Between A Rock Guitarist And A Hard Place

There’s a very nice series running over at NPR Books called ‘Crime and the City’, about ‘fictional detectives and the places they live’. The latest destination is Belfast, with NPR being given a tour by ‘the former rock guitarist’ Stuart Neville (right, pictured in No Alibis bookstore). To wit:

While Belfast is no longer the burned-out city that it once was, The Troubles still overshadow the city’s story. “We have this kind of strange, contradictory feeling about The Troubles,” Neville says. “We’re ashamed of it, kind of proud of it at the same time.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  While you’re at it, here’s the John Banville / Benjamin Black tour of Dublin, from 2011 …

EIGHTBALL BOOGIE by Declan Burke

‘Down in the Old Quarter, you flip a double-headed coin, two out of three it comes down on its edge.
  ‘Last time, it doesn’t come down at all ...’

When the wife of a politician keeping the Government in power is murdered, freelance journalist Harry Rigby is one of the first on the scene. But Harry's out of his depth: the woman’s murder is linked to an ex-paramilitary gang’s attempt to seize control of the burgeoning cocaine market in the Irish northwest. Harry’s ongoing feud with his ex-partner Denise over their young son’s future doesn’t help matters, and then there’s Harry’s ex-con brother Gonzo, back on the streets and mean as a jilted shark …

Praise for EIGHTBALL BOOGIE:

“Harry Rigby, the ultimate anti-hero, fights his own demons (including a death wish except for protecting his son) and some of the corrupt and powerful in and around his home town when murder comes a knockin’ at Christmas ... nothing short of brilliant writing is the highlight of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE ... absolutely brilliant writing.” - Charlie Stella

“There’s a lot to like in Declan Burke’s debut, including some cracking plot twists. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants an entertaining way to spend a few hours.” - Val McDermid

“I have seen the future of Irish crime fiction and it’s called Declan Burke. Here is talent writ large - mesmerizing, literate, smart and gripping. If there is such an animal as the literary crime novel, then this is it. But as a compelling crime novel, it is so far ahead of anything being produced, that at last my hopes for crime fiction are renewed. I can’t wait to read his next novel.” - Ken Bruen

“Burke writes in a staccato prose that ideally suits his purpose, and his narrative booms along as attention grippingly as a Harley Davidson with the silencer missing. Downbeat but exhilarating.” - The Irish Times

“Harry Rigby resembles the gin-soaked love child of Rosalind Russell and William Powell ... a wild ride worth taking.” – Booklist

“One of the sharpest, wittiest books I’ve read for ages.” - The Sunday Independent

“Eight Ball Boogie proves to be that rare commodity, a first novel that reads as if it were penned by a writer in mid-career ... (it) marks the arrival of a new master of suspense on the literary scene.” - Hank Wagner, Mystery Scene

“The comedy keeps the story rolling along between the sudden eruptions of violence … Burke’s novel is not just a pulp revival, it’s genuine neo-noir.” – International Noir

EIGHTBALL BOOGIE on Kindle UK (£3.99)

EIGHTBALL BOOGIE on Kindle US ($4.99)

