Review: THE CITY OF LIES by Michael Russell

Opening in 1940, The City of Lies (Constable) is Michael Russell’s fourth novel to feature Dublin-based Special Branch detective Stefan Gillespie, whose mixed Irish-German heritage has proved useful to his superiors on previous occasions. Investigating a suspected murder-arson in West Wicklow, Stefan stumbles across what appears to be a German radio. Soon he is on his way to Berlin as a courier carrying crucial information to the Irish ambassador, there to encounter Francis Stuart and Frank Ryan, among others. Meanwhile, in 1939, Hauptmann Johannes Rilling records the atrocities being committed by German troops as they blitzkrieg through Poland, a series of mass murders of civilians on a scale previously unimaginable to a Wehrmacht officer. Blending historical events and personages into his fiction, Russell creates a vividly detailed tale which investigates the coming horrors of the Holocaust (“Blood spoke to blood; when it did there were no questions.”) and explores a Berlin drunk on power and triumph, but already experiencing the increasingly bizarre collective psychosis of a city built on lies. With the charmingly frank and diffident Stefan Gillespie as our guide, The City of Lies, by turns harrowing, tender and hopeful, is Michael Russell’s most accomplished novel to date. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times’ crime fiction column for June.

Launch: CITY OF LIES by Michael Russell

One to Watch: THE CITY IN DARKNESS by Michael Russell

I don’t make a habit of blogging about books I’m still reading but with 100 pages or so still to go, Michael Russell’s THE CITY IN DARKNESS (Constable) is shaping up to be one of the best Irish crime fiction novels I’ve read all year. Quote the blurb elves:

Christmas 1939. In Europe the Phoney War hides carnage to come. In Ireland Detective Inspector Stefan Gillespie keeps tabs on Irishmen joining the British Forces. It’s unpleasant work, but when an IRA raid on a military arsenal sends Garda Special Branch in search of guns and explosives, Stefan is soon convinced his boss, Superintendent Terry Gregory, is working for the IRA.
  At home for Christmas, Stefan is abruptly called to Laragh, an isolated mountain town. A postman has disappeared, believed killed, and Laragh’s Guards are hiding something. Stefan is the nearest Special Branch detective, yet is he only there because Gregory wants him out of the way?
  Laragh is close to the lake where Stefan’s wife Maeve drowned years earlier, and when events expose a connection between the missing postman and her death, Stefan realises it wasn’t an accident, but murder. And it will be a difficult, dangerous journey where Stefan has to finally confront the ghosts of the past in the mountains of Wicklow, before he can return to Dublin and the truth of his boss’s duplicity.

  It’s a beautifully realised historical mystery, a blend of police procedural and spy novel, the story split between WWII Ireland and post-Civil War Spain. THE CITY IN DARKNESS was published on October 3rd; for more on Michael Russell, whose ‘City’ novels have previously been nominated for the CWA awards, clickety-click here …

Event: ECHOLAND by Joe Joyce Chosen as Dublin’s ‘One City, One Book’ for 2017

Hearty congratulations to Joe Joyce, whose ECHOLAND (2013) has been chosen as Dublin’s ‘One City, One Book’ for 2017. Set during the WWII years of Ireland’s ‘Emergency’, ECHOLAND is a spy thriller featuring young intelligence officer Paul Duggan, and the first in a series that includes ECHOBEAT (2014) and ECHOWAVE (2015). Quoth Joe:

“I’m delighted and honoured that ECHOLAND will be Dublin’s One City, One Book for 2017. The city is an integral part of the book, not just the backdrop to a spy story. As I was writing it, I was very conscious of the hardships and great dangers of the Emergency period, faced — as always by Dubliners — with resilience and wit.”

  For a review of ECHOLAND, clickety-click here.
  For an interview with Joe Joyce, clickety-click here.

