On Good Readers As The Greatest Reward

I’m quite fond of the notion that a book is only half-written by its author, and that it only begins to come alive when someone turns the first page and starts to read. It follows, then, that a book is only as good as its readers allow it to be - although it’s also true, as a kind of corollary, that an especially attentive and receptive reader may make a book better than it actually is.
  Such is the case, I fear, with the reviews SLAUGHTER’S HOUND picked up during the past week, with three readers picking up on different aspects of the novel. To wit:

“This is a dark tale, and it gets progressively darker as it goes along. In the middle, it reminded me a bit of Ross Macdonald, and also of his Irish literary descendent, Declan Hughes, with its tale of doomed families and the ruin that attends them. But there is a kind of go-for-broke quality to this book that I haven’t really found in the aforementioned illustrious writers’ work, and it took me till nearly the end of the book to realize that Burke has laid it all out for us in the very title of the work, and in a helpful author’s epigram, in which he notes that the great warrior Cú Chulainn’s name really means Hound of Ulster and that he owned a number of war hounds called archú, who were known for their love of slaughter … It is a tale steeped in the tradition of the Irish myth cycles, where deeds are great, but, well, bloody.” - Seana Graham

“This novel is a tragedy, which takes place in a town called Sligo, a location that could be Thebes or any other place in the world where the frailties of good men and women are exploited by the eternal cynics and they become the playthings of the gods, where a man can sleep with his mother without knowing she is his mother or kill his father without knowing whom he is killing, and be punished as if he had knowingly committed the two heinous crimes. As he twists and turns in the nets that have been set for him, the hero’s every good intention or action goes wrong, and Harry Rigby reminds you at times of Job and at other times of Oedipus. His every decent human trait, such as loyalty or friendship, is exploited by the people around him and each betrayal plunges him a little further into the circles of hell … Highly recommended.” - John J. Gaynard

“SLAUGHTER’S HOUND is yet another ‘How the hell does he do that?’ offering from author Declan Burke, whose book ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL has already secured a spot on my Top 10 Reads of 2012 list. More than just a crime fiction / noir novel, SLAUGHTER’S HOUND vividly brings to life the post-investment boom hangover much of Ireland is experiencing, personified by the Hamilton family. Once obscenely wealthy, the family is now teetering on financial ruin and, as Rigby learns, also has some incredibly dark secrets stashed away in the closet along with the skeletons. Lead by its ice princess matriarch, Saoirse, the Hamiltons add a Shakespearean level of drama, complete with a conniving attorney.
  “The story which unfolds is a beautiful balance of tremendous heart and horrific violence.” - Elizabeth A. White

  As you can imagine, that’s all very pleasing indeed.

I was certainly aiming, with SLAUGHTER’S HOUND, to splice together aspects of modern noir and classical tragedy, not least because the forms have so much in common. As Seana and Elizabeth point out, I was riffing on the motif of ‘doomed families’ that feature in the work of Ross Macdonald and Declan Hughes, although I’d be the first to say that SH comes up very short by comparison with both. Seana also mentions the epigram at the beginning of the book, and its reference to the Irish myth cycles, and I was conscious of that historical narrative too; but for a very long time, as John Gaynard detected, the epigram for SLAUGHTER’S HOUND came courtesy of Horace Kallen, from his intriguing THE BOOK OF JOB AS A GREEK TRAGEDY, which I wrote about here last January.
  So there you have it. Apologies for the trumpet-blowing, folks, but there are days, many days, when writing offers precious few tangible rewards. Good readers, on the other hand, are the greatest reward any writer can hope for.

Gorgeous George And Me

Marshal Zeringue is one of the most tireless supporters of books and writers of all stripes and none, most famously with his Page 69 Test, and more recently for Writers Read and My Book, The Movie. My most recent contribution to Marshal’s roster of heroes and villains consists of my take on the My Book, My Movie casting of the hypothetical adaptation of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, which starts out by asserting that only the multi-talented human rights advocate ‘Gorgeous George’ Clooney (one for the ladies, right) could play the part of the fictional ‘Declan Burke’ of AZC, and gets progressively more deluded / deranged from there. For all the details, clickety-click here …
  Elsewhere in AZC-related flummery, the good folk at Liberties Press were kind enough to upload a video of John Connolly mostly lying through this back teeth as he very kindly launched our humble tome on August 10th. Now, the vid starts off with the Dark Lord saying that he doesn’t usually do this kind of thing, for a variety of reasons; if I’d known that beforehand, I wouldn’t have asked him to do the honours, not least because I hate being put on the spot like that myself. True to form, however, JC not only did the honours, but did us and ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL proud in the process. Roll it there, Collette …

  Meanwhile, over at Seana Graham’s interweb lair, Not New For Long, there’s an impressively forensic review of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. It’s always nice when someone takes the time to read your book (and I’m still at the stage where I’m always surprised that someone has done so), but it’s particularly pleasing when said reader engages with the book in the kind of comprehensive fashion Seana has. It’s not the kind of review that lends itself to pull-out blurb-style quotes, but I am very impressed with the fact that Seana has managed to pack in references to Flann O’Brien, Dante, Mephistopheles, Adrian McKinty and James Joyce’s eye-patch. For all the skinny, clickety-click here …
  Finally, a quick word on my trek across the border to Norn Iron, and specifically to No Alibis, where David Torrans hosted a double-hander of yours truly and the aforementioned Adrian McKinty last Thursday night. A very enjoyable evening it was, too, with much scurrilous scuttlebutt being passed off as ‘insights into writing’ (koff), very little of which I could reproduce here without running the risk of being sued into oblivion (and which proved tame enough, as it happens, by comparison with the post-gig conversation carried out over the course and under the influence of a number of Pimms afterwards). Anyway, the good denizens of Belfast and surroundings came out in force, including a number of scribes, among them Stuart Neville, David Park, Andrew Pepper and Gerard Brennan. It was slightly unsettling that Stuart Neville chose to sit in the front row, particularly as the man is a runaway bestseller these days, but we survived the grilling nonetheless, and terrific fun it all was. Incidentally, for those of you in the general vicinity of Belfast, John Connolly and Alan Glynn will also be appearing at No Alibis, on September 1st, to promote THE BURNING SOUL and BLOODLAND, respectively. Should be a cracking night …

