A Heist Of Crime Writers II: The Line-Up

As promised, and only a week or so late, the full list of writers attending the Books 2008 Crime Writing Series has now been posted on-line. Three cheers, two stools and a resounding huzzah, etc. The series takes place over the first weekend in September in Dun Laoghaire, and the main draw, I’d expect, will be a centre-piece interview of John Connolly (right) by Declan Hughes on Saturday, with John also reading excerpts from his 2009 release, THE LOVERS. Mmmmm, exclusive.
  Other than that, there’s three multiple-author panels. On Friday, September 5, Declan Hughes, Gene Kerrigan, Tana French, Alex Barclay and Ruth Dudley Edwards discuss ‘Heroes and Villains: What We Love and Hate about Crime Fiction’, with Paul Johnston moderating.
  Kicking off Saturday’s panels are Gene Kerrigan, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Brian McGilloway, Arlene Hunt and Declan Burke yakking it up about ‘Forty Shades of Grey: Real Fiction, Real Ireland’, with Mick Halpin asking the questions. Following the John Connolly interview, the series wraps up with ‘Sex & Violence: How Far is Too Far?’, with Declan Hughes quizzing John Connolly, Alex Barclay, Declan Burke, Arlene Hunt and Brian McGilloway about sex and violence, presumably in the context of crime fiction.
  For all the details, jump on over here …

The IRA: They’re Not Quite Dead Yet, Apparently

Adrian McKinty suggested over on Detectives Beyond Borders last week that Martin McGuinness’s autobiography, if it ever appears, will be a key text for anyone planning to write the great post-Troubles Northern Ireland novel. In the meantime, Anthony McIntyre’s GOOD FRIDAY: THE DEATH OF IRISH REPUBLICANISM, published last week, is as authentic an IRA voice as you’ll need – not that we’re suggesting, of course, that Martin McGuinness had anything at all to do with the IRA, ever.
  Anyhoo, Liam Clarke wrote about the book yesterday in the Sunday Times, under the headline ‘Why the IRA lost its long and futile battle’, with snippets running thusly:

  “Last week McIntyre trumped him with a tome entitled THE DEATH OF IRISH REPUBLICANISM, published as the Irish and British governments commissioned a report from the International Monitoring Commission (IMC), designed to ascertain if the IRA army council is still in existence. The fact that they need to ask, and need three weeks to consider the evidence and weigh up the reported sightings, speaks for itself …

  “McIntyre, a former IRA commander who served 18 years for murder and then did a PhD in republican history, is right. The Provisional IRA — and the army council that plotted its campaign — is on its death bed. It may thrash around like a headless chicken for a few years, but it is past reviving. If the IRA ever re-emerges, it will be a new organisation with new people …

  “McIntyre paints a picture of a republican leadership who were reformists from the outset, being secretly protected, groomed and eventually steered into Stormont by the British forces they claimed to be fighting. All the while, a supine membership cheered them on from the sidelines, easily fooled by symbolism and rhetoric …

  “To his credit, McIntyre doesn’t dodge this awkward dilemma: “The major question historians will ask is not why the republicans surrendered, but why they fought such a futile long war,” he writes. “It has not been unconditional surrender. And it has been infinitely better than continuing to fight a futile war for the sake of honouring Ireland’s dead, yet producing only more of them. But let us not labour under any illusions that the conditions were good.”

  It’s a terrific piece, and well worth reading in full.

No Country For Grand Men

Crumbs! No sooner had the dust settled on the entirely unnecessary ‘Great Post-Troubles Norn Iron Novel’ baloohaha than Joseph O’Connor, in the context of reviewing Gerard Donovan’s collection of short stories COUNTRY OF THE GRAND, starts banging on about the ‘Great Post-Celtic Tiger Novel’ over at The Guardian, to wit:

“Some of Ireland’s wisest literary commentators have been troubled in recent times by a reticence they perceive among the country’s writers of fiction on the matter of the new prosperity. The novelists have told us nothing – thus runs the argument. An Irish Amis has proved reluctant to appear.
  “Like most debating stances, it obscures as much as it reveals, but its assumptions are more enlightening than its conclusions. Mass-market fiction, the historical novel, the thriller, the crime novel and other incarnations of genre-based storytelling have not been judged worthy of critical notice, no matter their level of engagement with the now deceased Celtic Tiger. Where is our Bret Easton Ellis? Our BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES?”

  In the prevailing spirit of self-biggery-uppery, as modelled by Master Bateman when he voted for I PREDICT A RIOT during the halcyon days of the GTPNIN debate, I’m going to say that blowing up a hospital is a metaphor for deconstructing the Celtic Tiger, and in particular the way Ireland shot its economic boom in the foot (or paw, if you will), because that’s the kind of malarkey the literary types who decide these things seem to like, although I may not be entirely serious in doing so on the basis that novels lauded as ‘the Great [Insert Your Own Pet Obsession Here] Novel’ generally tend to be anything but because they’re too busy trying to disguise the self-aggrandizing promotion of half-baked theories therein. Or is it just me?

