Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Clare O’Donohue

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?
For true crime, I’d love to take credit for IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote. It is, hands down, one of the best crime books I’ve read – fiction or non-fiction and has put me off ever writing true crime, since mine would be crap in comparison. For a novel, I’d be happy to have written the worst thing Donald Westlake ever wrote, because even his worst (if such a thing exists) is still really good.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Nora Charles in Dashiell Hammett’s THE THIN MAN. She was smart, funny, and could handle her liquor.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Porn. And quilting magazines. And recently I reread James Crumley’s THE LAST GOOD KISS for about the twentieth time.

Most satisfying writing moment?
I love it when I think I’ve written myself in a corner and I have no idea what my character will do. And then, while I’m driving, or trying to sleep or something, suddenly it comes to me – the way out of the mess and it all makes perfect sense and is completely right. It feels as though I’ve unlocked the secrets of the universe – until the next time I write myself into a corner.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I’m no expert on the subject, but I loved THE GUARDS, by Ken Bruen and Brian McGilloway’s Inspector Devlin series. I haven’t read any of Tana French’s book yet, though they are massively popular and on my ‘to read’ list.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Damn, that’s a hard question. I think there are so many dark, atmospheric Irish crime novels out there that it may be the next Sweden.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst is the money, the uncertainty, empty book signings, and wondering why someone else’s load of crap is doing better than my book. The best is the joy of writing itself, the hours, hanging out with other writers, and finding some other author’s book that is so off-the-charts good that I get inspired all over again.

The pitch for your next book is …?
I’m working on the second in my Kate Conway series. In this one, Kate, an American TV producer, is doing a documentary in a prison outside Chicago, talking with guys who are serving LWP sentences. An LWP is life without parole, which means they die there. Kate is generally a sarcastic type, not prone to excessive human interaction, but she finds herself entangled with these men, and with the mistress of her late husband. It leads to a lie, a murder, blackmail and who knows what else since I still have about eighty pages to write.

Who are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading two books. THE PSYCHOPATH TEST, by Jon Ronson, and STILL LIFE, by Louise Penny. Louise is one of those off-the-charts good writers who inspire me.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
God is a cruel duck. It’s like choosing between breathing and blinking my eyes. I guess I would choose writing. I love to read, but I have to write. (And despise saying it like that since it sounds so pretentious and annoying.)

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Way past deadline.

Clare O’Donohue’s MISSING PERSONS is published by Plume Books.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: RJ Ellory

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?
IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote. No doubt about it. And I know it’s not a ‘novel’ per se, but what the hell? That’s the one for me!

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Holmes. For the coke and the opium and the violin-playing. No, seriously, just for the sheer intellect of the man.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Anything by Annie Proulx. And it’s a guilty pleasure because I’m supposed to read Chandler and Hammett and Cain, not someone who writes homo-erotic cowboy stories!

Most satisfying writing moment?
When A QUIET BELIEF IN ANGELS was selected for Richard and Judy, because I knew it would open the door to translations, further publishing contracts, and a future. For me, it was as if I suddenly realized that I might be able to get away with doing this for the rest of my life.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Impossible to answer. Even ULYSSES has been hailed as a murder mystery so that would have to figure in the ranking. I read Bruen, Burke, McGilloway, Hughes, and they are all superb.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Not an Irish writer, but it is an Irish novel; THE GOLDEN DOOR by Kerry Jamieson. I say this simply because I possess a profound fascination for New York at this time (Prohibition-era), and it was the Irish who built much of what we now consider to be New York.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Best thing is to have been given the privilege to do what you love for a living. Worst thing is the mind-numbing, bone-deep exhaustion of endless touring. Like thirty-two hour journeys back from New Zealand - five flights, nine films, no sleep ...

The pitch for your next book is …?
Orphaned by an act of senseless violence that took their mother from them, half-brothers Clarence Luckman and Elliott Danziger start life with two strikes against them. Raised in state institutions, unaware of any world beyond the confines of rules and regulation, their lives take a sudden turn when they are seized as hostages by a convicted killer en route to his execution. Earl Sheridan, psychopathic murderer, could be their salvation or their downfall. A road trip ensues – Sheridan and the two brothers on the run from the law through California and Texas, but as the journey continues the two brothers must come to terms with the ever-growing tide of violence that follows in their wake, a tide of violence that forces them to make a choice about their lives, and their relationship to one another. Will the brothers manage to elude the dark star that has hung over them since their mother’s death, or will they succumb to the pull of Earl Sheridan’s terrifying, but exhilarating vision of the world? Set in the mid 1960s, this is a tale of the darkness within Man, the inherent hope for redemption, and the ultimate consequences of evil.