A Good Think, Interrupted

I tuned in late to the Masters last night, long after Rory McIlroy (right) had blown his four-shot lead at the start of the day, but just in time to watch Rory disintegrate in considerable style as he took the long way home, hacking his way through the undergrowth of the more remote parts of Augusta’s back nine. Commiserations to Rory, although it’s hard to feel truly sorry for him - if you’re good enough to establish a four-shot lead going into the last day of the Masters, then you’re good, period.
  Back in the days when I used to swing a golf club, in the process exploring the more exotic flora of whatever course I was on, I used to call that ‘value for money’. People did try to persuade me that the point of the exercise was to take the minimum number of shots to get around, but investing good money in a set of clubs and not using them as often as possible made no sense to me.
  I don’t golf anymore. I like the game, but I can’t be doing with all the bullshit that has to be negotiated between the car park and the first tee. Plus, it’s a time-consuming sport. Besides, writing is a much more exquisite form of self-torture. If golf is a good walk spoiled, as Mark Twain suggested, then writing is all too often a good think interrupted.
  It occurred to me last night, and not for the first time, that golf and writing have much in common. The pursuit of an impossible excellence, for one. How the finest difference in intent and execution can result in triumph or disaster. One of Rory McIlroy’s drives last night was perhaps only a millimetre off when club struck ball, for example, but that put it two feet off its trajectory when the ball hit a tree branch, and the branch deflected the ball a couple of hundred yards away from where it should have been.
  At the time, Rory was a shot clear of a chasing pack which included Tiger Woods, and such competition brings with it its own pressures. Ultimately, though, when Rory stood over that shot, or any of his shots, he wasn’t competing against anyone but himself. He was competing with the limits of his skill, his facility for grace under pressure, his ability to keep his inner demons at bay whilst maintaining an outward façade of calm efficiency.
  In the end, Rory lost his battle with himself, which will probably be the most disappointing thing for him when he wakes up this morning. To be beaten by a better golfer is one thing, and nothing to be ashamed of. To be beaten by yourself, though, sabotaged from within, that’s a whole different issue.
  Most writers I know are prone to self-sabotage, most of it connected to the nebulous concept of confidence. They might have just written a brilliant book, but when it comes to starting the next one, they can’t remember how it’s done. And there’s no point in telling yourself that if you’ve done it once, you can do it again - there’s always the possibility that the last time was a fluke. Hell, even I hit a hole-in-one once. But I could stand on the same tee from now until Judgement Day, swinging the club in exactly the same way, and never hit that hole-in-one again.
  In the more extreme versions, some writers - yours truly being one example - go through this every day.
  All of which is a roundabout way of saying that confidence plays a huge part in the writing process. And it’s nice, on those occasions when you find yourself ankle-deep in the rough, and possibly out-of-bounds, to get a shot of confidence, aka a positive review. Seana Graham, a long-time friend of Irish crime writing, who blogs over at Confessions of Ignorance, provided such a shot in the arm this weekend, when she posted a reader’s review of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE on Amazon, with the gist running thusly:

“THE BIG O could justly be called an Elmore Leonard style caper book, with a madcap carnival of characters keeping the action going. Though EIGHTBALL BOOGIE could never be accused of being less than lively, and plot-wise it is probably just as complicated, the story is perhaps a bit more grounded in the character of its protagonist, one Harry Rigby. Rigby’s got all the usual P.I. problems - women trouble, cop trouble, and smart mouth trouble. Unlike some similar protagonists I’ve read recently, I’m not all together convinced that he’s a good guy. But he does have one core value, and that’s protecting his son Ben. Trace that through, and you’ll see that everything he does is motivated by that one objective. Everything.
  “In one aspect, anyway, this book is a straight up homage to Raymond Chandler, and of course it’s a brave thing to offer yourself up for comparison to an American master of detective fiction. But in my book, Burke is up to it. There are countless throwaway lines that show the same kind of spark of cleverness, and I think the first one where I realized I should slow down and start paying better attention was: “Conway lived two miles out of town, the house only three drainpipes short of a mansion.” This is the kind of book that fans will love to dig such nuggets out of, but why should I spoil your pleasure by revealing more?
  “There are many plot twists in this story, and some of them I did manage to see coming. But there is one great piece of finesse that figures in towards the end, and I admired it immensely. I think there is something in this one for everyone, though I will say that as with much Irish crime fiction I’ve read, there was one moment of brutality that was a bit beyond my tolerance level. Well, make that two.
  “But hey, if you’re going to read Irish crime fiction, you’re going to have to get used to this stuff.” - Seana Graham

  All of which is very nice indeed, and I thank you kindly, ma’am. Do I honestly believe that THE BIG O is entitled to be mentioned in the same breath as Elmore Leonard, or EIGHTBALL BOOGIE compared with Raymond Chandler? No, I don’t. But such references go a long way towards bolstering a fragile confidence, tantalising whispers that suggest if I stay the course, and keep doing what I do, that some day, somehow, I’ll write a book that does deserve such exalted company. Even if it does turn out to be a fluke.