“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Mark O’Sullivan

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?
DARK PASSAGE or THE BURGLAR, both by David Goodis. On the surface, his style was typically noir – hard-bitten, compact prose; taut, streetwise dialogue. But that’s just his kicking-off point. The writing is lifted with a quirky take on life, on logic and occasional surrealist touches. A character, for example, can be obsessed with the colour orange – clothes, furnishing, car – to such an odd extent that the novel begins to feel like some kind of surreal hand-tinted noir. Another character has a three-page conversation with a bloodied corpse. And, for me, the last chapter of THE BURGLAR can’t be beaten. An extended metaphor that sums up of all that has gone before, that’s in no way pretentiously literary, and is cinematic in its visual and visceral power.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Bernie Gunther in Philip Kerr’s superb Berlin noir novels.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Football bloggers, particularly those devoted to the team I support, Fulham FC – like
HammyEnd.com. We never win anything but we’re philosophical about the true value of failure and the illusory nature of success (especially Chelsea’s success).

Most satisfying writing moment?
Ruth Rendell has said that ‘the writer’s job is to stay confused for as long as possible’. It’s nerve-wracking but staying confused is the only effective antidote to predictability and lazy writing. The moment when that cloud of confusion begins to lift is more than satisfying – it’s a kind of ecstasy (without the thirst and the hyperactivity).

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
To be perfectly honest, I’m not sufficiently up to speed on the new Irish crime-writing wave to answer this one – or the next. I very much look forward to playing catch up though.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
As above.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst thing – If I was a plumber, I can’t imagine anyone arriving at my door and asking me to come take a look at a job they’ve just completed and how they might improve it – for free. Best thing – For some reason, a line from Leonard Cohen’s ‘Going Home’ occurs to me here: ‘He’s a lazy bastard living in a suit …’

The pitch for your next book is …?
A missing Goth girl, a hacker, a Libyan rebel fighter, a gangland casualty, a West Belfast Armenian, a woman betrayed, a mother seeking revenge – and the accidental nature of life and death. Confused? DI Leo Woods is too – but he’s working on it.

Who are you reading right now?
As always I’ve got too many books on the go. Right now I’m re-reading Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen series, which I love. I’m also nearing the end of Edward St. Aubyn’s AT LAST – the final Patrick Melrose novel. The only real freedom is the freedom from delusion, he concludes. Too right. In between times, I’m dodging in and out of John Gray’s STRAW DOGS – forget existentialism, this is real noir philosophy, stark but compelling and best taken in small doses.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
If I can write, I can read, but not vice-versa. Your move, God.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
I’ve read worse.

Mark O’Sullivan’s CROCODILE TEARS is published by Transworld.

A Perennial Blume

All Three Regular Readers will be aware that I’m rather fond of Conor Fitzgerald’s Rome-set Commissioner Blume novels, which have been described by the Sunday Times as filling the gap left by Michael Dibdin – no mean feat, I’m sure you’ll agree. The fourth Blume novel, THE MEMORY THEATRE (Bloomsbury), is due in April, with the blurb elves wibbling thusly:

On a freezing November night in Rome Commissioner Alec Blume is called to the scene of a shooting. The victim, Sofia Fontana, the sole witness to a previous shooting, had been under the questioning of Magistrate Principe, whose deteriorating health is affected by the sad fate of this attractive young woman he had become fond of. Sidestepping protocol, Blume takes the case from Principe. His enquiries lead from a professor with a passion for the Art of Memory to a hospitalised ex-terrorist whose injuries have left her mind innocently blank, and back twenty years to a murderous train station bombing in central Italy. But Blume’s disregard for authority, and refusal to kowtow to the politics endemic to the Carabinieri, look set to derail not just the investigation, but his troubled relationship with colleague Caterina Mattiola ...

