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

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that BOOKS TO DIE FOR (Hodder & Stoughton) is being reissued in paperback; last week, the Irish Times was kind enough to carry the book’s Introduction. To wit:

Why does the mystery novel enjoy such enduring appeal? There is no simple answer. It has a distinctive capacity for subtle social commentary; a concern with the disparity between law and justice; and a passion for order, however compromised. Even in the vision of the darkest of mystery writers, it provides us with a glimpse of the world as it might be, a world in which good men and women do not stand idly by and allow the worst aspects of human nature to triumph without opposition. It can touch upon all these aspects of itself while still entertaining the reader – and its provision of entertainment is not the least of its many qualities.
  But the mystery novel has always prized character over plot, which may come as some surprise to its detractors. True, this is not a universal tenet: there are degrees to which mysteries occupy themselves with the identity of the criminal as opposed to, say, the complexities of human motivation. Some, such as the classic puzzle mystery, tend towards the former; others are more concerned with the latter. But the mystery form understands that plot comes out of character, and not just that: it believes that the great mystery is character.
  If we take the view that fiction is an attempt to find the universal in the specific, to take individual human experiences and try to come to some understanding of our common nature through them, then the question at the heart of all novels can be expressed quite simply as ‘Why?’ Why do we do the things that we do? It is asked in Bleak House just as it is asked in The Maltese Falcon. It haunts The Pledge as it does The Chill. But the mystery novel, perhaps more than any other, not only asks this question; it attempts to suggest an answer to it as well.
  But where to start? There are so many from which to choose, even for the knowledgeable reader who has already taken to swimming in mystery’s dark waters, and huge numbers of new titles appear on our bookshelves each week. It is hard to keep up with authors who are alive, and those who are deceased are at risk of being forgotten entirely. There are treasures to be found, and their burial should not be permitted, even if there are some among these authors who might have been surprised to find themselves remembered at all, for they were not writing for the ages.
  And so, quite simply, we decided to give mystery writers from around the world the opportunity to enthuse about their favourite novel, and in doing so we hoped to come up a selection of books that was, if not definitive (which would be a foolish and impossible aim), then heartfelt, and flawless in its inclusions if not its omissions. What we sought from each of the contributors to this volume was passionate advocacy: we wanted them to pick one novel, just one, that they place in the canon. If you found them in a bar some evening, and the talk turned (as it almost inevitably would) to favorite writers, it would be the single book that each writer would press upon you, the book that, if there was time and the stores were still open, they would leave the bar in order to purchase for you, so they could be sure they had done all in their power to ensure it was read by you.
  While this volume is obviously ideal for dipping into when you have a quiet moment, enabling you to read an essay or two before moving on, there is also a pleasure to be had from the slow accumulation of its details. Reading through the book chronologically, as we have done during the editing process, patterns begin to emerge, some anticipated, some less so. There is, of course, the importance of the great Californian crime writers – Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and James M. Cain – to the generations of writers who have followed and, indeed, to each other: so Macdonald’s detective, Lew Archer, takes his name in part from Sam Spade’s murdered partner in The Maltese Falcon, while Chandler builds on Hammett, and then Macdonald builds on Chandler but also finds himself being disparaged by the older author behind his back, adding a further layer of complication to their relationship. But the writer who had the greatest number of advocates was not any of these men: it was the Scottish author Josephine Tey, who is a crucial figure to a high number of the female contributors to this book.
  Or one might take the year 1947: it produces both Dorothy B. Hughes’ In a Lonely Place, in which the seeds of what would later come to be called the serial killer novel begin to germinate, and Mickey Spillane’s I, The Jury. Both are examinations of male rage – although Spillane is probably more correctly considered as an expression of it – and both come out of the aftermath of the Second World War, when men who had fought in Europe and Asia returned home to find a changed world, a theme that is also touched on in Margery Allingham’s 1952 novel, The Tiger in the Smoke. The pulp formula in the US also adapted itself to these changes in post-war society, which resulted in the best work of writers such as Jim Thompson, Elliott Chaze and William McGivern, all of whom are considered in essays in this book.
  Finally, it’s interesting to see how often different writers, from Ed McBain to Mary Stewart, Newton Thornburg to Leonardo Padura, assert the view that they are, first and foremost, novelists. The mystery genre provides a structure for their work – the ideal structure – but it is extremely malleable, and constantly open to adaptation: the sheer range of titles and approaches considered here is testament to that.
  To give just one example: there had long been female characters at the heart of hard-boiled novels, most frequently as femmes fatales or adoring secretaries, but even when women were given central roles as detectives, the novels were written, either in whole or in part, by men: Erle Stanley Gardner’s Bertha Cool (created under the pseudonym A.A. Fair), who made her first appearance in 1939; Dwight W. Babcock’s Hannah Van Doren; Sam Merwin Jr.’s Amy Brewser; Will Oursler and Margaret Scott’s Gale Gallagher (all 1940s); and, perhaps most famously, Forrest and Gloria Fickling’s Honey West in the 1950s.
  But at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, a number of female novelists, among them Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, but also Amanda Cross and, in her pair of Cordelia Gray novels, PD James, found in the hard-boiled mystery novel a means of addressing issues affecting women, including violence (particularly sexual violence), victimization, power imbalances, and gender conflicts. They did so by questioning, altering, and subverting the established traditions in the genre, and, in the process, they created a new type of female writing. The mystery genre accommodated them without diminishing the seriousness of their aims, or hampering the result, and it did so with ease. It is why so many writers, even those who feel themselves to be working outside the genre, have chosen to introduce elements of it into their writing, and why this anthology can accommodate such a range of novelists, from Dickens to Dürrenmatt, and Capote to Crumley.
  But this volume also raises the question of what constitutes a mystery – or, if you prefer, a crime novel. (The terms are often taken as interchangeable, but ‘mystery’ is probably a more flexible, and accurate, description given the variety within the form. Crime may perhaps be considered the catalyst, mystery the consequence.) Genre, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder, but one useful formulation may be that, if one can take the crime out of the novel and the novel does not collapse, then it’s probably not a crime novel; but if one removes the crime element and the novel falls apart, then it is. It is interesting, though, to note that just as every great fortune is said to hide a great crime, so too many great novels, regardless of genre, have a crime at their heart. The line between genre fiction and literary fiction (itself a genre, it could be argued) is not as clear as some might like to believe.
  In the end, those who dismiss the genre and its capacity to permit and encourage great writing, and to produce great literature, are guilty not primarily of snobbery – although there may be an element of that – but of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of fiction and genre’s place in it. There is no need to splice genre into the DNA of fiction, literary or otherwise: it is already present. The mystery genre is both a form and a mechanism. It is an instrument to be used. In the hands of a bad writer, it will produce bad work, but great writers can make magic from it. ~ John Connolly and Declan Burke, Dublin, 2012

This piece was first published in the Irish Times.

