How NOT To Be A Writer

You may, if you’re an aspiring writer and you’ve perused the interweb for more than five seconds at a time, stumbled across a blog post titled, ‘How To Be A Writer’. There are variations on this theme, the bolder ones being titled, ‘How To Be A Successful Author’, but generally speaking the song remains the same: someone you’ve never heard of saying things like, ‘Work hard’ and ‘Don’t give up’ and ‘Try to marry someone who thinks you’re a genius but who doesn’t actually know a good book from an elephant’s left testicle’. And so on, and so forth.
  For some reason, you never come across posts about ‘How Not To Be A Writer’. Which is a little bit odd, really, because wanting to be a writer is a disease, a sickness, and most people (yours truly included, very probably) are never going to get well, aka make it as a successful author. Which means, in turn, that all these helpful bloggers are not unlike enablers in a perverse take on Alcoholics Anonymous (‘Be sure to drink booze every day’; ‘Set yourself a number of drinks, for example ten, and try to drink them all in one sitting, although don’t beat yourself up if you only manage nine.’).
  Funnily enough, very few of these posts about how to be a writer start off with (or mention at all) the need for some talent. ‘Before you begin your soul-shrivelling journey into oblivion, first ensure you have a flair for swilling martinis at 3pm in the afternoon, every afternoon. Your wife believing that you are a useless booze-hound simply isn’t enough.’
  Anyway, given that being a writer is a tough gig, but wanting to be a writer is that soul-shrivelling experience, and particularly if you lack talent, and that I’ve spent the last two decades embarked on such a journey, I hereby present for your delectation ‘Declan Burke’s How NOT To Be A Writer’ (© Declan Burke, 2012). To wit:

How NOT To Be A Writer

1) Read, read, read, read, read. And keep on reading. What’s the worst that could happen? An education?

2) Write every day. Especially on Twitter. Blogging helps too, and especially guest posts on other author’s blogs and unpaid self-promo gigs masquerading as op-eds in your local newspaper. If you’re of an ironic bent, you could specialise in ‘How To Be A Successful Author’ pieces.

3) Develop an obsession with honing your craft. An extreme example of this is Ernest Hemingway, who learned to write by typing out entire books by writers he admired. The trick here is to read back over these manuscripts once they’re typed up, accept that you’ll never in a million years do any better, acknowledge that there’s few enough trees in the Amazon rain forest anyway, and go read some Hemingway.

4) Express yourself. Many people turn to writing as a cathartic exercise, a means by which they can purge their inner demons. But why waste your time impressing complete strangers with your lunacy? It’s much more fun to allow your anger to build and build, then terrorise your nearest and dearest with irrational outbursts of (preferably inarticulate) rage.

5) Learn to delegate. Come up with story ideas and then hand them over to someone else to turn into a novel. If you’re very good at this, you’ll come up with the same story every single time. If James Patterson sues, great: you’ll be so busy fending off his lawyers you won’t have time to scribble so much as a Post-It note.

6) If at first you don’t succeed ... immediately accept that repeating the same action over and over again and getting the same result while expecting a different response is a kind of madness, albeit not a madness sufficiently interesting to be worth writing about. (see Number 4).

7) Shoot for the moon. Aim to be the next James Joyce, Mary Renault or Raymond Chandler, et al. If you’re useless, that should keep you locked away in a shed working on your first manuscript for at least forty years. If you’re halfway good, you’ll give up immediately. If you’re as brilliant as you think you are, you’ll pack it in after three pages, consumed by self-loathing at how close you came to stooping to compete with the likes of raggedy-ass Joyce, Renault and Chandler, et al.

8) Learn from the experts. Sign up to every creative writing programme in town. Literally. Not only will you be too busy attending classes to do any actual writing of your own, the conflicting advice offered by the internationally renowned, prize-winning and critically acclaimed authors hosting said programmes will melt your brain to the point where even your special brand of lunacy is left smouldering in the ashes.

9) Identify your target demographic. Don’t go writing any old tat in the hope people will find it interesting. Do some research and find out what it is people actually like to read (the NYT best-seller list may be of some use here), and then write that and publish it under the name of James Patterson. He’ll hardly notice one more, will he? And even if he sues, we’re back to Number 5 again.

10) Get a life. No, really. Make some friends, have a kid or two. Go for a walk. Play some ball. Travel the world, swim with the dolphins, stalk James Patterson. Start living first-hand rather than through the mirror darkly. What’s the worst that can happen? A life?

Flash! It May Save Every One Of Us …

I had a piece on flash fiction published in the Irish Times a couple of weeks ago, and the response to it was phenomenal. Not to my piece, per se, but to the fact that the Irish Times requested examples of flash fiction. In fact, so impressive was the response - in quality and quantity - that the Irish Times today publishes a selection of flash fiction, a feature that is to become a regular item in the newspaper. As far as I know, submission is open to all, regardless of where you’re from. First, the feature:

Flash fiction – very short, bite-sized stories – has become the favourite form of many writers. It’s succinct, punchy and effective – perfect for the online reader and perfectly in synch with the times, writes DECLAN BURKE

LESS HAS always been more in the writing of fiction, but “flash fiction” takes the concept to a whole new level. In essence, a flash fiction is a very short short story, the classic example being attributed to Ernest Hemingway: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
  “Flash fiction appeals because it gets right to the heart of human experience in just a few words,” says author Alison Wells. “Its brevity and condensed resonance make sure it lingers in the mind and heart. It has the power of a poem but with greater clarity and accessibility.”
  Nuala Ní Chonchúir is a novelist, poet and short-story writer. “Lovers of flash fiction, like poets, value brevity and the hit of surprise that flash often delivers,” she says. “A good flash story is intense, urgent and often a little explosive, but also deep and clear, so the effect on the reader is like that of a poem – as you read it you admire its concision and, afterwards, it lingers.” The format is quickly gaining credibility. The Dublin Review of Books , for example, announced Ní Chonchúir as the winner of its second annual flash fiction competition recently, securing her a prize of €1,000.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  For today’s samples of flash fiction in the Irish Times, clickety-click here …
  Anyone wishing to submit examples of their flash fiction should email them to flashfiction@irishtimes.com.

