Phew! It’s Tana French’s Scorcher …

I have no idea if the image on your right will be the official cover for Tana French’s BROKEN HARBOUR, but I kind of hope it is - it’s all very dramatic, indeed, and pretty timely in terms of where we are in Ireland, with storm clouds overhead and the waves crashing up onto the shores.
  Anyway, the novel isn’t due until next June (boo), but it will feature a minor character from Tana’s previous / current offering, FAITHFUL PLACE, one Scorcher Kennedy, and the blurb elves have been busy already, with their combined best efforts reading a lot like this:

In Broken Harbour, a ghost estate outside Dublin - half-built, half-inhabited, half-abandoned - two children and their father are dead. The mother is on her way to intensive care. Scorcher Kennedy is given the case because he is the Murder Squad’s star detective. At first he and his rookie partner, Richie, think this is a simple one: Pat Spain was a casualty of the recession, so he killed his children, tried to kill his wife Jenny, and finished off with himself. But there are too many inexplicable details and the evidence is pointing in two directions at once. Scorcher’s personal life is tugging for his attention. Seeing the case on the news has sent his sister Dina off the rails again, and she’s resurrecting something that Scorcher thought he had tightly under control: what happened to their family, one summer at Broken Harbour, back when they were children. The neat compartments of his life are breaking down, and the sudden tangle of work and family is putting both at risk …

  Can’t wait to see this one. And with Conor Fitzgerald’s THE NAMESAKE and Adrian McKinty’s THE COLD COLD GROUND already on the way, Laurence O’Bryan’s THE ISTANBUL PUZZLE due in January, and the perennial offering from John Connolly in the shape of THE ANGELS OF WRATH, 2012 is shaping up to be yet another cracking year for Irish crime fiction …

There’s No PLACE Like Home

Boo. I was under the impression that Tana French’s new novel, BROKEN HARBOUR, was due later this summer, but my ever-reliable moles in the industry (aka a quick squint at Amazon) tells me that BROKEN HARBOUR won’t be appearing until next March.
  That said, there’s a lot of Tana French around at the moment, most of it celebrating the release of the paperback of FAITHFUL PLACE, with Michael Malone leading the charge over at May Contain Nuts. An excerpt runs thusly:

MM: Your bio reads that you spent much of your childhood travelling - has this impacted on your ability to have a “Faithful Place” of your own?

TF: “I think my international-brat childhood played a big part in shaping FAITHFUL PLACE. You’re always fascinated by what’s alien and inaccessible to you, and I’ve always been fascinated by people and places whose roots go deep – people who are part of a centuries-old, tight-knit community where every relationship is shaped by generations’ worth of interaction and knowledge. That’s not something I’ll ever have, and that’s the world where FAITHFUL PLACE is set: the Liberties, an inner-city neighbourhood that’s one of Dublin’s oldest.
  “At the same time, though, Dublin is the nearest thing I’ve got to a home. I’ve lived here since 1990; it’s the only city I know inside out, all the accents, all the short cuts, the sense of humour and the best pubs. In a lot of ways FAITHFUL PLACE is a love song to Dublin, with all its flaws.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, over at Milo’s Rambles, Tana French is interviewed by, erm, Tana French. You know what to do …
  Finally, the inestimable Shotsmag has an intriguing piece, again from Tana, in which she offers her five favourite novels that deal with blood ties. One click and you’re there …

This World Is Mostly Broken

Tana French (right) is having a hell of a year. We’re still not halfway through, and already she’s been nominated for an LA Times Book Award, an Edgar and an Anthony, all for FAITHFUL PLACE. Nice work, with her latest offering, BROKEN HARBOUR, to come in August.
  Tana, of course, makes a virtue of pulling a minor character from a previous novel into the spotlight with her latest, and BROKEN HARBOUR will follow in the stumbling footsteps of ‘Scorcher’ Kennedy, who played a supporting role in FAITHFUL PLACE. So wot’s BROKEN HARBOUR all about then? Quoth Tana, from her contribution to DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS:

