“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Jarlath Gregory

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?
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. It’s a master-class in how to construct a whodunit. The twist ending has largely seeped into popular consciousness, but if you sit down to read the novel again, it’s astonishing to see how deftly Christie sets up and then demolishes the expectations of her readers.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Most of my favourite literary icons are tragic figures, great on the page, but you wouldn’t want to be them. I’ll go for Huckleberry Finn, because he knew how to enjoy himself, chewing on a stalk of grass and getting everyone else to do his chores.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I never feel guilty about my pleasures. Catholic Guilt is dead. I do feel a bit cringey when I read Ngaio Marsh though. When she hit her stride, her writing was great, but the overt snobbery, racism and homophobia which occur in so many of her books are appalling today.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When you go off on an unexpected tangent, and it becomes an integral part of the story.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
The Book of Evidence by John Banville.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu. It’s generally considered a late Gothic Romance rather than a crime novel, but I wrote an essay for The Green Book Vol. 4 arguing that it’s an early murder mystery. The mystery wouldn’t confuse modern readers, but a good director could have great fun with the elements of the plot which were to become tropes of the genre. There are multiple suspects and red herrings you could tease out and build on to keep the viewer guessing, and the atmosphere of gloomy horror would be gorgeous on the big screen.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is the money of course, unless you’re incredibly lucky and can make a living from your writing. Most writers can’t. The best thing is when people tell you how much they enjoy your work.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Sean Vaughan, dwarf detective, solves a series of baffling murders in Trinity College Dublin. It’s Raymond Chandler meets Agatha Christie in a contemporary Dublin setting.

Who are you reading right now?
Tana French. She’s brilliant at creating engaging narrators who draw you into the world of Dublin’s elite Murder Squad. Her novels are very grounded, but she manages to illuminate the horror in everyday life, and the devastating impact of murder on the lives of her characters ring true.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I’d say, “Piss off, God! You’re not the boss of me.” Then I’d make a more conducive deal with Satan.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Only bleedin’ massive.

Jarlath Gregory’s THE ORGANISED CRIMINAL is published by Liberties Press.

Review: THE MONOGRAM MURDERS by Sophie Hannah

There’s no rest for the wicked, they say, but lately it has been those fictional heroes whose job it is to bring the wicked to justice – James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe – whose literary rest has been disturbed.
  The latest fictional detective to be resurrected is Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, who featured in more than 30 novels. By some distance the most popular mystery author of all time, Christie’s final Poirot novel, Curtain, was published in 1975, although Christie – who died the following year – had written that book some three decades previously.
  In Sophie Hannah’s The Monogram Murders (HarperCollins), which is set in 1929, we first encounter Poirot, ‘the retired policeman from the Continent’, in ‘a most enjoyable state of hibernation’. When a terrified young woman called Jennie blunders into a London coffee shop and sits at Poirot’s table, however, his famous little grey cells are energised by Jennie’s bizarre story of her impending murder – and her assertion that nothing must be done to stop it, because only then will justice be done.
  Enter Edward Catchpool of Scotland Yard, a police detective who stands in for Poirot’s regular sounding-board Arthur Hastings, to narrate the story of Poirot’s latest investigation. It centres on a triple killing at the Bloxham Hotel, in which two women and a man are discovered identically murdered in three separate rooms, each with a monogrammed cufflink in their mouths. Naturally, the heinous crime is much more complicated than it at first appears, and only Poirot has the required acumen to disentangle the strands. Agatha Christie was justifiably celebrated for her intricate plots, and Sophie Hannah has done full justice to that reputation with a story that baffles to the final page.
  Not that everyone is entirely pleased by the bewildering nature of the tale. ‘Next time you’d like me to grasp something at once,’ Catchpool reproves a preening Poirot, ‘open your mouth and tell me facts. Be straightforward about it. You’ll find it saves a lot of bother.’
  Indeed, Sophie Hannah provides a double function in The Monogram Murders. The story is told in Agatha Christie’s style, but it also partly serves as a critique. Poirot is on holiday here, and has taken up residence in a house a whole three hundred yards from his home for the pleasure of looking back to enjoy the view. While the story is a full-blooded Poirot tale, a very English story of murder from the mystery novel’s Golden Age complete with quaint villages, vicarages and rare poisons, and – a clue! – afternoon tea taken at the wrong time, there are occasions, as above, when Hannah, via Catchpool, gently points out some of the flaws in Christie’s story-telling, particularly when it comes to Poirot’s infuriatingly obscure ‘method’, which as often as not delivered crucial clues to the reader about the identity of the murderer very late in the proceedings.
  Christie is also criticised for being too mechanical in her plotting, which makes Sophie Hannah an intriguing choice to write a Poirot novel. Hannah’s own crime novels are largely concerned with the psychology of criminality – the village of Great Holling, where this story has its roots, can be found in the same Culver Valley that provides the setting for Hannah’s books – which adds a frisson to Poirot’s declaration that, ‘We must think not only of the physical facts but of the psychological.’ Ultimately, we discover, The Monogram Murders is a novel in which the mechanics of plot, and Poirot’s reputation as the canniest of detectives, are harnessed for the purpose of exploring that simplest and strangest of all human emotions, love.
  Yet there is much more to The Monogram Murders, as Catchpool the crossword enthusiast discovers to his regret, than the solving of an emotionally charged puzzle. Hannah invests her tale with depth and breadth by investigating the grey areas between sin and crime, as her characters wrestle with Christian morality and the unforeseen consequences of a hypocritical interpretation of the spirit of Christian values (the ostensibly picturesque Great Holling is described as ‘a hell-pit of a village’). Further, the core event of the story offers a scenario that might, seen from different angles, be read as murder, execution or assisted suicide. To muddy the waters even more, Poirot asserts the conventional view that, ‘If a crime has been committed, one must ensure that the criminal is dealt with by the law in an appropriate fashion,’ only to be confounded at a later point by the declaration, ‘We were murderers, not according to the law but according to the truth.’
  In a fascinating act of literary ventriloquism from Hannah, the only real bum note is struck by the portrayal of Catchpool, the quasi-Hastings who faithfully records Poirot’s every utterance. A Scotland Yard detective with a terror of dead bodies, who lacks confidence in his own ability and who undermines his investigation on a number of occasions, the unfortunate Catchpool may well be the most hapless detective ever to grace the pages of a mystery novel. ‘Perhaps,’ he suggests when Poirot makes another brilliant discovery, ‘I’m in the wrong job,’ and it’s very difficult indeed not to agree.
  That said, there are occasions when it’s impossible not to agree with Catchpool, such as when Poirot assembles a host of characters in the Bloxham Hotel’s dining room for the traditional denouement. ‘I must say,’ Catchpool observes, ‘I did not and never would understand why he required such a sizeable audience. It was not a theatrical production. When I solved a crime … I simply presented my conclusions to my boss and then arrested the miscreant in question.’
  Catchpool and Sophie Hannah make a valid point, but then Hercule Poirot, luxuriant moustaches and all, would be nothing without his sense of theatre. Poirot may well be an entirely implausible creation, but his adventures – and The Monogram Murders deserves to take its place among them – are no less enjoyable for all that. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published 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: MR MERCEDES by Stephen King