The Book Of Book Things

John Connolly appeared at No Alibis bookstore in Belfast last week, to launch the limited hardbound cloth edition of his latest offering, the novella THE WANDERER IN UNKNOWN REALMS (Hodder & Stoughton). Quoth the blurb elves:

Soter, a Great War veteran with no past he wants to remember, takes the occasional assignment from the London barrister Quayle. His new task is to find Lionel Maulding, a wealthy bachelor with only one distinctive attribute: a passionate, almost obsessive love of books.
  Visiting Maulding’s country home, Soter finds rooms and rooms of books, but strange and frightening things as well. Wherever Maulding has gone, Soter realizes, it had to do with the hunt for one specific book, a book with powers Soter cannot even imagine. Where Soter’s quest converges with Maulding’s, entire worlds may be revealed and changed.
  THE WANDERER IN UNKNOWN REALMS is a story in the tradition of M.R. James and Dickens, full of horrors and wonders and illustrated beautifully by Emily Hall. It will be available in early June in a limited hardcover edition, signed by author and illustrator.

  To order your copy, drop a line to David Torrans at No Alibis here. Alternatively, the book is available as a Kindle Single here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Anthony Quinn

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?
Anything by Graham Greene, because his shading of good and evil still resonates strongly today. Has there ever been a better writer of noir?

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Patrick Kavanagh’s Tarry Flynn - a life spent constructing hayricks and reading poetry in the hedgerows, with a pitchfork to hand for devilment at night.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Social media websites are a terrible distraction when you have writer’s block at the computer. Dickens and Shakespeare were so prolific only because their inkwells weren’t full of friends and followers jostling for their attention.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Successfully forging a doctor’s prescription. No, seriously, when a background character you thought insignificant suddenly takes over a page and then an entire chapter.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I know this is the golden age of Irish crime fiction with authors such as mine host’s ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL redefining the genre itself, but I think the best Irish crime novel is still out there, lurking in the subconscious, waiting to be written …

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Any of Stuart Neville’s thrillers, which read as vivid cinematic treatments of Northern Ireland.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst thing is the daily confrontation with a blank page. Best thing is filling same – even though you might feel like flushing it down the loo the next day.

The pitch for your next book is …?
My historical thriller BLOOD DIMMED TIDE is currently doing the rounds. WB Yeats and his assistant ghost-catcher are summonsed to Sligo by the restless spirit of a girl whose body is mysteriously washed ashore in a coffin from the previous century. They are led on a gripping journey through the ruins of Sligo’s abandoned estates and into its darkest, most haunted corners as the country descends into a bloody war of independence.

Who are you reading right now?
Cormac McCarthy’s early ‘Appalachian noir’.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I’d pick ‘read’ rather than ‘write’, and hope it’s not an Old Testament God, otherwise he’ll condemn me to an eternity of reading my own work as a just punishment for attempting to get it published.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Everything is practice.

Anthony Quinn’s DISAPPEARED is published by the Mysterious Press.

The Moon, My Butt, And Other Very Big Issues That Occasionally Block Out The Sun

I do understand that e-publishing is proving a very liberating option for many writers, and that some are doing very well indeed from e-only publishing. What I don’t understand is why JA Konrath & Co insist on polarising the issue, and pitch it is as books vs e-books, with winner take all. Isn’t it possible for a writer (and his or her publisher) to accommodate those who like to read books and those who prefer to read on an electronic device? Seems like the simplest solution to me.
  One thing I don’t like about the debate is the way the e-evangelists are delighting in the prospects of dancing on the grave of traditional publishing. Your opinion on ‘gatekeepers’ et al notwithstanding, the decline of traditional publishing will see a lot of jobs to go the wall, and a lot of talented people out of work. Is that really something to celebrate, just so that we can pay $0.99 to read THE MOON, MY BUTT, AND OTHER VERY BIG ISSUES THAT OCCASIONALLY BLOCK OUT THE SUN?
  Anyway, the latest missive from the Dark Lord, aka John Connolly, offers his thoughts on the same subject. To wit:

“It’s one of the reasons why I find myself growing increasingly angry with those of my peers who seem to have divested themselves of any loyalty to bricks-and-mortar bookstores in favour of a rush to solely electronic publishing, too ignorant to even be ashamed to use phrases like “dead tree publishing” or “legacy publishing” about the beauty and usefulness of a printed book. Hey, guys and gals: those bookstores, chains and independents, that you’ve apparently abandoned to their fate were the making of you all, and you were very willing to badger their owners into stocking your books when they were the only game in town. I’m as happy as anyone to take my royalties on e-book sales, and I’m grateful to the companies that distribute me in that form, but I firmly believe that electronic publishing and printed books can co-exist in our brave new world, and I’d dearly like to see bookstores survive to take their place in that world, because it will be a poorer, coarser place without them. End of lesson.”

