It Can’t Be Mills & Boon Every Day, Right?

Love me, love my crime fiction. Mills & Boon, of all people, are about to dive into the murky world of gats ‘n’ gams with a crime imprint, according to The Bookseller (possible scenario, right). To wit:

Mills & Boon is to launch a crime and thriller series in its first venture beyond romance publishing since it was founded 100 years ago. Black Star Crime kicks off in August with five titles, and will initially publish five titles every two months. The heavily-branded short novels will be priced at £3.99.
  M&B anticipates sales of between 250,000 and 500,000 units a year for the series, which would be around 2% of the total UK crime and thriller market. Nielsen BookScan’s crime and thriller product class was worth £138.9m in 2007, with 22.7 million books sold.
  “Since 2001, crime and thriller sales have increased by 70%,” said M&B marketing manager Oliver Rhodes. “There were two ways for us to go. We could either do what everyone else is doing, and do it better, or carve out our own niche and try to create a unique proposition. The idea is that if people find something they like they can go back and find something similar. It is a brand promise.”
  Black Star Crime will include a range of genres, from cosy mysteries to hard-core thrillers, with authors to include new names as well as more established writers. M&B has liaised with Working Partners to generate some of the concepts, as well as acquiring titles itself, and is adamant the quality of the stories is paramount. Launch titles include RUNAWAY MINISTER by Nick Curtis, STREETWISE by Chris Freeman, A NARROW ESCAPE by Faith Martin and MURDER PLOT by Lance Elliott.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: CONFESSIONS OF A FALLEN ANGEL by Ronan O’Brien

Skating on the Surface of Celtic Tiger Ireland

Playing with his friends as a kid, Charlie nearly dies and from the moment of this early brush with mortality he is condemned, not to see dead people, but to dream their deaths. And so, with this unwanted capacity for premonition unifying his story and his life, Charlie’s tale unfolds.
  As can be imagined, Ronan O’Brien – a solicitor who specialises in criminal law – in this, his first novel, is not overly concerned with rendering a gritty Irish realism, rather he is content to flit between the comic and the serious, the extraordinary and the mundane, flirting with the fantastic along the way.
  Appropriately enough in the circumstances, there are three or four novels haunting this one particular novel: at times it is a kind of supernatural thriller, then a love story, with an ultra violent “gangster” element also thrown in for good measure.
  In keeping with the constantly shifting register, the novel moves at a fairly rapid pace. Apart from in the love story which is positioned mid-way through, in which Charlie allows himself the luxury of dwelling on his most positive relationship with the love of his life, Aisling, the novel’s plot offers numerous twists and turns.
  Charlie’s dilemma is one of trying to cheat destiny in his efforts to save those who die in his dreams. But, as is the way with fate (as the Greek tragedians knew), the outcome is always maddeningly fixed. Everything else in this world, however, is manifestly chaotic and unanticipated. It’s an odd juxtaposition that O’Brien presents, and he just about pulls it off.
  O’Brien’s achievement – and it is an achievement – is to keep all these constituent parts from becoming a cumbersome and unpalatable pudding. Charlie’s penchant for on-the-button one-liners, his wry perspective on the collection of oddball characters that people the fictional Northside Dublin village of Rathgorman keeps the reader’s attention and interest focused. The adult voice is the more convincing and consistent: the younger self as filtered through the grown-up Charlie appears awkward in comparison.
  In many ways, his hero is reminiscent of Patrick McCabe’s masterful creation Francie Brady, and O’Brien even nods his acknowledgement to this precursor by having Charlie read THE BUTCHER BOY. In a sense though, this book is “Butcher Boy-lite”, mainly owing to the deliberate way CONFESSIONS OF A FALLEN ANGEL avoids concentrating on any one aspect or element of the plot or character. The singularly absurdist vision of McCabe’s macabre fiction is absent here and so too is the dynamic edge that the truly unexpected provides.
  Despite the moments of heightened emotion surrounding the death of Aisling, the whirlwind of events surrounding Charlie’s life forces the reader to remain steadfastly engaged with the surface of this character instead of plumbing his depths. It is the way of the modern world, and the presence of a criminal element in the novel would seem to prove it.
  As with other narratives in which Irish gangland appears – be it journalism, film, the novel – their world of violence and blunt action becomes a means for the characters, and the audience, to get in touch with feeling, to be momentarily real. So deadening can modern life be that only extreme situations, and extreme violence particularly, can produce a reaction. It has become the cliché of modernity: certainly of Irish modernity.
  The reader, of course, should not take any of this too seriously. This novel is not a moral treatise on the vicissitudes of contemporary Irish life, nor is it meant to be. It is, nevertheless, a reflection of our relentless need for movement and distraction, there is no time here for stillness or quiet rumination: everything in this world is in flux.
  Is CONFESSIONS OF A FALLEN ANGEL a commentary on Celtic Tiger Ireland? Unintentionally perhaps. Is it a diverting read? Most definitely. – Derek Hand

