Crime Always Pays

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Claire McGowan

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:57:00 +0000

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?
I just read Mo Hayder’s TOYKO and it blew me away, to the point that I set it aside and thought, ‘I wish I could write like that’. It was a gripping story, a brilliant evocation of a place, a fascinating character study, and a hugely moving and emotional read. I’m in awe.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Nobody in a crime novel, that’s for sure. Even if you’re not a murder victim you’ll most likely be horribly traumatised by something. Probably someone from a Jilly Cooper novel, dripping in champagne and perfume, a hugely talented rider / TV producer / opera singer, and ending up madly in love with a gorgeous film director / polo player / musician. Sometimes it’s nice to read an unreservedly happy ending.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
As you can see above, I’m a big fan of Jilly Cooper, when I want to read something gripping, heart-warming, and glamorous. I’ve re-read most of hers at least ten times. I don’t feel guilty about it though. I feel guiltier about buying Heat magazine instead of all my unread copies of the London Review of Books.

Most satisfying writing moment?
I think it’s when a new story starts to take shape in your mind, and you feel excited about working on it, heart racing, palms sweating. When I’m editing I sometimes dream about leaving the old boring book for a thrilling new one. But you have to try to work things out.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I’ve heard it described loosely as one, so I’ll risk saying Roddy Doyle’s THE WOMAN WHO WALKED INTO DOORS. I like books that can make me cry, and that one did, a lot. I can still recite bits of it from memory and I read it years ago.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I just read Stuart Neville’s COLLUSION, and thought it would work very well as a film, especially the dramatic end scene. I’d love to see someone make a crime series set in Ireland. Surely it’s about time.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The best thing is working on something creative all day, and immersing yourself in a story. Oh, and being able to work in your pyjamas, of course. The worst thing is the insecurity of always wondering are you any good, will people like what you do, is someone reading your book right now and enjoying/not enjoying it, can you write another book that works, etc. You can talk to people about what you’re doing, but it doesn’t always help, so most of the time, you’re on your own.

The pitch for your next book is …?
My next book is about a woman whose life is turned upside down when her mother dies and she finds out who her father really is. As she learns that nothing in her apparently ordinary life is what it seems, she and her young daughter are thrown into terrible danger. It’s a psychological thriller with echoes of REBECCA and JANE EYRE.

Who are you reading right now?
An Irish writer, as it happens – William Ryan’s THE BLOODY MEADOW. So far it’s great- I could tell from page one I was in the hands of an expert.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
These are hard questions, aren’t they? Can I get a note from my Mum so I don’t have to answer? If you insist, probably reading. It would be sad, but I know I’d never produce anything good if I just wrote in a vacuum.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Unsettling. Emotional. Foreshadow-y (or a good word I learned today and plan to use more – ‘presageful’).

Claire McGowan’s debut novel The Fall is published by Headline.

ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL: The Booklist Verdict Is In

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 10:29:00 +0000

It’s been a while, although not nearly long enough, some might say, since we’ve had some ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL-related flummery here, but the book officially goes on sale in the United States and Canada next Friday, February 3rd (where the hell did January go?), so it’s incumbent upon me to point you in the direction of some recent reviews of said tome. I’ve already mentioned that Publishers Weekly gave it the thumbs up, and Elizabeth A. White was also good enough to say some very kind things about AZC a couple of weeks ago. With which, as you can imagine, I am mightily pleased.
Meanwhile, the most recent review comes courtesy of Booklist, with the gist running thusly:

“Metafiction? Postmodern noir? These and other labels will be applied to Burke’s newest; any might be apt, but none is sufficient. ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL is largely a literary novel that draws on history, mythology, and literature to insightfully discuss writing, books, parenting, relationships, health care, and dying with dignity. Bits of Burke’s comic noir (THE BIG O, 2008) appear, but they serve to subvert the form. Noir fans may not care for this one, but lovers of literary fiction will find much to savour.” — Thomas Gaughan, Booklist

Which is, again, very nice indeed, and I thank you kindly, Mr Gaughan.
Incidentally, THE BIG O picked up a review the other day, and one which touches in part on an issue raised here a few weeks back, given that the reviewer announces at the beginning of the review that he / she gave up reading halfway through, largely put off by the fact that the book is infested with sexism. “I wouldn’t normally review a book I disliked this much,” the review concludes, “but it’s frustrating to find an author who can clearly write, but who can’t make an intelligent creative decision.” Which may well be the epitome of the back-handed compliment.
Anyway, back to ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. The book gets its official North American release on Friday, as I say, and loath as I am to ask favours of CAP readers, I’d be obliged if you could spread the word by any means available to you. Tell a friend (or an enemy, if you read it and didn’t like it), mention it on your blog, post a review to Amazon, etc, or simply send up a barrage balloon with the book cover emblazoned on the side (or both sides, if your budget will stretch). As always, any and all help would be very greatly appreciated.
Here endeth the flummery.

A Murder Less Ordinary

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:52:00 +0000

Now this could be interesting. It’s not often you get a debut crime novel from a former editor of the Irish Times who is also a former Garda Ombudsman, but Conor Brady publishes A JUNE OF ORDINARY MURDERS with New Island next month. Quoth the blurb elves:

In the 1880s the Dublin Metropolitan Police classified crime in two distinct classes. Political crimes were ‘special’, whereas theft, robbery and even murder, no matter how terrible, were ‘ordinary’.
Dublin, June 1887: the mutilated bodies of a man and a child are discovered in Phoenix Park and Detective Sergeant Joe Swallow steps up to investigate. Cynical and tired, Swallow is a man living on past successes in need of a win.
In the background, the city is sweltering in a long summer heatwave, a potential gangland war is simmering as the chief lieutenants of a dying crime boss size each other up and the castle administration want the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee to pass off without complication. Underneath it all, the growing threat of anti-British radicals is never far away. With the Land War at its height, the priority is to contain ‘special’ crime. But these murders appear to be ‘ordinary’ and thus of lesser priority. When the evidence suggests high-level involvement, and as the body count increases, Swallow must navigate the waters of foolish superiors, political directives and frayed tempers to investigate the crime, find the true murderer and deliver justice.
A JUNE OF ORDINARY MURDERS captures the life and essence of Dublin in the 1880s and draws the reader on a thrilling journey of murder and intrigue.

Sounds like it could be an absolute cracker. Brady, incidentally, has previously published the non-fiction GUARDIANS OF THE PEACE, ‘a political history of the Irish Police, or Garda Síochána’. We’ve had historical Irish crime fiction from Cora Harrison and Kevin McCarthy to date, and while one Swallow (koff) doesn’t make a summer, the late 19th century in Ireland could well be very fertile ground for a very interesting series. We’ll keep you posted …

The James Gang

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:52:00 +0000

I had a round-up of recent crime titles published in the Sunday Independent last week, among them PERFECT PEOPLE by Peter James and DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLEY by PD James. I’ve mentioned both of those titles here recently, though, so here’s the third of the reviews, being FEAST DAY OF FOOLS by James Lee Burke. To wit:

Set in contemporary Texas, FEAST DAY OF FOOLS by James Lee Burke is a very modern novel that is nevertheless obsessed with the past. The novel is the third in a series of books to centre on Hackberry Holland, county sheriff of a Texas territory that shares a border with Mexico; the first in the series, LAY DOWN MY SWORD AND SHIELD, was published in 1971, while the second, RAIN GODS, was published in 2009.
Here Holland finds himself faced by an old adversary, a religiously-inspired killer called Preacher Jack. He also struggles to cope with a narco-gang spilling over the border from Mexico, led by the ruthless Krill; and a number of competing groups, some of whom are legal, others criminal, who are in pursuit of a missing man called Noie Barnum, an engineer with information on the Predator drone, and who is considered a valuable asset to be captured and sold to Al Qaeda.
Written in a style that could on occasion be mistaken for that of Cormac McCarthy, Burke’s prose is here heavily influenced by Biblical references, as the aging Holland meditates on this mortality and tries to come to terms with his failings as a man. Holland is depicted as something of a bridge between the past and the future - his grandfather, for example, was an Old West sheriff - and Burke is at pains to set Hackberry Holland very firmly in the landscape of south Texas, frequently writing eloquently descriptive passages about the deserts and mountains, its storms, sunsets and dawns.
Despite the contemporary references, however, and Burke’s explicit referencing of the consequences of 9/11, FEAST DAY OF FOOLS is no less than a good old-fashioned Western masquerading as a crime thriller, fuelled by the pioneer spirit and the attempt to impose order on the anarchy of the lawless Old West. The result is a hugely entertaining and thought-proving novel.

This review first appeared in the Sunday Independent.

