The Hunger Games

Those of you being remorselessly gnawed by the economic downturn might find Ed O’Loughlin’s latest offering, ALL YOU CAN EAT, a little (koff) close to the bone – it’s a zombie novel that functions as a satire on / allegory for the world we live in now, at least here in Ireland. Quoth the blurb elves:

They have no remorse or loyalty. They’re insatiable. They don’t hear what you say to them while they’re eating you alive. And then there’s the flesh-eating zombies ...
  A dark and pulpy satire of our dog-eat-dog society by Booker-nominated author Ed O’Loughlin.

  Ed O’Loughlin’s debut novel, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and his second, TOP LOADER, was an anarchic comedy about a Middle East conflict set in the future.
  For ALL YOU CAN EAT, Ed is offering to sell off the naming rights of various characters. “With e-books, you can change names – and everything else – as you go along, even after they are published, which offers interesting formal opportunities,” says O’Loughlin. For more on what sounds like an intriguing e-publishing development, clickety-click here …

Happy Birthday-Ish, Holden Caulfield

I had a piece in the Irish Times during the week, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the publication of JD Salinger’s CATCHER IN THE RYE, which featured contributions from authors Sarah Webb, Ed O’Loughlin, Eoin McNamee and Belinda McKeon. It opened up a lot like this:

“If you really want to know about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap …” - J.D. Salinger, ‘The Catcher in the Rye’

Routinely hailed as ‘the great American novel’, J.D. Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ offers a story that is on the face of it modest in ambition and scale. First published on July 16th, 1951, it follows the disaffected Holden Caulfield on his perambulations around New York city late in December, 1949, in the wake of his expulsion from an upmarket prep school. Intended by Salinger for an adult readership, Holden’s intensely first-person tale of his experiences amid the snobs and ‘phoneys’ of his social set has fired the imagination of generations of adolescents ever since.
  “God, I loved that book,” says Sarah Webb, herself an author of young adult novels, and who first read ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ at the age of 15. “I read it in one all-night sitting, gobbling up every page. The next night I turned back to Chapter 1 and started all over again. I remember slowing down towards the end, distraught to be coming to the end. I wanted the reading experience to last forever.”
  Holden Morrisey Caulfield first appeared in the short story ‘I’m Crazy’, which was published in Colliers in 1945 (a previous version had been accepted in 1941 by The New Yorker, but not published, as it was thought too bleak in tone). A reworked version of ‘I’m Crazy’ would eventually provide the material for the first chapter of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, establishing Caulfield’s expulsion from Pencey Prep, and also the unfussy, stream-of-consciousness first-person narrative that seems to bypass the critical faculties to speak directly to the teenage heart.
  The novel sells roughly 250,000 copies per year, with total sales topping 65 million …

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: TOPLOADER by Ed O’Loughlin

In taking the so-called ‘war on terror’ to its illogical conclusion, Ed O’Loughlin has written a very funny satire on war and its makers. Set in and around the ‘Embargoed Zone’, a walled-off territory in which an entire population is branded as terrorist, the story incorporates many elements familiar to anyone who is au fait with modern warfare and its reporting: embedded journalists, remote-control murder, realpolitik espionage, and a hapless people demonised, brutalised and pounded to despair.
  Had O’Loughlin played his strokes with a straight bat, as he did in his debut novel, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize, then it’s likely the novel would have been a powerful and worthy novelisation of contemporary conflicts from around the globe. By setting the story in the near future, however, and giving it a blackly comic tone, O’Loughlin offers a hellish vision that combines a dystopian fatalism with a ghastly surrealism.
  The result is comedy with dum-dum crosses carved into its punchlines, so that the horror explodes whenever O’Loughlin targets a new victim. Chief among these is Flint Driscoll, a blogger-journalist who blithely broadcasts his prejudiced opinions on the terrorists of the Embargoed Zone without ever planting his army-issue boots on the ground. Driscoll is aided and abetted by the conniving Captain Smith, his lackey Daddy Jesus, and their inept superior, Colonel White. Grotesques to a man, none of the characters would be out of place in CATCH 22 or DR STRANGELOVE as they set about manipulating the political situation for the sake of their personal advancement.
  While the novel is laugh-out-loud funny, however, it’s in exploring the lives of the oppressed inhabitants of the Embargoed Zone that O’Loughlin lifts his novel out of the realms of audacious farce, by investing the story with poignant and profound truths about the human condition. By contrast with Flint Driscoll, O’Loughlin has had his boots on the ground in a similar situation, when he served as Middle-East correspondent for Australia’s ‘The Age’ newspaper. Thus we get heartbreaking detail amid the headline-grabbing scenes of carnage caused by the latest rocket-firing drone, when “dozens of kites wavered red and white and gold in the last rays of sunshine, each the focus of a child’s tethered dream.”
  Meanwhile, the daily, grinding struggle for life’s basic requirements experienced by Joseph, the teenage Flora and all the other inhabitants of the Zone is compared by O’Loughlin in one memorable analogy as that of bulls in a bullring, as Flora explains to a soldier who has found himself lost behind enemy lines:

  ‘There’s a lot of money in bullfighting …There’s power, too. That’s why the Roman emperors spent all their money on circuses …’
  ‘That’s the most cynical thing I’ve ever heard.’
  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  Cynical, funny, harrowing and revelatory, TOPLOADER is one of the most inventive Irish novels of recent times. - Declan Burke

  This review first appeared in the Sunday Business Post.