Irish Crime Fiction: Ghetto Chic?

Two not entirely unrelated mails popped into ye olde inboxe yesterday, the first from Norm ‘Salman of Knowledge’ Price - yes, that's 'Salman' of Knowledge - to let me know that Barbara Fister (right) has established a new interweb yokeybus dedicated to Scandinavian Crime Fiction in English; the second was from Damien Seaman, to ask this: “You ever worry this kind of approach (i.e., a crime fiction blog with an Irish focus) can serve to ghettoise Irish crime fiction, or create false expectations as though ‘Irish crime’ were a genre in its own right?”
  The first thing here is to wish Barbara the best of luck with her latest endeavour, and here’s hoping it’s as successful as the Crime Carnival.
  The second thing to say is that I can only wish that Crime Always Pays was popular enough to influence opinion to the extent that it could ‘ghettoise’ Irish crime fiction. Sadly, it falls a long way short of that particular mark. Besides, one joy of Irish crime writing is its diversity.
  The main reason I set up Crime Always Pays a year and a half ago was to promote my new novel THE BIG O, on the basis that I hadn’t a red cent to promote it in the traditional way. I’d also been writing for some other Irish blogs, now sadly defunct, and I loved blogging. On top of that, I believed there were a number of authors coming through who were saying interesting things about contemporary Ireland, and that no other blog or website was covering these writers in a cohesive way. And so CAP was born.
  As it happens, and as the months went by, I was gobsmacked at the number of writers out there who were writing quality crime fiction that could very loosely be described as ‘Irish’. Every week seemed to turn up a new gem, but each new find only confirmed what was almost immediately apparent: that there was nothing homogenous about ‘Irish crime fiction’.
  For example, the three most high-profile authors at the time – John Connolly, Ken Bruen and Colin Bateman – could hardly write more different kinds of stories if they tried, with settings that included Maine, Galway / London and Belfast, respectively. Adrian McKinty’s novels were also set in the U.S., albeit with a more Northern Irish flavour. Eoin Colfer’s crime capers are about a pre-teen evil genius. Tana French, who was actually born in the U.S., arrived with a police procedural set very firmly in Dublin. Declan Hughes goes the private eye route and uses the Chandler / Macdonald model to get under the skin of modern Ireland. Brian McGilloway appeared with a police procedural set in rural Donegal. Gene Kerrigan’s gritty noirs are set in urban Dublin. Ruth Dudley Edwards writes comedy crime that are set wherever the mood takes her. Arlene Hunt riffs on the male / female private eye duo. Ingrid Black takes an ex-FBI agent and plonks her down in Dublin. KT McCaffrey has his amateur sleuth Emma Boylan work as an investigate reporter. Benjamin Black’s amateur sleuth is a pathologist in 1950’s Dublin. Cora Harrison’s Mara is a Brehon judge of the 16th century based in the wild Burren of Ireland’s west. Sam Millar writes darker-than-dark noir set in Northern Ireland. Derek Landy’s Skulduggery Pleasant is about a private eye skeleton. Stephen Leather writes balls-out thrillers. Aifric Campbell, Julie Parsons, Paul Charles, Garbhan Downey, DB Shan … the list goes on and on, and the only thing the writers have in common is how different their novels are. And that’s without factoring in the diaspora. Michael Haskins, for example, calls his protagonist ‘Mad’ Mick Murphy, a man who is as Irish as red hair despite his Florida Keys setting. By the same token, John McFetridge is Canadian-Irish, although you’d never know about the Irish element from reading his Toronto-based novels. And then there are the more literary offerings that utilise crime narratives. Gerard Donovan’s JULIUS WINSOME, David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER and Eoin McNamee’s 12:23, set in Maine, Belfast and Paris respectively, are only three of the most recent novels that engage with the tropes of crime fiction.
  If someone can draw a straight line between all of those novels, then he / she is a better man / woman than I. The only thing the writers have in common is that they are to one degree or another Irish. There is no ‘Tartan noir’ movement, and neither can Irish crime fiction be characterised by a particular tone, say, as you could argue Scandinavian crime can.
  It’s possible that I have done certain writers a disservice by calling them Irish crime writers, and if that’s the case I can only apologise. The intention was always to draw attention to their books, not to cram them into some pigeonhole to suit a theory of mine. And hey, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, right? Peace, out.