How NOT To Be A Writer

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 07:35:00 +0000

You may, if you’re an aspiring writer and you’ve perused the interweb for more than five seconds at a time, stumbled across a blog post titled, ‘How To Be A Writer’. There are variations on this theme, the bolder ones being titled, ‘How To Be A Successful Author’, but generally speaking the song remains the same: someone you’ve never heard of saying things like, ‘Work hard’ and ‘Don’t give up’ and ‘Try to marry someone who thinks you’re a genius but who doesn’t actually know a good book from an elephant’s left testicle’. And so on, and so forth.
For some reason, you never come across posts about ‘How Not To Be A Writer’. Which is a little bit odd, really, because wanting to be a writer is a disease, a sickness, and most people (yours truly included, very probably) are never going to get well, aka make it as a successful author. Which means, in turn, that all these helpful bloggers are not unlike enablers in a perverse take on Alcoholics Anonymous (‘Be sure to drink booze every day’; ‘Set yourself a number of drinks, for example ten, and try to drink them all in one sitting, although don’t beat yourself up if you only manage nine.’).
Funnily enough, very few of these posts about how to be a writer start off with (or mention at all) the need for some talent. ‘Before you begin your soul-shrivelling journey into oblivion, first ensure you have a flair for swilling martinis at 3pm in the afternoon, every afternoon. Your wife believing that you are a useless booze-hound simply isn’t enough.’
Anyway, given that being a writer is a tough gig, but wanting to be a writer is that soul-shrivelling experience, and particularly if you lack talent, and that I’ve spent the last two decades embarked on such a journey, I hereby present for your delectation ‘Declan Burke’s How NOT To Be A Writer’ (© Declan Burke, 2012). To wit:

How NOT To Be A Writer

1) Read, read, read, read, read. And keep on reading. What’s the worst that could happen? An education?

2) Write every day. Especially on Twitter. Blogging helps too, and especially guest posts on other author’s blogs and unpaid self-promo gigs masquerading as op-eds in your local newspaper. If you’re of an ironic bent, you could specialise in ‘How To Be A Successful Author’ pieces.

3) Develop an obsession with honing your craft. An extreme example of this is Ernest Hemingway, who learned to write by typing out entire books by writers he admired. The trick here is to read back over these manuscripts once they’re typed up, accept that you’ll never in a million years do any better, acknowledge that there’s few enough trees in the Amazon rain forest anyway, and go read some Hemingway.

4) Express yourself. Many people turn to writing as a cathartic exercise, a means by which they can purge their inner demons. But why waste your time impressing complete strangers with your lunacy? It’s much more fun to allow your anger to build and build, then terrorise your nearest and dearest with irrational outbursts of (preferably inarticulate) rage.

5) Learn to delegate. Come up with story ideas and then hand them over to someone else to turn into a novel. If you’re very good at this, you’ll come up with the same story every single time. If James Patterson sues, great: you’ll be so busy fending off his lawyers you won’t have time to scribble so much as a Post-It note.

6) If at first you don’t succeed ... immediately accept that repeating the same action over and over again and getting the same result while expecting a different response is a kind of madness, albeit not a madness sufficiently interesting to be worth writing about. (see Number 4).

7) Shoot for the moon. Aim to be the next James Joyce, Mary Renault or Raymond Chandler, et al. If you’re useless, that should keep you locked away in a shed working on your first manuscript for at least forty years. If you’re halfway good, you’ll give up immediately. If you’re as brilliant as you think you are, you’ll pack it in after three pages, consumed by self-loathing at how close you came to stooping to compete with the likes of raggedy-ass Joyce, Renault and Chandler, et al.

8) Learn from the experts. Sign up to every creative writing programme in town. Literally. Not only will you be too busy attending classes to do any actual writing of your own, the conflicting advice offered by the internationally renowned, prize-winning and critically acclaimed authors hosting said programmes will melt your brain to the point where even your special brand of lunacy is left smouldering in the ashes.

9) Identify your target demographic. Don’t go writing any old tat in the hope people will find it interesting. Do some research and find out what it is people actually like to read (the NYT best-seller list may be of some use here), and then write that and publish it under the name of James Patterson. He’ll hardly notice one more, will he? And even if he sues, we’re back to Number 5 again.

10) Get a life. No, really. Make some friends, have a kid or two. Go for a walk. Play some ball. Travel the world, swim with the dolphins, stalk James Patterson. Start living first-hand rather than through the mirror darkly. What’s the worst that can happen? A life?

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE COLD COLD GROUND by Adrian McKinty

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 09:43:00 +0000

I reviewed Adrian McKinty’s THE COLD COLD GROUND for RTE’s Arena programme last week, in the very fine company of Arlene Hunt. The audio can be found here, with the gist of my review notes running thusly:

The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife.
And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain. - Adrian McKinty, THE COLD COLD GROUND

Adrian McKinty’s latest novel opens in the spring of 1981, with a group of RUC officers watching a Belfast riot from afar. The action is described in the first person by Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy, a Catholic in the predominantly Protestant RUC. The backdrop to the riots is the ongoing hunger strikes, although Duffy and his cohorts are a little disappointed with this particular riot:

“In fact we had seen better only last week when, in the hospital wing of The Maze Prison, IRA commander Bobby Sands had finally popped his clogs.”

Against the powder-keg backdrop of the hunger strikes, DS Duffy investigates a number of murders that appeared to be linked: a homophobic serial killer seems to be targeting homosexuals. Given that Northern Ireland has had no previous experience of a serial killer, however, Duffy has his doubts, and believes that the murders may be perpetrated by someone using the homophobia, and the ongoing tension related to the hunger strikes, as an excuse to settle some personal, paramilitary-related scores …
DS Sean Duffy is a fascinating character, being a Catholic police officer in a predominantly Protestant RUC at the time of the hunger strikes. This immediately gives his story an extra frisson, as sectarianism was at its height (or nadir) in Northern Ireland during the early 1980s. In fact, and despite being a police officer, DS Duffy keeps his religion a secret from his neighbours, allowing them to presume that he is a Protestant.
That said, the sectarianism Duffy faces doesn’t necessarily lend itself to conflict. At work, for example, Duffy and his co-workers engage in sectarian banter in which Duffy gives as good as he gets. As often as not, the sectarianism manifests itself as lazy stereotyping; his Protestant superiors, for example, simply presume that Duffy, being a Catholic, must know virtually every other Catholic in Northern Ireland.
Away from work, Duffy is the antithesis of the ultra-conservative RUC officer. He listens to the period’s more adventurous rock music, and occasionally smokes dope. He appears to be more laidback about life in general than his colleagues, particularly in terms of the sectarianism of Northern Ireland. When it becomes clear that a killer is targeting homosexuals, Duffy is much less homophobic in his attitude towards the gay community than most of his colleagues.
It’s easy to see why McKinty picked the hunger strikes for a backdrop: the setting provides immediate tension, a sharply divided society, and a very vivid backdrop of continuous rioting. By the same token, the hunger strikes are still hugely important in the psyche of Northern Ireland, and have iconic status in large parts of the Catholic / Nationalist community. Any crime writer deploying the hunger strikes as a backdrop runs the risk of being accused of exploiting the period, and the sacrifices made, for the sake of a crime thriller.
Having said all that, I got the impression that McKinty picked the hunger strikes for the backdrop to this novel not just because it would provide instant tension, but because that period, arguably, represented the nadir of the Troubles, and so serves as a kind of crucible for the worst that humanity is capable of.
It’s worth mentioning, I think, that there has been very little by way of serial killer novels in Ireland until very recently. The only explicit examples I can think of are Rob Kitchin’s THE RULE BOOK and TABOO by Casey Hill, although it can be argued that Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE is a serial killer novel (in that particular case, the ‘serial killer’ is a sympathetic character, who kills to avenge others’ deaths). All three novels have appeared in the last two or three years. (Arlene Hunt’s novel THE CHOSEN is in part a serial killer novel, but that book is set in the US.)
This may be because Ireland itself has had no history of serial killers - officially, at least. By the same token, Ireland has lent itself over the years to being a place where a psychopath could very easily indulge a homicidal streak by signing up to one or another political / paramilitary creed. The Shankhill Butchers, for example, were serial killers in all but name.
As for the style, McKinty quickly establishes and maintains a pacy narrative, but he does a sight more too. McKinty brings a quality of muscular poetry to his prose, and the opening paragraph quoted above is as good an example as any. He belongs in a select group of crime writers, those you would read for the quality of their prose alone: James Lee Burke, John Connolly, Eoin McNamee, David Peace, James Ellroy.
I should probably have pointed out before beginning this review that I’ve been a fan of Adrian McKinty’s work since his first novel, DEAD I WELL MAY BE. I think he’s one of the best crime writers currently working today, and I also think that THE COLD COLD GROUND is his best novel since his debut. Given its backdrop, and the fact that the hunger strikes are still to a great extent a taboo subject in fiction, I would also argue that THE COLD COLD GROUND is an important novel too. - Declan Burke

