A Rum Do And No Mistake

“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest / Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum …” The Somali pirates are popping up all over the place these days (although mostly off the coast of Somalia, it has to be said). Elmore Leonard and Stella Rimington are two authors to have set their novels against a backdrop of Somali piracy, and now sometime Dublin resident Stephen Leather is adding his pieces-of-eight’s worth with FAIR GAME. To wit:

Kidnapping is one of the cruellest crimes - lives are put at risk for cold, hard cash. But when Somali pirates seize the crew of a yacht off the coast of Africa, they bite off more than they can chew. One of the hostages has friends in high places and Spider Shepherd is put on the case. He goes deep undercover in an audacious plan to bring an end to the pirate gang’s reign of terror. But as Shepherd closes in on his quarry he realises that there’s much more at stake than the lives of the hostages and that the pirates are involved in a terrorist plot that will strike at the heart of London.

  FAIR GAME, by the way, is Leather’s eight Spider Shepherd novel, and his 25th in total, by my reckoning. Prolific stuff. “If I get any spare time I’ll be working on a new thriller set in the United States,” says Leather on his blog, “using Richard Yokely, who appears in several of the Spider Shepherd books. And I really want to do a sequel to PRIVATE DANCER. I just wish there were more hours in the day.”
  Settle down there, squire. Leave a little paper in the rain forest for the rest of us working chumps …

A Cheap Shortcut To E-Oblivion

He’s an award-winning author and an agent, and he self-publishes his own ebooks, but it may be coming time for some enterprising publisher to employ Allan Guthrie as a commissioning editor. Allan was one of the contributors, along with Stephen Leather, Susanne O’Leary and Victorine Lieske, to a feature I had published in the Irish Times yesterday on the subject of epublishing, where he suggested that the publishing industry is missing a trick in not utilising the new technology to its own advantage. To wit:

“I find it odd,” says Guthrie, “that at a time when ebook sales are escalating, more publishers aren’t setting up ebook-only imprints and acquiring titles for those new lines like there’s no tomorrow. It seems like a no-brainer to me that you could put out cheap digital editions first, see what flies, and produce paper versions of the more successful ones (and print on demand for the others). So to me it seems that digital and print can be complementary. But then, I’m not a publisher. At least, not of anyone other than myself.”

  For the rest of the feature, clickety-click here …
  There’s a podcast that dovetails with the feature, in which yours truly, Anna Carey and Fintan O’Toole chat about epublishing and the future of genre publishing in Ireland. Both Anna and Fintan make the same point about epublishing, as did a number of people who contacted me from the publishing industry in the wake of the feature’s publication, which is that epublishing isn’t as simple as it looks, particularly in terms of the need for an editor. With which point I agree wholeheartedly - my own ebook, EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, was a previously published title which benefited from having an editor. I’d further suggest that an editor isn’t the only requirement: if you’re going to successful at self-publishing as an e-author, you’ll need (among other things, including a bloody good book) a professional to design your cover, another to format / typeset the work, and you’ll also need to invest heavily (time or money) in promotion. In other words, readers are fully entitled to expect the same quality from their ebooks as they would from a conventionally published title. Any writer who believes epublishing is a cheap shortcut to getting published is taking a cheap shortcut to oblivion.
  For that podcast, clickety-click here …

Something Pooky This Way Comes

John Connolly has been dabbling in the dark corners where demons lurk for many years now, and Stuart Neville’s THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST (aka THE TWELVE), as the title suggests, also incorporated supernatural elements, or at least allowed for the possibility of such. Is a trend starting? Should I start dusting off my dog-eared collection of Aleister Crowleys? For lo, the blurb for Stephen Leather’s latest, NIGHTFALL, runneth thusly:

“You’re going to hell, Jack Nightingale.” They are the words that ended his career as a police negotiator. Now Jack’s a struggling private detective – and the chilling words come back to haunt him. Nightingale’s life is turned upside down the day that he inherits a mansion with a priceless library; it comes from a man who claims to be his father, and it comes with a warning. That Nightingale’s soul was sold at birth and a devil will come to claim it on his thirty-third birthday – just three weeks away. Jack doesn’t believe in Hell, probably doesn’t believe in Heaven either. But when people close to him start to die horribly, he is led to the inescapable conclusion that real evil may be at work. And that if he doesn’t find a way out he’ll be damned in hell for eternity.

