“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Kevin Brooks

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 BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Travis McGee (from the John D MacDonald books).

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t feel guilty about reading anything.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Publication of my first book, MARTYN PIG.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Depends how you define ‘Irish crime novel’. Does John Connolly’s THE REAPERS count?

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE REAPERS (if allowed).

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Best thing – all of it. There is no worst thing.

The pitch for your next book is …?
London, 1976, the long hot summer, the birth of punk rock, and a young Irish boy known as Billy the Kid.

Who are you reading right now?
Christopher Hitchens.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I’m an atheist, so neither (and even if I wasn’t an atheist, I’d just tell Him to go away).

Kevin Brooks’ iBoy is published by Puffin.

The World: Gone To Hell In A Hand-Basket, Apparently

I had a piece published in the Irish Times yesterday, the gist of it concerned with the development of the crime novel in settings and countries not necessarily associated with the traditional haunts of crime fiction. To wit:

How the World Became One Big Crime Scene

From the Palestinian Territories to Mongolia and beyond, crime writers are using international locations to tackle global themes

The popular perception of crime fiction is that it’s the foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, black sheep of the literary family. Unsurprisingly, it’s quite popular with the ladies, perhaps as a result of the broad mind it has developed on its travels.
  The success of Stieg Larsson’s Sweden-set ‘Millennium Trilogy’ has alerted mainstream readers to the fact that the crime novel has an existence beyond its traditional enclaves of America and the UK. Larsson, of course, is following in the footsteps of his countryman Henning Mankell, while ‘foreign’ settings for crime novels are nothing new for aficionados au fait with the groundbreaking works of Georges Simenon (France) and Sjöwall and Wahlöö (Sweden), and latterly the likes of Andrea Camilleri (Italy), Colin Cotterill (Cambodia), Michael Dibdin (Italy), Jo Nesbø (Norway) and Deon Meyer (South Africa), to mention but a few.
  Three years ago, writing in the New Yorker, Clive James celebrated international crime fiction offerings from Ireland, Scandinavia and Italy while simultaneously deriding the limitations of the genre’s form. “In most of the crime novels coming out now,” he said, “it’s a matter not of what happens but of where. Essentially, they are guide books.”
  What James failed to recognise is that the crime novel, by virtue of engaging with issues of law and (dis)order in a timely and relevant fashion, tends to be at the cutting edge in terms of addressing society’s fundamental concerns and broaching its taboos.
  Per Wahlöö, for example, claimed that the motive behind the ten-book Martin Beck series written with his wife was to “use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideologically pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type.”
  Peeling back layers of cant and perceived wisdom is a theme that writers are currently exploring in settings as diverse as Canada, Poland, the Palestinian Territories, Brazil, South Africa and Mongolia.
  “Toronto has been proud of its label as one the most multi-ethnic cities in the world for the past twenty years or so,” says John McFetridge (right), whose Let It Ride is set in Canada’s great melting-pot city. “There’s been some great literature written here, but there hasn’t been much written about crime. And there’s been plenty of crime. Almost everything in my books is inspired by real events, from the closed brewery turned into a giant marijuana grow-op to the beauty queen pulling armed robberies at spas, to eight members of a gang killed in one night. I wanted to write what I saw going on in my city that not many people were talking about.”
  Mike Nicol, the author of Killer Country, is one of a new breed of South African writers inspired by Deon Meyer. “During apartheid the only fiction was literary fiction,” he says. “It was believed to have the seriousness that our political condition demanded. So there was no crime fiction – or almost none, although there were some very good novels from James McClure and Wessel Ebersohn.