  While we’re on the topic of TOPLOADER, one of its protagonists, blogger-cum-journalist Dr Flint Driscoll (right), offers his insights into contemporary international events via his website, blowback.net. Here, for example, is Dr Flint on the assassination - alleged - of Osama Bin Laden:

“So that’s it then. We finally got the Big O. Victory is at hand. It’s time to bring the boys and girls back home from Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo and Germany. President Barack Hussein Osama finally gets Uncle Sam some genuine pay-back for 9/11, and we can close this long and painful chapter in America’s gilded history.
  “Wrong, people. Wrong.
  “I have yet to see any convincing proof that whoever they – and we don’t know who “they” really are – killed in Pakistan last night was really Osama Bin Laden. We don’t even know that a raid took place. Sure, they can show us some grainy photos of a crashed helicopter, but what does that prove? Mysterious black helicopters crash all the time in the woods near my house in Virginia. The difference is that this time the UN aren’t covering it up.
  “These are ruthless, Godless, cunning people, who will stop at nothing to cling to their dream of global jihadi liberal domination. If you can fake a long-form Hawaii birth certificate, which uses a funny type of half-laminate paper, and has a Jack Lord watermark embedded against the grain, then this sort of thing is child’s play. Wise up, my friends: remember, these are the same people who faked two entire baseball World Series in 1992 and 1993, so the Toronto Blue Jays could appear to win. As if.
  “So what really happened in Abbottabad last night? Well, I’ve been working the blogosphere all night, and I’ve come up with a pretty solid picture of the real turn of events. According to security sources whom I can’t name here, for technical reasons, the principle target of the “raid” was an Osama Bin Laden lookalike, who has been kept “on ice” by the national Democratic leadership and its Pakistani/Al Qaeda allies since shortly before the 2001 terror atrocities. With President Osama’s re-election campaign only eighteen months away, the time was ripe to cash in on this particular chip. Cue ticker-tape and hoopla. Hail to the Chief.
  “So where is the real Osama Bin Laden, you ask me? Where he’s always been. Alive and well and living in Paris, like Khomeini before him, ready to go active again whenever the anti-American global elite needs him. A guy like that is far to useful to kill for real.” - Dr Flint Driscoll

  For more in the same vein, clickety-click here …

If The Name Fitz, Wear It

I was away last weekend, engaged in fifth wedding anniversary-related shenanigans, so I didn’t get to see Saturday’s Irish Times’ books pages until yesterday. Some very good stuff there was, too, starting with Arminta Wallace’s piece on how crime fiction set in Italy (albeit courtesy of non-Italian writers) is about to steal the limelight away from its Scandinavian counterpart. Among the writers interviewed was Conor Fitzgerald, whose THE FATAL TOUCH is published round about now. Quoth Conor:

“The Scandinavians have a good society with a nasty underbelly. In Italy it’s almost the reverse; they know they have a bad society. Usually detective fiction is about setting the world to rights, so if you place it in Italy you’ve got a problem. Crimes do not get solved; court cases never finish.”

  Wallace, by the way, also tells us that ‘Conor Fitzgerald’ is a pseudonym, and reveals the name of the author’s father, who is a famous Irish poet (hint: it’s not Seamus Heaney). For the scoop, clickety-click here …
  Elsewhere, Ed O’Loughlin’s very fine sophomore novel, TOPLOADER, was reviewed by David Park, with the gist running thusly:

“O’Louglin’s writing is consistently impressive in his descriptions of the imposition of military might and its human consequences. He is also skilled at capturing the nightmarish, terrorised topography inside the zone and the conditions that the inhabitants have to endure.”