  Meanwhile, Conor Fitzgerald reviewed John Connolly’s THE BURNING SOUL for the Irish Times a couple of weekends ago, when he had this to say about Connolly’s narrative style:

“THE BURNING SOUL opens with a filmic bird’s-eye view of the setting, thanks to the presence of some ravens on loan from Edgar Allan Poe. Connolly confidently guides us into their malevolent little minds, then it’s up into the cold air again, down into a car and then into a character’s mind in a blending of first-person narration and omniscience that is reminiscent of Dickens. Indeed, as the epigraph of this book consists of an excerpt from GREAT EXPECTATIONS, I am confident that Connolly knows exactly what he is doing and how much he is risking, which, for me, is the mark of a highly accomplished writer now beginning to explore the limits of his chosen form.” - Conor Fitzgerald, the Irish Times

  Dickens, no less. For the rest, clickety-click here …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: FAULKS ON FICTION: GREAT BRITISH CHARACTERS AND THE SECRET LIFE OF THE NOVEL by Sebastian Faulks

Lists are fine things, particularly if you’re in an argumentative mood, and FAULKS ON FICTION, being a list of great fictional British characters, is especially provocative. Faulks, the author of ‘Birdsong’ and other very fine novels, has divided his book into four headings: ‘Heroes’, ‘Lovers’, ‘Snobs’ and ‘Villains’, offering seven examples in each section. Thus the book takes us on an odyssey through British literature that begins in the Caribbean with ROBINSON CRUSOE and meanders right through to the present day, culminating in Faulks’ take on Barbara Covett, the villain of Zoë Heller’s NOTES ON A SCANDAL.
  Along the way we encounter some of the greats of the British novel, including Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Henry Fielding, Emily Brontë and Thomas Hardy.
  Given that the book was written as a tie-in with the recent BBC series of the same name, the style is unsurprisingly light and breezy. It’s also very readable, in part because Faulks spends a good chunk of his introduction debunking the various literary critiques that bedevilled the development of the novel in the late 20th century. It may be ‘old-fashioned’ he says, but he is determined to treat the characters as if they were real people, gauging their worth in terms of the impact they’ve had on the reading public.
  It’s a laudable ambition, although Faulks’ modus operandi works better for some characters than others. When writing about personal favourites, such as Emma Woodhouse or Sherlock Holmes, Faulks is intensely engaging (although prone to hyperbole: “Is there no flaw in this dazzling, Mozartian performance?” he wonders of Jane Austen’s EMMA). On the other hand, some chapters have a cursory feel, and read like little more than synopses with occasional digressions.
  What is most disappointing about the collection is its predictability. “The novel was, from the start, a popular and middle-class form,” says Faulks during his chapter on Fielding’s TOM JONES, and his selection of characters seems determined to prove that the novel - or more properly, the literary novel - is still very much a middle-class obsession. The roll-call of names will be familiar to most readers, from Daniel Defoe to Dickens, Jane Austen and Emily Brontë to William Golding and Doris Lessing, up to the present day and Martin Amis, Alan Hollingsworth and Monica Ali.
  In fact, and despite the ‘British’ flavour promised in the subtitle, the collection is a very English one, even when the characters under discussion are marooned on a desert island, mired in the Indian Raj, or immigrants from Bangladesh.
  Furthermore, there is very little that is challenging to the status quo. No Lawrence Durrell, for example, who was being touted in the 1960s as the next James Joyce. Indeed, there’s no James Joyce. John Fowles merits only a line or two; Mary Renault only one, and that in terms of her early, ‘lesbian’ novels. Olivia Manning goes unmentioned, as does Kazuo Ishiguro, while Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson merit only token references, if that.
  Stevenson, perhaps above all others, has good reason to be miffed at his exclusion. Long John Silver and the Dr Jekyll / Mr Hyde doppelganger are two of the most memorable characters in the history of the novel, and it beggars belief that not even one of Stevenson’s heroes or villains was deemed worthy of inclusion.
  One non-literary character who did sneak into the collection is James Bond, in the ‘Snobs’ section of the book. Unfortunately, Faulks does himself - and his argument in favour of literary snobs - no favours by spending most of the chapter talking about his own very enjoyable experience of writing a Bond novel, DEVIL MAY CARE (2009). Not that there is anything wrong with the chapter per se, but it’s telling that Faulks’ mini-biography at the end of the book lists all of his own novels bar DEVIL MAY CARE.
  This snobbishness about the literary novel reaches a climax late in the collection, when Faulks discusses Wilkie Collins’ THE WOMAN IN WHITE, which is regarded as one of the earliest examples of the thriller. Rather than celebrate the crime genre on its own terms, however, Faulks prefaces his exploration of the novel’s villain, Count Fosco, by recounting how plot-driven novels fell out of favour in the 20th century, only to be reinvigorated not by the various genre fictions of crime, science-fiction and romance, but by Proust’s A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU and Flaubert’s MADAME BOVARY. Were he not so serious, the proposition would be laughable.
  At times, Faulks is so beautifully precise that you almost forgive him his blinkered outlook. The happy-go-lucky Tom Jones is “a jolly cork on a choppy sea”; writing about love, or Graham Greene’s version of same, Faulks says, “All culture is for it; almost all history is against it.”
  Such insights are few and far between, however. FAULKS ON FICTION makes for an entertaining read, but it’s little more than a primer for those who have forgotten the main plot points of some of the great English novels. - Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Sunday Business Post

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE INVENTION OF MURDER by Judith Flanders

