Dead Men Tell Good Tales: GRAVELAND by Alan Glynn

Those who have been following Alan Glynn’s career will appreciate the symmetry that sees his latest offering, GRAVELAND (Picador USA), set in New York – which is where it all started for Alan Glynn, with the superb THE DARK FIELDS. The concluding chapter of a loose trilogy incorporating WINTERLAND and BLOODLAND (which won the crime fiction gong at the Irish Book Awards in 2011), GRAVELAND is released on May 23rd, and shapes up a lot like this:

A Wall Street investment banker is shot dead while jogging in Central Park. Later that night, one of the savviest hedge-fund managers in the city is gunned down outside a fancy Upper West Side restaurant. Are these killings part of a coordinated terrorist attack, or just coincidence? Investigative journalist Ellen Dorsey has a hunch that it’s neither. Days later, when an attempt is made on the life of another CEO, the story blows wide open ...
  Racing to stay ahead of the curve, Ellen encounters Frank Bishop, a recession-hit architect, whose daughter has gone missing. The search for Lizzie and her boyfriend takes Frank and Ellen from a quiet campus to the blazing spotlight of a national media storm - and into the devastating crucible of a personal and a public tragedy.
  Meanwhile, lurking in the shadows once again is James Vaughn, legendary CEO of private equity firm the Oberon Capital Group. Despite his failing health, Vaughan is refusing to give up control easily, and we soon see just how far-reaching and pervasive his influence really is.
  Set deep in the place where corrupt global business and radical politics clash, Alan Glynn’s GRAVELAND is an explosive and hugely topical thriller.

  For a review of BLOODLAND, clickety-click here.
  For a review of THE DARK FIELDS, clickety-click here.

I Bring Grave News

It isn’t due until next April, unfortunately, but if the third in Alan Glynn’s ‘loose-trilogy of conspiracy thrillers’, GRAVELAND (Faber & Faber), is on a par with WINTERLAND and BLOODLAND, we’re all in for a treat. Quoth the blurb elves:

In the final part of Alan Glynn’s spectacular loose-trilogy of conspiracy thrillers, someone is assassinating the most powerful players in the global financial markets.
  A Wall Street investment banker is shot dead while jogging in Central Park. Later that night, one of the savviest hedge-fund managers in the city is gunned down outside a fancy Upper West Side restaurant. Are these killings part of a coordinated terrorist attack, or just coincidence? Investigative journalist Ellen Dorsey has a hunch that it’s neither. Days later, when an attempt is made on the life of another CEO, the story blows wide open ...
  Racing to stay ahead of the curve, Ellen encounters Frank Bishop, a recession-hit architect, whose daughter has gone missing. The search for Lizzie and her boyfriend takes Frank and Ellen from a quiet campus to the blazing spotlight of a national media storm - and into the devastating crucible of a personal and a public tragedy.
  Meanwhile, lurking in the shadows once again is James Vaughn, legendary CEO of private equity firm the Oberon Capital Group. Despite his failing health, Vaughan is refusing to give up control easily, and we soon see just how far-reaching and pervasive his influence really is.
  Set deep in the place where corrupt global business and radical politics clash, Alan Glynn’s GRAVELAND is an explosive and hugely topical thriller.

  If you haven’t read either of the previous two novels, by the way, I can heartily recommend both - BLOODLAND, of course, won the Ireland AM Crime Novel of the Year at last year’s Irish Book Awards, and deservedly so.
  Incidentally, the cover of GRAVELAND - the image above suggests that it’ll be the US cover - carried a very nice encomium from a certain George Pelecanos, who declares the novel to be, ‘A terrific read … completely involving.’ So there you have it - if it’s good enough for George Pelecanos, etc.

ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL: This Week’s Flummery In Full

It’s been a funny old week, folks. A real roller-coaster. As all Three Regular Readers will be aware, Alan Glynn’s BLOODLAND took home the Crime Fiction gong at the Irish Book Awards last Thursday night, which was no great surprise to anyone who has read it, but was something of a disappointment on the night, given that ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL was also on the shortlist.
  Mind you, if you can’t take the occasional disappointment, you’ve really no right getting involved in writing books. And as I’ve said before, and will continue to say just so long as anyone will listen, BLOODLAND is a terrific novel.
  Happily, that disappointment was mitigated on the night by the news that AZC will be published in India in the near future. Now, I haven’t the faintest idea of how lucrative (or otherwise) such a deal might be, but to be honest, I’m more fascinated with the idea of my book being published in India. How will it translate, literally and figuratively? Will the story of Billy Karlsson have resonance on the sub-continent? Will they change the cover? Questions, questions …
  This week I also had some very good news on a project I’ve been working on for a few months now, in tandem with another Irish crime writer, a non-fiction title that may well pique your interest when I’m in a position to go public with the news in the next couple of weeks or so. For now I’ll simply say that the project features a stellar cast, and a concept that’s very close to my heart. Trust me - this is one you’re going to be hearing a lot about. Well, on this blog, at least.
  Elsewhere, it’s been a pretty good week for reviews. For starters, the inimitable Book Witch weighed in with her verdict on ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, which runs thusly:

“It’s weird. It’s different. But if you can keep several balls going at the same time in this juggling act, it’s a fun read. Shows you what publishing can be like.” - The Book Witch

  If you’re not familiar with the Book Witch, that’s actually very high praise indeed. Especially when it comes to yours truly.
  Meanwhile, over at Booksquawk, Bill Kirton had this to say:

“I don’t want to stress the analytical aspects of the book or get tangled in the complexities of having two narrators, both fictional and yet one of them also the author himself, because this is also a bloody good thriller. It’s also funny, thought-provoking and very satisfying. Some reviews refer to it as possibly becoming a cult classic; I think it deserves to be more. It’s consciously set in a literary and philosophical tradition of which the writer is constantly aware and on which he draws. He’s an intelligent, sensitive novelist who’s comfortable with the form, willing to explore its wider possibilities and simultaneously a creator of great characters and an assured story-teller.” - Bill Kirton

  I thank you kindly, Mr Kirton.
  Finally, John J. Gaynard reviewed AZC at length over on Good Reads, in the process invoking the post-structuralism of Derrida and Lacan, as you do, with the gist running thusly:

“A challenging, pleasing, provocative, wise-cracking read … ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL contains more than enough material for a couple of thousand conventional novels … In his first novel, EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, Burke demonstrated his mastery of the hard-bitten, wise-cracking noir novel and he has, so far, made his name in the framework of Irish crime fiction. With this novel, he has moved into a larger, perhaps more challenging, league. Where does Declan Burke go from here? Will he slip back into the genre of the crime novel, or will he pick up another gauntlet, and become Ireland’s answer to Michel Houellebecq? ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL shows that if he does decide to write the great tragi-comic Irish 21st century novel, it is a task for which he is well-equipped.” - John J. Gaynard

  Personally, I’d disagree with that last line, although it’s a very nice thing for Mr Gaynard to say . What’s most resonant there, though, is the line, ‘Will he slip back into the genre of the crime novel …?’ That’s because I’m currently redrafting a novel that’s a far more straightforward crime novel than AZC; in fact, it’s a sequel to EIGHTBALL BOOGIE. I didn’t have to pick that book to redraft, because there’s two or three other stories I could be working on right now, but I eventually decided to rewrite the current story because, having played around with narrative and all the rest in AZC, I felt like I wanted to prove to myself that I could play a straight-ish bat when required. It’s also true that AZC has been reviewed on more than one occasion along the lines of its ‘transcending the genre’, which is not a phrase that I’ve ever taken to, and I suppose I wanted to make a statement of sorts, with the current story, that I started out writing crime novels because I love the crime novel, and that I’ll always be a crime novelist, no matter how I try to bend the tropes and conventions out of shape.
  Anyway, that was the week that was. Here’s hoping next week is every bit as roller-coastery. As the Chinese say, may you live in interesting times …

The Irish Novel: Whither Protest?

