Reviews: Irish Times crime fiction column, December 2018

My crime fiction column for the Irish Times this month is an all-Irish affair, and features Kevin McCarthy, Tanya Farrelly, Fiona Gartland, Nessa O’Mahony and Ken Bruen. To wit:

Kevin McCarthy’s first two novels, Irregulars and Peeler, were set against the backdrop of the Irish Civil War, but Wolves of Eden (W.W. Norton) opens in the wake of the American Civil War, with the psychologically scarred Union Army veteran Lieutenant Molloy dispatched to Fort Phil Kearny in the Dakota Territory to ‘put boots on the gallows’ – i.e., investigate the apparent murder of the fort’s sutler and his wife. Molloy being an alcoholic determined to drink himself to death, the investigation is largely conducted by his second-in-command, Sergeant Kohn; woven through Kohn’s attempts to penetrate the code of omertà that pertains at Fort Kearny is a rambling, semi-literate confession written by Michael O’Driscoll, an Irish immigrant who has served with the Union Army during the recent War. A compelling tale of men who were ‘chucked into the roaring flames of history,’ Wolves of Eden is superbly detailed in its depiction of frontier soldiering, with Fort Kearny besieged by Chief Red Cloud and the story playing out against the events which led to the Fetterman Massacre of 1866. Flashing with shards of coal-black humour – Michael’s brother Tom, shot in the face at the battle of Chickamauga, has ‘a face that would make a funeral turn from a main road’ – Wolves of Eden is a brutal, blood-soaked and unsentimental account of the Old West that bears comparison with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

  Tanya Farrelly’s When Your Eyes Close (Killer Reads) is an audacious exercise in genre-blending. Nick Drake is an alcoholic who undergoes hypnotherapy in a desperate bid to curtail his boozing, only to witness himself committing multiple murders in what appears to be a previous life. Shaken to his core, and reluctantly believing himself to be the knife-wielding killer John Davis, Nick sets out to investigate what really happened – only to discover that Caitlin, the daughter he orphaned during his killing spree, is struggling to cope with the mysterious disappearance of her husband, David. Where Farrelly’s crime debut The Girl Behind the Lens came coated in gritty realism, When Your Eyes Close revels in its fantastical premise (even if much of Caitlin’s backstory is rooted in the ongoing homelessness crisis). The plot isn’t entirely seamless as Farrelly juggles her parallel time-lines, but the overall effect is an entertainingly off-beat account of a man determined to bring himself to justice.

  Big Pharma finds itself in the dock In the Court’s Hands (Poolbeg), the debut thriller from Irish Times journalist Fiona Gartland, which opens with Beatrice Barrington, a stenographer at the Dublin Criminal Court, observing a suspicious liaison in the Phoenix Park between Stephen O’Farrell, the accused in a high profile case, and the forewoman of the jury, Rachel Deere. When Rachel is subsequently found dead in her apartment, Beatrice suspects foul play, and enlists the help of ex-Garda detective Gabriel Ingram to help her investigate. There’s more than a hint of the Miss Marple about the prim, fussy and resolutely moral Beatrice Harrington, and In the Court’s Hands offers a neat blend of the courtroom drama and the amateur sleuth sub-genres, and even tosses in what appears to be an homage to Raymond Chandler as Beatrice, nosing around where she shouldn’t, finds herself drugged and incarcerated in a mental hospital. Regular flashbacks to the younger Beatrice’s life in 1980s Dublin leach tension from the main plot, but they are vividly rendered and contribute handsomely to a promising debut.

  Poet Nessa O’Mahony publishes her debut crime novel with The Branchman (Arlen House) which opens in 1925 with Michael Mackey, a detective officer in the newly formed Garda Special Branch, sent to the Garda barracks in Ballinasloe “to root out subversion”. Mackey, a veteran of numerous conflicts, isn’t fooled by the beauty of rural Galway: “It all looked innocent enough, but who knew what old animosities were lurking in those green fields?” There’s enough animosity to deliver a murder, certainly, and Mackey quickly discovers himself investigating the theft of a cache of stolen arms. O’Mahony is particularly strong on the everyday detail of a stranger negotiating a hazardous landscape – the character of Mackey is loosely based on her own grandfather, Michael McCann – and delivers a series of brief, intense chapters which generate a ferocious pace. Most fascinating, perhaps, is O’Mahony’s evocation of the wider political backdrop, that fragile, imperfect peace that took hold in the wake of the War of Independence and the Civil War.

  Jack Taylor returns in Ken Bruen’s In the Galway Silence (Head of Zeus), the 14th novel to feature the Galway-based private eye. Commissioned to investigate the bizarre murder of the anti-social Renaud twins, Jack quickly concludes that ‘It wasn’t a mystery as to them being killed but a mystery as to why it hadn’t happened sooner.’ The investigation, however, serves as springboard into a much wider exploration of the country’s ills, as Jack, self-described as ‘a broken PI’, wanders the mean streets of Galway lamenting the state of ‘the new broken Ireland.’ Post-modern to a fault, In the Galway Silence is littered with references to Jack Taylor’s preferred reading, which here includes the cult crime fiction authors Craig McDonald, Eddie Bunker and Daniel Woodrell, and further features the Galway-based author Scott Harden, whose ‘alleged stint in a South American jail had given him preternaturally totally white hair,’ and whose appearance causes Jack to believe that, ‘I could be looking at me fein (myself).’ Located on the literary spectrum somewhere between Charles Bukowski’s Pulp and the wilder extravagances of James Crumley’s private eye C.W. Sughrue, In the Galway Silence exudes a nihilistic thrill in smashing the crime fiction conventions to smithereens. ~ Declan Burke

  This column first appeared in the Irish Times.

