“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Sheena Lambert

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?
Kevin Barry’s CITY OF BOHANE – although there is no way that book would ever have found its way inside my head.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Mrs Danvers …

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Penny Vincenzi. Like Jilly Cooper, but better. Give me champagne-drinking, horse (and other people’s husbands)-riding, upper-class, family saga escapism over James Joyce any day. Sorry, James.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Seeing my first full-length play, ‘Glanaphuca’, come to life onstage in rehearsed reading at The New Theatre in Dublin last year. It’s something a novelist never gets to see – but as a playwright, I observed my characters as real, living people for two hours on a cold day in December, and not only did I get to hear them speak, I got to witness the audience’s reaction to them. Amazing. Amazing.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
Liz Nugent’s UNRAVELLING OLIVER.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE LAKE, of course! And I cannot wait to see ‘City of Bohane – The Movie’ when it comes out (I think there is a screenplay in the works …). I’m picturing a ‘Sin City’-type production myself.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Best: Being able to work anytime, anywhere. Worst: Your siblings looking at you like you should probably be trying to get a real job.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Some family trees should never be climbed.

Who are you reading right now?
Just finished ALL THE THINGS I NEVER TOLD YOU by Celeste Ng.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write of course! I LOVE reading my own stuff!!

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Original, readable and fabulous.

Sheena Lambert’s THE LAKE is published by Killer Reads.

Review: John Banville on Georges Simenon’s THE BLUE ROOM

John Banville had a fine piece in last weekend’s Irish Times, in which he reviewed Georges Simenon’s THE BLUE ROOM, which has just been republished by Penguin Classics. Sample quote:

“Like all writers he wrote for himself, but before and after writing he had a lively sense of his audience: he wrote for everyone, and anyone can read him, with ease and full understanding. Not for him the prolixity of Joyce or the exquisite nuances of Henry James. This is what Roland Barthes called “writing degree zero”, cool, controlled and throbbing with passion.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

One to Watch: JOHN LE CARRE: THE BIOGRAPHY by Adam Sisman

It won’t be published until October, unfortunately, but I’m very much looking forward to Adam Sisman’s biography of John le Carré, which will be published by Bloomsbury. To wit:

John le Carré is still at the top, more than half a century after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold became a worldwide bestseller. From his bleak childhood - the departure of his mother when he was five was followed by ‘sixteen hugless years’ in the dubious care of his father, a serial-seducer and con-man - through recruitment by both MI5 and MI6, to his emergence as the master of the espionage novel, le Carré has repeatedly quarried his life for his fiction. Millions of readers are hungry to know the truth about him. Written with exclusive access to le Carré himself, to his private archive and to many of the people closest to him, this is a major biography of one of the most important novelists alive today.

  I like the idea of the book promoting le Carré as ‘one of the most important novelists alive today’. All too often, when talking about le Carré, you hear that he’s a wonderful spy novelist, very likely the best of his kind and the man who spun literature from the Cold War conflict, but that the quality of his books has suffered in the Brave New post-Wall World. Stuff and nonsense, of course. As much as I love the Cold War novels, they were set during a period that to a large extent (and understandably so) characterised by a black-and-white, us-vs-them perspective. The latter work is far more fascinating, I think, ‘rooted’ as they are in the fertile but shifting sands of fluid conflicts, unlikely alliances and moral relativism.
  As for the idea that le Carré is a great spy novelist: he is, of course, but leaving at that is equivalent to saying that James Joyce was a dab hand at writing about Dublin, or METAMORPHOSIS is the finest possible example of a novel about bugs.
  As it happens, I’ve been on a bit of a le Carré binge this January: so far I’ve read OUR GAME, CALL FOR THE DEAD and SINGLE AND SINGLE. CALL FOR THE DEAD (1961) is a little out of place, of course, given that proceeds as far more a traditional investigation than le Carré would offer in later years (poignant to realise that the first character ever introduced in a le Carré novel, even before George Smiley puts in an appearance, is the perennially elusive Lady Ann Sercomb), but OUR GAME (1995) and SINGLE AND SINGLE (1999) both offer characters who are singularly and even self-destructively obsessed with achieving one good thing in a breathtakingly bleak and cynical world, despite their own awareness of how Pyrrhic their achievement might be. If fiction has more or better to offer than that particular kind of story, I really don’t know what it is. It helps, of course, that when it comes to the idea that character is mystery (to paraphrase John Connolly), le Carré delivers more value per line than any other writer I know.
  Here endeth my two cents. JOHN LE CARRE: THE BIOGRAPHY by Adam Sisman is published on October 22nd.

Blonde Ambition

I had a piece published in the Irish Independent last weekend on the new Benjamin Black Philip Marlowe novel, THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE (Mantle), which was very enjoyable to write, not least because the commission required me to write a goodly chunk about Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe before getting down to the nitty-gritty of the Benjamin Black novel. I liked the book a lot, by the way, even it’s not a purist’s dream of Chandleresque prose. That piece can be found here.
  Meanwhile, John Banville had a very good piece in The Guardian last weekend about his long-standing love affair with the novels of Raymond Chandler, which began at a young age. Here’s a sample:

“The most durable thing in writing is style,” Chandler wrote in a letter to a literary agent in 1945. In this assertion and others like it he was laying claim to his place on Parnassus, if on one of the lower slopes. Flaubert and Joyce complained frequently and loudly of having no choice but to scatter the gold coinage of their prose over the base metal of mere mortal doings, and Chandler too, in his less emphatic, more sardonic, way, sought to set himself among the gods of pure language, pure style.
  Like the bard of Bay City, the French and Irish masters of realist fiction frequently professed to care nothing for content and everything for form – and form, of course, was just another word for style. Writing to one of his numerous correspondents, Chandler insisted that “the only writers left who have anything to say are those who write about practically nothing and monkey around with odd ways of doing it”. Out of their grand indifference, however, Flaubert created Emma Bovary and Frédéric Moreau, and Joyce Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus; and Chandler, not to be outdone, gave us Marlowe, the private eye of private eyes, who is among the immortals. – John Banville

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Interview: Joe Joyce

I interviewed Joe Joyce (right) shortly after the publication of his novel ECHOLAND (Liberties Press) last year, and it’s fair to say the conversation was wide-ranging. Enid Blyton, John Creasey, James Joyce, Franklin Roosevelt, Nancy Drew, Bill Clinton and Charles Haughey – they’re all here. To wit:

When it comes to telling stories, Joe Joyce isn’t exactly single-minded about the form he works in. A journalist by trade, he published a pair of critically acclaimed crime thrillers in the 1990s, Off the Record (1990) and The Trigger Man (1991). He reinvented himself as a playwright for The Tower (2008), an imagined meeting between the ghosts of James Joyce and Oliver St. John Gogarty. With co-author Peter Murtagh, he has published two non-fiction titles: The Guinnesses: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Most Successful Family (2009) and The Boss (1997), an account of former taoiseach Charlie Haughey’s years in power.
  The latter book in particular was very well reviewed, although a certain Charles J. Haughey was distinctly unimpressed.
  “He was very upset by the book, apparently,” says Joyce. “There was an occasion when he was meeting the other party leaders, Garrett Fitzgerald and Dick Spring – they were in government at the time – and he got very emotional and started almost crying to them about the book. Of course, one of the things with Haughey was that you never knew when he was putting on an act. Afterwards people kept asking him to sign copies of The Boss. He always wrote the same thing, ‘There is not a word of truth in this book.’”
  He laughs quietly at Haughey’s hubris, but then presses on, keen to give both sides of the story.
  “Haughey was an intriguing character in many ways. What tends to get forgotten, I suppose, is his charisma. The only way to understand him, I think, is to look on him as an actor. He modelled himself on French presidents like Francois Mitterand, people who are really big into the idea of the royalty of power, all the symbols and all the rest of it. He never wore a watch, for example. But when he walked into a room, he was absolutely the centre of it. And it wasn’t just the women.”
  That combination of traits, the journalist’s desire to present both sides of the story and the vivid imagination that excavates a story from the bare bones of the facts, is what brings to life Joe Joyce’s latest offering, the novel Echoland. Set in Dublin in 1940, it opens with young army man Paul Duggan being promoted to G2, or Irish military intelligence, as German troops blitzkrieg their way through Europe.
  With Ireland clinging to a tenuous neutrality, and rumours of invasion growing stronger by the day, it’s a time of intrigue, betrayal and espionage.
  “It’s obviously one of the defining periods of modern Irish history,” says Joyce. “From a fictional point of view, what really interested me was trying to put myself back into that situation, which is a challenge because we all know now what happened, in order to capture the uncertainty of the time. I think we tend to look on the past as a simpler time, but that’s because we know what happened. The people of the time didn’t know what was going to happen – in fact, a lot of people thought they did know what was going to happen, and were wrong.”
  Paul Duggan and his colleagues in G2 aren’t only concerned with German spies and a possible invasion by Nazi Germany. Ireland’s neutrality was also under threat from the British, who were pressurising the then taoiseach, Eamon De Valera, to join the Allied cause. De Valera’s refusal, Joyce believes, had consequences for Ireland for decades to come.
  “I think that things would have been quite different if we hadn’t been neutral. It would have had a major effect on the later years of the 1940s, and on into the ’50s and ’60s. The more you get into that period the more you realise that the knock-on effect [of Ireland’s neutrality] probably blighted Irish-American relations up until the time of Bill Clinton. There was a serious falling-out between Franklin Roosevelt and Ireland because of it, and that had a real effect on us in the 1950s and 1960s. To the extent that, even when Kennedy came here [in 1963], he was not going to talk about Partition, he was not going to get into any of that. On the other hand,” he acknowledges, “it was perfectly understandable that Ireland would want to be neutral. It was only 20 years or so since we’d been fighting the British ourselves.”
  Despite the vividly rendered political backdrop, Joyce emphasises the fictional aspects of Echoland.
  “To me it’s an historical thriller. Hopefully it’s a good read above anything else. It’s not trying to push any particular line about neutrality or government policy or anything of a serious nature like that.”
  Can we call it an old-fashioned spy novel?
  “That’s fine with me. A spy novel, a political novel … I mean, what it’s not is a crime novel. You see these kinds of books classified as crime novels all the time, when they’re absolutely not.”
  What’s the difference between a crime novel and a spy novel?
  “To me, spy novels or political novels are more about ideas than they are about action. They involve action, of course, but they’re not about solving a particular crime. They’re usually about issues to which there is no simple or indeed complex answer. The story doesn’t resolve itself on the last page, necessarily, when the bad guy gets caught.”
  A softly-spoken, self-deprecating 65-year-old, Joyce grew up in Ballinasloe in Galway reading “all the usual Enid Blyton books, Nancy Drew, The Castle of Adventure, all that kind of stuff. I graduated – if that’s the word – to all the John Creasey’s and other big crime writers of the time, mainly from the 1930s. A lot of them seemed to involve the Riviera and jewel thieves, who I see are still in business.”

  He read English and Sociology at UCG, then embarked on a career in journalism, during which he wrote for the Guardian and the Irish Times. The publication of those critically acclaimed crime novels in the 1990s suggested that a successful career as an author beckoned, but it wasn’t to be.
  “A lot of things got in the way of the writing,” he says, “from having to earn a living to health issues. Serious health problems held me back for the best part of 10 years. Why start all over again? Because it was always something I wanted to do.”
  What got him back writing again, for the play The Tower, was an imagined conversation between the ghosts of James Joyce and Oliver St. John Gogarty. Did he ever stop to consider the audacity of writing dialogue for James Joyce?
  “I know, the arrogance of it. Jesus, when I think about it now …” He shrugs. “I hadn’t written anything for a very long time, and that was the first thing I wrote in my so-called second coming. I live quite close to the Martello tower in Sandycove, and I was just walking by it one day, wondering what these guys might say to one another if they met now.”
  Instead of the world-famous James Joyce, however, it was the largely overlooked Oliver St. John Gogarty’s reinvention of himself at an advanced age that intrigued Joe Joyce.
  “What really got me interested was when I was in Renvyle House Hotel in Connemara, which Gogarty had owned and run as a hotel, and they had various things up on the wall, framed newspapers and telegrams and so forth. They had a piece there about Gogarty leaving Ireland when he was 61, going to live in New York – and I could see that age coming at me, and it seemed like a great idea, that you could start over again at 61. So that’s what fascinated me.”
  Gogarty, who served as the inspiration for Buck Mulligan in Joyce’s Ulysses, wasn’t just a poet and author, but a politician, athlete and doctor besides.
  “Gogarty was as smart a guy as Joyce, possibly even smarter, but he was a man with too many talents. And why is one writer remembered and not the other? Basically what it came down to, I think, was discipline.” A wry smile. “With which I totally empathise.”