Down These Mean Streets A Man Called Job Must Go

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:08:00 +0000

I’m on a Raymond Chandler buzz at the moment, inspired by my annual treat of a Chandler novel, in this case THE HIGH WINDOW, which I haven’t read in many years. And before I go on, and before you waste your time reading on, I should declare an interest and say that Chandler is one of my many blind spots. I appreciate that some hail Dashiell Hammett as the original and the best, and that some claim Ross Macdonald as the man who finessed the private eye novel into the apogee of the form, and the truth is that I’m not learned enough to prove either faction wrong, if such were even possible. All I can say is that it was THE BIG SLEEP that properly introduced me to what a great crime novel was capable of, and that I love Raymond Chandler’s novels because first loves aren’t to be dissected and parsed and judged, but cherished with the giddy irrationality that characterises such things precisely because they were the first to expose you to love.
Anyway, reading THE HIGH WINDOW confirmed a few things, as reading Chandler generally does. One is that, yes, his plots were cats’ cradles in which chauffeurs get bumped off because a chauffeur, at that particular point in time, needed to be bumped off. The second is that Chandler, as a writer, and at the risk of over-stretching the point, is Hemingway with a sense of humour. The third - and it’s unfortunate that I’m currently re-reading my latest book right now, in preparation for its final draft - is that no matter what I do as a writer, I’ll essentially be writing the equivalent of fan fiction; and the equivalent of fan fiction is, of course, fan fiction, which is rarely good, and is never good enough.
The point of this post, however, is to invite your opinion of a question that has been dogging me through the latter stages of my current book, which has to do with the point of crime fiction; what it achieves and what it hopes to achieve; what its place is in pantheon of literature. Specifically, I’ve been wondering about its philosophy, and its stance vis-à-vis good and evil, if those terms aren’t too simplistic; and in terms of the bigger picture, about what it says about who we believe ourselves to be.
I’ve recently been writing about my attitude towards violence, for example, murder being the most extreme form of violence, and querying my right as an author to make hay from other people’s misery. The conclusion I draw over at Elizabeth A. White’s blog is fine as far as it goes, I think, although I think at this point that when I wrote that piece I was getting bogged down in detail; or, to put it another way, I was confusing the issue of telling a story with that of telling a story within a certain moral framework. But is it the job of a writer to be some kind of moral pathfinder? To present a scenario in which good and evil go to war, with conclusions to be drawn from the eventual triumph of one over the other? Is it my role to affirm that the glass is half-full if good wins out, or half-empty should evil, at the death, slip away into the shadows with a maniacal laugh?
At the time of writing I don’t have any good answers to these questions; and I should also say that I’m fully aware that every writer will have his or her own ‘philosophy’ in mind while writing, or none at all; and that the same applies to every reader, while reading.
But I was struck the other day by a quote I came across and its similarities to Chandler’s description of the ideal detective from his essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’. For those few of you unfamiliar with Chandler’s celebrated appraisal, it runs like this:

“In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour - by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world …
“He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks - that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness …
“If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.” - Raymond Chandler, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’

My first book, EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, was very much a homage (aka third-rate knock-off) to Chandler’s Marlowe novels; the current work is a sequel to that story, in which the main character, and narrator, Harry Rigby, takes a fairly heavy beating throughout. I liked the idea of Rigby’s experience being akin to that of the Biblical Job, and we’re all familiar with the notion that the crime novel essentially follows the three-act structure of classical Greek tragedy, as Chandler alludes to above; so when I came across a book by Horace M. Kallen called THE BOOK OF JOB AS A GREEK TRAGEDY, I could hardly resist.
That’s when I came across the quote below.

It’s worth bearing in mind, I think, that Chandler wrote (or had published) the ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ in 1950 (I’m open to correction on that), whereas the quote below, in which Kallen summarises Job’s confrontation with Yahweh, comes from a book first published in 1918:

“To cling to his integrity while he lives, to assert and to realize the excellences appropriate to his nature as a man, as this particular kind of man, knowing all the while that this is to be accomplished in a world which was not made for him, in which he shares his claim on the consideration of Omnipotence with the infinitude of its creatures that alike manifest its powers - this is the destiny of man. He must take his chance in a world that doesn’t care about him any more than about anything else. He must maintain his ways with courage rather than faith, with self-respect rather than with humility; or better, perhaps, with a faith that is courage, a humility that is self-respect. When ultimately confronted with the inward character of Omnipotence, man realizes that, on its part, alone moral indifference can be justice. Its providence, its indifference, its justice - they are all one.” - Horace M. Kallen, THE BOOK OF JOB AS A GREEK TRAGEDY

They sound quite similar in tone, I think, and even in certain phrasing; but while Chandler asserts that his hardboiled protagonist exists in a world which may be improved if a certain kind of moral code is adhered to, Kallen’s Job operates in a universe that is essentially indifferent. Kallen, who gives ‘The Book of Job’ a Euripidean reading (and goes to on convert the text into a classical Greek tragedy), and further suggests that Job emerges as an early, subversive example of a particular brand of humanism in the Old Testament, is more hardboiled, to my mind, than Chandler. His conclusion runs thusly:

“In [Job’s story] the soul of man comes to itself and is freed. It is a humanism terrible and unique. For unlike the Greek humanism it does not enfranchise the mind by interpreting the world in terms of its own substance, by declaring an ultimate happy destiny for man in a world immortally in harmony with his nature and needs; it is not an anthropomorphosis, not a pathetic fallacy. It is without illusion concerning the quality, extent and possibilities of man, without illusion concerning his relation to God. It accepts them, and makes of the human soul the citadel of man - even against Omnipotence itself - wherein he cherishes his integrity, and so cherishing, is victorious in the warfare of living even when life is lost.” (ibid)

We do good not because we fear divine retribution, or because our actions might improve our lot, or that of mankind in general; but because the alternative, in the active or passive sense, is to succumb to indifference and atrophy and sink into the premature death of apathy.
Or, this:

“When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it.” - Dashiell Hammett, THE MALTESE FALCON

You’ll appreciate, I hope, that all of the above may well just be a symptom of my desperately thrashing about trying to retrospectively justify a story that started out Chandleresque but slips the noose, for better or worse, of Chandler’s own retrospective assessment of Marlowe and his code. Come my next book, I may well be arguing something else entirely. For now, though, I quite like Kallen’s take on the ‘terrible and unique’ humanism of a Euripidean Job; for the want of a mast of my own construction, I’ll pin my colours to it.

Origins: Stuart Neville

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:06:00 +0000

Once in a while here at Crime Always Pays, I like to hand the reins over to an actual writer who knows what she or he is talking about. ‘Origins’ is a (very) occasional series in which an author talks about the inspiration - character, plot, setting, whatever - for their latest novel, in this case Stuart Neville on Galya Petrova, the heroine of STOLEN SOULS. To wit:

“For every crime, there’s a victim. Sometimes many victims. How those victims are portrayed is a weakness of crime fiction. Too often they are simply cadavers, pieces of meat on which the story feeds. They are rarely human. They seldom have lives that precede the moments of their deaths. They exist only to be crouched over by detectives or dissected by coroners.
“When I first started writing the character Galya Petrova I was determined she would not be a victim. She would not be a body on a slab. She would not wait passively, in fear, for a man to come and save her. If she was to survive STOLEN SOULS, it would be by her own efforts. The Damsel in Distress is a thriller trope that’s far too easy to fall back on, and I’m guilty of doing so myself in previous books. Galya is indeed a damsel, and in distress, but that trope does not stand without a white knight charging to the rescue.
“Jack Lennon is no white knight. Galya’s on her own with only her will to survive. Every aspect of her background and personality feeds into her fight for life. I wanted to create a character who might have fallen prey to some despicable people, but who’d never be a victim. I hope I’ve achieved that with Galya Petrova.” - Stuart Neville

Blessed Am I Amongst Women

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 08:17:00 +0000

The internet really is a wonderful place. You hang out, you meet lovely people, you talk about blowing up hospitals and Kurt Vonnegut. That is to say, you talk about blowing up hospitals, and Kurt Vonnegut. There’ll be no exploding Kurt Vonneguts on these pages, no sirree, ma’am.
Anyway, Alex Donald was kind enough to host me over at her Multiverse yesterday, where she asked me, among other things, about the meta-fictional elements of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL and who influenced the novel most, which is when the name Kurt Vonnegut came up. If you’re interested, the interview can be found here …
Alex was also good enough to read and review AZC last week, with the gist of her opinion running thusly:

“Darkly funny, superbly written, meta-fictional and with more than a passing nod to Paul Auster, Flann O’Brien and (dare I say it) Chuck Palahniuk’s FIGHT CLUB, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL l fuses literary and crime fiction to create something utterly original.” - Alex Donald

I thank you kindly, ma’am.
Meanwhile, over on the other side of the Atlantic, Elizabeth White hosted a guest post from yours truly on her blog, in which I talked about violence in the crime novel, and how the impact of real-life violence alters what you write - or whether you write at all. It also features such searing insights into the contemporary crime novel as the following:

“Meanwhile, it’s also true that the Irish crime novel, in common with most other territories’ crime novels, has for its structure the basic three-act drama of Greek tragedy. To wit: 1) Things Are Mostly Okay; 2) Things Get Screwed Up and / or Someone Sleeps With His Mom; 3) Things Are Mostly Okay Again.”

For the rest, clickety-click here …
Not all the internet ladies have been so kind, of course. Over at Good Reads, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL is currently thriving on a 4.29 average from 17 ratings. The average would probably be considerably higher had not one Celia Lynch, bless her cotton socks, given the book a one-star rating, even though the book’s status is ‘gave up’. Now, I know there’s absolutely no rules when it comes to internet reviewing, and that the ethics and standards that apply to professional reviewers go out the window, but isn’t it a bit much, regardless of your reviewing status, to award a rating to a book you haven’t had the courtesy to finish? Mind you, I suppose I should feel chuffed; the only other books Celia gave up on were by Joanne Harris and William Burroughs.
Finally, and for all of you who have been waiting breathlessly for the Tuam Herald verdict on AZC - it’s in. To wit:

“While the character-coming-to-life device is clever enough, the real beauty of this book is the sharp dialogue, the witty vignettes and the well-sharpened digs. The running commentary on the state of the world is priceless … his delightfully jaundiced take on our current ‘reality’ could provide a political primer for any arriving alien unluckily enough to be beamed down here right now.” - Tuam Herald

For the full report, including the reviewer’s appreciation of Raquel Welch in her fur bikini, clickety-click here …

Finally, this week’s reading: Paul Johnston’s THE SILVER STAIN is the latest Alex Mavros novel, is set on Crete and dabbles in the Nazi invasion of that island in 1941; it’s terrific stuff. I’m also reading THE BOOK OF JOB AS A GREEK TRAGEDY by Horace M. Kallen, which is a hoot and a half; and THE GOLDEN SCALES by Parker Bilal, a private eye tale set in contemporary Cairo that may or may not herald a wave of Egyptian hardboiled noir.
So there you have it: this week’s AZC flummery in full. Do tune in next week, when we’ll very probably be talking about Sophia Loren, Edward Anderson’s THIEVES LIKE US, the new Donald Westlake novel from Hard Case Crime and what it was like to meet Amanda Hocking (lovely person, very unassuming, big Kurt Vonnegut fan).