On Writing, Love And Quantum Physics

In the run-up to the publication of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, I’ve been offered some very nice opportunities to promote the book, and very grateful I am too. Unfortunately, some of those opportunities have come framed as requests for writing advice, and in particular advice for aspiring writers.
  The problem is actually twofold. One, I’m neither popular or successful enough to be in a position to give anyone advice. Secondly, I have no idea how I write.
  About all I know is that I generally get an idea for a book, as often as not from a setting. ‘Ooooh, this is a nice place, I’d like to write a book set here.’ Then along comes a character, or two, and once they’ve arrived you need to give them something to talk about it. After that, or so it seems to me, there’s an interminable amount of fiddling, scratching and progress stymied by excessive use of the backspace button, virtually all of which is subordinate to my sense of ‘feel’ for that story. And then there’s a book.
  Not much by way of advice, is it?
  Being the (occasionally) responsible type, I did try to write something that looked like advice to aspiring writers, but - as always - I got sidetracked into a number of tangents. The result comes below, but if you’re an aspiring writer, then I suggest you skip it and take the only solid piece of advice I’m in a position to give any writer: if you ever find yourself on a panel with Declan Hughes, read first or go home.
  And now, on with the show …

On Writing, Love And Quantum Physics

1. Writing is a lot like love and quantum physics. If you think you have the answer, you probably haven’t understood the question.

2. This is a good thing. It means there are no wrong or right answers to that question you probably haven’t understood.

3. This is because writing is largely a matter of ‘feel’.

4. The bad news is that this ‘feel’ is earned the hard way. Writing can no more be taught than love.

5. That said, love is its own teacher.

6. Which is to say, it’s a love of words in their best order that will drive you to master the basic components of grammar, syntax, punctuation, etc.

7. Learning how to bend and break those rules to suit your own particular need is what makes writing a matter of ‘feel’. And the better you get, the more it becomes about ‘feel’.

8. More bad news: there is no magic formula. Yes, there are tricks and cheats you can employ to fool the reader into believing you’re a competent writer. Ultimately, though, you’re cheating yourself.

9. Ernest Hemingway believed that a writer should have put in 10,000 hours writing before he or she is first published.

10. In one sense writing is a bit like physical exercise. You need to burn off the fat, boil off the toxins, before you get down to the solid muscle.

11. In a lot of ways, though, writing is a lot like love.

12. I’m talking about actual love, not romantic love. And neither am I talking about the unqualified love you give your children.

13. I mean a 10,000 hours kind of love. The way you love your wife, husband, intended or partner. The hard-earned love, the kind that remains and endures long after the tummy butterflies have gone to tummy butterfly heaven.

14. Just think about your most important non-child relationship for a moment. Every couple needs to master the basic grammar and syntax of relationships, and then go on to bend and break those rules for their own particular needs.

15. Every relationship, and on a daily basis, depends on both partners being capable of adapting to a whole range of very fluid elements, be they physical, emotional, psychological, etc.

16. Imagine, for a moment, that your partner comes home from work in a funk about who said what to who. Your attempt at empathy is rebuffed, and you say, ‘But honey, I said the exact same thing yesterday, and that made you happy.’

17. Start digging up bones, because you’re headed for the doghouse.

16. Ultimately, as with writing, love comes down to ‘feel’.

17. We can define ‘feel’ as instinct wrung from experience. It’s as simple and complicated as that, and about as easy to pin up over your desk.

18. More bad news. Call it instinct, intuition, hunch or ‘feel’: each time you apply it, you’ve about a 50% chance of being wrong.

19. Worse, you won’t always realise it straight away.

20. If you want to be a writer, get used to digging up bones.

21. Here’s where quantum physics comes into play, and particularly the Uncertainty Principle and Schrödinger’s Cat.

22. For the purpose of this tortured analogy, let’s pretend that words are the particles that churn through the chaotic maelstrom at the quantum level.

22. At the quantum level, and according to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, you can observe a particle’s position OR observe its direction and momentum. The more you focus on a particle’s position, the more fuzzy becomes its direction and / or momentum.

23. This principle, incidentally, can also be applied to your wife’s mood in the wake of a fractious water cooler incident.

24. In the thought experiment known as Schrödinger’s Cat, meanwhile, Schrödinger came up with a wheeze in which an unfortunate moggy is placed inside a box, and due to engineered circumstance is both dead AND alive while the experiment is ongoing, its fate to be revealed only once the box is opened.

25. When you’re immersed in a story, you’re hewing sense out of chaos. Actually, you’re creating something out of nothing, which is a whole different quantum theory, but for the sake of this argument we’ll agree that every writer begins with the most basic particles we have, the alphabet.

26. Every writer has access to those particles. How you assemble those particles in order to make sense from chaos, applying your unique ‘feel’, is what makes you a writer.

27. As to whether you’re a good writer, well, the cat in the box is both dead and alive. And you won’t know until you lift the lid.

28. It’s also true that you might not recognise a dead cat when you see one. A vivid imagination is a blessing but it can also be a curse, particularly when it’s so vivid that it imagines live cats where only dead cats be.

29. But here’s the kicker: this dead cat is your dead cat. And Schrödinger and Heisenberg may not have believed in God, but that cat is dead in a world you created out of nothing. And what’s the point of being God if you can’t indulge in a little resurrection once in a while?

30. I like to call this process ‘redrafting’. Think of it as loving the very same words in a different way, of adapting your ‘feel’.

31. It’s worth repeating that there’s no magic formula. There is hard work, and then more hard work; and if you work harder at it than you’ve ever worked at anything before, harder than you believed you could ever work, then there is the tantalising promise of magic and meaning.

32. It’s elusive, ephemeral and nebulous. But trying breaking love down into an algebraic equation, or discover love’s equivalent of the Higgs’ boson. You might even manage to do so. It won’t be much of a substitute for a good hug when your wife needs a bit of a cry just to flush out the system.

33. Yet more bad news. You’ll never know if you’re a good writer. Even if God Almighty taps you on the shoulder one morning, as you redraft a paragraph for the fortieth or four hundreth time, and says, ‘Y’know, that’s not bad.’

34. ‘Listen,’ you say, ‘no disrespect, but I’m busy. I think the cat might have a pulse.’

35. ‘No,’ He’ll say, ‘seriously, I’ve read a lot of stuff, and that’s pretty good, considering.’

