Essay: ‘Walking the Tightrope: Brexit, books and the Border’ by Brian McGilloway

Brian McGilloway (right) published a long-form essay in the Irish Times last weekend, considering the ways in which Northern Irish writers have written about the post-‘Troubles’ landscape in Northern Ireland, and the possible consequences for the re-imposition of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Sample quote:

It is here where writers become most important. In the absence of a truth commission in the North, it is up to writers to tiptoe between the conflicting versions of history and to tell the truth of the past as we saw it, whether that means considering the impact of the past on the present, or as Adrian McKinty is doing in his superlative Sean Duffy series, revisiting and reliving events of the past with the benefit of hindsight.
  And if writers are indeed our truth commission, their truth of the Border is not that it was a place of security and unity, but one of division, crime and violence. And yet, there are those now wishing to reinforce that very Border again, psychologically if not physically.
  My greatest concern is that Brexit will force those of us who were prepared to move forward and shelf old allegiances and aspirations in the name of peace to look once more to the tribe, to retreat back into our own communities because the hardening of the Border in any sense requires a reassertion of a single identity.

  For the full essay, clickety-click here …

Event: Adrian McKinty and Steve Cavanagh in Conversation

Feature: Crime Novels of the Year 2017

’Tis the season for end-of-year round-ups, so here’s my half of the Irish Times’ feature on 2017’s best crime fiction. To wit:

The year got off to a cracking start with Ali Land’s Good Me, Bad Me (Penguin Michael Joseph, €14.99), a genuinely unsettling novel of complex motivations that tests the reader’s capacity for empathy as teenager Milly struggles to cope with the horrors perpetrated by her mother. Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly (Serpent’s Tail, €15.99) was yet another densely plotted, blackly hilarious outing for Adrian McKinty’s protagonist Sean Duffy, a Catholic detective working for the RUC during Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’.

  Melissa Scrivner Love’s Lola (Point Blank, €14.99) was a brilliant debut, a bleak and cynical noir set in the patriarchal gangland world of LA’s South Central, with smack-peddler Lola pulling her gang’s strings as she does whatever it takes to survive. The Late Show by Michael Connelly (Orion, €15.99) delivered a terrific new protagonist: Renee Ballard, a hard-nosed LAPD detective who can more than hold her own with Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller. Sabine Durrant’s Lie With Me (Mulholland Books, €17.99) was a superb comi-tragic psychological thriller set on an Ionian island, a novel which owes, and handsomely repays, a debt to Patricia Highsmith.
  Dennis Lehane has written private eye novels, gangster novels and standalone thrillers. Since We Fell (Little, Brown, €16.99) offered another sub-genre variation as Lehane delivered a wonderful blend of melodrama and domestic noir. Spook Street (John Murray, €19.85) was the fourth, and arguably the best, in Mick Herron’s ‘Slough House’ series of spy novels, which feature spymaster Jackson Lamb and a charming collection of has-beens and never-will-bes.

  Let the Dead Speak (HarperCollins, €13.99) was the seventh in Jane Casey’s series to feature police detective Maeve Kerrigan, a variation on the locked-room mystery as Maeve investigates the whereabouts of a missing corpse in a London suburb underpinned by religious fanaticism and patriarchal sexism. Stuart Neville published Here and Gone (Harvill Secker, €18.45) under the pseudonym Haylen Beck, delivering an adrenaline-fuelled thriller set in the badlands of Arizona. Insidious Intent (Little, Brown, €16.99) was the tenth in Val McDermid’s Tony Hill & Carol Jordan series, but there’s no sense that Val is resting on her laurels – the novel delivered one of the most shocking denouements of the year. Set in 1939, Michael Russell’s The City of Lies (Constable, €16.99) was the fourth to feature Dublin-based Special Branch detective Stefan Gillespie, with Gillespie dispatched to Berlin, a city drunk on power and triumph but already suffering from mass psychosis.

  Finally, John le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (Viking, €14.99) hauled George Smiley’s old factotum, Peter Guillam, out of his well-earned retirement, as London’s contemporary spymasters investigate the possibility that Peter, Smiley & Co. deliberately put civilian lives at risk when mounting the operation that led to the death of Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It may not be vintage le Carré, but it’s a marvellously evocative trip down memory lane.

  For other half – i.e., Declan Hughes’ half – of the list, clickety-click here …

Event: NOIRELAND Crime Fiction Festival, October 27th to 29th

The inaugural NOIRELAND International Crime Fiction Festival will take place in Belfast from October 27th to 29th, featuring – and here, as always, we defer to the blurb elves – “the best in local talent, guest appearances by international crime-writing stars, and in-depth conversations with some of the greatest screenwriters to put crime dramas on the screen.
  “NOIRELAND is the brainchild of David Torrans who established the No Alibis Book Store twenty years ago and has been at the forefront promoting Irish crime fiction and bringing the greatest international crime writers to Belfast.”
  The three-day event will feature Irish writers Stuart Neville, Liz Nugent, Brian McGilloway, Adrian McKinty, Benjamin Black, Jo Spain, Claire McGowan, Anthony Quinn, Andrea Carter, Steve Cavanagh and Eoin McNamee, while Sophie Hannah, Arne Dahl, Robert Crais, Martin Edwards, Ruth Ware, Louise Welsh, Graeme McCrae Burnet, Abir Mukherjee, Ali Land and Steve Mosby are some of the international authors taking part.
  For all the details, including how to book tickets, clickety-click here …

The Top 10 Northern Irish Crime Novels: Brian McGilloway

Brian McGilloway (right) recently wrote a piece for the Strand Magazine on the Top 10 Northern Irish crime novels, and a very fine list it is too, despite the surprising absence of Eoin McNamee. In his Intro, Brian provides a context for why Northern Irish crime fiction has flourished over the last decade or so:

“I think it is also why Northern Irish crime fiction only really found its voice after the violence here subsided: there’s no need to vicariously experience fear when you are actually undergoing it. When I wrote Borderlands in 2003, I deliberately set out to write a novel unrelated to the Troubles. But, in the writing of it, I found the events of the previous thirty years remained a constant shadow, bleeding around the edges of every narrative. The same could be argued for many of the other crime writers here. In the absence of a Truth Commission in Northern Ireland, fiction is the closest we will come to an understanding of the past even as we chart our way forward. And crime fiction, more than any other genre, works in that dual movement—a crime novel starts at the end of the victim’s story and, while the narrative has continual forward momentum, the detectives are generally working backwards from the moment of the crime to trace the initial acts and motives that lead to it.”

  For Brian McGilloway’s Top 10 Northern Irish Crime Novels, clickety-click here …

Irish Times’ Crime Fiction Column

Ali Land’s Good Me, Bad Me (Penguin Michael Joseph, €14.99) opens with teenager Milly entering a foster home, having survived the horrors perpetrated by her mother, Ruth. Scheduled to testify against Ruth, good Milly understands that her mother is a monster who must pay for her crimes; but as the bullying at her new school reaches a crisis point, bad Milly finds herself wondering about the extent to which her mother’s perverted nurturing has poisoned her nature. Land’s debut is a genuinely unsettling tale that brings to mind Megan Abbott’s novels and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, as Land – previously a child and adolescent mental health nurse – delivers a bracing take on a disturbed teenager’s perception of good and evil. References to Peter Pan and The Lord of the Flies recur throughout, emphasising the extent to which Milly is a lost innocent abroad in a world where young adolescents engineer their own reality, a bleak and pitiless society where might is right and a flair for cruelty confers authority. A novel of complex motivations that will test readers’ capacity for empathy, Good Me, Bad Me is already a strong contender for debut of the year.

  Constance Kopp, whom Amy Stewart first introduced in Girl Waits with Gun (2015), is one of the most aptly monikered protagonists in crime fiction, not least because the real-life Kopp was New Jersey’s first lady deputy sheriff. Set in 1915, Lady Cop Makes Trouble (Scribe, €14.99) opens with Constance allowing a conman, the self-styled Baron von Matthesius, to escape from prison, a lapse which provides critics of the newly established role of female deputy with plenty of ammunition, but could also result in Constance’s boss, Sheriff Heath, going to prison. Suspended from normal duties, but determined to put things right, Constance sets out to track down the Baron. Constance Kopp should be a fascinating character as she embarks on her twin battles with male prejudice and the criminals of New Jersey, particularly as Amy Stewart’s meticulous research provides the reader with a wealth of period detail. Despite being rooted in real events, however, the plot is a plodding affair, and matters aren’t helped by Stewart’s staid prose (“The two of them sat in the sheriff’s office looking about as unhappy to be with one another as two men ever have.”) and too many minor characters devoting far too much time to remarking upon the novelty of a female deputy sheriff.

  Julia Crouch’s fifth novel, Her Husband’s Lover (Headline, €17.99), is a delightfully lurid slice of domestic noir, which opens with Louisa Williams fleeing from her ‘grade A, one-hundred-per-cent, undiluted bastard’ husband Sam in a dramatic car-chase that ends with a fatal collision in which Sam kills himself and their two children. The tragic scenario is compounded when Louisa emerges from her rehabilitation to discover that Sam’s vengeful mistress, Sophie, is pregnant and determined to destroy what is left of Louisa’s life. Julia Crouch coined the term ‘domestic noir’ to describe crime fiction’s latest sub-genre, and this latest offering is unlikely to disappoint fans, being a full-throttle romp through the paranoid delusions of a cast of grotesques, each more repellent than the last. The tone errs on the shrill side as the story strives to establish each of its narrators as unreliable, with the characters deliberately pitched as too perfect / too obsessed / too evil to ring entirely true, but it’s a hugely addictive read as Julia Crouch, having set up an apparently open-and-shut case of domestic abuse, gleefully rips to shreds both the characters’ pretensions and the reader’s expectations.

  E.O. Chirovici’s The Book of Mirrors begins with literary editor Peter Katz receiving a partial manuscript from Richard Flynn, which documents the murder of Princeton psychologist Professor Joseph Wieder but only hints at the identity of his killer. When Katz tries to contact Flynn, however, he discovers that the author has died without revealing the whereabouts of the full manuscript, leading Katz to commission freelance journalist John Keller to uncover the truth … A prolific author in his native Romanian, The Book of Mirrors is E.O. Chirovici’s first novel written in English, an intriguing Russian doll of a narrative which passes the mystery of Professor Wieder’s murder on to a number of investigators. The prose is stolidly functional, but Chirovici’s story nevertheless offers an intriguing whydunit underpinned by a treatise on memory, as a number of witnesses create a cat’s-cradle of conflicting testimony designed to keep the reader guessing to the very end. That said, even the most generous reader will likely baulk at one character’s suggestion that the story is reminiscent of Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Chirovici’s invoking of ‘the great French writer’ and his remembrance of things past is at best ill-advised.

  Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly (Serpent’s Tail, €15.99) is the sixth in Adrian McKinty’s increasingly impressive series to feature Sean Duffy, a Catholic detective working for the RUC during Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’. The mystery begins with a bizarre murder, when drug dealer Francis Deauville is shot to death with a crossbow, but when Duffy starts to wonder why an ‘independent’ drug dealer who has been paying protection to the paramilitaries has been assassinated in such an exotic fashion, he finds himself assailed on all sides. Persecuted by Internal Affairs and fending off IRA attacks, Duffy digs deep into Northern Ireland’s recent past to uncover a tale of collusion and unsolved murder. The plot is as tortuously twisting as McKinty’s readers have come to expect but it’s the tone that proves the novel’s most enjoyable aspect, as Duffy delivers a first-person tale of cheerfully grim fatalism and Proddy-Taig banter, the story chock-a-block with cultural references, from NWA and Kylie Minogue to Miami Vice and The Myth of Sisyphus. ~ Declan Burke

  This column was first published in the Irish Times.

Preview: The Irish Crime Novel of the Year

It’s that time of the year again – or will be, in about a month’s time – when the shortlists for the Irish Book of the Year arrive to a backing track of whoops of delight, wails of anguish and groans of frustration. It’s been – and please stop me if you’ve heard this before – another bumper year for Irish crime fiction, with over 40 titles providing the basis for – potentially – one of the strongest shortlists to date.
  Below, I offer a potential shortlist, albeit with some caveats: 1. John Connolly’s books never appear on the IBA Crime Novel shortlist. 2. William Ryan’s excellent THE CONSTANT SOLIDER isn’t a crime novel. 3. As always, I haven’t read all the Irish crime titles published this year. 4. Some titles – Graham Norton’s HOLDING, Neil Jordan’s THE DROWNED DETECTIVE and Emma Donoghue’s THE WONDER, for example – might be considered crime fiction titles; then again, they might not. 5. In recent years, the good folks at the IBA have made a virtue of shortlisting debut authors.
  Those caveats out of the way, my shortlist for Irish Crime Novel of the Year – based on the crudely simple basis of the best Irish crime titles I’ve read this year – would look a lot like this:

LYING IN WAIT by Liz Nugent
PARADIME by Alan Glynn
THE TRESPASSER by Tana French
SO SAY THE FALLEN by Stuart Neville
RAIN DOGS by Adrian McKinty

  No debutants on my list, then (Sam Blake, Vanessa Ronan, Annemarie Neary and Catherine Ryan Howard are contenders); Adrian McKinty is a bit of a wild card, given that his (regular) award-winning tends to take place on the other side of the world rather than closer to home; and I’m suggesting three men, whereas the last few years have seen the award dominated by women writers. So I wouldn’t be rushing off to the bookies with your hard-earned cash just yet …
  Anyway, the actual shortlist for the Irish Crime Novel of the Year will be published on October 25th. I’ll keep you posted.

Review: The Best Crime Novels of 2015

“And so this is Christmas,” as John Lennon once so astutely observed, “and what have you done?” Well, as always, I mostly read. Herewith be the list of my favourite / most enjoyable / most memorable crime novels from 2015:

The crime fiction year opened with a bang, appropriately enough, with Adrian McKinty’s Gun Street Girl (Serpent’s Tail), the fourth in a series featuring Sean Duffy. A Catholic detective with the RUC, Duffy investigates a double-killing as the news of the impending Anglo-Irish Agreement sends Northern Ireland into a turmoil of strikes, riots and violence.

Set in the 1970s, Celeste Ng’s impressive debut Everything I Never Told You (Black Friars) investigates the tragic life and death of Ohio teen Lydia Lee, creating a heartbreaking portrait of a teenage girl struggling to cope with unbearable and conflicting pressures.
  Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train (Doubleday) was an equally impressive first outing, and one of the year’s publishing sensations (touted as this year’s Gone Girl), as alcoholic Rachel turns amateur sleuth when a woman goes missing. Steve Cavanagh’s The Defence (Orion) was another debut, a rollicking tale of New York lawyer Eddie Flynn going into court with a bomb strapped to his back to defend a Russian mobster. Attica Locke’s third offering, Pleasantville (Serpent’s Tail), is another to feature a lawyer, as Jay Porter tries to extricate the personal from the political as reluctantly defends an alleged killer during a mayoral election in Houston, Texas, against the backdrop of a campaign of very dirty tricks.

  A Song of Shadows (Hodder & Stoughton) was John Connolly’s 13th novel to feature private eye Charlie Parker, and arguably his best, as Parker – no stranger to evil – finds himself immersed in the horrors of the Holocaust and evolving into something of a Christ-like figure. The Shut Eye (Bantam Press) was Belinda Bauer’s sixth novel, and another tinged with the supernatural, in which hard-nosed DCI John Marvel finds his scepticism tested to the limit in a thoughtful meditation on faith, hope and belief. Over in Colorado, FBI agent Ren Bryce returned in Killing Ways (Harper Collins), Alex Barclay’s seventh novel. Bryce tracks a serial killer in an unusually poignant thriller featuring moments of poetic horror.

  Richard Beard’s superb Acts of the Assassins (Harvill Secker) was a time-bending tale employing modern weaponry and infrastructure in which Roman investigator Gallio searches for the rabble-rousers who stole the corpse of the local mystic Jesus from his tomb in the wake of the prophet’s crucifixion. Camille (MacLehose) concluded Pierre Lemaitre’s impressive trilogy about the diminutive Parisian police detective, Camille Verhoeven, with Camille racing to track down a killer while constantly second-guessing his own motives and capabilities.
  In June, the ever reliable Karin Fossum delivered The Drowned Boy (Harvill Secker), in which her series detective, the brooding Norwegian Inspector Sejer, investigates the tragic death of a toddler with Down’s syndrome. Dennis Lehane concluded his excellent Joe Coughlin trilogy with World Gone By (Little, Brown), which was set in Florida and Cuba, and charted the turbulent transition of America’s criminal fraternity from the riotous gangster era to the more organised crime of the Mafia.

