One to Watch: HERE AND GONE by Haylen Beck

You’re likely to be hearing a lot about Haylen Beck over the next few months, the debut author of the psychological thriller HERE AND GONE (Harvill Secker), which will be published in April 2017. To wit:

Harvill Secker has acquired a “heart-stopping” standalone psychological thriller Here and Gone by Haylen Beck. The book, said to appeal to fans of Paula Hawkins and Gillian Flynn, is set to be Vintage’s lead thriller next year and will publish in April 2017. It begins on a desolate road in Arizona where Audra is fleeing her abusive husband in the family car. Her children, Sean and Louise, are buckled up in the back. Desperate not to draw attention, Audra is petrified when she is pulled over by the local sheriff. What happens next is every parent’s worst nightmare: one minute her children were here, the next they were gone.

  So why the big fuss about Haylen Beck on a blog dedicated to Irish crime fiction? Well, as the picture above suggests, ‘Haylen Beck’ is none other than our own Stuart Neville. To wit:

The book is said to mark “a thrilling new direction” for Stuart Neville, for whom Haylen Beck is a pseudonym for novels inspired by his love of American crime writing. A second standalone Haylen Beck novel will be published in 2018.

  Nice work, sir. For all the details, including those of the sale of the film rights option, clickety-click here …
  For more on Stuart Neville, clickety-click here …

Review: SO SAY THE FALLEN by Stuart Neville

A contemporary thriller set in Northern Ireland, SO SAY THE FALLEN (published this week in the US by Soho Crime) opens with Detective Chief Inspector Serena Flanagan arriving at the home of Roberta Garrick to investigate the apparent suicide of her husband, Harry. The evidence suggests that Harry Garrick, a man of very strong religious faith despite losing his legs in a horrific traffic accident some months previously, has taken his own life with an overdose of morphine granules consumed in his nightly pot of yoghurt. Also present is the Reverend Peter McKay, a regular visitor to the Garrick home who has been ministering to Harry. Flanagan is prepared to accept the Forensic Medical Officer’s verdict of suicide, although one tiny detail irritates her – Harry Garrick apparently arranged photographs of his wife and daughter on his bedside table before committing suicide, but from where he would have lain in the bed, he would have been unable to see the photographs properly. Flanagan’s instinct tells her that something is not quite right in the Garrick home, but is her instinct sufficient to persuade her superiors that an investigation is required?
  Serena Flanagan appeared as a supporting character in THE FINAL SILENCE (2014), and became the main character in THOSE WE LEFT BEHIND (2015). A tough but sensitive policewoman, one of Serena’s strengths in THOSE WE LEFT BEHIND was her ability to empathise with both the victims of crime and the reasons why the perpetrators grew up to become violent criminals.
  In her private life, Serena is married to Alistair, and has two children, Ruth and Eli; the demands of her job often cause friction at home, with Alistair particularly worried that the violence in Serena’s professional life will find its way into their home. This fear becomes a reality when their home is invaded near the end of THOSE WE LEFT BEHIND, and Alistair is stabbed whilst the children are downstairs.
  As SO SAY THE FALLEN opens, Serena is struggling with another issue: five years previously, she shot dead a gunman who was pointing a gun at her; but the recent death of the gunman’s getaway driver, who survived a crash and lay in a coma for those five years, has hit her hard. Currently in therapy, Serena also finds that her home life is falling apart: Alistair suffers nightly nightmares as he relives his stabbing, and he wants her to step back from the front-line of policing to take a position in administration. Emotionally estranged from her husband, and with her children taking his part due to her irregular hours and absences from the home, Serena is suffering for the sake of her job she defines herself by:

Without the job, Flanagan thought, what do I have left?
Her family should have been the answer. But even that seemed to be slipping beyond her reach.

