Nobody Move, This Is a Review: WHAT RICHARD DID

Richard Karlsen (Jack Reynor), the handsome young hero of Lenny Abrahamson’s What Richard Did (15A), is almost too good to be true. A schools rugby captain and the alpha male of his peer group in the leafy environs of south County Dublin, Richard is also thoughtful and sensitive, ‘the male equivalent,’ as one of his friends declares, ‘of the Rose of fucking Tralee’. Loosely based on Kevin Power’s novel Bad Day in Blackrock (2008), which was in turn inspired by the media coverage of the brutal death of a Dublin schoolboy at the hands - or feet - of his peers, What Richard Did is a character study of an intelligent young man who kicks his golden future apart in a moment of booze-fuelled jealous rage. It’s a thought-provoking film that offers its teenage protagonists no mercy as it pries into their intimate lives, but it’s refreshing too to watch a film that allows young men and women be who they are on their own terms - it’s a kind of Irish Less Than Zero (1987), in which the pretty young things prove to be pretty vacant when the first real stumbling block to their gilded passage through life drops out of the sky. Reynor is superb as Richard, an apparently effortless performance that grows impressively intense and anguished as he tries to come to terms with his tragedy, and he gets very strong support from fellow cast members Roisin Murphy, Sam Keeley and Fionn Walton. As if dazzled by Reynor’s performance, however, the filmmakers allow the true tragedy of the story to slip away - Richard is here the perpetrator, after all, rather than the victim - in favour of wallowing in persuasive but ultimately hollow existential self-questioning. Then again, this is a story that has its roots in the Me-Me-Me Celtic Tiger era, so perhaps focusing on Richard’s grief at the loss of his privileged existence is the most cutting satirical side-swipe at that benighted time Campbell and Abrahamson could have devised. ****

This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Jeeves? The Luger

The Glebe ‘Cultural Summit’ takes place in Donegal next month, as part of the Earagail Arts Festival, incorporating discussions on books, film and ‘the Next Door Neighbours’ - i.e., the relationship between Ireland and Britain.
  It all takes place at Glebe House and Gallery, a rather lovely little spot on the fringe of Glenveagh National Park. The former home of artist Derek Hill, the house is now maintained as a museum by Heritage Ireland. We were there a couple of weeks ago, and got the guided tour - there’s a Picasso, a Renoir, a beautiful Evie Hone, and much more - although the artist that caught my eye was John Craxton, whose ‘Shepherds Near Knossos’ decorates this post, and about whom you will be hearing more of in my next novel.
  But I digress. Its title apart, which has me instinctively reaching for my Luger, the ‘Glebe Cultural Summit’ has a very nice array of Irish talent on board. Peter Murphy, Mary Costello and Paul Lynch engage in a discussion called ‘New Irish Writing - Post-Boom Narratives’; director Lenny Abrahamson is interviewed in ‘Storytelling on Film’, with a particular stress on the forthcoming What Richard Did, which is adapted from Kevin Power’s very fine novel BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK; and a trio of our finest crime scribes, Arlene Hunt, Declan Hughes and Paul Charles, take part in ‘The Rise of Irish Crime Fiction’.
  For all the details, and how to book tickets, clickety-click here …

More Power To His Elbow

Kevin Power’s BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK (2008) is a very fine novel, and one in the mould of Eoin McNamee in that it fictionalises a real-life event, getting under the skin of the newspaper headlines - and boy, were there headlines. In essence, the story Power tells is one of the Celtic Tiger’s cubs at lethal play, yet it prefigures the economic bust in the way it investigates how, in Ireland, your socio-economic position dictates how severely you will be punished if and when you transgress. Then again, what’s the point of being rich and powerful if you can’t bend the rules once in a while? Quoth the blurb elves:

On a late August night a young man is kicked to death outside a Dublin nightclub and celebration turns to devastation. The reverberations of that event, its genesis and aftermath, are the subject of this extraordinary story, stripping away the veneer of a generation of Celtic cubs, whose social and sexual mores are chronicled and dissected in this tract for our times. The victim, Conor Harris, his killers - three of them are charged with manslaughter - and the trial judge share common childhoods and schooling in the privileged echelons of south Dublin suburbia. The intertwining of these lives leaves their afflicted families in moral free fall as public exposure merges with private anguish and imploded futures.

  The excellent Irish director Lenny Abrahamson is currently filming BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, which will appear on our screens next year as ‘What Richard Did’, courtesy of Element Pictures, whose most recent production was the black comedy ‘The Guard’. To wit:

Element Pictures are delighted to announce that Principal Photography begins this week on Lenny Abrahamson’s new film ‘What Richard Did’. Set in present-day Dublin, the story follows a group of privileged teens over the course of the summer after they leave school, focusing in particular on Richard, a popular sports star, whose life is changed forever after a senseless act of violence. ‘What Richard Did’ is directed by Lenny Abrahamson (Adam & Paul, Garage, Prosperity), written by Malcolm Campbell (Skins, Shameless), produced by Ed Guiney and executive produced by Andrew Lowe both of Element Pictures (‘The Guard’, ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’). It is loosely based on Kevin Powers award winning 2008 novel Bad Day at Blackrock. The film stars an ensemble of young Irish actors including Jack Reynor, Sam Keeley and Roisin Murphy as well as established talent including Lorraine Pilkington and Lars Mikkelsen (star of the Danish hit series, ‘The Killing’). The film will shoot in and around Dublin and Wicklow for five weeks and is backed by the Irish Film Board and Element Pictures.