  Elmer Mendoza’s Silver Bullets (MacLehose) was a Mexican ‘narco’ novel featuring Detective Edgar ‘Lefty’ Mendieta, a bracingly bleak but blackly comic tale of murder investigation set in a country where “nothing is true, nothing is false.” Set in Belfast, Those We Left Behind (Harvill Secker), Stuart Neville’s sixth novel, featured DCI Serena Flanagan and explored the physical and psychological damage wrought by the actions of two apparently sociopathic – but heartbreakingly vulnerable – young boys. Simon Mawer’s Tightrope (Little, Brown) was a superior spy novel set in the post-WWII years, an absorbing tale about Marian Sutro, a former war hero whose notions of patriotism and honour are ripped apart as the Cold War chills to deep freeze.

  Even the Dead (Penguin) was Benjamin Black’s seventh offering in the increasingly impressive series featuring the pathologist Quirke. Here the depiction of a genteel 1950s Dublin belie a brutally noir moral relativism, as Quirke sinks into a quicksand of politics and religion. Sinead Crowley’s sophomore offering, Are You Watching Me? (Quercus), was an assured take on the ‘domestic noir’ genre, as Garda Detective Claire Boyle tracks the stalker who is making life hell for media ingénue Liz Cafferky. Jon Steele concluded with another trilogy with the fantastic (and fantastical) The Way of Sorrows (Blue Rider Press), as Harper, an angel in human form, complete with Chandleresque quips, goes to war against the forces of Evil for humanity’s soul.
  Jane Casey’s After the Fire (Ebury Press) featured her series heroine, London-based DC Maeve Kerrigan. “Casey writes with a deft wit and immense skill,” wrote Declan Hughes in these pages. “The Maeve Kerrigan books keep getting better and better.” Mark Henshaw’s The Snow Kimono (Tinder Press) centred on retired Parisian police inspector Auguste Jovert in an unusual crime novel, with Jovert playing the part of reluctant confessor to an elaborately detailed declaration of guilt. Julia Heaberlin’s third novel, Black-Eyed Susans (Penguin), was a brilliantly constructed tale of parallel narratives as teenager Tessie and adult Tess recount their horrific story of being abducted and left for dead by a seasoned serial killer in an engrossing exploration of the morality of the death penalty.

  Lynda La Plante returned to the iconic heroine of Prime Suspect for Tennison (Simon & Schuster), offering a tale of how Tennison came of age as a policewoman in the early 1970s when she is seconded to an investigation into the murder of a 17-year-old girl found naked and strangled on Hackney Marshes. In a good year for Irish crime fiction, Jo Spain’s With Our Blessing (Quercus) was a remarkably assured debut that introduced Inspector Tom Reynolds in an old-fashioned murder mystery (albeit one freighted with the pain of recent Irish history) set in a convent.

  This article was first published in the Irish Times.

  So there it is, folks. It’s been another great year, and thank you kindly to everyone who dropped by ye olde blogge. A happy and peaceful Christmas to you all, and I’ll see you all back here come the New Year …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Marnie Riches

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?
The Silence of the Lambs should have been by me and not that Thomas Harris. Although, if I’d written it, there would have been some terrible swearing and scenes of a sexual nature in it that didn’t necessarily involve cannibalism or fava beans. But still, what a great baddy! Hannibal Lecter was the first villain I had fallen for since Darth Vader.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Probably Lisbeth Salander, who inspired, in no small part, my heroine, George McKenzie. Salander is whizzy with technology and surly. I’m a luddite and loud-mouth. I don’t do silent and smouldering well at all, which Salander does. It’s that Scandinavian vs Celt/Eastern European Mancunian thing. I come from a long line of big-gobbed tough women. We don’t do poise or studied cool. Plus, Salander always seems to have good hair. I’m a middle-aged woman. My hairline is receding. My appendages are hitting the deck. It’s not nice on any level. Anyway, though George McKenzie is young and kickass like Salander, she is gobby like me (although she has a reassuringly hairy head).

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I read an awful lot of children’s fiction – hardly surprising, since I started out as a children’s author. Children’s fiction is written in a sparing and economical way, which gives an adventure novel a real sense of urgency. Middle-grade is my favourite age banding. I love Eoin Colfer, Frank Cottrell-Boyce and the Young Bond series by Charlie Higson and now, Steve Cole.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When I’ve spent an entire day, writing one paragraph and trying to get a clever metaphor just right. These are the bits I agonise over, but when I read them back, I think, wow. I can actually write. Then I get the odd one star howler back that says I went off at a tangent or that they had to skip a paragraph because “it got boring”. Those are the clever bits, you one-star-howling berk!!

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
Now, I had to take this under advisement, since I can’t claim to have read widely in the Irish crime genre. My friend and book reviewer, Bookwitch, tells me the best crime novels are Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy series. I couldn’t specify one in particular and neither would she.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Declan Burke’s Crime Always Pays. It’s a very funny, very visual crime novel. The tight plotting, great dialogue and intriguing characters are all there. Humour and crime translate well to the big screen, as demonstrated by my favourites, In Bruges and The Guard.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst thing about being a writer is getting that one star howler of a review. There’s always some smart arse who sussed the killer by page ten, or who really couldn’t get any of your characters and thought the whole thing was tedious beyond belief. You can’t quite believe a story that took you years to write – two, in the case of The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die – can be dismissed in a short paragraph. That bit SUCKS, as does watching your book slide back in the Amazon rankings into obscurity. On the bright side, the best bit is ... well, most of it. I love working alone, talking to myself aloud about plot points, allowing my characters to become real to me, picking my nose without fear of discovery, sitting in my pyjama bottoms without fear of fashion or hygiene judgement. All the things you get up to when you’re in a small, enclosed space without supervision and with the aid of alcoholic drink ... Then, realising post-publication that people love what I’ve written and totally get my characters and absolutely didn’t sodding work out who the killer was by page ten. Those are the best bits.

