Wham, Bram, Thank You Ma’am

The Bram Stoker Festival takes place in Dublin from October 26th to 28th, featuring all things Dracula-related. One of the highlights will undoubtedly be the appearance of Patricia Cornwell, who will argue that the serial killer is literature’s contemporary take on the vampire. To wit:

Patricia Cornwell, whose bestselling novels have elevated her to the highest rank of international crime writing, will discuss ways in which the serial killer has become, in some sense, a modern-day equivalent of the vampire. Fear is the currency of the contemporary crime writer just as it was for the writers of Victorian gothic fiction. Bram Stoker’s DRACULA exploited the Victorians’ dread of the supernatural just as the crime thriller excites our fear of sudden murderous violence. By comparing characters, plots and stories to her own Scarpetta books, the author will illuminate those dark corners of the human psyche which, regardless of time and place, harbour and nourish our deepest human fears. Patricia Cornwell’s latest novel in the Scarpetta series, BONE BED, is published in October and she will be signing copies of the book after the event.

  That event takes place on Friday 26th October at the Edmund Burke Theatre, Trinity College, at 7.30pm. For all the details on how to book tickets, and the rest of the events planned for the Bram Stoker Festival, clickety-click here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Sarah Webb

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?
HARRIET THE SPY by Louise Fitzhugh. OK, it’s not your average crime novel, the spy is an eleven-year-old girl who lives in New York and spies on her neighbours, but it’s one of my favourite books of all time. There’s revenge, punishment, heartbreak and retribution. I’d highly recommend it to any reader, young or not so young.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
That’s a great question, Declan. In a lot of the books I adore, terrible things happen to the heroine - Alice, Rachel (in RACHEL’S HOLIDAY by Marian Keyes), Benny (CIRCLE OF FRIENDS by Maeve Binchy), Katniss (HUNGER GAMES), so I’ll say Posy in BALLET SHOES as I wanted to be a ballerina as a child. (Sorry, not very crime-y or kickass I know!)

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I spend a lot of time reading books for children and teenagers for work and enjoyment, so reading adult fiction is my guilty pleasure. I love good popular fiction by Marian Keyes or Katie Fforde. On the crime side, I used to be a huge Patricia Cornwell fan in the early days, and I’ve just started THE PLAYDATE by Louise Miller, a chilling psychological thriller about a child who goes missing which is excellent so far.

Most satisfying writing moment?
A good day at the desk, getting my 2,000 words done, that’s what I love. For me, that’s the real joy of a writing life.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
SKULDUGGERY PLEASANT by Derek Landy. Yes, it’s fantasy-thriller-crime, yes, it has a skeleton detective, but it’s hilarious, clever and very entertaining. (If I had to pick a book for adults, it would be John Connolly’s EVERY DEAD THING, which unleashed the brilliant character that is Charlie Parker)

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
See above.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst - the doubt and the insecurity. You are only as good as your last book. Best - the licence to create, and the amazing people you meet - other writers, readers, booksellers, publishers.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Wanted: Two girls to time-share one amazing dress, guaranteed to change your life. All enquiries - ask inside. (And no, they don’t get murdered ‘inside’, it’s popular fiction!) Julia Schuster, floundering amidst family troubles and problem drinking; Arietty Pilgrim, lonely and insecure; Pandora Schuster, the sister from hell: can they ever be friends? THE SHOESTRING CLUB, one extraordinary dress, one life-altering friendship.

Who are you reading right now?
BLACK HEART BLUE, a remarkable book by Louisa Reid, part horror story, part mystery, part coming of age novel. It will be published in May and it’s utterly brilliant. And THE PLAYDATE (see above). I tend to have a couple of books on the go at the same time.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
They are so closely linked, but I’d have to say read. Life wouldn’t be worth living without reading every day, it keeps me sane.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Full of potential.

Sarah Webb’s THE SHOESTRING CLUB is published by Pan Macmillan.

