Origins: Reed Farrel Coleman

Being the latest in what will probably be yet another short-lived series, in which yours truly reclines on a hammock by the pool with a jeroboam of Elf-Wonking Juice™ and lets a proper writer talk about the origins of his or her characters and stories. This week: Reed Farrel Coleman, author of INNOCENT MONSTER. To wit:

“Every author is sick to death of the questions about where ideas come from. We’re sick of the question because, as writers, the answer is so bloody obvious. Our ideas come from everywhere: from newspapers, from television, from life, from an incident that happened thirty years ago, from some seed planted in our twisted little brains. Where our protagonists come from is less obvious and much more interesting. In the two novels (HOSE MONKEY, THE FOURTH VICTIM) I wrote under the pen name Tony Spinosa, my protagonist, Joe Serpe, was a product of circumstance: mine and the world’s. For several years, I’d been making cash driving a truck and delivering home heating oil (a form of diesel fuel once popular in the northeast USA). I came to truck driving late in life, so, unlike driving a car, the process was fascinating to me. I also enjoyed the very physical nature of the work, so different than my writing. Hence Joe Serpe would drive a heating oil delivery truck. For once I was writing about something I knew about first hand. The other half of Joe’s equation was his struggle to come to grips with personal tragedy in the aftermath of 9/11.
  “Moe Prager, the protagonist of my most popular novels, is a different matter altogether. Moe is the product of another failed protagonist from an aborted series and from the plot of a novel that shaped him as much as anything else. In the 90s while I was writing my first three novels (LIFE GOES SLEEPING, LITTLE EASTER, THEY DON’T PLAY STICKBALL IN MILWAUKEE) featuring insurance investigator cum novelist Dylan Klein, I tried to write a second series featuring a Jewish, Brooklyn-born, hotshot NYPD homicide detective named Moe Einstein. Problem was my grasp exceeded my craft and though the novels had their strong points, they weren’t publishable. I didn’t have the chops to pull them off and Moe Einstein—Jesus, can you imagine all the lame puns I generated with that name—was too clever by half. I hadn’t yet developed my own voice to a point where I could escape the clichés and overdone conceits of the genre. Still, Moe Einstein stuck with me. I liked the fact that he struggled with his religious identity and that he was wed to his Brooklyn neighborhood. I liked that he was unconventional and loyal to his family.
  “Well, by the time I came to write my fourth novel, I was faced with a dilemma. I could either try to continue writing the Dylan Klein series or forge ahead into new ground. I tried to write DK4, but it just wasn’t working because of something I’d done plot-wise in Stickball that would have caused me to make a major shift in book 4. Looking back at it, I think I unconsciously sabotaged the series because I had taken it as far as I could. Basically, I had used the first three books—plus the two unpublished Moe Einstein books—to teach myself how to write. If you read my DK novels, you can see the growth for yourselves. Frustrated, I searched for a new direction. Boom! In New York Magazine, a story about a missing college student. I remembered reading many stories like it over the course of my life: a college student, usually male, comes into Manhattan for a night of partying and disappears off the face of the earth. What happened to them, I wondered? What were their stories? Who could the detective be to answer those questions? Moe Einstein raised his hand and volunteered and I picked him…sort of.
  “Moe kept his first name, but lost the Einstein. And now Moe was short for Moses because he would lead people to the Promised Land, but never quite reach it himself. I emphasized his allegorical nature by naming his brother Aaron and his sister Miriam. Moe Prager was born. This Moe would not be a hotshot detective, but an everyman cop, a guy in uniform who gets hurt on the job but in a completely inglorious manner. He had to be someone any reader could relate to. In uniform, Moe had done one great deed, but was never really rewarded for it. That’s something I know I can relate to. Plus Moe would be intimately close to the reader. He would do more than tell you what he was doing. He would tell you what he was thinking and, most importantly, what he was feeling. So Moe was an outgrowth of an earlier character and the plot of the book I was writing. Yet, Moe is such a fine character, I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t have found my way to him no matter what.” - Reed Farrel Coleman

INNOCENT MONSTER is the sixth Moe Prager novel. Reed Farrel Coleman has won the Shamus Award for Best Novel of the Year three times as well as the Barry and Anthony, and has twice been nominated for the Edgar.