Review: THE CONSTANT SOLDIER by William Ryan

William Ryan’s debut, The Holy Thief (2010), was the first of a series featuring Captain Alexei Korolev, a police detective operating in Moscow during the 1930s. His subsequent novels, The Bloody Meadow (2011) and The Twelfth Department (2013), confirmed that Ryan was a crime writing talent to watch, his unconventional police procedurals given a Kafkaesque twist as Korolev struggled to assimilate the genre’s notions of justice and truth into Stalin’s grotesque interpretation of same.
  The Constant Soldier (Mantle), then, is something of a departure for Ryan. A standalone novel, it’s set in an idyllic Silesian village in the autumn of 1944, a territory once Polish but now German – although everyone knows, with the Russian Army advancing rapidly from the East, that it won’t be German for much longer. Paul Brandt, a Wehrmacht soldier, returns home a decorated hero from the Eastern Front, invalided out of the fighting after losing an arm, his face so burnt his own father almost fails to recognise him when he collects him at the train station. His family are outraged when Paul accepts a position as steward at a ‘rest hut’ – in reality a luxurious villa – serving the Nazi officers who work at the nearby ‘work camp’, but Paul’s apparently docile acceptance of the status quo masks a vague desire to sabotage the German war effort.
  Paul, we learn, joined the Wehrmacht as the lesser of two evils when, charged with subversive activities before the war, he was offered the choice of the army or prison. When he realises that Judith, a fellow plotter, has spent the war in slave labour, and now works at the rest hut, Paul acknowledges that he has ‘wrongs he had to put right.’ But trapped as he is between the implacable evil of Nazi Germany and the mercilessly irresistible force of the oncoming Russians, what can one man do?
  There are comparisons to be drawn between William Ryan’s Captain Korolev novels and The Constant Soldier, the most obvious being that both feature good men trying to do the right thing in a world where even basic notions such as ‘good’ and ‘right’ have been perverted by the ideologies of megalomaniac dictators. But while the reader can be fairly sure that Korolev, as the protagonist of a series, will survive and thrive, Paul Brandt is a much more vulnerable character. Essentially a self-appointed spy operating behind enemy lines, Brandt has the wounds suffered on the battlefield in his favour – ‘behind his frozen face he could be anyone’ – and yet he is operating at a time when suspicion is the very oxygen of a political system. As a result, and despite Ryan’s deceptively gentle pacing, the tale quickly becomes an emotional rollercoaster that sustains an increasingly tense mood of impending disaster throughout.
  Paul Brandt’s isn’t the only perspective we get in The Constant Soldier, however. We also see the dog days of the war through the eyes of the idealistic Polya, a tank driver in the vanguard of the Russian advance; and those of Obersturmführer Neumann, the commandant of the ‘rest hut’, a long-serving Party member who secretly listens to the banned Jewish composer Mendelssohn and battles personal demons as he tries to maintain a semblance of order in the growing chaos. The multiple perspectives lend themselves to a subtle and sympathetic portrayal of the characters and their conflict, and with the shadow of nearby Auschwitz casting a long shadow across the story, Ryan is particularly acute when he deals with the subject of how ordinary people allowed themselves to engage in monstrous acts. “Mostly,” Neumann observes to himself, “no one had ever imagined it would come to this. Until it had, of course.” For his part, and despite being the closet thing the novel gets to a conventional hero, Paul Brandt is as guilty of brutal depredations as any German veteran of the Eastern Front. “When everyone else is doing something,” he tells his despairing father, “you end up doing it too – without thinking about it. Sometimes terrible things.”
  The Constant Soldier is a beguiling blend, a spy novel-cum-historical thriller that offers a gripping but nuanced narrative set against the horrors of the absolute abuse of absolute power. It’s a bleak but rewarding novel about guilt, personal and shared, and taking responsibility for your actions, even if doing so offers no possibility of reward. “What did it matter anyway?” Neumann asks. “Once you had killed even one innocent person, then the number becomes irrelevant … They were both of them guilty past the point of any form of redemption – on any scale.” ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

