“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 2,097: D.B. Shan

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 love James Ellroy, so probably one of his. Maybe LA CONFIDENTIAL or THE BLACK DAHLIA. Though it would have been special to write THE MALTESE FALCON too ...
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t believe in guilt when it comes to reading. Read what you like and have no shame about it!!! Having said that, if you’re talking about books that other people might look down their noses at, I guess Mickey Spillane would probably rank high on my list. He might be down ‘n’ dirty, and his so-called heroines all turn out to be nasty, stab-ya-in-the-back vixens, but he’s lots of fun!!
Most satisfying writing moment?
Finishing my first novel at the tender age of 17 was probably my most satisfying personal moment. It was no bloody good (nor were the next 6 or 7!), but I’d proven to myself that I could take a story all the way to the end. All that was left after that was working hard enough to be able to tell a good story!
The best Irish crime novel is?
One of John Connolly’s. I have all of his books, but I only came to him recently, and I’ve only read a few so far, so I’m not in a position to pick a favourite at the moment – but I’m getting through them quite quickly, so I will be soon!
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Again, I’d have to go with Connolly. I think there’s great movie potential in his books – they’re crying out to get the A-grade treatment.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is the isolation. You have to spend large chunks of your time by yourself, no company, no one to gossip with or discuss last night’s TV with. I miss being able to go to an office every day! The best thing is bringing stories to life which would otherwise never be told. The harder you work at writing, the more you develop, and you find yourself capable of writing stories that you never even dreamt you could tackle when you were younger.
The pitch for your next novel is?
HELL’S HORIZON (out in March 2009) is more of a straightforward crime tale than PROCESSION OF THE DEAD. A woman is murdered in a hotel. Her boyfriend is ordered by his boss (a crime kingpin) to investigate. He’s soon in over his head, and finds suspects everywhere he looks. He also comes to realise that the case ties in with his past and the death of his father. Someone’s playing with him, moving him around like a pawn piece, and it becomes much more than a case of just finding out who murdered his girlfriend. His entire life is under threat, as are the lives of those close to him ...
Who are you reading right now?
I’m currently reading THE KITE RUNNER. But I’m also working my way through the works of John Connolly and I recently began reading Meg Gardiner.
The three best words to describe your own writing are?
Twisted, twisting fun!!!

D.B. Shan’s PROCESSION OF THE DEAD will be published on March 3rd

Mi Casa, Su Casa: Adrian McKinty On James Ellroy

The Grand Vizier writes: The motives behind ‘Mi Casa, Su Casa’ are twofold. First, the idea is to give guest bloggers the few molecules of oxygen of publicity Crime Always Pays can provide. Secondly, even we’re sick of listening only to ourselves, and we reckon some new voices will provide fresh perspectives on crime fiction in general, and Irish crime fiction in particular. And so, with minimum fanfare – a tiny tootle there, please, maestro – we introduce the first of what we’re hoping will be an ongoing and extensive series of guest blogs, in which Adrian McKinty (right) waxes lyrical about ‘the Tolstoy of crime fiction’.