Review: THE POLKA DOT GIRL by Darragh McManus

Hera City, the setting for Darragh McManus’s The Polka Dot Girl, is a very unusual place. On the surface it resembles countless cities to be found in American-influenced hardboiled detective fiction, being sleazy at its heart and increasingly affluent the further you move out into the suburbs. Its lower social reaches teem with crooks and cops, prostitutes, drunks and drug addicts, all of whom are preyed upon by the corrupt politicians and wealthy business folk who gaze down on the city from their position of privilege like so many vultures anticipating their next feast. So far, so conventional – but what gives this novel a notable twist is that Hera City is entirely populated by women.
  The story is told by Hera City Police Department detective Eugenie ‘Genie’ Auf der Maur, who investigates the murder of Madeleine Greenhill, a young woman found floating in Hera City’s docks wearing a polka dot dress. Ambitious and conscientious, Genie is in her second year as a detective and keen to prove herself, not least because Madeleine Greenhill is the only daughter of Hera City’s most feared woman, the matriarch Misericordiae ‘Misery’ Greenhill.
  Struggling to compensate for her inexperience and lack of self-confidence, Genie initially finds herself grasping after shadows in Hera City’s labyrinth. Surviving an assassin’s attempted hit has the perverse effect of steadying Genie’s nerves, however, not least because it tips her off that Maddy Greenhill’s death was not a straightforward tragedy of a young woman in the wrong place at the wrong time, but a more sinister affair engineered by a powerful cabal with secrets to hide.
  It’s an intriguing set-up, and Genie makes for a very charming narrator. The book’s cover blurb suggests that we can anticipate ‘Sam Spade in lipstick and a dress’ but Genie, by her own admission an extremely petite example of a HCPD detective, is a much more vulnerable and sensitive character than Dashiell Hammett’s Spade or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, both of whom are strong influences on her hardboiled patter.
  Indeed, McManus and Genie establish their hardboiled credentials early in the story, as Genie leaves the Greenhill mansion after informing Misery of her daughter’s murder. “I drove straight home,” Genie tells us, “listening to a jazz station on the car radio. Sure, it’s a cliché – the wiped-out cop, in the middle of the night, driving through the dark streets with clarinets and cymbals in her ears, a smoke in her mouth and a fresh murder on her hands. All it was missing was the rain. But hey, I never said I was original. Besides, I’m a sucker for the classic stuff.”
  That ‘classic stuff’ extends to the way in which The Polka Dot Girl mirrors the narrative arc of much of hardboiled detective fiction, as Genie pulls on the thread of a street-level murder only to find that the unravelling runs all the way up to the highest echelons of society, laying bare its greed, corruption and immorality.
  This, despite the quirky setting of Hera City, is familiar territory for the crime fiction aficionado, and if you’re willing to buy into Genie’s knowing self-awareness of her place in crime writing mythology, then The Polka Dot Girl is an enjoyably offbeat take on the post-modern mystery novel. It’s overtly old-fashioned, and not only in the way it taps into the roots of the contemporary hardboiled crime genre. McManus litters the story with references to classical Greek tragedy and mythology: the obligatory femme fatale is called Cassandra, while geographical locations are given names such as Pasiphaë Prospect and Hecate Point. At the heart of the tale lies a religious cult which worships the moon goddess and appears to be derived from the Eleusinian Mysteries of Ancient Greece, a cult in which only women were indoctrinated.
  It all makes for very pleasant meta-fiction cross-pollination, but what Darragh McManus is trying to achieve with his plethora of classical references and his women-only city is never made explicit. Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky are probably the best known of the authors who have adapted the hardboiled private detective voice, and created feminist heroines who take on men – and more importantly, perhaps, a historically male-dominated genre – to succeed on their own terms. McManus adapts the same tone – albeit one that’s painfully self-aware of its fictional history – to a woman-only narrative, but Genie’s investigation of the prevailing culture ultimately reveals that the female of the species is no more or less deadly than the male. Meanwhile, and despite the unique setting, the patriarchal origins of the language remain the same: the detectives are still known as ‘Dicks’, a prostitute’s client remains a ‘John’. A crucial plot-point requires a prostitute to be beaten almost to death by a group of (female) clients, only to find herself somehow pregnant when she emerges from the subsequent coma.
  It’s arguable that McManus, who has a palpable affection for the tropes of the classic hardboiled novel, is simply retaining the linguistic conventions – fans of Black Mask-era pulp fiction, for example, will be delighted to find a hired killer referred to as a ‘gunsel’. It’s also true that McManus, in his career to date, has been more engaged with playing with the genre’s tropes than reinventing the wheel – his debut Cold! Steel!! Justice!!! (2010), published under the pseudonym Alexander O’Hara, was a spoof of Mickey Spillane-style masculinity, while Even Flow (2012) featured a trio of vigilantes waging war on society’s homophobes and misogynists.
  All told, there’s a nagging sense throughout that McManus has missed a trick by not recalibrating his narrator’s voice and language in order to make the most of Hera City’s unique setting. That said, The Polka Dot Girl is a very interesting addition to the growing canon of Irish crime writing which confirms Darragh McManus’s promise. - Declan Burke

Craic In The USSR

I had an interview with William Ryan published in the Irish Examiner last weekend, to mark the publication of his third Alexei Korolev novel, THE TWELFTH DEPARTMENT (Mantle). It opened up like this:

Of all the writers in the new wave of Irish crime fiction, William Ryan has a strong claim on offering the most interesting setting. THE TWELFTH DEPARTMENT is the third novel in a series featuring Captain Alexei Korolev, a police detective operating in Moscow during the 1930s, a period dominated by Stalin and overshadowed by the Great Terror.
  “Crime fiction is all about truth and justice and morality, and these are all things that were manipulated in the Soviet Union,” says Ryan. “They didn’t necessarily mean what you thought they meant. Back then they had the concept of ‘bourgeoisie morality’ – you know, what we now consider to be a valid morality would have been frowned upon in Stalin’s Russia. Right and wrong were all subordinate to the political will. So when you have a detective who is basically looking for truth and justice, these are things that don’t really exist in the way we understand them.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Ka-Bloom!

It’s Bloomsday today, as you probably know, that one day in the year when everyone cheerfully admits to being unable to read ULYSSES, although they quite like DUBLINERS, and as for FINNEGANS WAKE, well, it’s mad, Ted, and if the man couldn’t be bothered punctuating his own titles, why should I waste my time reading it, etc.
  So happy Bloomsday, folks, and enjoy your grilled kidneys. For those of you interested in Chief Justice Adrian Hardiman’s take on why ULYSSES has a murder mystery at its heart, clickety-click here …
  As always, my favourite bit about Bloomsday is the opportunity to run, yet again, Donald Clarke’s masterful short movie, aka “Pitch ‘n’ Putt with Beckett and Joyce”. Roll it there, Collette …

Always Apologise, Always Explain

Off with yours truly today to interview Jonathan Dee, author of A THOUSAND PARDONS (Corsair), and I’m hugely looking forward to it (Dee is also the author of THE PRIVILEGES, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011). I read A THOUSAND PARDONS last week in what was essentially two stretches – it’s a deliciously readable novel, an intimate epic of familial breakdown that read to me like Jonathan Franzen’s FREEDOM should have. Quoth the blurb elves:

Ben and Helen Armstead have reached breaking point. Once a privileged and loving couple, widely envied and respected, it takes just one afternoon - and a single act of recklessness - for Ben to deal the final blow to their marriage, spectacularly demolishing everything they built together. Separated from her husband, Helen and her teenage daughter Sara leave their family home for Manhattan, where Helen must build a new life for them both. Thrust back into the working world, Helen takes a job in PR - her first in many years - and discovers she has a rare gift: she can convince arrogant men to admit their mistakes, spinning crises into second chances. Faced with the fallout from her own marriage, and her daughter’s increasingly distant behaviour, Helen finds that the capacity for forgiveness she nurtures so successfully in her professional life is far harder to apply to her personal one. A THOUSAND PARDONS is an elegant, audacious, gripping and sharply observed novel about a marriage in ruins and a family in crisis; about the limits of self-invention and the seduction of self-destruction.

  Jonathan Dee will be appearing at the Dalkey Book Festival on Sunday, June 16th. For all the details, clickety-click here …

The Best Things In Life Are Free Books: IRREGULARS by Kevin McCarthy

I was very impressed with Kevin McCarthy’s debut offering, PEELERS, and I’m delighted to be giving away a copy of Kevin’s new novel, IRREGULARS (New Island), to one lucky reader. First the blurb elves:

Dublin, 1922, as civil war sets brother against brother and Free State and Republican death squads stalk the streets and back lanes of Dublin, demobbed RIC-man, Sean O’Keefe, takes a break from life as a whiskey-soaked waster to search for the missing son of one of Monto’s most powerful brothel owners.
  Hired to find the boy amid the tumult and terror of a country at war with itself O’Keefe soon finds that the story is not as simple as it first seemed and that the truth can be hard to pin down.
  The second book in the O’Keefe series, IRREGULARS explores a fascinating and complex period of Irish history.

