The Embiggened O # 2,049: Our Spinal Tap Moment

Sandra Ruttan at Spinetingler Magazine was kind enough to review our humble offering THE BIG O, and once we winkled out all the quibbles, ho-hums and snorts of disbelief that to our mind rather ruined the overall effect, we were left with the following, to wit:

“Burke shows remarkable skill at weaving a complex story from multiple points of view and pulling the strands together in an engaging fashion, and he clearly has the genius required to pull off a large-scale story … The emphasis is not on technical accuracy in terms of police procedure or organized crime. Capers are wild stories with a humorous edge, and THE BIG O delivers in spades, so plan for a healthy chunk of time, kick back with a few margaritas and indulge in Burke’s dark comedy – this is an author with a lot of promise, well worth taking note of, and I’m looking forward to his next book.”

Incidentally, eagle-eyed readers will have noted that Declan Burke is lined up to contribute to Sandra Ruttan’s new website At Central Booking, which yet again raises the spectre of bias, log-rolling and generalised back-scratchery. For more on this topic, jump here and here.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 2,063: Ronan O’Brien

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?
I have to say two books here but they’re by the same author: CARLITO’S WAY and AFTER HOURS, both of which I’m completely mad about. Believe it or not, they’re written by a Supreme Court judge named Edwin Torres who as far as I know, still practices as a judge in New York City. The gangster narrator in his books is so credible and vibrant, he just leaps off the page.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Biographies or anything that is not fiction. I feel that a writer has to read a lot of fiction in order to stir the fires of his own imagination. Writing without ever reading other people’s work is like flying a plane that has run out of fuel: you’ll probably be okay for a while but there’s a mountain looming and you need something in the tank in order to soar above it.
Most satisfying writing moment?
When I finally nailed the perfect ending for CONFESSIONS OF A FALLEN ANGEL on my sixth attempt, after some dark days when I had serious anguish about whether a satisfying ending was even possible.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
Something by John Connolly, possibly THE UNQUIET. My favourite one of his books is THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS, although I wouldn’t call that a crime novel.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I haven’t read all that many Irish crime novels, to be honest. Karen Gillece’s book, LONGSHORE DRIFT, is about an abducted child, so if that qualifies as a crime novel, then I’ll nominate that one. I thought it was great.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing as far as I’m concerned is writing to finish a book in time for a tight deadline because then you don’t have time to explore tangents that might lead to something great, or might lead to nothing. But when time is of the essence, then you don’t have the luxury of getting it wrong a couple of times before finally getting it right. And if you’re a slow writer like I am, it means you have to get the basic plot pretty much spot on at the first attempt. But then I stop and listen to myself, and think that I really don’t have much to moan about. There is nothing hard about being a writer compared to say, someone who works in a coalmine, or someone who unblocks sewers for a living. The best thing about being a writer is hearing complete strangers say that my book moved them to tears.
The pitch for your next novel is …?
It’s about three very different people whose lives become intertwined: a magician, an artist and a solicitor and it will make you laugh and make you cry. Needless to say, the lawyer is the evil one.
Who are you reading right now?
Bret Easton Ellis. I just finished LUNAR PARK which was weird and wonderful, and I’ll probably read AMERICAN PSYCHO next.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Unmissable, unputdownable, unforgettable.

CONFESSIONS OF A FALLEN ANGEL is Ronan O’Brien’s debut novel.

