“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Eamonn Sweeney

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

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE by George V. Higgins. Superbly written, tremendous dialogue, perfectly paced, a horde of memorable characters, not a wasted or graceless sentence in it. The gold standard.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
The eponymous protagonist of COCKFIGHTER: musical genius, unlikely babe magnet, sporting gentleman, a soul utterly unfazed by setbacks and troubles. Created by the great and greatly under-rated Charles Willeford.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
He wrote them in a hurry, I read them in a hurry, but I get great pleasure out of the Maigret novels by Georges Simenon. But I always feel relatively virtuous reading anything. If I want to feel guilty I play Missile Command or Galaxian on the computer.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Hearing that my first novel, WAITING FOR THE HEALER, was going to be published.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
OPEN CUT by JM O’Neill. The greatest Irish writer most people have never heard of. This and DUFFY IS DEAD are not just the best London Irish novels ever written but two of the best novels ever written about London. That he’s not much better known is, well, criminal.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE MIDNIGHT CHOIR by Gene Kerrigan. And, on the grounds that the parentage rule has done great good for this country, A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR by Dennis Lehane, whose father comes from over the road in Clonakilty.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The best is the freedom. The worst is the uncertainty. Two sides of the same coin really, I suppose.

The pitch for your next book is …?
DOWN DOWN, DEEPER AND DOWN: Ireland in the seventies, war, sex and corruption, oh baby it was a wild world. Or, if this counts as the current book, the novel I’m working on is called BORDERTOWN BLUES. Pitch: Ireland in the seventies, war, sex and corruption, oh baby it was a wild world.

Who are you reading right now?
The Martin Beck novels by Maj Sjowal and Per Wahloo. Fantastic stuff, THE MAN ON THE BALCONY would be in the runners-up slot behind Eddie Coyle. Sjowall and Wahloo are the Beatles, Henning Mankell is Oasis. I like Oasis, but the original of the species is, to use football parlance, different class.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
A bit unreasonable of the guy, considering I’m one of the declining number of people who still believe in him. Read, I could dictate the books to someone else.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Still getting there.

Eamonn Sweeney’s DOWN DOWN, DEEPER AND DOWN is published by Gill & Macmillan

On Preserving The Status Quo

DOWN, DOWN, DEEPER AND DOWN is the latest offering from one Eamonn Sweeney, a rather cheeky title for a tome about that most benighted of times and places, Ireland in the 1970s. To wit:

The years 1973 to 1985 in Ireland were turbulent, dramatic and unpredictable. It was a different and wild time. A time when strikes meant you couldn’t post a letter for five months, rubbish piled up in the streets and there was no TV to watch. When there were bombs in the streets of the capital, hostage dramas kept everyone glued to their sets and the government kidnapped a hunger-striker’s corpse. When you needed a prescription to buy a condom and when trying to alter this situation could see you threatened with death and your family with abduction. When crowds marched for pirate radio, a pro-life referendum and Viking relics, and against the PAYE system and nuclear power. When a president resigned, a Taoiseach voted against his own government and ministers bugged journalists and their own party colleague. When Garret and Charlie went head to head. When Irish women looked for equal pay and got it, when people risked their jobs and their liberty to help the oppressed in South Africa and the Philippines, when Irish gays took their first steps out of the closet. When the pope came to Dublin and so did heroin and Heffo’s Army.
  Sometimes it wasn’t too different from today. An unprecedented boom led to an economic meltdown, unemployment soared into double figures and the government bailed out the bankers while everyone else suffered.
  DOWN, DOWN, DEEPER AND DOWN is the story of a time when statues moved and the Rats rocked. It is the story of a time not so long ago which is sometimes portrayed as being part of ancient history.
  It is the story of the years that made us what we are today.

  Incidentally, those scholars of the Irish crime novel amongst you might want to take a gander at Sweeney’s debut novel, WAITING FOR THE HEALER, which was published in 1997, long before writing Irish crime fiction was either popular or - koff - profitable. The rather impressive big-ups run thusly:

“Exciting and explosive . . . As though Angela’s Ashes had been crossed with the novels of Cormac McCarthy.”—Colm Toibin

“Written in pungent, slangy prose . . . Part detective story, part coming-of-age novel.”—Erik Burns, The New York Times Book Review

“Sweeney paints his landscape with the eye of a Constable and the ear of a thief . . . [This book] leaves a thirst for more.”—Jonathan Levi, Los Angeles Times

“Sweeney’s language fuses resiual Gaelic lilt with staccato rapster rhythms and obscenities. The MTV generation takes over the Irish novel and makes it startlingly new.”—Entertainment Weekly

“[A] fine first novel . . . filled with the simple comedy of everyday life and warm moments of tenderness . . . hard to put down and hard still to forget.”—Neil Plakey, The Chicago Tribune

“Powerfully, sometimes brutally direct . . . [Sweeney] has fashioned a satisfying tale of quest and comeuppance.”—Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

“Grim, angry, profane, and entirely convincing . . . Paul’s salvation, when it comes, is hard-won and persuasive. Like everything else in this book, it has an authenticity found only in the work of first-rate writers.”—Kirkus Reviews

“In the character of Paul Kelly, Sweeney has carefully traced the psychological parameters of a man divided by pain . . . It is a testament to Sweeney’s authorial skill that Kelly somehow remains a sympathetic character . . . The range of well-drawn lesser characters . . . aid in making the Kelly family’s tragedy feel achingly real.”—Detroit Free Press

  Nice, no? It’s a long, long time since I read WAITING FOR THE HEALER, I might well dig it out for another perusal …