“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” DA Mishani

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?
Probably ROSEANNA, by Swedish authors Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (1965), the first Martin Beck novel. It taught crime writers that pacey can also be slow and its bitter melancholy is intertwined with the funniest scenes ever written in a crime novel (especially those with American detective Kafka).

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Any character living permanently in Paris. And since I wouldn’t mind being a real detective, at least for a while, why not Jules Maigret? He’s eating very well, drinking very well, smoking good tobacco, involved in the most interesting cases and still seems so relaxed.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
The Classics. Mainly Flaubert or Balzac. Now, for example, I’m reading a beautiful novel by Stefan Zweig and feeling very guilty I’m not reading crime.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Honestly? Writing the words ‘The End’. But also when a character surprises and sometimes even saves you. It happened to me while writing THE MISSING FILE: I thought the novel would end in a very sad way but then a female character I like a lot, Marianka, saved me and offered a new solution that I added to the novel.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
Since not many crime novels are translated to Hebrew I'm afraid I don’t know enough Irish crime novels – but I enjoyed immensely Benjamin Black’s CHRISTINE FALLS and THE SILVER SWAN. Obviously Black\Banville is an exceptional writer and I can’t wait to read his THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The best thing about being a writer is the fact that everything you do counts as ‘work’. I can watch a crime series on television or read or even just walk for hours and listen to music and still tell myself and others I’m working, and even hard, and that might even be true because who knows, maybe at these exact moments writing is happening inside. The worst thing is that sometimes, no matter what you do and how much you try, writing stays inside and just doesn’t happen elsewhere and then you really feel like you’re doing nothing, staring at your computer screen for hours, while you could (and should) have done something else, real work for instance.

The pitch for your next book is …?
An explosive device is found in a suitcase near a daycare centre in a quiet suburb of Tel Aviv. A few hours later, a threat is received: the suitcase was only the beginning. Tormented by the trauma and failure of his past case, Inspector Avraham Avraham is determined not to make the same mistakes—especially with innocent lives at stake. He may have a break when one of the suspects, a father of two, appears to have gone on the run. Is he the terrorist behind the threat? Or perhaps he’s fleeing a far more terrible crime that no one knows has been committed? (The novel’s name is A POSSIBILITY OF VIOLENCE and it’ll be published in English in July 2014).

Who are you reading right now?
I just finished Ian McEwan’s SWEET TOOTH (what an ending!) after discovering Juan Gabriel Vasquez’ excellent THE SOUND OF THINGS FALLING.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I can see my Ego jumping ahead and screaming ‘Write’! But that would have been a very miserable choice. Reading is much more important to my mental health.

THE MISSING FILE by DA Mishani is published by Quercus.

On Taking Pride In Prejudice

I’m not saying that John Boland is a crap reviewer, necessarily, and he’s as entitled to his opinion as the next man, but it’s worth pointing out that he took a pop at Alan Glynn’s BLOODLAND in the Irish Independent a couple of weeks ago on the basis that it was longer, more ambitious and more geographically diverse than the books he liked to read as a younger man. No, seriously. The review is here …
  This week he takes a swipe at DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS, opening up thusly:

Both critically and commercially, Irish crime writing has never had it so good and Irish crime authors have benefited from the boom it’s been enjoying over the last decade or so.
  Why, then, do so many of them whinge about not being taken seriously -- or, at least, not as seriously as they take themselves?
  In his editor’s note at the start of this ragbag of essays and stories by various Irish crime writers, Declan Burke concedes that it may be “stretching a point” to suggest they are “prophets without honour in their own country”, but he goes on to stretch it anyway -- finding it “a little bit odd” and “not a little unfortunate” that they’re “more celebrated outside of Ireland than they are at home”.
  Is this true? I thought they were doing pretty well for themselves here.
  Clearly, though, it rankles with some of them that they’re treated like second-class authors …