  I’m very much looking forward to THE MEMORY THEATRE; Conor Fitzgerald’s books tend to be among my reading highlights in any given year. For those of you interested in such things, and have the patience to click through, I’ve reviewed the Blume novels THE FATAL TOUCH here and THE NAMESAKE here. If you’ve reviewed any of Conor Fitzgerald’s novels yourself, please feel free to leave a link …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Thomas Mogford

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?
DIRTY TRICKS by Michael Dibdin. A stand-alone novel, rather than one of the ‘Zen’ series, it pulls off the near-impossible trick of making a thoroughly reprehensible main character utterly likeable. As someone who was brought up in Oxford, and has taught more than his fair share of foreign language classes, I felt a worrying sense of solidarity when the venal owner of language school receives a rather shocking comeuppance ...

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Keith Talent from Martin Amis’s LONDON FIELDS. Indefatigability and darts skills.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t often feel guilty about reading books. Free magazines and certain online newspapers, maybe…

Most satisfying writing moment?
When my wife reads something I’ve written, and doesn’t have a hint of a look that says ‘This could be better …’.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
DIVORCING JACK by Colin Bateman. My wife’s family are from Belfast, and this book convinced me that at any point while visiting them I would be kidnapped and trussed-up in a tower block. Still hasn’t happened, unfortunately …

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Irish-written, rather than Irish-set, but THE DOGS OF ROME by Conor Fitzgerald. Dog fights, mafia double dealings, all with the shimmering seedy backdrop of Rome… I’d buy a multiplex ticket for that.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The best thing is experiencing a scene as you write it in a way that is almost as intense as living it. The worst is the crippling sense of uncertainty as to whether that scene is any good.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Gibraltarian lawyer Spike Sanguinetti travels to Malta after the deaths of his uncle and aunt. What appears to be a blood-soaked murder-suicide turns out a great deal more dark and sinister…

Who are you reading right now?
An English translation of the crime novel BRENNER AND GOD by Wolf Haas. Gives the lie to the fact that German-speakers can’t be funny and cool.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I think write, so as to try and pen poems to persuade Him to increase our daily rations of manna.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
The Times called SHADOW OF THE ROCK, ‘Evocative, engrossing and entertaining’, so if I can be forgiven the hideous self-promotion, I’ll go for that.

Thomas Mogford’s SHADOW OF THE ROCK is published by Bloomsbury

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Paul Johnston

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?
It changes on a daily basis - today, Michael Dibdin’s DEAD LAGOON. (Sorry, Raymond Chandler’s THE BIG SLEEP, James Ellroy’s WHITE JAZZ, Ian Rankin’s BLACK AND BLUE, Robert Wilson’s A SMALL DEATH IN LISBON, James Lee Burke’s IN THE ELECTRIC MIST WITH THE CONFEDERATE DEAD - best title award, and John Connolly’s THE KILLING KIND.)

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
It would have been Sherlock H, but he’s been debased by modern revamps. So how about the Continental Op, with fewer pounds and more hair?

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
*Inhales deeply* Tolkien.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Finishing THE LAST RED DEATH (2003), my novel about terrorism in Greece. I’d been feeling like shit and it turned out I had a very nasty cancer (called ‘Thatcher’). Nearly didn’t see publication day...

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Aha! I won’t embarrass you by saying ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL (oops, I just did), so I’ll go for Eoin McNamee’s RESURRECTION MAN.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Well, they screwed up RESURRECTION MAN big time. I think Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND fits the bill.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The blank page or screen/ the last hours of writing a novel, when everything - unbelievably - comes together.

The pitch for your next book is …?
THE GREEN LADY - Athens 2004: the Olympic Games, the eyes of the world, and a major industrialist’s daughter goes missing. Think Persephone, Hades and all hell breaking loose around PI Alex Mavros ...

