The Asylum Has Taken Over The Lunatics

I’d have got less for GBH, etc. Today is the fifth anniversary of my voluntary incarceration in the occasional lunatic asylum that is Crime Always Pays Towers (appropriately stale two-year-old cake pictured, right) and all Three Regular Readers won’t be in the slightest bit surprised to learn that the first post was a plug for my then current novel, THE BIG O (these days, of course, I’m plugging the bejaysus out of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE. But that’s a story for another day). THE BIG O had just been published with the small but perfectly formed Hag’s Head Press, and between us we hadn’t so much as a Michael Lowry red cent for promotion and publicity purposes. Crime Always Pays was intended to be a cheap (i.e., free) means of getting the word out there, although I also saw it as a chance to celebrate the small but growing number of Irish crime writers.
  These days, I’m delighted to say, there are so many Irish crime writers that it can be hard to keep tabs on them all, with more appearing every year. Then again, it’s hardly surprising that crime writers are coming up like mushrooms, given that the official response to the larceny on the grandest of scales that is the Irish economic downturn, recession and austerity bail-out was to shovel on the shite and keep us all in the dark.
  Anyway, one unintended consequence of Crime Always Pays is DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS: IRISH CRIME WRITING IN THE 21st CENTURY, which is a collection of essays, interviews and short stories by Irish crime writers on the subject of Irish crime writing and edited by yours truly, and which will be published next month by Liberties Press. It’s an odd feeling, waiting for it to appear. I’m nervous on its behalf, of course, especially as I have no idea of how it’ll be received, given that - to the best of my knowledge - it’s one of a kind. But I have no sense of ownership of the collection, not in the way I would if it was one of my own books. As far as I’m concerned, the book belongs to the contributors. I am proud of it, though, proud on behalf of the very fine writers involved, and delighted to see such a diverse range of talents all together and talking about a phenomenon that has long since been recognised abroad, and is finally starting to register with an Irish audience.
  Another unintended consequence of CAP, the most delightful, and one which has always kept me going through the inevitable peaks and troughs of a writer’s life, is the number of people I’ve met on-line, most of them in the crime fiction community. I was bowled over in the early days of CAP by the generosity of spirit offered to a newbie by people I’d presumed would be competitors, i.e., fellow bloggers, but it appears that the spirit of good karma is alive and well in a blogosphere near you. People, you know who you are, and you keep me young(ish). It’s a labour of love, ye olde blogge, but as with most things, you get out what you put in.
  Upwards and onwards, folks. Here’s to another five years or so, twice as many Irish crime writers, multiples of good folk met on-line, and perhaps even a book or two to promote from yours truly. Hey, I can always dream …

Self-Publish And / Or Be Damned

I tend to be defensive when it comes to the self-publishing / vanity publishing issue, given that THE BIG O was originally co-published with Hag’s Head Press, which involved my paying half the costs of putting the book on the shelf. While I appreciate that there’s a lot of dross that gets self-published, there’s also a lot of crap that not only gets past the gatekeepers of the traditional publishing model, but gets championed by said gatekeepers (see Nobody Move, below).
  Time magazine has this week waded into the fray with a fine piece on the future of publishing, the gist of which is that the means of disseminating fiction is undergoing a radical change (e-books, print on demand, etc.), and that the new forms will inevitably influence the content. To wit:

A lot of headlines and blogs to the contrary, publishing isn’t dying. But it is evolving, and so radically that we may hardly recognize it when it’s done. Literature interprets the world, but it’s also shaped by that world, and we’re living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since--well, since the early 18th century. The novel won’t stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It’s about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever …
  Self-publishing has gone from being the last resort of the desperate and talentless to something more like out-of-town tryouts for theatre or the farm system in baseball. It’s the last ripple of the Web 2.0 vibe finally washing up on publishing’s remote shores. After YouTube and Wikipedia, the idea of user-generated content just isn’t that freaky anymore …
  None of this is good or bad; it just is. The books of the future may not meet all the conventional criteria for literary value that we have today, or any of them. But if that sounds alarming or tragic, go back and sample the righteous zeal with which people despised novels when they first arose. They thought novels were vulgar and immoral. And in a way they were, and that was what was great about them: they shocked and seduced people into new ways of thinking. These books will too. Somewhere out there is the self-publishing world’s answer to [Daniel] Defoe, and he’s probably selling books out of his trunk. But he won’t be for long.

  To be honest, I’m not sure this kind of DIY ethic is going to transmogrify the industry. Pop music had its Year Zero in 1976, when the Pistols, the Clash, the Buzzcocks et al arrived, but little really changed – Johnny Rotten recently turned up on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. And while the web makes it possible for anyone to get published and establish an audience, that still leaves the writer with the thorny question of how to get paid for the value of his or her time, let alone the value of the work. Or is ‘getting paid’ just too 20th century for words? Over to you, folks …

999: The Mark Of The Feast

Yep, it’s ‘Post # 999’ for Crime Always Pays. I don’t know about you, but that one caught me broadside and shivered me timbers when I realised how much time I’ve been spending on ye olde blogge. If every post is only 200 words long (and most of them are at least that), and bearing in mind that my novels come in around the 75,000-word mark, I’d have had the best part of three novels written for the same amount of time and effort invested over the last 18 months. A scary thought …
  Mind you, I don’t begrudge a second of it. It’s been terrific fun, I’ve met a veritable horde of brilliant people, and CAP has put me in regular touch with some of the best writers of their generation. Nice. And not only that, but Crime Always Pays has taken our humble tome THE BIG O from its lowly status as a co-published novel with the tiny but perfectly formed Hag’s Head Press in Ireland to within two weeks of a hardcover release in the U.S. courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
  Anyhoos, to celebrate the impendingness of both CAP’s one thousandth post and THE BIG O’s release in the U.S., I’m running a BIG O-style ‘Best Things In Life Are Free … Books’ competition this week. And not only that, I’m tossing in a copy of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE to boot. First, the blurb elves, aka THE BIG O’s back-cover big-ups:

“Declan Burke’s THE BIG O is one of the sharpest, wittiest, and most unusual Irish crime novels of recent years.” – John Connolly, author of THE UNQUIET

“Declan Burke’s THE BIG O has everything you want in a crime novel: machine-gun dialogue, unforgettable characters, and a wicked plot. Think George V. Higgins in Ireland on speed.” – Jason Starr, author of THE FOLLOWER

“No such thing as coincidence! Don’t tell that to the glorious band of cast-offs and misfits that populate the pages of Declan Burke’s uncanny THE BIG O. With a deft touch, Burke pulls together a cross-genre plot that’s part hard-boiled caper, part thriller, part classic noir, and flat out fun. From first page to last, THE BIG O grabs hold and won’t let go.” – Reed Farrel Coleman, author of THE JAMES DEANS

“It’s hard to praise THE BIG O highly enough. Excellent writing, great characters, superb storytelling – all played out at a ferocious tempo. By turns it’s dark, funny, moving, brutal, tender and twisted. A book that makes one hell of an impact. More Declan Burke, please.” – Allan Guthrie, author of SAVAGE NIGHT

“Declan Burke’s crime writing is fast, furious, and funny, but this is more than just genre fiction: Burke is a high satirist in the tradition of Waugh and Kingsley Amis, and his stories pulse with all the contradictions of contemporary Ireland. Burke has a deep respect for and understand of the classic traditions of the hardboiled school but he never forgets that his first duty is to give us a damn good read.” – Adrian McKinty, author of THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD

  So there you have it. To be in with a chance of winning one of three copies of THE BIG O and EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, just answer the following question. Exactly how cute is the Princess Lilyput (right)?

(a) Cute;
(b) Very cute;
(c) Wow, she’s gorgeous;
(d) Hey Dec, that’s a good-looking child – are you sure she’s yours?

  Answers via the comment box, including an email contact address that uses (at) rather than @ to confuse the spam munchkins, before noon on Tuesday, September 16. Et bon chance, mes amis …

Swan, Swan, Hummingbird – Hurrah!

Given that the ever-radiant Marsha Swan is the mastermind behind Hag’s Head Press, the original publisher of THE BIG O, it might seem like incestuous log-rolling for me to plug her forthcoming pair of interlocking novellas, THE PUNCHING MAN / BOYS ARE ELASTIC, GIRLS ARE FANTASTIC. But the story runs thusly …
  Marsha was the editor on my first novel, EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, which was published by Sitric, a now defunct imprint of Lilliput. Given the – shall we say – idiosyncratic way Lilliput goes about its business, I still hadn’t even heard of Marsha Swan by the time her independently published debut novel, DIRTY SKY, appeared some years later. But I was hugely impressed, and said that it reminded me of a more dynamic Raymond Carver when I reviewed it. Later again, Marsha got in touch to promote another Hag’s Head Press offering, Sean Harnett’s AISLING LTD, and in passing asked if I was working on anything on the time. As it happened, I was sitting on a cushion stuffed with rejection slips for THE BIG O …
  So it’s with a crystal clear conscience that I thoroughly recommend to you THE PUNCHING MAN / BOYS ARE ELASTIC, GIRLS ARE FANTASTIC. Quoth the blurb elves:

In THE PUNCHING MAN, Remus, a young Roma boy adrift in Dublin, becomes intrigued by a man he sees punch a stranger on the street. When Remus and his friends begin following the man, it quickly becomes unclear who is following whom. But Remus has even less comprehension of the biggest things in his life: the family who will adopt him, the country he will live in, how he will make his way in a new and daunting city.
  In BOYS ARE ELASTIC, GIRLS ARE FANTASTIC, Ruth abandons her life and career in Chicago to move to Dublin. She marries a man she met on holiday there, even though she doesn’t fully understand why—at 46—she’s suddenly ready to gamble on romance. The life she might have had changes abruptly when she is diagnosed with breast cancer and decides to take a challenging job in the Christian Brothers school where Remus is now a student.
  These interlocking novellas, published in one edition, offer two foreigners’ perspectives on a city where they quickly find themselves fighting against shadows: a culture they don’t understand and don’t have access to; bullies on the schoolyard and in the staffroom; a mysterious stranger or a mysterious disease. In this finely observed portrait of Ireland at the turn of the 21st century, Marsha Swan writes with a stark lyricism, giving voice to two very different characters navigating enormous change with hope and dignity.

  So there you have it. For those of you interested in such things, Marsha will be launching THE PUNCHING MAN / BOYS ARE ELASTIC, GIRLS ARE FANTASTIC in Dublin next week, on Thursday, September 18, in Toner’s of Baggot Street. The evening kicks off at 6.30pm, and all are welcome. Oh, and I’ll be the guy at the bar mumbling about Ray Carver …

