“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Marnie Riches

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?
The Silence of the Lambs should have been by me and not that Thomas Harris. Although, if I’d written it, there would have been some terrible swearing and scenes of a sexual nature in it that didn’t necessarily involve cannibalism or fava beans. But still, what a great baddy! Hannibal Lecter was the first villain I had fallen for since Darth Vader.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Probably Lisbeth Salander, who inspired, in no small part, my heroine, George McKenzie. Salander is whizzy with technology and surly. I’m a luddite and loud-mouth. I don’t do silent and smouldering well at all, which Salander does. It’s that Scandinavian vs Celt/Eastern European Mancunian thing. I come from a long line of big-gobbed tough women. We don’t do poise or studied cool. Plus, Salander always seems to have good hair. I’m a middle-aged woman. My hairline is receding. My appendages are hitting the deck. It’s not nice on any level. Anyway, though George McKenzie is young and kickass like Salander, she is gobby like me (although she has a reassuringly hairy head).

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I read an awful lot of children’s fiction – hardly surprising, since I started out as a children’s author. Children’s fiction is written in a sparing and economical way, which gives an adventure novel a real sense of urgency. Middle-grade is my favourite age banding. I love Eoin Colfer, Frank Cottrell-Boyce and the Young Bond series by Charlie Higson and now, Steve Cole.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When I’ve spent an entire day, writing one paragraph and trying to get a clever metaphor just right. These are the bits I agonise over, but when I read them back, I think, wow. I can actually write. Then I get the odd one star howler back that says I went off at a tangent or that they had to skip a paragraph because “it got boring”. Those are the clever bits, you one-star-howling berk!!

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
Now, I had to take this under advisement, since I can’t claim to have read widely in the Irish crime genre. My friend and book reviewer, Bookwitch, tells me the best crime novels are Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy series. I couldn’t specify one in particular and neither would she.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Declan Burke’s Crime Always Pays. It’s a very funny, very visual crime novel. The tight plotting, great dialogue and intriguing characters are all there. Humour and crime translate well to the big screen, as demonstrated by my favourites, In Bruges and The Guard.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst thing about being a writer is getting that one star howler of a review. There’s always some smart arse who sussed the killer by page ten, or who really couldn’t get any of your characters and thought the whole thing was tedious beyond belief. You can’t quite believe a story that took you years to write – two, in the case of The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die – can be dismissed in a short paragraph. That bit SUCKS, as does watching your book slide back in the Amazon rankings into obscurity. On the bright side, the best bit is ... well, most of it. I love working alone, talking to myself aloud about plot points, allowing my characters to become real to me, picking my nose without fear of discovery, sitting in my pyjama bottoms without fear of fashion or hygiene judgement. All the things you get up to when you’re in a small, enclosed space without supervision and with the aid of alcoholic drink ... Then, realising post-publication that people love what I’ve written and totally get my characters and absolutely didn’t sodding work out who the killer was by page ten. Those are the best bits.

The pitch for your next book is …?
In The Girl Who Broke the Rules – book 2 of the George McKenzie series – the heroine, George, gets to hang out with a grade A perv who equals Hannibal Lecter in both his finesse, his intellectual prowess and his aptitude for murder. George, together with Chief Inspector Paul van den Bergen of the Dutch police, must work out who is committing a string of brutal serial killings, where victims are sliced open and emptied of their innards! There’s sex, drugs and shenanigans in Amsterdam’s red light district. It’s Silence of the Lambs meets Trainspotting!

Who are you reading right now?
I’m reading Jo Nesbo’s The Son right now, along with Angela Marsons’ Silent Scream, but I’ve just finished The Farm by Tom Rob Smith which I enjoyed hugely.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write. Sometimes, all the naughty just has to come out.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Gritty, gripping, intelligent. Well, you could swap intelligent for naughty if you’re, you know, a bit funny about the swearing and the nookie and the violence.

THE GIRL WHO WOULDN’T DIE by Marnie Riches is published by Maze.

Event: ‘Irish Noir’ at Harrogate

The Harrogate festival – wisely, in my opinion – corral almost all of the appearing Irish writers onto one panel this year, as Stuart Neville, Steve Cavanagh, Brian McGilloway, Adrian McKinty and Eoin McNamee take to the stage under the banner of ‘Irish Noir’ (William Ryan also appears at Harrogate, albeit on a different panel). The festival runs from July 16 to 19, with the Irish Noir event taking place at noon on Friday 17th. The very, very best of luck to whatever unfortunate is scheduled to moderate that particular panel …
  Elsewhere, a couple of stand-out highlights of the festival include Val McDermid interviewing Sara Paretsky, and Arnaldur Indridason interviewed by Barry Forshaw.
  For all the details, clickety-click here …

Overview: The St Patrick’s Day Rewind

A very happy St Patrick’s Day to one and all, and to celebrate the day that’s in it I thought I’d offer up some of the highlights of Irish crime writing (aka Emerald Noir) from the blog – book reviews, interviews, features, etc. – from the last five years or so. To wit:

An interview with Tana French on the publication of BROKEN HARBOUR
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.