  While Flanagan is the main character, much of the story is told through the eyes of the Reverend Peter McKay, a fascinatingly charismatic but vulnerable man. When we first meet him, McKay is comforting the newly widowed Roberta Garrick, but immediately we understand that McKay’s interest in Roberta is rather more than pastoral:

Reverend Peter McKay followed [Roberta], feeling as if she dragged him by a piece of string. Conflicting desires battled within him: the desire for her body, the fear of the room beyond, the need to run. But he walked on regardless, as much by Roberta’s volition as by his own.

  Is it possible that this mild-mannered man of the cloth, a sensitive and thoughtful man – he is, we learn, still mourning the death of his wife a decade previously – colluded to either induce Harry Garrick to take his own life, or else helped to murder him? What we do know is that his wife’s death caused McKay to begin to lose his faith in God:

McKay seldom thought of God anymore, unless he was writing a sermon or taking a service. Reverend Peter McKay had ceased to believe in God some months ago. Everything since had been play-acting, as much out of pity for the parishioners as desire to keep his job.
No God. No sin. No heaven. No hell.
Reverend Peter McKay knew these things as certainly as he knew his own name.

  Faith, or its absence, is a major theme of SO SAY THE FALLEN. The Reverend McKay no longer believes in God, and serves his parishioners out of ‘pity’ for their own delusional faith in God. We quickly discover that Serena Flanagan is also a woman who lacks a faith in God:

Flanagan pictured them both, kneeling, eyes closed, mouths moving, talking to nothing but air. Stop it, she told herself. They need their belief now. Don’t belittle it.

  However, the theme isn’t simply devoted to exposing the consequences of an absence of faith and other religiously-inspired values. Later in the story, giving the sermon at Harry Garrick’s funeral, Reverend McKay talks about Harry’s faith:

‘Because without faith, what do we have left?’
McKay knew the answer to that question. Nothing. Without faith, we have nothing.

  Reverend McKay’s complicated attitude towards faith and its absence is mirrored in Flanagan’s own complicated attitude towards faith. Although she professes not to believe in God, Flanagan does pray:

If Flanagan did not believe, then why did she pray so often? She rationalised it as a form of self-talk, an internal therapy session. Wasn’t that it? Or were those Sunday mornings spent in [churches] so rooted in the bones of her that deep down she believed this nonsense, even if her higher mind disagreed?

  At one point, when Reverend McKay is contemplating taking his own life by drowning himself at a remote beach, he is offered solace by another minister:

‘Chaos or faith,’ she said. ‘It’s one or the other. I know which I prefer.’
‘It’s not a matter of preference,’ McKay said […] ‘It’s a matter of reality. What’s real and what’s just a story to cling to.’

  Flanagan empathises with Peter McKay’s plight; they both have much in common, including their absence of faith. Both of them also define themselves according to their professions, or vocations. At Harry Garrick’s funeral, when the Reverend McKay asks ‘Without faith, what do we have left?’, Serena finds herself agonising over her family:

Without the job, Flanagan thought, what do I have left? […]
Oh God, what do I have left?
I am my job. I am my children. What am I without them?

  Serena and McKay talk about the difficulty of separating their personal lives from their professional lives, and the extent to which their jobs aren’t simply jobs, but vocations which require sacrifice. McKay tells Serena:

‘Then you are your job, your job is you. Same for me.’
‘And I am my family. I need them, even if they don’t need me.’
His fingers tightened on her wrist, a small pressure. ‘Then the answer lies somewhere between the two. It’s like two sides of an arch. One can’t stand without the other.’

  Significantly, Serena explains to her family why her job is so important – not just to her, but because it’s an important job, and people depend on her to see justice done. In this, and much else, Serena Flanagan is emblematic of the strong female protagonists who have come to define crime and mystery fiction over the last decade or so, most notably in Stieg Larsson’s THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2008), Gillian Flynn’s GONE GIRL (2012) and Paula Hawkins’ THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN (2015).
  Not all the women characters are positive role models, however. Roberta Garrick is a classic femme fatale, a throwback to the deliciously dark days of noir:

She still wore her silk dressing gown over her nightdress, red hair spilling across her shoulders. A good-looking woman, mid-thirties. If not beautiful, then at least the kind to make men look twice. The kind teenage boys whispered to each other about, tinder for their adolescent fires.