Who are you reading right now?
DISPATCHES by Michael Herr, FAT CITY by Leonard Gardner and THE DISENCHANTED by Budd Schulberg.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write. No question. No doubt, no hesitation. It’s the only thing that keeps me crazy.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Slow-motion thrillers.

RJ Ellory’s SAINTS OF NEW YORK is published by Orion.

Make Mine A Shandy

An intriguing proposition hoves over the horizon, being Michael Sheridan’s true crime offering MURDER AT SHANDY HALL: THE COACHFORD POISONING CASE. To wit:

Cork, May, 1887. Murder stalks the countryside. Against a tranquil rural backdrop the sleepy County Cork village of Dripsey, near Coachford, a sensational Victorian murder is played out with a potent mix of love, lust, betrayal, and ultimately naked hatred. The entry of a young and beautiful governess into Shandy Hall, the home of a retired British Army surgeon Dr Philip Cross, acts as a catalyst for an act of horror that prompts suspicion, an exhumation, an inquest, and a charged courtroom drama that grabs newspaper headlines all over the world. The nation is transfixed by details of a murder which shatters the Victorian ideal of the home as a safe haven of privacy and comfort, and besmirches the blue-blooded reputation of an aristocratic line. The cast of real characters includes a cruel killer, cloaked in respectability; a beautiful and naïve governess; a blameless wife; a brilliant young pathologist; a canny and clever murder detective; two accomplished courtroom adversaries; a caring and emotional judge; and a notorious hangman. The unravelling of this true-life murder mystery will send a chill through your bones.

  Sheridan’s previous books include DEATH IN DECEMBER: THE STORY OF SOPHIE TOSCAN DU PLANTIER and A LETTER TO VERONICA: THE LAST DAYS OF VERONICA GUERIN, both true crime accounts. He’s not shy about raising the bar on himself, either. In his introduction, he has this to say:

“There is nothing ever new under the sun and the fact of murder echoes in our ears, in hour hearts and in our minds. And yet [murder] is an enduring mystery - one that drove the greatest writers over the generations, like Dickens, Dostoevsky, Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, Camus, Capote and Mailer to even greater heights of expression to get to its essence.”

  So - can Michael Sheridan’s SHANDY HALL cut the mustard alongside the greats? Only time, that notoriously doity rat, will tell …

Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Blair Oliver

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?
THE LAST GOOD KISS by James Crumley. Transcends the genre – a great American novel.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Charles Bovary.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Poker and fishing books. Oh, and 19th century women’s domestic fiction.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When a character says or does something I couldn’t see coming.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
THE GUARDS by Ken Bruen – it’s the standard, isn’t it?

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE MAGDALENE MARTYRS. Gritty, hardboiled, tradition rich and socially relevant.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The uniform is both a blessing and a curse. As are the legions of villanelle-loving women.

The pitch for your next book is …?
THE LONG SLIDE is a crime novel set in the new, roadside West, where bison graze alongside billboards of bison and even accountants pack heat. Henry Gavin, the narrator, is a bamboo fly-rod aficionado and editor of the Copper Falls Gazette, the only newspaper in a dying, Colorado mining town. Copper, the town’s last best resource, is also its curse. The land and its waters are beautiful, but deadly. Somehow, our man manages to survive. The other guys fuck up worse. So there’s going to be a sequel, which may turn out to be more of a novella because other guys can’t possibly keep fucking up worse. Maybe it’ll be flash fiction. Poems are always nice.

Who are you reading right now?
Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD for the fifth time. And TEAM OF RIVALS, for the obvious connections.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Read. I couldn’t do without the good, literate company.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Cinematic, skewed, lively.