The pitch for your next book is …?
In The Girl Who Broke the Rules – book 2 of the George McKenzie series – the heroine, George, gets to hang out with a grade A perv who equals Hannibal Lecter in both his finesse, his intellectual prowess and his aptitude for murder. George, together with Chief Inspector Paul van den Bergen of the Dutch police, must work out who is committing a string of brutal serial killings, where victims are sliced open and emptied of their innards! There’s sex, drugs and shenanigans in Amsterdam’s red light district. It’s Silence of the Lambs meets Trainspotting!

Who are you reading right now?
I’m reading Jo Nesbo’s The Son right now, along with Angela Marsons’ Silent Scream, but I’ve just finished The Farm by Tom Rob Smith which I enjoyed hugely.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write. Sometimes, all the naughty just has to come out.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Gritty, gripping, intelligent. Well, you could swap intelligent for naughty if you’re, you know, a bit funny about the swearing and the nookie and the violence.

THE GIRL WHO WOULDN’T DIE by Marnie Riches is published by Maze.

Event: ‘Irish Noir’ at Harrogate

The Harrogate festival – wisely, in my opinion – corral almost all of the appearing Irish writers onto one panel this year, as Stuart Neville, Steve Cavanagh, Brian McGilloway, Adrian McKinty and Eoin McNamee take to the stage under the banner of ‘Irish Noir’ (William Ryan also appears at Harrogate, albeit on a different panel). The festival runs from July 16 to 19, with the Irish Noir event taking place at noon on Friday 17th. The very, very best of luck to whatever unfortunate is scheduled to moderate that particular panel …
  Elsewhere, a couple of stand-out highlights of the festival include Val McDermid interviewing Sara Paretsky, and Arnaldur Indridason interviewed by Barry Forshaw.
  For all the details, clickety-click here …

Overview: The St Patrick’s Day Rewind

A very happy St Patrick’s Day to one and all, and to celebrate the day that’s in it I thought I’d offer up some of the highlights of Irish crime writing (aka Emerald Noir) from the blog – book reviews, interviews, features, etc. – from the last five years or so. To wit:

An interview with Tana French on the publication of BROKEN HARBOUR
In short, Tana French is one of modern Ireland’s great novelists. Broken Harbour isn’t just a wonderful mystery novel, it’s also the era-defining post-Celtic Tiger novel the Irish literati have been crying out for.

An interview with Alan Glynn on the publication of WINTERLAND
“I think that the stuff you ingest as a teenager is the stuff that sticks with you for life,” says Glynn. “When I was a teenager in the 1970s, the biggest influence was movies, and especially the conspiracy thrillers. What they call the ‘paranoid style’ in America – Klute, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, Three Days of the Condor, and of course, the great Chinatown … We’re all paranoid now.”

A triptych of reviews of John Connolly’s THE LOVERS, Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST) and Declan Hughes’ ALL THE DEAD VOICES:
“But then The Lovers, for all that it appears to be an unconventional but genre-friendly take on the classic private eye story, eventually reveals itself to be a rather complex novel, and one that is deliciously ambitious in its exploration of the meanings behind big small words such as love, family, duty and blood.”

“Whether or not Fegan and his ghosts come in time to be seen as a metaphor for Northern Ireland itself, as it internalises and represses its response to its sundering conflicts, remains to be seen. For now, The Twelve is a superb thriller, and one of the first great post-Troubles novels to emerge from Northern Ireland.”

“As with Gene Kerrigan’s recent Dark Times in the City, and Alan Glynn’s forthcoming Winterland, Hughes’s novel subtly explores the extent to which, in Ireland, the supposedly exclusive worlds of crime, business and politics can very often be fluid concepts capable of overlap and lucrative cross-pollination, a place where the fingers that once fumbled in greasy tills are now twitching on triggers.”

A review of Eoin McNamee’s ORCHID BLUE
“Students of Irish history will know that Robert McGladdery was the last man to be hanged on Irish soil, a fact that infuses Orchid Blue with a noir-ish sense of fatalism and the inevitability of retribution. That retribution and State-sanctioned revenge are no kind of justice is one of McNamee’s themes here, however, and while the story is strained through an unmistakably noir filter, McNamee couches the tale in a form that is ancient and classical, with McGladdery pursued by Fate and its Furies and Justice Curran a shadowy Thanatos overseeing all.”

A review of Jane Casey’s THE LAST GIRL
On the evidence of THE BURNING and THE LAST GIRL, Maeve Kerrigan seems to me to be an unusually realistic and pragmatic character in the world of genre fiction: competent and skilled, yet riddled with self-doubt and a lack of confidence, she seems to fully inhabit the page. This was a pacy and yet thoughtful read, psychologically acute and fascinating in terms of Maeve’s personal development, particularly in terms of her empathy with the victims of crime.

Eoin Colfer on Ken Bruen’s THE GUARDS
“I was expecting standard private-investigator fare, laced with laconic humour, which would have been fine, but what I got was sheer dark poetry.”

A review of Adrian McKinty’s THE COLD COLD GROUND
As for the style, McKinty quickly establishes and maintains a pacy narrative, but he does a sight more too. McKinty brings a quality of muscular poetry to his prose, and the opening paragraph quoted above is as good an example as any. He belongs in a select group of crime writers, those you would read for the quality of their prose alone: James Lee Burke, John Connolly, Eoin McNamee, David Peace, James Ellroy.

