News: Jane Casey Wins the Mary Higgins Clark Award

Hearty congratulations to Jane Casey, who won the Mary Higgins Clark Award last night for THE STRANGER YOU KNOW (Minotaur Books) (the announcement was made during the ongoing Mystery Writers of America / Edgar Awards season). As those in the know will, y’know, know, THE STRANGER YOU KNOW features Jane’s series heroine Maeve Kerrigan, the London-based police detective who is one of the most compellingly drawn protagonists in contemporary crime fiction. Jane has been shortlisted for a number of awards in the past, but to the best of my knowledge this is the first time she has taken home the prize, and it’s fully deserved.
  Meanwhile, Stuart Neville will go head-to-head with some real heavyweights tonight – Karin Slaughter, Stephen King, Ian Rankin – when the Edgar Award for Best Novel is announced. Can he make it an Irish double? Only that most notorious of tittle-tattlers – time – will tell …

The Art Of Charlie Parker

I interviewed Karin Slaughter last Friday afternoon, and a very enjoyable chat it was too. In the middle of the conversation she began waxing lyrical, unbidden, about how nice a guy is the Dark Lord, aka John Connolly, and how supportive he is of other writers. Which is as true a thing as has been said to me in a long, long time, and no real surprise. What we do tend to forget here in Ireland, however, is that Americans speak of John Connolly in the same breath as bestselling titans such as Lee Child, Patricia Cornwell, Sue Grafton and Michael Connelly. No mean feat, as they say.
  Anyway, further proof of John Connolly’s generosity, if any were required, is available on his blog, where he’s running a competition for the artists among his readers to mark the imminent publication of the latest Charlie Parker novel, THE WRATH OF ANGELS. To wit:

“Between now and July 31, I invite the artists among you to submit original artwork inspired by the world of Charlie Parker to contact@johnconnollybooks.com, for use as an image on one of five postcards to be given away at signing events for THE WRATH OF ANGELS. We will choose five images (one per artist) to reproduce. Winners will be credited on their postcards, and each will receive $250 and a signed first edition of THE WRATH OF ANGELS (as well as a signed set of the postcards). We’ll set up a gallery on the website and post the winners with the best of the runners-up, so everyone can see them.”

  I don’t know about you, but I’m plundering my daughter’s crayon box as you read. For all the details on the Charlie Parker competition, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, John recently posted a video in which he chats about Charlie Parker and THE WRATH OF ANGELS. Roll it there, Collette …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Lee Child

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

Forgetful Editor’s Note: I met with Lee Child (right) yesterday afternoon, to interview him about his latest novel, THE AFFAIR, and a very interesting conversation it was, too. In fact, the only bum notes were when he referred to knowing me, and my work, on a couple of occasions during the chat. Afterwards, not wanting to break the flow during the interview, I pointed out that he was confusing me with my bete noire, Declan Hughes. No, he said, it was Declan Burke he meant; he knew of me through Crime Always Pays, and had in fact filled in a Q&A for the blog last year. Which suggests, if there was ever any doubt about it, that Lee Child is far more professional, and significantly more a gentleman, than yours truly. As a form of penance, then, I hereby reprint said Q&A. To wit:

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
Either THE DAMNED AND THE DESTROYED by Kenneth Orvis, or DADDY by Loup Durand, or THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS by Thomas Harris. In the same way that people who like a) skiing and b) skateboarding and c) wearing baggy clothes invented snowboarding, I try to use the planetary pulls of those three novels to create my own orbit. Which will be completely incomprehensible to anyone who has actually read my books, but that’s what’s happening in my head.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Little John from the Robin Hood legend. Cheerful, tough, and a bit thick.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Barbara Taylor Bradford, and multi-generational sagas in general. Especially about rags to riches and long-delayed revenge by wronged girls.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Generally or specifically? Generally, when I’ve got the first couple thousand words down, and I can sense the story stretching ahead, and I haven’t screwed it up yet. Specifically, the end of the first chapter in PERSUADER. Even I was excited.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I’m half-Irish myself, and therefore half-entitled to feel that Irishness can work just as well - or even better - out there in the diaspora, maybe a generation or two from the auld sod itself, where all its doom and boneheaded cussedness and fatalism and stoicism and tribalism stands in stark relief against a more neutral setting. So, MYSTIC RIVER by Dennis Lehane. Or, if you insist on an Irish writer with Irish characters in Ireland, I liked IN THE WOODS by Tana French a lot. But it wasn’t essentially Irish, was it? Could have worked in Manchester or Baltimore or Sydney or Christchurch. So how about THE BIG O by Declan Burke?

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
MYSTIC RIVER, see above. And it was a fine movie.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Anyone who has had another job knows there’s nothing bad about it. Best? It’s all good.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Find out if Jack Reacher survived 61 HOURS.

