Review: THE POLKA DOT GIRL by Darragh McManus

Hera City, the setting for Darragh McManus’s The Polka Dot Girl, is a very unusual place. On the surface it resembles countless cities to be found in American-influenced hardboiled detective fiction, being sleazy at its heart and increasingly affluent the further you move out into the suburbs. Its lower social reaches teem with crooks and cops, prostitutes, drunks and drug addicts, all of whom are preyed upon by the corrupt politicians and wealthy business folk who gaze down on the city from their position of privilege like so many vultures anticipating their next feast. So far, so conventional – but what gives this novel a notable twist is that Hera City is entirely populated by women.
  The story is told by Hera City Police Department detective Eugenie ‘Genie’ Auf der Maur, who investigates the murder of Madeleine Greenhill, a young woman found floating in Hera City’s docks wearing a polka dot dress. Ambitious and conscientious, Genie is in her second year as a detective and keen to prove herself, not least because Madeleine Greenhill is the only daughter of Hera City’s most feared woman, the matriarch Misericordiae ‘Misery’ Greenhill.
  Struggling to compensate for her inexperience and lack of self-confidence, Genie initially finds herself grasping after shadows in Hera City’s labyrinth. Surviving an assassin’s attempted hit has the perverse effect of steadying Genie’s nerves, however, not least because it tips her off that Maddy Greenhill’s death was not a straightforward tragedy of a young woman in the wrong place at the wrong time, but a more sinister affair engineered by a powerful cabal with secrets to hide.
  It’s an intriguing set-up, and Genie makes for a very charming narrator. The book’s cover blurb suggests that we can anticipate ‘Sam Spade in lipstick and a dress’ but Genie, by her own admission an extremely petite example of a HCPD detective, is a much more vulnerable and sensitive character than Dashiell Hammett’s Spade or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, both of whom are strong influences on her hardboiled patter.
  Indeed, McManus and Genie establish their hardboiled credentials early in the story, as Genie leaves the Greenhill mansion after informing Misery of her daughter’s murder. “I drove straight home,” Genie tells us, “listening to a jazz station on the car radio. Sure, it’s a cliché – the wiped-out cop, in the middle of the night, driving through the dark streets with clarinets and cymbals in her ears, a smoke in her mouth and a fresh murder on her hands. All it was missing was the rain. But hey, I never said I was original. Besides, I’m a sucker for the classic stuff.”
  That ‘classic stuff’ extends to the way in which The Polka Dot Girl mirrors the narrative arc of much of hardboiled detective fiction, as Genie pulls on the thread of a street-level murder only to find that the unravelling runs all the way up to the highest echelons of society, laying bare its greed, corruption and immorality.
  This, despite the quirky setting of Hera City, is familiar territory for the crime fiction aficionado, and if you’re willing to buy into Genie’s knowing self-awareness of her place in crime writing mythology, then The Polka Dot Girl is an enjoyably offbeat take on the post-modern mystery novel. It’s overtly old-fashioned, and not only in the way it taps into the roots of the contemporary hardboiled crime genre. McManus litters the story with references to classical Greek tragedy and mythology: the obligatory femme fatale is called Cassandra, while geographical locations are given names such as Pasiphaë Prospect and Hecate Point. At the heart of the tale lies a religious cult which worships the moon goddess and appears to be derived from the Eleusinian Mysteries of Ancient Greece, a cult in which only women were indoctrinated.
  It all makes for very pleasant meta-fiction cross-pollination, but what Darragh McManus is trying to achieve with his plethora of classical references and his women-only city is never made explicit. Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky are probably the best known of the authors who have adapted the hardboiled private detective voice, and created feminist heroines who take on men – and more importantly, perhaps, a historically male-dominated genre – to succeed on their own terms. McManus adapts the same tone – albeit one that’s painfully self-aware of its fictional history – to a woman-only narrative, but Genie’s investigation of the prevailing culture ultimately reveals that the female of the species is no more or less deadly than the male. Meanwhile, and despite the unique setting, the patriarchal origins of the language remain the same: the detectives are still known as ‘Dicks’, a prostitute’s client remains a ‘John’. A crucial plot-point requires a prostitute to be beaten almost to death by a group of (female) clients, only to find herself somehow pregnant when she emerges from the subsequent coma.
  It’s arguable that McManus, who has a palpable affection for the tropes of the classic hardboiled novel, is simply retaining the linguistic conventions – fans of Black Mask-era pulp fiction, for example, will be delighted to find a hired killer referred to as a ‘gunsel’. It’s also true that McManus, in his career to date, has been more engaged with playing with the genre’s tropes than reinventing the wheel – his debut Cold! Steel!! Justice!!! (2010), published under the pseudonym Alexander O’Hara, was a spoof of Mickey Spillane-style masculinity, while Even Flow (2012) featured a trio of vigilantes waging war on society’s homophobes and misogynists.
  All told, there’s a nagging sense throughout that McManus has missed a trick by not recalibrating his narrator’s voice and language in order to make the most of Hera City’s unique setting. That said, The Polka Dot Girl is a very interesting addition to the growing canon of Irish crime writing which confirms Darragh McManus’s promise. - Declan Burke

