“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Colette Ni Reamonn Ioannidou

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?
POMPEII by Robert Harris, set in the year of my birth – not totally crime-crime but an engineer has to solve a mystery and does. It has a magic cake mix for me, ancient history and superb writing.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Princess Leia from the Star Wars series. She wears great bikinis, gets up close and uncomfortable with Jaba the Hutt (who, in reality, outside my delusions, looks more like me) and lives through it. And she has doughnuts over her ears, so she’s never short of a snack.

Who do I read for guilty pleasure?
Other people’s clever quotes. Why guilty? I never remember them. The one I keep close even though how close it is to the original saying, who knows, is one by Confucius: ‘He who flatters a man is his downfall. He who tells him of his faults is his maker.’

Most satisfying writing moment?
The dawning belief that I really wouldn’t go to hell if I wrote about rude words and sex in my stories. I tell my shocked (female) friends, ‘It was God that put the sex in man, and it’s not God’s fault (or mine) if men found rude words to describe it.’

The best Irish crime novel is …
WHO SLAUGHTERED THE CELTIC TIGER by Weall Wantaknow. (Cecilia Ahern is here [in Cyprus] in translation! Bet Irish crime isn’t.) However, I read reviews and there are some fine Irish writers of the genre on the scene if reviews are to be believed. I’m not lickin’ up, honest, I loved ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL but that was far more than just a novel with a crime. That story goes under cerebral genre. It had so much of the “wow, that’s cool, intelligent writing, that’s something deep to think about” element that is not the stuff of the ‘ordinary’ formulaic crime read. And I’ve read more formula crime than babies have formula. I loved the Wexford series (years ago – nothing to do with Wexford in Ireland, sorry) because of the late but smashing George Baker in the role.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
The Quartet from my book TO DIE OR NOT TO DIE. Frank McNally described that as, ‘A dark and twisted tale of secrets, misunderstandings and blighted lives …’ It has all the elements: sex, animals eating human flesh, (which no good crime story should be without!) and people gnawing on each other’s psyches … and a murder.

Worst/best thing about being a writer?
Worst: I lose patience when I can’t type as fast as my brain wants to give out. Best: Getting a book into actual print, holding your dream, as it were.

The pitch for your next book is …
It’s a story of the supernatural and how fascination with celebrity manages to take over the minds of kids to such an extent that the connection disrupts their lives, and the dead star that just won’t lie down and leave them and their shrink alone.

Who are you reading right now?
No one, I’m on the trot trying to promote moi!

God appears and says you can read OR write. Which would it be?
That’s a shite question. (Rude sentence optional.) It’s as the old song says, like a circle in a spiral like a wheel within a wheel … If you write you are reading what you put down, yes? So, one would cancel out the other, right? Or is it early onset Alzheimer’s with mise? I hope St Peter has better questions when I arrive at The Gate; I’m not very bright with trick questions.

Three best words to describe your writing …
Brilliant, beautiful and bullshit.

Colette Ni Reamonn Ioannidou’s TO DIE OR NOT TO DIE is published by Armida Publications.

Cecilia, You’re Breaking Our Hearts

The Irish Independent carried a piece last weekend previewing the Dublin Book Festival, the gist of which ran thusly:

‘Aspiring Irish writers hoping to follow in the footsteps of Cecilia’
Speaking ahead of this weekend’s Dublin Book Festival, Sean O’Cearnaigh, President of the Irish Book Publishing Association, said that the market was alive and well here. “It’s certainly in a state of change, but publishers here have around 15pc of the market of books that are on sale in shops at the moment.” And the success of the market is all down to the talent of Irish writers, he added. “Irish writers are our secret weapons,” he explains. “We have everything from big writers to chick-lit authors to sports writers. There is a lot of talent. We have a lot of up-and-coming writers coming through as well, writers who have their finger on the pulse. Ireland is changing a lot and it’s just a matter of reflecting that, which many of the writers do.”

