Feature: The Irish Spy Novel

I had a feature on the lesser-spotted Irish spy novel published in the Irish Times last week, which featured – among others – Joe Joyce, John Banville, Eoin McNamee, Stephen Burke, Michael Russell, Stuart Neville, Philip Davison, Joseph Hone and Andrew Hughes. To wit:

Brinsley McNamara always claimed that Garradrimna, the village which provides the setting for The Valley of the Squinting Windows, could have been any village in Ireland. Published in 1918, the novel can be read as an expression of a kind of colonial pathology, as the population of Garradrimna engage in constant mutual surveillance, monitoring one another’s weaknesses and ferreting out secrets in order to accrue what passes for power among the powerless.
  Naturally, any of Garradrimna’s upstanding citizens would take mortal offence at being called a spy. To the coloniser, every native is suspect until proven otherwise, and the only way to prove this logically fallacious gambit is to maintain a relentless scrutiny. Spied upon for generations, the colonised learn to abhor the spies, even as they absorb the tradecraft; it’s no coincidence that there are few Irish insults worse than that of tout, or informer.
  Perhaps this goes some way towards explaining why, despite the recent upsurge in Irish crime fiction, the Irish spy novel is notable by its absence. There is no Irish equivalent to Ian Fleming, for example, who served with British Naval Intelligence during WWII, or John le Carré, Somerset Maugham (Ashenden) and Graham Greene, all of whom worked with British Intelligence before going on to write spy fiction. The archetypal heroes of modern spy fiction were written from the perspective of the coloniser and empire builder; the methods employed by their protagonists may be less than savoury, of course, but the intelligent reader understands the realpolitik that means some eggs are destined for omelettes.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Is This A Pair Of Daggers I See Before Me?

Hearty congratulations to Michael Russell and Stuart Neville, both of whom were longlisted for a CWA Dagger Award last week. Michael’s THE CITY OF SHADOWS has been listed for the John Creasey Dagger, which is awarded for ‘the year’s best crime novel by a previously unpublished author’ – i.e., the debut dagger. Stuart, meanwhile, has been nominated for RATLINES in the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger category – it’s not the first time Stuart has been nominated for an award in 2013, and I strongly suspect that it won’t be the last.
  For all the details, clickety-click here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Chris Allen

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?
A STUDY IN SCARLET by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (and then every other Holmes/Watson excursion). I just love the style of his writing, the way in which he captured the time - the courtesy, the camaraderie, the thoroughness and dedication. This story really set up the principle characters, their partnership and the tone of the series that he maintained so well throughout the many years that he created these stories. I’m a huge fan and would love to write the way that he did. Sadly, I can only aspire to that standard ... but, I live in hope!

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
The character I would most like to have been is Dr John Watson. Far from being Sherlock’s sidekick as was portrayed in old movies and some treatments on television, Watson was a medical man with an outstanding military service record. He had enough wit to be Sherlock’s loyal intellectual companion, along with sufficient brawn to be his protector at the appropriate time. I would have loved being involved in the solving of those now iconic cases, and all the insight they provided into the human condition.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
There’s a great local writer here, a Canadian/Australian named Tara Moss who writes great contemporary crime fiction from a decidedly female perspective. Very strong. Great stories. I really enjoy them.

Most satisfying writing moment?
After writing my first book, DEFENDER, over a period of ten years - which I began on my return from East Timor in 2000 - the most satisfying moment was completing my second book, HUNTER, in just six months on a deadline for my publisher. I guess it was just great to prove to myself that I was able to churn out the story as fast as my clumsy two-fingered-typing style could achieve. By that stage, the story was so much in my head that I had to get Alex Morgan’s latest adventure onto the page.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
In all honesty, I am yet to knowingly read an Irish crime author. That said, the one that I currently have on my TBR list is Borderlands by Brian McGilloway. I’ve always been intrigued by the contemporary history of Ireland, North & South, and so I am looking forward to discovering McGilloway’s work.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst: The uncertainty of if/when all the hard work will actually pay off. Best: Those rare days when you can really feel that all the hard work and sacrifice is starting to pay off.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Alex Morgan has taken on gunrunners in DEFENDER and fugitive war criminals in HUNTER. Now in AVENGER he’s taking Intrepid’s first female agent into the centre of hell as together they bring to justice the masterminds of a global human trafficking cartel.

Who are you reading right now?
I find it really hard to read other action novels when I’m writing one. So I actually prefer to watch movies in my down time – sometimes it’ll be classic war movies like A Bridge Too Far or The Eagle Has Landed; sometimes it’ll be my favourite Bond action sequences, the new Hawaii-50, or the latest contemporary take on Holmes & Watson such as the BBC’s Sherlock or the US treatment Elementary. That said, I do enjoy returning to a story or two from Arthur Conan Doyle’s collected works or when I really needed inspiration I turn to Ian Fleming time and time again.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write. As long as others can read my stories, then I’ll be content just getting them out of the lumber room, my mind, and onto a page.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Contemporary. Action. Realism.

Chris Allen’s HUNTER is published by Momentum.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE SPIES by Luis Fernando Verissimo

Set in contemporary Brazil, THE SPIES (Picador) is told in the first-person by an unnamed narrator who works as an editor in a downmarket Brazilian publishing house. The editor began working with the publishing house in a bid to get his own novel – a spy novel – published, but has since accepted his limitations as a writer. He has also accepted his lot in life: he is doomed to a life of heavy drinking and a loveless marriage to Julinha.
  One day he receives a short manuscript from a writer who lives in the small Brazilian town of Frondosa and calls herself ‘Ariadne’. The manuscript details how Ariadne is trapped in a loveless marriage of her own, by a man who killed her ‘Secret Lover’. Once Ariadne has told her tale, she will commit suicide.
  Excited by the concept, the editor asks to see more, and also requests a photograph of the author. More of the manuscript duly arrives, along with a photograph of a beautiful young woman.
  Determined to rescue Ariadne from her fate, the editor conspires with his friends. One by one his friends are dispatched to Frondosa as undercover agents to find out what they can discover about Ariadne …
  THE SPIES is chock-a-block with references to crime and mystery authors. The most explicit is John Le Carré, as the editor – who announces in the opening line that he is a literary graduate – quotes Le Carré on a number of occasions as he puts into play his ‘Operation Theseus’.
  Other crime fiction authors mentioned included Simenon and Chandler, while there are also more oblique references to Edgar Allan Poe.
  One crime / mystery author not mentioned explicitly in THE SPIES, oddly enough, is Ian Fleming. This is odd because Fleming’s very first James Bond novel, DR NO, is a modern retelling of the ‘Theseus and the Minotaur’ story, relocated to the Caribbean and given a spy novel flavouring.
  Having said all that, while Verissimo appears to be quite genuine in his appreciation of the crime and mystery authors mentioned, the book as a whole plays out as a farce. Which is to say, there is definitely homage being paid to individual writers, but THE SPIES reads like a loving spoof of the crime novel.
  Overall, the tone of the novel is one of absurd comedy. It opens with the line, “I’m a literature graduate and I drink heavily,” as if one necessarily prompted the other; and that quality of dark humour continues throughout.
  The high seriousness with which the editor treats his quest is also quite funny, not least because he refuses to be swayed by any facts. For example, he believes in the beginning that ‘Ariadne’ is a pseudonym taken from Greek mythology, and that the manuscript he has been sent is a piece of string designed to guide him to her through the labyrinth. When it becomes clear that Ariadne is in fact the woman’s real name, he is not at all deterred; he simply recalibrates his quest, decides that it must be fate that her real name is Ariadne, and presses on regardless.
  Meanwhile, as the editor – ‘a literature graduate’, no less – is tying himself up in knots over imagined Greek mythology references, the more astute reader will be aware that Ariadne is in fact plagiarising one of the most famous pieces of literature of the 20th century.
  It’s reasonable to ask why Verissimo is engaged in this kind of literary cross-pollination, and as far as I can make out, he’s making the double point that literary authors shouldn’t take themselves as seriously as they do, while non-literary authors – or genre authors – should be taken a bit more seriously than they are. Having said that, it’s notable that Verissimo tends to quote and / or reference crime and mystery authors who are regarded as among the finest of their kind – Chandler, Simenon, Le Carré. There are no references here to James Patterson, for example.
  In terms of narrative playfulness, Verissimo is also engaged in folding the story back on itself. The editor consciously takes on the part of a fictional creation when he decides to become a spymaster investigating Ariadne; he looks to works of fiction for his inspiration when devising his plans. Here he appears to be asking the readers to decide for themselves as to what is real and what isn’t when it comes to reading fiction, a gambit he makes explicit on page 69:

  “If anything should happen to you, who should I contact?”
  “What could possibly happen to me?” And he added, when he was already halfway out the door, “Isn’t this all just a fiction?”