Reviewing The Evidence

There were a couple of very interesting reviews of Keith Ridgway’s HAWTHORN & CHILD (Granta Books) in the Irish Independent and Irish Times yesterday. What piqued my interest was that the phrase ‘crime fiction’ was conspicuous by its absence in both cases, even though our eponymous heroes are police detectives. Quoth the blurb elves:

Hawthorn and Child are mid-ranking detectives tasked with finding significance in the scattered facts. They appear and disappear in the fragments of this book along with a ghost car, a crime boss, a pick-pocket, a dead racing driver and a pack of wolves. The mysteries are everywhere, but the biggest of all is our mysterious compulsion to solve them. In HAWTHORN & CHILD, the only certainty is that we’ve all misunderstood everything.

  It’s not true, of course, that every novel to feature a police detective (or two) is a crime or mystery novel. Neither is it true that a book becomes a crime novel simply because crimes are committed or investigated during the course of the story. So I’m not entirely sure that HAWTHORN & CHILD qualifies as an Irish crime novel, or that Keith Ridgway would want it to be considered as such. Keith Ridgway is Irish, the novel is set in London, and Ridgway writes in the literary genre (I’ve already seen a call for it to be longlisted for the Booker Prize on Wednesday). That said, an earlier novel, THE PARTS, also dabbled in crime fiction tropes; and anyway, who the hell really knows what’s bubbling away at the back of a writer’s mind?
  Here’s a flavour of both reviews:

“Ridgway’s new book, HAWTHORN & CHILD, is strange, unsettling, fragmented, confusing, at times dreamlike (these are all good things, by the way). You won’t find sentimental stories of Irish emigrants here, nor self-flagellating clichés about dysfunctional families. […]
  “The story, or rather stories, concern two London policemen, the titular detectives Hawthorn and Child. It opens with them being called to a shooting, but this is just the beginning for a series of incidents both violent and tender, strange occurrences, stranger characters, shifts in time, shifts in perspective, shifts in tone and tempo.
  “The different threads are connected, but tenuously so, though of course this is deliberately done: it’s not as if Ridgway has lost control of his own stories.
  “The book makes the reader work hard, much like its two heroes: sifting through the facts, piecing together clues, trying to shape a cohesive narrative out of seemingly random bits of information. And it’s all the more satisfying for that.” - Darragh McManus, Irish Independent

“HAWTHORN & CHILD is a working partnership of two very different policemen. Together they patrol a seething present-day, utterly tangible London by car [...]
  “It is a novel of contrasts: darkness and light. The daily and mundane balanced against the sheer hell of evil. One man, who is good with accounts, has secured an easy life – admittedly working for a gangster – but then he finds himself pinned under a car that could fall on him. Elsewhere a baby who is about to be rescued is thrown down a stairs. A woman who lives in a neat, spacious flat hangs herself over a cooker while the gas rings burn her from beneath.” - Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

  I haven’t read the novel yet - I’ll be trotting along to my local independent bookseller tomorrow, as fast as my little legs will allow - but it sounds like a fascinating prospect, similar in theme and tone to two of my favourite novels from last year, Sara Gran’s CITY OF THE DEAD and James Sallis’ THE KILLER IS DYING. Both were vaguely surreal in their approach and existential in tone, but - and here we can draw parallels in an Irish context with Flann O’Brien’s THE THIRD POLICEMAN, or the work of Ken Bruen, Eoin McNamee and Colin Bateman’s ‘Mystery Man’ series - tapped into an uncompromising realism in acknowledging that, despite our culture’s plaintive protestations to the contrary, justice is a fiction, evidence is arbitrary, and any conclusions drawn can only be subjective and thus fictions in their own right. All of which, of course, is the true subject matter and governing philosophy of every great crime novel.
  If HAWTHORN & CHILD is in the same ballpark, I’m in for a treat.

A Critical Juncture

Another day, yet another Irish crime writing debutant. CRITICAL VALUE by DC Gogan comes to my attention via the good works of Bryan Roche over at the Irish Crime Writing Facebook page, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

A research project on homicidal fantasies ...
A murdered woman in the largest university in Ireland ...
Does a psychology student’s thesis hold the key to catching a killer?

Adam Twohig is in his final year of Psychology at University College Dublin. He never settled into the college lifestyle, never plugged into the social scene, and never excelled at his studies. Which is why he’s puzzled when Greg Taylor comes to him looking for help with his thesis.

Greg is studying the homicidal fantasies of UCD students, getting hundreds of written accounts of students’ darkest, murderous desires. When high-profile Entertainments Officer Christine Harvey is savagely murdered, the investigating detective wants access to his data. At first Adam thinks that the police are clutching at straws, but another murder on campus draws him deeper into the investigation.