Launch: THE CONSTANT SOLDIER by William Ryan

First Look: THE CONSTANT SOLDIER by William Ryan

William Ryan established his fine reputation as the author of a series of police procedurals set in Stalin-era Moscow, but THE CONSTANT SOLDIER (Mantle), while still historical fiction, takes him in something of a new direction. To wit:

1944. Paul Brandt, a soldier in the German army, returns wounded and ashamed from the bloody chaos of the Eastern front to find his village home much changed and existing in the dark shadow of an SS rest hut - a luxurious retreat for those who manage the concentration camps, run with the help of a small group of female prisoners who - against all odds - have so far survived the war.
  When, by chance, Brandt glimpses one of these prisoners, he realizes that he must find a way to access the hut. For inside is the woman to whom his fate has been tied since their arrest five years before, and now he must do all he can to protect her.
  But as the Russian offensive moves ever closer, the days of this rest hut and its SS inhabitants are numbered. And while hope - for Brandt and the female prisoners - grows tantalizingly close, the danger too is now greater than ever.
  And, in a forest to the east, a young female Soviet tank driver awaits her orders to advance …

  THE CONSTANT SOLDIER will be published on August 25th. For more, clickety-click here …

First Look: THE CITY IN DARKNESS by Michael Russell

THE CITY IN DARKNESS (Constable), set in Dublin in 1939, is the third novel in Michael Russell’s series featuring Detective Inspector Stefan Gillespie. To wit:

Christmas 1939. In Europe the Phoney War hides carnage to come. In Ireland Detective Inspector Stefan Gillespie keeps tabs on Irishmen joining the British Forces. It’s unpleasant work, but when an IRA raid on a military arsenal sends Garda Special Branch in search of guns and explosives, Stefan is soon convinced his boss, Superintendent Terry Gregory, is working for the IRA.
  At home for Christmas, Stefan is abruptly called to Laragh, an isolated mountain town. A postman has disappeared, believed killed, and Laragh’s Guards are hiding something. Stefan is the nearest Special Branch detective, yet is he only there because Gregory wants him out of the way?
  Laragh is close to the lake where Stefan’s wife Maeve drowned years earlier, and when events expose a connection between the missing postman and her death, Stefan realises it wasn’t an accident, but murder. And it will be a difficult, dangerous journey where Stefan has to finally confront the ghosts of the past in the mountains of Wicklow, before he can return to Dublin and the truth of his boss’s duplicity.

  THE CITY IN DARKNESS will be published on May 5th. For more on Michael Russell, clickety-click here …

Launch: ECHOWAVE by Joe Joyce

Joe Joyce publishes the third in his WWII-set mysteries, ECHOWAVE (Liberties Press) next week. Quoth the blurb elves:

June 1941. An American plane crashes in the west of Ireland. Its cargo of booze, cigarettes and caviar destined for the US embassy in London includes a piece of secret military hardware of great interest to the Germans. The device disappears from the wreckage. Paul Duggan, a young Irish military intelligence officer still pining for a beautiful Austrian-Jewish refugee who has moved on to a new life in New York, sets out to find it before the Germans do. Meanwhile, the United States and the British are pushing neutral Ireland to help protect their Atlantic convoys, which would involve it in the war. The search and the diplomatic arm-twisting become entwined and take Duggan to the dangerous back streets of Lisbon, the war’s spy centre, where the intelligence games between the Allies and the Nazis can turn deadly.