Best known for his novels of horror and the supernatural, Stephen King has over the years written a number of crime and mystery novels, including Misery (1987) – in which author Paul Sheldon abandons his Victorian romances to pen a crime novel – Dolores Claiborne (1992) and The Colorado Kid (2005).
  The title of his latest offering brings to mind King’s fascination with haunted cars but that’s as close to the supernatural tropes as Mr Mercedes (Hodder & Stoughton) gets. Pitched as a suspense thriller, it opens with an eye-witness account of a mass murder, when a stolen Mercedes is driven at high speed into a crowd of people standing outside an auditorium. Eight people are killed, fifteen are wounded, and the perpetrator gets away.
  Months later, recently retired police detective Bill Hodges receives a taunting letter signed by ‘The Mercedes Killer’. Hodges knows he should turn the letter over to his former partner, Pete Huntley, but Hodges is divorced, lonely and purposeless. He has, on occasion, put a .38 revolver in his mouth, “just to see what it feels like to have a loaded gun lying on your tongue and pointing at your palate. Getting used to it, he supposes.”
  Newly energised, Hodges decides to pursue the investigation alone, at least until he can be sure the letter isn’t a hoax. At this point Stephen King opens up the second of the parallel narratives that sustain the story, introducing Brady Hartsfield, a computer repairman and ice-cream van driver and the self-styled ‘Mercedes Killer’. A sociopath, Brady Hartsfield harbours a dark ambition to make his mark on American history by emulating, and perhaps exceeding, some of the worst mass murders of recent times.
  On the face of it, this is a conventional set-up: the cop with nothing left to lose pursuing a deranged serial killer as the clock ticks down to an explosive climax. Mr Mercedes is a more knowing, self-aware thriller than the broad strokes might suggest, however, as the host of quirky references to the genre’s greats – Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Joseph Wambaugh and Edgar Allan Poe – suggests.
  Meanwhile, the strongest influence on Mr Mercedes goes unmentioned. In the past Stephen King has cited John D. MacDonald as one of the three writers who most influenced him as an aspiring novelist – the others were Don Robertson and Richard Matheson – and Bill Hodges is a similar character to MacDonald’s series protagonist Travis McGee, who was neither a policeman nor a private detective.
  “Philip Marlowe you ain’t,” Hodges tells himself, referencing Chandler’s iconic gumshoe. He’s right. Bill Hodges is neither cop nor private eye, but something intriguingly in between, a man with a detective’s skills but no legal basis on which to act in order to prevent mass murder.
  Brady Hartsfield, for his part, is a fascinating variation on the genre’s stereotypical serial killer, the man – and it’s almost always a man – who is as ridiculously well resourced as he is intelligent. By contrast, Hartsfield is all the more plausible and dangerous for the unpredictability of his animal cunning, as he is constantly forced to recalibrate his scheme due to a lack of foresight and financial wherewithal.
  Told in a folksy, conversational style, Mr Mercedes is on one level a thoroughly enjoyable homage to the crime / thriller genre from an author who is obviously steeped in its lore. On another level, the novel stares dead-eyed into the heart of darkness, and explores the social and psychological factors that created the monster Brady Hartsfield. Supernatural tropes may be at a premium, but there is plenty of horror and evil to be found here. The evil is of the chillingly banal variety, the all too familiar desire to triumph over impotent anonymity through infamy and notoriety. The horror emerges via Hartsfield’s entirely logical thought processes, and his ability to blend, chameleon-like, into the society and culture he professes to despise.
  There is good too, of course, as represented by Bill Hodges and the motley band of volunteer helpers – amateurs all – he assembles around him as they bid to prevent a tragedy. In the grand scheme, however, or at least as far as Brady Hartsfield is concerned, good and evil are equally irrelevant: “He muses on the terrorists who brought down the World Trade Centre (he muses on them often). Those clowns actually though they were going to paradise …”
  Brady is operating under no such illusions: “Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion … The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That’s all history is, after all: scar tissue.”
  It’s a downbeat and occasionally unsettling tale. As with all great thrillers, however, it’s also compulsively readable and hugely entertaining. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

Murder, She Wrote

I was on Twitter last week, in a conversation about YA books and teenage reading, and I mentioned that the twin pillars of my teenage reading years – or so it seems, looking back through rose-tinted binoculars – were Agatha Christie (right) and Sven Hassel. Which very probably explains a lot about the kinds of books I like to write now.
  Anyway, there may come a time when I write a feature about why Sven Hassel loomed so large in my imagination, but for now I’ll point you in the direction of a piece I had published last week in the Irish Examiner on the enduring – and indeed, the increasing – popularity of Dame Agatha Christie. It features contributions from Sophie Hannah, who will publish her Poirot novel THE MONOGRAM MURDERS in September, and the inimitable John Curran, who very likely knows more about Agatha Christie than anyone else on the planet.
  If you’re in the mood, you can find the feature here …

A Herculean Task

Agatha Christie’s BLACK COFFEE comes to Dublin’s Bord Gais Energy Theatre in June, running from Monday 23rd to Saturday 28th, with Jason Durr playing the role of the immortal Poirot. To wit:

A quintessential English country estate is thrown into chaos following the murder of eccentric inventor Sir Claud Amory, and the theft of his new earth-shattering formula. Arriving at the estate just moments too late, one man immediately senses a potent brew of despair, treachery, and deception amid the estate’s occupants. That man is Hercule Poirot.
  In the first play ever written by Agatha Christie we are introduced to a character who went onto become the most famous detective of all time and the only fictional character ever to receive a full-page obituary in the New York Times.