Stuck In A RUT

I met Scott Phillips in a bar in Philly. Seriously annoying dude: laidback, cool, generous with his time, all that. And everyone kept raving about how good a writer he was. So I bought one of his books - THE ICE HARVEST - and took it back to the hotel room and gave it ten pages, just to see. Round about 4 am, and halfway through, I finally put it down.
  Woke up the next morning, said, ‘Okay, you’d had a few beers last night, it’s probably not as good as you remember it.’ It was, and better.
  Later that week, at the Baltimore B’con, I bumped into Scott Phillips twice. Both times he was walking around with THE BIG O tucked under his oxter. Nice guy.
  A couple of months later, I read COTTONWOOD. Better than THE ICE HARVEST? Possibly, but we’re dealing in quarks here.
  Anyway, the news that the Concord Free Press is publishing Scott Phillips’ new offering is all kinds of good news. To wit:

RUT, a wild and original novel from Scott Phillips, takes readers to the Rocky Mountains circa 2050, where the once thriving burg of Gower is about to become a 21st-century ghost town. Thanks to extreme weather and plenty of toxic waste, the skiers and celebrities are gone, along with the money and the veneer of civilization. What’s left? Old-time religion and brand-new pharmaceuticals, bad food and warm beer, mutated animals and small-town gossip. Can the town survive? We’ll see.

“Part of me would love to live in the near-future world Scott Phillips has imagined in RUT, but only a little part. The rest of me is happy just to read about this, um, direction in which we humans might be headed. Another great novel from one of our best.”
—Tom Franklin, author of CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER

  A dystopian novel with a difference, RUT is hilarious and horrifying. Phillips creates a richly imagined world that serves as a funhouse mirror for our own times. It’s filled with an unforgettable cast of spot on original characters who struggle, steal, lie, fight, drink, cheat, and scheme their way to better days. Or China. Or anywhere but Gower. Sly and cool, absurd and archly perceptive, RUT resonates with the best work of Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon, all in a wonderfully weird tale unlike any other.

  A Phillips / Vonnegut / Pynchon mash-up? I WANT IT NOW!
  Incidentally, if you haven’t come across the Concord Free Press before, they’re well worth checking out. The slogan: ‘Free their books and their minds will follow.’ Their mission statement reads thusly:

We publish great books and give them away. All we ask is that you make a voluntary donation to a charity or someone in need. Tell us about it. Then pass your book along so others can give. It’s a new kind of publishing, one based purely on generosity, and it’s changing the way people think about books.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

The Black Pool

The gaelic version of Dublin - Dubh Linn - translates as ‘the Black Pool’, and comes from the Viking name for the lagoon where they first moored their longships when they arrived to plunder and pillage the east coast of Ireland. I’ve always thought THE BLACK POOL would make a terrific title for a Durty Harry / vigilante-style revenge novel set in Dubbalin town … a Black Pool / Black Hole mash-up vibe, sci-fi / cri-fi … in which Durty Harry unleashes his Magnum .357 on assorted bankers, investors, speculators and politicians, and blows a hole in the city so big it takes on its own gravity and starts to suck in everything around it …
  Ooops, I’m thinking out loud again …
  Anyhoo, last week the Irish Times published a smashing supplement to mark Dublin’s designation as a UNESCO City of Literature, and yours truly was asked to contribute a piece on the rise of the Dublin-set crime novel. It ran a lot like this:

Darkness Falls on the Mean Streets

“In the last few years,” Fintan O’Toole wrote last November in the Irish Times, “Irish-set crime writing has not merely begun to blossom but has become arguably the nearest thing we have to a realist literature adequate to capturing the nature of contemporary society.”
  As to why Irish crime writing took so long to develop, O’Toole suggested that, “Crime fiction is a function of something Ireland didn’t have until recently – large-scale cities.”
  He further points to the fact that Ireland’s most famous and popular crime writer, John Connolly, set his first and subsequent crime novels in Maine, in the US. That argument is a little unfair to authors such as Vincent Banville, Julie Parsons and Hugo Hamilton, all of whom were setting their crime novels on the mean streets of Dublin in pre-Celtic Tiger days. By the same token, the last decade or so has seen an explosion of crime writing in which Dublin has not only become a familiar setting, but has become something of a recurring character in the works in a disparate number of writers.
  Declan Hughes’ private eye, Ed Loy, first appeared in The Wrong Kind of Blood (2006), and has charted the absurdities of Dublin’s rapidly changing fortunes over the course of five novels. Hughes explores the “broad tree-lined streets of detached Victorian and Edwardian villas” of South County Dublin in his debut novel, inventing for himself the fictional suburban enclaves of Bayview and Castlehill, “where the luxury homes of top Irish rock stars, film directors, barristers and CEOs formed the exclusive enclave the reporter claimed was nicknamed ‘Bel Eire’.”
  By the time his most recent novel, City of Lost Girls, was released earlier this year, however, Ed Loy has ‘followed the money’ all the way to the heart of a once affluent Dublin:

  “The wheels might have been coming off the economy at a frantic rate, but you wouldn’t have known a thing about it if the only place you ate your dinner was Shanahan’s on the Green. Mind you, if you could afford to dine in Shanahan’s Steakhouse every night, you probably didn’t care: you’d stored up enough nuts to get you through however long the winter lasted.” (City of Lost Girls, 2010)

  Arlene Hunt is another author to take advantage of Dublin’s relative intimacy as a city. Sarah Quigley and John Kenny comprise QuicK Investigations, which operates from an office in a ‘dilapidated old building on Wexford Street’. From their Southside base, however, the pair criss-cross the city in the course of their investigations, often doing so on a number of occasions within the space of a single day. Her characters are no less knowledgeable about their environment than those created by Parsons, Hamilton or Vincent Banville, but Hunt’s stories reflect the fact that Dublin has grown with the economic boom. In Hunt’s novels, increasing anonymity and a consequent alienation, combined with a massive injection of illicit wealth, has resulted in a pernicious disrespect for human life.
  On first glance, Benjamin Black’s evocation of a genteel 1950’s Dublin suggests that Black - or his alter-ego, John Banville - has donned rose-tinted glasses:

  He stood on the broad pavement under the trees, smoking the last of a cigarette and looking across the road at the girl on the steps of the Shelbourne Hotel … An olive-green dray went past, drawn by a chocolate-coloured Clydesdale. Quirke lifted his head and breathed in the late-summer smells: horse, foliage, diesel fumes, perhaps even, fancifully, a hint of the girl’s perfume.
  He crossed the street, dodging a green double-decker bus that parped its horn at him … (Christine Falls, 2006).

  Strip away the sepia tone, however, and it quickly becomes clear that Black has over the course of the three Quirke novels to date been engaged in exploring the dark underbelly of a Dublin that was no less in the throes of radical social change back then than it is today.
  That rapid transformation of Dublin is also a recurring theme in Gene Kerrigan’s novels, particularly in terms of how the redistribution of wealth impacts on those on the lowest rungs of the food-chain:

  Must be depressing to live in a dogbox like this, with walls like cardboard. Apartment blocks all over the place, these days, populated mostly by the young and eager. Weaned on Sex and the City, impatient to sample the supposed sophistication of Manhattan on the Liffey … During the late lamented boom, it had seemed like it took some builders no more than a long weekend to throw an apartment block together. (Dark Times in the City, 2009)

