Yes, We Have No Booker Prize

Peter Murphy has long been a friend of Crime Always Pays, and his debut novel, JOHN THE REVELATOR, is a very fine offering indeed. It put me in mind of Pat McCabe’s opus THE BUTCHER BOY when I was reading it, albeit with a tad less execution by pig-stickers.
  Anyway, JOHN THE REVELATOR is in the running for The Guardian’s innovative ‘Not the Booker Prize’ award, which will be given to the novel that should have been on the Booker longlist, and wasn’t, and you – yes, YOU! – can vote for it. Clickety-click here for all the details …
  Next week - Not the Orange Prize: In which you – yes, YOU! – get to vote for all those books that didn’t qualify for the Orange Prize because they were written by blokes …

Gone Fishin’

A couple of new offerings from the seemingly bottomless pool of Irish writers, folks. First up is Norn Iron’s resident evil genius Gerard Brennan (right), he of CSNI fame, with the opening to his novel PIRANHAS. To wit:

The streets of Beechmount stank of wet dog. The effect of drying rain in early summer. Light faded from the West Belfast housing area. Joe Philips yawned and slumped against the redbrick alley wall. Half past ten at night. He wanted to be in bed, cosy and watching a DVD until he drifted off to sleep. But he was the leader. The rest of the gang expected him to be there.
  At least it was holiday time. No school to mitch in the morning. He popped his head around the corner and glanced down the avenue.
  “I see one,” he said.
  They all looked up to him. Literally. In the last few weeks he’d taken what his ma called a growth spurt. He’d use his share of tonight’s money to buy longer trousers. Too much white sock showed between his Nike Air trainers and his Adidas tracksuit bottoms.
  “Anyone else about?” Wee Danny Gibson asked. He snubbed a half-smoked fag on the alley wall and tucked the butt behind his ear.
  “No, just the aul doll. Easy enough number.”
  Wee Danny nodded and the rest of the gang twitched, murmured and pulled hoods up over lowered baseball caps. Ten of them in all, not one above fourteen years old.
  “Right, let’s go,” Joe said.
  They spilled out of the alley and surrounded the blue-rinse bitch like a cursing tornado. She screamed, but they moved too fast for the curtain-twitchers to react. Broken nose bleeding, she dropped her handbag and tried to fend off kicks and punches. Wee Danny scooped it up and whistled. They split in ten different directions. The old granny shrieked at them. They were gone before any fucker so much as opened his door.

  Nice. For the rest, clickety-click on Allan Guthrie’s Noir Originals.
  Meanwhile, Peter Murphy’s JOHN THE REVELATOR will be published next February by Faber and Faber, with the book-trailer looking a lot like this. Roll it there, Collette …

Three Chords And The Truth

If the prospect of ‘low’ entertainment being transmuted into art makes you queasy, look away now. For lo, Peter Murphy has a fine treatise on the influence of punk music on Irish literature over at his Blog of Revelations, in the midst of which he has this to say:

“The compost theory of culture holds that what was once held as ‘low’ entertainment – gothic, southern gothic, pulp fiction, westerns, post-war noir, horror, magic realism, new journalism, the new wave of ’60s sci-fi, EC and Marvel comics, tales from the crypt, performance poetry, graffiti art, graphic novels – gets turned to precious metal by the pressure of successive decades heaped on top of each other, until, at this end of the process, what was once derided as common has become retroactively transmuted into art.
  “Anybody feeling queasy here should note that Cormac McCarthy, maybe the most respected living American writer, has worked exclusively in genre for decades, be it the post-apocalyptic (THE ROAD), modern noir, (NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN), western (THE BORDER TRILOGY) horror masquerading as western (BLOOD MERIDIAN) or southern gothic (CHILD OF GOD, OUTER DARK).”

