Interview: Adrian McKinty

I had an interview with Adrian McKinty (right) published in the Irish Examiner last weekend. It ran a lot like this:

As every good crime writer knows, desperate times call for desperate measures. So when Irish author Adrian McKinty found himself without a tree on Christmas Eve, and staring at a small forest of firs in a Melbourne suburb, he took matters – and an axe left behind by an absent Russian tree dealer – into his own hands.
  “I don’t know if that’s a year’s bad luck, or if that’s how it works,” McKinty tells me via Skype from Melbourne. “But stealing a Christmas tree – that can’t be a good thing, karma-wise.”
  It’s unlikely to be a bad year for the Carrickfergus native. In the Morning I’ll Be Gone, the third novel in McKinty’s Sean Duffy trilogy, has just been published to glowing reviews. Duffy is a Catholic policeman serving in the RUC during the 1980s, and the Troubles is about to hit another low point. The book revolves around the Brighton Bombing in 1984, when the IRA targeted Margaret Thatcher during a Conservative Party conference.
  The release of official British government documents relating to that period earlier this month gives the historical backdrop to In the Morning I’ll Be Gone another layer.
  “There was a story in the Guardian that when the Brighton bombing happened, the British government were negotiating with the IRA’s Army Council for a ceasefire, and that negotiations were quite advanced,” says McKinty. “And then the Brighton bomb happened, obviously, and those negotiations were put back by about five years. It looks to me like this was one faction of the IRA Army Council working against another faction, and that the operation hadn’t been completely authorised, or that it was a power-play within the Army Council. The whole thing is fascinating. And then there’s the fact that Thatcher escaped, as well. There’s a lot about that bombing that I think we’ll never find out the truth about.”
  Although the new book is being billed as the concluding act of a trilogy, McKinty believes that the Troubles provide a sufficiently bizarre backdrop to provide Sean Duffy with ample motive to return.
  “There’s that crazy story that no one’s ever talked about,” he says, “when Oliver North came to Ireland looking to get weapons to the Iran contras. He tried to get weapons from the UVF, and found they were a bunch of jokers. Then he tried to get them from the IRA and the IRA didn’t trust him. So then he had to go to the Israelis. That could be a fun story.
  “It certainly won’t be a Lee Child-style seventeen book cycle,” he says, “but there’s maybe a couple more Duffy stories left. That said, if I only ever write the trilogy then I’m happy enough – or as happy as I ever get in my dour Presbyterian world.”
  Renowned as a hardboiled noir novelist, McKinty set himself the challenge of including the classic mystery fiction trope of a ‘locked room mystery’ at the heart of his latest offering.
  “I’ve always been a secret locked room fanatic,” he enthuses. “I read my first one when I was about ten or eleven, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express with David Niven and Peter Ustinov on the cover. That was the first grown-up one that I’d read. It’s fantastic, this meta-theory thing where everyone is the killer, which was brilliant because I was used to reading the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and The Three Investigators. So I asked the librarian if she had any more like Orient Express. The first one I read was Murders in the Rue Morgue, which I totally hated – I just thought it was ridiculous, the idea of an orang-utan with a cut-throat razor … But then she gave me some John Dickson Carr novels, and I was hooked.
  “Later on I graduated on to noir,” he says, “and didn’t read locked room mysteries any more, but a few years ago I read one I really liked called The Tokyo Zodiac Murders [by Soji Shimada]. So I thought to myself, ‘Is it possible to do a locked room mystery within a noir setting?’ A good one, which doesn’t involve any tricks or misleading the reader. Where the reader has as much information as the detective does, and there’s no cheating, there’s no supernatural bullshit or magicians’ tricks.”
  This year will also see McKinty publish, along with co-editor Stuart Neville, the short story collection Belfast Noir. The latest in a global round of city-based collections from Akashic Books, the book will be, McKinty believes, another manifestation of a culture coming to terms with itself and its recent past.
  “I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen’s University set, in the 1970s and ’80s – y’know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson – that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic Renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory,” he says. “Those guys were kicking down the door and saying there was a high culture in Northern Ireland, and you can attain that even in the face of what must have seemed to them at the time like the abyss. Belfast was a city on fire, and there was no hope. And yet they were producing this incredible poetry. That creates a sense of confidence, culturally speaking. And in the ’90s you had people like Colin Bateman and Eoin McNamee coming along and saying, ‘It’s okay to talk about all this. We can even make fun of it. We can turn it into art.’ So all along it’s been a process of people finding the courage and the confidence to really deal with the issues.”