  I’m looking forward to this one in a big way. Lenny Abrahamson made the best Irish movie of the last decade with the pitch-black comedy ‘Adam & Paul’, and it’ll be intriguing to see what he does with Power’s source material. We’ll keep you posted …

Billy The Id Rides Again

Well, it can only go downhill from here. The launch of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL during the week was terrific fun, and this morning the first print reviews hove into sight, injecting yet another blast of adrenaline into what has already been something of a hi-octane week. First off, Kevin Power over at the Irish Times, under the very cute headline, ‘The Metafictional Adventures of Billy the Id’:

“Thus begins a fascinating hybrid of MISERY, AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS, THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN, and who knows what else … There’s a thematic richness, and a level of stylistic control, to ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL that makes it soar. Far from being ‘just’ a cleverly postmodern crime novel, this book is, among other things, a meditation on the writing life; a parable about terrorism; a bleak satire of the Irish healthcare system; and a fable about life, death and family responsibility … ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL isn’t quite like anything else you’ve read, in any genre. It’s clever, intimate, passionate, and funny: altogether a wonderful achievement.” - Irish Times

  Stephen King, Flann O’Brien and John Fowles? Those burbling sounds you hear are yours truly trying to mumble my thanks whilst struggling to cope with being about two fathoms out of my depth. For the full review, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, over at the Irish Independent, Edel Coffey is in equally generous mood. To wit:

“What is most refreshing about Burke’s book is its ambition. It is rare that a so-called genre book attempts to wrest free of its constraints and do something entirely different. ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL is a genre-buster. Clever, funny, challenging, surreal, unexpected and entirely original.” - Irish Independent

  For the full review, clickety-click here …
  So there you have it. I genuinely don’t know what to say to all that, and it’s probably best if I say nowt - people in shock do tend to say the daftest things. For your usual ration of garrulous non sequiturs, tune back in tomorrow, by which time normal service should have resumed …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Kevin Power

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?
I suppose everyone says THE BIG SLEEP, don’t they? It’s THE GREAT GATSBY of crime fiction. And I like to think that I’d be just slapdash enough to forget, in true Chandleresque style, who killed that chauffeur.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
James Bond. I remember being very impressed, as a kid, when I read GOLDFINGER and learned that Bond concealed his Walther PPK in a book called THE BIBLE DESIGNED TO BE READ AS LITERATURE. I think that was when I realised that true style is in the details.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
The Spenser novels by the late, great Robert B. Parker. Starting with THE GODWULF MANUSCRIPT in 1973, Spenser evolved into one of the great heroes of American popular fiction. Spenser isn’t really a noir protagonist in the true sense – he never compromises, and he’s always right. The Spenser books are basically romances in which the questing hero always triumphs, which I reckon is what makes them so satisfying.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When I was about thirty pages from the end of BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, I suddenly knew what the last paragraph would be, and I scribbled it down then and there. The most satisfying moment was realising everything else was done and I could finally type that final paragraph.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Declan Hughes’s Ed Loy novels are turning into a running commentary on the state of the nation, using the PI genre as a hook. I suspect Ed is the first fictional gumshoe ever to find himself in negative equity. And Hughes can really write, too.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE KILLING KIND by John Connolly. Because of the villain, mostly: Mr. Pudd, the unbelievably creepy arachnophile psychopath who kills people by jamming their mouths with chloroformed black widows. You could traumatize a lot of people by putting Mr. Pudd on screen.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
I can’t see much of a downside. The best thing is when you know you’ve got something right – a sentence, a paragraph, even a section title.

The pitch for your next book is …?
I have to write the bleedin’ thing first.

Who are you reading right now?
In my non-writing life I’m supposed to be doing a PhD on Norman Mailer, so I’ve just read a memoir called MORNINGS WITH MAILER by Dwayne Raymond, who was Mailer’s personal assistant for the last four years of his life. What amazed me was the account of Mailer’s work ethic. The man revised everything five or six times, even if it was just a Christmas card.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I think if God appears, I’ll have bigger problems ...

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
I aim for clarity, honesty, and what you might call “flow” – I want people to turn the pages.

The paperback edition of Kevin Power’s BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK is published by Pocket Books.