  And if that doesn’t constitute a trend, then how about THE DEVIL, the forthcoming Jack Taylor from Sir Kenneth of Bruen? Quoth the blurb elves:

America - the land of opportunity, a place where economic prosperity beckons: but not for PI Jack Taylor, who’s just been refused entry. Disappointed and bitter, he thinks that an encounter with an over-friendly stranger in an airport bar is the least of his problems. Except that this stranger seems to know rather more than he should about Jack. Jack thinks no more of their meeting and resumes his old life in Galway. But when he’s called to investigate a student murder - connected to an elusive Mr K - he remembers the man from the airport. Is the stranger really is who he says he is? With the help of the Jameson, Jack struggles to make sense of it all. After several more murders and too many coincidental encounters, Jack believes he may have met his nemesis. But why has he been chosen? And could he really have taken on the devil himself?

  Jack, of course, has long been at war with the demon drink, but this sounds a bit more personal …
  So. The Big Question: Any other upcoming occult-themed Irish crime novels out there we should know about? Or any featuring a few angels, maybe even a Messiah? We’re all ears, people …

  This week I have been mostly reading: DIAMOND STAR HALO by Tiffany Murray; PILGERMANN by Russell Hoban; and SICILIAN CAROSUEL by Lawrence Durrell.

Shiny-Shiny, Shiny Books Of Leather

The lovely people at Hodder & Stoughton were kind enough to send us a copy of Stephen Leather’s latest, DEAD MEN, and we really couldn't resist the headline. Quoth the blurb elves:

Former SAS trooper turned undercover cop Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd knows there are no easy solutions in the war against terrorism. But when a killer starts to target pardoned IRA terrorists, Shepherd has to put his life on the line to protect his former enemies. Whilst he is undercover in Belfast, a grief-stricken Saudi whose two sons died under torture in the name of the War On Terror is planning to avenge their deaths by striking out at two people close to Shepherd. As the Muslim assassin closes in on his prey, Shepherd realises that the only way to save lives is to become a killer himself.

Yes, yes – but is it any good? Quoth the Daily Express:

“There’s a new breed of British crime writer giving the genre a much-needed shake-up – and Stephen Leather is at the forefront … the sheer impetus of his storytelling is damned hard to resist.”

So there you have it, the book that finally lends the lie to the old saw that DEAD MEN tell no tales …

Funky Friday’s Freaky-Deak

Being our slightly jaundiced look back over the Irish crime fiction week that was, to wit: Arlene Hunt’s MISSING PRESUMED DEAD got its paperback release and pole-vaulted into the bestseller list, prompting in no little amount of gadzooking around at chez Hunt: “While sitting here at my desk earlier, chewing the end of a biro to ribbons and pondering the imponderable, namely how in the name of shark-jumping I was going to get John out of the scrape I’d just written him into, my telephone rang. Wearily, blearily, none too cheerily, I got up and went to throttle the offending racket. But gadzooks! Stall the ball! Hold yer horses. For it was news, good news, the sort of news Tuesdays never bring forth. MISSING PRESUMED DEAD is number five in the bestsellers list in Ireland!” Yaaaay! … Meanwhile, no one bothered to tell us that Darren Shan, prodigious and bestselling YA author, is shooting for the adult market when PROCESSION OF THE DEAD is released on February 25 … Ditto for THE INSIDER: THE PRISON DIARIES OF EAMONN BOYCE, which was published by Lilliput back in November. Like, was it something we said, people? Happily, the ever-lovely folk at Hodder Headline Ireland saw fit to pop a copy of Stephen Leather’s latest, DEAD MEN, in the post. It hits the shelves on January 24 … Marshal Zeringue was kind enough to wrassle our humble offering THE BIG O to the ground and Page 99 it until it uncled … Irish Independent columnist Kevin Myers (right) took a pop at gun crime and the Irish political classes, the gist of the piece running thusly: “For we have criminal gun crime for the same reasons that IRA gun crime went on for so long: because our political classes have not been shot, and are too morally inert to have taken the necessary action to have crushed either terrorist or criminal. But just one gangland killing, just one, among the precious 4 and 6 brigade, and by God, policing priorities would soon change. Until then, our political establishment will not really care what happens in working-class housing estates. If it really did, Garda Commissioner Murphy’s head would be on a stake outside Dublin Castle for even daring to promise a mere 2pc drop in crime in exchange for an 11pc increase in resources. Instead, his bonce is still on his shoulders, and the outcry from TDs over the ploddish modesty of his ambitions could have been completely drowned out by the din of tadpoles darning their socks.” Yep, those blummin’ tadpoles, darning while Rome burns … Finally, here’s Oscar-winning director Martin McDonagh introducing the trailer for the upcoming IN BRUGES, which stars Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes in which looks a lot like an Irish take on an Elmore Leonard-style caper flick. “If I’d grown up on a farm and was retarded, Bruges might impress me. But I didn’t, soooo … it doesn’t.” Maybe not, but the movie impressed Clint at Ain't It Cool News. Roll it there, Collette …