  Roberta is duplicitous, manipulative, physically aggressive and more than willing to use sex in order to achieve her aims. She is a predator, a sociopath who preys on ‘weak’ men – men ‘weakened’ by their lust for her – in order to gain financial independence. Ultimately we get Roberta’s philosophy on life, a sociopathic amorality that is the purest essence of noir’s classic femme fatales: “Life becomes so much easier when you let go of right and wrong.”
  The clash between Roberta’s amorality and Flanagan and McKay’s yearning for certainty provides a fascinating subtext to a novel that is a richly nuanced exploration of faith and vocation. SO SAY THE FALLEN is Stuart Neville’s seventh novel, and he becomes a more sophisticated, intriguing and subtly provocative author with each passing book. ~ Declan Burke

  SO SAY THE FALLEN is published by Soho Crime.

Review: THE NIGHT GAME by Frank Golden

Frank Golden’s second novel, The Night Game (Salmon Publishing), is set in a fog-choked New York at winter’s end. It opens with Mary walking home from work one evening, and sensing danger in the air. Oddly, Mary is rather fatalistic about the prospect: “She accepts the reality of something malevolent about to possess her.” When Mary gets home, she discovers that a man has left yet another threatening phone-call on her messaging service, one promising that he will ‘come and get her soon’.
  It’s an appropriately creepy introduction to a novel billed as a psychological intrigue, and Mary’s life quickly begins to spiral down into fear, paranoia and crippling self-doubt. Why does the NYPD cop, Gerry Keaney, behave so bizarrely when he comes to investigate the threatening call? Might Mary’s ex-husband David, whom she left due to ‘mental cruelty’, be trying to terrify her, or has he even worse in mind? Can Mary even trust her friend Sheila, who comes to stay with Mary to help her over this difficult period, but who has sinister secrets of her own to hide?
  These are all potential plot developments in a conventional psychological thriller, but The Night Game is by no means a conventional novel. Frank Golden is also an artist, filmmaker and poet, and the story is told in language that is as rich and dense as the fog that shrouds proceedings throughout. As Mary walks home that first evening, “The sloot bellow of a distant foghorn gutters in the darkness,” and Mary “ … feels the freedom in occlusion, the draped secrecy of befogged streets, the cling and obfuscation of the particle world.”
  This is not, however, language for its own sake. The vividly imagined storytelling is latticed with allusion, metaphor and double meaning, all of which become increasingly apt as Mary’s psychological condition is revealed. She’s an ‘alternate’, a woman with disassociative identity disorder who is entirely conscious of – and indeed, actively encourages the development of – the multiple personalities she inhabits at various stages throughout the story.
  The ‘domestic noir’ sub-genre of psychological thrillers thrives on the emotional intimacy between its protagonists, most notably in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and SJ Watson’s Before I Go To Sleep. In The Night Game, however, Frank Golden offers a fascinating twist on the conventions. Mary is every bit as ambiguously shape-shifting a character as her nemesis, but despite her apparent vulnerability she’s also equally dangerous: here the hunted is as potentially lethal as the hunter, and Mary – who just so happens to keep ‘a malicious little knife’ in her cutlery drawer – has no intention of playing the passive victim.
  The tension derived from Mary’s gradual metamorphosis results in a compelling tale that delves deep beneath the skin of the psychological thriller to explore unusually complex motivations. The story plunges into the dark gore of the human psyche, detailing brutal violence, abusive sex and harrowing self-harm. Indeed, certain passages demand a strong stomach, and there are times when it feels as if Golden is almost daring the reader to glance away, for the sake of decorum, from Mary’s self-torturing agonies.
  There are a number of improbable narrative segues (although such developments, it should be said, are fully in keeping with the nightmarish tone), and Golden’s emphasis on the psychological rather than the thriller means that the story occasionally veers into extended dialogues on therapy and disassociative identity disorder that tend to stall the story’s impetus. For the most part, however, The Night Game is a challenging, transgressive and gripping read, a chilling portrait of one woman’s personal hell. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Interview: Sheila Bugler

