News: THE LOST AND THE BLIND by Declan Burke

As the more eagle-eyed of the Three Regular Readers may have noted, I was away on holidays / vacation / the lam (delete as appropriate) for the first couple of weeks in April, a period which coincided with the US publication of THE LOST AND THE BLIND.
  If it’s okay with you, there’s one or three things I’d like to bring to your attention:

The Kindle publication of THE LOST AND THE BLIND;

Some very positive Amazon reviews in the UK and US for THE LOST AND THE BLIND;

An interview published by the RTE Ten website;

My ‘What Writers Are Reading’ offering, courtesy of the inestimable Marshal Zeringue;

A very nice review from that tireless champion of Irish crime writers, the Bookwitch;

And, finally, the delightful news that CRIME ALWAYS PAYS has been longlisted – in a list of 30 books, admittedly – for the Goldsboro Award for Comedy Crime Fiction, the winner of which will be announced at the Bristol Crimefest.

  So there you have it. I really should go away more often, shouldn’t I?

ZERO Minus One

The Big Day dawns tomorrow, said day being the launch date of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, and yea, verily, I’m bricking it. Hard to say why, really; at this stage, the book is what it is, and no amount of fretting is going to make it a better book. Also, anyone who turns up to the launch is very likely to be there in support mode, and anyway there’s a strict policy of no little boys allowed, lest one of them starts shouting about the emperor and his radical sartorial minimalism.
  No, it’ll all be okay on the night, once I get past the speechifying part. The idea of rambling aloud about AZC in front of a group of peers, friends and family is bowel-loosening enough, but the bit where I’ll be obliged to read some of AZC aloud? The horror, the horror …
  Anyway, there’s been a few nice snippets of promo on the interweb over the last week, quite apart from all the very generous folk who were good enough to plug the book’s publication. First up is The Sligo Champion, my hometown paper of record, who ran a short interview with yours truly, which can be found here. That’s a particularly nice buzz because, apart from having a poem published in a school magazine, my first experience of being published was in the Sligo Champion, for which I wrote up reports of junior football matches from the age of 16 onwards, a task only slightly complicated by the fact that I was generally playing in the games I wrote about.
  Meanwhile, Marshal Zeringue was good enough to ask me to submit ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL to the Page 69 Test, in which an author looks at pg 69 of his or her tome, and asks if it’s representative of the rest of the novel. A nifty notion, and you can find the results here …
  Over at Pulp Pusher, the rather fine Scottish writer and sex god Tony Black was kind enough to ask me to contribute to the ongoing series, ‘Every Day I Write the Book’, in which a writer details his experience of writing over a particular week. Somehow Steven Hawking, the Blue Nile and a serial killer stalking himself across multiple parallel universes got into the mix. You can find the results here …
  Elsewhere, Writing.ie is currently hosting an extract from AZC, said extract comprising what in most books would consist of the first chapter, even if AZC resolutely refuses to conform to such bourgeois concepts as ‘chapters’. If you’d like a flavour of what AZC is all about, feel free to clickety-click here …
  And that’s about it. The launch, by the way, for those of you who aren’t the Three Regular Readers, takes place in the Gutter Bookshop, Cow’s Lane, Temple Bar, Dublin, at 6.30pm on Wednesday, August 10th. All are welcome, and John Connolly has agreed to give the event a scintilla of respectability by saying a few words before AZC is finally unleashed on an unsuspecting public.
  As for the book itself, well, the jacket copy runs thusly:

“A genuinely original take on noir, inventive and funny. Imagine, if you can, a cross between Flann O’Brien and Raymond Chandler.” – John Banville, author of THE SEA

Who in their right mind would want to blow up a hospital?
  “Close it down, blow it up – what’s the difference?”
  Billy Karlsson needs to get real. Literally. A hospital porter with a sideline in euthanasia, Billy is a character trapped in the purgatory of an abandoned novel. Deranged by logic, driven beyond sanity, Billy makes his final stand: if killing old people won’t cut the mustard, the whole hospital will have to go up in flames.
  Only his creator can stop him now, the author who abandoned Billy to his half-life limbo, in which Billy schemes to do whatever it takes to get himself published, or be damned . . .

“ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL is unlike anything else you’ll read this year … Laugh-out-loud funny … This is writing at its dazzling, cleverest zenith. Think John Fowles, via Paul Auster and Rolling Stone … a feat of extraordinary alchemy.” – Ken Bruen, author of AMERICAN SKIN

The Embiggened O # 3,119: Instant Karma’s Gonna Get You

Given the day that’s in it, with our humble tome THE BIG O being published in hardback in the U.S. by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, I thought I’d take the opportunity to blow my own trumpet so hard that I squish both lungs out through said trumpet in little sausage-y links. Maestro? In your own time, please …
  Actually, no – there’ll be no trumpet-parping today. Today is a day for feeling quietly positive about the human race in general and the crime fiction community in particular. Why so? Well, the way said community has rallied around yours truly in the last week or 10 days has been heartwarming to say the least, and I’m currently basking in the glow of the kind of good vibes Brian Wilson could only dream about while he scratched about in his sandpit. To wit:

Jeff Kingston asked me to deface / guest-blog at The Rap Sheet for the last week;
The Book Witch has updated her review of THE BIG O;
Gerard Brennan at CSNI republished his review, and tossed in a major shout-out to boot;
Stuart Neville gave me a bejasus big-up;
Marshal Zeringue pulled out all the stops at America Reads;
Glenn Harper did me proud over at International Noir;
Barbara Fister was kind enough to invite me to host the Crime Carnival again;
And Peter Rozovsky has been log-rolling THE BIG O to beat the band over at Detectives Beyond Borders.

  If I’ve forgotten anyone, my sincerest apologies – I’m just a bit light-headed from all the good karma. Peace, people – your reward will come in heaven …

Funky Friday’s Freaky-Deak

It’s Friday, it’s funky, to wit: this week’s cornucopia of irrelevancies and fripperies culled from the interweb kicks off with El Blogador’s report that The John Hewitt International Summer School is getting in on the book club phenomenon, with Richard Irvine, Mary O’Donnell and Ian Sansom gathering to debate their chosen offerings in the Great Northern Novel debate, the novels up for wibbling about being Brian McGilloway’s BORDERLANDS, Eoin McNamee’s RESURRECTION MEN, and Flann O’Brien’s AT SWIM TWO BIRDS. Interestingly (or not), both BORDERLANDS and AT SWIM TWO BIRDS are set in the South / Free State / Republic of Ireland (delete according to prejudice), in Donegal and Dublin respectively; and all three writers reside(d) in the South, McGilloway in Donegal, McNamee in Sligo and O’Brien in Dublin, where reports of his death have not, sadly, been over-exaggerated … The latest Crime Carnival, which is hosted by Sharon Wheeler of Reviewing the Evidence, shows up over at Hey, There’s A Dead Guy In The Living Room. Confused? Not as confused as Sharon, obviously: “And then there’s the very charming Declan Burke over at Crime Always Pays, which has Irish crime fiction bang to rights, Guv.” Erm, Declan Burke charming? Shurely shome mishtake, ma’am? … Anyhoo, upward and onward to Marshal Zeringue’s What Writers Are Reading interweb yokeybus, where Irish historian Roy Foster is giving David Parks’ THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER the big-up, “because it’s a powerful novel about Northern Ireland by a writer I deeply admire.” Can’t say fairer than that … Here’s an interesting notion over at the Sigla Blog: an on-line book club trading in short stories. Whenever they get around to dealing with Raymond Carver, we’ll be front and centre, electronically speaking … Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Derek Landy might – his debut offering, SKULDUGGERY PLEASANT, has been voted their favourite book by Scarborough’s cheeky tyke population, who voted it numero uno at Scarborough College on World Book Day. Nice … Finally, Blooking spots “an odd justification for migrating blog characters to print” over at the synopsis for Twenty Major’s THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX PARK at Amazon. To wit: “For three years Twenty Major has written a daily blog. Now though comes a tale so bizarre and abominable that mere words on a computer screen wouldn’t have been able to do it justice. These words need to be on paper ...” Here at CAP Towers, we make the modest proposal that Twenty Major should be skinned, said skin smoke-dried for parchment, said parchment tattooed with THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX PARK, and the whole shebang nailed to the forehead of whoever it was arranged the running order for the Dublin Book Festival. No, don’t thank us, we’re only here to help …

Death To THE BIG O

Marshal Zeringue was kind enough to ask us to submit our humble offering THE BIG O to the Page 99 Test, apropos Ford Madox Ford’s dictum, “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” The results runneth thusly:

  The belly, yeah, thickening up, the love-handles running flabby, the stretch-marks like trenches from some abandoned war. But what did they expect, she was fifty-fucking-one, had twins for Chrissakes …

  The kick for Madge wasn’t so much the mellow buzz, the chilling out. No, what Madge enjoyed best was that she, Margaret Dolan, mother of twins, was smoking grass, weed, pot, call it whatever. All the movies she’d ever seen, the hippies rolling up in a haze of smoke, Madge’d wondered, okay, it looks fun but how’s it feel?

