CRIME ALWAYS PAYS on Crime Always Pays: In Which It All Gets Even More Self-Referential Than Usual

Rafe McGregor has been kind enough to post a review of CRIME ALWAYS PAYS, the forthcoming opus from your humble host, which will be available at a Kindle near you in the very near future. The gist runs thusly:

“CRIME ALWAYS PAYS is excellent, even better than THE BIG O. It has a great plot, cool characters, and there isn’t a single word wasted. This is really fine writing, masterful to the point where if I’d received the MS anonymously, I’d have assumed it came from one of the big bestsellers like Connelly, Crais, Rankin, or Child.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here ...
  CRIME ALWAYS PAYS, for those of you who aren’t this blog’s three regular readers, is the sequel to THE BIG O, in which most of the characters from THE BIG O take off on a variety of trans-Europe road-trips, fetching up in the Greek islands for fun, frolics and the occasional Bellini. Join Karen, Ray, Madge, Doyle, Rossi, Sleeps, Frank, Melody and Sleeps for another screwball noir romp in which the money is just a McGuffin with extra cheese! Or, don’t!! You – yes, YOU! – decide.
  Rafe was also kind enough to descend into a mild form of existential angst over the fact that CRIME ALWAYS PAYS – as all three regular readers will be aware – was dropped by its intended publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I should say at this point that the decision wasn’t as simple as the book not being good enough to publish – it was all a bit complicated, actually – although my brand of existential angst, when I first heard the news, was fairly raw.
  But at this point, I’m pretty much okay with it. That’s partly because I’ve spent the last few days formatting the story for Kindle, which is also a good opportunity to give the story one last proof-edit, and I’m as happy as I’m likely to get that the story stands up. It’s not perfect by any means, and at this stage – which is probably the 14th or 15th time I’ve read it through – I’m wondering why anyone else would want to read it.
  On the basis that some people might want to read it, however, I’ve been every bit as diligent on the Kindle proof-edit as if it was for a conventional publishing. No reason I shouldn’t be, of course: when it comes down it, for yours truly, the story is sacred and everything else is just detail. Apart from the fact that most people don’t have access to Kindle – a rather relevant factor, it has to be said – the format is virtually irrelevant. It matters not a whit whether the book is published electronically, on paper between cardboard, uploaded to the web, or scratched onto papyrus. As with the sob story about the book being dropped by its publisher initially, nothing bar what people think of the story itself will have any lasting value.
  I’m hopeful that the Kindle publishing will lead to a more conventional publishing, not because, as Rafe suggests, there’s more money to be made that way – the writer’s royalties aren’t that different when you publish to Kindle – but because more people are likely read it, in 2009, as an ordinary book. But if that doesn’t happen, then it doesn’t happen, and I’ll be as proud of CRIME ALWAYS PAYS, as a story, as if it had appeared as a conventional book.
  Meanwhile, and speaking of proper books, here’s a review by Garbhan Downey of Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND that’s worth checking out; and Ali Karim casts an eye over John Connolly’s THE LOVERS.

BOG’s Standard Raised Again

The late, lamented Siobhan Dowd’s BOG CHILD won the Bisto Book of the Year in the Children’s Book Awards, the second year running one of her books has found itself aboard the gravy train. Quoth the Irish Times:

IT IS “disturbing and disappointing” that the Department of Education has cut the school book grant to schools and libraries in a move that will “limit young people’s access to books”, the chairwoman of Children’s Books Ireland has said.
  Jane O’Hanlon was speaking at the announcement yesterday of the winners of the Bisto Children’s Book of the Year Awards.
  She described the department’s move as “retrogressive”, said it would “impact heavily on already overstretched schools and libraries”, and called for the decision to be reconsidered.
  Yesterday’s ceremony in Dublin marked the 19th year of the Children’s Book Awards.
  The top award for 2009 – the Bisto Book of the Year – went to the late Siobhan Dowd for BOG CHILD. The award was accepted by her sister Oona Emerson.
  Dowd died in August 2007 at the age of 47 after a long illness.
  The €10,000 prize money will be donated to the Siobhan Dowd Trust, which she established to help disadvantaged children improve their reading skills.
  BOG CHILD is about a boy, Fergus, who while digging turf finds the body of a child in the bog.