  Echoland by Joe Joyce is published by Liberties Press (€13.99)

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Ka-Bloom!

It’s Bloomsday today, as you probably know, that one day in the year when everyone cheerfully admits to being unable to read ULYSSES, although they quite like DUBLINERS, and as for FINNEGANS WAKE, well, it’s mad, Ted, and if the man couldn’t be bothered punctuating his own titles, why should I waste my time reading it, etc.
  So happy Bloomsday, folks, and enjoy your grilled kidneys. For those of you interested in Chief Justice Adrian Hardiman’s take on why ULYSSES has a murder mystery at its heart, clickety-click here …
  As always, my favourite bit about Bloomsday is the opportunity to run, yet again, Donald Clarke’s masterful short movie, aka “Pitch ‘n’ Putt with Beckett and Joyce”. Roll it there, Collette …

On Penny Candles And Leading Lights

I never got to meet Maeve Binchy (right), which is a sad state of affairs, because by all accounts she was one of the nicest people on the planet, as well as being one of the most influential Irish writers of the last 30 years.
  Maeve Binchy played a huge part, and arguably the crucial part, in legitimising popular fiction of all stripes in Ireland. Time and again she demonstrated that you didn’t need to differentiate between good writing and popular writing, and she did so by writing about ordinary Irish people and their ordinary Irish concerns, in the process, a la Patrick Kavanagh, making it all extraordinary. She will be sadly missed. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.
  I had a piece published in the Irish Examiner last Wednesday, in which some of Maeve’s peers spoke about her influence on successive generations of writers. It opened up a lot like this:

With the death of Maeve Binchy at the age of 72, Ireland has lost one of its leading literary lights.
  “I don’t think that Maeve was ever accorded the same kind of respect that some of the novelists who are considered more literary received,” says her colleague Sheila O’Flanagan, “but I think her storytelling certainly set a benchmark for commercial fiction that is very high and rarely surpassed.”
  […]
  Her place in the pantheon of great Irish writers has long been secured, but for many years Binchy has served as another kind of leading light, as a literary pathfinder who guided and inspired a younger generation.
  “It was simply the fact that she made it okay to write about Ireland,” says Marian Keyes. “I remember reading The Lilac Bus, I suppose I was about 17, and that was back in the days when nothing Irish was any good. All our things were just crap versions of US or UK TV shows or bands or books or whatever. And suddenly, somebody was writing about the Ireland we all knew. So that gave me confidence when I came to write, to think, ‘I don’t have to pretend to be English or American.’”
  Nor was it necessary to want to emulate James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, et al.
  “That was it as well,” Marian agrees. “The way she wrote was so conversational, and it was so true to how people talked, how Irish people are.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

A Towering Achievement

You won’t have noticed, I’m sure, but yours truly and family (typical wife-and-child pose, right) were away last week, soaking up the exotic delights and occasional sightings of sunshine in North Donegal, and very enjoyable it all was too. Hopefully I’ll get time to do a little work on behalf of the Donegal tourist board in the next couple of days, but for now allow me to point you in the direction of some very fine theatre that will be available in Dublin over the next week or so. Joe Joyce gets in touch with this to say:

“My play The Tower is being performed next week as part of the Dublin James Joyce Festival in The New Theatre in Temple Bar. I’d be grateful if you could forward this email to (and/or tweet) anyone who might be interested in what James Joyce and Oliver St John Gogarty (aka Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan) would have to say to each other now, with a century and more of hindsight.
  “Tom Hickey and Bosco Hogan, directed by Caroline FitzGerald, will be reprising their respective roles as Joyce and Gogarty at lunchtimes, 1pm, from Monday to Friday (18th to 22nd June) and on Saturday (23rd June) at 12.00 noon.”

  As it happens, I reviewed The Tower twice for the Sunday Times over the last decade or so, which means I’m in a position to recommend the experience whole-heartedly. To wit:

The Tower
The ghosts of James Joyce (Tom Hickey) and Oliver St. John Gogarty (Bosco Hogan) return to haunt the Martello Tower in Sandycove, there to bicker about art, their sundered friendship and their respective legacies. Joe Joyce’s two-hander is a tragi-comic piece that occasionally diverts into the realms of the surreal, such as when the terse Joyce and the loquacious Gogarty duet on a croaky version of The Beatles’ Help!. The overall tone is one of bitterness and regret, however: the prissily self-righteous Joyce greets Gogarty as ‘Oliver St. Jesus Gogarty’, and bemoans the latter’s ‘witless witticisms’, while Gogarty berates Joyce for being a parasite who fed on the misery of others, with an insatiable appetite for ‘drink, whores and depravity’. Hickey and Hogan are here reprising their roles from previous productions, and the director, Caroline FitzGerald, is content to allow the pair plough their well-worn furrows. It’s a wise decision, as both actors are comfortable in the skins of their characters, but also highly attuned to the nuances of one another’s performance. The result is that, despite the sedate pace and frequent digressions into deft wordplay, the production crackles with tension as both men strive to establish retrospective vindication of their actions. - Declan Burke

  There’s more information about the play and the other events in the festival at www.thenewtheatre.com.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Tom Piccirilli

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 original psycho-noir: the Bible.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
A 12-year-old Tom Piccirilli with endless potential. My mother tells me he once existed but she’s entering her dementia years.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t have any guilty pleasures. I have only guiltless pleasures.

Most satisfying writing moment?
They’re all a tie for worst disappointment, gut-wrenching dissatisfaction, boundless blind rage, and endless frustration.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I don’t know, but it’s probably been written by Ken Bruen. Nobody smears their guts on the page like that man. He’s got more courage than anybody I know.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
ULYSSES.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Having no stability/having no boss.

The pitch for your next book is …?
THE LAST KIND WORDS, due out June 12: Raised in a clan of small-time thieves and grifters, Terrier Rand decided to cut free from them and go straight after his older brother, Collie, went on a senseless killing spree that left an entire family and several others dead. Five years later, and days before his scheduled execution, Collie contacts Terry and asks him to return home. He claims he wasn’t responsible for one of the murders--and insists that the real killer is still on the loose.