An interview with Alan Glynn on the publication of WINTERLAND
“I think that the stuff you ingest as a teenager is the stuff that sticks with you for life,” says Glynn. “When I was a teenager in the 1970s, the biggest influence was movies, and especially the conspiracy thrillers. What they call the ‘paranoid style’ in America – Klute, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, Three Days of the Condor, and of course, the great Chinatown … We’re all paranoid now.”

A triptych of reviews of John Connolly’s THE LOVERS, Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST) and Declan Hughes’ ALL THE DEAD VOICES:
“But then The Lovers, for all that it appears to be an unconventional but genre-friendly take on the classic private eye story, eventually reveals itself to be a rather complex novel, and one that is deliciously ambitious in its exploration of the meanings behind big small words such as love, family, duty and blood.”

“Whether or not Fegan and his ghosts come in time to be seen as a metaphor for Northern Ireland itself, as it internalises and represses its response to its sundering conflicts, remains to be seen. For now, The Twelve is a superb thriller, and one of the first great post-Troubles novels to emerge from Northern Ireland.”

“As with Gene Kerrigan’s recent Dark Times in the City, and Alan Glynn’s forthcoming Winterland, Hughes’s novel subtly explores the extent to which, in Ireland, the supposedly exclusive worlds of crime, business and politics can very often be fluid concepts capable of overlap and lucrative cross-pollination, a place where the fingers that once fumbled in greasy tills are now twitching on triggers.”

A review of Eoin McNamee’s ORCHID BLUE
“Students of Irish history will know that Robert McGladdery was the last man to be hanged on Irish soil, a fact that infuses Orchid Blue with a noir-ish sense of fatalism and the inevitability of retribution. That retribution and State-sanctioned revenge are no kind of justice is one of McNamee’s themes here, however, and while the story is strained through an unmistakably noir filter, McNamee couches the tale in a form that is ancient and classical, with McGladdery pursued by Fate and its Furies and Justice Curran a shadowy Thanatos overseeing all.”

A review of Jane Casey’s THE LAST GIRL
On the evidence of THE BURNING and THE LAST GIRL, Maeve Kerrigan seems to me to be an unusually realistic and pragmatic character in the world of genre fiction: competent and skilled, yet riddled with self-doubt and a lack of confidence, she seems to fully inhabit the page. This was a pacy and yet thoughtful read, psychologically acute and fascinating in terms of Maeve’s personal development, particularly in terms of her empathy with the victims of crime.

Eoin Colfer on Ken Bruen’s THE GUARDS
“I was expecting standard private-investigator fare, laced with laconic humour, which would have been fine, but what I got was sheer dark poetry.”

A review of Adrian McKinty’s THE COLD COLD GROUND
As for the style, McKinty quickly establishes and maintains a pacy narrative, but he does a sight more too. McKinty brings a quality of muscular poetry to his prose, and the opening paragraph quoted above is as good an example as any. He belongs in a select group of crime writers, those you would read for the quality of their prose alone: James Lee Burke, John Connolly, Eoin McNamee, David Peace, James Ellroy.

  For updates on the latest on all Irish crime writers, just type the author’s name into the search box at the top left of the blog …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Steve Cavanagh

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?
There’s a few that spring to mind; The Black Echo by Michael Connelly, Silence Of The Lambs by Thomas Harris, The Killing Kind by John Connolly and I’d even throw in The Firm by John Grisham. I think The Firm is one hell of a thriller with great themes running all the way through it. It’s very much a class warfare book, and a modern dissection of the American dream.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
One of my favourite fictional characters is Horace Rumpole. He believes in the presumption of innocence, Legal Aid, cheap Claret and teasing judges. I can’t fault that. I think John Mortimer is often overlooked in the crime fiction canon but I’d put the Rumpole of the Bailey series right up there with Holmes – it’s that important. In later books Mortimer even used Rumpole like a moral scalpel for society by examining ASBO’s and knee jerk anti-terrorism legislation. It would mean I’d have to put up with She Who Must Be Obeyed. Maybe I should rethink that one?

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t believe there are guilty pleasures when reading. If I enjoy something and I think it’s good then I don’t feel guilty about it. But I know what you mean. I’d probably say the late David Gemmell, as he is my favourite fantasy writer. He wrote fantasy novels, but wrote them as thrillers. David Gemmell was labelled as writing “heroic fantasy” which puts some readers off as they think it’s all about white knights on horses rescuing damsels in distress. I would say Gemmell was the master of unheroic fantasy – as most of the supposed heroes in his novels are almost as bad as the villains. Character is the key in his books and doesn’t spend the first 50 pages with world building. The first two books of his Celtic quadrilogy are stunning page turners. Gemmell also wrote the best fight scenes I’ve ever read. Read Legend – Gemmell’s hero, Druss, is basically a sixty-year old Jack Reacher with an axe. I can see why some might think this a guilty pleasure – I just see it as pleasure.

