Publication: BOOKS TO DIE FOR, edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke

I’m delighted to announce that BOOKS TO DIE FOR is now available in trade paperback. An award-winning collection of essays on the great crime / mystery novels, penned by the great contemporary crime / mystery authors, BTDF was described by the Washington Post as “As good a collection of short essays on crime fiction as one is likely to find.” To wit:

The world’s most beloved mystery writers celebrate their favourite mystery novels in this gorgeously wrought collection, featuring essays by Michael Connelly, Kathy Reichs, Ian Rankin, and more. In the most ambitious anthology of its kind, the world’s leading mystery writers come together to champion the greatest mystery novels ever written. In a series of personal essays that reveal as much about the authors and their own work as they do about the books that they love, over a hundred authors from twenty countries have created a guide that will be indispensable for generations of readers and writers. From Agatha Christie to Lee Child, from Edgar Allan Poe to P. D. James, from Sherlock Holmes to Hannibal Lecter and Philip Marlowe to Lord Peter Wimsey, Books to Die For brings together the best of the mystery world for a feast of reading pleasure, a treasure trove for those new to the genre and for those who believe that there is nothing new left to discover. This is the one essential book for every reader who has ever finished a mystery novel and thought … I want more!

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

Books: BOOKS TO DIE FOR To Publish In Trade Paperback

I’m delighted to see that the award-winning BOOKS TO DIE FOR (Atria / Emily Bestler Books), edited by John Connolly and yours truly, will be published in trade paperback later this year, at what I think is a very reasonable price of $17 (I’m biased, obviously). If you haven’t come across BOOKS TO DIE FOR before, the concept runs a lot like this:

The world’s most beloved mystery writers celebrate their favourite mystery novels in this gorgeously wrought collection, featuring essays by Michael Connelly, Kathy Reichs, Ian Rankin, and more. In the most ambitious anthology of its kind, the world’s leading mystery writers come together to champion the greatest mystery novels ever written. In a series of personal essays that reveal as much about the authors and their own work as they do about the books that they love, over a hundred authors from twenty countries have created a guide that will be indispensable for generations of readers and writers. From Agatha Christie to Lee Child, from Edgar Allan Poe to P. D. James, from Sherlock Holmes to Hannibal Lecter and Philip Marlowe to Lord Peter Wimsey, Books to Die For brings together the best of the mystery world for a feast of reading pleasure, a treasure trove for those new to the genre and for those who believe that there is nothing new left to discover. This is the one essential book for every reader who has ever finished a mystery novel and thought … I want more!

BOOKS TO DIE FOR will be published in trade paperback on October 25th. For all the details, clickety-click here …

Interview: Anthony Quinn

Arminta Wallace interviewed Anthony Quinn (right) – author of DISAPPEARED, BORDER ANGELS and THE BLOOD DIMMED TIDE – for the Irish Times over the weekend, and a very good read it is too. Sample quote:

“One of the biggest influences on me is Graham Greene. He was very good at bringing out the darkness in everybody as well as the light. PD James and Ruth Rendell are also influences. But I would say that Stuart Neville and Colin Bateman have influenced me in more subtle ways, in that they first took on writing about the Troubles and using detective fiction to do it. They knocked away my inhibitions in that respect.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Publication: BOOKS TO DIE FOR, ed. John Connolly and Declan Burke

I’m delighted to say that BOOKS TO DIE FOR, originally published in 2012, will be reissued in trade paperback by its UK publishers, Hodder & Stoughton, on September 25th. Quoth the blurb elves:

Winner of the 2013 Agatha, Anthony and the Macavity Awards for Best Crime Non-Fiction.

The world’s greatest mystery writers on the world’s greatest mystery novels.

With so many mystery novels to choose from and so many new titles appearing each year, where should the reader start? What are the classics of the genre? Which are the hidden gems?