36. And you’ll say, ‘By your standards, maybe.’

37. Depending on whether He’s the Old or New Testament God, the conversation could go either way after that.

38. Providing you haven’t been struck by actual lightning, though, you won’t hear any of it.

39. Because you’ll be listening to yourself. Wondering, always wondering, how your unique ‘feel’ might be best employed for the benefit of others. The truth of writing is the truth of love.

40. As for what’s going on down there at the quantum level, well, who cares so long as it all works up here?

Burke On Burke; Or, Why Some Writers Are Too Good To Read

Many, many moons ago, when I was still young enough to read without prejudice or expectation, I picked up a book called ‘The James Lee Burke Collection’. I was poor then, or a little poorer than I am now, and three novels in one book represented value for money that was impossible to resist, especially as I was browsing in a second-hand bookstore at the time. The collection comprised TO THE BRIGHT AND SHINING SUN, LAY DOWN MY SWORD AND SHIELD, and THE LOST GET-BACK BOOGIE.
  If you’re a James Lee Burke fan, you don’t need me to tell you that the collection, even if I’d paid a hundred quid for it, would have been good value for money. Even the cover was fabulous, featuring a moody, sepia-toned black-and-white shot of a wrecked and gun-shot car abandoned on desert flats, a dark and stormy sky brewing overhead. As for the novels themselves, well, you could have substituted the car on the cover for any of the protagonists. Men gnarled and worn down, sand-blasted by lives lived too hard on the edge of nowhere. When I think of those novels now I think of Cormac McCarthy’s border trilogy, of Richard Ford’s THE ULTIMATE GOOD LUCK, of Raymond Carver and Hemingway’s TRUE AT FIRST LIGHT.
  That’s not to suggest that James Lee Burke is a writer on a par with literary giants such as McCarthy, Carver, Ford and Hemingway, or trying to sneak Burke, who is marketed as a crime writer, into the literary pantheon through the back door. I’m saying, definitively and brooking no argument, that James Lee Burke writes novels so good that he’s entitled to have the likes of McCarthy, Carver et al compared (favourably) to James Lee Burke, and I can only pity anyone who is so blinkered as to be blind to that fact.
  The first time I walked into a bookstore after EIGHTBALL BOOGIE was published (a fine emporium in Galway called Charlie Byrne’s, as it happens), said tome was nestling on the shelf beside those of James Lee Burke. Even at the time, high on the improbability of it all, I didn’t kid myself that EIGHTBALL deserved to be in the same shop, let alone on the same shelf; still, it was nice to see it there, if only for the incongruity. Even now, looking at the copy of The James Lee Burke Collection I’ve fished down off the shelf, I’m getting a shiver of anticipation at re-reading those novels yet again at some distant point in the future.
  So how come I’ve never read a Dave Robicheaux novel? Well, it’s complicated. Partly it’s to do with the sheer volume of Robicheaux novels (18 at the last count) and no longer having the kind of reading time that would allow me dive in with THE NEON RAIN and work my way forward; but mainly it’s because the writer part of my brain (tender, fragile, endlessly prone to self-doubt) understands that repeated exposure to James Lee Burke does very little to promote confidence in a writer. To read one great novel is one thing, and there are few pleasures to beat accidentally stumbling across a terrific novel; and nothing pleases me more, when I do discover a great novel, than to be in a position to trumpet the good news from the rooftops. But to willingly subject myself to repeated excellence such as James Lee Burke offers? At least Cormac McCarthy has the good grace to publish a novel only once every five or six years, or more; and Hemingway and Carver had the good grace to die, and so on; but Burke does it year after year after year.
  I do look forward to that distant point in the future, when the kids are reared and my fortune made, and I’m sitting on the balcony of my pension on a remote Greek island, a pomegranate sun sinking into the bottle-green sea, and reaching up to the bookshelf for THE NEON RAIN. Until then, though, I think James Lee Burke will have to wait, even if the signed copy of THE GLASS RAINBOW I received from Irish crime fiction’s most dedicated friend, Noo Yoik’s Joe Long, sits temptingly on a shelf within easy reach …
  All of which is a roundabout way of pointing you towards a rather fine piece the Dark Lord John Connolly published at his interweb lair, which is the introduction he wrote to a new and limited edition of THE GLASS RAINBOW published by Scorpion Press. To wit:

“For many of my generation of mystery writers, James Lee Burke is the greatest living author in our field, and one of the most accomplished literary stylists in modern American letters. For better or worse, I would not be writing without his influence, and all that I have written, I have written in his shadow. To borrow a phrase used by Jack Nicholson of Marlon Brando: “When he dies, everybody else moves up one.”
  “Burke’s preeminence is due, in no small part, to the manner in which he came to the mystery novel. Before publishing, in 1987, The Neon Rain, the first book to feature the recurring character of Dave Robicheaux, he had read little in the genre, the work of Raymond Chandler and James Crumley apart, so he approached the task of writing a mystery largely freed from any obligation to the perceived requisites. The books that have emerged in the decades since are, in a sense, only incidentally mysteries: they are, first and foremost, literate, literary, socially engaged novels. To read them is to encounter a great novelist applying his gifts to a sometimes underrated form, reinventing and reinvigorating it by his presence …”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Origins: Tony Black

Being the latest in what will probably be yet another short-lived series, in which yours truly reclines on a hammock by the pool with a jeroboam of Elf-Wonking Juice™ and lets a proper writer talk about the origins of his or her characters and stories. This week: Tony Black, author of the Gus Dury series.