Essay: ‘The Irresistible Rise of Irish Crime Fiction’

There’s a very nice essay on the rise – irresistible, it seems – of Irish crime fiction over at the 746 Books blog, which provides a concise appraisal of the last decade or so in Irish crime writing. Sample quote:

“What Ireland couldn’t offer pre-Celtic Tiger, pre-Stormont was anonymity. The country was too small, too parochial with a lack of big cities. With the economic growth of the boom all that changed and suddenly cities were booming and immigration was on the rise. It was possible to be a stranger in Ireland, to go unnoticed. With the crash came a growing distrust in politicians and those in power and coupled with a lack of faith in the Catholic Church, the old hierarchies were being disassembled and the lines between good and bad were being blurred even more. Society was no longer a hierarchy of authority with the priests and the politicians at the top. The gangsters were as likely to be in expensive offices as on the streets. Society had been shaken up and that makes for great subject matter for crime writers.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here.
  Meanwhile, Claire Coughlan contributes a very nice piece to the Irish Times’ ‘In Praise Of’ series celebrating Irish women writers, with a short but heartfelt paean to Tana French. You’ll find it here.

Interview: Anthony Quinn

Arminta Wallace interviewed Anthony Quinn (right) – author of DISAPPEARED, BORDER ANGELS and THE BLOOD DIMMED TIDE – for the Irish Times over the weekend, and a very good read it is too. Sample quote:

“One of the biggest influences on me is Graham Greene. He was very good at bringing out the darkness in everybody as well as the light. PD James and Ruth Rendell are also influences. But I would say that Stuart Neville and Colin Bateman have influenced me in more subtle ways, in that they first took on writing about the Troubles and using detective fiction to do it. They knocked away my inhibitions in that respect.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Review: THE BOY THAT NEVER WAS by Karen Perry

The latest Irish Times crime fiction column appeared last week, and included the new titles from Martin Cruz Smith, Chris Pavone, Natalie Haynes, Tom Rob Smith and Karen Perry. The Karen Perry review ran a lot like this:

Karen Perry is a new writing partnership composed of Karen Gillece and Paul Perry, and their debut The Boy That Never Was (Penguin / Michael Joseph, €14.99) suggests that it will be the first of many. A prologue set in Tangier in 2005 tells the reader that Harry is guilty of negligence in the death, during an earthquake, of his young son Dillon. The story then moves on to Dublin in 2010, when Harry believes he sees his missing son on O’Connell Street during an anti-government demonstration. Unable to persuade the Gardai that Dillon is alive and well, Harry confesses all to his wife, Robin, which is when we start to realise that Harry has a history of obsession and instability, and that Robin also has secrets she needs to conceal. The unreliable narrator is a staple of the crime / mystery genre, but The Boy That Never Was folds another dimension into the convention by offering us a pair of devious narrators. It’s a neat trick, especially as each succeeding account casts doubt on the truth of the previous offering’s events and the mental state of its narrator, with the result that this assured debut is equal parts thriller, mystery and fascinating psychological study. ~ Declan Burke

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Review: IN THE ROSARY GARDEN by Nicola White

The latest crime fiction column in the Irish Times featured offerings by Pierre LeMaitre, Kim Cooper, James Naughtie and Maurizio de Giovanni. It also included a review of Nicola White’s IN THE ROSARY GARDEN, which ran a lot like this:

Set in Ireland in 1984, Nicola White’s In the Rosary Garden (Cargo Publishing) centres on the discovery of a dead infant in the grounds of a convent. Given the place and particularly the time, Detective Vincent Swan has to proceed carefully as he investigates how the child was killed, and why it was left to be discovered in a convent, and matters are further complicated by the fact that this is not the first time that schoolgirl Ali Hogan has discovered a dead baby. White’s debut – the novel won the Dundee International Book Prize late last year – has haunting echoes of recent Irish history, and White has no compunction in pointing the finger at the patriarchal society that plays a significant part in the tragedies detailed here. The novel is by no means a polemic, however. An unusual but absorbingly twisting narrative is hugely enhanced by White’s creation of Detective Swan, a complex man whose own frustrated paternal instincts ensure that a highly politicised case becomes very personal indeed. ~ Declan Burke

  For the rest of the column, clickety-click here …

Darkness Visible: Michael Russell’s CITY OF SHADOWS

I’ve been hearing quite a lot about Michael Russell’s CITY OF SHADOWS (Avon) over the last few months, all of it very positive, and most recently from Joe Long – and if it’s good enough for the Long Fella, then it’s good enough for me. Quote the blurb elves:

“She looked up at the terraced house, with the closed shutters and the big room at the end of the long unlit corridor where the man who smiled too much did his work. She climbed the steps and knocked on the door …”
  Dublin 1934: Detective Stefan Gillespie arrests a German doctor and encounters Hannah Rosen, desperate to find her friend Susan, a Jewish woman who disappeared after a love affair with a Catholic priest. When the bodies of a man and woman are found buried in the Dublin mountains, Stefan becomes involved in a complex case that takes him, and Hannah, across Europe to Danzig. Stefan and Hannah are drawn together in an unfamiliar city where the Nazi Party are gaining power. But in their quest to uncover the truth of what happened to Susan, they find themselves in grave danger …