“Between my finger and my thumb /
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.”
  Seamus Heaney, Digging

It occurred to me on Thursday night, at the Irish Book Awards, that the process of selecting winners in the various categories was akin to what’s going on with Ireland itself these days. Contrary to my post last Thursday, most of the categories weren’t decided solely by public vote; it was a combination of public vote and the decision of a judging panel. These days, in Ireland, we tend to vote for something - a change in government, say, on the promise that the new government will prove less subservient to the unelected mandarins in Brussels, Frankfurt and New York - and then, once the vote is in, a ‘judging panel’ sits down to decide what’s really good for us. Or, more accurately, what’s good for French and German banks.
  Anyway, Thursday was an interesting day, the Book Awards aside. Thursday was the day we heard that the forthcoming Irish budget, to be announced in early December, had been circulated to the German parliament, in essence so that it could be ratified in Germany before being presented as a fait accompli to the Irish people. Thursday evening, meanwhile, was when the NYPD moved in force against the Occupy Wall Street camped at Zuccotti Park.
  Back at the ranch, or more precisely the Concert Hall in the RDS in Dublin, the best and brightest of the Irish publishing industry had gathered to celebrate the best and brightest in Irish books.
  I couldn’t help wondering what exactly it was we were celebrating.
  In part, we were celebrating the election of Michael D. Higgins as President of Ireland the previous week, President Higgins being a very well respected poet as well as a politician of impeccable credentials (impeccable, of course, if you’re of a left-leaning bent yourself, which I tend to be). His election is being heralded as something of a sea-change in Ireland: that having a man of culture and letters, and a man with a long-cherished aisling (dream, or vision) of how Ireland should be, is A Very Good Thing.
  We were also celebrating the lifetime achievements of Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize-winning poet, a friend and peer of Michael D. Higgins, and a man whose writing career was born as the Troubles kicked off in Northern Ireland. Is it stretching the point to describe Seamus Heaney as a poet of protest? It’s at least fair to say, I think, that his early poetry reflected the turbulent world in which he grew up, never more so than in 1975’s bleak vision of politico-religious schizophrenia, ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’.
  As for the rest of it, well, there were a number of well-meaning speeches on the subject of the quality of Irish writing, and how writers, publishers and book-sellers alike are all struggling to keep their heads above water in these turbulent economic times. All of which is very true, of course, but the question begs to be asked: to what end are writers, particularly, struggling to stay afloat?
  In other words, what are we saying? Are we saying anything, or nothing?
  Last Thursday, as I say, was a particularly interesting day, but the economic downturn has been making its effects known in Ireland for at least four years now. Those effects are pretty much the same here as everywhere else: those at the lower end of the economic scale are being brutalised at the expense of those who can afford to insulate themselves, and further capitalise on misery.
  Now, I do appreciate that a novel takes some time to write, but surely four years should be enough time for authors to have developed some kind of coherent philosophy in opposition to the brutalisation of Irish society.
  The winner of the Crime Fiction award, Alan Glynn’s BLOODLAND, being a ‘paranoid thriller’ about what happens when supposedly exclusive worlds of business, politics and crime converge, can be read in part as a protest against the current global crisis, and the effect it has on the ordinary person in the street.
  Otherwise, there was a marked absence of protest, anger, rage.
  Is it not the duty of the novelist to reflect the world he or she inhabits? Is it perhaps true that, in a time of crisis, readers are more inclined to seek out escapism? Is it the case that protest is only acceptable long after the event, as a historical footnote? Are protest, anger and rage simply unmarketable in the current climate? Should that even matter?
  Publishing in Ireland is facing the same range of issues that face publishing all over the world, and there are no simple solutions. And it’s perfectly understandable, I think, that people will always be far more concerned about losing their jobs, their income, their means of supporting their families, than they are about any kind of philosophy of protest.
  By the same token, I think there’s a fairly straightforward economic chain of cause-and-effect between publishing people - writers, publishers, book-sellers - losing their jobs, and the public not being able to afford to buy books in the quantities it once did, largely because of the mismanagement of the economy by a gilded elite of bankers, regulators and politicians that would be laughable were it not costing lives.
  Where’s the anger about that? Where’s the protest?
  I thoroughly enjoyed my night out at the Irish Book Awards on Thursday night, mainly because I got to meet so many excellent people, writers, publishers and book-sellers. But given the black tie context, and the glasses of champagne, and the faintly hysterical air of self-congratulation, it was hard not to think of the upper deck of the Titanic, and the string quartet playing diligently on.
  Perhaps that was entirely appropriate: as a whole, the Irish response to the brutalisation of our country, of the erosion of our economic sovereignty and national dignity, to the stories of children reduced to eating the cardboard box of Cornflakes, has been supine. ‘Ireland is not Greece,’ our politicians tell their overlords in Frankfurt and Berlin, although there really should be no need, given that the ordinary Greeks have at least made their fury known, at home and abroad, through mass protest, strikes and a violent rejection of shouldering a debt that was largely created by the gamblers, spoofers and charlatans who like to refer to themselves, without irony, as ‘Masters of the Universe’.
  And perhaps said spoofers are right to call themselves that. After all, in the last week or ten days, the markets have essentially been responsible for the replacement of democracy with technocracy in Greece and Italy; and, had Enda Kenny been so bold as to reject the notion that a foreign parliament and its funding machine should have the right to inspect Ireland’s economic blueprint before the Irish people had a chance to do so, very possibly Ireland too.
  In that context, I suppose, the Irish Book Awards last Thursday night were a microcosm of Ireland itself. The establishment busily celebrating its democratically elected winners, and yet casting anxious glances towards the volatile markets, unsure of which way the wind will blow. Whatever you say, say nothing.
  I say, fuck that for a game of soldiers.
  I say, we’ll be celebrating Jim Larkin’s lock-out in two years time.
  I say, it’s only five years to the centenary of the 1916 Rising.
  I say that with power comes responsibility, that Irish writers have the power, and the responsibility, to protest. To say what needs to be said.
  “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.”
  If you haven’t already gone blind from laughing at my naivety, I’ll be so bold as to offer an excerpt from ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, from pg 170, on the subject of democracy and capitalism, and the possible consequences when the latter is allowed to erode the essential human rights of the former. To wit:

The theory of democracy holds that the most wretched is rightfully equal in status to the most powerful.
  This is history.
  This is bunk.
  Democracy is political theory reaching back 5,000 years to the pyramids for inspiration, an apex dependent on a broad foundation for its very existence. It is the few bearing down on the millions, and the millions feeling proud that they have provided an unparalleled view of the universe for the few. Democracy is a blizzard of options so thick it obscures the fact that there is no choice.
  The cradles of democracy, London and Philadelphia, deployed genocide as a means of social engineering, in Australia and North America respectively, a full two hundred years before Hitler and Stalin began their pissing contest in Poland.
  It is no coincidence that democracy evolved in tandem with the industrial revolution. Democracy and capitalism are symbiotic parasites. Democracy’s truth is not one man, one vote; it is one man, one dollar. Democracy’s truth is the abrogation of the individual’s rights in favour of collective procrastination, while those running the show exercise censorious control on behalf of the nervous disposition of the collective will.
  Democracy’s truth is Frankie suspended on half pay pending an inquiry.
  Democracy has replaced religion as the opiate du jour. Democracy is the ostrich with its head in the sand and its ass in the air, begging to be taken in traditional pirate fashion. It is the subjugation of the people, by the people, for the people. It is the inalienable right to purchase your personalised interpretation of liberalised slavery. It is the right to sell your soul to the highest bidder. It is the right to pay for the privilege of being alive.
  In Ireland, for historical reasons, democracy is truth is one man, one mortgage. It is also one woman, one mortgage. Most often, given the size of the mortgage, it is one woman and man, one mortgage.
  For some reason most dictators fail to realise that the trick to democracy is to have the slaves buy and sell themselves. The trick is to incentivise slaves to invest in their slavery, to pay for their own prisons, shackle themselves to brick and mortar.
  The trick to democracy is in ensuring the slaves’ capacity for self-regulation is not taken for granted. The trick is to maintain the healthy tension between democracy and capitalism, so that one does not undermine or overshadow the other. The trick is to ensure the slaves’ investment retains the illusion of value. Failure to do so will result in the slaves questioning the worth of their dollar and / or vote. The answer to this question is delivered in blood.
  Masters of the Universe, do not say you weren’t warned.
  Frankie, the half-pay sop notwithstanding, is man paralysed by the conflicting impulses of rage and terror as he contemplates a future boiled down to an uncertain tomorrow. Charged with adrenaline, at the very limit of his chain, he is braced for fight or flight. But this unnatural condition cannot hold. Rage and terror will cancel one another out, leaving a vacuum that nature abhors and an empty vessel full of noise.
  What sound will emerge? What fury?
  Frankie, my friend, my pawn, my hero: now is the time to signify. Now is the time to reset the dial. Now is the time for absolute zero, to raze the pyramids to the sand and start all over again.
  My line for today comes courtesy of Miguel de Unamuno: A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.

Good Guys: No Longer Finishing Last, Apparently

It would take a better man than yours truly not to be even slightly disappointed by the events which transpired at the Concert Hall in the RDS last night. For lo! It came to pass that BLOODLAND by Alan Glynn (right) scooped the Ireland AM Crime Fiction gong at the Irish Book Awards, in the process putting to the sword his fellow nominees Casey Hill, Jane Casey, William Ryan, Benjamin Black and your humble correspondent.
  Yes, it’s true that Team Liberties Press went along more in hope than expectation, but even so, it would have been nice to win. The good news is that Alan Glynn is one of life’s good guys; and while that really shouldn’t matter, it kind of does. The guy is a gentleman, in all senses of the word, and I was very pleased indeed to see him ascending the steps to pick up his award.
  Just as importantly, or more importantly at the moment, perhaps, BLOODLAND is a terrific novel, and a very worthy winner of the award. I reviewed said tome on these pages a couple of weeks ago; if you’ve yet to read it, I humbly suggest you do so as soon as your TBR list allows.
  Meanwhile, spare a thought for Jane Casey. She’s been shortlisted for the prize two years in a row now, and has left empty-handed on both occasions. Here’s hoping that next year will be her year …
  As for the evening itself, I had an absolutely smashing time. It was terrific, as always, to catch up with the likes of Alan and Jane, and Bill Ryan, and to meet Casey Hill - aka Melissa and Kevin Hill - for the first time. Arlene Hunt was there too, and Bob Johnston of the Gutter Bookshop; I met with Sarah Webb, and briefly got to congratulate Sarah Carey, whose THE REAL REBECCA won the Young Adult award; the inimitable Vanessa O’Loughlin of writing.ie was there; and the marvellous Margaret Daly, and Cormac Kinsella and Declan Heeney, valiant soldiers in the book-promotion business all. I also got to meet, very briefly, with one of my childhood heroes, Ronnie Whelan, formerly of Ireland and Liverpool FC - and when I say ‘meet’, I mean I barged up to him, grabbed his hand, and muttered something about being a huge fan when I was a kid. All very embarrassing, of course, moreso for Ronnie than myself, probably, but a real thrill all the same. They really don’t make them like Ronnie Whelan anymore.
  And then there was our own table, which was for the most part taken up by the Team Liberties, including Caroline Lambe, Alice Dawson, Daniel Bolger and publisher Sean O’Keefe. The craic, as they say, was only mighty, and great fun was had by all, and I was delighted that they all turned up mob-handed to lend their support and enjoy the night in their own right. It was a pity we couldn’t take away an award to reward their faith and commitment to ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, but then, you can’t have everything, and we did get tiramisu, and a very strong rumour that AZC will be published in India in the near future. So these things do even out in the end.
  So there you have it. The heartiest of warm congratulations to Alan Glynn on his well deserved win last night, and upward and onward for the rest of us. There is, after all, next year to look forward to.
  Meanwhile, here’s a wee taste of what Ronnie Whelan was capable of, with THAT goal against Russia at Euro ’88. Roll it there, Collette …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: BLOODLAND by Alan Glynn

A tabloid star is killed in a helicopter crash. Three years later, a young freelance journalist, Jimmy Gilroy, is warned off the story by a political ‘fixer’, who has long been associated with the disgraced ex-taoiseach, Larry Bolger. Meanwhile, a private security contractor goes postal in the Congo whilst escorting an American politician with presidential ambitions, with deadly consequences.
  The story’s central spine is Jimmy Gilroy’s investigation of the death of the tabloid star, a young woman who is overly fond of her cocaine, and who bears more than a passing resemblance to Katy French. His original investigation, however, is a thread that, once pulled, begins to unravel an international conspiracy to cover up the murder of another passenger on the helicopter.
  This passenger is an Italian man who has threatened to blow the whistle on an American corporation which is mining a very precious metal in the Congo. That American corporation has links, via the American political fixer James Vaughn, to the proposed presidential election campaign of a US senator, JJ Rundle. James Vaughn, in turn, has links to ex-taoiseach Larry Bolger, who was party to a botched property deal in Glynn’s previous novel, WINTERLAND.
  Spanning three continents - or four, if we admit the peripheral activities of the Chinese in the Congo - BLOODLAND is a sprawling, labyrinthine thriller which has strong echoes of the classic 1970s paranoid crime thrillers, and particularly movies such as Three Days of the Condor and Chinatown. It explores the legacy of corruption in big business, the West’s fear of China, the role of back room political players and the question of who controls what we know.
  Ultimately, Jimmy Conway’s investigations, which take him from Dublin to Italy and on to New York, result in the downfall of the US Senator JJ Rundle and his businessman brother, Clark.
  While this appears on the face of it a happy ending, Glynn leaves us in no doubt that even if some of the players on the board will change, the game will remain the same, particularly in terms of the backroom fixers with their hands on the levers of power, such as the Machiavellian James Vaughn.
  BLOODLAND isn’t exactly a sequel to WINTERLAND, even if it employs some of the characters that appeared in that novel; it’s obvious, though, that Glynn is returning to some of the themes he touched on in WINTERLAND, and painting them on a broader canvas.
  I liked the style and the context, that of the hard-bitten thriller in the paranoid mould. I was very impressed with the scale of Glynn’s ambition, too; I found the scenes set outside of Ireland very vividly drawn, especially those set in the Congo.
  I did wonder - as a freelance writer - about the extent of Jimmy Gilroy’s motivation, particularly at the start of the novel. He’s not particularly idealistic, and most freelance journos, especially in these straitened times, would be happy enough to be ‘bought off’ by a plum job, particularly as Jimmy doesn’t have any real inkling of the scale of the cover-up when he is first approached by the political fixer and warned off.
  Overall, I very much liked the book, and warmly recommend it. Apparently it’s the second in a loose ‘trilogy’, and I’ll be first in the queue when the third instalment appears. - Declan Burke

Alan Glynn’s BLOODLAND has been short-listed for the Ireland AM Crime Fiction Award in the Bord Gais Irish Book Awards. To vote for it, clickety-click here …

That’s Entertainment?

