Belfast: Giggle City?

The ever-lovely Ciara Dwyer interviewed the ever-fragrant Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman (right) for the Sunday Independent last weekend, on the latest leg of the Bateman world domination / ORPHEUS RISING tour, during which the Batemeister waxed lyrical about that most elusive of sprites, Norn Iron humour. To wit:

“I think Northern humour is very dark. You laugh about everything that goes on. Maybe it’s not unique in that a joke always follows a tragedy, but it’s how you deal with things. When David Trimble was involved with the peace process he actually gave one of my books into 10 Downing Street, saying: ‘This says more about Northern Ireland than you’re going to find in a text book. This is how things are.’ I tend to write serious stories which happen to be very funny. The humour is always going to be there. One of my books, MOHAMMED MAGUIRE, was taking the piss out of the hunger strikes. It’s not that everything is fair game and that I decide that I am going to have a go at the hunger strikes. It just sort of comes out and people seem to like it. My last book, I PREDICT A RIOT, was the first of all my books that received a sustained amount of critical negative feedback from readers. It started off as a serial in a newspaper in Belfast and because I couldn’t swear in it, I put asterisks in it. I got dozens of emails saying, ‘Bring back the swearing, we miss the swearing,’ which is a sad reflection on the people who are reading my books. But I’m quite at home with them, the fuckers.”

Hmmm. Can swearing ever be big and clever? Or is it only so when Master Bateman uses rudeys? Only time, that rat-faced frickin’ clam-mouthed curmudgeon, will tell …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: ORPHEUS RISING by (The Artist Formerly Known As Colin) Bateman

(Colin) Bateman’s latest offering sees a big change in direction from the likes of his Dan Starkey series. ORPHEUS RISING still has that cool dry wit that the Bangor man employs with casual ease, but it’s less frequent and more understated in this novel. And for this particular story, it seems to be the perfect amount of humour. I think that Bateman had a story to tell and although it was very different than anything he’s tried before, he’s listened to his instincts and told it the way he thought best. I have to say, it worked a bloody treat.
  I coasted through this book with utter ease and loved every sentence. It seems as if he’s really upped his game since I PREDICT A RIOT. The writing is much denser than his usual minimalist style, but I didn’t feel bogged down by description or superfluous detail. Each word counted. And so the result is a huge story that still manages to weigh in at a smidge under 400 hardback pages.
  ORPHEUS RISING is the poignant tale of Michael Ryan, an Irish writer who found the love of his life under dramatic circumstances (involving a shark and grisly amputation) and lost her soon after to a violent death (even more violent than the shark thing). Without spoiling the plot for potential readers, I’ll tell you that we accompany Michael on his return to the Florida town of Brevard, ten years after he found happiness and had it ripped from him, to face up to the ghosts of his past.
  I was very surprised by the supernatural content in ORPHEUS RISING. Again, I’m wary of spoilers and there’s not a lot you can talk about without robbing the book of some of its impact, so I’ll not go into how or why he uses it. Just trust me when I say, he does it with the aptitude of the likes of Stephen King or John Connolly, and I hope it’s an area he revisits in future work. He sets up a powerful world and sticks rigidly to his own rules, and the transition into suspension of disbelief is an easy one for the reader as a result.
  His next book will see a return to form, with MYSTERY MAN, a detective story set in the real No Alibis bookshop in Belfast, but featuring a fictional owner. Not David Torrans. But maybe in the book after next he’ll bend the boundaries of his chosen genre? I hope so. He does it very well.
  Orpheus Rising is a rare example of a perfect book. – Gerard Brennan

This review is republished by the kind permission of Crime Scene Northern Ireland

Oop North No Longer Quite So Grim – Official!

Two rather excellent pieces of news to report today, people. Firstly, it gives us great pleasure to announce (a trumpet parp please, maestro) the arrival of Crime Scene NI, an interweb yokeybus that does exactly what it says on the tin (“Primarily devoted to the post-Troubles boom in Northern Irish crime fiction, Crime Scene NI is also highly interested in all Irish, Euro and international crime fiction”), and which is administered by the Grand Vizier’s latest and manliest mortal enemy, Gerard Brennan. For its very first post, Crime Scene NI scooped the bone-idle elves of CAP Towers with the news that (The Artist Formerly Known As) Bateman’s latest novel, ORPHEUS RISING, hit the shelves last week, with Crime Scene NI linking through to Master Bateman himself. Quoth the Batemeister:

“The new novel, ORPHEUS RISING, was published this week folks. The one with the big pink shark on the cover. Hard to miss. Although you will if you order books through Amazon … as due to an administrative foul-up, the book has failed to appear there at all. Hopefully this will be rectified in the very near future. Meanwhile, if you live anywhere near Belfast, you’re invited to come and help launch the blessed thing at No Alibis bookstore in Botanic Avenue on Thursday, March 13 at 7 pm.”

