Toronto’s Lone Ranger; and OLD DOGS For A Hard Road

It’s over a year now since I read John McFetridge’s SWAP, the third in his oeuvre after the Toronto-set DIRTY SWEET and EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE. As with the previous two, SWAP sent me into a sweaty, teeth-grinding frenzy of green-eyed monsterdom, which is always a good sign. Ken Bruen likes it too. Quoth Ken’s blurb:

“SWAP is a stunning leap forward from an already fine author. This is John channelling Elmore Leonard at the height of his game and with dialogue Tarantino would kill for. A plot that moves like Pulp Fiction but with a nice Canadian slant that keeps it fresh and different. John’s creation of the African-American characters is like Sallis at his finest. With a wicked sense of humour that is irresistible, SWAP moves Canadian mystery right to the top.”

  SWAP is published today in Canada, although it won’t hit U.S. stores – as LET IT RIDE – until next February. For what it’s worth, and bearing in mind that yon McFetridge is a good mate of mine, my advice is not to wait: SWAP is as good as the noir novel gets.
  Meanwhile, and while we’re on the subject of Ken Bruen, I’m hearing a rumour that yet another of his novels, the Busted Flush TOWER collaboration with Reed Farrel Coleman, has been optioned for the big screen, this time by the team behind the Tom Cruise flick Valkyrie. Can anyone confirm?
  Meanwhile meanwhile, and while we’re on the subject of Busted Flush and bigging-up good mates, here’s the cover for Donna Moore’s forthcoming OLD DOGS. Is it just me, or is that cover a work of art?

A Lender Nor A Borrower Be

With all the reams dedicated to the pros and cons of Kindle, I’m sure someone else has covered this elsewhere, but if they have I haven’t come across it. Anyway, what I’m wondering is this: What’s going to happen to the borrowing and lending of books?
  As I understand it, you won’t be able – even if it were legal to do so – to zap your latest fave from one e-reader to another. And a lot of readers take great pleasure in not only recommending a new book, but also pressing it into the hands of family and friends with the breathless command to read it now, this very minute, lest the unfortunate ignorant should fall under a bus the following morning and die without knowing true joy.
  Personally, I want to staple such people’s eyes closed. But that’s just me. And lots of people love to lend and swap books, to the extent that there’s a thriving black market in swappable books out there.
  So what’ll happen if the e-readers ever tumble over the tipping point? You’ll hardly be in a position to lend your Kindle, will you? Kind of defeats the point of having one if you keep loaning it to people so they can read books on it. And what about second-hand bookstores? Will there be some electronic equivalent, whereby a Kindle user can download pre-loved books at a fraction of the Kindle price?
  I don’t have a Kindle, at least not yet, but if I do invest then the whole lending-borrowing thing won’t be an issue, because I hate lending books. In fact, I do it only on very rare occasions, with people I can trust, and those rare occasions are enough to remind me why I don’t lend books. Mainly, it’s because no one ever returns a borrowed book.
  There are subtle reasons for this. In some cases, the borrower starts to read the book, and doesn’t like it, and then can’t return it for fear of calling the lender’s taste into question. Or the opposite occurs, and the book is so terrific that the borrower simply can’t countenance the prospect of living without the book on his or her shelf. Or, worst of all, the book is so terrific that the borrower, without asking permission, lends it on to someone else, with rave reviews. And why wouldn’t they? If you don’t love the book enough to hoard it in the first place, why should you love it enough to want it back?
  No, as with money, the best thing with books is to be neither a lender nor a borrower. If you love books, truly love them, then you’ll end up losing good friends in the fall-out and end up like me, with so few friends that you end up blogging in a pathetic attempt to generate on-line relationships.
  And all that is without opening the can of worms as to why, when people are supposed to be your friends, and family, and know you better than you know yourself, etc., they insist on lending you books you wouldn’t read were they the only books left after a nuclear holocaust. And oh, the horror, the horror, of the book-shaped Christmas gift in its shiny wrapping …