Maybe we can blame Graham Greene, who famously - or infamously - labelled his crime novels ‘entertainments’, although I suspect it goes back a lot further than that. I’m talking about the notion that crime novels - all genre novels, really, but we deal in crime writing here - are obliged to be entertaining, as if it’s incumbent upon crime novelists, or their books, to be clowns, regardless of how sad the clown might be behind the garish make-up.
  A recent and very positive review of Alan Glynn’s BLOODLAND in the Irish Times is a case in point. Anna Carey wrote the review, and did a very fine job too, in my opinion, finishing up thusly:

“A good thriller is there to entertain the reader as well as make her think - and [BLOODLAND] is a very entertaining book.” - Anna Carey, Irish Times

  Now, I’m sure Alan Glynn was very happy with that review, but I do wonder about the distinction being made in that line. There’s no good reason, for example, why the word ‘book’ couldn’t be substituted for ‘thriller’. After all, it’s the function of every book to ‘entertain the reader as well as make her think’. Crime, sci-fi, chick-lit, literary, fantasy, romance, historical biography, quantum physics - if a book on any given topic isn’t entertaining, which is to say enjoyable to read, then why would anyone read it? Are there books that are deliberately written not to entertain? Has any writer ever sat down at the desk with the express intention of writing a book that will bore his or her reader into a coma?
  I do hate the notion of ‘special pleading’ on behalf of crime fiction, but I think there’s a case to be made for declaring a moratorium on the use of ‘entertaining’ when it comes to reviewing the genre. I mean, if the book receives a positive review, then surely the fact that the reviewer was entertained is implicit in the good vibes. The moratorium might even be extended to the phrase ‘page-turning’. No, seriously - how else are you going to read a book if it doesn’t involve turning pages?
  I suppose what I’m suggesting, and not for the first time, is that crime fiction requires a more rigorous analysis than it generally gets. ‘An entertaining, page-turning read’ is a description that could apply to any good book, from Noddy to ULYSSES. Is it the case that crime fiction is more about breadth than depth, than it’s prime function is to entertain, and saying so suffices as a valid review? Is it the case that the genre doesn’t actually require or deserve a more subtle, nuanced lexicon? Or is it the case that the genre, being perceived as little more than a lurid distraction, and particularly by comparison with other kinds of books, is being ill-served by a self-perpetuating simplification, as often as not by the readers and fans of the genre itself?
  In the last month or so, I’ve read a number of books - among them BLOODLAND by Alan Glynn, THE BURNING SOUL by John Connolly, THE END OF EVERYTHING by Megan Abbott, THE KILLER IS DYING by James Sallis and THE END OF THE WASP SEASON by Denise Mina - that are as good as any novel of any stripe I’ve read in the last few years. They are all unmistakably crime fiction titles; all are beautifully written, first and foremost; they also have in common a rare quality of psychological insight as they pursue the flaws and foibles of the human condition. All of which are the essential elements of any good novel, it seems to me.
  Anyway, I opened up talking about Alan Glynn, and there’s a lot him about right now. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with the Faber blog, The Thought Fox:

[TF] BLOODLAND has the kind of plot where tiny details at the start lead to huge revelations by the end. How hard is it when writing a story like this to keep back secrets from your readers?

[AG] “It’s not easy. I continually re-read, re-write and revise. At the same time it’s an organic process and the subconscious does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. A connection that in the context of the story might seem inevitable, something meticulously and very deliberately placed there by the author, will often in fact have occurred to me at the very last minute. Maybe it was there all along, waiting to be discovered but the poor sap at the keyboard isn’t necessarily the first one to see it. But then when it all becomes clear, you have the luxury of being able to go back and re-arrange stuff, to re-weight and re-calibrate scenes in the overall context of the story. As the writer, you just have to pay attention, which I suppose isn’t too much to ask. Another way of keeping secrets back from the reader, of course is by not knowing them yourself, as you go along. No plan, therefore, no outline. It’s a good way of keeping things fresh and unpredictable, but it’s also fraught with danger. You can write yourself into a corner. Or fall off the tightrope.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here.
  Meanwhile, you can bag yourself a free signed copy of BLOODLAND over at the Harrogate Festival’s interweb lair, with the competition running until October 9th.
  For a couple of nifty reviews to complement Anna Carey’s take in the Irish Times, there’s one here at International Noir, and another courtesy of Laura Wilson at The Guardian.
  Finally, for Alan Glynn’s take on his ‘Book of a Lifetime’, aka THE GREAT GATSBY, jump on over to The Independent …
  Oh, and as I mentioned a day or so ago, I’ll be doing an event with Alan Glynn at The Rathgar Bookshop this coming Thursday, October 6th, at 7.30pm. He’ll be reading from BLOODLAND, I’ll be reading from ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, and if there’s anyone still awake after that little lot, we’ll be talking about, y’know, good books and stuff. If you’re around, I’d love to see you there …

On Combining Surrealism With The Best Of Noir Fiction

I do own more than one shirt, I swear. It just seems to be the case that, as happened last Friday night at the Mysterious Bookstore in New York (right), as I said a few words of thanks to everyone involved in bringing DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS to fruition, and particularly John Connolly, I’m always wearing the blue-striped affair whenever someone points a camera in my direction.
  As to what I was doing up a ladder, well, your guess is as good as mine.
  That pic comes courtesy of a fine piece by Peter McDermott in the Irish Echo, by the way, in which he gives a good overview of the events of the GREEN STREETS-inspired symposium on Irish crime writing hosted by Ireland House at NYU last weekend. For more, clickety-click here; and feel free to scroll down this page too …
  Elsewhere, it’s been a good week for ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. First off, The Crime of It All posted a very nice review indeed, with the gist running thusly:

“ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL challenges the perceived limitations of the crime fiction genre as much as the perceived limitations of Ireland’s current financial woes. Dreamlike and invigorating, it combines surrealism with the best of noir fiction in an enthralling reminiscence of Flann O’Brien’s AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS … Burke’s writing is sharp, funny, and excruciatingly honest … a genuinely original and inventive novel, and its brevity leaves the reader wanting more, more Declan Burke. After all, the man has crafted a clever, personal, and charming story, a testament to the prize worthy of the best of Irish crime fiction.” - Conor Tannam, The Crime of It All

  With which, as you can imagine, I was well pleased. For the rest, clickety-click here. But stay! For lo, there’s more, this courtesy of The Dubliner magazine:

“We’re into a self-conscious world of meta-fiction, somewhere between Muriel Sparks’ THE COMFORTERS, Bret Easton Ellis’ LUNAR PARK, and of course, the inevitable comparison, which John Banville makes on the front cover blurb, Flann O’Brien … It’s a measure of Burke’s achievement in this funny and clever book that he can stand comparison to these three. Meta-fiction is a high-wire act requiring wit and style, or it falls flat. Burke has both … the book is witty, philosophical and a page-turning crime thriller.” - Bridget Hourican, The Dubliner

  I thank you kindly, ma’am.
  Meanwhile, and equally good news for yours truly, was the confirmation that I’ll be taking part in a two-hander event with Alan Glynn next Thursday evening, October 6th, at The Rathgar Bookshop, kick-off for 7.30pm. The bad news is that there’s a €4 cover charge; the good news is, there’ll be wine served. And if my previous experience of the Rathgar Bookshop is any guide, the wine will flow until cups overfloweth. Even better news is that Alan Glynn’s BLOODLAND is a smashing piece of work in the classic ‘paranoid thriller’ mould. If you’re in the vicinity, and in the mood for a glass of wine (or three) and a conversation about good books, please drop by for a chat …