  And these writers with their fingers on the pulse, reflecting a changing Ireland? Declan Hughes, Arlene Hunt, Ken Bruen, Brian McGilloway, Ingrid Black, et al … They, unfortunately, were all too busy beavering away reflecting a changing Ireland to get along to the Festival. In fact, no Irish crime writer could tear him or herself away from the desk long enough to give a talk or attend a panel, lest removing their fingers from the pulse for even a moment might result in a national tragedy. The Festival did, of course, have a panel of true crime writers talking about crime and Ireland, but for the most part these were crime journalists promoting one-off books about a specific crime.
  Crime fiction writers? Pshaw, sir! Fie! And this despite the fact that the big news stories in Ireland over the last month were the brutal murder of two Polish men in Dublin; the ongoing farce in which an taoiseach (aka prime minister) Bertie Ahern attempts (and largely fails) to explain to a tribunal his, erm, idiosyncratic accounting procedures back when he was Minister for Finance; the largest drug haul in the history of the State; the murder of a young mother by her husband, who allegedly modelled his modus operandi on that of a previous killer; etc., ad nauseum. In other words, anyone writing fiction in Ireland today who is not dealing with crime is writing escapist fiction.
  And yet, if you walk into any Dublin bookstore today (other than the wonderful Murder Ink on Dawson Street), you’ll be faced with a bank of James Patterson’s 7TH HEAVEN, which is the worst apology for a sick monkey of a half-arsed first draft the Grand Vizier can remember reading. ‘Fingers on the pulse’, eh? Meanwhile, the Cecilia in whose footsteps Irish writers are hoping to follow? That’ll be the ever-lovely Cecilia Ahern (right), a creator of women’s fiction so insubstantial, frothy and sickeningly sweet that cotton candy may yet sue. Who just so happens to be the daughter of an taoiseach (aka prime minister) Bertie Ahern, who is attempting (and largely failing) to explain to a tribunal his, erm, idiosyncratic accounting procedures, etc., ad nauseum.
  Laugh? We nearly emigrated.

Prophets, Profits And Irish Crime Fiction: Discuss

Cecilia Ahern. Ken Bruen. Cathy Kelly. Tana French. Marian Keyes. Declan Hughes.
All Irish writers, of course, and no prizes for guessing which of names you’ve recognized. One of them won a brace of gongs at Bouchercon 2007 in the US, the biggest American awards ceremony of its kind. Another won the award for best debut novel at the same ceremony. A third debuted on the New York Times best-seller list three weeks ago.
Their names? Ken Bruen, Declan Hughes and Tana French, respectively.
But unless you’re one of their small but growing band of Irish crime fiction fans, there’s a very good chance you won’t have heard of them before.
Meanwhile we get Marian Keyes billboards and Cecilia Ahern bus posters. Displays of Cathy Kelly’s books that take up entire shop windows.
The crime fiction writers? Buried away down the back of the bookstore, jammed in between the soft porn and science fiction. An Irish crime writer hoping for publicity would be best advised to get a gun and a mask and go blag a bank for real.
Strange, isn’t it? Crime fiction and chick lit are equally reader-friendly genres, both primarily concerned with escapist entertainment. The crime writers are at least as good in the writing stakes as their chick lit peers, or else they wouldn’t be valued so highly in America (and not just America: Declan Hughes’s The Wrong Kind of Blood and Brian McGilloway’s Borderlands were both nominated for Best Debut Novels in the UK’s CWA ‘Dagger’ awards last month).
So why the disconnect between Irish crime writers and an Irish audience?
You could argue that an Irish generation reared during the hedonistic years of the Celtic Tiger has no stomach for reading about corrupt politicians, Tiger kidnappings, paedophile priests and gangland killings. You don’t get many murder-rapes in chick lit.
Fair enough, except the true crime genre is one of the fastest-growing niches in Irish publishing today. Books on the corpse-dismembering ‘Scissors Sisters’, the media-friendly murderer Joe O’Reilly, the Criminal Assets Bureau and the Miami Showband massacre are among some of the true crime stories that have appeared on Irish best-seller lists over the last 12 months.
Meanwhile, newspaper headlines are full of innocent bystanders gunned down by hired killers, and the taoiseach takes the stand again and again to explain financial irregularities.
And maybe crime fatigue is the problem. Where the crime writers are busy telling us where it all went wrong, chick lit is still promising it’ll all turn out Mr Right.
One crew is flogging hair-shirts, the other comfort pillows. No contest on the easier sale.
Prophets are never recognised in their own country. Profits generally are. - Declan Burke


This article was first published in the Evening Herald.