  “After the end of Nelson Mandela’s presidency in 1999 it became obvious that the new government wasn’t terribly different from the old government. Apartheid was gone but the politicians remained politicians. There was widespread cronyism, fraud, corruption, embezzlement within government, collusion between cops and gangsters, a collapse in the education system, a collapse in the health sector as AIDS denialism became a national policy, and an unhealthy relationship developed between the private sector and the public sector that was a mixture of threat and bribery. As a crime writer, I felt I was back in business.”
  Matt Benyon Rees (right), a journalist, sets his Omar Yussef series of novels in the Palestinian Territories in order to humanise the newspaper headlines. “I wanted to show the Palestinians - whom we all think we know from daily news reports - as they are and to make readers realize that they didn’t really know them at all. Detective fiction is perfect for such a manoeuvre because it requires readers to examine very closely what’s happening in the story - there’s not much room for gloss. When it’s placed in a foreign culture, the reader’s attention has to be that much closer and the writer has to look again at every element of his descriptions.
  “Fiction, strangely, is a much better way of getting at the truths of a foreign culture than political analysis,” he continues. “Politics and journalism are based around liars and those who observe liars at work but often neglect to point out that the liars are lying. Fiction can’t lie.”
  The classic dramatic conflict between have and have-nots forms the backdrop to Leighton Gage’s Chief Inspector Mario Silva novels, which are set in Brazil.
  “Brazil is a rich country,” he says, “but it’s still a developing country. As such, it continues to have highly inequitable income distribution. That’s changing, and changing rapidly, but it’s still true that this country’s taboos (unlike the ones Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler et al had to contend with) can vary immensely depending upon where you stand in the socioeconomic pecking order. Forcing one of your children into prostitution is repugnant, for example, but there’s no taboo against it if the alternative is to let your other children starve.
  “That’s an extreme case, obviously, but Brazil is full of societal issues that don’t arise in so-called First World countries. Liberation theology, for example, has been condemned by the Princes of the Church, but many of Brazil’s poorer priests practice it. Excessive concentration on the promise of reward in heaven, they say, often propagates social injustice on earth. So, at one end of the scale, a defence of liberation theology is taboo. And, at the other end, not embracing it is equally taboo. How could I possibly live here, be a writer, and not want to tell people what a fascinating place this is?”
  Michael Walters sets his Nergui novels in the former Soviet satellite of Mongolia.
  “I’m not exactly exploring ‘societal taboos’,” he says, “but writing about a society which is still in the process of trying to work out exactly what its values (and therefore taboos) ought to be. The relationship between ‘legality’ and ‘morality’ is sometimes far from clear. In my first book, for example, I was trying to work out the links between individual murder and corporate crime, and the way in which, in a society desperate for economic growth, the corporations can sometimes, maybe even literally, get away with murder. In my second, I was looking to explore the difficulty of trying to establish legitimate law enforcement in a society where corruption is endemic and, historically, the word ‘police’ has usually been preceded by the word ‘secret’.”
  “In a pretentious mode,” Walters says, “I’d quote the line from Gramsci: ‘The old is dying, the new is struggling to be born and in the period of interregnum there arise many morbid symptoms.’ That’s a pretty good description of some aspects of Mongolia. The ‘morbid symptoms’, of course, make perfect material for crime fiction.” - Declan Burke

  This feature first appeared in the Irish Times.

The Bryce Is Right

I’ve no idea what the hold-up was, but Alex Barclay’s eagerly awaited fourth novel, TIME OF DEATH, finally arrives this month, with FBI agent Ren Bryce suffering the consequences of an ostensibly successful undercover operation that left one or two loose ends without a frilly bow. To wit:

FBI agent Ren Bryce’s hunt for some of the country’s most dangerous killers is about to turn into a nightmare. There is unfinished business between Ren and those she is pursuing, and soon she is forced to confront both personal and professional traumas. Then someone close to Ren is murdered and secrets from her past look set to be revealed, throwing her into a world of fear, paranoia and danger. Dark forces are at work and someone is determined to destroy Ren’s life. But time is running out and Ren must catch a killer before he catches her …