  Park was less impressed with the comic aspects of the novel, which is a little bit odd, given that TOPLOADER is a comic novel in the vein of DR STRANGELOVE - dark and tragic, certainly, but always attuned to the absurdities of the ‘war on terror’. For what it’s worth, I read TOPLOADER with a sloppy grin pasted to my face throughout. If you remain unconvinced that the comic novel can be simultaneously funny and heartbreaking, then I recommend you read TOPLOADER.
  For the rest of the review, clickety-click here …
  Finally, Max McGuinness reviewed Hadrien Laroche’s THE LAST GENET: A WRITER IN REVOLT, which details Jean Genet’s political activism in the latter stages of his life, when he went out to bat for organisations such as the Black Panthers, the PLO and the Red Army Faction. I went through a phase of gorging on Jean Genet some years ago now, and enjoyed the vicarious wallowing in the gutter that reading Genet offers, although I wouldn’t be in any great hurry to re-read any of the novels. That said, I have a biography, THE IMAGINATION OF JEAN GENET by Joseph McMahon, sitting on the shelves, and I might be tempted to crack it open if I ever again get to the point where I have the luxury of simply reading for fun.
  Anyway, for the review of THE LAST GENET, clickety-click here …

Once More, From The Top Loader

Ed O’Loughlin came storming out of the gates a couple of years back with NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, which garnered a 2009 Booker Prize longlist nomination, not bad going at all for a debut novel. His forthcoming tome, TOP LOADER, sounds a right rip-snorter, and is described in the jacket copy as ‘A darkly comic masterpiece in the tradition of M*A*S*H, CATCH-22 and SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5’. Crikey. Quoth the blurb elves:

Spying inside the Embargoed Zone is an expensive business, not to say risky, and Agent Cobra wants his wages in full. But his down-at-heel spymaster can only offer payment in kind - and the first thing he finds in an unattended storeroom. And so both men are sucked into the mysterious Toploader project, a race to retrieve a deadly secret from inside the world’s first - and best - walled-off terrorist entity. Also caught in the crossfire are a resourceful teenage girl, a gung-ho reporter, a hapless drone-pilot and at least one very unfortunate donkey. Toploader is about to make their lives a lot more dangerous, and an awful lot more bizarre …

  NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND was given something of an edge given that former journalist O’Loughlin reported from Africa for the Irish Times for some years. He also worked as the Middle East correspondent for Melbourne’s The Age, which suggests that that yon ‘Embargoed Zone’, aka ‘the world’s first - and best - walled-off terrorist entity’, may or may not be based on the Gaza Strip.
  Either way, if NOT UNTRUE is any guide, O’Loughlin can write the hell out of a book, and ‘a darkly comic’ tale set in the Middle East sounds like a hell of a prospect. I’ll keep you posted as to how it goes …

The Irish Book Awards: And The Winner Is …

The Irish Book Awards shortlists were announced last night, with the details coming courtesy of Irish Publishing News, and congratulations to all nominees, and particularly RTE’s Ryan Tubridy, whose JFK IN IRELAND was nominated in three categories, despite being published on October 28th - the day the awards shortlists were announced. Which isn’t bad going, and reflects incredibly well on the (koff) perspicacity of the judging panel. Not that I begrudge Tubbers his nominations, I like him a lot as a radio presenter, and he’s done more than his fair share to promote Irish books over the years. Still, nominations in three categories, for a book published on the day of the award nominations? It wouldn’t be like the Irish Book Awards folk to be chasing the RTE imprimatur, would it?
  Anyhoo, onto the Ireland AM Crime Fiction Book of the Year category, in which six novels are represented. To wit:

CITY OF LOST GIRLS by Declan Hughes
TIME OF DEATH by Alex Barclay
FAITHFUL PLACE by Tana French
THE MISSING by Jane Casey
DARK TIMES IN THE CITY by Gene Kerrigan
THE TWELVE by Stuart Neville

