SLAUGHTER'S HOUND: “Everything You Want From Noir.”

I was clearing out some old files over the weekend, and I came across this - the blurb Tana French was kind enough to write for SLAUGHTER’S HOUND, and which I never got to use in full. Seems kind of a waste just to throw it out, so here it is:

“SLAUGHTER’S HOUND has everything you want from noir – a plot that switchbacks fast and furiously enough to give you whiplash, a desperately damaged investigator trying to hold on as the last threads tethering him to his humanity are ripped away, a cast of slippery and ruthless characters playing a high-stakes game, a dark and ambiguous moral heart – but what makes it something special is the writing: taut, honed and vivid, packed with phrases that I read over and over because reading them was a sheer pleasure.” – Tana French, author of BROKEN HARBOUR

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books

UPDATE: A quick thank you to everyone who took part in the Tana French / BROKEN HARBOUR competition – the response was fantastic. The winner is Linda Callaghan of Glasnevin in Dublin, Ireland. Stay tuned for another competition later this week, when I’ll be giving away copies of Mark O’Sullivan’s CROCODILE TEARS.

As you may or may not know, Tana French’s BROKEN HARBOUR won the Best Mystery / Thriller Award at the LA Times awards last weekend. A splendid achievement, I think you’ll agree, and fully deserved – BROKEN HARBOUR is a wonderful book.
  To (modestly) celebrate Tana’s win, I’m giving away a copy of BROKEN HARBOUR to one lucky reader. First, the blurb elves:

In Broken Harbour, a ghost estate outside Dublin - half-built, half-inhabited, half-abandoned - two children and their father are dead. The mother is on her way to intensive care. Scorcher Kennedy is given the case because he is the Murder squad’s star detective. At first he and his rookie partner, Richie, think this is a simple one: Pat Spain was a casualty of the recession, so he killed his children, tried to kill his wife Jenny, and finished off with himself. But there are too many inexplicable details and the evidence is pointing in two directions at once.
  Scorcher’s personal life is tugging for his attention. Seeing the case on the news has sent his sister Dina off the rails again, and she’s resurrecting something that Scorcher thought he had tightly under control: what happened to their family, one summer at Broken Harbour, back when they were children. The neat compartments of his life are breaking down, and the sudden tangle of work and family is putting both at risk . . .

  To be in with a chance of winning, just email me at dbrodb[at]gmail.com, putting ‘Broken Harbour’ in the subject line and your name and postal address in the body of the email. The closing date is noon on Friday, May 3rd, and I’ll draw the winner’s name out of a bobbly hat on Friday afternoon. Et bon chance, mes amis …

UPDATE: Just a quick reminder, folks – some of the entrants to the competition have neglected to include their name and postal address in the body of the email. If you’re taking part, please remember to include your name and address as part of your entry. Thanks kindly.

The Year Of La French, Part II

I’ve had good reason to congratulate Tana French in the past, and no doubt I’ll be doing so many times in the future, but for now let me congratulate her on winning the LA Times’ Book Prize for Best Mystery / Thriller with BROKEN HARBOUR (and a hat-tip to Joe Long in LA for the early info yesterday afternoon).
  Irish crime writers have fared well at the LA Times’ awards in recent years. Stuart Neville won for his debut, THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST), and Stuart was also shortlisted for COLLUSION – Eoin Colfer was also shortlisted in the same year, for PLUGGED. Tana French herself was previously shortlisted, for FAITHFUL PLACE.
  The LA Times’ gong is the second Tana has picked up for BROKEN HARBOUR, after the Irish Book Awards gave her the nod in the Best Crime Fiction category last year, and she’s currently shortlisted for the Strand Critics’ Award. Given the way Tana’s debut IN THE WOODS swept the boards, and that BROKEN HARBOUR is in my opinion a superior book, 2013 could very well turn out to be another Year of the French. Here at CAP Towers, we’ll be keeping our collective fingers crossed …

Thus Spake Mr & Mrs Kirkus …

J. Kingston Pierce compiles his Top Ten Crime / Mystery novels of 2012 over at the Kirkus Reviews blog, and you won’t be even remotely surprised to learn that a certain BROKEN HARBOUR by Tana French shows up. More intriguing, perhaps, is the fact that there’s a second Irish crime novel on the list, and one that seems to have flown under many radars this year: Anthony Quinn’s debut, DISAPPEARED. To wit:

“Quinn enriches DISAPPEARED with Irish history and does an excellent job of ratcheting up the tension as his plot unfolds.” - J. Kingston Pierce

  Very nice indeed. For more on DISAPPEARED, clickety-click here …

The Irish Book Awards: Yep, It’s Third Time Unlucky

Show me a good loser, as Vince Lombardi once said, and I’ll show you a loser. Which is irrefutably true. It’s also true, if we can continue the football analogy, that there’s no shame in being beaten by a better team, and BROKEN HARBOUR by Tana French was a very worthy winner of the Ireland AM Best Crime Novel award at the Irish Book Awards last night.
  I’ve said all along this year that BROKEN HARBOUR is a tremendous piece of work, and while it’s always disappointing not to win once you make it onto the shortlist - last night was my third time unlucky at the Irish Book Awards - it was no mean achievement to make it even that far, particularly when you consider some of the very fine novels that didn’t. Anyway, hearty congratulations to Tana French, and sincere commiserations to my fellow nominees Niamh O’Connor, Benjamin Black, Louise Philips and Laurence O’Bryan.
  Meanwhile, I was delighted to see Eoin Colfer win in the Young Adult section for the final Artemis Fowl novel, and John Banville win the Best Novel category with ANCIENT LIGHT. For all the Irish Book Award winners, clickety-click here …

On Ill-Fated Gull-Winged White Elephants

I mentioned a couple of weeks back that I believe the Ireland AM Crime Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards will be something of a coin-toss between Tana French’s BROKEN HARBOUR and Adrian McKinty’s THE COLD COLD GROUND, and nothing has happened in the interim to change my mind. The sequel to THE COLD COLD GROUND is I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET (Serpent’s Tail), which will be published in January, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

Sean Duffy knows there’s no such thing as a perfect crime. But a torso in a suitcase is pretty close. Still, one tiny clue is all it takes, and there it is. A tattoo. So Duffy, fully fit and back at work after the severe trauma of his last case, is ready to follow the trail of blood - however faint - that always, always connects a body to its killer. A legendarily stubborn man, Duffy becomes obsessed with this mystery as a distraction from the ruins of his love life, and to push down the seed of self-doubt that he seems to have traded for his youthful arrogance. So from country lanes to city streets, Duffy works every angle. And wherever he goes, he smells a rat ...

  As is the case with COLD GROUND, SIRENS brilliantly captures the atmosphere of paranoia and barely controlled fury of 1980’s Northern Ireland, but it also comes with the added bonus of being - to the best of my knowledge - the first crime / mystery novel to feature the notoriously ill-fated gull-winged white elephant (aka the DeLorean car) as an integral part of the tale. Of course, I may well be revealing the depth of my ignorance here. If anyone can point me at mystery novels featuring DeLoreans, I’d love to see ’em …

No Port In A Storm

Tana French’s BROKEN HARBOUR (Hachette Ireland) is one of my contenders for the best Irish novel of the year. Set in 2009, it’s a police procedural that gets under the skin of the post-Celtic Tiger years, investigating the extent to which the Irish economic meltdown had a brutalising effect on Irish society. I had an interview with Tana published in the Evening Herald yesterday, which opened up a lot like this:

Tana French is talking about killing again.
  “I really don’t believe in this borderline that exists between genre fiction and literature,” she says. “It shouldn’t be an either-or situation. Just because you kill somebody off, that shouldn’t mean it’s perceived as a particular kind of book.”
  The book in question is BROKEN HARBOUR, French’s fourth novel. Employing the framework of a police procedural crime novel, the book is a thought-provoking social commentary which explores the damaged mind of a psychologically complex anti-hero as a metaphor for a broken country.
  Set in the wake of the economic crash, BROKEN HARBOUR has a lot to live up to. French’s debut, IN THE WOODS (2007), won every available American crime writing prize - the Edgar, the Barry, the Anthony, the Macavity. She has been twice shortlisted for the LA Times Crime / Mystery Novel of the Year, for IN THE WOODS and FAITHFUL PLACE (2010). The latter was also nominated for the Impac Award earlier this year. French’s novels are perennial New York Times best-sellers, and tend to receive the kind of glowing reviews more associated with the John Banvilles and Julian Barnes of this world.
  In short, Tana French is one of modern Ireland’s great novelists. BROKEN HARBOUR isn’t just a wonderful mystery novel, it’s also the era-defining post-Celtic Tiger novel the Irish literati have been crying out for.
  “That wasn’t deliberate,” says Tana. “I wasn’t going for a state-of-the-nation kind of book. It’s just, when this is permeating the air around you, it seeps into everything.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