  In a sense, Verissimo is here challenging the reader as to how much he or she cares about the characters. If it’s ‘all just a fiction’, why should we care about the characters we encounter in books?
  I hugely enjoyed THE SPIES. At 169 pages it lacks the full impact of a novel, and dedicated fans of the crime / mystery spy thriller may feel cheated by the fact that Verissimo is playing with the conventions of the spy novel rather than writing a straightforward novel. For readers who enjoy a wider range of reading, however, THE SPIES is a real joy. Blending conventions from genre fiction, literary fiction, meta-fiction and Greek mythology, it’s a wonderfully funny commentary on the novel itself, as well as an entertaining tale about the dysfunctional nature of the creative process. – Declan Burke

THE SPIES by Luis Fernando Verissimo is published by Picador.

My Top Ten Crime Novels: Declan Burke

It’s not a book I hear mentioned a lot these days, but Alistair MacLean’s WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL is one of my favourite crime thrillers, and one I tend to indulge myself with a re-read every couple of years. Yes, I know MacLean isn’t exactly hip anymore, but, well, hip schmip. It’s a very neat piece of Bond pastiche / parody / homage, with the added bonus - by Ian Fleming’s standards, at least - of being unusually realistic for a thriller, and the setting of the west coast of Scotland is hugely atmospheric, possibly because it’s always raining.
  I first read WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL in my mid-teens, and it was hugely influential on me. I particularly liked the deadpan stoicism and ever-so-slightly knowing first-person narration delivered by the ‘hero’, the put-upon but resourceful spook Calvert. When my first novel appeared, people were generous enough to favourably mention the blatant Chandleresque rip-off, and some even mentioned John D. MacDonald and Jim Thompson (the latter due to the epigraph I used, probably), but even moreso than Chandler, EIGHTBALL BOOGIE was heavily influenced by Colin Bateman’s DIVORCING JACK and Alistair MacLean’s WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL - hence the ‘EIGHT’ in EIGHTBALL BOOGIE. To wit:

WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL by Alistair MacLean
I’m not normally a fan of thrillers, but when I read this at a young age it seemed to me a low-fi James Bond novel, and all the more enjoyable for it. In fact, it’s Bond laced with Chandlerisms, set in a superbly drawn Scottish landscape of islands, crags, inlets and castles, and combines the page-turning quality of the high-concept thriller with a grittily realistic spy tale reminiscent of Le Carré.

  Anyway, the reason I mention WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL is that the good people at Book Aware asked me to contribute my Top Ten Crime Novels to their list, as flagged earlier this week by Ken Bruen’s Top Ten Crime Novels. For the full list of my own Top Ten, which includes James Ellroy, Adrian McKinty, John McFetridge, Jim Thompson, The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman and Barry Gifford, clickety-click on Book Aware here …
  Book Aware is hosting a series of such lists, with the aim of supporting Sightsavers, which has the vision of ‘a world where no one is blind from avoidable causes and where visually impaired people participate equally in society. Help Sightsavers help people enjoy the world of books too.’ Any writers wishing to help out Book Aware and Sightsavers by contributing their own Top Ten Favourite Novels should contact Neil at neil(at)galwayprint.ie.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: The Irish Times’ Crime Beat Round-Up

The latest of yours truly’s crime fiction review columns appeared in the Irish Times yesterday, featuring Stuart Neville, Tana French, Alan Furst, Karin Fossum, Ruth Rendell and James Patterson, among others. To wit:

Lennon Takes the Lead

In the context of Northern Ireland, ‘collusion’ is an ugly word denoting state-sponsored murder during the Troubles. In COLLUSION (Harvill Secker, £12.99, pb), Stuart Neville takes pains to illustrate the extent to which collusion ‘worked all ways, all directions’, and continues do so in the murky world of covert operations. Belfast Detective Inspector Jack Lennon, a minor character from Neville’s debut THE TWELVE, takes the lead here as he investigates the fall-out from the slaughter that accrued when ex-paramilitary Gerry Fegan went on the rampage. The novel has the page-turning quality of Neville’s debut, which recently won the LA Times’ Mystery / Thriller of the Year, but it’s Neville’s clear-eyed appraisal of the real-politik of the post-Ceasefire Northern Ireland that gives it real heft.
  In FAITHFUL PLACE (Hachette Books Ireland, £12.99, pb), Tana French also gives prominence to a minor character from a previous novel. Undercover cop Frank Mackey appeared in both IN THE WOODS and THE LIKENESS, but here he is the narrator, sucked back into his former life when the corpse of the girl he’d once planned to elope with to England is discovered on his old stomping ground, Faithful Place in inner city Dublin. As always, French is as exercised by the psychology of criminality as she is by the investigation of the mystery, and the result is a gripping, literate thriller laced with black humour.
  The latest in her Inspector Sejer series, Karin Fossum’s BAD INTENTIONS (Harvill Secker, £11.99, pb) is another novel that trades heavily in the psychology of the criminal mind. Fossum sets up a scenario in which no actual crime is committed when a young man steps off a boat into a lake, to subsequently drown, but explores instead the morality of those who were with him as they finesse the details to their own advantage. Tautly told in a crisp translation from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund, the story is a riveting exploration of the consequences of crime, a whydunit rather than the traditional whodunit.
  Two aging brothers are murdered within hours of one another in RIVER OF SHADOWS (MacLehose Press, £18.99, pb), the debut from Italian author Valerio Varesi. Commissario Soneri investigates against an atmospheric backdrop of a wintry northern Italy, as the Po floods its banks. The plot neatly explores the ramifications of the Italy’s internal Fascist-Communist struggle during WWII, and Joseph Farrell’s translation is appropriately poetic, but Soneri himself is rather less fascinating, being yet another in a long line of urbane, sybaritic Italian detectives. Surely there are Italian policeman who are not obsessed with their stomachs?
  Equally atmospheric is Alan Furst’s SPIES OF THE BALKANS (W&N, £18.99, hb), the 11th in his ‘Night Soldiers’ novels, which are set in Eastern Europe prior to and during WWII. Set in Salonika in 1940, undercover policeman Costa Zannis awaits the inevitable invasion of Greece by Italian forces, and finds himself drawn into establishing an underground railway for Jewish refugees fleeing Germany. The literary style belies a deftly paced plot in an old-fashioned spy thriller more reminiscent of John Le Carré and Graham Greene than Ian Fleming. Highly recommended.
  Jeff Lindsay’s DEXTER IS DELICIOUS (Orion, £12.99, hb) is the fifth in his series about a homicidal Florida psychopath who harnesses his urges and only kills for the good of society. The twist here is that Dexter, who can barely describe himself as human, has his entire life overthrown when his wife gives birth to a baby daughter. Struggling to deal with emotions for the first time, Dexter has to deal with the appearance of his equally homicidal brother, all the while helping to investigate what appears to be a cannibalism spree. Lashings of gallows humour help to sugar the pill, but even though the tale moves swiftly towards its climax, it’s difficult to ignore the nagging thought that Dexter might well have outlived his novelty.
  DON’T BLINK (Century, £18.99, hb) is the latest offering from James Patterson, co-written with Howard Roughan. Magazine journalist Nick Daniels is plunged into peril when he goes to interview a former baseball player at a New York restaurant, only to witness the Mafia lawyer at the next table get his eyes gouged out. The usual Patterson tropes of very short chapters and cliff-hanger endings help to move the action along at a furious pace, but the characters couldn’t have been more crudely drawn had Patterson and Roughan used crayons and cardboard. The story somehow manages to be utterly implausible and entirely predictable, and has all the literary merit of a laundry list. If you’re in the mood for a migraine, this is the book for you.
  Ruth Rendell is one of the few authors who can claim to be as prolific as the James Patterson factory, although, despite publishing her first novel in 1964, she has yet to learn how to pander to her readers. TIGERLILY’S ORCHIDS (Hutchinson, £18.99, hb) features a host of characters, all of whom live in or near the flats of Lichfield House in north London, most of whom have their lives impacted by a number of crimes that occur in the locality, ranging in seriousness from identity theft to marijuana farming to murder. It’s by no means a conventional crime novel; in fact, it’s much more a social novel that incorporates criminal activity. That the tale succeeds brilliantly on both levels is due to Rendell’s telling eye for detail when it comes to characterisation, a quietly elegant style, an acerbic take on modern Britain and an irrepressible delight in storytelling that results in a novel bursting at the seams with ideas, narrative digressions and twists and turns that are as heartbreaking as they are unexpected. In a nutshell, a wonderfully satisfying novel. - Declan Burke