On Coincidences, Happy Accidents And The Possibility Of Magic

A Grand Vizier writes: “‘And so / The beginning is near / And we face / The opening curtain …’ The uncorrected proofs of THE BIG O arrived in the post from Harcourt yesterday, sparking all kinds of conflicting emotions in the Grand Viz’s heaving-but-manly breast. Delight and pride, obviously, that a life-long dream has inched another step closer to fruition, given that, as with the niche genres of Western movies and jazz music, America is the spiritual home of the crime novel. Yes indeed, I shall – for a moment or two at least, on September 22nd – be a bona fide Yankee doodle dandy.
  “The delight and pride lasted all of three seconds, of course, after which I was assailed by the usual doubts and uncertainties. How will it be received? Are American tables as wonky-legged as Irish tables, and thus in need of a one-size-fits-all book to prop up bockety workmanship? Will the book sell well, badly, or at all? Will Elmore Leonard and / or Barry Gifford sue? Questions, questions …
  “Coincidentally enough – especially given that THE BIG O has its fair share of coincidences – the proof edits of its sequel, currently labouring under the unlikely title of THE BLUE ORANGE, arrived on the same day. The woman behind the metaphorical green pen, the inimitable Marsha Swan of Hag’s Head Press, pronounced herself reasonably satisfied with the contents, declaring that it largely replicates the good things about THE BIG O, only moreso. She has some issues with various aspects, of course, as any self-respecting editor would, but nothing to cause the Grand Viz to throw himself from the battlements of CAP Towers in a veritable tizzy of despair. Happy days.
  “Naturally, once the correction process begins, the entire story will reveal itself as utterly incomprehensible, totally unbelievable, and collapse into a heap of dust. But we don’t have to worry about that until Monday. Huzzah! In the meantime, we’re going to take the fact that the corrections arrived on the same day as THE BIG O’s uncorrected proofs as A Good Omen.
  “That’s not a very logical state of affairs, but then life – and particularly the writing books bit – is rarely logical. That’s not to say that writers are necessarily a superstitious bunch, but most writers are more than pleased to embrace the concept of ‘happy accidents’. As often as not the writing process will involve a blind reaching forward into the darkness in the hope of finding some meaning or cohesion to the chaos and anarchy you’ve established, and only belatedly discovering that you were always aware of where the Eureka! moment lay, you just had to wallow in the bath long enough for it to drift into the front of your brain. The sparkity-spark fusing of synapses, the unnatural juxtaposition of two or three or four factors coming together in a situation you might have found yourself in ten or twelve years ago, that throwaway remark a secondary character made in Chapter 3 – suddenly the cave explodes into light and the paintings on the wall start to dance.
  “A confession: I’m not a good writer. By that I mean, as I’ve said before, that I’m not a naturally instinctive elegant writer. When it’s going well for yours truly, it means that the grubbing out of words, one painful syllable at a time, is progressing at an unnaturally rapid pace – a thousand words in a three-hour session would represent a good day at the desk for the Grand Viz. That micro-writing approach also applies to such fripperies as plotting and narrative arc – although I usually have a general idea of how I’d like things to work out, the plotting tends to run roughly a page or two ahead of the writing. I like it when I’m surprised by something a character might say or want to do, and being curious as to what they’ve cooked up in my absence is one of most powerful draws that brings me back to the desk every morning. That sounds a little infantile, certainly, but here’s the thing – I heard Richard Ford interviewed on the radio once, and he spoke very eloquently about how meticulously he plots his novels before he begins to write. As a callow page-blackener – I’d yet to have a novel published at the time – I thought that I certainly didn’t have any right to argue with Richard Ford. But I also thought, y’know, where’s the blummin’ fun in that?
  “Maybe writing isn’t supposed to be fun. The publishing business is exactly that, a business. And the most successful writers will very likely be those who approach the process of writing in a pragmatic way, asking themselves what the reader wants and delivering exactly that. And good luck to them all.
  “But here’s the other thing. Being an adult with a young child, as yours truly is delighted to be, means becoming something of a machine that benefits from being pragmatic, logical and forward-planning. But even adults with young children get time off, and the Grand Viz gets to spend his time off writing stories. There isn’t a lot of that kind of time available, so the last thing he wants to do is waste that precious time and imagination space being logical and pragmatic. What he does like to do is open himself up to happy accidents, coincidences and the possibility of magic. Which was why he was so delighted when Reed Farrel Coleman (right), so generously quoted on the back of the U.S. edition of THE BIG O, embraced the coincidences in the story so whole-heartedly, and in the spirit they were intended. Because the writing process itself – for yours truly, at least – is heavily informed by those happy accidents, coincidences and the possibility of magic.
  “Yep, that sounds dangerously hippy. But here’s the other-other thing. How the brain – the mind, the imagination – works is still largely a mystery, even to neuroscientists. Why certain synapses should fuse and produce certain emotional reactions, for example, can be explained by chemical secretions as a response to a given situation. But when you go deeper, all the way down to the quantum level that sustains and generates everything we are and can know, what prevails is chaos and anarchy. It may be that we are yet not smart enough to discover the patterns in the apparent randomness, and it may well be that there are no patterns to be discovered. Either way, at least for the time being, yours truly is entirely content to embrace all those happy accidents, coincidences and the possibility of magic.
  “Naïve? Yes. Impractical? You could argue so. Fun? Most certainly.
  “It may not be a very logical way of conducting a writing life, but yours truly will go on not just embracing but anticipating those happy accidents. The day the writing ceases to be fun is the day I hang up the quill. Peace, out.”

The Embiggened O # 1,002: That Was The Year That Was

A Minister for Propaganda Elf writes: It being April 16, and the anniversary of the first ever Crime Always Pays post, and the three-week anniversary of the arrival of Princess Lilyput (right), and only eight days after the two-year anniversary of the betrothal of Mr and Mrs Grand Vizier (and, sadly, the one-year anniversary of the death of the late, great Kurt Vonnegut), the Grand Viz would like to take this opportunity to emerge on to his entirely metaphorical balcony and address his incredibly loyal readership of three in an Urbi et Orbi-style orgy of sentimental reminiscing. To wit:
  “It’s been a strange and wonderful year, people. As all three regular readers will know, Crime Always Pays came into being last April in order to promote (a) Irish crime fiction, (b) THE BIG O, and (c) the monstrous ego of CAP’s Grand Vizier, Declan Burke.
  “On the Irish crime fiction front, we believed there was that there was a lot of talented people out there writing novels that were relevant to an Ireland that has undergone cataclysmic social and economic upheaval in the last decade or so. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that there was a hell of a lot more than just ‘a lot’ of talented writers out there: it’s no exaggeration to say that Irish crime fiction can make a genuine claim to be a substantial sub-genre of the crime fiction genus.
  “Meanwhile, once we hit the interweb highway, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that there were two on-line Irish crime fiction resources already available, Critical Mick and Cormac Millar, although the real shock to the system came when both proved incredibly generous with their time and space in helping Crime Always Pays get established as the – oh yes! – third most relevant Irish crime fiction web presence. Gentlemen, I thank ’ee kindly.
  “In fact, the kindness of strangers has been the most satisfying aspect of the blogging year. From all corners of the globe, people have been unfailingly helpful, friendly and generous. It helps, of course, that Crime Always Pays is a crime fiction blog, and that the crime fiction family’s willingness to lend a hand seems inexhaustible. To everyone who visited, wrote, linked and lurked their way to giving CAP almost 55,000 page impressions in the last year, a heartfelt thank you from the Grand Vizier and the, ahem, tireless elves.
  “As for THE BIG O, well, where do we start? Hmm, the start, you say? Cunning … Having sent THE BIG O to a selection of UK publishers, and received a selection of gracious rejections, the gist of which runneth ‘not commercial enough’, the Grand Vizier decided to bypass Irish publishing houses and self-publish the novel, simply as an exercise in learning the industry from the ground up. At this point, fate in the lovely form of Marsha Swan of Hag’s Head Press intervened. She suggested a co-publishing deal, on a 50-50 costs and profits arrangement, and THE BIG O was duly published in April, with a wonderful jacket design courtesy of Carly Schnur. With a promotion budget of precisely nil to work with, and lacking the power that bigger publishing houses can depend upon for reviews, blurbs and generally spreading the word, the Grand Vizier founded Crime Always Pays and got hustling. The rest, as they say, is history – i.e., a load of stuff no one really cares about anymore. Suffice to say that Stacia Decker, then of Harcourt, took pity on us, and signed THE BIG O on a two-book deal, the first of which will appear in all its hardback glory in August. The sequel, currently labouring under the unlikely working title of THE BLUE ORANGE, is already written and bursting with the literary equivalent of Vitamin C …
  “Meanwhile, to all the reviewers, both in print and on-line, who took the time to read and then write about THE BIG O, we are, and will remain, hugely grateful – unfortunately, we’re delighted to be able to say, there were too many to name individually, but you all know who you are. To the writers we persecuted for blurbs until they uncled and signed their names to the big-ups we’d pre-written for them, may you all wake up tomorrow morning to discover that the scribbling elves were in and finished your current novel while you were sleeping. And to everyone who parted with their hard-earned money to buy THE BIG O, and then spent your precious reading time on it – never, ever, underestimate what that might mean to an aspiring writer. God bless you, everyone …
  “Finally, a few special thank yous: to Claire Coughlan and Chico ‘Chicovich’ Morientes, for their help in keeping Crime Always Pays on the rails; to my agent, Jonathan Williams; Marsha Swan at Hag’s Head Press; Ken Bruen, as always a rock of support; John Connolly, for sneaking around and giving THE BIG O and EIGHTBALL BOOGIE the hup-ya to anyone who will listen, and refusing to take any credit for it; Charles Ardai for recommending THE BIG O to Harcourt; the ever-lovely Stacia Decker, ex-Harcourt, for believing in THE BIG O; Allan Guthrie, for his sage advice; and finally, and most importantly, to the ever-ravishing Mrs Grand Vizier, aka Aileen (right), for her constant support, strength and encouragement, particularly as she spent the latter half of 2007 and the first three months of 2008 pregnant with our impending arrival, Princess Lilyput, currently the Granny Smith of the Grand Vizier’s eye.
  “As for the rest of 2008: it’s upward and onward, people, and spare not the horses, James …”