Nobody Move, This Is A Review: ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS by William Boyd

A chance meeting in a London restaurant gives climatologist Adam Kindred the opportunity to become a Good Samaritan, when his distracted new acquaintance, Dr Wang, leaves his briefcase behind. On delivering the briefcase, however, Adam discovers Dr Wang knifed and dying. Moments later he is running for his life; within hours, pursued by Dr Wang’s killer, he is the subject of a nation-wide manhunt and embroiled in the corruption behind a multi-billion dollar scandal.
  William Boyd is a much-decorated writer, winning the Whitbread Award in 1981 for ‘A Good Man in Africa’, and the Costa Award in 2006 for ‘Restless’, along with numerous other prizes, and securing a pair of shortlist nominations for Booker and IMPAC for ‘An Ice-Cream War’ and ‘Any Human Heart’, respectively. A prolific screenwriter and film director, he has always maintained a sharp distinction between his film work and that of his novels, but ‘Ordinary Thunderstorms’ offers a propulsive, cinematic narrative. Certainly the novel, despite its deceptively sedate pace, has the page-turning quality of a genre novel, which suggests that Boyd was aiming yet again for crossover appeal – ‘Restless’, for example, bore all the hallmarks of the spy thriller.
  To the crime fiction fan, and particularly those familiar with the work of David Goodis and Gil Brewer, Adam Kindred’s plight will be a familiar one. Intelligent, urbane and highly educated, he nevertheless finds himself skulking in the shadows and reduced to a primitive quality of living as, in a desperate bid to render himself anonymous, he foregoes the props of contemporary life – credit cards, mobile phones, cash, etc. – to live rough in the very heart of London. The theme touches on the alienation intrinsic to the modern city, of our inability, whether willing or not, to successfully interact with those around us. Boyd’s protagonists invariably explore how a quintessential Englishness contends with an unfamiliar landscape, be that Africa, Los Angeles or the Philippines, but here the homeless Kindred (the name is ironically instructive) is a stranger in a land that should not be strange at all, and is yet utterly, and horrifyingly, foreign.
  Kindred’s exploration of his underground world is fascinating in itself, but Boyd surrounds him with a host of characters, some malevolent, others benign, most simply thoughtlessly callous in their own pursuit of whatever it will take to make it through the day. As the characters gradually flesh out, there is a suspicion that Boyd is simply toying with the genre tropes, as a policewoman, a company CEO, a prostitute, a lord and a killer-for-hire all emerge to engage with Kindred on some level. But even the minor characters get their full due here, and some of the main players, such as the prostitute who drugs her son with a ‘happy-mix’ of rum and pills before going out on the game for the night, are simply heart-breaking.
  The style is equally pleasing. There are few of the conventional cliff-hanger endings to chapters, and Boyd’s prose is for the most part resolutely deadpan, eschewing tension-building pyrotechnics for a faith in his readers’ ability to empathise with his characters. He does, on occasion, digress into purple prose, which can be irritating, especially when offered by characters who wouldn’t have access to such language, such as an illiterate prostitute or an ex-solider hitman, but these are few and forgivable lapses, as are the occasional deus ex machina plot-twists that rely too heavily on coincidence.
  Those caveats aside, ‘Ordinary Thunderstorms’ is a powerful, brooding novel of ideas with the compulsive readability of a straightforward thriller. Sturm und Drang, indeed. - Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Sunday Business Post

All Of These Kids Are Doing Their Own Thing

Funny how these kinds of things come in clusters. This week, friends and family are bustin’ out all over with creative stuff – the pic above is swiped from Niall Fennessy’s new blog, The Life in My Days, which details his work as a wedding photographer. He’s won awards for other kinds of photography too – well worth checking out.
  And while we’re on the subject of photography, my sister, Kathy, is no mean snapper too. To wit:


  Leaving the photos behind, it’s on to writing – long a friend of this blog, and a good friend of yours truly, Claire Coughlan graduates from the UCD MA Writing Class of 2009 this week, and the class is marking the occasion with the publication of A CURIOUS IMPULSE. The official launch takes place at 5.30pm on Wednesday, October 7th, with a wine reception at the Clarence Hotel (there’s posh). The authors include Claire, Susan Stairs, Jennifer McGrath, Jamie O’Connell, and the delightfully named Mariad Whisker. “The stories, poems and memoirs in this volume display uniformly an impressive maturity of insight and control of language,” says Kevin Power, author of the rather fine BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, while author James Ryan will be doing the introduction honours. All are welcome, folks …