Most satisfying writing moment?
There is a scene in the second Eddie Flynn novel, The Plea, where the book shifts up several gears in a single sentence. It’s a moment that nobody sees coming and sets up a really tense action sequence. I think it’s probably the best thing I’ve written.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
I can’t recommend just one. The latest novel from my host, would be high on my recommended reads list, as would Brian McGilloway’s Little Girl Lost, Stuart Neville’s The Twelve, Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy series and Gerard Brennan’s Undercover. I read Gerard’s last year and I thought it was the best thing he’s written, I loved it.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I think Stuart Neville’s The Twelve will make a great movie. And I really hope that does get made as it would transfer brilliantly to the screen. If I had my wish list – HBO would take a Charlie Parker book and adapt it over a whole season. That would be awesome.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Best thing is when someone reads your book and tells you they enjoyed it. Worst thing? The worry. I constantly worry about everything; the writing, promoting, the whole shebang is like a brilliant, exciting but nerve wracking dream.

The pitch for your next book is …?
It’s my debut novel, The Defence.

Eddie Flynn used to be a con artist. Then he became a lawyer. Turned out the two weren't that different. It’s been over a year since Eddie vowed never to set foot in a courtroom again. But now he doesn’t have a choice. Olek Volchek, the infamous head of the Russian mafia in New York, has strapped a bomb to Eddie’s back and kidnapped his ten-year-old daughter, Amy. Eddie only has forty-eight hours to defend Volchek in an impossible murder trial - and win - if he wants to save his daughter. Under the scrutiny of the media and the FBI, Eddie must use his razor-sharp wit and every con-artist trick in the book to defend his ‘client’ and ensure Amy’s safety. With the timer on his back ticking away, can Eddie convince the jury of the impossible? Lose this case and he loses everything.

Who are you reading right now?
I’ve just finished Lee Child’s Never Go Back, and I’m starting CJ Sansom’s Lamentation. I’m a real sucker for the Matthew Shardlake novels.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Read. I love to read but most of all I enjoy reading to my kids. Yeah, that’s the best. I couldn’t give that up.

The three best words to describe your own writing are…?
Fast. Tense. Funny. The three words I’d use to describe my process of writing are – Shit. Noooo. AARRGHHHH!!!!

Steve Cavanagh’s THE DEFENCE will be launched at No Alibis bookstore on March 12.

Republished: ODD MAN OUT by F.L. Green

Originally published in 1945, F.L. Green’s superb Belfast-set thriller ODD MAN OUT will soon be republished by Valancourt Books, with an introduction from Adrian McKinty. To wit:

An Irish Republican Army plot goes horribly wrong when its leader, Johnny Murtah, kills an innocent man and is himself gravely wounded. As the police close in on Johnny, his compatriots must make a daring bid to rescue him. But they are not the only ones in pursuit: an impoverished artist, a saintly priest, a sleazy informer, and a beautiful young woman all have their own reasons to be desperate to find him. Meanwhile Johnny wanders the streets injured and alone, trapped in a delirious nightmare, surrounded on all sides by betrayal and faced with the realization that he may die that night with the stain of murder on his soul. The action unfolds over eight hours of a cold Belfast night, with the suspense building towards an explosive conclusion.
  Both a critical success and a bestseller, F. L. Green’s masterful thriller Odd Man Out (1945) is best known today as the basis for the classic 1947 film adaptation directed by Carol Reed and starring James Mason. This edition, the first in over 30 years, features a new introduction by Adrian McKinty.

  As it happens, Adrian McKinty’s contribution to DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS (2011), which focused on Northern Ireland’s early contribution to Irish crime writing, was titled ‘Odd Men Out’, in which he touches briefly on ODD MAN OUT, describing it as a Dante-esque descent into a surrealist hell. Poor old Belfast, eh? Always the bitter word, etc. ...

One To Watch: THE DEFENCE by Steve Cavanagh

Steve Cavanagh’s ‘The Grey’ is one of the most impressive of the offerings in BELFAST NOIR, the new short story collection edited by Stuart Neville and Adrian McKinty, and it augurs well for THE DEFENCE (Orion), Steve’s debut novel, which will be published next March. Quoth the blurb elves:

The truth has no place in a courtroom. The truth doesn’t matter in a trial. The only thing that matters is what the prosecution can prove. Eddie Flynn used to be a con artist. Then he became a lawyer. Turned out the two weren’t that different. It’s been over a year since Eddie vowed never to set foot in a courtroom again. But now he doesn’t have a choice. Olek Volchek, the infamous head of the Russian mafia in New York, has strapped a bomb to Eddie's back and kidnapped his ten-year-old daughter Amy. Eddie only has 48 hours to defend Volchek in an impossible murder trial - and win - if wants to save his daughter. Under the scrutiny of the media and the FBI, Eddie must use his razor-sharp wit and every con-artist trick in the book to defend his ‘client’ and ensure Amy's safety. With the timer on his back ticking away, can Eddie convince the jury of the impossible? Lose this case and he loses everything.