  That confidence isn’t limited to poetry and fiction.
  “Glenn Patterson has a story in Belfast Noir about the energy of punk music in Northern Ireland. In ’78 and ’79, Stiff Little Fingers were doing songs like ‘Suspect Device’ and ‘Alternative Ulster’. And The Undertones were creating this amazing pop music that was defiantly apolitical. But it was all about the confidence to talk about whatever you wanted to talk about. So it’s all a part of a culture that’s been slowly finding its own voice, to speak and to turn the light within, onto itself.”
  Adrian McKinty grew up in Carrickfergus but left Northern Ireland to study politics and philosophy at Oxford. He published his first novel, Everything Rhymes With Orange in 1998, but it was the publication of his acclaimed crime debut, Dead I Well May Be, that put him on the map in 2003. Since then he has published nine adult titles and a trilogy of young adult novels, placing him at the head of a generation of new Irish crime authors such as Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville, Gerard Brennan and Anthony Quinn. It’s a generation that isn’t afraid to write about Northern Ireland’s troubled past, and how history informs the present.
  “People in the North are really taciturn and reticent and they don’t really like to talk about the past,” he says. “I mean, my dad worked in the shipyards for 20 years, and I remember asking him one time about the Titanic. And he said, ‘Oh, no one ever talks about that.’ I said, ‘Seriously? You work in Harland & Wolff and no one ever talks about the Titanic?’ And he said, ‘No.’ And I think that’s just symptomatic about the whole culture. It was the same during the Troubles, there were all these things that no one wanted to talk about, lest the dyke broke and all the darkness came pouring out.
  “I’m not surprised the Richard Haass talks broke down,” he continues, “because one of the things they broke down over was the whole ‘truth commission’ idea. There was just too many people who didn’t want a ‘truth commission’. They don’t want the truth to come out. But it’s our job, as writers, to do exactly that.”

In the Morning I’ll Be Gone by Adrian McKinty is published by Serpent’s Tail.

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

RIP Seamus Heaney

Digging
by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

‘Seamus Heaney, Irish poet of soil and strife, dies at 74’ – New York Times

Jane Says

I had an interview with Jane Casey (right) published in the Sunday Business Post a couple of weeks ago - there’s no link, I’m afraid, so I’ve republished the piece in its entirety here. To wit:

It is one of literature’s great tragedies that not every writer can manage to look like a wig-wearing bag.
  “I always get comments about not looking or sounding like a crime writer when I do events,” says Jane Casey. “I haven’t yet managed to find out how I should look and sound. Agatha Christie looked like a bag with a wig on it, after all.
  “It’s not a comment that I mind, much,” she continues. “But I did an event last year where I was reading with three other authors, all male, and I thought that in comparison to them I sounded like I was reading a school project. So maybe I still need to work on the gravitas.”
  THE LAST GIRL is Jane Casey’s fourth novel, and the third to feature her series heroine Maeve Kerrigan. London-born to Irish parents, Maeve is a Detective Constable with the London Metropolitan Murder Squad.
  Born and raised in Ireland, now living in London, Jane got the highest mark in English in her Leaving Certificate year, and received a medal to mark the achievement from Seamus Heaney. She read English at Oxford (where she would read crime novels whilst supposedly writing her thesis on Beowulf in the Bodleian Library) before completing a MPhil in Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College, Dublin.
  Given her classical education, what was it about the crime novel that drew her to write in the genre?
  “I can’t think of anything more telling about society than what we hold to be criminal acts,” she says. “Crimes occur because of how people live and how they relate to one another, essentially, which is the basis of literature. Go back to the start of literature itself and you find one of the first dramas, Oedipus, is based on the crime of patricide and its aftermath. Within the parameters of the genre you can write about more or less anything because crimes occur at every level of society.
  “Some of the sharpest social commentary can be found in crime novels. I’m not totally sure why it’s seen as being ‘light’ or ‘entertaining’ in comparison with more challenging fiction, because you don’t get much darker than murder.
  “It’s a generous type of literature for a writer,” she says, “because it can include pure tragedy alongside broad humour, or lyrical description followed by brutal dialogue. There are conventions to be observed but there’s no single style of writing that defines the genre. So there’s a freedom there to do what you want.”
  According to those very genre conventions, Maeve Kerrigan, as a young woman in an Old Boys’ world, should be utilising her feminine wiles to stay one step ahead. Time and again, however, Maeve herself is to be found mocking her supposed ‘female intuition’.
  “A large part of Maeve’s survival strategy is her ability to see a put-down coming and dodge it,” says Jane. “She wouldn’t like to think that she’s good at her job because of her female intuition, but then she likes to see herself as one of the boys. She’s young. She hasn’t yet realized that she doesn’t have to fit in with them.”
  Perhaps Maeve Kerrigan aspires to a similar quality of gravitas as Jane Casey when dealing with her male colleagues, but it can be argued that such a character development would hugely diminish Kerrigan’s appeal. Maeve Kerrigan is an ambitious and dedicated policewoman, but she is possessed of an endearingly charming irreverent streak and a wilful refusal to accept arbitrary limitations that is as destructive in her professional life as it is in her personal affairs.
  She is also, and unusually, exercised by the long-term impact of crime on its victims. Married to a criminal barrister, Jane Casey is privy to the harsh realities of the legal system.
  “Victims and their families are really invisible in the legal system,” she says. “The prosecution acts on behalf of the state, not the wronged individual, and the rights of the defendant are considered at all points. It’s a bruising world to encounter. A lot of the characters in THE LAST GIRL have been through the criminal justice system and haven’t seen anything remotely resembling justice.”
  THE LAST GIRL opens with the discovery of the bodies of a mother and daughter in their plush Wimbledon home, both of whom have been stabbed to death. Upstairs lies the unconscious and bloodied form of Philip Kennford, husband and father, and a successful criminal barrister with a reputation for arrogance and sexual predation.
  “There are certain professions that attract charming sociopaths, and the Bar could be one of them,” says Casey. “Barristers are generally delightful to talk to and full of good stories, but they do like to be right all the time and their work involves winning or losing – you don’t get many draws. It’s a challenging, responsible job that demands a certain toughness, which is interesting in itself. I’ve heard tales of barristers behaving extremely badly in their personal and professional lives, but the only sociopath I’ve ever met myself is not a barrister.
  “Obviously,” she adds with a mischievous grin, “Philip Kennford is not based on my husband.”
  Twice nominated in the crime fiction category for the Irish Book Awards, for THE BURNING (2010) and THE RECKONING (2011), Jane Casey is one of the brightest stars in the Irish crime writing firmament. But where some publishers are suggesting that Ireland is not ‘sexy’ enough a setting to market to an international crime reading audience, Casey’s publishers have made a virtue of Maeve Kerrigan’s Irishness, going so far as to include a Personnel File on the inside cover of THE LAST GIRL with her Irish parentage highlighted.
  “My publishers would love me to write a Maeve story set in Ireland,” says Casey. “I wouldn’t do it for the sake of having an Ireland-set book, though. It would have to be the right story.”
  In part, Maeve Kerrigan’s distinctiveness depends on the novels’ London setting.
  “Maeve is a misfit in various ways and one of those is her own sense of estrangement. She doesn’t fit into the very British world of the Metropolitan Police, but she isn’t like someone who’s grown up in Ireland either. I think she does have uniquely Irish qualities, in that she has empathy in bucket-loads and a strong desire to understand the people she encounters through her job, whereas her colleagues tend to take people at face value. She’s also tied to her family very much, whereas - and this is a sweeping generalization - the British don’t seem to have such a sense of obligation to their parents. You have the feeling that Maeve’s parents have made sacrifices for their children, among them leaving Ireland and settling in London, and they expect to be paid back by their children achieving in life. Maeve has chosen a path they don’t understand, probably deliberately, just to get out from under that weight of expectation.
  “Maeve’s background is also important to how she’s perceived by her colleagues. It’s still common for Irish people to be seen as charming but untrustworthy, fundamentally unreliable. So she has all of that prejudice to deal with too.”
  Crime writers too face a certain amount of prejudice: charming books, perhaps, but fundamentally unreliable as literature.
  “There are plenty of very good writers out there who are happy to define themselves as crime writers,” says Casey, “I’m proud of the title myself and I’d be sorry to lose it. But the definition of a crime novel is changing all the time. That boundary between literary writing and crime writing is thin, and the crime-writing community tends to be welcoming to ‘real’ writers who want to try crime. I’m not sure if the same is true going in the other direction …
  “As a genre, it’s probably not valued as highly as it might be, at least in terms of the way it is criticised and discussed in the media. But readers of crime fiction are a sophisticated and discerning lot – pleasing them is enough of a challenge for me. I write the books I want to write.”
  As a former children’s books editor, that includes writing a new Young Adult novel. It also means that a woman who has become a mother since her first novel was published feels fully entitled to adapt her thematic concerns to her new circumstances.
  “The narrator in my first book, THE MISSING (2009), is a young woman who doesn’t understand her mother’s inability to move on after the disappearance of her young son. The character of the mother is one of the most damaged I have created, and yet now I realise I didn’t even get close to conveying the agony you might feel if your child disappeared.
  “I couldn’t write the book now as I did then,” she says, “but that’s probably true of every book by every writer. They’re all the product of your experience. At the moment I don’t think I could write about a child suffering.” Another mischievous grin, a flash of irreverence. “Maybe that means I should tackle it.”