I Choo-Choo-Choose Arlene Hunt

Yesterday I do be mentioning Arlene Hunt in dispatches from last weekend’s trip to New York, so I do (sorry, but we were in an Irish bar on Friday night, and it takes time for the pixie dust to wear off), and it’s fair to say that one of the highlights of the weekend was seeing Arlene’s latest tome, THE CHOSEN, in the flesh for the first time. A very handsome tome it is too, and nice to see a crime novel that opts for a white cover rather than the usual grim tones that tend to dominate designers’ palettes. It’s all the more impressive, methinks, when you consider that THE CHOSEN is Arlene’s first outing under her own aegis, as it were: after six well-received titles published with a traditional house, Arlene has taken publishing matters into her own hands, setting up Portnoy Publishing with her husband. I wish them a fair wind and calm seas as they set sail into the future …
  As for the novel itself, Mike Nicol over at the very fine Crime Beat blog is currently publishing extracts from a number of contemporary Irish crime novels, and Arlene’s contribution from THE CHOSEN can be found here. “A taut, sharp, gripping re-imagining of the serial-killer novel,” says Tana French, which is all kinds of nice.
  Elsewhere, Crime Beat also features extracts from Alan Glynn’s latest, BLOODLAND; a snippet from Colin Bateman’s forthcoming tome NINE INCHES that begins - oh yes! - with, “It was a dark and stormy night …”; and my own humble tome, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, which is currently sulking in a corner and wishing it had been written by Colin Bateman. Ungrateful buggers, my books …

The Future Is Claret

There’s a couple of interesting launches next week, folks, and lashings of ye olde claret in prospect as BLOODLAND and THE BLOODY MEADOW see the light of day.
  First up, the official send-off for Alan Glynn’s BLOODLAND, which takes place on Tuesday 13th at - where else? - the Gutter Bookshop, Dublin, which appears to have become the bookstore of choice for the Irish crime fraternity. All the details are available in the invite to your right ...
  I got to read an early copy of BLOODLAND, although to be honest it didn’t arrive half early enough. As all Three Regular Readers will be aware, I’m a big fan of Alan Glynn’s first two offerings, THE DARK FIELDS and WINTERLAND, and BLOODLAND more than delivers on the promise of those novels, being something of a synthesis of the two, and a damn fine example of the classic paranoid thriller. If you don’t believe me - and I wouldn’t - then check out the couple of early reviews over at the Mulholland Books interweb lair, one of them written by no less a personage than the venerable Ali Karim. Sample quote:

“Glynn’s ability to take these big themes and distil them down to the seedy personal stories and motivations of the protagonists is the key to why this novel hypnotizes the reader.” - Ali Karim

  Elsewhere, William Ryan launches THE BLOODY MEADOW next Thursday, said tome being the follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut, THE HOLY THIEF, and one hotly anticipated around these here parts (said he, hoping to nudge some eagle-eyed PR personage into sending on an ARC). Quoth the blurb elves:

Following his investigations in THE HOLY THIEF, which implicated those at the very top of authority in Soviet Russia, Captain Alexei Korolev finds himself decorated and hailed as an example to all Soviet workers. But Korolev lives in an uneasy peace – his new-found knowledge is dangerous, and if it is discovered what his real actions were during the case, he will face deportation to the frozen camps of the far north. But when the knock on the door comes, in the dead of night, it is not Siberia Korolev is destined for. Instead, Colonel Rodinov of the NKVD security service asks the detective to look into the suspected suicide of a young woman: Maria Alexandovna Lenskaya, a model citizen. Korolev is unnerved to learn that Lenskaya had been of interest to Ezhov, the feared Commissar for State Security. Ezhov himself wants to matter looked into. And when the detective arrives on the set for Bloody Meadow, in the bleak, battle-scarred Ukraine, he soon discovers that there is more to Lenskaya’s death than meets the eye ...

  I thought THE HOLY THIEF was a terrific read, but I won’t be able to make the launch, unfortunately, given that it takes place at 7pm in O’Mahony’s Bookshop, 120 O’Connell Street, Limerick on Thursday the 15th, at which time I will be working in Dublin and still forlornly struggling to master the art of bi-location.
  So there you have it: Alan Glynn’s BLOODLAND and William Ryan’s THE BLOODY MEADOW. That’s another good week for Irish crime fiction right there …

Bloodymarvellousland; and Gordon Burn

I mentioned during the week on ye olde Twittere that I’d finished Alan Glynn’s latest offering, BLOODLAND, suggesting that he really should have gone for broke and titled it BLOODYMARVELLOUSLAND. Which is to say, I thought it was terrific, a synthesis of the best elements of his previous offerings, THE DARK FIELDS and WINTERLAND. I’ll be reviewing said tome in due course, so I’ll say no more about it for now, except to say that it’s likely to be one of the finest crime novels published this year, and a very fine example of the classic conspiracy thriller.
  All of which is by way of a preamble to pointing you towards a nifty little piece Alan penned for The Huffington Post last week, in which he speculates on the rise of a new sub-genre, ‘pulp faction’. To wit:

In LIBRA, Don DeLillo’s imagined Oswald and Ruby are so convincing, so forensically delineated, that it almost feels like time travel. Other writers - James Ellroy, Eoin McNamee, David Peace - have done this, too, filtered real events through their fictional prisms, and to equally electrifying effect. But a different approach again was taken in 2008 by the late Gordon Burn in his stunning BORN YESTERDAY, which had the subtitle, ‘The News as a Novel’. In presenting us with the events of summer 2007, Burn makes nothing up. Rather, he conjures it all into a kaleidoscope, a surrealistic canvas of connections, a mediated meditation. With the events of summer 2011 now drifting by, it’s hard not to speculate what Burn might have done with the hacking scandal - with Murdoch, Brooks, Cameron, Sean Hoare, Milly Dowler, The Hour, the sidelined debt crisis, the sidelined famine . . . Oslo . . . Amy . . .

  For the rest of the piece, clickety-click here …
  This isn’t the first time the name of Gordon Burn has popped up on these pages, by the way, and if he’s good enough for Alan Glynn and David Peace, then he’s certainly good enough for me. If anyone else out there has anything further to offer on Gordon Burn, I’m all ears.
  Meanwhile, BORN YESTERDAY was recently released as an e-book. You can find all the details here …

Soul Trader

As anyone who has attended any of his events will attest, John Connolly is something of a one-man three-ring circus when it comes to his public appearances. Which makes for a refreshing change from when most writers, yours truly included, step into the limelight, and the ‘entertainment’ generally runs as follows: “Thanks for coming, cough, mumble, insert-name-of-book-here, rhubarb, the support of my wife / husband, cough, erm, ah, copies to be signed, I thank you all.” Connolly, on the other hand, looks born to a life treading the boards when he takes centre-stage, although as with most things writing-related, I’d imagine that it’s years of hard graft that makes it all look so easy and comfortable.
  Anyway, the point behind that preamble is that John Connolly will be appearing at Eason’s on O’Connell Street, Dublin, on August 29th, for a public interview, the purpose of which is to officially launch his latest Charlie Parker tome, THE BURNING SOUL. Quoth the blurb elves:

Randall Haight has a secret: when he was a teenager, he and his friend killed a 14-year-old girl. Randall did his time and built a new life in the small Maine town of Pastor’s Bay, but somebody has discovered the truth about Randall. He is being tormented by anonymous messages, haunting reminders of his past crime, and he wants private detective Charlie Parker to make it stop. But another 14-year-old girl has gone missing, this time from Pastor’s Bay, and the missing girl’s family has its own secrets to protect. Now Parker must unravel a web of deceit involving the police, the FBI, a doomed mobster named Tommy Morris, and Randall Haight himself. Because Randall Haight is telling lies . . .