The author of HUNTING SHADOWS and THE WAITING GAME, Shelia Bugler (right) is interviewed over at the Words With Jam ezine. An excerpt:

“As someone with a particular interest in flawed female characters, I’d love to have written any one of Gillian Flynn’s marvellous novels. Or anything by Megan Abbott – I am a huge fan of her work. I recently read This Dark Road to Mercy by Wiley Cash and was in awe for days afterwards. It’s a stunning novel. Tana French’s latest The Secret Place is another brilliant piece of crime fiction. If I could ever write a book that compares to any of those authors, I’d be really happy.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Review: Gone Girl (16s)

Adapted by Gillian Flynn from her phenomenally bestselling novel, Gone Girl (16s) opens with Nick Dunne reporting the disappearance of his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), from their family home in North Carthage, Missouri. Signs of a struggle suggest that Amy has been abducted, but Nick’s odd behaviour leads police detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) to make Nick the prime suspect. A conventional tale to open with, Gone Girl very quickly starts to twist, turn and loop-the-loop: Flynn and director David Fincher have modified the novel’s narrative structure but otherwise the movie remains faithful to the source material, embroiling Nick – who is, of course, nowhere as innocent as he pretends – in a wonderfully baroque tale that is part revenge thriller, part lurid psychological dissection, and part ‘domestic noir’. Pike and Affleck are superb in the lead roles, not least because both are required to play ambivalent characters who become increasingly nasty in what amounts to a blizzard of revelations and volte-face turns – the story pulls few punches about the worst aspects of both male and female behaviour – while Dickens, Patrick Fugit and Carrie Coon provide strong support. Overly long for a thriller at 149 minutes, the movie is nevertheless full value for virtually every moment (the last ten minutes or so are unnecessarily tacked on), and Fincher and Flynn further offer a fascinating variety of storytelling techniques – Nick’s first-person voice-over, the flashbacks courtesy of Amy’s diary, the distorting prism of media overkill – to tease out the truth of what really happened to Amy Dunne. It’s not perfect by any means, but Gone Girl is an intensely gripping thriller that offers one of the most fabulously entertaining femme fatales of the past two decades. ***** ~ Declan Burke

This review first appeared in the Irish Examiner.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Lisa Alber

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?
This may sound perverse, but I’d love to channel the darkness that burbles around inside Gillian Flynn. She’s wicked! Have you seen photos of her? Looks like she bakes pies for homeless people. Any of her novels will do: SHARP OBJECTS, DARK PLACES, or GONE GIRL.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Fictional characters go through too many hardships and conflicts before their happy endings. I’m too lazy for all that. There’s gotta be a sidekick out there who lives a charmed life and is only around enough to support the hero. That’s more my speed. Anyone got any ideas for me?

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
DA VINCI CODE-type thrillers are my guilty pleasures because I love all that Catholic Church conspiracy stuff. I also like pseudo-scientific symbology stuff that incorporates our greatest myths into the story lines. I just finished a thriller centred around the Amazons. Fun stuff.

