Origins: Arlene Hunt

Being the latest in what will probably be yet another short-lived series, in which yours truly reclines on a hammock by the pool with a jeroboam of Elf-Wonking Juice™ and lets a proper writer talk about the origins of his or her characters and stories. This week: Arlene Hunt (right), author of BLOOD MONEY. To wit:

“I grew up on a steady diet of crime fiction. From the rough and tumble streets of Hill Street Blues to the verdant lushness and academic spires of Morse in Oxford, it mattered not the location. Once there was murder and mayhem involved I was a captive audience. I devoured every crime novel I could get my hands on, reading Wambaugh and Chandler alongside Jackie magazine and Just 17. I could think of nothing I enjoyed more than a rainy afternoon sprawled out on the sofa, my nose buried in a PD James or Agatha Christie novel.
  “Stemming from this base it seemed entirely natural that I might one day grow into a crime fiction author. There was just the small matter of how to go about it.
  “Before I developed QuicK Investigations I pondered long and hard over who I wanted as my ‘good guys’. I wanted a team, I wanted them to be as real as possible. I did not want a cerebral genius like Morse or Holmes, nor a tough guy like Pike or Marlowe. I did not want a melancholy alcoholic, or a prim snoopy old lady. What I wanted was someone to whom I could relate. Someone who has to slog hard to get to the truth, someone flawed, someone who would make mistakes, someone with secrets. Someone with trust issues. I wanted a novice, willing to put the work in, willing to try.
  “Someone like me.
  “With this as my blueprint I set to scribbling and within a week I had my rookie detectives, John Quigley and Sarah Kenny. The offices of QuicK Investigations, located in a rundown building on Wexford Street, had opened for business.
  “John Quigley is a heart a thoroughly decent man. He is not the brightest, or the most driven, but at his core he is the sort of person to whom the troubled turn. If John can help you he will. Sarah Kenny was a more complicated creation. She would need to be the counter balance to John’s slightly work shy attitude and his cockiness. She would be the brooder, the one mired in a personal battlefield that required her to be sharper and more serious. Though I did not want her to come across as a harpy, she has to be the one to rein in the impulsive John. She is also the person with the maturity to handle the mundane day to day running of the office, making sure the bills get paid on time and the insurance is up to date. Y’know, all the boring stuff that John has little interest in.
  “They were to be the yin and yang of the QuicK agency. They each bring different skills to the table, as individuals they have weaknesses, as a team they are stronger. John and Sarah have evolved over the course of the books. Older now, more cynical, they are almost as real to me as flesh and blood people. It tickles me greatly when I get emails from readers asking what they are up to now, expressing dismay over happenings or sympathy for them. Sarah Kenny and John Quigley, once a daydream and a slice of wishful thinking, have become a reality.” - Arlene Hunt

  Arlene Hunt’s BLOOD MONEY is published by Hachette Books Ireland.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE RISING by Brian McGilloway, BLOOD MONEY by Arlene Hunt, and THE CITY OF LOST GIRLS by Declan Hughes