  There’s no word yet as to who will be conducting the interview, by the way, although it’s probably fair to say, and with all due respect, that it doesn’t really matter. The event is free, by the way, although I’d imagine that it’ll be heavily booked in advance; my advice is to book early, and book often …

  For those of you residing in Norn Iron, by the way, John Connolly will be appearing at No Alibis a couple of days later, on September 1st, in tandem with Alan Glynn, who launches BLOODLAND later in the month, on September 13th, in the Gutter Bookshop. More of which anon, although given that I’m about 60 pages short of finishing BLOODLAND, let me just say that it’s Alan Glynn’s finest novel yet, which isn’t bad going considering his previous offerings were the excellent THE DARK FIELDS and WINTERLAND. Put it in your diary now; it should be a cracking night …
  As mentioned previously on these pages, by the way, the launch of THE BURNING SOUL kicks off a very impressive run of Irish crime offerings, from the likes of Alan Glynn, Colin Bateman, Stuart Neville and Ava McCarthy. For more, clickety-click here …

BLOODLAND: Has The Great Irish Novel Finally Arrived?

It’s fair to say that Alan Glynn is one of the most inventive and thoughtful Irish writers working today, and I was already looking forward to his forthcoming title, BLOODLAND, even before I read the Le Carré-meets-James Ellroy blurb. To wit:

A tabloid star is killed in a helicopter crash and three years later a young journalist is warned off the story. A private security contractor loses it in the Congo, with deadly consequences. In Ireland an ex-prime minister struggles to contain a dark secret from his time in office. A dramatic news story breaks in Paris just as a US senator begins his campaign to run for office. With echoes of John Le Carré, 24 and James Ellroy, Alan Glynn’s follow-up to WINTERLAND is another crime novel of and for our times – a ferocious, paranoid thriller that moves from Dublin to New York via Central Africa, and thrillingly explores the legacy of corruption in big business, the West’s fear of China, the role of back room political players and the question of who controls what we know.

  Sounds like a cracker, but stay! There’s more. Ken Bruen wades in with a cover blurb that runs thusly: “The debate is over - BLOODLAND is the great Irish novel, no argument.” - Ken Bruen
  Interesting, I think, that Ken Bruen doesn’t claim that BLOODLAND is the great Irish crime novel, but the great Irish novel. Is it the case that, given what Ireland has been through in the last number of years, the current generation of Irish writers are doomed to engage with crime and criminality? Is it that Alan Glynn doesn’t write conventional crime novels? Either way, Ken Bruen has just ratcheted up the expectations for BLOODLAND, which arrives on September 1st, by yet another notch or two …

UPDATE:

  A little birdie gets in touch, in the wake of this post, to tell us that a certain Val McDermid has read BLOODLAND, and appears to quite like it. To wit:

“Ripped from tomorrow’s headlines, BLOODLAND is irresistible. An exhilarating thriller from the dark heart of the global village.” - Val McDermid

  Very, very nice indeed …

In Like Glynn

Not naming any names or nowt, but as events this week in Ireland have proved, you can’t be too paranoid about the likely consequences when the worlds of business and politics collide. That’s a theme explored in ‘Limitless’ (see review here), the movie adapted from the novel THE DARK FIELDS written by Alan Glynn (right, in full-on Kenneth Branagh mode). As he explains in an Irish Times interview published today, it’s a theme Glynn further explores in the novels WINTERLAND (2009) and the forthcoming BLOODLAND (2011). To wit:

“People Do Get Away With Murder”

A writer of dark, thoughtful thrillers, Alan Glynn waited 10 years for his first novel to get the movie treatment. But when your hero Robert De Niro is starring in it, it’s worth the wait, he tells Declan Burke

“The idea of there being a ‘quick fix’ for everything in your life is one that’s current in the culture,” says Alan Glynn, author of THE DARK FIELDS, from which the film ‘Limitless’ is adapted. “There’s a drug for everything, there’s a quick diet, you can make yourself over, all these kinds of things. So it was a question of taking that notion and reducing it to a simple pill - if you take this one pill, you can have the world, but it’s going to cost you your soul.”
  ‘Limitless’ stars Bradley Cooper, who plays struggling New York writer Eddie Morra. Once Eddie is introduced to a new super-drug, NZT, his life is changed utterly. Productive, insightful and surpassingly intelligent, Eddie is soon making a fortune trading stocks. But every drug has its side-effects, and Eddie’s come-down involves paranoia, betrayal and the distinct possibility of an early death.
  Right now, Alan Glynn’s adrenaline rush has no need of artificial stimulants.
  “Before the movie started,” says Glynn of last week’s New York premiere of ‘Limitless’, “the director, Neil Burger, stood up and said he wanted to introduce a few people who were involved in the movie. And he said, ‘This all started with the book,’ and introduced me first (laughs). I hadn’t expected that, and I thought it was lovely, because after that he went through Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper, all the rest. So that was very gratifying.”
  What made it even better was that De Niro was sitting three rows behind in the theatre. “He was a hero of mine, as he was to a whole generation,” says Glynn. “If you had told me when the rights for THE DARK FIELDS were first signed [in 2001] that I’d have to wait another ten years to see it made, but Robert De Niro would be in the movie, I’d have taken that.”
  In a neat touch, the title of the book Eddie publishes in ‘Limitless’ is called ‘Illuminating the Dark Fields’. In the real world, THE DARK FIELDS has been re-released under the title LIMITLESS.
  “I’m not so happy about that,” he says. “Obviously, I’m very attached to the original title, it’s from the last page of THE GREAT GATSBY, and it has thematic resonances throughout the whole book, while the title ‘Limitless’ is the product of a marketing testing system. But the book has been re-released here and in the US, it was in the shops in the US before the movie opened and selling quite well. I mean, even before the movie has been released, the book has sold more copies now than it did on the entire run of its first publication.”
  Glynn, who lives in Dublin with his wife and two sons, lived in New York from 1985 to 1989, but only started writing THE DARK FIELDS after he moved back to Ireland from Italy in 1999. “That was around the time of the dot com bubble, and in the book there’s this whole section about the biggest corporate merger in American history, which I based on the Time Warner / AOL merger of the time.”
  The Faustian pact Eddie enters into is a theme Glynn subsequently explored in WINTERLAND (2009). Set in Dublin just as the property boom is going bust, and hailed as remarkably prescient on its release, it explores the shadowy nexus where the worlds of politics, business and white- and blue-collar crime intersect.
  “In anything I’ve ever written,” he says, “there always seems to be a dark, malign power figure at the heart of the story. It seems to me that the modern incarnation of that malign power in society is the CEO, who’s almost like the Machiavellian Prince figure. A politician or even a monarch might have a sense of responsibility to go with that power, but the CEO has a responsibility solely to his or her shareholders, so it’s almost an amoral power. In that sense it’s a very modern pure form of power, which can even be more evil in its consequences, with no regard all for any community or human value whatsoever.
  “I go into that in BLOODLAND as well. WINTERLAND is about the property boom in Ireland, but BLOODLAND has a broader, more international setting. Part of it has to do with the illegal mining of coltan in the Congo, and the lack of accountability there in the supply chain between the metals extracted illegally and high-end consumer products that are found in the First World. Coltan is essential for use in capacitors in the electronic equipment we use all the time - it’s in every mobile phone, every game console, that we use. But there doesn’t seem to be any moral connect between that and the conditions in which this stuff is extracted in the Congo, and which has in part been responsible for a war that’s been going on for nearly 20 years, in which five to eight million people have been killed. I mean, it’s covered intermittently, but the scale of it is mind-boggling. But because it’s not about oil, it flies under the radar, strategically speaking. I don’t want to sound polemical or that I’m pushing an agenda, but I’m using that to explore the kinds of power figures who control that trade, from the upper echelons of corporate America. That’s one strand of the story, and there’s a political aspect, and military contractors, and the privatisation of war as a business.
  “What I’m planning for the next book,” he continues, “which is called GRAVELAND - it’s the third in a loose trilogy - is to go back into the past, back to the 1870s in America, when the railroads were being built. There’s a character called James Vaughn who features in WINTERLAND, the old American corporate guy, he’s also in ‘Bloodland’ and he’ll feature largely in GRAVELAND - it goes back into his family history, almost like exploring a Kennedy-like dynasty.”
  Glynn was first inspired to write by what he calls the ‘great paranoid thrillers’ of the 1970s. How does ‘Limitless’ compares as a conspiracy thriller to that Golden Age?
  “It’s obviously different to the classic conspiracy thrillers,” he says, “the tone and the feel of those movies was so specific to the times, y’know, Watergate, Vietnam, and that paranoid, claustrophobic feeling can’t be recreated authentically. And it’s definitely not in this movie - there’s a lighter tone to this film, there’s a knowing, satirical edge to it that you didn’t get in the classic conspiracy thrillers.”
  While the movie ends on an upbeat but morally complex note, the novel THE DARK FIELDS has a very bleak and noir finale.
  “It’s not the book up there on screen,” Glynn concedes, “but you expect that. There’s always more depth in a book. In the movie, Eddie doesn’t get the really fuzzy end of the Faustian pact he gets in the book. But then, cinema is a whole different medium, there’s a totally different energy to it. The movie is the book’s story edited down to the bone.”
  That didn’t stop the author from enjoying the movie, which topped the US box office on its release last weekend.
  “To be perfectly honest, I grinned like a loon the whole way through,” he says. “I was anticipating feeling ambivalent, or even horrified, possibly, and afterwards there was such a sense of relief that I’d enjoyed it so much. I met Neil Burger two minutes after it finished, and I was able to shake his hand and say, ‘I loved it.’ Which was a great relief (laughs). To be able to speak positively about it is great. It’d be a strange position to be in otherwise, to have to either (a) lie about it or (b) tell the brutal truth. But I don’t have to do either of those, which is great.”
  Despite the themes of power and corruption, and the criminal activities in which his characters tend to dabble, Glynn is in no hurry to pigeonhole himself as a particular kind of writer.
  “I don’t really care about the labels. When I say I don’t see myself as a crime writer, I don’t mean that to sound judgemental. I love crime fiction, but that’s not in my head when I’m writing. I wouldn’t consider myself a literary writer either, I just do what I do.”
  The innate conservatism of the crime novel, where order almost inevitably emerges from chaos, is an unnecessarily restrictive constraint.
  “There is that element of conservatism and morality that exists in a lot of crime fiction, the idea that the wrong has to be set right. But some of the stuff I’ve done has almost been a cynical conclusion that right doesn’t triumph, that the harsh reality is that it often doesn’t, and that people do get away with murder.
  “I mean, by the end of WINTERLAND, the bad guy isn’t caught and held accountable, but he does die according to his own weakness. There’s a certain amount of wrapping-up there, but it’s a bit more complex than just the bad guy brought down by the good guy.”