  Jane Casey’s THE LAST GIRL is published by Ebury Press

  This interview was first published in the Sunday Business Post

On Small But Perfectly Formed Readerships

I mentioned last month that Adrian McKinty’s very fine novel THE COLD COLD GROUND is coming your way in January, but there’s also some excellent news about his 2011 offering, FALLING GLASS. For lo! Audible.com has picked FALLING GLASS as its Best Mystery / Thriller of the Year. Nice one, my son.
  Naturally, the award has sent McKinty into a dizzying downward spiral of self-examination over at his blog, wherein he talks about the titanic effort required to write novels when the world at large, for the most part, doesn’t seem to care. He then goes on to say this:

“But maybe the struggle is the point. I bet if I put my mind to it I could write a knock-off Michael Connelly or Lee Child and make boatloads of cash. But I don’t want to. I’m not that much of a cynic and books are too important to me. I don’t want to write for money or for the whims of editors in corner offices, I want to write the books that move me and make me think and make me excited. My readers get invested not just in the characters and the story but also in the words and sentences that make up the story. My readers like irony and judicial profanity. My readers like a good joke and a well turned phrase. My readers admire wit. My readers know who Seamus Heaney is. My readers DON’T HAVE TO HAVE EVERY LAST THING EXPLAINED TO THEM. My readers aren’t prudes. My readers don’t have to be told why its wrong to pour a shamrock on the head of a pint of Guinness. My readers can spot the gag in the sentence that begins chapter 2 of FALLING GLASS. My readers can recite poems from memory. My readers aren’t frightened by a page without dialogue. My readers can name the Presidents back to 1932. My readers are sometimes poleaxed but seldom banjaxed. My readers are a select group and, you know what, I’m really glad about that. Slainte.”

  God bless you, sir, and long may you run.

The Irish Novel: Whither Protest?

“Between my finger and my thumb /
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.”
  Seamus Heaney, Digging

It occurred to me on Thursday night, at the Irish Book Awards, that the process of selecting winners in the various categories was akin to what’s going on with Ireland itself these days. Contrary to my post last Thursday, most of the categories weren’t decided solely by public vote; it was a combination of public vote and the decision of a judging panel. These days, in Ireland, we tend to vote for something - a change in government, say, on the promise that the new government will prove less subservient to the unelected mandarins in Brussels, Frankfurt and New York - and then, once the vote is in, a ‘judging panel’ sits down to decide what’s really good for us. Or, more accurately, what’s good for French and German banks.
  Anyway, Thursday was an interesting day, the Book Awards aside. Thursday was the day we heard that the forthcoming Irish budget, to be announced in early December, had been circulated to the German parliament, in essence so that it could be ratified in Germany before being presented as a fait accompli to the Irish people. Thursday evening, meanwhile, was when the NYPD moved in force against the Occupy Wall Street camped at Zuccotti Park.
  Back at the ranch, or more precisely the Concert Hall in the RDS in Dublin, the best and brightest of the Irish publishing industry had gathered to celebrate the best and brightest in Irish books.
  I couldn’t help wondering what exactly it was we were celebrating.
  In part, we were celebrating the election of Michael D. Higgins as President of Ireland the previous week, President Higgins being a very well respected poet as well as a politician of impeccable credentials (impeccable, of course, if you’re of a left-leaning bent yourself, which I tend to be). His election is being heralded as something of a sea-change in Ireland: that having a man of culture and letters, and a man with a long-cherished aisling (dream, or vision) of how Ireland should be, is A Very Good Thing.
  We were also celebrating the lifetime achievements of Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize-winning poet, a friend and peer of Michael D. Higgins, and a man whose writing career was born as the Troubles kicked off in Northern Ireland. Is it stretching the point to describe Seamus Heaney as a poet of protest? It’s at least fair to say, I think, that his early poetry reflected the turbulent world in which he grew up, never more so than in 1975’s bleak vision of politico-religious schizophrenia, ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’.
  As for the rest of it, well, there were a number of well-meaning speeches on the subject of the quality of Irish writing, and how writers, publishers and book-sellers alike are all struggling to keep their heads above water in these turbulent economic times. All of which is very true, of course, but the question begs to be asked: to what end are writers, particularly, struggling to stay afloat?
  In other words, what are we saying? Are we saying anything, or nothing?
  Last Thursday, as I say, was a particularly interesting day, but the economic downturn has been making its effects known in Ireland for at least four years now. Those effects are pretty much the same here as everywhere else: those at the lower end of the economic scale are being brutalised at the expense of those who can afford to insulate themselves, and further capitalise on misery.
  Now, I do appreciate that a novel takes some time to write, but surely four years should be enough time for authors to have developed some kind of coherent philosophy in opposition to the brutalisation of Irish society.
  The winner of the Crime Fiction award, Alan Glynn’s BLOODLAND, being a ‘paranoid thriller’ about what happens when supposedly exclusive worlds of business, politics and crime converge, can be read in part as a protest against the current global crisis, and the effect it has on the ordinary person in the street.
  Otherwise, there was a marked absence of protest, anger, rage.
  Is it not the duty of the novelist to reflect the world he or she inhabits? Is it perhaps true that, in a time of crisis, readers are more inclined to seek out escapism? Is it the case that protest is only acceptable long after the event, as a historical footnote? Are protest, anger and rage simply unmarketable in the current climate? Should that even matter?
  Publishing in Ireland is facing the same range of issues that face publishing all over the world, and there are no simple solutions. And it’s perfectly understandable, I think, that people will always be far more concerned about losing their jobs, their income, their means of supporting their families, than they are about any kind of philosophy of protest.
  By the same token, I think there’s a fairly straightforward economic chain of cause-and-effect between publishing people - writers, publishers, book-sellers - losing their jobs, and the public not being able to afford to buy books in the quantities it once did, largely because of the mismanagement of the economy by a gilded elite of bankers, regulators and politicians that would be laughable were it not costing lives.
  Where’s the anger about that? Where’s the protest?
  I thoroughly enjoyed my night out at the Irish Book Awards on Thursday night, mainly because I got to meet so many excellent people, writers, publishers and book-sellers. But given the black tie context, and the glasses of champagne, and the faintly hysterical air of self-congratulation, it was hard not to think of the upper deck of the Titanic, and the string quartet playing diligently on.
  Perhaps that was entirely appropriate: as a whole, the Irish response to the brutalisation of our country, of the erosion of our economic sovereignty and national dignity, to the stories of children reduced to eating the cardboard box of Cornflakes, has been supine. ‘Ireland is not Greece,’ our politicians tell their overlords in Frankfurt and Berlin, although there really should be no need, given that the ordinary Greeks have at least made their fury known, at home and abroad, through mass protest, strikes and a violent rejection of shouldering a debt that was largely created by the gamblers, spoofers and charlatans who like to refer to themselves, without irony, as ‘Masters of the Universe’.
  And perhaps said spoofers are right to call themselves that. After all, in the last week or ten days, the markets have essentially been responsible for the replacement of democracy with technocracy in Greece and Italy; and, had Enda Kenny been so bold as to reject the notion that a foreign parliament and its funding machine should have the right to inspect Ireland’s economic blueprint before the Irish people had a chance to do so, very possibly Ireland too.
  In that context, I suppose, the Irish Book Awards last Thursday night were a microcosm of Ireland itself. The establishment busily celebrating its democratically elected winners, and yet casting anxious glances towards the volatile markets, unsure of which way the wind will blow. Whatever you say, say nothing.
  I say, fuck that for a game of soldiers.
  I say, we’ll be celebrating Jim Larkin’s lock-out in two years time.
  I say, it’s only five years to the centenary of the 1916 Rising.
  I say that with power comes responsibility, that Irish writers have the power, and the responsibility, to protest. To say what needs to be said.
  “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.”
  If you haven’t already gone blind from laughing at my naivety, I’ll be so bold as to offer an excerpt from ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, from pg 170, on the subject of democracy and capitalism, and the possible consequences when the latter is allowed to erode the essential human rights of the former. To wit:

The theory of democracy holds that the most wretched is rightfully equal in status to the most powerful.
  This is history.
  This is bunk.
  Democracy is political theory reaching back 5,000 years to the pyramids for inspiration, an apex dependent on a broad foundation for its very existence. It is the few bearing down on the millions, and the millions feeling proud that they have provided an unparalleled view of the universe for the few. Democracy is a blizzard of options so thick it obscures the fact that there is no choice.
  The cradles of democracy, London and Philadelphia, deployed genocide as a means of social engineering, in Australia and North America respectively, a full two hundred years before Hitler and Stalin began their pissing contest in Poland.
  It is no coincidence that democracy evolved in tandem with the industrial revolution. Democracy and capitalism are symbiotic parasites. Democracy’s truth is not one man, one vote; it is one man, one dollar. Democracy’s truth is the abrogation of the individual’s rights in favour of collective procrastination, while those running the show exercise censorious control on behalf of the nervous disposition of the collective will.
  Democracy’s truth is Frankie suspended on half pay pending an inquiry.
  Democracy has replaced religion as the opiate du jour. Democracy is the ostrich with its head in the sand and its ass in the air, begging to be taken in traditional pirate fashion. It is the subjugation of the people, by the people, for the people. It is the inalienable right to purchase your personalised interpretation of liberalised slavery. It is the right to sell your soul to the highest bidder. It is the right to pay for the privilege of being alive.
  In Ireland, for historical reasons, democracy is truth is one man, one mortgage. It is also one woman, one mortgage. Most often, given the size of the mortgage, it is one woman and man, one mortgage.
  For some reason most dictators fail to realise that the trick to democracy is to have the slaves buy and sell themselves. The trick is to incentivise slaves to invest in their slavery, to pay for their own prisons, shackle themselves to brick and mortar.
  The trick to democracy is in ensuring the slaves’ capacity for self-regulation is not taken for granted. The trick is to maintain the healthy tension between democracy and capitalism, so that one does not undermine or overshadow the other. The trick is to ensure the slaves’ investment retains the illusion of value. Failure to do so will result in the slaves questioning the worth of their dollar and / or vote. The answer to this question is delivered in blood.
  Masters of the Universe, do not say you weren’t warned.
  Frankie, the half-pay sop notwithstanding, is man paralysed by the conflicting impulses of rage and terror as he contemplates a future boiled down to an uncertain tomorrow. Charged with adrenaline, at the very limit of his chain, he is braced for fight or flight. But this unnatural condition cannot hold. Rage and terror will cancel one another out, leaving a vacuum that nature abhors and an empty vessel full of noise.
  What sound will emerge? What fury?
  Frankie, my friend, my pawn, my hero: now is the time to signify. Now is the time to reset the dial. Now is the time for absolute zero, to raze the pyramids to the sand and start all over again.
  My line for today comes courtesy of Miguel de Unamuno: A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.