Who are you reading right now?
David Lodge’s A MAN OF PARTS, about H.G. Wells - disappointingly little about the great SF books, mainly because ‘HG’ wasn’t shagging anything that moved when he wrote them. Crime novels I’ve read recently are Peter May’s THE BLACKHOUSE (over-rated), Christa Faust’s MONEY SHOT (not as revealing about the making of porn movies as I’d hoped ), Tony Black’s TRUTH LIES BLEEDING (good), Megan Abbott’s QUEENPIN (excellent) and Joyce Carol Oates’ ZOMBIE (the last word on serial killers and squirm-inducing, in a good way).

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
God? Who s/he? Anyway, obviously ‘write’. Then I could read what I’d written, thus sneakily defeating your conundrum.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Political, fast-paced, violent. (Oh, and on the grounds that no one expects the Irish Inquisition, deep.)

Paul Johnston’s THE SILVER STAIN is published by Crème de la Crime.

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.

Molto Benny

Benny Blanco, aka Benjamin Black, returns to the fray this year with A DEATH IN SUMMER, which sounds like it could be terrific fun. Quoth the blurb elves:

When newspaper magnate Richard Jewell is found dead at his country estate, clutching a shotgun in his lifeless hands, few see his demise as cause for sorrow. But before long Doctor Quirke and Inspector Hackett realise that, rather than the suspected suicide, ‘Diamond Dick’ has in fact been murdered. Jewell had made many enemies over the years and suspicion soon falls on one of his biggest rivals. But as Quirke and his assistant Sinclair get to know Jewell’s beautiful, enigmatic wife Françoise d’Aubigny, and his fragile sister Dannie, as well as those who work for the family, it gradually becomes clear that all is not as it seems. As Quirke’s investigations return him to the notorious orphanage of St Christopher’s, where he once resided, events begin to take a much darker turn. Quirke finds himself reunited with an old enemy and Sinclair receives sinister threats. But what have the shadowy benefactors of St Christopher’s to do with it all? Against the backdrop of 1950’s Dublin, Benjamin Black conjures another atmospheric, beguiling mystery.

  All of which sounds like a tongue-in-cheek Agatha Christie homage and / or parody, which would be no bad thing. And, given that John Banville toiled for many years with ink-stained fingers among the great and good of Irish journalism, it’ll be interesting to see if ‘Diamond Dick’ is modelled on any of said great and good.
  Meanwhile, and not wanting to waste a cheese-tastic Italian headline pun, Conor Fitzgerald publishes the second in his Rome-set Alec Blume series, THE FATAL TOUCH. To wit:

In the early hours of a Saturday morning, a body is discovered in Piazza de’ Renzi. If it was just a simple fall that killed him, why is a senior Carabiniere officer so interested? Commissioner Alec Blume is immediately curious and the discovery of the dead man’s notebooks reveals that there is a great deal more at stake than the unfortunate death of a down-and-out ... What secrets did he know that might have made him a target? What is the significance of the Galleria Orpiment? And why are the authorities so intent on blocking Blume’s investigations?

  I thoroughly enjoyed Fitzgerald’s debut, THE DOGS OF ROME, and I wasn’t alone. “A powerful and hugely compelling novel. Dark, worldly and written with tremendous style and assurance,” reckoned William Boyd. “The American-born Blume is an engaging hero who might just have to potential to fill the gap left when Michael Dibdin’s death ended his Italian detective Aurelio Zen’s investigations,” vouchsafed the Sunday Times. “Blumein’ marvellous,” Crime Always Pays barely restrained itself from quipping.
  Conor Fitzgerald as the new Michael Dibdin? I’ll buy that for a dollar …

The World: Gone To Hell In A Hand-Basket, Apparently

I had a piece published in the Irish Times yesterday, the gist of it concerned with the development of the crime novel in settings and countries not necessarily associated with the traditional haunts of crime fiction. To wit:

How the World Became One Big Crime Scene

From the Palestinian Territories to Mongolia and beyond, crime writers are using international locations to tackle global themes

