“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

This Week We're Reading ... Bishop's Pawn and Cannon Law

I’m not quite dead yet, etc. KT McCaffrey’s latest, Bishop’s Pawn , opens with series heroine Emma Boylan reading her obituary in the newspaper where she works, and subsequently prying the lid off a particularly nasty can of squiggly yokes slithering up out of her past – in other words, it’s a sequel of sorts to Revenge (1999). A multi-character piece with an impressive quotient of psychopathic villains, Bishop’s Pawn is a movie-in-waiting … we’re thinking Hilary Swank as Emma, and the Crime Always Pays staff as the motley crew of psycho freaks. Hey, call us, we’re free … Meanwhile, our nomination for the most underrated private dick scribbler anywhere is Vincent Banville, whose hardboiled(ish), painfully self-aware shamus John Blaine got a third outing in Cannon Law (2001). “An excellent new crime novel from one of Ireland’s foremost exponents of the genre,” reported Read Ireland, describing Banville’s writing as “Gripping, funny and stripped to the bone … packs a punch like a fist in a velvet glove.” Banville treads a fine line between paying homage to the Chandleresque tropes and unmercifully taking the proverbial out of said tropes … and then Blaine, being Blaine, stomps all over that delicately crafted prose. We like it a lot, and wethinks you will too.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi was just passing randomly

how different lives can be!

my life... your life...

both bloggers... there the similarity ends!!

take it e.z

gledwood "vol 2"...

Anonymous said...

Vincent Banville, unlike his bad ol' bro, is on my "to-read" list. The dude was recommended to me by Dermot Bolger (no slouch himself, in the world of Irish crime fiction) years ago.

Man, it pisses me off that piles of reviewers are heaped on John Banville's Christine Falls Bandwagon-of-Praise like so many plague-ridden corpses.

It pisses me off that John kicks Vincent's stick-figure ass. http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=%22vincent+banville%22&word2=%22John+banville%22