Launch: TROUBLE IS OUR BUSINESS at No Alibis

I’m hugely looking forward to my annual pilgrimage to No Alibis in Belfast, where we’ll be conducting the Northern Ireland launch of TROUBLE IS OUR BUSINESS (New Island) on Friday evening. If you’re in or around Belfast that evening, we’d love to see you there. The details:

Fri 25th November 6.30pm,
No Alibis, 83, Botanic Avenue, Belfast

An evening of chat about Crime Fiction on the Emerald Isle with Declan Burke, John Connolly, Louise Phillips and Others

Thrilling, disturbing, shocking and moving, Trouble Is Our Business: New Stories by Irish Crime Writers is a compulsive anthology of original stories by Ireland’s best-known crime writers.

Patrick McGinley, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Colin Bateman, Eoin McNamee, Ken Bruen, Paul Charles, Julie Parsons, John Connolly, Alan Glynn, Adrian McKinty, Arlene Hunt, Alex Barclay, Gene Kerrigan, Eoin Colfer, Declan Hughes, Cora Harrison, Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville, Jane Casey, Niamh O’Connor, William Ryan Murphy, Louise Phillips, Sinéad Crowley, Liz Nugent.

Irish crime writers have long been established on the international stage as bestsellers and award winners. Now, for the first time ever, the best of contemporary Irish crime novelists are brought together in one volume.
Edited by Declan Burke, the anthology embraces the crime genre’s traditional themes of murder, revenge, intrigue, justice and redemption. These stories engage with the full range of crime fiction incarnations: from police procedurals to psychological thrillers, domestic noir to historical crime – but there’s also room for the supernatural, the futuristic, the macabre. As Emerald Noir blossoms into an international phenomenon, there has never been a more exciting time to be a fan of Irish crime fiction.

Reviews:

‘This collection can be confidently recommended to anyone who reads any type of crime fiction. They will find something to tease and tantalise their inner detective.’ – The Irish Times

‘Trouble Is Our Business is one of the essential literary fiction compendiums in Irish publishing this year.’ – Sunday Independent

‘A crime anthology certain to keep you on the edge of your seat’ – The Sunday Times

I Want To Live Like Roscommon People*

Boyle in the grand old county of Roscommon isn’t quite my former stomping ground of Sligo in the Northwest, but it’s close enough to my hometown for the Boyle Arts Festival to qualify as a local event for yours truly. I’m hugely looking forward to taking part in the festival, when I’ll be giving a potted history of Irish crime fiction, aka Emerald Noir, and reading a sample or two from my own books. The event takes place at King House at 1pm on Saturday, July 26th.
  Meanwhile, and if you’re a dedicated fan of Irish crime writing, Sinead Crowley will be talking about her debut novel, CAN ANYBODY HELP ME?, on Sunday, July 27th. For all the details of the festival – which incorporates literature, film, comedy, classical music, drama and poetry – clickety-click here …

  *With apologies, obviously, to all Pulp fans.

All Decs On Hand

There has been, over the years, an occasional confusion between (or conflation of) Declan Hughes and Declan Burke, which will surely only be worsened by the fact that our current offerings – ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE and CRIME ALWAYS PAYS, respectively – are both published by Severn House as part of the ‘Celtic Crime’ imprint. I can only speak for myself, of course, but I’m quite pleased about this, because it means that I’m occasionally mistaken for a very good writer indeed.
  Anyway, in the interests of adding to the confusion, I’ll be appearing with Declan Hughes at the Dalkey Book Festival next month. The gist, according to the good people at the DBF, runs thusly:

There has never been so much interest in Irish crime writing and we are thrilled to have two of the best here for you this year.
  In an event called ‘Emerald Noir’, two of Ireland’s best crime writers, Declan Hughes and Declan Burke, take you through their favourite writers and discuss their own books in the context of current Irish crime fiction.