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Ita Ryan

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?
CROOKED HOUSE, or any one of about ten other Agatha Christies. She was the mistress of the twist. Another favourite is DEATH COMES AS THE END. That managed the difficult feat of getting the reader to look forward optimistically to the future while perched on a rock above the Nile in approximately 2000BC.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Sarah Kenny from the Quick Investigations series by Arlene Hunt. I’ve always loved Wexford St. It’s my favourite part of Dublin, with great bars and slapdash little cafés and flower sellers and unlikely charity shops. It’s lively and happening – just this side of seedy. Imagine the fun of perching a floor or two above it in an old-fashioned office and having dodgy characters appear and tell you implausible tales. Mind you, if a quarter of what happens to Sarah happened to me I’d have a nervous breakdown within a week.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Janet Evanovich. Georgette Heyer. P.G. Wodehouse. Terry Pratchett. I also enjoy children’s books. My kids are getting to the age now where I can read my collection of children’s fiction to them. I’m enjoying that very much.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When I re-read something a month or two later and it still makes me laugh, or cry.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
There are so many to choose from, but everyone should read MY LADY JUDGE, the first in the series of Mara novels by Cora Harrison. It transports you back to early 16th-century Ireland, depicting a happy community in the Burren living under traditional Brehon law. It was a pivotal time, with the looming threat of advances from the East. The history books tell us what happened next. All the same, you’ll find yourself hoping that maybe they’re wrong.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Tana French’s BROKEN HARBOUR. It has it all going on: tension, bleakness, disintegration. It should be filmed in the incredible light you get on a sunny winter’s day in Ireland, and pervaded by the sound of the sea.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is the editing. I do a lot of revising myself before handing over to my editor. I hate it. It’s totally worth doing, though. The best thing is getting a tweet or a message from someone who enjoyed the book. That’s like magic. This guy in Australia live-tweeted IT CAN BE DANGEROUS. Very entertaining.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Cynthia’s had a rough day. And now she’s found Nathan’s body. This could impact negatively on her performance review. Not to mention that the police are bound to suspect her, seeing as how she has no alibi and was cutting code right outside his office when he was murdered. Explaining that techies rarely interact with managers for long enough to kill them isn’t going to sort the problem. There’s only one thing to do before she’s arrested - find the killer herself. How hard can it be? She has a hotline to Nathan’s devilishly handsome son, enthusiastic friends and a lifetime’s expertise in armchair detection. Cynthia’s exploits soon reach the ears of the enigmatic Superintendent in charge of the case. She can handle that, but then she attracts the murderer’s attention ... (I must admit, that’s the pitch for my current book. My next book is currently just a tiny glint in Cynthia’s eye. But it’ll be brilliant.)

Who are you reading right now?
I’m re-reading Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides’ classic work DESIGN PATTERNS: ELEMENTS OF RE-USABLE OBJECT-ORIENTED SOFTWARE. I’m suffering from jet lag at the moment, and it helps me sleep.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I’d put up a good fight, but it’d have to be read. I couldn’t possibly do without books.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Funny, fast whodunit.

Ita Ryan’s IT CAN BE DANGEROUS is published by Kells Bay Books.

The Best Things In Life Are Free … BOOKS (TO DIE FOR)

’Tis the season to be jolly, and give presents, and even if I do tend to struggle with the ‘jolly’ bit on occasion, the BOOKS TO DIE FOR (Hodder & Stoughton) team will hopefully make up for that today. For lo! I have a (multiple) signed first edition of BOOKS TO DIE FOR to give away, which will warm the metaphorical cockles of any crime fiction fan’s heart. First, the blurb elves:

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!

  So there you have it. To be in with a chance of winning this unique prize, just answer the following question:

What one crime / mystery novel do you think every crime / mystery fan should read?

  Answers via the comment box below, please, leaving a contact email address (using ‘at’ rather than @ to confuse the spam munchkins), by noon on December 31st. Oh, and if you fancy a second bite at the proverbial cherry, we’re also giving away a signed BTDF over here. Et bon chance, mes amis …

Wake Up, It’s Time To Die

It’s a rather nerve-wracking time right now at CAP Towers. BOOKS TO DIE FOR, which I’ve co-edited with John Connolly, will be published at the end of August, but even as you read this the contributors’ copies are winging their way around the globe, the reviewers’ copies are landing with a hefty thump in many hallways, and the genie is very much out of the bottle. Quoth the blurb elves:

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!

  This, of course, is always the period of phoney war. That agonizing time when you’ve done all you can to make a book as good as it can be, when editors and designers have wrought their magic, and the book seems to exist in a kind of limbo between what you hope it is and how the rest of the world will perceive it.
  There is nothing more to do but fret and sweat, and try not to obsess over the most minute of details.
  Unusually for me at this point in the proceedings, and alongside all the usual traumas, I’m feeling a quiet pride for helping to bring BOOKS TO DIE FOR to this stage. That’s the case even though there’s an added pressure on this occasion, because BTDF isn’t just my book, and won’t simply stand or fall on how my efforts. To a large extent, I think, the book belongs to everyone who contributed to it, and to the crime fiction / mystery community at large, writers and readers alike.
  But even while acknowledging that, and accepting that BTDF isn’t perfect - no book is, and I’d imagine that there will be very few well-informed crime / mystery readers who won’t read it and wail, ‘But what about [insert overlooked tome here]?’ - it still feels pretty good to have helped to bring the book this far. It was a fraught experience at times, and a steep learning curve, but it was terrific to be involved in it, and particularly to observe, in John, a writer at the top of his game and how he goes about his business.
  Being the generous soul he is, John Connolly won’t tell you that he pretty much shouldered said hefty tome up the hill and over the finish line in a kind of Sisyphus-taunting performance, but he did, and did so in some style too. For my own part, I like to think that I brought a little panache in the way I stood back and watched and admired, and occasionally applauded. It’s also true that Clair Lamb’s input was prodigious, crucial and never less than excellent.
  Anyway, as I say, the genie is out of the bottle now and on its way to a bookstore near you. Launch dates for BOOKS TO DIE FOR in South Africa, Dublin and Belfast can be found here, and there’s oodles of information on the book, its contributors and the books and authors they wrote about, here and here. I sincerely hope you enjoy …

Jane Says

I had an interview with Jane Casey (right) published in the Sunday Business Post a couple of weeks ago - there’s no link, I’m afraid, so I’ve republished the piece in its entirety here. To wit:

It is one of literature’s great tragedies that not every writer can manage to look like a wig-wearing bag.
  “I always get comments about not looking or sounding like a crime writer when I do events,” says Jane Casey. “I haven’t yet managed to find out how I should look and sound. Agatha Christie looked like a bag with a wig on it, after all.
  “It’s not a comment that I mind, much,” she continues. “But I did an event last year where I was reading with three other authors, all male, and I thought that in comparison to them I sounded like I was reading a school project. So maybe I still need to work on the gravitas.”
  THE LAST GIRL is Jane Casey’s fourth novel, and the third to feature her series heroine Maeve Kerrigan. London-born to Irish parents, Maeve is a Detective Constable with the London Metropolitan Murder Squad.
  Born and raised in Ireland, now living in London, Jane got the highest mark in English in her Leaving Certificate year, and received a medal to mark the achievement from Seamus Heaney. She read English at Oxford (where she would read crime novels whilst supposedly writing her thesis on Beowulf in the Bodleian Library) before completing a MPhil in Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College, Dublin.
  Given her classical education, what was it about the crime novel that drew her to write in the genre?
  “I can’t think of anything more telling about society than what we hold to be criminal acts,” she says. “Crimes occur because of how people live and how they relate to one another, essentially, which is the basis of literature. Go back to the start of literature itself and you find one of the first dramas, Oedipus, is based on the crime of patricide and its aftermath. Within the parameters of the genre you can write about more or less anything because crimes occur at every level of society.
  “Some of the sharpest social commentary can be found in crime novels. I’m not totally sure why it’s seen as being ‘light’ or ‘entertaining’ in comparison with more challenging fiction, because you don’t get much darker than murder.
  “It’s a generous type of literature for a writer,” she says, “because it can include pure tragedy alongside broad humour, or lyrical description followed by brutal dialogue. There are conventions to be observed but there’s no single style of writing that defines the genre. So there’s a freedom there to do what you want.”
  According to those very genre conventions, Maeve Kerrigan, as a young woman in an Old Boys’ world, should be utilising her feminine wiles to stay one step ahead. Time and again, however, Maeve herself is to be found mocking her supposed ‘female intuition’.
  “A large part of Maeve’s survival strategy is her ability to see a put-down coming and dodge it,” says Jane. “She wouldn’t like to think that she’s good at her job because of her female intuition, but then she likes to see herself as one of the boys. She’s young. She hasn’t yet realized that she doesn’t have to fit in with them.”
  Perhaps Maeve Kerrigan aspires to a similar quality of gravitas as Jane Casey when dealing with her male colleagues, but it can be argued that such a character development would hugely diminish Kerrigan’s appeal. Maeve Kerrigan is an ambitious and dedicated policewoman, but she is possessed of an endearingly charming irreverent streak and a wilful refusal to accept arbitrary limitations that is as destructive in her professional life as it is in her personal affairs.
  She is also, and unusually, exercised by the long-term impact of crime on its victims. Married to a criminal barrister, Jane Casey is privy to the harsh realities of the legal system.
  “Victims and their families are really invisible in the legal system,” she says. “The prosecution acts on behalf of the state, not the wronged individual, and the rights of the defendant are considered at all points. It’s a bruising world to encounter. A lot of the characters in THE LAST GIRL have been through the criminal justice system and haven’t seen anything remotely resembling justice.”
  THE LAST GIRL opens with the discovery of the bodies of a mother and daughter in their plush Wimbledon home, both of whom have been stabbed to death. Upstairs lies the unconscious and bloodied form of Philip Kennford, husband and father, and a successful criminal barrister with a reputation for arrogance and sexual predation.
  “There are certain professions that attract charming sociopaths, and the Bar could be one of them,” says Casey. “Barristers are generally delightful to talk to and full of good stories, but they do like to be right all the time and their work involves winning or losing – you don’t get many draws. It’s a challenging, responsible job that demands a certain toughness, which is interesting in itself. I’ve heard tales of barristers behaving extremely badly in their personal and professional lives, but the only sociopath I’ve ever met myself is not a barrister.
  “Obviously,” she adds with a mischievous grin, “Philip Kennford is not based on my husband.”
  Twice nominated in the crime fiction category for the Irish Book Awards, for THE BURNING (2010) and THE RECKONING (2011), Jane Casey is one of the brightest stars in the Irish crime writing firmament. But where some publishers are suggesting that Ireland is not ‘sexy’ enough a setting to market to an international crime reading audience, Casey’s publishers have made a virtue of Maeve Kerrigan’s Irishness, going so far as to include a Personnel File on the inside cover of THE LAST GIRL with her Irish parentage highlighted.
  “My publishers would love me to write a Maeve story set in Ireland,” says Casey. “I wouldn’t do it for the sake of having an Ireland-set book, though. It would have to be the right story.”
  In part, Maeve Kerrigan’s distinctiveness depends on the novels’ London setting.
  “Maeve is a misfit in various ways and one of those is her own sense of estrangement. She doesn’t fit into the very British world of the Metropolitan Police, but she isn’t like someone who’s grown up in Ireland either. I think she does have uniquely Irish qualities, in that she has empathy in bucket-loads and a strong desire to understand the people she encounters through her job, whereas her colleagues tend to take people at face value. She’s also tied to her family very much, whereas - and this is a sweeping generalization - the British don’t seem to have such a sense of obligation to their parents. You have the feeling that Maeve’s parents have made sacrifices for their children, among them leaving Ireland and settling in London, and they expect to be paid back by their children achieving in life. Maeve has chosen a path they don’t understand, probably deliberately, just to get out from under that weight of expectation.
  “Maeve’s background is also important to how she’s perceived by her colleagues. It’s still common for Irish people to be seen as charming but untrustworthy, fundamentally unreliable. So she has all of that prejudice to deal with too.”
  Crime writers too face a certain amount of prejudice: charming books, perhaps, but fundamentally unreliable as literature.
  “There are plenty of very good writers out there who are happy to define themselves as crime writers,” says Casey, “I’m proud of the title myself and I’d be sorry to lose it. But the definition of a crime novel is changing all the time. That boundary between literary writing and crime writing is thin, and the crime-writing community tends to be welcoming to ‘real’ writers who want to try crime. I’m not sure if the same is true going in the other direction …
  “As a genre, it’s probably not valued as highly as it might be, at least in terms of the way it is criticised and discussed in the media. But readers of crime fiction are a sophisticated and discerning lot – pleasing them is enough of a challenge for me. I write the books I want to write.”
  As a former children’s books editor, that includes writing a new Young Adult novel. It also means that a woman who has become a mother since her first novel was published feels fully entitled to adapt her thematic concerns to her new circumstances.
  “The narrator in my first book, THE MISSING (2009), is a young woman who doesn’t understand her mother’s inability to move on after the disappearance of her young son. The character of the mother is one of the most damaged I have created, and yet now I realise I didn’t even get close to conveying the agony you might feel if your child disappeared.
  “I couldn’t write the book now as I did then,” she says, “but that’s probably true of every book by every writer. They’re all the product of your experience. At the moment I don’t think I could write about a child suffering.” Another mischievous grin, a flash of irreverence. “Maybe that means I should tackle it.”

