A Tsar Is Born

There was a very good interview with William Ryan in the Irish Times last week, conducted by Kevin Courtney, to mark the publication of Ryan’s sophomore offering, THE BLOODY MEADOW, a sequel to THE HOLY THIEF. The perennial evergreen of genre stereotyping raised its head, with the gist running thusly:

THE HOLY THIEF is about to be published in Russia, and Ryan is bracing himself for a spate of missives from the motherland pointing out glaring errors in geography and history. But Ryan is confident that his storytelling skill will make up for any factual inaccuracies, and happy that his serial detective is proving popular – a third Korolev novel is in the pipeline. But for him the biggest inaccuracy is that the books will, of necessity, end up being filed under crime fiction.
  “I think when you talk about genres as such . . . I can understand why publishers do it, but I think at the end of the day it’s whether you write a good book or not. I think a lot of crime writing is very, very good, and it’s a shame that it’s put into that category, particularly if you look at Irish writing at the moment. A lot of the good Irish writing, if you look at Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville and Ken Bruen, you could list 50 writers who are putting out really good stuff, and it’s a shame that you have that kind of genre thing.”

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