I’ve always liked the Pixies’ style, that quiet-LOUD-quiet dynamic they had, and THE BIG O is organised along those lines: fast-slooooow-fast-fast. Page 99 (the start and finish of which is given above) comes in the middle of one of the slow chapters, in which the ostensibly refined Madge contemplates her recently pierced navel while smoking a joint in a parking lot.
  The chapter concludes with Madge, soon to be divorced, deciding she’s ready for some life-changing action. What Madge can’t know, but the reader already does, is that her life is about to change irrevocably – Madge’s ex-husband, Frank, has arranged for her to be kidnapped, and intends absconding with the ransom his insurance company will pay out.
  The majority of THE BIG O is pacy and dialogue-driven, so page 99 isn’t very representative of the whole. On the other hand, Madge is emblematic of most of the characters, all of whom are trying to break out of their lives of quiet desperation without realising that they’re caught up in a broader narrative that will, despite their best efforts, thwart their ambitions and deflect them away from their hoped-for destination.
  This in turn feeds into the novel’s overarching theme, that of life as black farce which requires constant adaptation and reinvention, especially in the most daunting of circumstances. I suppose it’s because I generally tend to feel that the inability of people, myself included, to accept or even recognise their limitations is in equal measures funny, moving and inspiring.
  In that sense, page 99 is probably as pure a synthesis of what I was hoping to achieve as any other page in THE BIG O. If I’d known I’d be taking this test, though, I’d have included a few explosions.

Funky Friday’s Freaky-Deak

Being our slightly jaundiced look back over the Irish crime fiction week that was, to wit: Arlene Hunt’s MISSING PRESUMED DEAD got its paperback release and pole-vaulted into the bestseller list, prompting in no little amount of gadzooking around at chez Hunt: “While sitting here at my desk earlier, chewing the end of a biro to ribbons and pondering the imponderable, namely how in the name of shark-jumping I was going to get John out of the scrape I’d just written him into, my telephone rang. Wearily, blearily, none too cheerily, I got up and went to throttle the offending racket. But gadzooks! Stall the ball! Hold yer horses. For it was news, good news, the sort of news Tuesdays never bring forth. MISSING PRESUMED DEAD is number five in the bestsellers list in Ireland!” Yaaaay! … Meanwhile, no one bothered to tell us that Darren Shan, prodigious and bestselling YA author, is shooting for the adult market when PROCESSION OF THE DEAD is released on February 25 … Ditto for THE INSIDER: THE PRISON DIARIES OF EAMONN BOYCE, which was published by Lilliput back in November. Like, was it something we said, people? Happily, the ever-lovely folk at Hodder Headline Ireland saw fit to pop a copy of Stephen Leather’s latest, DEAD MEN, in the post. It hits the shelves on January 24 … Marshal Zeringue was kind enough to wrassle our humble offering THE BIG O to the ground and Page 99 it until it uncled … Irish Independent columnist Kevin Myers (right) took a pop at gun crime and the Irish political classes, the gist of the piece running thusly: “For we have criminal gun crime for the same reasons that IRA gun crime went on for so long: because our political classes have not been shot, and are too morally inert to have taken the necessary action to have crushed either terrorist or criminal. But just one gangland killing, just one, among the precious 4 and 6 brigade, and by God, policing priorities would soon change. Until then, our political establishment will not really care what happens in working-class housing estates. If it really did, Garda Commissioner Murphy’s head would be on a stake outside Dublin Castle for even daring to promise a mere 2pc drop in crime in exchange for an 11pc increase in resources. Instead, his bonce is still on his shoulders, and the outcry from TDs over the ploddish modesty of his ambitions could have been completely drowned out by the din of tadpoles darning their socks.” Yep, those blummin’ tadpoles, darning while Rome burns … Finally, here’s Oscar-winning director Martin McDonagh introducing the trailer for the upcoming IN BRUGES, which stars Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes in which looks a lot like an Irish take on an Elmore Leonard-style caper flick. “If I’d grown up on a farm and was retarded, Bruges might impress me. But I didn’t, soooo … it doesn’t.” Maybe not, but the movie impressed Clint at Ain't It Cool News. Roll it there, Collette …