Norn Iron In The Soul

Over at the ever-illuminating Detectives Beyond Borders, Peter Rozovsky hosts a debate on ‘the great post-Troubles Northern Irish novel’, which I unfortunately missed out on because I was away from the desk all day yesterday and on the proverbial batter last night. It’s a dirty job, etc. The general gist of the conversation is that said novel has yet to be written, with Adrian McKinty observing that, when it is, it’s more likely to be written by a woman than a man on the basis that they’re more pragmatic and clear-sighted when it comes to de-romanticizing. Koff. Anyhoos, no one mentioned David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER, which is a very brave stab at writing ‘the great post-Troubles Northern Irish novel’, using as it does the model of the South African truth and reconciliation forum in a Northern Irish context. Lamented last week by Boyd Tonkin in The Independent on the basis that it didn’t make the Booker Prize long-list, THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER takes a look at the Troubles from a variety of perspectives, including that of the British establishment, and is well worth reading if it’s a fictional take on the post-Troubles landscape you’re after.

Reed Farrel Coleman: Rebel Without A Pause

David Thompson of the Busted Flush Press gets in touch to give us a sneak preview of their forthcoming reprint of THE JAMES DEANS, the cover art of which is only sumptuous (it also features a foreword from Michael Connelly). It follows on from their reprint of WALKING THE PERFECT SQUARE, about which George Pelecanos had this to say:

“Reed Farrel Coleman is one of the more original voices to emerge from the crime fiction field in the last ten years. For the uninitiated, WALKING THE PERFECT SQUARE is the place to start.” – George Pelecanos

  Which is very nice indeed. I read THE JAMES DEANS last year, in Croatia, on a day of lowering skies and fine mist that made it pointless to go sight-seeing, and yet was perfect for sitting out on a veranda on a swing-seat with coffee, cigarettes and strong reading to hand. I read it in the proverbial one sitting, and put it down a little dazed. I meant to write it up for the blog when I got back from Croatia, but on the couple of tries I made, it seemed beyond me.
  It’s a Moe Prager novel, a private eye story set in 1983. Prager is an ex-NYPD cop turned private eye, albeit of the reluctant variety. The plot, which begins with the murder of a young political intern, has plenty of twists and turns, and the style is pleasingly aware of, without being deferential to, its sense of history and its place in the lineage of Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald et al.
  All of which would have made THE JAMES DEANS eminently readable. What made it compulsive, however, was the voice of Moe Prager. This was Coleman’s third novel, I think, and yet he had slipped inside the skin of his character in a way that is very difficult to achieve and impossible to fake. It’s not that Moe is gratifyingly human, although he is, because there are no superhuman feats of endurance and / or soaking up of punishment. It’s not that he is the vulnerable Everyman, doing his best in shitty circumstances, because he is, and there’s very little by way of artificial Eureka! moments and savant-like puzzle-solving. For me, what made Moe Prager such a compelling character was his realism. It’s a difficult thing to describe, and perhaps I was identifying too much with the character, but Coleman has the ability to synchronise Prager’s heartbeat with your own, so that you pulse and twitch and shudder as he does.
  Yes, THE JAMES DEANS is a crime fiction novel, and a superb example of same, and a terrific private eye tale that was nominated for the Edgar and Gumshoe awards. But Moe Prager could just as easily have been an accountant, or an Alaskan park ranger, or a road-sweeper, and his story would have been a fascinating one. At the end of the day, novels are about people and the consequences of how they live their lives. Some writers can make you feel that they have inhabited their characters to a degree associated with demonic possession, but Reed Farrel Coleman’s gift is to graft that sensation onto the reader, so that he or she feels they’re wearing the character like skin.
  In the interests of openness, transparency and accountability, I should mention that Reed Farrel Coleman was gracious enough to read and blurb THE BIG O, and in very generous terms too, simply on the basis that we had a mutual friend in Ken Bruen. At the time I thought it was a lovely gesture, and indicative of how hospitable the crime fiction community is; but what made his blurb so powerful to yours truly was that, after reading THE JAMES DEANS, I already knew he was so far ahead of the posse that there was no favour he could require of me in return.
  A nice guy, then, and a terrific writer, one of the finest of his generation. If you haven’t read THE JAMES DEANS yet, do yourself a favour and do so. It’s how books are supposed to be.

Integrity? Now There’s A Novel Idea

This really should have been the publishing story of the week. The guy, Tao Lin, has balls of steel if you skim the headline, with the gist of the story running thusly:

Shameless self-promotion or the future of the publishing industry? A young novelist is selling shares in his next book, to allow him to quit work and concentrate on his writing.

  You have to love his chutzpah, right? The little guy taking on the might of the conglomerates and kicking out the parameters until the paradigm shifts. Except then you read the actual piece, and you get this:

The 25-year-old says he likes the idea of a group of capitalists having a financial interest in his sales.
  “If anyone buys shares they will have concrete motivation to promote me and that also will increase sales,” he wrote.
  “If people buy shares I will probably, I think, make even more money than if I had not sold shares of my royalties.”

  Why does this story put me in mind of a POW tunnelling back into Colditz?
  Here’s a radical idea, you lazy, precious piece of corporate putty – get a job, write your novel at night (or early in the morning, if you prefer), save your moolah and self-publish. That way you retain the rights and maybe even a shred of dignity. Peace, out.