The Year Of Ms French

I mentioned last week that Tana French’s BROKEN HARBOUR had picked up a couple of very nice reviews in the Irish Times and The Observer, with Bernice Harrison in the Irish Times, in particular, offering some astute observations.
  The Sunday Times also chipped in with its two cents last weekend, with the gist running thusly:

“It is the surprising subtlety of plot, language and tone that makes this one of the must-read page-turners of the summer.” - Sunday Times

  The enthusiasm for BROKEN HARBOUR didn’t noticeably flag during the week, when our American cousins stepped up to the plate. To wit:

“It’s not the fashion in literary fiction these days to address such things as the psychological devastation that a fallout of the middle class can wreak on those who have never known anything else, and Ms. French does it with aplomb — and a headless sparrow and dozens of infrared baby monitors.” - Washington Times

“Edgar-winner French’s eloquently slow-burning fourth Dublin murder squad novel shows her at the top of her game.” - Publishers Weekly (Pick of the Week)

“This may sound like a routine police procedural. But like Gillian Flynn’s GONE GIRL, this summer’s other dagger-sharp display of mind games, BROKEN HARBOUR is something more. It’s true that Ms. French takes readers to all the familiar way stations of a murder investigation: the forensics, the autopsies, the serial interrogations and so on. But she has urgent points to make about the social and economic underpinnings of the Spain family murders. And she has irresistibly sly ways of toying with readers’ expectations.” - New York Times

“She’s drawn not just to the who but also to the why — those bigger mysteries about the human weaknesses that drive somebody to such inhuman brutality. What really gives BROKEN HARBOUR its nerve-rattling force is her exploration of events leading up to the murders, rendered just as vividly as the detectives’ scramble to solve them.” - Entertainment Weekly

“Perfectly paced, with nuanced characters set against a backdrop of heart-rending conflict and dialogue that reads as though you’re a fly on the wall, BROKEN HARBOUR shows once again that Tana French is not only one of the most assured crime writers of our times, but one of the best emerging writers in any genre.” - January Magazine

  So there you have it. It can only be a matter of time before someone jumps the shark in suggesting that BROKEN HARBOUR ‘transcends the genre’, but in the meantime, and in my humble opinion, the hype is fully justified. Enjoy.

Any Port In A Storm

Tana French’s BROKEN HARBOUR (Hachette Ireland) was reviewed today in the Irish Times by Bernice Harrison, and very well received it was too. What I particularly liked about the review was Bernice’s addendum at the end, which runs thusly:

“There’s a frequent lament that artists have been slow to respond to our economic depression, but the commentators who take this view surely haven’t immersed themselves in the work of our excellent new generation of crime writers, several of whom, including Tana French, set their work very much in the here and now. In BROKEN HARBOUR, as well as delivering a gruesome murder scene and some clever sleuthing, she picks away at the psychological damage the economic meltdown has done behind the glossy front doors of the new suburbia.” - Bernice Harrison, Irish Times

  That’s fair comment, I think. Not every Irish crime writer is interested in pulling up the carpets and writing exposés of our current woe, etc., but a significant number are, and are doing very interesting work.
  Equally interesting, perhaps, is the news that Fintan O’Toole has been appointed Literary Editor at the Irish Times. In an op-ed piece which appeared in the Old Lady in 2009, O’Toole was one of the first of the establishment commentators to recognise that Irish crime writing was saying important things, concluding his piece with the line, ‘In creating an Ireland with no faith in authority and no belief that the bad guys will be vanquished by naming their names, they get closer to reality than most literary fiction has managed.’
  That article is now behind a firewall, but if you can find DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS in a library, the article was republished therein.
  Meanwhile, for the rest of Bernice Harrison’s review of BROKEN HARBOUR, clickety-click here …