The Rebirth of Cool: James Ellroy’s THE COLD SIX THOUSAND

In 2007 I taught a course in American crime fiction at Naropa University in Boulder. I looked at the evolution of the American crime novel, from Poe through Hammett and Chandler, and I ended with James Ellroy’s LA CONFIDENTIAL, which appeared in 1990. I had put Ellroy in the curriculum because most of the students had seen movie versions of his fiction; however, I admitted to the class that I was not a huge fan of Ellroy’s writing. I had read his earliest crime novels and three of the titles in his celebrated LA Quartet without being completely convinced. His best books seemed to be LA CONFIDENTIAL, THE BIG NOWHERE and WHITE JAZZ, but for me these novels were, at best, flawed masterpieces. Ellroy’s plots tended to get away from him and his subtext about the greed and corruption of policemen, DA’s, politicians, Hollywood – everyone really – in 1950’s Southern California did not resonate with me on a deep level. None of his characters were particularly captivating and it seemed that Ellroy himself often got bored with his corrupt cops and ex-cops, frequently killing them, and moving the story on with a different lead.
  In these early novels Ellroy’s (right) descriptions are beautiful but chilly and his dialogue, although authentic and rich, lacks a sense of humour.
  I shared some of these observations with my class but one of my students disagreed with me in the strongest possible terms and asked me if I had read AMERICAN TABLOID or THE COLD SIX THOUSAND. I admitted that I hadn’t and she suggested that I should.
  The following month at Denver Airport I picked up a copy of THE COLD SIX THOUSAND and began reading it in a long security line. I finished it the same night at four in the morning in a hotel in Vancouver. A week later I read the book again. THE COLD SIX THOUSAND, I decided, was no ‘flawed masterpiece’ but rather one of the best books I had read so far this decade.
  James Ellroy’s biography is the stuff from which serial killers or junkies or mental patients or, rarely, great writers are made. His mother was murdered in 1958 when he was only 10 years old – the killer was never found. Ellroy’s father was a right-wing nut who drank heavily, had affairs, and whacked his son around to toughen him up. Ellroy took on the persona of a teenage neo-Nazi to torment his Jewish neighbours and he became a compulsive petty thief and burglar. As he got better at breaking into people’s houses his compulsions grew weirder. He would often spy on pretty Jewish girls, wait until their homes were empty, break in and sniff their underwear. Frequently arrested, LAPD cops became surrogate older brothers who eventually put him on the straight and narrow. Ellroy describes these early years in the brilliant memoir MY DARK PLACES. The LAPD and the discovery of crime fiction, he says, were the two things that saved his life.
  His early novels did well, but it was the success of the movie version of LA CONFIDENTIAL that seems to have given Ellroy the confidence and financial freedom to write fiction the way he always wanted to.
  Ostensibly THE COLD SIX THOUSAND is the story of a Las Vegas cop who arrives in Dallas on the day of the Kennedy assassination, but really it is the story of the 1960’s themselves and all the madness of Vietnam, Cuba, race riots, demonstrations and the hippy movement. But not content with writing a book about a whole decade, Ellroy decided to reinvent his prose style completely. Gone are most of the verbs and adverbs, the prose descriptions, the purple patches. What’s left is the distilled essence of the narrative, the bare bones, as rich as bad news from the AP wire, as lyrical as a haiku. This is how he describes ex-FBI agent Ward Little’s attempt to take Las Vegas for his boss Howard Hughes (Drac):

“Little planned. Little sowed. The Boys reaped. Bribes/PR/extortion. Blackmail / philanthropy. It took four years. Drac owns Las Vegas now.”

  Other writers might have spent a chapter on that episode.
  Critics complained that Hemingway wrote as if he was dictating the book for a telegraph operator; Ellroy could be the called the crime novelist for the email and text message generation. He seems to have taken seriously the famous claim of Joseph Conrad that “a work of art should justify itself in every line.” In THE COLD SIX THOUSAND not a single word is wasted, every sentence moves the plot, every paragraph tells a story. And what a story. The assassination of JFK, the hit on Martin Luther King, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and a supporting cast that includes Nixon, Howard Hughes and J. Edgar Hoover.
  After reading THE COLD SIX THOUSAND I devoured the prequel to that book, AMERICAN TABOLID, and ideally it should be read first, although it isn’t quite as brilliant. There is also a rumoured third novel to come, which will conclude Ellroy’s look at this period, roughly 1958 – 1973. If it’s only half as good as the others in the trilogy it still might be the best crime novel of 2008.
  Many people won’t be able to get past Ellroy’s machine-gun prose style or his racist characters or the completely insane conspiracy theory at the heart of THE COLD SIX THOUSAND but stick with the book and you’ll be rewarded. Ellroy’s phrases and dialogue rattle around in your brain. You start to think like Ellroy. You start to talk like him. Returning from Vancouver, my wife asked me if I’d managed to get that James Ellroy novel I was after. I told her: “I scoped the book, I bought the book, I read the book, I dug it.”
  In interviews Ellroy sometimes describes himself as “the Tolstoy of crime fiction.” His boast is inaccurate. He’s not that ponderous. He is, though, one of the greats. I believe that THE COLD SIX THOUSAND elevates Ellroy into the pantheon. It is perhaps the most important American crime novel since Patricia Highsmith’s THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY and it certainly proves that Ellroy is a worthy successor to Chandler, Hammett, Cain and Jim Thompson.
  I would guess that future lecturers won’t be as ignorant of Ellroy as I was and that any good course in American crime fiction will not only explain the revolution that began with THE MALTESE FALCON but also talk about the new revolution that started after James Ellroy began firing on all cylinders. – Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty is the author of the ‘Dead’ trilogy. He is currently working on a novel for Holt.

Actually, This Cromwell We Like

There’s a rare treat in the offing for Dublin’s crime flick fans at the IFI this coming Saturday (October 6): not only is there a big-screen showing of the superb LA Confidential, but Captain Dudley Smith, aka James Cromwell (right), will be in attendance for a Q&A with the Irish Times’ film critic, Donald ‘Don the Mon’ Clarke. Actually, truth be told, we’re only uploading this piece as an excuse to show you Don’s short movie, Pitch ‘n’ Putt With Joyce ‘n’ Beckett, which he wrote and directed and is without doubt the funniest film ever to come out of Ireland. Fact.