The Monday Review

It’s Monday, they’re reviews, to wit: “The fact that the build-up was so good made the fizzled payoff extra-disappointing – but at the same time the build-up was so good that it seems unfair not to credit it as a real achievement on its own … Though the resolution was deeply frustrating, I don’t regret surrendering to the story, and I may even try French’s next book. But oh, what could have been!” says Levi Stahl at I’ve Been Reading Lately of Tana French’s IN THE WOODS. Rita The Bookworm is more expansive: “I really liked this book. It’s a hefty book and the characters are a big part of it, so you can’t expect it to be a typical mystery that you charge through. Its pace is one that asks you to be a little patient for the pay-off and just enjoy the ride, and the writing makes that easy.” Karen Chisholm at AustCrimeFiction has taken a shine to Declan Hughes’ THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD: “Typically Irish in that the family loyalties and enmities that go back generations, are faithfully carried forward to the current day; typically hard-boiled thriller in that it portrays a stark brutality, beautifully balanced by a central character that's as tough as nails and fragile as glass all at the same time.” They’re still pouring in for Benny Blanco: “THE SILVER SWAN is a defter and more complex book than its predecessor, which occasionally found plot development smothered under the weight of Banville / Black’s always ravishing prose. The new novel boasts a neat whodunnit plot and a delightful command of suspense, but there’s also a kind of mordant, near-surreal playfulness about the characters’ appearance and actions this time, and the constricted dance that they undertake,” says Tim Martin at The Independent. Over at Reviewing the Evidence, Denise Pickles is a little more pick(le)y: “There is a certain literary, evocative note to the prose found in THE SILVER SWAN. John Banville, [Benjamin] Black’s name in the world of letters, has won more than one award, so no doubt that accounts for the standard of THE SILVER SWAN. It’s a shame, though, that he didn’t concentrate on lightening the tone of this very depressing work, for all it is so beautifully written.” A quick one for Derek Landy’s SKULDUGGERY PLEASANT: “Hilarious and suspenseful … This is really well done urban fantasy,” reckons Jennie at Biblio File … Meanwhile, the Irish Emigrant likes Ronan O’Brien’s debut, CONFESSIONS OF A FALLEN ANGEL: “… this engaging, unusual and beautifully-told tale … will bear a second reading to appreciate all the nuances of the narrative.” Sweet … Finally, a couple of big-ups for Catherine O’Flynn’s Costa-winning debut, WHAT WAS LOST: “It is good, very good. An easy, entertaining read with humorous observations of contemporary life, this novel is also dark, scary and cleverly constructed … It is an enjoyable comedy, an intriguing, sinister mystery and a harsh criticism of the consumerism of modern life. Rarely is such a well crafted book so eminently readable,” says Babygrem at Christchurch City Libraries Blog. Karen Meek at Euro Crime liked it a lot too: “I couldn’t put WHAT WAS LOST down … An amazing debut novel and Catherine O’Flynn will be hard pushed to top the outstanding critical reception it has deservedly received.” A word to the wise, people – don’t argue with Karen Meek. She’ll be inheriting the earth any day soon …

Mi Casa, Su Casa: Adrian McKinty On James Ellroy

The Grand Vizier writes: The motives behind ‘Mi Casa, Su Casa’ are twofold. First, the idea is to give guest bloggers the few molecules of oxygen of publicity Crime Always Pays can provide. Secondly, even we’re sick of listening only to ourselves, and we reckon some new voices will provide fresh perspectives on crime fiction in general, and Irish crime fiction in particular. And so, with minimum fanfare – a tiny tootle there, please, maestro – we introduce the first of what we’re hoping will be an ongoing and extensive series of guest blogs, in which Adrian McKinty (right) waxes lyrical about ‘the Tolstoy of crime fiction’.