“It’s set somewhere out past Balbriggan [north County Dublin], on one of those half-built ‘ghost estates’, one of the quarter-inhabited ones. A family has been attacked and the father and two children are dead, the mother’s in intensive care and Scorcher, who is still not one hundred per cent back in everyone’s good books after making a mess of the case in FAITHFUL PLACE, has been assigned this case with his rookie partner. And of course, it ends up getting tangled up with Scorcher’s own personal life because Scorcher’s got a history with this location in this previous incarnation – before it was an estate, it was a place where people went on their summer holidays. He’s got a bit of history there and what with that and everything else, the case sucks him in.”

  So there you have it: another slice of thoughtful social commentary wrapped up in beautiful prose which excavates the dark secrets of a psychologically complex anti-hero as a metaphor for a broken country. Easy when you know how, eh?

French Kissies From The USA

It’s a karma thing, probably. The dastardly French cheat Ireland out of their place at the World Cup finals in South Africa, and then crash and burn to a humiliating first-round exit. Meanwhile, Ireland’s very own Tana French is getting all the good vibes going, particularly from US reviewers. To wit:

“While it is a basic readerly instinct to trust the first-person narrator, especially when he’s a police detective, in Ms. French’s novels, the detective-narrators are as much the sources of mystery and danger as they are bringers of light, order and law to the dark world of crime, and the endings are not tidy returns to peace and order. Those who read for the plot may be disappointed by FAITHFUL PLACE, but those who value psychological complexity and vivid characterization, who aren’t afraid to have their generic expectations turned inside out, who like their thrillers with a strong regional and literary savour, owe themselves the pleasure of Tana French.” - The Washington Times

“Some thriller writers burst onto the scene in a sudden blaze of hype, while others bubble under the level of mass awareness for years before gaining a significant following. Two authors who have been steadily attracting fans—but not much fanfare—are Tana French and Dennis Tafoya. Both are likely only to widen their audiences with their latest work.” - Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal

  Erm, Tom? ‘Not much fanfare’? Do try to keep up …
  Elsewhere, the Courier-Journal had this to say:

“FAITHFUL PLACE is Tana French’s best book yet (readers familiar with IN THE WOODS and THE LIKENESS will recognize this as an incredible feat), a compelling and cutting mystery with the hardscrabble, savage Mackey clan at its heart.”

  Meanwhile, Myles McWeeney at the Irish Independent reckons that the novel is “more a sprawling inner-city Dublin family saga than a thriller in the strictest sense of the word. But that in no way takes away from the power of this enthralling and wonderfully nuanced book. Rosie and Frank’s story, told in flashback, hooks the reader from the beginning, the characters are masterfully drawn, and the author’s ear for Dublin dialogue is pitch-perfect.”
  And here’s Adam Woog in the Seattle Times: “Irish writer Tana French hit the big time with her stunning cop-drama debut, IN THE WOODS and followed it with an equally brilliant book, THE LIKENESS. Both demonstrated French’s gift for merging the best traits of the crime genre with the compassionate insights and nimble prose associated with ‘serious’ literature. A third dazzler, FAITHFUL PLACE, puts Detective Frank Mackey, a supporting actor from THE LIKENESS, front and centre.”
  If you want to hear Tana’s dulcet tones, clickety-click here for an NPR interview conducted by Lynn Neary …
  … and if you fancy reading an excerpt from Chapter One, here’s a flavour courtesy of the New York Times, which kicks off thusly:

My father once told me that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for. If you don’t know that, he said, what are you worth? Nothing. You’re not a man at all. I was thirteen and he was three quarters of the way into a bottle of Gordon’s finest, but hey, good talk. As far as I recall, he was willing to die a) for Ireland, b) for his mother, who had been dead for ten years, and c) to get that bitch Maggie Thatcher.

  Needless to say, Janet Maslin at the NYT gives “Tana French’s expertly rendered, gripping new novel” the thumbs up …
  So there you have it. FAITHFUL PLACE. What are you waiting for?