Derek Hand is a lecturer in the English department in St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra. He is presently writing A HISTORY OF THE IRISH NOVEL for the Cambridge University Press.

This review first appeared in the Irish Times

Funky Friday’s Freaky-Deak

It’s Friday, it’s funky, to wit: Publishers Weekly announces that Benny Blanco’s THE LEMUR is slated to appear as a Spring 2007 Audio, despite the fact that it’s currently being serialised in the New York Times and it won’t be published as an actual, y’know, novel until June … Harrumph, etc. Staying with the pseudonymous Black family: the first sighting of the upcoming Ingrid Black novel, THE NIGHT SHIFT, hoves into view over an October-shaped horizon, with the blurb elves at Michael Joseph / Penguin declaiming thusly: “It takes a lot to spook ex-FBI agent Saxon, but with a serial killer on the loose in Dublin, this is going to be a Halloween night to remember. Ingrid Black’s novel is a dark and inventive real-time thriller …” Hurrah! Two fascinating pieces for anyone still flogging the horse called ‘crime fiction is as good as that literary rubbish any day’: Charles McGrath had an excellent piece entitled ‘Great Literature? Depends Whodunit’ in the New York Times, while Lawrence Douglas and Alexander George compile The Literary Police Blotter at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Camus, Shakespeare, Kafka, Homer, Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Dostoevsky and Cervantes are among the usual suspects being interrogated for writing ‘classic’ crime narratives … Staying with classic crime narratives: Twenty Major’s genre-busting opus THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX PARK goes on the shelves next month – catch up here with Twenty’s drinking buddy Lucky Luciano, the ‘compassionate assassin’ … Finally, and by popular demand, it’s another Jim Steinman classic for the Funky Friday vid: yep, it’s Bonnie Tyler lacerating her vocal cords on Holding Out for a Hero from the soundtrack of FOOTLOOSE, complete with Kevin Bacon, subtitles and a pretty blatant nod (even leaving aside the chicky-run tractors) to REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (jump here for Marlon Brando’s screen-test as Jim Stark). Roll it there, Collette …

D.B. Or Not D.B., That Is The Question

D.B. Shan, aka Darren Shan, the prolific and best-selling author of young adult horror novels, makes a play for the adult crime market when PROCESSION OF THE DEAD is published on March 3rd. Quoth the blurb elves:

The first volume in a noirish, gritty urban fantasy for adults from the bestselling author otherwise known as Darren Shan. Quick-witted and cocksure, young upstart Capac Raimi arrives in the City determined to make his mark. As he learns the tricks of his new trade from his Uncle Theo – extortion, racketeering, threatening behaviour – he’s soon well on his way to becoming a promising new gangster. Then he crosses paths with The Cardinal, and his life changes forever. The Cardinal is the City and the City is The Cardinal. They are joined at the soul. Nothing moves on the streets, or below them, without the Cardinal’s knowledge. His rule is absolute. As Capac begins to discover more about the extent of the Cardinal’s influence on his own life he is faced with hard choices. And as his ambition soars ever higher he will learn all there is to know about loss, and the true cost of ultimate power!