The Rebirth of Cool: James Ellroy’s THE COLD SIX THOUSAND

In 2007 I taught a course in American crime fiction at Naropa University in Boulder. I looked at the evolution of the American crime novel, from Poe through Hammett and Chandler, and I ended with James Ellroy’s LA CONFIDENTIAL, which appeared in 1990. I had put Ellroy in the curriculum because most of the students had seen movie versions of his fiction; however, I admitted to the class that I was not a huge fan of Ellroy’s writing. I had read his earliest crime novels and three of the titles in his celebrated LA Quartet without being completely convinced. His best books seemed to be LA CONFIDENTIAL, THE BIG NOWHERE and WHITE JAZZ, but for me these novels were, at best, flawed masterpieces. Ellroy’s plots tended to get away from him and his subtext about the greed and corruption of policemen, DA’s, politicians, Hollywood – everyone really – in 1950’s Southern California did not resonate with me on a deep level. None of his characters were particularly captivating and it seemed that Ellroy himself often got bored with his corrupt cops and ex-cops, frequently killing them, and moving the story on with a different lead.
  In these early novels Ellroy’s (right) descriptions are beautiful but chilly and his dialogue, although authentic and rich, lacks a sense of humour.
  I shared some of these observations with my class but one of my students disagreed with me in the strongest possible terms and asked me if I had read AMERICAN TABLOID or THE COLD SIX THOUSAND. I admitted that I hadn’t and she suggested that I should.
  The following month at Denver Airport I picked up a copy of THE COLD SIX THOUSAND and began reading it in a long security line. I finished it the same night at four in the morning in a hotel in Vancouver. A week later I read the book again. THE COLD SIX THOUSAND, I decided, was no ‘flawed masterpiece’ but rather one of the best books I had read so far this decade.
  James Ellroy’s biography is the stuff from which serial killers or junkies or mental patients or, rarely, great writers are made. His mother was murdered in 1958 when he was only 10 years old – the killer was never found. Ellroy’s father was a right-wing nut who drank heavily, had affairs, and whacked his son around to toughen him up. Ellroy took on the persona of a teenage neo-Nazi to torment his Jewish neighbours and he became a compulsive petty thief and burglar. As he got better at breaking into people’s houses his compulsions grew weirder. He would often spy on pretty Jewish girls, wait until their homes were empty, break in and sniff their underwear. Frequently arrested, LAPD cops became surrogate older brothers who eventually put him on the straight and narrow. Ellroy describes these early years in the brilliant memoir MY DARK PLACES. The LAPD and the discovery of crime fiction, he says, were the two things that saved his life.
  His early novels did well, but it was the success of the movie version of LA CONFIDENTIAL that seems to have given Ellroy the confidence and financial freedom to write fiction the way he always wanted to.
  Ostensibly THE COLD SIX THOUSAND is the story of a Las Vegas cop who arrives in Dallas on the day of the Kennedy assassination, but really it is the story of the 1960’s themselves and all the madness of Vietnam, Cuba, race riots, demonstrations and the hippy movement. But not content with writing a book about a whole decade, Ellroy decided to reinvent his prose style completely. Gone are most of the verbs and adverbs, the prose descriptions, the purple patches. What’s left is the distilled essence of the narrative, the bare bones, as rich as bad news from the AP wire, as lyrical as a haiku. This is how he describes ex-FBI agent Ward Little’s attempt to take Las Vegas for his boss Howard Hughes (Drac):

“Little planned. Little sowed. The Boys reaped. Bribes/PR/extortion. Blackmail / philanthropy. It took four years. Drac owns Las Vegas now.”

  Other writers might have spent a chapter on that episode.
  Critics complained that Hemingway wrote as if he was dictating the book for a telegraph operator; Ellroy could be the called the crime novelist for the email and text message generation. He seems to have taken seriously the famous claim of Joseph Conrad that “a work of art should justify itself in every line.” In THE COLD SIX THOUSAND not a single word is wasted, every sentence moves the plot, every paragraph tells a story. And what a story. The assassination of JFK, the hit on Martin Luther King, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and a supporting cast that includes Nixon, Howard Hughes and J. Edgar Hoover.
  After reading THE COLD SIX THOUSAND I devoured the prequel to that book, AMERICAN TABOLID, and ideally it should be read first, although it isn’t quite as brilliant. There is also a rumoured third novel to come, which will conclude Ellroy’s look at this period, roughly 1958 – 1973. If it’s only half as good as the others in the trilogy it still might be the best crime novel of 2008.
  Many people won’t be able to get past Ellroy’s machine-gun prose style or his racist characters or the completely insane conspiracy theory at the heart of THE COLD SIX THOUSAND but stick with the book and you’ll be rewarded. Ellroy’s phrases and dialogue rattle around in your brain. You start to think like Ellroy. You start to talk like him. Returning from Vancouver, my wife asked me if I’d managed to get that James Ellroy novel I was after. I told her: “I scoped the book, I bought the book, I read the book, I dug it.”
  In interviews Ellroy sometimes describes himself as “the Tolstoy of crime fiction.” His boast is inaccurate. He’s not that ponderous. He is, though, one of the greats. I believe that THE COLD SIX THOUSAND elevates Ellroy into the pantheon. It is perhaps the most important American crime novel since Patricia Highsmith’s THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY and it certainly proves that Ellroy is a worthy successor to Chandler, Hammett, Cain and Jim Thompson.
  I would guess that future lecturers won’t be as ignorant of Ellroy as I was and that any good course in American crime fiction will not only explain the revolution that began with THE MALTESE FALCON but also talk about the new revolution that started after James Ellroy began firing on all cylinders. – Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty is the author of the ‘Dead’ trilogy. He is currently working on a novel for Holt.