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE IMPOSSIBLE DEAD by Ian Rankin

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 06:53:00 +0000

Off with yours truly to RTE last Monday night, and the Arena arts programme, there to review Ian Rankin’s THE IMPOSSIBLE DEAD in the company of Sean Rocks. The audio of the review is available here, with the gist running thusly:

THE IMPOSSIBLE DEAD is the second in Ian Rankin’s series of novels about Malcolm Fox, who is a police officer with the Scottish Professional Ethics and Standards Department, which is the equivalent of internal affairs, colloquially known as ‘the Complaints’.
Inspector Malcolm Fox and his ‘Complaints’ team of Sergeant Tony Kaye and Constable Joe Naysmith are based in Edinburgh. The novel opens with their arrival in Kirkcaldy, Fife, where they have come to interview a police officer, Detective Paul Carter, who has been found guilty of misconduct after Carter’s uncle, himself a former police officer, blew the whistle.
Carter was convicted of asking for sexual favours, and generally threatening women, and Fox and the Complaints are in Fife to discover the extent to which Carter’s behaviour was covered up by his colleagues. On interviewing Paul Carter’s uncle, Alan Carter, Fox realises that the retired policeman is conducting an informal investigation into the suspicious death of a radical lawyer in the mid-1980s, this at the request of an Edinburgh-based solicitor. When Alan Carter is subsequently discovered dead, in what appears to be a suicide, Fox suspects a conspiracy and a cover-up, especially as the gun Carter uses to kill himself doesn’t officially exist …
It’s difficult to review an Ian Rankin novel without referring at some point to Inspector Rebus, so it’s probably best to get that out of the way first. I know many people will disagree, but I actually prefer Malcolm Fox to Inspector Rebus. He’s a far more balanced and nuanced character than Rebus, who was very much a black-and-white, us-versus-them kind of character.
When I read the first Malcolm Fox novel, THE COMPLAINTS, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Fox. He seemed a milder version of Rebus, and I wondered why Rankin would offer the reader a similar kind of story, and investigator, while making his new protagonist less confrontational, and therefore less dramatic, character. I believed that Rankin could have challenged himself more, but it took THE IMPOSSIBLE DEAD to persuade me that that is exactly what Rankin did.
It’s probably fair to say, I think, that Malcolm Fox is a more difficult character to write than Rebus. Fox is a complex man, but he is essentially good-natured; he is also a team player, whereas Rebus was, as the conventions of the police procedural often demand, very much a loner. Moreover, the nature of Fox’s job - a cop investigating other cops - gives him a depth that Rebus’s job didn’t confer. Fox is not a crusader for a perfect police force; he understands that people are prone to making mistakes, and that cops are no less likely than civilians to fall foul of human faults and foibles. Neither does he set himself up as a shining example of what a policeman should be. In his personal life, Fox is as guilty of making mistakes as anyone else. By the same token, having been seconded to ‘the Complaints’, Fox is determined to do the best job he possibly can. If that means that he will earn the opprobrium of his peers for investigating their wrongdoing, then that is a price he is prepared to pay.
One of the most likeable aspects of the novel as a whole is its understated tone. One example: Fox and his team of Kaye and Naysmith. Most writers, with a team of three to fill out, would have made one of the team a woman, if only for politically correct reasons, and especially as the majority of crime fiction readers are women. Instead, Rankin gives us three relatively ordinary blokes who aren’t particularly sexist or politically correct, who enjoy friendly banter and pass their days in one another’s company with the minimum of friction and conflict. Given the pressure the trio are under, and especially as they are so despised by their peers, there’s an endearing quality to their understated mini-brotherhood.
That understated tone also extends to Rankin’s style. Here he writes in a pleasingly crisp, unfussy style, and seems content to allow the story emerge in what appears to be an organic fashion, rather than forcing the issue by giving proceedings a fake sense of urgency. The chapters unfold at a languid pace, and yet this belies the fact that there is plenty by way of drama and event being recorded.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the novel is its historical backdrop. According to Rankin, that backdrop is rooted in reality. When I interviewed Rankin recently , he had this to say:

“It’s based on a real case. The lawyer found dead in his car is absolutely accurate, it happened in 1985, although in the real-life case he was a Glasgow-based lawyer rather than an Edinburgh lawyer. His name was Willie MacRae. And all that stuff in the book, the Dark Hand Commando, the letter-bombs, the anthrax - that’s all taken from the newspapers of the time.”

Despite the sectarianism of the Celtic-Rangers football clashes, we don’t normally associate Scotland with extreme nationalism, and certainly not with paramilitary terrorism. THE IMPOSSIBLE DEAD offers a glimpse of a time and place not so far from Northern Ireland in the 1980s, and suggests - explicitly, at one point - that the situations weren’t all that different. The real difference, Rankin suggests, is that the Scottish equivalent(s) of the Irish paramilitary groups were far less organised and ruthless, and were quickly infiltrated by British secret services and Special Branch.
By the same token, there are contemporary resonances to be taken from THE IMPOSSIBLE DEAD in terms of Northern Ireland, not least the fact that former paramilitaries wind up democratically legitimate and working in government.
Ultimately, I give THE IMPOSSIBLE DEAD a very warm recommendation, to existing Ian Rankin fans who have yet to take plunge into the Malcolm Fox series, and also to those wondering why Ian Rankin is so highly regarded. It showcases his ability to construct an intriguing police procedural plot and people it with believable and interesting characters, and to provide a page-turning entertainment while still investing his story with a thoughtful critique of contemporary society. - Declan Burke

ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL: So It Goes

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:49:00 +0000

Is it really five months since the publication of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL? Jayz. Seems like it happened only a couple of weeks ago, and at the same time it feels like half a lifetime ago. Weird. Anyway, 2012 is off to a good start, review-wise; my cup fairly ran over last weekend.
First up was the inimitable Glenn Harper of International Noir, who opened his review by referencing a number of authors who dabbled in meta-fiction, most of whom (to be perfectly frank) I’d never even heard of. Glenn finished up something like this:

“Among the many crime fiction references, it’s [Patricia] Highsmith that resonates most with ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL (for me) … Declan Burke has cemented his central position in the current wave of neo-noir and contemporary crime fiction.” - Glenn Harper, International Noir

As you can imagine, I was pretty pleased with that; Glenn Harper knows of what he speaks. Then a review popped up from an Irish blogger, Alex Donald. Now, I should declare an interest here: about 18 months ago, Alex and I were two of a quartet of writers who sat down to establish a writing group, essentially to motivate one another into finding the time to write. As it happens, I was working on a different book entirely for that writing group, and only managed to make it along to two sessions; despite the writers being a smart and funny bunch, the truth was that I didn’t have the time to devote to any motivational sessions designed to find me time to write. Anyway, cutting a long and not very interesting story short, Alex was kind enough to review AZC over at her blog, with the gist running thusly:

“Darkly funny, superbly written, meta-fictional and with more than a passing nod to Paul Auster, Flann O’Brien and (dare I say it) Chuck Palahniuk’s FIGHT CLUB, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL fuses literary and crime fiction to create something utterly original.” - Alex Donald

Last weekend, incidentally, Dufour Editions was good enough to declare AZC its Book of the Week. I’m not really sure what that means, to be honest, although it was very nice indeed of the Dufour people to republish the Publishers Weekly review of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL that compares it (favourably) to Stephen King’s THE DARK HALF.
Also last weekend, the Sunday Independent carried a review of AZC, under the headline, ‘Darkly hilarious classic takes modern crime writing to a whole new level’. As you can probably imagine, the review that followed was broadly positive. To wit:

“Stylistically removed from anything being attempted by his peers … [a] darkly hilarious amalgam of classic crime riffing (hep Elmore Leonard-isms and screwballing) and the dimension-warping reflections of Charlie Kaufman or Kurt Vonnegut. Like the latter’s SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL sees another Billy ‘come unstuck’ in what is, frankly, a brilliant premise.” - Hilary White, Sunday Independent

I have to say, it’s all getting a little confusing in terms of the references. Patricia Highsmith, Paul Auster, Flann O’Brien, Chuck Palahniuk, Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, Charlie Kaufman, Kurt Vonnegut … that’s a pretty wild brew.