He’ll Be Having A Go At The Lilies Next

He pee’d off the literary crew when, on accepting the Booker Prize for THE SEA, he announced that it was ‘nice to see a work of art win for a change’. Then he got stuck into crime writing – allegedly. Yesterday, in a fine interview with Fiona McCann in the Irish Times, John Banville had a go at the webnauts. To wit:

Banville is full of opinions: on art, on sport, on working life, on the internet. “Most of the stuff that people churn out on the internet is rubbish. People should learn a little bit of reticence and not imagine that they have things to say.”

  Funnily enough, I read the interview on the Irish Times’ website, in which John Banville is, as Fiona McCann points out, ‘full of opinions’ …
  The interview, of course, was marking the publication of the latest Banville novel, THE INFINITIES, which I read a couple of weeks ago and thoroughly enjoyed. Told over the course of one day, as a family gathers about its dying pater familias, Adam Godley, the story is for the most part narrated by Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods – although, as Hermes points out, the gods being a rather protean lot, the first-person narrative duties do tend to switch about. The tale is a gently meandering one of mortal and immortal failings and foibles, and love stories, and minor infidelities, and quantum physics. The characters are fragmentary, deliberately so, as Hermes wafts in and out of their lives, with the story as a whole offering an incomplete mosaic of a family trapped in the amber of one day. The language, the prose style, is beautifully rendered, even if there are sentences and even whole paragraphs that billow like glass overblown – although it should be said that almost every line is shot through with sly and self-mocking humour. At the risk of displaying an unseemly lack of reticence, I’d say it’s Banville’s most engaging book for some time, an arched eyebrow of a comic novel that seems to appreciate its place in the grand scheme of things, which is, I think, because of its admittedly enjoyable angsty self-awareness, on the lower slopes of the empyrean rather than in the pantheon itself.

Roses Are Red, Dahlias Are Blue

“If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.” So spaketh Ray Chandler (right), who wasn’t overly enamoured, to put it mildly, by his experience of working as a screenwriter in La-La Land. Still, the movies are crackers, and the Irish Film Institute in Dublin is hosting a mini-festival of Chandler-related flicks in September, which kicks off with Farewell, My Lovely (1944) on September 5 and includes The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Marlowe, Farewell, My Lovely (1975), The Long Goodbye and Double Indemnity.
  My favourite, I have to say (usually while ducking rotten fruit and eggs of a similar disposition), is The Long Goodbye, probably because if I was a private eye, I’d be closer in spirit to Elliott Gould’s Marlowe than Bogart’s, or even Dick Powell’s. But hey, imagine if Mitchum had played Marlowe thirty years earlier …
  Speaking of Sleepy Bob, I watched Out of the Past the other night, yet again – it’s almost 20 years since I wrote a college essay on Out of the Past as the quintessential, and damn near perfect, film noir. Maybe there’s more important noirs, tauter and darker noirs, more noir-ish noirs – but Out of the Past is noir in a nutshell, right down to its US title. Build My Gallows High is too melodramatic, regardless of what the novel was called.
  Anyway, here’s a quick take on The Long Goodbye’s transition from novel to movie:

“The realist in murder,” wrote Raymond Chandler (right) in 1950, “writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities . . . It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.” Originally a man of action in taut, streamlined plots in novels such as The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Long Goodbye (1953) finds PI Philip Marlowe ruminating at length on the relevance of his attitude and philosophy. Plot had never been Chandler’s strength but in The Long Goodbye the plot becomes a rambling, shambolic paean to the tattered grandeur of a man out of time, whose idiosyncratic sense of morality has outlived its usefulness and relevance …

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review - Mesrine: Killer Instinct / Public Enemy No. 1