  It’s in Alan Glynn’s Winterland (2009), however, that the transformation of Dublin comes into its own. Here the restless city is not only a setting, but character and theme, as Glynn excavates the political and financial corruption that underpinned the Celtic Tiger boom. The flawed structure of the bright and shiny Richmond Plaza in the docklands is a metaphor not only for the economic crash, but for the hubris that fuelled the city’s maddened flight from itself:

  It used to be that wherever you happened to find yourself in Dublin, you could pretty much rely on the red-and-white-striped twin chimneys of the Poolbeg power station to find you. Situated in the bay, these were a sentimental reference point for many people - they defined the city … But that has all changed. Because what immediately catches the eye these days is the considerably taller glass and steel structure rising up out of the docklands. It’s a more appropriate structure anyway, in Norton’s opinion. Better to have office and retail space, a hotel, condominiums - he thinks - than a brace of ugly industrial smokestacks. (Winterland, 2009)

  Cynical, paranoid and downbeat though they might be, it’s entirely apt that the city’s designation as a UNESCO City of Literature should come at a time when the Dublin-set crime novel is maturing into our most relevant literature of social realism. - Declan Burke

  This article was first published in the Irish Times

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG by Kate Atkinson

Former policewoman and now a security guard at a Leeds shopping centre, Tracy Waterhouse makes a shocking, split-second decision on an otherwise ordinary day. In ‘buying’ a child from a junkie, Tracy puts herself on the other side of the thin blue line she has defended ever since she left school. Fifty-something, lonely, and living a life that grows increasingly meaningless with every passing day, Tracy is fully aware of the enormity of her decision, and yet every instinct screams at her to protect the half-starved mite, Courtney.
  A number of stories run parallel to Tracy’s. Jackson Brodie, a private investigator and a recurring character in Atkinson’s novels, criss-crosses the Northeast of England as he attempts to track down the genealogical roots of a client who was adopted at a very young age, and whose parents subsequently emigrated to New Zealand. Tilly, an aging actress who suffers from early dementia / Alzheimer’s, witnesses Tracy’s ‘purchase’ of Courtney, but can barely differentiate between who she is and the character she is playing, let alone help the police with their enquiries.
  A further narrative strand takes us back to the mid-’70s, when the Yorkshire Ripper was at large in the Northeast. Tracy’s first case, as a young policewoman on the beat, involves discovering a woman dead in her flat, and a young, half-starved boy who has been left alone with the mouldering remains of his mother for a number of weeks.
  It’s something of an understatement to say that STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG, the follow-up to Atkinson’s runaway smash WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS?, is an unusual crime novel. On the face of it, and given that it features a policewoman (both as an ex-policewoman and, in flashbacks, when she was actively working the beat) and a private eye, the novel appears to be adopting the standard tropes of both the police procedural and the private detective novel. Once you get under the skin of the novel, however, it quickly becomes clear that Atkinson employs these tropes in order to subvert them. Although she gains our sympathy very early in the story, and retains it throughout, Tracy Waterhouse is far from a typical copper. To begin with, her ‘buying’ of a young child is a shocking development mere pages into the story, regardless of how noble her motives are, or how desperate the circumstances Courtney is escaping. Atkinson never shies clear of how outrageous Tracy’s actions are, and yet still manages to generate reader sympathy for her self-imposed plight.
  Meanwhile, Jackson Brodie is arguably the most whimsical private detective in contemporary fiction. His past, which is alluded to in a number of tangential sections, suggests that he is by no means a man to be messed with, and yet his internal monologues, and the ‘conversations’ he carries on in his head with his ex-wife, often border on pure farce. Brodie, incidentally, is the man who ‘adopts’ the dog of the title, when he rescues a terrier from a bullying owner. His ‘adoption’ of the dog runs parallel to Tracy’s ‘adoption’ of Courtney, and much of the black humour of the novel derives from their lack of understanding of their new charges.