  TIME OF DEATH hits a shelf near you on July 22nd.
  Meanwhile, I’ve been mulling over for quite some time now (the entire three minutes since the idea occurred to me, to be precise) about how masculine are the current crop of Irish female crime writers. Not the writers themselves, of course - a more radiantly fragrant bunch of roses you’d be hard pressed to find the length and breadth of Christendom. As authors, though, they do tend to have a masculine edge. Alex Barclay’s hard-nosed Ren Bryce could by no stretch of the imagination be described as girly; Arlene Hunt not only writes of a partnership that is half male, but she did away entirely with the female half for her current offering, BLOOD MONEY; Tana French’s latest novel, FAITHFUL PLACE, features an entirely convincing male detective as its protagonist, as did IN THE WOODS; Cora Harrison’s series protagonist Mara is a judge in mediaeval times, an era not renowned for its enlightened attitude towards gender equality; Ava McCarthy’s female lead goes by the name Harry; and to say that Ingrid Black’s protagonists have balls would be anatomically incorrect, but metaphorically on the nail.
  Is it the case - Niamh O’Connor’s female detective being a hard-pressed domestic goddess at home, for example, but a ballsy woman at work - that the ladies are reflecting the fact that, in Ireland today, women have to work twice as hard as men in order to get paid half as much? Or are they simply having fun with gender politics? Or is it that, being the backward soul that I am, any woman not sporting kitten heels and a cleavage in which you could park a moped is immediately classed as unfeminine?
  The comment box is open for business, people …

Declan Burke bio

My sixth novel, THE LOST AND THE BLIND (2014), is published by Severn House.

CRIME ALWAYS PAYS (Severn House) was shortlisted for the Goldsboro ‘Last Laugh’ Award at Crimefest in 2015.

With John Connolly, I am the co-editor of BOOKS TO DIE FOR (2012), a collection of essays on the greatest crime and mystery novels written by the greatest living crime and mystery authors. The book won the non-fiction crime Anthony, Macavity and Agatha awards in 2013.

SLAUGHTER’S HOUND, the latest Harry Rigby mystery, was shortlisted in the Ireland AM Crime Fiction Category for the Irish Book Awards, 2012.

ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL won the Goldsboro ‘Last Laugh’ Award at Crimefest in 2012. It was also shortlisted for the Crime Fiction category at the Irish Book Awards, 2011.

EIGHTBALL BOOGIE (2003) was shortlisted in the Crime Fiction category at the Irish Book Awards, 2003. THE BIG O (2008) was shortlisted for the Goldsboro ‘Last Laugh’ Award in 2009.

In 2011, I edited DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS, a collection of essays, memoir and short stories written by Irish crime writers about the current wave of Irish crime writing.

As a journalist and critic, I write and broadcast on books and film for a variety of media outlets, including the Irish Times, RTE, the Irish Examiner and the Sunday Independent.

Contact: dbrodb[@]gmail.com

Origins: Sam Millar

Being the latest in what will probably be yet another short-lived series, in which yours truly reclines on a hammock by the pool with a jeroboam of Elf-Wonking Juice™ and lets a proper writer talk about the origins of his or her characters and stories. This week: Sam Millar (right), author of THE DARK PLACE. To wit:

“Write what you know, some old sage once wrote, many centuries ago. So mostly, that’s what I do: write what I know.
  “Karl Kane, my Belfast PI, always up to his neck in debt, shit and blood, is not unlike me – especially the debt bit. Although I would love to say he’s my alter ego, unfortunately – or fortunately, depending how you look upon him – he’s a hybrid of two other men, one fictional and the other real. I don’t even make it into the equation.
  “One part of Kane is based on James Scott Rockford, usually called Jim, sometimes Jimmy, or if you’re feeling really courageous, Jimbo. Mostly people will recognise Jim from the Rockford Files.
  “Still, despite not being me, there are some uncanny familiarities between myself and Jim Rockford.
  “Rockford served time in San Quentin Prison, not the most hospital of places at the best of times.
  “I served time in quite a few American prisons, even less hospitable, at any given time.
  “Rockford received five years for armed robbery. Later he received a pardon.
  “I received five years for an armed robbery. Later I received a pardon from President Bill Clinton.
  “He lives in a dilapidated home on the beach, 29 Cove Road, Paradise Cove.
  “I live in a dilapidated home, minus the beach, and I sure as hell ain’t giving my home address!
  “Just like Rockford, Karl Kane would sooner duck a fight than swing his fists, and rarely carries a gun, unless his life – or the life of those he loves –is in danger.
  “Kane also has the same dress sense as Rockford, which is pretty depressing, to say the least. He’ll wear anything provided it’s always within easy reach. He wore a pink bathrobe, for fuck sake, in the opening page of his latest adventure!
  “Now, that’s the fictional part of Kane.
  “The other man who gets the dubious honour of influencing my take on Kane was my father, one of the true ‘tough guys’ with a heart bigger than his punch. Big Sam, as he was affectionately known throughout Belfast, was a gentleman to a fault. Always a lover of the underdog, he was a socialist when it wasn’t fashionable to be one, a pugilist and a writer of millions of unpublished stories (a bit like Kane). He loved women, good brandy and gambling. A trinity that probably sent him to an early grave, but at least a happy one. I remember one day as a kid telling him I was going to be a writer, just like him. He smiled proudly (I think. I hope.) and patted me on the head. Years later, in the penitentiary, I decided to immortalise Big Sam, in a way he would love. And so the genesis of Karl Kane came eventually about.
  “Sadly, Big Sam never got to see Kane, or the way I saw him in Kane. I think he’d be very happy with the depiction. Just one thing, though: Big Sam would never wear a pink bathrobe. Me? Well, that’s telling, and writers never tell. They only show ...” - Sam Millar

  THE DARK PLACE is published by Brandon Books. Sam Millar is a judge of the Aeon Awards.

Cry Havoc, And Let Slip The Dogs Of Rome

An Irish author, an Italian setting, and a literary crime novel courtesy of a former arts editor who has produced a current affairs magazine for foreign embassies in Rome: Conor Fitzgerald’s debut THE DOGS OF ROME is an intriguing proposition. The early word is good too. To wit:

“A powerful and hugely compelling novel. Dark, worldly and written with tremendous style and assurance.” - William Boyd

“Guaranteed to whet the thirst of international crime fiction fans. This promising debut is reminiscent of early Michael Dibdin, and that is more than enough to put Fitzgerald’s series on your radar.” - Booklist

“Impressively plotted … those who like their gritty crime thrillers with a European flair will be well rewarded.” - Publishers Weekly

  Nice. Meanwhile, the blurb elves have been wittering thusly:

Rome. A city where rules are compromised. And compromise rules. It's one of the hottest days of the year. Chief Inspector Blume is enjoying a rare solitary lunch in a tranquil corner of Trastevere when an unwelcome phone call intrudes with news of a brutal killing a few streets away. Arturo Clemente is no ordinary victim. His widow is an elected member of the Senate, and Blume arrives at the scene to find enquiries well underway, the case itself apparently clear-cut, a prime suspect quickly identified. Blume must fight to regain control of the investigation, but well acquainted with the city's underworld, he knows from bitter experience that in Rome even a murder enquiry must bow to the rules of politics. But when worrying shortcuts sanctioned by one of his superiors are uncovered, it seems events are being manipulated from on high. The complex and uncomfortable truth Blume will unravel will shock even him, and his struggle for justice may yet cost more innocent lives ...

