Reviews: Irish Times Crime Fiction Column, August 2016

Already a four-time winner of the CWA’s International Dagger, A Climate of Fear (Harvill Secker, €19.50) is Fred Vargas’s ninth novel in the Paris-based Commissaire Adamsberg series. The apparent suicide of an old woman leads the Zen-like Adamsberg and his team to investigate a bizarre double murder on a remote Icelandic island ten years previously, although the team soon realises that their murderer is intimately involved with a cult devoted to enacting the speeches of Robespierre, Danton et al during the post-Revolutionary years of ‘the Terror’. Quirky doesn’t even begin to cover the plotting and characters here, but Vargas – the crime-writing pseudonym of French writer, historian and archaeologist Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau – is a veteran of 14 novels of total and remains in complete command of her bizarre investigation. The tone may be offbeat, and the affectionate bickering between the members of Adamsberg’s extended team amusing, but Vargas is assured in the way she marshals her narrative elements around a fascinating exploration of how a corrupted group dynamic can parlay historical horrors into contemporary crimes.

  Seamus Smyth’s Quinn (1999) is one of Irish crime fiction’s lost classics, a story narrated by a lethal charmer who has much in common with Red Dock, the anti-hero in Smyth’s – now writing as J.M. Smyth – Blood for Blood (Black and White, €9.99). A successful criminal based in Dublin, Red survived growing up in an Irish orphanage, although his brother Sean wasn’t so lucky. Now in a position to take his revenge on those responsible for Sean’s death, Red sets in train a diabolical plot that includes kidnap, blackmail and murder – but even a meticulous planner like Red couldn’t have anticipated the intervention of a serial killer who prides himself on the purity of his artistic vision. A snarling, anarchic yawp of a crime yarn, Blood for Blood is a novel that revels in its contradictions, the jaunty tone and blackly comic narrative regularly interrupted by grand guignol descriptions of violence and mutilation, while the increasingly improbable plot is firmly rooted in the harrowing abuse suffered by the inmates of state-run institutions. Crude, brutal and appallingly funny, Blood for Blood is like nothing else you’ll read this year.

  Robert Thorogood is best known for creating the BBC TV series Death in Paradise, which is set on a fictional Caribbean island and originally featured DI Richard Poole (since replaced by DI Humphrey Goodman), an uptight British policeman struggling to adapt to the idiosyncratic rhythms of Saint Marie. Thorogood revived Poole for his debut novel, A Meditation on Murder (2014), and Poole returns again in The Killing of Polly Carter (Harlequin, €19.50). World famous supermodel Polly Carter announces her intention to commit suicide before leaping from the cliff near her home on Saint Marie, her death witnessed by Polly’s twin sister, Claire. Poole’s suspicions are aroused, however, and soon he is leading his team in a murder investigation. Despite the contemporary setting, the Death in Paradise mysteries are deliciously retro Agatha Christie-style whodunits, with Poole trawling a shoal of red herrings as he interrogates his list of suspects. Much of the pleasure, meanwhile, is derived from Poole’s fish-out-of-water helplessness as he flops around trying to cope with Saint Marie’s heat, cultural quirks and easy-going pace of life, all the while wondering if ‘his entire existence as an Englishman was no more than Pavlovian conditioning.’

  The Last One (Penguin, €16.99) is Alexandra Oliva’s debut, in which we first meet ‘Zoo’ as a contestant on a TV wilderness survival reality show. Forbidden from contacting the outside world, Zoo has no way of knowing that a global catastrophe has laid waste to the human population: as she treks through the vast forest towards home, her survival grows increasingly unlikely. The narrative is split between an on-line commentary on the early episodes of the TV show and Zoo’s own account of her worsening conditions, although the chronology is out of kilter: the on-line conversation relates to events that occurred days before Zoo’s personal experience of those events, which interrupts and stilts the narrative flow. Meanwhile, Oliva deliberately creates a distancing effect by referring to her characters according to their reality show tags – ‘Zoo’, ‘Tracker’, ‘Engineer’, ‘Biology’ – a conceit that works as a commentary on our disconnection with reality in a media-managed world, although the flipside of employing archetypal titles is that it mutes our instinctive emotional response to the characters’ plight. Overall, though, The Last One is a smart and timely story about what it means to be human at a time when humanity is hanging on by a thread.