  UPDATE: The Observer weighed in on BROKEN HARBOUR yesterday, with the gist running thusly:

“BROKEN HARBOUR is a tale about the different facets of obsession and insanity, and it winds up to a finale that is almost too distressing. The best yet of French’s four excellent thrillers, it leaves its readers – just like the Spains – “throat-deep in terror”.” - Alison Flood

If It’s Broken, Don’t Fix It

It feels a bit odd to be suggesting that Tana French’s latest offering will be a game-changer, given that she’s already a multi-award-winning, best-selling author, but I do believe that BROKEN HARBOUR is going to take her onto a whole new level. In conversations in the last couple of weeks, I’ve used the words ‘majestic’, ‘superb’ and even ‘epic’ about BROKEN HARBOUR, and while that kind of hyperbole generally leaves me cold - for an industry based on words, publishing is rather less rigorous when it comes to praise than it might or should be - I think BROKEN HARBOUR deserves every plaudit coming its way.
  I think it’s a very, very good crime novel, even though I’m generally not all that fussed about police procedurals; and as I’ve also mentioned somewhere else (Twitter, probably), BROKEN HARBOUR is also ‘the great post-Celtic Tiger novel’ the literati has been baying for. There’s even more to it than that, though. Rooted in the banality of suburban life, the story is nonetheless genuinely horrifying; and despite being one of the most fatalistically noir titles I’ve read recently, the story also moved me to tears.
  Of course, my reaction to the book probably says a lot more about me than it does about BROKEN HARBOUR or Tana French’s writing; and maybe I’m just getting soft in my middle age, given that Brian McGilloway’s THE NAMELESS DEAD also had me reaching for the hankies ...
  This isn’t a review per se, because I’m not in a position to review BROKEN HARBOUR, given that - declaration alert - Tana French has been kind enough to write a blurb for my forthcoming book. But you don’t have to take my word for it: Maxine over at Petrona had a very early review of the novel, while Myles McWeeney reviewed it last weekend in the Irish Independent.
  Enjoy, folks.

Romantic Ireland's Dead And Gone ...

… and living on a ghost estate, apparently. Only sixty more sleeps before Tana French’s latest novel, BROKEN HARBOUR, is published on July 21st, gorgeously eerie cover and all. I’m looking forward to it, I have to say: French is one of those writers blessed with a number of gifts, offering substance by way of an intriguing plot set in the here-and-now of modern Ireland, with her elegant prose providing the style. Quote the back-page elves:

In BROKEN HARBOUR, a ghost estate outside Dublin - half-built, half-inhabited, half-abandoned - two children and their father are dead. The mother is on her way to intensive care. Scorcher Kennedy is given the case because he is the Murder squad’s star detective. At first he and his rookie partner, Richie, think this is a simple one: Pat Spain was a casualty of the recession, so he killed his children, tried to kill his wife Jenny, and finished off with himself. But there are too many inexplicable details and the evidence is pointing in two directions at once.
  Scorcher’s personal life is tugging for his attention. Seeing the case on the news has sent his sister Dina off the rails again, and she’s resurrecting something that Scorcher thought he had tightly under control: what happened to their family, one summer at Broken Harbour, back when they were children. The neat compartments of his life are breaking down, and the sudden tangle of work and family is putting both at risk . . .

  The novel has already attracted some very nice encomiums. To wit:

“Broken Harbour is better than whatever’s going to win the 2012 Man Booker. It’s better than the novels that are going to win the Costa and Orange prizes, and if it doesn’t win the Gold Dagger for best crime novel, the injustice might drive me to go and sit in a tent for a while, even though I hate camping. Tana French is a genius.” - Sophie Hannah

“I’ve been enthusiastically telling everyone who will listen to read Tana French. She is, without a doubt, my favourite new mystery writer. Her novels are poignant, compelling, beautifully written and wonderfully atmospheric. Just start reading the first page. You’ll see what I mean.” - Harlan Coben

“Tana French is one of those rare novelists who combine a gift for dialogue and characterisation, with suspense, intrigue and fabulous plotting. And she’s a beautiful writer, to boot. A real treat.” - Kate Mosse

  Very nice indeed. Finally, here’s a promo vid in which Tana French makes what appears to be a crime writing queen’s speech to Canada - roll it there, Collette …