Reviews: Lynda La Plante, Stuart Neville, Cara Black, Robert Littell

Best known, perhaps, as the writer of the TV series Prime Suspect, Lynda La Plante has published over 30 novels. Twisted (Simon & Schuster, €27.50) is probably her most complete offering to date. Ostensibly a police procedural, it opens with Lena and Marcus Fulford in the early stages of what promises to be a very messy divorce. Distracted by their bickering, neither parent notices when their only daughter, Amy, fails to appear home from boarding school for the weekend. When the alarm is finally raised, DI Reid of the Richmond Missing Persons’ Unit discovers some very disturbing entries in Amy’s private journal. As the search for Amy criss-crosses London, and friends of Lena and Marcus begin to die, DI Reid isn’t entirely sure if he’s trying to find a victim or hunting a killer. Told in a straightforward and unadorned style, the story drives relentlessly forward as it implicates a number of characters in Amy’s disappearance, broadening out from its police procedural origins to incorporate a fascinating psychological investigation into the damaged mind of a killer who is as much a victim of circumstance as those murdered. Compassion appears to be La Plante’s watchword here, as she contrives a series of revelations designed to force even the most seasoned of crime fiction readers to reappraise their expectations. Some of the revelations are a little more contrived than others, it’s true, but what’s most impressive about Twisted is La Plante’s treatment of the missing Amy. In less experienced hands, the ‘wandering daughter’ angle would serve as little more than an introductory hook to hang an investigation on. Absent though she might be for most of the story, Amy nevertheless becomes a more absorbing, poignant and complex character the further DI Reid’s investigation progresses.

  The Final Silence (Harvill Secker, €14.99) is Stuart Neville’s fifth novel, and the third to feature DI Jack Lennon of the PSNI as its central character. The story opens with Rea Carlisle, an old flame of Lennon’s, clearing out the house of her recently deceased uncle, Raymond. When Rea discovers evidence of horrific murders she contacts Lennon, unaware that he is currently suspended from duty and that her discovery, and her instinct to publicise it, has marked her out as problem to be disposed of. Neville’s most recent novel, Ratlines (2013), was set in the 1960s, but otherwise his novels tend to revolve around contemporary crimes that have their roots buried deep in Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’. The Final Silence is no exception, its succinct and pacy storytelling stretched taut across a morass of unresolved tensions and motives for murder that don’t necessarily fit the prevailing post-Peace Process narrative. Indeed, Lennon himself could well serve as a poster boy for conflict resolution, a deeply flawed man who has in the past been his own worst enemy, and is now battered and scarred, physically and emotionally, as he pursues truth and justice by any means necessary.
  American author Cara Black sets her Aimée Leduc series of novels in Paris, where the effortlessly chic Aimée works as a private investigator. Murder Below Montparnasse (Soho Crime, €27.50) is her 13th outing, which opens with Aimée commissioned by Yuri, a ‘stubborn old Cossack’ Russian émigré, to protect a long-lost Modigliani. It sounds like a straightforward job, but when Aimée discovers Yuri murdered – apparently tortured to death – and the painting gone, she discovers that the art world can be a lethal place to do business. What follows is a breathless tale of double-, triple- and quadruple-crosses as the private eye finds herself at the heart of a century-old plot that incorporates not only the great painters of the avant-garde but also one Vladimir Illyich Lenin. Black sketches in the Montparnasse backdrop with considerable style, contrasting its contemporary political turmoil with its bohemian origins in the early part of the 20th century, and weaves a host of sub-plots through the main story, including one involving the heroine’s long-absent mother, who may or may not be a hired killer for the CIA. It all makes for an exhilarating read, although the sheer volume of intricately plotted twists, turns and revelations that send Aimée ricocheting through the Parisian streets and make Murder Below Montparnasse the proverbial page-turner might well frustrate a more patient reader.

  The exploits of Adrian Russell ‘Kim’ Philby have been picked over many times, but Robert Littell’s Young Philby (Duckworth Overlook, €11.50) takes an intriguing approach to exploring the motivations of the notorious British spy, who defected to the Soviet Union when his cover was finally blown in 1963. The novel begins with a Prologue in 1938, with a Russian ‘handler’ of Philby being interrogated in a Moscow prison, before going back to 1933, and Philby’s arrival in Vienna as Fascism begins to take hold in Austria. Essentially a series of portraits of Philby offered by those he worked with, the story comprises fictionalised encounters between, among others, Philby and his first wife Litzi Friedman, Guy Burgess, Teodor Maly, who first recruited Philby in London, and Evelyn Sinclair, the secretary who recorded conversations at the heart of the British secret service. This last account is the most fascinating of a beautifully detailed mosaic, offering as it does a revolutionary theory on Philby’s career and activities. Littell, who has published 18 novels to date, also offers a beguiling range of narrative styles as his clutch of narrators follow Philby from Austria to London and on to the Spanish Civil War, deftly recreating the claustrophobic atmosphere of the pre-WWII years and the fluid political sympathies of the British ruling class. In re-imagining one of the most familiar figures of the Cold War landscape, Robert Littell has given us a spy thriller of the very highest order. ~ Declan Burke

  This column first appeared in the Irish Times.