A Warm, Warm Reception

The latest crime fiction column appeared in the Irish Times yesterday, featuring reviews of the latest titles from Elmore Leonard, Margie Orford, Ann Cleeves, Parker Bilal, Patricia Cornwell and Adrian McKinty. This being, ostensibly, an outlet for Irish crime writing, and THE COLD COLD GROUND being a terrific novel which has had a very warm reception to date, I’ll focus on the McKinty. To wit:

The Carrickfergus writer Adrian McKinty plunges into the dark heart of Northern Ireland’s Troubles in THE COLD COLD GROUND (£12.99, Serpent’s Tail), as Det Sgt Sean Duffy finds himself investigating a series of linked murders against the backdrop of the hunger strikes in the spring of 1981. The setting represents an extraordinarily tense scenario in itself, but the fact that Duffy is a Catholic in a predominantly Protestant RUC adds yet another fascinating twist to McKinty’s neatly crafted plot. Written in a terse style, the novel is a literary thriller that is as concerned with exploring the poisonously claustrophobic demi-monde of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and the self-sabotaging contradictions of its place and time, as it is with providing the genre’s conventional thrills and spills. The result is a masterpiece of Troubles crime fiction: had David Peace, Eoin McNamee and Brian Moore sat down to brew up the great Troubles novel, they would have been very pleased indeed to have written THE COLD COLD GROUND. - Declan Burke

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  For those of you who have read THE COLD COLD GROUND, and fancy a dip into the work-in-progress of its sequel, clickety-click here …

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books

The ever generous Katrina Alvarez gets in touch to offer free copies of Noah Boyd’s new thriller, AGENT X, the sequel to Boyd’s New York Times bestselling debut, THE BRICKLAYER. Quoth the blurb elves:

FBI-agent-turned-bricklayer Steve Vail once helped the FBI solve a brilliant extortion plot. It was supposed to be a one-and-done deal. But when he’s in Washington, D.C., to see Kate Bannon—an FBI assistant director—on what he thinks will be a romantic New Year’s Eve date, suddenly things get complicated. The FBI has another unsolvable problem, and it has Vail’s name written all over it.
  A man known as Calculus, an officer at the Russian embassy, has approached the FBI claiming that he has a list of Americans who are selling confidential information to the Russian SVR. In exchange for the list, he is asking for a quarter of a million dollars for each traitor the FBI apprehends. But then Calculus informs the FBI that he has been swiftly recalled to Moscow, and the Bureau suspects the worst: the Russians have discovered what Calculus is up to, probably have access to his list, and will be hunting the traitors to kill them unless the FBI can find them first.
  The FBI realizes that it has to keep the operation quiet. Once again, Vail is the perfect man, along with Kate Bannon, who would be anyone’s first pick for help on an impossibly dangerous case. But finding the traitors isn’t going to be easy. In fact, it’s going to be downright deadly. And if the Bricklayer survives, he will have to come up with a few tricks of his own.
  AGENT X is a heart-pounding thrill ride with an authenticity only a writer who’s an FBI veteran can provide, and Steve Vail—a man Patricia Cornwell calls a “new American hero”—is one of the smartest, toughest, and most compelling new characters to come along in many years.

  Noah Boyd is the author of the New York Times bestseller THE BRICKLAYER and a former FBI agent who spent more than twenty years working some of the Bureau’s toughest investigations, including the Green River Killer case and the Highland Park Strangler case (which he’s credited with solving). He currently works on cold cases when he’s not writing.

  So there you have it. To be in with a chance of winning a copy of AGENT X, just answer the following question:

What’s the best spy thriller you’ve read to feature those pesky Russians?

  Answers in the comment box below, please, along with a contact email address (using ‘at’ rather than @ to confound the spam munchkins). The competition closes at noon on Wednesday, February 16th; et bon chance, mes amis.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: The Irish Times’ ‘Crime Beat’

The latest of the Irish Times’ ‘Crime Beat’ columns appeared yesterday, featuring offerings from Patricia Cornwell, Jane Casey, Janet Evanovich, Philip Kerr, Michael Connelly and Anne Holt, along with your humble host’s take on the Top 10 Thrillers of the Year. To wit:

Patricia Cornwell is credited with kick-starting the current craze for the forensic pathology sub-genre in crime fiction, and her heroine Kay Scarpetta is again ahead of the curve in PORT MORTUARY (Little, Brown, £18.99, hb). Scarpetta employs a 3D system of imaging to help her autopsy the latest murder victim to wind up on her table, but it’s the victim’s use of innovative technology that appears to be the motive behind his killing. Is the US military involved in the murder? And is it a coincidence that the man was killed a stone’s throw from Scarpetta’s front door? Cornwell’s terse prose drives a complex tale of unravelling conspiracy theories, in which Scarpetta is unable to trust even her closest friends and associates. The pace is slow but measured, with the second half building to an unstoppable momentum, although first-time readers of Cornwell, and those who prefer their heroes flawed, might find it difficult to warm to Scarpetta’s icy-cold demeanour and unquestioned capability in virtually every field she encounters.
  Maeve Kerrigan, the heroine of Jane Casey’s THE BURNING (Ebury Press, £6.99, pb), is the polar opposite to Kay Scarpetta. A 28-year-old detective with the London Metropolitan Police, the ambitious and likeable Kerrigan is prone to the occasional procedural gaffe as she brings a woman’s quality of empathy to her male-dominated workplace during an investigation into a serial killer who immolates his victims. Casey, on the other hand, rarely puts a foot wrong in this enthralling example of a ‘bait-and-switch’ novel, of which the serial killer element is something of a red herring that allows Casey to dig deep into the psyche of an altogether more interesting brand of murder. Parallel first-person narratives from either side of the thin blue line contribute hugely to the novel’s page-turning quality, although the author’s success here is largely due to her superb characterisations. Casey’s debut novel, THE MISSING, was shortlisted in the Irish Book Awards crime section, and THE BURNING confirms that she’s a talent to watch.
  FIELD GREY (Quercus, £17.99, hb) is the seventh in Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series, of which the most recent, IF THE DEAD RISE NOT, won this year’s CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award. Gunther, a policeman in Germany during the 1930s and ’40s, is the focus of what has been dubbed ‘Nazi noir’, although FIELD GREY opens in 1954, with Gunther observing Graham Greene carousing with women in a Havana nightclub. A series of unfortunate events finds Gunther back in Germany and answering to American investigators probing Nazi war crimes, which in turn leads to extended flashbacks in which Gunther describes his trans-European adventures in pursuit of a killer called Erich Mielke, a pursuit that finds Gunther and Mielke crossing paths for the duration of the war. Dotted with historical personages such as Heydrich and Himmler, the novel is impressive in its detail, and harrowing in its description of mass slaughter. Gunther’s fondness for inappropriate quips undermines his authenticity, however, and the detective-cum-soldier’s peripatetic wanderings means that the novel can lack narrative drive.
  Janet Evanovich’s winsome heroine, Stephanie Plum, takes a back seat for her latest offering, WICKED APPETITE (Headline Review, £18.99, hb). Here Lizzy Tucker, singleton and pastry chef supreme, finds her all too normal world turned on its head when a mysterious and handsome stranger called Diesel materialises in her life and announces that he’s on the trail of seven mysterious stones, which will give the evil Gerwulf Grimoire unlimited powers should he manage to collect all seven. As fluffy and insubstantial as Lizzy’s legendary cupcakes, the story appears to be a parody of Harry Potter-style shenanigans, although Evanovich’s reputation for comedy is nowhere evident here. Slight, dull and for the most part needlessly irritating, WICKED APPETITE achieves very little except to sharpen the reader’s craving for a substantial novel.
  The eighth in Anne Holt’s Hanne Wilhelmsen series, although the first to be translated into English, 1222 (Corvus, £12.99, hb) is a far meatier proposition from a former Norwegian Minister for Justice. The wheelchair-bound Wilhelmsen and her fellow passengers find themselves stranded in a remote mountain hotel during a blizzard in the wake of a train crash, and things go from bad to worse when two of the survivors are murdered in quick succession. Can the cerebral Wilhelmsen identify the murderer before the hotel becomes a charnel house? Holt has Wilhelmsen reference Agatha Christie’s AND THEN THERE WERE NONE during the course of her musings, and 1222 is indeed a smart homage to the classic ‘locked room’ mystery, which also functions as an examination of Norwegian society in microcosm. While the pace is lively, and the tension expertly handled, Holt’s fondness for red herrings won’t be to every reader’s taste.
  Michael Connelly brings together two of his best-selling characters in THE REVERSAL (Orion, £18.99, hb), as defence lawyer Mickey Haller and detective Harry Bosch team up to ensure that a previously convicted child-killer does not escape justice when his case comes up for a retrial. It’s an outrageous conceit, particularly as Connelly is blending the traditional courtroom drama with a police procedural, and alternates Haller’s first-person narration with a third-person account of Bosch’s investigation, but the novel has a gripping clarity from the off, and very quickly establishes a compelling momentum. Connelly’s experience as an award-winning journalist is revealed in fascinating nuggets of information pertaining to both legal and police work, even as he draws us deeper into the conflicted worlds of Mickey Haller (for once operating ‘across the aisle’ as a prosecution lawyer) and the haunted Harry Bosch. All told, it’s another expertly handled tale from a born storyteller which blazes into an incendiary denouement as the child-killer turns his gaze on Mickey and Harry’s daughters. - Declan Burke