“Back in the day, when I was still pounding the streets, notebook in hand and hangover hovering after a hard-night’s ‘hackwork’ (reviewing nightclubs for a Scottish tabloid) I had a thought: what the fuck can I really say about another club? More lights … a less sticky carpet? Something had to give.
  “The night before, I’d been taken to the basement of a club in Glasgow,
introduced to a man in a Camel-coloured overcoat – and yes, his hair was slicked back too, clichés exist in the real world as well – who told me what he wanted to read in my review. He’d even gone to the trouble of making me a list that included a mention for his DJ son, Flava-Dave, (that might not have been his actual name).
  “A week before, I’d been treated to a display of roundhouses, foot-sweeps and power punching – though thankfully not to my person – by another club owner, who, when done with his display, placed a firm hand on my shoulder and said: “I know where you live.”
  “The job was becoming a chore. Even with the top-offs – the Nationals paid well for those then – about rival club owners dousing dance-floors in paraffin in the middle of the night, or standing over their own cashiers with bouncers in balaclavas, didn’t compensate. I jumped ship.
  “Call it reactionary, but I went from the Scottish club scene to covering the courts for another daily newspaper. On my first day, fumbling about for the press box in a funky open-plan courtroom, I managed to sit myself down in the dock. The fiscal quickly sorted me out: “Don’t let the Beak catch you in there, he’ll do you for contempt.” I should have seen it as a sign.
  “I spent a year or two watching a succession of overfed, tweedy arsewipes lording it over society’s misfortunates – single mothers who hadn’t been able to pay the rent, ex-service men who couldn’t get a handle on civvy street, bored scheemie teens, cadaverous addicts … the list was endless. The justice, swift.
  “By this stage, I’d become a fully-paid up cynical hack. I didn’t need a stint covering the newly-formed Scottish Parliament, or should I say the shiny-arsed careerists that filled it, to tell me there was something rotten in Denmark … or another small Northern European country. Life was looking very Noir to me.
  “I’d been invited to a press call, a Minister for something-or-other, was giving a speech and being a hack my job was to ask a few questions and get a story that wasn’t the manufactured media release. I stood outside the venue in the biting cold, waiting for the limo to show. When it did, the Minister was quickly ushered inside without so much as a nod to the assembled. His speech lasted less than a minute, then he was off, racing for the door. I tried to waylay him as he left but as I produced my Dictaphone I was quickly surrounded by men in black. Another three Dictaphones appeared over my shoulder as I spoke.
  “I never got my story. What I did get was knots in my stomach, a bollicking from my boss, and a desire to expose the hypocrisy. When I got home that night, Gus Dury was born. I replayed the scene I’d just been through with the Minister and put Dury in my boots – he handled it differently – swinging for the flunkies and landing a flying headbutt on the Minister. The scene survives in PAYING FOR IT, my first novel featuring Gus Dury.
  “What influences an author to draw a character in a certain way is not always clear; unconscious motivation comes into play and any dissection of the origins of a character or a book, especially when recounted by the author, must be questionable. But I do know for sure I wanted to make Dury a failed hack. I wanted to use my experiences, and expand on them, to produce a deeply cynical protagonist who had fallen so low that he didn’t much care about the next bend in the road.
  “Four books later, the journey has been a bit of a vertical fall for Dury, but the latest in the series, LONG TIME DEAD, shows he is starting to turn things around. The cynicism is still there, the anger and desire for justice too, but there is only so much bullshit one man can take. As Hemingway said, ‘The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places.’” - Tony Black

  Tony Black’s LONG TIME DEAD is published by Preface Publishing.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND by Ed O’Loughlin

To mark Ed O’Loughlin’s terrific achievement in being long-listed for the Booker Prize with his debut novel, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, here’s purple prose-tinged excerpt from yours truly’s review from earlier this year:

‘Has anyone seen the other half of this baby?’ he asked. ‘We mustn’t count it twice.’
  It’s a moment to make even the most hardened reader of gory novels wince, but O’Loughlin is not in the business of sensationalism. Simmons bears witness to what seems at times a daily litany of tragedy, but does so in a clipped, understated fashion. The novel has been compared with the works of V.S. Naipaul and Graham Greene, but there’s a measure of Ernest Hemingway here too. The prose is muscular and delicate, the mark of a writer who knows his own strength and is sure of his aim. In the chaos of a jungle fire-fight, ambushed by the latest in an interminable series of half-naked rebel forces, Simmons observes a jeep make “a slow and sedate turn towards us, part-sheltered by the hulk of the armoured car … its indicator piously winking.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here.
  For a Q&A with the man, clickety-click here.

No GUTTED, No Glory

CAP’s good friend Tony Black (right) has a new novel coming your way, GUTTED being the follow-up to PAYING FOR IT, and featuring the reluctant PI Gus Dury. “Maybe the best novel I’ve read all year … A stunning piece of work,” says Allan Guthrie, no slouch himself when it comes to penning stunning novels. And agent-type representing of Declan Burke, for that matter. Anyway, seeing as how he has already filled in the standard Q&A, we fired a few fresh Qs at Tony. To wit:

You’ve a new novel coming, called GUTTED. Tell us a little about it and its protagonist, Gus Dury.
“GUTTED kicks off with Gus staking out badger baiters on Edinburgh’s Corstorphine Hill and after a bit of a pagger with the local young crew, who are torturing a dog, he finds himself tripping over the gutted (see what I did there!) corpse of a known villain. Gus is mad enough to hang about and call plod, who turn up and promptly put him in the frame.
  “The real fun ensues, though, when Gus finds the investigating officer is dating his ex-wife, Debs, and that fifty grand belonging to city ganglord Rab Hart has been snatched from the corpse. Roll on corruption, casual violence and a stack of characters so unsavoury they make the first book look like an episode of Chuckle Vision.”

What was the one thing you learned about writing and publishing PAYING FOR IT that helped most when you came to GUTTED?
  “To try and enjoy it. Seriously I got myself so stressed out with the first one that I forgot about how frickin’ hard I’d tried to get published. I made a conscious decision not to do that this time round, so I’m way more laid back … enjoying the ride. I’ve spoken to a few writers about seeing their first novel published and to a one, none have enjoyed the process first time round - it’s just too nerve wracking.”

What is it about Gus Dury that you, as a writer, find so compelling? And, for the uninitiated reader, what sets him apart as a reluctant PI?
  “Good question. I’ve never really examined it that closely and I’m a bit reluctant to try in case some of the magic rubs off … y’know, like I’ll understand him and lose all fascination. But, to try and answer the question, I guess there’s something in the fact that he’s an escapist figure; he’s a hardcore alky, a man who sorts his problems with his fists, he just doesn’t give a shit.
  “What sets Gus apart is, and again I’m guessing because really it’s not for me to say, but I think he’s a man that’s fallen so low, who’s so completely wrecked himself, that there’s a certain curiosity to see what keeps him putting his boots on in the morning.”

