Daniel Woodrell: Love What You Do

Daniel Woodrell (right) is probably best known for his novel Winter’s Bone, although really you could pick any of his novels and make a reasonable argument that it is his finest work. Or was his finest work, as we should probably say now, given that Daniel passed late last November – although, as with all the great writers (and Daniel Woodrell was most certainly a great writer), he’ll never truly be gone so long as his novels are still read.
 I was lucky enough to meet with Daniel way back in 2012, when we were interviewed together for the Mountains to Sea Festival in Dun Laoghaire, when I took the opportunity to interview him for the Irish Times. To wit:

Back in September I had the very great pleasure of reading alongside Daniel Woodrell during the Mountains to Sea Festival in Dun Laoghaire. Even more enjoyable was the couple of hours before the event, when we sat down for a chat over some lunch, conducted an interview for the Irish Times, and then sat around some more, talking books and writing and whatnot.
 He’s a good guy, Daniel Woodrell. Understated, funny, with no affectations. The kind of quietly spoken that comes with carrying a big stick – or in his case, a big, big talent. I liked him a lot. And then, last week, after the interview finally appeared in the Irish Times, I received an email from him to say thanks, he liked the piece. A classy touch, and a pleasant surprise, but not really surprising, if you follow my drift.

 Naturally, it was that afternoon that sprang to mind when I first heard of Daniel’s passing. And while I – like many, I’d imagine – immediately resolved to go back and reread some of his novels, what has stuck with me ever since was what he said when I was concluding the interview with the standard question about advice for aspiring authors. Daniel thought for a little, then said:

‘Make sure you love what you do, because that might be all you get out of it.’

 Sage advice if you’re working on a novel, because if you don’t love your story and your characters, you’ll probably end up hating them over the course of a 100,000-word marathon, and that’s a scenario that rarely ends well.
 But that advice also applies to the bigger picture. Like most writers, I don’t earn a huge amount of money from my fiction (and by ‘don’t earn a huge amount’ I mean that most of the advances for my novels over the years just about paid my mortgage for that month). And that’s okay, from my point of view, because I didn’t start out writing fiction with any great plan to make a living from it – back then, if I’m honest, my main ambition was to write books that other writers would like, the idea there being that if other writers liked it, it was probably a decent book.
 It wasn’t until the brutally isolating days of the Covid pandemic, when everyone was shut up at home and baking banana bread and talking about mindfulness, that I belatedly discovered what writing truly meant to me. Writing was and always had been my form of mindfulness, I realised, my way of (partly) self-medicating for mental health. I didn’t just love what I did, I did it because I loved doing it, and because – imperceptibly, day after day after day – the process boosts my self-esteem, gets the synapses fizzing and the serotonin bubbling up nicely.
 ‘Make sure you love what you do, because that might be all you get out of it.’ No arguments here, Daniel, except to say that that ‘all’ contains multitudes. But you knew that too.

Reviews: Irish Times crime fiction column, December 2018

My crime fiction column for the Irish Times this month is an all-Irish affair, and features Kevin McCarthy, Tanya Farrelly, Fiona Gartland, Nessa O’Mahony and Ken Bruen. To wit:

Kevin McCarthy’s first two novels, Irregulars and Peeler, were set against the backdrop of the Irish Civil War, but Wolves of Eden (W.W. Norton) opens in the wake of the American Civil War, with the psychologically scarred Union Army veteran Lieutenant Molloy dispatched to Fort Phil Kearny in the Dakota Territory to ‘put boots on the gallows’ – i.e., investigate the apparent murder of the fort’s sutler and his wife. Molloy being an alcoholic determined to drink himself to death, the investigation is largely conducted by his second-in-command, Sergeant Kohn; woven through Kohn’s attempts to penetrate the code of omertà that pertains at Fort Kearny is a rambling, semi-literate confession written by Michael O’Driscoll, an Irish immigrant who has served with the Union Army during the recent War. A compelling tale of men who were ‘chucked into the roaring flames of history,’ Wolves of Eden is superbly detailed in its depiction of frontier soldiering, with Fort Kearny besieged by Chief Red Cloud and the story playing out against the events which led to the Fetterman Massacre of 1866. Flashing with shards of coal-black humour – Michael’s brother Tom, shot in the face at the battle of Chickamauga, has ‘a face that would make a funeral turn from a main road’ – Wolves of Eden is a brutal, blood-soaked and unsentimental account of the Old West that bears comparison with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

  Tanya Farrelly’s When Your Eyes Close (Killer Reads) is an audacious exercise in genre-blending. Nick Drake is an alcoholic who undergoes hypnotherapy in a desperate bid to curtail his boozing, only to witness himself committing multiple murders in what appears to be a previous life. Shaken to his core, and reluctantly believing himself to be the knife-wielding killer John Davis, Nick sets out to investigate what really happened – only to discover that Caitlin, the daughter he orphaned during his killing spree, is struggling to cope with the mysterious disappearance of her husband, David. Where Farrelly’s crime debut The Girl Behind the Lens came coated in gritty realism, When Your Eyes Close revels in its fantastical premise (even if much of Caitlin’s backstory is rooted in the ongoing homelessness crisis). The plot isn’t entirely seamless as Farrelly juggles her parallel time-lines, but the overall effect is an entertainingly off-beat account of a man determined to bring himself to justice.