Who are you reading right now?
THE RED SCARF by Gil Brewer.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I’ve pretty much ignored the commands and tenets of God up until now, so I doubt I’d start listening to Him about this.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Audacious, brazen, bold, chilling, haunting, poignant, haunting, delightful, assured. Is that three? I’m a writer not a fucking mathematician.

THE LAST KIND WORDS by Tom Piccirilli is published by Bantam Dell.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Hesh Kestin

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?
‘Exodus’, and not the one by Leon Uris. In this shrewdly penned thriller, an Egyptian nobleman takes it on the lam after knocking off one of Pharaoh’s brutal overseers. Then, after discovered the secret of his birth, he blackmails the bossman himself by hitting him with plague after plague until the big hood finally relents: In history’s greatest heist, the newly minted but fast-thinking yid walks off with the equivalent of a couple billion quid [figuring the average slave was a cool thou] plus livestock and uncounted treasure. And that’s only the caper. What happens next would make a hell of a movie. Wait a minute, they may have already done it.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Hesh Kestin. When I was a journalist the CIA had me down for a Mossadnilk, the Mossad thought I was CIA and -- for the three years I was based in London -- MI5 interviewed me entirely too often. Alas, my only secret was rather pedestrian: I worked hard.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Newspapers. Except for the British, journos don’t even know they’re doing fiction.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Finishing anything.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
FINNEGANS WAKE. A crime against the English language. According to George Orwell, “Good prose is like a window pane.” According to me, “A clean one.”

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Hell, I’m not going to kill anyone’s luck. All I have to is make a suggestion and Hollywood’s phone goes dead.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Sometimes you can get manual affection if seated next to a dedicated reader on an airplane.

The pitch for your next book is …?
I never pitch. To do so would mean I’d have to know what the hell I’m doing and how it comes out. Not my style.

Who are you reading right now?
SPIES by Michael Frayn.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
He talks to you too?

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
What. The. And fuck.

Hesh Kestin’s THE IRON WILL OF SHOESHINE CATS is Stephen King’s recommended read for World Book Night.

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?

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: John J. Gaynard

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

Editor’s Note: I received a rather interesting review of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL by John J. Gaynard during the week; when I investigated further, I discovered that John J. Gaynard is himself the author of what sounds like a rather fascinating novel. Now read on …

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
The Bible. Although I’d put more effort into improving on the lazy Sunday draft that gets the whole thing off to the sexist, incestuous, start and I’d make sure that it’s, Abel, the eater of sacrificial meat and not Cain, the vegetarian brother, who gets murdered. The book’s greatest accomplishment, apart from the spinoffs, is that you’ve got this schizophrenic Stalin-like figure, sending down floods of hate, revenge, betrayal and plagues of locusts, whenever it suits him, while the head-scratchers in the Gulag he’s created can’t come up with the right question: “Did we invent him or did he invent us?” Every good cop who turns up, in the shape of a prophet, gets sold out by his own side. But the main reason this is the book I would have liked to write is the sales and the number of boondoogles you’d get invited to. The Bible study industry is still bigger than the James Joyce or Shakespeare industries.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Gulley Jimson, the painter, in the Anglo-Irish writer Joyce Cary’s 1940s trilogy: HERSELF SURPRISED, TO BE A PILGRIM and, in what I think is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, THE HORSE’S MOUTH. At the beginning of THE HORSE’S MOUTH, Gulley Jimson has just got out of jail. Collectors would pay thousands for any painting he could produce. But Jimson couldn’t give a damn about them, he paints for himself, not for anybody else, the problem is he hasn’t got a penny to buy brushes, paint or a palette. He borrows or scams money from any old acquaintance who will still talk to him, similar to a character in a Ken Bruen novel, and tries to get back some of the paintings he gave away before he went broke. His new passion is for painting on people’s walls. I suppose you could call him the original tagger. He destroys himself, but he never has a minute of guilt or regret. His whole life is either spent getting his hands on a brush and paints, or in painting itself and nearly getting killed by the people who think he’s desecrated their houses. It’s one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read. At the end, when he’s on his deathbed, a nun criticizes him for laughing instead of praying and he tells her that they’re the same thing.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Suzanne Tyrpak, the author of DATING MY VIBRATOR. DATING MY VIBRATOR is a small book of hilarious short stories about a lady who went through a messy divorce, hit the online dating sites and then discovered, as do many innocent young divorcees, that all men, not only the ex-husband, are congenital liars. The book’s about the mental and physical deficiencies of the sex-hungry slobs the hero meets, and you couldn’t call any of the descriptions complimentary. After the book came out, one of the slobs recognized himself in one of the stories, and since then he’s been giving Suzanne really bad reviews on Amazon, and any other website he can come across. There’s a big phenomenon in France of women becoming call girls after they’ve had some experience on online dating sites. They say they might as well get paid for doing what they have to do anyway

Most satisfying writing moment?
There have been many of them, ranging from when I got a story published in the old London Evening News, through when I got my first satirical article published by Le Monde, or when a French translation of Allen Ginsberg’s meeting with Ezra Pound was published. In those days I was using a nom de plume. The latest most satisfactory moment is when I saw the Kirkus Review of THE IMITATION OF PATSY BURKE. Maybe once in a lifetime you get a reviewer who really understands what you were trying to write: “A rich, darkly comic send-up of the art world and the megalomaniacal souls that populate it.” The only quibble I might have with that review is that it might not prepare readers for the novel’s really dark side.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Of all time, I would say THE INFORMER by Liam O’Flaherty. The best one I’ve read over the past few years is Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE, published in the States as THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST. I like a novel that contains an element of psychopathy and some good fight scenes. The fight, or maybe I should say massacre scene, towards the end of THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST is second to none.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Every day I realize that there are a hell of a lot of Irish crime novels I still haven’t read. Tana French’s IN THE WOODS would make a great movie, but you’d have to make sure that Cecilia Ahern wasn’t taken on to write the script.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing, apart from French women writers who’ve fallen out of love with you making you a character in their books, is that it’s easy to become isolated from the rest of humanity. To avoid that I get up very early, every morning in Paris and I spend a couple of hours doing a café crawl, meeting up with friends like taxi drivers, plumbers, illegal African immigrants working on the building sites, and transsexual night club bouncers or heterosexual hostesses, who clock off at six o’clock in the morning and who like to sit around and talk shop in the cafés for a couple of hours before they head home for bed. One of the transsexual bouncers used to run the newspaper shop in the European Commission building in Luxemburg and, s/he tells me, the stuff that went on there was weirder than any club in the whole of the European Union. Once the office workers come out, at about eight-thirty, I head back to my own work. One of my favorite songs is Jacques Dutronc’s, “It’s 5 a.m. Paris Awakes”. It’s about a young man walking down from Pigalle, as it used to be, after a night in the clubs. The best thing is raising your head after ten or eleven hours of work and realizing that you’ve been so captivated by what you’re doing that you’ve lived life to the full. Then you can sit down to three or four hours of reading before you go contentedly to bed.