  For more on Steve Cavanagh, clickety-click here …

Feature: The Alternative Irish Crime Novel of the Year

It’s that time of the year again, as the Irish Book Awards hove into view on November 26th, when I suggest that [insert year here] has been yet another annus terrificus for Irish crime fiction, aka ‘Emerald Noir’. The shortlist for the Irish Crime Novel of the Year runs as follows:

The Ireland AM Crime Fiction Award

Can Anybody Help Me? by Sinéad Crowley
Last Kiss by Louise Phillips
The Final Silence by Stuart Neville
The Kill by Jane Casey
The Secret Place by Tana French
Unravelling Oliver by Liz Nugent

  As always, however, there were a number of tremendous novels published that didn’t, for various reasons, feature on the shortlist. The following is another short list, of books I’ve read to date this year that are also easily good enough to win the title of best Irish crime fiction novel in 2014. As you might expect, there were also a number of very good novels that I didn’t manage to read this year; but the gist of this post is to celebrate the quality and diversity of Irish crime fiction in 2014. To wit:

The Dead Pass, Colin Bateman
The Black Eyed Blonde, Benjamin Black
The Wolf in Winter, John Connolly
Bitter Remedy, Conor Fitzgerald
Cross of Vengeance, Cora Harrison
The Sun is God, Adrian McKinty
Blue is the Night, Eoin McNamee
The Boy That Never Was, Karen Perry

  Finally, the very best of luck to all the shortlisted nominees on November 26th. Given that she has been oft-nominated and is yet to win, and her Maeve Kerrigan series grows more impressive with each succeeding book, my vote goes to Jane Casey’s THE KILL …

Launch: BELFAST NOIR, ed. Stuart Neville and Adrian McKinty

BELFAST NOIR (Akashic Books), edited by Stuart Neville and Adrian McKinty, will be launched at the Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast, on November 22nd. To wit:

An event for crime fiction fans guys, one that is certainly not to be missed!

No Alibis Bookstore invite you to the Crescent Arts Centre on Saturday 22nd November at 6:30pm for the launch of BELFAST NOIR. This FREE event sees a variety of authors come together in a new anthology.

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. Brand-new stories by: Glenn Patterson, Eoin McNamee, Garbhan Downey, Lee Child, Alex Barclay, Brian McGilloway, Ian McDonald, Arlene Hunt, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Claire McGowan, Steve Cavanagh, Lucy Caldwell, Sam Millar, and Gerard Brennan.

From the introduction by Adrian McKinty & Stuart Neville:

“Few European cities have had as disturbed and violent a history as Belfast over the last half-century. For much of that time the Troubles (1968–1998) dominated life in Ireland’s second-biggest population centre, and during the darkest days of the conflict—in the 1970s and 1980s—riots, bombings, and indiscriminate shootings were tragically commonplace. The British army patrolled the streets in armoured vehicles and civilians were searched for guns and explosives before they were allowed entry into the shopping district of the city centre . . . Belfast is still a city divided . . .
  “You can see Belfast’s bloodstains up close and personal. This is the city that gave the world its worst ever maritime disaster, and turned it into a tourist attraction; similarly, we are perversely proud of our thousands of murders, our wounds constantly on display. You want noir? How about a painting the size of a house, a portrait of a man known to have murdered at least a dozen human beings in cold blood? Or a similar house-sized gable painting of a zombie marching across a postapocalyptic wasteland with an AK-47 over the legend UVF: Prepared for Peace—Ready for War. As Lee Child has said, Belfast is still ‘the most noir place on earth.’

  For all the details, 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 …

The Weekly Update

Given that I’m up to my oxters in rewrites / edits, and time at CAP Towers is at a premium, I hope you’ll forgive me if I offer a couple of days worth of posts in one ‘Weekly Update’-style bundle. To wit:

  My latest Irish Times column has a review of Adrian McKinty’s latest offering, THE SUN IS GOD (Serpent’s Tail), which runs a lot like this:

The Troubles and 1980s Northern Ireland formed the backdrop to Adrian McKinty’s recent trilogy of novels, but The Sun is God (Serpent’s Tail, €17.90) is set on the tiny Duke of York islands in the South Pacific island in 1906. Boer War veteran and former military policeman Will Prior is supervising a failing rubber plantation when he is commissioned to investigate a suspicious death on nearby Kabakon Island, home to a cult that worships the sun and eats only coconuts. Based on an improbable but true story, the novel offers a fascinating twist on the traditional ‘locked room’ mystery, as only the island’s miserable few inhabitants can be considered suspects in the alleged murder. Prior, as reluctant a sleuth as has ever shuffled into the genre, makes for a blackly humorous guide to a palm-fringed, sun-drenched idyll that is both heaven and hell. McKinty’s 15th novel (including YA titles) is an ambitious offering that incorporates a sub-plot exploring pre-WWI colonial tensions between Britain and Germany, but it’s the investigation of the central mystery, with its undertones of Paradise Lost, that proves most entertaining. ~ Declan Burke

  For the rest of the column, which includes very good books from Alafair Burke, Marc Dugain, Alan Furst and Karin Fossum, clickety-click here:

  Meanwhile, Desmond Doherty launches his latest Valberg novel, SINS OF THE FATHERS (Guildhall Press), on Thursday, June 26th, at the Tower Hotel in Derry, with Brian McGilloway doing the honours as guest speaker. For more, clickety-click here …

After inflicting brutal revenge on the jury that wrongly sent him down for child murder, a deadly assassin is back on the streets of Derry. And this time he’s working his way up the legal ladder. Police, lawyers, judges – no one is safe. Detective Jon Valberg leads the hunt to nail the killer and expose his shadowy accomplices. And soon finds out how personal it’s all about to become ...