Most satisfying writing moment?
The “a-ha.” You know when you’re writing along, maybe it’s not going well, but you’re slapping down the words anyhow (knowing you’ll have a helluva rewrite later), and then somehow, you lose sense of yourself and time and the world around you, and then later you come to and an hour has passed and you can’t remember what you wrote exactly, but you know it’s something grand? Yeah, that. That’s what I love. It’s rare, but the potential is always there. Also, the a-ha moment when you’re writing along and all of a sudden a fantastic idea comes to you out of nowhere -- a plot twist or character revelation -- and you feel so euphoric, the best high ever, that you jump out of your chair and do a little jig that causes your cat to tear out of the room? Yeah, that too.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
I’m still in Irish-crime-novel discovery mode! Some of the obvious recommendations for people like me who aren’t as well-read as they could be are Tana French and Benjamin Black (a.k.a. John Banville) – and you too. Immediate curiosity has me leaning toward checking out Arlene Hunt, Adrian McKinty, Declan Hughes, and Bartholomew Gill (although he’s Irish-American) next.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Benjamin Black’s first mystery, CHRISTINE FALLS, would make a fabulous movie. I picture something stylized, gritty, atmospheric, and filmed in a limited palette (neo-noir Mulholland Drive comes to mind). The way the central mystery about dead Christine slowly circles in on the starring detective’s family baggage is great. Plus, it’s got Catholic Church stuff in it. Like I said above, I can’t get enough of that.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Right now, the worst thing about being a novelist is my need for a day J-O-B. It’s a creative energy sucker, that’s for sure. I struggle to find energy to get the fiction writing in--before work, after work, on weekends. I’m the kind of person who needs long swaths of down time to stay centred and to rejuvenate. The best things are the ‘a-ha’ moments I described above.

The pitch for your next book is ...?
My debut novel, KILMOON, just came out. It’s set in County Clare, the first in a series.

“Family secrets, betrayal, and vengeance from beyond the grave … Merrit Chase is about to meet her long-lost father. Californian Merrit Chase travels to Ireland to meet her father, a celebrated matchmaker, in hopes that she can mend her troubled past. Instead, her arrival triggers a rising tide of violence, and Merrit finds herself both suspect and victim, accomplice and pawn, in a manipulative game that began thirty years previously. When she discovers that the matchmaker’s treacherous past is at the heart of the chaos, she must decide how far she will go to save him from himself—and to get what she wants, a family.”

I’m working on the second novel in the series, for the moment called Grey Man. Things get personal, oh so personal, when a teenage boy dies and disaster hits Detective Sergeant Danny Ahern’s family as a result.

Who are you reading right now?
I’m trying out an author I’ve never read before: James Barney, THE JOSHUA STONE. Another in the realm of guilty pleasures because it features secret government experiments and voodoo science.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I could give up writing if I had to (it’s freaking hard work!), but never reading. Reading goes along with those long swaths of down time I require.

The three best words to describe your own writing are ...?
Atmospheric, multi-layered, and intricate.

KILMOON is Lisa Alber’s debut novel.

Review: TAMPA by Alissa Nutting

Celeste Price, the narrator of Alissa Nutting’s debut novel Tampa (Faber & Faber, €14.99), is a high school English teacher in Florida. Married to a local police officer, Celeste is friendly, helpful and dedicated in her vocation. Respectability personified, she harbours a dark secret: Celeste has made it her life’s work to put herself in a position where she can prey sexually on 14-year-old boys. It’s a chilling tale in many respects, not least because Celeste suffers no crisis of conscience about her deviant behaviour and the effect it might have on the young men she targets, but it’s very difficult for the reader to dislike Celeste herself. Her first-person voice is charming, self-deprecating and witty, the amiable tone drawing the reluctantly complicit reader deeper and deeper into her immorality. There are echoes of Humbert Humbert and Tom Ripley to be heard here, and also Jim Thompson’s charming psychopath Lou Ford (Celeste’s husband is called Ford), but Nutting’s reinvention of the taboo-breaking femme fatale results in a self-determining female protagonist reminiscent of those created in recent years by Gillian Flynn and Megan Abbott. That said, Celeste Price is a unique creation and Tampa is a singular tale. It may well be the most challenging crime novel you’ll read all year. – Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the monthly crime fiction column in the Irish Times. Also reviewed were the latest offerings from Jo Nesbo, Nele Neuhaus and Joe Joyce.

