Review: THE LATE SHOW by Michael Connelly

The Late Show (Orion), Michael Connelly’s first novel to feature a new series character since Mickey Haller appeared in The Lincoln Lawyer (2005), opens with Renée Ballard and her partner John Jenkins taking a call to investigate credit card fraud. A mundane crime on the face of it, but par for the course: working ‘the late show’, i.e., the night shift, out of LA’s Hollywood Division, Ballard and Jenkins generally turn up to crime scenes, write their reports, then hand over the cases to the day shift the following morning.
  Connelly, however, is the creator of Harry Bosch, one of the most iconic protagonists in American crime fiction, and the deceptively routine opening quickly segues into a story that finds Ballard investigating the abduction and brutal assault of the transgender Ramona Ramone and a multiple shooting at a nightclub, during the course of which a waitress, Cynthia Haddel, is murdered simply because she is a potential witness.
  The names may have changed, then, but Connelly’s song remains essentially the same. The Late Show reads like a Bosch novel, as Connelly braids multiple investigations into his plot, driving the story onward with precise, measured prose that eschews sensationalism. Ballard, like the author, is an ex-journalist, whose ‘training and experience had given her skills that helped with [writing reports]. … She wrote short, clear sentences that gave momentum to the narrative of the investigation.’ Where Harry Bosch is a loner apart from his relationship with his daughter, Maddie, Ballard is a loner apart from her relationship with her grandmother, Tutu. Sleeping on the beach, showering and changing at the station, Ballard lives a minimalist existence that allows her dedicate herself to her work, believing that nothing should interfere with ‘the sacred bond that exists between homicide victims and the detectives who speak for them.’ Like Bosch, Ballard adheres to a Manichean philosophy: ‘big evil’ exists in the world, and her job is to prevent the spread of its ‘callous malignancy’.
  That said, Ballard is significantly more than a Bosch replacement or clone, at least for the time being (Connelly will publish the 20th Harry Bosch novel, Two Kinds of Truth, later this year). An absorbing character on her own terms, Ballard is morally disciplined but irreverently free-spirited as she goes down those mean streets (the reference to Chandler’s The Long Goodbye is no coincidence), and while she may plough a lone furrow broadly familiar to fans of Philip Marlowe, Harry Bosch or Mickey Haller, her gender allows Connelly to explore avenues closed off to his male protagonists. Her experience of institutionalised misogyny in the ranks of the LAPD may have hardened the previously idealistic Ballard, but it has not shut down her instinctive emotional responses; if anything, it has heightened her compassion for female victims of crime. Meanwhile, her sense of her own vulnerability and her attenuated awareness of possible threat, both of which feed into the story to a significant degree, are not qualities Bosch or Haller – or very few male protagonists in crime fiction, for that matter – would be likely to admit to out loud.
  Early in the novel, Ballard notes that the murdered waitress, Cynthia Haddel, was an aspiring actress who had played the part of ‘Girl at the Bar’ in an episode of the TV show Bosch, ‘which Ballard knew was based on the exploits of a now-retired LAPD detective.’ Harry Bosch has been hanging on by his fingernails for some years now, semi-retired and raging at the dying of the light, but it can only be a matter of time before Michael Connelly puts the old warhorse out to grass.
  That day may well provoke the kind of protests not witnessed since Arthur Conan Doyle tipped Sherlock Holmes off the Reichenbach Falls, but Connelly’s fans needn’t fret. In Renée Ballard, Connelly has created yet another potentially iconic tarnished knight of those perennially mean streets, a woman who understands, as her psychiatrist warns, that ‘if you go into darkness, the darkness goes into you,’ but who will defiantly stare down the abyss nonetheless. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

Publication: UNWILLING EXECUTIONER by Andrew Pepper

Andrew Pepper, the Belfast-based author of the Pyke mystery series, has just published the non-fiction title UNWILLING EXECUTIONER (Oxford University Press), which is aimed at ‘students and scholars of crime fiction; those with an interest in the history of crime and policing and the relationship between literature and the state.’ To wit:

What gives crime fiction its distinctive shape and form? What makes it such a compelling vehicle of social and political critique? UNWILLING EXECUTIONER argues that the answer lies in the emerging genre’s complex and intimate relationship with the bureaucratic state and modern capitalism, and the contradictions that ensue once the state assumes control of the criminal justice system. This study offers a dramatic new interpretation of the genre’s emergence and evolution over a three hundred year period and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon.
  From its roots in the tales of criminality circulated widely in Paris and London in the early eighteenth century, this book examines the extraordinary richness, diversity and complexity of the genre’s subsequent thematizations of crime and policing - moving from France and Britain and from continental Europe and the United States to other parts of the globe. In doing so it offers new ways of reading established crime novelists like Gaboriau, Doyle, Hammett, and Simenon, beyond their national contexts and an impulse to characterize their work as either straightforwardly "radical" or "conservative". It also argues for the centrality of writers like Defoe, Gay, Godwin, Vidocq, Morrison, and more recently Manchette, Himes, and Sjöwall and Wahlöö to a project where crime and policing are rooted, and shown to be rooted, in the social and economic conditions of their time. These are all deeply political writers even if their novels exhibit no interest in directly promoting political causes or parties. The result is an agile, layered, and far-reaching account of the crime story’s ambivalent relationship to the justice system and its move to complicate our understanding of what crime is and how society is policed and for whose benefit.

  Sounds like the proverbial cracker. For more, clickety-click here …

Review: NIGHT MUSIC by John Connolly

All good fiction incorporates an investigation of one kind or another, which may account in part for the enduring popularity of the crime / mystery novel. John Connolly is best known for his Charlie Parker novels, set in Maine and featuring a private eye who lives in a world tinged by the supernatural. By contrast, Connolly’s short stories – Night Music is his second collection; the first, Nocturnes, was published in 2004 – tend to foreground the supernatural. Night Music (Hodder & Stoughton) borrows liberally from the traditions of the ghost and horror story, the fairy and folktale, and boldly goes into the unknown realms of quantum physics.
  The collection opens with the Edgar Award-winning tale of ‘The Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository’, a delightfully absurd story about an institution to which the memorable characters of fiction retire to live for eternity once their creators have shuffled off this mortal coil. The note of whimsy may not set the tone for the rest of the collection, but its theme – the way in which fiction can rewrite reality – certainly does.
  That theme is directly addressed in the collection’s centre-piece, ‘The Fractured Atlas – Five Fragments’. The first fragment finds the Huguenot refugee Couvret in Amsterdam, where he encounters a book “that is like being in contact with a living thing. It pulses, and smells of blood.” Each of the five fragments explores the evil potential of this book: when an investigator searching for Lionel Maulding, the missing owner of the book, mocks the possibility that the book is ‘rewriting the world’, he is told firmly that, “The world is forever being altered by books.”
  In the midst of ‘The Fractured Atlas’ is the collection’s finest moment, the novella-length and M.R. James-influenced ‘The Wanderer in Unknown Realms’, in which the WWI veteran searching for Lionel Maulding might be experiencing the world being redrafted by an evil tome; equally, he might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by the horrors he witnessed in the trenches.
  Other elements from Connolly’s fiction resurface during the collection. ‘Razorshins’, set in Maine, is a story that draws upon the folklore of the great North Woods as Connolly resurrects the mythical ‘wendigo’. The fascination with theoretical physics Connolly explores in his young adult novels featuring Samuel Johnson returns in ‘The Wanderer in Unknown Realms’, as the author references William James’ concept of ‘the multiverse’; in ‘The Children of Dr Lyall’, set in London during WWII, Connolly explores an existential kind of horror in a story that blends abortion and quantum physics.
  Elsewhere, ‘The Hollow King’ offers a return to ‘the Universe of The Book of Lost Things’, an offshoot from the standalone novel published in 2006 that goes to the dark heart of the fairytale form to evoke Charles Perrault. ‘On The Anatomization of an Unknown Man (1637) by Frans Mier’ is pure Edgar Allen Poe; ‘Lazarus’ goes back to the New Testament for its inspiration, as the resurrected Lazarus, adrift and zombie-like, fears that “some great wrong has been committed in the name of pity and love.” ‘The Haunting’, meanwhile, is the boldest statement of intent title-wise; in fact, it’s a love story, and one of the most affecting in the collection.
  In a collection crackling with invention and ambition, Connolly saves the best for (almost) last. ‘Holmes on the Range’ is a very funny offshoot from ‘The Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository’, in which Sherlock Holmes arrives at the library in the wake of his infamous death at the Reichenbach Falls, only to belatedly discover that his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle (as countless authors have done since), has begun to rewrite his character. Is it conceivable that the immortal Holmes and Watson might – gasp! – be ‘replaced at some future date by alternative versions of themselves’?
  The rest, as they say, is history …