  Big Pharma finds itself in the dock In the Court’s Hands (Poolbeg), the debut thriller from Irish Times journalist Fiona Gartland, which opens with Beatrice Barrington, a stenographer at the Dublin Criminal Court, observing a suspicious liaison in the Phoenix Park between Stephen O’Farrell, the accused in a high profile case, and the forewoman of the jury, Rachel Deere. When Rachel is subsequently found dead in her apartment, Beatrice suspects foul play, and enlists the help of ex-Garda detective Gabriel Ingram to help her investigate. There’s more than a hint of the Miss Marple about the prim, fussy and resolutely moral Beatrice Harrington, and In the Court’s Hands offers a neat blend of the courtroom drama and the amateur sleuth sub-genres, and even tosses in what appears to be an homage to Raymond Chandler as Beatrice, nosing around where she shouldn’t, finds herself drugged and incarcerated in a mental hospital. Regular flashbacks to the younger Beatrice’s life in 1980s Dublin leach tension from the main plot, but they are vividly rendered and contribute handsomely to a promising debut.

  Poet Nessa O’Mahony publishes her debut crime novel with The Branchman (Arlen House) which opens in 1925 with Michael Mackey, a detective officer in the newly formed Garda Special Branch, sent to the Garda barracks in Ballinasloe “to root out subversion”. Mackey, a veteran of numerous conflicts, isn’t fooled by the beauty of rural Galway: “It all looked innocent enough, but who knew what old animosities were lurking in those green fields?” There’s enough animosity to deliver a murder, certainly, and Mackey quickly discovers himself investigating the theft of a cache of stolen arms. O’Mahony is particularly strong on the everyday detail of a stranger negotiating a hazardous landscape – the character of Mackey is loosely based on her own grandfather, Michael McCann – and delivers a series of brief, intense chapters which generate a ferocious pace. Most fascinating, perhaps, is O’Mahony’s evocation of the wider political backdrop, that fragile, imperfect peace that took hold in the wake of the War of Independence and the Civil War.

  Jack Taylor returns in Ken Bruen’s In the Galway Silence (Head of Zeus), the 14th novel to feature the Galway-based private eye. Commissioned to investigate the bizarre murder of the anti-social Renaud twins, Jack quickly concludes that ‘It wasn’t a mystery as to them being killed but a mystery as to why it hadn’t happened sooner.’ The investigation, however, serves as springboard into a much wider exploration of the country’s ills, as Jack, self-described as ‘a broken PI’, wanders the mean streets of Galway lamenting the state of ‘the new broken Ireland.’ Post-modern to a fault, In the Galway Silence is littered with references to Jack Taylor’s preferred reading, which here includes the cult crime fiction authors Craig McDonald, Eddie Bunker and Daniel Woodrell, and further features the Galway-based author Scott Harden, whose ‘alleged stint in a South American jail had given him preternaturally totally white hair,’ and whose appearance causes Jack to believe that, ‘I could be looking at me fein (myself).’ Located on the literary spectrum somewhere between Charles Bukowski’s Pulp and the wilder extravagances of James Crumley’s private eye C.W. Sughrue, In the Galway Silence exudes a nihilistic thrill in smashing the crime fiction conventions to smithereens. ~ Declan Burke

  This column first appeared in the Irish Times.

A LIFE Less Ordinary: Kate Atkinson at Dun Laoghaire

I was something of a latecomer to Kate Atkinson’s work, only discovering her with STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG, but that book by itself was enough to persuade me that she’s a writer worth taking very seriously indeed. She’s currently promoting her latest tome, LIFE AFTER LIFE – which has just been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction – and will be appearing in Dun Laoghaire on Sunday, March 24th. To wit:

Kate Atkinson was one of the stars of the 2010 Mountains to Sea Book Festival and we’re delighted to welcome her back to Dun Laoghaire. Already garnering rave advance notices, her new novel, LIFE AFTER LIFE, poses the intriguing question, What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? Here is Kate Atkinson at her most profound and inventive, in a novel that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves.