Cain invented murder, of course, but Judith Flanders’ splendidly lurid title is entirely appropriate. What makes THE INVENTION OF MURDER: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime a compelling read is not the grisly murders Flanders documents in such meticulous detail, but the grotesque appetite the Victorians developed for fresh blood.
  This is Flanders’ fourth book on Victorian society, and the pages teem not only with black-hearted murderers, devious poisoners and outrageous miscarriages of justice, but also with the minutiae of day-to-day Victorian life. Thus the book is not simply a list of the most famous murders of the period (John Thurtell, Burke and Hare, Jack the Ripper) but also provides a comprehensive dissection of Victorian society, and particularly its evolving understanding of crime, class, justice and policing.
  Flanders’ theme, however, is the representation of murder. She quotes, approvingly, Thomas de Quincey’s ironic commentary on the public appetite for gore in her opening chapter, ‘Imagining Murder’: “‘Pleasant it is, no doubt, to drink tea with your sweetheart, but most disagreeable to find her bubbling in the tea-urn.’ … But even more pleasant, he thought, was to read about someone else’s sweetheart bubbling in the tea urn … for crime, especially murder, is very pleasant to think about in the abstract …”
  There are no cases documented here of sweethearts bubbling in tea urns, but it wasn’t for a lack of imagination on the part of the Victorian chroniclers of crime. The first major case Flanders deals with is that of John Thurtell, a decadent playboy who murdered his associate Joseph Weare over a gambling debt in 1823. Thurtell was no criminal mastermind, and the evidence against him amounted to a cut-and-dried case, but what is shocking to the modern mind is the extent to which the media was allowed to comment on the case. Flanders is excellent on the development of ‘broadsides’, cheap pamphlets hawked on street corners for the delectation of a blood-thirsty working-class. But even the most prestigious of the era’s newspapers were happy to print the kind of unfounded allegations and prejudicial rumours that today would have seen Thurtell walk away from court a free man, unable to obtain a fair trial.
  Thurtell’s guilt might have been plain for all to see, but where Flanders excels is in her excavation of cases in which conviction (and the almost inevitable public execution) were preordained, regardless of the evidence. Eliza Fenning, a servant girl who was accused of attempted murder by poisoning in 1815, is probably the best example. “Her terrible story was inextricably bound up with class anxiety, with fear of the mob, with hierarchy and social structure,” writes Flanders. Fenning, who was undoubtedly innocent of the charge of attempted murder, was convicted on a mish-mash of hearsay and confused testimony, a victim of paranoia and prejudice. Flanders’ account of the tawdry episode is a superb example of the complex interplay of forces - rudimentary policing, social change, a system of justice in dire need of transparency and accountability - which doomed many of those who appeared before men who prided themselves on their reputation as ‘hanging judges’.
  Fenning became notorious after the event, the subject of ‘broadsides’, acres of newspaper print and theatrical productions. In fact, if there’s a caveat to this book, it’s one of repetition: determined to explore each case to its fullest extent, Flanders is meticulous in exhaustively detailing the consequences of each case. Her devotion to her subject cannot be faulted, but once the pattern is established (murder, trial, representations in various media), the reader may well find him or herself skipping whole chunks of Flanders’ research.
  Curiously, the real murder rate was relatively low. In 1810, for example, the murder rate in Britain was 0.15 per 100,000 people; for comparative purposes, the murder rate in Canada in 2007-2008 was 0.5 per 100,000. Nonetheless, crime-influenced theatre was massively popular for the Victorians: “in 1866 there were 51,363 nightly seats in twenty-five London theatres,” Flanders writes, a figure which only applies to legitimate theatre. Queen Victoria herself attended a production of Dion Boucicault’s ‘The Colleen Bawn’ three times in one fortnight.
  The evolution of policing from a rudimentary arrangement of nightwatchmen prowling a particular parish into a more sophisticated organisation devoted to detection as well as prevention provides Flanders with another sub-plot. That development is reflected in the embryonic crime novel, with Flanders crediting Charles Dickens as one of the genre’s early leading lights, alongside Wilkie Collins.
  By then the Victorian lust for blood, further sharpened by the likes of Conan Doyle’s fictional Sherlock Holmes, and the horrifyingly real crimes of Jack the Ripper, was firmly established, allowing Flanders to conclude thusly: “By the start of the new century, therefore, a love of blood could be indulged in safely and securely, without any fear of an ugly reality bursting in. Instead, oceans of blood could cheerfully be poured across the stage, across the page, in song and in sermon. Murder was, finally, an art.” - Declan Burke

  This review first appeared in the Sunday Business Post.

21st Century Boy

I have no idea of when it’ll go live, but at some point today Mulholland Books will begin serializing a new novel by Sir Kenneth of Bruen (right). It all sounds splendidly Dickensian, albeit in a 21st century kinda way, and would be even more Dickensian were it a Jack Taylor novel exploring the squalor of recession-hit Galway (sorry, Galway), with soot-blackened urchins being shoved up chimneys to discover corpses and whatnot. Anyway, you can clickety-click here for more …
  In other news, yesterday I received a long awaited decision on the future of my own current tome, which is at the moment languishing under the improbable title of THE BABY KILLERS. The news, disappointingly, was a negative, although the disappointment has less to do with the fact that the book won’t be published any time in the near future (I’m well used to that at this stage) as it has to do with the potential publisher, a small but perfectly formed press with some radical ideas on the future of publishing. It’s a pity, but there it is; upward and onward.
  It now looks very much like I’m going to self-publish THE BABY KILLERS, aka BAD FOR GOOD, aka A GONZO NOIR at some point later this year. I’ve had a good scour around the interweb for self-publishing deals, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t in all conscience, given these straitened times and the need to put food on the table, etc., pump even a relatively modest sum of money into a project just for the sheer vanity of being able to hold an actual book. And so I’ll be e-publishing THE BABY KILLERS, and pretending that I’m doing it to be on the cutting edge of technology, especially in the context of Amazon claiming that they’re now selling more Kindles than McBurger sells cheeseburgers, etc, yadda-yadda.
  For those of you who’ve been keeping an eye on this project, the principle behind it will remain the same: any monies accruing will be donated to charity. That won’t amount to much more than a hill of beans, and probably a lot less, because the price of the book will probably be in the $1 range. Still, it’s the thought that counts.
  As to what I’ll do once THE BABY KILLERS is out there, I really have no idea. I’ve a couple of stories I’d really like to write, and one in particular that simply won’t go away, so I have plenty of material to work with. Whether or not there’s an actual point to writing it, or them, is another matter entirely. Yes, it’ll be that uniquely perverse kind of masochistic fun that is writing, which is roughly 90% of the reason I write; but I can only delude myself for so long, and eventually the other 10% - actually presenting the story to other people for the purpose of reading it, if for no other reason than to justify the time you’ve wasted writing the bloody thing - will kick in. And where do I go then, with my oh-so-precious m/s clasped in my clammy hands? Being practical, there’s only so many times I can tell the Three Regular Readers of ye olde blogge that good times are just around the corner; at some point they’re going to lose interest, or worse, start pitying me. Better perhaps to just accept that I’ve had a good enough run at this point, a better run than I’d even allowed myself to imagine starting out, and simply fall on my sword.
  We’ll see. Right now my priority is to get DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS to the publisher on deadline, and see it ushered onto a bookshelf near you in all its pomp and glory; and once that’s done, I’ll crack on with e-publishing THE BABY KILLERS, and apologies in advance to all of you who, like me, prefer actual books to the electronic version. After that, well, who knows? Only time, that notoriously doity rat, will tell.