  For updates on the latest on all Irish crime writers, just type the author’s name into the search box at the top left of the blog …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Steve Cavanagh

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?
There’s a few that spring to mind; The Black Echo by Michael Connelly, Silence Of The Lambs by Thomas Harris, The Killing Kind by John Connolly and I’d even throw in The Firm by John Grisham. I think The Firm is one hell of a thriller with great themes running all the way through it. It’s very much a class warfare book, and a modern dissection of the American dream.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
One of my favourite fictional characters is Horace Rumpole. He believes in the presumption of innocence, Legal Aid, cheap Claret and teasing judges. I can’t fault that. I think John Mortimer is often overlooked in the crime fiction canon but I’d put the Rumpole of the Bailey series right up there with Holmes – it’s that important. In later books Mortimer even used Rumpole like a moral scalpel for society by examining ASBO’s and knee jerk anti-terrorism legislation. It would mean I’d have to put up with She Who Must Be Obeyed. Maybe I should rethink that one?

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t believe there are guilty pleasures when reading. If I enjoy something and I think it’s good then I don’t feel guilty about it. But I know what you mean. I’d probably say the late David Gemmell, as he is my favourite fantasy writer. He wrote fantasy novels, but wrote them as thrillers. David Gemmell was labelled as writing “heroic fantasy” which puts some readers off as they think it’s all about white knights on horses rescuing damsels in distress. I would say Gemmell was the master of unheroic fantasy – as most of the supposed heroes in his novels are almost as bad as the villains. Character is the key in his books and doesn’t spend the first 50 pages with world building. The first two books of his Celtic quadrilogy are stunning page turners. Gemmell also wrote the best fight scenes I’ve ever read. Read Legend – Gemmell’s hero, Druss, is basically a sixty-year old Jack Reacher with an axe. I can see why some might think this a guilty pleasure – I just see it as pleasure.

Most satisfying writing moment?
There is a scene in the second Eddie Flynn novel, The Plea, where the book shifts up several gears in a single sentence. It’s a moment that nobody sees coming and sets up a really tense action sequence. I think it’s probably the best thing I’ve written.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
I can’t recommend just one. The latest novel from my host, would be high on my recommended reads list, as would Brian McGilloway’s Little Girl Lost, Stuart Neville’s The Twelve, Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy series and Gerard Brennan’s Undercover. I read Gerard’s last year and I thought it was the best thing he’s written, I loved it.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I think Stuart Neville’s The Twelve will make a great movie. And I really hope that does get made as it would transfer brilliantly to the screen. If I had my wish list – HBO would take a Charlie Parker book and adapt it over a whole season. That would be awesome.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Best thing is when someone reads your book and tells you they enjoyed it. Worst thing? The worry. I constantly worry about everything; the writing, promoting, the whole shebang is like a brilliant, exciting but nerve wracking dream.

The pitch for your next book is …?
It’s my debut novel, The Defence.

Eddie Flynn used to be a con artist. Then he became a lawyer. Turned out the two weren't that different. It’s been over a year since Eddie vowed never to set foot in a courtroom again. But now he doesn’t have a choice. Olek Volchek, the infamous head of the Russian mafia in New York, has strapped a bomb to Eddie’s back and kidnapped his ten-year-old daughter, Amy. Eddie only has forty-eight hours to defend Volchek in an impossible murder trial - and win - if he wants to save his daughter. Under the scrutiny of the media and the FBI, Eddie must use his razor-sharp wit and every con-artist trick in the book to defend his ‘client’ and ensure Amy’s safety. With the timer on his back ticking away, can Eddie convince the jury of the impossible? Lose this case and he loses everything.

Who are you reading right now?
I’ve just finished Lee Child’s Never Go Back, and I’m starting CJ Sansom’s Lamentation. I’m a real sucker for the Matthew Shardlake novels.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Read. I love to read but most of all I enjoy reading to my kids. Yeah, that’s the best. I couldn’t give that up.

The three best words to describe your own writing are…?
Fast. Tense. Funny. The three words I’d use to describe my process of writing are – Shit. Noooo. AARRGHHHH!!!!

Steve Cavanagh’s THE DEFENCE will be launched at No Alibis bookstore on March 12.

Republished: ODD MAN OUT by F.L. Green

Originally published in 1945, F.L. Green’s superb Belfast-set thriller ODD MAN OUT will soon be republished by Valancourt Books, with an introduction from Adrian McKinty. To wit:

An Irish Republican Army plot goes horribly wrong when its leader, Johnny Murtah, kills an innocent man and is himself gravely wounded. As the police close in on Johnny, his compatriots must make a daring bid to rescue him. But they are not the only ones in pursuit: an impoverished artist, a saintly priest, a sleazy informer, and a beautiful young woman all have their own reasons to be desperate to find him. Meanwhile Johnny wanders the streets injured and alone, trapped in a delirious nightmare, surrounded on all sides by betrayal and faced with the realization that he may die that night with the stain of murder on his soul. The action unfolds over eight hours of a cold Belfast night, with the suspense building towards an explosive conclusion.
  Both a critical success and a bestseller, F. L. Green’s masterful thriller Odd Man Out (1945) is best known today as the basis for the classic 1947 film adaptation directed by Carol Reed and starring James Mason. This edition, the first in over 30 years, features a new introduction by Adrian McKinty.

  As it happens, Adrian McKinty’s contribution to DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS (2011), which focused on Northern Ireland’s early contribution to Irish crime writing, was titled ‘Odd Men Out’, in which he touches briefly on ODD MAN OUT, describing it as a Dante-esque descent into a surrealist hell. Poor old Belfast, eh? Always the bitter word, etc. ...