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books

The ever-lovely people at Hodder Headline Ireland are giving away three copies of the ever-lovely John Connolly’s THE UNQUIET, which has just gone into paperback. Quoth the blurb elves:

Daniel Clay, a once-respected psychiatrist, has been missing for years following revelations about harm done to the children in his care. Believing him dead, his daughter Rebecca has tried to come to terms with her father’s legacy, but her fragile peace is about to be shattered. Someone is asking questions about Daniel Clay, someone who refuses to believe that he is dead: the revenger Merrick, a father and a killer obsessed with discovering the truth about his own daughter’s disappearance. Private detective Charlie Parker is hired to make Merrick go away, but Merrick will not be stopped. Soon Parker finds himself trapped between those who want the truth about Daniel Clay to be revealed, and those who want it to remain hidden at all costs. But there are other forces at work. Someone is funding Merrick’s hunt, a ghost from Parker’s past. And Merrick’s actions have drawn others from the shadows, half-glimpsed figures intent upon their own form of revenge, pale wraiths drifting through the ranks of the unquiet dead. The Hollow Men have come . . .

To be in with a chance of winning a copy for free, gratis and sweet bugger-all, just answer the following question.

Is John Connolly:
(a) lovely;
(b) ever-lovely;
(c) hell, even John Connolly doesn’t have words to describe how blummin’ lovely he is.

Answers to dbrodb(at)gmail.com before noon on Thursday, February 7, putting ‘I wish they made John Connolly teddy-bears’ in the subject line. Et bon chance, mes amis.

“You Charm Us To Sorrow.” Irish Crime Fiction: A CrimeSpree Appraisal

Last week we wrote a feature article for the Evening Herald to a pretty tight deadline, which was why Reed Farrel Coleman’s reply to our query, in the wake of the Edgar nominations, about why Irish writers are becoming so popular in the US of A arrived a little late. Ditto the answer from Ruth and Jon Jordan of the indispensable CrimeSpree Magazine (right, clutching the prestigious Anthony Award for ‘Cutest Couple in Crime Fiction’), both of whom have been cheerleading for Irish crime writing since God was a boy. Herewith follows their rather generous two cents on why Irish writing is becoming so popular:

“The economic and political status of Ireland today is much in line with that of the time in which American crime classics were written. A poor-to-affluent generation living in a post-violent but pre-pacific time, remembering the religious ironies and icons with equal resonance and enwrapping them in a story like a taco bell quesadilla. The Irish story is updated with generations more of ennui and religious acceptance behind it, the precarious situation that is refracted by words of today flirted with, exposed and uniquely discovered by a group of writers who embrace the crime novel as the way to tell their story for all the world.
  “The talent for words is remarkable and embraced by a United States at once ahead and behind a continent we’ve pretended to understand for three generations. Our story, told with more history and depth. Yet Ireland is unique, as are the people writing of it in crime form. Different voices tell the story and make it stronger, more complete. You charm us to sorrow and make us examine where we are today.
  “The background of many of today’s Irish crime fiction writers includes not only a reading of ‘literary fiction’ but also almost all have found the literary brilliance within American crime fiction, be it recent greats like Lehane, Pelecanos, Connelly, Lippman, Rozan, Paretsky and James Lee Burke (to name a few), or the classics (Chandler, Hammett, Cain). They elevate their novels’ structure from the debut and almost always add a fresh voice to the genre. They don’t want to emulate as much as pay tribute to this often overlooked genre of fiction. Pay it forward and make it better, to use an American phrase. They see the possibilities of one flawed man/woman trying to solve a unique and usually violent problem. The writing jumps off the page and connects with the American reader because Irish authors use the entire environment of the crime and make it resonate.
  “The first author I fell in love with from Ireland is John Connolly, an Irishman who set his fiction in a relatively remote American locale. John has said he loved the work of James Lee Burke and many others. He grabbed a location he knew and made it his own. Last year’s work is remarkable in any time: THE UNQUIET is a true literary novel and I cannot think of many recent reads who express the joy of reading and the possibility it has to soothe, but THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS is a must-read for anyone who has ever loved a book and lost a loved one.
  “From Connolly I went to L. Welch, who strips bare any pretences in her prose to expose the baldness of story, and Declan Burke, whose approach to EIGHTBALL BOOGIE was as refreshing as THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE in its time. Ken Bruen’s arrival on our shores made everyone take notice. From THE GUARDS forward, Ken has infused admiration and anticipation for a writing style so unique it cannot be compared to anyone else writing today. Full of bon mots and cultural references that put you into the being of his characters, only someone so sharp of pen could get away with it.
  “America came full circle with the words of one Declan Hughes, whose third novel [THE PRICE OF BLOOD] is about to launch in the States. Instead of taking an Irish sensibility and applying it to the American detective, he brought an Irishman home who has been an American P.I.
  “The possibilities are just beginning and yet we’ve already come full circle.”

Funky Friday’s Freaky-Deak

Being the weekly cornucopic round-up of stuff ‘n’ nonsense from the interweb we were too busy / lazy / underwhelmed to write up as fully fledged posts, to wit: Ken Bruen (resplendent in oils, right, courtesy of KT McCaffrey), gets hauled in for questioning by the Podcast Inspector over at the Podcast Pickle, answering, among other queries, ‘the one question he hasn’t been asked that he really wants to answer – namely, what he really thinks of the Irish police’ … Meanwhile, the Grand Vizier of Crime Always Pays, aka Declan Burke, turns up here on Pulp Pusher waffling on about the importance of characters’ names … Over at The Guardian, Ronan Bennett allows mere mortals to peer into his rather resplendent cave in their ongoing ‘Writers’ Rooms’ series … ress – Stop the Press – Stop the Press: Joan Brady update: the author gives her side of the infamous ‘fumes wot wrecked my life and made me write crime fiction’ story in a rather poignant piece with The Guardian … Mark Sarvas at The Elegant Variation alerts us to some Benny Blanco vids, including one we illegally uploaded to YouTube ourselves, albeit without giving us the credit. Boo … Finally, a rare treat for fans of hysterically histrionic pop-opera at its finest. Lifted from the soundtrack of 1984’s STREETS OF FIRE, the vid features Diane Lane in a backless velvet red dress coming over all Bonnie Tyler to the god-like genius Jim Steinman’s classic, Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young. A perfect storm, we call it … although it might help if you appreciate that your correspondent was an entirely impressionable 14-year-old the first time he clapped eyes on this six minutes of pure joy. Altogether now: “And if I can’t get an angel / I can still get a boy / And a boy’ll be the next best thing / The next best thing to an angel / A boy’ll be the next best thing …” Sigh. Roll it there, Collette …

The Big Question: Is it just us, or does Diane Lane remind anyone else of an ever-so-slightly younger Donna Moore?