It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Soul

It won’t be published until October, but already Stuart Neville’s STOLEN SOULS is shaping up to be one of the novels to watch out for in 2011. The winner of the LA Times’ Mystery / Thriller award in 2009 with his debut THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST, and in the running for the same gong this year for COLLUSION, Neville’s third novel comes freighted with expectation. Mind you, the blurb elves suggest that STOLEN SOULS will deliver. To wit:

Detective Inspector Jack Lennon of the Belfast Police has watched the developing cooperation between Northern Ireland’s Loyalist gangs and immigrant Lithuanian criminals with unease. The Lithuanians traffic women from Eastern Europe and Asia for the Loyalists’ brothels, and they’re all making big money in spite of the recession that has stopped Northern Ireland’s peace boom in its tracks. Lennon has a more intimate knowledge of the city’s brothels than he’ll ever admit, but the surge in trafficked girls makes him question his lifestyle, especially considering he has his daughter, Ellen, to care for now.
  When a Lithuanian trafficker turns up dead on Christmas Eve with a shard of glass embedded in his throat, Lennon’s plans to spend the holiday with Ellen are put in jeopardy. The dead man was the younger brother of a ruthless Lithuanian crime boss, Arturas Strazdas, and the young Ukrainian woman who killed him has escaped her captors. Now Strazdas holds the Loyalists responsible and won’t let up until everyone involved has paid. A bloody gang war erupts across the city.
  Meanwhile, somewhere in Belfast, Galya, the Ukrainian girl, is running for her life, alone and scared, clinging to the darkest corners as the frozen streets empty for the holiday. Galya’s captors told her how the police deal with illegal immigrants, that she is a criminal in a foreign land, and the law will not help her. And now she is also a murderer. She cannot be discovered by anyone, not the cops, not the gang who held her prisoner. There is only one person she can go to: a man she met on her first day as a prostitute, a friend who gave her a crucifix and an address to run to if she ever got away. He’d saved four prostitutes before her, he’s told her, and she can be his fifth. But when Galya arrives at the address, she finds something more evil than she had ever imagined.

  Sounds like a cracker. Mind you, I was putting the final proofs for DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS to bed this week, and while proofing Neville’s contribution, a short story entitled ‘The Craftsman’, it struck me that, as propulsive as he is as a thriller writer, it’s in the quieter moments, the emotional connections, that Neville truly excels. I can’t say much more than that or I’ll spoil the story; suffice to say that beneath the bearded, hard-boiled exterior Neville presents to the world, there lurks the soul of a poet. And, if the subtleties that underpin ‘The Craftsman’ is a measure of how Neville has developed as a writer since the publication of COLLUSION, then STOLEN SOULS promises to outstrip his previous novels by some distance. It’s a tantalising prospect.

There Will Be Fresh Blood

Waterstones’ ‘Fresh Blood’ campaign, currently in its second year, aims to showcase ‘some of the best new crime writers around’. The fact that one quarter of this year’s list is taken up by Irish writers is a sign of just how healthy 2009 was for Irish crime writing: step forward Alan Glynn (WINTERLAND), Gene Kerrigan (DARK TIMES IN THE CITY) and Stuart Neville (THE TWELVE, aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST).
  Unsurprisingly, all three novels finished in the top four (along with John Connolly’s THE LOVERS) in the inaugural ‘Crime Always Pays Irish Crime Novel of the Year’, with THE TWELVE topping the poll - no mean feat for a debut novel. Mind you, and as I said at the time, the fact that WINTERLAND was published in November worked against it, voting-wise, and I have no doubt it would have polled even better had it had a longer shelf-life.
  Anyway, the bottom line is that all three are terrific novels. Clickety-click here for a review of THE TWELVE, and here for a review of WINTERLAND, and here for DARK TIMES IN THE CITY. Or better still, go out and buy them, all three.
  Oh, and if anyone reading this has read any (or all) of the titles, don’t be shy about telling us what you thought about them. You know what to do …