  This article first appeared in The Irish Times

Mi Casa, Su Casa: Rafe McGregor on William Melville

Rafe McGregor (right) was kind enough to pen a few words for ye olde blogge, on the real-life spy-catcher William Melville, who also happens to be – although it’s surely only a coinkidink – the hero of his debut novel, THE ARCHITECT OF MURDER. To wit:

“My main interest as a writer is – and probably always will be – the hardboiled detective story, but for a number of reasons my first published novel is a historical murder mystery. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, however, as historical crime stories often lend themselves to the hardboiled style, and I was pleased to make the most of this in THE ARCHITECT OF MURDER, which is set in London in 1902. Once I’d decided to go back in time a hundred years or more, I found there were a number of significant differences in telling the story and writing the novel. Some were disadvantages, and some advantages, and one of the latter was being able to mix real historical personalities with fictional characters. Several real people appear in the novel, but the most important by far is a gent by the name of William Melville: top Met thief-taker, spymaster extraordinaire, and as Irish as Guinness.
  “Melville was born on the 25th April 1850 in Sneem, County Kerry. At the time, Sneem was a poor village, with some of the inhabitants living in conditions described as ‘medieval’. Melville wasn’t quite that badly off, as his parents ran a bakery-cum-liquor store, but his origins and education were certainly both humble. In THE GUARDS, his first Jack Taylor novel, Ken Bruen writes:

“There are no private eyes in Ireland. The Irish wouldn’t wear it. The concept brushes perilously close to the hated ‘informer’. You can get away with almost anything except ‘telling’.”

  “Perhaps that explains why Melville, like so many of his contemporaries, sought to make his fortune overseas, leaving Ireland some time between his seventeenth and twenty-first year. I read that – like Jack Taylor – Melville was a competent hurler in his youth, but as so little is actually known of his early life, I had doubts, and you won’t find him taking a camán to anyone in THE ARCHITECT OF MURDER …
  “Melville’s life is better documented after he joined the Metropolitan Police in 1872. He distinguished himself several times in his early service and was recruited to the new Special Irish Branch in 1883. This was the first specialist detective branch set up in the British Empire, with the aim of bringing the Dynamiters’ bombing campaign in London to an end. Although Melville spent most of his life in London, he always thought of himself as Irish, raised his children to be Irish rather than English, and didn’t see any contradiction in working against the Fenians.
  “In 1893, he found himself in charge of the new Section D, renamed Special Branch, which now concentrated on the anarchist threat and VIP protection duties. Alec Marshall, the narrator of THE ARCHITECT OF MURDER, sums up the next nine years of Melville’s career:

“William Melville had been one of the most famous policemen in the Empire when I was growing up. He was one of the original Special Irish Branch, established to counter the Fenian bombing campaign, and had played a part in foiling the Jubilee, Balfour, and Walsall Plots. He’d also been personal bodyguard to the Prince of Wales, the Shah of Persia, and the German Kaiser. It was claimed that while anarchists and nihilists traditionally regarded London as a safe haven because of the British government’s reluctance to repatriate them, ‘Melville’s Gang’ were so effective that the violent extremists had all left for greener pastures.”