A Burning Ambition

Jane Casey’s (right) debut novel, THE MISSING, was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards crime fiction category, and her new offering, the very fine THE BURNING, should be landing on a shelf near you right about now. Yours truly met with Jane last week, and a very pleasant experience it was too, for your humble host at least. To wit:

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and a similar warning should apply to authors. Quietly spoken and impeccably mannered, Jane Casey is a doe-eyed beauty who could well have popped up as some hack writer’s notion of what a serial killer’s victim should look like. Until, that is, she starts to talk about why she was drawn to write about an arsonist-cum-serial killer in her new novel, THE BURNING.
  “My husband is a criminal barrister,” she says, “and he always gets very annoyed when you get this incredibly gothic killer with a complex backstory in books and films. He says, and it’s true, that people who kill in this fashion do it because they enjoy it, full stop. So I wanted to write about the reality of what it’s like to look for someone who just likes to kill.
  “It’s like the case of Levi Bellfield,” she continues, “it all happened quite close to where I used to live in London. It was a really nice area, a part of Richmond, near Twickenham, very expensive, and it was there that he beat two girls to death. He’s an incredibly sinister person, and yet he has no complicated motive for murdering women. He’s just a very violent man. And I wanted to have a character who was just a killer who liked to kill, and how do you find a person like that in a place the size of London? Because they’re not standing on a corner twirling their moustache, or leaving clues for the police to give themselves away.”
  The 33-year-old Casey is Irish born and was raised in Castleknock. “Not very interesting,” she deadpans, “a typical suburb.” Except the suburbs, of course, are where all the quality fictional killers hide out behind their twitching curtains. “Actually, I think the suburbs are really creepy,” she says. “You don’t know what these apparently respectable people are thinking, or how they’re really living.”
  After getting the highest marks in the country in English when she did her Leaving Certificate, Casey had the pleasure of having a medal awarded by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney.
  “It was just brilliant,” she says. “I sat and listened to him reading his poetry and it was just the most amazing experience. Except my father fell asleep. I could have murdered him! And Heaney obviously spotted this, we were sitting in the fifth row, and as he was winding down he said something very nice about how people had come a long way and were tired of listening to him. Except then he came over and was introduced to us, and asked where we were from, and Dad said, ‘Oh, from just down the road, in Castleknock.’ But Heaney didn’t bat an eyelid. A lovely man.”
  Casey went on to read English at Oxford, and has lived in England for some years now. Her debut novel, THE MISSING, which is set in London, was shortlisted for the Crime Fiction section in this year’s Irish Book Awards.
  “I know that people always says this, and that it can sound trite, but it really does mean so much to me to be included,” she says. “Mainly, I think, because a lot of people didn’t realise I am Irish, and it’s nice to have it recognised that I am, even though THE MISSING is set in London, and it has a totally English cast.
  “THE BURNING is a bit different,” she says, “because Maeve Kerrigan has an Irish background, and it draws from the two cultures, playing them off one against the other, which is something I’ll be looking to do more of in later books.”
  “Somebody who’s quite young and ambitious, and trying her best to get her head around the job,” according to Casey, Maeve Kerrigan is the heroine of THE BURNING, a woman who isn’t particularly skilled in any one sphere of policing but brings a rare quality of empathy to the way she goes about her job. Despite her telling eye for detail, Maeve is always likely to be battling for credibility with her male workmates.
  “I think for women working in that kind of environment, they have some stark choices,” says Casey. “They can either be very girly or they can be quite butch, or they can try and just be neutral. Maeve is trying to be taken seriously, she doesn’t want to be seen as one of the girlies going off and acting as bait for the killer - she’s one of the lads, in her mind at least. But of course, they don’t care about that. And she’s always coming up against that.”
  If Maeve Kerrigan is at times a contradiction in terms, so too is Jane Casey’s writing. A children’s books editor who took an mPhil in Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College, THE BURNING somehow manages to blend a horrifyingly authentic tale of arson and serial killing with a deceptively light storytelling touch that is studded with nuggets of the blackest humour.
  “I think it was partly the desire to keep it entertaining,” she says, “to keep a little bit of Maeve’s humour coming through. Police officers generally use humour to get through the things that they’re dealing with, and I think the banter is very important. I think that that’s something that Kate Atkinson does very well, that ability to entertain you as she’s telling the story, and I think you can let the story have that light touch it you want, and still deal with big themes and have dark events.”