  This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Review: MR MERCEDES by Stephen King

Best known for his novels of horror and the supernatural, Stephen King has over the years written a number of crime and mystery novels, including Misery (1987) – in which author Paul Sheldon abandons his Victorian romances to pen a crime novel – Dolores Claiborne (1992) and The Colorado Kid (2005).
  The title of his latest offering brings to mind King’s fascination with haunted cars but that’s as close to the supernatural tropes as Mr Mercedes (Hodder & Stoughton) gets. Pitched as a suspense thriller, it opens with an eye-witness account of a mass murder, when a stolen Mercedes is driven at high speed into a crowd of people standing outside an auditorium. Eight people are killed, fifteen are wounded, and the perpetrator gets away.
  Months later, recently retired police detective Bill Hodges receives a taunting letter signed by ‘The Mercedes Killer’. Hodges knows he should turn the letter over to his former partner, Pete Huntley, but Hodges is divorced, lonely and purposeless. He has, on occasion, put a .38 revolver in his mouth, “just to see what it feels like to have a loaded gun lying on your tongue and pointing at your palate. Getting used to it, he supposes.”
  Newly energised, Hodges decides to pursue the investigation alone, at least until he can be sure the letter isn’t a hoax. At this point Stephen King opens up the second of the parallel narratives that sustain the story, introducing Brady Hartsfield, a computer repairman and ice-cream van driver and the self-styled ‘Mercedes Killer’. A sociopath, Brady Hartsfield harbours a dark ambition to make his mark on American history by emulating, and perhaps exceeding, some of the worst mass murders of recent times.
  On the face of it, this is a conventional set-up: the cop with nothing left to lose pursuing a deranged serial killer as the clock ticks down to an explosive climax. Mr Mercedes is a more knowing, self-aware thriller than the broad strokes might suggest, however, as the host of quirky references to the genre’s greats – Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Joseph Wambaugh and Edgar Allan Poe – suggests.
  Meanwhile, the strongest influence on Mr Mercedes goes unmentioned. In the past Stephen King has cited John D. MacDonald as one of the three writers who most influenced him as an aspiring novelist – the others were Don Robertson and Richard Matheson – and Bill Hodges is a similar character to MacDonald’s series protagonist Travis McGee, who was neither a policeman nor a private detective.
  “Philip Marlowe you ain’t,” Hodges tells himself, referencing Chandler’s iconic gumshoe. He’s right. Bill Hodges is neither cop nor private eye, but something intriguingly in between, a man with a detective’s skills but no legal basis on which to act in order to prevent mass murder.
  Brady Hartsfield, for his part, is a fascinating variation on the genre’s stereotypical serial killer, the man – and it’s almost always a man – who is as ridiculously well resourced as he is intelligent. By contrast, Hartsfield is all the more plausible and dangerous for the unpredictability of his animal cunning, as he is constantly forced to recalibrate his scheme due to a lack of foresight and financial wherewithal.
  Told in a folksy, conversational style, Mr Mercedes is on one level a thoroughly enjoyable homage to the crime / thriller genre from an author who is obviously steeped in its lore. On another level, the novel stares dead-eyed into the heart of darkness, and explores the social and psychological factors that created the monster Brady Hartsfield. Supernatural tropes may be at a premium, but there is plenty of horror and evil to be found here. The evil is of the chillingly banal variety, the all too familiar desire to triumph over impotent anonymity through infamy and notoriety. The horror emerges via Hartsfield’s entirely logical thought processes, and his ability to blend, chameleon-like, into the society and culture he professes to despise.
  There is good too, of course, as represented by Bill Hodges and the motley band of volunteer helpers – amateurs all – he assembles around him as they bid to prevent a tragedy. In the grand scheme, however, or at least as far as Brady Hartsfield is concerned, good and evil are equally irrelevant: “He muses on the terrorists who brought down the World Trade Centre (he muses on them often). Those clowns actually though they were going to paradise …”
  Brady is operating under no such illusions: “Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion … The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That’s all history is, after all: scar tissue.”
  It’s a downbeat and occasionally unsettling tale. As with all great thrillers, however, it’s also compulsively readable and hugely entertaining. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

