“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Michael Dymmoch

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?
MYSTIC RIVER. For some reason it’s still meandering through my head, though I read it years ago.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Odysseus. He was brave, cunning, practical, curious, and human.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Baroness Orczy , Alexandre Dumas, Zane Gray.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Someone I sent a piece to responded with, “Damn You!” It wasn’t what I was aiming for, but it obviously evoked a strong emotion.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I really loved John Connolly’s THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS although I’m not sure it qualifies as a ‘crime’ novel, and The Crying Game though it’s not a novel. I’m sorry to say I’m not really familiar with Irish fiction – I’m hopelessly behind on reading well-known American writers. BTW – Who do you suggest I read after you?

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Guillermo del Toro could do a great job with THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst: Sometimes the words won’t come, or when you have a deadline, you get dozens of ideas for other books, none for the book you’re working on. Best: Total strangers come up to you and rave about something you wrote, speaking as if the characters you invented were living beings. (It’s also nice to kill people off in your latest opus when they get on your nerves.)

The pitch for your next book is …?
In 1998, a young man is dragged to death in Boys Town. A victim of malignant homophobia or something else?

Who are you reading right now?
I’m working my way through the stack of books I brought home from Bouchercon, including Barry Eisler, Jason Goodwin, Lynda LaPlante, and Reed Farrel Coleman.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Neither. MY God would certainly know that you can’t write if you don’t read, and would never demand a such a choice. Maybe the devil...

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
My own style.

Michael Dymmoch’s M.I.A. is published by St Martin’s Minotaur.

Last Month I Was Mostly Reading …

A good month, last month. The highlight was Scott Phillips’ THE ICE HARVEST, not bad going when the company included Jason Goodwin’s THE SNAKE STONE, Cormac McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN, and John Le Carré’s TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY.
  I sneaked a peak at the first page of THE ICE HARVEST, just to get a flavour, when I got back to the hotel at 1am, this in Philadelphia after meeting Scott Phillips and having the novel warmly recommended by the quasi-mythical Greg Gillespie. Drink had been consumed, and I’d never heard of Scott Phillips or THE ICE HARVEST. I put the book down again at 3am because it was too damn good to read in one go. Scott has a lovely light touch, a dry sense of humour and a sharp ear for wry dialogue. It’s also an exemplary character study, as good as Banville’s Victor Maskell and Thompson’s Lou Ford. Terrific stuff.
  I met Scott Phillips again in Baltimore, actually, which was nice, especially as he spent the entire Friday walking around with a copy of THE BIG O under his arm. I also met Jason Goodwin, this about a week after I’d finished THE SNAKE STONE, which I thought was superb. The day after I finished it I bought the first in the series, THE JANISSARY TREE, which I started reading on the Baltimore-Boston leg of the flight home to Dublin. Unfortunately, I got distracted by a very attractive young lady who wanted to talk about how much she missed her boyfriend, who was just after getting on a flight to Afghanistan, and so I left THE JANISSARY TREE behind on the plane, along with a notebook full of doodles about my road-trip around the States. Still, she was a very attractive young lady.
  BLOOD MERIDIAN was a strange read. A re-read, I started it in September, keeping it beside the bed and dipping into it for five or ten pages at a time. Wonderful stuff, as you already know. Then, around the halfway mark, I ran with it and found myself getting bored. There’s a lot of post-apocalyptic neo-Western slaughter going on, which was absolutely fine, but there’s also a huge amount of traversing bleak and parched terrain, during which not a lot happens. And I didn’t believe in the Judge; so larger-than-life was he that he was literally unbelievable. Maybe he’s meant to be that way, although I can’t for the life of me think why.
  I finally read my first Le Carré novel in TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, and for a long stretch I wasn’t sure if I believed in Smiley either, or cared about his world. It felt at times like his characters were trying too hard to sound authentic, although at the same time I liked the way the story was rooted in a grey, drab reality. For the first half or so it felt like a Boy’s Own compendium of monochrome adventures, a Rider Haggard take on the Cold War, but even then it was obvious that Le Carré is a fine stylist. I certainly missed Smiley’s world when I finished the story.
  I didn’t miss the world Kevin Power recreated in BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, which is set in the suburbs of southern County Dublin. Touted as a latter-day IN COLD BLOOD and THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE, it’s a fictionalised account of the death of a young Irish man after a post-nightclub assault, an event that dominated the news headlines in Ireland for many months. On the evidence of his debut offering, Power is a fine writer with a lyrical touch, but his choice of subject matter lets him down as he goes behind the headlines and explores the culture in which the young man was killed, a privileged sub-section of society composed of perennial adolescents in thrall to the cult of rugby and the cultivated aggression the sport promotes. The novel it put me most in mind of was Bret Easton Ellis’s LESS THAN ZERO, albeit with vacuous ambition at its heart rather than soi-bored nihilism. The trouble, I think, is that the specific generation Power so piercingly dissects has no virtues worth mythologizing, or vices for that matter; the writer doesn’t so much lance a boil as pop a bubble. In saying that, I’ll be reading his next novel; I think he’s the real deal.
  HITLER’S IRISHMEN by Terence O’Reilly was a fascinating read, telling the story of those few Irishmen who served in the SS during World War II. They were a motley crew, most of whom were recruited from the ranks of British POWs, but most were about as effective as they were moral. I particularly liked the story about the guy who signed up to be a German spy, underwent rigorous training, then parachuted into Northern Ireland and promptly made his way to the nearest police station to give himself up. O’Reilly is a military historian, and it shows, both in the meticulous detail and the pedestrian pace. I put it down with a hundred pages to go, and will very probably pick it up again to finish at some point in the future, but I thought that the narrative, which advances in a strictly chronological way, would have benefited from a less rigid framework and a more inventive approach to telling the various stories.
  I also read Nick Brownlee’s debut, BAIT, which is set in modern Kenya and has some interesting things to say about the fragility of Kenyan democracy. It’s a solid read, although not particularly innovative; there’s more here if you’re interested.
  Meanwhile, it hasn’t been a great start to this month. I’m 60 pages into THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, and the more I read, the less I’m inclined to believe in the eponymous heroine – right now she reads like the idealised fantasy of a middle-aged man. I’ll give it 100 pages and see how it pans out, but so far it’s fairly pedestrian stuff.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE SNAKE STONE by Jason Goodwin