One To Watch: THE DEFENCE by Steve Cavanagh

Steve Cavanagh’s ‘The Grey’ is one of the most impressive of the offerings in BELFAST NOIR, the new short story collection edited by Stuart Neville and Adrian McKinty, and it augurs well for THE DEFENCE (Orion), Steve’s debut novel, which will be published next March. Quoth the blurb elves:

The truth has no place in a courtroom. The truth doesn’t matter in a trial. The only thing that matters is what the prosecution can prove. Eddie Flynn used to be a con artist. Then he became a lawyer. Turned out the two weren’t that different. It’s been over a year since Eddie vowed never to set foot in a courtroom again. But now he doesn’t have a choice. Olek Volchek, the infamous head of the Russian mafia in New York, has strapped a bomb to Eddie's back and kidnapped his ten-year-old daughter Amy. Eddie only has 48 hours to defend Volchek in an impossible murder trial - and win - if wants to save his daughter. Under the scrutiny of the media and the FBI, Eddie must use his razor-sharp wit and every con-artist trick in the book to defend his ‘client’ and ensure Amy's safety. With the timer on his back ticking away, can Eddie convince the jury of the impossible? Lose this case and he loses everything.

  For more on Steve Cavanagh, clickety-click here …

Feature: The Alternative Irish Crime Novel of the Year

It’s that time of the year again, as the Irish Book Awards hove into view on November 26th, when I suggest that [insert year here] has been yet another annus terrificus for Irish crime fiction, aka ‘Emerald Noir’. The shortlist for the Irish Crime Novel of the Year runs as follows:

The Ireland AM Crime Fiction Award

Can Anybody Help Me? by Sinéad Crowley
Last Kiss by Louise Phillips
The Final Silence by Stuart Neville
The Kill by Jane Casey
The Secret Place by Tana French
Unravelling Oliver by Liz Nugent

  As always, however, there were a number of tremendous novels published that didn’t, for various reasons, feature on the shortlist. The following is another short list, of books I’ve read to date this year that are also easily good enough to win the title of best Irish crime fiction novel in 2014. As you might expect, there were also a number of very good novels that I didn’t manage to read this year; but the gist of this post is to celebrate the quality and diversity of Irish crime fiction in 2014. To wit:

The Dead Pass, Colin Bateman
The Black Eyed Blonde, Benjamin Black
The Wolf in Winter, John Connolly
Bitter Remedy, Conor Fitzgerald
Cross of Vengeance, Cora Harrison
The Sun is God, Adrian McKinty
Blue is the Night, Eoin McNamee
The Boy That Never Was, Karen Perry

  Finally, the very best of luck to all the shortlisted nominees on November 26th. Given that she has been oft-nominated and is yet to win, and her Maeve Kerrigan series grows more impressive with each succeeding book, my vote goes to Jane Casey’s THE KILL …

Launch: BELFAST NOIR, ed. Stuart Neville and Adrian McKinty

BELFAST NOIR (Akashic Books), edited by Stuart Neville and Adrian McKinty, will be launched at the Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast, on November 22nd. To wit:

An event for crime fiction fans guys, one that is certainly not to be missed!

No Alibis Bookstore invite you to the Crescent Arts Centre on Saturday 22nd November at 6:30pm for the launch of BELFAST NOIR. This FREE event sees a variety of authors come together in a new anthology.

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. Brand-new stories by: Glenn Patterson, Eoin McNamee, Garbhan Downey, Lee Child, Alex Barclay, Brian McGilloway, Ian McDonald, Arlene Hunt, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Claire McGowan, Steve Cavanagh, Lucy Caldwell, Sam Millar, and Gerard Brennan.

From the introduction by Adrian McKinty & Stuart Neville:

“Few European cities have had as disturbed and violent a history as Belfast over the last half-century. For much of that time the Troubles (1968–1998) dominated life in Ireland’s second-biggest population centre, and during the darkest days of the conflict—in the 1970s and 1980s—riots, bombings, and indiscriminate shootings were tragically commonplace. The British army patrolled the streets in armoured vehicles and civilians were searched for guns and explosives before they were allowed entry into the shopping district of the city centre . . . Belfast is still a city divided . . .
  “You can see Belfast’s bloodstains up close and personal. This is the city that gave the world its worst ever maritime disaster, and turned it into a tourist attraction; similarly, we are perversely proud of our thousands of murders, our wounds constantly on display. You want noir? How about a painting the size of a house, a portrait of a man known to have murdered at least a dozen human beings in cold blood? Or a similar house-sized gable painting of a zombie marching across a postapocalyptic wasteland with an AK-47 over the legend UVF: Prepared for Peace—Ready for War. As Lee Child has said, Belfast is still ‘the most noir place on earth.’

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

News: Adrian McKinty Wins Australian ‘Ned Kelly’ Award

Hearty congratulations to Adrian McKinty (right), who yesterday won the Australian ‘Ned Kelly’ award for Best Australian Crime Fiction for IN THE MORNING I’LL BE GONE (Serpent’s Tail). The prize was awarded at the Brisbane Writers Festival. Quoth the judges:

“In his use of humour with the grim realities of Belfast in 1984, coupled with a wonderfully constructed locked room mystery, McKinty has produced something really quite extraordinary. There’s a fine line between social commentary and compelling mystery and not many writers, crime or literary, can do both.”