  Given the nature of such lists, and the fact that last year was the strongest yet for Irish crime writing, there’s bound to be a bit of ‘Oi, but where’s …?’ etc. And, while it’s hard to quibble with most of the nominations, there are some notable absentees. No Ken Bruen, for starters. No Colin Bateman. No Adrian McKinty, Arlene Hunt or Brian McGilloway, all of whom published the finest novels of their career to date in the last twelve months. There’s also no PEELER by Kevin McCarthy, which was one of the best Irish crime novels of 2010, nor THE HOLY THIEF by William Ryan (which was nominated for a CWA award), and ditto for Conor Fitzgerald’s very fine THE DOGS OF ROME. McCarthy, Ryan and Fitzgerald are debutant writers, of course, but they don’t show up in the Best Newcomer of the Year either, although it’s good to see that Niamh O’Connor’s IF I DON’T SEE YOU AGAIN does make a showing there, as does Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE.
  The glaring absentee for me, though, is Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND, which has a strong claim on being the best Irish crime novel of the last five years, let alone the last twelve months. Doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to me, but then what would I know, I’m just blinded by bitterness that they didn’t take my Kindle-only publication of CRIME ALWAYS PAYS under consideration. Boo, etc.
  Elsewhere, it’s nice to see that Ed O’Loughlin’s NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND made the Best Newcomer list, although it’s more than disappointing that it’s not nestling in the Irish Novel of the Year category. I’ve only read two in that category, Paul Murray’s SKIPPY DIES and Colm Toibin’s BROOKLYN, and while SKIPPY DIES is a terrific book, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND is by any measure superior to the vastly overrated BROOKLYN. Incidentally, and while we’re on an Alan Glynn-related rant, WINTERLAND deserved its place in the Irish Novel of the Year category as well as the Crime Fiction one.
  Staying with the Best Newcomer award for a moment, does anyone seriously believe that Amy Huberman’s debut offering was a better novel than Peter Murphy’s JOHN THE REVELATOR? Like, seriously?
  Elsewhere, Derek Landy’s SKULDUGGERY PLEASANT: MORTAL COIL turns up in the Children’s Book of the Year (Senior) category, and here at CAP we send out all kinds of good vibes to Benji Bennett, whose self-published ADAM’S PIRATE TREASURE made the Junior category.
  Finally, how did Ruth Dudley Edwards’ epic AFTERMATH: THE OMAGH BOMBING (which won the CWA non-fiction prize) not manage to make it into the Non-Fiction Book of the Year category? What were the judges thinking of? Too busy ensuring that Amy Huberman’s HELLO HEARTBREAK was squeezed into two categories, perhaps, in order to provide a little glamour for the awards ceremony?
  Two words, folks: FOR. SHAME.

Famous Last Words

I had a piece published recently in the Irish Examiner called ‘Famous Last Words’, the idea being that writers nominate their favourite last lines from a novel. Declan Hughes, Tana French, Val McDermid, Eoin Colfer and Adrian McKinty were among the contributors, and it went something like this …

Famous Last Words

It’s one of the most understated finales of any novel, and yet the last lines of To Kill a Mockingbird, delivered after Atticus Finch consoles his daughter Scout in the wake of the Boo Radley affair, have an enduringly quiet resonance. “He turned out the light and went into Jem’s room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”
  To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s classic coming-of-age tale, we asked a number of authors to tell us their favourite last lines from a novel.


  “‘Murder doesn’t round out anyone’s life except maybe the murdered’s, and sometimes the murderer’s.’
  ‘That may be,’ Nora said, ‘but it’s all pretty unsatisfactory.’” - The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
  Declan Hughes, author of City of Lost Girls: “I like this because it sums up the complex, open-ended nature of the new type of crime fiction Dashiell Hammett was writing, where justice and order were not restored at the end.”


  “Poor Eric came home to see his brother, only to find (Zap! Pow! Dams burst! Bombs go off! Wasps fry: ttsss!) he’s got a sister.” - The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
  Niamh O’Connor, author of If I Never See You Again: “To the very last line, The Wasp Factory manages to just keep the surprises coming.”


  “Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.” - Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
  Adrian McKinty, author of Fifty Grand: “If the world were not a fallen place someone would help the blind man. And perhaps, eventually, someone will.”


  “ … I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like made and yes I said yes I will Yes.” - Ulysses by James Joyce
  Patrick McCabe, author of The Holy City: “With no contest, it’s Molly at the end of Ulysses. It makes a perfect circle of the narrative.”


  “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” - Middlemarch by George Eliot
  Ruth Dudley Edwards, author of Aftermath: The Omagh Bombing: “Middlemarch is the wisest novel I know, and its ending is a wonderful tribute to all those fine but forgotten people to whom the world has owed so much down the generations.”


  “I laid my cheek against his hand and breathed with him until the last breath. ‘You done good, kid,’ I whispered, when he was still at last.” - O is for Outlaw by Sue Grafton
  Ava McCarthy, author of The Courier: “Snappy sound-bites are all very well, but they usually just deliver an intellectual impact. For me, the last line should capture the core emotional change that has occurred at the very heart of the story. An emotional ingredient is far more enduring.”


  “When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter’s mother in turn; and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.” - Peter Pan by JM Barrie
  Eoin Colfer, author of And Another Thing: “This is a brilliant sentence at once romantic and cutting, which gets straight to the heart of how young people are and I think that was J.M Barrie’s gift; he understood children.”


  “I leave this manuscript, I do not know for whom; I know longer know what it is about: stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.” The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.
  Brian McGilloway, author of The Rising: “In a book about books and how we respond to them, where objects such as a Rose have become so symbolic that they lose all meaning, the final phrasing is beautiful.”


  “Are there any questions?” - The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  Val McDermid, author of The Fever of the Bone: “I like novels that leave space for my own imagination, and I like the confidence and wit of Atwood’s ending.”