  The event takes place at The Masonic Hall at 12.30pm, Saturday 21st June. For all the details, including how to book tickets, clickety-click here …

The French Detection Connection

Here’s an intriguing proposition for those of you with academic ambitions. ‘Clues: A Journal of Detection’ is taking submissions for an issue themed ‘Tana French and Irish Crime Fiction’, with the gist running thusly:

Tana French and Irish Crime Fiction
(theme issue of ‘Clues: A Journal of Detection’)
Guest editor: Rachel Schaffer (Montana State University Billings)
Submission Deadline: August 1, 2013

The number of Irish crime writers and books currently in print is a clear indication that the popularity of Emerald Noir, aka Celtic crime and Hibernian homicide, has never been greater. Ireland—with its economic boom and bust, child abuse scandals, and growing problems with drugs, gangs, and murder—offers a wealth of material to authors looking for rich veins of mystery and crime themes to mine. One of the most popular of these Irish writers is Tana French. Her popularity and critical acclaim have grown with each book, but, to date, there have been few serious academic studies of her work in print. Therefore, Clues seeks previously unpublished papers about Tana French in particular, as well as about Irish crime fiction and writers in general.

Topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:
  Essays on Tana French or other Irish crime writers, individual or comparative
  Trends in Irish crime fiction
  Comparisons of Irish crime fiction to that of other nations or cultures
  Connections between social, cultural, or economic issues in Ireland and crime
  Connections between Irish history—past, present, or future—and crime
  Connections among Irish identity, stereotypes, or mythology and crime

Submission details
Submissions should include a 50-word abstract and 4–5 keywords, and be between 15 to 20 double-spaced, typed pages (approximately 3,300 to 6,000 words) in Times or Times Roman font with minimal formatting. Manuscripts should follow the MLA Style Manual, including parenthetical citations in text and an alphabetized Works Cited list. Please confirm that manuscripts have been submitted solely to Clues.

Submit essays to Janice Allan, Clues executive editor, at j.m.allan@ salford.ac.uk; inquiries may be directed to Elizabeth Foxwell, Clues managing editor, at clues@elizabethfoxwell.com.

  For more details, click on the ‘Clues: A Journal of Detection’ website.

Emerald Noir: The Purple Patch

As in sport, where you’re only as good as your last game, so it runs in books: every book needs to be judged on its own merits. That said, and staying with the sporting clichés, form is temporary but class is permanent. Which is a roundabout way of saying that the next couple of months should prove something of a purple patch for the Irish crime novel.
  For starters, John Connolly’s THE BURNING SOUL is published on September 1st, and at this stage you could pretty much stake the mortgage on Connolly providing one of the top quality private eye offerings of the year. Quoth the blurb elves:

Randall Haight has a secret: when he was a teenager, he and his friend killed a 14-year-old girl. Randall did his time and built a new life in the small Maine town of Pastor’s Bay, but somebody has discovered the truth about Randall. He is being tormented by anonymous messages, haunting reminders of his past crime, and he wants private detective Charlie Parker to make it stop. But another 14-year-old girl has gone missing, this time from Pastor’s Bay, and the missing girl’s family has its own secrets to protect. Now Parker must unravel a web of deceit involving the police, the FBI, a doomed mobster named Tommy Morris, and Randall Haight himself. Because Randall Haight is telling lies . . .

  A month later, Stuart Neville publishes his latest novel, STOLEN SOULS. A mere whippersnapper by the standards of John Connolly’s prodigious output, Neville’s third offering is rumoured - by Neville himself, as it happens - to be a more taut and streamlined affair that takes its cue from classic ’70s thrillers. To wit:

Detective Inspector Jack Lennon of the Belfast Police has watched the developing cooperation between Northern Ireland’s Loyalist gangs and immigrant Lithuanian criminals with unease. The Lithuanians traffic women from Eastern Europe and Asia for the Loyalists’ brothels, and they’re all making big money in spite of the recession that has stopped Northern Ireland’s peace boom in its tracks. Lennon has a more intimate knowledge of the city’s brothels than he’ll ever admit, but the surge in trafficked girls makes him question his lifestyle, especially considering he has his daughter, Ellen, to care for now. When a Lithuanian trafficker turns up dead on Christmas Eve with a shard of glass embedded in his throat, Lennon’s plans to spend the holiday with Ellen are put in jeopardy. The dead man was the younger brother of a ruthless Lithuanian crime boss, Arturas Strazdas, and the young Ukrainian woman who killed him has escaped her captors. Now Strazdas holds the Loyalists responsible and won’t let up until everyone involved has paid. A bloody gang war erupts across the city. Meanwhile, somewhere in Belfast, Galya, the Ukrainian girl, is running for her life, alone and scared, clinging to the darkest corners as the frozen streets empty for the holiday. Galya’s captors told her how the police deal with illegal immigrants, that she is a criminal in a foreign land, and the law will not help her. And now she is also a murderer. She cannot be discovered by anyone, not the cops, not the gang who held her prisoner. There is only one person she can go to: a man she met on her first day as a prostitute, a friend who gave her a crucifix and an address to run to if she ever got away. He’d saved four prostitutes before her, he’s told her, and she can be his fifth. But when Galya arrives at the address, she finds something more evil than she had ever imagined.