  Ken Bruen likes it, by the way:

“IRREGULARS is astounding. Kevin McCarthy is doing for Irish history what Dennis Lehane is doing for the history of Boston. Wonderfully written, tense, provocative and oh so highly entertaining. Shaping up to be THE SERIES of accessible Irish history. Cries out to be filmed.” – Ken Bruen

  To be in with a chance of winning a copy of IRREGULARS, just email me at dbrodb[at]gmail.com, putting ‘Irregulars’ in the subject line and – most important, folks – your postal address in the body text. The offer ends at noon on Saturday, June 15th. Et bon chance, mes amis …

Leave It To Deaver

Jeffrey Deaver is currently touring his new novel, THE KILL ROOM, which is the latest Lincoln Rhyme offering. As part of his tour he’ll be in Ireland on June 25th, for what sounds like a fascinating addition to the DLR Library Voices series, in which he’ll be talking with John Connolly. The details:

DLR Library Voices Series at the Pavilion Theatre
Tuesday 25 June, 8pm
Tickets €10/8

Jeffrey Deaver is the creator of the critically-acclaimed Lincoln Rhyme series and the award-winning author of 29 internationally bestselling thrillers, including the recent James Bond novel CARTE BLANCHE. In THE KILL ROOM, brilliant criminologist and quadriplegic Lincoln Rhyme returns to investigate the state-sanctioned killing of a US citizen who is suspected of planning a terrorist attack on a US oil company. Deaver’s trademark suspense, richly developed characters and left-field plot twists mark him out as the consummate thriller writer. Don’t miss this rare chance to hear one of the world’s most successful thriller-writers talking about his work with Ireland’s leading crime writer, John Connolly.

  For all the details, including how to book tickets, clickety-click here ...

The Growth Economy

Journalist and non-fiction author Michael Clifford made his crime fiction debut last year with GHOST TOWN, and a very fine piece of work it was too. He returns this year with THE DEAL (Hachette Ireland), with the blurb elves wibbling thusly:

Karen Riney is a young woman desperate to put bad memories behind her and get back on her feet when she hits upon an idea to make fast money. In the depths of a recession, there’s no business like the grow house business. But getting her venture off the ground requires some assistance. Enter Paschal Nix, a Dublin crime lord with a fearsome reputation. Nix provides more than money for the deal by throwing in the services of out-of-work builder Kevin Wyman, who is up to his ears in hoc to Nix and grappling with serious personal problems. He also dispatches hitman-for-hire Dara Burns to keep an eye on the investment, a man who’s fiercely guarding his back in a world where life is cheap. All have their eyes on one prize: a quick killing. But as Karen Riney soon learns, when you’re in over your head, there’s no such thing as easy money. THE DEAL is a gripping, blind-siding tale of greed, revenge and the price of survival.

  I’ve yet to see a copy, but I’m reliably informed that THE DEAL is in the shops as we speak. If it’s on a par with GHOST TOWN, it will be one of the best Irish crime novels of the year.

The Book Of Book Things

John Connolly appeared at No Alibis bookstore in Belfast last week, to launch the limited hardbound cloth edition of his latest offering, the novella THE WANDERER IN UNKNOWN REALMS (Hodder & Stoughton). Quoth the blurb elves:

Soter, a Great War veteran with no past he wants to remember, takes the occasional assignment from the London barrister Quayle. His new task is to find Lionel Maulding, a wealthy bachelor with only one distinctive attribute: a passionate, almost obsessive love of books.
  Visiting Maulding’s country home, Soter finds rooms and rooms of books, but strange and frightening things as well. Wherever Maulding has gone, Soter realizes, it had to do with the hunt for one specific book, a book with powers Soter cannot even imagine. Where Soter’s quest converges with Maulding’s, entire worlds may be revealed and changed.
  THE WANDERER IN UNKNOWN REALMS is a story in the tradition of M.R. James and Dickens, full of horrors and wonders and illustrated beautifully by Emily Hall. It will be available in early June in a limited hardcover edition, signed by author and illustrator.

  To order your copy, drop a line to David Torrans at No Alibis here. Alternatively, the book is available as a Kindle Single here …

Out Of The Past

Brendan John Sweeney launches his debut novel, ONCE IN ANOTHER WORLD (New Island), at Hodges Figgis in Dublin at 6.30pm on Monday, June 10th. Quoth the blurb elves:

Dublin, March 1937. Holland, an idealistic young IRA recruit, is offered a strange assignment. He is told to guard and spy on a sinister Hungarian businessman and Sabine his secretary – a Jewish refugee.
  The mission tests Holland’s loyalties and his idealism to the utmost and ends with a sordid shooting match in a field in England. Holland finds himself fleeing with Sabine into the depths of the Irish countryside, where treacherous swamps and dense woods protect them from their pursuers. An intense love affair between two young people from vastly different worlds suddenly becomes possible.
  But Holland’s closest friend in the Movement knows his mind too well, and seeks him out, leading to a confrontation as fateful and tragic as any Irish myth.

