Keep Calm And Carry It Off: Sophie Hannah’s THE CARRIER

I had an interview with Sophie Hannah published in the Irish Times yesterday, to mark the publication of her latest novel, THE CARRIER (Hodder & Stoughton). It opens up a lot like this:

“I’ve always loved rhyming, metrical poetry and mystery stories,” says author Sophie Hannah. “Ever since I discovered Enid Blyton and read the Secret Seven books, I can remember thinking this is what stories should do. They should have a mystery, and why would anyone want to write a story that didn’t have a mystery in it? I’ve never really changed my mind since.”
  Sophie Hannah is a very rare kind of crime author. The daughter of academic Norman Geras and the writer Adèle Geras, she was first published as a poet with the collection Early Bird Blues in 1993.
  “I’ve always loved books, and we were a very book-y family, but no, I don’t think it was always inevitable that I would be a writer,” she says. “I did get very keen on writing at a very young age, though, and throughout my whole childhood and teenage years, writing was pretty much my only hobby. I always wrote, both poems and stories.”
  Those Enid Blyton-inspired stories led to her career as a crime novelist, which began in 2006 with the publication of Little Face, but Sophie has continued to write poetry, and was shortlisted for the 2007 TS Eliot Award for her fifth collection, Pessimism for Beginners.
  In a sense, Sophie herself embodies the apparent contradiction of a poet who also writes bestselling psychological thrillers. Friendly and bubbly before we sit down in the crypt-like surroundings of the Merrion Hotel’s vaults to talk about her current novel, The Carrier, she is icily precise in her diction and choice of words once the interview begins. It’s a matter of respect for the tools of her trade.
  “I read a lot of crime fiction, and while the language is fine and does the job of telling the story, a lot of crime fiction doesn’t have an obvious flair for language,” she says. “It’s perfunctory, but it feels a bit like reading an episode of Silent Witness adapted into a novel, rather than a proper novel. I’d rather read books that aren’t like that, but the thing is that I’m addicted to mystery. So if I read a literary novel by a brilliant writer I often get impatient because not enough interesting things are happening. My ideal is a book that is brilliantly written with a proper, literary use of language, but also with a really gripping plot. That’s why I really like Tana French, or Gone Girl [by Gillian Flynn]. Properly good writers writing crime fiction that obeys all the rules of the genre, but being as original as possible within those rules.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Cold Cold Comfort

I had an interview with Adrian McKinty (right) published in the Irish Examiner recently. It ran a lot like this:

Taboo or not taboo, that is the question. Adrian McKinty’s latest novel, THE COLD COLD GROUND, has for its backdrop one of the most contentious topics in recent Irish history, the IRA hunger strikes of 1981.
  “It is a taboo subject,” McKinty agrees. “In fact, the whole Troubles era is still a taboo. I had a conversation with a BBC NI producer once, we were discussing a potential commission. He was completely aghast when I told him that I wanted to do something about the Troubles. ‘That’s all behind us now, we want to look to the future,’ he said. Well, it isn’t behind me. I’ll never forget those days.
  “It’s also true,” he adds, “that if no one wants to talk about something, then that’s probably the very thing you should be talking about.”
  Born in 1968 in Carrickfergus, Co Antrim, McKinty grew up a child of the Troubles.
  “My memories of that time are so vivid that it was pretty easy coming up with material for the book,” he says. “For example, I used to get a lift to school from a neighbour who was a Major in the UDR. Every morning he would get down on his knees and check under his car for mercury-tilt bombs, and when he got the all-clear he would call my little brother, me and his son outside and we would get in the car and go to school. But then one day it was raining hard, and he decided just to skip it and called us out without checking under the car. Every week on the news you’d hear about a copper or a soldier, and sometimes their families, who were killed by a mercury-tilt device. So on that ride to school I literally thought I was going to die.”
  If you’re a writer, there are no such things as bad memories, only experiences to be retro-fitted for the sake of a story.
  “Of course,” he grins, “like the self-consuming novelist I am, I took the memory and put it in the book. But it was really an extraordinary time and the more I probed my own recollections, the more those gates opened. A lot of them were bad memories: the time I got knocked down by a police Land Rover in a hit-and-run, the fight I got into with a paramilitary hood and ended up with 18 stitches in my face, the time I planted a bullet in my sister’s handbag to see what would happen at a police checkpoint, our next door neighbour getting arrested for a triple homicide by seemingly half the British Army, bomb scares, bombs, riots … So, yeah, they sound like bad memories. But in many ways, they’re gold for a writer.”
  THE COLD COLD GROUND centres on Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy, who investigates a series of murders that appear to be the work of a killer taking advantage of the tensions created by the hunger strikes. As the name suggests, Sean Duffy is a Catholic. Why did McKinty, himself a Protestant, choose a Catholic RUC man for the hero of his book?
  “There were a couple of reasons,” he says. “I wanted Duffy to arrive in East Antrim as an outsider, and as an outsider he could cast a jaundiced eye on the toxic politics and culture of the area. And of course, I knew that as a Catholic Duffy would run right up against all the fault lines of the time, which would be tremendous material for a novelist. I grew up in a working class Protestant housing estate and I loved the idea of putting a cynical intellectual like Duffy in among those people. And as a Catholic copper, Duffy can never be completely comfortable in his own skin or in the company he keeps. His life is literally on the line every single day.
  “That he’s a Catholic in the RUC in 1981 would have been incredibly rare back then,” he says. “The IRA famously had a bounty on Catholic policemen and the RUC was completely distrusted by the Catholic community, so few joined. The force in that era would have been over 90% Protestant. So you’ve got a gifted but conflicted and fractured young man in a very hot-house environment.”
  McKinty has written six adult crime titles previous to THE COLD COLD GROUND (he also writes children’s fiction), but this is his first police procedural novel. Why the change in direction?
  “To be honest, I was never that enthused about the police procedural story,” he says, “but then I got to know Evan Hunter [Ed McBain] a little bit before he died, and I started reading his fantastic 87th precinct books and I gradually saw the possibilities of that type of book. What finally sold me was reading James Ellroy’s LA Quartet, which are fascinating takes on the procedural, and by then I knew that this was a genre I wanted to tackle.”
  THE COLD COLD GROUND blends the police procedural with a serial killer storyline, a rare development in the Irish crime novel, which has seen very few serial killer stories published despite the recent boom in Irish crime fiction.
  Is this because, officially at least, we have no record of a serial killer operating in Ireland?
  “I don’t know about the South,” says McKinty, “but in the North, serial killers just get absorbed into the paramilitaries. I knew several clearly deranged individuals who were high ranking paramilitaries. The Shankhill Butchers and Michael Stone are just a couple of examples of psychopaths who probably would have been ordinary, everyday serial killers had they grown up in a non-sectarian society.”
  McKinty currently lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and two daughters. Is it the case that he needed to travel to the other side of the planet before he could start writing about home?

  “I’m not sure I completely buy into this exilic notion that you have to leave a place to write about it,” says the author. “At the last stanza of TS Eliot’s Little Gidding, he says, “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Perhaps, but William Faulkner did a pretty good job writing about Oxford, Mississippi while living in Oxford, Mississippi his entire life.”
  McKinty’s novels have been very well received to date, particularly, and unusually, as audio books. The Dead Year (2007) won the ‘Audie’ for Best Thriller / Suspense Novel, while Audible.com chose last year’s offering Falling Glass as the Best Mystery / Thriller of 2011.
  “That’s all down to the narrator, I think,” says McKinty. “If you can get a good narrator, you’re in like Flynn. I’ve been fortunate with Gerard Doyle, who is incredibly popular and much sought after. I’m pretty sure if I’d done a Le Carré or a Douglas Adams and narrated the books myself, it would have been a complete disaster.”
  THE COLD COLD GROUND is being touted as the first of a proposed trilogy, and McKinty is looking forward to exploring Northern Ireland in the 1980s through DS Duffy’s eyes.
  “I’ve got so much material about that time and place and there are many more interesting places the character can go,” he says. “I’d love to get him in some kind of confrontation with the Thatcher government, for example, or get mixed up in the DeLorean disaster, or any number of things. And of course, musically, we’ll eventually have to get to his difficult ‘New Romantic’ years …”

  THE COLD COLD GROUND by Adrian McKinty is published by Serpent’s Tail.