Make Mine A Shandy

An intriguing proposition hoves over the horizon, being Michael Sheridan’s true crime offering MURDER AT SHANDY HALL: THE COACHFORD POISONING CASE. To wit:

Cork, May, 1887. Murder stalks the countryside. Against a tranquil rural backdrop the sleepy County Cork village of Dripsey, near Coachford, a sensational Victorian murder is played out with a potent mix of love, lust, betrayal, and ultimately naked hatred. The entry of a young and beautiful governess into Shandy Hall, the home of a retired British Army surgeon Dr Philip Cross, acts as a catalyst for an act of horror that prompts suspicion, an exhumation, an inquest, and a charged courtroom drama that grabs newspaper headlines all over the world. The nation is transfixed by details of a murder which shatters the Victorian ideal of the home as a safe haven of privacy and comfort, and besmirches the blue-blooded reputation of an aristocratic line. The cast of real characters includes a cruel killer, cloaked in respectability; a beautiful and naïve governess; a blameless wife; a brilliant young pathologist; a canny and clever murder detective; two accomplished courtroom adversaries; a caring and emotional judge; and a notorious hangman. The unravelling of this true-life murder mystery will send a chill through your bones.

  Sheridan’s previous books include DEATH IN DECEMBER: THE STORY OF SOPHIE TOSCAN DU PLANTIER and A LETTER TO VERONICA: THE LAST DAYS OF VERONICA GUERIN, both true crime accounts. He’s not shy about raising the bar on himself, either. In his introduction, he has this to say:

“There is nothing ever new under the sun and the fact of murder echoes in our ears, in hour hearts and in our minds. And yet [murder] is an enduring mystery - one that drove the greatest writers over the generations, like Dickens, Dostoevsky, Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, Camus, Capote and Mailer to even greater heights of expression to get to its essence.”

  So - can Michael Sheridan’s SHANDY HALL cut the mustard alongside the greats? Only time, that notoriously doity rat, will tell …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Gerry O’Carroll

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?
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT by Dostoevsky, it embodies to me the two ingredients of the story of a villain. It personifies that a criminal can run but can’t hide, the inevitability of his punishment. It’s a profound insight into the dark soul of a criminal.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Jack Rebus from Rankin’s novels - I see in him a lot of the darkness of myself and the weakness of human nature.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I go back and go back and go back to Charles Dickens’ TALE OF TWO CITIES and Victor Hugo’s THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO. And of course J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When I got to writing the last line of the last chapter of THE GATHERING OF SOULS.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
John Connolly’s EVERY DEAD THING. I love Connolly’s style and his encroachment into the supernatural that seems to accompany his books. I’m very much an aficionado of the paranormal thanks to my own personal experiences.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Brian McGilloway’s border thriller GALLOWS LANE would adapt to the screen very well. There’s a richness in his style and tapestry that would suit the movies. But especially it is the depth of his characters – in particular Inspector Ben Devlin - and the scale of the plot that includes suspect arms finds and shadowy MI5 figures that would keep you on the edge of your seat.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is that I’m lazy, and it’s an absolutely ordeal – I’d have to be handcuffed to the chair. The best thing is probably getting the first copy hot off the press that will make up for the blood sweat and tears. I’ve always been more of the outdoor type, and that need for discipline hamstrings me.

The pitch for your next book is …?
I wouldn’t want to dig too deeply into that yet, but it’ll probably go further into the exploration of Quinn’s and Doyle characters, set in Ireland’s gripping world of crime, which extends right across the globe (as seen in recent happenings in Spain), and which we all live in. There will be a certain international element in their next case.

Who are you reading right now?
Stieg Larsson - I just finished the last novel of his tremendous trilogy, THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS’ NEST. For me, Stieg Larsson is the most original contemporary crime writer, almost the revelation of crime writers in the last twenty years. My breath was taken away when I read the first book. It is a much abused world he depicts, and I just couldn’t stop, I was blown away.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Read. It is the last refuge and comfort of old age.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Authentic. Heartfelt. Uncompromising.

Gerry O’Carroll’s THE GATHERING OF SOULS is published by Liberties Press. The image is used courtesy of the Evening Herald.

“Whither The ATOM BOMB ANGEL?”: A Word Or Five From Peter James

I met with Peter James (right) at the Merrion Hotel last week, to interview him for the Sunday Independent, and a very pleasant lunch it was too. Beforehand, I was a little concerned he was one of these robo-writers – we all have our (koff) favourites – who write crime fiction because crime fiction readers are so dim they’ll read any old tat so long as there’s a corpse on every second page. As a matter of fact, Peter James was a charming interviewee – articulate, erudite, self-deprecating and charming, and passionate about the morality of crime fiction and a corresponding attention to detail.
  I don’t usually publish interview transcripts, but I had to leave out so much of the Peter James interview when I was writing it up for the Sunday Indo, and because I think Peter James has quite a lot of interesting things to say, I thought I’d put it up here. I’ve nipped and tucked here and there, but what appears below is roughly how it happened in real time. One other thing that’s delightful about Peter James as an interviewee – he needs very little prompting to get going. And once he gets going, he’s almost impossible to stop …
  I started by asking him about the first three novels he ever wrote, which he currently keeps out of print on the very noble principle that anyone who buys them won’t be getting their money’s worth. Will he ever make them available again, or can I just go ahead and steal the wonderful title, ATOM BOMB ANGEL?