  Now, I know it’s the done thing to just take your lumps when you get a bad review, brush it off and get on with it. But what actually rankles is when someone reviews a book according to preconceived notions, or an agenda, and deliberately misreads the text in order to prove their point.
  Because here’s the thing, John - Irish crime authors are more celebrated outside of Ireland than they are at home. If you’d like a little proof, just dig out the ‘Emerald Noir’ documentary Val McDermid put together for BBC 4 last February, celebrating the rise and rise of Irish crime writing - maybe I missed it, but I can’t remember a similar radio doc being made for Irish radio. Or click on this link here, which will tell you all you need to know about how New York University is hosting a symposium this coming weekend on Irish crime writing - again, I might have missed it, but I don’t think any of the Irish universities have marked the coming of age of the Irish crime novel in a similar way. If you need still more proof, take the time to dig out all the awards that Irish crime writers have been nominated for in the last decade in America, home of the hardboiled crime novel, the most recent example of which was the LA Times’ Crime Novel of the Year award earlier this year, when a shortlist of five writers was made of three American writers and two Irish, Stuart Neville and Tana French. Or, if you choose, just take a look at the Irish Top Ten fiction lists over the last year alone, where you’ll find plenty of crime writers hitting the Top Ten, but very few Irish crime writers. Or there was last month’s announcement that both Benjamin Black and Casey Hill will have their novels adapted for TV in the UK. Perhaps Irish broadcasters were trampled underfoot in the stampede to bring those writers’ to the small screen, but suffice to say that both series will be broadcast courtesy of the UK, not Ireland.
  Yes, John, Irish crime writers are ‘doing pretty well for themselves’ (one guy, I think his name is Alan Glynn, even had his novel THE DARK FIELDS adapted as a major Hollywood movie earlier this year). The fact remains, though, that Irish crime writers are more celebrated outside of Ireland than at home.
  I was also a little taken aback by the snide tone of Boland’s review. To wit:

Some of these are comic, and all the more so for not being meant that way, as in Tana French’s argument that crime writing has become the genre that “examines the tensions and fears of a society” and that it’s also “where the crucial issues of any nation’s identity get explored”. So, not just French, but Balzac, too.

  Laugh? I nearly emigrated. Interesting, of course, that in his rush to deploy a piss-poor pun on Tana French’s name that any self-respecting crime writer would baulk at, John Boland cites Balzac rather than any of the heavyweight contemporary Irish literary writers. As fine a writer as he is, Balzac is hardly a poster-boy for how the modern novel, Irish or otherwise, engages with current concerns.
  But stay! Because John has a word or two to say on that topic too:

Yes, the ills of today’s post-boom Ireland form the backdrop to many recent crime novels but the plot remains the key thing, and while seedy politicians and venal developers feature in these stories, their roles are seldom more than decoratively expedient -- gaudily drawn villains in tales that are much less interested in (or capable of) exploring the roots of our current malaise than in working towards the tense denouement demanded by a tried-and-trusted formula.

  ‘But the plot remains the key thing …’ Here’s a question: Since when did ‘plot’ become such a dirty word in literature? Has literary fiction disappeared so far up its own fundament that a good plot is now fair game for sneering at?
  As for crime fiction being ‘tales that are much less interested in (or capable of) exploring the roots of our current malaise than in working towards the tense denouement demanded by a tried-and-trusted formula’, well, where to start?
  I suppose we could start by pointing out that, broadly speaking, the classic three-act drama of order-chaos-order (the latter featuring redemption / retribution / catharsis) has been with us since the Classical Greeks, and by those lights is indeed a ‘tried-and-trusted formula’. We could also ask, in all sincerity, where the literary novels ‘exploring the roots of our current malaise’ are, and what the literary writers have to offer in this regard that the crime writers don’t, the vast majority of literary authors being no more or less blessed with penetrating economic insights than their crime-writing brethren, or the vast majority of economists, for that matter.
  I could go on, but the review is here if you want to read it, and I’ve a busy afternoon ahead, what with that Ph.D in Economics to study for, that overview of the use of dramatic momentum in Classic Greek tragedy to brush up on, and that essay I have to write for Book Reviewing 101: ‘Taking Pride In Prejudice’.
  Gosh, it really is all go when you’re an Irish crime writer …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Mehmet Murat Somer

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?
Definitely the Ripley’s of Patricia Highsmith. If these are taken, I’ll go for the ANIMAL LOVER’S BOOK OF BEASTLY MURDER.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Quite content as myself. Really. But if I must choose a name: Vautrin of Balzac.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Porn!

Most satisfying writing moment?
When I stop typing with a wide silly smile on my face!

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Whichever one is not in the blood ‘n’ gore genre.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
The one Steven Spielberg or Pedro Almodovar will direct.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst are: Sleeping less – my natural condition; spending more time with my laptop – not fun. And my recent habit of making additions, changes or twists according to reader requests. Best? No idea.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Working simultaneously on two: Completion of my Champagne Trilogy, after THE HOLDING AND THE CATWALK, with the grand finale THE BACKSTAGE. Every piece gets in order as like a jigsaw puzzle. And another Hop-Çiki-Yaya thriller, the 8th, where my sleuth, with his Audrey Hepburn alter-ego, finds a murder in her family past.

Who are you reading right now?
Right now? The questions on this Q&A! But nowadays I am going over again COUSINE BETTE of Balzac, and enjoying the grande-dame of modern Turkish literature Ayşe Kulin’s VEDA (THE FAREWELL).

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
God shouldn’t be so cruel. I’ll do my best to persuade.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Life is joy!

Mehmet Murat Somer’s THE GIGOLO MURDER is published by Serpent’s Tail.