  Over at Writing.ie, Louise Phillips interviews Michael Russell about CITY OF SHADOWS, and during the chat elicited this:

“One of the problems with writing anything historical is that you’ve got to be very careful your characters don’t already know what’s going to happen, and although Nazism was extremely unpleasant, and there was already plenty of evidence of that [at the time the book is set], it’s not the case that people had the knowledge they subsequently learned, so therefore as the writer you have to look at it slightly differently. The association with the swastika flag was important too, and the incident in Chapter 2 came from an old photograph of a tricolour and a swastika flag hanging outside a Dublin hotel, the party held there was reported in the Irish Times as a great party, one for the German community. There were plenty of people who thought, again referring to an old photograph of a branch of Hitler Youth, formed by the German community in Ireland, that they were polite, they were disciplined and in the case of the Hitler Youth on that particular occasion, sang rather nicely.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

A Murder Less Ordinary

Now this could be interesting. It’s not often you get a debut crime novel from a former editor of the Irish Times who is also a former Garda Ombudsman, but Conor Brady publishes A JUNE OF ORDINARY MURDERS with New Island next month. Quoth the blurb elves:

In the 1880s the Dublin Metropolitan Police classified crime in two distinct classes. Political crimes were ‘special’, whereas theft, robbery and even murder, no matter how terrible, were ‘ordinary’.
  Dublin, June 1887: the mutilated bodies of a man and a child are discovered in Phoenix Park and Detective Sergeant Joe Swallow steps up to investigate. Cynical and tired, Swallow is a man living on past successes in need of a win.
  In the background, the city is sweltering in a long summer heatwave, a potential gangland war is simmering as the chief lieutenants of a dying crime boss size each other up and the castle administration want the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee to pass off without complication. Underneath it all, the growing threat of anti-British radicals is never far away. With the Land War at its height, the priority is to contain ‘special’ crime. But these murders appear to be ‘ordinary’ and thus of lesser priority.   When the evidence suggests high-level involvement, and as the body count increases, Swallow must navigate the waters of foolish superiors, political directives and frayed tempers to investigate the crime, find the true murderer and deliver justice.
  A JUNE OF ORDINARY MURDERS captures the life and essence of Dublin in the 1880s and draws the reader on a thrilling journey of murder and intrigue.

  Sounds like it could be an absolute cracker. Brady, incidentally, has previously published the non-fiction GUARDIANS OF THE PEACE, ‘a political history of the Irish Police, or Garda Síochána’. We’ve had historical Irish crime fiction from Cora Harrison and Kevin McCarthy to date, and while one Swallow (koff) doesn’t make a summer, the late 19th century in Ireland could well be very fertile ground for a very interesting series. We’ll keep you posted …

Flash! It May Save Every One Of Us …

I had a piece on flash fiction published in the Irish Times a couple of weeks ago, and the response to it was phenomenal. Not to my piece, per se, but to the fact that the Irish Times requested examples of flash fiction. In fact, so impressive was the response - in quality and quantity - that the Irish Times today publishes a selection of flash fiction, a feature that is to become a regular item in the newspaper. As far as I know, submission is open to all, regardless of where you’re from. First, the feature:

Flash fiction – very short, bite-sized stories – has become the favourite form of many writers. It’s succinct, punchy and effective – perfect for the online reader and perfectly in synch with the times, writes DECLAN BURKE

LESS HAS always been more in the writing of fiction, but “flash fiction” takes the concept to a whole new level. In essence, a flash fiction is a very short short story, the classic example being attributed to Ernest Hemingway: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
  “Flash fiction appeals because it gets right to the heart of human experience in just a few words,” says author Alison Wells. “Its brevity and condensed resonance make sure it lingers in the mind and heart. It has the power of a poem but with greater clarity and accessibility.”
  Nuala Ní Chonchúir is a novelist, poet and short-story writer. “Lovers of flash fiction, like poets, value brevity and the hit of surprise that flash often delivers,” she says. “A good flash story is intense, urgent and often a little explosive, but also deep and clear, so the effect on the reader is like that of a poem – as you read it you admire its concision and, afterwards, it lingers.” The format is quickly gaining credibility. The Dublin Review of Books , for example, announced Ní Chonchúir as the winner of its second annual flash fiction competition recently, securing her a prize of €1,000.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  For today’s samples of flash fiction in the Irish Times, clickety-click here …
  Anyone wishing to submit examples of their flash fiction should email them to flashfiction@irishtimes.com.

DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS: The Irish Times Speaks!

I wasn’t expecting the reviews to start coming through so soon - and as always, you half-expect that your book won’t be reviewed at all - but today’s Irish Times carries a review of DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS (Liberties Press), written by David Park, with which I am well pleased. The gist runneth thusly:

“HEINOUS CRIMES have been committed the length and breadth of Ireland, and even farther afield. Crimes that would make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. Crimes committed by smiling serial killers, dead-eyed psychopaths, low-life gangsters and those who thought themselves soldiers or even avenging angels. Too many crimes to count. Now what looks indisputably like a body has emerged. Some literary pathologists suggest it stems from the mid-1990s; others say it bears a much older history. DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS: IRISH CRIME WRITING IN THE 21st CENTURY, under the skilled editorship of Declan Burke, reveals the full story of this body and offers thought-provoking theories about its origins, identity and future.
  The body in question is no decaying corpse but a flourishing school of work that generically gets labelled as crime fiction. A new generation of writers has emerged in the past 10 years, with Gene Kerrigan, Arlene Hunt, Alan Glynn, Declan Hughes, Brian McGilloway, Adrian McKinty, Ken Bruen, Jane Casey and a seemingly endless host of other authors joining the likes of John Connolly and Colin Bateman. Declan Burke, author of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, THE BIG O and ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, and creator of a lively blog called Crime Always Pays, has assembled a thoroughly entertaining miscellany of essays, interviews, short stories, memoir and first-hand perspectives that offers intriguing insights into the genre, including excellent pieces on film and theatre […]
  “John Connolly believes the future challenge for Irish crime writing is how to find a place on the international stage and “how to create a uniquely Irish form of the genre without losing sight of the universal”. The energetic, passionate voices evident in this wonderful collection suggest that this is a challenge Irish crime writers, the trawlers and scribes of our mean streets, might well have the talent to meet.” - David Park

  So there you have it: ‘thought-provoking … entertaining … wonderful collection’. We thank you kindly, Mr Park. For the full review, clickety-click here …
  Incidentally, last week RTE’s radio arts programme Arena interviewed yours truly and Declan Hughes on the subject of GREEN STREETS in particular and Irish crime writing in general. If you’re interested, the podcast can be found here …

DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS: ‘A Book To Savour Slowly’

UPDATE: Just heard this morning that our humble offering, DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS (Liberties Press), entered the Irish Nielsen HB charts at # 2. Jazzed, buzzed and generally delighted, as you might imagine. And now, dear reader, read on …

The Irish Times was kind enough, yesterday, to run an excerpt from John Connolly’s (right) contribution to DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS: IRISH CRIME WRITING IN THE 21st CENTURY. Taken from his wide-ranging essay, ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Crime Writers: Ireland and the Mystery Genre’, Connolly examines the reasons why Ireland was not fertile ground for the crime novel until very recently, suggesting here that ‘… the private eye novel has struggled to make a successful case for itself in the UK.’ He then goes on to say:

“While that may be due, to some degree, to the sense that gun-toting PIs don’t travel well across the Atlantic, I would suggest that it is also a consequence of a deeply held belief that the pursuit of justice is one best entrusted to the police, and an absence of the frontier spirit of the United States that places such a premium on independence and individual action.
  “That belief may be shaken by reports of real life police corruption, brutality, and incompetence, but it seems such revelations may simply cause readers to turn to the more idealised police officers of crime fiction with renewed vigour.
  “After all, crime fiction is less about the world as it is than the world as it should be. As William Gaddis wrote in his novel JR (1976): “Justice? – you get justice in the next world, in this world, you have the law.”
  “Crime fiction refuses to accept that this should be the case, and in doing so it reflects the desire of its readers for a more just society. Even at its darkest it is, essentially, hopeful by nature.
  “All of which brings us back to Ireland, and the question of which of these two opposing outlooks might best have suited an Irish crime novel. The answer, I think, is neither: the Irish police had yet to establish themselves in the mind of the populace, and after centuries of British rule our faith in the Establishment and its values was minimal.
  “If we accept the view that crime fiction is not merely engaged with the society from which it comes but is representative of it, then the nascent Irish Republic – secretive, defensive, intensely parochial, and unforgiving of its critics – gave Irish crime fiction little with which to work.” - John Connolly

  For the rest of the excerpt, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, Shane Hegarty, Arts Editor at the Irish Times, was good enough to invite me to take part in that organ’s weekly podcast, along with Sinead Gleeson and Mick Heaney, to talk about the issues bedevilling the literary novel, and provide me with the opportunity to plug GREEN STREETS, and great fun it was too. For the audio, clickety-click here …
  Elsewhere, Michael Shonk was quickly out of the blocks to review GREEN STREETS for The Mystery Reader. Quoth Michael:

“Aimed at the casual reader and the devoted fan, there is much for all to enjoy. This is not a book you read in one night unable to stop, though it is about such books. Instead this is a book to savour slowly, a chapter at a time.” - Michael Shonk

  We thank you kindly, sir. For the rest, clickety-click here …

Emerald Noir: Val McDermid Speaks

The doyenne of British crime fiction, Val McDermid (right), turns her steely gaze on the Irish crime novel next Tuesday, March 8th, in a BBC radio programme entitled ‘Emerald Noir: The Rise of Irish Crime Fiction’. Quoth the BBC blurb elves:

Peace in Northern Ireland and the economic boom and bust in Southern Ireland have led to a recent rise in crime fiction.
  Val McDermid looks at the way real life violence has been dealt with in the work of authors including Tana French, Eoin McNamee, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Stuart Neville and Declan Hughes. We meet David Torrans - whose bookstore in Belfast has been fictionalised in Colin Bateman’s series of crime novels. Declan Burke - author of the blog Crime Always Pays - takes us on a tour of Dublin locations featured in crime novels from the modern Docklands offices which inspired Alan Glynn’s novel Winterland to the hotels and shops of 1950s Dublin featured in the crime fiction of Booker winner John Banville - who writes under the name Benjamin Black.
  Val asks whether the Noir novel is a protestant art form and hears how writers are trying to find new villains in a place where violence has - until recently - been part of everyday life.
  Producer: Robyn Read.
  Tuesday, 11:30 on BBC Radio 4