  Jane Casey’s THE LAST GIRL is published by Ebury Press

  This interview was first published in the Sunday Business Post

Get Busy Dying

A trumpet-parp please, maestro …
  I’ll be writing about BOOKS TO DIE FOR in greater detail over the next couple of months, but for now I just want to put the word out there: this tasty little confection, edited by John Connolly and I, and about which I am very excited, is due on an Irish / UK / Australian / South African shelf near you on August 30th, and will be debuting on October 2nd, at the Cleveland Bouchercon, in North America. Quoth the blurb elves:

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 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 Marlow 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!

  So there you have it. If you want to take a wander over to the BOOKS TO DIE FOR website, there’s a section there where you can nominate the novel you think is absolutely indispensable for the great crime fiction canon. Or you could simply drop a note into the comment box below. As always, we’re open for business …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Brian Finnegan

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?
MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS by Agatha Christie. I graduated from Enid Blyton to Agatha Christie at the age of 13 and read her voraciously. ORIENT EXPRESS is her best, and even though it’s dated and the language is now unintentionally funny, it’s still as tightly wound and perfectly structured as a crime novel can be.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Ignatius J. Reilly from A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES - possibly the best literary creation of all time.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Marian Keyes. Seriously.

Most satisfying writing moment?
At the end of 1,000 words, which is my daily target.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
IN THE WOODS by Tana French. A brilliant investigation, a chilling backstory, a cracking crime team, beautiful prose and relentless tension.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
IN THE WOODS. I imagined it as a movie as I read it. It’s structurally perfect for screen adaptation.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is making myself get up at 6.30am every morning to write before I go to work (I find it impossible to write after a day at the office). The best thing, so far, has been getting my first book back from the printer, holding it and smelling it.

The pitch for your next book is …?
When a group of colleagues all lose their jobs in a Dublin-based global corporation, they resolve to stay in touch. The five meet once a month in the Forced Redundancy Film Club to watch their favourite classic movies in each other’s houses. Over the course of a year unlikely friendships form as each goes on a personal journey – reflected through the films chosen for their monthly meetings

Who are you reading right now?
PURE by Andrew Miller. Can’t put it down.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Too hard. Read, I think. Reading my own writing over and over again wouldn’t be enough for me.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Light, funny, pacy.

Brian Finnegan’s THE FORCED REDUNDANCY FILM CLUB is published by Hachette.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Val McDermid

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?

If I was a mercenary bitch, I’d say THE DA VINCI CODE. But I’m not, so I’ll go with Reginald Hill’s ON BEULAH HEIGHT. Tender, savage, clever, funny and moving. Beautifully written and immaculately plotted. What’s not to envy?



What fictional character would you most like to have been?

Jim Hawkins. So I could play inside the perfect novel.



Who do you read for guilty pleasures?

I go back to childhood and read the Chalet School books by Elinor M Brent Dyer, and Agatha Christie.



Most satisfying writing moment?

When I figured out a structure that would allow me to tell the story of A PLACE OF EXECUTION. That was a beautiful moment in itself, but it also made me trust myself and not worry that sometimes it takes years to find the right way to tell the story.



The best Irish crime novel is …?

Oh yeah, right. Like I’m going to stick my neck out like that just before I visit Ireland ... That wouldn’t have been too tough a call ten years ago. But now? Seriously, there’s been so much quality crime fiction coming out of Ireland in the past few years it would be invidious to single out any one book. I love youse all. Well, most of youse.



What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?

If you’d just let my throat go ... Thank you. I think Adrian McKinty’s Dead trilogy would make a great sequence of films. But so would many others. What’s more important is that Irish writers keep on writing great books.



Worst / best thing about being a writer?

Working alone. I love my own company but I’m also a very social animal. Sometimes I spend so long with characters I can push around that I forget how to interact properly with real people ...



The pitch for your next book is …?

A woman is going through US airport security with her kid. She sets off the metal detector and while she’s waiting in the perspex box to be patted down and wanded, someone walks up to her kid by the X-ray belt and walks off with him. As she attempts pursuit, she’s thrown to the ground and tasered. When she comes round, the kid is long gone. That’s next year’s book.



Who are you reading right now?

It’s the time of year when I read mostly debut novels so I can put together my wish-list for next year’s Harrogate Festival new blood panel. So I’ve just started the proof of a first novel called TIDELINE by Penny Hancock which is not out till January. I’ve just finished a proof of Stuart Neville’s third novel, STOLEN SOULS, which somehow sneaked into the pile. And I can exclusively reveal that it’s nail-biting, gut-wrenching and nearly made me miss my stop on the train. Next up will be something called ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL by some Irish guy who claims he’s holding my wife, my kid and my dog hostage.



God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?

I’m not as arrogant as people might think I am; I’d read.



The three best words to describe your own writing are …?

I’d rather leave that to other people. Preferably those to whom I have already slipped a £20 note.



Val McDermid’s THE RETRIBUTION is published by Little, Brown. Val will be appearing at the Mountains to Sea Festival, in conversation with Declan Hughes, on Saturday, September 10th. For all the details, clickety-click here …

On Gene Kerrigan, Agatha Christie And Quantum Mechanics

The latest of the Irish Times’ Crime Beat columns was published yesterday, and led off with a review of THE RAGE by Gene Kerrigan. To wit:

THE RAGE (Harvill Secker, £11.99) is the fourth novel from journalist Gene Kerrigan, a serial chronicler of Dublin’s criminal underworld who was last year shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger, and was the winner of the Irish Book Awards’ crime fiction prize, for his previous offering, DARK TIMES IN THE CITY (2009). THE RAGE essentially blends two stories, that of Detective Sergeant Bob Tidey, who is investigating the apparent suicide of a banker of dubious morality, and that of Vincent Naylor, a low-level criminal recently released from prison with plans to move up in the world. That the men will eventually cross paths is inevitable, although it’s Kerrigan’s quality of gritty realism that renders THE RAGE an enjoyable page-turner as Tidey negotiates the blind alleys of a labyrinth constructed by officious judges, corrupt lawyers, and even his own superiors. Largely recession-proof (“Bob Tidey was in the law and order business, and whatever else went belly-up there’d always be hard men and chancers and a need for someone to manners on them.”), Tidey is an empathic character, pragmatic rather than idealistic, but what makes THE RAGE a compulsive document of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland is Tidey’s growing awareness that the moral anarchy that reigns at all levels of Irish society means that the old rules no longer apply, especially when it comes to enforcing a crude approximation of law and order, by any means necessary.