  Jane Casey’s THE BURNING is published by the Ebury Press.

  This interview was first published in the Evening Herald.

I’ve Seen The Future, Baby, It Is Murder …

For all my recent piffling about quitting as a writer, it was still something of a shock to see my picture in yesterday’s Sunday Times’ Culture section (Irish edition) with the caption ‘ex-novelist Burke’. Mind you, as my lovely wife pointed out, at least I’ll be able to show it to the grandkids to prove that I’m not some senile old fool when I wibble on about the halcyon days when I used to be a writer.
  I write theatre reviews for the Irish Culture section most weeks, and very enjoyable work it is too. The editor of the Culture section was kind enough to get in touch last week to say that he’d read the post on the blog about my quitting the writing game, and wondering if I’d be interested in turning it into an article. I didn’t want to write a me-me-me piece, even if my experience of the last few years was the hook, so I suggested we make it an article about how 2009 was an excellent year for the Irish crime novel, but that forces beyond the control of the writers could mean that the future isn’t as bright as it could or should be. Basically, I didn’t want the piece to read as a bilious case of sour grapes.
  The piece that appeared yesterday (no link) was pretty much the one I submitted, although it had been subbed to give it a punchier opening, and the last two paragraphs were gone, presumably because they were weak and sentimental and because I had already made the relevant point. (This, of course, is pertinent writing advice: perhaps if my books had had punchier openings and stronger endings, I wouldn’t be ‘ex-novelist Burke’.) Anyway, the piece as it appeared yesterday comes below, and – because I’m weak and sentimental – I’ve included the excised final paragraphs beneath. To wit:

This year has been a vintage one for the Irish crime novel, as writers tackle our post-boom neuroses. But it could become a high water mark, too, warns the retiring Declan Burke

