World Book Night: Free Books For The Asking

It’s World Book Night, as you may already be aware, and to get into the spirit of the occasion I’m going to send off a free e-book of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE or THE BIG O to anyone who asks.
  All you have to do is email me at dbrodb[at]gmail.com and indicate which book you’d prefer. Simple as that.
 I look forward to hearing from you …

UPDATE: Thanks very much to everyone who got in touch yesterday to request books, and also to those of you who got in touch with some very kind words indeed. I’m working my way through the backlog as you read: if you made a request and haven’t received your copy yet, rest assured that it will be with you very shortly.
  Normal service has now been resumed, and THE BIG O and EIGHTBALL BOOGIE are available again at $2.99 / £2.99.
  Thanks again, folks – that was a lot of fun.

Harry Rigby: The ‘Lost Get Back Boogie’ Years

I was ‘down home’, as we say, in Sligo last weekend, and went for a stroll on the shores of Lough Gill early on Sunday morning, which was where my good lady wife took the photograph above. It was incredibly still and peaceful, as the shot suggests, and it got me thinking about a ‘lost’ Harry Rigby novel, which is largely set around and on the lake.
  For those of you unfamiliar with Sligo’s geography, by the way, Lough Gill is about five miles from Sligo’s city centre; the Garavogue river empties out of Lough Gill and wends its leisurely way through Sligo and on out to the Atlantic.
  Anyway, I got back to Wicklow from Sligo and had a rummage through my old files, in search of the ‘lost’ Harry Rigby. And lo! It transpires that there are in fact three Harry Rigby novels gathering dust in the files, as well as a standalone thriller set in the Greek islands.
  The books were actually written when I was living in Sligo. I wrote EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, the first Harry Rigby story, while living in Dublin; when I heard it was going to be published, I thought it’d be no harm to take a little time off from the day job and write another book, to have it ready when (koff) publishing’s ravening hordes came kicking down my front door.
  And so, being single and with no great financial commitments, I took a year off and worked part-time as a teacher, and wrote a sequel to EIGHTBALL. It wasn’t published due to reasons far too boring to get into here, but by the time it wasn’t published I was two years into my sabbatical and writing like a demon. During that period I wrote the three Harry Rigby novels and the Greek islands thriller mentioned above, roughly 80% of what became ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, and all of THE BIG O. I also wrote a heap of short stories and about two drafts of a book I like to call THE GOD OF LIGHT AND MICE, which has since received three or four more drafts, and which will be my next writing project – if I can find the time.
  In the meantime, I’m sorely tempted to publish the Harry Rigby novels as e-books. I bought back the rights to EIGHTBALL BOOGIE a couple of years ago, and e-published that, and the other three books – well, they’re just lying around gathering dust. I’ve since written SLAUGHTER’S HOUND, a Harry Rigby novel published last year by the good people at Liberties Press, but the three unpublished stories are of a piece with EIGHTBALL and SLAUGHTER’S HOUND, and would work well as a series, I think.
  Given how well EIGHTBALL has done for me as an e-book, I have to say it’s the classic no-brainer. What that then means in terms of my future vis-à-vis the publishing industry, however, I have no idea.
  I think it might be fun to find out, though.

To Care Or Not To Care, That Is The Question

The most recent Amazon review for EIGHTBALL BOOGIE runs like this:

“Attempt at slick writing in the style of Mickey Spillane, doesn’t quite pull it off. Hope to see more sophisticated, streamlined writing in future. Shows promise but local research insufficient for subject matter.” (three stars) – Frances Heneghan

  10 things about that:
  1. I hadn’t read a single Mickey Spillane novel before writing EIGHTBALL, and I’ve only read two since, the second to confirm that my dislike of Mickey Spillane’s writing wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction.
  2. I too hope to see ‘more sophisticated, streamlined writing’ from myself in the future, providing a particular story requires it. If the story demands a more rough ‘n’ tumble approach, then that’s what it’ll get.
  3. The ‘local research’ for EIGHTBALL entailed living in the place where it’s set for over two decades. Maybe I should have spent three.
  4. Three stars feels about right for a debut novel that throws the proverbial kitchen sink at a Ray Chandler homage. On my bad days, of which there are many, this being one, three stars feels like it errs on the generous side.
  5. On my good days, of course, I wouldn’t care what anyone thinks about EIGHTBALL, positive or negative, because I’d be (a) writing something new or (b) basking in the glow of having written something new.
  6. Unfortunately, not caring is not a good thing, because every writer worth his or her salt writes for readers, hoping to fire their imaginations, emotions, reactions. Which makes writing a psychological high-wire act of sorts: you do care about what readers think of your stories, but you can’t afford to care too much or otherwise you’ll lose your balance and topple off. And there’s no safety net.
  7. This is a very odd and potentially destabilising way to live your life.
  8. Still, on a cold and blustery day like today, it beats shovelling wet cement on a building site.
  9. Or does it?
  10. God bless you, Frances Heneghan, for caring enough about books and reading to post a review to Amazon.

On First Novels And Kitchen Sinks

“It really shouldn’t work,” begins Karen Chisholm’s review of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE over at AustCrimeFiction, which sounds a tad ominous, and things aren’t improved much when Karen starts listing the ways in which EIGHTBALL and its protagonist, Harry Rigby, really shouldn’t, erm, work.
  Happily, Karen’s time wasn’t entirely wasted in reading the novel. To wit:

“It’s undoubtedly something to do with the crisp, sharp, pointy, sticky, dark, hilariously funny writing throughout the book … Sure the plot probably needed a tourist guide, a very good torch and maybe a cheat sheet, but I ... simply ... did ... not ... care. I loved the whole package and frankly, had a ball reading it.” - Karen Chisholm, AustCrimeFiction

  Which is very nice indeed. Books-wise, the last couple of months at Chez CAP have been largely taken up with BOOKS TO DIE FOR and SLAUGHTER’S HOUND (the sequel to EIGHTBALL BOOGIE), and you do tend to forget that you have other books out there, like children grown up and gone off to discover the world, and reviews like Karen’s function a little like postcards from a distant land, or the past, or somewhere they do things differently.
  At the Crime Night event at Tallaght’s recent Red Line Books Festival, I asked Niamh O’Connor if there was anything about her first book she’d like to change. She said no, and asked if I’d like to change anything about my first book, and I said yes, pretty much everything. As Karen Chisholm points out (very nicely) in her review, the characters in EIGHTBALL BOOGIE crunch their way through the story across the porcelain shards of what feels like a million metaphorical kitchen sinks, said sinks having been (metaphorically) thrown by yours truly in a desperate bid to keep the book interesting.
  In short, it’s a hyper-ventilating love-letter to the crime novel in general and those of Raymond Chandler in particular, although it’s probably fair to say that I took his tongue-in-cheek advice on what to do should the pace ever flag - have a man come the door with a gun in his hand - a little too seriously. And yet, for all its faults I love it still. The way you might love a child, keenly aware of the ways in which it isn’t perfect, but loving it all the more because of its imperfections rather than despite them.
  For a sample chapter or three from EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, please feel free to clickety-click here …