I should also say that Hilary White was inspired, in terms of references, in his choice of SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE. The Billy in AZC is so called as a homage to Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut’s classic, which is one of my favourite novels from one of my favourite writers; Vonnegut is one of those very rare writers who combines hugely entertaining and accessible stories with great profundity. In my head, Kurt Vonnegut’s fingerprints are all over AZC, to the extent that I went out of my way to erase all traces of his influence in the final drafts - apart, of course, from renaming Karlsson ‘Billy’.
God, I wish I had the time to go read a Vonnegut RIGHT NOW …

“Let’s Get Critical, Critical / I Wanna Get Critical / Let’s Get Into Critical …”

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:56:00 +0000

With apologies, obviously, to Olivia Neutron-Bomb. Anyhoo, I have been usurped, ladies and gentleman: nay, I have been cuckolded. For lo! The Irish Crime Fiction Group on Facebook does pretty much what it says on the tin, and achieves pretty much what this blog has been trying to do over the last few years, which is to bring news of developments in Irish crime writing to a wider public.
Actually, and in the interest of transparency, etc., I should point out that the ICFGF is the brainchild of one Mick Halpin, aka Critical Mick, who was writing about Irish crime fiction long before Crime Always Pays ever saw the light of day, and who was hugely supportive of yours truly when I was trying to get CAP up and running.
Anyway, I’m delighted to see the ICFGF doing it’s thang, and doing it so well, and not least because it seems to be attracting writers to contribute to the page. With CAP, it was always my blog, with added other writers; ICFGF is a more democratic set-up, and everyone’s entitled to log on and update. There’s also more of a community vibe to it, and while it’s still early days, I can easily see the ICFGF becoming the kind of forum for discussion I had originally envisaged for CAP, before I sabotaged the whole concept by hijacking CAP for my own nefarious purposes.
Anyway, the rise of ICFGF coincides with yours truly doing a bit of thinking about where the good ship SS CAP might be sailing to in the future, and the idea of maintaining an online presence (blog, Twitter, Facebook, et al) which eats away at the time I have available to write (in a sense, the self-promotion thing veers into Catch-22 territory: the more time you spend promoting yourself, the more successful you’ll be; the more successful you are, the less time you get to write.)
Simply put, I don’t have the time to do all the things I used to do. Last year, during which I was lucky enough to have two books published, I was burning the candle at both ends and taking a blowtorch to the middle too. It was an unsustainable schedule, and one that left me feeling pretty ropey by the year’s end.
Ultimately, I need to work full-time, then spend time with my family, and then find time to write and / or spend time on book-related projects. The blog comes under the third heading there, which means, essentially, that it eats into writing time. Which means, I’m afraid, that the blog will have to go. Or, at least, that I’ll be ratcheting waaaaaaay back on the amount of time I put into CAP.
In effect, and with ICFGF thriving, I guess what I’m hoping to do is abandon any pretence that Crime Always Pays exists to support Irish crime writing, and simply use it to let people in the wider on-line community know about any developments relating to my own writing. Which means posting erratically, and occasionally, and whenever it’s possible, time-wise. I’d hate to drop it entirely, given that I’ve met so many great people via Crime Always Pays, and because it is a useful way of staying in touch with the wider on-line crime writing community. Of course, whether or not people will still be interested in dropping by here when CAP is all about me waffling on about me is another matter entirely. We shall see.
For now, I’d just like to say thanks a million to the Three Regular Readers, and to the more irregular visitors too, for making the last six years such an enjoyable experience. Hopefully I’ll be seeing you all over at ICFGF …

“Leave. The Kid. Alone.”

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 09:48:00 +0000

I have a number of issues with Garry Mulholland’s STRANDED AT THE DRIVE-IN, which is subtitled, ‘FROM THE BREAKFAST CLUB TO THE SOCIAL NETWORK: THE 100 BEST TEEN MOVIES. Actually, I have five issues. One is Saturday Night Fever. The second is The Wanderers. The third is Brick. The fourth is Can’t Buy Me Love. The fifth is Some Kind of Wonderful. Classic teen movies all, and not one of them makes it into Mulholland’s Top 100.
Still, half the joy of compiling and reading lists is the arguments they provoke, about what should go in and what stinks like a dead armadillo. And Mulholland’s list, while entirely subjective, makes for a breezy read that flirts dangerously with anorak-style analysis at times, but is largely terrific fun.
Anyway, I had a feature on STRANDED AT THE DRIVE-IN published in the Examiner earlier this week, which kicked off a lot like this ...

“Stranded at the drive-in / Feelin’ like a fool / What will they say / Monday at school …?”

A lovelorn John Travolta pining for Olivia Newton-John may not, at first glance, represent film at its dazzling zenith, but film buff Garry Mulholland begs to differ. ‘Stranded at the Drive-In’, the opening line to one of the best-loved songs from Grease (1978), is the title of the Mulholland’s latest book, which attempts to list the 100 Best Teen Movies.
‘Not only do we get a cinema reference,’ says Mulholland in his introduction of the song Sandy, ‘but a neat summing up of a few of the key elements of teen fiction: thwarted romance, peer pressure, school, the quest for night-time pleasure, fear of humiliation.’
Of course, no one really takes teen movies seriously. They’re all about hormonal angst and ridiculous serial killers, bad hair-dos and the Prom. Aren’t they?

For the rest, clickety-click here …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 07:32:00 +0000

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (18s)
David Fincher has directed some very good crime films during his distinguished career, including Se7en (1995) and Zodiac (2007), but it’s unlikely The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (18s) will feature on a show-reel of his finest moments when the Academy finally gets around to presenting him with a lifetime achievement award. A remake of the Swedish film of the same name from 2009, and remarkably faithful to both it and the Stieg Larsson novel that serves as its source material, the story finds disgraced journalist Mikael Blomqvist (Daniel Craig) commissioned by a wealthy industrialist, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), to investigate the disappearance of the man’s niece some forty years previously. Blomqvist is aided in his search by Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), an unorthodox investigator who specialises in computer hacking. The fatal flaw in the film, however, is that while Salander is by some distance the most original element of the tale, the story doesn’t actually require her presence in order for Blomqvist to solve the mystery. Meanwhile, her originality should not be confused with plausibility: shockingly rebellious, and with good reason, Salander’s memorable physical appearance is the antithesis of the successful investigator’s ability to blend in to the point of invisibility. Moreover, a crucial plot twist, in which she meekly submits to a sexual predator and so sets in train most of the secondary plot, is entirely out of character. That said, Mara is bracingly forthright as the unlovable Salander, and Craig puts in a solid if largely unmemorable performance. Fincher crafts a handsome-looking film which offers a beautifully bleak Sweden, and presents us with a formidable cast (Robin Wright, Stellan Skarsgaard, Steven Berkoff and Joely Richardson all have meaty roles), but ultimately the story, which is essentially a creaking old Agatha Christie-style ‘locked-room’ mystery, defeats even this most inventive and idiosyncratic of auteur directors. - Declan Burke

This review first appeared in the Irish Examiner.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: JJ DeCeglie

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 08:30:00 +0000

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 GETAWAY by Jim Thompson (very tough to pick just one, I tell you!).

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
If I say Nick Corey from Thompson’s POP. 1280, does that make me a psycho? If so pretend I said Highsmith’s Tom Ripley.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I try to avoid this situation.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When someone tells you that what you wrote hit them right in the balls.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I’ll give you two that jawed me - THE GUARDS by Ken Bruen, and DEAD I WELL MAY BE by Adrian McKinty.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I think McKinty’s sleeper FALLING GLASS would adapt very, very well.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Constant rejection and misinterpretation. Flashes of praise and occasional absolute understanding.

The pitch for your next book is …?
A slow-burn psycho, a big bet gone wrong in Vegas, booze, madness and Mexico ... oh, and a beautiful young trophy wife that my boy stupidly falls ass over for (including all the mayhem, punishment and revenge that comes with it).

Who are you reading right now?
THE SHARK-INFESTED CUSTARD by Charles Willeford.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Uh ... suicide?

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Unremitting, thoughtful, fecund. (If you’re thinking ‘Boy, what an asshole’, know that I thought it first).

JJ Deceglie’s DRAWING DEAD is available as an e-book on Amazon.com.

Ground Control To Major Brennan: We Have Blast-Off

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:20:00 +0000

A belated Happy New Year from the Crime Always Pays elves to all Three Regular Readers, and apologies for the delay in getting our collective ass in gear for 2012. The issue, for the most part, is that the Grand Vizier has packed in the smokes again, and is finding it rather difficult to type, having gnawed his fingernails down to the elbow-stumps. Still, it can’t be Mills & Boon every day, right?
Moving swiftly onwards, I can think of no better way to kick off 2012 than with a big fat juicy plug for Gerard Brennan, who follows up last year’s novella offering THE POINT with WEE ROCKETS. Quoth the blurb elves:

WEE ROCKETS is a gritty, urban morality tale; a wake-up call for society. It follows a gang of fourteen-year-old hoods as they rampage through West Belfast, fearless and forever upping the ante in their anti-social crimes. They mug pensioners to pay for the cider, cigarettes and sweets they hope will ease them through so many long, aimless days of summer. Their actions send shockwaves through an already damaged post-Troubles society that has yet to build a relationship with a new ‘Catholic-friendly’ police force. Stephen McVeigh, a local Gaelic football ‘star’ and concerned resident has had enough. He wants the kind of justice the Provos dealt in their heyday and he believes he’s the man to fill that void. With rat-like instincts, Joe Phillips has realised that his luck can’t hold out much longer. He wants to relinquish his post as the leader of the Wee Rockets. But as Stephen McVeigh closes in with his ham-fisted investigation, has Joe left it too late to change his ways? Without his loyal gang to back him up, Joe’s just a vulnerable fourteen-year-old kid from a broken home with nobody to turn to.

WEE ROCKETS does for Belfast what Irvine Welsh did for Edinburgh. It’s a frank look at the drink- and drug-addled youth ejected onto the streets of a socially deprived community as they smirk in the face of authority and play Russian Roulette with their adolescent lives.