  I’ve been struck lately by the number of Irish writers who are writing historical crime fiction. Apart from Brendan John Sweeney, we’ve had in the last year or so Michael Russell (THE CITY OF SHADOWS), Kevin McCarthy (IRREGULARS), Benjamin Black (HOLY ORDERS), William Ryan (THE TWELFTH DEPARTMENT), Joe Joyce (ECHOLAND), Adrian McKinty (I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET), Patrick McGinley (COLD SPRING), Conor Brady (A JUNE OF ORDINARY MURDERS) and Stuart Neville (RATLINES) – and of course, the doyenne of them all, Cora Harrison (LAWS IN CONFLICT).
  I’m not sure what that means, or if it needs to mean anything, but there may well be a PhD in it for anyone who can figure out (or invent a plausible enough reason) as to why so many Irish crime novelists are delving into the past for inspiration.

Black Ops

It took me a couple of books before I began warming to the Benjamin Black novels, but at this point it feels like John Banville has grown into the persona of his crime-writing alter-ego Benny Blanco and – whisper it – may even be enjoying the process. I reviewed the latest Benjamin Black novel, HOLY ORDERS (Mantle), as part of the latest crime fiction column in the Irish Times, which also includes Sara Paretsky’s BREAKDOWN, Benjamin Tammuz’s MINOTAUR and Marco Vichi’s DEATH IN FLORENCE. For more, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, if you’re in Dublin city next Wednesday evening, June 12th, John Banville / Benjamin Black will be taking part in a Q&A with Olivia O’Leary at the Smock Alley Theatre. To wit:

Writers at Smock Alley – John Banville as Benjamin Black in conversation with Olivia O’Leary
Venue: The Smock Alley Theatre
Date: Wednesday 12th June – 6pm until 7pm

The Gutter Bookshop are delighted to announce the second event in a new series of author events with their neighbours, the Smock Alley Theatre 1662. Join them in this beautiful and unique theatre to meet bestselling Irish novelist John Banville who will be discussing his new Benjamin Black crime novel Holy Orders with journalist and broadcaster Olivia O’Leary, as well as the new Quirke television series, and the film version of his Booker Prize winning book The Sea. A book signing will take place after the event.

Tickets cost €5 and available from Smock Alley Theatre (01 6770014) or the Gutter Bookshop (01 6799206).

Life’s A Riot With Spy vs Spy

Suddenly it’s all about the spies in Irish crime writing. Last year we had Stuart Neville’s RATLINES, Joseph Hone’s GOODBYE AGAIN and Michael Russell’s THE CITY OF SHADOWS; this year we’ve had Kevin Brophy’s ANOTHER KIND OF COUNTRY, and we’re looking forward to Brendan John Sweeney’s ONCE IN ANOTHER WORLD and Joe Joyce’s ECHOLAND.
  Joe Joyce has previously published two very well received crime novels, and ECHOLAND (Liberties Press), which will be published in August, sounds like it could be a cracker. Quoth the blurb elves:

Joe Joyce’s ECHOLAND portrays a nervous and divided Dublin. Some see Britain as an ally, others look to Germany for a hopeful future, while some wish to remain as neutral as possible. In this atmosphere of edgy uncertainty, a young lieutenant, Paul Duggan, is drafted into the army’s intelligence division, G2, and put on the German desk. Paul delves into the double-dealing worlds of spies and politics, where ruthlessness, deviousness and occasional violence prevail, before confronting a surprising secret that challenges everything he has grown up believing.

