Can We Fit Just One More E Into PEELER?

It’s going to be a lot tougher to keep up with Irish crime fiction now that writers are bypassing the traditional structures and going directly to the e-market - see Alexander O’Hara here, and Ruby Barnes here. And that’s on top of the writers who are conventionally published but are also availing of the e-option, such as Kevin McCarthy, whose debut novel PEELER is now available in electronic form.
  Here’s a quick review of PEELER I contributed to January Magazine’s end-of-year round-up of the best books of 2010. To wit:

PEELER by Kevin McCarthy

Eoin McNamee, Benjamin Black and Cora Harrison are among those who write historical Irish crime fiction, and Kevin McCarthy’s PEELER (Mercier Press) deserves to be mentioned in the same breath. Set in Cork in 1920, during the Irish War of Independence, the novel has for its main protagonist Acting Sergeant Sean O’Keefe, a man who is not only a policeman with the hated Royal Irish Constabulary, but also a veteran of the Great War. McCarthy has made things doubly difficult for himself by choosing such a man for his hero, as Ireland’s relationship remains conflicted even today with the men who served in the RIC and fought for Britain during WWI. It’s a testament to his skill as a storyteller, then, that the complex O’Keefe - who considers himself as Irish as the next man, and is considered suspect by his superiors for that very reason - is such a sympathetic character as, aided and abetted by the despised Black-and-Tans, he pursues a killer who is also wanted by the IRA. McCarthy’s historical detail is excellent as he weaves a backdrop of black ops and blacker propaganda, with O’Keefe often a lone voice of reason and law-and-order while about him move squads of killers, both rebel and state-sanctioned. The pace and tension are expertly handled in what is a traditional page-turner of a thriller, yet McCarthy invests the novel with occasional poetic flourishes that highlight the bleak environment in which O’Keefe operates. All told, it’s a remarkably assured debut. - Declan Burke

  Don’t take my word for it, though - check out the rather impressive array of readers’ reviews PEELER has already generated at Amazon US, and here at Amazon UK …

Lord Mountbatten Revisited

I was 10 years old when the IRA blew up Lord Mountbatten at Mullaghmore, about six or seven miles from my home, as the crow flies. It wasn’t just Lord Mountbatten, of course – he died alongside Lady Brabourne, local lad Paul Maxwell and Mountbatten’s grandson, Nicholas Knatchbull (left, with twin Timothy). Sligo was only about 30 miles or so from the border with Northern Ireland, and the Troubles had been ongoing for about a decade or so, but that was the first time it all impinged on my consciousness. I can’t remember too much of what I thought of it at the time, other than thinking it was all a bit unfair, really – I was, as most young boys of my generation were, an avid reader of war comics like Warlord and Battle, and if I wasn’t kicking football I was playing war and cowboys and Indians. But blowing up a boat full of old people and kids? That didn’t seem much like war to me.
  It was only years later that I found out who Lord Mountbatten was, and what he’d done, and what he represented. According to the IRA, the guy was an imperialist swine and a war criminal, and it probably didn’t help his cause that he was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth. By that stage, of course, the Mullaghmore bomb was the very epitome of war, in which old folks and young kids tend to suffer and die at the hands of able-bodied men.
  Anyhoos, that’s all by way of a long-winded preamble to the news that Timothy Knatchbull will be publishing his memoirs this coming August, with the blurb elves wibbling thusly:

On the August bank holiday Monday in 1979, 14-year-old Timothy Knatchbull went out on a holiday boat trip in Co Sligo. The IRA bomb that exploded in the boat killed his grandfather Lord Mountbatten, his grandmother Lady Brabourne, his identical twin brother Nicholas and a local teenager Paul Maxwell. In telling this story for the first time, Knatchbull is not only revisiting the terrible events he and his family lived through but also writing an intensely personal book of human triumph over tragedy. Taking place in Ireland at the height of the Troubles, FROM A CLEAR BLUE SKY gives a compelling insight into that period of Irish history. Although it is unflinching in its detail, this is a book about reconciliation that asks searching questions about why human beings inflict misery on others, and suggests how we can learn to forgive, to heal and to move on. FROM A CLEAR BLUE SKY will be published by Hutchinson to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the atrocity on 27th August.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: ‘Fifty Dead Men Walking’