The secrets buried in Greg’s data force Adam into an unlikely alliance between the Irish police and two FBI agents on the hunt for a serial killer, and put him and his friends in the sights of a murderer whose depravity seems to stand outside everything Adam knows about human psychology.

  Sounds intriguing, not least because it’s been quite a while - when Cormac Millar last deigned to grace us with his presence, basically - since we’ve had a good old-fashioned campus novel.
  What’s most interesting to me, though, is that it’s still only June and I’ve already seen or heard of eleven - now twelve - Irish crime writing debuts. Some are traditionally published, others are e-book only, one - Seamus Scanlon’s - is a collection of short stories; but regardless of format or form, 2012 marks something significant in the development of the Irish crime novel.
  To the best of my knowledge, the list of Irish crime debutants in 2012 runs as follows:

A JUNE OF ORDINARY MURDERS by Conor Brady;
BLOOD FROM A SHADOW by Gerard Cappa;
GHOST TOWN by Michael Clifford;
EL NINO by Mick Donnellan;
CRITICAL VALUE by DC Gogan;
THE FALL by Claire McGowan;
EVEN FLOW by Darragh McManus;
BLOOD RED TURNS DOLLAR GREEN by Paul O'Brien;
THE ISTANBUL PUZZLE by Laurence O’Bryan;
RED RIBBONS by Louise Phillips;
DISAPPEARED by Anthony Quinn;
AS CLOSE AS YOU’LL EVER BE by Seamus Scanlon.

  If I’ve missed out on anyone, or if you have a novel on the way later in the year, please drop me a line and I’ll include you on the list.
  Meanwhile, Louise Phillips (crimescenewriter@gmail.com) is putting together a series of features on debutant Irish crime writers for the writing.ie site. If you’re a new Irish crime writer, why not drop over to writing.ie and introduce yourself? I’m sure she’d be delighted to hear from you.

Origins: COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!! by Alexander O’Hara

Editor’s Note: In a rather pleasing development, the sub-sub-genre of Irish crime writing seems to be throwing up some writers who are either maverick geniuses (genii?) or permanently bombed out of their gourd. The first such to come to my attention was the redoubtable Captain Joseph Barbelo with BARBELO’S BLOOD; the latest crazily shining rough diamond is Alexander O’Hara, aka Darragh McManus. To wit:

Origins: COLD! STEEL!! JUSTICE!!!