  For a review of Joe Joyce’s ECHOLAND, clickety-click here …

Review: WORLD GONE BY by Dennis Lehane

“Before the small war broke them apart,” begins Dennis Lehane’s World Gone By, (Little, Brown) “they all gathered to support the big war.” The story opens in December 1942 in the Versailles Ballroom, Tampa, at a glamorous fundraiser for US troops stationed overseas. Actors, singers and sport stars mingle with financial and political heavyweights, the event organised and choreographed by Joseph ‘Boston Joe’ Coughlin, the Irish-American gangster we first met as a street punk on the make in The Given Day (2008), and who whose bloody and brutal rise to power during Prohibition is detailed in Live By Night (2012).
  By now a largely respectable businessman, albeit one who still has business interests in common with the notorious Meyer Lansky in Cuba, Joe Coughlin is respected and feared by his colleagues and enemies. A man who has always ensured that his associates in ‘the most powerful business syndicate in the Western hemisphere’ earned handsomely from his illicit ventures, and a former gangster who no longer has any power worth killing for, Joe is to all intents and purposes untouchable. So who has put a hit out on Joe Coughlin? And why would anyone want to kill him and disrupt the status quo?
  These questions provide World Gone By, Lehane’s 12th novel, with its narrative spine, as Coughlin tries to discover who his enemies are and second-guess their motives, all the while trying to keep a lid on a race war that is threatening to explode as an ambitious Italian-American faction tries to muscle in on the Tampa turf of ‘the Negro gangster Montooth Dix’. There are thrills and spills aplenty as the story unfolds, but it’s in the flesh Lehane packs onto the bones that the novel truly comes alive. Joe Coughlin is a fascinating creation, a dignified savage who is every bit as vicious when it comes to defending his own interests – including, most notably, the life of his young son Tomas – as he is noble in his aspirations for a better, more rewarding life for those he holds dear.
  He is a complex man, the black sheep scion of “a family tree whose branches had bent over the centuries with the weight of troubadours, publicans, writers, revolutionaries, magistrates, and policemen – liars all.” He is capable of falling in love with another man’s wife (in the process risking abject humiliation for them both) while still fiercely grieving for his dead wife, Tomas’s mother Graciela. He is acutely self-aware of his failings as a man and a father: “No,” he says in the wake of a shoot-out massacre, answering Tomas’s question as to whether he’s ‘a bad guy’, “just not a particularly good one.” Haunted by what appears to be the ghost of a young boy, Joe is unable to decide if he is hallucinating due to stress, experiencing a foreshadowing of his own mortality, or suffering a self-fulfilling prophecy born of years of subsumed guilt over the blood on his hands.
  Ultimately, World Gone By is a novel about the turbulent transition of America’s criminal fraternity from the riotous gangster era, as epitomised by Joe Coughlin and his peers, to the post-WWII years and the more organised crime of the Mafia. Joe Coughlin, the former hot-headed punk who grew up to become a thoughtful strategist, straddles both worlds, although from the beginning Joe, one of the great tragic anti-heroes of contemporary crime fiction, is conscious that his is an untenable position, that fate itself decrees that blood must always be paid back in blood. “Sometimes,” Lehane writes, “when outrage begat outrage with enough frequency, it threatened the fabric of the universe, and the universe pushed back.” ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

Publication: The US release of THE LOST AND THE BLIND by Declan Burke

I’m heading off on holidays in the next couple of days, which is nice, although it does mean that I’ll be away from the desk when THE LOST AND THE BLIND (Severn House) gets its official US release, on April 1st [insert your own April Fool gags here]. Quoth the blurb elves:

This gripping Irish thriller is an intriguing new departure for comic noir writer Declan Burke.
  “A dying man, if he is any kind of man, will live beyond the law.” The elderly German, Karl Uxkull, was senile or desperate for attention. Why else would he concoct a tale of Nazi atrocity on the remote island of Delphi, off the coast of Donegal? And why now, 60 years after the event, just when Irish-American billionaire Shay Govern has tendered for a prospecting licence for gold in Lough Swilly? Journalist Tom Noone doesn’t want to know. With his young daughter Emily to provide for, and a ghost-writing commission on Shay Govern’s autobiography to deliver, the timing is all wrong. Besides, can it be mere coincidence that Karl Uxkull's tale bears a strong resemblance to the first thriller published by legendary spy novelist Sebastian Devereaux, the reclusive English author who has spent the past 50 years holed up on Delphi? But when a body is discovered drowned, Tom and Emily find themselves running for their lives, in pursuit of the truth that is their only hope of survival.

