Zane by name, Radcliffe by nature. Yep, that’s
Zane Radcliffe (right), people, author of THE KILLER’S GUIDE TO ICELAND, BIG JESSIE and
LONDON IRISH. What do we know of him? Very little. Happily, our resident private dick elf was on the case like skin on custard. To wit:
Zane Radcliffe was born in Bangor, Northern Ireland in 1969, the year the Troubles started. The day he moved to London in 1994, the IRA declared a ceasefire. Typical.
The undoubted highlight of Zane’s advertising career was writing the world’s first topless radio ad, voiced by glamour model Jo Guest. Bizarrely the ad was banned when listeners complained about such flagrant nudity on the airwaves.
In the summer of 2001, Zane penned his first novel LONDON IRISH, a black comedy concerning a disillusioned Ulsterman living in London who is forced to flee the city and ends up in Edinburgh. Spookily, life then imitated art, and Zane moved to Edinburgh six months after the book’s publication.
LONDON IRISH went on to win the 2003 WH Smith ‘People’s Choice’ Award for New Talent. It was followed in September of that year by BIG JESSIE, a novel described by FHM as ‘ funny, absurd and memorable … 
the Peace Process written by The Fast Show.’
So there you have it. A prize-winning Irish crime fiction author, and we only heard about him last week. Doesn’t do an awful lot for our claim to be the third-most relevant interweb presence for Irish crime fiction, does it? In fact, we don’t really know why we bother. If it wasn’t that the blummin’ towers are so tough to erect again once you’ve packed them away, we’d have folded our tent long since …
Zane by name, Radcliffe by nature. Yep, that’s Zane Radcliffe (right), people, author of THE KILLER’S GUIDE TO ICELAND, BIG JESSIE and LONDON IRISH. What do we know of him? Very little. Happily, our resident private dick elf was on the case like skin on custard. To wit: 
3 comments:
Dec: It's official!
Stuart Neville, my Prince of Darkness, and the writer formerly known as "Conduit," has landed an agent - and not just any agent - but literary powerhouse and legend, Nat Sobel.
His agency, Sobel Weber Associates, New York, represents a few scribes you might have heard of: James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential, The Black Dahlia, American Tabloid), Joseph Wambaugh (The Choirboys, The Onion Field, Hollywood Station), Pulitzer winner Richard Russo (Nobody's Fool, Empire Falls, Bridge of Sighs), F.X. Toole (Rope Burns - adapted for the screen as the multi Oscar winning Million Dollar Baby - and Pound for Pound), Robert Jordan (the Wheel of Time series), Tim Dorsey (the Serge Storms series), and many more.
Oh, Nat also loves him some cats. My kind of guy.
And how did Stuart get on the Uber agent’s radar? I’m going to steal a bit of Stuart’s thunder and reveal to my blog peeps that Mr. Sobel scouted him on the Internet. That’s right – a big name agent was scouring the online crime magazines and plucked our man from obscurity. (of course I’ve been singing Stuart’s praises loud and clear since last fall when I first read his work in Agent Nathan’s Bransford’s writing contest). To those of you that don’t believe agents are poking around the world wide web looking for The Next Big Thing – here’s your proof. Here. Is. Your. Proof.
So do stop by and give a big shout out to the literary world’s best and brightest rising star!
http://conduitnovel.blogspot.com/
*shake my booty*
Having already read Stuarts’s manuscript (it already holds the distinction of being only one of four books I liked well enough to finish this year) GHOSTS OF BELFAST, I can tell you it’s nothing by clover ahead for this blessed son of Northern Ireland.
Hmmmm ... damned with faint praise then, Josephine? Tell Stuart to drop us a line, we'd love to do a Q&A with him ... Cheers, Dec
Line, dropped.
Thanks to Josie for the evangelising. She knows how to get a point across!
Post a Comment