Okay, this might get a little confusing. My name is Darragh McManus and I’ve just published a comic crime novel called COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!! Except the author is actually called Alexander O’Hara, and the book was originally called The Nutcracker. And wasn’t a book at all, but a movie script.
  Sorry. Let me start over. COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!! has just been self-published by me (as in Darragh) as an e-book at Amazon.com for Kindle and Smashwords.com for other formats. I used the Alexander O’Hara nom du guerre to differentiate “funny me” from “serious me”; as has been discussed here before, the “industry” doesn’t like eclecticism in writers. So I thought, what the hell, I’ll just invent a new writer altogether.
  The bumpf – written either by Darragh or Alexander, I actually can’t remember anymore – goes something like this: “COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!! is a rollicking, rocking riot of raw, roaring reading, about renegade detective Christian Beretta, his resurrected-from-the-dead sweetheart, his partner with an over-eating problem, and the evil Mayor who wants control of the drugs trade – and wants Beretta deader than dead… In Paradise City, all hell is about to break loose!”
  And the whole thing of the film script? Our story begins – and the story began – all the way back in 1999 during downtime in my first real job. There was a lot of downtime, and The Nutcracker was a lot of fun to write. (The title, by the way, refers to our hero’s trademark method of “interrogation”: squeezing the baddies’ testicles in a tourniquet. It gets results, dammit!).
  I basically took every cliché I could think of, from every piss-poor, straight-to-video 1980s cop movie I’d ever seen, and played around with them. End result: something like The Naked Gun crossed with The Simpsons crossed with Monty Python crossed with that drunken conversation in the pub one night about which Z-list actor you’d cast in a remake of Bloodfist 9: The Killening.
  So you’ve got a loose cannon cop who’s been kicked off the force for – yes – being “just too violent”. And a grizzled Italian Chief of Police, feisty and beautiful journalist girlfriend, tubby black sidekick who’s a solid family man, sleazy Mexican drug lord, camp European assassin, deranged media billionaire, huge-toothed chat-show host, insanely sexy femme fatale who wears rubber cat-suits quite often, and so on and so forth.
  For Beretta, I wanted a guy who looked, sounded and acted more-or-less like Dirty Harry having an especially bad goddamn day. But better-looking, and considerably dumber, and probably a wee bit more warm-hearted, underneath all the macho bluster. His name had to reflect that, so I picked something both tough (Beretta, as in the pistol) and soft (Christian, or Chris as he’s known to loved ones – this sounds like the name of a tousle-haired little boy, or that cuddly, bespectacled man in your office who always wears a colourful tie with short-sleeved shirts.)
  Then I took all these eejits and started writing about them; it was pretty much as simple as that. Of course, I needed a storyline of some sort, on which to hang all the surreal lines, slapstick gags, amusing non-sequiturs and self-referential in-jokes. So I thought to myself, what are these dreadful movies always about? Answer: a big drugs deal, generally involving “the merchandise”.
  That was about it, and that was about all I needed. The plot, amazingly, made some sense by the time I’d finished; it had structure and pacing, things happened in a vaguely chronological order, there was a beginning, middle and end. Too many spoofs, I’ve since been told, concentrate on japery at the expense of an actual storyline; The Nutcracker had one, albeit the most daft and ridiculous storyline you’ve ever encountered.
  You want a mad Kerry-born Mayor who wants to televise the trial and execution of criminals? You got it. An army of castrated international guns-for-hire, led by a man called Englebert who bears a disturbing resemblance to a young Julian Sands? You got that, too. A conversation between our heroes that lasts for fifteen minutes, during which they’re continuously taking the longest pee in history? Sure, why not. A flashback scene where Beretta enters a moment of Zen totality and shoots six ducks from the sky without looking? What the hell, let’s throw that in there as well.
  Eventually, the thing was written. I sent it to Roger Corman’s long-time associate, Frances Doel; she was charming and friendly on the phone and I never heard from her again. A few other producer types had nice things to say about it, but I kind of realised after a while that The Nutcracker, as a movie, fell uncomfortably between two stools: too stupid to be respected, too clever to sell to a stupid movie audience.
  Readers, though, are a different kettle of fish. Despite what the “industry” might presume, readers like all sorts of things from books. They like to be challenged. And when it comes to comedy, they don’t necessarily want all the jokes teed up 15 minutes beforehand, then quickly followed by canned laughter, real or metaphorical, to really hammer the point home. They’re okay, I think – I hope? – with a book that’s dumb but clever in its dumbness but dumb in its cleverness but simultaneously clever and dumb.
  So I took the original script and fleshed it out as a novel, adding descriptive prose, more dialogue, inner monologue, character motivation, and about eight thousand fresh jokes. Well, when I say “fresh”, I mean “not in the original script”. They’re not fresh in the sense that I – and, indeed, other writers – haven’t used them before. More than once.
  Finally, I changed the title. The Nutcracker was a bit vague and allusive; it made sense, and was amusing, to me, but I didn’t know that everyone else would get it, or like it. At least not until they got to the actual nut-cracking part, round about the end of Chapter 5. So I racked my brains for something that captured the dumbness, crassness, obviousness and weird obsession with exclamation marks that characterise all my favourite rubbish ‘80s cop flicks. You know, masterworks like Unkillable Bastard!, Rampage of Destruction IV!!, and of course, Gutz ‘n’ Bulletz 2: The Return of Fat Larry!
  The end result was COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!!: the book of the movie of the comic of the book of the screenplay of the movie of the game of the TV show. Of the book. And it’s funny: DEAD FUNNY. Guaranteed, you will laugh at least once per paragraph. That’s right, PER PARAGRAPH – no mealy-mouthed “per page” promises here – or your money back. (Note: guarantee is not a guarantee. CAP accepts full responsibility for any disappointment caused. Caveat emptor, terms & conditions apply, exit on your left, etc etc etc.)
  And so here we are: me, Alex, Christian, India the fiery girlfriend, Spud the tubby sidekick, O’Flannigan the crazy Mayor, the castrated assassins, the Oedipal-fixation Mexican gangster who gets incinerated in his own car to the strains of Herb Alpert playing The Girl from Ipanema … and hopefully a whole bunch of you, the paying customer.
  Welcome to Dice City, everybody. Where justice walks tall, quips smart, busts shit up on a regular basis and totes a hand-cannon so fucking enormous that the toting itself carries a minimum ten years. Cold! Steel! Justice!!!: sooner or later, everybody gets delivery of theirs. Fuck yeah!!
  Thanks for listening, Darragh. (PS: I mean Alexander. I think.)

  COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!! by Alexander O’Hara is published on Kindle.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review - Mesrine: Killer Instinct / Public Enemy No. 1