  Also reviewed are SJ Watson’s BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP, Erin Kelly’s THE POISON TREE, Mary Higgins Clark’s I’LL WALK ALONE, and Keigo Higashino’s THE DEVOTION OF SUSPECT X, which last I heartily recommend as an erudite, thought-provoking thriller. For the full column, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, there was some interesting short-list nominations during the week. Mind you, the only real surprise would have been had Tana French’s ubiquitous FAITHFUL PLACE (which has so far been short-listed for an Edgar, an Anthony and a LA Times book award this year) not made the Best Mystery list in the Macavity Awards.
  A less-trumpeted title, on these pages at least, is John Curran’s AGATHA CHRISTIE’S SECRET NOTEBOOKS: FIFTY YEARS OF MYSTERIES IN THE MAKING, a labour of love that contains no less than two unpublished Poirot short stories, and which pops up in the Best Mystery-Related Nonfiction section. Incidentally, the follow-up to SECRET NOTEBOOKS will be published in September under the title AGATHA CHRISTIE’S MURDER IN THE MAKING, all of which may or may not mean that Curran’s doctoral thesis on Christie, undertaken at Trinity College, Dublin, may or may not be on the backburner for now. For the full rundown of Macavity nominees, you know what to do …
  Elsewhere, William Ryan beat off some stiff contenders (oo-er, vicar, etc.) to make the Theakston’s Old Peculier shortlist, a feat that’s all the more impressive when you consider that his novel, THE HOLY THIEF, is a debut offering. Another serial nominee, which has already been under consideration for Best Novel awards with the CWA and the Listowel Writer’s Week, THE HOLY THIEF will see its sequel, THE BLOODY MEADOW, published in September. All of which means that William Ryan is very probably feeling rather pleased with himself right now, and deservedly so. For the full list of nominees, via Kiwi Crime, clickety-click here …
  Finally, those of you pining for the stentorian tones of the Dark Lord himself, John Connolly, should click on this interview with the Daily Telegraph, in which the HELL’S BELLS author waxes lyrical about hell, bells and why he was entitled to, and duly received, an apology from CERN for the quality of his understanding of quantum mechanics. Proper order, too …

Summertime, And The Killing Is Easy …

Yours truly had a rather nice surprise today, when the post arrived and the latest offering from Benny Blanco, aka Benjamin Black, dropped out of an envelope. A DEATH IN SUMMER boasts a fabulous cover and has all the makings, if the blurb elves are to be believed, of being a rather neat satire on ye olde Big House mystery. To wit:

When newspaper magnate Richard Jewell is found dead at his country estate, clutching a shotgun in his lifeless hands, few see his demise as cause for sorrow. But before long Doctor Quirke and Inspector Hackett realise that, rather than the suspected suicide, ‘Diamond Dick’ has in fact been murdered. Jewell had made many enemies over the years and suspicion soon falls on one of his biggest rivals. But as Quirke and his assistant Sinclair get to know Jewell’s beautiful, enigmatic wife Françoise d’Aubigny, and his fragile sister Dannie, as well as those who work for the family, it gradually becomes clear that all is not as it seems. As Quirke’s investigations return him to the notorious orphanage of St Christopher’s, where he once resided, events begin to take a much darker turn. Quirke finds himself reunited with an old enemy and Sinclair receives sinister threats. But what have the shadowy benefactors of St Christopher’s to do with it all? Against the backdrop of 1950’s Dublin, Benjamin Black conjures another atmospheric, beguiling mystery.

  I’m already taking away three Irish crime novels on holiday as part of my freshly patented ‘100% Only Top Quality Books And Suffer No Fools On Holiday’ campaign, said tomes being FALLING GLASS by Adrian McKinty, THE RAGE by Gene Kerrigan and BLOODLAND by Alan Glynn. But I’m extraordinarily tempted to slip A DEATH IN SUMMER into the bag too, not least because the blurb is very suggestive of an Agatha Christie homage / pastiche. But that’ll make it 27 books in the bag, and who the hell can read 27 books in a fortnight? I mean, seriously, 26 is my absolute limit …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: 1222 by Anne Holt

A train crash high in the Norwegian mountains leaves the train driver dead and the passengers marooned in the small village of Finse, 1222 metres above sea level and accessible only by rail. One of the passengers is Hanne Wilhelmsen, a former policewoman who retired four years previously, after a bullet severed her spinal cord, and is now confined to a wheelchair. A worsening blizzard means that immediate rescue is out of the question for the passengers, but events take a lethal turn when a charismatic priest, Cato Hammer, is shot dead on their first night in the hotel. A second murder, of Hammer’s close associate, quickly follows. Can Hanne Wilhelmsen discover who the murderer is? And who are the mysterious men in black who have barricaded themselves into the hotel’s upper floors?
  Anne Holt has been described as ‘the next Stieg Larsson’, which appears to be a label attached to every Scandinavian crime writer these days. She probably has a very good chance of becoming the next Stieg Larsson, not least because her publishers are putting a huge push behind this novel, with further translations to arrive in 2011. Holt not only has eight novels in the Hanne Wilhelmsen series behind her, she also has a second series, the Vik / Stubo series, of which there have been four novels to date (latest one published in 2009).
  Holt has an insider’s eye for issues of crime and punishment. She worked with the Oslo Police Force from 1988 to 1990, which earned her the right to practice as a lawyer. She started her own law practice in 1994. She served as Minister for Justice from November 1996 until February 1997, a very short period which was ended by illness.
  I was initially sceptical about 1222, as it seemed to me to be very derivative. The fact that Hanne is confined to a wheelchair should make her a fascinating character, as she must depend on her cerebral rather than physical efforts in order to impose herself on the situation in which she finds herself. Unfortunately, the character reminded me very much of Ironside, a wheelchair-bound Chief of Detectives who featured in a TV series starring Raymond Burr which ran in the US from 1967 to 1975.
  It’s also true that Hanne isn’t the most empathic character I’ve ever read. A reclusive character, she neither seeks nor celebrates human contact other than that of her lesbian partner Nefis and her beloved daughter Ida. In fact, she actively rebuffs people’s attempts to get to know her, and has withdrawn into herself ever since her accident. It’s fair to say, and something of an understatement, that Hanne does not suffer fools gladly. She is, not to put too fine a point on it, a difficult character to dislike.
  Happily (!), the murder of the priest Cato Hammer slowly reawakens Hanne’s old policing instincts, and her experience of being forced into company gradually thaws her frosty nature.
  A second murder quickly follows the first, at which point - given the circumstances Hanne and her fellow travellers are in - I started thinking of Agatha Christie’s AND THEN THERE WERE NONE. To be fair, Holt acknowledges this, and goes so far as to reference Christie’s novel on pg 124:

I thought about Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.
  I immediately tried to dismiss the thought.
  And Then There Were None is a story that doesn’t exactly have a happy ending.