The Dark Art of Paranoia

The publication of the paperback edition of Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND is as good an excuse as any to reprint the interview with him I had published in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times’ Culture section a couple of months ago. To wit:

It started on the late, late shows. While most boys in the early ’70s were trawling the late-night TV channels in the hope of glimpsing some illicit flesh, the teenage Alan Glynn was getting off on a more potent charge: paranoia.
  “I think that the stuff you ingest as a teenager is the stuff that sticks with you for life,” says Glynn. “When I was a teenager in the 1970s, the biggest influence was movies, and especially the conspiracy thrillers. What they call the ‘paranoid style’ in America – Klute, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, Three Days of the Condor, and of course, the great Chinatown. There was a societal thing going on, they were examining the whole paranoia thing in American politics at the time, which seemed exotic to me when I was catching late-night movies on BBC2. It was exotic back then, but now we’ve got it. We’re all paranoid now.”
  ‘Follow the money,’ urged Deep Throat in All the President’s Men. Sage advice for those trying to understand why and how Ireland’s boom went bust; or it might be, were there any money left to follow.
  Written while the economy was still thriving, Glynn’s new novel, Winterland, nevertheless gets under the bricks and mortar of post-boom Ireland. Noel Rafferty is a consultant working on a building development on Dublin’s quays. His nephew, also Noel Rafferty, is a gangland hard man. When both men die on the same night, Gina Rafferty, sister and aunt to the men, suspects there is more to the deaths than mere coincidence. As Gina asks questions of those in authority, however, the novel broadens its remit to investigate the connections between blue-collar criminality and those who inhabit the white-collar worlds of politics and business, the latter with fortunes to lose if their building development fails.
  Is there a danger that there will be little new in Winterland, at least in terms of newspaper headlines, for contemporary readers?
  “There has been a tendency for people to say that this is a very prescient book,” he says. “But none of it was consciously written to be prescient. It’s not an economic polemic, or a political polemic, so the specifics of the story detail and how they run parallel to where we are now aren’t all that important.”
  Established as a paradigm by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the theme of linking street-level crime to those in positions of authority abusing their power is virtually axiomatic in crime fiction. Glynn, however, is interested in taking that paradigm onto another level (“I haven’t read a lot of it, really,” he says. “I’m not an expert on crime writing.”) In common with such recent Irish novels as Gerard Donovan’s Julius Winsome, Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Blackrock, or Gene Kerrigan’s Dark Times in the City, Winterland expands beyond crime and punishment to explore those junctures where the personal becomes the political. Fuelled by bad blood and paranoia, the novels investigate the nature of justice itself.
  “Gene Kerrigan is much more knowledgeable about the specifics of this, because of his career in journalism,” says Glynn. “And I think ‘crusade’ would too strong a word, but juxtaposing street crime with the kind of crime that happens in politics or business, I think that highlights on a moral level the question, ‘Where’s the difference?’ Not to be heavy-handed about it, but in Winterland, certain people get away with things in a way that people from a lower economic class wouldn’t get away with.”
  In person amiable and self-deprecating to a fault, Glynn is a far cry from the hard-bitten anti-heroes of ‘the paranoid style’, although he is every bit as single-minded when it comes to following his instincts. Born in Dublin in 1960, and educated locally, he decided very early in life that he had a vocation to write.
  “There was never anything else, ever, on the radar. I have a photograph of myself when I was about seven, sitting at a desk with a pen and a notebook. I only came across it recently, and I was amazed, but it’s completely consistent with what I remember as a kid.”
  He went to Trinity College to read English, where he met his wife Eithne, with whom he has two sons. He then spent five years in Verona teaching English, and then went to New York, returning to Ireland in 1992, when he took the decision to write full-time. His first novel, The Dark Fields, set in New York, was published in 2002.
  “It’s insane,” he says of the writing process, “it’s painfully, painstakingly slow. If I have to write a note to the milkman it’ll take me half-an-hour and three drafts. Not that it’ll be any better in the end, but that’s just the process I have to go through. And that’s a disadvantage in some respects.”
  The main disadvantage is that, as a father of two, and despite working as a full-time writer, Glynn has produced only two published novels in eight years. A third novel, The Paloma Stripe, was rejected in 2005.
  “The reason I was given basically boiled down to ‘likeability’, they had a ‘likeability’ issue with the main character. And that’s a very subjective thing.” It’s also an issue more relevant to commercial fiction, whereas Glynn’s ambitions are more literary. “Look at Humbert Humbert, you wouldn’t call him a likeable character. Or Macbeth.”
  With the publication of Winterland and a Neil Burger-helmed Hollywood adaptation of The Dark Fields due later this year, Glynn’s personal circumstances have hugely improved. His themes, however, remain the same.
  “It’s called Bloodland,” he says of his current work, “and it’s not a sequel to The Dark Fields, but it develops a minor character from that novel and turns on similar themes of power and corruption and the abuse of money and position. The character is an investment banker, and he’s involved in a series of companies which are involved in illegal mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I’m fascinated by this idea that the scramble for Africa, and the plunder of its natural resources, is as big or bigger today as it was when Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness. Then it was ivory and rubber, and the exploitation was on a massive scale. Today it’s coltan, and other precious metals that are used in consumer products, like mobile phones and games consoles and that kind of stuff.”
  Again, the personal meets the political.
  “Well, absolutely. It’s about responsibility – taking responsibility or not taking responsibility, and the broad consequences individual actions can have throughout society.”
  Winterland’s abiding symbol is a tower being built in Dublin’s docklands, proposed to be Europe’s highest building if only those individuals with their hands on the levers of power can apply enough pressure in the right places. Such projects, whether flawed by engineering or overweening ambition, are now considered monuments or mausoleums to the boom years.
  “I was writing this when everything was fine, economically speaking,” says Glynn, “although in saying that, if you looked ahead you knew there had to be something coming down the tracks. People saying, ‘This time it’s different,’ and ‘The Irish model is different.’ We knew then that that was insane. But I was conscious even then that this flaw in the building could symbolise in some sense the hubris that existed, that there was an in-built, invisible fatal flaw in this whole economic boom. Originally the flaw was just a technical issue, an engineering problem, but it quickly became apparent that it was symbolic. I didn’t want to push that too heavily, or be heavy-handed about it, but it was there.
  “Now, in the context of the economic collapse, it makes more sense. It’s clearer to me now than it would have been then. The organic development of those kind of ideas … Sometimes it’s hard, because you’re not quite sure of where it’s bringing you. I think that’s a very important part of writing, to learn to go with that instinctual feel for an idea. You have to trust that.”
  ‘That all is not what it seems’ was once described by the great creative writing teacher John Gardner as the quintessential narrative hook, and it’s an instinctive philosophy that Glynn cleaves to as he gives voice to a distrust of authority that is by no means confined to Ireland.
  “It’s the only sane position to hold,” he says. “This whole idea that we’re being presented with what’s going on, but that behind that again there’s something else happening. Not to be a loopy conspiracy theorist, but just to voice the sense that there’s a disconnect. And we’ve had plenty of evidence of that over the last two decades that things simply were not as we were told they were.”