The decision to set the novels in Edinburgh – not taken lightly, I presume, given the shadow cast by Ian Rankin?
  “Well, there was never going to be anywhere else to set them, I’m from Edinburgh and the character of Gus is so closely associated with the city that he wouldn’t be the same man elsewhere.
  “Every writer brings something different to the work so my Edinburgh isn’t going to be Ian Rankin’s or Irvine Welsh’s, or Muriel Spark’s for that matter … but I hear what you’re saying, Dec, and the honest answer is that if I looked at the sheer quantity and unbelievable quality of writing that’s come from this place I’d never open the laptop.”

Ken Bruen has been loud in his praise, and PAYING FOR IT was compared with the work of Ian Rankin, Simon Kernick and Mark Billingham. Did you feel any pressure to match that standard when it came to the ‘difficult second novel’?
  “God, isn’t Guv’nor Bruen a true saint of a man … I can absolutely die happy tomorrow knowing what Ken’s said about my work. As far as I’m concerned he’s the best there is. Bar none. To get his praise, to get any praise, as a new novelist is a surreal experience.
  “The pressure was there alright with GUTTED, from the get-go. I was told that there’d be folk queuing up to give me a kicking if the second book wasn’t as good as the first. Thankfully I’m never satisfied with anything I do so am constantly finding fault and looking to improve on what I‘ve just done. It was another shock when folk started to get excited about GUTTED, but, God, I’ve just delivered the third, called LOSS, and they thought that was better yet … I keep expecting to get a call saying, ‘Hahahaha, we were joking you actually totally suck!’”

Who are the writers who got you writing? Is there one novel you can pinpoint as the novel that exploded the flashbulb above your head, and got you saying, “I can do that!”?
  “The first book I can remember reading and being utterly transported by was Twain’s ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN … I must have been about eight or so, I was really captured by the adventure of it all. Same happened with Stevenson’s TREASURE ISLAND a bit later.
  “The first time I started seriously to think about writing though, was after reading Hemingway’s A FAREWELL TO ARMS, must have been eighteen then and was blown away by what writing could do. In terms of the crime stuff, that was Bruen’s RILKE ON BLACK … the style and the sheer force of the storytelling dazzled me.”

Is Gus Dury going to be around for the long haul? Do you plan and plot books ahead, or how does a character and story unfold for you as you’re writing?
  “Gus is there for a wee while yet, I’ve got a four-book deal and although I might do some standalones in there I do have a fourth episode for Gus all mapped out. I don’t look much further ahead than the next book, I’m in awe of these writers who can envisage a grand arc covering several books. Couldn’t manage that. So, yeah, I take a loose idea and try to add layers as I go along, then rewrite and rewrite again.”

You work as a journalist. Do you find being a journalist a help or a hindrance when it comes to writing fiction?
  “Well, there’s advantages and disadvantages - Hemingway said hackwork was good for a writer as long as they got out soon enough and I think I know what he meant. I still do bits and pieces here and there but I couldn’t still do a full-time reporter’s job and write around it … I did that for about six or seven years before I got a deal and it was too much. But, the discipline of putting down words that journalism teaches you, as you know yourself, is useful. I’ve never heard a hack griping about writer’s block or a lack of inspiration … the muse doesn’t write daily newspapers!”

Why do you think so many journalists take up writing crime fiction?
  “The game’s gone to balls … Christalmighty, when PR starts to look like a better option, journalism has hit the skids. Crime fiction’s a far better gig than Macy Ds, I suppose.”

Finally, what are the future plans? Are there more Gus Dury books in the works?
  “Well, LOSS is out around February 2010, and after that there might be a standalone I’ve been working on, or the other Dury novel which I’ve got planned out … I’m not looking much further ahead than that. To be honest, this whole writing gig’s such a tough nut to crack, and believe me there was years when I thought I’d never get an in, that just to be able to say I’m published is still a bit unreal.”

Tony Black’s GUTTED is available now.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: FIFTY GRAND by Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND is officially on sale today, and if that’s not enough to send you into dizzy paroxysms of delight, then it suggests you haven’t encountered Adrian McKinty’s unique stylings before. It also means you’re in for a rare treat when you do read FIFTY GRAND, because it’s a terrific novel from a writer who isn’t just a superb wordsmith, he’s a man with important things to say about this world of ours. Trust me on this: FIFTY GRAND is already one of the Top Five Crime Novels of 2009. Peace, out.

Taking its title from a Hemingway short story, Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND opens in Cuba before moving on, via Mexico, to Colorado, as a Cuban cop, Hernandez, goes illegally undercover in the US to investigate her father’s death. The Hemingway homage is a brave one, inviting ridicule and accusations of hubris, but McKinty has long been purveying a blend of muscular lyricism in which collide the brutalities of the crime novel and a knowing, self-effacing literary style.
  His sixth novel for adults (he also writes the ‘Lighthouse’ series for children), FIFTY GRAND offers a challenging conceit, which is to put the tough, spare rhythms associated with classic hard-boiled novels (think Hemingway himself, James Ellroy, James Cain) into the mind of a first-person female protagonist. The result is an incendiary, adrenalin-fuelled thriller, but one that also functions as a blackly hilarious social satire of the skewed values of pre-Obama America, as Hernandez, in the role of exploited illegal immigrant, infiltrates the glitzy world of Colorado’s ski-resort set, cleaning up the mess left behind by Hollywood‘s jet-set.
  Most successful of all, however, is McKinty’s ability to slip inside Hernandez’s skin. The undercover Hernandez is thrown back on her own resources as she investigates her father’s death and brings those responsible to a very particular kind of justice, without recourse to conventional resources. As vulnerable as she is tough, as scared as she is determined, as fragile as she is lethal, she makes for a highly unusual, creepily authentic and utterly compelling anti-heroine.