Of course, by pg 124, there are 118 guests locked into the hotel wing with Hanne, so it might have been something of a whopping novel had she engaged with bumping them all off one-by-one …
  Having said all that, it’s more than a month since I’ve read 1222, and it has stayed with me in a way I didn’t expect it to. One factor, I think, is that Holt is particularly strong when it comes to describing the atrocious weather conditions that buffet the hotel, and does a terrific job of enhancing the mounting tension by referencing the ever-worsening weather. In fact, each chapter is prefaced with a reference to the Beaufort Scale, and the impact on the human being of snow-driven winds.
  I also found the novel interesting in the way it used the trapped passengers to present a cross-section of Norwegian society, and at times it can read as a kind of social realist critique of Norwegian societal tensions, most of which were new to me. Holt is at times very critical of the Norwegian people, or at least certain aspects of the Norwegian mentality. Her criticisms largely stem from the fact that, according to Hanne Wilhelmsen at least, Norwegians can be docile sheep, but can be moved from docility to hysteria in a very short period of time. This, to be fair, is probably an accurate criticism of any group of any one nationality.
  The passengers do embrace a wide swathe of society. There are priests, and some older, religiously inclined, lay people. There are businessmen, a teenage sports team, and a group of older teenagers on their way to a rock concert. There are a few foreign nationals. There are doctors, on their way to a conference. There are also some locals trapped in the hotel, including the manager, a lawyer, and a mountain man. There is a feminist TV personality. All told, Holt appears to have covered quite a few of society’s bases. Few of the minor characters behave admirably in times of crises.
  There’s also a strong religious thread running through the novel, and particularly a theme of discredited religious institutions, which offers another layer to the conventions of Hanne attempting to discover who the murderer is. The two priests in the novel, Cato Hammer and Roar Hanson, both end up murdered. Early on, there are blatant signs that the clergy is not universally respected. A teenager, Adrian, swears forcefully at one of the priests in public, and yet he is not overly rebuked for his action. In general, the clergy and their small flock are more to be tolerated and pitied than admired.
  Equally interesting is the minor character Kari Thue, particularly in terms of her ability to foment fear and discord, and her representation of right-wing intolerance. Hanne herself is fascinated with the character of Kari Thue. She despises what Thue stands for, as the minor TV and media celebrity gathers around her a small retinue and protests about the living conditions - by which she means, implicitly, the fact that she’s expected to share space with two characters who are believed to be Muslim, possibly Kurdish (and again, religious tensions surface). In fact, Hanne so despises Kari Thue that she finds herself wishing that Thue had murdered Cato Hammer, and begins to bend the facts in order to point the finger of blame at Thue.
  Hanne Wilhelmsen’s lesbian partner, incidentally, is a practicing Muslim called Nefis. There’s a very nice long paragraph on pg 145 which describes Nefis’ beliefs, which begins:

For Nefis, Islam is the strict love of her father and the sound of the soles of her brothers’ shoes on the floor as they laughed and chased her around the palatial house where she grew up …

  Overall, 1222 is a solid example of the reluctant detective protagonist in crime fiction, even if Hanne Wilhelmsen a little too derivative for my liking (although I did get the impression that Holt was paying homage to the conventions of the classic mystery novel). Holt is also a little too fond of strewing red herrings through the story - the sub-plot about the mysterious men in black on a floor overhead is unnecessary, for example. The writing itself is workmanlike, although that may well be as a result of its translation than Holt’s own style, while the backdrop to the novel, the glimpse we catch of a cross-section of Norwegian society and how it behaves under pressure, is actually more interesting than the main plot itself. - Declan Burke

Ten Little N-Words

I honestly thought @shanehegarty of the Irish Times was having a laugh when he tweeted about THE N-WORD OF THE NARCISSUS during the week, in the midst of all the furore about NewSouth replacing the word ‘nigger’ with ‘slave’ in their new text of HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Unfortunately, he wasn’t.
  My knee-jerk reaction when I heard about the Huck Finn farrago was that it was political correctness run wild, and a pointlessly belated attempt to sanitise a text for contemporary readers, particularly schoolchildren. Maybe there’s an element of that, but the fact is that while ‘slave’ is a more acceptable word than ‘nigger’ today, it’s equally abhorrent as a concept. Changing a word is one thing, but the tragedy of HUCKLEBERRY FINN is the subjugation of men and women on the basis of their skin colour, not the language used to describe that subjugation.
  Besides, and with all due respect to NewSouth, the new version is only one version; anyone who desperately needs to get their fix of the printed word ‘nigger’ won’t have to go too far to find it.
  One thing that did slightly jar with me was the insistence that the new version is intended for schoolchildren, who are no longer reading HUCKLEBERRY FINN, given the potential for embarrassment in the classroom. It’s a long time since I’ve read either book, but I always thought that TOM SAWYER was a kids’ book in which Huck Finn appears, whereas HUCKLEBERRY FINN was a more serious novel, intended for adults.
  THE NIGGER OF THE NARCISSUS is definitely a novel for adults, and one I feel a little more protective of, because I love Joseph Conrad’s novels. Should it be renamed, and so clumsily? Quoth Professor Ruben Alvarado, who provides the version’s introduction:

“THE N-WORD OF THE NARCISSUS tells the tale of a fateful voyage of a British sailing ship, and on that voyage the ability of a lone black man to take the crew hostage. The ability of this man to manipulate an entire ship’s crew can no longer be seen as a mere exercise in storytelling. Conrad in fact appears to have been the first to highlight the phenomenon of manipulation based in white guilt.”