You can call them genre conventions or you can call them clichés, but the male protagonists in crime novels tend to have a lot in common. Whether cops, private eyes, crusading journalists or ex-military veterans, they’re generally misanthropic loners with addiction issues - booze is the most popular - and while they rarely have trouble attracting women, they have huge problems holding on to them. They are, as Raymond Chandler dubbed them, the tarnished white knights, who go down those mean streets without becoming themselves mean, and whose sense of justice remains undimmed no matter how many beatings they take on our behalf.
  Three recent Irish crime novels have taken those conventions and tossed them out the window. Inspector Benedict Devlin, the main character in Brian McGilloway’s Donegal-set series of police procedurals, is as happily a married man as any married man is likely to be. Devlin has two kids, no addiction issues, and is no more cynical about the human race than any policeman is entitled to be having achieved the rank of Inspector. In all, he’s an unusually clean-cut credit to his family, his country and the Gardai.
  THE RISING is the fourth Devlin novel in the series, and as has been the case in the previous novels, Devlin is the juncture where personal and political collide. Here the political is provided by the eponymous Republican splinter group, which is gathering local support on both sides of the North / South border around Strabane and Lifford for its zero tolerance approach to drug dealing. One of the leading lights of The Rising is an old foe of Devlin’s, Vincent Morrison, who has served his prison term and emerged with his debt paid to society. When Devlin’s 11-year-old daughter Penny develops a crush on Morrison’s son, Devlin finds himself compromised in relation to the investigation he is conducting into the brutal murders of small-time drug dealers.
  Devlin is far removed from the by-all-means-necessary kind of copper to be found in crime fiction, and part of the enjoyment of THE RISING is seeing one of the consequences of the post-Good Friday peace process - that of ex-paramilitaries turning to more prosaic forms of crime - through the eyes of a family man who is as concerned for his daughter’s well-being as he is with conceptual notions of justice and accountability. That said, McGilloway claims no moral high ground for Devlin, who is on occasion moved to use his fists in brutal fashion when his domestic life is infringed upon.
  For all that the story is peppered with outbreaks of violence and murder, McGilloway, writing in the spare, unadorned style of classic noir tradition, never renders the violence lurid or gratuitous. Nor does he break faith with the reader by having his methodical inspector depend on hunches or gut instinct for his big breakthroughs. Instead the story imitates police procedural as closely as any entertaining novel is allowed, depending on the steady and stealthy accretion of detail and nuance rather than show-stopping flourishes designed to mythologise both the process and its protagonist. It’s an approach that whets the appetite even as it sates it. McGilloway improves with every novel, and the latest Inspector Devlin - Morse without the affectations, basically - is fast becoming an annual must-read.
  Arlene Hunt also plays with the conventions in her latest offering, BLOOD MONEY. In her previous novels, the QuicK Investigations partnership of Sarah Quigley and John Kenny has been dominated by Sarah, the cool and thoughtful yin to John’s impulsive and occasionally boneheaded yang.
  In BLOOD MONEY, as a result of events in the previous novel, Sarah has disappeared, leaving John to investigate a case of apparent suicide brought to him by a grieving mother. Alison Cooper is a dedicated doctor, a married woman and a loving mother. Although her husband Tom had an affair a year previously, the pragmatic Alison is highly unlikely to have taken her own life as a result. Has there been foul play? Hunt juxtaposes John’s investigation with a parallel tale in which Pavel Sunic, a Bosnian Roma, travels to Ireland to hunt down the person responsible for his sister’s death.
  It quickly becomes apparent that John and Pavel are both investigating the murky world of international organ trafficking. This gives the novel a contemporary flavour, and also imbues the tale with an uncomfortable moral conundrum - what would you do, the story asks implicitly, if it was your nearest and dearest who could well die waiting for an organ transplant to arrive through the conventional channels? Hunt, who personalises the theme in her acknowledgements, leaves the answers up to the reader. John Quigley is not a detective burning with a sense of justice undelivered. Instead he is a man who engages in his detective work because it is his job, his way of paying the bills, and if he is no less diligent for all that, his prosaic style - knocking on doors, taking statements where he’s let, accumulating tiny amounts of information that may or may not prove useful - has a powerful ring of authenticity, not least in terms of the number of petty obstacles he encounters on his travels.
  Ed Loy, Declan Hughes’ private detective who gets his fifth outing in THE CITY OF LOST GIRLS, comes closest to the Chandlerian notion of the tarnished white knight in Irish crime fiction. In the past Hughes has very deliberately cultivated Loy as an Irish version of Lew Archer, the private eye who featured in Ross Macdonald’s novels and made a speciality of investigating the skeletons in wealthy families’ closets.
  While families and their dark secrets play their part in THE CITY OF LOST GIRLS, here Hughes has Loy investigate a different kind of family, the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ led by Jack Donovan, an old friend of Loy’s and an Irish film director made good in Hollywood who has returned home to make his masterpiece on home soil. When two extras go missing from the movie set, Loy is called in to investigate their disappearance. Loy immediately remembers that three girls went missing, never to be found, on another Jack Donovan shoot, this one some 15 years previously in California, and suspects that a serial killer might be at work.
  Loy, previously a hard-drinking, self-torturing romantic, has mellowed somewhat since his last appearance, in ALL THE DEAD VOICES, when he met Anne Fogarty, a divorced woman with two children. Now settled into his own version of suburban bliss, the detective is more pragmatic about life in general, and is willing to overlook humanity’s faults in a way he might not have in previous outings. Nonetheless, Loy’s sense of justice remains undimmed, even if his reasons for pursuing it have changed.
  A compelling page-turner, THE CITY OF LOST GIRLS also marks a new departure for Hughes. Always a fine stylist, he has here brought an new maturity and assuredness to his blending of three separate voices - the first-person narration by Loy, Anne Fogarty’s third-person perception of Loy, and the serial killer’s first-person justification for his killings - to create a courageous, challenging and ambitious novel. There is also a subtle investigation of what it means to be Irish now, an attempt to sift some truth of who and what we are from all the doom-and-gloom headlines. In all, it is a powerful tale from a gifted storyteller. If there is to be a better Irish novel this year, it will be a very fine piece of work indeed. - Declan Burke

  This article first appeared in the Sunday Independent

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books

Pepper Smith has been kind enough to offer CAP two copies of her new novel, BLOOD MONEY, for the purposes of a competition giveaway. First, the blurb elves:

When Patty O’Donnell married her Irish sweetheart and moved from America to her husband’s small home town on the Irish seacoast, the most dangerous things she had to deal with were the half-ton racehorses in her father-in-law’s stables. But when she and her husband return from a late night out to find their house being searched, she discovers there are far worse things lurking in her bucolic surroundings than temperamental Thoroughbreds. The teenage son of a late family friend brings proof of a long forgotten debt owed by the O’Donnells, part of a cargo lost in a shipwreck over a century and a half ago. He wants the cargo salvaged, and quickly, so he can help his mother free herself from her abusive second husband. The O’Donnells are willing, but the search and salvage mission puts them square in the sights of modern-day pirates, who want the salvage for themselves. Suddenly, Patty finds herself hunted and in a fight for her life, where yielding to panic means a swift and ugly death.

  For Chapter One, clickety-click here. Meanwhile, to be in with a chance of winning a free copy of BLOOD MONEY, just answer the following question:

Which Irish author recently released a book entitled BLOOD MONEY? Was it:
  (a) Arlene Hunt;
  (b) Bertie Ahern;
  (c) The Board of Directors at Anglo-Irish Bank?

  Answers in the comment box, please, along with a contact email address (using (at) instead of @ to confound the spam monkeys), before noon on Monday, April 26th. Et bon chance, mes amis …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Pepper Smith

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?
I really don’t know. I like too many things to pick just one.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
I wouldn’t, not even my own. I really liked Phil Rickman’s answer to this question, especially considering what crime writers tend to do to their characters.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I should feel guilty for reading? But ... but ...

Most satisfying writing moment?
Going back over difficult-to-write scenes and realizing you nailed them. Or the moment when that plot twist pops fully formed into your head and you know it’s going to change your story from something ordinary into something several notches above. "The End" carries only limited satisfaction for me, because it means I have to leave the world I’ve spent so much time in.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Since my entire exposure to any Irish crime fiction has been the Sister Fidelma series, I’m probably not best qualified to answer this question.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
See above.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst--those days when you have to force yourself behind the keyboard. Best--Knowing that someone else gets what you’re written.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Patty O’Donnell becomes an unwilling pawn in a game of revenge between an Argentine ex-military officer and a man whose wife was among the disappeared in the Dirty War.

Who are you reading right now?
Currently reading COUNCIL OF THE CURSED by Peter Tremayne.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Ah, but how can you write without reading? God is not that unreasonable...

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Tight, visual, fast.

BLOOD MONEY by Pepper Smith is available now.

Declan Hughes In The Gutter. Again.

The stars were out in force last week to help Arlene Hunt launch her latest tome, BLOOD MONEY, at the Gutter Bookshop, and Declan Hughes was there too (ba-boom-tish, etc.). Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it myself, possibly because I was too busy feverishly thumbing through said tome. For my verdict, which was delivered on RTE’s Arena programme on Tuesday night, clickety-click here. Don’t adjust your speakers; if you’re wondering why I sound even more like a hippo playing the tuba than usual, it’s because I had a heavy man-cold. Poor me, etc.
  Happily enough, a couple of books popped through the letter-flap to cheer me up - the paperback versions of Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND arrived, as did a new version of Gene Kerrigan’s DARK TIMES IN THE CITY, complete with ‘Shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger’ branding. Nice. And as if that wasn’t enough, John Connolly’s THE WHISPERERS arrived too. So that’s next week’s reading taken care of.
  In other news, the Spinetingler Awards are open for business again, with Stuart Neville, Adrian McKinty and Ken Bruen (co-writing with Reed Farrel Coleman on TOWER) holding up the Irish end of things in the nominations. If you want do your democratic duty, clickety-click here …
  In other-other news, I was a bit gobsmacked to learn that JA Konrath, a veteran of e-book publishing at this point, earned just over $4,200 in March, just by selling e-books. Now, maybe March was a particularly good month for him (he gives all the details here). But if that kind of income evens out over a year, he’s looking at earning about fifty grand a year from e-book sales. Not a figure to be sneezed at, especially if you’re a writer (i.e., yours truly) who can’t get the proverbial dog to bark at him.
  In that spirit, and after hearing that Smashwords have signed up with the forthcoming iPad, I uploaded the previously Kindle-only CRIME ALWAYS PAYS to Smashwords, which now means that it’s available in a wide range of electronic formats. Hell, you can now read the blummin’ thing on your iPhone. For a free sample of the novel, clickety-click here …