  This article first appeared in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times’ Culture section.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: Bateman, Bruen and Coleman, Glynn

Yours truly had a piece in the Sunday Independent this week, in which were reviewed the latest offerings from The Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman, Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman, and Alan Glynn. To wit:

THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSELL is the whimsical title to Bateman’s latest offering, and the second title in a year from a new Bateman series which features a hero who goes under the moniker of Mystery Man. I use the word “hero” advisedly: Bateman’s protagonist is the owner of a Belfast bookshop specialising in crime fiction, and a man who likes to dabble in puzzles and the solving of crimes unlikely to put him in any serious danger. He is a whinging hypochondriac, a coward and misogynist, a bookworm nerd who nonetheless gets the girl and saves the day. He may well turn out to be Colin Bateman’s most endearing creation.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, for those of you in the Dublin area this coming Saturday (30th), Declan Hughes and Arlene Hunt are doing a couple of readings from their forthcoming tomes, CITY OF LOST GIRLS and BLOOD MONEY, respectively. Squire Hughes has all the details here …
  Finally, I heard a snippet on the radio yesterday that suggests Kevin Power’s BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK is to be adapted for a movie. Which should be a very interesting project, given that the novel is a fictional reimagining of a high-profile real life event. If anyone has any details, I’m all ears …

The Gospel According To Genre

There was a good piece in Publishers Weekly titled ‘Breaking the Wall’, in which a variety of crime writers discuss what Michael Connelly describes as the ‘membrane’ (as opposed to ‘wall’) between genre and literary fiction. For my money, Tana French (right) nails it to the wall:

“When you’re working to make a sentence as perfect as it can be,” says French, “or to make a character real and vivid and three-dimensional, how and whether you do that isn’t dependent on where the book will be shelved.”

  Well said, that woman. Mind you, Tana is one of those writers for whom style appears to be every bit as important as plot or character. Could it be a coincidence that IN THE WOODS and THE LIKENESS are award-winning best-sellers? Erm, probably not …
  It’s also true that Ireland has its fair share of ‘literary crime fiction’: John Banville’s THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE and THE UNTOUCHABLE, Flann O’Brien’s THE THIRD POLICEMAN, Pat McCabe’s THE BUTCHER BOY, Eoin McNamee’s RESURRECTION MAN (and others), Brian Moore’s THE COLOUR OF BLOOD (and others), Liam O’Flaherty’s THE INFORMER and THE ASSASSIN, David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER, Kevin Power’s BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, Gerard Donovan’s JULIUS WINSOME, Edna O’Brien’s IN THE FOREST (and others) … It’s a long and noble tradition.
  Okay, your turn. Your favourite ‘literary crime fiction’ is ...