The popular perception of crime fiction is that it’s the foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, black sheep of the literary family. Unsurprisingly, it’s quite popular with the ladies, perhaps as a result of the broad mind it has developed on its travels.
  The success of Stieg Larsson’s Sweden-set ‘Millennium Trilogy’ has alerted mainstream readers to the fact that the crime novel has an existence beyond its traditional enclaves of America and the UK. Larsson, of course, is following in the footsteps of his countryman Henning Mankell, while ‘foreign’ settings for crime novels are nothing new for aficionados au fait with the groundbreaking works of Georges Simenon (France) and Sjöwall and Wahlöö (Sweden), and latterly the likes of Andrea Camilleri (Italy), Colin Cotterill (Cambodia), Michael Dibdin (Italy), Jo Nesbø (Norway) and Deon Meyer (South Africa), to mention but a few.
  Three years ago, writing in the New Yorker, Clive James celebrated international crime fiction offerings from Ireland, Scandinavia and Italy while simultaneously deriding the limitations of the genre’s form. “In most of the crime novels coming out now,” he said, “it’s a matter not of what happens but of where. Essentially, they are guide books.”
  What James failed to recognise is that the crime novel, by virtue of engaging with issues of law and (dis)order in a timely and relevant fashion, tends to be at the cutting edge in terms of addressing society’s fundamental concerns and broaching its taboos.
  Per Wahlöö, for example, claimed that the motive behind the ten-book Martin Beck series written with his wife was to “use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideologically pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type.”
  Peeling back layers of cant and perceived wisdom is a theme that writers are currently exploring in settings as diverse as Canada, Poland, the Palestinian Territories, Brazil, South Africa and Mongolia.
  “Toronto has been proud of its label as one the most multi-ethnic cities in the world for the past twenty years or so,” says John McFetridge (right), whose Let It Ride is set in Canada’s great melting-pot city. “There’s been some great literature written here, but there hasn’t been much written about crime. And there’s been plenty of crime. Almost everything in my books is inspired by real events, from the closed brewery turned into a giant marijuana grow-op to the beauty queen pulling armed robberies at spas, to eight members of a gang killed in one night. I wanted to write what I saw going on in my city that not many people were talking about.”
  Mike Nicol, the author of Killer Country, is one of a new breed of South African writers inspired by Deon Meyer. “During apartheid the only fiction was literary fiction,” he says. “It was believed to have the seriousness that our political condition demanded. So there was no crime fiction – or almost none, although there were some very good novels from James McClure and Wessel Ebersohn.
  “After the end of Nelson Mandela’s presidency in 1999 it became obvious that the new government wasn’t terribly different from the old government. Apartheid was gone but the politicians remained politicians. There was widespread cronyism, fraud, corruption, embezzlement within government, collusion between cops and gangsters, a collapse in the education system, a collapse in the health sector as AIDS denialism became a national policy, and an unhealthy relationship developed between the private sector and the public sector that was a mixture of threat and bribery. As a crime writer, I felt I was back in business.”
  Matt Benyon Rees (right), a journalist, sets his Omar Yussef series of novels in the Palestinian Territories in order to humanise the newspaper headlines. “I wanted to show the Palestinians - whom we all think we know from daily news reports - as they are and to make readers realize that they didn’t really know them at all. Detective fiction is perfect for such a manoeuvre because it requires readers to examine very closely what’s happening in the story - there’s not much room for gloss. When it’s placed in a foreign culture, the reader’s attention has to be that much closer and the writer has to look again at every element of his descriptions.
  “Fiction, strangely, is a much better way of getting at the truths of a foreign culture than political analysis,” he continues. “Politics and journalism are based around liars and those who observe liars at work but often neglect to point out that the liars are lying. Fiction can’t lie.”
  The classic dramatic conflict between have and have-nots forms the backdrop to Leighton Gage’s Chief Inspector Mario Silva novels, which are set in Brazil.
  “Brazil is a rich country,” he says, “but it’s still a developing country. As such, it continues to have highly inequitable income distribution. That’s changing, and changing rapidly, but it’s still true that this country’s taboos (unlike the ones Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler et al had to contend with) can vary immensely depending upon where you stand in the socioeconomic pecking order. Forcing one of your children into prostitution is repugnant, for example, but there’s no taboo against it if the alternative is to let your other children starve.
  “That’s an extreme case, obviously, but Brazil is full of societal issues that don’t arise in so-called First World countries. Liberation theology, for example, has been condemned by the Princes of the Church, but many of Brazil’s poorer priests practice it. Excessive concentration on the promise of reward in heaven, they say, often propagates social injustice on earth. So, at one end of the scale, a defence of liberation theology is taboo. And, at the other end, not embracing it is equally taboo. How could I possibly live here, be a writer, and not want to tell people what a fascinating place this is?”
  Michael Walters sets his Nergui novels in the former Soviet satellite of Mongolia.
  “I’m not exactly exploring ‘societal taboos’,” he says, “but writing about a society which is still in the process of trying to work out exactly what its values (and therefore taboos) ought to be. The relationship between ‘legality’ and ‘morality’ is sometimes far from clear. In my first book, for example, I was trying to work out the links between individual murder and corporate crime, and the way in which, in a society desperate for economic growth, the corporations can sometimes, maybe even literally, get away with murder. In my second, I was looking to explore the difficulty of trying to establish legitimate law enforcement in a society where corruption is endemic and, historically, the word ‘police’ has usually been preceded by the word ‘secret’.”
  “In a pretentious mode,” Walters says, “I’d quote the line from Gramsci: ‘The old is dying, the new is struggling to be born and in the period of interregnum there arise many morbid symptoms.’ That’s a pretty good description of some aspects of Mongolia. The ‘morbid symptoms’, of course, make perfect material for crime fiction.” - Declan Burke