“I think I might republish them some day, under ‘Vintage Cliché’, or something like that (laughs), with a warning on the front, ‘Read these at your own risk’. But I wrote those a long time ago. I’d always wanted to be a writer, this is going back to the ’70s, and I saw this article saying there was a shortage of spy thrillers. So I wrote this kind of pastiche, and to my amazement I got published. And then, to my amazement, it completely flopped (laughs). So I wrote two more … and they flopped too. I nearly gave up writing, I got very despondent.”
  “The real tipping point for me was when I was pouring my heart out to a friend of mine who was writing jacket blurb at Penguin. And I was saying, ‘How do earn a living at this?’ And she said, ‘Why are you writing spy thrillers?’ So I said, ‘Because I read somewhere there was a shortage.’ And she said, ‘You will not make money from writing something because you think it will pay. You have to write what you’re passionate about.’ That was the best advice I ever had. And around that time, the son of a very good friend was killed in an horrific car-crash. Afterwards, his parents started seeing a medium. Now, I’d always been interested in the paranormal, and they were absolutely convinced they were in touch with their son. Anyway, I went along to one of the séances, and decided that, whether or not they were in touch with him, they believe that. And I could see how people could take comfort in that. But then I thought, what if you went to a medium to contact your dead son, and discovered through the medium that he’d murdered his girlfriend?”
  “I’d always wanted to be a crime writer, right back when I was 12 and I read my first Sherlock Holmes story. And then I read Graham Greene’s BRIGHTON ROCK, and it just blew me away. Brighton was my home town … And I thought, One day I want to write a book that’s twenty percent as good as this. That was my dream. But I kept away from writing crime fiction for a long time, and then after POSSESSION I wrote a series of supernatural chillers, and I kept away from the [crime fiction] genre because of what I thought of as the very rigid conventions. You had to have a country house, with a library, and a dead body is discovered … Then I discovered the Americans. Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain, and a whole world opened up. And then, about eight years ago, Macmillan asked if I’d ever considered writing a crime novel. And I just said, ‘Yes!’”
  “I had a great relationship with the police at that point. I’d been setting books in Brighton, and I’d been out with the police a lot. And I’d met one guy about 14 years before, who was then a detective inspector in Brighton. I remember going to his office and there were about 20 boxes, big crates, piled up in there. And I said, ‘Are you moving?’ And he said, ‘No, these are my dead friends.’ And I thought, okay, I’ve found the only weirdo in the Brighton police force (laughs). But he then explained that he was in charge of cold cases. They weren’t called cold cases back then, that’s a relatively recent term, but he said, ‘Each one of these crates holds the principal case files in an unsolved murder. I’m the last chance the victim has for justice and the last chance the family has for closure.’ And I loved that rather caring, quiet man alone with these ghosts who were depending on him. In creating Roy Grace I drew heavily on that. And I became very friendly with this guy, and we’re great mates today, he then became detective chief superintendent, and he’s really the role model behind Roy Grace.”
  “I spent a lot of time thinking hard about what would make him different. I like Rebus, but I didn’t want to copy Rebus. And I decided to stay away from the drunk, cynical … you know, the clichés. And about two years before I created him, I got taken with a group from Sussex Police to an organisation called the Missing Persons’ Helpline, an open day run by a charity which basically helps the police look for missing people. And I discovered that over 230,000 are reported missing every year in the UK. Now, most of those turn up within 30 days, but if they don’t turn up in 30 days, they’re not going to turn up. And there are over 11,000 at any one time permanently missing. It’s roughly 60,000 in America, it’s the same, pro rata, all around the Western world. And that’s a kind of a similar situation to an unsolved murder. You have people left behind wondering, Where are they? Are they under Fred West’s toolshed? Are they down in some Austrian cellar? Have they run off with a lover? Have they had an accident and never been discovered? Were they kidnapped by some lunatic? Have they changed their identity? And what detectives do is, they solve puzzles. That’s really what major crime solving is about, putting together the pieces. And I thought it would be interesting to have a detective have a personal puzzle of his own, one he can’t solve. And that was when I decided that, when we first meet Roy Grace, which is in DEAD SIMPLE, he’s got a wife, Sandy, who he loved and adored, but who, when he came home nine years earlier on his 30th birthday, wasn’t there, and he hasn’t seen or heard from her since. And that dogs his life.”
  “In the last book, DEAD MAN’S FOOTSTEPS, a character, right at the end of the book, is on a beach in South America, and is chatting to the woman next to her, who tells her that her name is Sandy. Now, you don’t have to know who she is to read the book, but in DEAD TOMORROW, Roy has his new love, Cleo, and she’s now pregnant. So he’s ready to move on, but the shadow of Sandy is actually starting to lengthen … The book I’m working on now, the sixth one, some of it is set ten years back, when Roy is still with Sandy, so we’re seeing life from her perspective too.”
  “I get really angry at the snobbery against the crime fiction genre. I mean, look at Shakespeare. If Shakespeare was writing today, he’d be writing crime fiction. Most of his plays feature a crime, or a trial. Dickens’ last novel was a crime novel. Dostoevsky. But you had the chair of the Booker prize, three years ago, saying that hell would freeze over before crime fiction would get short-listed. Well, I’m sorry, but I think the crime novel is the way to examine the world in which we live. I go out with the police once a week, and they see stuff, that aspect of human nature, that you’re just not going to get at a Hampstead dinner party. The police see the world warts and all, every possible facet, and the insights into human nature they get, whether it’s arresting an armed robber, or going into some godawful sink estate apartment where there’s a domestic going on … I mean, the police look at the world with what I call a healthy cultural suspicion. You and I, if we were to walk down Grafton Street, and saw two guys looking into a shop window, we’d think, they’re wondering what to buy. A cop looks at them and thinks, Why are they standing there? Are they about to kick off? Rob the shop? Do a drug deal?”
  “There’s a pub [the Chief Super and I] go to, the same pub every time, the same table every time (laughs), and we sit down and I go through the planned storyline, and he gives me his input. And he reads every book as I’m writing it, I send him every 100 pages, and then we discuss the police aspects of it. What I need for a particular situation, what procedure I need to follow … I’ve also got a young copper now too, he’s 28, he does the same thing for me. So I get the younger perspective too, and from a street police officer as well as a chief super. So anything I want to find out, I can. For instance, in DEAD TOMORROW, a dredger pulls a dead body up off the seafloor. So I’m wondering, what would the police do in a situation like that? Well, a police diver would go down to try to find the place where the body came from. So I contacted the diving unit – I’m kind of fairly well known at this stage – and they said, Why don’t you come out with us and we’ll do an exercise for you. So we actually went out, with a dummy called Eric, which actually replicates the human body, and chucked Eric overboard and recovered him. So I spent the day with the diving unit. And similarly, with the dredging ship … So pretty much everything that the police do in my books, I have experienced first-hand – car chases, surveillance, helicopter pursuits, I’ve been on two or three of those. For me it’s really important to get the details right. I get very irritated when reading, or more often seeing on television, people who get the details wrong. The classic example is Frost. I think some of the public must think that the reason SOCO officers wear white suits is that they don’t want to get dirty attending a crime scene. Because they’re all wearing their protective suits, and along comes David Jason with his big brogues and clumps all over the crime scene. The early Rebus did it too. I mean, the reason the SOCOs wear those suits is so they do not contaminate the crime scene. The first police officer at a murder, or a rape scene, his first job is to seal it off, with one exit-entry point. And it doesn’t matter if he’s the most junior police officer in the entire force, he is empowered to prevent anybody, including the Chief Constable, through that tape if they’re not wearing protective clothing. And it’s not just being fussy about detail for its own sake. I think if you get it right, then the story tends to come out better as well.”