News: White’s Swan Takes Flight

Hearty congratulations to Nicola White, whose debut novel IN THE ROSARY GARDEN (Cargo Publishing) has just been shortlisted for the Deanston Scottish Crime Book of the Year. I reviewed IN THE ROSARY GARDEN a few months ago in the Irish Times, with the gist running a lot like this:

Set in Ireland in 1984, Nicola White’s IN THE ROSARY GARDEN (Cargo Publishing) centres on the discovery of a dead infant in the grounds of a convent. Given the place and particularly the time, Detective Vincent Swan has to proceed carefully as he investigates how the child was killed, and why it was left to be discovered in a convent, and matters are further complicated by the fact that this is not the first time that schoolgirl Ali Hogan has discovered a dead baby. White’s debut – the novel won the Dundee International Book Prize late last year – has haunting echoes of recent Irish history, and White has no compunction in pointing the finger at the patriarchal society that plays a significant part in the tragedies detailed here. The novel is by no means a polemic, however. An unusual but absorbingly twisting narrative is hugely enhanced by White’s creation of Detective Swan, a complex man whose own frustrated paternal instincts ensure that a highly politicised case becomes very personal indeed. ~ Declan Burke

  For the full shortlist, clickety-click here …

Publication: BITTER REMEDY by Conor Fitzgerald

On August 14th, Conor Fitzgerald publishes BITTER REMEDY (Bloomsbury), the fifth in the increasingly enthralling series featuring the Rome-based police detective Commissario Alec Blume. To wit:

There’s no cure for murder.
  Commissario Alec Blume, on health leave and fleeing his partner Caterina, has retreated from Rome to central Italy. At the Villa Romanelli he enrolls on a natural remedies course conducted by a young woman named Silvana.
  But far from recuperating or resolving his differences with Caterina, a feverish Blume becomes isolated and sluggish with sickness. Increasingly ill-at-ease in the stifling environment, the dark history of the crumbling villa and its once-magnificent gardens draws him in. And when a Romanian girl who works for Silvana’s ambiguous fiancé Niki asks for his help, Blume finds himself dragged into the shadowy case of a missing girl, and the secret horrors of the garden’s malign beauty.

  For more on Conor Fitzgerald’s novels, clickety-click here and here …

Interview: Darragh McKeon, author of ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR

‘Noble gases, expanding into the noble land.’ That short line from Darragh McKeon’s debut novel, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (Harper Perennial) has the appearance of a throwaway pun, but in a nutshell it captures the insidious horror of the aftermath of the nuclear reactor meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986, as the invisible, lethal radiation destroys the physical landscape and rots the very fabric of Russian society.
  Born in Tullamore in 1979, Darragh McKeon was only seven years old when the disaster took place. The obvious question is, why Chernobyl?
  “Adi Roche’s foundation brought kids from Chernobyl to Tullamore when I was about 12 or 13,” Darragh tells me when we sit down in Dublin’s Fitzwilliam Hotel. “Those kids were the first outsiders, or foreigners, I’d ever met. And I was really intrigued. I didn’t understand anything about Chernobyl. I knew it was an event, and they were here for recuperation, but we’d get these little stories about their lives. They didn’t speak English, obviously, and we didn’t speak Russian, so we only got small details, but even the idea of them living in Soviet tower-blocks was fascinating – the tallest building in Tullamore was only three stories high.
  “Then later I saw the documentary Black Wind, White Land, which Adi Roche made with Ali Hewson, and I remember them interviewing the farmers, who came back to the exclusion zone afterwards. A lot of them were old people, and the land was totally radiated and toxic and deadly, but it was home. The draw of the land was very powerful, and that really struck me – and that’s a very Irish theme, we could instinctively respond to that. It was fascinating to me that the pull of home can be that strong that you’ll give your life for it.”
  So began an obsession with Chernobyl which has culminated in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, a novel that centres on Grigory, a doctor who arrives at the disaster site in the immediate aftermath; Maria, his estranged lover, and a proscribed journalist; and Maria’s nephew Yevgeni, a teenage musical prodigy.
  It’s a fascinating tale, not least because the characters find themselves suddenly embattled by an invisible foe that is impossible to fight back against.
  “I’ve been to Chernobyl since I wrote the book,” says Darragh, “and I’ve talked to some nuclear physicists, and someone said a very interesting thing. He said radioactivity is silent, it’s colourless, it’s tasteless, we can’t see it – none of our senses are attuned to picking up radioactivity. He said it’s because that it wasn’t part of our evolution, that those kind of man-made, highly toxic elements only came into existence about a hundred years ago.
  “When you go to Chernobyl now,” he says, “yes, it feels abandoned, and it feels like a momentous event in history happened, but that’s it – you can’t actually see it. It’s not a war-ravaged landscape. It’s actually a very peaceful place.”
  For a novel so impressively illuminated with images of terrible beauty, it was what McKeon couldn’t see that proved most seductive to him as a novelist.
  “With radiation, it’s a long-term, completely invisible phenomenon, and that’s quite interesting for a writer, because the kind of writing I like tends to get under the surface and explore the roots of things. And that whole [Chernobyl] accident happened under the surface. I mean, 9/11 happened and we all knew straight away, it was iconic, and some of the shock and horror of that event was its visual impact. But nobody even knew Chernobyl had happened until a radar in a facility in Sweden started going crazy days later.”
  Previously a theatre director based in London, McKeon has recently moved to New York. His experience in the theatre, he suggests, gives him an unusual perspective on writing fiction.
  “When you’re a director you’re the audience’s representative in the rehearsal room,” he says. “And one of the things I learned very quickly was that if you’re bored then the play’s dead. I think I took that experience into my writing. Maybe I’ll have a better sense of what’s interesting and what’s not, what’s coming across well.”
  The nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in the US is mentioned in the novel, and McKeon also cites Robert Oppenheimer, ‘tinkering with the atom in the deserts of New Mexico during the Great Patriotic War: I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ He doesn’t intend for the novel to be read as a cautionary tale, however.
  “I wrote it out of curiosity, and from observation, and I tried to chart that line,” he says. “I certainly didn’t write it with an agenda. I think that’s dangerous ground for a novelist. There’s not really that many writers who can pull that off, combine a strong, artistically valid story and also have an agenda. George Orwell is maybe the only one. I was very careful to be as objective and neutral as I could be.”
  He applies the same care to his treatment of the clean-up operation that followed the disaster, when the Russian authorities – horrifically, perhaps, to a Western mindset – deliberately sacrificed lives for the sake of the greater good.

  “That idea of sacrifice is fundamental to the Russian culture,” says Darragh. “Veterans of the second world war are venerated, they’re gods in the Soviet Union. I’ve since gone back and talked to some of the ‘liquidators’ and they’re completely isolated now, they’re not supported financially or in terms of their health. But anyone I spoke to who was involved in the clean-up said they would do it all again tomorrow.”
  The novel offers a running commentary on perceptions of weakness and strength, albeit as seen through the eyes of the Russian and Ukrainian protagonists.
  “I think we don’t understand the Russian relationship with strength,” he says. “We look at Putin with his shirt off and think he’s naff, but there that kind of image is so important, it’s ingrained. Something that I found really interesting was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote The Gulag Archipelago and was the great dissident writer of that period of oppression. He came back to Russia in Yeltsin’s time, and when Putin was elected he said, ‘Finally, we are going to be strong again.’ Even Solzhenitsyn had this obsession with strength. So I tried to accept that as much as I could and not judge it.”
  McKeon is already working on his second novel, which will be set in South America, and believes he is unlikely to return to theatre.
  “I did always want to write, and I think that I probably always felt that I was a writer, but you have to get to the age, I think, at which you have something to say. Or that you have enough experience to make it worth putting down on paper. Like most writers, I tried to write when I was in my teens, and I just didn’t have anything to say. I didn’t have enough life experience.
  “I think at this stage I’ve figured out now that you are what you spend your time doing,” he says. “I think you can’t have it both ways – I kind of figured that out halfway through writing the book. So I may end up doing a show or two, but I’m a novelist now. I mean, it took me a long time to admit that to myself,” he laughs, “so I might as well stick to it now.” ~ Declan Burke

  This interview first appeared in the Irish Examiner.

