Gene Kerrigan gets the hup-ya for The Midnight Choir, the follow-up to Little Criminals being his debut in the States: “Kerrigan has crafted an incisive portrait of contemporary Ireland through the matter-of-fact perspectives of officers on its legendary police force, the Gardai.” Which is nicer than nice … Meanwhile, two children’s authors get the big bump from Captain Kirkus. Eoin McNamee’s The Navigator is described as “… a crafty first piece of young-adult fiction …” while Derek Landy (see more down below somewhere) is the rave du jour: “Skulduggery Pleasant, his smart, stylish young-adult debut novel, has both substance and velocity, giving the story – a modern-day tale of sorcery, murder and menace, with a couple of sharp-tongued leading characters – a frightful excitement.” Okay – but yon Landy still isn’t dating Nicole Kidman, right?
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Captain Kirkus Boldly Goes
By way of Maxine Clarke's very funky Petrona blog comes news of the influential Kirkus Reviews ’07 First Fiction Spotlight, aka ‘Promising Debuts From Important New Voices’. 
Gene Kerrigan gets the hup-ya for The Midnight Choir, the follow-up to Little Criminals being his debut in the States: “Kerrigan has crafted an incisive portrait of contemporary Ireland through the matter-of-fact perspectives of officers on its legendary police force, the Gardai.” Which is nicer than nice … Meanwhile, two children’s authors get the big bump from Captain Kirkus. Eoin McNamee’s The Navigator is described as “… a crafty first piece of young-adult fiction …” while Derek Landy (see more down below somewhere) is the rave du jour: “Skulduggery Pleasant, his smart, stylish young-adult debut novel, has both substance and velocity, giving the story – a modern-day tale of sorcery, murder and menace, with a couple of sharp-tongued leading characters – a frightful excitement.” Okay – but yon Landy still isn’t dating Nicole Kidman, right?
Gene Kerrigan gets the hup-ya for The Midnight Choir, the follow-up to Little Criminals being his debut in the States: “Kerrigan has crafted an incisive portrait of contemporary Ireland through the matter-of-fact perspectives of officers on its legendary police force, the Gardai.” Which is nicer than nice … Meanwhile, two children’s authors get the big bump from Captain Kirkus. Eoin McNamee’s The Navigator is described as “… a crafty first piece of young-adult fiction …” while Derek Landy (see more down below somewhere) is the rave du jour: “Skulduggery Pleasant, his smart, stylish young-adult debut novel, has both substance and velocity, giving the story – a modern-day tale of sorcery, murder and menace, with a couple of sharp-tongued leading characters – a frightful excitement.” Okay – but yon Landy still isn’t dating Nicole Kidman, right?
Nobody Move, This Is A Review: Cross by Ken Bruen
Another outing for disgraced ex-Guard Jack Taylor: he’s on the PI trail in Galway, mainly looking into disappearing dogs, and while he’s off the sauce, he often feels that he might be better back on it. 
His beloved teenage sidekick just took some bullets on his behalf, so he’s got bona fide grief to add to all the other grief that he seems to effortlessly attract, one of which is premature old age. When a teenage boy is crucified and his sister is later immolated in her car, Taylor is asked to investigate by Ridge - an old friend from the force - in order to give her a better shot at promotion. His investigation unravels a vengeance killing that subsequently opened a Pandora’s box of unstoppable malevolence and Bruen cleverly references various snippets from Irish history, culture and folklore that parallel this. The murders and investigation themselves, as well as the murderer, aren’t quite fleshed out enough though, and seem almost incidental to Bruen’s walking tour of an ancient city - and, by extension, country - which have belatedly collided with the modern world. The old strangleholds of religion and poverty are gone, but the hypothesis throughout the novel appears to be that evil is immutable. Bruen has now deservedly established an international reputation, and although Cross dawdles at times, he more than makes up for the lack of pace with tension, atmosphere and humour. – Claire Coughlan
His beloved teenage sidekick just took some bullets on his behalf, so he’s got bona fide grief to add to all the other grief that he seems to effortlessly attract, one of which is premature old age. When a teenage boy is crucified and his sister is later immolated in her car, Taylor is asked to investigate by Ridge - an old friend from the force - in order to give her a better shot at promotion. His investigation unravels a vengeance killing that subsequently opened a Pandora’s box of unstoppable malevolence and Bruen cleverly references various snippets from Irish history, culture and folklore that parallel this. The murders and investigation themselves, as well as the murderer, aren’t quite fleshed out enough though, and seem almost incidental to Bruen’s walking tour of an ancient city - and, by extension, country - which have belatedly collided with the modern world. The old strangleholds of religion and poverty are gone, but the hypothesis throughout the novel appears to be that evil is immutable. Bruen has now deservedly established an international reputation, and although Cross dawdles at times, he more than makes up for the lack of pace with tension, atmosphere and humour. – Claire Coughlan
It’s Millar Time. All The Time
Why are we plugging Albedo One magazine if they’re into science fiction, fantasy and horror rather than good old-fashioned crime? 