All Of These Kids Are Doing Their Own Thing

Funny how these kinds of things come in clusters. This week, friends and family are bustin’ out all over with creative stuff – the pic above is swiped from Niall Fennessy’s new blog, The Life in My Days, which details his work as a wedding photographer. He’s won awards for other kinds of photography too – well worth checking out.
  And while we’re on the subject of photography, my sister, Kathy, is no mean snapper too. To wit:


  Leaving the photos behind, it’s on to writing – long a friend of this blog, and a good friend of yours truly, Claire Coughlan graduates from the UCD MA Writing Class of 2009 this week, and the class is marking the occasion with the publication of A CURIOUS IMPULSE. The official launch takes place at 5.30pm on Wednesday, October 7th, with a wine reception at the Clarence Hotel (there’s posh). The authors include Claire, Susan Stairs, Jennifer McGrath, Jamie O’Connell, and the delightfully named Mariad Whisker. “The stories, poems and memoirs in this volume display uniformly an impressive maturity of insight and control of language,” says Kevin Power, author of the rather fine BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, while author James Ryan will be doing the introduction honours. All are welcome, folks …

  Shay Bagnall, another mate, is also a writer – his first novel, a crime tome, has attracted an agent, and is currently out under consideration – but his contribution above is as a combo ukulele / movie-maker genius. Not sure what THE BIG O is doing in there lurking in the background, but roll it there anyway, Collette ...
  Finally, and speaking of THE BIG O, my brother Gavin (right) has finally succumbed to the Dark Side (aka script-writing) and yesterday submitted to the Irish Film Board the script he has adapted from THE BIG O. Polite mutterings of approval have been heard emanating from the IFB in the wake of exploratory submissions, so you never know … Keep your fingers crossed, people – Lily needs new shoes. No, seriously she’s already outgrown her first proper pair of shoes. Looks like a weekend’s overtime down the salt-mines beckons for yours truly …

Crime Fiction: The Second Draft Of History # 341

I’ve mentioned before how the Irish Times has been bucking the global trend by increasing its books coverage, with a ‘Book of the Day’ review on the Op-Ed pages supplementing its traditional coverage in Saturday’s Review section. It’s a ballsy move, and they’re not above getting down ‘n’ dirty with the crime fic crew either. Ava McCarthy’s debut THE INSIDER got a rave two weeks ago, and this week it was Gene Kerrigan’s turn, with Kevin Power reviewing DARK TIMES IN THE CITY. To wit:

“Kerrigan, no slouch, is alert to the possibilities of the thriller form. This is a novel that uses a beautifully spun crime narrative to say something interesting about Ireland in the here and now. (It’s strikingly up to date: Kerrigan has, I think, written the first Irish novel that manages to take account of the global financial crisis – doubly impressive when you remember that most Irish writers haven’t even caught up with the boom years yet.)”

  DARK TIMES … is strikingly fresh as a snapshot of Ireland’s crumbling façade, but it’s not the only novel to capture the current mood and tone. Declan Hughes’s ALL THE DEAD VOICES is not only mired in economic failure, it also dared to predict the recent upsurge in murderous dissident Republicanism. Alan Glynn’s forthcoming WINTERLAND is similarly pessimistic about Ireland’s economic future, in a story which quite literally lays bare the shaky foundations of the boom years as politics, business and gangland conspire to hoodwink Dublin’s denizens. And Ken Bruen has been writing about the decline and fall for a couple of years now, as Jack Taylor notes how Galway’s glossy party rep gets duller by the year.
  Being a pompous windbag, I’ve said before that if journalism is the first draft of history, crime fiction is its second. I’m generalising, of course, and as always, but crime fiction does seem to me to be the most relevant kind of writing out there. Is it because writers need to keep up with the always innovative criminals? Does the form itself have an immediacy that lends itself to the now? Is it simply a matter of recycling the classic three-act structure and filling in the gaps with tomorrow’s headlines? Or a more cynical case of today’s taboo being next year’s best-seller?
  Over to you people. Comment is free …

Black Day at Bad Rock

The line-up for John Sturges’ movie ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ had the greatest cast of character actors ever assembled on the same lot: apart from Spencer Tracy in the one-armed lead, you had Robert Ryan, Walter Brennan, Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine. Although Sam Peckinpah’s ‘The Wild Bunch’ is arguably better. Can anyone name the Wild Bunch off the top of their head? I’ll give you Bo Hopkins for a starter …
  Anyway, the point of today’s broadcast, courtesy of Caroline Walsh at the Irish Times:

A film version of Irish novelist Kevin Power’s debut novel BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, inspired by the death of a young man after an attack outside a Dublin nightclub, is in the offing. The book has been sold via agent Marianne Gunn O’Connor to Ed Guiney’s Irish-based company Element Pictures which produced the movies Garage and Adam and Paul and co-produced The Wind that Shakes the Barley.

