Event: Andrea Carter and Anthony J. Quinn at the Bray Literary Festival

I’m delighted to be taking part in the Bray Literary Festival this year, interviewing Andrea Carter and Anthony J. Quinn in the ‘Crime Watch’ strand.

Andrea Carter studied law at Trinity College Dublin, practising as both a solicitor and barrister before turning to write crime novels. She is the author of the Inishowen Mysteries, most recently The Well of Ice. Her books are published in the UK, Germany and the US, and have recently been optioned for television. Murder at Greysbridge will be published in October.

Anthony J. Quinn is the author of seven novels, including Undertow, his latest, which was published in June. His debut novel Disappeared was a Daily Mail Crime Novel of the Year, and was also picked by the Sunday Times as one of the best books of the year. It was shortlisted for a Strand Literary Award in the US.

The ‘Crime Watch’ event takes place in Bray Town Hall at 2.30pm on Sunday, September 30th. For all the details about the Festival, clickety-click here …

Irish Times’ Crime Fiction Column, December 2017

My latest Irish Times’ crime fiction column was published last weekend, and read very much like this:

Jo Spain’s The Confession (Quercus, €16.95) opens with a brutal home invasion, in which disgraced banker Harry McNamara is bludgeoned into a coma with his own golf club. Is the assault linked to Harry’s dodgy financial dealings, which helped to destroy the Irish economy? Why does Harry’s wife, Julie, simply sit and observe while Harry is being beaten to a pulp? And why does his assailant, JP Carney, turn himself in immediately afterwards, claiming to have no motive for the assault? Spain has previously published three police procedurals, but The Confession is a standalone psychological thriller which features not one but two confessions, as Julie and JP, in alternate chapters, tell us their life stories and the ways in which Harry McNamara has made their lives a misery. Delivered in an breezily irreverent, no-nonsense style (“McNamara is a banker. Who hasn’t wanted to kill one?”), the story offers a scathing overview of the Celtic Tiger years and the consequences of the subsequent economic crash: “The government, greedy and bloated on property-related taxes, and the Central Bank and the financial regulator, bought and owned on the golf course by the banks’ chief executives, had let things escalate out of control.” The money, however, is only a McGuffin; the assault on Harry McNamara isn’t business, but deeply personal. Spain teases out a tale woven around what Julie describes as ‘secrets, little petty lies and bigger sins,’ which is reminiscent of Liz Nugent’s Unravelling Oliver in its vivid portrait of a fascinating monster.

  Savages: The Wedding (Corsair, €16.95), the first in a quartet from French author Sabri Loutah, opens on the eve of a presidential election, with Idder Chaouch, French-born of Algerian heritage, strongly tipped to win. The novel revolves around the titular wedding, however, as which takes place in Saint-Etienne between third-generation French-Algerian ‘Slim’ Nerrouche and Kenza Zerbi, although it’s Slim’s brothers Fouad and Nazir who are most relevant to the story’s political backdrop. Fouad, a popular actor connected to Chaouch’s campaign, favours Arab integration; by contrast, Nazir advocates a more separatist Arab identity. It’s an absorbing set-up, not least because Sabri Loutah brilliantly conveys the anarchy and chaos of a wedding party in which both sets of families consider the other beneath them; on the downside, the novel is almost entirely composed of set-up, with the anticipated explosive events only occurring in the final few pages.

  “Southern fables usually went the other way around,” Texas Ranger Darren Matthews tells us in Attica Locke’s fourth novel, Bluebird, Bluebird (Serpent’s Tail, €16.99), “a white woman killed or harmed in some way, real or imagined, and then, like the moon follows the sun, a black man ends up dead.” When Matthews arrives in the East Texas community of Shelby County to investigate the killing of a black man and white woman, murdered in that order, he finds himself battling institutionalised racism and a thriving Aryan Brotherhood of Texas in a story steeped in the Blues and woven from tangled bloodlines that span generations. Previously nominated for the Orange Prize, the Edgar Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, Attica Locke has built a career on political novels wrapped in the conventions of the crime thriller, and Bluebird, Bluebird burnishes an already impressive reputation.

  The Assassin of Verona (Zaffre, €22.50) is the second in Benet Brandreth’s series of historical thrillers featuring a young William Shakespeare – player, poet and spy. Following on from the events of The Spy of Venice (2016), Will and his comrades Nicholas Oldcastle and John Hemminges find themselves in the vicinity of Verona, hunted by the Pope’s emissary, the inquisitor Fr Thornhill, as they seek to return to England with intelligence crucial to Queen Elizabeth’s court. The plot is more akin to the Robin Hood legend than anything Shakespearean, but the chief pleasure here is in the way Brandreth – who works with the Royal Shakespeare Company as an authority on Shakespeare – honours the spirit of the period’s language (‘Perchance the pain within her womb is the blossoming of some seed in ground ill-suited to the harvest.’) with a richly baroque hybrid style that is, almost inevitably, littered with references and allusions to the plays William Shakespeare will eventually settle down to write.