Well, for starters they’ve got a sharp eye for a funky cover (exhibit A, right), which always goes down like the proverbial granite submarine at CAP. Better still, there’s a story by Sam Millar called The Barber lurking in their back catalogues. Best of all, though, Albedo One has an in-depth interview with Sam in their next issue, in which – along with yakking it up about a host of stuff ‘n’ such – Sam cuts loose about his upcoming novel, Bloodstorm, which is due in December / January and follows the fortunes of PI Karl Kane, a gumshoe with a very dark past who returns to the mean streets of Belfast with a hankering to avenge his mother’s rape and murder, more of which anon …
Well, for starters they’ve got a sharp eye for a funky cover (exhibit A, right), which always goes down like the proverbial granite submarine at CAP. Better still, there’s a story by Sam Millar called The Barber lurking in their back catalogues. Best of all, though, Albedo One has an in-depth interview with Sam in their next issue, in which – along with yakking it up about a host of stuff ‘n’ such – Sam cuts loose about his upcoming novel, Bloodstorm, which is due in December / January and follows the fortunes of PI Karl Kane, a gumshoe with a very dark past who returns to the mean streets of Belfast with a hankering to avenge his mother’s rape and murder, more of which anon …
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
This Landy Is Your Landy
With a Harry Potter-sized hole to fill, HarperCollins have turned to Derek Landy (right) and his skeletal anti-hero Skulduggery Pleasant, a dead wizard-type private eye who haunts the mean streets of Dublin with his 12-year-old sidekick, Stephanie. Word around the campfire is that Landy, a first-time author with screenplays (Dead Bodies, Boy Eats Girl) in his back pocket, received a seven-figure advance for a three-book deal. Nice work if you can get it, etc. So – is it any good? “A very tasty mix of the cinematic and the novelistic against 
which a cast of vivid heroes and villains play out the rip-roaring storyline,” says Publishing News. We like the sound of the villain plotting world domination, Nefarious Serpine, and so does Warner Bros: the Harry Potter franchise earned them some decent kicking around money, and now they’re taking a punt on Skulduggery Pleasant, with Landy to adapt the novel for the big screen. Are we jealous? Hell, it’s not like he’s dating Nicole Kidman or anything … he isn't, right?
“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 819: Pat Mullan
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?
John Berendt’s Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Too many thrillers and crime novels, I’m afraid: just finished Jim Rollins’ Map of Bones, Lee Child’s One Shot, Simon Kernick’s Relentless, Harry Hunsicker’s The Next Time You Die, Doug Preston’s The Book of the Dead, Stuart MacBride’s Cold Granite, Bob Liparulo’s Germ, Gayle Lynds’ The Last Spymaster, Barry Eisler’s Choke Point … and I’m in the middle of Rob Browne’s (Robert Gregory Browne) Kiss Her Goodbye. To absolve my guilt, I have stacked up and waiting: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, John Berendt’s The City of Fallen Angels, Michael Collins’ The Secret Life of E. Robert Pendleton.
Most satisfying writing moment?
The chapter I just finished this morning in my WIP, Creatures of Habit.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
There are so many that it’s quite impossible for me to select one and call it the best. However, a work that falls into both the crime and the thriller category captured me when I first read it: Victor O’Reilly’s Games of the Hangman.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Well, I don’t know about movie, maybe TV series: definitely Ken Bruen’s White Trilogy series about Brandt and his corrupt, almost comical, associates. Let Jimmy McGovern do the screenplay and I say it’d match the ratings of The Sopranos! So, any film / TV producers reading this – what are you waiting for?
