“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Kevin Lewis

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?
THE LADY IN THE LAKE by Raymond Chandler and TIGER IN THE SMOKE by Margery Allingham.
What fictional character would you most like to have been?
It’s not crime but definitely Indiana Jones.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Viz.
Most satisfying writing moment?
Finishing my first crime novel, KAITLYN.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
THE KILLING OF THE TINKERS by Ken Bruen.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE KILLING OF THE TINKERS.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst – the loneliness. Best – Seeing my work in book form ready for the readers.
The pitch for your next book is …?
I wanted to keep writing about what I know best – the sprawling and nasty urban estates, the crime and brutality of the gangs and the harsher realities of London life. My new novel, FALLEN ANGEL is the first novel in a new series featuring DI Stacey Collins – a single mum in her 30s, and a gritty hard-nosed detective in the Metropolitan Police.
Who are you reading right now?
A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway.
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write, because then I can read what I’ve written.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Fast. Paced. Thrillers.

Kevin Lewis’ FALLEN ANGEL is published by Penguin Books

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: CONFESSIONS OF A FALLEN ANGEL by Ronan O’Brien

Skating on the Surface of Celtic Tiger Ireland

Playing with his friends as a kid, Charlie nearly dies and from the moment of this early brush with mortality he is condemned, not to see dead people, but to dream their deaths. And so, with this unwanted capacity for premonition unifying his story and his life, Charlie’s tale unfolds.
  As can be imagined, Ronan O’Brien – a solicitor who specialises in criminal law – in this, his first novel, is not overly concerned with rendering a gritty Irish realism, rather he is content to flit between the comic and the serious, the extraordinary and the mundane, flirting with the fantastic along the way.
  Appropriately enough in the circumstances, there are three or four novels haunting this one particular novel: at times it is a kind of supernatural thriller, then a love story, with an ultra violent “gangster” element also thrown in for good measure.
  In keeping with the constantly shifting register, the novel moves at a fairly rapid pace. Apart from in the love story which is positioned mid-way through, in which Charlie allows himself the luxury of dwelling on his most positive relationship with the love of his life, Aisling, the novel’s plot offers numerous twists and turns.
  Charlie’s dilemma is one of trying to cheat destiny in his efforts to save those who die in his dreams. But, as is the way with fate (as the Greek tragedians knew), the outcome is always maddeningly fixed. Everything else in this world, however, is manifestly chaotic and unanticipated. It’s an odd juxtaposition that O’Brien presents, and he just about pulls it off.
  O’Brien’s achievement – and it is an achievement – is to keep all these constituent parts from becoming a cumbersome and unpalatable pudding. Charlie’s penchant for on-the-button one-liners, his wry perspective on the collection of oddball characters that people the fictional Northside Dublin village of Rathgorman keeps the reader’s attention and interest focused. The adult voice is the more convincing and consistent: the younger self as filtered through the grown-up Charlie appears awkward in comparison.
  In many ways, his hero is reminiscent of Patrick McCabe’s masterful creation Francie Brady, and O’Brien even nods his acknowledgement to this precursor by having Charlie read THE BUTCHER BOY. In a sense though, this book is “Butcher Boy-lite”, mainly owing to the deliberate way CONFESSIONS OF A FALLEN ANGEL avoids concentrating on any one aspect or element of the plot or character. The singularly absurdist vision of McCabe’s macabre fiction is absent here and so too is the dynamic edge that the truly unexpected provides.
  Despite the moments of heightened emotion surrounding the death of Aisling, the whirlwind of events surrounding Charlie’s life forces the reader to remain steadfastly engaged with the surface of this character instead of plumbing his depths. It is the way of the modern world, and the presence of a criminal element in the novel would seem to prove it.
  As with other narratives in which Irish gangland appears – be it journalism, film, the novel – their world of violence and blunt action becomes a means for the characters, and the audience, to get in touch with feeling, to be momentarily real. So deadening can modern life be that only extreme situations, and extreme violence particularly, can produce a reaction. It has become the cliché of modernity: certainly of Irish modernity.
  The reader, of course, should not take any of this too seriously. This novel is not a moral treatise on the vicissitudes of contemporary Irish life, nor is it meant to be. It is, nevertheless, a reflection of our relentless need for movement and distraction, there is no time here for stillness or quiet rumination: everything in this world is in flux.
  Is CONFESSIONS OF A FALLEN ANGEL a commentary on Celtic Tiger Ireland? Unintentionally perhaps. Is it a diverting read? Most definitely. – Derek Hand

Derek Hand is a lecturer in the English department in St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra. He is presently writing A HISTORY OF THE IRISH NOVEL for the Cambridge University Press.