  “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. But the old man didn’t have to be. He could lie quiet in his canopied bed, with his bloodless hands folded on the sheet, waiting. His heart was a brief, uncertain murmur. His thoughts were as gray as ashes. And in a little while he too, like Rusty Regan, would be sleeping the big sleep.
  “On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn’t do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver Wig, and I never saw her again.” - The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
  Ed O’Loughlin, author of Not Untrue & Not Unkind: “I love the way it aches.”


  “Enough.” - Rabbit at Rest by John Updike
  Aifric Campbell, author of The Loss Adjustor: “Updike closes his four volume ‘Rabbit’ masterpiece with one word, and with this masterful stroke, he captures the joy and pain and beauty that is at the heart of all endings for readers and writers alike: we cannot bear to say goodbye, but it is time to let go.”


  “My dearest, said Valentine, has the count not just told us that all human wisdom was contained in these two words - ‘wait’ and ‘hope’?” - The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
  William Ryan, author of The Holy Thief: “That last line is a neat encapsulation of the thousand odd pages that precede it, and a perfect finish to a book I love reading.”


  “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” - The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  Deborah Lawrenson, author of Songs of Blue and Gold: “It’s just magical.”


  “He told me what he was going to do when he won his money then I said it was time to go tracking in the mountains, so off we went, counting our footprints in the snow, him with his bony arse clicking and me with the tears streaming down my face.” - The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe
  Tana French, author of Faithful Place: “This line captures everything that’s punch-in-the-gut powerful about the whole book - that expert mix of black humour, vortexing insanity and terrible sadness.”

  This feature first appeared in the Irish Examiner.

Stop, You’re Killing Me

The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman had a nice piece over on the Guardian Book Blog today (Thursday, 3rd), in which he waxed lyrical about the comic crime novel. The gist runneth thusly:

“ … humour in crime fiction is nowadays a rare bird. I was struck by something my friend, thriller writer John Connolly – 7m sales and counting – said at a writing workshop, that comic crime fiction, with rare exceptions, is never going to sell and will forever be frozen out of the major prizes. The Last Laugh Award that my latest book – The Day of the Jack Russell – has picked up is a fantastic honour, but to put it in perspective, it was announced at Bristol’s international convention on crime fiction at the same time as those other biggies, the e-Dunnit Award for best ebook first published in the UK and The Sounds of Crime Award for best abridged and unabridged audiobooks. All three were vastly overshadowed by the concurrent announcement of this year’s Crime Writers’ Association Dagger awards shortlist, which is not noticeably troubled by anything likely to put a smile on your face. John Connolly has a point …
  “Which means, bizarrely, that if you want to find something new and challenging, comic crime fiction is now the place to go. British authors like Robert Lewis, Charlie Williams, Malcolm Pryce, Chris Ewan, Declan Burke and Len Tyler are at the vanguard of a new wave of young writers kicking against the clichés and producing ambitious, challenging, genre-bending works. They may not yet be hogging the bestseller lists but at least they’re adding some wit and balls to a moribund genre. What they’d all probably say, if I could be bothered asking them, is that people who read their books love them, it’s getting them to pick them up in the first place that is the difficulty.”

  Now, yours truly is a native-born and horny-handed son of the soil of Eireann, as some of you know and some of you even care. But I’m more than willing to overlook the fact that I’m now - according to Bateman, at least - a subject of Queen Elizabeth II, bless her cotton socks, on the basis that he reckons I’m (a) comic, (b) challenging, (c) loved and (d) young. Said last - young! - being by far the most important attribute, obviously. Take that, mid-life crisis!
  Bateman, by the way, will be appearing at the Gutter Bookshop next Wednesday, June 9th, where he’ll be waffling at some length about the paperback release of the award-winning THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSELL. Click on the pic top right for all the details …
  Elsewhere, Joe Long, a good friend of this blog, and of Irish crime writing in general, forwards me on an article from the Irish Echo celebrating the rise and rise of Irish crime writing. Quoth Joe:

“John Connolly is the pied piper,” said Joe Long, a graduate student at New York University. Ten years ago, he met Connolly at a reading in New York and they became firm friends. Soon, Long, who has lived all of his 58 years in Manhattan, was hooked on Irish crime fiction. “There’re all great,” he said. “It’s not just good crime writing; it’s good Irish writing.”

