Holmes to Hannibal Lecter and Philip Marlowe to Peter Wimsey, BOOKS TO DIE FOR brings together the cream of the mystery world for a feast of reading pleasure, a treasure trove for those new to the genre and those who believe that there is nothing new left to discover. This is the one essential book for every reader who has ever finished a mystery novel and thought . . . I want more!

  For more on BOOKS TO DIE FOR, clickety-click here …

Review: THE SECRET PLACE by Tana French

The same again, runs the advice when it comes to writing a series of commercial bestsellers, just a little different.
  Tana French’s debut novel, In the Woods (2007), won the Edgar, Macavity, Barry and Anthony awards in the United States. An elegantly written police procedural, it has served as a template for her body of work to date. The Likeness (2008), Faithful Place (2010) and Broken Harbour (2012) – the latter won the Irish Book Crime Fiction and the LA Times’ Mystery/Thriller awards – have all featured murder investigations rooted in the warped psychology of small, intensely bonded groups.
  Tana French, of course, gives the ‘just a little different’ advice a unique spin. Rather than a familiar protagonist or detective returning each time, French promotes a minor character from a previous novel to centre-stage. In The Secret Place (Hachette), our narrator is Detective Stephen Moran, whom we first met in Faithful Place as the ambitious young sidekick to the investigating detective, Frank Mackey.
  Now stuck working in Cold Cases, Stephen sees an opportunity for advancement when Holly Mackey, Frank’s daughter, comes to him with a chilling message. A boarder at the exclusive St. Kilda’s, Holly brings Stephen a note she discovered pinned to ‘the Secret Place’, a noticeboard at St. Kilda’s where pupils can anonymously post their thoughts, desires and frustrations. ‘I know who killed him’ says the note: the ‘him’ is Christopher Harper, a popular 16-year-old from nearby St. Colm’s school, who was murdered almost a year previously.
  Taking the note to Detective Antoinette Conway in Murder, Stephen inveigles his way into the investigation – a relatively easy thing to do, given that none of Conway’s colleagues want to work with her – and the pair set off to St. Kilda’s to interview the girls who might have posted the note.
  What follows is a very long day’s journey into night. The story unfolds over the course of an increasingly fraught and tense twelve or so hours, with Stephen’s first-person narration of contemporary developments broken up by third-person accounts from Holly and her friends – Selena, Rebecca and Julia – that recount significant events in the year leading up to the murder of Chris Harper.
  It’s a gripping tale on a number of levels, all of them concerned with the psychology of relationships. Stephen and Conway start out at loggerheads, each suspicious of the other’s motives – Conway has been tainted by her involvement in the initial murder investigation, which yielded nothing but a conviction for possession with intent to sell for one of the St. Kilda’s gardeners – but soon realise that they will need to join forces if they are to penetrate the protective shield thrown up by the fiercely protective teenage girls. The combative odd couple detectives who belatedly and begrudgingly come to respect one another is a standard trope in the crime genre, but what causes most friction between this pair is their shared rough-and-tumble upbringing on hard-knock council estates on Dublin’s Northside, an experience a long way removed from the wealthy privilege of St. Kilda’s and its leafy environs.
  Where the story really scores, however, is the way in which French gets under the skin of her teenage characters. Holly, Julia et al start off as a relatively normal group of friends but quickly draw much closer, and possibly become dangerous to themselves and others (other pupils describe the quartet as witches) as their shared experiences wind so tightly around them as to bind them into a single personality. Feeling their way blind through adolescence, bewildered by the expectations – and particularly those of a sexual nature – of the big, bad world beyond the school walls, crazed by hormones and concerned only for the here and now, Holly and her friends become much more than the sum of their parts as their collective energy seeks an outlet. In its vivid account of the crackling intensity of adolescence, The Secret Place brings to mind recent novels from Megan Abbott and Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Blackrock, but also, as the title might well be alluding to, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.
  As always, French offers a sharp contrast between her narrative prose and her characters’ dialogue. Seen through the eyes of Stephen, who regrets not having similar educational opportunities, St. Kilda’s is rendered a fabulous and almost mythical kind of oasis. When Conway, as the pair first arrive at the school, pours scorn on its aspirational ethos, Stephen silently admires ‘[a] portico held up by slim curl-topped columns; a rooftop balustrade, pillars curved delicate as vases. Perfect, it was … every inch.’
  That fragile beauty is rather undermined the way the girls speak, their conversations delivered in the mid-Atlantic ‘OMG whatevs’ hybrid that is, to French’s credit, at times irritatingly pitch-perfect. Meanwhile, the back-and-forth between Conway and Stephen is harshly abrasive, although privately Stephen craves the finer things, a different kind of world than the one he lives in: ‘I love beautiful; always have. I never saw why I should hate what I wish I had. Love it harder. Work your way closer. Clasp your hands around it tighter. Till you find a way to make it yours.’
  It’s a philosophy, offered early in the story, that drops a broad hint about the motive for murder, which may well appear slight to some readers. By then, however, French has so embroiled the reader in the claustrophobically febrile world of her adolescent characters that hard-headed adult logic no longer applies – and besides, a motive for murder only ever needs to make sense to the killer. – Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

