Souls For Sale

Get ’em while they’re hot, they’re luvverly, etc. Stuart Neville will be in Dublin on Tuesday, October 25th, to launch his latest tome, STOLEN SOULS, and a fine night it should be, too. Few writers of recent times have had such a vertical ascent to stardom - THE TWELVE, Stuart’s debut, as all Three Regular Readers will be aware, was a runaway bestseller, and nabbed the LA Times’ gong for Best Crime / Mystery Novel for that year. He followed that up with COLLUSION, which featured DI Jack Lennon, and Lennon returns for STOLEN SOULS, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

Galya Petrova travels to Ireland on a promise that she will work for a nice Russian family, teaching their children English. Instead, she is dragged into the world of modern slavery, sold to a Belfast brothel, and held there against her will. She escapes at a terrible cost—the slaying of one of her captors—and takes refuge with a man who offers his help. As the traffickers she fled scour the city for her, seeking revenge for their fallen comrade, Galya faces an even greater danger: her saviour is not what he seems. She is not the first trafficked girl to have crossed his threshold, and she must fight to avoid their fate. Detective Inspector Jack Lennon wants a quiet Christmas with his daughter, but when an apparent turf war between rival gangs leaves bodies across the city, he knows he won't get it. As he digs deeper into the case, he realizes an escaped prostitute is the cause of the violence, and soon he is locked in a deadly race with two very different killers.

  Nice. The launch of STOLEN SOULS takes place on Tuesday, October 25th at The Gutter Bookshop, Temple Bar, with festivities kicking off at 6.30pm, and those of you impressed by such things will be duly impressed to learn that the novel carries an encomium from one James Ellroy. And if it’s good enough for James Ellroy, etc. I’ll see you there - but do be careful, and keep a tight grip on your souls. The Gutter Bookshop will take no responsibility for eternal damnation, etc.

He Steals Souls

I interviewed Stuart Neville a couple of weeks back for an Irish Times interview, during which Stuart had this to say about his forthcoming novel, STOLEN SOULS, his third offering after THE TWELVE and COLLUSION:

“STOLEN SOULS is a much more streamlined thriller. Because the first couple of books, whether it was intentional or not, both have this very strong political slant, I really wanted to make a very definite step away from that. And I wanted too to give a nod to some of the thrillers I really enjoyed reading when I was younger. I was a big fan of those thrillers that were maybe 200 pages long and were just punch-punch-punch, that go full tilt from first to last page, no flab. So STOLEN SOULS really does hit the ground running, and doesn’t let up until the last page. There are far fewer organisations with three-letter acronyms, for starters (laughs). It can be hard to keep track of that kind of thing. It’s much more of a ticking-clock kind of thriller, and I hope that it’ll work for readers.”

  Intriguing stuff, with Stuart citing ’70s-set novels such as William Goldman’s MARATHON MAN as one inspiration. For the full interview, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, Stuart has contributed a short story, ‘The Craftsman’, to DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS. As I said to him at the time, if ‘The Craftsman’ is indicative of his new direction, we’re in for a defter, more subtle novel than the propulsive THE TWELVE and COLLUSION. For an audio version of ‘The Craftsman’, click here for the BBC iPlayer …
  STOLEN SOULS, by the way, is published in October by Soho Crime.

The Neville Will Find Work For Idle Hands To Do

I interviewed Stuart Neville (right) last week, and a very pleasant experience it was too, not least because Stuart is in a very good place these days. Recently married, he’s on the shortlist for tonight’s LA Times’ Mystery / Thriller Book Awards with COLLUSION, a gong he scooped last year for his debut novel, THE TWELVE, aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST. Could he possibly win two years running? It’s a big ask, as they say, particularly given the quality of the opposition: our own Tana French, for FAITHFUL PLACE; Kelli Stanley for CITY OF DRAGONS; Laura Lippman for I’D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE; and Tom Franklin for CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER, which is the best novel I’ve read this year to date (although my current read, IRON HOUSE by John Hart, is running it close).
  Meanwhile, Stuart is also gearing up to the release of his third novel, STOLEN SOULS, which he describes as ‘a much more streamlined, ticking-clock kind of thriller’, influenced by classic ’70s thrillers such as William Goldman’s MARATHON MAN, and the early novels of Thomas Harris. Sounds tasty. For more on STOLEN SOULS, clickety-click here …
  Anyway, I asked Stuart in passing if he’d like to nominate an Irish crime title to recommend to readers, to which he responded thusly:

“The new Gene Kerrigan book, THE RAGE, is absolutely terrific. It captures that sense of Ireland on the down-slope of the rollercoaster, he’s done that very, very well. But also, his journalistic background makes it seem like there’s almost a documentary feel to it. You feel like you could be reading an actual description of a crime in it, as opposed to a fictional crime. It has a real core of authenticity to it. It’s very impressive. I’d hope that the Irish Book Awards win last year, and the CWA nomination, will help raise his profile. He’s a terrific writer.”

  That makes Stuart’s nod the third very positive recommendation for THE RAGE I’ve heard in the last couple of weeks. It isn’t released until June 2nd, but already it seems set to catapult Gene Kerrigan into the stratosphere. Here’s hoping.
  What I love most about Gene Kerrigan’s books, I think, is the ring of authenticity Stuart refers to, which is very probably derived from his years spent as a court reporter. Not for Kerrigan the demonising of criminals, little or otherwise. I never tire of repeating the line Kerrigan used during a conversation on crime writing a few years ago, when he suggested that the typical criminal isn’t all that different to law-abiding folk. “This guy will babysit your kids on a Friday night,” he said, “then go to work on Saturday morning with a gun in his pocket.”
  I always get an image of some uncle-type babysitter driven demented by an unruly brood who refuse to go to bed on time, whose shoulders straighten the next morning as he leaves the house, checking the safety on his Glock before he slouches off, some rough beast, headed for the mean streets to be born again …

UPDATE: Tom Franklin’s CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER won the LA Times’ Book Awards Best Mystery / Thriller last night, and while I’m disappointed on behalf of our own Stuart Neville and Tana French, there’s no disputing the fact that Franklin’s is a wonderful novel. Here’s the review I wrote back in February as part of that month’s Irish Times column:

Set in rural Mississippi, Tom Franklin’s CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER (Macmillan, £11.99, pb) opens with the shooting of small town mechanic Larry Ott, a semi-recluse who has long been suspected of the abduction and murder of a local girl some decades before. Local deputy Silas Jones is reluctant to lead the investigation into the shooting, as he and Larry were childhood friends before an ugly racial incident drove them apart, but the disappearance of another young girl overrules Silas’s personal distaste for the case. Ostensibly a police procedural, Franklin’s third novel deploys the genre’s narrative conventions as a framework for a much deeper exploration of the psychology of small-town America and its recent racist past. Both Larry and Silas are superbly drawn and fully fleshed characters, their personalities and conflict chthonic to rural Mississippi but luminously relevant, in Franklin’s hands, to any locale on the planet. Factor in a mesmerising evocation of rural Mississippi, language of sinuous and shimmering elegance, and a finely tuned ear for the nuances of dialogue, and you have a novel that is an early contender for one of the great novels of the year. - Declan Burke

It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Soul

It won’t be published until October, but already Stuart Neville’s STOLEN SOULS is shaping up to be one of the novels to watch out for in 2011. The winner of the LA Times’ Mystery / Thriller award in 2009 with his debut THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST, and in the running for the same gong this year for COLLUSION, Neville’s third novel comes freighted with expectation. Mind you, the blurb elves suggest that STOLEN SOULS will deliver. To wit:

Detective Inspector Jack Lennon of the Belfast Police has watched the developing cooperation between Northern Ireland’s Loyalist gangs and immigrant Lithuanian criminals with unease. The Lithuanians traffic women from Eastern Europe and Asia for the Loyalists’ brothels, and they’re all making big money in spite of the recession that has stopped Northern Ireland’s peace boom in its tracks. Lennon has a more intimate knowledge of the city’s brothels than he’ll ever admit, but the surge in trafficked girls makes him question his lifestyle, especially considering he has his daughter, Ellen, to care for now.
  When a Lithuanian trafficker turns up dead on Christmas Eve with a shard of glass embedded in his throat, Lennon’s plans to spend the holiday with Ellen are put in jeopardy. The dead man was the younger brother of a ruthless Lithuanian crime boss, Arturas Strazdas, and the young Ukrainian woman who killed him has escaped her captors. Now Strazdas holds the Loyalists responsible and won’t let up until everyone involved has paid. A bloody gang war erupts across the city.
  Meanwhile, somewhere in Belfast, Galya, the Ukrainian girl, is running for her life, alone and scared, clinging to the darkest corners as the frozen streets empty for the holiday. Galya’s captors told her how the police deal with illegal immigrants, that she is a criminal in a foreign land, and the law will not help her. And now she is also a murderer. She cannot be discovered by anyone, not the cops, not the gang who held her prisoner. There is only one person she can go to: a man she met on her first day as a prostitute, a friend who gave her a crucifix and an address to run to if she ever got away. He’d saved four prostitutes before her, he’s told her, and she can be his fifth. But when Galya arrives at the address, she finds something more evil than she had ever imagined.

  Sounds like a cracker. Mind you, I was putting the final proofs for DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS to bed this week, and while proofing Neville’s contribution, a short story entitled ‘The Craftsman’, it struck me that, as propulsive as he is as a thriller writer, it’s in the quieter moments, the emotional connections, that Neville truly excels. I can’t say much more than that or I’ll spoil the story; suffice to say that beneath the bearded, hard-boiled exterior Neville presents to the world, there lurks the soul of a poet. And, if the subtleties that underpin ‘The Craftsman’ is a measure of how Neville has developed as a writer since the publication of COLLUSION, then STOLEN SOULS promises to outstrip his previous novels by some distance. It’s a tantalising prospect.

I Wish I Was Back Home In Derry

Gerard Brennan (right), the ever affable host of Crime Scene Norn Iron, drops a line to see if I’ll plug Derry’s ‘Night of Crime’, which takes place at Derry Central Library tomorrow evening, September 24th. To wit:

Thanks to the City’s first ever Culture Night, Libraries NI, in partnership with Derry City Council, is inviting fans of crime thrillers along to Derry Central Library’s ‘Night of Crime’ event.
  Over half a million people are expected to explore and engage with culture on the evening of 24th September and at this Derry Central Library event, fans of crime thrillers will be able to enjoy readings by two renowned local authors of crime fiction, Eoin McNamee and Stuart Neville, who read from their work from 8pm to 9.30pm. This will be followed by an open discussion, led by Gerard Brennan of the blog Crime Scene NI, about the emerging crime writing scene in Northern Ireland.
  Trisha Ward, Business Manager with Libraries NI explains:
  “Culture Night is a night of entertainment, discovery and adventure and Derry Central Library is proud to be involved. Arts and cultural organisation, including libraries, will open their doors with hundreds of free events, tours, talks and performances for you, your family and friends to enjoy – and Libraries NI is delighted to be working with Derry City council to make this ‘A Night of Crime’ event, featuring respected crime thriller novelists and bloggers, a success.”
  Eoin McNamee, is originally from Kilkeel, County Down and saw his first book, the novella THE LAST OF DEEDS, shortlisted for the Irish Times Literature Prize. In his new novel, ORCHID BLUE, due out in November, he returns to the territory of his acclaimed Booker longlisted THE BLUE TANGO. The evening will include readings from this book as well as from the crime fiction titles McNamee has published under the name John Creed.
  Stuart Neville burst onto the crime writing scene in 2009 with his Belfast set novel THE TWELVE. The sequel to that award- winning debut, COLLUSION, has just been published. Both books confront in an unsparing manner post-ceasefire Northern Ireland.
  Gerard Brennan, of the Crime Scene NI blog, will also be in the library to chair the event and to stimulate discussion. He has edited REQUIEMS FOR THE DEPARTED, published earlier this year, an anthology of short stories inspired by tales from Irish mythology. His work is due to appear in the MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST BRITISH CRIME 2010.

