Funky Friday’s Freaky-Deak

It’s Friday, it’s funky, to wit: a few interviews to kick off, first with CONFESSIONS OF A FALLEN ANGEL’s Ronan O’Brien (right) at his interweb thingagummy, and also with PROCESSION OF THE DEAD scribe DB Shan over at Indie London. Oh, and Declan Hughes is yakking it up with Dana King at the New Mystery Reader: “THE GALTON CASE stands out for me,” says Dec, “it’s about patrimony and personal reinvention and the American dream: it’s THE GREAT GATSBY of crime fiction.” A certain J. Kingston Pierce might well agree … Staying with Dec Hughes: he and John Connolly are appearing at Belfast’s premier crime fiction outlet, No Alibis, on May 9, if Gerard Brennan at CSNI is to be believed – which isn’t always the case, sadly. Meanwhile, and still riffing on a Norn Iron theme, Verbal Magazine is giving away free copies of Sam Millar’s BLOODSTORM, while Irish crime fiction’s newest very best friend, Alex Meehan of the Sunday Business Post, interviews The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman ... Garbhan Downey gets interviewed on BBC Norn Iron about his new book, CONFIDENTIALLY YOURS, three signed copies of which we’ve already got our grubby little mitts on and will be releasing into the wild via a giveaway comp in the very near future … Via Detectives Beyond Borders comes the news that the doyenne of the Carnival of the Criminal Minds, Barbara Fister, has deigned to offer her favourite crime fiction blogs for your perusal … Some spoofing chancer called Declan Burke talks about the writing life he used to have before the arrival of Princess Lilyput over At Central Booking … Over in Berkshire, some speccy pipsqueak called Potter narrowly pipsqueaked Derek Landy’s SKULDUGGERY PLEASANT in the Berkshire Children’s Book Award. If you ask us, yon Potter is 'playing with fire'. See what we just did there? … Brian McGilloway used to write guest blogs for Crime Always Pays, but he’s gone upmarket now and is currently guesting on It’s A Crime, the cad. Was it us, Brian? Was it something we said, or didn’t say? Just give us one more opportunity to put things right, we can change … David Thompson of Busted Flush very kindly gets in touch to let us know there’s a free download of Bill Crider’s Edgar Award-nominated short story, ‘Crank’, taken from BF’s DAMN NEAR DEAD compilation, available just about here … Finally, Andrew Taylor did more than enough to convince us of his Irish connections to qualify for Crime Always Pays: here (or just below, to be pedantic about it) be the booktrailer for his latest novel, BLEEDING HEART SQUARE, which may or may not be about some geeky pinko commie liberal. Not, probably. Roll it there, Collette …