Blair Oliver’s THE LONG SLIDE is available now.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: TRUE CRIME: AN AMERICAN ANTHOLOGY, ed. Harold Schechter

This anthology is an important contribution to the understanding and chronicling of true crime reporting in the US by contemporaneous authors.
  It ranges from 1651 (the hanging of John Billington) to 2001 (the trial of the Menendez brothers for murdering their parents.
  Billington was on the first ship from England to the Plymouth Colony and was regarded by everyone on board as depraved and boorish, so no one was surprised when he killed a fellow Plymouth Brethern some years later over a trivial incident.
  The Menendez brothers shot their parents to death in the family home in Elm Drive, an affluent address in Beverly Hills, with fourteen twelve-gauge shotgun rounds that obliterated the parents’ heads and torsos.
  Other stories covered include Ed Gein (the basis for the movie Psycho), the Son of Sam, the Black Dahlia murder, the Turner-Stompanato (self-defence) killing and the Loeb and Leopold (Superman) case.
  The quality of the writing across the centuries and decades is very engaging and high calibre. The styles are varied and often attain high art. Some are straight narratives, some are social commentaries, some are psychological analysis, some are essays on guilt and evidence.
  The cases in the book run the gamut from the obscure to the high celebrity ones. The authors include well known crime writers like Herbert Ashbury, Theodore Dreiser, Jim Thompson, Jack Webb, Robert Bloch, Truman Capote, James Ellroy, Ann Rule and Dominick Dunne in addition to writers like Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Mark Twain and Damon Runyon.
  The editor, Dr. Harold Schechter, a professor of American Literature and Culture, at Queen's College in New York, has written a masterful introduction which delineates the growth of true crime reportage, the seminal influence of IN COLD BLOOD, and the basis of true crime for authors of crime fiction such as Dashiell Hammett, Joyce Carol Oates and James Ellroy. Schechter is also the author of many books on true crime and crime fiction.
  One major bonus of this book is the introduction to each piece written by Schechter and the primary and secondary sources that he lists for stories.
  The only major deficit, for a book published in 2008, is the dearth of modern coverage. The newest writing dates from 2001.
  For crime writing later than 2001, the annual series, The Best American Crime Reporting, is essential. These volumes are a lucid and comprehensive documentation of the best in US true crime writing. (Best American Crime Reporting 2009 is due for publication Sep 15th 2009 – a review to follow on publication).
  TRUE CRIME: AN AMERICAN ANTHOLOGY, however, remains an essential volume in understanding the genesis and exposition of crime reporting as a legitimate specialization within journalism and creative non-fiction. – Seamus Scanlon

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Jason O’Toole

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?
Anything by Raymond Chandler or James M Cain.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Philip Marlowe.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Charles Bukowski and John Fante.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Interviewing John Gilligan last year for a Hot Press magazine cover story. It was 13,000 words feature that ran over two editions of the magazine, which subsequently resulted in Hot Press being banned from Irish prisons. This feature is in my latest book, CRIME, INK.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Ireland has produced an abundance of excellent crime authors (Connolly, Collins, Bruen, Burke, McNamee, Hughes, Barclay, Bateman, Kerrigan … to name a few) but my personal favourite is THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE by John Banville or Edna O’Brien’s IN THE FOREST.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Again, there are several, but I’d suggest LIES OF SILENCE by Brian Moore.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The best thing about writing is the flexibility of working from home and not having to work office hours. However, the downside is you always bring your work home with you, so it’s very hard to just switch off …

The pitch for your next book is …?
I have no idea, but I seem to start every pitch with the following words: “I can turn this around quick …”

Who are you reading right now?
I’m rereading Truman Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD and THE NEW JOURNALISM, edited by Tom Wolfe and EW Johnson.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I’d probably go insane without being able to write …

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
In your face! The Sunday Independent once described my writing as “in your face”, which I hope was meant as a compliment.

Jason O’Toole’s CRIME, INK is published by Merlin Publishing.

