All About Eve

I’m way behind the curve on Deborah Lawrenson’s latest offering, THE LANTERN, which has already been chosen as a TV Book Club pick in the UK. Still, better late than never, eh? To date Deborah Lawrenson has written historical dramas spiced with mystery - THE ART OF FALLING, the Lawrence Durrell-inspired SONGS OF GOLD AND BLUE - and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed both. THE LANTERN is being pitched as a Gothic take on the historical drama, with the shadow of REBECCA falling across the Provence landscape. Quoth the blurb elves:

When Eve falls for the secretive, charming Dom, their whirlwind relationship leads them to purchase Les Genevriers, an abandoned house in a rural hamlet in the south of France. As the beautiful Provence summer turns to autumn, Eve finds it impossible to ignore the mysteries that haunt both her lover and the run-down old house, in particular the mysterious disappearance of his beautiful first wife, Rachel. Whilst Eve tries to untangle the secrets surrounding Rachel’s last recorded days, Les Genevriers itself seems to come alive. As strange events begin to occur with frightening regularity, Eve’s voice becomes intertwined with that of Benedicte Lincel, a girl who lived in the house decades before. As the tangled skeins of the house’s history begin to unravel, the tension grows between Dom and Eve. In a page-turning race, Eve must fight to discover the fates of both Benedicte and Rachel, before Les Genevriers’ dark history has a chance to repeat itself.

  THE LANTERN was published last month in the UK, and will be published in the US in August. If it’s anything like Lawrenson’s previous offerings, it’ll be a cracker. You have been forewarned …

Countdown To ZERO

The votes are in, the die is cast, and the cover for the forthcoming ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL by your humble correspondent has been decided (right). As all Three Regular Readers will be aware, I had a personal preference for a different cover, one featuring a gas canister, but good sense has prevailed and I’m more than happy with the final decision. If I’m honest, it actually reflects the tone of the book better than my own preference: for some reason, the artwork puts me in mind of a series of Kurt Vonnegut reissues from some years back, and as AZC is a blackly comic novel, it seems appropriate to alert the potential reader to that fact.
  For those of you unfamiliar with the novel, by the way, the blurb elves have been wibbling thusly:

Who in their right mind would want to blow up a hospital?

  “Close it down, blow it up - what’s the difference?”

  Hospital porter Billy K is a man on a mission: to highlight how vulnerable hospitals are, and to demonstrate how easily they might be demolished in a terrorist attack.

  But no one is listening. Deranged by logic, driven by a perverse passion, Billy may have to blow up a hospital in order to prove his point. Only his creator can stop him now, the author who abandoned Billy to his half-life limbo, in which Billy schemes to do whatever it takes to get himself published, or be damned …

“ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL is unlike anything else you’ll read this year … Laugh-out-loud funny … This is writing at its dazzling, cleverest zenith. Think John Fowles, via Paul Auster and Rolling Stone … a feat of extraordinary alchemy.” – Ken Bruen, author of AMERICAN SKIN

  So there you have it, and thank you kindly, Mr Bruen. Other generous commendations run as follows:

“A genuinely original take on noir, inventive and funny. Imagine, if you can, a cross between Flann O’Brien and Raymond Chandler.” - John Banville, author of THE SEA

“Stop waiting for Godot – he’s here. Declan Burke takes the existential dilemma of characters writing themselves and turns it on its ear, and then some. He gives it body and soul … an Irish soul.” - Reed Farrel Coleman, author of EMPTY EVER AFTER

“Declan Burke has broken the mould with ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, which is actually very cool indeed. Funny, inventive and hugely entertaining crime fiction - I guarantee you’ll love it.” - Melissa Hill, author of SOMETHING FROM TIFFANY’S

“If you want to find something new and challenging, comic crime fiction is now the place to go … Declan Burke [is] at the vanguard of a new wave of young writers kicking against the clichés and producing ambitious, challenging, genre-bending works.” - Colin Bateman, author of NINE INCHES

“ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL is a surreal rollercoaster of a read, full of the blackest humour, and yet poignant. An outrageously funny novel ... The joy is in the writing itself, all sparky dialogue and wry observation, so smooth that when it cuts, it’s like finding razor blades in honey.” - Deborah Lawrenson, author of THE LANTERN

“Burke has written a deep, lyrical and moving crime novel … an intoxicating and exciting novel of which the master himself, Flann O’Brien, would be proud.” - Adrian McKinty, author of FIFTY GRAND

  ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL will be published next month by the good folk at Liberties Press, and should be available for pre-order any day soon. Rest assured that I’ll keep you posted …

On Writing As Wasteful Self-Indulgence

I’ve written in these pages before about Deborah Lawrenson, author of the very fine THE ART OF FALLING and the Lawrence Durrell-influenced SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD (and the forthcoming THE LANTERN) - indeed, it was the Lawrence Durrell hook that drew me into her novels first. She isn’t a crime writer by any stretch of the imagination, even if there is a crime lurking at the heart of SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD, which is why I’m doubly pleased that she not only agreed to read the m/s of THE BABY KILLERS, but offered the following blurb:

“THE BABY KILLERS is surreal rollercoaster of a read, full of the blackest humour, and yet poignant – an outrageously funny novel that’s also deadly serious about the pain of being a contemporary writer. The joy is in the writing itself, all sparky dialogue and wry observation, so smooth that when it cuts, it’s like finding razor blades in honey.
“Here’s the agony that underpins the novel: the writer – as opposed to the real-life human being who is father, husband, son, brother, friend – only truly becomes what he strives to be when he is on this own, wrestling with his creations on the page. Yet, at certain times in life, when there is a new baby for example, or publishing hits the economic buffers, guilt for all those stolen hours sets in and those fictional creations become demons.
“In THE BABY KILLERS, Declan Burke hasn’t just written another comedy crime novel (at which he excels) but has used it as a getaway vehicle to peel away the layers of the writing process itself, howling with anger at the state of the world and sparing himself no punishment along the way.” - Deborah Lawrenson

  I thank you kindly, ma’am.
  THE BABY KILLERS, for those of you new to these pages, is a novel which will be published later this year, and which has already received a number of humbling blurbs from some very fine writers. As such blurbs by definition come from fellow writers, I’m a tad concerned at this point that the book, which is in part concerned with the process of writing a novel, will be more interesting to other writers than it will to readers who aren’t writers. And there’s always the danger that a reader with no interest in the process of writing, or the struggle to get published that most writers experience, will simply feel that that aspect of the novel is at best self-indulgent.
  All I can say to that is that this book captures a particular frame of mind, an especially profound time and space in my life, and that I wanted to incorporate that into the story itself. As a challenge, as an experiment, as a once-off peek behind the curtain of the writing process, to expose myself as a pathetic ‘wizard’ furiously pulling on levers in a vain attempt to convince the world of my ‘magical’ powers. Perhaps it’s because so much of the publishing industry - leaving aside the actual writing for the moment - is an exercise in smoke and mirrors, one in which too many writers swan about offering lofty guff about genius and the creative process and dropping broad hints as to how they occupy a different plane entirely to their readers, when the truth is that they are every bit as desperately seeking truth, inspiration and meaning as the people who read their books.
  Most writers, if they’re honest, struggle with the same issues (financial and otherwise) as are dealt with in THE BABY KILLERS; most writers, if they’re honest, lose the battle, although very few, thankfully, resort to blowing up hospitals in frustration.
  Maybe THE BABY KILLERS is an exercise in self-indulgence - at this point I’m still too close to it to offer any kind of balanced opinion. That said, and for those writers who aren’t earning a decent living from publishing novels, which is most writers, the very act of writing, that of stealing away time, effort, income and emotion from your nearest and dearest in order to invest it in a tissue of lies, all for the sake of satisfying ego and ambition, is as self-indulgent a process as can be imagined. But can you imagine how much poorer the world would be without it?