  The Unfortunate Englishman (Grove Press, €19.50) is John Lawton’s 10th novel and the second to feature Joe Wilderness, who first appeared in Then We Take Berlin (2013). A thief co-opted by MI6, Wilderness is a reluctant spy, a man motivated by personal concerns – i.e., pulling scams in the conman’s paradise that is Cold War-era Berlin – rather than ideology. The title refers to two unfortunate Englishmen: Geoffrey Masefield, a geologist who travels to Moscow by MI6 as an amateur spy, and Bernard Alleyn, a KGB mole who has spent so long playing the role of the English gentleman that he barely remembers his original name. Charged with negotiating a swap of Masefield and Alleyn in Berlin, Wilderness learns that the deal involves heisting a fortune in vintage wine looted during the war from a Jewish family destined for the gas chamber. The tone of unsentimental realpolitik means that The Unfortunate Englishman earns the right to that le Carré-esque title, even if Wilderness himself is reminiscent of Len Deighton’s spy Harry Palmer. The result is a complex and beautifully detailed tale, a full-blooded Cold War spy thriller given an added dimension courtesy of Wilderness’s quirky humour and his pragmatic take on morality and honour. ~ Declan Burke

  This column was first published in the Irish Times.

The Dial Code Was … Death!

First published in 1997, DEATH CALL by TS O’Rourke was one of the earliest of the modern Irish noirs. In common with some other Irish crime writers of the time - Vincent Banville, Ingrid Black, Eugene McEldowney, Jim Lusby, Seamus Smyth - O’Rourke was probably a little too far ahead of the curve, and the first phase of his career could probably be characterised by the old maxim about pioneers, who tend to get shot, and generally in the back.
  Happily, TS O’Rourke is a hard man to kill, in the literary sense, and he has recently begun publishing again. Not only that, but he has just republished DEATH CALL, with the blurb elves wibbling thusly:

It was all he could do to stop his hangover from spilling out onto the victim as he studied her neck and what he made out to be the initial puncture wound in her abdomen. From that point, he thought, she had been opened like an envelope with a paper knife, revealing a mess of entrails and blood.
  With a deranged serial killer on the loose, Detective Sergeant Dan Carroll and his new partner Detective Constable Samuel Grant find themselves trawling the seedy side of London in search of a brutal killer who preys on prostitutes.

  For all the info you need on TS O’Rourke’s novels, new and otherwise, take a wee wander over to his interweb lair …

If You’re Irish, Come Into The Parlour. And Get A Cap In Yo Ass

The Mystery Readers’ Journal goes forty shades of green for its summer issue, as ever-radiant editor Janet Rudolph brings together a veritable Who’s Who of Irish crime fiction to celebrate the current boom in dubh noir (three of the usual suspects pictured, right – yours truly, Ruth ‘Cuddly’ Dudley-Edwards, and Declan Hughes). The magazine is for the most part subscription, but there’s a few free tasters available web-side, among them Glenn Harper’s ‘Ordinary Decent Criminals: Irish Noir Fiction in the 21st Century’, which kicks off with a few names unfamiliar to yours truly. To wit:

“There are a couple of literary thrillers from the last decades of the 20th century worth mentioning in passing because they approach noir in distinctive ways. M.S. Power’s CHILDREN OF THE NORTH is an intense, complex trilogy on the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland, in a dark, Graham Greene vein and with a rich sense of both tragedy and comedy. Another novel on the Troubles, THE PSALM KILLER by Christopher Petit, has an eerie quality of being both a documentary novel about the convoluted politics of Northern Ireland and a brutal thriller that has some common ground with SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. It’s also worth mentioning a few noir-ish late 20th-century Irish novels that aren’t exactly crime novels: Hugo Hamilton’s HEADBANGER and SAD BASTARD (featuring a cop and a noir atmosphere as well as considerable black comedy) and Seamus Smyth’s QUINN (featuring a career criminal and a lot of even blacker comedy).”