Jacques Mesrine – it’s pronounced Meh-reen; you called him Mez-reen at your peril – was the French equivalent of Martin Cahill, aka The General. A Robin Hood-style folk-hero, Mesrine was essentially a bank robber during a career that lasted from the early ’60s until 1979, when he was allegedly executed in the Paris streets by a shadowy police unit.
  Being French, of course, Mesrine was considerably more flamboyant than Cahill. A master of disguise known alternatively as ‘the Man of a Hundred Faces’ and ‘Jacques Du Monde’ (Jacques Everyman), he actively courted the media. His ability to escape from maximum security prisons, in France and Canada, struck a chord with a nation that was struggling to escape from its perception of itself as it came to terms with the emerging truth of the dirty war in Algeria. (Mesrine himself served in Algeria in 1956, where it’s alleged that he was a member of a torture squad.)
  By pitching himself as an anti-establishment rebel in a series of high-profile media interviews with outlets such as Paris Match, Mesrine captured the French imagination at a time when France itself was experiencing the social and cultural unrest that would culminate in the protests and riots of the student revolution of Paris ’68.
  His signature trademark was the double-whammy stick-up: after robbing a bank, Mesrine would run to the next street and rob another, while the police floundered at the scene of the first.
  In thumbing his nose at the authorities in such a fashion, Mesrine garnered potent enemies among the police, the judiciary and the political establishment. Yet it was this flagrant contempt for the powers-that-be that secured him a cult hero status in France on a par with Che Guevara. All of which has contributed hugely to the critical and commercial success, in France, of the movies Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1.
  Directed by Jean-François Richet, the movies are superb thrillers that capture Mesrine’s charisma, devil-may-care attitude and cavalier spirit. Captured in Canada after a failed kidnapping, for example, Mesrine is asked on TV for a quote, and responds with “Long live Free Quebec!” In a microcosm, the moment sums up Mesrine’s appeal: media savvy, cheerfully defiant in the face of apparent defeat, a man of the people, a rebel with a cause for each of his hundred faces. With their free-wheeling style and irrepressible kinetic energy, not to mention their uncomplicated and largely uncritical celebration of his lifestyle, the films are garnering favourable comparisons with Mean Streets and Goodfellas, due in no small part to a terrific performance from Vincent Cassel in the role of the eponymous anti-hero.
  And yet the subtitle of Richet’s first movie, Killer Instinct, is an uncompromising one and should give pause for thought to those who would champion Mesrine’s freebooting adventures. Mesrine was a killer who boasted of 39 murders in total. That may well be a wildly exaggerated number, given that Mesrine makes the claim in an autobiography he published from prison in 1977, also titled Killer Instinct, and which he subsequently asserted he wrote to confuse the authorities in the lead-up to his latest trial, and because his public expected any book from Mesrine to contain a high body-count. And yet there’s no getting away from the fact that, his reputation for glamour, high living and wooing beautiful women notwithstanding, Mesrine’s capacity for murder remained undiminished during the course of his career.
  Richet’s movies are not the first time Mesrine’s exploits have been committed to celluloid, although André Génovès’s film from 1984, Mesrine, confines itself to the 18 months the outlaw spent on the run – after escaping in 1978 from the maximum security prison specially designed to keep him behind bars – with his then girlfriend, Sylvia Jeanjacquot, who was by his side when his car was riddled with bullets in Paris. The fact that Richet devotes two films to Mesrine’s exploits may seem excessive, but there are strong arguments in favour of his approach.
  The first is that Mesrine packed a hell of a lot of incident into his relatively short life. Bank robbery was only one string to the bow of a man who was equally happy robbing casinos and kidnapping for profit. He was also unusually loyal, given that he operated in a milieu in which the notion of ‘honour amongst thieves’ is virtually always revealed to be a myth. After escaping from a Canadian prison, for instance, Mesrine later returned with an accomplice, both heavily armed, in a failed bid to break out some of his old comrades. Later, on the loose after yet another escape, Mesrine telephoned his then girlfriend, who was still incarcerated. She had to plead with him not to come and rescue her, on the basis that she had only a short time left to serve on her sentence.
  Moreover, Mesrine had an incorrigible sense of theatre, and it’s impossible to fully dislike a man who can unlock his handcuffs in court and throw them in the face of a judge, and later bound from the dock to kidnap the judge whilst his trial is ongoing, escaping to the street with his hostage in tow and from there to freedom, yet again.
  All of which fits very neatly with the Mesrine mythology, in which Robin Hood meets John Dillinger and provides a very satisfying movie for fans of gritty, violent and entertaining thrillers.
  The second movie, Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1, is a different affair. Slower in pace, more thoughtful in its appraisal of Mesrine’s public persona, it covers a period in which the criminal becomes ever more politicised, until such time as he is stating that his robberies are actually politically motivated. He claims fraternity with international causes such as the Palestinian struggle and the Red Brigades, and seems to be trying to pass himself off as a French Carlos the Jackal. While it is entirely probably that Mesrine did business with a wide range of individuals and organisations, not least when it came to trading information and / or purchasing weaponry, the grandstanding comes across as poignantly quixotic attempt by a common criminal to give his prosaic actions some socio-political ballast.
  It’s as if Mesrine, acutely aware of the power of the media, eventually came to believe his own press, despite the fact that he was the one responsible for creating much of the mythology. What is particularly poignant, however, is that he seems to have come to believe that he had transcended the law and its minions, and that he would be judged, when the time came for final reckonings, by the court of public appeal.
  Of course, the success of Richet’s films suggests that the court of public appeal has come down very much in favour of Mesrine and his self-aggrandizing rhetoric. Meanwhile, that a career criminal and self-confessed killer is the cause celebre du jour with both the disenfranchised youth and the intellectual elite in France suggests that a new work-out routine is the least of Nicolas Sarkozy’s problems this summer.

  Mesrine: Killer Instinct is released on August 7th. Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 is released on August 28th. This article first appeared in the Irish Examiner.

  Meanwhile, friend of CAP and aspiring crime writer Darragh McManus has posted the first chapter of his magnum opus crime spoof COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!! to the web, suggesting that, if enough people are interested, he’ll post Chapter Two. Make it so, people …

Declan Hughes: Resistance Is Futile

As befits these recessionary times, Crime Always Pays has gone on a go-slow, paring back all output to a one-day week. But the news that Declan Hughes (right) has been nominated for yet another Shamus is more than enough to get yours truly back at the keyboard, given that this year’s nomination – full list here – is his third Shamus nom on the bounce: he won the debut section in 2007 for THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD, was back in harness in 2008 with THE COLOUR OF BLOOD, and has just been nominated for 2009 for THE PRICE OF BLOOD (winner to be announced at the Indiana Bouchercon, October 16th). Now, without having the patience or time to go through the history of the Shamus awards, I’m sure there have been other writers who have been nominated for three awards in a row – but for their first three novels?
  I know that the news itself is a little stale at this stage, given that the nominations were announced last week, but given that a high percentage of this blog’s readers are Irish, and there remains a resistance among Irish readers for Irish-set crime fiction, it’s certainly worth repeating – Declan Hughes is one of the best PI writers in the world.
  Quite why Irish readers are resistant to Irish-set crime fic is a story for another day, but it’ll be interesting to see what kind of turn-out Hughes gets for his crime writing workshop next month, which kicks off the crime fiction element of the Books 2009 Festival (Dublin, September 12th). If there’s any justice in the world, they’ll need cattle-prods to keep the crowds at bay.
  In a not-unrelated digression, I was at the recent Flat Lake Festival in Monaghan, where I was ‘Who’s he?’ guy in a line-up of yours truly, Declan Hughes, Brian McGilloway and Eoin McNamee. The conversation largely concerned itself with why literary fiction is generally considered superior to crime fiction, although what bugs me about those kind of conversations is the presumption that people only read one kind of story – crime or literary fiction, or sci-fi, or chick lit, or whatever you’re having yourself. I always feel a bit guilty at times like that, because I’m a complete magpie – I’ll read anything once it’s well written, or has a great plot, or terrific ideas. And if you can give me all three at the same time, I’ll come and be your Filipino house-boy for the rest of your life (I’m being rhetorical, McKinty).
  Anyway, the gig finished up with Dec Hughes reading a passage from his latest novel, the fifth Ed Loy, which Dec Hughes has very recently finished (the name escapes me now). When he was finished, Eoin McNamee said, ‘Well, that’s put to bed the idea that crime writers can’t write literary fiction.’ Or words to that effect.
  Perhaps it’s because Hughes takes for his inspiration Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and – particularly – Ross Macdonald that his prose has a lushly gorgeous style, and perhaps it’s that the PI of crime fiction – that eternally wounded romantic – lends itself to the kind of first-person monologue that allows the writer’s imagination to flourish. Either way – and this is for those resistant Irish readers – Declan Hughes is a wonderful writer. And all of the foregoing doesn’t even take into consideration his best novel, in my opinion his latest, ALL THE DEAD VOICES, which won’t even be nominated for a Shamus until this time next year.
  There’s a bandwagon leaving town, people. Its name is Declan Hughes. My advice to you is to be on it when it pulls out.

