Strange Days Indeed

I read the latest George Pelecanos, WHAT IT WAS, last week, and very enjoyable is exactly what it was. It’s a Derek Strange ‘origins’ novel, set in 1972, with Watergate simmering away in the background; as well as Derek Strange, it features Frank Vaughn and Nick Stefanos. Derek even wanders by a record store called Nutty Nathan’s at one point …
  If it all sounds a little self-referential, it is - but in a good way, a bringing it all back home kinda way. There’s something oddly elegiac about the tone, given that it’s an origins story; but at the same time the novel fairly bops along, a swaying, swaggering, finger-clicking slice of funked-up cool. I’ll review it in a bit more depth in a week or so, when I’ve finally surfaced for air; for now I’ll leave you with an interview with George Pelecanos I had published in the Irish Times today. It starts a lot like this:

“LET ME ASK you a question,” George Pelecanos says as our interview comes to an end. “Are you a Thin Lizzy fan?” Given my Dublin connection, he has been itching to ask it all along. “I just think it’s an amazing story,” he says. “I get chills when I think that there’s a statue of Phil Lynott on a street in Dublin, that people leave flowers by the statue. I love stuff like that.”
  Music has always played an important part in George Pelecanos’s novels. From his debut A Firing Offense in 1992, his characters have prowled the mean streets of Washington DC, tapping a toe to a bewildering variety of sounds, from the swing jazz of the 1930s through the funk rock of the 1970s and on to the contemporary sounds of last year’s The Cut. In fact, it was music that taught him how to write his own way.
  Pelecanos wasn’t much of a reader until his mid-20s – “Until then I wanted to be a filmmaker, I was a real film nut” – but then he took a class in classic crime fiction. The curriculum included Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Ross Macdonald and James Crumley.
  “All these books blew me away,” he says. “I mean, even an early Mickey Spillane, that’s a good book. I got obsessed with books after taking that class. And by books I mean crime novels.”
  Rejecting the notion of a formal writing class, Pelecanos instead chose to immerse himself in reading. “It took me 10 years before I sat down to write my first novel,” he says. “By then it was the 1980s, the punk thing had happened, and I was heavily involved in that. And I got the idea that what I was going to do was write a punk rock detective novel …”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Mi Casa, Su Casa: Tony Bailie

The continuing stooooooory of how the Grand Vizier puts his feet up and lets other writers talk some sense for a change. This week: Tony Bailie (right) on his debut novel, THE LOST CHORD

One CHORD And The Truth

“My publisher Lagan Press described THE LOST CHORD as a novel of music and mystery. Although it was not written as a crime novel it does contain elements of a detective story, where the narrator has to sift through a series of clues to find out what has become of the enigmatic Irish rock star Gino Morgan, who disappeared without trace seven years earlier.
  “Rock music has created its own mythology and the tortured musical genius who rapidly self destructs is a constant theme. Another is the vague suspicion that people like Doors singer Jim Morrison and Elvis Presley may have faked their own deaths in order to disappear from the public spotlight. A more recent example is Richie Edwards from the Manic Street Preachers, whose car was found on the Severn Bridge in Wales but whose body was never found, and who has been ‘spotted’ throughout the world.
  “I tried to make Gino a composite Irish rock star who combined the mysticism of Van Morrison, the precocious musicianship of Rory Gallagher and the self-destructive hedonism and bad-boy charm of Phil Lynott.
  “The story is told from the perspective of busker Manus Brennan who is literally picked up from the side of the road while hitching by Gino and asked to join his band, Duil. Manus is thrust into limelight and for five years lives the debauched lifestyle of a member of a hard-living rock band. However, during that time he witnesses Gino’s gradual decline into a drug-wasted shadow of his former self until one day he simply disappears.
  “Manus is as much in the dark as everyone else about what happened to Gino but constantly faces the suspicion that he and the other remaining band members know more than they are letting on. As the years pass, interest in the fate of Gino fades and Manus finds himself thrust back into obscurity and battling his own demons. Then someone shows him a picture that appears to show Gino, taken six years after he disappeared …” – Tony Bailie

THE LOST CHORD is available from The Lagan Press