  Glenn? I love you like a mother from another brother, etc., but I have no idea of how Hugo Hamilton’s Pat Coyne tales, and that of Seamus Smyth’s QUINN, ‘aren’t exactly crime novels’. Hamilton, you could argue, offers a crude but quixotic protagonist raging against the world at large, and one who could just as easily be a middle-management figure as an Irish police detective tilting at the windmills of Irish justice or lack of same. But QUINN (1999), a first-person account of a killer-for-hire, is one of the defining Irish crime fiction novels of the current outpouring. Jump here for Ken Bruen’s verdict.
  Anyhoo, Tana French also features on the freebie list, and here ponders on why Irish writers took so long to embrace crime writing:

“Ireland had a deep, passionate resistance to bringing its problems out in the open. Maybe because of centuries of living under British rule, this country had an intense culture of secrecy: whatever you say, say nothing. Anything shameful or dangerous belonged tightly under wraps, unmentioned. To write about a murder, even a fictional one, would have gone very strongly against the grain. That mentality comes through even in one of the few pieces of Irish crime writing I can think of from before about 1990: John B. Keane’s powerful play The Field, in which a couple of local men kill an outsider for trying to buy a field that they feel belongs to them, and the community covers up the murder. Even the absence of crime writing can tell you a lot about a place.”

  Aye, sure we were all too busy slaughtering each other and starving to death to bother our collective arse writing about it. But lo! No more! For yea, verily, the full list of the MRJ’s contents runneth thusly:

• Shadows of Guilt: Ireland in the 1950s by John Banville, aka Benjamin Black
• Distance Lends Perspective by Colin Bateman
• Billy Boyle Goes to Ireland by James R. Benn
• An Irish Heroine by Rhys Bowen
• Crime Pays—On the Page by Declan Burke
• No, Not the Blarney Stone by Ken Bruen
• An Irishman's Lot by Doug M. Cummings
• The Importance of Being Irish by David Dickinson
• When Irish Writing Roots Are Showing... by Carole Nelson Douglas
• Where Fact Meets Fiction by Garbhan Downey
• Killing the Peace Process by Ruth Dudley Edwards
• The Roots of Murder by Tana French
• Rachel O'Reilly's Murder by Jenny Friel
• Josephine Tey and Nuala Anne McGrail by Father Andrew M. Greeley
• Finding Mythic Ireland by Lyn Hamilton
• Foxes, Cabbages & the Ancient Laws of Ireland by Cora Harrison
• Stumbling on a Body in the Bog by Erin Hart
• How the Irish Created My Civilization by Jeremiah Healy
• I Owe My Life to an Irish Criminal by Eoin Hennigan
• Irish Soul by Tobsha Learner
• A Literary Tour of One Dublin Author by Stephen Leather
• The Irish in P.I. Frank Johnson's Debut Outing by Ed Lynskey
• Casting a Cold Eye on the Gloss of Modern Ireland by K.T. McCaffrey
• Irish Connection by John McEvoy
• Patrolling the Border by Brian McGilloway
• The Absence of Death by Cormac Millar
• Writing and Ireland by Pat Mullan
• The Elusive Irishman by Teagan Oliver
• An Arresting Tale by Ralph Robb
• The Irish in Me by Les Roberts
• Balancing the Book by Zoë Sharp
• Lark and the Quaker Connection by Sheila Simonson
• Interwoven Irish by Therese Szymanski
• Irish Crime Writing: Truth Sells Better Than Fiction by Neville Thompson
• Sister Fidelma, 7th-Century Supersleuth by Peter Tremayne

Hmmm, colour us impressed. Meanwhile, the Macavity Award nominees have been announced, and John Connolly and – oh yes! – the ever-radiant Tana French are among the front-runners. To wit:

Best Novel
SOUL PATCH by Reed Farrel Coleman (Bleak House)
THE UNQUIET by John Connolly (Hodder & Stoughton*/Atria)
BLOOD OF PARADISE by David Corbett (Ballantine Mortalis)
WATER LIKE A STONE by Deborah Crombie (HarperCollins)
WHAT THE DEAD KNOW by Laura Lippman (Morrow)

Best First Mystery
IN THE WOODS by Tana French (Hodder & Stoughton*/Viking)
HEART-SHAPED BOX by Joe Hill (William Morrow)
THE SPELLMAN FILES by Lisa Lutz (Simon & Schuster)
STEALING THE DRAGON by Tim Maleeny (Midnight Ink)
THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM by Matt Beynon Rees (Soho)

  So there you have it. Irish crime fiction – we finally pulled our heads out of the sand and thumbs out of our asses and started talking about what’s really happening in modern Ireland. Sure aren’t we only marvellous all the same?

