Reviews: Irish Times Crime Fiction Column, August 2016

Already a four-time winner of the CWA’s International Dagger, A Climate of Fear (Harvill Secker, €19.50) is Fred Vargas’s ninth novel in the Paris-based Commissaire Adamsberg series. The apparent suicide of an old woman leads the Zen-like Adamsberg and his team to investigate a bizarre double murder on a remote Icelandic island ten years previously, although the team soon realises that their murderer is intimately involved with a cult devoted to enacting the speeches of Robespierre, Danton et al during the post-Revolutionary years of ‘the Terror’. Quirky doesn’t even begin to cover the plotting and characters here, but Vargas – the crime-writing pseudonym of French writer, historian and archaeologist Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau – is a veteran of 14 novels of total and remains in complete command of her bizarre investigation. The tone may be offbeat, and the affectionate bickering between the members of Adamsberg’s extended team amusing, but Vargas is assured in the way she marshals her narrative elements around a fascinating exploration of how a corrupted group dynamic can parlay historical horrors into contemporary crimes.

  Seamus Smyth’s Quinn (1999) is one of Irish crime fiction’s lost classics, a story narrated by a lethal charmer who has much in common with Red Dock, the anti-hero in Smyth’s – now writing as J.M. Smyth – Blood for Blood (Black and White, €9.99). A successful criminal based in Dublin, Red survived growing up in an Irish orphanage, although his brother Sean wasn’t so lucky. Now in a position to take his revenge on those responsible for Sean’s death, Red sets in train a diabolical plot that includes kidnap, blackmail and murder – but even a meticulous planner like Red couldn’t have anticipated the intervention of a serial killer who prides himself on the purity of his artistic vision. A snarling, anarchic yawp of a crime yarn, Blood for Blood is a novel that revels in its contradictions, the jaunty tone and blackly comic narrative regularly interrupted by grand guignol descriptions of violence and mutilation, while the increasingly improbable plot is firmly rooted in the harrowing abuse suffered by the inmates of state-run institutions. Crude, brutal and appallingly funny, Blood for Blood is like nothing else you’ll read this year.

  Robert Thorogood is best known for creating the BBC TV series Death in Paradise, which is set on a fictional Caribbean island and originally featured DI Richard Poole (since replaced by DI Humphrey Goodman), an uptight British policeman struggling to adapt to the idiosyncratic rhythms of Saint Marie. Thorogood revived Poole for his debut novel, A Meditation on Murder (2014), and Poole returns again in The Killing of Polly Carter (Harlequin, €19.50). World famous supermodel Polly Carter announces her intention to commit suicide before leaping from the cliff near her home on Saint Marie, her death witnessed by Polly’s twin sister, Claire. Poole’s suspicions are aroused, however, and soon he is leading his team in a murder investigation. Despite the contemporary setting, the Death in Paradise mysteries are deliciously retro Agatha Christie-style whodunits, with Poole trawling a shoal of red herrings as he interrogates his list of suspects. Much of the pleasure, meanwhile, is derived from Poole’s fish-out-of-water helplessness as he flops around trying to cope with Saint Marie’s heat, cultural quirks and easy-going pace of life, all the while wondering if ‘his entire existence as an Englishman was no more than Pavlovian conditioning.’

  The Last One (Penguin, €16.99) is Alexandra Oliva’s debut, in which we first meet ‘Zoo’ as a contestant on a TV wilderness survival reality show. Forbidden from contacting the outside world, Zoo has no way of knowing that a global catastrophe has laid waste to the human population: as she treks through the vast forest towards home, her survival grows increasingly unlikely. The narrative is split between an on-line commentary on the early episodes of the TV show and Zoo’s own account of her worsening conditions, although the chronology is out of kilter: the on-line conversation relates to events that occurred days before Zoo’s personal experience of those events, which interrupts and stilts the narrative flow. Meanwhile, Oliva deliberately creates a distancing effect by referring to her characters according to their reality show tags – ‘Zoo’, ‘Tracker’, ‘Engineer’, ‘Biology’ – a conceit that works as a commentary on our disconnection with reality in a media-managed world, although the flipside of employing archetypal titles is that it mutes our instinctive emotional response to the characters’ plight. Overall, though, The Last One is a smart and timely story about what it means to be human at a time when humanity is hanging on by a thread.