Top 10 Thrillers of the Year

ORCHID BLUE by Eoin McNamee (Faber and Faber, £12.99, pb).
A stunning meditation on the nature of justice, rooted in the real-life murder of Newry shop-girl Pearl Gamble in 1961.

TRICK OF THE DARK by Val McDermid (Little, Brown, £18.99, hb)
Disgraced clinical psychologist Charlie Flint seeks redemption in the pursuit of a possible serial killer.

THE LAST CHILD by John Hart (John Murray, £6.99, pb)
A young boy tracks his twin sister’s abductor in a superb excavation of the prejudices of small town America.

FAITHFUL PLACE by Tana French (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99, pb)
Undercover policeman Frank Mackey’s past comes back to haunt him when a body is discovered in an inner-city Dublin tenement.

THE SNOWMAN by Jo Nesbo (Vintage, £6.99, pb)
Oslo police detective Harry Hole investigates a killer whose trademark is a snowman in a hard-hitting tale of revenge.

SPIES OF THE BALKANS by Alan Furst (W&N, £18.99, hb)
Subterfuge and intrigue in WWII Greece, as policeman Costa Zannis sets up an underground railway to aid Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.

PEELER by Kevin McCarthy (Mercier Press, £9.50, pb)
Excellently detailed historical crime novel set in Cork, in which the RIC and IRA chase the same killer during the War of Independence.

STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, £18.99, hb)
Whimsical but compelling tale of private detective Jackson Brodie’s attempt to trace an abducted child.

CITY OF LOST GIRLS by Declan Hughes (John Murray, £19.99, hb)
Hughes’ series detective investigates a peculiarly Irish morality as a serial killer stalks a Dublin-based movie set.

BAD INTENTIONS by Karin Fossum (Harvill Secker, £11.99, pb)
Inspector Sejer investigates an apparent suicide in Fossum’s latest cerebral take on the nature of crime and punishment.

  This column was first published in the Irish Times.

Fiddling With His Funny Bits: The Bateman Interview

With his latest ‘Mystery Man’ novel, DR YES, on the horizon, and a new play in the works, I recently interviewed Colin Bateman (right) for the Evening Herald. It went a lot like this:

FOR A MAN who recently lost his first name, The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman is in remarkably chipper form.
  The prolific writer (25 novels and counting) of comedy crime novels that began with DIVORCING JACK was recently rebranded ‘Bateman’ to coincide with the publication of a new series character who goes only by the name ‘Mystery Man’ as Bateman spoofs the conventions of the traditional crime thriller.
  “It’s kind of a mixed blessing,” he says of his new moniker. “It has undeniably worked as far as the books are concerned - or maybe the books are getting better - in that there’s a recognition factor there. The downside, I suppose, is that if you don’t know it’s tongue in cheek, you’d think it was a bit self-important. And of course, now that I have that doctorate from Coleraine University, I’m officially a Doctor, so the new book could be DR YES by Dr Bateman. If I chose to, ahem, yank my own chain.”
  Fiddling with his funny bits, of course, is what led to the creation of Bateman’s choicest character to date.
  “Most of my books have been launched in Belfast’s No Alibis mystery bookstore,” he says, “and at a launch I generally read the first chapter of the new book: you don’t have to set it all up or confuse people with back stories and asides. But when I was launching DRIVING BIG DAVIE about six years ago I had a bit of a problem – the first chapter was all about masturbation, and my mother-in-law was in the audience. So I had to read something, and that something was a story I wrote over the weekend before the launch, actually set in the bookstore, and with a fictional version of the owner [Dave Torrans] cracking a humdrum crime in ‘The Case of Mrs Geary’s Leather Trousers’. It really was just to fill a gap, but it went down so well that at the next book launch I wrote another short story featuring the same character, and those two stories eventually evolved into the first novel.”
  Mystery Man’s schtick is that he is the antithesis of the conventional crime fiction hero: he’s a cowardly neurotic, a hypochondriac with all the fighting qualities of a cloistered nun, a man who excels only at “being paranoid and foolish and saying the wrong thing, mostly. Yep, it’s a thinly veiled autobiography,” laughs Bateman. “I think Mystery Man and Dan Starkey [the wise-cracking hero of Bateman’s previous series of novels] have a lot in common in that they both tend to open their mouths before they put their brains into gear. The difference is that Dan’s a bit of a jack-the-lad, and if he doesn’t exactly get away with it, he does have a bit of charm and swagger to him. Mystery Man you’d probably just want to hit with a hammer. I suspect I’m probably half way between the two of them.”
  The first in the new series, MYSTERY MAN, was a Richard and Judy ‘Summer Read’, while the second, THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSELL, scooped the Last Laugh award at the recent CrimeFest bunfight in Bristol. The third, DR YES, will be published on September 30th, but Bateman isn’t resting on his laurels.
  “I think it’s important to keep the writing fresh,” he says, “so I’m always open to new challenges – the most recent being writing an erotic short story for Maxim Jakubowski’s Dublin-set anthology, SEX IN THE CITY, which story is chiefly notable for having no discernable erotic content.”
  Having previously written for TV, most notably the Murphy’s Law series that starred James Nesbitt, Bateman has now turned to writing for the stage.
  “‘National Anthem’ is about a composer and a poet,” he explains, “both exiles for twenty years, and with a certain level of fame, who are commissioned by the Government to create a national anthem for Northern Ireland to coincide with the visit of the American President. They’re very much up against a deadline: two men in a room with one day to compose it. But this isn’t the country they left, and they both have secrets which are exposed during the course of the play, secrets which also come back to haunt them. I should add that it’s a comedy, a farce, but maybe with a few points to make about how ‘we’ see ourselves, where we’ve been and where we’re going.”
  After that it’s back to another Mystery Man novel, and using comedy to continue to carve out a niche in what he believes is quickly becoming a depressingly homogenous genre.
  “In publishing terms,” he says, “crime fiction is the biggest genre, and the best-selling authors are selling phenomenal amounts of books. But I genuinely believe that 99 per cent of crime readers, if they were given just the books minus their covers and any identifying information, really couldn’t tell the difference between any of them.
  “I was at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival a couple of months ago and I met many crime fiction fans, and they were all perfectly nice and lovely and I got a great reception and they laughed at my jokes, but it was absolutely clear to me that at the end of the day what they actually wanted was the next Jeffrey Deaver, or Patricia Cornwell or Karin Slaughter. They like the safety of knowing what they’re getting every time they buy a book, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but most of them just aren’t comfortable with the idea of crime comedy and won’t take a chance on it.
  “I think maybe readers have forgotten that there was a strong element of humour in crime fiction in the past - Sherlock Holmes and Raymond Chandler had it in spades - but it seems to have been sucked out of it over the years in favour of blood and guts.
  “It’s not so much that comic crime is cutting edge,” he continues, “it’s just that I think anything that varies from the norm is always worth checking out. Comic crime fiction at least dares to be different. It also,” he grins, “dares not to sell very many copies.”