Making A Killing

I interviewed Jeffrey Deaver (right) earlier this year, although for a variety of reasons the piece was only published last month. It runs like this:

“You may as well,” says author Jeffrey Deaver when I ask him if it’s okay to record our conversation. “It’s all going back to GCHG, and to the NSA and CIA anyway. Especially with this book.”
  The comment is delivered with Deaver’s dust-dry sense of humour, and sounds rather strange in the plush environs of the Merrion Hotel’s reception rooms, but he makes a valid point. The Kill Room is a very timely novel indeed – ‘oddly prescient’ is how Deaver describes it – which engages with some very contemporary headlines.
  “It deals with targeted killings,” says Deaver, “and only last month we had President Obama giving a press conference in which he talked about the killing of American citizens. It deals with data-mining, and we’ve just had this big scandal about [Edward] Snowden releasing that information. And there’s a whistle-blower, which is, again, Snowden. But I don’t want readers to think that Jeffrey Deaver is or has become a political writer. It’s the only political book I’ve ever written. It just happened that all these things came together at the same time.”
  Indeed, Deaver is at pains to stress that the political is not the personal in his novel.
  “I fall back on the adage that has been attributed to Ernest Hemingway,” he says. “Hemingway said, if you want to send a message, use Western Union. Meaning, it’s not the author’s job to give his or her own personal views in a novel, but it is the author’s job to raise the questions. I feel that even my kind of entertaining thrillers, which is the point of what I do, enhance the experience if you bring in issues that transcend the crime itself.
  “My goal is to entertain,” he continues. “I’ll do whatever I can to get readers to turn pages, so they lose sleep at night, they show up for work late. If somebody closes a Deaver book and says only, ‘I found that interesting,’ then I’ve failed. What I want them to do is close a book and say, ‘Oh my God, I survived that book!’
  The Kill Room is the 10th Lincoln Rhyme novel, and Jeffrey Deaver’s 30th in total. It opens with the targeted killing of an American citizen in the Bahamas, a murder that New York-based forensic scientist Lincoln Rhyme is commissioned to investigate on the basis that the ‘kill order’ was issued in New York state. Complicating matters, as always, is the fact that Lincoln Rhyme is a quadriplegic who very rarely leaves his customised apartment.
  “Lots of internal reversals, cliffhangers, some esoteric information about, and surprise endings, plural,” is how the author describes his recipe for ‘a Deaver novel’, but back in 1997, with eight novels already published, Deaver was looking to offer the reader yet another twist in terms of character.
  “I thought,” he says, ‘How about we do Sherlock Holmes? We haven’t seen Sherlock Holmes for a while.’ That sounds quite egotistical, and I wouldn’t want to take on Arthur Conan Doyle – I mean, he was a spiritualist, so he might come back to haunt me (laughs). But I wanted a character who was a cerebral man, a thinker. Holmes could fight if he had to, or go somewhere in disguise. I wanted someone who had no choice but to out-think his opponent. That was what I was trying to do in The Bone Collector. I never imagined that Lincoln would become as popular as he has.”
  The Bone Collector was adapted into a successful movie starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie, but for Deaver the novel is the most persuasive storytelling form.
  “I do believe that as an emotional experience,” he says, “reading fiction is the highest form of entertainment – I’m not going to use the word ‘art’, but I’ll say ‘entertainment’. That’s because it requires active participation on the part of the reader, as opposed to a film or a video game, where you tend to be more passive. Even in video games where you’re participating in a shoot-’em-up, it’s not really intellectually or emotionally engaging. So with that element of the book as an experience, we start from higher ground right away.”
  He chose the thriller form because it is, as John Connolly has suggested in the past, a kind of Trojan Horse that allows an author to smuggle virtually any kind of subject matter into the public domain – such as the political ambiguities of The Kill Room – in the disguise of popular fiction.
  “Well, John is absolutely right. Crime fiction permits and even urges us authors to consolidate as many different strains of conflict as we can, which is what storytelling is all about.” The fact that the crime novel is rooted in modern realities also makes it, he says, ‘a touch more compelling’ than other kinds of fiction.
  “Lord of the Rings is probably my favourite book ever,” he says, “but you have to buy into a whole lot of disbelief for that book. I mean, if you’re on the subway in New York City, do you really believe an orc is going to come in with scimitar and slice your head off? No. I love Stephen King, but do I really believe there’s a ghost in my closet? No. I do enjoy those books, but in a crime novel, if you answer the door and a cop holds up his badge, you let him in – and then you realise he’s wearing cloth gloves, and holding a knife in his other hand. That could happen.”
  Jeffrey Deaver is today an award-winning author who invariably tops the bestseller lists. For a writer who might be expected to rest on his laurels, however, he is still refreshingly ambitious. Despite being a writer who specialises in cerebral characters, he took on the challenge of writing Carte Blanche (2011), about the thriller genre’s most celebrated action-hero, James Bond. Meanwhile, his next novel, The October List, which will be published in October, is a standalone thriller which radically reworks the conventions of the genre and which Deaver describes as his most complex plot yet.
  Why is he still so determined to challenge himself?
  “I’m worried that some day I’ll wake up and discover that everyone has realised I’m a fake and a fraud,” he says.
  Perhaps that’s why he’s notorious for ‘micro-managing’ his books, taking eight months to sketch out an outline of 150-200 pages for a 400-page book.
  “I’m a pretty sloppy writer,” he shrugs. “I get the ideas down, I bang them out. My first drafts are messy, they’re too long, I always put in a lot more research than I need. I used to panic about that. I’d read something I’d written and go, ‘Where did this crap come from?’ And then I learned to say, ‘But at least you recognise it’s crap. That’s the good thing.’”