On Keeping It Real

Paul Lynch (RED SKY IN MORNING), Gavin Corbett (THIS IS THE WAY) and journalist / literary scout Sinead Gleeson discuss ‘The Real Story: The Challenges Facing New Authors and the Myths Surrounding Book Deals’ at the Irish Writers’ Centre on June 18. Should be a good session: Paul Lynch’s novel is a terrific debut, while Gavin Corbett won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year last week. For all the details, clickety-click here …

The Best Things In Life Are Free Books: GRAVELAND by Alan Glynn

I was very impressed by Alan Glynn’s GRAVELAND, the third of a loose trilogy that also includes WINTERLAND and BLOODLAND – although I think that as good as those books were, GRAVELAND represents another step up in class. I’m delighted to host a competition giveaway for three copies of GRAVELAND, but first the blurb elves:

A Wall Street investment banker is shot dead while jogging in Central Park. Later that night, one of the savviest hedge-fund managers in the city is gunned down outside a fancy Upper West Side restaurant. Are these killings part of a coordinated terrorist attack, or just coincidence? Investigative journalist Ellen Dorsey has a hunch that it’s neither. Days later, when an attempt is made on the life of another CEO, the story blows wide open...
  Racing to stay ahead of the curve, Ellen encounters Frank Bishop, a recession-hit architect, whose daughter has gone missing. The search for Lizzie and her boyfriend takes Frank and Ellen from a quiet campus to the blazing spotlight of a national media storm - and into the devastating crucible of a personal and a public tragedy.
  Meanwhile, lurking in the shadows once again is James Vaughn, legendary CEO of private equity firm the Oberon Capital Group. Despite his failing health, Vaughan is refusing to give up control easily, and we soon see just how far-reaching and pervasive his influence really is.
  Set deep in the place where corrupt global business and radical politics clash, Alan Glynn’s GRAVELAND is an explosive and hugely topical thriller.

  To be in with a chance of winning a copy of GRAVELAND, just email me at dbrodb[at]gmail.com, putting ‘Alan Glynn’ in the subject line and – very important, folks – a postal address to which we can send you the book. The competition closes at noon on Saturday, June 8th. Et bon chance, mes amis …

Crimefest 2013

Caveat emptor, as they say. There were no criminals on the stage, to the best of my knowledge, for the ‘Criminal Mastermind’ quiz on Sunday at Crimefest, and on the evidence produced by the question-and-answer session hosted by Barry Forshaw, there were precious few masterminds either. I took part (I use the phrase in its loosest possible meaning, and thanks to Ali Karim, who took this picture of yours truly about two seconds after I’d heard that Peter Rozovsky had compiled the questions for my ‘specialist subject’) with fellow victims, sorry, authors Peter Guttridge, Susan Moody and Matt Hilton, with my specialist subject being Irish crime fiction. Things went downhill even before the event began, when I learned that my questions had been compiled by Peter Rozovsky, who shall henceforth be known as ‘Et Tu Rozovsky’. I’ll draw a veil over how well (or badly) I fared on my ‘specialist’ subject. Suffice to say that I did not win the ‘Criminal Mastermind’ crown, which went, for the second year, to Peter Guttridge.
  For those of you interested in testing yourself against Et Tu Rozovsky’s questions, he has kindly provided the full list here. I got four right out of eleven questions asked, by the way …
  I was also shortlisted (or co-shortlisted) for two awards during the Crimefest weekend, for SLAUGHTER’S HOUND and – along with John Connolly and Clair Lamb, for BOOKS TO DIE FOR – and was conspicuously unsuccessful there too. Which should be disappointing, but in fact wasn’t – both shortlists were very strong, and you can’t win ’em all. Hearty congratulations, then, to Ruth Dudley Edwards, who won the Goldsboro Last Laugh gong for KILLING THE EMPERORS; and to Barry Forshaw, whose BRITISH CRIME WRITING: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA won the HRF Keating Award for Best Non-Fiction.
  All told, I had an absolute ball at this year’s Crimefest, which seemed to me to be the best to date. Yes, there are panels to attend, and awards to be competed for, but Crimefest is fundamentally about people for me, and I got to spend time with some terrific folk. I won’t list them all, because we’d be here all day, but I would like to say well done and congratulations, yet again, to Miles, Adrian and Donna for a brilliant weekend.
  Roll on Crimefest 2014 …

Angels In The Architecture, Spinning In Infinity

Some books, like some people, just click with you. Such was the case with Jon Steele’s debut, THE WATCHERS, which was in my not-always-humble opinion one of the best novels of 2011. To wit:

“Reads like ‘Paradise Lost’ by way of John Connolly, although Steele, formerly a war reporter, brings hard-edged modernity to this timeless tale as he roots his depiction of evil in the contemporary world. Clever, stylish and epic in scale, it’s a tremendously satisfying debut.” -- Irish Times