  For more, clickety-click on Adrian’s blog.
  For an interview published on the release of IN THE MORNING I’LL BE GONE, clickety-click here …

The Weekly Update

Given that I’m up to my oxters in rewrites / edits, and time at CAP Towers is at a premium, I hope you’ll forgive me if I offer a couple of days worth of posts in one ‘Weekly Update’-style bundle. To wit:

  My latest Irish Times column has a review of Adrian McKinty’s latest offering, THE SUN IS GOD (Serpent’s Tail), which runs a lot like this:

The Troubles and 1980s Northern Ireland formed the backdrop to Adrian McKinty’s recent trilogy of novels, but The Sun is God (Serpent’s Tail, €17.90) is set on the tiny Duke of York islands in the South Pacific island in 1906. Boer War veteran and former military policeman Will Prior is supervising a failing rubber plantation when he is commissioned to investigate a suspicious death on nearby Kabakon Island, home to a cult that worships the sun and eats only coconuts. Based on an improbable but true story, the novel offers a fascinating twist on the traditional ‘locked room’ mystery, as only the island’s miserable few inhabitants can be considered suspects in the alleged murder. Prior, as reluctant a sleuth as has ever shuffled into the genre, makes for a blackly humorous guide to a palm-fringed, sun-drenched idyll that is both heaven and hell. McKinty’s 15th novel (including YA titles) is an ambitious offering that incorporates a sub-plot exploring pre-WWI colonial tensions between Britain and Germany, but it’s the investigation of the central mystery, with its undertones of Paradise Lost, that proves most entertaining. ~ Declan Burke

  For the rest of the column, which includes very good books from Alafair Burke, Marc Dugain, Alan Furst and Karin Fossum, clickety-click here:

  Meanwhile, Desmond Doherty launches his latest Valberg novel, SINS OF THE FATHERS (Guildhall Press), on Thursday, June 26th, at the Tower Hotel in Derry, with Brian McGilloway doing the honours as guest speaker. For more, clickety-click here …

After inflicting brutal revenge on the jury that wrongly sent him down for child murder, a deadly assassin is back on the streets of Derry. And this time he’s working his way up the legal ladder. Police, lawyers, judges – no one is safe. Detective Jon Valberg leads the hunt to nail the killer and expose his shadowy accomplices. And soon finds out how personal it’s all about to become ...

  Elsewhere, I thoroughly enjoyed myself last Saturday afternoon at the Dalkey Books Festival, where I took part in a conversation on ‘Emerald Noir’ with the always entertaining Declan Hughes (right) at Dalkey’s Masonic Hall. We got to sit on a pair of thrones for the proceedings (not pictured), with Declan Hughes, obviously, perched on the gold throne, while I had to do with the less gilded one. A very nice hour or so it was too, not least because a lovely lady described me as ‘the Quentin Tarantino of Irish crime fiction’, and it was lovely to meet the fabulously talented Aifric Campbell again, and Ross Golden Bannon, who is a name to watch. You heard it here first …

  Finally, my current tome CRIME ALWAYS PAYS nabbed itself a rather nice review in the forthcoming Booklist. The reviewer thought the characters erred on the side of unsympathetic, but the gist was positive:

“This is screwball comedy at its screwiest, with super-short chapters told from the viewpoints of myriad characters … The dialogue flows fast, though, which moves the story along at a frantic pace. Give this one to fans of comic crime capers.” ~ Booklist

  Speaking of which, the lovely Bob Johnstone of the Gutter Bookshop asked me sign a load of copies of CRIME ALWAYS PAYS at the Dalkey Festival; so if anyone is craving a signed copy, Bob is your man …

Here Comes The Sun

Adrian McKinty’s THE SUN IS GOD (Serpent’s Tail) arrived in the post to CAP Towers yesterday, and a handsome tome it is too. McKinty’s most recent offerings, aka the Sean Duffy Trilogy, are set in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, so it’s fair to say that THE SUN IS GOD is something of a departure. Quoth the blurb elves:

Colonial New Guinea—1906: a small group of mostly German nudists live an extreme back-to-nature existence on the remote island of Kabakon. Eating only coconuts and bananas, they purport to worship the sun. One of their members—Max Lutzow—has recently died, allegedly from malaria. But an autopsy on his body in the nearby capital of Herbertshöhe raises suspicions about foul play.
  Retired British military police officer Will Prior is recruited to investigate the circumstances of Lutzow’s death. At first, the eccentric group seems friendly and willing to cooperate with the investigation. They all insist that Lutzow died of malaria. Despite lack of evidence for a murder, Prior is convinced that the group is hiding something …

  THE SUN IS GOD will be published on July 1st. For all the details, clickety-click here …

When Edgar Met Johnny

It’s (a slightly belated) three cheers, two stools and a resounding ‘Huzzah!’ for John Connolly (right), who took home a prestigious Edgar Award last weekend for his short story, ‘The Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository’. Not too shabby, as they say, not by a long chalk, and CAP Towers was en fete for the weekend after the news filtered through. And while we’re on the subject, John’s current offering, the latest Charlie Parker novel THE WOLF IN WINTER, is a rather fine piece of work too …

  Elsewhere, and staying with the topic of awards, I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville (along with Gene Kerrigan) have been nominated for Barry Awards. Well, it’s a hearty congratulations to both, again, on the news that they’ve been longlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, which will be awarded at the Harrogate Festival in July. Stuart has been nominated for RATLINES, while Adrian’s nomination is for I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET. Both are terrific novels, in my opinion, but the competition is fierce: the longlist also includes Lee Child, Denise Mina, Ian Rankin, Cathi Unsworth and Belinda Bauer, among others. The shortlist will be announced on July 1st, by the way, and there’s a public voting system for narrowing down the longlist: if you’re so inclined, you’ll find all the details here.