  Very nice, especially since 'Adam and Paul' is the greatest Irish movie ever made.
  Actually, I’m not even sure if BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK is a crime novel, or even a novel of crime. And I’m pretty sure Kevin Power didn’t write it as a crime novel. But it’s a good book, and I think in time it will be an important book, and Kevin Power seems to be a decent sort of chap who can write very well, and I think he deserves all the publicity he gets, including the precious few molecules generated here. Well done, that man.
  Meanwhile, there’s already an Irish movie called ‘Bad Day at Blackrock’ (2001), Gerry Stembridge’s story about racism in the south Dublin suburb, the same backdrop against which Kevin Power’s novel takes place. So: what are they going to call it? ‘Black Day at Bad Rock?’

Santa’s Little Helper

’Tis the season to be busy, tra-la-la-la-lah, etc. So, rather than write full posts, here’s a few Weinmanesque Irish crime fic link-type smatterings that have popped up over the last week or so …

Gerard Brennan’s MYTHS AND MOBSTERS sounds like a terrific idea.

Colm Keegan interviews Kevin Power at Uiscebot.

Yet more good news for Stuart Neville …

… and here’s Stuart on AMERICAN TABLOID.

Who knew Ali Karim had a blog?

John McFetridge is still on his meta-fiction crime spree at Bouchercon.

Finally, the Irish Sentinel prints the truth in the news. Ish.

Erm, Have We Had A ‘Dear Genre’ Post Yet This Week?

Kevin Power reviewed the latest Paul Howard novel, MR S AND THE SECRETS OF ANDORRA’S BOX, in the Irish Times yesterday, Paul Howard being the creator of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, a Falstaffian comic foil that has allowed Howard skewer the pretensions of Celtic Tiger Ireland over the course of nine novels. The gist of Power’s review runneth thusly:

Irish fiction hasn’t kept up with Irish reality. So we get “literary” novels about paedophile priests, novels about the Famine, novels in which farmers walk the fields - but who pops into Starbucks and orders a grande chai latte with soy? During the last decade few novelists have bothered to notice what modern Ireland is actually like. This is terrain that Paul Howard … has made his own, seeing - or, more accurately, hearing - what the Irish really are, in south Dublin anyway … You will search the pages of our more distinguished literary novelists in vain for this kind of thing. When was the last time you read a novelist whose ear for the way some Irish people speak was so acute that he was capable of writing a sentence like “Just going back to what you were saying there about the whole non-national thing”?

  About two weeks ago, actually, when I read Kevin Power’s BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK. Power’s novel deals with the same strata of Irish society as Howard’s, albeit in a more serious vein. While I believe that the culture both men target is so hollow as to defy satire – Howard’s novels are much closer in tone to farce – Power certainly recreated the mini-cosmos with a deft touch, in the process showcasing a sharp ear for dialogue.
  Having said that, you have to wonder why Power ignores novels other than “literary” ones when making his point about fiction not dealing with the ‘real Ireland’. There are many examples of women’s fiction, aka chick lit, nailing the zeitgeist, the best and most popular being Marian Keyes. And, naturally, there are any amount of crime fiction novels that do so too. In 2008 alone we’ve had Declan Hughes’s THE DYING BREED, Tana French’s THE LIKENESS, Brian McGilloway’s GALLOWS LANE, Andrew Nugent’s SOUL MURDER, and Ingrid Black’s CIRCLE OF THE DEAD.
  You can argue in your own time about the literary merits, or otherwise, of those novels, although I’d argue that when it comes to storytelling, language is a tool akin to the sculptor’s chisel or the filmmaker’s camera – in other words, it needs to be first and foremost functional before it can start claiming any other virtues. The point being, there are plenty of novels relevant to the ‘real Ireland’ – there are novels due from Gene Kerrigan, Christy Kenneally, Declan Hughes and Tana French next year – that are being written with an ear for who we are now and where we are going.
  This is not to damn “literary” novels for not engaging with modern Ireland; a little birdie, for example, tells me that Gerard Donovan, for one, is currently at work on ‘a novel of crimes’, while David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER, published earlier this year, is a powerful work about the post-Troubles political landscape in Northern Ireland. But why is it that only “literary” novels are accorded sufficient weight and credibility when it comes to recording the authentic experience of what is ‘real’ about the way we live?