The pitch for your next book is …?
It’s going to be about a testosterone-fuelled Irish Guard, Timothy O’Mahony, who first came to life in my first novel, ANOTHER LIFE. O’Mahony is the son of a French woman and an Irish father, from Charlestown. After a scandalous liaison with a Northern Irish woman politician, he was demoted from a senior position in Dublin and exiled to the Garda station in Bangor, Erris. He’s now put in charge of investigating the murder of a young African girl, whose body washed up on the shoreline of County Mayo. The story will take O’Mahony into that part of French life in which presidential candidates, policemen, prostitutes and jaded middle-class political groupies engage in group sex, freemasonry, corruption and conversations about Ireland’s refusal to extradite people strongly suspected of killing beautiful French women. Any resemblance to what is going on at the moment in Ireland, France, or what recently happened in New York, will be purely fortuitous. I’m still deciding to what extent O’Mahony will be allowed to participate in the group sex.

Who are you reading right now?
I just finished reading the Australian crime writer Peter Temple’s THE BROKEN SHORE. It’s the prototypical hard-bitten crime novel, with a lot of guilt about how much unspoken homosexuality underlies the Australian need for mateship. The dialogue reminded me of Allan Guthrie’s writing. I just started on William Boyd’s ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS, because I’ve always liked the comic element of Boyd’s novels and then I’ll probably read the recent Goncourt Prize winner, THE FRENCH ART OF WAR, even though, the other day, when I asked a guy in a train sitting with the book in front of him and looking out the window, how he was enjoying it he told me he hadn’t been able to get past the first two pages …

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I’d tell her to go to hell. If she wouldn’t take that for an answer, I would opt for writing, write her out of her own story and then go back to reading.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Whatever it takes! At times, the story needs sex, booze, brawling and schizophrenia, and at other times it needs some pathos.

John J Gaynard’s THE IMITATION OF PATSY BURKE is published by Createspace.

Gorgeous George And Me

Marshal Zeringue is one of the most tireless supporters of books and writers of all stripes and none, most famously with his Page 69 Test, and more recently for Writers Read and My Book, The Movie. My most recent contribution to Marshal’s roster of heroes and villains consists of my take on the My Book, My Movie casting of the hypothetical adaptation of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, which starts out by asserting that only the multi-talented human rights advocate ‘Gorgeous George’ Clooney (one for the ladies, right) could play the part of the fictional ‘Declan Burke’ of AZC, and gets progressively more deluded / deranged from there. For all the details, clickety-click here …

  Elsewhere in AZC-related flummery, the good folk at Liberties Press were kind enough to upload a video of John Connolly mostly lying through this back teeth as he very kindly launched our humble tome on August 10th. Now, the vid starts off with the Dark Lord saying that he doesn’t usually do this kind of thing, for a variety of reasons; if I’d known that beforehand, I wouldn’t have asked him to do the honours, not least because I hate being put on the spot like that myself. True to form, however, JC not only did the honours, but did us and ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL proud in the process. Roll it there, Collette …

  Meanwhile, over at Seana Graham’s interweb lair, Not New For Long, there’s an impressively forensic review of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. It’s always nice when someone takes the time to read your book (and I’m still at the stage where I’m always surprised that someone has done so), but it’s particularly pleasing when said reader engages with the book in the kind of comprehensive fashion Seana has. It’s not the kind of review that lends itself to pull-out blurb-style quotes, but I am very impressed with the fact that Seana has managed to pack in references to Flann O’Brien, Dante, Mephistopheles, Adrian McKinty and James Joyce’s eye-patch. For all the skinny, clickety-click here …

  Finally, a quick word on my trek across the border to Norn Iron, and specifically to No Alibis, where David Torrans hosted a double-hander of yours truly and the aforementioned Adrian McKinty last Thursday night. A very enjoyable evening it was, too, with much scurrilous scuttlebutt being passed off as ‘insights into writing’ (koff), very little of which I could reproduce here without running the risk of being sued into oblivion (and which proved tame enough, as it happens, by comparison with the post-gig conversation carried out over the course and under the influence of a number of Pimms afterwards). Anyway, the good denizens of Belfast and surroundings came out in force, including a number of scribes, among them Stuart Neville, David Park, Andrew Pepper and Gerard Brennan. It was slightly unsettling that Stuart Neville chose to sit in the front row, particularly as the man is a runaway bestseller these days, but we survived the grilling nonetheless, and terrific fun it all was. Incidentally, for those of you in the general vicinity of Belfast, John Connolly and Alan Glynn will also be appearing at No Alibis, on September 1st, to promote THE BURNING SOUL and BLOODLAND, respectively. Should be a cracking night …

ULYSSES: A Crime Novel, Innit?

