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

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?
RED HARVEST by Dashiell Hammett – the original hard-boiled crime novel and still the best. David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet – four astonishing novels that made me feel physically ill by the time I’d finished them (in a good way). THE POWER OF THE DOG by Don Winslow is a thing of awe and wonder – visceral, finger-chewing stuff and the last word on the lamentable ‘war on drugs’ and the limitations of American power. Anything bleak and angry that asks the right questions but knows not to try and provide answers. Newton Thornburg’s CUTTER AND BONE is another novel I’d loved to have written. Failure and despair are all but inevitable but that doesn’t mean you have to give up. And each time I read the part where Cutter tries to ‘park’ his car I weep with laughter.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Chief Bromden played a cagier game than McMurphy and managed to side-step the lobotomy.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Student essays.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Whenever you know you absolutely should be doing something else and yet you still feel somehow compelled to sit in front of the screen and type away – and before you know it an hour, two hours, four hours, have passed since you last thought to check the time.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
THE ULTRAS by Eoin McNamee. It’s spare, terse, poetic; it disorientates you and never lets you settle; it delves deep into minds of its characters but never gives you the answers you expect; it tells a gripping and gut-churning story about complicity and state violence without succumbing to political posturing or cliché.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
WINTERLAND by Alan Glynn – I see Richard Gere channelling his best ‘Jackal’ voice for the part of Paddy Norton and Julia Roberts reprising her star turn from ‘Mary Reilly’ in the role of Gina Rafferty.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Best: Monday 10.37am – everything is great, you’re great, what you’re writing is great, not just great, it’s going to blow every other crime novel ever written out of the water. Great is a word, daring is another, because what you’re doing is ripping up the genre into tiny little pieces and letting them fall where they may on the page …

Worst: Monday 12.13pm – you’ve spent the last half hour picking up those pieces of paper and carefully sellotaping them back into some kind of recognisable order. The result is a piece of writing so dreary and predictable, so utterly moribund, that it could creosote Alan Shearer’s shed and still have time to put in a full shift at the call centre. Not only does it suck, you suck, you’re a fraud, and worse, a coward, and just when you think you can’t sink any lower you’re watching a repeat of ‘Bargain Hunt’ which you know is a repeat because you’ve seen it before …

The pitch for your next book is …?
I slip into the leather booth and when the movie producer asks this same question, I lean across the table and whisper, “Karl Marx meets ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’.” The producer smiles to reveal teeth as white as Belfast (circa 1997) and says, “I saw a Karl Malden movie once.” Not listening, I reply, ‘He was German.” He says, ‘In ‘On the Waterfront’?” I grimace a little and remember to thank him for the first-class flights and the suite at the Chateau Marmont. “Who’s going to play the Marlon Brando role?” says he. I frown. “It’s a searing indictment of the ills of global capitalism.” He checks his phone. “Have you thought about Justin Bieber?”

Who are you reading right now?
Jonathan Franzen’s FREEDOM. I always feel uplifted when I read proper literature.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
First I’d ask God to do his Morgan Freeman impression. Then I’d ask him about the Old Testament and what happened to his sense of humour. Then I’d select the latter option. Anyone can write. Reading is for the chosen few.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Be. Less. Shit.

Andrew Pepper’s BLOODY WINTER is published by W&N.

Now Is The BLOODY WINTER Of Our Discontent

Belfast-based author Andrew Pepper provides the latest title to prove my entirely spurious theory that crime writers are reflecting the upheavals in Irish society. BLOODY WINTER features Pepper’s 19th century detective Pyke, the Irish famine, and an unusual corpse discovered in County Tipperary. Quoth the blurb elves:

A body is discovered in a ditch outside the town of Dundrum in County Tipperary. The local land agent tells Knox, a young Irish policeman with divided loyalties, that it is the body of a vagrant and that the landowner Lord Cornwallis wants the case dealt with swiftly and quietly. The potato crop has failed for a second time and the Irish people are dying in their thousands. However when Knox examines the corpse it is clear that this man died wearing a Saville Row suit. Keeping his investigations secret, it becomes clear to Knox that the stranger came from London. Three months earlier Detective Inspector Pyke receives a letter from the daughter of a family friend. She has married a wealthy industrialist who owns ironworks in Merthyr Tydfil and her son has been kidnapped. Lured by the promise of a substantial fee and wanting to escape the tensions of Scotland Yard, Pyke agrees to go to Wales to investigate. There, he discovers a town riven with social discord following the brutal suppression of a workers strike and the importation of cheap Irish labour. The kidnapping is linked to a group of rebels but Pyke soon begins to suspect the case is not as clear cut as it seems. What are the links between the rebellion in Wales and the unrest in Ireland, and has Pyke finally bitten off more than he can chew?

  Sounds like a belter, although it’d be nice if we had some explanatory guff to flesh out the plot’s bones. But stay! What’s this? Quoth Andrew:  

“Below is some explanatory guff I wrote for Barry Forshaw over in Blighty:

“I knew at the start of the Pyke series that I wanted to write about the famine in Ireland. To do otherwise, to ignore it, when apparently committed to peering through the dark looking-glass at mid-nineteenth century British and Irish life, seemed like an abdication of responsibility. But I didn’t have any idea how such a task might be possible. How readily could the crime novel, which typically concerns itself with individual acts of murder and transgression, speak about the circumstances which led to hunger, destitution and death on such a vast scale? How far might be the idea of crime itself – the breaking of state-sanctioned laws – be unsettled by the state’s complicity in perpetuating, if not directly causing, the misery of so many? And then there was the issue of what to do with my hero, or anti-hero, Pyke, a detective whose unusual methods and dubious morality usually produce answers to the questions his investigations pose. How could such a figure, an Englishman no less, turn up in Ireland in 1847 and end up succeeding despite himself and the odds stacked against him? The very notion seemed to stink of bad faith.
  “From the beginning of BLOODY WINTER, therefore, I had made a decision not to bring Pyke to Ireland or if I did, then to have him play the most marginal of roles. And what more marginal role is there but to be a corpse? For this is the situation that Bloody Winter poses throughout: that the dead body which turns up on a Tipperary estate may be that of my erstwhile detective. And for the young, inexperienced constable who is told to turn a blind eye to the murder, the enquiry can only lead to heartache and failure: his personal failure, aided by official intransigence and the interference of vested interests, mirroring the devastation he sees all around him.
  “But having made these decisions, I needed a reason for Pyke to travel to Ireland in the first place and then I read about the migration of famine-hit Irish men and women in the other direction: to find work in the ironworks of South Wales’s original boom town, Merthyr Tydfil. And Merthyr, a forerunner of Dashiell Hammett’s Personville, a town literally and metaphorically dirtied up by mining and riven by petty criminality and industrial unrest, seemed just the kind of place where Pyke would feel perfectly at home.
  “So it is a kidnapping that first takes Pyke to Merthyr: the son of a wealthy industrialist. But Pyke soon finds out that all is not as it seems and as his suspicions settle on the town’s rich and poor alike, the novel asks what links the events in Ireland and Wales and whether the same system of free trade that has emptied Ireland of its harvest and its people is in fact be responsible for the bloodbath that greets Pyke in Merthyr. And as the young Irish constable quickly discovers, in the face of so much power, and so much needless death, what can one man realistically be expected to do?”

  So there you have it. BLOODY WINTER, as well as being another cracking Pyke mystery and a peek ‘through the dark looking-glass at mid-nineteenth century British and Irish life’, incorporates famine, bad faith, civil unrest, the protection of the wealthy classes’ vested interests and the individual beaten down in face of overwhelming state-sanctioned criminality. Hurrah! If that’s not a novel for our times, then I’ll eat my copy of AN DUANAIRE, with a side order of mouldy black spuds and nettle-leaf salad.