“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Tom Galvin

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 POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain. It’s got so many elements that make it such a tragic and emotional read. Of course the lesson is there -- regardless of circumstances, you don’t profit from crime, even crimes of passion. Not that everyone would agree with that, particularly in the current climate. But this is a story that pulls you in so many directions but ultimately breaks your heart. It is a crime story, but a very credible and human one. If a story lacks humanity, somewhere, then it struggles to be told.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Where to start . . . lots of fictional characters I love as fictional characters, but then there are characters in fiction that are so vividly portrayed that they sit better in an everyday world. One jumps out, the character Ed in James Dickey’s novel, DELIVERANCE, so brilliantly played Jon Voight in the film. He is the one who rises above the horror of the situation the group find themselves in -- not only against their pursuers, but against the natural elements -- and comes out the cool hero. Although in the book Ed is a balding, pudgy character in his forties somewhere; so I would prefer the Jon Voight version if that’s okay.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
My last ‘guilty pleasure’ was Stephen King’s FULL DARK, NO STARS. Why King is classified as a ‘guilty pleasure’ is a mystery to me. As he is one of the greatest story tellers there is and while there were a couple of tales in this collection that disappointed the first, 1922, is one of the darkest and most original stories I’ve read in years. My only other crib here . . . the cover image of the night sky? There were lots of stars on it. Something in that perhaps?

Most satisfying writing moment?
There have been a couple. In terms of actual writing, there was a ‘eureka’ moment in a novel called THE RUSSIAN DOLL, which came to me when I went to a Russian exclave called Kaliningrad to research the book. I needed a strong plot twist and couldn’t come up with one. I spent a fortune getting there and it was the weirdest place I’ve ever visited. But while I was there I got what I needed and finished the book. It’s on the way . . . I hope. In terms of satisfaction as a writer, getting the first copy of GABRIEL’S GATE home. It was almost three in the morning and I was soused and pickled but I sat up and savoured the moment. That book has a long history, a long wait, and I had actually abandoned it a long time ago. So holding a physical copy I thought I would never get to hold was incredible. Of course, the hard work starts now. But at least it gets the ball rolling at a time when I was literally on the verge of dropping out of the game altogether because of so many other commitments.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Martin Dillon’s THE SHANKHILL BUTCHERS still makes me shudder every time. I normally read a book that grips me several times; but this could only be read once. Of course it wasn’t fiction, so in terms of a novel, I’ll give it to John Banville’s THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE. I was reading a lot of Camus at the time as a student and this sat comfortably with the mood I was in.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Quite a few now ... but will take a punt on something by Declan Hughes being grabbed soon; maybe Tana French.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
You’re never satisfied. Even when you reach a goal, you don’t even want to stand long enough to give yourself a round of applause. All you’re thinking is . . . now what will I do?

The pitch for your next book is …?
It’s set in Mexico and concerns a group of travellers on their last trip as a circle of friends who unwittingly become involved in, how should I put it, an ‘existential kidnapping’ in the jungles of the Yucatan. Have I coined a new phrase? Perhaps a new genre?

Who are you reading right now?
Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy; it was on my list for some time as I have read so much of this great man’s work. I began it before revising GABRIEL’S GATE but had to drop it because there was no time. As with all of McCarthy’s books, it kicks, punches, shocks and caresses the soul all in equal measures. Also at my elbow is Arlene Hunt’s new book, THE CHOSEN, and Declan Burke’s ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. One at a time folks . . .

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Drink.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Read me please.

Tom Galvin’s GABRIEL’S GATE is published by Book Republic.

Flick Lit # 43: The Getaway

In Jim Thompson’s novels, no one gets away. Not even, as in the case of Doc and Carol McCoy, when they manage to escape the forces of law and order and their double-crossed partners to fetch up rich and free in Mexico. “Before Kerouac,” wrote Steven King on Thompson’s legacy, “before Ginsberg, before Marlon Brando in The Wild One or Yossarian in Catch 22, this anonymous and little-read Oklahoma novelist captured the spirit of his age, and the spirit of the twentieth century’s latter half: emptiness, a feeling of loss in a land of plenty, of unease amid conformity, of alienation in what was meant, in the wake of World War II, to be a generation of brotherhood.” Thompson wrote 29 novels, including The Killer Inside Me, Nothing More Than Murder, The Nothing Man and The Rip Off. The fatalistic titles say it all: Thompson was the poet laureate of the long-term loser and the short-con grifter. In The Getaway, Thompson got inside the mind of the amoral psychotic, the charming killer who is as much a product of his society as he is a threat to its illusions of normality. It is the relationship between Doc and Carol, however, that lifts it into the realms of the contemporary classics. “They are terrifying,” wrote psychiatrist Tim Willocks. “As Doc and Carol find themselves pitching their reptilian self-interest – an interest, a commitment, so profound and unquestioned as to approach the force of a biological imperative – against each other, Jim Thompson unfolds one of the most perverse love affairs in fiction.” While the cast of characters ranged against Doc and Carol are lurid contortions of humanity, none are quite so vividly repulsive as the main protagonists. And so it seems quite appropriate that, when Doc and Carol finally make it to Mexico, it is to the living death of having their fortune milked away until they are left with nothing but their own mutually destructive mistrust. Sam Peckinpah was not a director renowned for restraint, as he displayed in the callous blood baths of (among others) The Wild Bunch and Cross of Iron. So it is curious that the director shied away from the more graphic episodes of Thompson’s novel when filming Walter Hill’s screenplay. Indeed, the tone of the 1972 version of The Getaway, starring Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw, is notable for its downbeat treatment of a quintessential Hollywood staple, the bungled heist. McQueen, never the most lively of actors, plays Doc with a stilted intensity, even when he’s threatening to break a kid’s arm, rabbit-punching a blonde floozy, or slapping around McGraw, then America’s sweetheart. McGraw, meanwhile, appears to be taking her cue from McQueen, and remains virtually comatose throughout (a deliberate attempt, perhaps, to quell rumour of their illicit off-screen affair). Indeed, Peckinpah renders the couple far more conventional than the pairing in Thompson’s novel. Given that the movie starred box office luminaries McQueen and McGraw, and was released in 1972, when the iconoclastic loner ruled Hollywood, it is unrealistic to expect them to suffer in the way the McCoys of Thompson’s novel did: while the traditional Peckinpah conflagration engulfs all the minor parties in a brutal shoot-out, Doc and Carol make good their escape in a patently false feel-good ending with the aid of a chirpy ex-con truck driver. Perhaps that was Peckinpah’s final irony. “The McCoys are natural born killers who do not waste time worrying about their haircuts and tattoos,” wrote Willocks. “They are far too busy charming those who will become their victims should the latter take a single – often innocently aware – step that might jeopardise their goal.” Had Thompson’s Doc and Carol been aided by a chirpy trucker in their bid for freedom, his impulsive generosity would have ensured that he too would have joined the long list of corpses that littered the McCoys’ eternal getaway to nowhere.– Michael McGowan