The FLIGHT Stuff

Considering she’s due to inherit the earth any day now, Euro Crime’s Karen Meek is surprisingly tolerant of mere mortals in general and very helpful to the CAP elves in particular. Thus it was that she tipped us off about yet another Irish crime fiction writer who had yet to blip across the radar screens of the elves, John McAllister, whose post-Troubles thriller LINE OF FLIGHT (2006) sounds like a potent brew. Quoth the blurb elves:

“Jimmy watched the white van on the television and saw people stream away from the surrounding buildings. The mortars had been found and the Queen was safe, and yet something was not quite right.” Jimmy has spent a lifetime fighting the Republicans who wanted to take over his country, and the politicians who ran it to suit themselves. But old enemies have formed new alliances based on greed, and now, when his deadly skills are needed most, Jimmy is powerless. The only outsiders Jimmy can rely on are an unorthodox policeman, Ian Patterson, and his mortal enemy, IRA killer Mick Quinn. But Ian has divided loyalties and Mick is obsessed with taking his revenge on the SAS. To save the life of the Queen, the three men have to counterattack even as the mortars begin to fly. But first, for the sake of his children, Jimmy must throw away his gun. McAllister’s LINE OF FLIGHT is more than just another thriller; it explores the aftermath of a peace process that has left fear, doubt and loathing to breed under the shiny new skin of reinvestment, forming a volatile cocktail that needs but the barest spark to ignite. McAllister’s skill at capturing the language and nuances of the main factions is impressive, but the warning it provides for those waging a war on terror is terrifying for us all.

They’re coming thick and fast out of Norn Iron now, people: in the last month alone we’ve had David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER, Garbhan Downey’s CONFIDENTIALLY YOURS, Sam Millar’s BLOODSTORM and (The Artist Formerly Known As) Colin Bateman’s ORPHEUS RISING, with Seamus Smyth’s THE MOLE’S CAGE to be published in France later this year. For more on the topic, jaunt on over to Gerard Brennan’s distressingly cool Crime Scene Northern Ireland …

Saints, Scholars, Cops And Killers

Given that it’s Paddy’s Day (hic), and we’re supposed to be celebrating Irishness in all its wonderful manifestations (the lovely caílín, right, being a prime example), Crime Always Pays would like to take this opportunity to direct your attention to some Irish crime writers that we believe were woefully neglected in years gone by. To wit, and in no particular order:

Seamus Smyth: “This is not just a great crime novel, it’s one hell of a novel, full stop. QUINN should be THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE for this decade, it’s that good and fresh and innovative.” – Ken Bruen

Eugene McEldowney: “The novel was a reaction to some of the awful books that had been written about Northern Ireland and which made no effort to place the political violence in any kind of context.” – Dublin Quarterly

Vincent Banville: John Blaine was the original hardboiled Irish private eye. He may yet sue Declan Hughes for being younger and thus better placed to capitalise on Ireland’s newly minted mean streets.

Philip Davison: “Part le Carré, part Graham Greene … thoroughly compelling… cracking dialogue.” – The Independent. “Each word in this bleakly humorous novel promises to explode and bring light to the shadows … Davison never fails to surprise, compel and intrigue with dry philosophy and grim wit.” - The Times Literary Supplement

TS O’Rourke: “History is written in stone. I know that history is also written by the victor, but the truth, the whole story of these terrible times, is now emerging and I have tried to present at least a small picture of what the Civil War was like for a foot soldier, a volunteer, in Dublin City.” – Dublin Quarterly

There’s many more, of course, but right now we’re blogging from the pub and some amateur has just spilled a pint of green beer onto our laptop and fhizz signal seems to be crrssshsprcklefrtz … Arrah, bollocks. Hic. Another bucket of porter there, Jamesey, and don’t shpare the horshes …