It’s A Long Way From Licking Goobers Off The Cobbles

You hear a lot of guff these days from Ireland’s literati about Irish literature’s failure to produce the Great Celtic Tiger Novel. ‘Where, oh where, is the Great Celtic Tiger Novel?’ is the general gist of it, followed by, ‘Why, oh why?’ and ‘Oh when, oh when?’. Well, a little birdie tells me that the wait is almost over. Once Amadán O’Lungamhain concludes IT’S A LONG WAY FROM LICKING GOOBERS OFF THE COBBLES, his five-volume epic ring cycle on the eradication of TB, he’s setting his sights on the Celtic Tiger years. A HILL OF MAGIC BEANS should be arriving on shelf near you by 2051 at the very latest.
  At the risk of sounding a tad more obtuse than usual, I really don’t get this obsession with the Great Celtic Tiger Novel. Yes, I understand that Ireland is a post-colonial country that has yet to shuck off its inferiority complex, and that a reluctance to engage, as Brian Cowen might say, with ‘we are where we are’ is a symptom of that. And yes, I understand that writing novels about the past offers the opportunity of rewriting the past, and thus making the official version of our tawdry history that bit more palatable. And I understand too, if the post-boom years are any marker, that Ireland is one of the very few modern nations for which the past is not another country where they do things differently; Ireland, as the newspaper headlines on any given day will tell us, is a country that bears an eerie similarity to the psychological landscape of Flann O’Brien’s THE THIRD POLICEMAN, in which past, present and future are locked into a hellish cycle of eternal return. If our politicians, financiers, bishops and electorate are all doomed to repeat their mistakes over and over again, never truly escaping tragedy into farce, then why should our novelists be any different?
  Maybe it’s the case – and bear in mind that some days I’m more wilfully obtuse than others – that I’m simply too callow or uneducated to appreciate the subtle nuances of a body of literature that glories in its inability to come to terms with the present, or at least to try. But it seems to me that any self-respecting novel should be more interested in raising pertinent questions than providing belated answers, in wrestling with current dilemmas than offering quasi-philosophical interpretations of historical events. The point of any art, surely, is to reflect and / or investigate the culture from which it springs. That’s not as easy as it sounds, of course, especially when it comes to the novel. A good book can take an author years to write, so that he or she finds that the zeitgeist has long sailed by time the book lands on a shelf. It’s also true that a crucial moment in a nation’s development can take many years for all the sediment to sift down, so that an author can see it clearly enough for what it really was. By which time, unfortunately, the novel is no longer relevant as a tool to aid our understanding of ourselves, which is the fundamental point of art.
  You wouldn’t know it if you only listened to the Irish literati, but there is a body of writers engaging with modern Ireland. Only time will tell if they are entitled to call themselves artists, but right now they are asking hard questions of our society, our mores, challenging our ethical stances. This is the kind of thing that good crime fiction does as a matter of course, and that a number of Irish crime writers are doing on a regular basis. Brian McGilloway, Ken Bruen, Tana French, Declan Hughes, Gene Kerrigan, Alan Glynn, Stuart Neville – these are some of the writers who do not allow themselves the luxury of elapsed decades before confronting the issues that are relevant to a country bedevilled by corruption at virtually every strata of society. Yes, yes, I know I cut a pathetic figure bleating on yet again about the relevance of Irish crime fiction, but you’d need to be a far more obtuse figure than I not to appreciate the fact that there is a phenomenon at play here; and more, that such writers – like Liam O’Flaherty publishing THE ASSASSIN in 1928, or Colin Bateman publishing DIVORCING JACK in 1995 – deserve credit for their courage in grappling with crucial issues when they are still live, messy and important.
  All of which protracted preamble leads me to the ever-radiant Arlene Hunt, who appeared on TV3 last Thursday morning chatting about her new tome, BLOOD MONEY. I can’t say too much about the novel just yet, as I won’t get to start reading it for another day or two, but I do know that the story dips a toe into the murky waters of organ tourism, aka the black market in organ transplants, and subsequently tip-toes through an ethical minefield. Now, I have no idea of how prevalent organ tourism is here in Ireland, although I’ve no reason to believe it’s not as common-place here as it is anywhere else; nor do I know how qualified or otherwise Arlene Hunt is to write about the topic. I do know that Arlene Hunt is a terrific story-teller, though, and that I’m looking forward to reading a topical novel about contemporary Ireland.
  Topical novels about contemporary Ireland, eh? When literary Ireland finally gets around to pulling its head out of its ass, and stops whining about how the Arts Council trough is no longer as full as it used to be, and realises that it’s not entitled to consider itself an heir to Joyce, Beckett, Shaw, O’Casey, et al simply because there’s a harp on its passport, it might want to consider the following question: Is a topical novel about modern Ireland once in a blue moon really too much to ask?