Abzorba Da Greek

Not long before he died, Kingsley Amis was asked in an interview what he’d do differently if he could live his life over again. He thought for a while and said, “Well, I wouldn’t read THE MAGUS again.”
  I love THE MAGUS. I know it’s not fashionable anymore, and that no one seems to read John Fowles these days, but I’ve read THE MAGUS three times (maybe four, I’ve started leaving out the last bit), and I’m gearing up to read it again. Which is a bit of a commitment, it being a re-read of 656 pages (554 if you stop where I generally stop: I was marooned; wingless and leaden, as if I had been momentarily surrounded, then abandoned, by a flock of strange winged creatures; emancipated, mysterious, departing, as singing birds pass on overhead; leaving a silence spent with voices. Which seems to me to be an excellent way to end a novel, and the experience of reading a novel, and writing one). Anyway, THE MAGUS is set on a Greek island, and Greek islands are the literary equivalent of cat-nip for yours truly.
  I’m also partial to a good private eye, and fine writing, and Paul Johnston combines all three in A DEEPER SHADE OF BLUE, which features Alex Mavros. Quoth Mr & Mrs Kirkus:

Famous for his Quintilian Dalrymple series based in 2020s Edinburgh, the first of which won the John Creasy Memorial Dagger in 1997, Johnston changes location for this thriller, set on a Greek island. Trigono is breathtakingly beautiful and seemingly peaceful. But is there an evil hidden beneath its paradisiacal exterior? Rosa Ozal, a young Turkish-American beauty, has gone missing and the clue to her last known whereabouts is a postcard from Trigono. Alex Mavros is the private detective hired to find her. But when he reaches the island he discovers a community intent on hiding its secrets, and the task of finding any information regarding Rosa is not an easy one. The sudden deaths of a young island couple, found naked in a fishing boat with terror on their faces, make the atmosphere even more sombre. And is there a connection with the dreadful events that took place on Trigono during the Second World War? The plot moves on apace and soon Alex is confronted with a terrifying murderer. This is a high-class thriller, tautly written with the contrast between the idyllic surroundings and the shadow of violent danger adding to the charged atmosphere. Johnston's plotting and characterization are just as adept as they are in his Dalrymple books, and this is a novel to be enjoyed by anyone who loves thrilling prose and action-packed storylines.

  Nice. The good news is that the Mavros trilogy is (are?) being republished in April, with A DEEPER SHADE OF BLUE renamed CRYING BLUE MURDER. I prefer the original title, but there you go. THE LAST RED DEATH and THE GOLDEN SILENCE complete the triptych, but neither of them are set on Greek islands (the Peloponnese and Athens, respectively), which is a total bummer.
  Anyone got any suggestions for Greek island novels? The last one I read was the very fine SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD, and I need my fix.