Jacques Mesrine – it’s pronounced Meh-reen; you called him Mez-reen at your peril – was the French equivalent of Martin Cahill, aka The General. A Robin Hood-style folk-hero, Mesrine was essentially a bank robber during a career that lasted from the early ’60s until 1979, when he was allegedly executed in the Paris streets by a shadowy police unit.
  Being French, of course, Mesrine was considerably more flamboyant than Cahill. A master of disguise known alternatively as ‘the Man of a Hundred Faces’ and ‘Jacques Du Monde’ (Jacques Everyman), he actively courted the media. His ability to escape from maximum security prisons, in France and Canada, struck a chord with a nation that was struggling to escape from its perception of itself as it came to terms with the emerging truth of the dirty war in Algeria. (Mesrine himself served in Algeria in 1956, where it’s alleged that he was a member of a torture squad.)
  By pitching himself as an anti-establishment rebel in a series of high-profile media interviews with outlets such as Paris Match, Mesrine captured the French imagination at a time when France itself was experiencing the social and cultural unrest that would culminate in the protests and riots of the student revolution of Paris ’68.
  His signature trademark was the double-whammy stick-up: after robbing a bank, Mesrine would run to the next street and rob another, while the police floundered at the scene of the first.
  In thumbing his nose at the authorities in such a fashion, Mesrine garnered potent enemies among the police, the judiciary and the political establishment. Yet it was this flagrant contempt for the powers-that-be that secured him a cult hero status in France on a par with Che Guevara. All of which has contributed hugely to the critical and commercial success, in France, of the movies Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1.
  Directed by Jean-François Richet, the movies are superb thrillers that capture Mesrine’s charisma, devil-may-care attitude and cavalier spirit. Captured in Canada after a failed kidnapping, for example, Mesrine is asked on TV for a quote, and responds with “Long live Free Quebec!” In a microcosm, the moment sums up Mesrine’s appeal: media savvy, cheerfully defiant in the face of apparent defeat, a man of the people, a rebel with a cause for each of his hundred faces. With their free-wheeling style and irrepressible kinetic energy, not to mention their uncomplicated and largely uncritical celebration of his lifestyle, the films are garnering favourable comparisons with Mean Streets and Goodfellas, due in no small part to a terrific performance from Vincent Cassel in the role of the eponymous anti-hero.
  And yet the subtitle of Richet’s first movie, Killer Instinct, is an uncompromising one and should give pause for thought to those who would champion Mesrine’s freebooting adventures. Mesrine was a killer who boasted of 39 murders in total. That may well be a wildly exaggerated number, given that Mesrine makes the claim in an autobiography he published from prison in 1977, also titled Killer Instinct, and which he subsequently asserted he wrote to confuse the authorities in the lead-up to his latest trial, and because his public expected any book from Mesrine to contain a high body-count. And yet there’s no getting away from the fact that, his reputation for glamour, high living and wooing beautiful women notwithstanding, Mesrine’s capacity for murder remained undiminished during the course of his career.
  Richet’s movies are not the first time Mesrine’s exploits have been committed to celluloid, although André Génovès’s film from 1984, Mesrine, confines itself to the 18 months the outlaw spent on the run – after escaping in 1978 from the maximum security prison specially designed to keep him behind bars – with his then girlfriend, Sylvia Jeanjacquot, who was by his side when his car was riddled with bullets in Paris. The fact that Richet devotes two films to Mesrine’s exploits may seem excessive, but there are strong arguments in favour of his approach.
  The first is that Mesrine packed a hell of a lot of incident into his relatively short life. Bank robbery was only one string to the bow of a man who was equally happy robbing casinos and kidnapping for profit. He was also unusually loyal, given that he operated in a milieu in which the notion of ‘honour amongst thieves’ is virtually always revealed to be a myth. After escaping from a Canadian prison, for instance, Mesrine later returned with an accomplice, both heavily armed, in a failed bid to break out some of his old comrades. Later, on the loose after yet another escape, Mesrine telephoned his then girlfriend, who was still incarcerated. She had to plead with him not to come and rescue her, on the basis that she had only a short time left to serve on her sentence.
  Moreover, Mesrine had an incorrigible sense of theatre, and it’s impossible to fully dislike a man who can unlock his handcuffs in court and throw them in the face of a judge, and later bound from the dock to kidnap the judge whilst his trial is ongoing, escaping to the street with his hostage in tow and from there to freedom, yet again.
  All of which fits very neatly with the Mesrine mythology, in which Robin Hood meets John Dillinger and provides a very satisfying movie for fans of gritty, violent and entertaining thrillers.
  The second movie, Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1, is a different affair. Slower in pace, more thoughtful in its appraisal of Mesrine’s public persona, it covers a period in which the criminal becomes ever more politicised, until such time as he is stating that his robberies are actually politically motivated. He claims fraternity with international causes such as the Palestinian struggle and the Red Brigades, and seems to be trying to pass himself off as a French Carlos the Jackal. While it is entirely probably that Mesrine did business with a wide range of individuals and organisations, not least when it came to trading information and / or purchasing weaponry, the grandstanding comes across as poignantly quixotic attempt by a common criminal to give his prosaic actions some socio-political ballast.
  It’s as if Mesrine, acutely aware of the power of the media, eventually came to believe his own press, despite the fact that he was the one responsible for creating much of the mythology. What is particularly poignant, however, is that he seems to have come to believe that he had transcended the law and its minions, and that he would be judged, when the time came for final reckonings, by the court of public appeal.
  Of course, the success of Richet’s films suggests that the court of public appeal has come down very much in favour of Mesrine and his self-aggrandizing rhetoric. Meanwhile, that a career criminal and self-confessed killer is the cause celebre du jour with both the disenfranchised youth and the intellectual elite in France suggests that a new work-out routine is the least of Nicolas Sarkozy’s problems this summer.

