All The Rage

It’s a hearty congratulations to Gene Kerrigan from all here at CAP Towers, on the news that THE RAGE has been shortlisted for a Los Angeles Times Crime / Mystery award. THE RAGE, of course, won the CWA Gold Dagger, way back in 2012. I thought the novel was terrific when I first read it; for that review, clickety-click here.
  The line-up for the Mystery / Thriller category runs as follows:

Richard Crompton, “Hour of the Red God,” Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Robert Galbraith, “The Cuckoo's Calling,” Mulholland Books/Little, Brown & Co.
John Grisham, “Sycamore Row,” Doubleday Books
Gene Kerrigan, “The Rage,” Europa Editions
Ferdinand von Schirach, “The Collini Case,” Viking

  For the full list of all nominees in the LA Times Book Awards, clickety-click here …

The Selfless Gene

I’m delighted to see Gene Kerrigan’s THE RAGE shortlisted for this year’s CWA Gold Dagger, not least because, in his day job as a journalist, Gene’s long been waging a kind of sniper’s war on behalf of working stiffs against the not-so-great and not-terribly-good from the back page of the Sunday Independent. He’s also a bloody good crime novelist.
  I reviewed THE RAGE in the Irish Times when it was published last year, with the gist running thusly:

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.

  A month or so previous to that review being published, I interviewed Stuart Neville, and asked him in passing if he’d read anything he’d like to recommend. Did the perspicacious Stuart go straight for THE RAGE? Yes he did …
  For all the Dagger nominees, clickety-click here. And the best of luck to all involved …

DARK TIMES’ Bright Prospects

Time being not so much a cruel mistress as a vengeful dominatrix these days, I gave Gene Kerrigan’s (right) nomination for the CWA Gold Dagger only a cursory mention on Monday. It’s worth mentioning again, though, because I think DARK TIMES IN THE CITY is a terrific read – for those who have read and enjoyed LITTLE CRIMINALS and A MIDNIGHT CHOIR, it’s an entirely new gear altogether. Here’s my two cents, in a review for the Sunday Independent (where Gene Kerrigan is a columnist) from last February:

IN one sense, it’s a shame that Gene Kerrigan hails from this parish, because you’re going to think I’m biased when I say that, with DARK TIMES IN THE CITY, he has written one of the finest crime novels set in Ireland.
  Initially the story of Danny Callaghan, a Dublin ex-con who instinctively interferes in a gangland hit and suffers the consequences, DARK TIMES is a novel that gets under the skin of post-boom Ireland. The various settings are for the most part those urban wastelands by-passed by the boom, where people live cheek-by-jowl with the criminal fraternity, and where the notion of law and order is a sick joke.
  And yet, as with Kerrigan’s previous novels, LITTLE CRIMINALS and A MIDNIGHT CHOIR, the issues are not black-and-white, and the lines drawn are not between good and bad, or law and disorder. Kerrigan is more interested in exploring the concept of power, its use and abuse, and how those at the bottom of the pecking order, regardless of which side of the thin blue line they stand, are powerless -- physically, financially and morally -- when confronted with the juggernaut of power corrupted absolutely.
  Written in a terse, economical style studded with nuggets of black humour, the novel is unflinchingly cynical about the cause-and-effect cycle of poverty, mis-education, hopelessness and violence that provides an unending flow of willing volunteers for gangland life.
  Kerrigan the journalist is apparent in the novel’s relevance, as three or four narrative strands that could easily have jumped off yesterday’s front pages coalesce into a splendid page-turner. But it’s Kerrigan the novelist that lifts DARK TIMES above the realms of the conventional crime novel, with his detailed and often poignant depiction of the truth behind the headlines.
  His characters are never ‘scum’ or ‘thugs’; they don’t labour under ridiculous nicknames; they’re fully-rounded individuals who can tug on your heart-strings on one page, and force a man to dig his own grave on the next.
  Cruelly authentic, the novel refuses the simplistic pieties of either the genre’s form or society’s wishful thinking. DARK TIMES IN THE CITY is a very fine crime novel, but it’s also one of the very few novels of any stripe to hold up a mirror to the dark heart of modern Ireland’s boom-and-bust.

  So there you have it. For an appetite-whetting Chapter One, clickety-click here …