  For more, clickety-click here. But be warned, it mentions me a bit …
  Actually, I’m having a pretty good week, I have to say. I got a nice email from someone running an on-line book club asking if I’d be interested in BAD FOR GOOD being their July pick, this despite the fact that BAD FOR GOOD has yet to be published. I don’t mind telling you, I was pretty flattered …
  Speaking of which: we (aka Team Laughably Impossible Dream, aka the group of crack optimists doing their damnedest to inflict the demented wibblings of yours truly on an unsuspecting public) got a little nibble on said BAD FOR GOOD this week, and from a rather impressive source. Protocol demands that I gloss over the details; suffice to say that the house publishes two of the finest crime writers of all time. Again, I’m pretty flattered. And not only that, but it transpires that there are two other houses displaying ‘serious’ interest. All of which amounts to a hill of beans, of course, but hey - only one of those beans needs to be magic, right?
  On top of all that, it looks like it’s going to be a sunny Bank Holiday, for once. I’m off to the Flat Lake Festival in Monaghan on Saturday June 6th, there to hook up - all going well and Sat Nav permitting - with Brian McGilloway and Ed O’Loughlin, the idea being to (a) promote the bejasus out of two of the finest contemporary Irish authors, (b) chat about THE INFORMER and THE ASSASSIN, the ur-noir novels of Liam O’Flaherty and (c) wonder aloud to no great practical purpose about whether contemporary Irish novels are engaging with the political realities of Ireland today in the way O’Flaherty rather bravely engaged with his. If you’re in the general vicinity of Monaghan, we’ll be yakking it up in the Butty Barn at 2.45pm: do drop by for a heckle or two.
  For the full Flat Lake Festival line-up - which includes Anne Enright, Alexei Sayle, The Brad Pitt Light Orchestra, Eoin McNamee, Dermot Healy, Shane McGowan, Eugene McCabe, greasy-pig wrassling and generalised debauchery - clickety-click here …

And JC Arose And Spoke To Many

Off with yours truly to the launch of John Connolly’s THE WHISPERERS last Wednesday evening, which was held in the very pleasant environs of the Gutter Bookshop in Dublin’s Temple Bar. Being a perverse kind of Dark Lord, JC refused to read from THE WHISPERERS (clickety-click here for the prologue), instead offering a snippet of his current project, which appears to be a follow-up to THE GATES, which is all sorts of good news. The snippet in question featured four of the seven dwarves (that’ll be the recession, then), some of whom were in mortal danger of being tossed due to their unnecessary aggressiveness, plus a boy-band, a crumbling castle and a pop video shoot, and suggests that the book will be a very funny one indeed.
  As always, JC was besieged by fans afterwards in an impromptu signing session; as always, and because the man seems incapable of signing a book without engaging in banter, the signing session took at least an hour. It’s hard to judge these things qualitatively, but from the sounds of it, JC was in even better form by the end of it all than he was at the start, and he was plenty lively at the start.
  (By the way - for those unfortunates still yet to escape from Direland, John Connolly features on The Late, Late Show tonight (Friday). If you miss it, the RTE iPlayer can be found here …)
  Meanwhile, lurking with intent in the vicinity were Arlene Hunt and Declan Hughes, and Kevin McCarthy and Ed O’Loughlin. Bob Burke was there too, apparently, but I managed to miss him. Boo. Bob Johnstone, the owner of the Gutter Bookshop, seems to be a nice bloke, and we can only wish him well with the new venture. Opening a bookshop in these straitened times, in Ireland, is either a case of counter-intuitive genius or noble lunacy. Either way, Bob gets our vote. Apparently he gets the thumbs up from The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman too, for lo, Bateman is due to do an event at the Gutter Bookshop next month. When I know more, you’ll know more …
  In other updates - Kevin McCarthy publishes his debut, PEELER, next month, a potentially fascinating tale of a murder investigation set in Ireland in the 1920s, in which the IRA and the Black-and-Tans chase the same killer. It’s on my bookshelf and due a reading in the immediate future. Meanwhile, Ed O’Loughlin, who got himself a Booker long-list nomination for his debut, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, had the news that his second novel, a dystopian sci-fi, will be published next year. Nice. Elsewhere, Arlene Hunt’s latest, BLOOD MONEY, you should know all about, while Declan Hughes’ new offering, THE CITY OF LOST GIRLS, is an absolutely tremendous read, even by his standards, and a whole new gear for one of the best crime writers around. Truly, it’s a terrific novel. Hughes fans are in for a real treat. He should be launching said tome next month too. Apparently there’s a review in Sunday’s New York Times …
  While outside for a crafty smoke, I also met Helen, who confessed - in public! - to having read THE BIG O. She also said very nice things about the Princess Lilyput, thus making herself a new friend for life, whether she wants one or not. I thank you kindly, ma’am.
  And as if all that wasn’t nice enough, the lovely Margaret Ward and the equally lovely people from Hodder Stoughton were good enough to promise me some tasty titles in the near future, one being the new Tana French, FAITHFUL PLACE, the other being David Mitchell’s eagerly anticipated THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET. Woot, etc.
  Finally, I decamped to the nearby Porterhouse in the company of Kevin McCarthy and Ed O’Loughlin for a very pleasant couple of hours chat about books ‘n’ suchlike over a few dry Pimms. Unfortunately, I was on the non-alcoholic Pimms, having been to the dentist on Tuesday in the throes of man-agony, there to discover I was suffering from an infection of an abscess. Picking up some super-strong antibiotics from the chemist (I’m immune to Penicillin, for some bizarre reason), the chemist warned me not to drink booze on top of the pills, which is something I usually do for the extra buzz, even if I hadn’t planned on drinking. ‘Of course I won’t,’ says I. ‘No,’ says she sternly, having caught a glint in my eye, ‘I’m serious - you’ll end up in hospital if you drink alcohol even two days after the course finishes.’ Now, staying off the booze shouldn’t be a huge problem, except my brother’s stag weekend takes place in Galway this weekend. And now I’m curious. Like, seriously - how strong can gum-healing antibiotics really be?
  There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?