  The Kill Room by Jeffrey Deaver is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Chris Allen

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?
A STUDY IN SCARLET by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (and then every other Holmes/Watson excursion). I just love the style of his writing, the way in which he captured the time - the courtesy, the camaraderie, the thoroughness and dedication. This story really set up the principle characters, their partnership and the tone of the series that he maintained so well throughout the many years that he created these stories. I’m a huge fan and would love to write the way that he did. Sadly, I can only aspire to that standard ... but, I live in hope!

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
The character I would most like to have been is Dr John Watson. Far from being Sherlock’s sidekick as was portrayed in old movies and some treatments on television, Watson was a medical man with an outstanding military service record. He had enough wit to be Sherlock’s loyal intellectual companion, along with sufficient brawn to be his protector at the appropriate time. I would have loved being involved in the solving of those now iconic cases, and all the insight they provided into the human condition.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
There’s a great local writer here, a Canadian/Australian named Tara Moss who writes great contemporary crime fiction from a decidedly female perspective. Very strong. Great stories. I really enjoy them.

Most satisfying writing moment?
After writing my first book, DEFENDER, over a period of ten years - which I began on my return from East Timor in 2000 - the most satisfying moment was completing my second book, HUNTER, in just six months on a deadline for my publisher. I guess it was just great to prove to myself that I was able to churn out the story as fast as my clumsy two-fingered-typing style could achieve. By that stage, the story was so much in my head that I had to get Alex Morgan’s latest adventure onto the page.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
In all honesty, I am yet to knowingly read an Irish crime author. That said, the one that I currently have on my TBR list is Borderlands by Brian McGilloway. I’ve always been intrigued by the contemporary history of Ireland, North & South, and so I am looking forward to discovering McGilloway’s work.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst: The uncertainty of if/when all the hard work will actually pay off. Best: Those rare days when you can really feel that all the hard work and sacrifice is starting to pay off.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Alex Morgan has taken on gunrunners in DEFENDER and fugitive war criminals in HUNTER. Now in AVENGER he’s taking Intrepid’s first female agent into the centre of hell as together they bring to justice the masterminds of a global human trafficking cartel.

Who are you reading right now?
I find it really hard to read other action novels when I’m writing one. So I actually prefer to watch movies in my down time – sometimes it’ll be classic war movies like A Bridge Too Far or The Eagle Has Landed; sometimes it’ll be my favourite Bond action sequences, the new Hawaii-50, or the latest contemporary take on Holmes & Watson such as the BBC’s Sherlock or the US treatment Elementary. That said, I do enjoy returning to a story or two from Arthur Conan Doyle’s collected works or when I really needed inspiration I turn to Ian Fleming time and time again.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write. As long as others can read my stories, then I’ll be content just getting them out of the lumber room, my mind, and onto a page.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Contemporary. Action. Realism.

