Event: Dennis Lehane at the Irish Writers’ Centre

The great Dennis Lehane (right) will be appearing at the Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, on Thursday 28th, in conversation with Declan Hughes. To wit:

Date: Thursday 28 May
Time: 7.30pm
Venue: Irish Writers Centre
Fee: €18 / €15 IWC Members

Dennis Lehane, novelist, screenwriter and writer-producer, is set to release his latest novel World Gone By (Little, Brown) and will be joining us at the Centre to talk about this latest endeavour, writing for print and screen and will reveal all about the much discussed Love/Hate US adaptation.
  Dennis Lehane grew up in Boston. His novels have been translated into more than 30 languages and have become international bestsellers and include Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, Darkness Take My Hand and Moonlight Mile. His most recent work World Gone By, a psychologically and morally complex novel set in World War II was published March 2015. Three of his novels - Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and Shutter Island - have been adapted into award-winning films.
  Lehane was a staff writer on the acclaimed HBO series The Wire and is a writer-producer on the fourth season of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. His film The Drop features James Gandolfini in his last movie role. It has recently been reported in the press that Dennis has been approached to adapt the Irish crime drama Love/Hate for a US cable television network.
  Dennis will be interviewed by writer and playwright Declan Hughes.

  For details of how to book tickets, clickety-click here.
  Dennis will also be appearing at the Listowel Writer’s Festival on Friday, May 29th.
  For a review of WORLD GONE BY, clickety-click here.
  For an interview with Dennis, clickety-click here.

News: Dennis Lehane for Listowel Writers’ Festival

Dennis Lehane (right) will appear at the Listowel Writers’ Festival on Friday, May 29th. Dennis publishes WORLD GONE BY (Little, Brown) early next month, the third in the historical crime trilogy that began with THE GIVEN DAY (2009) and continued with LIVE BY NIGHT (2012). Quoth the Festival:

Dennis Lehane grew up in Boston. His novels have been translated into more than 30 languages and have become international bestsellers and include Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, Darkness Take My Hand and Moonlight Mile. His most recent work World Gone By, a psychologically and morally complex novel set in World War II was published March 2015. Three of his novels - Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and Shutter Island - have been adapted into award-winning films.
  Lehane was a staff writer on the acclaimed HBO series The Wire and is a writer-producer on the fourth season of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. His film The Drop features James Gandolfini in his last movie role. It has recently been reported in the press that Dennis has been approached to adapt the Irish crime drama Love/Hate for a US cable television network.
  Dennis Lehane will be interviewed by music and arts journalist Jim Carroll.

  For all the details, including how to book your ticket, clickety-click here …

Reviews: Lehane, Minato, Bateman, Tey, Child

Mystic River, Shutter Island and Gone, Baby, Gone were all very fine film adaptations of Dennis Lehane novels, so there’s a kind of inevitability to the fact that Lehane’s latest offering, The Drop (Abacus, €11.95), is published as a tie-in with the cinematic release of the movie of the same name (the book began life as a short story, ‘Animal Rescue’, before Lehane, previously a writer on The Wire, developed the short story for the film’s screenplay). Bob Saginowski works as a barman at a Boston bar which serves as a front for the laundering of illicit cash by Balkan gangsters. A lonely, God-fearing man, Bob’s life of quiet desperation becomes more emotionally involving than he might prefer when he adopts a brutalised puppy and incurs the wrath of the neighbourhood’s resident sociopath. When Bob’s bar is held up at gunpoint not long afterwards, and the Balkan mob demand its money be retrieved regardless of the cost, Bob realises that the time has come when he must step up and make a stand for what matters. Unsurprisingly, given its origins, The Drop is a slim novel but it’s one that bears the unmistakable Lehane imprint. Saginowski is an archetypal Lehane hero, an introspective, put-upon man with deeply held moral principles and a long, slow-burning fuse. The prose lacks the elegance of Lehane’s recent historical epics The Given Day (2008) and Live By Night (2012) but the story compensates with its incident-packed intensity, dialogue-driven narrative and sharply etched characters.

  Kanae Minato’s Confessions (Mulholland Books, €13.40) opens with middle school teacher Yuko Moriguchi informing her class of the tragic death of her four-year-old daughter, and of the terrible revenge she has wrought on the two pupils who murdered her child. Moriguichi’s ‘confession’, however, is only the opening salvo: the book is composed of a number of first-person accounts from characters who all have secrets to hide and sins to expiate, including those of both the young killers. The intimate nature of the narrative contributes to a harrowing account of a generation of Japanese teenagers that has lost its way, particularly as Minato eschews sensationalism for a style that favours a crisp, clear-eyed account of the various motives and agendas (the novel is translated with impressive economy by Stephen Snyder). Despite the bleak tone, however, the intimacy of the first-person accounts affords Minato the opportunity to delve deep into each character’s personality, which hugely complicates the reader’s response to the story by giving these ostensibly soulless teenagers an unexpected poignancy.