Hmmm … Any chance yon Capac Raimi is a nod to schlock-horror maestro and A SIMPLE PLAN director Sam Raimi? Only time, that perennially doity rat, will tell …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 2,057: Laura Lippman

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?
MILDRED PIERCE by James M. Cain. I know most people don’t consider it a crime novel, but it does have accounting fraud.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Literary fiction. Seriously.
Most satisfying writing moment?
Finishing the draft that goes off to my editor.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
No way. I’m not well read enough.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I’m going to cheat here and say A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR because a) Dennis Lehane’s parents were Irish immigrants and b) he has ridiculously good karma when it comes to film adaptation – MYSTIC RIVER, GONE, BABY, GONE, and now Scorsese is directing SHUTTER ISLAND. I don’t know why Hollywood doesn’t screw up Dennis’s books, but so far, so good.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is working alone. The best thing is working alone.
The pitch for your next novel is …?
Memoirist in a slump returns to her hometown of Baltimore, thinking she might tease a book out of a little-known murder case and realizes her investigation will come at a great personal cost. Oh wait, that’s the novel I’m writing. The novel I’m publishing next month is ANOTHER THING TO FALL: Tess Monaghan collides with Hollywood, literally.
Who are you reading right now?
David Lodge, Martin Amis, Michael Pollan, Jacob Weisberg, Winifred Watson. I tend to read a lot of books at once, until one breaks away from the pack, and the Pollan is in the lead right now, followed by Weisberg’s THE BUSH TRAGEDY.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Obstinate, angry, inadequate.

Laura Lippman’s ANOTHER THING TO FALL will be published in March

Not All Crimes Are Actually Illegal

Crime Fic at It’s A Crime! has supported some noble causes in the past, but few so noble as her current one, which picks up on a campaign being run by Norm at Crime Scraps. Quoth Crime Fic:

"CARE Blackerton House is registered to provide care to people under 65 years of age with learning disabilities. It is run by the charity CARE which states on its home page:

“Our aim is to assist men and women with learning disabilities to live a full and purposeful life at the heart of society and to help them to gain independence through the encouragement of further training in everyday and vocational skills.”

  "Norm at Crime Scraps has recently been writing about the risks to such people in the community and CARE’s proposal to sell the site and move its residents to another location, which he argues is of less quality with the disruption of the move likely to cause immense stress to the residents. He has now started an online petition and in his post to announce this, he also lists his previous posts which cover his thoughts on the proposal and its background. You can find it here along with a link to the petition. I think Norm makes a strong case.
  "Alas, whatever the government tries to tell us, we live in a period where certain crimes are mounting and it is easy to prey on the vulnerable. Indeed, Disability Now is maintaining a “hate crime dossier” to support its arguments for its hate crime campaign.
  "If you feel you already know enough to add weight to the petition, you can go directly here. But please read Norm’s posts and if you have a blog and feel empathy, please link as I have done."

“It’s Writing, Jim, But Not As We Know It.”

How time flies, eh? It seems like it was only last week when we were letting you know that Ken Bruen’s latest, SANCTUARY, is due in June from Transworld and that – woah, that was last week. And now the Edgar-nominated Sir Kenneth of Bruen gets in touch to let us know that ONCE WERE COPS (funkadelic new cover, right) will be St Martins’ lead title come September, and that “it’s darker than AMERICAN SKIN”. Crumbs! Has Bruen cracked the whole ‘multiple universe’ malarkey at the heart of quantum physics, and marshalled all his theoretical selves to write novels at virtually the speed of light? And can we get a (theoretically infinite) Star Trek episode out of it? Hmmmm. Only time, that notoriously doity rat, will tell …