  This review was first published in the Sunday Independent

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND by Ed O’Loughlin

When his newspaper editor dies, a photograph in one of the man’s personal folders sets Owen Simmons, the Dublin-based narrator of NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, reminiscing about his time as a correspondent in Africa, when he reported from South Africa, Zaire and Sierra Leone, among other hot-spots. One of a loose grouping of correspondents and photographers who roamed the continent in pursuit of the latest war, atrocity or military coup, Simmons has the detached tone and sharp eye for detail of a good journalist, even when writing about Beatrice, the photographer he falls for with despite his professional and personal cynicism.
  Ed O’Loughlin reported on Africa for eight years as a correspondent for ‘The Irish Times’, and here his debut fiction rings with a rare authenticity. As they pick their way through a rat-infested refugee camp massacre in search of ‘colour’ for their feature stories, for example, one of the journalists calls out to his colleagues. “‘Has anyone seen the other half of this baby?’ he asked. ‘We mustn’t count it twice.’”
  It’s a moment to make even the most hardened reader of gory novels wince, but O’Loughlin is not in the business of sensationalism. Simmons bears witness to what seems at times a daily litany of tragedy, but does so in a clipped, understated fashion. The novel has been compared with the works of V.S. Naipaul and Graham Greene, but there’s a measure of Ernest Hemingway here too. The prose is muscular and delicate, the mark of a writer who knows his own strength and is sure of his aim. In the chaos of a jungle fire-fight, ambushed by the latest in an interminable series of half-naked rebel forces, Simmons observes a jeep make “a slow and sedate turn towards us, part-sheltered by the hulk of the armoured car … its indicator piously winking.” Later, at a conference in Durban, he observes: “By the time I’d finished reading, the tide in the foyer had receded, stranding little pools of gossipers and the odd scuttling newcomer.”
  O’Loughlin, who has also reported on the Middle East, might have been expected to write a political treatise disguised as a novel. But while there is at one point a brilliantly sustained piece of ice-cold vitriol directed at the professional charity operatives, who “spend years dodging from one short-term contract to the next, chasing the funds as compassion flits from disaster to disaster”, the novel is almost perversely blinkered in the way it follows the fortunes of its characters without ever stepping back from the fray to make grand statements about the whys and wherefores of the conditions and situations they find themselves in. The journalists are there to dispassionately observe and report back to the outside world, and Simmons mimics their apparently callous tones as he records for the reader their words and deeds, very few of which derive from philanthropic or ideological motives.
  In another writer’s hands, the tale of last-minute evacuations, jungle ambushes, flights into and out of cities on the brink of fall or liberation, and discreet but passionate affairs, would have resulted in a full-tilt sprint delivered in breathless prose. Instead, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND offers a meandering and at times deliberately obtuse narrative, one that shuffles and weaves, moving to an odd but quickly addictive rhythm. So much so, in fact, that it’s tempting to believe that O’Loughlin has composed the story in a style that conjures up outsiders’ perceptions of, and prejudices about, Africa. Certainly, having referenced the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, in which Muhammad Ali outfoxed George Foreman in Kinshasa by spreading himself on the ropes and absorbing inhuman levels of punishment before landing a killer blow, O’Loughlin provides a final twist that reveals his tale, and Simmons’ cynical posturing, to be a literary version of Ali’s legendary ‘rope-a-dope’ trick.
  Laced with the blackest of humour, studded with glints of hard-edged poetry, and underpinned by a poisonously cynical mindset that is as repulsive as it is compelling, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND is one of the most powerful debut Irish novels of the last decade.

This review first appeared in the Sunday Business Post

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Robert Wilson

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
THE LONG GOODBYE by Raymond Chandler.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Harry Morgan in Hemingway’s TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (esp the film version, where he gets taught how to whistle by Lauren Bacall: ‘You just put your lips together and blow.’

What do you read for guilty pleasures?
Hello magazine at the dentist, even though I don’t know who anybody is any more.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Writing the journals of Francisco Falcón for THE BLIND MAN OF SEVILLE.

The best Irish crime novel is…?
THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE by John Banville.

Which Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
ASYLUM by Patrick McGrath (or has it been done and nobody told me?)

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst thing about being a writer: the loneliness. Best thing about being a writer: the solitary nature of the work.

The pitch for your next book is …?
My pitch for THE IGNORANCE OF BLOOD is: El ultimo Falcón: Russian mafiosi and Islamist terrorists find inventive ways to make people dance to their tune in the sweltering heat of Seville.

Who are you reading right now?
Fiction: THE WHITE TIGER by Aravind Adiga. Non-fiction: DREAMS FROM MY FATHER by Barack Obama.

God appears and says you can only write or read. Which would it be?
Read. Who could resist a life of pleasure rather than endless dissatisfaction?

The three best words to describe your writing are ...?
Descriptive. Complex. Demanding.

Robert Wilson’s THE IGNORANCE OF BLOOD is available now

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Kevin Lewis

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
THE LADY IN THE LAKE by Raymond Chandler and TIGER IN THE SMOKE by Margery Allingham.
What fictional character would you most like to have been?
It’s not crime but definitely Indiana Jones.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Viz.
Most satisfying writing moment?
Finishing my first crime novel, KAITLYN.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
THE KILLING OF THE TINKERS by Ken Bruen.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE KILLING OF THE TINKERS.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst – the loneliness. Best – Seeing my work in book form ready for the readers.
The pitch for your next book is …?
I wanted to keep writing about what I know best – the sprawling and nasty urban estates, the crime and brutality of the gangs and the harsher realities of London life. My new novel, FALLEN ANGEL is the first novel in a new series featuring DI Stacey Collins – a single mum in her 30s, and a gritty hard-nosed detective in the Metropolitan Police.
Who are you reading right now?
A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway.
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write, because then I can read what I’ve written.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Fast. Paced. Thrillers.

Kevin Lewis’ FALLEN ANGEL is published by Penguin Books

The Thieves’ Journal*

Shawn Patrick Bagley (right) tags the Grand Vizier for a project Patti Abbott is working on called Fridays: The Book You Have to Read, the gist of which is to refresh people’s memories about great books that might have slipped off the radar. Quoth Patti:

“I’m worried that we are letting some great books of the recent past slide out of print and out of our consciousness. Not the first-tier classics we can all name perhaps, but that group of books that comes next.”