  Colin Bateman’s Belfast-based Dan Starkey – formerly a journalist, now a private investigator – has been charting the changes in Northern Ireland since he first appeared in Divorcing Jack (1995). The Dead Pass (Headline, €18.99) is Starkey’s 10th outing, and finds him in unfamiliar territory in Derry – or Londonderry, as he insists on calling it – when he is commissioned by concerned mother and former political activist Moira Doherty to find her missing son, Billy. What follows is an old-fashioned gumshoe tale of snooping, beatings and snide quips, shot through with Bateman’s anarchic sense of humour (the story involves dissident Republicanism, a teenage Messiah and soft-core pornography), as Northern Ireland’s ‘Sam Spud’, as one character dubs him, doggedly pursues the trail of justice and truth. Despite all the gags, puns and post-modern re-imagining of the role of the fictional private eye, The Dead Pass is most notable for its sombre undertone, as the investigation wanders up and down Derry’s backstreets and comes to the conclusion that Northern Ireland’s post-Troubles peace is a very fragile construct that could very easily splinter or explode.
  First published in 1952, and the last of Josephine Tey’s novels to feature Inspector Alan Grant, The Singing Sands (Folio Society, €29.99) finds Grant suffering from a breakdown and taking himself off to the Highlands to recuperate on a fishing holiday. Disembarking from the train in Scotland, Grant realises that a man has died in the compartment next to his. When Grant finds himself in possession of the dead man’s newspaper, upon which has been scrawled some intriguing lines of poetry, his policeman’s mind goes into overdrive. Beloved by crime and mystery writers, Tey is regarded as one of the most brilliantly imaginative of the UK’s ‘Golden Age’ of mystery authors. Delivered in a crisp, formal and lyrical style, this reissue from the Folio Society – which is beautifully illustrated by Mark Smith – showcases Tey’s facility for a plot that is as absorbing as it is incredible (the tale turns on the discovery of a very unusual ‘Atlantis’). The Singing Sands is as good a place as any to rediscover (or discover) one of the great mystery writers, although purists may instead point you to the standalone titles The Franchise Affair (1948) or Brat Farrar (1949), both of which are also reissued by the Folio Society.

  Personal (Bantam, €18.99) is Lee Child’s 19th novel to feature the nomadic Jack Reacher, an ex-Military Policeman who wanders the United States dispensing rough justice. When a sniper attempts to assassinate the French president from a distance of 1,400 yards, Reacher and his former colleagues at the CIA come to the same conclusion: the sniper can only be John Kott, an ex-Special Forces operative whom Reacher sent to prison some 15 years previously, and now on the loose. Dispatched to London, Reacher’s mission is to prevent Kott from killing a world leader during the forthcoming G8 Summit – but first Reacher must negotiate the labyrinthine world of London’s criminal gangs. Child employs a laconic tone and dust-dry humour as he delivers yet another convoluted tale in direct and forthright prose, a blend that seems to mock the self-effacing Reacher’s rather implausible invincibility even as the story itself celebrates our need for such heroes.

  This column was first published in the Irish Times.

Interview: Michael Connelly

I had an interview with Michael Connelly (right) published in the Irish Examiner last week. It ran a lot like this:

Early on in the new Michael Connelly novel, ‘The Gods of Guilt’, defence lawyer Mickey Haller – aka the Lincoln Lawyer – emerges from the courthouse, rushes down the steps and sits into the back of his Lincoln town car, only to discover it’s the wrong Lincoln.
  “What happened after the movie [The Lincoln Lawyer] came out,” says Michael Connelly, “was I started hearing from people who were saying, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the way I operate as a lawyer as well.’ So there’s a lot of copy-catting and so forth going on, and I really enjoyed breaking that fourth wall and mentioning that there’s a film out there in which Mickey Haller is portrayed by Matthew McConaughey. And I thought it’d be a fun thing to do, that Mickey comes out of the courthouse and doesn’t know which Lincoln town car is his.”
  Connelly, in Ireland to headline the recent Irish Crime Fiction Festival at Trinity College, was ‘very happy’ with The Lincoln Lawyer movie, although its success has proved something of a double-edged sword.
  “The movie version changed my profile,” he says, “and I ended up selling a lot of books, and the movie probably made the Lincoln Lawyer series more popular than the Harry Bosch series. That was strange for me, because I’m all about Harry Bosch, and doing The Lincoln Lawyer book in the first place was designed to allow me a break from Harry, so I could come back to him strong. So it’s a little bit odd to have the main character that I want to write about in life coming in second to that,” he laughs.
  The title of ‘The Gods of Guilt’ refers to the jury Mickey Haller faces in the courtroom, but it also has a personal resonance for Mickey himself. “He’s seeking redemption for things he has done in his professional life,” says Connelly, “but also in terms of very damaging things that have happened to people in his personal life.”
  Indeed, it’s Mickey Haller’s personal life, and his growth as a character, that has ensured Michael Connelly is no longer ‘all about Harry Bosch’.
  “I’m finding that the Lincoln Lawyer series is cycling the way the Bosch series did, just ten years later. I think it took me four or five Bosch books to really put that series on a plane where it was about Harry and his character, where I was thinking about that first before I got into thoughts about plot. This is the fifth time I’ve put Mickey centre-stage, and I’m thinking more about him as a person, or a character, and how he sleeps at night and how he lives. So I feel good about that.”
  Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller have intersected in previous Connelly novels, and do so again in ‘The Gods of Guilt’, when the pair meet in a courthouse hallway. Bosch is a cop, a man driven to bring the bad guys to justice; Haller is a defence lawyer, whose job it often is to see that his client – bad or otherwise – gets acquitted.
  “It’s funny,” says Connelly, “but somebody said this great line – ‘Harry Bosch is driven by justice, and Mickey Haller is driven by a chauffeur.’ That really underlines how different they are.”
  Is the contrast between the half-brothers, who have been appearing in alternate novels of late and have much in common in their personal lives, including teenage daughters, a deliberate ploy by Connelly?
  “What’s deliberate about it is that I also have a daughter who is the same age as those girls,” he says, “and I think what I’m doing is that with one guy [Harry Bosch], and lucky for him, I’m writing about a father-daughter relationship that’s working – tentative but working. And then there’s one that’s not working. So on the one hand I’m working on what I don’t want to happen to me, and on the other hand I’m writing about what I think would be cool to have happen to me.” He shrugs, then grins. “I mean, it could all shift around. You never know.”
  ‘The Gods of Guilt’ is Michael Connelly’s 26th crime novel, although he’s wary of pigeon-holing himself as any particular kind of author. “I really don’t go for any kind of classifications,” he says. “People say I’m a mystery writer, but I don’t even classify myself as an American writer – I’m just a writer.”
  His enduring love affair with writing began while he was at college, and happened to see Robert Altman’s film of the Raymond Chandler novel ‘The Long Goodbye’. He immediately read and re-read all of Chandler’s novels, then packed in his engineering course and went home to announce that he was becoming a writer. His father suggested he become a policeman, to learn the world of crime from the inside, but, he says, “to become a detective you’ve got to spend years in a uniform and being that kind of cop first. And I didn’t think I had the personality or desire to go through that. So going the Joseph Wambaugh route, where you do the work and then write about it, was knocked off early. Then the journalism idea came up, and that sounded good to me.”
  Connelly spent six years working the crime beat as a journalist in Florida and wound up being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Offered a job with the LA Times, he moved in 1987 to California, the spiritual home of the private eye novel. His debut novel, ‘The Black Echo’, was published in 1992. It featured Harry Bosch, a LAPD detective, but Connelly never lost sight of his first literary love, the private eye novel.