Chris Allen’s HUNTER is published by Momentum.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: STANDING IN ANOTHER MAN’S GRAVE (Orion) by Ian Rankin

Lee Child recently noted that were he to die, his fans would mourn and quickly move on. Were he to kill off Jack Reacher, on the other hand, the result would be uproar.
  It’s an echo of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s experience when he was forced to resurrect Sherlock Holmes after that character’s apparently fatal plunge into the Reichenbach Falls. One of the strengths of the crime / mystery genre is that it encourages the development of a character over a series of novels, to the point where the reader comes to identify more with the hero rather than his or her creator. Thus Max Allan Collins can write ‘new’ Mickey Spillane novels, and John Banville’s alter ego, Benjamin Black, can next year take up the baton from Robert B. Parker in writing about Raymond Chandler’s iconic private eye, Philip Marlowe.
  Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh-based Inspector John Rebus is equally iconic. Indeed, he is archetypal in his dour contempt of authority, his solitary nature, his fidelity to old-school policing methods and a fondness for the demon drink.
  Ian Rankin didn’t exactly kill off Rebus at the end of Exit Music (2007), the 17th novel in the series and flagged at the time as the final Rebus novel. With his customary fidelity to the realities of Rebus’s experiences, Rankin put Rebus out to pasture, because a police detective of his age operating in Scotland would have reached retirement age.
  Rebus requires no melodramatic resurrection for Standing in Another Man’s Grave, then, but it is notable that he is working, in a civilian capacity, in a ‘cold case’ department as the story begins. Approached by a woman whose daughter disappeared many years previously on the A9 motorway, and who is convinced that a recent disappearance of another girl on the same route represents the latest in a series of abductions, Rebus agrees to persuade his former subordinate, Siobhan Clarke, to take the case to her current boss.
  Meanwhile, with revised retirement legislation in place, Rebus is angling for a return to professional duties with CID. His reputation should be sufficient to secure his place, but Rebus is under investigation by Malcolm Fox of Edinburgh’s internal affairs department, which is probing his habit of consorting with known criminals, and in particular Rebus’s old nemesis, Ger Cafferty.
  With these twin hooks, Rankin draws us into a thematically rich plot which evolves into a meditation on mortality and how best to assess a man’s worth (the novel’s title is adapted from a song by Jackie Leven, a Scottish singer-songwriter with whom Rankin collaborated with in the past, and who died in 2011).
  There’s a certain poignancy in the novel’s opening as Rebus, one of the most iconic fictional characters of our generation, fumbles through the ashes of various cold cases, and then proceeds to pursue an investigation largely on his own initiative, all on the basis that his previous dedication to the job has left him solitary and - in his own eyes - irrelevant in his retirement. Painfully aware of his limitations and his diminishing physical capability, Rebus rouses himself - much as he cajoles his battered old Audi into life every morning - for one last tilt at the windmills, convinced that CID’s new and improved policing methods lack the hands-on quality that requires police officers to get said hands dirty, to engage with the criminals and barter away some of your soul, if that’s what it takes to bring a killer to justice.
  In that sense the novel is a commentary of sorts on the kind of crime / mystery narrative that has come to dominate popular culture in recent decades, that of the bright, shiny and utterly implausible CSI series and their multitude of spin-offs. Despite the best efforts of his young, social media-friendly colleagues, Rebus remains wedded to the old methods, just as Rankin eschews the easy options, plot-wise, to concentrate on his fascination with the character of Rebus, and how this previously immovable object is contending with the irresistible force of aging and death.
  It’s a compelling tale, although fans of the Malcolm Fox stories - the internal affairs man has appeared in two novels published by Rankin subsequent to Rebus’s retirement, The Complaints (2009) and The Impossible Dead (2011) - may be taken aback by Rankin’s portrayal of Fox here. To date an entertainingly flawed character who appreciates that his peers are entitled to consider that his investigations of his colleagues are a treachery of sorts, Fox is here rather one-dimensional, a petty jobsworth determined that Rebus should be exposed as tainted due to his complex relationship with the criminal fraternity.
  Perhaps Rankin is burning his bridges with Fox in preparation for more Rebus novels to come. If so, it’s a pity - but then, with Rebus, the ends always justify the means. – Declan Burke

Editor’s Note: The more eagle-eyed Rebus / Rankin fans among you will have spotted that I managed to confuse ‘Audi’ with ‘Saab’ for the purpose of this review. I am currently crouched in a corner wearing a pointy hat.