  The Unfortunate Englishman (Grove Press, €19.50) is John Lawton’s 10th novel and the second to feature Joe Wilderness, who first appeared in Then We Take Berlin (2013). A thief co-opted by MI6, Wilderness is a reluctant spy, a man motivated by personal concerns – i.e., pulling scams in the conman’s paradise that is Cold War-era Berlin – rather than ideology. The title refers to two unfortunate Englishmen: Geoffrey Masefield, a geologist who travels to Moscow by MI6 as an amateur spy, and Bernard Alleyn, a KGB mole who has spent so long playing the role of the English gentleman that he barely remembers his original name. Charged with negotiating a swap of Masefield and Alleyn in Berlin, Wilderness learns that the deal involves heisting a fortune in vintage wine looted during the war from a Jewish family destined for the gas chamber. The tone of unsentimental realpolitik means that The Unfortunate Englishman earns the right to that le Carré-esque title, even if Wilderness himself is reminiscent of Len Deighton’s spy Harry Palmer. The result is a complex and beautifully detailed tale, a full-blooded Cold War spy thriller given an added dimension courtesy of Wilderness’s quirky humour and his pragmatic take on morality and honour. ~ Declan Burke

  This column was first published in the Irish Times.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Robert Thorogood

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?
 

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carré. I read it (and the subsequent two George Smiley books) from start to finish every couple of years or so and am always captivated by the beauty of the writing and the sense of moral decay it has running through almost every line. When I was younger, I thought it was a ‘whodunnit’ and couldn’t wait to find out who the killer was. Now that I’m older, I realise that the killer is pretty much revealed in Chapter 1, and the greatness of the book is that Smiley also realises who it is from the start. I think it’s Le Carré’s masterpiece.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
 

I know that this is a bit bleak for a 44-year old man with a family and a mortgage, but I think I most want to be Harry Potter. Or at least, there’s still a bit of me that’s waiting for a letter to come through the post that tells me that yes, I am indeed a magical wizard, and now I’ve got to go into an intense period of training so I can become the best wizard in the world.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
 

Surely there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure when it comes to reading? However, I’d agree that there are definitely some books that have shorter sentence structures than others, so I’m happy to admit that I’ve always loved a good Techno Thriller. Back in the day, I used to tear through every Tom Clancy, Larry Bond, Stephen Coonts and Patrick Robinson novel I could get my hands on. And I suppose the thing that makes them ‘guilty pleasures’ is that I’ve not dared go near any of them for years. I worry that the stories (and politics) would feel somewhat dated from the distance of the 21st century.

Most satisfying writing moment?
 

It’s always the same, whether I’m writing episodes for DEATH IN PARADISE on TV, or if I’m writing the stand-alone novels: it’s the moment I get to write ‘The End’ for the first time. In truth, I tend to do a mad dash on the first draft of anything, so writing ‘The End’ is never even close to being the actual end of the writing process, but I always feel an overwhelming sense of relief and release when I know that, for good or for ill, I have in fact managed to get to the end of the story.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
 

I remember living in a filthy flat in London with friends back in the 1990s. We’d just left University and were all on the dole or doing temp jobs for next-to-no cash. Whenever someone found a good book, it used to be passed from person to person, and I remember DIVORCING JACK by Colin Bateman coming into the house and it going off like a grenade. It was so flip, so sarcastic and off-the-cuff, and we all devoured it. It seemed to combine the glib wit of a PG Wodehouse with the filth and punch of a James Ellroy. I loved it.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
 

Okay, so it’s not quite a crime novel (although there is a murder of sorts at the end), but I’ve been wanting to see a movie of THE SEA by John Banville ever since the day I was working as a script reader at Miramax and I was asked to write a report on the novel. The story is so wonderfully cinematic – centring on a lone man in a seaside cottage who’s trying to come to terms with the decisions he’s made in his life while the ghost of a mysterious woman and child visit him. The big cheeses at Miramax didn’t want to take things further, but it’s a beautiful, haunting novel, and I’m still convinced it would make a beautiful, haunting film.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
 

The worst thing about being a writer is that you’re on your own all day. From the moment you turn your computer on in the morning to the moment you turn it off at night. It’s just you. In a shed. And, as the years pass, I find I’m increasingly unable to function in the real world. I’m distracted at the school gates when I pick up the kids. Or I’m baffled by our lovely Postie trying to talk to me as he delivers an item too large to fit through the letterbox. Or I’m terrified by a phone ringing from an ‘unknown’ number. Spending so much time on your own with only imaginary characters for company isn’t exactly a very healthy way to live.

The pitch for your next book is …?

When the owner of a coffee plantation is found murdered inside a farm building, Detective Inspector Richard Poole and his team have to work out which member of his family killed him, why, and—even more impossibly—just how the killer managed to escape from the locked room afterwards.

Who are you reading right now?

I spent the weekend at the Harrogate Crime Festival, and was really impressed with how Ruth Ware talked about her writing. The brilliant things about crime festivals is that the panelists’ books are always for sale in a ‘pop up’ bookshop on site, so I was able to buy her first book, IN A DARK, DARK WOOD. So far it’s everything I hoped it would be: a modern-day murder mystery with a brooding sense of menace and a real mastery of tension.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?

The only sane answer is ‘read’, because for all that I love writing, I love reading more. I think that as long as I’ve got a pile of novels by my bedside, I could pretty much put up with everything else I had to endure in life.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Fun. Comic. Thrilling.

THE KILLING OF POLLY CARTER by Robert Thorogood is published by Harlequin Mira.