  Nice. It’s entirely serendipitous that the programme airs in advance of the publication next month of DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS: IRISH CRIME WRITING IN THE 21st CENTURY, edited by one Declan Burke (Liberties Press), a collection of essays, interviews and short stories by Irish crime writers which includes all the names mentioned above, and also John Connolly, Ken Bruen, Arlene Hunt, Alex Barclay, Adrian McKinty, Gene Kerrigan, Jane Casey, and many more. GREEN STREETS will be published next month, and will be the subject of a New York University symposium on the rise of the Irish crime novel at the end of April, more of which anon.
  Finally, for the day that’s in it, here’s a rather fine review by David Park in the Irish Times of Adrian McKinty’s new offering, FALLING GLASS. The gist runs thusly:

McKinty is a streetwise, energetic gunslinger of a writer, firing off volleys of sassy dialogue and explosive action that always delivers what it has promised the reader. The story is skilfully constructed, and the pace is always full throttle forwards. There is one violent scene in Mexico involving a chainsaw that is definitely not for the squeamish, but it would be unfair to think of the author as someone exclusively reliant on external action. There is, for example, an interesting psychological exploration of Killian’s re-embracing of his half-forgotten roots and the cultural values of the Traveller community. Even the dark figure of Markov, the Russian hitman, gets layered and lightened with some psychological subtleties that are the product of his relationship with his partner, Marina, and experiences of the war in Chechnya that continue to haunt him.

  For the full review, clickety-click here …

Fly Concord For Free

I had a piece published in the Irish Times yesterday on the Concord Free Press, which is currently publishing Scott Phillips’ rather excellent RUT. The opening ran a lot like this:

The best things in life are free books. That’s the philosophy of the US-based Concord Free Press, which publishes books and gives them away.
  “GIVE + TAKE, my fourth novel, inspired the whole idea,” says Stona Fitch of CFP. “It’s about a jazz pianist who steals diamonds and BMWs and gives away the money - in short, a modern retelling of the Robin Hood fable. But it’s also about the limits of generosity and the slippery nature of value. When the book ran into classic delay at a major New York publishing house, I decided to start the Concord Free Press and give it the book away, asking only that readers give some money to a charity they believed in or someone in need.”
  The CFP publishing model - which they have dubbed ‘generosity-based publishing’ - is overseen by an Advisory Board of writers that includes Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Megan Abbott and Gregory Maguire, among others. “It’s important to point out that we’re a group of writers that publishes books,” says Stona, “not a publisher only. We’ve just seized control of the machinery of publishing and put it to work in a new way.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

On Tight Jeans And Strategically-Placed Zips

Tony Clayton-Lea interviewed the ever radiant Alex Barclay (right) for the Irish Times to mark the publication of TIME OF DEATH, and was clearly very taken by the feminine charms of his interviewee. To wit:

A CITY-CENTRE Dublin hotel, Saturday morning, July 31st. A slim, attractive woman in a silver-blue top with strategically-placed zips, tight jeans and black, heeled boots sits down in a low sofa and starts to speak. She will spill only as many beans as she wants to, and will, occasionally, be as difficult to determine as the stain on a nearby rug.
  Half conundrum, full beauty, Irish crime writer and former journalist Alex Barclay is currently sitting atop various bestseller lists with her latest novel, TIME OF DEATH. Her fourth book in a thriller-writing career that commenced six years ago with DARKHOUSE has clearly benefited from her former role as a journalist. Discipline with words, awareness of deadlines, structure, research, and knowing how important beginnings, middles and ends are to stories have filtered down into a writing style that is as trim as Barclay herself.
  She won’t give too much of herself away, either, which also comes from her former life of interviewing people and hearing too much personal guff; Barclay sticks to the facts, clear and simple.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  How come no one ever mentions how trim I am when they interview me? Or my tight jeans and strategically-placed zips? More to the point, how come no ever wants to interview me?
  Oh. ‘Best-seller lists’. Right.

The Sharpest O’Toole In The Box

There was an interesting piece on Irish crime fiction from Fintan O’Toole (right) in yesterday’s Irish Times, in which he referenced Declan Hughes, Gene Kerrigan and Alan Glynn as exemplars of ‘the nearest thing we have to a realist literature adequate to capturing the nature of contemporary society …’. The gist runneth thusly:

“It is striking that the most successful Irish crime writer, John Connolly, who began his career just a decade ago, felt it necessary to set his books in the US and to insert himself directly into the American detective tradition. Connolly presumably decided that Ireland, even in the Celtic Tiger years, was not the place for crime fiction. Yet it is equally striking that in the last few years, Irish-set crime writing has not merely begun to blossom but has become arguably the nearest thing we have to a realist literature adequate to capturing the nature of contemporary society …
  “If that were the whole story, however, what we’d be getting now would be simply a local version of the established international genre. That we’re getting something rather more interesting than that is suggested by two intriguing ways in which the best writing is inflected by older Irish traditions …
  “In creating an Ireland with no faith in authority and no belief that the bad guys will be vanquished by naming their names, they get closer to reality than most literary fiction has managed.”

