What KT Did Next, Again

A busy chap, yon KT McCaffrey (right, in full-on Sam Spade mode). No sooner had we finished reviewing his current release, Bishop’s Pawn (“a superb addition to the canon of Irish crime fiction”), than he’s back on to let us know that its sequel, The Cat Trap, is due out in November courtesy of Robert Hale. Quoth KT:

“Five women, all wealthy and with influential connections, meet once a month to set in motion a project that challenges their collective intellects. For their latest challenge, they accuse Detective Inspector Connolly of aggravated rape, then set about providing ‘compelling evidence’ to support their claim. Only investigative journalist, Emma Boylan (heroine of my five previous novels), appears to be on Connolly’s side, but her motives are questioned when it transpires that she and the detective are lovers …”

Consider us suitably intrigued, sir. But hell, do us a favour and slow down a little with the old scribbling. We’ve already burnt out two keyboards and three sets of fingertips trying to keep up …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: Bishop’s Pawn by KT McCaffrey

If it’s linguistic pyrotechnics you’re after, you’d be advised to look elsewhere: KT McCaffrey writes in a quiet, measured and very effective fashion that reflects the way his main protagonist, journalist Emma Boylan, goes about her business. Set in Dublin, Bishop’s Pawn is a sequel-of-sorts to McCaffrey’s first novel, Revenge (1999). It opens with Emma discovering that the newspaper she works for is about to publish her obituary. Other newspapers follow suit, and – as corpses begin to pile up – it soon becomes apparent that the practical joke has sinister overtones. In Revenge, Emma was one of a number of eye-witnesses to the suicide of a woman whose life had been destroyed by an elaborate cover-up partly engineered by the Catholic Church. Now the woman’s daughter has come of age, and seems hell-bent on nothing less than divinely inspired retribution. The thrill of KT McCaffrey’s writing is the juxtaposition between that finely modulated downbeat style and the apocalyptic scenario it describes. Emma is an Everywoman who is not particularly tough or hardboiled, and whose domestic concerns run parallel to the CSI-style bodycount. The tension that builds relentlessly from the early stages is derived from Emma’s very ordinariness, which includes a penchant for logical thinking appropriate to an investigative journalist, and the outrageous machinations of the psychopathic murderess she finds herself pitted against. Certainly McCaffrey can do pithy humour (“There’s a breeze out there that’d freeze a pawnbroker’s balls.”), and his multiple-character narrative that drives with tragic inevitability towards an explosive finale has all the components of a blockbuster movie script. But once the dust has settled, the abiding and poignant memory is of McCaffrey’s skill in evoking the nuances of Emma’s plight as she finds herself at the heart of a maelstrom that threatens to destroy everything she once believed in. The ability to mine the extraordinary from the ordinary, as the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh once put it, is not one that should be underestimated. Bishop’s Pawn is a superb addition to the canon of Irish crime fiction.- Declan Burke

This review was reproduced by the kind permission of Euro Crime

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 417: KT McCaffrey

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?
Mystic River by Dennis Lehane or Asylum by Patrick McGrath.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Hmmm! I’ll pass on that one.
Most satisfying writing moment?
Typing “The End” on each of the six books I’ve written.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
The Guards by Ken Bruen.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Putting all modesty to one side – “Revenge”, my first crime novel.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst: the eighth, ninth and tenth revision of each book. Best: When one of my characters begins to dictate his or her actions.
Why does John Banville use a pseudonym for writing crime?
Because he sees it as slumming, not grand enough to be considered ‘real’ writing. He’s a prick.
Three words to describe your own writing are …?
Original - Entertaining - Intelligent.

KT McCaffrey’s Bishop’s Pawn is the latest in the Emma Boylan series

This Week We're Reading ... Bishop's Pawn and Cannon Law

I’m not quite dead yet, etc. KT McCaffrey’s latest, Bishop’s Pawn , opens with series heroine Emma Boylan reading her obituary in the newspaper where she works, and subsequently prying the lid off a particularly nasty can of squiggly yokes slithering up out of her past – in other words, it’s a sequel of sorts to Revenge (1999). A multi-character piece with an impressive quotient of psychopathic villains, Bishop’s Pawn is a movie-in-waiting … we’re thinking Hilary Swank as Emma, and the Crime Always Pays staff as the motley crew of psycho freaks. Hey, call us, we’re free … Meanwhile, our nomination for the most underrated private dick scribbler anywhere is Vincent Banville, whose hardboiled(ish), painfully self-aware shamus John Blaine got a third outing in Cannon Law (2001). “An excellent new crime novel from one of Ireland’s foremost exponents of the genre,” reported Read Ireland, describing Banville’s writing as “Gripping, funny and stripped to the bone … packs a punch like a fist in a velvet glove.” Banville treads a fine line between paying homage to the Chandleresque tropes and unmercifully taking the proverbial out of said tropes … and then Blaine, being Blaine, stomps all over that delicately crafted prose. We like it a lot, and wethinks you will too.