Praise for WEE ROCKETS:

“The Wire? This is Barbed Wire. A cheeky slice of urban noir, a drink-soaked, drug-addled journey into the violent underbelly of one of Europe’s most notorious ghettos, WEE ROCKETS make The Outsiders look like the Teletubbies.” – Colin Bateman

“Gerard Brennan stands apart from the Irish crime fiction crowd with a novel rooted in the reality of today’s Belfast. The author’s prose speaks with a rare authenticity about the pain of growing up in a fractured society, shot through with a black humour that can only come from the streets. WEE ROCKETS is urban crime fiction for the 21st century, and Brennan is a unique voice among contemporary Irish writers.” – Stuart Neville

“In WEE ROCKETS Gerard Brennan has written a fast paced, exciting story of West Belfast gang culture; brimming with violence, authentic street dialogue and surprising black humour. This is a great debut novel. Brennan takes us into the heart of Belfast’s chav underclass, in a story that lies somewhere in the intersection between The Warriors, Colin Bateman and Guy Ritchie. This is the first in what undoubtedly will be a stellar literary career.” – Adrian McKinty

So there you have it. WEE ROCKETS is published by Blasted Heath, the e-only publishing company out of Scotland; interestingly, to me at least, the image of WEE ROCKETS presented on the Blasted Heath website is that of a book, rather than a e-book cover. Are the Blasted Heath boys trying on some Jedi mind-trick, designed to convince readers they’re purchasing a dead-tree book rather than a digital version? Only time, that notorious tittle-tattler, will tell …

The Road Less Chosen

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 10:08:00 +0000

One of the unsung success stories in Irish crime writing in 2011 was Arlene Hunt’s decision to set up her own publishing company, Portnoy Publishing, for her latest title, THE CHOSEN. I sat down with Arlene last month, to interview her for the Irish Examiner, and the result ran a lot like this:

“Jessie’s very much a product of her own making,” says crime author Arlene Hunt of her latest heroine, “because she’s rebuilt her whole life. She’s where she wants to be, and with the man she wants to be with, doing the job she wants to do. And she would have cheerfully carried on that way for the rest of her days, if she’d been let.”
Hunt is talking about Jessie Conway, a dedicated special needs teacher in a small American town who has fame thrust upon her when she instinctively acts to prevent a Columbine-style massacre in the school where she works.
Hunt has previously penned five best-selling titles in her Dublin-set ‘QuicK Investigations’ series, which star the private eye pairing of John Quigley and Sarah Kenny. Her new book, The Chosen, is set in the US, but that’s not its only unusual aspect.
Despite being an established author with one of Ireland’s biggest publishing houses, Hunt made the decision to take the road less travelled for The Chosen, and set up her own publishing company, Portnoy Publishing, with her husband and business partner, Andrew.
“People do think that it’s a little curious,” says Hunt, “because I turned down a two-book deal to go my own way, but it’s a calculated risk. With a two-book deal, you’ve got security for two years, but you also lose the rights to your book for seventy years. And with the tipping-point coming for digital books, I just wasn’t prepared to do that.”

For the rest, clickety-click here …

The Write Stuff

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 09:36:00 +0000

I’ve been meaning to mention the Irish Crime Fiction Facebook group for ages now, said group being helmed by the inimitable Mick Halpin, aka Critical Mick, and a fine resource for writers and readers alike it is too. Just before Christmas, the Mickster posted a piece about an upcoming crime-writing course to be held at the Irish Writers’ Centre, a timely intervention given that Irish crime fiction is (koff) about to take centre-stage in 2012 (see post below).
Anyway, the course will be presented by Cormac Millar (right), and the gist runs thusly:

This course aims to be useful to anyone interested in writing crime fiction. Over eight weeks, it explores topics such as finding story ideas, developing plot and structure, genre, characterization, dialogue, description and scene writing, social and political themes, finding the narrative voice, editing and continuity, writing a pitch and a blurb, approaching agents and publishers. These questions will be approached through formal presentations but also through questions, group discussions, writing assignments and exercises.
24th January - 13th March: Tuesdays 6.30-8.30pm. €220/€200 members
The presenter, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, teaches Italian at Trinity College Dublin. As Cormac Millar, he has published two crime novels with Penguin.

For all the details, clickety-click here …
Meanwhile, Cormac contributed a talk to ‘Crime and the City’ last year, as did yours truly, a series hosted by Dublin City Libraries that included writers of crime fiction and non-fiction, experts in the field of drug-related crime, and a former governor of Mountjoy Prison. For audios of those talks, and the transcripts, clickety-click here …

On The Irish Crime Novel and Institutional Cultural Caution

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 11:39:00 +0000

I find myself in a very unusual situation as 2011 draws to a close, because I’ve never before had novels published in consecutive years. Four years separated EIGHTBALL BOOGIE and THE BIG O, and it was another four years before ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL landed on bookshelves last year. And yet, if all goes to plan, my fourth novel should arrive some time around the middle of 2012.
This is, of course, very good news for yours truly, not least because books in consecutive years might create some kind of momentum. Even so, I’m feeling a little bit fraught at the moment. This is partly because there’s still a job of work to be done on the new book, with semi-final revisions due before it goes off to the editor at the end of January, but it’s mainly due to the fact that the new book - formerly known as THE BIG EMPTY, and currently labouring under the working title of SLAUGHTER’S HOUND - is a very different kind of book to AZC.
As all Three Regular Readers will be aware, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL is a novel that has a little fun with straightforward narrative and conventional tropes, being a story in which an author who bears a very strong resemblance to one Declan Burke is confronted by a character from an abandoned novel, said character being a possibly homicidal hospital porter to demands to be rewritten as a more likeable sociopath, and who promises to make the rewrite worthwhile by blowing up the hospital where he works.
Before it was published, I was worried that AZC might fall between two stools. Those readers who don’t read crime fiction might not have bothered with it, on the basis that it is essentially a crime novel, once you strip away the bells and whistles; and crime fans who prefer their stories told in a straightforward way could well have shrugged and moved on to something more conventional. So I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the book was, for the very great part, pretty well received, and that most reviewers were happy to champion the more offbeat aspects of the story.
Of course, that kind of thing can backfire badly. If I can (immodestly) point you towards the Publishers Weekly review, which is the most recent review AZC has received, the reviewer suggests that, “those looking for a highly intellectual version of Stephen King’s THE DARK HALF will be most satisfied.” Which was nice to hear, although my first instinct was to wonder whether the phrase ‘highly intellectual’ wouldn’t put off more people than it might attract.
The new book, on the other hand, is far more straightforward a story than AZC. It’s a sequel-of-sorts to my first book, EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, and features erstwhile ‘research consultant’ (aka freelance journalist and occasional private eye) Harry Rigby, who has recently been released after serving a term in a prison for the criminally insane. And even if Rigby’s killing of this brother at the end of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE makes him, as one character points out, ‘the least private eye in the business, and Rigby is driving a taxi to earn a living as the novel opens, it is to my mind a private eye story, and proceeds within the parameters of that kind of tale.
So right now I’m a little concerned that those readers who liked ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL for the way it messed around with story and storytelling might be disappointed by the fact that SLAUGHTER’S HOUND has very little interest in meta-narrative et al, and aims instead to tell a hard-boiled tale of fatalistic noir. We shall see.
I’m prompted to wonder about such things by a piece in today’s Irish Times by Mick Heaney, which looks back on the Irish arts world and the way in which, as Heaney says, “2011 felt like a pivotal year, during which Ireland’s cultural landscape started to take on new, as yet unformed, contours.” The piece takes into account film, music, theatre and the visual arts, and has quite a bit to say about literature too.

Heaney name-checks some established and new names in Irish literary fiction, before having this to say:

“These works suggest Irish literary fiction – the jewel in the crown of Irish writing over the past 20 years – is in a healthy state, but its primacy is quietly being questioned by another, less vaunted, genre.
“Crime fiction continued to thrive last year, with writers such as John Connolly and Stuart Neville, and newer arrivals such as William Ryan and Conor Fitzgerald, showing how Irish authors can compete in this huge international market.
“DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS, an anthology of home-grown crime writing edited by novelist Declan Burke, showed how such writers can weave contemporary issues and darker themes while maintaining entertainment value. Such work may not have quite the same highbrow appeal as “serious” fiction, but the fact John Banville’s latest volume, A DEATH IN SUMMER, was published under his crime-writing nom de plume, Benjamin Black, is further indication of how the genre has taken centre stage in the public imagination.”

