It Takes Two To Boogie

It appears that Irish crime fiction might be getting its very own Stadler and Waldorf. For those of you who didn’t log on to CSNI yesterday, Gerard Brennan and Mike Stone (right and righter) did a ‘tag-team’ review of mine own humble EIGHTBALL BOOGIE which – the big-ups aside – looks like it could be an intriguing way of reviewing a novel. To wit:

Mike Stone: Hiya, mate. I finished Declan Burke’s EIGHTBALL BOOGIE yesterday. Give it a day or two and the dust will have settled enough for me to do a write-up. Assuming you want one of course?

Gerard Brennan: Hey, man. Yeah, I could well use a review of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE. Thing is, I’ve only just read it myself. And I’m kind of in the mood to review it too. Not sure what to do. I like to get other opinions on CSNI when I can, but ... hmmm, what say you?

  For the rest of the review, clickety-click here …
  Oh, and while I’m on the subject of CSNI – it seems that it was the good work of Gerard Brennan that convinced Tony Bailie to start blogging. As well as being a novelist, Tony’s a poet and journalist, but I don’t hold that against him and neither should you …

The Disembiggened O # 312: No Trumpets, There Are None

Quel fromage! Phantom 102.5 FM’s The Kiosk subjected our humble offering, The Big O, to something of a rather vigorous colonoscopy on Saturday and the results – you have been warned – aren’t pretty. If Nadine O’Regan (not pictured, right) wasn’t such a total babe, she’d be off our Christmas card list until, oh, November at least. But she is, so she isn’t, if you follow our drift. In the spirit of interweb openness, accountability and transparency, etc., you can hear the ten or so minutes of the review here or hereabouts, and a big shout-out to Critical Mick for doing the knob-twiddling on the diggery-wibbly technology bit. Meanwhile, The Rap Sheet has taken our prints in their rather wonderful ‘overlooked crime classic’ series, for which we’ve nominated Paul Cain’s Fast One. “Reading Fast One was like travelling to Antarctica,” says this enlightened soul (scroll down a tad), “once you arrived, there was nowhere else to go.” Sweet.