  Shay Bagnall, another mate, is also a writer – his first novel, a crime tome, has attracted an agent, and is currently out under consideration – but his contribution above is as a combo ukulele / movie-maker genius. Not sure what THE BIG O is doing in there lurking in the background, but roll it there anyway, Collette ...
  Finally, and speaking of THE BIG O, my brother Gavin (right) has finally succumbed to the Dark Side (aka script-writing) and yesterday submitted to the Irish Film Board the script he has adapted from THE BIG O. Polite mutterings of approval have been heard emanating from the IFB in the wake of exploratory submissions, so you never know … Keep your fingers crossed, people – Lily needs new shoes. No, seriously she’s already outgrown her first proper pair of shoes. Looks like a weekend’s overtime down the salt-mines beckons for yours truly …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Stuart Neville

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?
AMERICAN TABLOID by James Ellroy. It’s just the sheer scale of the thing, the ambition of it. It’s a tie for my favourite novel of all time with Tom Wolfe’s BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I collect old movie novelisations. The cinema in Armagh closed when I was a kid, so the only way I could experience things like ET or Raiders of the Lost Ark was by reading them in book form. Even today, I search charity shops for hidden gems. Some novelisations are very good (Poltergeist by James Kahn, Fort Apache: The Bronx by Heywood Gould) and some of them are bloody awful. Freebie and the Bean, for instance, is possibly the worst book ever written. While the source material for that was pretty poor, the novelisation of Dirty Harry had a great story to work from, and it was still bloody awful.

Most satisfying writing moment?
The first time I actually managed to type the last words of a full honest-to-God novel. It didn’t matter that it turned out to be not very good; I had proven that I could actually climb that mountain, and that was a huge step forward psychologically.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I think I’d have to say Bateman’s DIVORCING JACK, simply because he blazed a trail for Northern Irish crime writers.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I recently read Gerard Brennan’s THE WEE ROCKETS. I think it’d make a really good TV serial with its urban setting and big cast of characters.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is that panicky feeling when you’ve invested a huge chunk of your life in something and you don’t know if it was any good or not. Conversely, the best thing is finding out you hadn’t wasted your time after all, and someone thinks it’s worth reading. The second best thing was a couple of days ago when a pretty checkout girl in the supermarket asked me in a hushed tone if I was “that author from the papers”. That was pretty good.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Belfast cop Jack Lennon starts digging into an apparent Republican feud when he realises his former lover Marie McKenna and their daughter Ellen were somehow involved and are now missing. As he delves deeper he discovers it might not have been the feud the authorities claimed, but when he challenges his superiors, he is told to leave it alone. When someone starts picking off survivors of the feud, Lennon knows he must act.

Who are you reading right now?
I’m reading AFTERMATH by Ruth Dudley Edwards. It’s an account of the Omagh bombing, and how the families of the victims fought for justice through the civil courts when the criminal system let them down. Some of it is so harrowing it’s very painful to read, and I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been to write. I’ll be on a panel with Ruth at this year’s Bouchercon inIndianapolis, which will be interesting.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
This is kind of a Catch 22; I couldn’t write if I didn’t read, so I think I’d have to choose the egg over the chicken. Or something.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Hard, fast, brutal.