  “Since the very first book I’ve always had the idea that Harry would be an outsider with an insider’s job,” he says, “but every step of the way he would feel like an outsider. That’s the feeling I got, and the inspiration I got, from Chandler’s books. I was a journalist for a long time before I started writing these books and so there was a practical aspect when it came to deciding what I was going to write. Do I ignore all the years I spent in police stations and talking to detectives and learning about their world, and just go off and write a private eye novel because I love those novels? No. I was practical. I wanted to get published. I followed the path of what I knew I could bring to the genre. So I made Harry Bosch a cop, but I certainly brought everything I’d learned from Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler to the character.”
  “In my mind I visualise any Harry Bosch story, even though he’s a cop and there’s all kinds of people at his disposal, forensics and so forth, I’ve always just viewed him in a tunnel by himself – the case is the tunnel he’s going through,” he continues. “When I think of Mickey Haller, the visual image has a lot of people in it – it’s a courtroom full of people. So one is more of a private investigation, and one is more of a public examination.”
  The good news for Harry Bosch fans is that the detective will soon feature in his own TV series – Connelly oversaw the shooting of the pilot show before coming to Ireland. “I’m an executive producer,” he says, “and I co-wrote the script with Eric Overmyer, who worked on the The Wire and Treme, he’s a really good writer. So Harry Bosch is in really good hands, I think.”
  Better still is the news that, even if Bosch is forced to retire as a cop in the next couple of books, he will very likely reinvent himself as a fully-fledged private eye, the classic romantic tarnished knight of the genre. Could Harry go to work for Mickey Haller?
  “That’s an option,” says Connelly, “but that’d mean Harry would be working to help Mickey ameliorate the situations of some bad guys. I don’t see Harry being able to do that. If anything I can see Harry and Mickey on opposite sides.
  “I can see him being the kind of private eye who maybe comes in a does cases he’s not even asked to do,” he continues, “something he’ll see in the paper, some injustice or some need for justice, that’s what will get him going. So yeah, there could be some cool stuff ahead.”

  ‘The Gods of Guilt’ by Michael Connelly is published by Orion (€19.99).

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Appy Bird-Day To Daggy; and John Connolly Goes Posh

This morning I woke to breakfast in bed (well, coffee) served by the Lovely Ladies (right) and a rousing rendition of ‘Appy bird-day to Daggy’ courtesy of the Princess Lilyput. I may never have a finer morning again. I’ll leave the existential ruminations on turning 41 to another day, and just say ta kindly to everyone who’s been in touch with good wishes. Much obliged, folks.
  Meanwhile, a rare birthday treat awaits me later tonight, when the Dark Lord, aka John Connolly, is the subject of an Arts Lives documentary on RTE TV. Swish stuff – surely it’s only a matter of time before Connolly is elected to (koff) Aosdána. Anyway, I’ve seen the trailer, in which Connolly claims that evil exists, not as an entity but as the absence of empathy, which is a fascinating concept, and Connolly’s natural gift as a raconteur suggests that the documentary could well be a cracker. Quoth the blurb elves:

Shot in Dublin, Maine, Baltimore and Washington, John Connolly: Of Blood and Lost Things traces 40-year-old Connolly’s literary trajectory from jobbing freelance with The Irish Times newspaper to publishing superstardom on the sale of his first novel, Every Dead Thing, which launched his flawed protagonist, P.I., Charlie (Bird) Parker. The roots of the novel and its location go back some years to his coverage for the Irish Times of the murder of Sri Lankan prostitute Belinda Perreira in Dublin and a student summer spent in Portland, Maine … Featuring dramatised readings from his work John Connolly: Of Blood and Lost Things examines the sense of place and atmosphere in Connolly’s work but also includes a biographical narrative of his Dublin childhood and journey toward becoming a writer. The documentary features interviews with iconic American crime writer George Pelecanos; David Simon, creator of TV’s The Wire; American novelist and friend Laura Lippman, and fellow Irish crime writer Declan Hughes.

  Nice. The documentary goes out at 10:15pm tonight (Tuesday) on RTE1; if you happened to miss it, it’ll be available on the RTE iPlayer for three weeks after the broadcast date. Enjoy …

UPDATE: John Connolly’s THE GATES has just been nominated for the Bisto Children’s Books Ireland Book of the Year, with Bob ‘No Relation’ Burke’s THE THIRD PIG DETECTIVE AGENCY nestling in there snugly too. Nice one, chaps ...

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: PRIDE AND GLORY

You’d have thought – at least, I did – that finding himself amidst the combined talents of Edward Norton, Jon Voight and Noah Emmerich would leave Colin Farrell looking a bit thin, but in fact he’s the best thing about Pride and Glory, a good-cop / bad-cop drama set in New York. Farrell plays Jimmy Egan, married into an Irish-American family with a long and proud tradition of service in the NYPD. Son-in-law to Francis Tierney Snr (Voight), brother-in-law to Francis Jnr (Emmerich) and Ray (Norton), all of whom are flawed but noble characters, Jimmy is a dirty cop for whom the shield is little more than a flag of convenience behind which he operates his drug-related scams. Norton is ostensibly the hero of the piece, as he reluctantly takes on a brief to uncover those responsible for the death of two cops, but Farrell steals the show with a charismatic performance of swaggering venality. The story itself is satisfyingly complex, with a number of sub-plots contributing handsomely to the main tale – the fraught relationship between Francis Snr and his less-favoured but conscientious son Ray; the poignant journey taken by Francis Jnr as he tries to cope with the news that his men are incorrigibly corrupt, all the while supporting his wife (Jennifer Ehle) as she battles cancer. The director, Gavin O’Connor (who also co-wrote), maintains a tense atmosphere for the most part, although the movie does drift away from gritty realism into melodrama for the big finale. While there’s little on offer here that you haven’t seen before – and it’s relatively tame by comparison with The Shield and The Wire, both of which are obviously influences – it’s a strong and sturdy drama that will do Farrell’s career no harm at all.