In the most ambitious anthology of its kind yet attempted, the world’s leading mystery writers have come together to champion the greatest mystery novels ever written. In a series of personal essays that often reveal as much about themselves and their work work as they do about the books that they love, more than 120 authors from twenty countries have created a guide that will be indispensable for generations of readers and writers. From Christie to Child and Poe to PD James, from Sherlock Holmes to Hannibal Lecter and Philip Marlowe to Peter Wimsey, BOOKS TO DIE FOR brings together the cream of the mystery world for a feast of reading pleasure, a treasure trove for those new to the genre and those who believe that there is nothing new left to discover. This is the one essential book for every reader who has ever finished a mystery novel and thought . . . I want more!

  For more on BOOKS TO DIE FOR, clickety-click here …

Last Night I Dreamt I Went To Pemberley Again

I had one of the most enjoyable experiences of my writing life yesterday evening, when interviewing PD James (right) in the Public Theatre at Trinity College. And when I say ‘interviewing’, I mean ‘struggling to get a word in edgeways’. The Right Honourable Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE – or Phyllis, as she insisted we call her – was in sparkling form, and really could not have made my job any easier. She was truly wonderful company, and the tone was set from the very beginning when the packed audience – 600 or thereabouts – gave her a standing ovation when she first appeared.
  The evening took place under the auspices of the UNESCO / Dublin City of Literature, in association with Trinity College, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. PD James has, of course, written a sequel-of-sorts to that book, DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLEY, and most of the conversation was taken up with a chat about Jane Austen and PEMBERLEY. So what was her publisher’s reaction when she suggested rewriting Jane Austen as a murder mystery? “Oh, one never tells one’s publisher anything,” was the gist of the reply.
  Anyway, the very good news to come out of last night’s chat was that PD James has just begun – at the tender age of 93 – another Adam Dalgliesh novel. Here’s hoping the Baroness returns to Dublin to celebrate that particular delight.

Death Comes To Trinity

Dublin UNESCO City of Literature is delighted to announce that renowned crime author PD James will be speaking to novelist Declan Burke about her novel DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLEY in The Public Theatre, Trinity College on Tuesday 8th October.

DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLEY is written in the style of Jane Austen as follow-on from Pride and Prejudice, where PD James draws the characters of Jane Austen into a tale of murder, intrigue and emotional mayhem. It is currently being made into a 3 part mini-drama series for the BBC to be aired in December. As this is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice, PD James will discuss DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLEY, her love of Jane Austen, as well as her crime novels.

PD James was born in Oxford in 1920. Her first book was published when she was in her late thirties. She is the author of 20 books, most of which have been filmed and broadcast in the United States and other countries. Many of her books, including A Taste for Death, The Murder Room and Devices and Desires, feature Scotland Yard detective Adam Dalgliesh.

She spent 30 years working in various departments of the British Civil Service, including the Police and Criminal Law Department of Great Britain's Home Office.

In 2000, at the age of 80, she published her autobiography TIME TO BE IN EARNEST. She has won awards for crime writing in several countries including Britain, America and Scandinavia. She was awarded an OBE in 1983 and was created a life peer in 1991. She lives in London and Oxford and has two daughters, five grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

Date: Tuesday 8th October
Venue: The Public Theatre (known as the Examinations Hall), Front Square, Trinity College
Time: 7pm (doors close at 6.50pm sharp)
Admission: Free.
Booking is essential (maximum of 4 tickets per person).
Book at 01 - 6744862 or email cityofliterature@dublincity.ie