A feckless young man growing up in war-torn Belfast, Martin McGartland (Jim Sturgess, right) is recruited by the Special Branch as a ‘tout’, or informer. When Martin infiltrates the IRA, he finds himself in a position to save lives by telling his handler, ‘Fergus’ (Ben Kingsley), details of planned operations. Based on Martin McGartland’s true story, Kari Skogland’s movie is a terrific thriller. The history and politics are painted with broad strokes (the final credits, for example, blandly inform us that the British army has left Northern Ireland), but a knowledge of ‘the Troubles’ isn’t actually necessary to enjoy this – it works just as well as a gritty, violent tale of paranoia, double-cross and sell-out akin to ‘Goodfellas’, for example. The character of McGartland is a hard sell, given that he is perceived as a traitor to his own people, although here he’s pitched as a hero who saves the lives of the fifty men of the title, who would today be dead were it not for his activities. A strong script helps the movie’s cause, and Sturgess is compelling in the main role, believable as a hard-nosed undercover operative, and also as a loving family man. The context is excellently evoked too. Skogland gets under the skin of Belfast’s mean streets, capturing not only the period detail of the place and time, but also the sense of oppression and intimidation generated by British army soldiers and the RUC, which is mirrored by the summary justice of the IRA’s ‘community policing’, all of which feeds into Martin’s complex motivation for doing what he does. Kingsley gives Sturgess strong support, as does Natalie Press as his girlfriend, Lara, and Kevin Zegers as his ideologue friend and IRA operative, Sean. A challenging, thoughtful piece, it’s not for the faint-hearted. ****

  Elsewhere, Martin McGartland disowns the movie in the Sunday Times.

On Politics In The Irish Crime Novel, Or Lack Thereof

Our German friend Bernd Kochanowski from International Crime adds an interesting coda to the comment he left on the post On Publishing and Being Damned, to wit:

BTW: He (the reviewer) is also unhappy that the new Irish crime fiction is almost apolitical and doesn’t reflect the events that shook Ireland for years.

  The reviewer in question was casting a cold eye over Tana French’s IN THE WOODS, and is presumably referring to what we in Ireland like to euphemistically refer to as ‘the Troubles’.
  In other words – and we’re taking Bernd’s word for this – said reviewer is disappointed that Irish crime writers aren’t dealing with the consequences of the 30-year conflict that involved the Provisional IRA, the INLA, the British Army, the RUC (latterly the PSNI), the Gardai, and more Loyalist paramilitary armies than you could shake a cat-o’-nine-tails at.
  To which we reply, ‘Tosh, piffle and balderdash, sirrah!’
  Case for the Defence # 1: Adrian McKinty’s protagonist Michael Forsythe is an ex-British Army soldier. In THE DEAD YARD, he goes undercover to break up a gang of renegade Republicans. In THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD he engages with (and generally vaporises) any number of ex-paramilitaries on his return to Belfast.
  Case for the Defence # 2: Sylvester Young’s SLEEPING DOGS LIE, in which ex-IRA men travel to the U.S. and become embroiled in a complex plot involving a number of security agencies.
  Case for the Defence # 3: Ken Bruen’s AMERICAN SKIN, in which an ex-IRA man wreaks mayhem in the U.S.
  Case for the Defence # 4: Declan Burke’s EIGHT BALL BOOGIE, in which former paramilitaries diversify into more prosaic criminality, specifically coke-trafficking.
  Case for the Defence # 5: David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER, in which former paramilitaries and an ex-RUC officer find themselves called to account for their actions twenty years previously.
  Case for the Defence # 6: Colin Bateman.
  Case for the Defence # 7: Sam Millar.
  Case for the Defence # 8: Authors such as Peter Cunningham, Jack Holland and S.J. Michaels, who were writing about ‘the Troubles’ as far back as the late ’80s and early ’90s.
  I could go on, but hopefully the point is made. Besides, and pertinently in the context of the reviewer’s comments being made during a review of IN THE WOODS, Tana French’s novel had a political subtext that perhaps was too subtle for the reviewer to pick up on. The novel opens on an archaeological dig, where the body of a young girl has been found, said dig being conducted hastily on the basis that the bulldozers of the property developers are due in the very near future.
  In Ireland, many such developments are highly controversial and politically charged, the most obvious example being that of the M3 motorway, currently planned to run through the Tara Valley (right), an archaeological complex dating back to 2,000 BC.
  Furthermore, the ongoing tribunals of investigation were initially set up to investigate the links – if such could be proved – between property developers and politicians, specifically to discover if politicians had been bribed to facilitate the rezoning of land in favour of property speculators. Among the many politicians to find themselves under serious scrutiny at these tribunals, to put it mildly, were two former taoisigh, or Irish prime ministers, Charles Haughey and Bertie Ahern.
  To suggest that IN THE WOODS is an apolitical novel is to deliberately ignore, or be utterly ignorant of, recent Irish history. Here endeth the lesson. Peace, out.