This Month I Was Mostly Reading …

Ye olde reading time was at a premium this month, for a variety of reasons, but while the quantity was low, the quality was pretty good. I gave up on Stieg Larsson’s THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO after something like 120 pages, not because the preamble was so tortured, but because I didn’t believe in what appeared to be the two main characters, Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander. It just didn’t make sense to me that a wealthy industrialist, who wanted his family’s history explored with discretion and could afford the finest private investigation talents available, would turn to a journalist who had been recently disgraced in a high-profile court case in which he was found to be guilty of a serious error of judgement. The Lisbeth character, meanwhile, came on like a goth Modesty Blaise who was simply too good to be true. It’s a pity, because the overwhelming verdict seems to be that TGWTGT is a modern classic, and Ali Karim reckons it’s sequel is even better. Maybe I’ll come back to it in a few years’ time and try again.
  For some reason I re-read Alistair MacLean’s WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL immediately afterwards, and I should point out here that WEBT is one of my blind spots – I must have read it about six times by now. I’m not a MacLean fan, though. I know I read more of his novels in my misspent youth, but none of them stand up the way WEBT does. If you haven’t read it, it’s set amid the Scottish islands and features Philip Calvert as a British Secret Service agent investigating piracy on the high seas, which makes it kind of topical. The ‘Philip’ is a nod to Marlowe, presumably, as the style is a Chandleresque take on the typical Bond story, albeit one grounded in the kind of self-deprecation where Calvert describes himself as a civil servant. Pithy, funny and pacy, it’s a darling read, and I’ve only semi-plagiarised the style with third-rate knock-offs twice to date.
  I went straight from that to MacLean’s THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, because I’m working on something right now that involves WWII shenanigans in the Greek islands. I made it as far as page 17 or thereabouts, which was when MacLean has one of his characters tell how an island in the Dodecanese was invaded by German forces, some of whom were parachuted in. As far as I could tell, the story is set midway through WWII, but to the best of my knowledge the German parachute regiment – the Fallschirmjager – was downgraded to infantry after the debacle that was the airborne invasion of Crete, in 1941, and never went a-parachuting again. I hope I didn’t put away the book on the basis of my getting the timing wrong, but that kind of detail should be important. I can only presume the Allied commandos succeeded in their mission, given that FORCE TEN FROM NAVARONE was a subsequent best-seller, but I’ve never seen the movie and I probably won’t be reading the book again.
  I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I don’t read a lot of women writers. I don’t think it’s a sexist thing, but more to do with the fact that men tend to write the kind of stories I’m interested in. Anyhoos, Mary Renault is one of the rare exceptions, and THE KING MUST DIE was the latest of her novels, most of which are set in classical Greece. It’s a fictionalised version of the Theseus myth, or the first half of it, covering the hero’s journey on the Greek mainland and his coming to recognition as the son and heir of the King of Athens, Aigeus, before he volunteers to be one of the victims sacrificed to the minotaur of King Minos and sails off to Crete to become a bull-dancer. Renault strips away the mythical elements, while remaining true to the quasi-spiritual aspects of the myth, and presents a fascinating tale of the clash of civilisations between the crude barbarians of the mainland Achaeans and the sophisticated culture of Minoa, which would eventually be undone by a combination of indolence, earthquake and ravening hordes from the north. Again, there’s a topical resonance, and Renault is a beautiful writer. Mind you, for a woman she tends to write quite a lot on the quintessentially male topics of war, conquest and glory – Alexander the Great was an obsession of hers – so maybe she’s not really an exception. I think she was a lesbian too, although I’m open to contradiction.
  Speaking of women with a male mind-set, I dipped into Alex Barclay’s latest, BLOOD RUNS COLD, and found myself fascinated by her creation Ren Bryce, a hard-drinking, no-bullshit FBI agent who seems to have more balls than most male characters. So I’ll be reading that next month. I’ll also be reading Donna Moore’s latest, on manuscript, because GO TO HELENA HANDBASKET was screamingly funny, and the first couple of chapters I dipped into there were just as hilarious. Staying with the manuscripts, I was sent an m/s of Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND, which is due out next year and already claiming all kinds of wondrous big-ups. The first chapter seems to bear them out, so that’s another cracker lined up for next month.
  Back to this month and another female writer, Deborah Lawrenson, whose THE ART OF FALLING was a terrific read. Set in the present day, but driven by a parallel narrative from WWII (Italy this time, rather than Greece), it’s the story of a woman on a quest to lay some ghosts to rest in order to gift herself the peace of mind she needs to be happy. Lawrenson published TAOF herself, before Random House picked it up and gave it the Big House treatment, and I enjoyed it every bit as much as SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD, which employs a similarly dual narrative, this time steeped in the fictionalised life of a writer who bears a very strong resemblance to Lawrence Durrell, and which I’ve already recommended in these here pages.
  Finally, and for research purposes, I’m about to finish THE RASH ADVENTURER: A LIFE OF JOHN PENDLEBURY by Imogen Grundon, which features a foreword from Patrick Leigh Fermor. Pendlebury was a renowned archaeologist in the period between the wars, a specialist on Egyptian and Minoan culture. His life came to a premature end on Crete in 1941, when he was shot by German forces as a spy while working with the Cretan resistance while operating under the guise of the island’s ‘honorary consul’. His was a life lived to the full, and he seems to have been the classic kind of post-Edwardian renaissance man, and a superb writer in his own right who played a huge part in making the esoteric science of archaeology accessible to the masses. Grundon is also a beautiful writer, her own descriptive work no less evocative than the liberal sprinklings of excerpts taken from Pendlebury’s letters. All in all, it makes for stirring stuff.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Deborah Lawrenson

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?
A FATAL INVERSION by Barbara Vine (aka Ruth Rendell).