The Agatha Awards: BOOKS TO DIE FOR

I’m delighted to announce that BOOKS TO DIE FOR, edited by John Connolly, Clair Lamb and yours truly, has won the Agatha Award for Best Non-Fiction at the annual Malice Domestic convention.
  The Agatha Awards, for those of you unfamiliar with them, ‘honour the “traditional mystery.” That is to say, books best typified by the works of Agatha Christie as well as others.’
  It’s a considerable honour, and I’m particularly thrilled for John and Clair, but also for all the writers who contributed to BOOKS TO DIE FOR – it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that this award belongs to every one of them as much as it does the book’s editors.
  For all the Agatha Awards shortlists and winners, clickety-click here.
  It’s been a real roller-coaster week for BOOKS TO DIE FOR. We were hugely honoured to be shortlisted for Thursday night’s Edgar Awards, and naturally we were disappointed not to win. That disappointment was offset on Friday by the news that BTDF has been shortlisted for the HRF Keating Award at Crimefest, where the book will find itself, again, in some very fine company. To wit:

Declan Burke & John Connolly for BOOKS TO DIE FOR (Hodder & Stoughton, 2012)
John Curran for AGATHA CHRISTIE’S SECRET NOTEBOOKS (HarperCollins, 2009)
Barry Forshaw (editor) for BRITISH CRIME WRITING: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA (Greenwood World Publishing, 2008)
Christopher Fowler for INVISIBLE INK (Strange Attractor, 2012)
Maxim Jakubowski (editor) for FOLLOWING THE DETECTIVES (New Holland Publishers, 2010)
P.D. James for TALKING ABOUT DETECTIVE FICTION (The Bodleian Library, 2009)

  Incidentally, I’ll be hosting a panel at Crimefest on BOOKS TO DIE FOR, featuring contributors Peter James, Yrsa Sigurdardottir and Brian McGilloway. If you’re going to be in Bristol that weekend, we’d love to see you there.

The Best Things In Life Are Free … BOOKS (TO DIE FOR)

’Tis the season to be jolly, and give presents, and even if I do tend to struggle with the ‘jolly’ bit on occasion, the BOOKS TO DIE FOR (Hodder & Stoughton) team will hopefully make up for that today. For lo! I have a (multiple) signed first edition of BOOKS TO DIE FOR to give away, which will warm the metaphorical cockles of any crime fiction fan’s heart. First, the blurb elves:

With so many mystery novels to choose from and so many new titles appearing each year, where should the reader start? What are the classics of the genre? Which are the hidden gems? In the most ambitious anthology of its kind yet attempted, the world’s leading mystery writers have come together to champion the greatest mystery novels ever written. In a series of personal essays that often reveal as much about themselves and their work work as they do about the books that they love, more than 120 authors from twenty countries have created a guide that will be indispensable for generations of readers and writers. From Christie to Child and Poe to PD James, from Sherlock Holmes to Hannibal Lecter and Philip Marlowe to Peter Wimsey, BOOKS TO DIE FOR brings together the cream of the mystery world for a feast of reading pleasure, a treasure trove for those new to the genre and those who believe that there is nothing new left to discover. This is the one essential book for every reader who has ever finished a mystery novel and thought . . . I want more!

  So there you have it. To be in with a chance of winning this unique prize, just answer the following question:

What one crime / mystery novel do you think every crime / mystery fan should read?

  Answers via the comment box below, please, leaving a contact email address (using ‘at’ rather than @ to confuse the spam munchkins), by noon on December 31st. Oh, and if you fancy a second bite at the proverbial cherry, we’re also giving away a signed BTDF over here. Et bon chance, mes amis …

Wake Up, It’s Time To Die

It’s a rather nerve-wracking time right now at CAP Towers. BOOKS TO DIE FOR, which I’ve co-edited with John Connolly, will be published at the end of August, but even as you read this the contributors’ copies are winging their way around the globe, the reviewers’ copies are landing with a hefty thump in many hallways, and the genie is very much out of the bottle. Quoth the blurb elves:

With so many mystery novels to choose from and so many new titles appearing each year, where should the reader start? What are the classics of the genre? Which are the hidden gems? In the most ambitious anthology of its kind yet attempted, the world’s leading mystery writers have come together to champion the greatest mystery novels ever written. In a series of personal essays that often reveal as much about themselves and their work work as they do about the books that they love, more than 120 authors from twenty countries have created a guide that will be indispensable for generations of readers and writers. From Christie to Child and Poe to PD James, from Sherlock Holmes to Hannibal Lecter and Philip Marlowe to Peter Wimsey, BOOKS TO DIE FOR brings together the cream of the mystery world for a feast of reading pleasure, a treasure trove for those new to the genre and those who believe that there is nothing new left to discover. This is the one essential book for every reader who has ever finished a mystery novel and thought . . . I want more!