Yet Again, We Need To Talk About Kevin

The Lilliput Press publish Kevin Power’s debut novel, BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, with the blurb elves outdoing themselves by comparing it to THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE, IN COLD BLOOD and WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN. To wit:

On a late August night in 2004, a young man is kicked to death by his team-mates outside a Dublin nightclub and celebration turns to devastation. The reverberations of that event, its genesis and aftermath, is the subject of this extraordinary story, stripping away the veneer of a generation of Celtic cubs, whose social and sexual mores are chronicled and dissected in this tract for our times. The victim, Conor Harris, his killers – three of them are charged with manslaughter – and the trial judge share common childhoods and schooling in the privileged echelons of south Dublin suburbia. The intertwining of these lives leaves their afflicted families in moral freefall as public exposure merges with private anguish and imploded futures. This stark, elliptical tale tells of catharsis and self-examination through the eyes of the narrator and Laura Haines, girlfriend, confidante and catalyst. Akin to Lionel Shriver’s WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, John Banville’s THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE and Truman Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD, it deals with the unacceptable, and the nature of truth. Like all good fiction, it illuminates a society and transcends its age with the searchlight of a sympathetic imagination. It is a significant debut by an intuitive writer.

  The title is a nod to the classic Spencer Tracy movie, obviously, although it’s been used in an Irish context before – Blackrock, y’see, being a well-to-do area of south Dublin, represents leafy-suburbed affluence in Ireland. Anyhoos, Power’s story appears to be based on a real event from a few years back, and one that exercised the country to an enormous extent at the time, giving rise to much media soul-searching and state-of-the-nation polemics mainly because the perpetrators and the victim hailed from the ranks of the overly moneyed oiks of what passes for Ireland’s aspirational middle-class.
  My initial reaction when I read the blurb was that the story is too parochial to translate to a wider audience, that Power will take all kinds of stick for reopening old wounds (fair play to him), and that the blurb elves were doing a debutant novelist no favours at all by comparing him to John Banville, Truman Capote and Lionel Shriver.
  Then I heard ‘Wilderness Gothic’ on Sunday night, Power’s short-listed entry for the Francis MacManus Short Story Award, and I thought, hmmm, okay, the guy can write …
  Anyone out there know anything more about him?

The Time Of Gifts That Keeps On Giving

I watched a BBC 4 documentary on Patrick Leigh Fermor (right) last week, which was terrific stuff, as it covered his writing and personal lives in equal measure. One of the best travel writers of his generation, if not the best, Fermor is best known for the first two parts of a proposed trilogy, A TIME OF GIFTS and BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER, in which he recounts his experiences of walking from England to the Balkans in the late 1930s. He’s still adamant that the third part of the trilogy is on its way, although the fact that he’s 94 and contemplating a major rewrite on the book does not augur well.
  The documentary, incidentally, didn’t mention his superb books on Greece, MANI: TRAVELS IN THE SOUTHERN PELOPONNESE and ROUMELI: TRAVELS IN NORTHERN GREECE. It did spend some time on his audacious coup during WWII, when Fermor led a commando group that parachuted onto Crete to kidnap the German general in charge of the Cretan occupation. ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT, an account of the raid, was written by Fermor’s second-in-command, Captain Billy Moss, and the story was later made into a movie starring Dirk Bogarde as Fermor.
  Fermor is still revered today in Crete as an honorary Cretan, particularly among the mountainous regions, and accolades don’t come much higher than that.
  Fermor is a writer with rare descriptive powers, so it was nice that the documentary featured old footage of the author reading aloud from his work. But here’s the rub – I’m willing to make an exception for Patrick Leigh Fermor, on the basis that he is an exceptional human being and his writing is strongly autobiographical.
  In general, though, I haven’t the faintest interest in hearing authors real aloud from their books, and especially works of fiction. I just don’t get the appeal. And it’s irrelevant as to whether the authors are great showmen and entertainers (Declan Hughes and John Connolly spring to mind), or whether they’re crap at public speaking (c.f. yours truly). The whole point of writing fiction, after all, is to create a voice, or voices, which the reader then brings to life in his or her own mind. Is it not?
  Right now I’m reading Cormac McCarthy’s CITIES OF THE PLAIN. I’d hate to hear McCarthy read aloud from it and discover that he sounds like Truman Capote. I’d never be able to read his novels again.