  Lately I have mostly been reading: THE CITY OF LOST GIRLS by Declan Hughes, 61 HOURS by Lee Child, and THE GOOD MAN JESUS AND THE SCOUNDREL CHRIST by Philip Pullman.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND by Ed O’Loughlin

To mark Ed O’Loughlin’s terrific achievement in being long-listed for the Booker Prize with his debut novel, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, here’s purple prose-tinged excerpt from yours truly’s review from earlier this year:

‘Has anyone seen the other half of this baby?’ he asked. ‘We mustn’t count it twice.’
  It’s a moment to make even the most hardened reader of gory novels wince, but O’Loughlin is not in the business of sensationalism. Simmons bears witness to what seems at times a daily litany of tragedy, but does so in a clipped, understated fashion. The novel has been compared with the works of V.S. Naipaul and Graham Greene, but there’s a measure of Ernest Hemingway here too. The prose is muscular and delicate, the mark of a writer who knows his own strength and is sure of his aim. In the chaos of a jungle fire-fight, ambushed by the latest in an interminable series of half-naked rebel forces, Simmons observes a jeep make “a slow and sedate turn towards us, part-sheltered by the hulk of the armoured car … its indicator piously winking.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here.
  For a Q&A with the man, clickety-click here.

Down These Green Streets A Man Must Go …

They say a week is a long time in politics, but a day can be a hell of a time in the writing business too. In the last 24 hours or so, I’ve had one novel rejected by an American publisher; interest expressed in a different novel by another American publisher; and strong interest expressed by an Irish publisher in the non-fiction project DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS. I’ve also moderated a panel of Aifric Campbell, Ed O’Loughlin and Peter Murphy for the Dublin Writers’ Festival, and had my plans for world domination thwarted by Amazon / Kindle (you can’t publish to Kindle unless you have a U.S. bank account - boo). Meanwhile, I’m lightly redrafting a novel I’d kind of forgotten about – this is the one I propose to upload to Kindle – and finding myself pleasantly surprised with it. I might even post the first chapter up hereabouts, just for some feedback … because I really don’t have enough going on right now.

Methinks I need a holiday, folks ...

Semantics, She Wrote

One of the benefits of running a books blog is that you get sent free books all the time, which is absolutely terrific. I received a copy of Aifric Campbell’s THE SEMANTICS OF MURDER last year, when it was first published, but – the demands on everyone’s reading time being what they are – I simply didn’t get around to reading it. Happily, circumstance has forced my hand, as I’m moderating a panel at next week’s Dublin Writers’ Festival, doing my best not to get myself blinded as Aifric Campbell, Ed O’Loughlin and Peter Murphy dazzle their audience.
  Anyway, being the consummate pro that I am (koff), I read THE SEMANTICS OF MURDER this week, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Nice to have a right good novel-of-ideas to mull over, the kind that you’d read in two days if only you weren’t breaking off to stare out the window every five minutes going, ‘Hmmmm, that’s interesting …’. Example thereof:

“The truth was that creative writers were more qualified to explain humanity than psychiatrists and philosophers. This was what Levi the chemist had eventually realised, that he would have to resort to fiction and poetry to communicate the horror of Auschwitz. The psychologists and psychoanalysts who had staked out their territorial claim knew no more than the great novelists …” – Aifric Campbell, THE SEMANTICS OF MURDER

  I’m currently a third of the way through Peter Murphy’s JOHN THE REVELATOR, and enjoying that hugely too. There’s a beautiful narrative voice that puts me in mind of Pat McCabe’s THE BUTCHER BOY, and a whimsical note that suggests a tincture of Flann O’Brien. All of which is most excellent …
  As for Ed O’Loughlin’s NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, clickety-click here …
  That panel, by the way, takes place next Wednesday, June 3rd, at 6pm at the Project Arts Centre. Tickets are €12 / €10. Of which, sadly, I don’t see a red cent. Boo …
  In other Dublin Writers’ Festival News, the impossibly gorgeous Arlene Hunt moderates a panel composed of Val McDermid and Kate Summerscale on Sunday, June 7th, at 5pm at The Abbey, which is quite posh for crime writers, but there you go. Val McDermid is plugging her latest novel, whatever that happens to be, while Kate Summerscale will be talking about THE SUSPICIONS OF MR WHICHER, which I’ve yet to read but I’m hearing great things about … Again, tickets are €12 / €10, which is a bargain for The Abbey. Plus, you get Arlene Hunt, and very possibly Val McDermid on a feminist rant. What more could any red-blooded male want?