  This, of course, is always the period of phoney war. That agonizing time when you’ve done all you can to make a book as good as it can be, when editors and designers have wrought their magic, and the book seems to exist in a kind of limbo between what you hope it is and how the rest of the world will perceive it.
  There is nothing more to do but fret and sweat, and try not to obsess over the most minute of details.
  Unusually for me at this point in the proceedings, and alongside all the usual traumas, I’m feeling a quiet pride for helping to bring BOOKS TO DIE FOR to this stage. That’s the case even though there’s an added pressure on this occasion, because BTDF isn’t just my book, and won’t simply stand or fall on how my efforts. To a large extent, I think, the book belongs to everyone who contributed to it, and to the crime fiction / mystery community at large, writers and readers alike.
  But even while acknowledging that, and accepting that BTDF isn’t perfect - no book is, and I’d imagine that there will be very few well-informed crime / mystery readers who won’t read it and wail, ‘But what about [insert overlooked tome here]?’ - it still feels pretty good to have helped to bring the book this far. It was a fraught experience at times, and a steep learning curve, but it was terrific to be involved in it, and particularly to observe, in John, a writer at the top of his game and how he goes about his business.
  Being the generous soul he is, John Connolly won’t tell you that he pretty much shouldered said hefty tome up the hill and over the finish line in a kind of Sisyphus-taunting performance, but he did, and did so in some style too. For my own part, I like to think that I brought a little panache in the way I stood back and watched and admired, and occasionally applauded. It’s also true that Clair Lamb’s input was prodigious, crucial and never less than excellent.
  Anyway, as I say, the genie is out of the bottle now and on its way to a bookstore near you. Launch dates for BOOKS TO DIE FOR in South Africa, Dublin and Belfast can be found here, and there’s oodles of information on the book, its contributors and the books and authors they wrote about, here and here. I sincerely hope you enjoy …

Get Busy Dying

A trumpet-parp please, maestro …
  I’ll be writing about BOOKS TO DIE FOR in greater detail over the next couple of months, but for now I just want to put the word out there: this tasty little confection, edited by John Connolly and I, and about which I am very excited, is due on an Irish / UK / Australian / South African shelf near you on August 30th, and will be debuting on October 2nd, at the Cleveland Bouchercon, in North America. Quoth the blurb elves:

With so many mystery novels to choose from and so many new titles appearing each year, where should the reader start? What are the classics of the genre? Which are the hidden gems?

In the most ambitious anthology of its kind yet attempted, the world’s leading mystery writers have come together to champion the greatest mystery novels ever written. In a series of personal essays that often reveal as much about themselves and their work as they do about the books that they love, more than 120 authors from twenty countries have created a guide that will be indispensable for generations of readers and writers. From Christie to Child and Poe to PD James, from Sherlock Holmes to Hannibal Lecter and Philip Marlow to Peter Wimsey, BOOKS TO DIE FOR brings together the cream of the mystery world for a feast of reading pleasure, a treasure trove for those new to the genre and those who believe that there is nothing new left to discover. This is the one essential book for every reader who has ever finished a mystery novel and thought . . . I want more!