The Embiggened O # 44,106: Yep, It’s That Blummin’ Book Again

Chances are you won’t be in the vicinity of Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny, this coming weekend, but if you are you might want to drop in on the inaugural Castlecomer Writers’ Festival, where yours truly (right) will be hosting two workshops, one titled ‘Fictional Crime’, the other ‘Crime Always Pays’. Or leading everyone in a chorus of All Kinds of Everything, depending on how it goes … Other contributors to the weekend include Neville Thompson, Anita Notaro and Garbhan Downey, and Emerging Writer has all the details …
  Meanwhile, the on-line crime fic community continues its generous cheerleading on THE BIG O’s behalf, with Salman Rushdie’s stunt-double, Uriah Robinson, wibbling thusly:

“Fun is the word I associate with Declan’s book and in my review I wrote that ‘THE BIG O is a loveable rogue of a novel ...’ and great read. The full review is here.”

  Thank you kindly, O Salman-ish of Knowledge. Over at Pitched Up, Mack Lundy does us proud too:

“You know how there are television shows where the cast is perfect and they complement each other – Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life on the Street, The Shield, The Wire, shows like that. That’s the way I felt about the characters in THE BIG O. I liked many of them but was interested in all of them.”

  Nice one, Mack. Oh, and by the way – in Monday’s round-up of BIG O big-ups, I disgracefully neglected to mention the New Mystery Reader. Folks? I’m currently wearing sackcloth and ashes. Mea culpa …

Around The Web In 80 Seconds*

Crumbs! There’s nothing like eBay to give you a sense of perspective. An ARC of THE BIG O just went over there for $3, which is a long, long way from the heady heights of the $195.36 it was selling for on Amazon not so long ago. Talk about a credit crunch …
  Anyhoos, on with the more interesting stuff. Over at The Blog of Revelations, Peter Murphy reports that David Simon will be in Dublin on September 19 for a special screening of The Wire, which will be followed by a public interview. Jump on this for all the details …
  Brian McGilloway’s BORDERLANDS hits the U.S. shelves this week, and Brian’s blogging his heart out over at Moments in Crime all week, with today’s instalment concerning itself with why he picked up the quill in the first place. To wit:

“It was as a fan of these series that, four or five years ago, I had a strong sense that many of them were nearing an end: Rebus was reaching retirement; Morse had died; Robicheaux thought he was taking a heart attack in LAST CAR TO ELYSIAN FIELDS. I decided that, in case these series should stop, I would need a new book to read, featuring that sense of place and central character linked. And so I wrote BORDERLANDS …”

  Which is nice. Meanwhile, over at the Book Witch’s impossibly glamorous lair, the Witch is talking up Oisín McGann’s SMALL-MINDED GIANTS, which Eoin Colfer recommended to her. Quoth la Witch:

“The cover of SMALL-MINDED GIANTS says this is a book for older readers, and there may be some truth in this. It’s a violent story, in a way, and the future looks bleak. Oisín has written a thriller with lots of action, and none of the clever gadgets or the backup that Alex Rider enjoys.”

  If it’s good enough for Eoin Colfer and the Witch, it’s good enough for us. Finally, Sam Millar gets in touch to let us all know that BLOODSTORM has reached American shores, complete with a funky new cover, and that the early reviews have been very positive indeed. First our good friends at Publishers Weekly:

“BLOODSTORM is the first in a powerful new crime series from Irish author Millar. Extremely original, it is a chillingly gripping book, and the consistently tough prose should help gain Millar more fans in the U.S. with a taste for the hard-boiled.”

  Nice. And then there’s the folk at Booklist:

“Irish crime writer, Sam Millar (THE REDEMPTION FACTORY) is back with a brand new anti-hero, Karl Kane … crime noir doesn’t get much darker or grittier than this shocking tale of corruption and revenge …”

  Nicer still. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – it’s always Millar time at Crime Always Pays.

* Providing you don’t click any of the links, of course