Banana-Shaped Free-Kicks, Stuart Neville And Me

If you’ve read Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST), and you’re a football fan, and particularly a fan of Brazil circa 1970, you’ll understand why, in my many private conversations with myself, I tend to refer to Stuart as ‘Nevellino’. All of which is a rather circuitous - indeed, a veritable banana-shaped free-kick - way of letting you know that Stuart has uploaded Chapter One of THE TWELVE’S sequel-of-sorts, COLLUSION, over at his interweb portal. To wit:

CHAPTER ONE

“We’re being followed,” Eugene McSorley said. The Ford Focus crested the rise, weightless for a moment, and thudded hard back onto the tarmac. Its eight-year-old suspension did little to cushion the impact. McSorley kept his eyes on the rear-view mirror, the silver Skoda Octavia lost behind the hill he’d just sped over. It had been tailing them along the narrow country road since they crossed the border into the North.
  Comiskey twisted in the passenger seat. “I don’t see anyone,” he said. “No, wait. Fuck. Is that the peelers?”
  “Aye,” McSorley said. The Skoda reappeared in his mirror, its windows tinted dark green. He couldn’t make out the occupants, but they were cops all right. The tarmac darkened under the growing drizzle, the sky a blank, heavy sheet of grey above the green fields.
  “Jesus,” Hughes moaned from the back seat. “Are we going to get pulled?”
  “Looks like it,” Comiskey said. “Fuck.”
  Hedgerows streaked past the Focus. McSorley checked his speed, staying just below sixty. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’ve nothing on us. Not unless you boys have any blow in your pockets.”
  “Shit,” Hughes said.
  “What?”
  “I’ve an eighth on me.”
  McSorley shot a look back over his shoulder. “Arsehole. Chuck it.”
  McSorley hit the switch to roll down the rear window and pulled close to the hedgerow so the cops wouldn’t see. He watched his side mirror as Hughes’s hand flicked a small brown cube into the greenery. “Arsehole,” he repeated.
  Comiskey peered between the seats. “They’re not getting any closer,” he said.   “Maybe they won’t pull us.”
  McSorley said nothing. He raised the rear window again. The car rounded a bend onto a long straight, the road falling away in a shallow descent before rising to meet the skyline half a mile ahead. He flicked the wipers on. They left wet smears across the windscreen, barely shifting the water. He’d meant to replace them a year ago. McSorley cursed and squinted through the raindrops.
  A white van sat idling at a side road. It had all the time in the world to ease out and be on its way. It didn’t. Instead it inched forward to the junction, the driver holding it on the clutch. McSorley wet his lips. He felt the accelerator beneath the sole of his shoe. The Focus had a decent engine, but the suspension was shot. Once the road started to twist, he wouldn’t have a chance. He eased off the pedal. The van drew closer. Two men in the cabin, watching …

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Lost Girls And Golden Boys

It’s long past time to declare a moratorium on the serial killer in crime fiction. Yes, the serial killer is our contemporary bogeyman, and a McGuffin for our most primeval fears, Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf relocated from forest to urban nightmare - but enough already. For one, you’re far more likely to become the victim of an inept politician running the Department of Health than you are to fall into the hands of a serial killer. For two, the killer created by Anthony Zuiker for DARK ORIGINS is so barkingly implausible as to render the serial killer sub-genre beyond parody and pastiche for at least a generation to come.
  Marilyn Stasio and Hallie Ephron, reviewing Declan Hughes’s THE CITY OF LOST GIRLS last weekend in the New York Times and the Boston Globe respectively, lamented the fact that Hughes has his private eye Ed Loy pursuing a serial killer in his latest outing. As it happens, I think Hughes has created one of the very few believable serial killers I’ve read about in recent times, a character who is not simply a two-dimensional cipher for evil but who is fascinating in his own right. That caveat aside, both ladies, along with Laura Wilson in The Guardian, were generous in their praise of THE CITY OF LOST GIRLS. To wit:

Declan Hughes isn’t just an other gruff voice in the barking crowd of noir crime writers. His characters have depth, his scenes have drama, and his sentences have grace.” - Marilyn Stasio, New York Times