  So there you have it. If you want to take a wander over to the BOOKS TO DIE FOR website, there’s a section there where you can nominate the novel you think is absolutely indispensable for the great crime fiction canon. Or you could simply drop a note into the comment box below. As always, we’re open for business …

The James Gang

I had a round-up of recent crime titles published in the Sunday Independent last week, among them PERFECT PEOPLE by Peter James and DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLEY by PD James. I’ve mentioned both of those titles here recently, though, so here’s the third of the reviews, being FEAST DAY OF FOOLS by James Lee Burke. To wit:

Set in contemporary Texas, FEAST DAY OF FOOLS by James Lee Burke is a very modern novel that is nevertheless obsessed with the past. The novel is the third in a series of books to centre on Hackberry Holland, county sheriff of a Texas territory that shares a border with Mexico; the first in the series, LAY DOWN MY SWORD AND SHIELD, was published in 1971, while the second, RAIN GODS, was published in 2009.
  Here Holland finds himself faced by an old adversary, a religiously-inspired killer called Preacher Jack. He also struggles to cope with a narco-gang spilling over the border from Mexico, led by the ruthless Krill; and a number of competing groups, some of whom are legal, others criminal, who are in pursuit of a missing man called Noie Barnum, an engineer with information on the Predator drone, and who is considered a valuable asset to be captured and sold to Al Qaeda.
  Written in a style that could on occasion be mistaken for that of Cormac McCarthy, Burke’s prose is here heavily influenced by Biblical references, as the aging Holland meditates on this mortality and tries to come to terms with his failings as a man. Holland is depicted as something of a bridge between the past and the future - his grandfather, for example, was an Old West sheriff - and Burke is at pains to set Hackberry Holland very firmly in the landscape of south Texas, frequently writing eloquently descriptive passages about the deserts and mountains, its storms, sunsets and dawns.
  Despite the contemporary references, however, and Burke’s explicit referencing of the consequences of 9/11, FEAST DAY OF FOOLS is no less than a good old-fashioned Western masquerading as a crime thriller, fuelled by the pioneer spirit and the attempt to impose order on the anarchy of the lawless Old West. The result is a hugely entertaining and thought-proving novel.

  This review first appeared in the Sunday Independent.

Thinking Inside The Bosch

Apologies for yesterday’s rant, people, and particularly for foisting my own purple prose on you in the name of ‘protest’. Normal-ish service is resumed today.
  Michael Connelly (right) was in town a couple of weeks ago, on a promo tour for THE DROP, his latest offering featuring Harry Bosch, and a very great pleasure it was to meet with him for the purpose of interview, which appeared on Saturday in the Irish Examiner, especially as Connelly qualifies as an Irish crime writer under FIFA’s grandparent ruling, and was good enough to pen a short foreword to DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS. Nice. Anyway, on the with the interview, which opens up a lot like this:

BE CAREFUL where you stash your guns, people. You might just be corrupting an impressionable 16-year-old.
  Michael Connelly is the Irish-American author of 26 novels, the latest of which is The Drop, featuring his iconic Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective Harry Bosch.
  From our vantage point in the plush environs of the Merrion Hotel, where the softly spoken Connelly sips tea in front of a blazing log fire, his ascent to literary superstardom, via numerous awards and critical acclaim, seems in retrospect inevitable. And yet, had the teenage Connelly not spotted a man acting suspiciously as he hid something in a bush, the world would never have heard of Connelly’s best-selling creations, which include Hieronymous ‘Harry’ Bosch, Mickey Haller and Jack McEvoy.
  “I was from a middle- to upper-class background,” says Connelly, “more middle-class pretending to be upper, probably, so I had no real experience at all of the police. I loved reading crime novels and stuff like that, but this was like, ‘Wow!’. It was suddenly real life. And it wasn’t so much the crime part, finding the gun in the bush and all that.
  “What left a real resonance was the night I spent with the detectives, and comparing them to detectives I’d read about. A lot of my reading was stuff handed to me by my mother, so I was going from PD James to a real PD squad-room. And that opened my eyes a little bit.
  “In your life as a writer,” he reflects, “certain things have to happen, and sometimes it freaks you out a bit to go back and think, ‘What if that didn’t happen, or that.’ That moment had to happen for me to become a writer, because I was someone who’d been dropped into school in the middle of the year, and had no friends, and I became something of an introvert, which led me to read. So that was the first step. And then just happening to see this guy hide something in a bush had to happen. And then, later, I had to go see The Long Goodbye by Robert Altman at the dollar movie night at college. I didn’t have to go to that movie, that particular night. So all these elements of chance add up.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