  “For me, I could never write something that I hadn’t checked out, and didn’t know was accurate. That’s not the way I want my books to be perceived. And I always find that when I do the research … For example, I went out on the dredger ship for DEAD TOMORROW because I’d never been on a dredger. I didn’t even know a dredger brought up gravel for commercial purposes, I thought they just cleared harbours. And out of that experience came the idea for having the ship’s engineer as the husband of Caitlin’s mother, and gradually the characters started to come together. I really do find that the research tends to inform the story in ways I never expect. For example, DEAD MAN’S FOOTSTEPS was about a guy who fakes his disappearance in the wake of 9/11, and while I was researching it I got friendly with two New York cops, who’d been first on the scene on 9/11. And they became quite major characters in the story. And likewise, for the character of Caitlin’s mum, I wanted to have her working in a debt collection agency, but I didn’t know what that actually entailed. So I contacted a debt collection agency, and as it turned out I had a fan who worked there … (laughs). I just thought that, at the moment, given that the world is in financial crisis, that that would be interesting work to be doing, but how does it work? And I ended up going there and spending a couple of days, and asking questions, and realising that, yes, you could actually steal money from a place like that, if you knew what you were doing. And that turned out to be a very important aspect of her character.”
  “Brighton’s great. I think a sense of place is as important as character. A lot of the great crime novels that I’ve admired, such as Rebus in Edinburgh, Hiaasen’s Miami, Ed McBain in New York, and so on, are very true to their setting. And Brighton for me is perfect. I was born in Brighton, and Brighton’s been known as the Crime Capital of England since 1934. It’s the favourite place to live in England for first division criminals. It goes right back to the razor gangs of the ’30s, protection rackets … It’s got a seaport either side, the largest number of antique shops in the UK, it’s got the racecourse … It’s always had a seedy reputation as a weekend resort. And it does have this undertow of violence. It doesn’t have the kind of inner-city gun violence but it does have endemic criminality. For nine years running it was the ‘injecting drugs death capital’ of the UK. We lost it last year to Liverpool, but we got it back this year.”
  “In terms of how I work … I think, as I was saying earlier, it comes back to the relevance of the good crime writer to the world we live in. But I also tend to take the theme that intrigues me at the time. DEAD MAN’S FOOTSTEPS is about a man who uses 9/11 as an opportunity to fake his own disappearance and get out of debt. My previous novel, NOT DEAD ENOUGH, was about identity theft, which is the fastest-growing crime in the Western world. And with this book, its genesis came one night when I was out a dinner, and this woman was talking to me and she said, ‘Do you know how much you’re worth in bits?’ I said, ‘In bits?’ And she said, ‘In body parts.’ And the answer is about a million dollars. She then started telling me about how, since transplant technology has improved, the number of organ donors has actually decreased. The big irony is that less people are dying in car accidents, because people are now wearing seat-belts. The perfect donor is someone who dies in a car accident by hitting his head off the steering-wheel, leaving the organs intact. Motorcycle accidents are another good source. And she’d been trying to make a documentary about the growth in black market human organs, and she’d tied up with Médecins Sans Frontières. And they discovered that in Colombia, in some areas, the Colombian mafia make more money out of human body parts than they do from drugs. They sent two reporters to Colombia to investigate, and they got murdered. So she was scared off it, but she had all this research, and she said it was mine if I wanted to use it. So I started researching it, and discovered that Manila, for example, in the Philippines, is known as ‘One-Kidney Island’. For forty-five thousand pounds, you can go on holiday and get a new kidney. The Chinese are shooting prisoners, and selling the cadavers for a million-plus to Korea and Taiwan, or they’re harvesting the parts themselves. Places like Romania feed this part of the world …”
  “Wherever I go, I’ll always try to meet police officers from around the world. And I had to go to Moscow last year, for my Russian publishers. I asked if there was any chance of meeting any Russian police officers, so they introduced me to the Chief of Police for Central Moscow (laughs). But I got on really well with him, I ended up going out to dinner with him and about 15 of his colleagues. And his office is full of animal heads, wild boars and what have you, and he has invited me to spend four days hunting with him, at the beginning of September! I just could not say no to that …”
  “I’ve just always been fascinated by human nature, and human beings and why they do the things they do. And the crime genre gives me the chance to explore that to its fullest extent. I’m writing now about a rapist who takes his victims’ shoes, but oddly enough, before I decided to make that the theme … I met and became quite friendly with the governor of our local prison, and he’s a moderniser. He’s quite controversial, because in his prison, sex offenders and paedophiles are not segregated from other prisoners. And his view is that it’s almost politically correct to regard these people as somehow worse. I mean, I’ve been burgled, and it took me years to get over the horrible feeling. So I know what he means when he says that other crimes can destroy people’s lives just as much as a paedophile can. And rape is really interesting … The average clear-up rate for major crimes in the UK is 34%, and for murder, it’s 98%. Very few murderers end up getting away with it, because so much in the way of resources are thrown at it, and because a lot of the time, unless it’s committed by the member of a gang, most murders are committed by a member of family, or the murderer can’t live it. There are a lot of issues that go with it. The clear-up rate for rape, on the other hand, is under 4%. And women who’ve been raped, their lives are destroyed. So I’ve been reading a lot about the psychology of rapists, and the psychology of what happens to the victim, and why people rape … So, with each book, I’m interested in taking an issue, or an area of crime, that impinges on society, hopefully without being didactic.”
  “I do plan my books – perhaps because of my background in film – in terms of the three-act structure. I always think of three high-points as the basic guts of the book. And I do plan the ending, I must know the ending. It might change when I get to it, but I do need to have a vanishing point. And I plan the first 20% quite carefully. But I love the magic that happens, and I’m sure you know what I mean, as a writer, when something pops up that wasn’t originally intended. My best time for writing is six o’clock in the evening, a vodka martini, put on some music, and get in the zone. And then blitz until about ten at night. And when a character appears, who was not there 10 seconds ago, then wow … But then, that happens to me in almost every book.”