“No one writes crime fiction quite like Declan Hughes … The storytelling is lean but always with poetic force and attention paid to word choice and to the rhythm of the prose.” - Hallie Ephron, Boston Globe

“Irish writer Hughes’s fifth book is a welcome addition to a series which has given the tired private-eye sub-genre a much-needed shot in the arm … The plot is taut and pacy, the prose is gorgeous, and there are plenty of twists and turns: a page-turner and a treat.” - Laura Wilson, The Guardian

  For what they’re worth, my own three cents are that Hughes has raised the bar with THE CITY OF LOST GIRLS, both for the PI novel in general and for Irish crime fiction in general. And given the year we had last year, that’s saying something.
  Meanwhile, and while we’re on the subject of raising the bar, belated congratulations to Stuart Neville, who last weekend won the LA Times Best Mystery / Thriller Novel of the Year for his debut, THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST (aka THE TWELVE).
  By happy coincidence, Neville’s novel features a protagonist who is not just a serial killer who goes about the business of killing a baker’s dozen of victims with some aplomb, but a man who is a serial killer twice over - first as a paramilitary hitman, then as a guilt-ridden ex-paramilitary driven to clear his conscience - who nevertheless gains and holds the reader’s sympathy as he cuts a bloody swathe through post-Peace Process Northern Ireland. Which suggests, as does Declan Hughes’s contribution, that it’s not the serial killer sub-genre that’s moribund per se, it’s the lazy writers who depend too heavily, and too luridly, on what the serial killer does rather than who the serial killer is. It’s the difference, I think, between pointing up the grotesque in humanity rather than illuminating the humanity in the grotesque. And that makes for a world of difference.

THE GHOSTS Of Christmas Presents

It’s been a terrific year for Stuart Neville. Superb reviews of his debut novel, THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST); interviewing James Ellroy at the Belfast Waterfront; and last weekend – in case you missed it – a lovely write up from Marilyn Stasio in the New York Times, in which TGOB was the lead review. All of which is very nice indeed, but then Stuart is a very nice bloke indeed, as you’ll see for yourself in this video interview with Keith Rawson. Roll it there, Collette …
  And while we’re on the subject of nice blokes, there was a marvellous turn-out for Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND launch at Dubray Books last Tuesday night, which was cunningly timed to coincide with the official turning on of the Christmas lights on Grafton Street. Among the writerly types in attendance were Declan Hughes, Peter Murphy, Professor Ian Ross, Cormac Millar, Ava McCarthy, Critical Mick and John Boyne, and at least one Booker Prize winner, Anne Enright. Which goes to show how highly regarded Alan Glynn is across the writing spectrum, and deservedly so, because WINTERLAND is a wonderful novel.
  Anyway, you may well be wondering about Christmas gifts at this point. For the reader in your life, you could do a hell of a lot worse than give them THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST or WINTERLAND. Or, better still, both. They’re both beautifully written novels that are page-turning thrillers, but they also do what the best crime writing does: they remind us who we really are and how we live now.
  Incidentally, in a very good week for Irish writing, hearty congratulations to Colum McCann for scooping the National Book Award for LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN.
  Finally, and in contradiction to erroneous information provided here by yours truly, it appears that my latest opus, THE BIG EMPTY, has only gone out for consideration to publishers this week – last Monday, to be precise. I really should pay more attention to such things, but I was under the impression that the book was already under consideration. This is both good news and bad news: good in the sense that the book is still a live grenade, in a manner of speaking, and bad in the sense that the waiting begins all over again. And, given the fact that editors generally have an already existing pile of submissions to work their way through, and that it’s already more than halfway through November, there’s a good chance that we won’t hear how it’s faring until well into the New Year.
  It is, of course, the hope that kills you in the end, but as all three regular readers of this blog will know, I last week went public with my decision to quit writing. So I feel curiously detached from THE BIG EMPTY – although there’s a strong possibility that I feel that way because it’s by far my most personal piece of writing to date, and I’m simply steeling myself against the inevitable rejection letters (hey, not everyone’s going to like it, or love it enough to publish it; that’s just the way things work). Having said all that, I wouldn’t be human if I wasn’t feeling just the tiniest frisson of anticipation, or trepidation: in effect, I’ve submitted my baby to a beauty contest, and she’s now at the mercy of factors beyond my control, and depending on the kindness of strangers.
  As for the story, it’s a Harry Rigby private eye tale, a sequel to EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, of which the ever-generous Ken Bruen had this to say on its publication:

“I have seen the future of Irish crime fiction and it’s called Declan Burke. Here is talent writ large – mesmerizing, literate, smart and gripping. If there is such an animal as the literary crime novel, then this is it. But as a compelling crime novel, it is so far ahead of anything being produced, that at last my hopes for crime fiction are renewed. I can’t wait to read his next novel.”

  For what it’s worth, I think that THE BIG EMPTY is a better book than EIGHTBALL BOOGIE – but then, I would say that. The fact of the matter is that, when it comes to THE BIG EMPTY, my opinion no longer matters. To belabour the baby metaphor, I’ve done all I can to prepare her for the big, bad world, and can do nothing more to protect her from its harsh realities. All I can do is pray she gets a fair hearing and is treated kindly. Here’s hoping.
  If some kind soul does pick it up, then it would actually jibe quite well with last week’s decision, given that there are another two Harry Rigby novels already written, the rewriting / redrafting of which would allow me to keep my hand in at writing, without requiring the full-time commitment I’d have to make to write a new novel from scratch. In a perfect world, that would be the perfect scenario – although you don’t need me to tell you that neither you, I nor Harry Rigby lives in a perfect world. Anyway, upward and onward: bon voyage, THE BIG EMPTY, and a fair wind …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Stuart Neville

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
AMERICAN TABLOID by James Ellroy. It’s just the sheer scale of the thing, the ambition of it. It’s a tie for my favourite novel of all time with Tom Wolfe’s BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I collect old movie novelisations. The cinema in Armagh closed when I was a kid, so the only way I could experience things like ET or Raiders of the Lost Ark was by reading them in book form. Even today, I search charity shops for hidden gems. Some novelisations are very good (Poltergeist by James Kahn, Fort Apache: The Bronx by Heywood Gould) and some of them are bloody awful. Freebie and the Bean, for instance, is possibly the worst book ever written. While the source material for that was pretty poor, the novelisation of Dirty Harry had a great story to work from, and it was still bloody awful.

Most satisfying writing moment?
The first time I actually managed to type the last words of a full honest-to-God novel. It didn’t matter that it turned out to be not very good; I had proven that I could actually climb that mountain, and that was a huge step forward psychologically.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I think I’d have to say Bateman’s DIVORCING JACK, simply because he blazed a trail for Northern Irish crime writers.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I recently read Gerard Brennan’s THE WEE ROCKETS. I think it’d make a really good TV serial with its urban setting and big cast of characters.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is that panicky feeling when you’ve invested a huge chunk of your life in something and you don’t know if it was any good or not. Conversely, the best thing is finding out you hadn’t wasted your time after all, and someone thinks it’s worth reading. The second best thing was a couple of days ago when a pretty checkout girl in the supermarket asked me in a hushed tone if I was “that author from the papers”. That was pretty good.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Belfast cop Jack Lennon starts digging into an apparent Republican feud when he realises his former lover Marie McKenna and their daughter Ellen were somehow involved and are now missing. As he delves deeper he discovers it might not have been the feud the authorities claimed, but when he challenges his superiors, he is told to leave it alone. When someone starts picking off survivors of the feud, Lennon knows he must act.

Who are you reading right now?
I’m reading AFTERMATH by Ruth Dudley Edwards. It’s an account of the Omagh bombing, and how the families of the victims fought for justice through the civil courts when the criminal system let them down. Some of it is so harrowing it’s very painful to read, and I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been to write. I’ll be on a panel with Ruth at this year’s Bouchercon inIndianapolis, which will be interesting.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
This is kind of a Catch 22; I couldn’t write if I didn’t read, so I think I’d have to choose the egg over the chicken. Or something.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Hard, fast, brutal.