  Mesrine: Killer Instinct is released on August 7th. Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 is released on August 28th. This article first appeared in the Irish Examiner.

  Meanwhile, friend of CAP and aspiring crime writer Darragh McManus has posted the first chapter of his magnum opus crime spoof COLD! STEEL! JUSTICE!!! to the web, suggesting that, if enough people are interested, he’ll post Chapter Two. Make it so, people …

THE BULL ISLAND POMES ‘N’ PRATIES ASSOCIATION: A Literary Classic In The Making?

Friend of CAP and aspiring crime writer Darragh McManus (right) has a rather jaundiced view of painfully obscure novel titles, a treatise on the subject of which he has written on our behalf because we were too busy reading THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY. Quoth Darragh:

Apparently book titles can’t be copyrighted – I was going to call my first tome ‘Confessions of an English Opium Eater’, but my advisers counselled against it – which might explain why so many of them sound so familiar to me. More precisely, particular books of a particular genre all have similar names.
  I suppose the old publishing game has become very stratified, and publishers are hell-bent on making sure their new product reaches the exact market they want it to reach. Therefore, they give each book the perfect title for that demographic. (Yes, I know it’s a sin to use words like ‘market’, ‘product’ and ‘demographic’ when discussing books, but such is the crass, grubby world we live in.)
  This was once limited to what used to be – and probably still is – called ‘genre fiction’: Chick Lit, Bloke Lit, Chicks With Dicks Lit, Blokes With No Dicks Lit, zombie novels, the Tom Clancy oeuvre (note: some of these may be invented). Now, what still is – and will continue to be – called ‘literary fiction’ has also caught the ‘samey title’ virus.
  At times I even suspect that there’s a computer somewhere that spews out clichéd names for books, depending on the genre. THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS, for example: what a tiresomely predictable title for a Booker Prize winner.
  Seriously – THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS? Presumably the marketing department keyed in ‘self-important, depressing, award-winning, Literary-with-a-capital-L’ and hit Return, and this is what the machine gave them. (They also added the fairly redundant subtitle, ‘A Novel’, just in case we might have mistaken it for a comical sports book.)
  Add to this list of shame such uninspired titles as: THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST. THE SECRET SCRIPTURE. THE GATHERING. (The Boredom. The Trite. The Cynical. The horror, the horror.)
  By rights there should be a moratorium put on certain words being used in the name of a novel: ‘Notes from’, ‘Letters from’, ‘Confessions of’, anyone’s ‘...Daughter’ or ‘...Son’, anything involving quirky-but-annoying juxtapositions, e.g. ‘Searching for Tractors in Alaska During Ramadan’, anything lengthy and literal which rips off THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME …
  Having said that, if you can’t beat them, something something. (I always forget how that goes.) So help yourselves to any or all of these tremendous genre-specific monikers for your next book, folks …

Chick Lit: Is He Really as Much of a Bastard as He Seems?
Sci-fi: //_MultiVerse UnderTime Chronicles Vol. 1_//
Crime: Joey Jones’ Downbeat Goddamn Downtown Blues
Serial killer thriller type yoke: Blood on the Edge
Action-espionage: The Armageddon Code
‘Serious’ historical novel, i.e. something set in an immigrant community during the 1970s: Claggy Alley
Popular historical novel, i.e. something jolly and unpretentious written by Bernard Cornwell: Pirate Lords of Old Bristol
Fantasy: Mandala: Empress of the Golden Plains
Whimsical comic novel: The Spectabulicious Adventures of Lord Pettlesnook and his Patchwork Dirigible
Edgy fiction for hip twentysomethings: Fuckepedia
Booker winner: The Persimmon Gatherers
Bitterly disappointed Booker runner-up: Notes from the Spice-monger’s Daughter

The Pigeon Who Didn’t Want To Fly Home

Darragh McManus (right) waxes lyrical on the pigeonholing of writers below, and while Darragh might be an extreme example of the desire of a writer to write in different styles, genres and disciplines (Darragh’s the guy who kicked the ‘ass’ right back into Renaissance Man, basically), he makes a valid point or three.
  Two of the Grand Viz’s favourite novels were written by William Goldman, but it’s difficult to imagine two more different stories than those of MARATHON MAN and THE PRINCESS BRIDE (plus Goldman wrote Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid and The Right Stuff, and a veritable buncha other novels and movies and non-fiction books). Closer to home, we’re always mightily impressed with Gene Kerrigan’s work, regardless if he’s writing novels, non-fiction or his weekly journalism. Another example is John Connolly, whose standalone THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS is very different to his Charlie Parker novels, something of a minor masterpiece, and in the not-entirely-humble opinion of the Grand Viz, his finest work to date. Word around the not-entirely-metaphorical campfire is that Connolly’s book-after-next will not be a crime fiction novel, and we for one are already looking forward to it.
  So, yes, we’re perfectly open to the idea of a writer breaking fresh ground. By the same token, the Grand Viz can’t imagine wanting to read anything by Raymond Chandler outside of crime fiction; thinks Elmore Leonard is a genius in a low key, but has never read any of his Western stories, even though he loves Western movies; and cheerfully admits that he misspent a goodly portion of his youth re-reading THE CATCHER IN THE RYE but has little time for Salinger’s short stories, with the notable exception of ‘Teddy’.
  Anyway, the question is: are publishers short-changing readers by presuming they’re Pavlovian dimwits (how else to explain James Patterson?); or are they canny buggers really, who know us better than we think we know ourselves? Darragh, squire? Over to you …