  Professor Alvarado claims that the title of the novel (novella, really) put him off reading it for many years, and that the inclusion of ‘N-Word’ in the title is an attempt to provide a text that will allow readers to appreciate Conrad’s theme of slavery, subjugation and white guilt. In other words, that it’s a version of white guilt that led to the changing of the title of a novel which trades in white guilt. Which seems to me a tad perverse, not least because the use of the word ‘nigger’ in the title is, in contemporary parlance, something of a grabber, but also because the word ‘nigger’ has been comprehensively reclaimed and subverted by those it was intended to denigrate in the first place, as Sean O’Driscoll’s fine piece in the Irish Times points out.
  The estate of Samuel Beckett aside, few texts are sacred these days, and to be perfectly honest, I’m much more outraged by the raft of Jane Austen zombie novels and their ilk than the changing of a few words in HUCKLEBERRY FINN. That novel is important for Mark Twain’s savage satire on slavery and racism, not for the language used to describe it. Arguing that texts must retain their original language for its own sake is something of a blind alley, in which lurks Agatha Christie’s facetiously insulting title, TEN LITTLE NIGGERS. Is it a good thing that Christie’s novel was retitled AND THEN THERE WERE NONE to reflect the fact that schoolchildren are no longer unthinkingly taught nursery rhymes featuring the word ‘nigger’? I’d argue yes.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: L.C. Tyler

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?
OK, let’s establish some ground rules here, shall we? I write crime but I also write what gets described (for want of a better term) as “general comic fiction”. So my envy about other novels is fairly widespread and comprehensive. The novel I would most like to have written is THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD - not crime exactly, but there is a spine-tingling moment about ten pages in from the end, when you suddenly realise how comprehensively hoodwinked you have been - precisely what you try to achieve in a good detective story. If you want me to stick narrowly to crime, then I’d probably go for one of the classics from the Golden Age – THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD, say. I also wish I had written THE GOOD THIEF’S GUIDE TO AMSTERDAM before Chris Ewan did. But, sadly, I didn’t.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Rabbit from Winnie the Pooh. There’s an on-line quiz you can do to establish which character from Winnie the Pooh you are. I was Rabbit. I know a number of other people who also did the quiz and proved to be Rabbit. We were all very happy with our choice; it’s the type of fictional character we are.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
At any given time I tend to have two metaphorical piles of books. One is the books I ought to be reading: crime novels I’ve been told I should read, books by people I know well and who’ve read my books, anything that might constitute “research” for a future novel. The other pile is everything else. Reading from one pile makes me feel slightly guiltier than reading from the other - but not much.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Typing “Chapter One” (or more usually, in my case, “Prologue”).

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Other than your own, of course ... GALLOWS LANE by Brian McGilloway.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Logically the answer should be as above, and I’m sure it would make an excellent film or TV series. I’d also like to see one of Ruth Dudley Edward’s novels made into a film, though.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Most things about being a writer are pretty good, as you’ll know yourself. The best thing is the actual creative process - watching the book unfold in front of you is a bit magical. Also, as a writer of comic crime, it always comes as a pleasant surprise that something you wrote and found funny is something that other people have read and found funny. The worst? Possibly reviews that fail to convey the absolute sense of wonder and awe that you feel your book should command in any right-minded critic. (Yes, you really do get reviews like that occasionally. No, I couldn’t believe it either.)

The pitch for your next book is …?
My next book, after the paperback of THE HERRING SELLER’S APPRENTICE, is A VERY PERSISTENT ILLUSION (published in March), and the first thing I need to explain is that it isn’t crime. It’s black humour and it delves into the nature of reality, why people support Southend United and the importance of owning a classic sports car. But there is a mystery to solve and a point, about ten pages from the end, where hopefully you finally see what it was all about. For the one after that (TEN LITTLE HERRINGS - out in August) it’s back to a life of crime ...

Who are you reading right now?
It’s a book on the English Civil War from the non-guilt pile. At some stage soon I’d like to start writing a comic-historical-crime series set in the seventeenth century. There’s a real-life murder that I want to include, but I’m not going to be so foolish as to reveal which one at this stage. I’ve just finished DROWNED HOPES by Donald Westlake - a great writer sadly no longer with us.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
This is clearly a bum deal either way. I’d be straight onto the internet to see if any other deity was offering better terms.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
“Perky” (Financial Times) “Classic” (The Scotsman) “Subversive” (The Bookseller)

L.C. Tyler’s THE HERRING SELLER’S APPRENTICE is now available in paperback

On Equal Writes For Wimmin

I recently interviewed four Irish female crime writers – Ruth Dudley-Edwards (right), Arlene Hunt, Alex Barclay and Ingrid Black – for the Sunday Independent about being, y’know, crime writers who are Irish and women. Anyhoos, one of the questions was about why Irish crime writing has so far been dominated by men. Quoth ‘Cuddly’ Dudley-Edwards:

“It may be that Irish crime fiction is dominated by men because so far, it has tended toward the noir,” suggests Dudley-Edwards. “Certainly, very many of the most famous names in classical English crime fiction are female: Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, PD James, Ruth Rendell. Indeed Reginald Hill has a story of being at a cultural event in France where an earnest man rose to ask why most of the writers of the Golden Age [the Thirties] of detection were women. ‘Because,’ explained Reg, ‘all the men were dead.’”

  Oh, and Arlene Hunt is adamant that women no longer need fainting couches. For the rest, clickety-click here.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Jeremy Duns

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?
ENDLESS NIGHT by Agatha Christie. It’s a late novel of hers, and oddly reminiscent of the Angry Young Men novels. It’s beautifully crafted, haunting, with a killer ending.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
James Bond - he lives well, saves the world, and survives.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Dennis Wheatley’s Gregory Sallust spy thrillers.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Coming up with the title for my first novel: FREE AGENT. I wanted something that was very simple, in the vein of Geoffrey Household’s ROGUE MALE, but that would also reveal another layer once you’d finished the book. I just felt a great burden had been lifted and it acted as a kind of mini-tone poem guiding the rest of the book.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Not exactly a crime novel, although it features plenty of crimes, Joseph Hone’s THE SIXTH DIRECTORATE, part of the superb Peter Marlow spy series, sadly long out of print. Gripping plot, beautiful prose.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE BIG O, of course!

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is the mental strain of putting it all together. The best thing is being paid to do what you love.

The pitch for your next book is …?
1969: a British spy on the run in Biafra has to confront his past.

Who are you reading right now?
George Blake’s memoirs, NO OTHER CHOICE.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Spare, gripping, sweat-inducing.

Jeremy Duns’s FREE AGENT will be published in May 2009 by Simon & Schuster.