  Elsewhere, I thoroughly enjoyed myself last Saturday afternoon at the Dalkey Books Festival, where I took part in a conversation on ‘Emerald Noir’ with the always entertaining Declan Hughes (right) at Dalkey’s Masonic Hall. We got to sit on a pair of thrones for the proceedings (not pictured), with Declan Hughes, obviously, perched on the gold throne, while I had to do with the less gilded one. A very nice hour or so it was too, not least because a lovely lady described me as ‘the Quentin Tarantino of Irish crime fiction’, and it was lovely to meet the fabulously talented Aifric Campbell again, and Ross Golden Bannon, who is a name to watch. You heard it here first …

  Finally, my current tome CRIME ALWAYS PAYS nabbed itself a rather nice review in the forthcoming Booklist. The reviewer thought the characters erred on the side of unsympathetic, but the gist was positive:

“This is screwball comedy at its screwiest, with super-short chapters told from the viewpoints of myriad characters … The dialogue flows fast, though, which moves the story along at a frantic pace. Give this one to fans of comic crime capers.” ~ Booklist

  Speaking of which, the lovely Bob Johnstone of the Gutter Bookshop asked me sign a load of copies of CRIME ALWAYS PAYS at the Dalkey Festival; so if anyone is craving a signed copy, Bob is your man …

Here Comes The Sun

Adrian McKinty’s THE SUN IS GOD (Serpent’s Tail) arrived in the post to CAP Towers yesterday, and a handsome tome it is too. McKinty’s most recent offerings, aka the Sean Duffy Trilogy, are set in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, so it’s fair to say that THE SUN IS GOD is something of a departure. Quoth the blurb elves:

Colonial New Guinea—1906: a small group of mostly German nudists live an extreme back-to-nature existence on the remote island of Kabakon. Eating only coconuts and bananas, they purport to worship the sun. One of their members—Max Lutzow—has recently died, allegedly from malaria. But an autopsy on his body in the nearby capital of Herbertshöhe raises suspicions about foul play.
  Retired British military police officer Will Prior is recruited to investigate the circumstances of Lutzow’s death. At first, the eccentric group seems friendly and willing to cooperate with the investigation. They all insist that Lutzow died of malaria. Despite lack of evidence for a murder, Prior is convinced that the group is hiding something …

  THE SUN IS GOD will be published on July 1st. For all the details, clickety-click here …

When Edgar Met Johnny

It’s (a slightly belated) three cheers, two stools and a resounding ‘Huzzah!’ for John Connolly (right), who took home a prestigious Edgar Award last weekend for his short story, ‘The Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository’. Not too shabby, as they say, not by a long chalk, and CAP Towers was en fete for the weekend after the news filtered through. And while we’re on the subject, John’s current offering, the latest Charlie Parker novel THE WOLF IN WINTER, is a rather fine piece of work too …

  Elsewhere, and staying with the topic of awards, I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville (along with Gene Kerrigan) have been nominated for Barry Awards. Well, it’s a hearty congratulations to both, again, on the news that they’ve been longlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, which will be awarded at the Harrogate Festival in July. Stuart has been nominated for RATLINES, while Adrian’s nomination is for I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET. Both are terrific novels, in my opinion, but the competition is fierce: the longlist also includes Lee Child, Denise Mina, Ian Rankin, Cathi Unsworth and Belinda Bauer, among others. The shortlist will be announced on July 1st, by the way, and there’s a public voting system for narrowing down the longlist: if you’re so inclined, you’ll find all the details here.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Lisa Alber

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?
This may sound perverse, but I’d love to channel the darkness that burbles around inside Gillian Flynn. She’s wicked! Have you seen photos of her? Looks like she bakes pies for homeless people. Any of her novels will do: SHARP OBJECTS, DARK PLACES, or GONE GIRL.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Fictional characters go through too many hardships and conflicts before their happy endings. I’m too lazy for all that. There’s gotta be a sidekick out there who lives a charmed life and is only around enough to support the hero. That’s more my speed. Anyone got any ideas for me?

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
DA VINCI CODE-type thrillers are my guilty pleasures because I love all that Catholic Church conspiracy stuff. I also like pseudo-scientific symbology stuff that incorporates our greatest myths into the story lines. I just finished a thriller centred around the Amazons. Fun stuff.

Most satisfying writing moment?
The “a-ha.” You know when you’re writing along, maybe it’s not going well, but you’re slapping down the words anyhow (knowing you’ll have a helluva rewrite later), and then somehow, you lose sense of yourself and time and the world around you, and then later you come to and an hour has passed and you can’t remember what you wrote exactly, but you know it’s something grand? Yeah, that. That’s what I love. It’s rare, but the potential is always there. Also, the a-ha moment when you’re writing along and all of a sudden a fantastic idea comes to you out of nowhere -- a plot twist or character revelation -- and you feel so euphoric, the best high ever, that you jump out of your chair and do a little jig that causes your cat to tear out of the room? Yeah, that too.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
I’m still in Irish-crime-novel discovery mode! Some of the obvious recommendations for people like me who aren’t as well-read as they could be are Tana French and Benjamin Black (a.k.a. John Banville) – and you too. Immediate curiosity has me leaning toward checking out Arlene Hunt, Adrian McKinty, Declan Hughes, and Bartholomew Gill (although he’s Irish-American) next.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Benjamin Black’s first mystery, CHRISTINE FALLS, would make a fabulous movie. I picture something stylized, gritty, atmospheric, and filmed in a limited palette (neo-noir Mulholland Drive comes to mind). The way the central mystery about dead Christine slowly circles in on the starring detective’s family baggage is great. Plus, it’s got Catholic Church stuff in it. Like I said above, I can’t get enough of that.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Right now, the worst thing about being a novelist is my need for a day J-O-B. It’s a creative energy sucker, that’s for sure. I struggle to find energy to get the fiction writing in--before work, after work, on weekends. I’m the kind of person who needs long swaths of down time to stay centred and to rejuvenate. The best things are the ‘a-ha’ moments I described above.