My name is Darragh, and I’m a writer.
  Actually, I’ll be more specific – my name is Darragh and I want to write all sorts of things, but I’m not sure that this is possible. Let me explain.
  When I was growing up I read comic books, thrillers, crime novels, horror novels, lurid western paperbacks full of terrible Apache atrocities and even worse Apache stereotypes. I also read what might be termed ‘high literature’, albeit mainly suitable for children: ROBINSON CRUSOE, LAST OF THE MOHICANS, Sherlock Holmes stories. I seem to remember making a stab at JANE EYRE, aged around 12, which surely was a triumph of optimism over probability – if I couldn’t master this turgid leviathan in university, what hope had I at that age?
  Basically, I read any and all available printed matter, from timeless classics to the ingredients on cereal packets, and it all had an influence.
  Around my mid-teens the notion that I wanted to write for a living became formalised, became concrete in my mind. And what I wanted to write was … well, everything and anything.
  My favourite writers of all time, probably, are Don DeLillo and Margaret Atwood; therefore profound, elliptical, exquisitely crafted literature was definitely on my authorial ‘to-do’ list. My favourite books of all time are NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, and I’ve always enjoyed sci-fi; therefore a paradigm-shattering, futuristic dystopia had to be tackled at some point.
  I had a soft spot for the Gothic horror of Anne Rice, Mary Shelly, Stoker, Poe et al; therefore a grand Gothic of my own (probably set in Ireland, the genre’s and my spiritual home) was factored into the master-plan. I adored comic books (particularly the more mature, ambiguous stuff like Alan Moore and Frank Miller), loved the way they married the visual and the verbal, word and image; therefore an award-winning creation, with huge movie spin-off potential, was marked as essential.
  Aged 23 I read Sarah Dunn’s THE OFFICIAL SLACKER HANDBOOK, the funniest book ever hewn by god or woman, and a collection of Woody Allen’s satire; therefore I allotted some future effort to making ‘em laugh, laugh, laugh. And I also loved James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard and Christopher Brookmyre, among many other crime writers; therefore I would, in this totipotential career awaiting me, find time for a series of dark, edgy crime novels, possibly with a metaphysical twist. (The details, as I’m sure you all recognise, were still a little fuzzy.)
  Hell, I probably even told myself I’d knock out something way post-modern, so hip it hurt, based on those cereal packet ingredients. The Tao of Vitamin B12 (a novel in B12 parts) …
  That was the plan, book-wise. In the day-job – journalism – I also desired diversity, variety, all those colours of the rainbow. I wanted to write about sport, movies, philosophy, politics, celebrity nonsense. I wanted to write serious social commentary and the silliest satire imaginable. I wanted to do interviews and reviews, match reports and features, restaurant criticism and news analysis.
  I wanted it all, baby – it’s the capitalist in me, I guess.
  So what’s the problem, I hear you ask? The problem is this: publishing and media (and in a broader sense, society) don’t want the Renaissance man or woman, the versatile epicurean of letters who can dip their quill into just about area they choose. They want to pigeonhole writers.
  Example: I spent two years, early in a journalistic career of a decade, editing an Irish sports magazine. Editing it, I might add, as a part-time gig, during which I also wrote features and satire for other magazines and newspapers. Forever after, I am known to some folks as ‘the guy who’s into sport’. I swear to God, I still meet people who say to me, ‘Oh, you write about sport, don’t you?’ Well, yes, I mean, I did up to 2001 which isn’t that long ago, so yeah, I suppose you’re not too far off the mark.
  And how does this relate to books – more accurately, to the contents of this here blog? It appears to me that it is very difficult to forge a career as a crime writer AND serious novelist AND purveyor of cheap horror tricks AND smart satirist AND who knows what else. The business, the culture and the audience don’t seem to want writers to diversify. We are encouraged to find our niche, get good at it and stick to it.
  Otherwise, whoa, who knows what might happen? We don’t want to surprise the reader, after all. God forbid a writer should challenge expectations or give a little flip to preconceptions, right?
  This is why someone like John Banville writes crime fiction under an assumed name, even though everyone knows it’s him. Benjamin Black isn’t a proper pseudonym which hides the author’s identity, but it delineates the literary, ‘serious’ Banville from the (assumed) mass-market thrills of crime fiction. He has a reputation to protect, after all. The Banville brand must be preserved in dust and amber.
  It’s why Sebastian Faulks publishes an espionage thriller with the caveat, ‘writing as Ian Fleming’. Or Steven King writes sci-fi under the name Richard Bachman. Or Iain Banks does likewise but only after inserting a middle initial on the book cover. Or a thousand other examples.
  I wonder why this is so in publishing – the field of artistic endeavour, one would imagine, that is most open to genre-busting, to freshness and the unexpected. After all, directors are allowed make movies of different kinds. Bands are applauded when they veer off in new directions. Even TV actors – the ultimate hacks in the ultimate hack medium – often quit their soap or medical drama to play a radically different character.
But for us poor writers? Get used to staying stuck in the same place.
  My first book, GAA CONFIDENTIAL, was a humorous, ironic little romp about Irish sports and culture, and I was so afraid of being ghettoised as a sportswriter that I seriously considered publishing under a nom de plume. (Thank God nobody actually read the thing, so I escaped that trap …).
  I’ve also written what might be termed a ‘literary’ novel, a collection of short stories on one motif, a crime novel with a vigilante angle, a fairly avant-garde play about dreams and memory, a broad comedy film script, a slacker drama film script, a collection of satirical pieces on pop culture and media, and the beginnings of a spoof history of the universe and a satirical travel book. I have about fifty other ideas in my computer for novels, plays, TV shows, movies, comic books.
  What’s wrong with the above list? I’ll tell you – it’s all over the place. Too diffuse, too varied, too unfocused. I mean, does this fella want to be a novelist or a comedian or a screenwriter or the new John Connolly or the new John Banville? Or what? (Wow – looking at like that, it’s no wonder I’m still waiting on a publishing deal.)
Meanwhile I’ve been trying to get satirical stuff published in British and Irish papers for over a year now, with limited success. Let me stress, in all modesty, that it’s not because the material isn’t funny, or accessible, or entertaining, because it is all three. The people turning it down even tell me so. But it’s just ‘not right’ for them, or it’s all a bit left-field, or maybe I should concentrate more on what I’m already doing …
  So I set up a blog, basically to promote myself and my work. Hopefully the features editor of the Guardian or New York Times will be passing by, stop for a gander and be enraptured by that hilarious rewriting of Hamlet in the style of Eastenders. But I’m not too confident.
  People always say, ‘Have faith in yourself.’ I have faith in myself, as I’m sure do all of you. The problem is that I don’t necessarily have faith in society, and in the publishing and media industries. I don’t have faith that any of us will be allowed a writing career encompassing crime fiction, heavily researched non-fiction, historical romances, poetry, action-espionage thrillers, elegiac non-linear novels wherein nothing happens and happens really goddamn slowly, or whatever our heads and hearts tell us to put on paper. I don’t have faith that one can earn a reputation as a journalist who writes equally strongly on sober matters and satirical daftness.
  For me there is absolutely no dichotomy in any of this. I see no tension between the guy who writes a meditative novel about death and the guy who writes a film script which crosses The Naked Gun with Commando.
  But that’s just me. The industry, I fear, goes by an inversion of the old catchphrase: ‘Now for something exactly the same as the last time.’ – Darragh McManus