  Undertow (Head of Zeus, €19.50) is Anthony J. Quinn’s fifth novel to feature PSNI detective Celsius Daly, who is based on the shores of Lough Neagh, the ‘great wild space that had been his only respite from the two habits that governed his existence: work and insomnia.’ Called to investigate a suspicious death-by-drowning in Lough Neagh, Daly quickly finds himself enmeshed in a thick web of collusion when he discovers that the dead man, a Garda detective who lived in Northern Ireland, was a member of an unaccountable cross-border collective running a stable of informers and spies, and not always for the benefit of the greater good. “That corner of Ulster was a conflicted place,” Daly muses, “betrayal running in every direction, shadowy figures exerting opposing forms of deception, the stress lines running through every layer of society,” and it’s the border itself, and the recent history it represents, that provides Undertow with its theme, with Brexit and a possible return to the bad old days throwing a long shadow. Daly may keep himself busy ‘devising new ways of staying out of the past,’ but he ultimately discovers that ‘the undertow of the past was too strong. It took the legs out from under him and dragged him down without mercy.’ A powerful tale stained with the darkest of noir, Undertow is a powerful tale of a generation manipulated, betrayed and ultimately abandoned by the powers-that-be. ~ Declan Burke

Feature: Anthony J. Quinn on ‘the Border’

Anthony J. Quinn publishes UNDERTOW (Head of Zeus) this month, a story over which Brexit and the potential consequences of a ‘hard’ border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland throws a long shadow. Anthony had a piece published in the Irish Times yesterday about growing up with the border as a reality. To wit:

“Growing up during the Troubles, I wanted to run, but instead I remained rooted to the spot, in my home parish of Killeeshil in Tyrone, about three miles from the Border with Monaghan. By staying here and raising a family, I’ve managed to lift my childhood landscape out of the darkness of the past. The trees and rivers I played in as a boy with my brothers and sisters live on in my children’s world, their familiar sounds and images translated into new stories and adventures.
  “However, my children think I grew up somewhere else, in a grim terrain of checkpoints and military hardware, armed men in camouflage greens, bulletproof vests and balaclavas. To their generation, the Border exists not as a line on a map, but as a contradictory series of romantic recollections about smuggling and horror stories from the Troubles. They’ve never noticed the Border, which runs so invisibly close to their lives, and they’ve never been able to locate these stories in their own landscape. For the past 15 years or so, the Border has existed more as folklore, and in the crevices of the past, until its story took an unexpected turn in June 2016 when the UK made a political decision about immigration and voted for Brexit.
  “Then it was as if the Border had suddenly fallen upon us from the sky again.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Patricia Gibney

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?
Misery by Stephen King.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
No time for pleasures – guilty or otherwise. Most of my reading is crime and thrillers, detective based. But I do like the occasional short story.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Two really – getting my agent, Ger Nichol was, for me, the first validation of my writing. Then, of course, signing a four-book deal with Bookouture.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
Every Dead Thing by John Connolly. For an Irish-based novel, Disappeared by Anthony J. Quinn.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Freedom’s Child by Jax Miller. It’s not set in Ireland, but Jax lives in Enfield, just down the road! For an Irish-based novel, Red Ribbons by Louise Phillips.

Worst thing about being a writer?
For me it’s finding the discipline to edit my own work.

Best thing about being a writer?
I get to make things up. I can use my imagination and be creative.

The pitch for your book is …
When a woman’s body is found in Ragmullin cathedral, and hours later a man’s body is found hanging from a tree, DI Lottie Parker is called in to lead the investigation. The trail leads her to a former children’s home with a dark connection to her own family history. As she begins to link the current victims to unsolved murders decades old, two teenage boys go missing. She must close in on the killer before they strike again, but in doing so is she putting her own children in terrifying danger? Lottie is about to come face to face with a twisted soul who has a very warped idea of justice.

Who is on your shoulder as you write?
My husband, Aidan, who died almost eight years ago after a short illness, aged just 49. He has been with me in spirit every tap of the keyboard. Missed but cherished.

Who are you reading right now?
Robert Dugoni. My writing has been compared to his and I must admit I hadn’t read any of his work. So I’m catching up now. I didn’t realise he was a US bestseller!

God appears and says you can only write or read. Which would it be?
Write, of course. (However, I might need to be able to read a little in order to edit what I’ve written).

The three best words to describe your own writing …
Dark. Mysterious. Gripping. (I took those words from a review). Though my editor calls it ‘creepy’.

THE MISSING ONES by Patricia Gibney is published by Bookouture.

Event: Anthony J. Quinn and William Ryan at No Alibis

Belfast’s dedicated crime fiction bookstore No Alibis will host ‘An Evening with Anthony Quinn and William Ryan’ on November 4th, which promises to be a fascinating event. To wit:

An Evening with Anthony Quinn and William Ryan

Friday, November 4 at 6:30 PM

No Alibis
83 Botanic Avenue, BT7 1, Belfast

Anthony Quinn is an Irish writer and journalist. His debut novel Disappeared was shortlisted for a Strand Literary Award in the United States. It was also listed by Kirkus Reviews as one of the top ten thrillers of 2012. After its UK publication in 2014, Disappeared was selected by the Daily Mail and the Times as one of the best novels of the year. It was also long-listed for the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. His short stories have twice been shortlisted for a Hennessy/New Irish Writing award. Anthony will be chatting about and launching his latest Celcius Daley novel, Trespass.

William Ryan is an Irish writer living in London. His first novel, THE HOLY THIEF, was shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year, The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award, The CWA John Creasy New Blood Dagger and a Barry Award. His second novel, THE BLOODY MEADOW, was shortlisted for the Ireland AM Irish Crime Novel of the Year. William teaches on the Crime Writing Masters at City University in London. His latest novel The Constant Soldier has been described by AL Kennedy as “a nuanced, complex and gripping tale of guilt and love that captures the chaos at the end of World War Two”.

  For all the details, clickety-click here …