Come All Ye FAITHFUL

Currently the shining peak of Mt TBR here at CAP Towers, Tana French’s FAITHFUL PLACE has been garnering some tasty reviews, not least from Laura Miller over at Salon.com, where she describes French as ‘the Kurt Gödel of crime fiction’. Excerpts run thusly:

“French’s hypnotic storytelling remains in full force in this novel, despite having shaken off the dreaminess that suffused IN THE WOODS and THE LIKENESS. This is Roddy Doyle territory, an excavation of that particular torture experienced by those who want to break out of a hopeless, working-class world but keep getting sucked back in by the loyalty that is its one redeeming quality. FAITHFUL PLACE is wrenching to a degree that detective fiction rarely achieves: Frank -- a cocky devil who prides himself on his skilful lying and ability to play other people -- gets pulled apart psychologically as he pursues Rosie’s killer, and the reader undergoes it with him. By the end, it’s difficult to distinguish what the real crime is or who committed it …
  “Which is not to say that French doesn’t solve the novel’s technical mystery or that the answer isn’t tightly cinched into her larger themes. Like Kate Atkinson, who has grafted the contemporary novel of manners onto the bones of the detective story in her Jackson Brodie series, French sticks to the genre’s brief while conveying it into new territory. But where the Brodie books are all pretty much the same in tone and subject matter, French does something fresh with every novel, each one as powerful as the last but in a very different manner. Perhaps she has superpowers of her own? Whatever the source of her gift, it’s only growing more miraculous with every book.” - Laura Miller

  All of which is very nice indeed. For the full review, clickety-click here …
  So, the Big Question: Will we be hearing Tana French’s name being spoken in the hushed tones reserved for literary prize winners some day soon? Only time, that notoriously doity rat, will tell …

A Little French Fancy

God bless Tana French and her fanciful notions. Obviously the various prizes and gushings of critical acclaim that accompanied IN THE WOODS and THE LIKENESS have gone to her noggin, because over at the Penguin interweb portal she’s yakking it up about breaking down the ‘ridiculous imaginary barrier’ between mystery fiction and literature. To wit:

Q: Your novels have won critical acclaim, a broad public following, and a well-deserved sackful of awards. What would you still like to accomplish as a writer?

A: “I don’t have a long-term plan. Actually, I still find it hard to think ahead even as far as the end of the book I’m working on-the idea of writing a whole book seems so ridiculously huge that I just focus on the next little section, or I’ll freak myself out. At the moment, I’m working on the fourth book (Scorcher Kennedy, who shows up in FAITHFUL PLACE, is the narrator this time) and my only goal as a writer is to get this one right!
  “On a broader scale, though . . . I hope someday soon we’ll get to the point where “mystery” and “literature” are no longer seen as mutually exclusive. There have always been crime novels that are every bit as beautifully written and as thematically complex as the finest literary fiction, and there have always been literary novels shaped around a crime framework. But there are still a few people (apparently people who’ve never read, for example, the courtroom drama TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD) who have real difficulty with the idea of things not fitting neatly under one label, so they still think of genre fiction and literature as utterly separate, unconnected and unconnectable. More and more crime writers are rebelling against that, and I’d love to be a small part of the force that finally crumbles that ridiculous imaginary barrier.”

  For the full interview, clickety-click here …

O Come All Ye FAITHFUL. Just Not Yet

The faithful patiently (and not-so-patiently) awaiting the third Tana French novel, FAITHFUL PLACE, will have to twiddle yon thumbs a while longer – the novel isn’t due to hit a shelf near you until next July. Boo, etc. The story features Frank Mackey, who was Cassie Maddox’s boss when she went undercover in THE LIKENESS, with Tana describing him thusly:

“He’s a lot of fun to write, because his moral sense isn’t like most people’s. He’s willing to do anything, to himself or to anyone else, in order to get who he’s after. His conscience is not all that developed, and you find out why, in the course of the book. This one spins around family, the way THE LIKENESS spun around identity.”

  Colour us intrigued …