  Kate Atkinson will be interviewed by Sinead Gleeson, by the way, who was in the chair to interview Daniel Woodrell and yours truly at the Mountains to Sea Festival last year.
  For all the details of Kate Atkinson’s appearance, including how to book tickets, clickety-click here …

The Sirens Are Singing Again

I mentioned back at the start of December that Adrian McKinty’s I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET would be published in early January; and lo! The day hath arrived. Adrian has a number of things to say about that over at his interweb lair, where he also publishes an extensive quote about SIRENS from Daniel Woodrell. I particularly like Woodrell’s description of Northern Ireland as “ … a uniquely beautiful and nasty part of the world I’d be scared to visit if everybody didn’t sound like they might be cousins of my dad on my mom’s side.”
  Anyway, the Irish Independent reviewed SIRENS on Saturday, kicking off thusly:

“Adrian McKinty has done it again. In the second episode of a promised trilogy on the exploits of Sean Duffy, a Catholic policeman in the RUC at the height of the Northern Troubles, he maintains the tension, the sense of period and the quirks of character that made THE COLD COLD GROUND such a compelling read.”

  So there you have it. McKinty’s fans won’t need much persuading to pick up I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET, but if you’re coming to him fresh, brace yourself - you’re in for a proper treat.
  Meanwhile, I’ll be interviewing Adrian about SIRENS when he touches down on the Oul’ Sod on Wednesday. If there’s anything you think I should ask him, be sure to let me know …

The Morning Redness In The West

Paul Lynch is a name you’ll be hearing quite a bit of in 2013, methinks. His debut novel, RED SKY IN MORNING (Quercus) won’t be published until April 25th, but it’s already creating something of a word of mouth buzz. Quoth the blurb elves:

Spring 1832: Donegal, north west Ireland. Coll Coyle wakes to a blood dawn and a day he does not want to face. The young father stands to lose everything on account of the cruel intentions of his landowner’s heedless son. Although reluctant, Coll sets out to confront his trouble. And so begins his fall from the rain-soaked, cloud-swirling Eden, and a pursuit across the wild bog lands of Donegal. Behind him is John Faller - a man who has vowed to hunt Coll to the ends of the earth - in a pursuit that will stretch to an epic voyage across the Atlantic, and to greater tragedy in the new American frontier. RED SKY IN MORNING is a dark tale of oppression bathed in sparkling, unconstrained imagery. A compassionate and sensitive exploration of the merciless side of man and the indifference of nature, it is both a mesmerizing feat of imagination and a landmark piece of fiction.

  Nice. Meanwhile, the early word is very positive indeed. To wit:

‘Classic storytelling, rough and haunted people and the times that made them, powerfully conjured, written in language that demands attention. Lynch is bardic, given to sly and inspired word selections, with his own sprung rhythms and angled, stark musicality.’ - Daniel Woodrell

‘This book makes the literary synapses spark and burn. Forged in his own new and wonderful language, Paul Lynch reaches to the root, branch and bole of things, and unfurls a signal masterpiece.’ - Sebastian Barry

  So there you have it. RED SKY IN MORNING by Paul Lynch - mark it down in your calendars, people …

I Hear The Bandwagon In The Street

Adrian McKinty has been receiving very fine reviews for many years now, but it appears that the Sean Duffy series of novels are moving him onto another level entirely, and not a moment too soon. His forthcoming opus, I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET, is the second in the Duffy series, and bears a couple of very short but very sweet encomiums. To wit:

“It blew my doors off.” - Ian Rankin

“I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET is one hell of a story.” - Daniel Woodrell

  Nice. Herewith be the blurb elves:

Sean Duffy knows there’s no such thing as a perfect crime. But a torso in a suitcase is pretty close. Still, one tiny clue is all it takes, and there it is. A tattoo. So Duffy, fully fit and back at work after the severe trauma of his last case, is ready to follow the trail of blood - however faint - that always, always connects a body to its killer. A legendarily stubborn man, Duffy becomes obsessed with this mystery as a distraction from the ruins of his love life, and to push down the seed of self-doubt that he seems to have traded for his youthful arrogance. So from country lanes to city streets, Duffy works every angle. And wherever he goes, he smells a rat ...

  So there you have it. SIRENS is released on January 10th, which means you have plenty of time to pick up the first Sean Duffy novel, THE COLD COLD GROUND, before it arrives. For what it’s worth (two cents, actually), here’s my two cents on said tome.