Stuart Neville’s THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST is published in the U.S. by Soho Crime

In The Name Of The Father

Rosita Boland had a rather poignant interview with John Connolly (right) in yesterday’s Irish Times to mark the publication of THE GATES, in which Connolly touched on the death of his father, and how the loss has impacted on his writing. To wit:

When Connolly left Dublin Corporation to study English at Trinity College, he had money in the bank, and a renewed vigour for education. On a summer student job in the US soon after, he called home one evening from New York and discovered his father had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He flew home the next day, and his father died soon afterwards. The cancer he died from has since become a recurrent symbolic motif in Connolly’s work: people’s bodies being horribly consumed by something they cannot control. “I think because of what happened to my father and the way he died, I have an absolute loathing and fear of that disease. I just think it’s so insidious and so appalling. It occurs in the books again and again. ‘The Cancer Cowboy Rides’ [a story in NOCTURNES] is the most explicit version of it, but again and again, with people in my books, there is this image of cancer or of being eaten from the inside.”
  Recurrent also in the books is the theme of fathers – fatherhood, absent fathers, dead fathers, men who don’t know whether they want to be fathers. “I think all young men are trying to prove something to their dads,” he says carefully. “I think his whole idea was he worked so that at some point, he didn’t have to work any more, and that work was a kind of chore he got through as a prelude to retirement, when he could do all the things that he planned on doing. And then you know, work kind of had the last laugh, because he died while he was still working.
  “He was not impressed by me wanting to be a writer, or to be a journalist. And I suppose part of me becoming a journalist and part of me going to college and doing something like English was a kind of way of saying to him, well actually, what you want is not what I want. The awful thing is, having done all that, had he seen what I do now, he would have been immensely proud.” Earlier, he said his father had a distrust of the “kind of freelance existence” that journalism and a career as a writer offered. It’s not hard to see where the roots of Connolly’s drive and work ethic came from.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