  DR YES is published by Headline on September 30th. National Anthem debuts at the Belfast Theatre Festival on October 20th.

  This interview first appeared in the Evening Herald.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Sheila Lowe

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?
It’s a tossup between THE CONCRETE BLONDE (Connelly) and DEMOLITION ANGEL (Crais). Who could have come up with a better opening line than in THE CONCRETE BLONDE: The house in Silverlake was dark, its windows as empty as a dead man’s eyes. Gives me shivers every time I read it. And the story holds up all the way through, too.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
I suppose it’s cheating a bit, but the one that comes to mind is Hermione Granger, Harry Potter’s girl chum. I’d love to have gone to Hogwarts. As I was born in England, I’m strongly attracted to the scenery and Hermione is just the kind of little knowitall smartass that I’m afraid I was. Expecto Patronum!

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Can’t say I feel a bit guilty, as when I take some time out to read, I believe I’ve earned it: John Sandford, Michael Connelly, Tess Gerritsen, Deborah Crombie, Patricia Cornwell, Robert Crais, Jonathan Kellerman, and so on, and so on ...

Most satisfying writing moment?
Ripping open the carton of finished books and seeing the reality—a major publisher believed my books are good enough to publish!!! Nothing like that feeling. Or does that count as a writing moment? How about having written a scene and just knowing it works.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Sadly, I haven’t the foggiest—would you recommend one for me to begin my education?

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Ditto above, I’m ashamed to say.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst: having to handle promo and sales numbers. Best: seeing my characters come to life on the printed page and readers emailing that they just had to stay up all night to finish the book(s).

The pitch for your next book is …?
LAST WRITES, coming out July 6th: What does an old stuffed bunny have to do with a fundamentalist religious cult and a forensic handwriting expert? … Erin Powers is a member of a religious sect, living in an isolated compound called the Ark. Now her husband and young child have disappeared, leaving behind a cryptic note with a terrifying message. In desperation, Erin seeks help from her estranged sister, Kelly Brennan, who in turn enlists the aid of forensic handwriting expert Claudia Rose. Claudia seizes on an unexpected opportunity to use her special skills and becomes one of the few outsiders ever to be invited inside the cult compound. With time fast running out, Claudia must uncover the truth about Kelly’s missing niece before the prophecy of a secret ancient parchment can be fulfilled and a child’s life is written off for good …

Who are you reading right now?
Just finished Michael Palmer’s SECOND OPINION and am about to dive into John Sandford’s latest ‘Prey’ novel (he is my top favourite author). Sandford’s characters are all so real, the dialogue so true to life, I always look forward to spending time with them.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Too tough a choice, I guess I’d have to kill myself … Or would I really? It’s a mystery …

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
I’m going to cheat and pick three words that I like best from reader mail: Evocative, suspenseful, intelligent.

Sheila Lowe’s LAST WRITES is published by Signet Books.

Yep, It’s Another ‘Dear Genre’ Letter

John Connolly reviewed Irvine Welsh’s latest novel CRIME for the Irish Times today (Saturday), making the following point in the process:

Genre conventions offer literary writers both significant advantages (structure, momentum and, frankly, the promise of some hard cash in return for increased sales) and potential pitfalls, the latter usually a result of their failure to take the genre in question seriously. Occasionally, though, their literary credentials liberate such writers from the expectations that readers might have of a more mainstream genre novel, allowing them to create something startlingly different while remaining, for the most part, within the structures of their adopted form.