  Tilly, the aging actress, is also presented largely by way of internal monologue, although Tilly’s version of events tends to be cloudy at best, given that she is suffering from short-term memory loss and incipient dementia. Tilly is currently shooting a TV series called Collier, which is set in the Northeast and features the kind of hard-nosed, rebellious copper beloved of screen crime writers. Here, again, Atkinson has plenty of inter-textual fun poking jibes at fictional representations of crime in mainstream media, particularly in terms of how TV cop dramas tend to be chock-a-block with incident, whereas Atkinson’s story is positively mundane by comparison.
  Atkinson writes in a deceptively elegant style, with the musings of her characters rendered almost conversational. The easy flow and apparently disjointed thought process masks precise plotting and superb attention to detail, although the style does become more staccato in the flashback sequences that take us back to the mid-’70s, when the writing - deliberately or otherwise - echoes the more impressionistic but simultaneously brutal style of David Peace’s haunting ‘Red Riding’ quartet, which also employed the Yorkshire Ripper’s reign of terror for backdrop.
  Atkinson’s subversive treatment of the tropes of crime fiction, and particularly those of the staple narratives of police procedural and private eye, is very much to her credit. Many crime fiction fans read little other than crime stories, and many are very happy to re-read the same kind of story over and over again. In playfully deconstructing the police procedural (Tracy, for example, uses her skills as a policewoman in order to keep herself beyond the reach of the long arm of the law), Atkinson is tapping into a zeitgeist in which concepts of law and order grow more fluid by the day. That sense of fluidity can be something as simple as the downgrading / upgrading of a particular drug from Class A to Class B, or vice versa, with the penalty for possession and / or dealing very much dependent on the political will of the day; or it can emerge from a much more important philosophical point of view, given that Britain - for example, and whether the majority of its citizens like it or not - played a major part in the illegal invasion of Iraq. If it’s okay for a government to flout international law, runs the theory, then why should the citizens of its country feel obliged to obey domestic laws? When the particular case explored here, that of Tracy’s rescuing the stray waif Courtney from horrible domestic circumstances, is an example of doing the right thing regardless of what the law demands, then the line between right and wrong is further blurred.
  This is especially the case when Tracy’s actions are set against the historical backdrop of the novel, in which corruption, murder and cover-up go right to the heart of the policing establishment.
  Meanwhile, Jackson Brodie’s private investigator is in many ways a parody of the conventional private eye. Yes, he is dogged, and yes, he follows through on his case to uncover the truth for his client. By the same token, Brodie has been commissioned to discover the truth about a woman’s birth details, which is hardly the kind of mission any self-respecting fictional private eye would concern him or herself with. Moreover, Brodie appears to be using the case as an excuse to visit monasteries and castles and other tourist traps. And while Brodie does deliver the information required, his emotional commitment in the novel is to the stray waif of a dog he has rescued from a bullying owner. This sub-plot strand is apparently designed to parallel that of Tracy and her rescue of Courtney, and Atkinson seems to be saying that, in the grand scheme of things, one more or less rescued child is worth no more or less than a rescued dog.
  It’s also possible that the reverse is true, and that Atkinson is suggesting that a society can be judged on how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable, and that that applies not just to its human beings. If Brodie, a hard-nosed cynic with a dubious past, is prepared to go the extra mile and learn to live with his new best friend on its terms, then society is far more robust in terms of doing the right thing at its grass roots level than it is in its higher echelons.
  Despite its picaresque structure and its flaunting of the standard crime novel tropes (and perhaps because of this), STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG is never less than a compelling page turner. It’s also a very good novel of any stripe, genre or otherwise, which shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that Atkinson’s debut novel BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM (1995) won the Whitbread Book of the Year. Atkinson, of course, isn’t the first literary author to turn her hand to crime fiction, and she won’t be the last. What makes this offering so satisfying is very obviously immersed in the genre, to the extent that she can afford to stand its conventions on their head and still turn in a pulsating, thoughtful, intelligent thriller. - Declan Burke