News: Andrea Carter To Debut With WHITEWATER CHURCH

Hearty congrats to Andrea Carter, who will publish her debut novel WHITEWATER CHURCH (Constable) next year. Quoth the Bookseller:

Krystyna Green at Constable has acquired world English language rights in WHITEWATER CHURCH by Andrea Carter (right) in a two book deal from Kerry Glencorse at Susanna Lea Associates.
  WHITEWATER CHURCH is the first of a crime series set in a small town in the beautiful and remote Inishowen Peninsula in Ireland. When a skeleton wrapped in a blanket is found in the secret crypt of a deconsecrated church, local solicitor Ben (Benedicta) O’Keeffe finds herself drawn into the dark secrets of a rural community, as she negotiates between the official investigation and obstructive locals to uncover the truth of what happened.
  Krystyna Green said: “We are absolutely thrilled to be taking Andrea on, especially at this exciting time for the Constable list. As well as publishing our more traditional titles it’s marvellous too we can devote time and energy to pushing forward debut authors with a long and thrilling future ahead of them.”
  Andrea Carter is a barrister living in Dublin. She lived and worked in the Inishowen Peninsula in County Donegal as a solicitor for a number of years. WHITEWATER CHURCH was one of the winners of the 2013 Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair and received an Arts Council of Ireland Literature Bursary Award. Constable will publish in Autumn 2015.

  For more on Andrea Carter, clickety-click here …

Launch: NOBODY WINS by Michael Haskins

News: Irish Crime Writing at Mountains To Sea

The Mountains to Sea literary festival takes place this year from Thursday 11th to Sunday 14th of September, and as always it’s something of a smorgasbord. I’m delighted to see that there’s a very strong Irish crime writing presence lined up, three of whom are debutants.
  Lee Child , interviewed by the inimitable Declan Hughes, leads the charge. Lee, who claims his Irishness under a variation on FIFA’s ‘grandparent rule’, will also have a short story in the BELFAST NOIR (Akashic Books) anthology later this year. Elsewhere, the line-up includes Sinead Crowley (CAN ANYBODY HELP ME?), Karen Perry (THE BOY THAT NEVER WAS), Liz Nugent (UNRAVELLING OLIVER) and Jane Casey (THE KILL). In addition to her appearance at the festival, Jane Casey will also host a writing workshop.
  For all the details on the Mountains to Sea programme, and how to book tickets, clickety-click here …

News: Adrian McKinty Wins Australian ‘Ned Kelly’ Award

Hearty congratulations to Adrian McKinty (right), who yesterday won the Australian ‘Ned Kelly’ award for Best Australian Crime Fiction for IN THE MORNING I’LL BE GONE (Serpent’s Tail). The prize was awarded at the Brisbane Writers Festival. Quoth the judges:

“In his use of humour with the grim realities of Belfast in 1984, coupled with a wonderfully constructed locked room mystery, McKinty has produced something really quite extraordinary. There’s a fine line between social commentary and compelling mystery and not many writers, crime or literary, can do both.”

  For more, clickety-click on Adrian’s blog.
  For an interview published on the release of IN THE MORNING I’LL BE GONE, clickety-click here …