Going Underground-ish

As regular readers (hi, mum) of Crime Always Pays will be aware, we’re big, big fans of Seamus Smyth. Not the elves, obviously – they’re tiny big fans. But we think QUINN was one of the defining Irish crime narratives of the last decade, and we never could work out why Smyth was only big in Japan. Three cheers, two stools and resounding huzzah, then, for those impeccably tasteful French, where – a little mole-shaped birdie tells us – Smyth has recently signed a three-book deal for QUINN, RED DOCK and THE MOLE’S CAGE. Quoth Seamus:

“The best part is, they’re already written. And all three were bestsellers in Japan. Let’s hope the French are as enthusiastic.”

Being, erm, diligent researchers, the elves have winkled out the synopsis to THE MOLE’S CAGE, which runneth thusly:

In July 1972, 17-year-old Michael Hill is arrested crossing the border into the Irish Republic, interrogated and interned in Long Kesh, an ex-RAF airfield ten miles west of Belfast. The compounds (or ‘cages’), some two dozen, house several thousand men. He is put into Cage 5, nicknamed ‘the Moles’ Cage’ because inmates are forever doing what moles do – burrowing. They live in corrugated-iron Nissan huts – ovens in summer, fridges in winter. Conditions are akin, according to the Red Cross permanently stationed outside, to those of a WW2 POW camp. The only way out for Michael is to convince the army he is not IRA. Naturally they believe the IRA when they back him up. Many men are in the same Catch-22. And many of them are known to Michael. For him, walking into Long Kesh is like walking into a pub on the Falls Road – a sea of familiar faces, kids he went to school with, in some cases their fathers. One pal was interned because he had fuse wire in his toolbag, which can be used to make detonators – he’s an apprentice electrician. Another was interned because he delivered bread in Catholic areas and therefore, according to army logic, had to be in a position to know who was in the IRA and what they were planning. Milkmen got the same treatment. It’s a crazy world where justice has been removed and there’s nowhere to go for it. Michael’s forever trying to escape, but the IRA control the escape committees and they want their own men out, not non-members. Countless tunnels cave in because there’s no shoring. After years of fighting for decent food and better conditions, the IRA CO orders the place burnt to the ground. The men survive living out in all weathers for months, under ‘tents’ made from corrugated iron. But the charred remains bring opportunities – they can be used for shoring. A plan is hatched to dig a 200 foot tunnel, for the whole cage to escape, then each cage in turn under the cover of darkness …

Quoth Seamus:

“THE MOLE’S CAGE focuses on the experiences of the thousands of Catholics wrongly interned without charge or recourse to legal representation, not on the IRA. A lot’s been written about the H-Blocks but this story covers the four years before they were built, about which comparatively little has been written. It’s a first-person narrative told through the eyes of a streetwise teenager.”

Bon chance, Monsieur Smyth …

Books Of The Year # 1: CROSS, by Ken Bruen

We’re always the last to know. Like, couldn’t someone have mentioned, even in passing, that it’s coming up to Christmas? Now here’s us with nary a child in the house washed and no sign of a ‘2007 Round-Up Of Books Wot My Friends Wrote’ compilation to fill a gap. Bah blummin’ humbug, etc. Anyhoo, here’s the first of our Books of the Year – Seamus Smyth on Ken Bruen’s CROSS. To wit:

“Like all gifted writers, Ken Bruen is big on atmosphere. He wallops you with it on page one – not with a character wearing a cross, but with a cross wearing him – and never lets up. And try this for characterisation: “I didn’t enquire how the barman knew my order. I was afraid he’d tell me … You sit behind a pint like that, a pure gift, with the Jameson already weaving its dark magic on your eyes, you can believe that Iraq is indeed on the other side of the world, that winter isn’t coming, that the Galway light will always hold that beautiful fascination and that priests are our protectors, not predators. You won’t have the illusion for very long, but the moment is priceless.” Bruen stalks Galway with the eye of a jackal, scouring the city’s ever-changing cultural and social scene and rancid underbelly, and weaves it into a thought-provoking sleuth yarn which is an indictment on modern-day Ireland. And he’s very visual. You see everything. The ‘half-crouch young people adopt’, the tree in the centre of McSwiggan’s pub reassuring us that the ‘country still has a sense of the absurd’. Bruen adds to the genre a voice that’s as challenging and unsettling as it is original. No genre-writing for this guy. He writes as if he’s sitting over a beer talking to a mate. It’s as subtle a piece of crime-writing as you’re likely to get. Nothing’s forced. It’s a masterclass in pace. Many writers are compared to writers who spawned their own sub-genre. Not Bruen. He’s spawning his own for others to aspire to. How many of us can claim that?”- Seamus Smyth

Seamus Smyth is the author of QUINN.