Stranded: French, Quinn Shortlisted For Strand’s Critics Awards

Hearty congratulations to Tana French and Anthony Quinn, the Irish writers who picked up nominations in the Strand’s Critics Awards for Best Novel and Best Debut Novel, respectively. The shortlists were announced yesterday, with the gist of the press release looking like this:

Recognizing excellence in the field of mystery fiction, the Critics Awards were judged by a select group of book critics and journalists, from news venues such as The Washington Post, LA Times, Chicago Sun Times, Associated Press, San Francisco Chronicle, CNN, The Guardian, and several other daily papers.

Best Novel
The Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye (Putnam)
Broken Harbour by Tana French (Viking)
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (Crown)
Defending Jacob by William Landay (Delacorte Press)
Live by Night by Dennis Lehane (William Morrow)

Best Debut Novel
A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash (William Morrow)
The Yard by Alex Grecian (Putnam)
The Expats by Chris Pavone (Crown)
Disappeared by Anthony Quinn (Mysterious Press/Open Road)
The 500 by Matthew Quirk (Hachette)

  Tana French’s BROKEN HARBOUR, of course, won the Crime Fiction gong at last year’s Irish Book Awards, and will very probably turn up on quite a few shortlists this year. On the other hand, Anthony Quinn’s DISAPPEARED hasn’t popped up on many radars on this side of the pond, which makes his nomination all the more impressive. The very best of luck to both writers when the winners are announced – at a cocktail party, no less – on July 9th.

Keep Calm And Carry It Off: Sophie Hannah’s THE CARRIER

I had an interview with Sophie Hannah published in the Irish Times yesterday, to mark the publication of her latest novel, THE CARRIER (Hodder & Stoughton). It opens up a lot like this:

“I’ve always loved rhyming, metrical poetry and mystery stories,” says author Sophie Hannah. “Ever since I discovered Enid Blyton and read the Secret Seven books, I can remember thinking this is what stories should do. They should have a mystery, and why would anyone want to write a story that didn’t have a mystery in it? I’ve never really changed my mind since.”
  Sophie Hannah is a very rare kind of crime author. The daughter of academic Norman Geras and the writer Adèle Geras, she was first published as a poet with the collection Early Bird Blues in 1993.
  “I’ve always loved books, and we were a very book-y family, but no, I don’t think it was always inevitable that I would be a writer,” she says. “I did get very keen on writing at a very young age, though, and throughout my whole childhood and teenage years, writing was pretty much my only hobby. I always wrote, both poems and stories.”
  Those Enid Blyton-inspired stories led to her career as a crime novelist, which began in 2006 with the publication of Little Face, but Sophie has continued to write poetry, and was shortlisted for the 2007 TS Eliot Award for her fifth collection, Pessimism for Beginners.
  In a sense, Sophie herself embodies the apparent contradiction of a poet who also writes bestselling psychological thrillers. Friendly and bubbly before we sit down in the crypt-like surroundings of the Merrion Hotel’s vaults to talk about her current novel, The Carrier, she is icily precise in her diction and choice of words once the interview begins. It’s a matter of respect for the tools of her trade.
  “I read a lot of crime fiction, and while the language is fine and does the job of telling the story, a lot of crime fiction doesn’t have an obvious flair for language,” she says. “It’s perfunctory, but it feels a bit like reading an episode of Silent Witness adapted into a novel, rather than a proper novel. I’d rather read books that aren’t like that, but the thing is that I’m addicted to mystery. So if I read a literary novel by a brilliant writer I often get impatient because not enough interesting things are happening. My ideal is a book that is brilliantly written with a proper, literary use of language, but also with a really gripping plot. That’s why I really like Tana French, or Gone Girl [by Gillian Flynn]. Properly good writers writing crime fiction that obeys all the rules of the genre, but being as original as possible within those rules.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Stephan Talty

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 SILENCE OF THE LAMBS by Thomas Harris. Never been topped.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Sam Spade in THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett or Travis McGee from the great crime series by John D. MacDonald.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
People Magazine.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When you only have forty minutes to write, but three clean pages come rolling out.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST by Stuart Neville. Such a great concept, and beautifully executed.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
IN THE WOODS by Tana French.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst is that you have no one to gossip to all day. Best is freedom.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Abbie Kearney hunts down an escaped serial killer as he takes up where he left off.