Meanwhile, and although we’re very impressed with the artwork for ORPHEUS RISING, we do like the idiosyncratic version posted on Fantastic Fiction, for which the CAP lawyers would like to announce the Grand Vizier bears no responsibility at all, much.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: I PREDICT A RIOT by (The Artist Formerly Known As Colin) Bateman

I PREDICT A RIOT is a big brick of a book from the Northern Irish crime fiction aficionado now going by the name of Bateman. As a fan of his since DIVORCING JACK, I had high hopes for this book. As ever, the Bangor man failed to disappoint me. I cracked my first smile at the dedication to his Christian name, “… gone but not forgotten.” Couple this with the intriguing tagline, ‘Murder, extortion & carrot cake’, and the reader already knows what they’re in for. Classic Bateman violence and humour.
  As always, his flawed characters leave you cringing as they stumble towards inevitable disaster, and his cleverly constructed plot is revealed with a lightning fast pace that keeps you turning the pages. And as always, I laughed out loud. A lot. Seriously, people at work were staring at me as I giggled through my lunch break for a week.
  The book started life as a serialisation in a Belfast newspaper, The News Letter. Each chapter is an instalment from the paper, and so each one is very short. I have no complaints about this. It made it an incredibly easy read. Also, as a result of its original venue, all the f**king swearing has been ****ed out. If you read Mr Bateman’s blog, you’ll see a mini rant about this. Apparently a lot of folk found his “censorship” rather annoying. I disagree. I thought it made some of the swearing funnier in places.
  However, another hangover from its genesis is the rather annoying amount of recaps within the chapters. I can understand the need to drop the odd sentence of back-story when the reader has to wait days for the next instalment, but in a book as fast-paced as this it’s completely unnecessary. I reckon this was the result of lazy editing as opposed to overkill from the writer.
  All in all, I PREDICT A RIOT rocks harder than the Kaiser Chiefs (sorry, too easy to resist). With a strong cast of characters and a wry look at life in modern Belfast, you’re on to a winner with this one. My final thought when turning the last page was, when’s the next one coming out? Good news! ORPHEUS RISING will be on the shelves in March. It will be mine. – Gerard Brennan

Gerard Brennan can be found right here.

Ghosts In The Machine

So there we were, all ready to give Colin Bateman’s (right) – oops, sorry, Bateman’s – latest the big-up hup-ya, when news arrived via a distinctly dishevelled carrier pigeon that the opus will not, after all, be called GHOST TOWN. Boo. Quoth Master Bateman:

“Those many, many hundreds of thousands of you feverishly waiting for the next novel, GHOST TOWN, may tear up your cheques and cancel your Amazon orders. Fear not though – it’s only a change of title. All the way through writing it I called it ORPHEUS RISING and it was only on delivery that my publishers thought that was a bit unwieldy and we came up with GHOST TOWN instead. So ever since that’s what it has been – I actually have the cover for the book in the house (will that be worth something on Ebay? £5? Maybe £10) – but now for reasons which are a bit complicated, and at a very late stage, at least in publishing terms, we’re back to ORPHEUS RISING. Actually – and this has nothing to do with the title change, because it would actually have been quite helpful – the new film from Ricky Gervais, his first leading role, is also called GHOST TOWN, also set in America, and has quite a similar plot. I was looking forward to the confusion this would have caused, because he is an international superstar and comedy genius, and I still play five-a-side.”

And modest too, eh? ORPHEUS RISING (GHOST TOWN cover slightly modified by the elves after a hard night on the Elf-Wonking Juice™, right) enters the stratosphere on March 6, with the hard-pressed elves blurbing thusly:

Michael met Claire when she was dragging Paul de Luca, detective novel writer and owner of a porn shop, out of the sea after he’d lost his feet in a shark attack. Claire was living with local hard man Tommy, a Gulf War vet, at the time and Tommy was not impressed with Michael’s interest in his girl. When Tommy leaves town to be a roadie for a band playing a six-week stint on a cruise ship, Michael falls in love with Claire, they marry and he writes his novel. But then Claire is killed in the bank raid. Ten years later Michael returns to the scene of the crime to exorcise the ghosts of the past and try to write his second novel. But he discovers the grim truth behind his wife’s murder and encounters the strangest of small-town behaviour ...

The subtitle? ‘Love, Rockets and a Bloody Great Fish’. All together now: “We’re gonna need a bigger bookshelf …”