Alan Glynn’s Top Paranoid Thrillers

‘Chinatown’ (1974)
“With its sun-drenched 1930s LA setting, a brilliant script by Robert Towne and unforgettable score by Jerry Goldsmith, Polanski’s ‘Chinatown’ is the ultimate study of power and corruption. It looks back nostalgically to the classic noir era, but it also roots itself in the malaise of the 1970s – because never before had a big screen American hero been so casually crushed by malign, unaccountable forces.”

‘Three Days of the Condor’ (1975)
“The ending is brilliant, it’s an ending they’d never use today. The Robert Redford character is standing outside the ‘New York Times’ offices, and he’s telling this guy he’s about to blow the story, this conspiracy, wide open. And the guy is saying, well, go ahead, but do you really think it’s worth it, every day for the rest of your life looking over your shoulder? And it all ends on a very dark, paranoid note …”

‘All the President’s Men’ (1976)
“Even today, it really stands up. I saw it again recently and it’s just fantastic. What’s great about it is the way it cuts out before the whole thing about Nixon really goes off, they’re typing away - tchk-tchk-tchck- it’s up there on the screen, it’s fantastic. And that kind of ending requires the audience to know what happened next, to be intelligent enough to make their own leap. That doesn’t happen a lot these days.”

‘Marathon Man’ (1976)
“I love Marathon Man. I saw it when it came out first, I was still a kid, and I absolutely adored it. Especially the music, by Michael Small. You can’t get it anymore. None of his scores are available, and he’s one of the key ’70s composers of music for paranoid thrillers - ‘Klute’, ‘Marathon Man’ and a couple of others.”

  ‘Limitless’ goes on general release this weekend. Alan Glynn’s BLOODLAND will be published by Faber & Faber in September.

  This interview first appeared in the Irish Times

Origins: Alan Glynn

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: Alan Glynn (right), author of WINTERLAND. To wit:

“Origins? It seems to me that that’s just a fancy way of asking the dreaded question: where do you get your ideas from? (A question second only in dread to: what’s your book about?). Whenever I’m asked the first question I try hard to answer it, but I generally end up feeling like a bit of a fraud, as though I’ve made an answer up on the spot just to keep things moving. Because the thing is, by the time I arrive at the end of a book I usually find I’ve forgotten how it got started, its origins obscured somewhere in memory and almost inaccessible now through thickets of notes, outlines, obsessive but often unnecessary research and a seemingly endless process of re-writing.
  “Thinking back on answers I’ve given, though, a pattern emerges. The account I offer will either be fine-sounding and rational or slightly random and mechanistic – left brain, right brain stuff. Both do the job, and neither, I suspect, is actually untrue. It’s just that I can never be sure which came first . . .
  “For example, when asked about my first novel, THE DARK FIELDS, I would say either one of two things. I would say that it arose from an interest in the scandals of the late ’90s regarding performance-enhancing drugs in sport, and that it was a sort of ‘what if . . .’ story – what if there existed a performance-enhancing drug for lawyers or businessmen or politicians? Out of which came questions about that very American theme of the perfectability of man and the notion of a latter-day Gatsby, whose impulse for self-improvement has been reduced to a pharmaceutical commodity.
  “Or I would say that it arose from . . . not much at all, from a desperate scrambling around inside my own brain for SOMETHING TO WRITE ABOUT. So . . . a situation. Maybe two guys who bump into each other on the street. One is a bit desperate (like I am at the time) and he meets . . . who? His ex-brother-in-law? Someone he hasn’t seen in nearly ten years? Yeah, that’s the ticket. But now that I have them together what are they going to talk about? What have you been up to? Still dealing? Not exactly. How about you? Still a loser? One thing leads to another and before you know it they’re having a conversation. Possibilities are opening up. And – quite literally – the whole book comes out of that.
  “With WINTERLAND I would say that I was fascinated by the idea of a skyscraper that had an in-built structural flaw and of having that represent the greedy aspirations of a society spinning out of all moral control. Or . . . I’d say that the book started with the disconnected image of some people sitting in a beer garden having to listen to a car alarm outside, and slowly realizing that the car belongs to a young gangland thug sitting in their midst who refuses to go out and switch it off.
  “With my new novel, BLOODLAND, was it reading Michela Wrong’s IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF MR KURTZ and wanting to explore the direct line from ivory and rubber extraction in the Congo over a hundred years ago to the extraction of coltan today? Or was it simply wanting to kick-start a whole novel with just these two words: ‘Phone rings.’
  “Well? Was it?
  “As Rocky Balboa once said, “I don’t know, you know, who knows?”
  “It’s a weird process and Edgar Allen Poe describes it best in an essay called ‘The Philosophy of Composition’. He suggests going behind the scenes of a work-in-progress and taking a peep, ‘at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought - at the true purposes seized only at the last moment - at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view - at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable . . .’
  “Ouch. But it sounds about right.
  “Having finished BLOODLAND, it won’t be long before I’m heading back once more into the thickets. But every time I do this, I try to convince myself that there must be a form of insurance policy you can take out to guarantee safe passage to the other side, that there must be some help available – a GPS system for novelists, say, or at the very least a how-to manual that actually works . . .
  “It’s amazing how much time you can devote to this sort of stuff – and for devote, of course, read waste. I think what happens is that one day you realize you have started, you’re somewhere, and the only way to go is forward. By the time you’re secure enough to look back the starting point will invariably seem distant and fuzzy.
  “But then, when you get asked about it later on, you can always come up with something – a handy retrofit based on what eventually emerges . . . either that or a half-remembered fragment, a shard, dreamlike but telling, that might very well be the actual starting point, that might very well be the truth. But hey, one way or the other, who’s going to contradict you, right?” - Alan Glynn

Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND is published by Faber and Faber.