I’d Love To Set A Thriller On The Moon, But …

Atmosphere or no, it’s amazing there aren’t more thrillers set on the moon*. Exotic locations are growing more and more popular with the crime fic fraternity, to the point where it can be argued – I think some po-faced critic did so recently, actually – that the novels are becoming as much travelogues as they are thrillers. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – I discovered Paul Johnston, for example, because he set the first Alex Mavros novel on a Greek island – but there can be times when writers overstep the mark and wallow in exotica to the exclusion of formerly vital components of the crime novel, such as tension and dead bodies.
  Anyway, kudos are due yet again to the Irish Times for their ongoing support for crime fiction, which this weekend manifested itself as a double-page spread feature on exotic locations for crime fic novels. To wit:

“BAD THINGS happen in beautiful places,” the doyenne of British crime fiction, PD James, recently observed. She’s so right. When we’re sunning ourselves on some idyllic beach or downing grilled prawns and dry white wine in some sheltered harbour, we like nothing better than a good murder – fictional, of course – to keep us entertained. A strong sense of place is one of the most attractive elements of a top-notch crime novel, and it needn’t be a remote wilderness place, either; it can be a pulsating city neighbourhood, or even a single apartment building. Arminta Wallace suggests some striking locations for a spot of summer sleuthing.

  The locations Wallace picked are Louisiana, Yorkshire, Venice, Boston, Bangkok, Donegal, Alaska, Shanghai, Botswana, Reykjavik, Washington DC, Sicily, London, Breslau, Dublin, Paris, New York, Edinburgh, Seville, Istanbul, Los Angeles, Nairobi, Maine, Sweden and Norfolk, although I’m sure Peter Rozovsky could suggest a few more. I’m thinking, off the top of my head, Tibet, Egypt, Australia, Greece and Brazil …
  And in the week that’s in it, given that it’s getting its UK publication, how the hell could they miss out on Cuba and Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND?
  Quibbles apart, it’s a fine piece. Clickety-click here for all the details …

* Funnily enough, Duncan Jones – aka Zowie Bowie – has just directed Sam Rockwell in Moon, a Phil Dick-style existential thriller of paranoia, cloning and double-cross set on the moon, which is due out in Ireland on July 17, and comes warmly recommended by your genial host. Oh, and expect to see every newspaper feature dealing with Moon titled ‘Space Oddity’.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Ellen McCarthy

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?
John Connolly’s EVERY DEAD THING is so horribly great. Some people find it too graphic but I think it is crafted beautifully while looking at the extremes of human depravity. I’m glad it’s fiction!
What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Miss Marple. I want to live in a picture perfect cottage in St Mary Meade and meddle in everyone’s life.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
P.D. James. Her quiet insular settings are captivating whether it’s an isolated monastery or a remote Cornish island retreat. Her characterisation and prose are comforting, timeless and old worldly.
Most satisfying writing moment?
My most satisfying writing moment to date was when I won the short story competition ‘Do The Write Thing,’ with Poolbeg Press in conjunction with RTE’s ‘Seoige’. It wasn’t the Edgar but it was the moment my writing came out of the back room and on to the bookshelves.
The best Irish crime novel is…?
LOST SOULS by Michael Collins. It is part police procedural with a deep psychological feel. It is beautifully written, taking an unforgiving look at the decline of a small town and its inhabitants when poverty strikes.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
BLACK SHEEP by Arlene Hunt. I think the director could really focus on the Quinn brothers and the legacy of family and bad decisions.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing about being a writer is the fear and insecurity. Every time I send something out I’m shaking with nerves. The best thing about being a writer is getting positive reviews from readers.
The pitch for your next book is …?
A husband dies suddenly, but who was he? His work colleagues claim they never met him and nobody seems to know his real name. Now some stranger is prompting his wife towards a past he obviously didn’t want her to know. Was this person responsible for his death and where will it all lead her?
Who are you reading right now?
I’m reading Robert Crais’ L.A. REQUIEM. I fell for the title. The book is proving to be just as good.
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
That’s an impossible question. It’s like saying I’ll give you legs but you can either stand or walk.
The best three words to describe your own writing are …?
Vivid, tense, absorbing.