  This feature first appeared in the Irish Times.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” PJ Brooke

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?
This is going to be interesting, as PJ Brooke is two of us, Jane Brooke and Phil O’Brien. Phil is Creative Genius; I turn dodgy drafts into decent prose. Phil’s family on his father’s side is from Clonmel, County Tipperary, and on his mother’s from Germany. He had the misfortune to be schooled by the Jesuits in Glasgow, went to Chile after University, was radicalized there, briefly joined the International Marxist Group after the Chile coup, got a University post in Glasgow at the Institute of Latin American Studies and supported solidarity and anti-war movements. I’m a nice girl from Pontefract, a market town in Yorkshire, who spent too long behind a desk in Glasgow. We met at a Green Party meeting. He had terrible hair, and worse tee shirt. His sisters think he looks okay now. Anyway, the crime novel - THE NAME OF THE ROSE (Umberto Eco). We agree on that one.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Me? Lizbeth Salander of course. Pure wish fulfilment: getting to beat up the bad guys, rescue hero, AND steal a Harley Davidson. Phil, having had a much more interesting life than me so far, would settle for being Father William of Baskerville.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Phil follows the footy – strong Barcelona supporter. I read cookery books. Phil eats the outcomes.

Most satisfying writing moment?
For me, we’d finished the first complete draft of BLOOD WEDDING, but the ending seemed … well … limp. We’d spent best part of five years on it. And just couldn’t come up with the plot twist we needed. So I asked my aunt (80 at the time) to have a wee look at it. And she said, “It wasn’t x that did it, it was y.” So we thought again, revised the draft, wrote two more chapters, and the whole thing fell into focus something wonderful. For Phil, the most satisfying writing moment was just finishing the bloody thing.

