News: Benedict Kiely’s PROXOPERA Republished

The good people over at Crime Fiction Ireland report that Benedict Kiely’s PROXOPERA, a story of that vile invention known as a ‘proxy bomb’ and first published in 1977, has been republished by Turnpike Books. To wit:

When violent men intrude on his home by the lake, Granda Binchey is forced to deliver a bomb while his family are held hostage. As Binchey travels through the countryside he reflects on the past, his family and everything that he values, all that is now threatened.

  Turnpike Books “was founded to publish new editions of a series of books that will build into a history of Northern Ireland’s twentieth-century literature, and a parallel series of the major English short story writers.” For more, clickety-click here …

One to Watch: THE BONES OF IT by Kelly Creighton

There’s one half of Karen Perry and also Frank Golden, and now Kelly Creighton is the latest Irish poet to publish crime fiction. The Northern Ireland author publishes THE BONES OF IT (Liberties Press) next month, with the blurb running thusly:

A psychological crime thriller set in present day County Down. Twenty-two-year-old Scott McAuley, son of ex-paramilitary Duke McAuley, pens diary entries. When Scott is ousted from his politics degree course for joyriding, he returns home to live with Duke for the first time in his memory. When Scott was a baby, Duke was imprisoned for the murders of two young Catholic men, and Scott’s grandmother, Isla, became his guardian. Scott finds it difficult living with Duke now, and even more so when he starts getting paranoid that Duke is secretly seeing his ex-girlfriend.

  THE BONES OF IT is published on May 15.

Launch: THE ORGANISED CRIMINAL by Jarlath Gregory

Declan Hughes will launch Jarlath Gregory’s THE ORGANISED CRIMINAL (Liberties Press) on Thursday, April 23rd. The event takes place at 6.30pm at The Liquor Rooms, 5 Wellington Quay, Dublin 2. Quoth the blurb elves:

Spiked with black humour throughout, The Organised Criminal introduces us to Jay O’Reilly reluctantly returning to his family home. A childhood steeped in dysfunction with his family of criminals made him determined never to return, despite his attempts to leave the past behind, comes home to bid a final farewell to his recently-departed cousin Duncan. Though Jay likes to think he’s turned his back on his community, his lost past still holds a bleak fascination for him. His father, a well-known smuggler in the city with a wealthy, far-reaching empire, comes to him with a proposal. As Jay contemplates the job offer he reacquaints himself with the place and the family he left, only to find that it is exactly as hard, cold and unwelcoming as he remembered. With the anxieties and troubles of Northern Ireland as a back drop, Jay’s story becomes one of fear, family ties and self-worth. When the truth behind his father’s offer is finally revealed, Jay faces the primal struggle between familial bonds and moral obligations.

  For more on Jarlath Gregory, clickety-click here …

Review: GUN STREET GIRL by Adrian McKinty

The latest Irish Times crime fiction column includes a review of Adrian McKinty’s current offering, GUN STREET GIRL (Serpent’s Tail). It runs a lot like this:

The fourth in Adrian McKinty’s award-winning series of police procedurals featuring Sean Duffy, a Catholic detective serving in the RUC during the 1980s, Gun Street Girl (Serpent’s Tail, €19.40), opens in 1985, as the news of the impending Anglo-Irish Agreement sends Northern Ireland into a turmoil of strikes, riots and violence. “How can you investigate a murder in a time of incipient civil war?” Duffy wonders as he attends the scene of what appears to be a professional double-killing of ‘civilians’. That conundrum is quickly left behind as Duffy finds himself investigating the possibility that the murders are connected to the theft of Javelin missile systems from the Shorts manufacturing plant, which may well implicate rogue members of an American secret service. The claustrophobic tension of the previous novels is replaced here by a surprisingly jocular tone, as Duffy resorts to absurdist humour in order to preserve his sanity in an increasingly bleak Northern Ireland. “Out here,” Duffy tells us, “on the edge of the dying British Empire, farce is the only mode of narrative discourse that makes any sense at all.” Gun Street Girl may well be a comically implausible tale, but its roots in historical fact renders it a superb satire of its time and place. ~ Declan Burke