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Charlotte Gray, eponymous heroine of Sebastian Faulks’ wartime novel, for sheer bravery and guts, with a yearly sabbatical as Daisy in THE GREAT GATSBY: how utterly relaxing to be that shallow and careless of others while remaining adored …

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Not who but what: arty picture books of houses in the South of France.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Selling the rights to my fourth novel THE ART OF FALLING to Random House after having published it myself ten months earlier.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
THE STATEMENT by Brian Moore. Hope that counts. I love the way he writes sparingly yet lyrically, as tension builds.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Well, genuinely, I’d like to see THE BIG O make it. With Billy Bob Thornton as Frank.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst: sitting at my desk and realising I’d be better off on a ten-mile run before sad case of Writer’s Bottom becomes irreversible. Best: sitting at my desk for hours playing around with words.

The pitch for your next book is …?
A cycle of interlinked stories set in Provence, exploring themes of age and experience, youth and innocence, reality and imagination - and a cold murder investigation.

Who are you reading right now?
THE LEVANT TRILOGY by Olivia Manning, alongside the biography of Olivia Manning by Neville and June Braybrooke.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Reading – without hesitation.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Evocative, sensuous and derriere-enlarging.

Deborah Lawrenson’s SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD is published by Arrow Books.

A Pleb Writes

The world’s dumbing-down continues apace, and we can but weep. The latest example is Deborah Lawrenson’s novel SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD, a fictionalised version of Lawrence Durrell’s complex love-life during his time on the island of Corfu, which is being marketed without any reference at all to Lawrence Durrell on the basis that the plebs won’t have heard of him. Blummin’ plebs, eh?
  Happily, Ms Lawrenson herself is more than happy to wax lyrical about the inspiration for SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD over at her interweb malarkey, with the gist running thusly:

“Inspired by the writer, poet and traveller Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), this is a novel about love and memory, identity and biography.
  “It sparked into life one gloomy winter afternoon when I rediscovered PROSPERO’S CELL on the bookshelves of a bedroom at the top of the house. Opening it and starting to read was like injecting the grey with vivid blues and emeralds. A richly evocative account of Durrell’s life in Corfu in the 1930s, it was first published in 1945 and purports to be a diary in which he is a serious young writer living blissfully in the sun, deeply in love both with his new wife and with the idea of Greece.
  “Durrell states that PROSPERO’S CELL is a “guide to the landscape and manners” of Corfu but it never quite becomes this. It is a lyrical personal notebook, and what he leaves out is as poignant as what he includes.
  “Its content is almost unrecognisable as the same ground his younger brother, the zoologist Gerald, covers in his famous Corfu book MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS, in which ‘Larry’ lives with the family (which he never did) and is the ‘diminutive blond firework’ by turns pompously literary and hilarious.
  “And by the time he wrote PROSPERO’S CELL, Lawrence and his first wife Nancy had separated. He was already sadder and wiser, and living in wartime Egypt with Eve Cohen who would become his second wife.
  “I was intrigued. Further researches and a reading of several biographies soon revealed a complex and contradictory character - and a further two wives. His work, over a period of nearly sixty years - most famously in The Alexandria Quartet - was concerned with duality: love and hate; truth and fiction; memory and misinterpretation. And running through it all, the transfiguring effect of time …
  “Durrell aficionados might be disconcerted by the way I’ve played fast and loose with his chronology, compressing and altering his travels and his wives’ biographies to give an impression of the author’s life without providing in any way an accurate portrayal. In this, the book has more in common with his fictional characters, his use of dualism and reinterpretation, than with real people. “All these writers [in my books] are variations of myself,” he said a few years before he died. So, on one level, Julian Adie is another fictionalised version of Lawrence Durrell: what he might have become if certain events had taken place …”

  Incidentally, Deborah tells us that the Folio Society is publishing a new edition of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet this month, the introduction to which can be found here …