Sounds just about jake to us. The Grand Vizier’s choice? Edward Anderson’s Depression-era classic, THIEVES LIKE US. To wit:

“They steal …”

According to Raymond Chandler, THIEVES LIKE US (1937) is “one of the great forgotten novels of the ’30s”. Given that Edward Anderson published only one other novel (HUNGRY MEN, in 1935), and that Anderson garners little more than a footnote in the margins of American literature, it is perhaps unsurprising that THIEVES LIKE US has been consigned to the dustbin of history.
  Taking its cue from the social realism of John Steinbeck’s dustbowl sagas, and utilising the spare, hard-boiled rhythms of Ernest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammet, THIEVES LIKE US represents a literary masterclass in social critique. Anderson took to the road to research his debut novel, HUNGRY MEN, which chronicled the plight of the transients and hobos who travelled the trains during the Depression of the `30s; his experience had not noticeably diminished his compassion for a disenfranchised, alienated underclass by the time he came to write THIEVES LIKE US.
  HUNGRY MEN won the Doubleday Story prize in 1935; Anderson used the prize money to travel to Texas, where he interviewed his cousin, then a convicted bank robber serving time in Huntsville State Penitentiary. Taking the contemporary exploits of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker as his starting point, the author recounted the exploits of the young jail-breaker Bowie and his lover Keechie as they twist and turn in a desperate, doomed attempt to escape the law, their criminal background, and the eventually lethal suspicions of society at large.
  America had suffered economic deprivation on the scale of the Depression-era ’30s before, most notably in the 1870s and the 1890s. What made the depression of the ’30s different was the mobility of the ravaged underclass; when the communist authorities in the USSR sanctioned the screening of John Ford’s THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1940), in order to demonstrate the folly of capitalism, it had to be withdrawn again when the proletariat marvelled at how even the most deprived of the American poor could afford to drive cars.
  Bowie and Keechie’s battle to establish a life worth living was not a new story to proletarian America, but their cross-country flight and dogged determination to stay one step ahead of the law suggested that – in theory at least – it was possible to escape the ties that bind. The Promised Land beckoned, and all a man and a woman needed was a tank full of gas and one even break …

* With abject apologies to Jean Genet

New Hope For The Dead

With his acclaimed ‘Dead’ trilogy now complete, where to now for one of crime fiction’s most thoughtful practitioners, Adrian McKinty? Eh? EH?