It’s Bloomsday today, as you probably know, that one day in the year when everyone cheerfully admits to being unable to read ULYSSES, although they quite like DUBLINERS, and as for FINNEGANS WAKE, well, it’s mad, Ted, and if the man couldn’t be bothered punctuating his own titles, why should I waste my time reading it, etc.
  So happy Bloomsday, folks, and enjoy your grilled kidneys. For those of you interested in Chief Justice Adrian Hardiman’s take on why ULYSSES has a murder mystery at its heart, clickety-click here …
  As always, my favourite bit about Bloomsday is the opportunity to run, yet again, Donald Clarke’s masterful short movie and a gloriously scatological slice of genius, aka ‘Pitch ‘n’ Putt with Beckett and Joyce’. Roll it there, Collette …

  Meanwhile, in crime fic-related news, this blog is yet again about three miles behind the curve. For lo! News reaches us via the darker reaches of the interweb that Ken Bruen has - oh yes! - another Jack Taylor tome on the way, with the blurb elves wibbling thusly:

Some people help the less fortunate. Others kill them. Welcome to HEADSTONE - Jack Taylor’s darkest nightmare. An elderly priest is viciously beaten until nearly dead. A special needs boy is brutally attacked. Evil has many guises. Jack Taylor has encountered most of them but nothing before has ever truly terrified him until a group called Headstone rears its ugly head. A series of seemingly random, insane, violent events has even the national police, the Guards, shaken. Most would see a headstone as a marker of the dead, but this coterie of evil intends to act as a death knell to every aspect of Jack’s life as an act of appalling violence alerts him to the horror enveloping Galway. Accepting the power of Headstone, Jack realizes that in order to fight back he must relinquish the remaining shreds of what has made him human, knowledge that may have come too late to prevent an act of such ferocious evil that the whole country would be changed forever - and in the worst way. With awful clarity, Jack knows that not only might he be powerless to stop it but that he may not have the grit needed to even face it.

  So there you have it. Last time out, Jack Taylor was grappling with the Devil himself, so how much more ferocious can evil get? Well, you’ll need to nab yourself a copy of HEADSTONE to find out. The way things are around here, we could be waiting until next Bloomsday for the book to arrive …
  Elsewhere in crime fic-related news - Rathgar, to be precise - I was delighted to play Watson to John Banville’s Holmes last night, as the Rathgar Bookshop hosted a Q&A in which I pretty much asked John Banville variations on the same question he gets asked everywhere he goes: i.e., Wassup wit dat Benny Blanco, eh? Things went fairly swimmingly in front of a very clued-in audience, which included one Alan Glynn, until such time as Banville started referencing classic crime titles I’d never heard of, at which point I handed over the audience for Qs, in case my ignorance of the subject was revealed.   Anyway, the point of the exercise was to promote Banville’s new Benjamin Black tome, A DEATH IN SUMMER, and DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS (have I mentioned that GREEN STREETS debuted at # 2 in the Nielsen hardback charts? Yes? Good.), in which I interview John Banville about his fascination with the crime narrative, regardless of whether he’s writing as Banville or Black. Many books were sold, much wine was drank, and everyone went home happy. Except Alan Glynn, the miserable sod.
  Incidentally, I reviewed A DEATH IN SUMMER in tandem with Arlene Hunt for RTE’s Arena programme last Monday night. You can catch the audio here, and my review notes ran a lot like this:

A Death in Summer by Benjamin Black (Mantle)

Synopsis:
A DEATH IN SUMMER is the fourth Benjamin Black novel, a series of crime novels written by John Banville and set in 1950’s Dublin. It opens in the wake of the apparent suicide of newspaper owner and well-to-do businessman Richard ‘Diamond Dick’ Jewell at his country estate in County Kildare. Lugubrious Inspector Hackett is first on the scene, followed by his friend and foil, the coroner Quirke. Their subsequent examination of the corpse, and their interview of the dead man’s widow Francoise Jewell, nee d’Aubigny, and her sister-in-law Denise, aka Dannie, convinces both men that Jewell’s death was not a suicide. Consequently, a murder investigation is embarked upon, one in which the obvious suspect appears to be Jewell’s bitter business rival, the Canadian-born Carlton Sumner, who has been attempting an hostile takeover of Jewell’s newspaper for some time. But as Quirke assists Hackett in his enquiries, and finds himself drawn into an affair with Jewell’s widow, malign forces make themselves manifest as powerful men strive to keep their dark deeds to remain in the shadows.

John Banville tends to describe his Benjamin Black novels as the work of an artisan rather than an artist, but it’s hard to resist the feeling, while reading A DEATH IN SUMMER, that he is enjoying his role as a crime writer rather more than is public persona of curmudgeonly aesthete allows. Certainly the novel is the most accomplished to date of the Benjamin Black offerings, being a satisfying blend of character, atmosphere, pace and (largely) unexpected twists.

Main Characters:

Quirke
The central character, Quirke - who ever only goes by a single name - has changed little since his first outing in CHRISTINE FALLS (2006). The survivor of a traumatic childhood, when he was orphaned early and consigned to a number of homes and industrial schools, he was later adopted by a wealthy judge, and brought up in the rarefied air of middle-class Ireland of the 1940s. A reformed alcoholic who spent time drying out at the beginning of ELEGY FOR APRIL (2010), Quirke falls off the wagon again in A DEATH IN SUMMER, in part because he betrays his lover, the actress Isabel Galloway, to begin an affair with Francoise d’Aubigny. A prickly man whose internal monologues reveal that he lacks the basic social graces, despite appearances to the contrary, Quirke is problematic and largely unknown even to those who know him best, Inspector Hackett and his daughter, Phoebe.

Inspector Hackett
Originally little more than a foil for Quirke, Hackett emerges fully fledged in A DEATH IN SUMMER; indeed, the story opens with Hackett attending the murder of Richard Jewell, with Quirke arriving a little later. A phlegmatic and studiously careful man, he favours stout boots even in the warmest of weather, which Banville alludes to in order point up Hackett’s love of routine and the status quo. Originally from the country, Hackett has never really adapted to the city life of Dublin, and is more than happy to play the buffoon when conducting interviews, the better to lure his suspects into a false sense of superiority.

Phoebe
Quirke gave up his daughter Phoebe for adoption when she was born, and her mother died in child-birth, and has only belatedly acknowledged her as his own, albeit for her sake rather than his. The pair are closer than either is prepared to admit, perhaps because they share the same character traits, and Phoebe provides for Banville a conduit to a younger generation of Dublin’s men and women, a more stylish generation that was to explode into the 1960s with a sense that they were entitled to more from life than grey, depressed Ireland had to offer. Here Phoebe provides Quirke, and by extension the reader, access via Dannie Jewell to Dublin’s ‘fast set’, one of whom is Carlton Sumner’s son Teddy, a young man with a history of violence against women.