Launch: LAST KISS by Louise Phillips

Review: THE SILKWORM by Robert Galbraith

One of the literary world’s best kept secrets exploded into the headlines last summer, when it was inadvertently revealed that ‘Robert Galbraith’, the debutant author of the private eye novel The Cuckoo’s Calling, was a pseudonym for JK Rowling, the creator of the Harry Potter phenomena.
  Eyebrows were raised, first in surprise, but later in admiration, as The Cuckoo’s Calling – which initially sold relatively few copies – went on to become an almost universally acclaimed bestseller. It also scooped the LA Times’ Book Prize in the ‘Mystery/Thriller’ category.
  Set in London during the bleak winter of 2010, The Silkworm (Sphere) is a sequel to The Cuckoo’s Calling, and again features the private detective Cormoran Strike. A war veteran who lost a leg to an IED device in Afghanistan, Strike is a gruff, hulking but surprisingly sensitive soul who was named after a mythical Cornwall giant. His brush with death has left Strike physically and mentally scarred, but he is a proud man determined to live life on his own terms. Despite being belatedly acknowledged by his millionaire rock star father Jonny Rokey, Strike lives, as his straitened circumstances dictate, in a tiny flat above his office in Denmark Street.
  Also returning from The Cuckoo’s Calling is Robin Ellacott, the young woman Strike employed on a temporary basis to handle the paperwork, but who proved herself vital to the success of his previous investigation, and who now harbours serious ambitions of becoming a private investigator herself, despite the friction this causes with her fiancée, Matthew.
  Proving, in The Cuckoo’s Calling, that the model and socialite Lula Landry was murdered has made something of a minor celebrity of Cormoran Strike, and established a clientele that is for the most part composed of wealthy businessmen attempting to prove their mistresses’ infidelity. Bored by their self-absorption, Strike is intrigued when he is approached by a rather dowdy woman, Leonora Quine, who wants him to find her missing husband, the author and former enfant terrible, Owen Quine. It’s not the first time the impetuous Quine has folded his tent, and Leonora is sure that Quine’s agent, or his editor, will be able to point Strike in the right direction.
  Soon, however, Strike discovers that Quine has gone to ground because he has written a slanderous novel, titled Bombyx Mori – which translates as The Silkworm – in which vicious pen-portraits of his wife, editor, publisher, agent and peers are easily identifiable to anyone in the publishing industry. When Quine is discovered murdered in a vile fashion, and in a manner terrifyingly similar to the climax of Bombyx Mori, the police immediately suspect Leonora Quine. Determined to prove her innocence, Strike plunges into the murky world of literary publishing in search of the real killer.
  It’s hard to avoid the feeling that JK Rowling hugely enjoyed loosing her bluff, no-nonsense private detective on the literary world. Bombyx Mori represents hilariously bad literary fiction, an overwrought Pilgrim’s Progress stuffed to the gunwales with classical references, necrophilia, cannibalism and sadomasochism. Strike, for all his size and bulk, moves carefully through this world, sidestepping the blades that regularly flash into the hands of the embittered cast of back-stabbing publishers, editors, agents and PR people. And then, of course, there are the literary authors themselves, all of whom seem to be involved in a complex Mexican stand-off fuelled by envy, insecurity, greed and mutual loathing.
  All of which is good fun, if excessively caricatured, but even as Rowling weaves a satisfying complicated plot around a lurid cast of characters, her instinct is to place Strike and Robin front and centre. The investigators make for a fascinating pair, both individually and in tandem – both are struggling with personal relationships, which gives the ‘will they / won’t they’ sub-plot an added frisson – and while there is very little that is new about this kind of relationship, that seems to be point: Strike and Robin make for a double act strongly reminiscent of Holmes and Watson, even if here it’s Strike, rather than his assistant, who has recently returned wounded from Afghanistan. Indeed, the homage to the golden age of the mystery novel is evident throughout, not least when the denouement, with all the suspects present, takes place in a London club ‘that had the feeling of a country house, cosy and a little scruffy.’
  The novel also functions as something of a love letter to the city, or perhaps more accurately a well-thumbed and dog-eared London A-Z, as Strike limps his way down its mean streets and alleyways, lurching into a variety of pubs, clubs and restaurants, noting as he goes the more unusual sculptures and the less-travelled routes. These digressions, and the occasional poetic flourishes that see Strike on his way, are in stark contrast to the main thrust of Rowling’s storytelling, in which the prose is as functional and direct in its devotion to advancing the story as Owen Quine’s Bombyx Mori is meandering and prolix.
  It is telling that Cormoran Strike sees fit, on a number of occasions, to remind us of his pragmatic philosophy in work as in life, which is ‘to do the job, and do it well.’ JK Rowling, as Robert Galbraith, has done the job and done it very well indeed. ~ Declan Burke

  This review first appeared in the Irish Times.

I Want To Live Like Roscommon People*

Boyle in the grand old county of Roscommon isn’t quite my former stomping ground of Sligo in the Northwest, but it’s close enough to my hometown for the Boyle Arts Festival to qualify as a local event for yours truly. I’m hugely looking forward to taking part in the festival, when I’ll be giving a potted history of Irish crime fiction, aka Emerald Noir, and reading a sample or two from my own books. The event takes place at King House at 1pm on Saturday, July 26th.
  Meanwhile, and if you’re a dedicated fan of Irish crime writing, Sinead Crowley will be talking about her debut novel, CAN ANYBODY HELP ME?, on Sunday, July 27th. For all the details of the festival – which incorporates literature, film, comedy, classical music, drama and poetry – clickety-click here …

  *With apologies, obviously, to all Pulp fans.