  Another third novel offering comes courtesy of Ava McCarthy, whose HIDE ME arrives towards the end of October, and features her series heroine, hacker specialist Harry Martinez, going undercover in the Basque region of Spain. Quoth the blurb elves:

Security expert Henrietta ‘Harry’ Martinez has arrived in beautiful San Sebastian, birthplace of her Spanish father. But she’s not here to explore her roots. She’s been hired by glamorous casino boss Riva Mills to expose a scamming crew, headed by ruthless conman Franco Chavez. When the crew’s expert hacker is brutally murdered, Harry goes undercover as his replacement. As she infiltrates the dangerous criminal organization, she begins to understand that Chavez’s schemes reach far beyond the casino sting. Suddenly trapped in a deadly global underworld that encompasses international terrorism, organized crime and drug cartels, Harry learns that when you play this game, you play for your life…

  Yet another third novel, BLOODLAND, arrives from Alan Glynn, again on September 1st - we can only hope that the Dark Lord Connolly doesn’t consign Glynn to some dank dungeon for his temerity. Coming in the wake of the critically-acclaimed WINTERLAND, and surfing the name recognition that comes with having your debut novel adapted into a movie starring Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro, Glynn’s BLOODLAND sounds epic, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

A tabloid star is killed in a helicopter crash and three years later a young journalist is warned off the story. A private security contractor loses it in the Congo, with deadly consequences. In Ireland an ex-prime minister struggles to contain a dark secret from his time in office. A dramatic news story breaks in Paris just as a US senator begins his campaign to run for office. With echoes of John Le Carré, 24 and James Ellroy, Alan Glynn’s follow-up to WINTERLAND is another crime novel of and for our times – a ferocious, paranoid thriller that moves from Dublin to New York via Central Africa, and thrillingly explores the legacy of corruption in big business, the West’s fear of China, the role of back room political players and the question of who controls what we know.

  Lastly, but by no means leastly, and as I mentioned last week, the inimitable Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman releases his NINE INCHES on an unsuspecting public in mid-October. Abandoning for the moment the less-than-intrepid Man With No Name hero of his recent post-modern series, Bateman returns to the iconic and only slightly more intrepid Dan Starkey, about whom the blurb elves have this to say:

Dan Starkey, the ducking and diving hapless investigator, takes centre stage again in this brilliant new novel by the master of comic crime. Radio shock-jock and self-styled people’s champion Jack Caramac is used to courting controversy - but when his four-year-old son is kidnapped for just one hour, and then sent back with a warning note, he knows he may have finally gone too far. Jack has no choice but to turn to Dan Starkey for help. Recently chucked by his long-suffering wife Patricia, Dan has finally given up on journalism and is now providing a boutique, bespoke service for important people with difficult problems. Dan resolves to catch whoever kidnapped Jack’s son - and very soon finds himself in the middle of a violent feud between rival drug gangs, pursued by jealous husbands, unscrupulous property developers and vicious killers as the case spirals ever more out of his control ...

  So there you have it: private eye novels, rollicking thrillers, conspiracy epics, and comedy thrills ‘n’ spills. Buckle up, folks, it could be a bumpy ride …

