Black In The Pink

The New York Times has a bit of a jones for Irish crime scribes these days. Yesterday I mentioned Marilyn Stasio’s review of Conor Fitzgerald’s THE FATAL TOUCH; not to be outdone, Janet Maslin weighed in with a fine appreciation of Benjamin Black’s latest, A DEATH IN SUMMER. The gist runs thusly:

“Benjamin Black, whose fourth book is A DEATH IN SUMMER, started out as the escapist alter ego of John Banville, who won the Man Booker Prize for his 2005 novel THE SEA. But his Black persona has been such a success that he looks increasingly like the Superman to Mr. Banville’s more literary Clark Kent. His books about the dour Irish pathologist named Quirke have effortless flair, with their period-piece cinematic ambience and their sultry romance. The Black books are much more like Alan Furst’s elegant, doom-infused World War II spy books than like standard crime tales.” - Janet Maslin

  Mind you, Ms Maslin does report that Mr Black does succumb “to the occasional fit of verbosity. At one atypically overripe moment the author manages to use “miasmic,” “ether,” “teeming,” “bacilli,” “succumb,” “writhe” and “tender torment” in the same sentence.”
  I have to say that I didn’t notice that particular sentence when I read A DEATH IN SUMMER, which I enjoyed very much, not least because there’s a palpable sense of John Banville settling into the Benjamin Black persona and - whispers, now - actually enjoying it. For my take on the novel, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, Eithne Shortall in the Sunday Times (no link) brought us the news that the Benjamin Black novels are to be made into a TV series for the BBC, to be filmed in Dublin by Tyrone Productions and Element Pictures. To wit:

Banville … set out to create a detective series for television, and when the project was shelved he converted it into a novel. Nine years later it is about to complete a roundabout journey to the screen. […] Each of the first three Black books will be turned into a 90-minute drama, and if they prove successful the fourth instalment will also be adapted.

  So that’s Black in the pink, and Banville in the black. Nice.

Wicka Wicka Wild West

I’ve no idea what it is they’re putting in the water over there these days, but the west coast of Ireland, if what we’re seeing on screen is to be believed, is going to hell in a hand-basket. RTE’s acclaimed TV series about a lone rural cop, ‘Single-Handed’, recently had its fourth run; Ken Bruen’s THE GUARDS was adapted as ‘Jack Taylor’, starring Iain Glen; now comes ‘The Guard’, which this week opened the Sundance Festival World Dramatic Competition. To wit:

‘The Guard’ is a thriller-comedy set on the west coast of Ireland where Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson) is a small-town cop with a confrontational personality, a subversive sense of humour, a dying mother, a fondness for prostitutes, and absolutely no interest whatsoever in the international cocaine-smuggling ring that has brought FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) to his door.

The film is written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, brother to playwright and film director Martin McDonagh (‘The Lonesome West’ et al, ‘In Bruges’), who doubles up here, along with Don Cheadle, as executive producer. The big attraction for me here is Brendan Gleeson, though, an immensely likeable and always watchable actor, and by all accounts a thoroughly nice bloke to boot. Variety likes him too, with the gist of its Sundance review running thusly:

“… it’s Gleeson who rightly owns the screen as a beer-swilling, crotch-grabbing, Derringer-firing crusader with one hell of a filthy mouth to go along with his heart of gold,” while the director John Michael McDonagh’s “filmmaking crackles with energy.”

According to Element Pictures, the movie will be getting a summer release here in Ireland. Should be a cracker.