Ellen McCarthy’s novel GUILT RIDDEN is published by Poolbeg Crimson

On Equal Writes For Wimmin

I recently interviewed four Irish female crime writers – Ruth Dudley-Edwards (right), Arlene Hunt, Alex Barclay and Ingrid Black – for the Sunday Independent about being, y’know, crime writers who are Irish and women. Anyhoos, one of the questions was about why Irish crime writing has so far been dominated by men. Quoth ‘Cuddly’ Dudley-Edwards:

“It may be that Irish crime fiction is dominated by men because so far, it has tended toward the noir,” suggests Dudley-Edwards. “Certainly, very many of the most famous names in classical English crime fiction are female: Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, PD James, Ruth Rendell. Indeed Reginald Hill has a story of being at a cultural event in France where an earnest man rose to ask why most of the writers of the Golden Age [the Thirties] of detection were women. ‘Because,’ explained Reg, ‘all the men were dead.’”

  Oh, and Arlene Hunt is adamant that women no longer need fainting couches. For the rest, clickety-click here.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Paul Johnston

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?
Difficult. Toss-up between Ellroy’s WHITE JAZZ and Philip Kerr’s A PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATION (I only wish I had the nerve to have a serial killer called Wittgenstein).
What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Sherlock H. Rude, brilliant, stoned and nifty with his fists.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
P D James. Don’t agree with her politics and can’t stand the lengthy descriptions, but she gets to the meat of things for all her Golden Age credentials.
Most satisfying writing moment?
If you mean literally writing, it would be nailing the death-bed vision of old Maro in A DEEPER SHADE OF BLUE (soon to be republished as CRYING BLUE MURDER) - after about fifty attempts. If you mean more generally, I’d have to say winning the Sherlock Award (see above) for THE LAST RED DEATH - a novel I literally nearly died writing (thanks to cancer).
The best Irish crime novel is …?
Do you mean written by an Irish person or set in Ireland? If the former, John Connolly’s THE KILLING KIND. The latter, Declan Hughes’s THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD. (They’re two of a ‘kind’...)
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
See above.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst - the first sentence every day. Best - the unexpected appearance of a deeply sneaky plot twist or such like from the subconscious.
The pitch for your next book is …?
Nazis, Satanists and the FBI - who are the scariest of them all?
Who are you reading right now?
Declan Burke (no, really...)
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
If he was paying me for it, read - much easier.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Ideas above (his) station (quote J Connolly).

Paul Johnston’s THE SOUL COLLECTOR has just been published by Mira Books.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 2,045: Elizabeth Zelvin