I’m intrigued by the line about ‘how such writers can weave contemporary issues and darker themes while maintaining entertainment value.’ I’ve gone on record here many times to say that the Irish crime novel is important in terms of how it is documenting the upheaval in Irish society, although it’s interesting that of the five writers Heaney mentions by name, three set their novels outside of Ireland, and one sets his stories in 1950s Ireland. Of the batch mentioned above, only Stuart Neville’s STOLEN SOULS was a contemporary Irish tale.
I’m also wondering about the primacy of the elements of that line, and whether crime writers are obliged to first create an entertainment, and then invest that entertainment with ‘contemporary issues and darker themes’; or whether the onus is on the crime author to write about ‘contemporary issues and darker themes’, in the process making them entertaining.
I’m wondering about this because I can write about contemporary issues and dark themes until the cows come home. It’s the making them entertaining bit that keeps me awake at night.
In terms of the bigger picture, such questions are becoming increasingly important, I think. The Irish crime novel has been in the ‘promising’ phase for quite some time now, without ever fully delivering on that promise and crossing over into the realms of fiction to be taken seriously. This may well be because the crime novel is doomed to be considered entertainment first and foremost, and thus irrelevant in terms of what it has to say about the culture and society from which it springs. Just before Christmas, for example, I had a very interesting conversation with a literary editor of one of the Irish Sunday broadsheets, who said that they’d nominated a certain literary title as their book of the year, this on the basis that it was the only novel they’d read that had something to say about modern Ireland, and even though said novel was set in the past. What was implicit in that statement was that crime novels by the likes of Gene Kerrigan, Niamh O’Connor, Adrian McKinty, Colin Bateman, Stuart Neville and Alan Glynn, just to mention some high-profile names, were excluded from ‘book of the year’ consideration because they were crime novelists, even though they all had very pertinent things to say about Ireland in 2011.
Such an attitude, from an ostensibly well-read person who is after all a literary editor, is entirely dispiriting; or would be, if the times weren’t so dramatically a-changing. To quote again from Mick Heaney’s piece:

“Taken separately, these disparate developments in the literary, theatre, music and visual spheres are exciting; viewed together, they can be seen as the first tectonic shifts in a culture as affected by doubt and upheaval as the wider economy. After all, the current cultural climate was essentially shaped during the extended period of turmoil and decline that ran from the oil shocks of 1973 to the chronic recession of the 1980s, which swept away the institutional cultural caution of before.”

Next year will be a tough one for Ireland Inc., and all who sail in her; and so will the following year, and the year after that. Ireland is not Greece, as our politicians are fond of telling our overlords in Brussels and Frankfurt, this because the Irish are accepting their harsh and unfair economic medicine without taking to the streets, going on strike and burning banks and bondholders alike.

But if it all looks very placid on the surface, those tectonic plates are shifting. Essentially, there’s a whole new order up for grabs, politically, economically, and in terms of how we speak to ourselves about ourselves.
Writers, to paraphrase the Chinese saying, always live in interesting times, and the crime novel is perfectly positioned right now to colonise the Irish literary landscape over the next few years, to speak to us all about who we are, how we got here and where we are going.
Here’s hoping it rises to the challenge of the new cultural climate, as the current institutional caution is swept away.

A Happy CAP Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:05:00 +0000

Well, it’s that time of the year again. It’s been a great year here at CAP Towers, folks, although it wouldn’t have been half as much fun without the Three Regular Readers (you know who you are) along for the ride. I thank you all from the bottom of my black, pitiless heart.
I’m looking forward to the break, I have to say. It’s been a busy, busy year - although that, in these straitened times, is not a bad complaint to have. And next year should be every bit as busy, if not busier - and I can’t wait. I sincerely hope that you all have a very happy Christmas, and a prosperous New Year.
God bless us, every one.
Lily? Over to you, my love …

Some Thoughts On The Pricing Of E-Books

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:49:00 +0000

I came across a Twitter comment during the week, which was retweeted by Mike Cane, from a woman who had drawn a line in the sand on the price of e-books. She was happy enough paying anything up to $5.99 for her e-books; beyond that, she just wasn’t prepared to go.
Given that I recently upped the price of the e-book version of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE to $7.99, as part of my ongoing experiment in e-publishing, I found her attitude fascinating.
I should probably give you some context to this ‘experiment’, by the way. I first e-published EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, after buying out the rights from the publisher, at $1.99. It sold pretty well at that price, and I even got a royalty cheque from Amazon after six months. Around about then, I bumped up the price to $3.99, just to see how sales would fare. Not very well, as it turned out. The book still sold, but in nowhere near the same numbers. And so, being a perverse sod at the best of times, last month I bumped the price up to $7.99. Sales, as you can probably guess, fell off a cliff. I think I’ve sold three copies since the price went to $7.99.
I should also say that, given that I work full-time, and write in my spare time, I don’t have a lot of time left over for promoting the e-version of EIGHTBALL. And the last couple of months, while the book has been retailing for $7.99, have been particularly busy. Perhaps sales might have been a little better had I invested a little more time in reminding people that EIGHTBALL is there. We’ll never know.
I should also say, before going any further, that different writers have different reasons for publishing e-books. Some are e-only writers, and are bent on earning a living from their writing. Some, like myself, are part-time writers who publish (some of) their backlist at a discount price in the hope of drumming up some word-of-mouth and momentum on their writing careers. Others are full-time writers earning a living writing conventional books, whose publishers also offer their books in e-format. And on it goes.
The point being, ‘writers’ are not a monolithic bunch who all earn the same amount of money from their writing. The same applies to publishers, some of which belong to vast corporations, while others are of the small but perfectly formed variety, struggling to make ends meet and publish interesting books. Many others inhabit the middle-ground between those extremes.
And yet, there is a growing number of readers who insist that the price of an e-book should be this and no more.
Now, I do appreciate that the middle of one of the worst recessions / depressions in living memory is a very bad time to be arguing the case for raising the price of anything, and particularly a luxury item such as a book. Some people, of course, would argue that a book is not an luxury, but an essential, but that’s a debate for another day. The bottom line is that, for most people, the money they spend on books comes out of their disposable income, which to all intents and purposes makes it a luxury item.
I can also appreciate the main argument some readers put forward for cheaper e-books. If, say, Lee Child’s latest thriller is retailing at $18.99 as a conventional book because of his publisher’s costs when it comes to printing, distribution, etc., then the e-format should be considerably cheaper, given that there are no printing and distribution costs.
Having said that, and without pretending to know how Lee Child’s publishers work, it’s also true that the conventional and e-version copies of Lee Child’s latest book comes at the end of a long chain of events, most of which cost quite a bit of money, given that the services involved are provided by skilled professionals, not least of whom is Lee Child himself.
Ah, say the e-readers, but why not cut out all those pesky middle-men? Why doesn’t Lee Child just write his book and upload it directly as an e-book? He already has the brand, and even if he’s selling his book at a reduced price, he’s taking home all the profit, which means that readers and writer both profit.
That’s fine in theory, but again, and without pretending to know anything about Lee Child, it presumes that Lee Child is a skilled editor and designer, typesetter, marketing specialist, etc.
Ah, say the e-readers, but the costs of such skilled professionals are one-offs. If Lee was to out-source all the requirements he isn’t capable of providing himself, and write a couple of cheques, he’s home and hosed. Apart from the fee he pays to the various e-publishers, he’s taking home all the profit.
Again, in theory, this is very true. Unfortunately for most writers, they’re not Lee Child. They don’t have his brand. They don’t have his financial resources. Neither do they have his gift for writing a cracking thriller, but that, again, is a conversation for another day.
Simply put, and like the vast majority of writers, I’m not in Lee Child’s league. If publishing exists as a pyramid structure, with a lucky (and very hard-working) few at the apex, then I’m down in the dirt scrabbling for purchase on the steep incline.
When it came to e-publishing EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, I was in a better position than most. The book had already been published, and I was in possession of a pdf that was already type-set to a professional standard. The book also benefited from some blurbs that had been provided for the conventional version. I did, however, commission a new cover for the book, which means that despite receiving that royalty cheque from Amazon (it was for $100), I’m still in the hole, eight months later, to the tune of over $200.
Given the cost of living here in Ireland, and that I’m a husband and father with all the responsibilities that entails, I would need to sell roughly 35,000 copies of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE per year, at its original price of $1.99, in order to avoid seeing my daughter live in a cardboard box. Even at $3.99, I’d need to sell 25,000 copies. That’s a hell of a lot of books to sell in order to break even. And at $7.99, I’d still need to sell 8,000 copies, or thereabouts, to achieve the same.
Go ahead and ask the vast majority of writers how they’d feel about selling 8,000 copies of their book per year. But do me a favour and have an oxygen mask handy. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for any untimely strokes.
There are a number of aspects to the e-pricing debate that seem a little odd to me. The first is that e-publishing was originally trumpeted as a means of bringing reader and writer closer together, because writers could by-pass the whited sepulchres of the traditional publishing houses and connect directly with their readers, via the intertwined electronic miracles of e-readers and the Web. Instead, it appears that many readers are taking the hump with writers because they won’t play ball and give them quality books cheaply, while writers are taking the hump because readers want quality books on the cheap.
This clash may be a consequence of many e-reading fans being early adopters, the kind of Web-savvy people who jumped on the idea of combining the potential of the internet with their love of reading, and see e-books as the idea synthesis. Being Web-savvy, of course, they don’t expect to pay very much for the digital content they read; indeed, they seem a little bit shocked they’re expected to pay anything at all.
The other odd thing, from a personal point of view, is exemplified by the drop-off in sales for EIGHTBALL BOOGIE once its price started to go up. The e-book fan (or anyone with even the vaguest grasp of economics) will very probably be screaming right now at the screen a variation on, ‘It’s the economy, stooopid.’
I understand that. I really do. But from my point of view, EIGHTBALL BOOGIE is the same book regardless of whether it’s $1.99 or $7.99: it’s not a quarter as interesting, or funny, or thrilling, at the cheaper price, and it doesn’t come in at 25,000 words rather than 85,000 words.
It’s not my place, by the way, to say that EIGHTBALL is interesting, funny or thrilling. I’m just saying that whatever qualities the book had at the $1.99 price, those qualities remain the same regardless of whether I charge $7.99 or give the book away for free.
I suppose my central concern, when it all boils down, is that fans of e-books are confusing cost and value. That’s not to say that very good books aren’t being sold for $1.99, or $0.99, or even being given away free. But it’s patently self-limiting for a reader to impose an arbitrary price of (say) $4.99 on a book, and state that he or she refuses to pay any more, regardless of the quality of that book.
This becomes especially resonant, I think, when we move away from the realms of fiction, and particularly genre fiction, to talk about the kinds of books that require serious research, which in turn requires investment. But that, again, may be a debate for another day.

For now it seems that many authors are happily collaborating in a race to the bottom on price. The mantra is very much quantity over quality, to the extent that many writers, in a desperate bid to get noticed and put one foot on the bottom rung of the slippery ladder, are now giving away their books for free.
There’s a certain kind of logic to this, although it only exists inside the e-publishing bubble, which appears determined to eat itself. Because once you give away one book for free, the expectation is that all your books will come at no cost, an expectation that derives from an entirely understandable mentality that runs, ‘Well, if you don’t value your work, why should I?’
Ultimately, and pursuing the deranged logic that characterises the e-publishing frenzy on lower and lower pricing to its bitter end, can it be very long before e-fans are demanding that writers pay them - not very much; perhaps as little as $0.99 per book - for the privilege of reading their books?

CAPNYA: Or, The Crime Always Pays Novel of the Year Award!

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 06:19:00 +0000

A trumpet-parp please, maestro. The votes are in, the counts have been tallied, the hanging chads ignored, and the winner emerges triumphant. The short-list consisted of THE BURNING SOUL by John Connolly, THE RAGE by Gene Kerrigan and FALLING GLASS by Adrian McKinty, and - ta-da! - it’s FALLING GLASS that wins the hardly-coveted-at-all Crime Always Pays Novel of the Year Award!
Now all I need to do is come up with some kind of trophy to mark the occasion. Meanwhile, it’s a hearty congrats to Adrian McKinty, not least, as I’ve said before, because 2011 was yet another very fine year for Irish crime writing. Incidentally, FALLING GLASS has already secured the significantly-more-coveted Audible.com Best Mystery / Thriller of the Year. Which just goes to prove that the readers of this blog, if not its host, have impeccably good taste …
I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised, by the way, if McKinty’s forthcoming tome, THE COLD COLD GROUND, doesn’t feature on a number of 2012’s Best Of lists. It’s due in January, and I’ve already gone on the record about it on these pages, with the gist running thusly:

“The hunger strikes mark the bleakest period of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’, and it’s entirely fitting that Adrian McKinty should be the writer to plunge into that darkest of hearts. It’s a rare author who can write so beautifully about such a poisonous atmosphere, but McKinty’s prose is a master-class in vicious poise as he explores the apparent contradictions that underpin Ulster’s self-loathing. Be in no doubt that this novel is a masterpiece: had David Peace, Eoin McNamee and Brian Moore sat down to brew up the great ‘Troubles’ novel, they would have been very pleased indeed to have written THE COLD COLD GROUND.”

Very pleased I was, not to mention a little gobsmacked, to see a line from that little lot quoted on the back cover blurb of THE COLD COLD GROUND when it fell through my letterbox last Monday morning. But don’t take my word for it. The various blurbs also feature Stuart Neville (“A razor-sharp thriller with style, courage and dark-as-night wit … brilliant”) and Brian McGilloway (“A brilliant piece of work which does for Northern Ireland what [David] Peace’s Red Riding Quartet did for Yorkshire”).
So there you have it. THE COLD COLD GROUND by Adrian McKinty. Don’t say you haven’t been warned …
As for my own favourite novels of the year, well, 2011 was a year in which I was fairly spoiled. They are, in roughly the order I read them:

THE TERROR OF LIVING by Urban Waite;
CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER by Tom Franklin;
THE GLASS RAINBOW by James Lee Burke;
CITY OF THE DEAD by Sara Gran;
THE TROUBLED MAN by Henning Mankell;
THE FATAL TOUCH by Conor Fitzgerald;
THE DEVOTION OF SUSPECT X by Keigo Higashino;
THE CALLER by Karin Fossum;
FALLING GLASS by Adrian McKinty;
THE WATCHERS by Jon Steele;
LASTING DAMAGE by Sophie Hannah;
BLOODLAND by Alan Glynn;
THE BURNING SOUL by John Connolly;
THE END OF EVERYTHING by Megan Abbott;
A SINGLE SHOT by Matthew F. Jones;
DADDY’S GIRL by Margie Orford;

Winnowing those down for the purpose of picking my overall favourite, I find myself stuck on three titles:

CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER by Tom Franklin;
THE BURNING SOUL by John Connolly;
THE END OF EVERYTHING by Megan Abbott;

Trust me, on this much at least: blow your book token vouchers on those three titles, and you won’t be disappointed.
Finally, it’s over to you, dear reader. What was your favourite crime title of the year? The comment box is now open …

The Mark Of Cain

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 09:58:00 +0000

The Swedish wing of the Irish crime fiction cabal, TS O’Rourke, is at it again. For lo! TS follows up his novella CANDY SAYS KILL with another short ‘n’ snappy shot of noir, aka the novella SUNSET STRIP. Quoth the blurb elves:

A travelling businessman meets a beautiful young Latina from the wrong side of the tracks. She follows him back to his hotel on Sunset Boulevard and they have sex. But then everything starts to go wrong. Waking from a drug-induced sleep, he finds his life turned upside-down and all reason gone from his world. Caught in an impossible situation and running out of time, he searches frantically for a way out …

In terms of his bleak noir vision, stripped-back prose and being something of an early adopter of Irish crime fiction (his first hard-boiled tale, GANGLANDS, was published all the way back in 1996), TS O’Rourke qualifies as the Irish equivalent of Paul Cain. If you’ve an interest in Irish crime literature, you really can’t afford not to check him out …

Bateman: Give Him An Inch, Etc.

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 08:01:00 +0000

The latest ‘Crime Beat’ column appeared in the Irish Times on Saturday, offering short reviews of the latest offerings from Michael Connelly, Aly Monroe, Susan Hill, Roslund & Hellstrom, George Pelecanos and The Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman. I’ll quote you the Bateman, if I may:

Another former journalist, Colin Bateman, resurrects the mouthy newspaperman Dan Starkey for his first outing in six years in NINE INCHES (Headline, £19.99). No longer a reporter, Starkey has set up as a private detective, in which capacity he is commissioned by a shock-jock radio host, Jack Caramac, to discover who kidnapped his young son. A slew of nefarious characters hove into sight as Starkey’s investigation moves from the well-heeled suburbs to working-class loyalist enclaves, in the process proffering a rather jaundiced view of the officially peaceful Northern Ireland landscape. Oddly, the ex-paramilitaries Starkey encounters are far more terrifying than those he outwitted when Bateman was writing during the Troubles, perhaps because, back then, there was always the hope the psychopathic parasites might melt back into the shadows when the new dispensation dawned. Dotted with Starkey’s blackly comic observations, NINE INCHES is an unsettling, breathless and very funny novel.

For the rest, clickety-click here …

ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL: The ‘Publishers Weekly’ Verdict Is In

noreply@blogger.com (Declan Burke) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 10:15:00 +0000

Well, now. You’ll excuse me, I hope, for running two ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL-related posts in a row, but I woke this morning to a very nice early Christmas present indeed. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, AZC has gone off on its travels to the North American continent; and while the book has received a very gentle handling on this side of the Atlantic, so far at least, I did wonder as to how it might be received in the spiritual home of the hard-boiled crime novel.
Here’s hoping that the first review sets the tone, because Publishers Weekly has stepped into the breach early, with its verdict running thusly:

In this ambitious meta-thriller from Irish author Burke (THE BIG O), the unnamed narrator, a stand-in for the author, meets a character from an unfinished novel of his, Karlsson, “a hospital porter who assisted old people who wanted to die.” Karlsson, who now likes to be called Billy, is intent on blowing up the hospital with everyone in it, but he has more cerebral concerns. Author and character meet again and again in online chatfests, where they discuss their options, and soon start Sermo Vulgus, a novel-within-the-novel. Should fictional characters live, die, or never be born? Burke sprinkles his way-outside-the-box noir with quotes from Beckett, Bukowski, and other literary names as he explores the nature of writing and the descent of personal darkness. Those looking for a highly intellectual version of Stephen King’s THE DARK HALF will be most satisfied. (Feb.) - Publishers Weekly

Crikey. Stephen King? ‘Ambitious meta-thriller’? ‘Highly intellectual’? That’s the Christmas ruined for everyone around me. I’ll be bloody insufferable after that little lot …
Meanwhile, one of the hardest working men in crime fiction, J. Kingston Pierce of The Rap Sheet and January Magazine fame, includes DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS in his round-up of the best ‘books—all of which were published this year, but none of which has yet seen print in the States—that would be worth your crossing the Atlantic to buy’ for the Kirkus Reviews blog. Herewith be the gist:

“Using essays, interviews and short stories, DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS seeks to prove the distinctiveness of Irish crime writing (that its DNA, for instance, includes “extra chromosomes for metaphor, legend and wit,” to quote from Michael Connelly’s introduction) at the same time as it makes the case that mysteries concocted by authors who bleed Guinness can be appreciated by readers who live half a world away from the Old Sod.”

For all of J. Kingston Pierce’s choices, clickety-click here …