  For all the details, clickety-click here …
  I’ve said it here before, and no doubt I’ll be saying it again, but ORCHID BLUE and COLLUSION are two excellent novels from writers who have important things to say about Northern Ireland, past and present. Should be a cracking night …

The Collusionist

That cradle and lair of all things Irish crime fiction, Belfast’s No Alibis, hosts the official launch of Stuart Neville’s COLLUSION tomorrow, July 30th, with the details running thusly:

No Alibis Bookstore is pleased to invite you to the launch party for Stuart Neville’s second novel, COLLUSION, on Friday 30th July at 6:30PM.
  Stuart Neville has been a musician, a composer, a teacher, a salesman, a film extra, a baker and a hand double for a well known Irish comedian, but is currently a partner in a successful multimedia design business in the wilds of Northern Ireland. COLLUSION is his second novel, the follow-up to the hugely successful and award winning THE TWELVE.

  In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST) came complete with a blurb from none other than James Ellroy (“THE TWELVE will knock you sideways. This guy can write.”) and scooped the LA Times’ Mystery / Thriller of the Year a couple of months back. Not bad for a debut, but THE TWELVE has also been nominated for a Best First Novel gong in each of the Anthony, Barry and Macavity awards, to be announced at this year’s Bouchercon.
  I mentioned a couple of weeks back that COLLUSION is a finer novel than THE TWELVE, not least because it’s rather more cynical than its predecessor about joining the dots between ‘the Troubles’ and post-conflict Northern Ireland. Here’s another snippet:

Did anyone live here now? He searched for signs of someone, anyone, making a life on this street. Not a soul. Less than a mile away, millions were being pumped into brownfield sites, building apartments, shopping centres, technology parks. Just across the river, property was changing hands for prices never imagined just a few years before. One-bedroom flats sold for a quarter of a million, snapped up by investors looking to make a killing out of Belfast’s peace boom, desperate to get rich before the bubble burst, as it surely would. And here, not ten minutes away, stood two rows of empty houses with generations of memories rotting away along with the mortar and woodwork, all because small-minded thugs couldn’t see beyond the world of Them and Us.

  In my humble opinion, COLLUSION is a very fine novel indeed. A good old-fashioned page-turner of a thriller, it should be required reading for those Ivory Tower types who bemoan the paucity of novels addressing social and political flux of contemporary Ireland, and the lack of post-ceasefire literature concerning itself with Northern Ireland.

Ohmigod They’ve Shot Kenny, Etc.

Des Kenny has long been one of Ireland’s most respected booksellers, and is still regarded as such, even if the iconic Kenny’s Bookshop in Galway is now largely a web-based business. The video below has Des Kenny waxing lyrical about Ken Bruen’s latest, THE DEVIL - Ken Bruen, of course, being only slightly less famous than the bay itself when it comes to Galway landmarks. I don’t know who shot the vid, so apologies for leaving out the credits … Roll it there, Collette:

  Incidentally, long ago, when I was still young and dynamic, and Ken Bruen was kind enough to launch my debut EIGHTBALL BOOGIE in Galway, Des brought me into Kenny’s Bookshop, gave me a guided tour and had me sign a number of copies. Thrilling enough for the callow scribe I was then, but Des capped that by saying, “I’ve only one question. How the hell are you going to top EIGHTBALL BOOGIE?”
  Erm, Des? The good news is that I haven’t, so you’re not missing much.
  Meanwhile, and for a different kind of viewing experience entirely, Declan Hughes and Arlene Hunt (right) appeared on TV3’s Ireland AM last week.They were there, ostensibly, to chat about the programme’s book of the week, Bateman’s THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSELL. As you’ll see if you clickety-click the link, poor old Bateman hardly got a mention, as the conversation veered off almost immediately into exploring the whys and wherefores of the explosion in Irish crime fiction. Still, it’s a good chat, and anyway yon Bateman is rich as Croesus, and doesn’t need any unnecessary plugs from mere mortals.
  Rounding off this less-than-comprehensive round-up of crime fic doings in Ireland this week is an interview with Stuart Neville over at that bastion of all things Irish and manly, Joe.ie. For those of you still unaware of the fact that Neville’s COLLUSION, which is the follow-up to THE TWELVE but not strictly a sequel, will be appearing on a shelf near you next month, it’s a nice little refresher as to how the bould Stuart’s debut took on all comers last year and ended up as the LA Times’ Mystery / Thriller of the Year.
  I’m about halfway through COLLUSION right now, and it’s terrific stuff. All the pace and punch of THE TWELVE, but with a snarkier edge, particularly when it comes to detailing the more squalid aspects of The Troubles. To wit:

‘Everybody knows it all, but no one says anything. Look, collusion worked all ways, all directions. Between the Brits and the Loyalists, between the Irish government and the Republicans, between the Republicans and the Brits, between the Loyalists and the Republicans.’ Toner ran out of breath and his face reddened. He pulled hard on his cigarette and coughed. ‘All ways, all directions. We’ll never know how far it went. All the small things, all the big things. Loyalists supplying Republicans with fake DVDs and Ecstasy tablets. Republicans wholesaling laundered diesel and bootleg vodka to Loyalists. Feeding off the hate, letting on they’re fighting for their fucking causes when all the time they’re making each other rich. And the killings. How many of our own did we set up for the Loyalists to take out? How many of their own did the Loyalists set up for us? How many times did I get a taxi to some club or other on the Shankhill with a name in an envelope, and two days later, some poor cunt from the Falls gets his head took off?’

  Stirring stuff. Let’s hope no Loyalist / Republican sympathisers go rushing over to Amazon to give COLLUSION a negative review on the basis of that little lot, eh?

Banana-Shaped Free-Kicks, Stuart Neville And Me

If you’ve read Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST), and you’re a football fan, and particularly a fan of Brazil circa 1970, you’ll understand why, in my many private conversations with myself, I tend to refer to Stuart as ‘Nevellino’. All of which is a rather circuitous - indeed, a veritable banana-shaped free-kick - way of letting you know that Stuart has uploaded Chapter One of THE TWELVE’S sequel-of-sorts, COLLUSION, over at his interweb portal. To wit:

CHAPTER ONE

“We’re being followed,” Eugene McSorley said. The Ford Focus crested the rise, weightless for a moment, and thudded hard back onto the tarmac. Its eight-year-old suspension did little to cushion the impact. McSorley kept his eyes on the rear-view mirror, the silver Skoda Octavia lost behind the hill he’d just sped over. It had been tailing them along the narrow country road since they crossed the border into the North.
  Comiskey twisted in the passenger seat. “I don’t see anyone,” he said. “No, wait. Fuck. Is that the peelers?”
  “Aye,” McSorley said. The Skoda reappeared in his mirror, its windows tinted dark green. He couldn’t make out the occupants, but they were cops all right. The tarmac darkened under the growing drizzle, the sky a blank, heavy sheet of grey above the green fields.
  “Jesus,” Hughes moaned from the back seat. “Are we going to get pulled?”
  “Looks like it,” Comiskey said. “Fuck.”
  Hedgerows streaked past the Focus. McSorley checked his speed, staying just below sixty. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’ve nothing on us. Not unless you boys have any blow in your pockets.”
  “Shit,” Hughes said.
  “What?”
  “I’ve an eighth on me.”
  McSorley shot a look back over his shoulder. “Arsehole. Chuck it.”
  McSorley hit the switch to roll down the rear window and pulled close to the hedgerow so the cops wouldn’t see. He watched his side mirror as Hughes’s hand flicked a small brown cube into the greenery. “Arsehole,” he repeated.
  Comiskey peered between the seats. “They’re not getting any closer,” he said.   “Maybe they won’t pull us.”
  McSorley said nothing. He raised the rear window again. The car rounded a bend onto a long straight, the road falling away in a shallow descent before rising to meet the skyline half a mile ahead. He flicked the wipers on. They left wet smears across the windscreen, barely shifting the water. He’d meant to replace them a year ago. McSorley cursed and squinted through the raindrops.
  A white van sat idling at a side road. It had all the time in the world to ease out and be on its way. It didn’t. Instead it inched forward to the junction, the driver holding it on the clutch. McSorley wet his lips. He felt the accelerator beneath the sole of his shoe. The Focus had a decent engine, but the suspension was shot. Once the road started to twist, he wouldn’t have a chance. He eased off the pedal. The van drew closer. Two men in the cabin, watching …