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for Michael Forsythe. Released in mass-market paperback in December, THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD (first published in March 2007; to be released in pback on June 12) sounded the death knell for Adrian McKinty’s ‘Dead’ trilogy, which began in 2003 with DEAD I WELL MAY BE.
  For the most part concerned with the indestructible Forsythe’s run-ins with the Irish mob in America, the trilogy offers an irresistible blend of the thriller genre’s traditional hi-octane action and quip-happy protagonist, albeit filtered through the mind of an unusually cerebral and literary-minded thug. Bloomsday, of course, is celebrated on June 16, the day on which James Joyce’s ULYSSES is set. THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD, which gently riffs on ULYSSES throughout, finds Michael Forsythe back on Irish soil for the first time in over a decade, with outstanding accounts due to be settled in blood.
  Born and raised in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, McKinty today lives in Colorado, married with a young family and writing very much in the American idiom.
  DB: Does it make any sense for Irish readers to claim you as an Irish crime writer?
  AMcK: “Yeah, that’s interesting isn’t it. My models were all American writers from the ’30s, Chandler, Hammett, James Cain, and later Jim Thompson, but the world I grew up in, Carrickfergus in the ’70s and ’80s, is so rich with incident and detail that I think every book I write has a bit of that in it. I remember the Hunger Strikes and [the] Enniskillen and Omagh [bombings] like they were yesterday, and the Ulster vernacular and black humour has fortunately dripped deep into my soul. Every time an editor asks me to remove the words craic, sheugh, shite and eggy, I know I’m still operating from an Irish standpoint.”
  DB: Why are Irish crime fiction writers starting to pop up now, all of a sudden?
  AMcK: “It’s the economy and the culture, I think. Crime fiction thrives in an urban environment and expanding economies. Greed, money, power, betrayal – these are all touchstones – some would say clichés – of the genre. Ireland was largely stagnant economically from 1945 to1990 and only in the last decade have we had all of these juicy tropes working so well.”
  Ken Bruen and John Connolly are long established as favourites with the American reading public, but both established their reputations by setting their novels in London and Maine, respectively. Adrian McKinty, despite setting his novels in the United States (with occasional jaunts to Central and South America), is one of a new breed of Irish crime writers (which he dubs, half-seriously, ‘the Celtic New Wave’) that includes Brian McGilloway, Gene Kerrigan, Tana French and Declan Hughes.
  DB: Did you have a sense of yourself as a pioneer when setting out to write DEAD I WELL MAY BE?
  AMcK: “No, Ken Bruen (right) was first. But I did think that Ireland was ready for this genre. Ireland punches above its weight in terms of literary culture and the fact that crime fiction was almost non-existent was a vacuum that needed to be filled. For years people thought of Ireland as a cross between ‘The Quiet Man’ and DUBLINERS. Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon etc. are geniuses, but they didn’t help give us a real picture of a country that is increasingly urban, diverse, young and exciting. Crime writers under forty are in touch with a culture and a society that the older generation, frankly, isn’t.”
  DB: Michael Forsythe, on the other hand, is a veritable treasure chest of pop-culture references, asides and in-jokes, and it seemed like he could keep going indefinitely. What was the thinking behind ending the ‘Dead’ series?
  AMcK: “I never wanted to do a series. It was 50/50 that I would kill Michael at the end of book one, and 60/40 that I would kill him at the end of book three. In fact, if the trilogy ever gets brought together in one volume, I think as an appendix I’ll give the alternative endings for books one and three. I don’t like characters that live in this world and somehow survive everything that’s thrown at them. Most of the hoods I grew up with in North Belfast are either in prison, on parole (i.e. retired) or dead. Fictional characters who take hit after hit in book after book and don’t have nervous breakdowns are hard to take, so Michael either had to die or I had to stop writing about him, or both.”
  DB: How did it feel to wave him goodbye?
  AMcK: “I was depressed. I knew I could do a couple more things with him. I lived in the East End of London for a year and I would have loved to have brought Michael into that environment. I even had a title picked out, ENGLAND, YOUR ENGLAND, which is a riff on that Orwell essay about nuns cycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist. But on reflection I knew I couldn’t sustain my interest in the concept for a whole book. So I suppose ultimately it was relief that I was done with him.”
  DB: Is that how the process starts, with a setting? Or is it a face, a name, an incident – what?
  AMcK: “With DEAD I WELL MAY BE, THE DEAD YARD and THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD, I wrote the last chapter first and worked backwards. I knew the place I wanted to end up and I just had to get there.”
  DB: THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD is the most overt example, but your novels are littered with literary references. How do you respond to the notion that the vast majority of crime fiction is deliberately, and unnecessarily, dumbed down?
  AMcK: “There’s no reason to dumb down anything, especially in Ireland, where people read a lot. I had an editor at Simon & Schuster who always said that we should write for the lowest common denominator, eliminating words and references that the ordinary Joe wouldn’t get. I’ve never understood that. If you miss a reference you generally just skip it and move on, or if you’re curious you look it up. If the LCD rule were true, no one would read Thomas Pynchon and he’s a bestseller.”
  DB: What are the best and worst aspects of writing crime fiction?
  AMcK: “The downside is that you usually always have to kill someone. I’d really like to do a crime book where no one dies. I used to play [the computer games] ‘Halo’ and ‘Doom’ and attempt to get through the levels just by running past the bad guys without killing anyone. It was fun. And I like that French movie ‘Pickpocket’, where no one dies, but it’s still a very tense and exciting movie. And the best aspect of crime writing? You get to kill people! It’s great.”
  DB: Everyone writes with an invisible presence peering over their shoulder at the page. Who’s looking over Adrian McKinty’s shoulder?
  AMcK: “I suppose it would be the Platonic ideal version of myself, a more hardworking, dedicated me urging me on.”
  DB: Who’s the one person, dead or alive, you’d like to ring up and say, “Man, I just read your new book and it’s a hell of a read”?
  AMcK: “There’s a lot. I’d love to call up Jim Thompson and say, “Jim, don’t listen to the critics, or your publishers, or your wife, you’re bloody brilliant.” I’d tell Scott Fitzgerald “Lay off the booze, mate. Fifty years from now all those bestseller types are going to be forgotten but you are going to be more famous than ever.” I just read a book about Cuba that blew my mind, by Reinaldo Arenas, but unfortunately he died of AIDS a few years ago, I would love to have met him. Still alive – if they’d take my call, I’d ring Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie and Ken Bruen.”
  DB: Is there any one book you can remember reading in your youth and thinking, “Yeah, I’d like to be a writer”? Or was it a more gradual process?
  “No, it was much more a gradual process, although Chandler and Hemmingway did get me very excited about the possibilities of fiction.”
  DB: Okay, then – pretend for one moment that you have to be another writer, and assume responsibility for his or her canon of work. Who would it be, and why?
  AMcK: “Cormac McCarthy (right) is such a bad ass. He’s followed his own rules, virtually invented his own genre and especially in his early Tennessee work he showed us a whole rich, complex world of Irish rednecks living in the mountains – people the rest of the US look at with contempt. I like his Texas stuff too, and although I wouldn’t want to appropriate his entire canon, if someday I could write a book half as good as BLOOD MERIDIAN I’d die a happy man. Last year he went on Oprah, which took the edge off his hipness for me, but I think I can blank that from my mind.”
  DB: You teach to earn a living, which – given that you have a young family – very probably involves huge sacrifice on your and their behalf. What are the moments when you feel that that sacrifice is worth it?
  AMcK: “Working for a living and hanging out with the kids when I get back home means that I basically have to write at night. It’s a drag but when I think of Faulkner shovelling coal in a power station or Henry Miller picking cigarette butts off the ground, I realise that I’ve actually got it pretty easy.”
  DB: Ever wonder what your kids will think if they ever read your books?
  AMcK: “Oh my God, the kids are barred from even looking at the covers for at least ten years. Torture, murder and violent death won’t be good for anyone’s sleep.”
  DB: Does a writer have any responsibility regarding the morality (or otherwise) of his or her characters?
  AMcK: “No. As Sam Goldywn said, if you want to send a message, get Western Union. Oscar Wilde demolished the idea that art has to be moral or uplifting. It doesn’t, it just has to be good. I’m much more offended by bad writing than by characters who do bad things. I’m also offended by poor fact-checking. THE DA VINCI CODE is a great example of both problems: ‘He entered Westminster Abbey, a church redolent with history including the marriage of Lady Diana and Prince Charles.’”
  DB: Picture the scenario: a publisher introduces a series in which contemporary writers rewrite the classics for a modern audience. What work would you choose, and why?
  AMcK: “Is Bond a classic? I’d love to do a Bond. I’d also love to do a Sherlock Holmes. It would be great to make Holmes a villain. I imagine him in the ’30s thinking, ‘That Oswald Mosley [notorious British Nazi sympathiser in the 1930s] is a jolly good chap.’ Could be hilarious.”
  DB: Finally, a word or two about the upcoming FIFTY GRAND. What’s the skinny?
  AMcK: FIFTY GRAND came about from an eye-opening visit to Cuba. I went there primarily to see some literary sights connected with Ernest Hemingway (right), Jose Marti and Garcia Lorca but I very quickly got sucked into the landscape and culture. The place really gets into your blood and I found that I couldn’t shake it, so I went back for a longer deeper visit. All island peoples are unique in their own way and coming from Ireland - which has a big neighbour right next door too - I think I appreciated Cuba’s problems without excusing the current regime who seemed to have screwed up the country in a spectacular way. Once I had the context and the geography, the story just flowed from there. I live in the mountains of Colorado so I thought it might be fun to take a Cuban cop and throw him way out of context ten thousand feet up in the snow.”

Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND will be published by Holt later this year.

Mailer Demons Alert

Bedevilled with demons right to the end, America’s tough-talking laureate, Prince of Letters and author of one of the greatest crime fiction titles (if not novels) of all time with TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE, Norman Mailer (right) died on Saturday, November 10. Quoth the New York Times:

[Norman] Mailer died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J. Michael Lennon, who is also the author’s official biographer. From his classic debut novel to such masterworks of literary journalism as THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for insight, passion and originality. Some of his works were highly praised, some panned, but none was pronounced the Great American Novel that seemed to be his life quest from the time he soared to the top as a brash 25-year-old enfant terrible. Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious, streetwise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party …

Picture the scene, people. We’re somewhere Down Below, it’s warm enough to go bare-chested, and it’s Mailer in the Blue corner, Hemingway in the Red. Ding-ding, seconds out – who’s your money on?