All The Rage

It’s a hearty congratulations to Gene Kerrigan from all here at CAP Towers, on the news that THE RAGE has been shortlisted for a Los Angeles Times Crime / Mystery award. THE RAGE, of course, won the CWA Gold Dagger, way back in 2012. I thought the novel was terrific when I first read it; for that review, clickety-click here.
  The line-up for the Mystery / Thriller category runs as follows:

Richard Crompton, “Hour of the Red God,” Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Robert Galbraith, “The Cuckoo's Calling,” Mulholland Books/Little, Brown & Co.
John Grisham, “Sycamore Row,” Doubleday Books
Gene Kerrigan, “The Rage,” Europa Editions
Ferdinand von Schirach, “The Collini Case,” Viking

  For the full list of all nominees in the LA Times Book Awards, clickety-click here …

Sheer Geneius

I was absolutely delighted last night when word filtered through that Gene Kerrigan’s THE RAGE had won the Gold Dagger at the Crime Writers’ Association Awards. I thought it was a superb novel when I read it first, all those many moons ago, and I’m very pleased indeed to see it, and Gene, get the credit they deserve.
  Mind you, a certain Stuart Neville won’t be at all surprised. During the course of an interview waaaaaay back in April of 2011, I asked Stuart if he’d read anything recently that he’d like to recommend, and his response ran thusly:

“The new Gene Kerrigan book, THE RAGE, is absolutely terrific. It captures that sense of Ireland on the down-slope of the rollercoaster, he’s done that very, very well. But also, his journalistic background makes it seem like there’s almost a documentary feel to it. You feel like you could be reading an actual description of a crime in it, as opposed to a fictional crime. It has a real core of authenticity to it. It’s very impressive. I’d hope that the Irish Book Awards win last year, and the CWA nomination, will help raise his profile. He’s a terrific writer.”

  Indeed he is. For the rest of the CWA Awards nominees and winners, by the way, clickety-click on the very fine blog It’s A Crime …

Stop The Press! ’Tis The CAPNYA Short-List …

And so to the short-list for the less-than-coveted Crime Always Pays Novel of the Year Award - or CAPNYA, if you prefer. I ran a proposed long-list a week or so ago, and with the votes in (it was a very low voter turn-out, incidentally; I blame the weather), only three titles received more than one vote. So it makes sense, I guess, to make those three titles the short-list. And so - a trumpet-blast please, maestro - they are:

THE BURNING SOUL by John Connolly;
FALLING GLASS by Adrian McKinty;
THE RAGE by Gene Kerrigan.

  Bearing in mind that there’s nothing remotely scientific about the polling method, and that the voting will be necessarily skewed by the fact that I’ve mentioned my own personal favourites here on CAP more often than others on the long-list, it’s interesting (to me, at least) that none of those three titles made the short-list for the Irish Book Awards’ crime fiction gong.
  It’s also worth saying that all three are terrific novels, and well worth winning an award in any given year, regardless of the competition.
  Anyway, on to the business end. Please feel free to vote for any of those three titles as the best Irish crime novel of 2011, via the comment box below. Oh, and if you don’t, I’ll come over all Brussels on your collective ass and start imposing my own verdict on the democratic process. Don’t say you haven’t been warned …

John Connolly: A Genre Of One?

I’ve mentioned before that I think John Connolly’s latest, THE BURNING SOUL, is one of his finest offerings yet, and it would appear that I’m not alone. Quote Joe Hartlaub over at The Book Reporter:

“The work of John Connolly is becoming more and more entrenched as a genre of one. His Charlie Parker novels are at once some of the darkest and most beautifully written books one is likely to encounter … Connolly’s characterization is marvellous and unforgettable, and his plotting first-rate - think Stephen King and George C. Higgins somehow sitting down and collaborating. But it’s his prose - so black, so rich, so deep -that keeps readers coming back.” - Joe Hartlaub

  Very nice indeed; and Mr and Mrs Kirkus, if a little more conservative, are in broad agreement:

“Connolly’s latest Charlie Parker thriller offers a powerful story line that weaves together suspense, mystery and a small touch of the supernatural … An intelligent, plausible thriller, both harrowing and memorable.” - Kirkus Reviews

  Meanwhile, and while we’re on the subject of fine reviews, the inestimable Glenn Harper of International Noir recently weighed in with his verdict on Gene Kerrigan’s THE RAGE. Quoth Glenn:

“THE RAGE is very good indeed, and I found in it some of the grim poetry of the first two books, as well as a very original approach to crime writing, responsive to both the demands of storytelling and the truth of a realistic portrayal of a very specific social milieu.” - Glenn Harper

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

The Neville Will Find Work For Idle Hands To Do

I interviewed Stuart Neville (right) last week, and a very pleasant experience it was too, not least because Stuart is in a very good place these days. Recently married, he’s on the shortlist for tonight’s LA Times’ Mystery / Thriller Book Awards with COLLUSION, a gong he scooped last year for his debut novel, THE TWELVE, aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST. Could he possibly win two years running? It’s a big ask, as they say, particularly given the quality of the opposition: our own Tana French, for FAITHFUL PLACE; Kelli Stanley for CITY OF DRAGONS; Laura Lippman for I’D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE; and Tom Franklin for CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER, which is the best novel I’ve read this year to date (although my current read, IRON HOUSE by John Hart, is running it close).
  Meanwhile, Stuart is also gearing up to the release of his third novel, STOLEN SOULS, which he describes as ‘a much more streamlined, ticking-clock kind of thriller’, influenced by classic ’70s thrillers such as William Goldman’s MARATHON MAN, and the early novels of Thomas Harris. Sounds tasty. For more on STOLEN SOULS, clickety-click here …
  Anyway, I asked Stuart in passing if he’d like to nominate an Irish crime title to recommend to readers, to which he responded thusly:

“The new Gene Kerrigan book, THE RAGE, is absolutely terrific. It captures that sense of Ireland on the down-slope of the rollercoaster, he’s done that very, very well. But also, his journalistic background makes it seem like there’s almost a documentary feel to it. You feel like you could be reading an actual description of a crime in it, as opposed to a fictional crime. It has a real core of authenticity to it. It’s very impressive. I’d hope that the Irish Book Awards win last year, and the CWA nomination, will help raise his profile. He’s a terrific writer.”

