Belfast: Giggle City?

The ever-lovely Ciara Dwyer interviewed the ever-fragrant Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman (right) for the Sunday Independent last weekend, on the latest leg of the Bateman world domination / ORPHEUS RISING tour, during which the Batemeister waxed lyrical about that most elusive of sprites, Norn Iron humour. To wit:

“I think Northern humour is very dark. You laugh about everything that goes on. Maybe it’s not unique in that a joke always follows a tragedy, but it’s how you deal with things. When David Trimble was involved with the peace process he actually gave one of my books into 10 Downing Street, saying: ‘This says more about Northern Ireland than you’re going to find in a text book. This is how things are.’ I tend to write serious stories which happen to be very funny. The humour is always going to be there. One of my books, MOHAMMED MAGUIRE, was taking the piss out of the hunger strikes. It’s not that everything is fair game and that I decide that I am going to have a go at the hunger strikes. It just sort of comes out and people seem to like it. My last book, I PREDICT A RIOT, was the first of all my books that received a sustained amount of critical negative feedback from readers. It started off as a serial in a newspaper in Belfast and because I couldn’t swear in it, I put asterisks in it. I got dozens of emails saying, ‘Bring back the swearing, we miss the swearing,’ which is a sad reflection on the people who are reading my books. But I’m quite at home with them, the fuckers.”

Hmmm. Can swearing ever be big and clever? Or is it only so when Master Bateman uses rudeys? Only time, that rat-faced frickin’ clam-mouthed curmudgeon, will tell …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: ORPHEUS RISING by (The Artist Formerly Known As Colin) Bateman

(Colin) Bateman’s latest offering sees a big change in direction from the likes of his Dan Starkey series. ORPHEUS RISING still has that cool dry wit that the Bangor man employs with casual ease, but it’s less frequent and more understated in this novel. And for this particular story, it seems to be the perfect amount of humour. I think that Bateman had a story to tell and although it was very different than anything he’s tried before, he’s listened to his instincts and told it the way he thought best. I have to say, it worked a bloody treat.
  I coasted through this book with utter ease and loved every sentence. It seems as if he’s really upped his game since I PREDICT A RIOT. The writing is much denser than his usual minimalist style, but I didn’t feel bogged down by description or superfluous detail. Each word counted. And so the result is a huge story that still manages to weigh in at a smidge under 400 hardback pages.
  ORPHEUS RISING is the poignant tale of Michael Ryan, an Irish writer who found the love of his life under dramatic circumstances (involving a shark and grisly amputation) and lost her soon after to a violent death (even more violent than the shark thing). Without spoiling the plot for potential readers, I’ll tell you that we accompany Michael on his return to the Florida town of Brevard, ten years after he found happiness and had it ripped from him, to face up to the ghosts of his past.
  I was very surprised by the supernatural content in ORPHEUS RISING. Again, I’m wary of spoilers and there’s not a lot you can talk about without robbing the book of some of its impact, so I’ll not go into how or why he uses it. Just trust me when I say, he does it with the aptitude of the likes of Stephen King or John Connolly, and I hope it’s an area he revisits in future work. He sets up a powerful world and sticks rigidly to his own rules, and the transition into suspension of disbelief is an easy one for the reader as a result.
  His next book will see a return to form, with MYSTERY MAN, a detective story set in the real No Alibis bookshop in Belfast, but featuring a fictional owner. Not David Torrans. But maybe in the book after next he’ll bend the boundaries of his chosen genre? I hope so. He does it very well.
  Orpheus Rising is a rare example of a perfect book. – Gerard Brennan

This review is republished by the kind permission of Crime Scene Northern Ireland

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: I PREDICT A RIOT by (The Artist Formerly Known As Colin) Bateman

I PREDICT A RIOT is a big brick of a book from the Northern Irish crime fiction aficionado now going by the name of Bateman. As a fan of his since DIVORCING JACK, I had high hopes for this book. As ever, the Bangor man failed to disappoint me. I cracked my first smile at the dedication to his Christian name, “… gone but not forgotten.” Couple this with the intriguing tagline, ‘Murder, extortion & carrot cake’, and the reader already knows what they’re in for. Classic Bateman violence and humour.
  As always, his flawed characters leave you cringing as they stumble towards inevitable disaster, and his cleverly constructed plot is revealed with a lightning fast pace that keeps you turning the pages. And as always, I laughed out loud. A lot. Seriously, people at work were staring at me as I giggled through my lunch break for a week.
  The book started life as a serialisation in a Belfast newspaper, The News Letter. Each chapter is an instalment from the paper, and so each one is very short. I have no complaints about this. It made it an incredibly easy read. Also, as a result of its original venue, all the f**king swearing has been ****ed out. If you read Mr Bateman’s blog, you’ll see a mini rant about this. Apparently a lot of folk found his “censorship” rather annoying. I disagree. I thought it made some of the swearing funnier in places.
  However, another hangover from its genesis is the rather annoying amount of recaps within the chapters. I can understand the need to drop the odd sentence of back-story when the reader has to wait days for the next instalment, but in a book as fast-paced as this it’s completely unnecessary. I reckon this was the result of lazy editing as opposed to overkill from the writer.
  All in all, I PREDICT A RIOT rocks harder than the Kaiser Chiefs (sorry, too easy to resist). With a strong cast of characters and a wry look at life in modern Belfast, you’re on to a winner with this one. My final thought when turning the last page was, when’s the next one coming out? Good news! ORPHEUS RISING will be on the shelves in March. It will be mine. – Gerard Brennan

Gerard Brennan can be found right here.

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books

The elves are up to their oxters in a vat of their patented Elf-Wonking Juice to celebrate the second paperback release of The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman’s I PREDICT A RIOT, and as a result are utterly incapable of penning anything remotely compos mentis-ish about Bateman’s latest hilarious Belfast-based caper. And so it’s with a heavy heart that we resort to the cheap publicity gimmick of offering, in conjunction with the lovely people at Hodder Headline Ireland, a competition giving away three copies of said tome at a total cost to you, the reader, of zip, zilch, nada and bugger-all. The all-important question:

Is The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman officially referred to these days as:
(a) Bateman;
(b) Yon Double-Hard Bastard From Norn Iron;
(c) Priscilla?

Answers to dbrodb(at)gmail.com, putting ‘I love Master Bateman’ in the subject line, before noon on Monday, 19th November. Et bon chance, mes amis …

(Bate)Man With A Camera

Crikey! Someone’s gone and given The Artist Formerly Known As Bateman a camera and set him upon an unsuspecting populace, according to the latest update from his interweb page thingy:

“If you’re in and around my home town of Bangor over the next fortnight, beware – I’m on the loose with a camera, making a 40-minute documentary for BBC1 Northern Ireland. Never really done anything like this before, but am already enjoying it immensely - nearly everyone I’ve approached to take part has agreed, including the likes of Jimmy Nesbitt, Lord Trimble and Laine McGaw (who played Patricia in Divorcing Jack). I’ll be returning to my old schools, Ballyholme PS and Bangor Grammar and talking about the Spectator years, where I trained as a reporter, and we’ve already got a lot of footage we recorded at the Aspects Festival in the town in September. Should be on TV some time in the autumn.”

Rest easy, Maine-folk – that’s Bangor in Norn Iron. A narrow escape, eh?

The Monday Review: It’s Nice To Be Nice, Although It’d Be Nicer To Be In Nice

That stalwart friend of Irish crime writers, Myles McWeeney at the Indo, is back on the case again, this time trawling the mean streets of Arlene Hunt’s latest, Missing Presumed Dead: “A very enjoyable, neatly worked mystery, packed with deft characterisation. Read it on the beach but keep an eye on the kids.” … Over at The Book Bag, Jill Murphy likes Derek Landy’s Skulduggery Pleasant: “It’s pacy, it’s funny, it’s irreverent … a humorous badinage going on that’s reminiscent of Woody Allen and Diane Keaton or even Doctor Who … the plotting is a little bit loose. The villain isn’t really much more than a cardboard cut-out. But the humour, the high-spiritedness and the wonderful interaction between the two main characters more than make up for it.” Mmm, lovely … Not to be outdone, Julia Eccleshare at Love Reading 4 Kids is bigging up the other major current kiddie crime release, Siobhan Dowd’s The London Eye Mystery: “This may only be Siobhan Dowd’s second novel but it’s clear her talent as a superb storyteller is beyond question. Her first novel A Swift Pure Cry was short-listed for nearly all the major awards last year and although this second novel is very different it has that same page-turner feeling to it.” But stay! I hear you cry – what news of Alex Barclay’s The Caller? “Written with a depth of feeling for the characters that is sometimes lacking in the genre from her colleagues … a fast-paced and sometimes ugly serial killer novel. The characters are richly described with a sense of humour at times that makes you smile, and a touch of the cruel and sadistic where needed …” reckon the folks at Woyano … They’re still coming in thick and fast for John Connolly’s The Unquiet: “One of the finest reads of this or any year, from the man with the darkest imagination. I was enthralled and terrified at the same time, but it’s the wit Connolly employs that prevents this dark tale from becoming too malevolent,” says Ali Karim at Books ‘n’ Bytes, while The Observer is no less impressed: “The Unquiet is more contemplative and affecting than some of the earlier novels, but the violence, when it comes, is vicious. Hard to put down, harder to forget.” Just about gorgeous … Staying with The Observer, for The Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman’s latest: “Exuberant also describes I Predict a Riot, the latest diverting entertainment from ‘Bateman’ … what follows is sometimes brutal, often blackly humorous and always terrific.” Meanwhile, Neil Dowling at Totally Dublin is middling-to-fairly impressed with The Big O, from inky-fingered urchin Declan Burke: “The Big O is a fairly standard crime caper with some implausible turns in the plot. Burke’s great achievement, however, is to give a typical genre storyline some real flavour through his skilful use of dialogue and imagery.” Neil? The snakebites are on us … Finally, you know you’re in business when the Indo’s arts editor, Sophie Gorman, gives you the hup-ya: “With Julius, [Donovan] has created a man who exists beyond society and a story that magnetically absorbs you with every page turned … You know that you are having one of those special reading experiences when you find yourself rationing the final chapters, in an attempt to prolong the experience for as long as possible,” she says of Julius Winsome, while The Guardian reckons that, “History may judge it to be less than the perfect modern classic it aims to be, but it is a memorable tale, distinguished by masterful prose, an intriguingly peculiar sensibility, and something hard to define that many great works of art have: a kind of dignity. Such books are rarer than publishers’ hype encourages us to believe.” Publishers’ hype? Shurely shome mishtake ...

The Bateman Cometh

The Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman, aka Bateman (his publishers have dropped the boring old 'Colin' bit, apparently), reads from his latest, I Predict A Riot ("bursting with intrigue, extortion, greed, love, murder and carrot cake") at the Marketplace Theatre in Armagh on Friday, May 25. The gig kicks off at 8pm, Bateman fiends - we predict a sizeable turnout, which will very probably include nubile young ladies throwing their nether garments at The Batemeister. As for the early reviews: "... an extraordinary mix of plots and characters begging to be described as colourful, zany, absurd and surreal. Comparisons with Carl Hiaasen are not inappropriate," says Marcel Berlins at The Times. Which is nicer than nice ...

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 313: Colin Bateman

Yep, it's rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire pick-'n'-mix Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...
What crime novel would you most like to have written?
The Silence of the Lambs. And I suspect it would have been funnier.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Been reading Sherlock Holmes recently on holiday. Kept leaving it in the bar and the bar maid kept having to track me down. She was good.
Most satisfying writing moment?
The first book, always the first book. And the Oscar, of course. (What, did I dream that?)
The best Irish crime novel is …?
Modesty forbids. Was Wilkie Collins Irish? I read The Moonstone recently and loved it.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Modesty forbids. Certainly not The Moonstone.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The sex and the drugs. And the best: well, it's all a dream come true, so I'm happy.
Why does John Banville use a pseudonym for writing crime?
Because he's ashamed, and smug at the same time. Unless of course I meet him.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Must try harder.

Colin Bateman's I Predict A Riot is available now at all good bookshops, and quite a few of the utterly shite ones too.