  The sequel, and the second in what is now ‘the Angelus Trilogy’, is ANGEL CITY (Bantam). Quoth the blurb elves:

Jay Harper, one of the last ‘angels’ on Planet Earth, is hunting down the half-breeds and goons who infected Paradise with evil. Intercepting a plot to turn half of Paris into a dead zone, Harper ends up on the wrong side of the law and finds himself a wanted man. That doesn’t stop his commander, Inspector Gobet of the Swiss Police, from sending him back to Paris on a recon mission ... a mission that uncovers a truth buried in the Book of Enoch.
  Katherine Taylor and her two year old son Max are living in a small town in the American Northwest. It’s a quiet life. She runs a candle shop and spends her afternoons drinking herbal teas, imagining a crooked little man in the belfry of Lausanne Cathedral, a man who believed Lausanne was a hideout for lost angels. And there was someone else, someone she can’t quite remember ... as if he was there, and not there at the same time.
  A man with a disfigured face emerges from the shadows. His name is Astruc, he’s obsessed with the immortal souls of men. Like a voice crying in the wilderness, he warns the time of The Prophecy is at hand ... a prophecy that calls for the sacrifice of the child born of light …

  My advice, for what it’s worth, is to read THE WATCHERS sometime in the next month or so, and then dive straight into ANGEL CITY. If it’s a rollicking good read you’re after, you won’t be disappointed.

And So To Bristol

If I’m perfectly honest about it, the only reason I go to Crimefest in Bristol is to meet the fabulous Donna Moore (right). She can be a bit of a recluse, Donna, and doesn’t venture outside her front door very often – the occasional gig, a rare excursion to buy shoes, the opening of an envelope, that kind of thing.
  Anyway, I’m off again to see Donna (and do the whole Bristol Crimefest thing) again this year, and I’m hugely looking forward to it. I’m taking part in a discussion called ‘Making Us Laugh About Murder’ on Friday afternoon, alongside Ruth Dudley Edwards, Colin Cotterill, Dorothy Cannell and moderator Lindsey Davis; and on Saturday afternoon I’ll be hosting a discussion on ‘Books to Die For’, featuring contributors to the BOOKS TO DIE FOR tome Barbara Nadel, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Colin Bateman and Brian McGilloway.
  On Saturday night, there’s the Gala Dinner and Awards Presentation, at which I hope to be seated beside Peter Rozovsky, because he’s the only one who can stop me throwing my broccoli out of my high chair. BOOKS TO DIE FOR is up for an award on Saturday night, along with some very fine books indeed; and SLAUGHTER’S HOUND has been shortlisted for the Goldsboro ‘Last Laugh’ gong, an award I was lucky enough to win last year (at least, I’m pretty sure I did – it might well have been a particularly vivid fever-dream).
  Apart from the various events, panels and official events, though, the best part of the weekend is catching up with people you tend not to see from one end of the year to the other. Much coffee will be consumed, and perhaps a glass of sherry or two, and quite a bit of hot air generated. Even the weather is promised fine. Should be a cracker. For the full Crimefest programme, clickety-click here ...

Lock Up Your Stained-Glass Windows

It isn’t due until March 2014, unfortunately, but I’m already looking forward to THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE (Henry Holt) by Benjamin Black, aka John Banville, writing in the style of Raymond Chandler about Philip Marlowe. Confused? Well, if Black / Banville adopts Chandler’s haphazard approach to plotting, there’s a very good chance you will be. There’s precious little information available about said plot so far, but as soon as we hear you’ll be the first to know …

Review: PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR: AN ADVENTURE by Artemis Cooper

