That’s Entertainment?

Maybe we can blame Graham Greene, who famously - or infamously - labelled his crime novels ‘entertainments’, although I suspect it goes back a lot further than that. I’m talking about the notion that crime novels - all genre novels, really, but we deal in crime writing here - are obliged to be entertaining, as if it’s incumbent upon crime novelists, or their books, to be clowns, regardless of how sad the clown might be behind the garish make-up.
  A recent and very positive review of Alan Glynn’s BLOODLAND in the Irish Times is a case in point. Anna Carey wrote the review, and did a very fine job too, in my opinion, finishing up thusly:

“A good thriller is there to entertain the reader as well as make her think - and [BLOODLAND] is a very entertaining book.” - Anna Carey, Irish Times

  Now, I’m sure Alan Glynn was very happy with that review, but I do wonder about the distinction being made in that line. There’s no good reason, for example, why the word ‘book’ couldn’t be substituted for ‘thriller’. After all, it’s the function of every book to ‘entertain the reader as well as make her think’. Crime, sci-fi, chick-lit, literary, fantasy, romance, historical biography, quantum physics - if a book on any given topic isn’t entertaining, which is to say enjoyable to read, then why would anyone read it? Are there books that are deliberately written not to entertain? Has any writer ever sat down at the desk with the express intention of writing a book that will bore his or her reader into a coma?
  I do hate the notion of ‘special pleading’ on behalf of crime fiction, but I think there’s a case to be made for declaring a moratorium on the use of ‘entertaining’ when it comes to reviewing the genre. I mean, if the book receives a positive review, then surely the fact that the reviewer was entertained is implicit in the good vibes. The moratorium might even be extended to the phrase ‘page-turning’. No, seriously - how else are you going to read a book if it doesn’t involve turning pages?
  I suppose what I’m suggesting, and not for the first time, is that crime fiction requires a more rigorous analysis than it generally gets. ‘An entertaining, page-turning read’ is a description that could apply to any good book, from Noddy to ULYSSES. Is it the case that crime fiction is more about breadth than depth, than it’s prime function is to entertain, and saying so suffices as a valid review? Is it the case that the genre doesn’t actually require or deserve a more subtle, nuanced lexicon? Or is it the case that the genre, being perceived as little more than a lurid distraction, and particularly by comparison with other kinds of books, is being ill-served by a self-perpetuating simplification, as often as not by the readers and fans of the genre itself?
  In the last month or so, I’ve read a number of books - among them BLOODLAND by Alan Glynn, THE BURNING SOUL by John Connolly, THE END OF EVERYTHING by Megan Abbott, THE KILLER IS DYING by James Sallis and THE END OF THE WASP SEASON by Denise Mina - that are as good as any novel of any stripe I’ve read in the last few years. They are all unmistakably crime fiction titles; all are beautifully written, first and foremost; they also have in common a rare quality of psychological insight as they pursue the flaws and foibles of the human condition. All of which are the essential elements of any good novel, it seems to me.
  Anyway, I opened up talking about Alan Glynn, and there’s a lot him about right now. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with the Faber blog, The Thought Fox:

[TF] BLOODLAND has the kind of plot where tiny details at the start lead to huge revelations by the end. How hard is it when writing a story like this to keep back secrets from your readers?

[AG] “It’s not easy. I continually re-read, re-write and revise. At the same time it’s an organic process and the subconscious does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. A connection that in the context of the story might seem inevitable, something meticulously and very deliberately placed there by the author, will often in fact have occurred to me at the very last minute. Maybe it was there all along, waiting to be discovered but the poor sap at the keyboard isn’t necessarily the first one to see it. But then when it all becomes clear, you have the luxury of being able to go back and re-arrange stuff, to re-weight and re-calibrate scenes in the overall context of the story. As the writer, you just have to pay attention, which I suppose isn’t too much to ask. Another way of keeping secrets back from the reader, of course is by not knowing them yourself, as you go along. No plan, therefore, no outline. It’s a good way of keeping things fresh and unpredictable, but it’s also fraught with danger. You can write yourself into a corner. Or fall off the tightrope.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here.
  Meanwhile, you can bag yourself a free signed copy of BLOODLAND over at the Harrogate Festival’s interweb lair, with the competition running until October 9th.
  For a couple of nifty reviews to complement Anna Carey’s take in the Irish Times, there’s one here at International Noir, and another courtesy of Laura Wilson at The Guardian.
  Finally, for Alan Glynn’s take on his ‘Book of a Lifetime’, aka THE GREAT GATSBY, jump on over to The Independent …
  Oh, and as I mentioned a day or so ago, I’ll be doing an event with Alan Glynn at The Rathgar Bookshop this coming Thursday, October 6th, at 7.30pm. He’ll be reading from BLOODLAND, I’ll be reading from ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, and if there’s anyone still awake after that little lot, we’ll be talking about, y’know, good books and stuff. If you’re around, I’d love to see you there …