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

The Revolution: Will Be Downloadable, Apparently

Gah! Scooped yet again. As reported first – as always – by Gerard Brennan on Crime Scene Northern Ireland, The Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman has launched an innovative little marketing ploy, by which the first chapter of his latest opus, MYSTERY MAN, can be downloaded by texting ‘MYSTERY’ to 64888. Now, I’m not sure if that applies only to UK mobile / cell phones (those in the Republic of Ireland can text ‘SUMMER’ TO 53705), but either way it’s a nice little idea, and a good example of a writer and / or publisher using technology in a proactive way, rather than wasting their time wailing about the demise of the traditional book format.
  Speaking of which, says he, segueing unsteadily into a kind-of related topic … Writing in The Times yesterday, Nicholas Clee had a very interesting piece about the impact of technology, and particularly digital technology, on the publishing industry, a sample of which runneth thusly:

“Practices that have been normal in the book industry for years are becoming unsustainable … This is where digital technology, such as the EBM [‘Espresso Machine’] and electronic devices, including the Sony Reader, comes in. Printing thousands of books that sit in warehouses or on booksellers’ shelves, only to be pulped, is unsustainable. But remember the long tail: there may be a demand, albeit “niche”, for these texts. It makes sense to create digital files that can be downloaded or printed according to demand.”

  It’s a long-ish piece, but well worth the time of any writer …
  Speaking of which, says he, segueing unsteadily, etc., The Guardian this week also had a smashing piece on how the future is going to look for writers, suggesting that the impact of the interweb means the era of the ‘gifted amateur’ is about to return. To wit:

“A misleading idea has arisen, however, that writers generally can earn enough money to do nothing else. The idea is ignorant of history, of TS Eliot keeping himself comfortable on academic stipends and a publishing house directorship, of Angus Wilson superintending the reading room at the British Museum. It may be that we have it because authorship is now so visible, with the author turned into a small celebrity. But we can all be authors now and publish ourselves on the web. What you might call the moral and aesthetic case for writing - to think, imagine and describe and then communicate the result to an audience - can be satisfied online. It just doesn’t make any money. The age of the gifted amateur is surely about to return.”

  So – no change there for yours truly, although I might want to work a little on the ‘gifted’ side of things. Sigh, etc. Ah well, upward and onward …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 2,084: Aifric Campbell

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?
IN COLD BLOOD, Truman Capote.
What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Now this is tricky one because so many female characters have a habit of coming to a rather nasty end or have their hearts broken by unsavoury men. And one of the great things about being a writer is your life takes on the quality of fiction when you spend so much time plotting and scheming on your own in a room. So I’ll have to say I haven’t found her yet.
Who do you read for guilty pleasure?
All my reading is guilt free! But I will never finish a book that doesn’t grip me – life is far too short to waste time reading something that bores you.
Most satisfying writing moment?
There are many – often it’s when I feel that I have succeeded in writing about something that is outside my experience. In THE SEMANTICS OF MURDER, for example, it was a gay cruising scene in California in the 1960s seen through the eyes of a teenager. Last week it was a 21-year-old Canadian soldier landing on the beach at Dieppe in 1941 under a hail of machinegun fire. I love the challenge of writing what I don’t know. Sometimes it’s the pleasure of finding exactly the right word - yesterday it was “pleaching”, which is a type of pruning ...
The best Irish crime novel is …?
In my view THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE by John Banville is a certainly a contender but is it usually considered to belong to the genre? I’ve read and enjoyed the first Benjamin Black and am intrigued to know whether or readers will migrate from Black to Banville. Otherwise I haven’t read enough contemporary Irish crime writers to say.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
IN THE WOODS by Tana French springs to mind. Very atmospheric on suburban Dublin.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Two sides of the same coin: the long solitary hours in front of a screen.
The pitch for your next book is …?
I hate pitches! I was once given exactly one minute to do a book pitch to an editor in New York and I choked. Completely. But it did focus my mind on the importance of book titles. My current work-in-progress is about a woman with a dark past meets old man in graveyard ... I won’t write the pitch until I’ve finished the last page.
Who are you reading right now?
IN THE MISO SOUP by Ryu Murukami. THE UNQUIET, John Connolly. A collection of stories by Edgar Allen Poe. And TS Eliot’s Selected Poems is always by the bed. I compile long reading lists and next up is David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER, Kevin Myer’s WATCHING THE DOOR and Don De Lillo’s FALLING MAN.
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
You see, this is the kind of capricious behaviour that encourages people to doubt God’s existence! My nine-year-old son suggested that I should go for reading because I could write in my head.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
You have got to be kidding ... That’s writer-baiting!

Aifric Campbell’s debut novel, THE SEMANTICS OF MURDER, is published on April 24