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

The North Will Rise Again

Yon Norn Iron blokes have been busy lately. First up is Stuart Neville (right), who hasn’t been resting on the laurels garnered by his debut, THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST). Quoth the Scotland Herald:

Neville’s next novel, COLLUSION, is in part a sequel to THE TWELVE. It follows one of the minor characters from his debut, a policeman investigating his missing wife and child, but the novelist says the similarities between the new book and its predecessor end there. “The Twelve is about frustration, about knowing that people will never be held to account for what they did. COLLUSION will not touch on those issues. It has nothing to do with party politics or Stormont.”
  Decades of fatuous Hollywood IRA flicks may have given audiences Troubles fatigue, but there is now an appetite for understanding Northern Ireland. “I think the next 10 years are going to be a very interesting time,” Neville says. “You have to remember that great fiction never emerges until a conflict is over. Look at the Second World War: while that was going on, the only things coming out were propaganda films, but in the years after, it inspired so much. Part of the reason is that, after the fact, you don’t need to be so politically sensitive.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here. Meanwhile, COLLUSION is due in August, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

Former paramilitary killer Gerry Fegan wanders New York City, hiding from a past he escaped at a terrible cost. But he made a fatal mistake: he spared the life of Bull O’Kane, a ruthless man who will stop at nothing to get his revenge. Too many witnesses survived a bloody battle at his border farm, and now he wants them silenced, whether man, woman or child. O’Kane calls the Traveller, an assassin without pity or remorse, a killer of the purest kind. Back in Belfast, Detective Inspector Jack Lennon, father of one the witnesses, is caught up in a web of official secrets and lies as he tries to uncover the whereabouts of his daughter. The closer he gets to the truth about the events on O’Kane’s border farm, the more his superiors instruct him to back off. When Fegan realises he can’t shake off the trail of violence that has followed him across the world, he has no choice but to return to Belfast and confront his past. The Traveller awaits Fegan’s return, ready for the fight of his life. A fast-paced thriller about duty and revenge, COLLUSION is a blistering sequel to THE TWELVE, one of the most highly acclaimed debuts of recent years.

  Elsewhere, Garbhan Downey has just published THE AMERICAN ENVOY, even though it seems no more than minutes since he brought you THE WAR OF THE BLUE ROSES. Quoth the blurb elves:

Money ... Power ... Drugs ... Women. Just another day at the office ... Boston journalist Dave Schumann is in line for a major posting from the US Secretary of State. But instead, his big smart mouth gets him exited to Derry, the rainiest city in Ireland. There, the new envoy is forced to contend with psychotic drug smugglers, a leftie shock-jock who wants to burn him live on air and a renegade security team who are monitoring his every move. Schumann’s letters to his father and friends reveal his increasingly precarious – and hilarious – struggle to cope with the most thankless job on earth. And that’s before he discovers there’s a spy in the camp who has dark plans for the Presidential visit.

  Finally, and even though his novels are set in the South of Ireland, Brian McGilloway was born in Derry, which makes him a Nordie whether he likes it or not. The video below has Brian wibbling on about the latest in the Inspector Devlin series, THE RISING, which hits a shelf near you next month. Roll it there, Collette ...