Emerald Noir: A Gem By Any Other Name

As flagged elsewhere on these pages, Val McDermid presented a rather fine BBC4 radio programme (produced by Robyn Read) on the phenomenon of Irish crime writing yesterday morning called ‘Emerald Noir’, although the demands of the lunatic asylum known as CAP Towers meant that I didn’t get to hear it until this morning, courtesy of the BBC iPlayer.
  A comprehensive romp through modern Irish crime writing it is, too, with Val covering the influence of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’, the boom-and-bust of the Celtic Tiger, and the crime novel as a Protestant art form. There are even shades of Winston Churchill, as Val compares Ireland to the Balkans as a place unable to contain the history bursting from its seams. Contributors include Ruth Dudley Edwards, Brian McGilloway, Colin Bateman, Declan Hughes, Eoin McNamee, Tana French, Stuart Neville, No Alibis owner David Torrans, and one Declan Burke, who is the editor of an - allegedly - ‘influential’ blog on the subject.
  John Connolly fans may be a tad disappointed that the Dark Lord doesn’t feature in person, but never fear - virtually everyone quotes John Connolly at some point.
  Meanwhile, Ruth ‘Cuddly’ Dudley Edwards has the good grace to mention DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS, the collection of essays, interviews and short stories by Irish writers on the subject of Irish crime writing in the 21st century, which will be published by Liberties Press next month. Nice one, Ruth.
  Elsewhere, Gerard O’Donovan - author of THE PRIEST - had an interview with Val McDermid in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph on the same subject. Quoth Gerard:

“Writers such as Tana French, whose Dublin-based psychological thrillers have topped the US fiction charts, and Stuart Neville whose soul-searing tale of a former terrorist haunted by his victims, THE TWELVE, have been swamped in critical acclaim. Writers such as the pioneering Ken Bruen and Colin Bateman, Declan Hughes, Gene Kerrigan, Declan Burke, Niamh O’Connor, Brian McGilloway and, dare I say it, myself are attracting not just local but worldwide attention. The Irish economy may be on its knees, the political system in tatters, confidence at an all-time low. But in crime fiction at least Ireland has never been so vibrant.”

 For the rest of the feature, clickety-click here ...
  So there you have it. Irish crime fiction: the cat’s meow, the bee’s knees or the dog’s bollocks? YOU decide.

Emerald Noir: Val McDermid Speaks

The doyenne of British crime fiction, Val McDermid (right), turns her steely gaze on the Irish crime novel next Tuesday, March 8th, in a BBC radio programme entitled ‘Emerald Noir: The Rise of Irish Crime Fiction’. Quoth the BBC blurb elves:

Peace in Northern Ireland and the economic boom and bust in Southern Ireland have led to a recent rise in crime fiction.
  Val McDermid looks at the way real life violence has been dealt with in the work of authors including Tana French, Eoin McNamee, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Stuart Neville and Declan Hughes. We meet David Torrans - whose bookstore in Belfast has been fictionalised in Colin Bateman’s series of crime novels. Declan Burke - author of the blog Crime Always Pays - takes us on a tour of Dublin locations featured in crime novels from the modern Docklands offices which inspired Alan Glynn’s novel Winterland to the hotels and shops of 1950s Dublin featured in the crime fiction of Booker winner John Banville - who writes under the name Benjamin Black.
  Val asks whether the Noir novel is a protestant art form and hears how writers are trying to find new villains in a place where violence has - until recently - been part of everyday life.
  Producer: Robyn Read.
  Tuesday, 11:30 on BBC Radio 4

  Nice. It’s entirely serendipitous that the programme airs in advance of the publication next month of DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS: IRISH CRIME WRITING IN THE 21st CENTURY, edited by one Declan Burke (Liberties Press), a collection of essays, interviews and short stories by Irish crime writers which includes all the names mentioned above, and also John Connolly, Ken Bruen, Arlene Hunt, Alex Barclay, Adrian McKinty, Gene Kerrigan, Jane Casey, and many more. GREEN STREETS will be published next month, and will be the subject of a New York University symposium on the rise of the Irish crime novel at the end of April, more of which anon.
  Finally, for the day that’s in it, here’s a rather fine review by David Park in the Irish Times of Adrian McKinty’s new offering, FALLING GLASS. The gist runs thusly:

McKinty is a streetwise, energetic gunslinger of a writer, firing off volleys of sassy dialogue and explosive action that always delivers what it has promised the reader. The story is skilfully constructed, and the pace is always full throttle forwards. There is one violent scene in Mexico involving a chainsaw that is definitely not for the squeamish, but it would be unfair to think of the author as someone exclusively reliant on external action. There is, for example, an interesting psychological exploration of Killian’s re-embracing of his half-forgotten roots and the cultural values of the Traveller community. Even the dark figure of Markov, the Russian hitman, gets layered and lightened with some psychological subtleties that are the product of his relationship with his partner, Marina, and experiences of the war in Chechnya that continue to haunt him.