Origins: Reed Farrel Coleman On GUN CHURCH

Once in a while here at Crime Always Pays, I like to hand the reins over to an actual writer who knows what she or he is talking about. ‘Origins’ is a (very) occasional series in which an author talks about the inspiration - character, plot, setting, whatever - for their latest novel, in this case the venerable Reed Farrel Coleman, on GUN CHURCH. To wit:

WONDER BOYS Meets FIGHT CLUB, With Guns
By Reed Farrel Coleman

“I’m an adjunct professor of English at Hofstra University and I teach writing classes for Mystery Writers of America University—a kind of travelling roadshow MWA offers as a great member benefit. In any case, one of the things I inevitably discuss with students is the elevator pitch or, to put it another way, a very brief description of what your book is about. This is not a description of what happens in the book. It’s not a plot summary. It’s one line that conveys the gist of the novel. Writers, even seasoned and experienced ones, often struggle with this concept. The odd thing about GUN CHURCH is that not only did its entire plot pop into my head when I had the inspiration to write it, but the elevator pitch appeared immediately as well: WONDER BOYS meets FIGHT CLUB, with guns.
  “First, a brief summary, so you can get some idea of where I’m coming from. Kip Weiler is a washed up ’80s literary wunderkind fallen on hard times. Twenty years past his last novel, Kip’s foibles have landed him in the rural mining town of Brixton. He teaches creative writing at the local community college. One day, Kip saves his class from potential violence. For this he gets his second fifteen minutes of fame and, more importantly, the urge to write again. Little does Kip know that the book he is working on may be the blueprint of his own demise. Kip gets deeply involved with two of his students and a cult-like group that is obsessed with the intrinsic nature of handguns. The world gets very weird when art begins to imitate life imitating art.
  “So, back to how this all came about. Six years ago I was at a mystery conference, sitting in the audience as my close friend and fellow author, Jim Born, gave a weapons and self-defence demonstration. During the Q&A part of the demonstration, someone in the audience asked a question about how far shotgun pellets spread and at what rate. Jim said something like, “You’d have to be a real gun expert to answer that one.” And bang! (no pun intended), the plot of GUN CHURCH and the elevator pitch popped into my head. I’ll never know why, exactly. It just did.
  “Unfortunately, it took me six years and about twenty drafts to get it right. Strange thing is, I can usually write a series novel in 4 to 6 months, not years. But I didn’t have the chops to pull off the novel as originally conceived. There are many moving parts, lots of characters, a book within a book, tons of Irish dialect, third and first person narration … Talk about giving yourself a challenge, but it was absolutely worth it. Much like writing TOWER, the stand-alone I did with Ken Bruen, GUN CHURCH proved to be a means through which I became a far better and skilful writer. The chops I didn’t have when I began the project, I developed because of the project.” - Reed Farrel Coleman

  For a free sample of GUN CHURCH at Audible.com, along with a couple of very nice big-ups from Daniel Woodrell and Don Winslow, clickety-click here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Donna Moore

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?
Tough choice. Does it really have to be one? Probably THE HOT ROCK by Donald Westlake. He was the master of the caper novel and I re-read that book every year. It’s a hoot. Alternatively, anything by Daniel Woodrell. He’s a genius.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Winnie The Pooh.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t feel guilty about ANY reading I do. I am frequently to be found in public toilets reading the graffiti. Wait, did that sound strange? Oh, too late. My guilty pleasure would be rubbish TV if I’m not feeling well. If I’m off work for more than three days I go on a Crap In The Attic spree and become an expert on the value of Victorian cake forks.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Loads, but one of the best was when world’s best agent Allan Guthrie called me and said “Donna, I know this is hard to believe, but someone wants to publish OLD DOGS ... Why are you crying?”

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Anything by Ken Bruen. Don’t make me choose.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Well, it seems that everything Ken Bruen ever wrote is being filmed (did you know he has a new film coming out in 2012? It’s called Shopping List and stars Baked Beans and Jameson), and I’m well chuffed about that. I’d really like to see THE BIG O being made into a film and I don’t care what you say about that.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst - not having enough time to do it. Best - when someone tells me they have enjoyed something I’ve written. Makes me want to hug complete strangers. I don’t think I’ll ever get over that feeling. Unluckily for complete strangers.

The pitch for your next book is …?
I’m rubbish at pitches. I’m currently working on two books. One is further along than the other and is a caper about an elderly man who cons a conman. See, I told you I was rubbish at pitches.

Who are you reading right now?
Mark Timlin’s GUNS OF BRIXTON - a crime novel set in South London, with its roots in events in the 1960s. Good stuff.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I would say “God, I don’t know how many times I have to tell you, but you’ve got to stop coming up with these ridiculous either/or questions. For lo, this is Heaven. I can read AND write. Now, toddle off and smite a politician or something.”

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
I think I’ll go for a quote from my mum. “My daughter is weird, weird, weird.”

Donna Moore’s OLD DOGS is available now.