CRIME ALWAYS PAYS: That Crucial First Week In Full

It was only last week that CRIME ALWAYS PAYS went live on Kindle, and already there’s so, so much to report. For one, CRIME ALWAYS PAYS knackered Mack Lundy’s Kindle mid-flight. Sorry about that, Mack. That blip was supposed to be a dry-run for my cunning plot to activate the virus I’ve coded into the text of CRIME ALWAYS PAYS in order to knacker the entire Kindle system on October 28th ...
  Sales-wise, it’s fair to say, things could have gone better. CRIME ALWAYS PAYS entered Amazon’s Kindle charts at # 8,245 and soared almost immediately to # 1,235 before it promptly plummeted out to # 13,889. On a chart, the graph would resemble the orbit of Halley’s comet. So that’s not good.
  On the other hand, the book did get the latest in its many write-ups from the lovely Book Witch. Quoth Ms Witch: “It’s simply a very amusing and mad crime novel, which any crime fan should enjoy.” So that’s good.
  Then Duane Swiersynski announced on Twitter that he’d bought a copy, which was good, but there’s been radio silence ever since, which is not good. Duane? I operate a value-for-money payback guarantee, so if it didn’t buzz your bajingas, just let me know where I should send the cheque.
  And then … Actually, no, that’s it. Just as well, really. It was all getting a bit frenetic there on Monday, and I am, to be quite frank about it, a parcel of vain strivings, loosely tied, methinks, for milder climes than these. Or words to that effect …
  In a nutshell, then, the week was a pretty fair reflection of the amount of work I put into promoting CAP, which amounted to little more than a blog post and a couple of tweets on Twitter. Now, it’s still early days, and the UK Kindle is coming this month, apparently, so that might make a difference – but even at this early stage it looks as if my avant-garde experiment in laissez-faire promotion is paying off handsomely. What I’m trying to prove in this experiment is something I already know, which is that it’s impossible to achieve a working wage in the publishing industry without having to work ten times as hard as you would in a job that pays minimum wage. Even the fact that I’m talking about writing books as ‘the publishing industry’ is fairly damning. The fact is, though, that it is an industry, and as with all industries, it’s the best capitalised endeavours that will rise to the top. Which is to say that, generally speaking, publishing a book these days is a pointless endeavour, if your aim is to reach the maximum number of readers possible for your particular kind of book, unless you’ve got pretty explicit incriminating photographs of the guy or gal behind the advertising budget. Forget quirky titles, and great stories, and viral marketing, and book trailers, and blogs and word-of-mouth and every other one-off fluke success story you’ve ever heard – as far as I can make out, it’s all about the promotional spend.
  Apart from the paltry few hours it took me to write CRIME ALWAYS PAYS, the spend on the book has been pretty minimal – about $20, or thereabouts. Which is why it is currently languishing at (checks Amazon Kindle listings on Friday night) # 5,711. Which is, okay, better than it was earlier this afternoon, but still not causing Dan Brown any sleepless nights.
  Meantime, I’m using the time that I’m not blogging / promoting / shilling to write. It’s going well, thanks for asking – I’m having fun screwing around with conventional notions of ‘story’, ‘novel’ and ‘book’. If I’m honest, I’d have to say that it is by a country mile the least commercial story I’ve ever written, and if I’m totally honest, I’d have to say that that’s deliberate. One reason for that is because, in the last year or so, I’ve had three books picked up by an editor at a pretty reputable U.S. publisher, and three times he has failed (no fault of his own) to get them past the bean-counters. Two of the three were straightforward enough, being a crime caper and a PI story, while the third was (to be fair to the bean-counters) rather more unconventional. The problem for me is that it’s the unconventional one that I found to be the most fun to write; and, if I’m not going to get published anyway, then I might as well keep writing, in the scarce few writing hours I have every week, the stuff that’s fun.
  It’s also, I think, a bit of a reaction to an industry that is becoming increasingly sterile and homogenous. There’s no getting away from the fact that that’s a very subjective take on things, and obviously it depends very heavily on the books I’ve been reading. I’ve read some terrific novels this year – Gene Kerrigan’s DARK TIMES IN THE CITY, Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST), Robert Wilson’s THE IGNORANCE OF BLOOD, Ed O’Loughlin’s NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, John Connolly’s THE GATES, Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND, Scott Philips’ COTTONWOOD, John Banville’s THE INFINITIES – but apart from re-reads – James Ellroy’s LA CONFIDENTIAL and Raymond Chandler’s FAREWELL, MY LOVELY – the only books that truly blew me away were GENIUS, a biography of Richard Feynman by James Gleick, 1974 by David Peace, and I AM ALIVE AND YOU ARE DEAD, a biography of Philip K. Dick by Emmanuel Carrère.
  The Richard Feynman biography was mind-blowing because it incorporates a history of 20th century quantum physics, which, as is always the case when I dip into quantum physics, is akin to leaving my brain behind on a roller-coaster to fend for itself – I don’t know much about what’s going on, but it’s a hell of a ride. The same, I suppose, applied to 1974, but what I particularly liked about that was David Peace’s ability to bypass my eyes and lodge his words directly in the cerebral cortex – I’d imagine it’s the way a trained composer, say, ‘reads’ music off the sheet. What I liked about the Philip K. Dick book was the way Carrère screwed around with the biographical form, blending Dick’s professional and personal fictions and fantasies to the point where they became something of a double-helix, and it was virtually impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
  I have no idea of how well, or otherwise, the three books sold when they first appeared. I do know that all three, if not exactly life-changing reads, had the capacity (had I read them at a more impressionable age) to change the way I perceived books: to re-evaluate what a book can deliver, and the way in which a story can be told. I’m not trying to say that they were ‘unputdownable’ (the Feynman book, especially, required putting down on nearly every second page), or that the writers were such slick craftsmen that the pages seemed to turn on their own, so that I found myself transported to a world of the writer’s creation, blah-de-blah, nor offer any of the absurdly reductionist opinions that the commercial publishing world seems to value so highly. I don’t read to be ‘swept away’, or ‘entertained’, or distracted from my commute or to while away the hours on a beach – I read to be challenged and provoked, to be goaded into a greater awareness of my place in the grand scheme, etc. Most books these days, and fiction in particular, seem to want to be the literary equivalent of either Valium or Viagra, but life’s too short, and the world too wide, to waste it on third-rate knock-offs of stories that were already old by the time Aristophanes got around to spoofing Athenian intellectuals with CLOUDS – of which, I should say, bringing us full circle, CRIME ALWAYS PAYS is a fourth-rate example, which may well account for why it is currently (checks Amazon Kindle rankings on Saturday morning before uploading post) languishing at # 14,199. Hence the new departure.
  All of which is a roundabout way of saying that, if I’m going to be a pathetically failed writer, then I’ll be a pathetically failed writer on my terms, not the industry’s. Yes, that ‘clunk-click’ you hear is yours truly bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted – and yes, you’re perfectly entitled to wonder whether I’d be so critical of the industry had one of my books being bought for a tidy sum in the last year or so. The answer, I’m pretty sure, is ‘Yes, I would’ – although I wouldn’t be blogging about it. I’d probably just bitch about it in private, and then go and write something similar to fulfil the contract, and put the interesting story that I’d really like to write on the back-burner, for another year at least.
  I guess I’m pretty lucky. I’m happy and healthy, I like my job, I can pay my bills, and I can – given that very few people in the publishing industry care either way – write whatever the hell I want to write. I’ll probably end up publishing the new story to the web next year, to the electronic equivalent of a few embarrassed coughs, but hey, it’s mine own. Life is good.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: FEVER OF THE BONE by Val McDermid

