Publication: THE PIGEON TUNNEL: STORIES FROM MY LIFE by John le Carré

I do love a good spy novel, and particularly those from the WWII / Cold War era – I’m especially fond of John le Carré, Helen MacInnes, Eric Ambler, John Lawton, Aly Monroe, Graham Greene and Len Deighton. Not that I’m any kind of expert on the spy novel – I’m happy to concede that I’m probably the only person who believes Alistair MacLean’s WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL is one of the finest spy novels ever written.
  Anyway, and speaking of the great spy novelists, I thoroughly enjoyed Adam Sisman’s biography of John le Carré last year, and I’m looking forward to le Carré’s own memoir, THE PIGEON TUNNEL (Viking), which is published later this week. Quoth the blurb elves:

‘Out of the secret world I once knew, I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I’m sitting now.’
  From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion, to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, John le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive - reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he’s writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire, or visiting Rwanda’s museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide, or celebrating New Year’s Eve with Yasser Arafat, or interviewing a German terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev, or watching Alec Guinness preparing for his role as George Smiley, or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in his The Constant Gardener, le Carré endows each happening with vividness and humour, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood. Best of all, le Carré gives us a glimpse of a writer’s journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters.

  THE PIGEON TUNNEL is published on September 8th. For all the details, clickety-click here …

I Bring Grave News

I had a crime fiction column published in the Irish Times last weekend, featuring new titles from Alan Glynn, Aly Monroe, Anne Holt and Carl Hiaasen. The review of Alan Glynn’s GRAVELAND (Faber and Faber) runs like this:

Alan Glynn’s fourth novel, Graveland, opens with the apparently random murder of a Central Park jogger. When a second man is shot dead in the street, and an attempted murder is botched in a similar attack, a pattern emerges: the targets are Wall Street high-flyers, representatives of the self-styled ‘Masters of the Universe’ who have ruined lives and destroyed the US economy.
  Thus the scene is set for a frantic manhunt for vigilante killers – or would be, if Graveland was a conventional thriller. The third of a loose trilogy that began with Winterland (2009) and continued with Bloodland (2011), the novel incorporates the search for the vigilantes and the investigation of their motives, and certainly proceeds at a rattling pace. Glynn, however, crafts a complex tale in which a host of disparate characters – among them a pair of radicalised brothers, a bereft father, a crusading journalist and a Wall Street kingpin – are skilfully interwoven, creating a story that is both a contemporary take on the timeless clash between the powerless and the powerful few and a commentary on the perception, interpretation and manipulation of the narratives that shape our lives.
  On the one hand an invigorating slice of conspiracy noir, Graveland is simultaneously a heartbreaking account of the human cost of corporate greed.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Bateman: Give Him An Inch, Etc.

The latest ‘Crime Beat’ column appeared in the Irish Times on Saturday, offering short reviews of the latest offerings from Michael Connelly, Aly Monroe, Susan Hill, Roslund & Hellstrom, George Pelecanos and The Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman. I’ll quote you the Bateman, if I may:

Another former journalist, Colin Bateman, resurrects the mouthy newspaperman Dan Starkey for his first outing in six years in NINE INCHES (Headline, £19.99). No longer a reporter, Starkey has set up as a private detective, in which capacity he is commissioned by a shock-jock radio host, Jack Caramac, to discover who kidnapped his young son. A slew of nefarious characters hove into sight as Starkey’s investigation moves from the well-heeled suburbs to working-class loyalist enclaves, in the process proffering a rather jaundiced view of the officially peaceful Northern Ireland landscape. Oddly, the ex-paramilitaries Starkey encounters are far more terrifying than those he outwitted when Bateman was writing during the Troubles, perhaps because, back then, there was always the hope the psychopathic parasites might melt back into the shadows when the new dispensation dawned. Dotted with Starkey’s blackly comic observations, NINE INCHES is an unsettling, breathless and very funny novel.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …