Synge When You’re Winning: Two More Jack Taylor Movies Based On Ken Bruen’s Novels

Ken Bruen’s fans will be delighted to hear that there are another two Jack Taylor movies coming from TV3 in the next couple of weeks, starting on Sunday night, March 3rd, and starring Iain Glen (right) as the bould Jack. To wit:

Two new films, ‘Jack Taylor: The Dramatist’ and ‘Jack Taylor: The Priest’, which were filmed on location in Galway, will see Iain Glen (Game of Thrones), Nora Jane Noone (Deception) and Killian Scott (Love/Hate) reprise their roles, while Emma Eliza Regan (Love Eternal), Aaron Monaghan (The Other Side of Sleep), and Gavin Drea (What Richard Did) join the cast. The film series, which is based on the novels of Galway writer Ken Bruen, follow ex-garda Taylor, as he takes on cases that the Gardaí won’t. In ‘The Dramatist’, which airs on TV3 on Sunday, audiences catch up with Taylor, who against all odds, is clean and sober. While his mother resides in a retirement home, Taylor is summoned by a jailed drug-dealer who doesn’t believe the death of his younger sister was an accident. When a second murdered girl is found, Taylor receives teasing messages from a killer obsessed with John Millington Synge’s play ‘Deirdre of the Sorrows’.

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

Portnoy’s Not Complaining

It’s fair to say it’s been a busy couple of months for Arlene Hunt. Not only has she published her latest offering, THE CHOSEN, but she and her husband decided to bypass the traditional publishing route to set up their own publishing company, Portnoy Publishing (and no, it’s not a Philip Roth reference). Happily, all the hard work seems to be paying off: THE CHOSEN is the ‘Book of the Month’ for TV3’s Ireland AM book club, which is fantastic exposure for the book, Arlene and Portnoy.
  The good news for readers is that there’s more than a terrific read in prospect if they get involved. If you pen a review of THE CHOSEN and submit it to Ireland AM, you’ll be in with a chance of winning a laptop. Nice. For all the details, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, Arlene was on RTE’s Arena arts programme recently, talking with presenter Sean Rocks about THE CHOSEN, and the decision to go it alone set up her own publishing company, despite the fact that she’d been published for many years previously by one of Ireland’s most respected publishing houses. Given all the yakkity-yak about the future of publishing and the changing dynamic of the relationship between authors and publishing houses, it makes for fascinating listening. Clickety-click here for more …

Ken Bruen’s Cartoons

Ah, bored. Remember being bored? God be with the days when I’d be so bored I’d collapse comatose on the couch and flick through the TV channels just to see if there was anything on that didn’t involve cooking, buying property or Hitler. Halcyon days.
  Boredom’s a bit of a luxury these days, as is TV: about the only TV I watch now is the occasional baseball game on ESPN, Match of the Day on a Saturday night, and a documentary now and again. I got to watch half of a documentary on the Minoans last night, and good stuff it was too, although I stumbled off to bed once they started to get into the really good stuff, i.e., human sacrifice. Not that the human sacrifice bit put me off; more that I wanted to be alert when I come to the second half, so as not to miss the gory details.
  Anyway, I may just have to make room in the schedule for some TV on Thursday night, as I discovered whilst roaming through KT McCaffrey’s new blog. Quoth KT:

“I’m looking forward to Ken Bruen’s latest Jack Taylor episode. It’s on TV3 this Thursday at 9.30pm. Should be interesting to see how Bruen’s writing translates to the small screen. This one is called ‘The Pikemen Murders’ and will be shown over two nights.”

  Meanwhile, Publishers Weekly throws its eye over Sir Kenneth’s latest offering, HEADSTONE, with the gist running thusly:

Moments of grace are fleeting in Bruen’s world, and things rapidly head south after Taylor receives a miniature gravestone in the post, courtesy of a group of psychopaths calling themselves “Headstone.” Led by a fanatic recidivist criminal from a previous Taylor case, they target the “weak,” including the handicapped, the mentally ill, and the homeless. Now they have their sights set on Taylor and everyone close to him. That the plot is a tad cartoonish and over-the-top scarcely matters in a remarkable series that at heart is about one man’s reckoning with a lifetime of pain and loss in a rapidly changing Ireland.

  ‘A tad cartoonish’? A tad harsh, no? Especially when it’s the case that Ken Bruen tends to use plot in the way a TV chef might use a wok, a purely functional tool into which are mixed his prime ingredients of character, atmosphere and language.
  Of course, it being a Ken Bruen novel, virtually anything is possible, and without having read it yet, it’s not beyond the bounds of plausibility, given that his previous offering featured the Devil, that the storyline features actual cartoon characters.
  Ken Bruen scripting Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote? I’d buy that for a dollar, not least because I’d imagine that that perpetually irritating overgrown chicken would finally get its comeuppance …

Yet More GREEN STREETS: Or, Dropping Murder Back In The Alleyway, Where It Belongs

(l-r: Claire Coughlan, Jane Casey, Cormac Millar, Declan Hughes, Sara Keating, Kevin McCarthy, Ingrid Black, Arlene Hunt, Declan Burke, Gene Kerrigan, Alex Barclay, John Connolly, Ian Ross, Alan Glynn and Ken Bruen.

Back to DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS duty today, folks, and what I consider to be a rather interesting and possibly even historic photograph (above), which was actually taken in a (sadly metaphorical) green alleyway, as opposed to on a green street, outside the Gutter Bookshop at Tuesday night’s launch of said tome. The photo was taken outside, of course, because of the sheer volume of the combined egos involved; one wrong word, one perceived slight, and the Gutter Bookshop could have gone up like the Hindenburg.
  Thankfully, everyone was excessively polite to one another, and very nice it was to see so many excellent writers in the same company. Hopefully we’ll all get the chance to do it again some day. For more pics of the night, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, a certain Ray Thornton of the Evening Herald has the dubious honour of being the first to hit the mainstream newsprint media with a piece on DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS: IRISH CRIME WRITING IN THE 21st CENTURY. The article was more in the way of an article offering an overview of Irish crime writing, using GREEN STREETS as a jumping-off point, but Thornton was suitably impressed by chapters from, among others, John Connolly, Declan Hughes, Cora Harrison and Tara Brady. He was particularly impressed by the guys ‘n’ gals of Norn Iron. Quoth Thornton:

“One of the most fascinating aspects of DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS is the contributions made by writers from the North. If authors in the Republic were reluctant to tack the Troubles then one can only imagine how difficult it was for those operating in the Six Counties. And yet, the travails of trying to figure out a way of writing entertaining books about killers when there was murder and mayhem going on around you adds a blackly humourous edge to the pieces by Colin Bateman, Adrian McKinty and Brian McGilloway.”

  We thank you kindly, sir.
  Incidentally, and if you’re interested, I appeared with Eoin McNamee on TV3’s Ireland AM programme last Wednesday, to talk about GREEN STREETS and the phenomenal rise in Irish crime writing. The link is here …
  Finally, the second launch of GREEN STREETS takes place in Belfast on this coming Saturday, June 18th, at the Crescent Arts Centre, in conjunction with No Alibis and the Belfast Books Festival. I’ll be there, but don’t let that put you off - Brian McGilloway, Eoin McNamee, Colin Bateman, Stuart Neville, Arlene Hunt and Gerard Brennan will also be in attendance. If you’re in the Belfast area next Saturday, you’re more than welcome along. All the details can be found here …
  Oh, and by the way - if you’re in Belfast on Friday night, there’s an unmissable gig planned for No Alibis. Titled ‘States of Crime: The State in Crime Fiction’, it’s a conversation between Eoin McNamee and David Peace, which will be hosted by BLOODY WINTER author Andrew Pepper. For all the details, clickety-click here …

The Sun Comes Up On Galway Bay: Or, Jack Taylor Hits The Silver Screen

‘Jack Taylor’, the pilot for the movies based on Ken Bruen’s THE GUARDS, screened last night on TV3, and I have to say - reluctantly - that I don’t buy Iain Glen (above, left) in the lead. It doesn’t help that his faux-Irish accent wanders all over the map, but that’s not the biggest problem.
  The script, and particularly in the voice-overs, makes something whimsical of Jack Taylor’s fatalism. In the movie, Jack Taylor is a broth of a boy, prone to the odd eye-twinkle, a tough man to deal with if you push him too hard.
  In the novels, or in my reading of them at least, Jack Taylor is a dangerous bastard to know, a man fuelled on anger and Jameson, a man who is as hard as only the truly brittle can be, who know that just one more shove or punch or insult could shatter the façade.
  It also doesn’t help that the movie, being a movie, needed to make of THE GUARDS a straightforward narrative of investigation, whereas the novel, and all the Taylor novels, are a post-modern take on the detective story, for the most part philosophical ruminations occasionally linked by the need to have some investigative narrative.
  I suppose the difference is that, in the movie, Jack Taylor was investigating a series of crimes, rather than investigating Galway itself as a microcosm of the new Ireland.
  There was a lot to like, it has to be said, not least of which was the depiction of Galway city, and there were some good performances in the minor roles. And hey, maybe Iain Glen has the chops to convince an audience that isn’t familiar with the Bruen novels. Fans, though, will be disappointed, I think. For some promo vids, and to make up your own mind, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, it’s been a busy week for Irish crime fiction. Staying with TV3, the ever-radiant Alex Barclay was on the Ireland AM couch, talking up her latest offering, TIME OF DEATH. The conversation includes a very nice shout-out to John Connolly and Declan Hughes - clickety-click here for more …
  Staying with Declan Hughes … I don’t know if you could call Emma Donoghue’s new novel, ROOM, a crime novel, even though it concerns itself with some rather despicable criminal activity, but Squire Hughes was suitably impressed when reviewing it for the Irish Times. All the details are here …
  Staying with reviews: the eagle-eyed Maxine Clarke has organised her reviews by country over at the Petrona blog, and her introduction to her Irish reviews cites Gene Kerrigan, Brian McGilloway, Alan Glynn and, erm, yours truly. But don’t let that put you off - there’s some really good stuff just about here …
  Elsewhere, Peter Rozovsky reviews Declan Hughes’ latest, CITY OF LOST GIRLS, while the good word has already started to tumble in for Stuart Neville’s COLLUSION …
  Finally, and veering off the straight-and-narrow of crime fiction, congrats to all who were responsible for having Dublin declared a UNESCO City of Literature last week; and congrats too to Irish scribes Emma Donoghue and Paul Murray, both of whom were long-listed for the Booker Prize, for ROOM and SKIPPY DIES respectively.
  Nice work, folks. Very nice indeed …

Just The Facts, Hack

A crime correspondent for the Sunday World, Niamh O’Connor gets to see the consequences of violent crime in a way that many crime writers don’t. What’s unusual is that she’s more than happy to talk about how her antipathy towards the criminals she encounters translated into her debut novel. Here’s a snippet from her blog:

“Went on TV3 this morning to talk about IF I NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN, and realised how instinctive a hack anchor Sinead Desmond was when she started talking about the murder of the gangland boss, the Don.
  “Since IF I NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN began as an idea about a killer purging gangland to atone for an horrific crime against a little girl, it was an intuitive link. It may sound heartless, but now the Don is dead, what’s wrong with the feeling of good riddance?”

  For the rest of the blog post, clickety-click here. Meanwhile, the full interview with Sinead Desmond comes below, and makes for very interesting viewing indeed. Roll it there, Collette …

“Ah, The Roar Of The Sawdust, The Smell Of The Crowd …”

Yours truly tripped the lights fantastic and briefly stumbled into the bright glare of showbiz yesterday morning, courtesy of TV3, which is due kudos for its coverage of Irish crime writing, which has pretty decent for quite a while now, but which has cranked up a considerable few notches ever since Ireland AM announced it was sponsoring the inaugural Irish crime fiction gong at the Irish Book Awards. Shortlisted author Brian McGilloway (yep, it’s Brian McGilloway week on CAP) was interviewed last week, when he revealed that BLEED A RIVER DEEP was titled for an Ed Harcourt song, while another shortlistee, Tana French (right, and shortlisted for THE LIKENESS), got a grilling on Tuesday, although I can’t pretend to know what she actually said, being too distracted at how radiant the lady was looking.
  Thursday morning’s interview lowered the tone a little, as The Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman and The Artist Forthwith To Be Known as Some Dodgy Chancer gave it large about crime fiction and the movies, and the best book-to-movie adaptations of all time. My split vote goes to THE GODFATHER, a masterpiece derived from (if memory serves) a not particularly brilliant novel, and DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? / BLADE RUNNER, which is a novel of uneven pleasures, but a terrific sci-fi neo-noir movie, and genre-bending at its best.
  Clickety-click here for Brian McGilloway …
  … here for Tana French …
  … and here for Bateman and S.D. Chancer. Roll it there, Collette …

Ava: A-Va-Va-Voom

Following on from Thursday’s ‘negative and/or crap reviews’ storm in a teacup, Ava McCarthy’s debut, THE INSIDER, isn’t really my cup of Darjeeling. Which is a shame, because I really wanted to like it – the protag, Harry Martinez, is a likeable minx, what with her wilful computer hackery and poker-playing wiles. Anyway, what the blummery do I know, I can’t even snag myself a book deal with Lulu these days …
  Anyhoos, and as always, my opinion is utterly moot, because THE INSIDER is moving through the publishing world like the proverbial dose of salts, with a little birdie telling me that the novel is selling into so many territories they’re thinking of terra-forming Mars just to accommodate the overspill. First, however – drum roll there, maestro – the novel will be conquering China, which is, as a publishing territory, the ultimate in sleeping giants. Well done, that woman.
  Meanwhile, here’s an interview with Ava, conducted by TV3, which has been pretty damn good lately when it comes to supporting the Irish crime fic rabble. Roll it there, Collette …