  Peter James’s DEAD TOMORROW is published by Macmillan.

On Little Nell, Crime Fiction And The Social Fabric

Yours truly tripped gaily along to the theatre last night to see The Old Curiosity Shop. The director, Alan Stanford, who also adapted the novel for the stage, had this to say in the programme notes about Charles Dickens (right, in ‘sultry belle’ mode):

“His novels, his short stories and his articles have become not only a major portion of world literature but also an important record of the social fabric of his own time. He wrote stories, but his stories were a record of the truth. His books tell us of an England and a London at the start of a new age. An age of Industrial revolution – an age of new Empire – an age of new wealth. But it was also an age of unspeakable poverty, suffering and disease. And of those evils, Dickens chose to write. To a great extent, he opened the eyes of his generation to the sufferings of the poor and weak. The tale teller could not only create characters of such size and range as to fascinate and enthral the imagination of the nation but could even make them, occasionally, examine their own consciences.”

  I’m not saying every genre, including the literary genre, can’t do the same. But it strikes me that crime fiction is the genre best placed to do so, and not only because it’s the most popular kind of writing, and thus likely to result in more occasionally examined consciences, but also because it’s the most immediate record of the social fabric of its time. Does that make it an ‘important record’? I think so. But I also think that things are generally only important up until they begin to revel in their own importance. Here’s hoping crime fiction never crawls up its own fundament in search of self-importance.
  Finally, because it is Friday, arguably my favourite piece of literary criticism, courtesy of Oscar Wilde on dismal fate of Little Nell in THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP: “It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at it.”

You Can’t Spell ‘Killarney’ Without ‘Kill’

You live a little, you learn a lot. Not only has it belatedly come to our attention here at CAP Towers (yep, all the elves finally straggled back from their summer sojourn to Santa Ponsa) that Atlantic Books are issuing a ‘Classic Crime’ series, and that said series includes Dickens’ BLEAK HOUSE, but they’ve also tossed us something of a curveball in Gerald Griffins’ THE COLLEGIANS, which is – apparently – a classic Irish crime fiction title, first published in 1829. Who knew? Apart from the folks at Atlantic, obviously. Quoth The Bookseller:

The series will begin on 1st November with a four-strong launch comprising Gerald Griffin’s thriller THE COLLEGIANS, Sapper’s detective novel BULLDOG DRUMMOND, RAFFLES by E W Hornung, and Charles Dickens’ BLEAK HOUSE, which Atlantic describes as “the first detective novel”.
  Thereafter, the publisher will launch a book every month—including titles by Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sheridan Le Fanu and G K Chesterton—until at least the end of 2009.

Nice. Meanwhile, here’s the blurb elves on THE COLLEGIANS:

This romantic melodrama set in rural Killarney in the early 19th century was based on a real case of 1829. Its impressive Irish locations, thrilling characters, complex plot involving love, rivalry, secrecy, betrayal, and impressive denouement made it into one of the most successful thrillers of its day. Recently home from college, young Hardess Cregan rescues poor but striking Eily O’Connor and her father from an unruly mob in the street, with the help of his hunchback foster-brother and sidekick, Danny Mann. Although he is courting his wealthy cousin, Anne Chute, he is smitten by Eily’s beauty. And to complicate matters further, his friend and fellow collegian, Kyrle, is also in love with Anne - and vying hard with him for her attentions. He secretly marries Eily, but her unsophisticated ways soon begin to anger him. And - arrogant and full of roguish self-confidence - when his mother starts to push him into the very advantageous marriage with Anne, he starts to reconsider his choices ... Married to one, engaged to another: can Hardess extricate himself from this impasse? It seems he’s trapped - until Danny suggests that perhaps if Eily were to ‘disappear’, his problems would be solved ...

  You just don’t get many hunchback foster-brother sidekicks to the pound these days, do you?

Crimes Against Crime Fiction # 2,102: The Daily Telegraph

The Daily Telegraph ran a feature on Saturday entitled ‘50 Crime Writers To Read Before You Die’, and we’re still not sure if we should laugh or cry. Yes, we’ve always had a sneaking fondness for GREAT EXPECTATIONS as a noir-ish tale – but Charles Dickens as a crime writer? Hmmmmm ... Happy days for The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman, who gets the following entry: “Any appearance by Bateman’s regular protagonist, journalist Dan Starkey, heralds the imminent death in amusing fashion of half the population of Belfast. Comic thrillers that are actually comic and thrilling.” Hurrah! Okay, now for the crying bit: the list of 50 does not – repeat not – include James M. Cain, Ross Macdonald, John D. McDonald, W.R. Burnett or Horace McCoy. Seriously. But it does – repeat, does – include Benjamin Black. Wot? Benny Blanco? ARE YOU FRICKIN’ KIDDING US?????