The best Irish crime novel is?
Ah … we have a bit of a problem here ’cos I’m writing this in Granada, Spain, and our big library is in our main house in Glasgow. But we enjoyed, in part, Benjamin Black’s THE SILVER SWAN. The gloomy pathologist, Quirke, struck a chord, as did some superb writing. “The past was tied to him like a tin can to a cat’s tail …”

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Stretching the definition of Irish to include those across the Atlantic, Denis Lehane’s MYSTIC RIVER was a pretty good novel, but rambled somewhat. But Clint Eastwood trimmed and tightened it into a brilliant, brilliant movie, a dark Shakespearian tale.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is when the plot just won’t come together, but you can’t put the damn thing aside because the publisher needs the complete typescript next month. So you just have to keep plugging away, and hope inspiration strikes before repetitive strain injury kicks in. The best thing is when a trivial observation illuminates an entire chapter, or maybe when characters start to speak for themselves. That’s good.

The pitch for your next book is?
Pretty graduate student Leila is doing research on the impacts of the Spanish Civil War on a village outside Granada. She’s Muslim, but that's not her main thing. But then Leila is found dead under a bridge, and a badly mishandled police investigation spirals out of control when the prime suspect, a Muslim kid from Leeds, turns out to have connections with a radical mosque in London.

Who are you reading right now?
I’m reading Michael Dibdin’s COSI FAN TUTTI. Phil is reading ANATOMIA DE UN INSTANTE, novelist Javier Cercas’ extraordinary account of 23 February 1981, when troops stormed the Spanish Parliament building, and Spain’s democracy was nearly strangled at birth. With luck, the coup attempt is going to be the jumping off point for another Max Romero novel.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I would opt for reading, ’cos there are folks out there who write far better than we do. Phil, being a Jesuit, would argue the point with God, and probably win.

The three best words to describe your own writing are?
Looking at our reviews on Amazon, people use the words “evocative “, “political” and “absorbing” quite a lot. Which I suppose reflects what we are trying to do … to share with readers our pleasure in Granada … an exotic and beautiful city, which was the last Muslim kingdom in Europe. We use Granada to explore the fault-lines in Spanish politics going back to the Civil War (the dress rehearsal for the Second Word War), and try to find in conversations, newspaper articles and graffiti, human stories that people might want to read.

A DARKER NIGHT by PJ Brooke is published by Soho Constable.

Books Wanted. Only Brilliance Need Apply

A quick question for any Italian readers out there. Yesterday I came across the following line in Michele Giuttari’s A DEATH IN TUSCANY: “A five-thousand-lire phone card was used for the call.” The novel was originally published in 2005, three years after Italy converted to the euro, so is this a blatant mistake or is it the case that in Italy ‘lire’ is still used as slang, much in the same way that ‘quid’ is still used as slang in euro-friendly Ireland? I’m just curious.
  As for the novel itself: I gave it 223 pages and then packed it in, which is the second time this week I’ve finished a book early, albeit for wildly different reasons. For a story written by a former Florence police chief, the tale offers no particularly interesting insights into how the Italian police go about their business. Neither is the story especially interesting or unusual; in fact, it’s pretty standard fare. And despite the exotic location of Florence and its hinterland, Giuttari gives us little sense of the natural or man-made beauties of the locale.
  John McFetridge left a comment somewhere on these pages to the effect that I should skip A DEATH IN TUSCANY and read Michael Dibdin instead, although it arrived too late – I was already 100 pages or so in at that stage. But he’s right. Michael Dibdin, perhaps because he was seeing Italy with a foreigner’s eye, offers a more richly textured setting, and his protagonist, Aurelio Zen, is rather more complex and interesting than Michele Giuttari’s central character, Michele Ferrara.
  (Incidentally, Glenn Harper over at International Noir has an fascinating theory on Giuttari’s inter-textuality, to wit: “I have to mention as well that [Giuttari] evidently persecuted a pair of journalists with an alternate view of a real case that is part of his plot in his first novel, A FLORENTINE DEATH, jailing one and kicking the other out of the country for the crime of contradicting the cop’s theory of the Monster of Florence case, in both his police work and his own book on the case.” According to Glenn, the Monster of Florence case has a bearing on the outcome of A DEATH IN TUSCANY).
  It’s probably only fair to mention at this point that A DEATH IN TUSCANY probably suffered in the reading because yours truly has pretty much decided that brilliance is the order of the day from here on in. Life is too short to be reading average books at the best of times, but with time so short these days, only brilliance – as a minimum – will do it from now on. Up until now I’ve always had it on my conscience if I didn’t finish a book to the bitter end, even if I wasn’t enjoying it, perhaps out of some kind of perverted sympathy with the author, given all the work he or she has put into the novel. But no more.
  I’ll take genius, I’ll take unusual, I’ll take challenging, I’ll take glorious failures. But spare me the rising tide of bland read-a-likes seeping onto the bookshelves of the world like so much literary porridge.
  Take John McFetridge (right), for example. Desperate for a jump-start after putting away A DEATH IN TUSCANY, I turned to GO ROUND, his third and yet-to-be-published novel set in Toronto. Bang! A propulsive narrative. Fascinating characters. Believable dialogue. A setting depicted with real vim and love. A hefty dollop of piss-and-vinegar to season. The result? A masterclass in storytelling and a vibrant, relevant rendition of the one story the entire world is dealing with. And I’m still only on page 97.
  Of course, demanding brilliance and genius of the books I read raises the bar all over, but especially in terms of what I manage to grind out of the white page myself. Am I entitled to demand brilliance in my reading when I can’t deliver it in my own writing? No. Am I deliberately offering a hostage to fortune in order to get my small but perfectly formed ass in gear for the redrafting projects I’ve planned for the next six months? Yes. Will it result in brilliance? Erm, probably not.
  Which writes me into a corner and / or makes me a hypocrite. Bummer. Aha, but can I do hypocrisy brilliantly? Only time, that endlessly prevaricating doity rat, will tell …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 2,023: David M. Kiely

