Review: UNDER THE NIGHT by Alan Glynn

Alan Glynn’s UNDER THE NIGHT (Faber) opens in Manhattan in 1953, with ad man Ned Sweeney experiencing supernatural clarity and intelligence after being slipped a good old-fashioned Mickey Finn. In a parallel narrative set sixty years later, Ned’s grandson and political researcher Ray Sweeney begins to hear rumours about the fabled MDT-48, a drug employed by the CIA in its MK-Ultra experiments in mind control. Both a prequel to and sequel of Glynn’s debut The Dark Fields (2001), Under the Night is a wild ride through history’s back channels, as Ned encounters Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe and Dylan Thomas, and winds up in the remote heart of the Pacific watching the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb. Meanwhile, Ray discovers himself the unlikely confidante of ex-CIA man Clay Proctor, a former adviser to President Nixon and a man who knows where a good many bodies are buried. Shot through with Glynn’s leitmotif of justifiable paranoia, it’s a tantalising tale of what-ifs and could-have-beens as Ned and Ray separately piece together an appalling account of a ‘deep state’ manipulation of the American public on a staggering scale. ~ Declan Burke

  This review first appeared in the Irish Times’ crime fiction review column for October. Also reviewed were the latest titles from Michael Connelly, Ann Cleeves, SJ Morden and Robert Galbraith. For more, clickety-click here …

The Derry Air

There’s something special in the Derry air, alright. About the only downside to the weekend’s trip to Derry for the ‘Killer Books’ festival was that I was still stuck on the M50 on the way home on Sunday evening when Sligo Rovers scored the winner in the Cup Final about three hours into injury time.
  Other than that, ‘Killer Books’ made for a very fine weekend indeed. As always, the best part of such events is meeting fellow scribes, such as Lee Child and Desmond Doherty (right and righter). I also had a couple of brief-but-lovely chats with Claire McGowan, Andrew Pepper, Stuart Neville, William Ryan, John McAllister, Arlene Hunt, Alan Glynn, Stephen Mearns and Ann Cleeves.
  On Friday afternoon I had the honour of taking part in a panel discussion on comedy crime fiction alongside Colin Bateman (who was a busy man, given that his ‘Teenage Kicks’ punk musical opened in Derry over the weekend) and Gerard Brennan, all of which was moderated in some style by the great Garbhan Downey.
  All told, ‘Killer Books’ was a huge credit to its curator, Brian McGilloway, who launched his latest offering, HURT, on the Friday evening. Here’s hoping that ‘Killer Books’ in Derry becomes an annual event …

Derry’s Killer Books

Brian McGilloway is curating the ‘Killer Books’ event in Derry next month, which takes place under the aegis of the City of Culture 2013 and runs from November 1st to November 3rd. Brian took to Facebook a couple of days back to give a flavour of the event, which runs a lot like this:

“I’m hugely excited to be curating Killer Books at the Verbal Arts Centre in Derry, supported by Easons, from 1-3rd Nov. Guest authors include Lee Child, Ann Cleeves, Colin Bateman, Stuart Neville, Claire McGowan, Declan Burke, Declan Hughes, Louise Phillips, William Ryan, John McAllister, Gerard Brennan, Andrew Pepper, Alan Glynn, Arlene Hunt, Paul Charles, Dave Barclay, Garbhan Downey, Des Doherty and more. I’ll also be launching HURT on Friday 1st in the Verbal Arts at 7pm. There will also be CSI demonstrations, Victorian murder tours of the city walls, story telling, special kids events and much, much more.”

  For details on how to book tickets, etc., contact the Verbal Arts Centre on 02871 266946.

Silver Stain, Gold Standard

I’ve already mentioned on these pages how wonderful Paul Johnston’s THE SILVER STAIN is, but I’m going to do it again, because they’re my pages, and because I can. Oh, and because I reviewed said novel as part of the most recent Irish Times crime fiction column, which appeared a couple of weeks back and was composed of short reviews of the latest novels from Sue Grafton, Parker Bilal, Kevin Brophy, Ann Cleeves and said Paul Johnston. To wit:

Crete is the setting for Paul Johnston’s 13th novel, THE SILVER STAIN (Crème de la Crime, £19.99), which sees a film producer commission Johnston’s Athens-based private eye, Alex Mavros, to find a movie star’s personal assistant. A straightforward assignment, but Mavros quickly discovers that the events being depicted on the film set – the Nazi invasion of Crete in 1941 – have contemporary resonances that prove lethal. A Scottish author living in Greece, writing about a detective who is half-Scottish, half-Greek, Johnston employs an observer who is ideally placed to make an outsider’s caustic observations about modern Crete, yet he knows the terrain well enough to give the setting a vividly authentic feel. The island’s time-honoured love-hate relationship with law and order, allied to pacy narrative and deadpan black humour courtesy of a knowingly archetypal private eye, all delivered in deceptively elegant prose, make THE SILVER STAIN an early contender for one of the best private detective novels of the year.

  For the rest of the column, clickety-click here …

A Warm, Warm Reception

The latest crime fiction column appeared in the Irish Times yesterday, featuring reviews of the latest titles from Elmore Leonard, Margie Orford, Ann Cleeves, Parker Bilal, Patricia Cornwell and Adrian McKinty. This being, ostensibly, an outlet for Irish crime writing, and THE COLD COLD GROUND being a terrific novel which has had a very warm reception to date, I’ll focus on the McKinty. To wit:

The Carrickfergus writer Adrian McKinty plunges into the dark heart of Northern Ireland’s Troubles in THE COLD COLD GROUND (£12.99, Serpent’s Tail), as Det Sgt Sean Duffy finds himself investigating a series of linked murders against the backdrop of the hunger strikes in the spring of 1981. The setting represents an extraordinarily tense scenario in itself, but the fact that Duffy is a Catholic in a predominantly Protestant RUC adds yet another fascinating twist to McKinty’s neatly crafted plot. Written in a terse style, the novel is a literary thriller that is as concerned with exploring the poisonously claustrophobic demi-monde of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and the self-sabotaging contradictions of its place and time, as it is with providing the genre’s conventional thrills and spills. The result is a masterpiece of Troubles crime fiction: had David Peace, Eoin McNamee and Brian Moore sat down to brew up the great Troubles novel, they would have been very pleased indeed to have written THE COLD COLD GROUND. - Declan Burke

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  For those of you who have read THE COLD COLD GROUND, and fancy a dip into the work-in-progress of its sequel, clickety-click here …