If Artemis Cooper’s book was a novel rather than a biography, you’d never believe the story.
  Born in London in 1915, Patrick Leigh Fermor - Paddy to family and his legions of friends - was arguably the greatest travel writer working in the English language in the 20th century. Insatiably curious about other cultures, his ornately elegant writing style reflected his fascination with languages, and particularly their etymology. Fluent as a speaker and reader in eight languages, Fermor was a cultural magpie, delighting in the shiny, the rare and the unique.
  But Paddy Fermor was no donnish wordsmith. He was a decorated war hero for orchestrating the abduction of a German general from the island of Crete in 1944. He took part in the last cavalry charge to take place on the European mainland. A renowned ladies’ man, he had a prolonged affair with a Hungarian countess, and yet, craving solitude, was often to be found holed up in remote monasteries. He wrote a novel as well as his travel books, found himself the subject of a blood feud vendetta on Crete, swam the Bosphorus in his sixties as a homage to Lord Byron, and lived the life of the renaissance man to the full.
  When he died last year Paddy Fermor was mourned equally in England and Greece, although the most common reaction to the news of his death was, ‘Has he finished the third volume?’
  Born into a reasonably prosperous middleclass family, Paddy was expected to achieve a respectable education and become an engineer, lawyer or doctor. Instead the young boy found himself expelled from a number of schools, as his fizzing imagination and irrepressible spirit refused to conform to rules and regulations. A magnet for trouble, he was a sponge for poetry and literature, for history, geography and philosophy. At the age of 18, living a dissolute ‘miniature Rake’s Progress’ in London as he waited to join the army at Sandhurst, he was struck by a fantastic notion: he would walk across Europe, from England all the way to his beloved Greece.
  Setting out in December 1933, Fermor tramped across the continent against a backdrop of rising Fascism, walking through Holland and Germany, down through Hungary and Romania, and on through the Balkans to Constantinople. In the first book recounting his travels, A Time of Gifts (1977), Paddy tells how he would sleep in a hayrick one night, a castle the next, as he marched from Holland to Hungary. The second instalment, Between the Woods and the Water (1986), follows on as Paddy walks deep into the Balkans, and the third instalment - well, we wait still.
  Long before A Time of Gifts was published, however, Fermor had established himself as the pre-eminent travel writer of his generation, with his debut The Traveller’s Tree (1950) an insightful account of Caribbean cultures, and the twinned Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966) both fabulous accounts of life in the Greek Peloponnese. His feeling for the Greek character was honed by his wartime experiences as a SOE operative, when he parachuted onto Crete and spent years behind German lines liaising with the local resistance groups, or andartes, an experience that culminated in the storied account of how Paddy led the abduction of General Kreipe in 1944, at the time a propaganda coup for the Allies. Dirk Bogarde played Paddy in the film made about the abduction, Ill Met By Moonlight (1957).
  Artemis Cooper is a family friend of Paddy Fermor, and knew him as a young girl. If the book reads in large parts as a breathless Boy’s Own adventure tale - indeed, it is subtitled ‘An Adventure’ - she can hardly be faulted, given the extent to which Fermor spent his life constantly in search of the next challenge, the next curiosity. By the same token, the book is more biography than it is hagiography. The fabled account of how Fermor took part in the last cavalry charge on European soil, for example, is here presented more as a story about how a precocious teenager took advantage of his gracious host while in Hungary, and stole a horse so that he could gallop along at the ragtag end of the charge. Fermor’s womanising is not glossed over, and neither are the consequences, particularly in terms of how it impacted on his long-suffering life partner, the Honourable Joan Rayner (there’s also an extensive quote from a funny but revolting letter from Fermor about the latest invasion of pubic lice).
  Cooper also digs into the legend of Fermor’s time on Crete, raising questions about the practicality of the famous abduction of General Kreipe, especially given the German penchant for ruthless reprisals against the Cretan population. She also details how Fermor wasn’t universally revered among the Cretans, due to the fact that he had accidentally shot and killed one of the andartes during the war. On a return visit long after the war, she writes, Paddy would be received with great celebration in a village, while those who maintained the blood vendetta waited beyond the village borders, guns cocked.
  The man who emerges from the pages of Cooper’s biography is without doubt a fascinating one, a flawed, brilliant throwback to the warrior poets of yore, a man of letters and a man of action. It’s a page-turning story right to the end, although it’s arguable that Fermor is such a ripe figure for biography, his life so dense with incident and adventure, with contrast and contradiction, that simply listing the bewildering number of his various accomplishments soaks up all Cooper’s time and effort. Beautifully researched, particularly in terms of the way Cooper points up the discrepancies between Fermor’s actual experiences and the poetic way in which he renders his memories, this biography is a solid addition to the canon of work which exists on Fermor. It may not provide very much in the way of startling new revelations for Fermor fans, but it’s an outstanding introduction to the man’s life and writing for those who have yet to make his acquaintance. – Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.