Ready, Amis, Fire …

Just when you start to believe that today’s writers are only in it for the Ferraris and hot chicks, along comes Ronan Bennett (right). In a piece in Monday’s Guardian, the author of ZUGWANG takes Martin Amis to task in no uncertain terms for what Bennett believes are Amis’s inflammatory remarks about Muslims. Bennett, who was wrongly convicted of murdering an RUC officer in 1974, and spent 18 months imprisoned in Long Kesh, was subsequently arrested in London in the mid-’70s for the now-legendary offence of “conspiring to commit crimes unknown against persons unknown in places unknown” and tried at the Old Bailey in the so-called ‘anarchists’ trial’. Acquitted after defending himself in court, he has perhaps more capacity than most for the ‘imaginative sympathy’ he believes is lacking in the West for a persecuted minority. The gist, proceeding by excerpts, runneth thusly:

What do you make of the following statement: “Asians are gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered.” While we’re at it, what do you think of this, incidentally from the same speaker: “The Black community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” Or this, the same speaker again: “I just don’t hear from moderate Judaism, do you?” And (yes, same speaker): “Strip-searching Irish people. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole Irish community and they start getting tough with their children.” The speaker was Martin Amis and, yes, the quotations have been modified, with Asians, Blacks and Irish here substituted for Muslims, and Judaism for Islam - though, it should be stressed, these are the only amendments. Terry Eagleton, professor of English literature at Manchester University, where Amis has also started to teach, recently quoted the remarks in a new edition of his book IDEOLOGY: AN INTRODUCTION. Amis, Eagleton claimed, was advocating nothing less than the “hounding and humiliation” of Muslims so “they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man’s law”. […] The views quoted by Eagleton first appeared last year, in an interview Amis [right] gave to Ginny Dougary of the Times. That they passed with virtually no comment at the time says a great deal about the depoliticised state of intellectual debate in Britain. While a great deal of media time and energy is spent discussing the latest translation of WAR AND PEACE or the artwork in the refurbished St Pancras station, there has been, with a few notable exceptions, a puzzling lack of effort when it comes to something as critical as expressing support for an increasingly demonised minority in our society. Martin Amis should have been taken to task by his peers for his views. He was not. […] This is a community under attack, and not just by novelists. By every official index, violence and discrimination against Muslims have increased since 2001. The victims of physical violence will always be a minority – although Asian people are twice as likely to be stabbed to death than they were ten years ago – but what the majority experience in their daily lives is much more insidious, the kind of coded rejection that in this more enlightened age takes the place of outright expressions of racism. And, of course, hanging over them are threats of control orders, curfews, arrest and extended periods of detention without trial. Just as the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act left the Irish community in Britain feeling like a suspect nation, so the infinitely more repressive anti- terrorist legislation – including 28 days’ detention without charge rather than the old seven when the IRA were active – of today intimidates, alienates and inflames Muslims. […] I can’t help feeling that Amis’s remarks, his defence of them, and the reaction to them were a test. They were a test of our commitment to a society in which imaginative sympathy applies not just to those like us but to those whose lives and beliefs run along different lines. And I can’t help feeling we failed that test. Amis got away with it. He got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it.

Ronan Bennett wrote the screenplay of THE HAMBURG CELL, a film about the 9/11 hijackers. His latest novel is ZUGZWANG.