  The piece is short but it is wide-ranging enough to touch on the perversity of the Irish crime narrative, beginning with JM Synge’s play ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, in which the ‘murderer’ is not only discovered very early on in the story, but spends most of his time protesting his ‘guilt’, to no avail. In offering reasons for why the traditional crime novel didn’t find its place in Ireland until recently, however, O’Toole doesn’t mention the post-colonial Irish attitude summed up by Seamus Heaney’s phrase, “Whatever you say / Say nothing.” In Ireland, everyone loves to tell a story, but no one wants to be thought an informant. Hence the power of Liam O’Flaherty’s proto-noir THE INFORMER, a claustrophobic tale of treachery and insufferable guilt and the consequences of betrayal, a Greek tragedy set in Dublin’s red-light district and written in the brusque, staccato style that Dashiell Hammett would later pioneer in the U.S. (THE INFORMER was published in 1925).
  All in all, O’Toole’s is a thought-provoking piece, and could well prove a quantum leap in the ongoing struggle for the Irish crime novel to gain traction with the Irish reading public. Fintan O’Toole is one of the most clear-eyed observers among the Irish intelligentsia (he recently published SHIP OF FOOLS: HOW STUPIDITY AND CORRUPTION SANK THE CELTIC TIGER) and his tacit approval certainly won’t do Declan Hughes, Gene Kerrigan and Alan Glynn any harm.
  Naturally, given that the piece appeared shortly after yours truly went public with his decision to pack in the writing career, I’m a little sceptical about the prospects for the Irish crime novel. But it’s not just me: this week just gone by, I had conversations with two very fine Irish crime writers, both of whom were very pessimistic about the publishing industry in general, and Irish crime fiction in particular. Put bluntly, and despite high-profile awards and awards nominations for the likes of Connolly, Hughes, Ken Bruen, Tana French, Gene Kerrigan, Ruth Dudley Edwards and Brian McGilloway in recent years, Irish crime novels don’t sell, either in Ireland or (crucially) abroad. Without knowing exact figures, John Connolly is probably the exception to this rule, as he is to most rules - and apologies to any writer mentioned who is, in fact, rolling in dosh.
  Next year will see no less than three movies based on Ken Bruen novels hit the big screen, and – all going well – filming begin on Alan Glynn’s THE DARK FIELDS. On the surface, things appear to be going swimmingly for Irish crime writers, and it was heart-warming to see Stuart Neville’s THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST (aka THE TWELVE) get top billing in Marilyn Stasio’s NYT column last week. This year has been a terrific year for Irish crime writing: along with Connolly, Kerrigan, Glynn and Hughes, Fintan O’Toole could quite easily, given his terms of reference, have mentioned the likes of Adrian McKinty, Colin Bateman, Alex Barclay, Stuart Neville, Brian McGilloway, Ken Bruen, Ava McCarthy, Garbhan Downey and Sam Millar, and that’s in a year when we didn’t have any books from Arlene Hunt, Julie Parsons, Benjamin Black or Tana French. It was also the year when the Irish crime novel got its own category at the Irish Book Awards, with Alex Barclay the inaugural winner.
  All of which seems overwhelmingly positive, and a rising tide lifts all boats, but I can’t help wondering if Fintan O’Toole’s piece won’t come to be seen as the high-water mark of the Irish crime novel – usually, mainstream media picking up on a trend means sounding its death-knell. I certainly hope it doesn’t, because, leaving aside the fact that most of the writers mentioned above write well-written entertainments, they also write novels that are important in terms of our understanding of who we are and where we’re going. As Val McDermid says in today’s Sunday Independent:

“The crime novel really has become the state-of-the-nation fiction. There’s an Irish writer called Alan Glynn, who has just published a novel WINTERLAND … This is a book that speaks to absolutely now. Good writers – good crime writers in particular – have a knack of plugging into the zeitgeist.”

  As a writer, I’ve been hearing for some time now from editors and agents and publishers that what the industry wants is ‘big’ books – crime stories with an appeal broad enough to propel the book into the mainstream. CHILD 44 and THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO are good recent examples, and it’s possibly the case that Ireland, despite its potentially fertile setting for crime fiction (post-Troubles, post-economic boom) simply isn’t ‘big’ enough to capture the imagination of the reading public at large. That shouldn’t be the case, in theory at least, because, like politics, all good novels are local, and if there’s one thing Ireland is producing in these benighted times, it’s damn fine novels.
  The irony, of course, is that the best way for a country to break out of an economic slump is to start creating unique indigenous products for export, which is very much the case when it comes to most of the writers mentioned above. Has it come time for Irish crime writers to band together in a union, the better to lobby the government for investment to market their high quality exports abroad? A little investment, cleverly used, would go a long way, particularly in terms of impacting on the media. Or has the time finally come for an Irish crime writing association? Are such associations of any practical use? Or are there any other ideas out there in left field that might be beneficial?
  I know that there are plenty of Irish crime writers out there who ‘lurk’ on Crime Always Pays, and it’s your prerogative not to leave a comment, or get involved in any way, because the writing game is at heart a solitary business, and (speaking for myself, at least) joining gangs goes against the grain. But the times they are a-changing, folks, and what worked in the past just ain’t cutting it anymore. And it would be horrible, truly horrible, if we were to look back in five years time and concede that Fintan O’Toole’s piece in the Irish Times was a high-water mark, and that the tide has gone out, leaving some very fine boats stranded.
  The floor is open, people …

Sec’s Appeal: The Other John Waters Vs Secularism # 1,014

At the risk of oversimplifying John Waters’ most recent book, LAPSED AGNOSTIC, the Irish Times journalist found God through Alcoholics Anonymous, and then learned to justify an entire belief system by viewing it through the prism of his own experience.
  Now I’m delighted, for his sake, that John Waters managed to escape the demon booze, because you wouldn’t wish alcoholism on your worst enemy, but I really do wish that he’d stop trying to belittle those who have yet to share his epiphany by suggesting that they are somehow less human than he.
  He was at it again in today’s Irish Times, when he had this to say:

“Religion, rather than just another “category”, is the guiding hypothesis that makes sense of the whole, the public expression of the total dimension of human nature. No other channel has the capacity to convey the broadest truths about man’s nature and his relationship to the universe. Secularists do not like this characterisation of the situation, but it has long been obvious that they have nothing to offer society as an alternative source of ethics, meaning or hope.”