Who are you reading right now?
GONE GIRL by Gillian Flynn. Masterpiece.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Please don’t ask me that. Jesus. Read.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Clean and vivid.

Stephan Talty’s BLACK IRISH is published by Headline.

On Bottling The Spirit Of Raymond Chandler

We may not have brought home the proverbial bacon from the Irish Book Awards on Thursday night, losing out in the Crime Novel category to Tana French’s excellent BROKEN HARBOUR, but it’s fair to say that the weekend wasn’t entirely wasted. On Thursday, the Irish Times published a Christmas gifts supplement, in which a number of writers were asked to suggest books as presents. BROKEN HARBOUR was among Marian Keyes’ picks, as was THE LAST GIRL by Jane Casey and GONE GIRL by Gillian Flynn, although she opened up, bless her cotton socks, with SLAUGHTER’S HOUND. To wit:

“SLAUGHTER’S HOUND starts with a body diving from a building and a car exploding, and the action doesn’t let up until the last line. But what sets this novel apart is its tone, which is being called ‘Irish noir’: it’s dead-pan and sardonic, and although it’s often very, very funny, this is a grim and gritty read.” - Marian Keyes, Irish Times

  I was, as you can imagine, absolutely delighted by that - it does ye olde confidence no harm at all to have a writer of Marian Keyes’ calibre say such things.
  In the same section, incidentally, John Connolly picked CREOLE BELLE by James Lee Burke, LIVE BY NIGHT by Dennis Lehane and HHhH by Laurence Binet - with all of which I heartily concur.
  Then, today, the Sunday Times published its annual selection of the year’s finest books, and lo! SLAUGHTER’S HOUND popped up in the ‘standout works of genre fiction’, being the Crime Fiction choice. To wit:

“It takes a writer of rare skill to make modern-day Sligo feel like 1940s California, but Declan Burke has clearly bottled the spirit of Raymond Chandler for SLAUGHTER’S HOUND. When Harry Rigby sees his best friend dive off a building onto his taxi - blowing up a load of grass in the process - the former private eye is launched into a dark, twisting screwball caper of gang bosses, a rich family in the clutches of Nama, a fiery Cypriot beauty, and a very unsympathetic detective.” - Kristoffer Mullin, Sunday Times

  So there you have it. SLAUGHTER’S HOUND, by the way, has just been published in the US and Canada, and has picked up four five-star reviews to date. If you’ve read the book and liked it, and have the time and inclination to say so, I’d really appreciate your review over here. I thank you kindly …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Marian Keyes

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 first book by Nicci French. I think it was called THE MEMORY GAME, it’s a long time since I read it but I remember being awestruck by the subject matter (‘retrieved’ memories of childhood abuse) and all the twists and turns that go with something as unreliable as that.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
I’d like to be Faith Zanetti from the series by Anna Blundy. She’s tough and cool and funny.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t think any reading should be regarded as a guilty pleasure. If you’re enjoying whatever you’re reading, then there’s no need to apologise for it.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
Ah here! There are so many brilliant books and if I pick one, all the writers I didn’t choose will take agin me. [Ed - I'm afraid I'm going to have to put a gun to your head, ma'am.] However, as you have the gun to my head, I’m going to go for THE LIKENESS by Tana French because the atmosphere is so magical and strange and spooky.