The Mighty Quinn: Just Got That Bit Mightier

Ain’t technology wonderful? Courtesy of the statcounting doohickey the CAP elves use to justify their criminal indolence, it’s possible for the Chief Google-Watching Elf to keep an eye on the names people are searching for in order to arrive at our humble blog. The first two names in the Top Three won’t surprise anyone, being John Connolly and Ken Bruen, but the third name might. Take a bow Seamus Smyth, author of the cult classic QUINN and long-suffering beneficiary of CAP’s ongoing campaign to have QUINN republished (scroll down, scan left). Who’d a thunk it, eh? Now comes the news that the reclusive Smyth – Irish crime fiction’s JD Salinger, basically, albeit with 97% less bananafish – has written a second tome, which is currently abroad amidst the unsuspecting publishers of Europe. Consider it a particularly bloody bucket of chum dumped into shark-infested waters, and brace yourself for the feeding frenzy. Meanwhile, even as you read this, a detachment of commando elves are scaling the walls of Smyth’s remote mansion, their mission to return with a m/s copy of said tome or die trying. Our money’s on the latter – yon Smyth, he takes no prisoners ...

Ask Not For Whom The Bell Polls

Last week, we asked YOU to decide on the best ever Irish crime fiction debut and YOU said, “We’re not telling you again – ring this number just once more and we’re getting a barring order.” Sheesh. Can’t we just be friends, eh? No? Okay, be like that. And for what it’s worth, yes, your ass did look big in that. Every that. Anyhoo, the result of last week’s poll to discover the best ever Irish crime fiction debut ever was … (drum roll ‘n’ trumpet parp please, maestro) …

Every Dead Thing by John Connolly (27%)
Dead I Well May Be by Adrian McKinty (22%)
Divorcing Jack by Colin Bateman (22%)
Quinn by Seamus Smyth (16%)
In The Woods by Tana French (11%)

Wanna quibble, punk? The comment box is officially open: let the inquibbilating begin …

Brought To Book # 213: Seamus Smyth On Ken Bruen’s Cross

Like all gifted writers, Ken Bruen is big on atmosphere. He wallops you with it on page one – not with a character wearing a cross, but with a cross wearing him – and never lets up. And try this for characterisation: “I didn’t enquire how the barman knew my order. I was afraid he’d tell me … You sit behind a pint like that, a pure gift, with the Jameson already weaving its dark magic on your eyes, you can believe that Iraq is indeed on the other side of the world, that winter isn’t coming, that the Galway light will always hold that beautiful fascination and that priests are our protectors, not predators. You won’t have the illusion for very long, but the moment is priceless.” Bruen stalks Galway with the eye of a jackal, scouring the city’s ever-changing cultural and social scene and rancid underbelly, and weaves it into a thought-provoking sleuth yarn which is an indictment on modern-day Ireland. And he’s very visual. You see everything. The ‘half-crouch young people adopt’, the tree in the centre of McSwiggan’s pub reassuring us that the ‘country still has a sense of the absurd’. Bruen adds to the genre a voice that’s as challenging and unsettling as it is original. No genre-writing for this guy. He writes as if he’s sitting over a beer talking to a mate. It’s as subtle a piece of crime-writing as you’re likely to get. Nothing’s forced. It’s a masterclass in pace. Many writers are compared to writers who spawned their own sub-genre. Not Bruen. He’s spawning his own for others to aspire to. How many of us can claim that?- Seamus Smyth, author of Quinn