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Ed O’Loughlin

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 BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Mr Kurtz.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Viz comics.

Most satisfying writing moment?
The joke which only you get, and which you subsequently, regretfully, cut out of the final draft.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
DRACULA by Bram Stoker.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE THIRD POLICEMAN by Flann O’Brien.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Don’t know yet – I’m still new.

The pitch for your next book is …?
The desperate race to retrieve a weapons-grade washing machine from inside a near-future dystopia.

Who are you reading right now?
Anne Enright.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write – if God appears to you, you’re a prophet, and prophets make top dollar in the self-help market.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Online discounts available.

Ed O’Loughlin’s debut novel is NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND by Ed O’Loughlin

When his newspaper editor dies, a photograph in one of the man’s personal folders sets Owen Simmons, the Dublin-based narrator of NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, reminiscing about his time as a correspondent in Africa, when he reported from South Africa, Zaire and Sierra Leone, among other hot-spots. One of a loose grouping of correspondents and photographers who roamed the continent in pursuit of the latest war, atrocity or military coup, Simmons has the detached tone and sharp eye for detail of a good journalist, even when writing about Beatrice, the photographer he falls for with despite his professional and personal cynicism.
  Ed O’Loughlin reported on Africa for eight years as a correspondent for ‘The Irish Times’, and here his debut fiction rings with a rare authenticity. As they pick their way through a rat-infested refugee camp massacre in search of ‘colour’ for their feature stories, for example, one of the journalists calls out to his colleagues. “‘Has anyone seen the other half of this baby?’ he asked. ‘We mustn’t count it twice.’”
  It’s a moment to make even the most hardened reader of gory novels wince, but O’Loughlin is not in the business of sensationalism. Simmons bears witness to what seems at times a daily litany of tragedy, but does so in a clipped, understated fashion. The novel has been compared with the works of V.S. Naipaul and Graham Greene, but there’s a measure of Ernest Hemingway here too. The prose is muscular and delicate, the mark of a writer who knows his own strength and is sure of his aim. In the chaos of a jungle fire-fight, ambushed by the latest in an interminable series of half-naked rebel forces, Simmons observes a jeep make “a slow and sedate turn towards us, part-sheltered by the hulk of the armoured car … its indicator piously winking.” Later, at a conference in Durban, he observes: “By the time I’d finished reading, the tide in the foyer had receded, stranding little pools of gossipers and the odd scuttling newcomer.”
  O’Loughlin, who has also reported on the Middle East, might have been expected to write a political treatise disguised as a novel. But while there is at one point a brilliantly sustained piece of ice-cold vitriol directed at the professional charity operatives, who “spend years dodging from one short-term contract to the next, chasing the funds as compassion flits from disaster to disaster”, the novel is almost perversely blinkered in the way it follows the fortunes of its characters without ever stepping back from the fray to make grand statements about the whys and wherefores of the conditions and situations they find themselves in. The journalists are there to dispassionately observe and report back to the outside world, and Simmons mimics their apparently callous tones as he records for the reader their words and deeds, very few of which derive from philanthropic or ideological motives.
  In another writer’s hands, the tale of last-minute evacuations, jungle ambushes, flights into and out of cities on the brink of fall or liberation, and discreet but passionate affairs, would have resulted in a full-tilt sprint delivered in breathless prose. Instead, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND offers a meandering and at times deliberately obtuse narrative, one that shuffles and weaves, moving to an odd but quickly addictive rhythm. So much so, in fact, that it’s tempting to believe that O’Loughlin has composed the story in a style that conjures up outsiders’ perceptions of, and prejudices about, Africa. Certainly, having referenced the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, in which Muhammad Ali outfoxed George Foreman in Kinshasa by spreading himself on the ropes and absorbing inhuman levels of punishment before landing a killer blow, O’Loughlin provides a final twist that reveals his tale, and Simmons’ cynical posturing, to be a literary version of Ali’s legendary ‘rope-a-dope’ trick.
  Laced with the blackest of humour, studded with glints of hard-edged poetry, and underpinned by a poisonously cynical mindset that is as repulsive as it is compelling, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND is one of the most powerful debut Irish novels of the last decade.

This review first appeared in the Sunday Business Post