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 DYING OF THE LIGHT by the great and unfortunately late Michael Dibdin.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Ted Dekker. It’s writing by numbers but it’s dark and lunatic.
Most satisfying writing moment?
My first favourable review.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
THE UNQUIET by John Connolly, his most mature to date.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Why, THE ANGEL TAPES, of course! Would need updating though.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Evaluating your own work is perhaps the worst thing. It’s also the best thing.
The pitch for your next novel is …?
The Faust legend reworked for c21.
Who are you reading right now?
I’m behind. JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR NORRELL by Susanna Clarke. A staggering feat of imagination.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Varied, European, mercenary.

David M. Kiely’s THE ANGEL TAPES is a lost classic of Irish crime fiction.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: End Games by Michael Dibdin

The death of Michael Dibdin last March has robbed crime fiction of one of its most perceptive practitioners. Dibdin occasionally wrote stand-alone novels such as Thanksgiving (2000) and Dark Spectre (1995), but he is best known for his Aurelio Zen mysteries, a series set in Italy in which each outing finds the taciturn Venice-born detective dispatched to a new location, there to investigate the local idiosyncrasies and traditions with the same clear-eyed rigour he brings to his police work. Zen’s peripatetic lifestyle was mirrored by that of the author’s. Born in Wolverhampton in 1947, Dibdin’s early years were spent travelling as his father, an unusual combination of physicist and folklore expert, kept the family on the road. They finally settled in Lisburn in Northern Ireland, where the young Dibdin’s education at the Quaker’s Friends School was supplemented by the avid reading of some distinctly non-Quakerish crime fiction, in particular that of crime fiction’s premier stylist, Raymond Chandler. While his first novel, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978), was received as an entirely adequate pastiche, Dibdin only began to carve an original niche for himself after moving to Perugia to work. Back in Oxford, he produced the first Aurelio Zen novel, Ratking (1988), which was awarded the Gold Dagger Award by the Crime Writers’ Association for best crime novel of the year. End Games, the 11th novel in the Zen series, contains all the Dibdin hallmarks. This time the detective is in Calabria, the toe of the Italian boot, content to mark time in the city of Cosenza while its police chief recovers from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The Chandleresque eye for telling description is ever-present (‘This was a dish he had grown up with, the clitoral gristle of the clams in their gaping porcelain shells …’), as is the discursive mode of story-telling, in which the meandering plot is less important than the characters who keep the anti-heroic Zen in a perpetual state of stoical second-guessing, not least of whom is his own conscience. An American kidnapped whilst scouting movie locations and subsequently murdered in a gruesome ritual provides the initial impetus for the story, but as with Dibdin’s most recent novels, in which the detective barely survived repeated attempts on his life, the emphasis is very much on Zen’s deadpan investigation of his own precarious existence. We know now, sadly, that End Games brings the Zen cycle to a close, but from the beginning there are intimations that Dibdin intended this to be his final