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst: in the beginning the worst thing is rejection – until you find out that every writer, famous and obscure, suffers from the same chronic disease. Best: simply being a writer. I’ve done a lot of other things in my life but being a writer is, by far, the best!
Why does John Banville use a pseudonym for writing crime?
I’d sure like to ask him that! If I run into him at one of the writers’ conventions, I promise you I’ll ask him. And John (er, Benjamin) if either or both of you are reading this, please let me know. He’s not the only one: recently, Peter Cunningham, using the name Peter Benjamin, (what’s with this word Benjamin anyway ?) published a thriller, Terms and Conditions. Why not do what Iain Banks does? For his science fiction, he simply adds a middle initial: Iain M. Banks. Still proud to have his own name on the genre!
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Fast-paced, intelligent, gripping.
Pat Mullan’s The Root of All Evil is on its way to a shop near you
This Week We’re Reading … Hard Cases and Mr Paradise
One of Ireland’s finest journalists, and now a superb crime fiction author (Little Criminals, The Midnight Choir), 
Gene Kerrigan is also a dab hand in the true crime genre. In the brief preface to Hard Cases (1996), a series of case histories Kerrigan covered for Magill magazine, the Sunday Independent and the Sunday Tribune, Kerrigan cuts to the heart of the appeal and philosophy of crime writing: “If there is a theme, it is the arbitrary nature of justice.” Published when the Celtic Tiger was only sharpening its claws, Hard Cases is a tersely written, powerful read and one that deserves a sequel. As for Elmore Leonard, where do you start? Mr Paradise, surprisingly enough, received some negative reviews, mostly – you’d imagine – from the kind of peon who wouldn’t know a cracking police procedural if it rubber-hosed him around the room. 
As always, a character-led, dialogue-driven black comedy of manners that just so happens to find itself up to its oxters in criminality when Detective Delsa investigates the murder of a wealthy ex-lawyer and his cheerleader playmate, Mr Paradise is the latest in a long, long line of Leonard novels that appears so effortlessly written that anyone who has ever scribbled a line will find their teeth gnashed down to stumps by the finale.
Gene Kerrigan is also a dab hand in the true crime genre. In the brief preface to Hard Cases (1996), a series of case histories Kerrigan covered for Magill magazine, the Sunday Independent and the Sunday Tribune, Kerrigan cuts to the heart of the appeal and philosophy of crime writing: “If there is a theme, it is the arbitrary nature of justice.” Published when the Celtic Tiger was only sharpening its claws, Hard Cases is a tersely written, powerful read and one that deserves a sequel. As for Elmore Leonard, where do you start? Mr Paradise, surprisingly enough, received some negative reviews, mostly – you’d imagine – from the kind of peon who wouldn’t know a cracking police procedural if it rubber-hosed him around the room. 
As always, a character-led, dialogue-driven black comedy of manners that just so happens to find itself up to its oxters in criminality when Detective Delsa investigates the murder of a wealthy ex-lawyer and his cheerleader playmate, Mr Paradise is the latest in a long, long line of Leonard novels that appears so effortlessly written that anyone who has ever scribbled a line will find their teeth gnashed down to stumps by the finale.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
The Thick Plottens: Yep, ’Tis Yet Another Mid-Week Mash-Up, To Be Sure
Has crime fiction lost Pauline McLynn to the perfumed Babylon of civilised scribbling forever? Even the title of her latest, Bright Lights and Promises, suggests as much … to say nothing of the cover. 
Was it something we said, Pauline? Something we didn’t say? How come you talk more to the Sunday Trib people than you talk to us these days? Don’t give up on us, baby – we can still come through, etc. … Staying with last Sunday’s Turbine, where Eoin McNamee cut to the heart of the matter about the appeal of 12:33: A Parisian Summer, his ‘factional’ account of the death of the Princess of Wails: “I started to find this Graham Greene noir-ish story line emerging from it. What’s interesting about it is I was very surprised no one else had picked up on it as a possibility for fiction because it has such great texture to it.” Texture? Never mind the width, feel the quality … Meanwhile, there’s a rare negative review for Ruth Dudley Edwards’ Murdering Americans over at Contra Costa Times (nope, we neither): “Although there’s quite a bit of humour here, the targets are painted so broadly that what should be rapier thrusts of wit become cannonballs launched at a flimsy wall.” 
There’s always one, and the exception proves the rule, we guess … Worth repeating is last February’s Time Out Chicago header for their review of Gerard Donovan’s Julius Winsome (‘The Hunter Is A Lonely Heart’), the review itself winding up thusly: “Donovan has a remarkable austerity in his prose, a beauty that is as entrancing as Winsome’s grief is contagious. The only trouble we had with the book was that we didn’t read it earlier. Out in October, but on our desk in January, if we had got to it around the time of its release, we surely would have included it when compiling our best reads of 2006.” Mmmm, lovely … Cora Harrison gets a big-up from the Globe and Mail for her historical crime novel, My Lady Judge: “This is a terrific debut of a historical series that promises something completely different. If the test of a good historical is a solid plot with an intricate setting, My Lady Judge is the real thing. I know nothing about the area of Ireland known as the Burren, 
or the ancient set of Irish laws known as Brehon, but Harrison seems to have brought it all vividly to life.” Finally, it’s three’s-a-charm for Ingrid Black, who releases the third in the Saxon series, The Judas Heart, with the former FBI agent back on the mean streets of Dublin investigating the brutal murder of an actress and the disappearance of her ol’ buddy, Leon Kaminski. Expect ‘Atmosphere, pace and tension,’ if the Sunday Times is to be believed …
Was it something we said, Pauline? Something we didn’t say? How come you talk more to the Sunday Trib people than you talk to us these days? Don’t give up on us, baby – we can still come through, etc. … Staying with last Sunday’s Turbine, where Eoin McNamee cut to the heart of the matter about the appeal of 12:33: A Parisian Summer, his ‘factional’ account of the death of the Princess of Wails: “I started to find this Graham Greene noir-ish story line emerging from it. What’s interesting about it is I was very surprised no one else had picked up on it as a possibility for fiction because it has such great texture to it.” Texture? Never mind the width, feel the quality … Meanwhile, there’s a rare negative review for Ruth Dudley Edwards’ Murdering Americans over at Contra Costa Times (nope, we neither): “Although there’s quite a bit of humour here, the targets are painted so broadly that what should be rapier thrusts of wit become cannonballs launched at a flimsy wall.” 
There’s always one, and the exception proves the rule, we guess … Worth repeating is last February’s Time Out Chicago header for their review of Gerard Donovan’s Julius Winsome (‘The Hunter Is A Lonely Heart’), the review itself winding up thusly: “Donovan has a remarkable austerity in his prose, a beauty that is as entrancing as Winsome’s grief is contagious. The only trouble we had with the book was that we didn’t read it earlier. Out in October, but on our desk in January, if we had got to it around the time of its release, we surely would have included it when compiling our best reads of 2006.” Mmmm, lovely … Cora Harrison gets a big-up from the Globe and Mail for her historical crime novel, My Lady Judge: “This is a terrific debut of a historical series that promises something completely different. If the test of a good historical is a solid plot with an intricate setting, My Lady Judge is the real thing. I know nothing about the area of Ireland known as the Burren, 
or the ancient set of Irish laws known as Brehon, but Harrison seems to have brought it all vividly to life.” Finally, it’s three’s-a-charm for Ingrid Black, who releases the third in the Saxon series, The Judas Heart, with the former FBI agent back on the mean streets of Dublin investigating the brutal murder of an actress and the disappearance of her ol’ buddy, Leon Kaminski. Expect ‘Atmosphere, pace and tension,’ if the Sunday Times is to be believed …
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Declan Burke has published a number of novels, the most recent of which is ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. As a journalist and critic, he writes and broadcasts on books and film for a variety of media outlets, including the Irish Times, RTE, the Irish Examiner and the Sunday Independent. He has an unfortunate habit of speaking about himself in the third person. All views expressed here are his own and are very likely to be contrary.