The Troubles? We Don’t Need No Stinking Troubles

Good vibes for Stuart Neville’s latest tome, STOLEN SOULS, which appears to be stealing as many hearts as it does nebulous spiritual manifestations of the human spirit, or souls. This review comes courtesy of Denise Hamilton in the LA Times, which kicks off in no uncertain manner, declaring in the standfirst that STOLEN SOULS is ‘a masterpiece of hard-edged, fast-paced Irish crime fiction’. Crikey. But stay! There’s more! For it opens thusly:

“The Irish crime fiction wave rises to new heights with Stuart Neville’s third novel, the tight, telescopic thriller STOLEN SOULS. The writing here is mature and assured: there are no extraneous words or characters, no discussion of Northern Ireland’s long and sorrowful ‘Troubles’. We are beyond politics, beyond the Celtic Tiger and its financial meltdown, mired in a crumbling 21st century Belfast wasteland where Lithuanian gangs bed down with Ulster Loyalists and Republicans as law enforcement looks the other way.” - Denise Hamilton

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, if you’re in the mood to be soothed by Stuart’s dulcet tones, he was interviewed about STOLEN SOULS last week on Ireland AM. Roll it there, Collette …

An Absolute Masterpiece Of Crime Fiction

I should declare an interest before writing this post, because John Banville (right) was kind enough to write a very generous blurb for my forthcoming tome ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. So you may want to take my opinion with a Siberian mine-sized pinch of salt. That said, I find his mischief-making contrarianism hilarious. Here’s some excerpts from his recent interview with the LA Times:

A DEATH IN SUMMER finds dour, bumbling pathologist Garret Quirke trying to get to the bottom of the apparent suicide of a Dublin newspaper owner. Banville tells readers, only partly in jest, to expect an “absolute masterpiece of crime fiction.”

  And, later:

“My books are better than anybody else’s. They are just not good enough for me,” he said.

  And here he is on bog-standard crime fiction:

Banville said he is turned off by graphic depictions of violence both in crime novels and in Hollywood movies. He derides the hugely popular Stieg Larsson novels as crude stories “written with the blunt end of a burned stick.”

  Mind you, for a man who gets regularly pummelled by crime fic fans for his snotty attitude to his mystery writing, which he writes under the open pseudonym of Benjamin Black, Banville appears to be working a two-way street:

“Black was able to help Banville,” he said over breakfast at the Knickerbocker Club on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, explaining that the Banville novel he just completed, ANCIENT LIGHT, was improved by his crime fiction. “Black has got used to doing plots and keeping all that balanced, and Banville has learned some of that from him,” he said.

  For the full interview, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, Benjamin Black is spreading like a virus throughout the US. I mentioned last week that Janet Maslin was full of praise for A DEATH IN SUMMER in the New York Times, but the raves are piling up elsewhere. To wit:

The Daily Beast on ‘The New Master of Noir’;
A review from the LA Times: ‘a beach read for the brainy’;
The Chicago Tribune: ‘some of the most beautiful sentences this side of heaven's rewrite desk’;
Irish Central: ‘utterly delightful’;

  On the other side of the pond, the UK reviewers are also queuing up to lavish their encomiums:

Mark Lawson in The Guardian on ‘a fascinating addition to the ranks of the defective detective’;
Barry Forshaw in The Independent: ‘a highly professional and engaging piece of work’;

  So there you have it. Benny Blanco, on a roll. Hark, do I hear the sound of axes grinding?

Books With Backbone

The Irish crew mightn’t have done so well in the Edgars this year - odd, really, given that there’s usually an Irish presence, and that 2009 was such a fecund year for Irish crime writing - but they’ve been doing okay in other award ceremonies. Stuart Neville, as you might have heard, won the best Mystery / Thriller section in the recent LA Book of the Year awards for THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST (aka THE TWELVE), and he also nabbed the Best Novel: New Voice gong in the Spinetingler Awards. Meanwhile, and staying with the Spinetinglers, Adrian McKinty got the nod for Best Novel: Rising Star Category for FIFTY GRAND, which is belated recognition for what was one of the best novels of last year, in my rarely humble opinion.
  Incidentally, both McKinty and Neville contribute to the forthcoming compilation of crime short stories based on Irish myths, REQUIEMS FOR THE DEPARTED, which promises to be one of the most intriguing collections of the year.
  Anyway, what makes the Spinetingler a pretty special award, I think, is that it’s voted for by the reading public, and a public that’s steeped in the genre to what is very probably an unprecedented degree. All of that takes serious co-ordination, of course, which translates into a lot of blood, sweat and (possibly) tears, all from a team - Sandra Ruttan, Jack Getze, Brian Lindemuth, the Nerd of Noir, and Keith Rawson - that work year-round to promote crime fiction of all stripes. Quoth the Spinetingler team on this year’s award:

This year’s turnout was greater then last years with a total of 4812 votes cast. That’s a huge increase from last year and we’ve seen growth every year. I think I speak for all of us here at Spinetingler when I say we’re glad to see more people participate in them and we have room for a lot more. We hope you enjoyed the awards as much as we did pulling them together. Hopefully at least one of the nominees made you curious enough to check it out because for us that’s the greatest reward. You all did this. And you did something good.

  No, Spinetingler folks, you did all this. And you did something good. Give yourselves a big fat slap on the back.

THE SCARECROW: Outstanding In Its Own Field

I was shocked, horrified and on the verge of calling the Culture Cops when Gerard Brennan announced a few weeks ago on CSNI that he’d never read a Chandler novel, although – as is the case with most people, I suspect – there are more gaps in my own reading than there is reading. I’ve only ever read one Sherlock Holmes story, for example, that being THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, and it didn’t really do it for me. Should I be tarred and feathered?
  Anyway, THE SCARECROW is the first Michael Connelly novel I’ve read, and I very probably wouldn’t have read it had I not been reviewing it for the Irish Times, which continues to fly in the face of the global trend for cutbacks in print newspaper book review trends with its laudable ‘Book of the Day’ review on its Op-Ed pages. Appropriately enough, THE SCARECROW features Jack McEvoy, last encountered in THE POET, a journalist who is ‘pink-slipped’ by the LA Times as the novel opens, a device which gives Connelly plenty of opportunities to sound off about the decline and fall of newspaper journalism. To wit:

  Eschewing linguistic pyrotechnics, Connelly writes as McEvoy would, as a responsible journalist recording facts rather than a hack bent on exploiting vulnerable people for the sake of a headline. It’s a fine line for a thriller writer to walk, but Connelly pulls it off with aplomb.
  Where there is authorial intrusion is in Connelly’s account of the worm’s-eye view of the evisceration of American journalism.
  Clearly appalled at the ongoing downsizing of newspapers, and the resultant shrinkage in quality journalism, Connelly puts his words into the mouth of the cynical McEvoy: “Like the paper and ink newspaper itself, my time was over. It was about the internet now. It was about hourly uploads to online editions and blogs. It was about television tie-ins and Twitter updates. It was about filing stories on your phone rather than using it to call rewrite. The morning paper might as well have been called the Daily Afterthought.”

  Zing, etc.
  For the rest of the review, clickety-click here …