The Weekly Seamus Smith Update: You’ve Not Seen Nothing Like The Mighty Quinn

So what more do we have to do to convince you of Quinn’s greatness? What’s that? You want actual proof in the form of reviews? Okeley-dokely … The folks over at Amazon are only drooling, to wit: “Quinn encompasses both intense bluntness and delicious irony … alongside moments of sharp humour. Harrowing and enlightening, Quinn cleverly shows the shock and the appeal of altered perception.” And then there’s: “By turns exciting, intriguing and horrifying the book never fails to keep you hooked.” But stay! There’s more! “While American Psycho shocked through the creativity of the various murders, Quinn shocks through its cold-hearted premeditation.” And our own Ken Bruen, who should know a thing or seventeen about fictional psycho killers, reckons that, “The hero, Gerd Quinn, is straight from the tradition of Goodis through Thompson to the wry, sly humour of a Willeford.” Quoth the Times: “For all its lightning exposition of Quinn’s swaggering amorality, this first novel proves Smyth to be a truly original, febrile talent.” As for ourselves, you know where we stand: on a pulpit proclaiming Quinn’s genius. Do the right thing, people – you know it makes sense.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 419: Seamus Smyth

Yep, it's rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire pick-'n'-mix Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
The one that sold most.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
My bank statements, when there’s money enough to indulge myself in them.
Most satisfying writing moment?
I’ve never written anything I was satisfied with.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
I like Ken Bruen’s way with a pen.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Wish I knew. It would mean I’ve read a ‘great’ book.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Punching the keys and a story not turning up.
Why does John Banville use a pseudonym for writing crime?
I used a pseudonym once, because I didn’t want anyone to know I wrote it.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
It never brags.

Seamus Smyth’s Quinn is a stone-cold classic. Fact.

Brought To Book # 29: Ken Bruen On Seamus Smyth’s Quinn

A Criminal Shame: Ken Bruen (right) on why Quinn should be 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle for this decade'.
"Life sucks, yadda-yadda, so what else is new? But sometimes it sucks on a level that you want to scream, “Ah for fucksakes!” Being a crime writer always means registering low on the literary barometer but being an Irish crime writer? Just shoot yourself – unless you're plugged into the usual mafia circle of same tired old names. Seamus Smyth wrote a blistering debut titled Quinn back in 1999 and what should have been a major lift-off to a glittering career came to zilch. If he were writing in the UK or USA, he'd be mega. Quinn is a kick-in-the-face wondrous blitz of a novel. No tip-toeing Mr Nice Guy here: this is a first-person narrative of a psycho who operates in the Dublin underworld, the kind of novel Paul Williams would, ahem, kill to have written. The hero, Gerd Quinn, is straight from the tradition of Goodis through Thompson to the wry, sly humour of a Willeford. The writing is a dream, a style all Smyth’s own. He uses his anti-hero to pay homage to the noir genre and yet subvert it in a way only a true dark Irish craftsman could. It's the kind of novel you read and think, ‘Just bloody mighty’, and immediately watch out for his next. But this is not just a great crime novel, it's one hell of a novel, full stop. Quinn should be The Friends of Eddie Coyle for this decade, it's that good and fresh and innovative. Let's remedy one case of criminal neglect and get Seamus Smyth up where he belongs, right at the top of the genre, and allow a rare and unique talent to do what he was born to do - write the provocative novels this country deserves. Gerd Quinn states, ‘There's no malice in what I do …’, which makes it one of the most ironic opening lines of any novel in light of what’s coming down the Smyth pike. Quinn is not only vital, it's damn essential."

Ken Bruen’s Cross is out now

The Weekly Seamus Smyth Update: No One, But No One, Is Bigger In Japan

Question: how come Seamus Smyth's Quinn wasn't THE Irish crime fiction success of the last decade? He's big in Japan, for one - he hit the Top 3 in the Japanese critics' list two years running, 2001 and 2002, fending off the likes of Thomas Harris, Scott Turow, Michael Connelly, Denis Lehane and Jeffrey Deaver in the process, AND the London Times raved it up - "For all its lightning exposition of Quinn's swaggering amorality, this first novel proves Smyth to be a truly original, febrile talent." And as if that wasn't enough, Quinn was Crime Always Pays' inaugural Lost Classic. Like, what more does the guy have to do?