A veritable cornucopia of writing can be found at Darragh’s blog, Satire For Hire

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 974: Darragh McManus

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 was blown away the first time I read The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy. The bebop rhythms of the writing, the labyrinthine plot, the complexity of the characters, with all their ambiguities, their casual racism and fundamental decency … So original, I didn’t really know if I liked it or not until halfway through.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
The TV listings, to see what movies are on. Also partial to the odd trashy novel about zombies.
Most satisfying writing moment?
There have been a few times, writing fiction, when the sentence or paragraph has come together so perfectly that I’ve thought, ‘Yes. There it is. This can’t get any better’, and actually thought of myself, however temporarily, as somewhat comparable to all the great writers I admire.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
Can Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man count as a crime novel? It’s certainly my favourite Irish novel of all time.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
See above. (Yes, I know they already made a movie of it, but it could have been better.)
Worst/best thing about being a writer?
The opportunity to let your mind go free and make stuff up – it’s that simple. Inventing people and situations and conversations. Much more satisfying than the real world.
The pitch for your next novel is…?
‘In a world of pain, Jim ‘Propane’ McDonovan is the really, really bad toothache.’
Who are you reading right now?
George Orwell, Why I Write; Primo Levi, If This is a Man; and, believe it or not, I’m also trying to grapple with James Joyce’s Ulysses. This is an atypical week, clearly. I’m not normally this highbrow.
The three best words to describe your own writing are…?
Funny, smart, sincere.

Darragh McManus is spit-‘n’-polishing his crime debut Even Flow as you read. His current work of non-fiction, GAA Confidential, is “Perhaps the funniest, most cultured book ever written about [Irish] national sports.” (Irish Independent)