The Dark Art of Paranoia

The publication of the paperback edition of Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND is as good an excuse as any to reprint the interview with him I had published in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times’ Culture section a couple of months ago. To wit:

It started on the late, late shows. While most boys in the early ’70s were trawling the late-night TV channels in the hope of glimpsing some illicit flesh, the teenage Alan Glynn was getting off on a more potent charge: paranoia.
  “I think that the stuff you ingest as a teenager is the stuff that sticks with you for life,” says Glynn. “When I was a teenager in the 1970s, the biggest influence was movies, and especially the conspiracy thrillers. What they call the ‘paranoid style’ in America – Klute, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, Three Days of the Condor, and of course, the great Chinatown. There was a societal thing going on, they were examining the whole paranoia thing in American politics at the time, which seemed exotic to me when I was catching late-night movies on BBC2. It was exotic back then, but now we’ve got it. We’re all paranoid now.”
  ‘Follow the money,’ urged Deep Throat in All the President’s Men. Sage advice for those trying to understand why and how Ireland’s boom went bust; or it might be, were there any money left to follow.
  Written while the economy was still thriving, Glynn’s new novel, Winterland, nevertheless gets under the bricks and mortar of post-boom Ireland. Noel Rafferty is a consultant working on a building development on Dublin’s quays. His nephew, also Noel Rafferty, is a gangland hard man. When both men die on the same night, Gina Rafferty, sister and aunt to the men, suspects there is more to the deaths than mere coincidence. As Gina asks questions of those in authority, however, the novel broadens its remit to investigate the connections between blue-collar criminality and those who inhabit the white-collar worlds of politics and business, the latter with fortunes to lose if their building development fails.
  Is there a danger that there will be little new in Winterland, at least in terms of newspaper headlines, for contemporary readers?
  “There has been a tendency for people to say that this is a very prescient book,” he says. “But none of it was consciously written to be prescient. It’s not an economic polemic, or a political polemic, so the specifics of the story detail and how they run parallel to where we are now aren’t all that important.”
  Established as a paradigm by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the theme of linking street-level crime to those in positions of authority abusing their power is virtually axiomatic in crime fiction. Glynn, however, is interested in taking that paradigm onto another level (“I haven’t read a lot of it, really,” he says. “I’m not an expert on crime writing.”) In common with such recent Irish novels as Gerard Donovan’s Julius Winsome, Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Blackrock, or Gene Kerrigan’s Dark Times in the City, Winterland expands beyond crime and punishment to explore those junctures where the personal becomes the political. Fuelled by bad blood and paranoia, the novels investigate the nature of justice itself.
  “Gene Kerrigan is much more knowledgeable about the specifics of this, because of his career in journalism,” says Glynn. “And I think ‘crusade’ would too strong a word, but juxtaposing street crime with the kind of crime that happens in politics or business, I think that highlights on a moral level the question, ‘Where’s the difference?’ Not to be heavy-handed about it, but in Winterland, certain people get away with things in a way that people from a lower economic class wouldn’t get away with.”
  In person amiable and self-deprecating to a fault, Glynn is a far cry from the hard-bitten anti-heroes of ‘the paranoid style’, although he is every bit as single-minded when it comes to following his instincts. Born in Dublin in 1960, and educated locally, he decided very early in life that he had a vocation to write.
  “There was never anything else, ever, on the radar. I have a photograph of myself when I was about seven, sitting at a desk with a pen and a notebook. I only came across it recently, and I was amazed, but it’s completely consistent with what I remember as a kid.”
  He went to Trinity College to read English, where he met his wife Eithne, with whom he has two sons. He then spent five years in Verona teaching English, and then went to New York, returning to Ireland in 1992, when he took the decision to write full-time. His first novel, The Dark Fields, set in New York, was published in 2002.
  “It’s insane,” he says of the writing process, “it’s painfully, painstakingly slow. If I have to write a note to the milkman it’ll take me half-an-hour and three drafts. Not that it’ll be any better in the end, but that’s just the process I have to go through. And that’s a disadvantage in some respects.”
  The main disadvantage is that, as a father of two, and despite working as a full-time writer, Glynn has produced only two published novels in eight years. A third novel, The Paloma Stripe, was rejected in 2005.
  “The reason I was given basically boiled down to ‘likeability’, they had a ‘likeability’ issue with the main character. And that’s a very subjective thing.” It’s also an issue more relevant to commercial fiction, whereas Glynn’s ambitions are more literary. “Look at Humbert Humbert, you wouldn’t call him a likeable character. Or Macbeth.”
  With the publication of Winterland and a Neil Burger-helmed Hollywood adaptation of The Dark Fields due later this year, Glynn’s personal circumstances have hugely improved. His themes, however, remain the same.
  “It’s called Bloodland,” he says of his current work, “and it’s not a sequel to The Dark Fields, but it develops a minor character from that novel and turns on similar themes of power and corruption and the abuse of money and position. The character is an investment banker, and he’s involved in a series of companies which are involved in illegal mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I’m fascinated by this idea that the scramble for Africa, and the plunder of its natural resources, is as big or bigger today as it was when Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness. Then it was ivory and rubber, and the exploitation was on a massive scale. Today it’s coltan, and other precious metals that are used in consumer products, like mobile phones and games consoles and that kind of stuff.”
  Again, the personal meets the political.
  “Well, absolutely. It’s about responsibility – taking responsibility or not taking responsibility, and the broad consequences individual actions can have throughout society.”
  Winterland’s abiding symbol is a tower being built in Dublin’s docklands, proposed to be Europe’s highest building if only those individuals with their hands on the levers of power can apply enough pressure in the right places. Such projects, whether flawed by engineering or overweening ambition, are now considered monuments or mausoleums to the boom years.
  “I was writing this when everything was fine, economically speaking,” says Glynn, “although in saying that, if you looked ahead you knew there had to be something coming down the tracks. People saying, ‘This time it’s different,’ and ‘The Irish model is different.’ We knew then that that was insane. But I was conscious even then that this flaw in the building could symbolise in some sense the hubris that existed, that there was an in-built, invisible fatal flaw in this whole economic boom. Originally the flaw was just a technical issue, an engineering problem, but it quickly became apparent that it was symbolic. I didn’t want to push that too heavily, or be heavy-handed about it, but it was there.
  “Now, in the context of the economic collapse, it makes more sense. It’s clearer to me now than it would have been then. The organic development of those kind of ideas … Sometimes it’s hard, because you’re not quite sure of where it’s bringing you. I think that’s a very important part of writing, to learn to go with that instinctual feel for an idea. You have to trust that.”
  ‘That all is not what it seems’ was once described by the great creative writing teacher John Gardner as the quintessential narrative hook, and it’s an instinctive philosophy that Glynn cleaves to as he gives voice to a distrust of authority that is by no means confined to Ireland.
  “It’s the only sane position to hold,” he says. “This whole idea that we’re being presented with what’s going on, but that behind that again there’s something else happening. Not to be a loopy conspiracy theorist, but just to voice the sense that there’s a disconnect. And we’ve had plenty of evidence of that over the last two decades that things simply were not as we were told they were.”

  This article first appeared in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times’ Culture section.