  For the rest of the column, which includes reviews of the latest books from Colette McBeth, Antonio Hodgson and Dana King, clickety-click here …

Gone, Baby, Gone

Adrian McKinty publishes the third (and what he suggests will be the ‘swansong’) in his Norn Iron-set ‘Duffy’ series next March, said tome rejoicing in the title of IN THE MORNING I’LL BE GONE (Serpent’s Tail). Quoth the blurb elves:

It’s 1983 and Sean Duffy’s life has hit what looks like rock bottom. Humiliated by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and stripped of his rank, with no social life, no one to love, he is wasting his time away. He has no plan and no desire to get one. While Sean has sunk so low, his school friend - and rival - Dermot McCann has risen up the ranks of the IRA before being fitted up by the RUC and sent to serve at Her Majesty’s pleasure at the notorious Maze prison. So, when Sean gets a late-night call to duty because Dermot and his comrades have made a daring escape, all their history comes back to him. And as Sean stands at a road-block in the pouring rain, on a country lane in the dark, he has plenty of time to think about Dermot McCann. And he knows, with the chilly certainty of a fairy story, that their paths will cross again.

  For a flavour of the book, Adrian is offering the first six chapters of IN THE MORNING I’LL BE GONE over at his interweb lair. For all the details, clickety-click here …

Claire For Take-Off

I had a review of Claire McGowan’s THE LOST (Headline) published in the Irish Times last weekend, as part of a crime / mystery column, although I can’t seem to find the link. A pity, that. Anyway, the review ran a lot like this:

Religion and sex collide in The Lost by Claire McGowan (Headline, pb, €19.99), her second novel after 2012’s debut The Fall and the first of a series to feature forensic psychologist Paula Maguire. Opening in London, where the Northern Ireland-born Paula scores a notable success in locating a missing girl, the story moves to Ballyterrin in Northern Ireland, a small Border town that strongly resembles McGowan’s native Newry. Seconded to a newly formed Missing Persons unit, Paula is charged with discovering the whereabouts of two teenagers who have recently disappeared, and her investigation – very little of it officially sanctioned – leads her to suspect that the disappearances may be linked to similar, unsolved cases dating from 1985. In a different setting, The Lost might well have been a straightforward tale of abduction and serial killing, but the Northern Ireland backdrop offers sub-plots incorporating sectarian bigotry, religious and political fundamentalism, and a heavy-handed sexual repression that manifests itself in a number of ugly ways. Not all of the plot strands are resolved in a plausible fashion by the conclusion of the breathless climax, but McGowan’s pacy, direct style ensures that the twists come thick and fast. As for Paula Maguire, she makes for a satisfyingly complex heroine, a quietly determined professional determined to prove herself on her home turf but privately as vulnerable as any of the young women she seeks to find, and her investigation into ‘Ballyterrin’s’ recent history, and her own tortured past, should prove fascinating as the series evolves. – Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

Northern Lights

Colin Bateman and Eoin McNamee were two of the notable exceptions, but for many years Northern Ireland crime novelists steered clear of writing about ‘the Troubles’. Now a new generation of crime writers has begun to engage with that historical period and its violence, among them Claire McGowan, Adrian McKinty, Brian McGilloway and Anthony Quinn. I had a feature on the subject published in the Irish Examiner last Saturday, which opened up like this:

“The riot had taken on a beauty of its own,” begins Adrian McKinty’s novel The Cold Cold Ground, outlining in those few spare words why so many Northern Irish authors have recently turned to writing about the Troubles.
  Published in 2011, the novel was the first of a new series by McKinty, which features a Catholic RUC policeman operating in Belfast in 1981. As the terrible beauty of the opening page’s chaos gives way to the violence surrounding the hunger strikes, and the story broadens out to detail the province-wide paranoia and social unrest, the bombings and the murders, you start to wonder why it has taken so long for Northern Irish crime writers to embrace the Troubles as a setting.
  “I think, ultimately, crime fiction works best as a vicarious experience of crime, with the sense that there will be justice in some form,” says Derry-born author Brian McGilloway. “For many years there was no need to experience it vicariously, as it was happening for real. More than that, though, the idea of justice was a ridiculous one when it so clearly wasn’t happening in real life.”
  McGilloway writes a series of detective novels featuring Inspector Ben Devlin, a Donegal-based Garda who liaises with his counterpart across the border in the PSNI. While the novels have always dealt with post-Troubles scenarios, last year’s offering, The Nameless Dead, found Devlin resurrecting a case from the 1970s.
  Claire McGowan’s debut novel, The Fall (2012), was set in London. Her second offering, The Lost, is set in her native Newry, and concerns itself with a pair of missing girls, whose disappearance mirrors that of two girls who vanished in 1985.
  “I always think about something Ian Rankin said years ago,” she says, “that there was very little northern Irish crime fiction because the pain and violence was all too recent. We weren’t ready then to fictionalise it. I’d imagine people felt worried about engaging too directly with the powerful interests in society. It’s something I still worry about now.”
  Anthony Quinn, whose debut Disappeared was published last year, agrees. “During the Troubles many of us walked a tightrope with the IRA at one end and the British Army and Loyalist paramilitaries at the other. You had to be careful about what you said and wrote. Words could kill. If you said the wrong thing, you might never be seen again. The phrase ‘and whatever you say, say nothing’ was a mantra for survival.”
  McKinty, meanwhile, believes that an entire generation was so traumatised by the experience of the Troubles that it was shocked into silence.
  “No one wants to talk about it in these terms,” he says, “but it’s my belief that the whole of society in Northern Ireland is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. A war that lasted 30 years and impacted every walk of life and is still rumbling away in the background is going to leave deep and painful scars.”
  There were crime novelists who explored the consequences of the conflict while the Troubles were ongoing – Colin Bateman and Eoin McNamee spring to mind, along with thriller writers such as Gerald Seymour and Jack Higgins – but in recent years a growing number of younger writers have begun to incorporate their experiences of growing up through the Troubles into their stories.
  “Now, I think, the Troubles can be considered with a degree of distance and can be explored with intelligence and insight rather than being exploited for sensationalist entertainment, which was the case with many of the Troubles books of that period,” suggests McGilloway. “I think that’s what made it off-limits for so long – the sense that you didn’t want to exploit real pain and suffering.”
  Time and distance has also allowed some writers to come to terms with the anomalies of living through what the Chinese proverb euphemistically describes as ‘interesting times’.
  “For my own part, Disappeared allowed me to shine a light upon some deep contradictions in my own experience of the Troubles,” says Quinn. “My family were held at gunpoint by the IRA and our car hijacked in a murder bid on a policeman. We suffered intimidation and abuse. For instance, we were given a bullet by the IRA which was destined for my father if he contacted the police before a certain time. We were cowed into silence. Writing the book allowed me the chance to break this silence as well as explore the contradictory sense of being terrorised by the IRA and at the same time protected and somehow energised by them.”
  Claire McGowan also sees fiction as a means of giving voice to her conflicted childhood.
  “It’s a way of dealing with the past, and showing the wider world how things were for us,” she says. “I was born in 1981 and grew up through some very bad years, and I always struggle to explain to non-Irish friends what it was really like, how frightened we often were as children.”
  “The conspiracy of silence about the Troubles is what attracted me to writing about it in the first place,” says McKinty. “If you’re a writer and you take your job seriously you should be exploring regions that no one wants you to go into. You should be diving deep into the fractures and seeing what it was that made people act that way.”
  It’s possible for writers to play their part in a kind of reconciliation process, argues McGowan, by acknowledging that contemporary Northern Ireland is a compelling setting, and embracing its potential rather than ignoring its past.
  “For me it’s the aspect of living in a post-conflict society, where appalling events are still so fresh in the mind,” she says, “but we’re all supposed to wipe the slate clean and live alongside the perpetrators. What’s most amazing is how many people are willing to do this for the sake of peace.”
  “Even now, post-ceasefire, Northern Ireland is still a place in turmoil, emotionally and politically, as the Union Jack protests demonstrate,” says Quinn. “Swift political changes and inverted values have driven former terrorists into power, and to have this as a backdrop adds great dramatic tension and resonance to your writing, especially when you set individuals on a personal struggle between good and bad.”
  McGilloway also believes the crime novel has an important part to play in the cultural future of Northern Ireland.
  “Fiction has always provided a way to reflect on the concerns of society, and to allow the writer to tease out various scenarios,” he says. “I think the distance that the Peace Process has provided has allowed that to happen much more successfully. There’s a case of not being able to see the wood for the trees when you’re in the centre of things.”
  For Anthony Quinn, writing about the Troubles also provides a perspective on the present that isn’t necessarily politically correct.
  “One of the consequences of breaking this silence and writing about the Troubles,” he says, “and in particular the post-ceasefire society of Northern Ireland, is that it exposes the cracks in the harmonious, peaceful new society dreamed of in the Good Friday Agreement. But I believe Irish readers are now better able to tolerate these flaws.
  “Our politicians lie and dissemble,” he adds, “and historical documents can be subjective and flawed, but at least fiction never pretends to be anything else.”
  For writers, and artists of every kind, there is the not inconsiderable challenge of overcoming the historic resistance to Troubles-set drama.
  “The Troubles are an unpopular topic,” acknowledges McKinty, “but the events of the Troubles are so dark and heroic and perverse and mundane that to me at least they’re almost irresistible. It’s true that my book sales are a tiny fraction of other writers who wisely steer clear of these messy waters but I do think this period needs to be looked at by poets and novelists and film makers. Eventually the public will come round to seeing that too.”