Most satisfying writing moment?
I’d never written a ‘mystery’ book before THE MYSTERY OF MERCY CLOSE and plot-wise it was a big challenge, but most people don’t guess the whereabouts of my missing person. I was ‘quietly pleased’.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I’m not sure Kevin Barry will thank me for describing CITY OF BOHANE as a crime novel, but it is, as well as being about 800 different types of book. It’d be great to see the fantastic, colourful world he’s created, on the screen. (Mind you, I get cranky when people go on about turning books into films, as if the medium of books is somehow second-rate …)

The best thing about being a writer?
Getting to play with words. I love words. They’re beautiful things.

The pitch for your next book is …
My current book (THE MYSTERY OF MERCY CLOSE) is a missing persons case about a ex-boyband member who has disappeared five days before a massive reunion gig. Is that any good to you?

What are you reading right now?
GONE GIRL by Gillian Flynn. Bloody fantastic!!!

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
First of all I’d have strong words with God about the cruelty of the human condition. When I was finished berating him, I’d pick reading. I love writing but it’s very fecking hard.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Conversational, dark, funny.

THE MYSTERY OF MERCY CLOSE by Marian Keyes is published by Michael Joseph.

The Year Of Ms French

I mentioned last week that Tana French’s BROKEN HARBOUR had picked up a couple of very nice reviews in the Irish Times and The Observer, with Bernice Harrison in the Irish Times, in particular, offering some astute observations.
  The Sunday Times also chipped in with its two cents last weekend, with the gist running thusly:

“It is the surprising subtlety of plot, language and tone that makes this one of the must-read page-turners of the summer.” - Sunday Times

  The enthusiasm for BROKEN HARBOUR didn’t noticeably flag during the week, when our American cousins stepped up to the plate. To wit:

“It’s not the fashion in literary fiction these days to address such things as the psychological devastation that a fallout of the middle class can wreak on those who have never known anything else, and Ms. French does it with aplomb — and a headless sparrow and dozens of infrared baby monitors.” - Washington Times

“Edgar-winner French’s eloquently slow-burning fourth Dublin murder squad novel shows her at the top of her game.” - Publishers Weekly (Pick of the Week)

“This may sound like a routine police procedural. But like Gillian Flynn’s GONE GIRL, this summer’s other dagger-sharp display of mind games, BROKEN HARBOUR is something more. It’s true that Ms. French takes readers to all the familiar way stations of a murder investigation: the forensics, the autopsies, the serial interrogations and so on. But she has urgent points to make about the social and economic underpinnings of the Spain family murders. And she has irresistibly sly ways of toying with readers’ expectations.” - New York Times

“She’s drawn not just to the who but also to the why — those bigger mysteries about the human weaknesses that drive somebody to such inhuman brutality. What really gives BROKEN HARBOUR its nerve-rattling force is her exploration of events leading up to the murders, rendered just as vividly as the detectives’ scramble to solve them.” - Entertainment Weekly

“Perfectly paced, with nuanced characters set against a backdrop of heart-rending conflict and dialogue that reads as though you’re a fly on the wall, BROKEN HARBOUR shows once again that Tana French is not only one of the most assured crime writers of our times, but one of the best emerging writers in any genre.” - January Magazine

  So there you have it. It can only be a matter of time before someone jumps the shark in suggesting that BROKEN HARBOUR ‘transcends the genre’, but in the meantime, and in my humble opinion, the hype is fully justified. Enjoy.

The Temple Of Doom

Yep, Peter Temple (right) slid the CWA’s Duncan Lawrie Dagger into his entirely metaphorical scabbard for The Broken Shore, voted best crime novel of the year on Thursday night. There’s one in the eye for the bloody Poms, eh? In a doom-laden night for Irish crime writing, neither Declan Hughes or Brian McGilloway managed to get their hands on the New Blood Dagger, Gillian Flynn winning that award, and the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, for Sharp Objects, appropriately enough. Worst of all, though, was our belated discovery that our lame pun – y’know, Peter Temple writes the Jack Irish novels – is a non-runner given that Temple’s 'Irish' is actually pronounced 'I-reich'. Buggery … Mind you, we can now blame the man we stole the lame pun from, the one and only Mr After Dark, My Sweet …