Francoise d’Aubigny
Being French is enough in itself to give Francoise d’Aubigny a rare glamour in 1950’s Dublin, but she compounds the effect by being possessed of a haughty poise and a haunting beauty. A Jewess, and a veteran of the French Resistance in WWII, Francoise beguiles Quirke, drawing uncharacteristically passionate responses from a man who finds himself awkwardly adapting to acting on instinct and against his conscience, particularly as Francoise, who has been living a separate life from her late husband for some time, cannot be discounted as a suspect for his murder.

General Comment:
Despite the austere tone and apparently sedate pace, the novel progresses at a page-turning clip, due to the fact that Banville musters a host of characters to provide third-person narration, including minor characters such as his colleague Sinclair, who becomes romantically involved with Phoebe, and Dannie Jewell. This represents a neat sleight of hand by Banville, as the Benjamin Black novels, given their setting and tone, are generally considered ‘cosies’, a variation of the crime novel that tends to progress, as the name suggests, at a comfortable stroll rather than a flat-out sprint.

The prose, as Banville cheerfully confesses, is less accomplished than those of the self-consciously artistic Banville novels, being more functional, direct and plain. That said, Banville is probably incapable of publishing a bad sentence, regardless of writing persona, and A DEATH IN SUMMER is as precisely written as the best crime novels, even if the prose only rarely calls attention to itself. Some examples do stand out, such as “The priest was studying him closely again, running ghostly fingers over the braille of Quirke’s soul” (pg 144), but for the most part Banville is happy to allow form, function and plot to take precedence over any other considerations.

Conclusion:
As in previous Benjamin Black novels, the sepia-toned backdrop of 1950s Dublin gradually gives way to a more black-and-white world, in which Quirke and Hackett’s investigations penetrate to some of the darker corners of Ireland’s past. To explain further how that applies in the case of A DEATH IN SUMMER would be to provide too many spoilers, but it’s fair to say that by the novel’s conclusion, the apparent simplicity of black-and-white and the pieties of good-versus-evil have taken on the more ambiguously blurred lines of noir-ish chiaroscuro. Indeed, from the vantage point of 2011, the finale of A DEATH IN SUMMER represents one of the most stomach-churningly fatalistic noir endings of any crime novel published to date this year. - Declan Burke

Down These Green Streets: Michael Connelly Speaks!

All Three Regular Readers will excuse me, I hope, for running two consecutive posts on DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS, but it’s not often that a book appears with my name on the cover, and given that today marks its official launch, the fact is that I’m giddy as a three-legged donkey on ice. If you’ll bear with me, normal-ish service will be resumed on Wednesday, but in the meantime I offer for your delectation the Introduction to DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS, which is penned by no less a personage than the great Michael Connelly (right). To wit:

Introduction
By Michael Connelly

“At first I thought I didn’t belong here. My name got me the invite but the truth was that I didn’t belong. I am a full and direct descendant of Ireland all right. My grandparents were Scahan, McEvoy, McGrath and Connelly, but still, what did I know of the true Irish experience? I’d been to Dublin and Belfast, quaffed a Guinness at the place on the river where it’s made and drank another pint at Davy Byrnes in an effort to conjure the ghost and inspiration of Joyce. But it hardly qualified me to introduce this book.
  “But then I started reading the stories and the essays and I came to realize there is a universal language in the crime story. What Tana French does in Dublin I try to do in Los Angeles. What John Connolly (spelling not withstanding) hopes to say with Charlie Parker is what I want to say with Harry Bosch. Same goes with Black, Bateman, Burke, and any of the other writers whose work is contained here in. We’re all in this together and there is only the language of storytelling.
  “Great storytelling knows no boundaries such as oceans or borders. It is universal and it is in embedded in the twisting helix of our DNA. It is arguable that the Irish DNA is indeed different, that it has extra chromosomes for metaphor, legend and wit. For such a relatively small place, its impact on and contribution to the world of literature has been disproportionately huge.
  “So, too, now in the shorter field of crime fiction. What you have in this book is the acknowledgement of some of the finest writers in the world in the understanding of the crime story’s important place in literature. These writers know the secret. That the examination of a crime is an examination of society. The form is simply the doorway we go through as we enter lives and worlds as fully realized as any in fiction, as we examine issues and societies and moral dilemmas that are important to all of us. I am drawn to these stories as an outsider with this inside information. As someone who knows the power and importance of what these pages hold.” - Michael Connelly

  We thank you kindly, sir. Meanwhile, the launch of DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS takes place today, Tuesday June 7th, at the Gutter Bookshop, Cow’s Lane, Temple Bar, with festivities kicking off at 6pm. All are more than welcome, and for a full list of the attending authors, who will be signing copies en masse, see the post below …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE FATAL TOUCH by Conor Fitzgerald

Set in Rome, but featuring an American-born Italian police detective, and written by an Irishman, THE FATAL TOUCH is Conor Fitzgerald’s sequel to last year’s debut, THE DOGS OF ROME, which garnered him comparisons with the late Michael Dibdin, who along with Donna Leon had virtually cornered the market on English-language crime fiction set in Italy until his untimely death.
  ‘Conor Fitzgerald’, by the way, is a pseudonym for Conor Fitzgerald Deane; the author is the son of poet and academic, Seamus Deane. Intriguingly for a man who has previously translated Joycean academic work, Fitzgerald has given his protagonist the name Blume.
  Here Commissario Alec Blume investigates the murky world of art forgery, aided and abetted by his colleague Caterina Mattiola, former policeman Beppe Paolini, the mysterious Colonel Farinelli, and the memoirs left behind by a dead forger, the Irish artist-in-exile Henry Treacy.
  Beautifully written, the story proceeds at a stately pace which disguises an exquisitely complex plot, as Blume delicately negotiates the labyrinth that is Roman policing. Fitzgerald has an elegant, spare style that straddles both the literary and crime genres, and the style is perfectly pitched to reflect Blume’s own world-weariness.
  Despite his cynicism, however, one of Blume’s chief virtues is his laconic sense of humour, which gives rise to deliciously dry and deadpan observations on virtually every page, most of them at Blume’s own expense.
  Blume is a loner, an outsider and a potential alcoholic, but Fitzgerald cleverly reworks the police procedural’s conventions, much as the forger Treacy pays homage to the Old Masters, and makes a distinctive hero of Blume, particularly in terms of his ability to not only adjust to the corruption that is integral to Italian policing, but to employ it on his own terms. This is a particularly clever twist, as the world is fully aware that corruption is endemic to Italian public life, but this is the first time I’ve come across a character proactively employing corruption as a policing tool.
  Meanwhile, Treacy’s memoirs provide a secondary narrative strand that is equally compelling, and which neatly feed into the main story despite Treacy’s penchant for baroque and self-serving prose. Treacy’s journals, of which there are extensive excerpts, put me in mind of John Banville’s THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE, had Freddie Montgomery turned to art forgery rather than murder.
  The character of Colonel Farinelli is also an intriguing one. A corpulent sybarite, he carries a whiff of cordite wherever he goes. Formerly a powerful policeman, he has long since been shunted out of the corridors of power, due to a murky past in which he was involved, unsuccessfully, in attempting to secure the release of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, who was abducted and subsequently murdered by the Red Brigade in 1978.
  All these elements come together in a scintillating novel which offers a compelling snapshot of contemporary Rome, courtesy of a guide, in Alec Blume, who seems set fair to become this generation’s Aurelio Zen. - Declan Burke