He’s Not The Messiah, He’s A Very Naughty Boy

I was emailing someone today about what constitutes a crime novel, as you do, and I offered up my theory, which runneth thusly: If you can take out the criminality and the story still works, then it’s not a crime novel. And vice versa, obviously. Which means, as I’ve said before, that the likes of Hamlet, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, Oedipus, THE UNTOUCHABLE, and – if you want to piss off Declan Hughes – THE GREAT GATSBY are all crime novels. THE TRIAL is an exception to this rule, having no crime but being a superb crime novel all the same.
  Anyway, that got me thinking – who’s the most famous criminal of all time? I’m guessing Jesus, from a story point of view at least, given that he was crucified for being found guilty on a charge of sedition, although whether you believe the sedition was of the secular or religious variety is up to you. Crucifixion, as you probably already know, was the form of execution the Romans reserved for common criminals, although that does beg the question of why, if he was considered important enough to try and execute for sedition, Jesus would have been considered a common criminal.
  Either way, crucifixion was / is a horrible way to die, and might be an interesting place to start a novel. Also, Jerusalem at the time was a city of political and religious intrigue, a city fermenting in the kind of passions that would see catastrophe visited on it in the very near future. And it’s true that if you take the crime out of the New Testament the story collapses – without a crime to be arrested for, Jesus cannot be tried and executed.
  I think the legal aspect of it is interesting. If the authorities wanted Jesus done away with, they could have had him bumped off quietly, and the body disposed of, as Nikos Kazantstakis suggests early on in THE LAST TEMPTATION, when Judas visits Jesus in the desert with the intention of slitting his throat. But the authorities, secular or religious, were so keen to go by the book that Jesus found himself shuttled back and forth between various institutions, each one hoping that another would be the one to find him guilty of a crime.
  Anyway, Jesus was killed. Shortly afterwards, his body went missing from a tomb guarded by Roman soldiers. At this point – and this is where the novel I’m thinking about gets interesting, to me anyway – all of those responsible, directly or indirectly, start worrying about who has stolen away the body, and why. Concerned about the propaganda value of the corpse, and particularly that of a vanished corpse, the various authorities need to discover (a) the whereabouts of the body and (b) who stole it from the tomb. They need to do so quickly and discreetly. Who better to call upon than an impartial observer, for example an Ephesian Greek leading a diplomatic trade mission to Jerusalem, to make discreet enquiries among his contacts in Jerusalem as to the whys and wherefores of Jesus’ disappearance?
  There is no mystery here for Christians, of course, given that they believe that Jesus, being man and god, was resurrected, or resurrected himself, in order to redeem mankind. But Jesus, according to the Acts of the Apostles, did not ascend into heaven until 40 days after his body vanished from the tomb, which gives our Ephesian Greek plenty of time to play with.
  So: the most famous criminal of all time, a political cover-up, a missing corpse, a city fermenting in violent passions, and a reluctant private eye who is heir to the Socratic tradition of questioning logic – sounds like a story to me. Has it been done before? And if not, are there any takers?

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Deborah Lawrenson

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?
A FATAL INVERSION by Barbara Vine (aka Ruth Rendell).

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Charlotte Gray, eponymous heroine of Sebastian Faulks’ wartime novel, for sheer bravery and guts, with a yearly sabbatical as Daisy in THE GREAT GATSBY: how utterly relaxing to be that shallow and careless of others while remaining adored …

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Not who but what: arty picture books of houses in the South of France.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Selling the rights to my fourth novel THE ART OF FALLING to Random House after having published it myself ten months earlier.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
THE STATEMENT by Brian Moore. Hope that counts. I love the way he writes sparingly yet lyrically, as tension builds.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Well, genuinely, I’d like to see THE BIG O make it. With Billy Bob Thornton as Frank.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst: sitting at my desk and realising I’d be better off on a ten-mile run before sad case of Writer’s Bottom becomes irreversible. Best: sitting at my desk for hours playing around with words.

The pitch for your next book is …?
A cycle of interlinked stories set in Provence, exploring themes of age and experience, youth and innocence, reality and imagination - and a cold murder investigation.

Who are you reading right now?
THE LEVANT TRILOGY by Olivia Manning, alongside the biography of Olivia Manning by Neville and June Braybrooke.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Reading – without hesitation.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Evocative, sensuous and derriere-enlarging.