  This feature was first published in the Irish Examiner.

The Collusionist

That cradle and lair of all things Irish crime fiction, Belfast’s No Alibis, hosts the official launch of Stuart Neville’s COLLUSION tomorrow, July 30th, with the details running thusly:

No Alibis Bookstore is pleased to invite you to the launch party for Stuart Neville’s second novel, COLLUSION, on Friday 30th July at 6:30PM.
  Stuart Neville has been a musician, a composer, a teacher, a salesman, a film extra, a baker and a hand double for a well known Irish comedian, but is currently a partner in a successful multimedia design business in the wilds of Northern Ireland. COLLUSION is his second novel, the follow-up to the hugely successful and award winning THE TWELVE.

  In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST) came complete with a blurb from none other than James Ellroy (“THE TWELVE will knock you sideways. This guy can write.”) and scooped the LA Times’ Mystery / Thriller of the Year a couple of months back. Not bad for a debut, but THE TWELVE has also been nominated for a Best First Novel gong in each of the Anthony, Barry and Macavity awards, to be announced at this year’s Bouchercon.
  I mentioned a couple of weeks back that COLLUSION is a finer novel than THE TWELVE, not least because it’s rather more cynical than its predecessor about joining the dots between ‘the Troubles’ and post-conflict Northern Ireland. Here’s another snippet:

Did anyone live here now? He searched for signs of someone, anyone, making a life on this street. Not a soul. Less than a mile away, millions were being pumped into brownfield sites, building apartments, shopping centres, technology parks. Just across the river, property was changing hands for prices never imagined just a few years before. One-bedroom flats sold for a quarter of a million, snapped up by investors looking to make a killing out of Belfast’s peace boom, desperate to get rich before the bubble burst, as it surely would. And here, not ten minutes away, stood two rows of empty houses with generations of memories rotting away along with the mortar and woodwork, all because small-minded thugs couldn’t see beyond the world of Them and Us.

  In my humble opinion, COLLUSION is a very fine novel indeed. A good old-fashioned page-turner of a thriller, it should be required reading for those Ivory Tower types who bemoan the paucity of novels addressing social and political flux of contemporary Ireland, and the lack of post-ceasefire literature concerning itself with Northern Ireland.