Set in Istanbul in the mid-19th century, THE SNAKE STONE is the second of Jason Goodwin’s novels to feature Yashim Togalu, an unusual variation on the reluctant private eye (Yashim made his debut in THE JANISSARY TREE; THE SNAKE STONE won the 2007 Edgar for Best Novel). Formerly a eunuch at the sultan’s court, Yashim has earned a reputation as a lala, or guardian – a man of discretion to whom people can turn in their time of need. When an archaeologist, Lefèvre, throws himself on Yashim’s hospitality, Yashim is duty-bound to provide the Frenchman with whatever help he can. But when Lefevre is discovered horribly murdered shortly after Yashim has arranged for his escape from Istanbul, it quickly becomes apparent that the only suspect in the murder is Yashim himself.
  If that sounds fairly conventional, worry not; that’s merely the bare bones of the first 50 pages or so. Goodwin writes a pleasingly labyrinthine plot, one that utilises history, archaeology and politics in fleshing out a vibrant and meticulously detailed vision of Istanbul. The city makes for a wonderful setting, situated at the geographical crossing point between East and West, and a cultural melting pot that accommodates a bewildering variety of nationalities alongside its staple populations of Turk and Greek. Historically, the city can be summed up by the narrative of the former cathedral of Aya Sofia, a miracle of architecture that was formerly the jewel of Constantinople and pride of Byzantium, now the mosque with the largest dome in Islam. The aging sultan is dying; the hated janissaries have been defeated; the past and the future mingle in the thronged markets.

Early the next morning, leaving the Frenchman sleeping on the divan, Yashim walked down to the Horn and took a caique over to Galata, the centre of foreign commerce. In the harbourmaster’s office he asked for the shipping list and scanned it for a suitable vessel. There was a French 400-tonner, La Reunion, leaving for Valetta and Marseilles with a mixed cargo in four days’ time; but there was a Neapolitan vessel, too, Ca d’Oro out of Palermo, which had already been issued with bills of lading.

  Goodwin, a prize-winning historian, doesn’t graft his learning onto the plot. Instead the narrative is driven by its context, and the unravelling of the central mystery is integral to Yashim’s peeling back of layer upon layer of the city’s history. Yashim is a classic private investigator in that he seeks to understand his urban hinterland as a means by which he explore the motives of those who thrive in its mean streets; and just as Marlowe’s LA speaks to subsequent generations, so Goodwin’s Istanbul is a metaphor for contemporary globalisation. Istanbul is home to dozens of languages, the proverbial melting-pot of race and religion, a socially stratified nexus for trade and cross-cultural pollination.
  As for the story, it’s an absorbing tale, and Goodwin has a relaxed and lyrical style perfectly suited to the stately pace. Yashim walks, and never runs; he never so much as raises a jog. But Goodwin appreciates the fine difference between pace and pacing, and the importance of judicious timing, and THE SNAKE STONE is very much a compelling page-turner, a literary thriller. The most impressive thing, though, is the sense that Jason Goodwin is equally committed to all the elements of his craft: not only does he write beautifully and craft a fine plot set against an exotic background, he does so with a keen respect for the tradition of the crime narrative:

He’d seen it before, the way that sudden death made a nonsense of the things people did and said. Murder, above all, overturned the natural order of God’s creation: it was only to be expected that unreason and absurdity should crackle in its wake.