This review was first published in the Irish Times.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE INVENTION OF MURDER by Judith Flanders

Cain invented murder, of course, but Judith Flanders’ splendidly lurid title is entirely appropriate. What makes THE INVENTION OF MURDER: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime a compelling read is not the grisly murders Flanders documents in such meticulous detail, but the grotesque appetite the Victorians developed for fresh blood.
  This is Flanders’ fourth book on Victorian society, and the pages teem not only with black-hearted murderers, devious poisoners and outrageous miscarriages of justice, but also with the minutiae of day-to-day Victorian life. Thus the book is not simply a list of the most famous murders of the period (John Thurtell, Burke and Hare, Jack the Ripper) but also provides a comprehensive dissection of Victorian society, and particularly its evolving understanding of crime, class, justice and policing.
  Flanders’ theme, however, is the representation of murder. She quotes, approvingly, Thomas de Quincey’s ironic commentary on the public appetite for gore in her opening chapter, ‘Imagining Murder’: “‘Pleasant it is, no doubt, to drink tea with your sweetheart, but most disagreeable to find her bubbling in the tea-urn.’ … But even more pleasant, he thought, was to read about someone else’s sweetheart bubbling in the tea urn … for crime, especially murder, is very pleasant to think about in the abstract …”
  There are no cases documented here of sweethearts bubbling in tea urns, but it wasn’t for a lack of imagination on the part of the Victorian chroniclers of crime. The first major case Flanders deals with is that of John Thurtell, a decadent playboy who murdered his associate Joseph Weare over a gambling debt in 1823. Thurtell was no criminal mastermind, and the evidence against him amounted to a cut-and-dried case, but what is shocking to the modern mind is the extent to which the media was allowed to comment on the case. Flanders is excellent on the development of ‘broadsides’, cheap pamphlets hawked on street corners for the delectation of a blood-thirsty working-class. But even the most prestigious of the era’s newspapers were happy to print the kind of unfounded allegations and prejudicial rumours that today would have seen Thurtell walk away from court a free man, unable to obtain a fair trial.
  Thurtell’s guilt might have been plain for all to see, but where Flanders excels is in her excavation of cases in which conviction (and the almost inevitable public execution) were preordained, regardless of the evidence. Eliza Fenning, a servant girl who was accused of attempted murder by poisoning in 1815, is probably the best example. “Her terrible story was inextricably bound up with class anxiety, with fear of the mob, with hierarchy and social structure,” writes Flanders. Fenning, who was undoubtedly innocent of the charge of attempted murder, was convicted on a mish-mash of hearsay and confused testimony, a victim of paranoia and prejudice. Flanders’ account of the tawdry episode is a superb example of the complex interplay of forces - rudimentary policing, social change, a system of justice in dire need of transparency and accountability - which doomed many of those who appeared before men who prided themselves on their reputation as ‘hanging judges’.
  Fenning became notorious after the event, the subject of ‘broadsides’, acres of newspaper print and theatrical productions. In fact, if there’s a caveat to this book, it’s one of repetition: determined to explore each case to its fullest extent, Flanders is meticulous in exhaustively detailing the consequences of each case. Her devotion to her subject cannot be faulted, but once the pattern is established (murder, trial, representations in various media), the reader may well find him or herself skipping whole chunks of Flanders’ research.
  Curiously, the real murder rate was relatively low. In 1810, for example, the murder rate in Britain was 0.15 per 100,000 people; for comparative purposes, the murder rate in Canada in 2007-2008 was 0.5 per 100,000. Nonetheless, crime-influenced theatre was massively popular for the Victorians: “in 1866 there were 51,363 nightly seats in twenty-five London theatres,” Flanders writes, a figure which only applies to legitimate theatre. Queen Victoria herself attended a production of Dion Boucicault’s ‘The Colleen Bawn’ three times in one fortnight.
  The evolution of policing from a rudimentary arrangement of nightwatchmen prowling a particular parish into a more sophisticated organisation devoted to detection as well as prevention provides Flanders with another sub-plot. That development is reflected in the embryonic crime novel, with Flanders crediting Charles Dickens as one of the genre’s early leading lights, alongside Wilkie Collins.
  By then the Victorian lust for blood, further sharpened by the likes of Conan Doyle’s fictional Sherlock Holmes, and the horrifyingly real crimes of Jack the Ripper, was firmly established, allowing Flanders to conclude thusly: “By the start of the new century, therefore, a love of blood could be indulged in safely and securely, without any fear of an ugly reality bursting in. Instead, oceans of blood could cheerfully be poured across the stage, across the page, in song and in sermon. Murder was, finally, an art.” - Declan Burke

  This review first appeared in the Sunday Business Post.