  Of the first part of his assertion, I’d suggest that science has not only “the capacity to convey the broadest truths about man’s nature and his relationship to the universe”, but is in fact the only rational approach to trying to understand the whys and wherefores of being alive.
  As for secularists having “nothing to offer society as an alternative source of ethics, meaning or hope”: leaving aside the basic human capacity to instinctively understand good from bad, and all that flows from that understanding, Waters fails to suggest how humanity managed to survive for the 100,000 years or so of its current incarnation (up to about 14,000-12,000 BC, when the first inklings of religion appear) without even a primitive system of ethics, meaning or hope to sustain it.
  Humans invented religion, the most perverse case of wishful thinking every visited on the race. And good for us, it’s a tribute to our imaginations and the brainy brains that got us this far in the struggle for survival. In the grand scheme of things, though, religion is Santa Claus for slow learners. Here endeth the sermon.

In The Name Of The Father

Rosita Boland had a rather poignant interview with John Connolly (right) in yesterday’s Irish Times to mark the publication of THE GATES, in which Connolly touched on the death of his father, and how the loss has impacted on his writing. To wit:

When Connolly left Dublin Corporation to study English at Trinity College, he had money in the bank, and a renewed vigour for education. On a summer student job in the US soon after, he called home one evening from New York and discovered his father had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He flew home the next day, and his father died soon afterwards. The cancer he died from has since become a recurrent symbolic motif in Connolly’s work: people’s bodies being horribly consumed by something they cannot control. “I think because of what happened to my father and the way he died, I have an absolute loathing and fear of that disease. I just think it’s so insidious and so appalling. It occurs in the books again and again. ‘The Cancer Cowboy Rides’ [a story in NOCTURNES] is the most explicit version of it, but again and again, with people in my books, there is this image of cancer or of being eaten from the inside.”
  Recurrent also in the books is the theme of fathers – fatherhood, absent fathers, dead fathers, men who don’t know whether they want to be fathers. “I think all young men are trying to prove something to their dads,” he says carefully. “I think his whole idea was he worked so that at some point, he didn’t have to work any more, and that work was a kind of chore he got through as a prelude to retirement, when he could do all the things that he planned on doing. And then you know, work kind of had the last laugh, because he died while he was still working.
  “He was not impressed by me wanting to be a writer, or to be a journalist. And I suppose part of me becoming a journalist and part of me going to college and doing something like English was a kind of way of saying to him, well actually, what you want is not what I want. The awful thing is, having done all that, had he seen what I do now, he would have been immensely proud.” Earlier, he said his father had a distrust of the “kind of freelance existence” that journalism and a career as a writer offered. It’s not hard to see where the roots of Connolly’s drive and work ethic came from.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

He’ll Be Having A Go At The Lilies Next

He pee’d off the literary crew when, on accepting the Booker Prize for THE SEA, he announced that it was ‘nice to see a work of art win for a change’. Then he got stuck into crime writing – allegedly. Yesterday, in a fine interview with Fiona McCann in the Irish Times, John Banville had a go at the webnauts. To wit:

Banville is full of opinions: on art, on sport, on working life, on the internet. “Most of the stuff that people churn out on the internet is rubbish. People should learn a little bit of reticence and not imagine that they have things to say.”

  Funnily enough, I read the interview on the Irish Times’ website, in which John Banville is, as Fiona McCann points out, ‘full of opinions’ …
  The interview, of course, was marking the publication of the latest Banville novel, THE INFINITIES, which I read a couple of weeks ago and thoroughly enjoyed. Told over the course of one day, as a family gathers about its dying pater familias, Adam Godley, the story is for the most part narrated by Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods – although, as Hermes points out, the gods being a rather protean lot, the first-person narrative duties do tend to switch about. The tale is a gently meandering one of mortal and immortal failings and foibles, and love stories, and minor infidelities, and quantum physics. The characters are fragmentary, deliberately so, as Hermes wafts in and out of their lives, with the story as a whole offering an incomplete mosaic of a family trapped in the amber of one day. The language, the prose style, is beautifully rendered, even if there are sentences and even whole paragraphs that billow like glass overblown – although it should be said that almost every line is shot through with sly and self-mocking humour. At the risk of displaying an unseemly lack of reticence, I’d say it’s Banville’s most engaging book for some time, an arched eyebrow of a comic novel that seems to appreciate its place in the grand scheme of things, which is, I think, because of its admittedly enjoyable angsty self-awareness, on the lower slopes of the empyrean rather than in the pantheon itself.