The pitch for your next book is ...?
My debut novel, KILMOON, just came out. It’s set in County Clare, the first in a series.

“Family secrets, betrayal, and vengeance from beyond the grave … Merrit Chase is about to meet her long-lost father. Californian Merrit Chase travels to Ireland to meet her father, a celebrated matchmaker, in hopes that she can mend her troubled past. Instead, her arrival triggers a rising tide of violence, and Merrit finds herself both suspect and victim, accomplice and pawn, in a manipulative game that began thirty years previously. When she discovers that the matchmaker’s treacherous past is at the heart of the chaos, she must decide how far she will go to save him from himself—and to get what she wants, a family.”

I’m working on the second novel in the series, for the moment called Grey Man. Things get personal, oh so personal, when a teenage boy dies and disaster hits Detective Sergeant Danny Ahern’s family as a result.

Who are you reading right now?
I’m trying out an author I’ve never read before: James Barney, THE JOSHUA STONE. Another in the realm of guilty pleasures because it features secret government experiments and voodoo science.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I could give up writing if I had to (it’s freaking hard work!), but never reading. Reading goes along with those long swaths of down time I require.

The three best words to describe your own writing are ...?
Atmospheric, multi-layered, and intricate.

KILMOON is Lisa Alber’s debut novel.

Eyes On The Prize(s)

Apologies for the breakdown in transmission over the last fortnight, folks, but yours truly trundled off to Cyprus for a holiday, where a wonderful time was had by all.
  Back to business, then, and we’ll kick off again with a hearty congratulations to Adrian McKinty (right), Gene Kerrigan and Stuart Neville, all of whom have been shortlisted for Barry Awards. Nice work, gents. Adrian McKinty has all the details and the full shortlists over here …
  And while we’re on the topic of award nominations, it’s an equally hearty bon chance to The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman, who has been shortlisted – for about the seven hundredth time – for the Goldsboro ‘Last Laugh’ gong, which will be awarded at Crimefest next month. Colin Bateman, as I’m sure you all know, is a previous winner of the ‘Last Laugh’ award, which is given for Best Humourous Crime Novel. For all the details – and all the Crimefest award shortlists – clickety-click here …

The St. Patrick’s Day Massacre

Given that it’s the St. Patrick’s Day weekend, I thought I’d run a quick round-up of some interesting Irish crime fiction novels, aka ‘Emerald Noir’, that have appeared on ye olde blogge so far in 2014. It runs a lot like this:

THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE by Benjamin Black, aka the new Philip Marlowe novel.

UNRAVELLING OLIVER by Liz Nugent, an intriguing debut from an impressive new voice.

SLEEPING DOGS by Mark O’Sullivan, a sequel to one of the more interesting debuts I read last year.

THE RAGE by Gene Kerrigan, which was recently shortlisted in the LA Times’ Book Awards crime / mystery category.

BLUE IS THE NIGHT by Eoin McNamee, a superb novel which concludes his ‘Blue’ trilogy.

IN THE ROSARY GARDEN by Nicola White, another excellent debut.

HARM’S REACH by Alex Barclay, the latest in the Ren Bryce series, which I’ve been enjoying hugely.

THE FINAL SILENCE by Stuart Neville, the third novel to feature DI Jack Lennon.

KILMOON by Lisa Alber, a debut written by an American author and set in Ireland.

DEADLY INTENT by Anna Sweeney, which is to the best of my knowledge the first Irish crime novel translated from the Irish language.

THE WOLF IN WINTER by John Connolly, which is the latest Charlie Parker novel, and hotly anticipated it is too.

IN THE MORNING I’LL BE GONE by Adrian McKinty, which concludes his excellent Sean Duffy trilogy.

CAN ANYONE HELP ME? by Sinead Crowley, a forthcoming debut already attracting plenty of strong advance buzz.

  So there you have it – just some of the highlights from the last couple of months on Crime Always Pays. If you’re looking for another author, just type in the name in the search engine on the top left of the page, and off you go. Oh, and a very happy St. Patrick’s day to you, wherever you may be in the world …

Norn Iron, Norn Noir

I mentioned a couple of months ago that Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville are co-editing a collection of short stories titled BELFAST NOIR (Akashic City Noir), and the first sight of the cover has popped up over at Adrian McKinty’s interweb lair. Quoth Adrian:

“With the success of the new BBC drama ‘The Fall’ and the bestseller status of a surprising number of crime writers from Ireland, I think the wheel may finally turning towards Northern Irish fiction. For years the words “The Troubles”, “Northern Ireland” and “Belfast” caused book buyers, programme makers and publishers to either shrug with indifference or shudder in horror; but the new generation of writers coming out of Belfast is so good that a previously reluctant audience has had their interest piqued. I’ve been saying on this blog for the last three years that the Scandinavian crime boom is going to end and the Irish crime boom is going to begin and I still believe that. The depth of talent is there. All it needs is a spark, hopefully BELFAST NOIR will add kindling to a growing fire ...”