Who are you reading right now?
An ARC of BROKEN by Karin Slaughter.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
If God appears I’ll have a whole lot more to worry about than that. Like revising a whole lot of assumptions. Or complaining to my dealer. But - I would choose reading, of course. I like reading other people’s stuff a thousand times better than typing out my own crap.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Good enough, sometimes.

Lee Child’s THE AFFAIR is published by Bantam Press.

Torture-Porn: Yay Or Nay?

In a comment on one of the posts below, Richard L paraphrases Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo in saying that ‘Literature, both the writing and the reading of it, makes men more humanely compassionate.’ And women too, you’d imagine, particularly as women account for the majority of fiction readers these days, and at least half of fiction writers.
  On the same day Richard L left his comment, I received a review copy of a book that had the strap-line, ‘TAKEN, TRAPPED, TORTURED’. Written by Chevy Stevens, the novel comes complete with a raves from Kathy Reichs and Karin Slaughter, and tells the story of ‘Annie Sullivan’s abduction, her year in captivity and the chilling aftermath’.
  Now, I do appreciate that writers set up their serial killers / torturers / sex fiends et al as straw men, to be burned to the ground in a vigilante narrative that, presumably, offers readers a sense that justice (natural or otherwise) prevails against the evil that men do.
  I have no idea of how subtly or otherwise Chevy Smith handles the torture of Annie Sullivan in STILL MISSING, and I won’t be finding out, because I have zero interest in reading novels that are predicated on violence against women. That Chevy Smith is a woman writing about violence against women is neither here nor there. I’m just not interested.
  It’s not that I have my head buried in the sand. I know that such things happen in the real world. In Ireland, in the last few days alone, we’ve had some desperately tragic news that included the smothering of a toddler and the stabbing to death of an infant. So I do understand, unfortunately, the evil that men do, and as often as not to women and children.
  Reading about such depravity in the newspaper is one thing, however. Reading about it in a novel that is packaged as entertainment is another thing entirely. Neither Karin Slaughter’s rave (‘Will have you spellbound from the first page’) nor Kathy Reichs’ (‘Fast-paced and utterly absorbing’) suggest that Stevens has written a novel railing against violence done to women; their appreciation of the story is bound up in Stevens’ ability to entertain.
  Maybe I’m a little squeamish about such things these days because I have a baby girl of my own, and because - being a man - I’m all too aware of how deviant men can be. In fact, in my first novel, I have a scene in which a woman is tortured by having her fingers broken one by one. In my second novel, a female character is beaten, has her leg broken, and an eye gouged out with a fork, and the fact that Anna is a Siberian wolf is neither here nor there. Neither novel, on the other hand, could be described as torture-porn. As it happens, one of the main reasons I wrote the second novel was to find out how convincing (or otherwise) a crime novel could be with an absolute minimum of violence employed. In the first instance, when fingers are broken, I did my best to minimise the lurid aspect of it, and the finger-breaking lasts for less than a page.
  That said, I’ve never had any interest in reading books or watching movies in which a defenceless woman is physically or sexually brutalised by a man, or men. Torture-porn, I believe the phrase is, and regardless of how total and deserved the eventual revenge scenario proves to be, the experience (when I’ve had to sit through such a movie for review purposes, say) leaves me feeling dirty and degraded. Not because I’ve identified with the victim, necessarily, but because I belong to a society and civilisation that obviously believes that making a profit out of suffering is a good idea.
  There are good novels to be written about the brutalisation of women, and I’m sure they’ve already been written. A novel, for example, that dealt with the experience of a Muslim woman lashed into unconsciousness, or even stoned to death, for adultery real or imagined. Or the experience of a woman enduring the banal evil of marital rape. Or - and not to belabour the broader Muslim community unnecessarily - the experience of a woman targeted for an honour killing, because she refused to participate in an arranged marriage, or wear certain kinds of clothing. Or the story of a six-year-old girl who had acid thrown in her face for daring to go to school.
  These kinds of stories, I’d imagine, providing they’re well written, could hardly achieve any other impact than to make men and women more compassionate, as Richard L suggests is the point of writing and reading books.
  Of course, it’s possible to argue that the torture-porn sub-genre is making the point that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the women of so-called ‘civilised societies’ are no less vulnerable to an underlying fear of women that manifests itself in male violence, brutality and perversion. If that is the case, then it’s arguably a valid point to make.
  By the same token, there’s an equally valid question to be asked about the kind of novels that incorporate torture-porn into page-turning entertainments, and it’s this: What, apart from financial profit, is the ultimate point of the torture-porn novel?