Robert Downey Jnr: An Ideal Holmes?

I’ve never been much of a Sherlock Holmes man myself, but a press release came through yesterday that may be of interest, to wit:

LONDON, ENGLAND, October 1, 2008 – Principal photography is set to begin on location in London for the action adventure mystery “Sherlock Holmes,” being helmed by acclaimed filmmaker Guy Ritchie, for Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures.
  Robert Downey Jr. brings the legendary detective to life as he has never been portrayed before. Jude Law stars as Holmes’ trusted colleague, Watson, a doctor and war veteran who is a formidable ally for Sherlock Holmes. Rachel McAdams stars as Irene Adler, the only woman ever to have bested Holmes and who has maintained a tempestuous relationship with the detective. Mark Strong stars as their mysterious new adversary, Blackwood. Kelly Reilly will play Watson’s love interest, Mary.
  In a dynamic new portrayal of Conan Doyle’s famous characters, “Sherlock Holmes” sends Holmes and his stalwart partner Watson on their latest challenge. Revealing fighting skills as lethal as his legendary intellect, Holmes will battle as never before to bring down a new nemesis and unravel a deadly plot that could destroy the country.

  And Jude Law will be going from that set to the “Blitz” set in early 2009, by all accounts …

CRIME: But Will It Pay?

He’s not Irish, but he lives here, so we’ll call Irvine Welsh an adopted Irish crime writer. Anyhoo, Welsh has been getting some grief over the subject matter of his latest novel, CRIME. Quoth Peter Doyle in the Irish Independent:

TRAINSPOTTING author Irvine Welsh has lashed out at claims he’s cashing-in on Madeleine McCann’s disappearance and the horrors of child-sex abuse with his latest novel. Set in Florida, CRIME is a thriller about a burned-out Scottish detective who stumbles across a paedophile ring while on holiday with his fiancée … some critics have panned his latest literary venture, saying the best-selling novelist is cynically exploiting a controversial and emotive subject to “pay the mortgage”.

  This story is particularly relevant in Ireland, where the release of Ben Affleck’s movie Gone Baby Gone, based on Dennis Lehane’s novel, was delayed for six months in deference to the sensibilities of those affected by the McCann disappearance. An unusually tasteful and worthy move by the distributors, the delay was nonetheless a pointless exercise in the kind of woolly thinking that strives to protect the general public from itself.
  Without being flippant or dismissive of child sex abuse, or the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, this issue really does beg the question of what an author, and particularly a crime novelist, is allowed to write about without incurring the wrath of morality’s storm-troopers. For example, on pages 6-7 of yesterday’s Irish Times, there were stories, in no particular order of importance, relating to:

drug smuggling; solicitors found guilty of misconduct; the jailing of a man for possessing child-rape pornography; a woman convicted of murdering her husband; a man convicted of indecent assault; a woman alleged to have contracted a hitman to murder her husband; the trafficking of a Nigerian girl as a sex-slave; a Gardai inquiry into a case of alleged euthanasia; and a murder arising from a gangland feud in Limerick.

  Are these stories, and any stories similar to them, now off-limits to novelists simply because those involved have achieved their 15 minutes of fame? Should Shakespeare be struck off the Leaving Certificate curriculum for writing about regicide? Is it our moral duty to tout Arthur Conan Doyle to the SPCA for advocating the relentless pursuit of large hounds on Dartmoor?
  We don’t for one second believe that Irvine Welsh – who wrote about heroin addiction when it was neither popular nor profitable, for example – had Madeleine McCann in mind when he began writing CRIME. But even if he did, is he not entitled, and some might argue morally obliged as a novelist, to confront the issues that are relevant to contemporary society? If crime fiction is about only one thing, it is about lancing taboos to allow us confront our worst fears, forcing us to deal with the casual horrors of day-to-day life in a mature and balanced way. Demonising paedophiles hasn’t helped; trying to understand the whys and hows of their sickness might help, both them and us. For that reason alone, Irvine Welsh’s CRIME deserves a wide audience.