Death, Where Is Thy Sting? Oh, There It Is …

Two true crime releases for you this week, folks. Hachette Ireland publishes LOVE YOU TO DEATH by Sunday Tribune journalist Michael Clifford, which offers a potted history of Irish wife-killers, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

From the recent notorious and horrific murders of Rachel O’Reilly, Dolores McCrea and Siobhan Kearney, cases are outlined as far back as the poisoning of Margaret Lehman in Dublin of the war years, for which her husband was hanged in 1945. A picture is revealed about how little has changed in this area of crime, but also about how society’s attitude has changed towards it, as reflected in court verdicts and sentences. From open-and-shut cases to ones that relied on detailed forensic evidence, the book also examines the aftermath, describing courtroom scenes of high emotion as the bereaved family seek to ensure their former in-law is held accountable for the crime. In its detailed examination of Ireland’s most notorious wife killings from the 1940s right up to present day and the most recent returned verdict in the Siobhan Kearney case, LOVE YOU TO DEATH charts each story from apparently normal marriages all the way to a violent ending and a legal conclusions. A chilling, gripping and at times gruesome read.

Meanwhile, Maverick House republish GANGSTER by the Sunday Times’ John Mooney, which details the life and crimes of John Gilligan. To wit:

GANGSTER is the critically acclaimed biography of John Gilligan, the biggest drugs trafficker to emerge from the Irish underworld. The book is an extraordinarily account of how a young Dubliner became a multi-millionaire criminal. It uses first-hand interviews with Gilligan, his thugs, friends, family, enemies, anti-drugs activists, members of the IRA and the police. It tells of violence, kidnapping, shootings, criminal espionage, drug dealing and how criminal gangs vied for power to control the Irish trade in drugs. Shocking, fascinating and frightening, GANGSTER also tells the story behind the murder of Veronica Guerin, the crime reporter. Fully updated and revised with new photographs.

Can’t say I’ve ever been bitten by the true crime bug, although IN COLD BLOOD is a terrific read. Maybe it’s because the details are too sordid and the evil banal, but mainly I think it’s because although there’s crime and (usually) punishment, which satisfies the basic narrative arc, it generally lacks the sense of redemption – something other, something sacred or hallowed – that good crime fiction delivers. Any thoughts and / or recommendations?

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 2,084: Aifric Campbell

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?
IN COLD BLOOD, Truman Capote.
What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Now this is tricky one because so many female characters have a habit of coming to a rather nasty end or have their hearts broken by unsavoury men. And one of the great things about being a writer is your life takes on the quality of fiction when you spend so much time plotting and scheming on your own in a room. So I’ll have to say I haven’t found her yet.
Who do you read for guilty pleasure?
All my reading is guilt free! But I will never finish a book that doesn’t grip me – life is far too short to waste time reading something that bores you.
Most satisfying writing moment?
There are many – often it’s when I feel that I have succeeded in writing about something that is outside my experience. In THE SEMANTICS OF MURDER, for example, it was a gay cruising scene in California in the 1960s seen through the eyes of a teenager. Last week it was a 21-year-old Canadian soldier landing on the beach at Dieppe in 1941 under a hail of machinegun fire. I love the challenge of writing what I don’t know. Sometimes it’s the pleasure of finding exactly the right word - yesterday it was “pleaching”, which is a type of pruning ...
The best Irish crime novel is …?
In my view THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE by John Banville is a certainly a contender but is it usually considered to belong to the genre? I’ve read and enjoyed the first Benjamin Black and am intrigued to know whether or readers will migrate from Black to Banville. Otherwise I haven’t read enough contemporary Irish crime writers to say.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
IN THE WOODS by Tana French springs to mind. Very atmospheric on suburban Dublin.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Two sides of the same coin: the long solitary hours in front of a screen.
The pitch for your next book is …?
I hate pitches! I was once given exactly one minute to do a book pitch to an editor in New York and I choked. Completely. But it did focus my mind on the importance of book titles. My current work-in-progress is about a woman with a dark past meets old man in graveyard ... I won’t write the pitch until I’ve finished the last page.
Who are you reading right now?
IN THE MISO SOUP by Ryu Murukami. THE UNQUIET, John Connolly. A collection of stories by Edgar Allen Poe. And TS Eliot’s Selected Poems is always by the bed. I compile long reading lists and next up is David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER, Kevin Myer’s WATCHING THE DOOR and Don De Lillo’s FALLING MAN.
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
You see, this is the kind of capricious behaviour that encourages people to doubt God’s existence! My nine-year-old son suggested that I should go for reading because I could write in my head.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
You have got to be kidding ... That’s writer-baiting!

Aifric Campbell’s debut novel, THE SEMANTICS OF MURDER, is published on April 24