  Maybe it’s just that I don’t read enough but my most recent experiences of literary authors writing crime – Benjamin Black’s THE LEMUR and Sebastian Faulks’ DEVIL MAY CARE – have resulted in anything but ‘startlingly different’. THE LEMUR, in point of fact, is hugely enjoyable because Black is poking fun at the genre’s tropes, but it’s by no means a radical departure for crime fiction. DEVIL MAY CARE, on the other hand, is utter tripe.
  The last time I read a terrific novel from a literary author writing crime fiction was JULIUS WINSOME by Gerard Donovan. And Donovan would probably explode into a million literary pieces if he heard we were describing his novel as crime fiction.
  Elsewhere in today’s crime-packed Irish Times, Vincent Banville returns – hurrah! – with a Crime File round-up that includes the latest offerings from Jeffrey Deaver, Harlan Coben, Patricia Cornwell, Michele Giuttari, Sue Grafton, Camilla Lackberg and Karin Fossum. Giuttari’s A DEATH IN TUSCANY has been winking at yours truly from near the top of Mt. TBR for some weeks now, and Banville’s review (“a long, absorbing and entertaining read set in a most exotic location”) sends it straight to the summit.
  The Big Question – when will we get to read another Vincent Banville novel? Only time, that notoriously prevaricating doity rat, will tell …

Yon Patricia Cornwell’s Got Some FRONT, Hasn’t She?

Our newest VBFs, the chaps and chapesses at The Times, get in touch to let us know that they’re running an extract from Patricia Cornwell’s latest, THE FRONT, the gist of which runneth thusly:

Nana’s Buick shakes and coughs as the engine turns off, and the driver’s door screeches open like a prehistoric bird.
  Win pockets the key, wonders why Farouk the landlord is sitting on the back steps, lighting a cigarette. Since when does he smoke, and he’s breaking his own rule. No
smoking, no lighting matches or grills, not so much as a spark is allowed on the grounds of his nineteenth-century brick apartment building, a former school, impeccably
maintained and rented to privileged people. Or in Win’s case, to someone who earns his keep. It’s past midnight.
  “Either you just started a nasty new habit or something’s up,” says Win.
  “An ugly shorty was looking for you,” Farouk says, a dish towel under him, probably so he doesn’t get dirt on his ill-fitting white suit.
  “She calls herself my shorty?” Win says. “Or is that what you’re calling her?”
  “She say it, not me. I don’t know what it is.”
  “Gang slang for girlfriend,” Win says.
  “See! I knew she was a gangster! I knew it! That’s why I’m this upset! I don’t want peoples like that, try very hard to keep things the right way.” In his heavy accent.   “These peoples you see in your job, they come here, I have to ask you to move out! My tenants will complain and I will lose my leases!”
  “Easy going, Farouk . . .”
  “No! I let you here for this unbelievable good price to protect me from bad peoples, and then they come here, these very ones you’re supposed to keep away!” He jabs his finger at Win. “Good thing no one but me sees her! I’m very upset. Peoples like that show up here, and you let me down. You have to move.”
  “What did she look like, and tell me exactly what happened.” Win sits next to him.
  “I come home from dinner and this white girl come from nowhere like a ghost ..”
  “Where? Here in back? Were you sitting out here smoking when she showed up?”
  “I got very upset and so I go to visit José across the street to have a beer and see if he know anything about the shorty, ever seen her, and he said no. So he give me a
cigarette or two. I only smoke when I get very stressed, you know. I don’t want you to have to move, you know.”
 Win tries again. “What time was it when she showed up, and where were you? Inside your apartment?”
  “I just was dropped off from dinner, so I’m thinking maybe nine o’clock, and you know I always come in from back here, and as I walk up these steps, there she is like a ghost out of a movie. Like she was waiting. I never seen her before and have no idea. She say to me, ‘Where’s the policeman?’ I say, “What policeman,’ Then she says, ‘Geronimo’.”
  “She said that?” Few people know his nickname. Mostly cops.
  “I swear,” Farouk says.
  “Describe her.”
  “It’s hard to see, you know. I should get lights. A cap on, big pants and short. Skinny.”
  “What makes you think she’s involved in gang activity? Aside from my telling you what a shorty is.”
  “The way she talk. Like a black person even though she white. And very rough talk, street talk, said a lot of bad words.” He repeats a few of them. “And when I say I don’t know a policeman named Geronimo, because I protect you always, she cuss me some more and say she knows you live here, and she hand me this.” He slides an envelope out of his jacket pocket. “I don’t want those gang peoples. Don’t need drugs and shootings around here.”

For the rest of the extract, jump on over here …