  In other news, while we’re on the topic of YA crime fiction, Rafe McGregor and Adrian McKinty (right) had a fascinating exchange over at Rafe’s blog. To wit:

  Rafe: “What project are you currently working on?”
  Adrian: “I’m working on a Young Adult novel provisionally called DARK ENERGY about a skateboard punk kid who moves to Colorado Springs.”
  Rafe: “Your crime fiction is clearly aimed at an adult audience, so I was surprised to see that you also write YA. Can you tell me about your work in this genre and how you came to it?”
  Adrian: “I had an idea for an initial novel about an emotionally damaged child who comes to Islandmagee (an area in Ireland very close to my heart) that I knew wasn’t appropriate as a crime novel so I wrote it as a YA and the one book eventually became three. The new YA however is a crime novel. It’s about a serial killer in a small town in Colorado, I’m calling it a YA noir. God alone knows if there’s a market for something like that, but that’s the story and I’m just telling it.”

  YA Noir? From Adrian McKinty? Colour me intrigued, squire …

Bristol 2009: Natural Born Shillers?

I was a bit ambivalent about the Bristol Crime Fest this year, I have to say. On the one hand, it’s always terrific to meet up with people you only see once or twice a year, if you’re lucky, some of whom dandered out for a bite to eat on Friday night (L to R: award-winning blogger Peter Rozovsky (sans beard), Vincent Holland-Keen, Donna Moore, Ewan (aka Donna Moore’s other half), Cara Black, Chris Ewan, Rafe McGregor, and Your Humble Host). A good night was had by all, although some appetites were rather ruined by Ewan’s mention of Donna’s party piece, which she was gracious enough not to showcase …
  On the other hand, events / conventions aren’t really about the business of writing, but much more about the business of marketing. I shouldn’t really grouse about that fact, given that I was privileged enough to be asked to sit on two panels, one of which took place on Friday and was moderated by Donna Moore, alongside Chris Ewan, Steve Mosby and Kevin Wignall. The panel went well enough, in that none of the panellists were chucked out any windows for boring the audience to tears, although I did find myself explaining why, exactly, I’d hijacked a mini-bus at the age of 15. Gosh, you get a bad rap and The Man never lets you forget it …
  But I only attended one panel I wasn’t involved with all weekend, and that for about 20 minutes, and that only because I got caught up in Ali Karim’s gravitational pull and he was already headed that way. The panellists were all interesting people, and two of them had published novels set in Greece (Paul Johnston and Anne Zouroudi), which is something I have a personal interest in, given that I’ve been working on-and-off on a novel set on Crete for the last five or six years, but … well, I don’t know. It’s hard to feel that you’re not really discovering anything you wouldn’t from reading between the lines of a back-page biog, I suppose … which isn’t to criticise the writers, because all the panellists I saw were pro-active and engaging. Maybe it’s just the case that writers talking about writing just isn’t very interesting, much in the same way as porn stars talking about sex isn’t very interesting. Or so I imagine …
  By the same token, and maybe it’s just that the dry sherries were in, the various conversations on Friday night were much more fun.
I had a particularly good one with Steve Mosby and Ali Karim (right) about a whole range of subjects – which is to say, of course, that Ali talked while Steve and I nodded occasionally. Still, there was a couple of fascinating topics, not least of which is the new demand in the US for companies which will maintain your on-line persona after your death, updating your Facebook, emailing your buddies, and even keeping your game-playing avatar hale and hearty while you sleep the big sleep. Perverse? Yes. Pointless? Yes. Chunky material for a Phil Dick-style book? Most certainly.
  Anyway, Friday was a good day, given that I bumped into Karen Meek and Norm Rushdie, and Dec Hughes and Brian McGilloway, and Ruth Dudley Edwards, and Maxim Jakubowski and Paul Johnston, and spent a very enjoyable couple of hours bitching about the publishing industry with Rafe McGregor, gentleman that he is. All of which went some way to off-setting the embarrassment I should have been feeling at attending Crime Fest with no book other than THE BIG O to promote, which was first published two years ago, and – technically speaking – has never been published in the UK. For shame, etc …
  Which brings me back to the whole being-marketed-at issue. Would I have been happier with the weekend if I’d had a book to market? Not really. And I should say that I’m not dissing Crime Fest here, because I think it’s a terrific experience, and brilliantly run, and I’ll be back again next year to hook up with like-minded folk. But, to be honest – and I’m probably shooting myself in the foot here – the whole issue of selling / marketing books is simply a necessary evil that follows on from the privilege of being published in the first place. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d imagine most writers would much prefer to live in splendid isolation, tossing a manuscript over the wall of their mansion every year or so to a waiting editor, leaving the whole business of promotion and generalised shilling to people who are trained and / or have a vocation for the selling side of things.
  Hey, maybe there’s a market for a company that could maintain an electronic avatar-style version of writers, 3-D simulations who go on the circuit and promote the books, while the real writer stays home and writes. Any takers?