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’d rather amend the question to name crime novels I admire enormously, knowing I could never have written them. I have plenty of candidates: the Reginald Hill’s UNDERWORLD and ON BEULAH HEIGHT, Laurie King’s THE BEEKEEPER’S APPRENTICE, Dorothy L. Sayers’s GAUDY NIGHT, Peter Dickinson’s KING AND JOKER, Janet Neel’s DEATH’S BRIGHT ANGEL, Josephine Tey’s BRAT FARRAR. I’d add a few series by American women: Marcia Muller, Margaret Maron, Dana Stabenow, Nevada Barr.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Now, this is embarrassing: Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver mysteries. These are cozies in the grand tradition, written after the Golden Age of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Detective Club and before the proliferation of light fare that has made “cozy” a pejorative term in some quarters. Wentworth’s books are perfectly predictable, but they are intelligent and character driven, if you accept that the characters fall into a finite number of types based on now outmoded assumptions about men, women, and society.
Most satisfying writing moment?
That would be the moment when the words tug at my mind, demanding to be released onto the page, and once they’re on the paper, I know I’ve got it. Writers have had different names for it over time: the Muse, inspiration, being a channel, even God or Higher Power. I’ve had it more frequently as a poet than as a novelist. Two of my most powerful poems came to me that way, one the day of my mother’s death and the other the day of my father’s funeral. When it comes during the first draft of a mystery, it feels wonderful, but I still have to sit back down at the computer the next day and keep on slogging.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
Ken Bruen’s PRIEST, which is up for an Edgar for Best Novel and is one helluva book. Or maybe CROSS, his new one: the opening, prologue and first chapter, left me breathless. I’ve been a poet myself for thirty years or so, and you can see the poet on every page of Ken’s work. I shied away from it until recently, not only because I don’t read much noir but also because I’d heard his protagonist Jack Taylor was a heavy-duty alcoholic who hated sobriety—the opposite of my protagonist Bruce, who gets into genuine recovery, however reluctantly, and won’t relapse no matter how long the series runs. But when I finally read Ken’s books, I found he knows his stuff about the disease and is no fan of active alcoholism, so my bias in that area didn’t get triggered and I could relax and appreciate the writing.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Oh, Lord, a priest’s head, like the horse’s head in THE GODFATHER? I’m not sure I could handle seeing the movie. I have a horror of beheading that started before it moved from history books about the era of Queen Elizabeth I to the front page of today’s news. Even worse, a crucifixion? Mel Gibson’s already done that one.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Apart from the moments I’ve already mentioned, when the words are flowing right through me—and their aftermath, when I can reread what I’ve written over and over without falling out of love with it—I’d say the best thing is being able to wear sweats and bunny slippers (okay, a sleep tee and flip-flops) all day long. The worst thing—if you don’t count repeated rejection and discouragement and not making a living—is when I don’t know what comes next and I’m afraid I won’t be able to summon it up. Unfortunately, my daily process seems to start with “I can’t!” I’ve been reassured by hearing quite a few very successful writers admit the same. And I could avoid the problem altogether by giving up novels and sticking to short stories, poems, songs, and blog posts. But if I did, “I can’t” would turn into “I couldn’t,” and that would never do.
The pitch for your next novel is …?
My debut mystery, DEATH WILL GET YOU SOBER, will be out from St. Martin’s on April 15. When Bruce wakes up in detox on the Bowery on Christmas Day, he knows it's time to change his life. Afraid he’ll die of boredom without the booze, he finds a formula for staying sober: Don't drink, go to meetings, and investigate a murder. A computer geek who loves AA and New York City and the world's most co-dependent addictions counselLor help Bruce find out who's killing homeless alcoholics – including the one with enemies and a big trust fund. And everyone’s invited to my launch party at the Mysterious Bookshop. It’s my birthday as well as Income Tax Day, and my accountant has made me promise to say something clever about death and taxes.
Who are you reading right now?
I just finished PD James’s THE LIGHTHOUSE. It held my interest, but the way the mystery is constructed would never pass muster in a new author’s manuscript today. All that stately prose, the lengthy descriptions of landscape and interiors, the back-story, the “telling, not showing”—reading it transported me back to the Golden Age of mystery.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Edgar winner Julie Smith gave DEATH WILL GET YOU SOBER a terrific blurb in which she used the words “snappy dialogue and quirky relationships.” Snappy and quirky work for me—and the third would be “fun.”

Elizabeth Zelvin’s DEATH WILL GET YOU SOBER is published on April 15