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

Hardboiled Cool

I came across a very nice round-up of ‘hardboiled Irish crime fiction’ over at Off the Shelf the other day, which – I was very pleased to discover – included my very own ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. To wit:

A fictional version of writer Burke is confronted by a character from an unfinished novel. Karlsson, the now-corporeal character, is irked at the limbo he has been left in. Burke is under pressure from his publisher to submit his next manuscript, but Karlsson is alternately charming and cheeky, and Burke agrees to let him write his own story. This gripping tale subverts the crime genre’s grand tradition of liberal sadism. Not only an example of Irish crime writing at its best; it is an innovative, self-reflexive piece that turns every convention of crime fiction on its head.

  The piece also includes novels by Gene Kerrigan, Tana French, Alan Glynn, Adrian McKinty, Ken Bruen, Stuart Neville and Declan Hughes. For all the details, clickety-click here …

Here Comes The Sun

I do like a writer who is prepared to stretch him or herself, and it’s fair to say that Adrian McKinty’s next offering, THE SUN IS GOD (Serpent’s Tail), offers a dramatically different setting to his recent trilogy, which was set in Northern Ireland during the 1980s. To wit:

Based on real events, a story of murder in the South Pacific among a most peculiar sect of sun-worshippers.
  1906. Will Prior is in self-imposed exile on a remote South Pacific island, working a small, and failing, plantation. He should never have told anyone about his previous existence as a military foot policeman in the Boer War, but a man needs friends, even if they are as stuffy and, well, German, as Hauptmann Kessler, the local government representative.
  So it is that Kessler approaches Will one hot afternoon, with a request for his help with a problem on a neighbouring island, inhabited by a reclusive, cultish group of European ‘cocovores’, who believe that sun worship and eating only coconuts will bring them eternal life. Unfortunately, one of their number has died in suspicious circumstances, and Kessler has been tasked with uncovering the real reason for his demise. So along with a ‘lady traveller’, Bessie Pullen-Burry, who is foisted on them by the archipelago’s eccentric owner, they travel to the island of Kabakon, to find out what is really going on …

  I love that cover, by the way. THE SUN IS GOD will be published on July 24th. For all the details, clickety-click here …

Interview: Adrian McKinty

I had an interview with Adrian McKinty (right) published in the Irish Examiner last weekend. It ran a lot like this:

As every good crime writer knows, desperate times call for desperate measures. So when Irish author Adrian McKinty found himself without a tree on Christmas Eve, and staring at a small forest of firs in a Melbourne suburb, he took matters – and an axe left behind by an absent Russian tree dealer – into his own hands.
  “I don’t know if that’s a year’s bad luck, or if that’s how it works,” McKinty tells me via Skype from Melbourne. “But stealing a Christmas tree – that can’t be a good thing, karma-wise.”
  It’s unlikely to be a bad year for the Carrickfergus native. In the Morning I’ll Be Gone, the third novel in McKinty’s Sean Duffy trilogy, has just been published to glowing reviews. Duffy is a Catholic policeman serving in the RUC during the 1980s, and the Troubles is about to hit another low point. The book revolves around the Brighton Bombing in 1984, when the IRA targeted Margaret Thatcher during a Conservative Party conference.
  The release of official British government documents relating to that period earlier this month gives the historical backdrop to In the Morning I’ll Be Gone another layer.
  “There was a story in the Guardian that when the Brighton bombing happened, the British government were negotiating with the IRA’s Army Council for a ceasefire, and that negotiations were quite advanced,” says McKinty. “And then the Brighton bomb happened, obviously, and those negotiations were put back by about five years. It looks to me like this was one faction of the IRA Army Council working against another faction, and that the operation hadn’t been completely authorised, or that it was a power-play within the Army Council. The whole thing is fascinating. And then there’s the fact that Thatcher escaped, as well. There’s a lot about that bombing that I think we’ll never find out the truth about.”
  Although the new book is being billed as the concluding act of a trilogy, McKinty believes that the Troubles provide a sufficiently bizarre backdrop to provide Sean Duffy with ample motive to return.
  “There’s that crazy story that no one’s ever talked about,” he says, “when Oliver North came to Ireland looking to get weapons to the Iran contras. He tried to get weapons from the UVF, and found they were a bunch of jokers. Then he tried to get them from the IRA and the IRA didn’t trust him. So then he had to go to the Israelis. That could be a fun story.
  “It certainly won’t be a Lee Child-style seventeen book cycle,” he says, “but there’s maybe a couple more Duffy stories left. That said, if I only ever write the trilogy then I’m happy enough – or as happy as I ever get in my dour Presbyterian world.”
  Renowned as a hardboiled noir novelist, McKinty set himself the challenge of including the classic mystery fiction trope of a ‘locked room mystery’ at the heart of his latest offering.
  “I’ve always been a secret locked room fanatic,” he enthuses. “I read my first one when I was about ten or eleven, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express with David Niven and Peter Ustinov on the cover. That was the first grown-up one that I’d read. It’s fantastic, this meta-theory thing where everyone is the killer, which was brilliant because I was used to reading the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and The Three Investigators. So I asked the librarian if she had any more like Orient Express. The first one I read was Murders in the Rue Morgue, which I totally hated – I just thought it was ridiculous, the idea of an orang-utan with a cut-throat razor … But then she gave me some John Dickson Carr novels, and I was hooked.
  “Later on I graduated on to noir,” he says, “and didn’t read locked room mysteries any more, but a few years ago I read one I really liked called The Tokyo Zodiac Murders [by Soji Shimada]. So I thought to myself, ‘Is it possible to do a locked room mystery within a noir setting?’ A good one, which doesn’t involve any tricks or misleading the reader. Where the reader has as much information as the detective does, and there’s no cheating, there’s no supernatural bullshit or magicians’ tricks.”
  This year will also see McKinty publish, along with co-editor Stuart Neville, the short story collection Belfast Noir. The latest in a global round of city-based collections from Akashic Books, the book will be, McKinty believes, another manifestation of a culture coming to terms with itself and its recent past.
  “I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen’s University set, in the 1970s and ’80s – y’know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson – that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic Renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory,” he says. “Those guys were kicking down the door and saying there was a high culture in Northern Ireland, and you can attain that even in the face of what must have seemed to them at the time like the abyss. Belfast was a city on fire, and there was no hope. And yet they were producing this incredible poetry. That creates a sense of confidence, culturally speaking. And in the ’90s you had people like Colin Bateman and Eoin McNamee coming along and saying, ‘It’s okay to talk about all this. We can even make fun of it. We can turn it into art.’ So all along it’s been a process of people finding the courage and the confidence to really deal with the issues.”