  Conor Fitzgerald’s THE FATAL TOUCH is published by Bloomsbury.

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

Hooked, Line and Sinker

“All children, except one, grow up.”
  It celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, but PETER PAN hasn’t aged a day. JM Barrie’s children’s classic originated with a story published in ‘The Little White Bird’ in 1902, made its debut as a play in 1904, and finally appeared as the beloved book in 1911, under the title PETER AND WENDY.
  As the author of a couple of hard-boiled crime novels, I occasionally get asked about my favourite novel. PETER PAN, I say, and brace myself for the inevitable squinty-eyed glare from under a raised eyebrow. Am I being ironic? Did I mishear the question? Have I gone senile, and am I reverting to infantilism?
  No, no and not quite yet. There’s no other way of putting this, so I’m just going to go ahead and say it: PETER PAN is the best novel ever written, bar none.
  Why so? Well, first off it’s a rollicking tale, as you already know. Boys and girls who fly off to a magical islands, there to encounter fairies, pirates and Red Indians, wild beasts for the hunting and a ticking crocodile, and an anarchic band of lost boys led by the irrepressibly brave swashbuckler, Peter himself, nemesis of the unspeakably evil and sadistic Captain Hook. It’s funny, dangerous and tragic; it features betrayals and outrageous reversals of fortune, the poignancy of loss, death and even a resurrection.
  There’s a good chance, of course, that you know the story from the 1953 Disney cartoon, or from the countless adaptations of the book, or contemporary movies such as ‘Hook’ (1991), ‘Peter Pan’ (2003) or ‘Finding Neverland’ (2004). If that’s the case, you won’t know that the novel itself is exquisitely written by a writer at the very top of his game. Stuffy literary types arguing that James Joyce’s ULYSSES, say, or Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE, are better written, neglect the scientifically proven fact that PETER PAN is one million times more enjoyable than WAR AND PEACE, and just under one trillion times more comprehensible than ULYSSES.
  Furthermore, neither WAR AND PEACE nor ULYSSES, nor any other novel to the best of my knowledge, have been central to the funding of a children’s hospital, as is the case with London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital, which has been in receipt of the royalties from PETER PAN since 1929. It’s a particularly poignant relationship, given that the Peter Pan story Wendy’s mother knew as a child was that Peter went part of the way to heaven with children who died, so that they wouldn’t be frightened on the journey.
  It’s no small coincidence that one of the heroines of PETER PAN is called Tiger-Lily, and that my own daughter is called Lily. So you can imagine my delight went I arrived at the crèche last week to find one of Lily’s carers reading PETER PAN aloud to a small circle of bowed heads, all utterly rapt.
  I’d presumed Lily was still too young for PETER PAN - it gets quite dark in places, after all. But no. In the car on the way home, I asked about Captain Hook. “He’s scrummied up in the crockdile’s tummy, yum-yum!” she crowed.
  One hundred years on, the tale of the boy who never grew up is still wowing children all over the world. More importantly, perhaps, it’s helping sick kids to get better and grow up at Ormond Street Hospital.
  This year, do yourself a favour and treat a kid you know, perhaps even your own inner child, to PETER PAN. Would that we all stayed so young with such grace.

Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes

I don’t know if literary Dublin is a sexy city or not, but certainly James Joyce wasn’t averse to sticking in (oo-er, missus) some rumpy-pumpy whenever the mood took him. Anyway, a very reputable man in the publishing field gets in touch to tell me he’s putting together ‘a set of four city-based anthologies, in the literary erotica field’, and wondering if I know of any writers of literary erotica. To wit:

“Dublin has so far evinced very few submissions, and it looks as if I’m going to be short of stories. Are there any Irish writers whom you might recommend who might be interested in attempting a sexy/erotic story set in Dublin? Would be quite happy to formally commission a story on basis of a paragraph or so outline.”

  So there you have it. If you write literary erotica, or think you could do a good job of writing Dublin-based literary erotica, drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch. The money’s good, by the way.
  Oh, and McKinty? You’re barred.

A Bloom By Any Other Name

Further to Adrian McKinty getting lumps kicked out of his latest novel, FIFTY GRAND, in the Irish Times this week, and in the interest of balance, we present a little nugget that slipped through the net from last month, in which Fintan O’Toole gits jiggy with James Joyce’s ULYSSES in – oh yes! – the Irish Times. To wit:

Is there a middle way between solemn worship on the one side and touristic antics on the other? How about thrillers? Anyone who can read a good thriller is half way towards being able to enjoy ULYSSES. Murder stories have a lot in common with Joyce’s masterpiece. They venture down the mean streets of the city. Their plots depend on a concentrated unfolding of time in which everything has to be carefully sequenced. Chance encounters acquire significance. The city, unknown at first, gradually yields up its hidden mysteries.
  This is why thriller writers have long been drawn to ULYSSES and also why thrillers can serve as excellent introductions to the book. Adrian McKinty’s recent hard-boiled, fast-paced THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD is as dark and violent as any thriller fan could demand, but it also serves as an intelligent homage to ULYSSES – not so much to its content as to Joyce’s way of telling a story …

  For the rest, clickety-click here …