On Beating Swords Into Gardening Tools

Garbhan Downey has been kind enough to offer an insight into the genesis of his latest screwball crime fiction, WAR OF THE BLUE ROSES, in which he offers ‘a novel solution to the Northern Ireland’s parades issue’.
  For those of you unfamiliar with the ‘parades issue’, it’s a phenomenon in Norn Iron in which the Loyalist Orangemen have loads of marches to celebrate the fact that they have loads of marches, whereas the Disloyalist Fenians can only muster one, on Paddy’s Day.
  Now read on …

  Two of the most dangerous moments of my life involved marching – and they both happened on the same day.
  As a newspaper reporter in Derry in August, 1995, I decided, with a cameraman, to try and get some pictures of loyalists celebrating outside the Memorial Hall, after a particularly controversial morning parade. We were scouting the revellers from about 30 yards away, when one of them spotted us. And before you could blink, an angry battalion were hurtling towards us, tearing off their sashes as they ran.
  Had it not been for a very brave RUC man, who appeared out of nowhere and stood between ourselves and the mob, the photographer and I have would have been place-kicked off the Derry walls a full 40 feet into the Bogside below. No question about it.
  Later that day, I was monitoring the afternoon parade from Butcher Street, when a notorious Antrim band broke away from the route and decided to stage an impromptu performance for 500 young people wearing Celtic tops, hemmed behind police lines. It’s hard to believe how quickly it all kicked off; but for the first time in my life I truly got the significance of the phrase “rabbit in the headlights”. On that occasion, I was hit with a bottle as I fled – but still escaped a lot lighter than most of the city-centre, which was burnt to a cinder.
  The FTQ parades, if I’m to be honest, never had quite the same edge. Possibly because they never applied to march down Ballymena High Street, so the opportunity for direct confrontation wasn’t there. But they always carried an air of menace nonetheless, right down to the band everybody hoped wouldn’t turn up, with their shaved heads, 1970s’ sunglasses and black berets.
  Not surprisingly, in idle moments, I used to wonder if there ever could be an alternative to parades. Perhaps a more productive and less volatile alternative. From what I could see, the rest of the world didn’t spend their summers marching and counter-demonstrating - so there were obviously other pursuits out there for grown men that didn’t end in nationwide arson.
  Then one evening, I was dead-heading a cloud of wild ‘bucky’ roses in my father’s garden, when an idea began to, ah, take root. Instead of spending £5 million to police this annual square-off, why doesn’t somebody take the money and sponsor a giant gardening competition? Loads of category winners, with the overall champs getting, say a big bundle of cash and the chance to design a new rose-garden for the White House.
  Complete, off-the-wall fantasy, I know. Who would ever spend their days growing flowers when there’s a chance to stage a paramilitary passing-out parade over their neighbour’s lawn? The incentive, i.e. bribe, would have to be enormous.
  Step forward a cunning Taoiseach, who suggests that if the winners of the festival produce a blue rose – the Holy Grail of the gardening world – they could be eligible for a £50 million-a-year patent. Now, we’re talking. The only condition is that anyone caught marching, counter-marching or looking sideways at another honest citizen for the months of April to September will be automatically disqualified from taking part.
  Yes, yes, I thought. What a wonderful idea. I just have to tell the world. Sadly, however, as I was speeding my way to the Parades Commission, I was waylaid by a publisher, who offered me a very small bagful of money to deliver the plan as a comedy novel instead.
  “Let’s face it,” he said, “they’d only muck it all up anyway.” Only he did not quite say muck.
  So in true Northern Ireland fashion, I took my mess of pottage and left the wider community to sort out its own business.
  As you’d expect, the characters in my new book WAR OF THE BLUE ROSES, experience their own difficulties beating swords into gardening-tools. And, as in most schemes involving the British and American governments, things never quite work out the way we were promised over praties and Jameson in the White House on St Patrick’s Day.
  All-out victory on the parade ground is swapped for all-out victory on the rose-plots. People lie, cheat and otherwise behave like the politicians they are, in the race to produce the world’s first blue rose - and capture the multi-million pound payday. Type reverts to type.
  Happily, however, in my books at least, there is always a moral compass that allows me to deal with the worst offenders in the most satisfying of manners. Sinners are punished, honest men rewarded, and skin-headed drum-bangers consigned to levels of crapulence Dante couldn’t have dreamt of.
  If only a man could get a job like that in the real world ...

Garbhan Downey’s WAR OF THE BLUE ROSES is the Hughes & Hughes Irish Book of the Month for August. Nice one, squire.