  Peter I love like a mother from another brother, etc., but there’s an issue at the heart of his argument I can’t get my head around, which is that he views Irish literary works through the prism of the punk music of the Sex Pistols, The Clash, et al.
  Surely, if the ‘low entertainment vs art’ argument holds true, then punk – and pop, rock, C&W, metal, et al – are simply genres of music, with classical the only music worth taking seriously for true connoisseurs.
  Here’s something that occurred to me while watching the Coen Brothers’ take on NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN – the movie would not be judged on its merits as a genre flick, but simply on whether it was a good or bad movie. And when the awards season rolled around, the film wasn’t awarded ‘Best Crime Flick’, it was given ‘Best Flick’.
  You can argue, as I’ve been known to do after a dry sherry or four, that movie-making being a relatively new form, it’s more in tune with generalised democracy and universal suffrage – as with TV, it instinctively understands that its audience is for the very great part composed of a classless society, or at least believes that it belongs to a classless society.
  The world of books, on the other hand, has its roots in a much different world order, one which depended for its very existence on the idea of a pecking order. And no matter how you arranged that pecking order – by title, rank or money – the essential element underpinning it was snobbery.
  Peter, back at the Blog of Revelations, celebrates the social and cultural leveller that was / is the punk ethic by urging us to:

“ … imagine a climate where Irish writers and, crucially, non-Irish writers resident here, co-opted punk’s refusal to observe protocol, where there’s no confining delineation between so-called serious and popular literature, where language, theme, storytelling craft and imagination all co-exist.”

  He goes on to cite, as examples of same, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, Joe Hill, AM Homes, David Foster Wallace, Steven Hall, Jeffrey Eugenides, Dave Eggars, George Saunders, Katherine Dunne and Tom Spanbauer.
  I don’t get the “and, crucially, non-Irish writers resident here” bit, but what I can suggest is that there many Irish writers who have “co-opted punk’s refusal to observe protocol”. They include John Connolly, Ken Bruen, Alan Glynn, Tana French, Adrian McKinty, Gerard Donovan, Colin Bateman … you get my drift.
  If punk was about anything, it was about telling it like it is. Some, like the Pistols, were wilfully raw. Others, such as The Buzzcocks, were deceptively articulate and sophisticated.
  Crime writing – whether wilfully raw or sophisticated and articulate – tells it like it is.
  All together now: “Even fallen in love with someone / Ever fallen in love / In love with someone / You shouldna fallen in love with …”

The Blog Of Revelations

Peter Murphy is a name I think you’ll be hearing a lot of in 2009. His debut novel, JOHN THE REVELATOR, will be published by Faber and Faber in February, but you can get on the bandwagon early by jumping over to his Blog of Revelations, where he’s currently wibbling about the arrival of Richard Price’s LUSH LIFE at the Revelatorium and linking to an interview he conducted with Price for Hot Press back in 2003, which is terrific stuff. Meanwhile, here’s one we prepared earlier …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 973: Peter Murphy

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?
Oh boy. A photo-finish between FROM HELL by Alan Moore, THE BLACK DAHLIA by James Ellroy, and Borges’ story ‘Death And The Compass’.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
There’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure when it comes to books. Crime novels, sci-fi, music books, comic books, journalism, ‘mainstream’ literature, ‘slipstream’ literature, biographies, tales of the macabre … MAUS is just as valid as MOBY DICK.
Most satisfying writing moment?
That Twilight Zone thing where your peripheral vision goes fuzzy and time buggers off …
The best Irish crime novel is …?
THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE. Poe was melancholic, alcoholic and black-humoured, so he qualifies as Irish by default.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I think Mike McCormack’s short story ‘A Is For Axe’ from GETTING IT IN THE HEAD would be a hoot.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst – it’s a profoundly antisocial occupation. Best – see above.
The pitch for your next novel is …?
Black and sticky.
Who are you reading right now?
THE NEW GRANTA BOOK OF AMERICAN SHORT STORY, edited by Richard Ford. They’re all great, but every fourth or fifth story just about makes my heart stop. And I’m re-reading A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND by Flannery O’Connor, ’cos she's the queen.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Blood, sweat and tears.

Peter Murphy’s JOHN THE REVELATOR will be published by Faber & Faber and Harcourt (US) in 2009.