Mi Casa, Su Casa: Rafe McGregor on William Melville

Rafe McGregor (right) was kind enough to pen a few words for ye olde blogge, on the real-life spy-catcher William Melville, who also happens to be – although it’s surely only a coinkidink – the hero of his debut novel, THE ARCHITECT OF MURDER. To wit:

“My main interest as a writer is – and probably always will be – the hardboiled detective story, but for a number of reasons my first published novel is a historical murder mystery. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, however, as historical crime stories often lend themselves to the hardboiled style, and I was pleased to make the most of this in THE ARCHITECT OF MURDER, which is set in London in 1902. Once I’d decided to go back in time a hundred years or more, I found there were a number of significant differences in telling the story and writing the novel. Some were disadvantages, and some advantages, and one of the latter was being able to mix real historical personalities with fictional characters. Several real people appear in the novel, but the most important by far is a gent by the name of William Melville: top Met thief-taker, spymaster extraordinaire, and as Irish as Guinness.
  “Melville was born on the 25th April 1850 in Sneem, County Kerry. At the time, Sneem was a poor village, with some of the inhabitants living in conditions described as ‘medieval’. Melville wasn’t quite that badly off, as his parents ran a bakery-cum-liquor store, but his origins and education were certainly both humble. In THE GUARDS, his first Jack Taylor novel, Ken Bruen writes:

“There are no private eyes in Ireland. The Irish wouldn’t wear it. The concept brushes perilously close to the hated ‘informer’. You can get away with almost anything except ‘telling’.”

  “Perhaps that explains why Melville, like so many of his contemporaries, sought to make his fortune overseas, leaving Ireland some time between his seventeenth and twenty-first year. I read that – like Jack Taylor – Melville was a competent hurler in his youth, but as so little is actually known of his early life, I had doubts, and you won’t find him taking a camán to anyone in THE ARCHITECT OF MURDER …
  “Melville’s life is better documented after he joined the Metropolitan Police in 1872. He distinguished himself several times in his early service and was recruited to the new Special Irish Branch in 1883. This was the first specialist detective branch set up in the British Empire, with the aim of bringing the Dynamiters’ bombing campaign in London to an end. Although Melville spent most of his life in London, he always thought of himself as Irish, raised his children to be Irish rather than English, and didn’t see any contradiction in working against the Fenians.
  “In 1893, he found himself in charge of the new Section D, renamed Special Branch, which now concentrated on the anarchist threat and VIP protection duties. Alec Marshall, the narrator of THE ARCHITECT OF MURDER, sums up the next nine years of Melville’s career:

“William Melville had been one of the most famous policemen in the Empire when I was growing up. He was one of the original Special Irish Branch, established to counter the Fenian bombing campaign, and had played a part in foiling the Jubilee, Balfour, and Walsall Plots. He’d also been personal bodyguard to the Prince of Wales, the Shah of Persia, and the German Kaiser. It was claimed that while anarchists and nihilists traditionally regarded London as a safe haven because of the British government’s reluctance to repatriate them, ‘Melville’s Gang’ were so effective that the violent extremists had all left for greener pastures.”

  “‘The King’s Detective’ – as Melville was known to the public – retired from the Met in 1903 to set up the organisation that later became MI5, and he is considered a possible candidate for Ian Fleming’s ‘M’ in the James Bond novels. Many of the details of Melville’s work with organisations such as the Secret Service Bureau (as featured in the latest adaptation of THE 39 STEPS) are still shrouded in mystery, but much of it involved preparation for a future war with Germany, which was regarded as inevitable by 1909.
  “One of Melville’s strengths, which distinguished him from so many of his contemporaries in the early days of spying, was that he knew how to keep a secret. Most of the spies exposed before the First World War were caught because they either boasted of their profession, were incredibly careless, or both. Melville was neither, and had a reputation for the type of ‘need to know’ flow of information with which everyone is now familiar. I won’t say any more about his fascinating career, so as not to reveal too much of the plot of the novel, except that he finally retired at the end of 1917. He died of kidney failure in February the following year, aged sixty-seven. There is, as far as I know, only one biography of this remarkable Irishman, M: MI5’S FIRST SPYMASTER by Andrew Cook (first published in 2004, and still in print), which is well worth the read.
  “THE ARCHITECT OF MURDER takes place the year before Melville’s move to the secret service. He’s a fit fifty-two year old, the superintendent in charge of Special Branch, and at the height of his powers. He’s also rather busy with all the royalty in London for King Edward VII’s Coronation. Shortly after the home secretary tells him to find out why the will of the richest man in the Empire is taking so long to prove, he hears that a young Scottish war hero named Marshall is back in town. Marshall used to lodge with one of the witnesses to the will, and was a policeman before the war. Melville does what any chief of police would do: lights up a Henry Clay, pulls Marshall’s file, and sends his best man to fetch him. Thus begins THE ARCHITECT OF MURDER.
  “The novel is the first Marshall and Melville case, but it won’t be their last. There is plenty of work left in the first decade of the twentieth century, and a horde of villains lurking in the shadows of the metropolis. Meanwhile, across the channel, a man with a handlebar moustache, crippled left arm, and an appetite for conquest watches the British Isles. Unfortunately, he won’t be the last of his race to attempt to rule the world …” – Rafe McGregor

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Rafe McGregor

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?
PLUM ISLAND by Nelson DeMille.
What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Philip Marlowe.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Sherlock Holmes pastiche – a mixed bag if ever there was one.
Most satisfying writing moment?
Receiving the cheque for the advance on my first novel.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
THE MAGDALENE MARTYRS by Ken Bruen.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I have to go for your own THE BIG O, Dec.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is trying to find the balance between what I want to write and what I think has the best chance of being taken on by a publisher – sometimes these seem mutually exclusive. The best is probably the same as every other writer, the thought that people are reading my stories.
The pitch for your next book is …?
Twenty thousand war dead, the will of the wealthiest man in the Empire, the coronation of Edward VII, and a hero with post traumatic stress disorder … Murder and mayhem on the mean streets of 1902 Westminster.
Who are you reading right now?
MONEY SHOT by Christa Faust.
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write. While I’ve been reading for as long as I can remember, I’ve already spent too much of my life not writing.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Original, authentic, uncompromising.

Rafe McGregor’s THE ARCHITECT OF MURDER will be published by Robert Hale in February, 2009