  That makes Stuart’s nod the third very positive recommendation for THE RAGE I’ve heard in the last couple of weeks. It isn’t released until June 2nd, but already it seems set to catapult Gene Kerrigan into the stratosphere. Here’s hoping.
  What I love most about Gene Kerrigan’s books, I think, is the ring of authenticity Stuart refers to, which is very probably derived from his years spent as a court reporter. Not for Kerrigan the demonising of criminals, little or otherwise. I never tire of repeating the line Kerrigan used during a conversation on crime writing a few years ago, when he suggested that the typical criminal isn’t all that different to law-abiding folk. “This guy will babysit your kids on a Friday night,” he said, “then go to work on Saturday morning with a gun in his pocket.”
  I always get an image of some uncle-type babysitter driven demented by an unruly brood who refuse to go to bed on time, whose shoulders straighten the next morning as he leaves the house, checking the safety on his Glock before he slouches off, some rough beast, headed for the mean streets to be born again …

UPDATE: Tom Franklin’s CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER won the LA Times’ Book Awards Best Mystery / Thriller last night, and while I’m disappointed on behalf of our own Stuart Neville and Tana French, there’s no disputing the fact that Franklin’s is a wonderful novel. Here’s the review I wrote back in February as part of that month’s Irish Times column:

Set in rural Mississippi, Tom Franklin’s CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER (Macmillan, £11.99, pb) opens with the shooting of small town mechanic Larry Ott, a semi-recluse who has long been suspected of the abduction and murder of a local girl some decades before. Local deputy Silas Jones is reluctant to lead the investigation into the shooting, as he and Larry were childhood friends before an ugly racial incident drove them apart, but the disappearance of another young girl overrules Silas’s personal distaste for the case. Ostensibly a police procedural, Franklin’s third novel deploys the genre’s narrative conventions as a framework for a much deeper exploration of the psychology of small-town America and its recent racist past. Both Larry and Silas are superbly drawn and fully fleshed characters, their personalities and conflict chthonic to rural Mississippi but luminously relevant, in Franklin’s hands, to any locale on the planet. Factor in a mesmerising evocation of rural Mississippi, language of sinuous and shimmering elegance, and a finely tuned ear for the nuances of dialogue, and you have a novel that is an early contender for one of the great novels of the year. - Declan Burke

Don’t Mourn. Organise.

Yesterday I read yet another well-meaning op-ed piece in the Irish Times on the current state of this benighted isle, which claimed that the Irish peopled feel ‘humiliated’ by recent economic events, which culminated in the EU / IMF bail-out of Ireland.
  Now, the first thing to say about that is that Ireland wasn’t bailed out by the EU / IMF. The Irish banks were bailed out, so as to save the lily-white asses of those European bankers who loaned vast sums of money to Irish bankers without first checking to see if the Irish bankers were possessed, at the very least, of the wit to use an abacus. The Irish people will pay for it, certainly, and will continue to do so until such time as we get a government with the cojones to tell the EU / ECB to go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut, tell the gamblers who took a punt on Irish banks that they lost, and that the casino is now closed for essential repairs.
  The second thing, arguably more important, is that no one I know feels even remotely ‘humiliated’ by the economic wreckage. Why should they? They had nothing to do with dodgy lending practices, and certainly didn’t benefit from same. No, everyone I know is angry at the fact that the country was (and still is) being run by a greedy, corrupt and cretinous golden circle of politicians, money-men and sundry fuckwits who treat the place like their personal fiefdom. I can’t and won’t speak for exactly how everyone else is feeling, but I can tell you how I feel: a cold, black, poisonous rage.
  I’ve been reading reports that suggest that the Fianna Fail meltdown in the coming election could be so profound as to result in as few as nine FF TDs being returned to the next Dail. In my opinion, that’s not nearly enough. The coming election is the best opportunity the Irish people will ever get to wear Fianna Fail down to the very nub, and with the grace of all that is sacred, wipe it out entirely. Nits, as they say, grow into lice. Or, in the last words of Joe Hill: “Don’t mourn. Organise.”
  All of which is to say that Gene Kerrigan’s latest offering has the perfect title: THE RAGE. Gene’s previous novel, DARK TIMES IN THE CITY, was a brilliant slice of urban noir, and was nominated last year for a CWA gong; as a journalist, Gene Kerrigan has been reporting for more years than he cares to remember on the (putting it politely) follies and foibles of our governing class, and I’m already sweaty-palmed at the prospect of discovering exactly what he has to say, in the guise of fiction, about what’s happened to Ireland in the last couple of years. Quoth the blurb elves:

Vincent Naylor is a professional thief, as confident as he is reckless. Just ten days out of jail, and he’s preparing his next robbery. Already, his plan is unravelling. While investigating the murder of a crooked banker, Detective Sergeant Bob Tidey gets a call from an old acquaintance, Maura Coady. The retired nun believes there’s something suspicious happening in the Dublin backstreet where she lives alone. Maura’s call inadvertently unleashes a storm of violence that will engulf Vincent Naylor and force Tidey to make a deadly choice. THE RAGE is a masterpiece of suspense, told against the background of a country’s shameful past and its troubled present.

  Gene? Bring. It. On.