Last Month I Was Mostly Reading …

A good month, last month. The highlight was Scott Phillips’ THE ICE HARVEST, not bad going when the company included Jason Goodwin’s THE SNAKE STONE, Cormac McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN, and John Le Carré’s TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY.
  I sneaked a peak at the first page of THE ICE HARVEST, just to get a flavour, when I got back to the hotel at 1am, this in Philadelphia after meeting Scott Phillips and having the novel warmly recommended by the quasi-mythical Greg Gillespie. Drink had been consumed, and I’d never heard of Scott Phillips or THE ICE HARVEST. I put the book down again at 3am because it was too damn good to read in one go. Scott has a lovely light touch, a dry sense of humour and a sharp ear for wry dialogue. It’s also an exemplary character study, as good as Banville’s Victor Maskell and Thompson’s Lou Ford. Terrific stuff.
  I met Scott Phillips again in Baltimore, actually, which was nice, especially as he spent the entire Friday walking around with a copy of THE BIG O under his arm. I also met Jason Goodwin, this about a week after I’d finished THE SNAKE STONE, which I thought was superb. The day after I finished it I bought the first in the series, THE JANISSARY TREE, which I started reading on the Baltimore-Boston leg of the flight home to Dublin. Unfortunately, I got distracted by a very attractive young lady who wanted to talk about how much she missed her boyfriend, who was just after getting on a flight to Afghanistan, and so I left THE JANISSARY TREE behind on the plane, along with a notebook full of doodles about my road-trip around the States. Still, she was a very attractive young lady.
  BLOOD MERIDIAN was a strange read. A re-read, I started it in September, keeping it beside the bed and dipping into it for five or ten pages at a time. Wonderful stuff, as you already know. Then, around the halfway mark, I ran with it and found myself getting bored. There’s a lot of post-apocalyptic neo-Western slaughter going on, which was absolutely fine, but there’s also a huge amount of traversing bleak and parched terrain, during which not a lot happens. And I didn’t believe in the Judge; so larger-than-life was he that he was literally unbelievable. Maybe he’s meant to be that way, although I can’t for the life of me think why.
  I finally read my first Le Carré novel in TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, and for a long stretch I wasn’t sure if I believed in Smiley either, or cared about his world. It felt at times like his characters were trying too hard to sound authentic, although at the same time I liked the way the story was rooted in a grey, drab reality. For the first half or so it felt like a Boy’s Own compendium of monochrome adventures, a Rider Haggard take on the Cold War, but even then it was obvious that Le Carré is a fine stylist. I certainly missed Smiley’s world when I finished the story.
  I didn’t miss the world Kevin Power recreated in BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, which is set in the suburbs of southern County Dublin. Touted as a latter-day IN COLD BLOOD and THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE, it’s a fictionalised account of the death of a young Irish man after a post-nightclub assault, an event that dominated the news headlines in Ireland for many months. On the evidence of his debut offering, Power is a fine writer with a lyrical touch, but his choice of subject matter lets him down as he goes behind the headlines and explores the culture in which the young man was killed, a privileged sub-section of society composed of perennial adolescents in thrall to the cult of rugby and the cultivated aggression the sport promotes. The novel it put me most in mind of was Bret Easton Ellis’s LESS THAN ZERO, albeit with vacuous ambition at its heart rather than soi-bored nihilism. The trouble, I think, is that the specific generation Power so piercingly dissects has no virtues worth mythologizing, or vices for that matter; the writer doesn’t so much lance a boil as pop a bubble. In saying that, I’ll be reading his next novel; I think he’s the real deal.
  HITLER’S IRISHMEN by Terence O’Reilly was a fascinating read, telling the story of those few Irishmen who served in the SS during World War II. They were a motley crew, most of whom were recruited from the ranks of British POWs, but most were about as effective as they were moral. I particularly liked the story about the guy who signed up to be a German spy, underwent rigorous training, then parachuted into Northern Ireland and promptly made his way to the nearest police station to give himself up. O’Reilly is a military historian, and it shows, both in the meticulous detail and the pedestrian pace. I put it down with a hundred pages to go, and will very probably pick it up again to finish at some point in the future, but I thought that the narrative, which advances in a strictly chronological way, would have benefited from a less rigid framework and a more inventive approach to telling the various stories.
  I also read Nick Brownlee’s debut, BAIT, which is set in modern Kenya and has some interesting things to say about the fragility of Kenyan democracy. It’s a solid read, although not particularly innovative; there’s more here if you’re interested.
  Meanwhile, it hasn’t been a great start to this month. I’m 60 pages into THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, and the more I read, the less I’m inclined to believe in the eponymous heroine – right now she reads like the idealised fantasy of a middle-aged man. I’ll give it 100 pages and see how it pans out, but so far it’s fairly pedestrian stuff.

The Neville Will Find Work For Idle Hands To Do, Part II

There’s been some mouthwatering blurbs scribbled about Irish novels of late – Kevin Power’s debut, BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, for example, was heralded as a blend of IN COLD BLOOD, THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE and WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN – but Stuart Neville (right) is rapidly becoming the name to watch for in 2009, with his debut offering, GHOSTS OF BELFAST, exciting some heavyweight names. James Ellroy described it as “The best first novel I’ve read in years ... It’s a flat out terror trip,” which was enough to get me wondering who the hell Stuart Neville was way back when, but now – courtesy of CSNI – comes John Connolly’s big-up, the gist of which runneth thusly:

“GHOSTS OF BELFAST is not only one of the finest thriller debuts of the last ten years, but is also one of the best Irish novels, in any genre, of recent times. It grips from the first page to the last, and heralds the arrival of a major new voice in Irish writing. I don’t know how Stuart Neville is going to improve upon such an exceptional first novel, but I can’t wait to find out …”

  Mmmmm, nice. For an excerpt, clickety-click on this little yokeybus right here. It’s a hell of a start …