  “‘The King’s Detective’ – as Melville was known to the public – retired from the Met in 1903 to set up the organisation that later became MI5, and he is considered a possible candidate for Ian Fleming’s ‘M’ in the James Bond novels. Many of the details of Melville’s work with organisations such as the Secret Service Bureau (as featured in the latest adaptation of THE 39 STEPS) are still shrouded in mystery, but much of it involved preparation for a future war with Germany, which was regarded as inevitable by 1909.
  “One of Melville’s strengths, which distinguished him from so many of his contemporaries in the early days of spying, was that he knew how to keep a secret. Most of the spies exposed before the First World War were caught because they either boasted of their profession, were incredibly careless, or both. Melville was neither, and had a reputation for the type of ‘need to know’ flow of information with which everyone is now familiar. I won’t say any more about his fascinating career, so as not to reveal too much of the plot of the novel, except that he finally retired at the end of 1917. He died of kidney failure in February the following year, aged sixty-seven. There is, as far as I know, only one biography of this remarkable Irishman, M: MI5’S FIRST SPYMASTER by Andrew Cook (first published in 2004, and still in print), which is well worth the read.
  “THE ARCHITECT OF MURDER takes place the year before Melville’s move to the secret service. He’s a fit fifty-two year old, the superintendent in charge of Special Branch, and at the height of his powers. He’s also rather busy with all the royalty in London for King Edward VII’s Coronation. Shortly after the home secretary tells him to find out why the will of the richest man in the Empire is taking so long to prove, he hears that a young Scottish war hero named Marshall is back in town. Marshall used to lodge with one of the witnesses to the will, and was a policeman before the war. Melville does what any chief of police would do: lights up a Henry Clay, pulls Marshall’s file, and sends his best man to fetch him. Thus begins THE ARCHITECT OF MURDER.
  “The novel is the first Marshall and Melville case, but it won’t be their last. There is plenty of work left in the first decade of the twentieth century, and a horde of villains lurking in the shadows of the metropolis. Meanwhile, across the channel, a man with a handlebar moustache, crippled left arm, and an appetite for conquest watches the British Isles. Unfortunately, he won’t be the last of his race to attempt to rule the world …” – Rafe McGregor

Come As You Are. Or, Y’Know, As Bogie.

It’s looking like we’ll all be artists soon, drawing the dole (ba-boom-tish), but bona fide multi-media artist Ken Lambert has an exhibition which ‘pays homage to the visual composition of film noir, psychological thrillers of the forties and the visual literacy of detective fiction writers such as Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming’ opening tomorrow night in Dublin – click on the invite for all the details. The guest speaker, by the way, is uber-babe Arlene Hunt, who’ll be providing all the crime fiction context you can handle …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: DEVIL MAY CARE by Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming

Described as the “pillow book fantasies of an adolescent mind” by no less an authority than Ian Fleming himself, the original James Bond novels were models of functional writing. The plots were ludicrous, of course, as a single agent, the sociopathic killing machine known as 007, foiled a series of megalomaniacs in their bid to achieve world domination. Perversely, Fleming’s successful career as a journalist stood him in good stead when writing his ‘fantasies’. In delivering the pot-boilers via a hard-bitten prose that eschewed the elaborate flourishes and curlicues of more literary stylists, Fleming – a SOE operative during WWII – invested his stories of unlikely triumphs over the Blofelds and Scaramangas with what seemed like gritty and plausible realism.
  The further you delve into DEVIL MAY CARE, then, the more you’re inclined to wonder why Sebastian Faulks was so assiduously courted to write the novel intended to mark the centenary of Ian Fleming’s death. A superb stylist, his Birdsong is among the finest novels published in the last decade precisely because Faulks achieves a heart-wrenching realism by virtue of his painstaking accretion of detail. And while Charlotte Gray, for example, engages with the world of espionage, albeit during WW II, and On Green Dolphin Street is set during the Cold War, Fleming and Faulks inhabit opposite ends of the literary spectrum. Faulks is a subtly persuasive writer, and a very English one in the mould of Fleming’s peers such as Lawrence Durrell and William Golding. Even if Fleming hadn’t been championed by Raymond Chandler, the grand master of the American crime novel, his brutally foreshortened sentences and wilful disregard for the finer things in life, such as metaphor and adverb, would have marked him out as an artisan rather than an artist.
  Devil May Care has Faulks ‘writing as Ian Fleming’ rather than reimagining Fleming for a contemporary audience. In effect it’s an act of literary ventriloquism, which begs the question as to why Faulks, who was famously reluctant to take the job, and spent a mere six weeks writing the novel, was asked to take on the project in the first place. Certainly it’s not because Faulks has the ability to create a note-perfect echo of Fleming’s style. DEVIL MAY CARE is at times slapdash and shoddy, and contains far too many clunky, faux-philosophical moments that would have horrified Fleming, the first of which appears as early as page 7: “It was here that Paris shunted off those for whom there was no house in the City of Light, only an airless room in the looming cities of dark.”
  But if Faulks is perfunctory where Fleming was functional, the plot is outrageously implausible even by Fleming’s standards. Sent by M to Paris to investigate Dr Julius Gorner, who is suspected of flooding Britain with cheap heroin, Bond discovers that Gorner is in fact plotting a nuclear strike in order to gain revenge on the British Empire for a personal slight which he received as a student at Cambridge. If it were simply pastiche it might be funny (Gorner justifies his attack on the British establishment by referencing the Irish potato famine, for example), but there’s a persistent silliness to it all that suggests nothing less than contempt for the veteran Bond reader.
  There are positive aspects. Faulks is wonderfully evocative when it comes to exploring the exotic settings of Paris and the Near East, and particularly when juxtaposing the austere Bond and the flesh-pots which could easily have been drawn from a modern take on the Arabian Nights. He is excellent too at recreating Bond himself, who is at the start of the novel a poignant creation, half-broken by the death of his wife and the years of abuse, physical and emotional, he has suffered in his vocation as a human weapon. The Cold War backdrop is sketched in deftly, courtesy of some glancing references to The Rolling Stones, the Vietnam war and the fashion boutiques of the King’s Road, Chelsea.
  Most pleasing of all is Faulks’ refusal to provide a commentary on 1967 from the vantage point of the 21st century. Bond, an emblem of British might-is-right despite its crumbling empire, the fragile but unbreakable wedge between the superpowers of America and Soviet Russia, remains gloriously and unrepentantly a one-man flag-waving band for innate British superiority. Form, the character of James Bond trumpets, is temporary but class will always be permanent.
  So where sits DEVIL MAY CARE in the Fleming pantheon? It’s a fine pastiche, an hilarious parody and a poor homage. Had it been written by an anonymous hack and published with little fanfare, it might well have been hailed as an workmanlike rebirth of the Fleming brand. Given the hype, however, and the high-risk gamble of employing a writer of Sebastian Faulks’ quality to write it, DEVIL MAY CARE can only be judged a severe disappointment. – Declan Burke

This review was first published in the Sunday Business Post

Funky Friday’s Free-For-All: We’ll Trade You Monday And Tuesday For Another Friday, Big Guy

Fleming or Phlegming? The Bond books tend to raise the hackles of the literary set – yet another reason to love them – and yet Ian 'Dirty Harry' Fleming’s (right) popularity remains undimmed. On the back of the news that Sebastian Faulks is the latest Fleming avatar, Ben Macintyre had a nice piece in the Irish Indo last week in which he defended Bond against the snobs … If free books beep your jeep, off-road over to Crime and Investigation, where they’re running a competition to win signed copies of Nick Stone’s King of Swords, or to Ray Banks’ The Saturday Boy, where they’re giving away copies of Ray’s Donkey Punch (kudos on the Billy Bragg-inspired title for the interweb page, Ray) … Southern Accent at the Southern Voice links to the Declan Hughes interview at January Magazine, to wit: “The author of a brace of highly regarded novels of Irish suspense chats with January Magazine contributing editor Kevin Burton Smith about his influences – both literary and musical – his letter from Pete Townshend and how we’re all walking in Snoopy’s shadow.” Which is lovely … except for the fact that the post is headered ‘I Like The British Writers’. Erm, Mr Accent, sir? At the risk of sounding excessively pedantic, Dec Hughes’ part of Ireland hasn’t been British for almost 85 years now. Not that we’re counting or anything … Have we mentioned that it’s officially Parry Hotter day on Crime Always Pays today? The elves can barely contain themselves, bless their little cotton socks; they do love yon speccy git Hotter. Jump over to The Scotsman for Allan Guthrie’s hard-boiled take on how the series should end. Yep, that’s the same Allan Guthrie who last night won the 2007 Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award for Two-Way Split. Huzzah! … Finally, The World’s Best Ever High School PI, Like Ever, aka Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), goes head-to-head with the schoolyard bully, Brad the Jock, in the vid below. If you haven’t seen Brick yet, people, you’re doing yourself a serious disservice … And that’s it for another week. Have yourselves a very merry weekend, and don’t forget to come back here, y’all …