The Revolution Will Be Televised, With Endorsements

Kudos yet again to the Irish Times for its Book of the Day review slot, although today’s offering was a terrible review of Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND. By which I mean, the reviewer didn’t like the novel, but the review itself was terrible. It kicks off like this:

SERIOUS CRIME fiction these days is a fickle gamble, especially for newer writers. Genre boundaries have become blurred. Crime thriller enthusiasts are perhaps among the hardest readers to impress because of their love for both the list of illustrious luminaries and equally because of the powerful abilities of this same elite to bring their main characters to life. It’s called character stamina …

  Leaving aside ‘character stamina’ (?), what’s all this about ‘crime thriller enthusiasts’? Do those who love chick lit not have a list of illustrious luminaries? What about sci-fi lovers – don’t they have their own geniuses? Do not those who prefer literary fiction, or poetry, love their luminaries for their ability to bring their characters to life?
  The review goes downhill from there, losing wheels at a rate of knots. This bit stands out, though:

Some of Hollywood’s hottest names pop up in the storyline, including Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Matthew Broderick. Seeing their names made me increasingly uncomfortable as to how they might feel about being associated with the image of the resort’s labour conditions, bent sheriff and sleazy drug dealers.

  Happily, the reviewer was in no way uncomfortable with trashing a brilliant writer’s novel on the basis that he, the reviewer, preferred the works of Jeffrey Deaver and David Baldacci.
  Seriously, some days you’d wonder why you bother your hole.
  And then, just when you think the day can’t get any worse, the ever-fragrant Sarah Weinman pops up with the worst cover (see above) in the history of publishing.
  It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better, people …

I’d Love To Set A Thriller On The Moon, But …

Atmosphere or no, it’s amazing there aren’t more thrillers set on the moon*. Exotic locations are growing more and more popular with the crime fic fraternity, to the point where it can be argued – I think some po-faced critic did so recently, actually – that the novels are becoming as much travelogues as they are thrillers. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – I discovered Paul Johnston, for example, because he set the first Alex Mavros novel on a Greek island – but there can be times when writers overstep the mark and wallow in exotica to the exclusion of formerly vital components of the crime novel, such as tension and dead bodies.
  Anyway, kudos are due yet again to the Irish Times for their ongoing support for crime fiction, which this weekend manifested itself as a double-page spread feature on exotic locations for crime fic novels. To wit:

“BAD THINGS happen in beautiful places,” the doyenne of British crime fiction, PD James, recently observed. She’s so right. When we’re sunning ourselves on some idyllic beach or downing grilled prawns and dry white wine in some sheltered harbour, we like nothing better than a good murder – fictional, of course – to keep us entertained. A strong sense of place is one of the most attractive elements of a top-notch crime novel, and it needn’t be a remote wilderness place, either; it can be a pulsating city neighbourhood, or even a single apartment building. Arminta Wallace suggests some striking locations for a spot of summer sleuthing.

  The locations Wallace picked are Louisiana, Yorkshire, Venice, Boston, Bangkok, Donegal, Alaska, Shanghai, Botswana, Reykjavik, Washington DC, Sicily, London, Breslau, Dublin, Paris, New York, Edinburgh, Seville, Istanbul, Los Angeles, Nairobi, Maine, Sweden and Norfolk, although I’m sure Peter Rozovsky could suggest a few more. I’m thinking, off the top of my head, Tibet, Egypt, Australia, Greece and Brazil …
  And in the week that’s in it, given that it’s getting its UK publication, how the hell could they miss out on Cuba and Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND?
  Quibbles apart, it’s a fine piece. Clickety-click here for all the details …

* Funnily enough, Duncan Jones – aka Zowie Bowie – has just directed Sam Rockwell in Moon, a Phil Dick-style existential thriller of paranoia, cloning and double-cross set on the moon, which is due out in Ireland on July 17, and comes warmly recommended by your genial host. Oh, and expect to see every newspaper feature dealing with Moon titled ‘Space Oddity’.

Suffer, Little Children

Those of you who have read Ken Bruen’s THE MAGDALEN MARTYRS and perhaps thought that Ken was, as writers tend to do, exaggerating the horrors of the ‘Magdalene laundries’ for dramatic purposes, might be interested in the findings of the report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, published earlier this week. The report details systematic abuses – including physical and psychological brutality, gang-rape and torture – on an industrial scale, all of which were perpetrated by members of the Catholic Church’s various bodies. Yesterday’s Irish Times editorial, under the heading ‘The savage reality of our darkest days’, had this to say:

The key to understanding these attitudes is surely to realise that abuse was not a failure of the system. It was the system. Terror was both the point of these institutions and their standard operating procedure. Their function in Irish society was to impose social control, particularly on the poor, by acting as a threat. Without the horror of an institution like Letterfrack, it could not fulfil that function. Within the institutions, terror was systematic and deliberate. It was a methodology handed down through “successive generations of [Christian] Brothers, priests and nuns”.
  There is a nightmarish quality to this systemic malice, reminiscent of authoritarian regimes. We read of children “flogged, kicked . . . scalded, burned and held under water”. We read of deliberate psychological torment inflicted through humiliation, expressions of contempt and the practice of incorrectly telling children that their parents were dead …

  For the full editorial, click here …
  Those inclined to defend, rebut, apologise for or otherwise try to contextualise the horror by way of the ‘one bad apple in a barrel’ argument should realise that some apples are bad going into the barrel, some apples are made bad by the barrel, and some barrels are better than others at creating bad apples.
  Last week I mentioned that the Minister for Justice, Mr Brian Lenihan, is pressing ahead with his plans to put the crime of blasphemy on the statute books in Ireland. Given the findings of the report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, he might make better use of his time by banning religions, and particularly those who make a virtue of deviant sexual practices, such as celibacy.