Stuart Neville’s THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST is published in the U.S. by Soho Crime

The TIES That Bind

Off with yours truly to the Fingal Readers’ Day in Blanchardstown in north Dublin yesterday, there to take lunch with the ever-lovely Niamh O’Connor, whose BLOOD TIES was published last week by Transworld Ireland. Quoth the blurb elves:

Husband against wife … Wife against husband … Discover what happens when the bonds of family break …
  Find out more about the gruesome case of the so-called ‘Scissor Sisters’, whose bloody slaughter of their mother’s lover ended with an unsolved mystery as to the final resting place of the victim’s head – see the only interview with killer Charlotte Mulhall since she entered prison.
  Read the most up-to-date account of the murder of mother-of-two Rachel O’Reilly, including her husband’s latest appeal.
  And get the full story behind the sensational case of Sharon Collins and the ‘Lying Eyes’ hitman-for-hire scandal.
  As a leading crime reporter for the Sunday World, Niamh O’Connor has interviewed killers, has sat in court as justice was done, and spoken to the condemned in prison to give us the inside stories on three of Ireland’s most notorious murder cases.

  Meanwhile, the point of the Blanchardstown excursion for yours truly was to interview Stuart Neville, whose terrific novel THE TWELVE is about to be published Stateside as the equally terrific THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST. Stuart being a self-confessed ‘affable chap’, it was all very pleasant indeed, with none of the pyrotechnics you can probably expect when Stuart hosts James Ellroy at Belfast’s Waterfront on November 7th, in a gig organised by No Alibis. To wit:

No Alibis Bookstore is very pleased to announce that we will be hosting an event with none other than the Demon Dog of American crime fiction, James Ellroy, in early November to celebrate the release of the final book in his Underworld USA trilogy, BLOOD’S A ROVER. This event will be held in the Waterfront Hall, Belfast, on Saturday 7th November at 8:00PM. Tickets are now on sale, and are priced £12.

  Twelve quid to see James Ellroy, when it was eighty-odd quid to see Beyoncé earlier this year? Now that’s a steal …

The Neville Has All The Best Tunes # 2: THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST

Truth be told, we don’t know a hell of a lot about Stuart Neville (right), other than he’s a handsome cove and his forthcoming novel, THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST, has been described as “The best first novel I’ve read in years ... It’s a flat out terror trip” by no less a luminary than James Ellroy. Hmmmm, nice. Quoth the blurb elves:

Sooner or later, everybody pays - and the dead will set the price ...
  Former paramilitary killer Gerry Fegan is haunted by his victims, twelve souls who shadow his every waking day and scream through every drunken night. Just as he reaches the edge of sanity they reveal their desire: vengeance on those who engineered their deaths. From the greedy politicians to the corrupt security forces, the street thugs to the complacent bystanders who let it happen, all must pay the price.
  When Fegan’s vendetta threatens to derail Northern Ireland’s peace process and destabilise its fledgling government, old comrades and enemies alike want him gone. David Campbell, a double agent lost between the forces of law and terror, takes the job. But he has his own reasons for eliminating Fegan; the secrets of a dirty war should stay buried, even if its ghosts do not.  Set against the backdrop of a post-conflict Northern Ireland struggling with its past, THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST takes the reader from the back streets of the city, where violence and politics go hand-in-hand, to the country’s darkest heart. Often brutal, sometimes tender, the journey will see one man find his humanity while the other loses his.

Colour us intrigued. Meanwhile, there’s quite the Semtex blast of post-Troubles Norn Iron crime fiction coming to light these days. David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER, Sam Millar’s BLOODSTORM, Garbhan Downey’s YOURS CONFIDENTIALLY, Adrian McKinty’s THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD, John McAllister’s LINE OF FLIGHT and – whisper it – CSNI’s own Gerard Brennan’s PIRHANAS. Will any of them rise to take the crown of El Maestro himself, Colin ‘Master’ Bateman? Only time, that notoriously doity rat, will tell …