  For the full review, clickety-click here …

A Very Irish Noir

Some whippersnapper called Otto Penzler has been making predictions about the ‘Future Masters of Noir’, and of the five tipped for the top (or bottom, if you’re being noir-ish about it), two are Irish. Not bad going, chaps. The two are Ken Bruen and Stuart Neville (right), authors of the recently published THE DEVIL and COLLUSION, respectively, and while I’m certainly not going to quibble about the inclusion of either, you’d have to question the bit about Ken Bruen being a ‘future’ master of noir. Which is to say, Sir Kenneth of Bruen has been writing some of the most provocative noir for the best part of 20 years now - although Otto does hedge his bets a little there, suggesting that Ken is already a master, even if the mainstream has yet to embrace his bleak, twisted vision of the world.
  Anyhoo, it’s all kinds of good news for both men, and well deserved to boot. For the full list of Penzler’s ‘Masters of Noir’, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, Stuart Neville had a piece on ‘Emerald Noir’ published in the Sunday Tribune last weekend, and a fine piece it is too, with Stuart waxing lyrical on the origins of the current boom in Irish crime writing and invoking names such as John Connolly, Declan Hughes, Adrian McKinty, Colin Bateman, Ken Bruen, Arlene Hunt, Gene Kerrigan and FL Green. Quoth Stuart:

“Perhaps the blossoming of home-grown crime fiction can be better explained by a change in attitude, rather than circumstance. Having more money in our pockets, however fleetingly, was a symptom of change, rather than a cause. The simultaneous transformations of the Celtic Tiger and the peace process went hand-in-hand with a deeper, more permanent shift that occurred on this island: Ireland, north and south, began to look outward rather than inward. With that change came a greater willingness, particularly in the Republic, to discuss and confront the uglier aspects of its own history, such as state and church abuse against children.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Foxing Clever

The Thought Fox - aka Faber editor Katherine Armstrong - posts a piece on her blog titled ‘In Praise of Emerald Noir’, in which she offers a list of the ‘25 best writers of Emerald Noir’. It’s a comprehensive list - so comprehensive, in fact, that it even includes yours truly - with proceedings kicking off thusly:

“I grew up in Northern Ireland in the eighties and nineties, which was probably not Judith Chalmers’ first point of call for Wish You Were Here but still, it was home. As most people will remember, Northern Ireland during that period was an interesting place to be if you were particularly keen on scaring yourself silly. The television most evenings would have talk of car bombs, murders, knee-cappings and other assorted terrorist activities. Going to school in Belfast every day on the train you became used to having to get a replacement bus service due to bomb scares. For anyone who wanted to skip class the various alphabetical groups bent on death and destruction could guarantee that no one would question your excuse for being late – there always seemed to be a bomb scare somewhere.
“Throughout the difficult years there were books that focused on the Troubles – you know the stuff – where an English spy from British Intelligence would invariably fall in love with a Catholic girl who would betray him to the IRA and he’d be executed. But there was a huge gap in the market for really good home grown crime fiction. Over the past twenty years or so there has been an emergence of what has become known as Emerald Noir. It’s gritty, it’s realistic, and contemporary Ireland – both north and south – is a whole lot better for it …”

  For the full list of 25 Irish crime writers, clickety-click here …
  Naturally, and given the nature of such things, even a list of 25 Irish crime writers is going to miss out on a few names that really should be in there. John Connolly doesn’t make the cut because he doesn’t set his novels in Ireland, but Armstrong’s roll-call of honour doesn’t include Julie Parsons, Paul Charles, Liam O’Flaherty, Garbhan Downey, Ava McCarthy, Peter Cunningham, Hugo Hamilton, Rory McCormac, Vincent McDonnell, Cora Harrison, or - shock, horror! - Twenty Major. On the upside, it’s nice to see that the list does include Eilís Dillon, Eugene McEldowney, Jim Lusby, Andrew Nugent and Vincent Banville, all of whom tend to get overlooked in discussions about Irish crime writing.
  Perhaps understandably, the list is also short on recent debutants, such as Niamh O’Connor, Kevin McCarthy, Gerard O’Donovan, Gerry O’Carroll and Rob Kitchin. There are also a number of mavericks who deserve a plug, like TS O’Rourke, John Kelly, Patrick McGinley and Seamus Smyth, all of whom were writing Irish crime fiction when it was neither popular or (even less) profitable.
  So there you have it. Any names that should be on that list, but aren’t? You know what to do …