Move Along, Please, Nothing To See Here …

Apologies to all three regular readers, but Crime Always Pays is going off-line for the foreseeable future. The main reason is time, or the lack thereof, and the fact that yours truly, aka Some Chancer, Esq., has to choose between blogging and writing, and that’s a foregone conclusion. If any Irish writer wants to avail of the space here, and is prepared to upload their own news, reviews, updates etc., then he or she is more than welcome to do so – log-in passwords et al available on request. In the meantime, thanks a million to everyone who made the last couple of years such an enjoyable experience – you all know who you are.

UPDATE (Slight Return): Many thanks for all the kind words, folks, whether delivered by comment or privately – really, you’re being far too generous. I have a few regrets about parking the blog, not least of which is that it was a decent spot to let people know about new Irish crime writers – myself included, of course. On that score, the various blogs on the left-hand side, a goodly chunk of which are recent additions by new Irish writers, will continue to update. There’s also, although it hardly needs to be said, Gerard Brennan’s excellent Crime Scene Northern Ireland.
  I’ll miss it for myself too, and not just for self-promotion, which was always a vital component of the quid pro quo. Blogging has become like a stroll through the neighbourhood. Some days you’ll stop and chat with the neighbours, other days you’ll nod and go by. Either way, it’s always nice to know you have good neighbours.
  There have been some ideas put forward in the last day or so about how to keep the blog running with a minimum input from me, some of which have been interesting. And I repeat – if anyone fancies updating the blog themselves, with news and views, etc., then they’re more than welcome. Although, as I say, updating your own blog means that the news will pop up on the left-hand side of Crime Always Pays anyway.
  Now, the essence of successful blogging is regular and interesting content. Despite that, and given that I know I’ll miss it (or, more precisely, the people it puts me in contact with), and as a result of being prodded with a big stick by my good lady wife, I’m very tempted to blog on a reduced basis – perhaps, as Donna Moore suggested, once a week. That would allow me to post links to writers’ latest news and releases, etc., while also indulging in a little self-promotion, and also have some fun with whatever rant happens to be occupying me at the time. Business as usual, in other words, albeit on a weekly rather than daily basis. So long as it doesn’t impact on my new writing schedule, that would be ideal.
  I don’t kid myself that it would be blogging per se, but it would, crucially, allow me to stay in touch with people, and give people a reason to stay in touch with me. Given the loneliness of the long-distance writer, that’s not to be underestimated.
  Lastly, thanks again for all the big-ups. I guess there’s a few more than three regular readers after all …
  Cheers, Dec