Fiddling With His Funny Bits: The Bateman Interview

With his latest ‘Mystery Man’ novel, DR YES, on the horizon, and a new play in the works, I recently interviewed Colin Bateman (right) for the Evening Herald. It went a lot like this:

FOR A MAN who recently lost his first name, The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman is in remarkably chipper form.
  The prolific writer (25 novels and counting) of comedy crime novels that began with DIVORCING JACK was recently rebranded ‘Bateman’ to coincide with the publication of a new series character who goes only by the name ‘Mystery Man’ as Bateman spoofs the conventions of the traditional crime thriller.
  “It’s kind of a mixed blessing,” he says of his new moniker. “It has undeniably worked as far as the books are concerned - or maybe the books are getting better - in that there’s a recognition factor there. The downside, I suppose, is that if you don’t know it’s tongue in cheek, you’d think it was a bit self-important. And of course, now that I have that doctorate from Coleraine University, I’m officially a Doctor, so the new book could be DR YES by Dr Bateman. If I chose to, ahem, yank my own chain.”
  Fiddling with his funny bits, of course, is what led to the creation of Bateman’s choicest character to date.
  “Most of my books have been launched in Belfast’s No Alibis mystery bookstore,” he says, “and at a launch I generally read the first chapter of the new book: you don’t have to set it all up or confuse people with back stories and asides. But when I was launching DRIVING BIG DAVIE about six years ago I had a bit of a problem – the first chapter was all about masturbation, and my mother-in-law was in the audience. So I had to read something, and that something was a story I wrote over the weekend before the launch, actually set in the bookstore, and with a fictional version of the owner [Dave Torrans] cracking a humdrum crime in ‘The Case of Mrs Geary’s Leather Trousers’. It really was just to fill a gap, but it went down so well that at the next book launch I wrote another short story featuring the same character, and those two stories eventually evolved into the first novel.”
  Mystery Man’s schtick is that he is the antithesis of the conventional crime fiction hero: he’s a cowardly neurotic, a hypochondriac with all the fighting qualities of a cloistered nun, a man who excels only at “being paranoid and foolish and saying the wrong thing, mostly. Yep, it’s a thinly veiled autobiography,” laughs Bateman. “I think Mystery Man and Dan Starkey [the wise-cracking hero of Bateman’s previous series of novels] have a lot in common in that they both tend to open their mouths before they put their brains into gear. The difference is that Dan’s a bit of a jack-the-lad, and if he doesn’t exactly get away with it, he does have a bit of charm and swagger to him. Mystery Man you’d probably just want to hit with a hammer. I suspect I’m probably half way between the two of them.”
  The first in the new series, MYSTERY MAN, was a Richard and Judy ‘Summer Read’, while the second, THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSELL, scooped the Last Laugh award at the recent CrimeFest bunfight in Bristol. The third, DR YES, will be published on September 30th, but Bateman isn’t resting on his laurels.
  “I think it’s important to keep the writing fresh,” he says, “so I’m always open to new challenges – the most recent being writing an erotic short story for Maxim Jakubowski’s Dublin-set anthology, SEX IN THE CITY, which story is chiefly notable for having no discernable erotic content.”
  Having previously written for TV, most notably the Murphy’s Law series that starred James Nesbitt, Bateman has now turned to writing for the stage.
  “‘National Anthem’ is about a composer and a poet,” he explains, “both exiles for twenty years, and with a certain level of fame, who are commissioned by the Government to create a national anthem for Northern Ireland to coincide with the visit of the American President. They’re very much up against a deadline: two men in a room with one day to compose it. But this isn’t the country they left, and they both have secrets which are exposed during the course of the play, secrets which also come back to haunt them. I should add that it’s a comedy, a farce, but maybe with a few points to make about how ‘we’ see ourselves, where we’ve been and where we’re going.”
  After that it’s back to another Mystery Man novel, and using comedy to continue to carve out a niche in what he believes is quickly becoming a depressingly homogenous genre.
  “In publishing terms,” he says, “crime fiction is the biggest genre, and the best-selling authors are selling phenomenal amounts of books. But I genuinely believe that 99 per cent of crime readers, if they were given just the books minus their covers and any identifying information, really couldn’t tell the difference between any of them.
  “I was at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival a couple of months ago and I met many crime fiction fans, and they were all perfectly nice and lovely and I got a great reception and they laughed at my jokes, but it was absolutely clear to me that at the end of the day what they actually wanted was the next Jeffrey Deaver, or Patricia Cornwell or Karin Slaughter. They like the safety of knowing what they’re getting every time they buy a book, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but most of them just aren’t comfortable with the idea of crime comedy and won’t take a chance on it.
  “I think maybe readers have forgotten that there was a strong element of humour in crime fiction in the past - Sherlock Holmes and Raymond Chandler had it in spades - but it seems to have been sucked out of it over the years in favour of blood and guts.
  “It’s not so much that comic crime is cutting edge,” he continues, “it’s just that I think anything that varies from the norm is always worth checking out. Comic crime fiction at least dares to be different. It also,” he grins, “dares not to sell very many copies.”

  DR YES is published by Headline on September 30th. National Anthem debuts at the Belfast Theatre Festival on October 20th.

  This interview first appeared in the Evening Herald.