  Incidentally, Conor Fitzgerald has in the past “collaborated in the translation and annotation of “Scritti Italiani” by James Joyce. These consist of lectures and essays in Italian written by Joyce while in Trieste and Rome, and were included in JAMES JOYCE OCCASIONAL, CRITICAL AND POLITCAL WRITING (Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford 2000).”
  Hmmmm. James Joyce? Leopold Bloom? Inspector Blume? Let the third-form theorizing commence post-haste …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” PJ Brooke

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?
This is going to be interesting, as PJ Brooke is two of us, Jane Brooke and Phil O’Brien. Phil is Creative Genius; I turn dodgy drafts into decent prose. Phil’s family on his father’s side is from Clonmel, County Tipperary, and on his mother’s from Germany. He had the misfortune to be schooled by the Jesuits in Glasgow, went to Chile after University, was radicalized there, briefly joined the International Marxist Group after the Chile coup, got a University post in Glasgow at the Institute of Latin American Studies and supported solidarity and anti-war movements. I’m a nice girl from Pontefract, a market town in Yorkshire, who spent too long behind a desk in Glasgow. We met at a Green Party meeting. He had terrible hair, and worse tee shirt. His sisters think he looks okay now. Anyway, the crime novel - THE NAME OF THE ROSE (Umberto Eco). We agree on that one.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Me? Lizbeth Salander of course. Pure wish fulfilment: getting to beat up the bad guys, rescue hero, AND steal a Harley Davidson. Phil, having had a much more interesting life than me so far, would settle for being Father William of Baskerville.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Phil follows the footy – strong Barcelona supporter. I read cookery books. Phil eats the outcomes.

Most satisfying writing moment?
For me, we’d finished the first complete draft of BLOOD WEDDING, but the ending seemed … well … limp. We’d spent best part of five years on it. And just couldn’t come up with the plot twist we needed. So I asked my aunt (80 at the time) to have a wee look at it. And she said, “It wasn’t x that did it, it was y.” So we thought again, revised the draft, wrote two more chapters, and the whole thing fell into focus something wonderful. For Phil, the most satisfying writing moment was just finishing the bloody thing.

The best Irish crime novel is?
Ah … we have a bit of a problem here ’cos I’m writing this in Granada, Spain, and our big library is in our main house in Glasgow. But we enjoyed, in part, Benjamin Black’s THE SILVER SWAN. The gloomy pathologist, Quirke, struck a chord, as did some superb writing. “The past was tied to him like a tin can to a cat’s tail …”

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Stretching the definition of Irish to include those across the Atlantic, Denis Lehane’s MYSTIC RIVER was a pretty good novel, but rambled somewhat. But Clint Eastwood trimmed and tightened it into a brilliant, brilliant movie, a dark Shakespearian tale.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is when the plot just won’t come together, but you can’t put the damn thing aside because the publisher needs the complete typescript next month. So you just have to keep plugging away, and hope inspiration strikes before repetitive strain injury kicks in. The best thing is when a trivial observation illuminates an entire chapter, or maybe when characters start to speak for themselves. That’s good.

The pitch for your next book is?
Pretty graduate student Leila is doing research on the impacts of the Spanish Civil War on a village outside Granada. She’s Muslim, but that's not her main thing. But then Leila is found dead under a bridge, and a badly mishandled police investigation spirals out of control when the prime suspect, a Muslim kid from Leeds, turns out to have connections with a radical mosque in London.

Who are you reading right now?
I’m reading Michael Dibdin’s COSI FAN TUTTI. Phil is reading ANATOMIA DE UN INSTANTE, novelist Javier Cercas’ extraordinary account of 23 February 1981, when troops stormed the Spanish Parliament building, and Spain’s democracy was nearly strangled at birth. With luck, the coup attempt is going to be the jumping off point for another Max Romero novel.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I would opt for reading, ’cos there are folks out there who write far better than we do. Phil, being a Jesuit, would argue the point with God, and probably win.

The three best words to describe your own writing are?
Looking at our reviews on Amazon, people use the words “evocative “, “political” and “absorbing” quite a lot. Which I suppose reflects what we are trying to do … to share with readers our pleasure in Granada … an exotic and beautiful city, which was the last Muslim kingdom in Europe. We use Granada to explore the fault-lines in Spanish politics going back to the Civil War (the dress rehearsal for the Second Word War), and try to find in conversations, newspaper articles and graffiti, human stories that people might want to read.

A DARKER NIGHT by PJ Brooke is published by Soho Constable.