Few literary agents come much bigger or more influential than Darley Anderson, and few have keener snouts for new talent. Twenty years ago, when he was getting his agency off the ground, he signed the unpublished Martina Cole and set about turning the thriller writer into a bestseller. Eleven years ago, he secured an advance of £350,000 for John Connolly’s debut novel, Every Dead Thing, the then 29-year-old Dublin crime writer having been rejected by half a dozen publishers before he approached Anderson. For reasons such as these, the publishing world listens when Anderson speaks.
  It’s especially depressing, therefore, to see what Anderson looks for in authors, which he outlined in candid terms to a publishing trade journal last month: plot first, characters second. “Good writing is the last thing,” said Anderson, “and we can work with authors on that.”
  The success of his stable of writers is testament to the wisdom of Anderson’s approach, but is formula is a depressing one for anyone who appreciates good crime writing. Plot and character are the staples of any good genre novel, but they are equally integral to movies, plays and even computer games. In reducing the crime novel to its most basic building blocks, and marginalising the author’s voice, Anderson is doing what the market requires. Artistry is an option extra that can be applied if and when necessary.
  Many in the new generation of Irish crime writers have taken a different tack. There is no school of Irish crime writing, but writers such as Gene Kerrigan, Alan Glynn, Declan Hughes and Stuart Neville have something in common in the way they have looked for cues to America, where noir novels take inspiration from the trinity of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, writers for whom matters of style were inextricably linked with matters of content. Their novels sold to a mass market but they also came to be recognised as works of art, and as having something to say about the societies in which they were set.
  In what may well come to be regarded as the watershed year for Irish crime fiction, Kerrigan, Hughes, Glynn and Neville this year published books that straddle the line between crime fiction ‘entertainments’, as Graham Greene referred to his crime narratives, and the social, or realist, novel. Political corruption, the fall-out from Northern Ireland’s Peace Process and the parlay of paramilitary gains into socially acceptable wealth were some of the themes explored. Angry, fresh and bracingly polemical, the novels are important contributions to our attempt to understand who we are and where we are going.
  They have a fair wind behind them. Writing about crime has become increasingly popular in Ireland over the last decade, and particularly in the last five years or so. The seismic shudders generated by the murder of Veronica Guerin shouldn’t be discounted, but the post-Troubles fall-out, the economic boom, an increasing urban anonymity and the commercial success of ‘chick lit’ have all contributed to a growing number of writers utilising crime narratives to tell their stories about modern Ireland.
  Connolly, who sets his supernatural thrillers in Maine, blazed a trail in the U.S. that Ken Bruen and Tana French have followed. There are movies being made from Irish crime novels, and awards are being won. Literary authors such as John Banville and Eoin McNamee write crime fiction under nom-de-plumes. All told, 2010 should be the year in which the Irish crime novel finally breaks out onto the international stage.
  If it does – and I hope it does – I won’t be along for the ride. Last month, and despite having two published novels under my belt (Eightball Boogie in 2003 and The Big O in 2007) I decided to hang up the gumshoes and abandon crime fiction. The problems of any struggling writer don’t amount to a hill of beans, but there can come a point, especially with a young family and a hefty mortgage, when the rational decision is to withdraw.
  For most aspiring writers, the business of writing involves working two to four hours per day, five or six days per week, all in the quixotic hope that someone, somewhere will like your book enough to pay you an advance that is enough, if you’re lucky, to pay two months’ worth of mortgage. Any business requires sacrifices to make it a success, but if you’re a writer, you’re asking others to make those sacrifices on your behalf, and that can come to seem wrongheaded, or worse, when you’re taking large chunks of time to write books that the market doesn’t want.
  Any sensible reflection on failure involves the realisation that, for one reason or another, one simply wasn’t up to delivering what was required. My problem, according to various rejection letters, was that my books aren’t big enough. By big, publishers mean books that will translate to an international audience and be easily adaptable for the movie screen. Ireland, in its post-Troubles, post-boom incarnation, is fertile ground for a writer, particularly given the prevalence of both blue- and white-collar crime, but the advice I’m being given is that Irish-set crime novels simply don’t have the appeal to cut it on the global stage.
  It’s not just me. In the last week alone I’ve had conversations with two well-respected and well-reviewed Irish crime writers, both of whom were pessimistic about their immediate futures because their books simply aren’t selling; one has already made the decision to stop writing. Their loss would not only impact on the potential of the Irish crime novel, it would raise a serious question mark as to whether the Irish crime novel can continue to generate the kind of momentum that would see it reach a tipping point of market acceptance.
  There are reasons for optimism. Hughes’s The Price of Blood was this year shortlisted for the Mystery Writers of America’s prestigious Edgar award in the U.S., while Kerrigan’s Dark Times in the City was nominated for the CWA Gold Dagger award in Britain. A fortnight ago, Neville’s debut The Twelve received top billing in the New York Times’ weekly review of crime fiction. Glynn’s recent release, Winterland, has been widely praised by reviewers.
  As any writer will tell you, however, you can’t eat good reviews. In any case, a review is just one person’s opinion. While Neville’s novel was recently praised by a South African reviewer for how it dealt with post-conflict politics, Hughes’s was given a negative verdict by a New Zealand reviewer on the basis that raking over the Troubles is in nobody’s interest. It’s telling, too, that Neville’s novel was published under its original title, The Ghosts of Belfast, in the U.S., but was rebranded for the British market because of perceived apathy or even antipathy to anything related to Northern Ireland.
  The next few years will be crucial for the development of the Irish crime novel. Are our stories big enough to compete on the international stage? Connolly sets novels in the U.S., and Bruen has recently taken to setting his standalone works in America too. Adrian McKinty’s most recent offering, Fifty Grand, was set in Cuba and Colorado, while Alex Barclay’s Blood Runs Cold, and her forthcoming Black Run, are also set in Colorado. French has proved that Irish-set crime novels can be both international best-sellers and award winners, but on current form she is very much the exception to the rule.
  Right now there is a very real danger that what appears to be the Irish crime novel’s annus mirabilis will in fact come to be seen as the high-water mark from which the tide rolled back, leaving some very fine writers high and dry.
  It’s a Catch-22 situation: to survive in the current publishing climate, Irish authors will have to write the big novels that publishers want; but doing so means they will no longer be writing the novels that made this year such a stand-out for the Irish crime novel. – Declan Burke

  So there you have it. Not just sour grapes, but dog-in-a-manger to boot.
  Finally, those excised concluding paragraphs in full:

  Not every author will change course or stop writing, of course. Many will persevere despite their economic circumstances and the lack of commercial success. Some will do so because they have no choice but to write the kind of novels they do. Personally, I hope they survive and thrive, because the realist literature being created by the new wave of Irish crime novelists is too important to be allowed wither away.
  That said, it would be a terrible pity if, having as a nation finally matured beyond Seamus Heaney’s “Whatever you say, say nothing” to broach the taboos that have historically blighted Irish society, we were to be left with “Whatever you say, keep it yourselves.”