On First Novels And Kitchen Sinks

“It really shouldn’t work,” begins Karen Chisholm’s review of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE over at AustCrimeFiction, which sounds a tad ominous, and things aren’t improved much when Karen starts listing the ways in which EIGHTBALL and its protagonist, Harry Rigby, really shouldn’t, erm, work.
  Happily, Karen’s time wasn’t entirely wasted in reading the novel. To wit:

“It’s undoubtedly something to do with the crisp, sharp, pointy, sticky, dark, hilariously funny writing throughout the book … Sure the plot probably needed a tourist guide, a very good torch and maybe a cheat sheet, but I ... simply ... did ... not ... care. I loved the whole package and frankly, had a ball reading it.” - Karen Chisholm, AustCrimeFiction

  Which is very nice indeed. Books-wise, the last couple of months at Chez CAP have been largely taken up with BOOKS TO DIE FOR and SLAUGHTER’S HOUND (the sequel to EIGHTBALL BOOGIE), and you do tend to forget that you have other books out there, like children grown up and gone off to discover the world, and reviews like Karen’s function a little like postcards from a distant land, or the past, or somewhere they do things differently.
  At the Crime Night event at Tallaght’s recent Red Line Books Festival, I asked Niamh O’Connor if there was anything about her first book she’d like to change. She said no, and asked if I’d like to change anything about my first book, and I said yes, pretty much everything. As Karen Chisholm points out (very nicely) in her review, the characters in EIGHTBALL BOOGIE crunch their way through the story across the porcelain shards of what feels like a million metaphorical kitchen sinks, said sinks having been (metaphorically) thrown by yours truly in a desperate bid to keep the book interesting.
  In short, it’s a hyper-ventilating love-letter to the crime novel in general and those of Raymond Chandler in particular, although it’s probably fair to say that I took his tongue-in-cheek advice on what to do should the pace ever flag - have a man come the door with a gun in his hand - a little too seriously. And yet, for all its faults I love it still. The way you might love a child, keenly aware of the ways in which it isn’t perfect, but loving it all the more because of its imperfections rather than despite them.
  For a sample chapter or three from EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, please feel free to clickety-click here …

The Embiggened O # 1,307: Hope, Like Alice, Springs Eternal

Strewth! Bonzer news from Down Under, people, where Karen Chisholm of the rather fine AustCrimeFiction interweb thingagummy not only read our humble offering THE BIG O all the way through, but managed to stay awake for the duration! Fair dinkum, Sheila! Quoth Sheila / Karen (in excerpt, naturally, to spare you the boring bits about what she didn’t like):

“The style of THE BIG O is slightly tongue-in-cheek, very rapid-fire, slightly wisecracking, slightly brittle and surprisingly vulnerable in some places. There’s a lot of crossing and double crossing of everybody going on; there’s a lot of charging around as you’d expect from a caper style novel … the book clips along at a tremendous pace … the dialogue … is snappy, stylistic and sometimes laugh-out loud-funny, sometimes snicker inducing; and sometimes a bit tear-jerking … it’s one of my favourite styles of escapist reading – the slightly lunatic caper, albeit this time with a twist in the guts at the end.”

Thank you kindly, ma’am. In return, consider our fatwa on Marmite officially cancelled …

“Roll Up, Roll Up, ’Tis The Crime Carnival!”

The brainchild of author and academic librarian Barbara Fister (right), the Crime Carnival – currently blaring its calliope over at The Rap Sheet – is a fairly simple piece of genius. Hark while Karen Chisholm of AustCrimeFiction explains:

“The idea for this rolling blog carnival came from author and academic librarian Barbara Fister, who in mid-September suggested that a gaggle of bloggers interested in crime and mystery fiction get together and regularly post links to Web-based stories about the genre that they’ve read and enjoyed recently. At least initially, the carnival’s hosts will alternate on a fortnightly basis ... The Rap Sheet will follow up with a similar round-up posting in mid-October, and things are expected to go on from there … This seems to me like a fun opportunity to cooperate with, and get to know other bloggers who boast similar reading interests. Since Barbara Fister is trying to rope people in from around the globe, we might even learn something about just how broad and interesting the genre is these days.”

The schedule for Crime Carnival can be found hereabouts, and Crime Always Pays’ bid for world domination kicks off on December 1st, which – rather frustratingly – was the day we’d pencilled in to invade Poland. Jeez - something always crops up, doesn’t it?