Deborah Lawrenson’s SONGS OF BLUE AND GOLD is published by Arrow Books.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE DARK FIELDS by Alan Glynn

Given Wall Street’s current woes, I couldn’t have picked a better time to read THE DARK FIELDS. With the help of the ‘smart drug’ MDT-48, Eddie Spinola goes from being a dysfunctional bottom-feeder to master of the financial universe in just a few months, playing a crucial role in brokering the biggest corporate merger in US history.
  Of course, there are side-effects to taking MDT-48, an as-yet unproven experimental drug. Eddie suffers from blackouts, during the course of one he may or may not have assaulted a woman badly enough to put her in a coma. And coming off MDT-48 doesn’t just result in a bad case of cold turkey – it’s lethal.
  Told in a deceptively casual conversational style, Alan Glynn’s debut is assured, inventive and polished. Its occasional sci-fi touches are reminiscent of Philip K. Dick or William Gibson, although the depth of cynicism to Glynn’s dystopian vision doesn’t reveal itself fully until the last page. The novel was first published in 2001, but given the events of the last eight years, it can now be read as black farce, chilling prophecy, or a combination of both.
  Glynn’s subtle touch extends beyond a deft way with plot and characterisation, however. THE DARK FIELDS swaggers like a crime novel, and it has its fair share of criminals, violent deaths, illicit dealings and rampant paranoia, but the criminality is subservient to the narrative. MDT-48 is not a proscribed substance, for example, so Eddie is not breaking any law by taking it, nor by prospering as a result. And, given his black-outs, and the first-person narration, the reader is never entirely sure as to whether Eddie is responsible for the violent assault that charges the narrative.
  Eddie does engage in overtly criminal acts as the story moves towards its climax, but taking these explicit crimes out of the story would by no means render it pointless. Further, there’s a palpable sense of ambition at play here, an application of crime fiction’s tropes to a philosophical end, crystallised when Eddie cuts to the nub of the story: “If human behaviour was all about synapses and serotonin, then where did free will come into the picture? Where did personal responsibility end and brain chemistry begin?”
  A beautifully written thriller that is a compelling and at times profound exploration of the human condition, it’s no surprise that THE DARK FIELDS is prefaced with a quote from THE GREAT GATSBY. The novel represents my kind of holy grail, that quality of storytelling that erases the artificially contrived and / or supposed differences between genre and literary writing. Erudite, thoughtful and entertaining, it is a novel to be treasured. – Declan Burke

Nether Say Nether Again

Joseph O’Neill’s debut, NETHERLAND, has been attracting a lot of very positive comment, with one excitable reviewer suggesting that it’s already a Booker Prize contender. Naturally, being insatiable nosey-parkers, we had to take a gander, and we discovered that the blurb elves have been wibbling thusly:

In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal. In London, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek hears the news, and remembers his unlikely friendship with Chuck and the off-kilter New York in which it flourished: the New York of 9/11, the power cut and the Iraq war. Those years were difficult for Hans - his English wife Rachel left with their son after the attack, as if that event revealed the cracks and silences in their marriage, and he spent two strange years in the Chelsea Hotel, passing stranger evenings with the eccentric residents. Lost in a country he’d regarded as his new home, Hans sought comfort in a most alien place - the thriving but almost invisible world of New York cricket, in which immigrants from Asia and the West Indies play a beautiful, mystifying game on the city’s most marginal parks. It was during these games that Hans befriended Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreamed of establishing the city’s first proper cricket field. Over the course of a summer, Hans grew to share Chuck’s dream and Chuck’s sense of American possibility - until he began to glimpse the darker meaning of his new friend’s activities and ambitions … NETHERLAND is a novel of belonging and not belonging, and the uneasy state in between. It is a novel of a marriage foundering and recuperating, and of the shallows and depths of male friendship. With it, Joseph O’Neill has taken the anxieties and uncertainties of our new century and fashioned a work of extraordinary beauty and brilliance.

Lovely. Not really Crime Always Pays material, thought we, but lovely nonetheless. But lo! Then we discovered Brian Lynch’s review in the Sunday Independent, the gist of which runs to-wittishly:

“We never discover the identity of the murderer – this is a whodunit without a who – but that is part of the purpose of the book: the political violence of our times, the personal unease that follows from it, but above all the constantly shifting and strange glamour of the world cannot be explained, only apprehended … Already, NETHERLAND has been compared to THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The comparison is apt, but add in something of the ironic intellect of John Banville and a good dash of the coarse energy of the early Saul Bellow and you will get a better idea of how rich this book is.”

Hmmmm … the Bellow / Banville / Fitzgerald references suggest a literary tome, but the murderer / whodunit element suggests crime fiction. So which is it? Or – yipes! – could it be one of those increasingly popular crossover ‘lit crime’ bukes which thrive on employing crime fiction tropes, the likes of which have been popping up here, here, here and here? Only time, that notoriously prevaricating doity rat, will tell …