  That confidence isn’t limited to poetry and fiction.
  “Glenn Patterson has a story in Belfast Noir about the energy of punk music in Northern Ireland. In ’78 and ’79, Stiff Little Fingers were doing songs like ‘Suspect Device’ and ‘Alternative Ulster’. And The Undertones were creating this amazing pop music that was defiantly apolitical. But it was all about the confidence to talk about whatever you wanted to talk about. So it’s all a part of a culture that’s been slowly finding its own voice, to speak and to turn the light within, onto itself.”
  Adrian McKinty grew up in Carrickfergus but left Northern Ireland to study politics and philosophy at Oxford. He published his first novel, Everything Rhymes With Orange in 1998, but it was the publication of his acclaimed crime debut, Dead I Well May Be, that put him on the map in 2003. Since then he has published nine adult titles and a trilogy of young adult novels, placing him at the head of a generation of new Irish crime authors such as Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville, Gerard Brennan and Anthony Quinn. It’s a generation that isn’t afraid to write about Northern Ireland’s troubled past, and how history informs the present.
  “People in the North are really taciturn and reticent and they don’t really like to talk about the past,” he says. “I mean, my dad worked in the shipyards for 20 years, and I remember asking him one time about the Titanic. And he said, ‘Oh, no one ever talks about that.’ I said, ‘Seriously? You work in Harland & Wolff and no one ever talks about the Titanic?’ And he said, ‘No.’ And I think that’s just symptomatic about the whole culture. It was the same during the Troubles, there were all these things that no one wanted to talk about, lest the dyke broke and all the darkness came pouring out.
  “I’m not surprised the Richard Haass talks broke down,” he continues, “because one of the things they broke down over was the whole ‘truth commission’ idea. There was just too many people who didn’t want a ‘truth commission’. They don’t want the truth to come out. But it’s our job, as writers, to do exactly that.”

In the Morning I’ll Be Gone by Adrian McKinty is published by Serpent’s Tail.

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

On Killing The Competition

Northern Ireland writer Anthony Quinn had a piece titled ‘Irish Crime Writers Killing the Competition’ published in the Irish News last week, which referenced Eoin McNamee, John Connolly, Claire McGowan, Ken Bruen and Adrian McKinty, among many others. It kicked off like this:

“Irish crime fiction has risen to new heights this year with home-grown noir finally moving beyond cult status to a must-have for every discerning reader. Blame the brooding landscape, the overhang of religious guilt or the legacy of the Troubles, the imaginations of this new generation of crime writers are proving potently fertile when it comes to fictionalising violence and evil.”

  Anthony included some samples of his own recent reading as part of the piece, and was kind enough to include yours truly. To wit:

DECLAN BURKE: ‘Slaughter’s Hound’ - Serving up rampant corruption, scamming and relentlessly brutal action scenes, Burke proves that Irish crime writers can also kick ass in the blood and guts department. What sets the award-winning Sligo writer apart is his deadpan sardonic tone. If you enjoy your crime fiction hard-boiled, and haven’t read Burke, then you’re several tequila shots behind the party. Watch out for his next outing Crime Always Pays, due to be published by Severn Press in the UK in March, and in the US in July.

  For the article in its entirety, clickety-click here …