Zen novel. The title itself is shot through with foreboding, and the first line forsakes the usual light-hearted opening gambit for funereal finality: ‘The dead man parked his car at the edge of the town, beside a crumbling wall marking the bounds of a rock-gashed wasteland of crippled oaks and dusty scrub …’. The apocalyptic tone continues throughout. As the villains hove into view and their motives are unveiled, it becomes clear that Dibdin believes that his hero and the civilisation he represents is under siege, as he invokes the Romans’ sacking of the Temple of Jerusalem and the pillaging of Rome in turn by the Barbarian Alaric, whose long-lost Calabrian tomb is believed to contain treasures with the power to provoke armageddon and thus precipitate the Rapture of Christian fundamentalist belief. The police procedural aspect is handled with Dibdin’s usual panache, the dogged detective meticulously working his way through a labyrinthine plot with his by now familiar healthy disrespect for local traditions and the established tropes of the police procedural novel, all the while unburdening himself of eminently quotable observations (‘She gave him a lingering glance before moving on, the cheeks of her buttocks colluding furtively as she strolled away.’). The Calabrian hinterland, too, receives its due, with Dibdin convincingly recreating its rustic charms, centuries-old vendettas and self-deluding philosophies (“Reality here has always been so harsh that we have by necessity learnt to content ourselves with the possible, the desirable and the purely imaginary.”). There’s humour too in the form of the arch-villain, Jake, an inarticulate computer game mogul from America’s West Coast whose ‘dude-speak’ is mercilessly lampooned, while his apparently simplistic motive for pursuing Alaric’s fabled treasure, which is irritatingly at odds with Dibdin’s logical approach throughout, is neatly inverted when least expected. Despite the page-turning quality of the denouement, you may nevertheless find yourself sipping at the final pages as at a last glass of a particularly fine wine, as much to prolong the pleasure as to defer a reckoning that, for Dibdin fans at least, will prove every bit as apocalyptic as that envisaged by Zen’s nemesis.- Declan Burke

This review is reproduced with the kind permission of the Irish Times.

This Week We’re Reading … End Games and Julius Winsome

‘The last Aurelio Zen mystery’ proclaims the cover, dashing the hopes of those bereft Michael Dibdin fans who might have been hoping there was a draft or two stashed away in a desk drawer that might some day be posthumously published. But no – the very fine End Games, prophetically enough, is where Zen finally runs out of time. Ironically, given the way Zen has been ducking and diving and generally cheating Il Grimmo Reapero in recent times, this novel is a far more placid and meditative piece, and one which, in the final analysis, finds Zen fight his conscience to a grinding stalemate. Here’s hoping Dibdin achieved something similar before his far too early shuffle off this mortal coil. RIP, sir. Meanwhile, Gerard Donovan’s Julius Winsome, we’re more than pleased to report, lives up to all the hype, being a gripping first-person narrative of one of the most unusual and sympathetic murderers you’ll ever have the pleasure to meet. It’s difficult to avoid the Jim Thompson / Killer Inside of Me comparisons, so we won’t, but Donovan brings a tough poetry to his deranged hero, who goes – very quietly, but very deliberately – on the warpath when his beloved dog and only companion is cruelly shot to death in the remote woods of northern Maine. All in all, as fine a week’s reading as we can remember.