This review first appeared in the Irish Times

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 2,063: Ronan O’Brien

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
I have to say two books here but they’re by the same author: CARLITO’S WAY and AFTER HOURS, both of which I’m completely mad about. Believe it or not, they’re written by a Supreme Court judge named Edwin Torres who as far as I know, still practices as a judge in New York City. The gangster narrator in his books is so credible and vibrant, he just leaps off the page.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Biographies or anything that is not fiction. I feel that a writer has to read a lot of fiction in order to stir the fires of his own imagination. Writing without ever reading other people’s work is like flying a plane that has run out of fuel: you’ll probably be okay for a while but there’s a mountain looming and you need something in the tank in order to soar above it.
Most satisfying writing moment?
When I finally nailed the perfect ending for CONFESSIONS OF A FALLEN ANGEL on my sixth attempt, after some dark days when I had serious anguish about whether a satisfying ending was even possible.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
Something by John Connolly, possibly THE UNQUIET. My favourite one of his books is THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS, although I wouldn’t call that a crime novel.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I haven’t read all that many Irish crime novels, to be honest. Karen Gillece’s book, LONGSHORE DRIFT, is about an abducted child, so if that qualifies as a crime novel, then I’ll nominate that one. I thought it was great.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing as far as I’m concerned is writing to finish a book in time for a tight deadline because then you don’t have time to explore tangents that might lead to something great, or might lead to nothing. But when time is of the essence, then you don’t have the luxury of getting it wrong a couple of times before finally getting it right. And if you’re a slow writer like I am, it means you have to get the basic plot pretty much spot on at the first attempt. But then I stop and listen to myself, and think that I really don’t have much to moan about. There is nothing hard about being a writer compared to say, someone who works in a coalmine, or someone who unblocks sewers for a living. The best thing about being a writer is hearing complete strangers say that my book moved them to tears.
The pitch for your next novel is …?
It’s about three very different people whose lives become intertwined: a magician, an artist and a solicitor and it will make you laugh and make you cry. Needless to say, the lawyer is the evil one.
Who are you reading right now?
Bret Easton Ellis. I just finished LUNAR PARK which was weird and wonderful, and I’ll probably read AMERICAN PSYCHO next.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Unmissable, unputdownable, unforgettable.

CONFESSIONS OF A FALLEN ANGEL is Ronan O’Brien’s debut novel.

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books

“Dying was the easy bit. It was during my life after death that things started to go wrong. A conspiracy of coincidences perhaps or else maybe some higher power was having a laugh at my expense. But when I returned from the other side I brought something fearful back with me …”

So beginneth Ronan O’Brien’s CONFESSIONS OF A FALLEN ANGEL, which sounds to us like an intriguing premise and vaguely reminiscent of the crime / supernatural crossover work of one John Connolly. Happily, the ever-lovely folk at Hodder Headline Ireland are offering three copies of said opus free, gratis and for nothing so that you don’t have to depend on our shoddy opinions, and all you have to do to get your grubby mitts on one is answer the following question:

If an angel falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear its confession, does it:
(a) evaporate in a puff of celestial smoke;
(b) make like a tree and hope there’s a logger nearby;
(c) schlep out of the forest all the way to Ronan O’Brien’s house and dictate its memoirs to his secretary?

Answers to dbrodb(at)gmail.com before noon on Wednesday January 23, putting ‘Milton me arse’ in the subject line. Et bon chance, mes amis ...

Bring Guns, Lawyers And Debut Novels

You know things have reached something of a tipping-point when the lawyers get involved. Ronan O’Brien, a solicitor specialising in criminal law for the Irish Director of Public Prosecutions, publishes his debut novel, CONFESSIONS OF A FALLEN ANGEL, on January 10, with the blurb elves crunching his delicious prose thusly:

Following a near-death experience as a child, ‘the narrator’ becomes cursed with the ability to foresee the deaths of people closest to him. These visions come to him in his dreams and, following a disastrous attempt to save a childhood friend from drowning, a set of terrifying events begins to unfold. As a young man, he finds redemption in the arms of Ashling, his beautiful wife. But then the visions return ... Set in the fictional suburb of Rathgorman, CONFESSIONS OF A FALLEN ANGEL is a truly remarkable debut novel that will grip you from the first line and surprise you to the last.

The most surprising aspect for us is that a lawyer is capable of writing anything other than his signature across the bottom of his expense forms, but – knee-jerk cynicism aside – we can testify that the opening to CONFESSIONS … is indeed an intriguing one. We’ll bring you a review as soon as is humanly, or indeed elfishly, possible, m’luds.