Git Along Little Dogie – A Round-Up Of Interweb Stuff-‘N’-Such

Our good friend and colleague Mr Adrian McKinty was included in The Telegraph’s list of ‘50 Books Worth Talking About’, which appeared last weekend. The novel in question is THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD, and the object of the exercise is to get people talking about books in advance of World Book Day, which happens on March 5, 2009. As a point of fact, the list should really be renamed ‘51 Books Worth Talking About’, as it’s impossible to discuss THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD without referencing ULYSSES. Anyhoos, we’re done talking about THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD …
  Over at the Book Witch, the young but knowledgeable Charlie conducts an in-depth interview with Eoin Colfer, during the course of which the Artemis Fowl movie rears its head. Quoth Eoin:

“On the movie, at the moment I’m working with the director to write the script. I think it could be very good, because we’re going to put some new stuff in for the fans that they won’t expect, and because I’m writing it, I’m hoping they’ll allow that … I’ve just been up to Scotland last week, where we’re making HALF MOON INVESTIGATIONS into a TV show, and that looks great so I’m very happy with that.”

  HALF MOON INVESTIGATIONS as a TV show? I’ll buy that for a dollar. Meanwhile, Emerging Writer brings us the news that Aifric Campbell’s THE SEMANTICS OF MURDER has been short-listed for the Glen Dimplex Awards. The GD award is given to ‘best first book’ in a variety of categories, with €5,000 going to the winner of each of five categories, and €20,000 going to the overall winner. I’m not sure what the criteria for inclusion is, but it’s all done in conjunction with the Irish Writers’ Centre, so no doubt it’s all above-board, ship-shape and depressingly worthy. Aifric? You go, gal …
  Finally, I’m about two-thirds of the way through Kevin Power’s BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, which took a bit of a hammering on RTE’s arts TV programme The View last Monday night, by all accounts. Quoth Colm Keegan: “The most telling comment I think came from Peter Murphy. He said it was the first real book of the Celtic Tiger age and that it was ugly.”
  On the other hand, John Boyne, writing in the Irish Times, liked it a lot:
“This is a book that breaks the rules of the conventional crime narrative … It’s an excellent novel, though, there’s no two ways about that. It comes from the gut, it’s raw, it’s passionate and it suggests, like Barry McCrea’s THE THIRD VERSE did a few months ago, that there are a group of young Irish novelists about to be set loose on the world like a pack of hungry wolves. Bring ’em on, I say. I’ll read them.”
  Erm, chaps? At the risk of banging a hole right through this here drum, has no one heard of Gene Kerrigan? Declan Hughes? Tana French? Ken Bruen? Brian McGilloway? Et al?
  Celtic Tiger novelists, one and all …

Yet Again, We Need To Talk About Kevin

The Lilliput Press publish Kevin Power’s debut novel, BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, with the blurb elves outdoing themselves by comparing it to THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE, IN COLD BLOOD and WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN. To wit:

On a late August night in 2004, a young man is kicked to death by his team-mates outside a Dublin nightclub and celebration turns to devastation. The reverberations of that event, its genesis and aftermath, is the subject of this extraordinary story, stripping away the veneer of a generation of Celtic cubs, whose social and sexual mores are chronicled and dissected in this tract for our times. The victim, Conor Harris, his killers – three of them are charged with manslaughter – and the trial judge share common childhoods and schooling in the privileged echelons of south Dublin suburbia. The intertwining of these lives leaves their afflicted families in moral freefall as public exposure merges with private anguish and imploded futures. This stark, elliptical tale tells of catharsis and self-examination through the eyes of the narrator and Laura Haines, girlfriend, confidante and catalyst. Akin to Lionel Shriver’s WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, John Banville’s THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE and Truman Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD, it deals with the unacceptable, and the nature of truth. Like all good fiction, it illuminates a society and transcends its age with the searchlight of a sympathetic imagination. It is a significant debut by an intuitive writer.

  The title is a nod to the classic Spencer Tracy movie, obviously, although it’s been used in an Irish context before – Blackrock, y’see, being a well-to-do area of south Dublin, represents leafy-suburbed affluence in Ireland. Anyhoos, Power’s story appears to be based on a real event from a few years back, and one that exercised the country to an enormous extent at the time, giving rise to much media soul-searching and state-of-the-nation polemics mainly because the perpetrators and the victim hailed from the ranks of the overly moneyed oiks of what passes for Ireland’s aspirational middle-class.
  My initial reaction when I read the blurb was that the story is too parochial to translate to a wider audience, that Power will take all kinds of stick for reopening old wounds (fair play to him), and that the blurb elves were doing a debutant novelist no favours at all by comparing him to John Banville, Truman Capote and Lionel Shriver.
  Then I heard ‘Wilderness Gothic’ on Sunday night, Power’s short-listed entry for the Francis MacManus Short Story Award, and I thought, hmmm, okay, the guy can write …
  Anyone out there know anything more about him?