I met Val McDermid at last year’s Bouchercon, introduced by Marian at the Sleuth of Baker Street desk. Neither of us gushed, exactly, possibly because neither of us had read the other’s books, but probably because Val McDermid meets more wannabe writers on a daily basis than she could shake a metaphorical razor-studded dildo at. Which is to say that, while her literary reputation precedes her, FEVER OF THE BONE is my first McDermid read. The review runneth thusly:

THE CHARACTERS of DCI Carol Jordan and Tony Hill will be familiar to many people who have never read a Val McDermid novel. Jordan and Hill were the double-act at the heart of the UTV series Wire in the Blood , which ran from 2002 until it was cancelled earlier this year, in which Jordan (for the first three series, at least) played a tough cop to Hill’s sensitive, complex psychological profiler.
  The pair take centre stage again in Fever of the Bone , the sixth in McDermid’s Jordan-Hill series, and her 23rd novel in total. Opening with a teenage murder victim discovered in Worcester, the story soon reverts to Jordan and Hill’s fictional stamping ground of Bradfield, in Yorkshire, where a number of sexually mutilated teenage corpses are discovered. The pressure quickly builds on Jordan to find the serial killer, but this time she has to work without her trusted confidante Hill, as her new boss, suspicious of her motives in employing the freelance profiler, has decreed that she must use internal police resources.
  Hill, for his part, finds himself in Worcester, partly at the behest of a local police force keen to use his unique talents, but also to tidy up the estate of his late father, a man about whom all Hill ever knew was that he had abandoned his son at an early age.
Val McDermid is renowned for her compulsively readable police procedural novels, in which she takes pains to get right the detail of real police work (or “old-fashioned coppery”, as one character describes it).
  One of the pleasures of Fever of the Bone , for example, is McDermid’s description of mutually suspicious police forces reluctant to give up any scrap of information that might give a rival force some glory, and the politicking that goes on both within a particular police force and between competing forces, a frustratingly tiresome process that has, of course, ramifications for any officer investigating crimes that straddle jurisdictions.
  McDermid is also celebrated for her willingness to engage with contemporary issues (the murdered teenagers, for example, all come into contact with their killer on Bebo-style internet site called Rigmarole), and her ability to explore convincingly the darker end of the crime-writing spectrum.
  Not only do her detectives investigate the kind of murders that haunt the darkest of nightmares, but her profiler, Tony Hill, takes the investigation – and the reader – a crucial step further by inhabiting the minds of sick and twisted killers, who often have a sexual motive.
  That’s an explosive combination, if not particularly original, but McDermid the writer has one more trick up her sleeve.
  Unlike many of her best-selling peers, McDermid understands that it’s the internal workings of her characters that make a novel tick, as opposed to their implausible feats of detection and a superhuman ability to give and take physical punishment. There are times, in fact, when Fever of the Bone reads like a soap opera rather than a thriller, as McDermid deftly introduces a host of characters from the previous five novels, and then proceeds to broaden their experiences.
  The most poignant example of this is Tony Hill’s slow and painful exhumation of the man his father truly was, as opposed to the caricature he’d had rammed down this throat by his vindictive mother.
  Touching, gripping and entertaining by turns, Fever of the Bone is a hugely satisfying novel. There are caveats – it seems unlikely, for example, that a serial killer would spend months carefully grooming a series of victims, and then strike at them all within a short space of time, and continue to do so even knowing the police are hot on the trail – but those caveats are minor indeed. – Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times