  So there you have it. The early word has been quite positive, I’m delighted (and, as always, relieved) to say. To wit:

“Burke shows again that he’s not just a comic genius, but also a fine dramatic writer and storyteller.” – Booklist

“There’s much, much more, and readers with the patience to watch as Burke (Crime Always Pays, 2014, etc.) peels back layer after layer will be rewarded with an unholy Chinese box of a thriller. Make that an Irish-German box.” – Kirkus Reviews

“In “The Lost and the Blind,” Declan Burke weaves plot twist after plot twist together to create a thriller full of mystery and intrigue … Not many authors are capable of successfully pulling off such a complex plot, but Burke does and makes it seem effortless.” – Library Thing

  If that sounds like your kind of book, you can find THE LOST AND THE BLIND here. I thank you for your consideration …

Publication: A POSTCARD FROM HAMBURG by JJ Toner

It sounds a lot like the title of an Alan Furst spy novel, but A POSTCARD FROM HAMBURG is the third in JJ Toner’s WWII series of crime thrillers to feature Kurt Müller, and the sequel to THE BLACK ORCHESTRA. Quoth the blurb elves:

1943. WWII is raging in Europe. Kurt Müller is living in London. While working for British Intelligence he discovers a photograph of his girlfriend, Gudrun, among the possessions of a German agent. Then he gets a postcard from Gudrun, posted in Germany, and he knows the Gestapo has taken her…

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

Review: SOME LUCK by Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley returns to the agrarian American mid-west setting of her 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres for Some Luck (Mantle) the first book in a proposed ‘Hundred Years Trilogy’ that will span the 20th century. The novel opens in Iowa in 1920, with young farmer Walter Langdon – recently returned from the trenches of WWI – experiencing the blend of joy and terror that comes with being a new father who has just bought his first farm.
  Walter’s pragmatic voice (“Oat straw was also a beautiful colour – paler than gold but more useful.”) is by no means the only one to be heard in Some Luck. The story offers perspectives from Walter’s wife Rosanna and their growing brood of children – Frank, Joe, Mary, Lillian, Henry and Claire – all of whom have distinctive takes on the experience of growing up on a farm in rural America.
  The novel covers the years from 1920 to 1953, and so incorporates major events in recent American history, such as the Wall Street Crash, the Great Depression, the rise of American Communism, WWII, and the post-WWII development of the Cold War. Rather than deal with these events head-on, however, Jane Smiley tends to refer to them obliquely, or at a tangent (WWII is the exception, given that we follow in Frank’s footsteps as he fights his way from North Africa, across Sicily and into Italy).
  Events such as the Wall Street Crash, for example, merit no more than a couple of lines of conversation between two characters, as they give voice to their fears that the crash might affect produce prices in the Mid-West. The same applies to the Great Depression. While there are references to the ‘Oklahoma Dustbowl’, and times do grow leaner (and a ham-fisted attempt at an armed robbery by desperate men causes some excitement), the Langdons and most of their neighbours escape the worst of the deprivation and poverty – although, as always, prices keep on falling.
  Despite the huge sweep of the story, however, given the backdrop of momentous events, the number of characters who appear and the time-span involved, Some Luck is a very intimate kind of epic, and one that is rooted in the domestic concerns of Walter and Rosanna Langdon.
  Indeed, the recurring motif of the book is the physical manifestation of family domesticity, the house: at various points in the novel, the characters’ good and bad times are reflected in the kind of house where they live, and the condition of that house. The novel opens with Walter walking out on his new farm and evaluating the farm’s prospects, but eventually turning to the solidly built home that lies at its centre; the devastation of the Great Depression is characterised by abandoned houses, which turn into eyesores on the landscape; and the novel concludes with the young Claire struggling to cope with the news of a momentous death, and the emotional churn inside that leaves her feeling ‘like an empty house’.
  Beautifully descriptive in its depictions of an Iowa landscape at the mercy of volatile and extreme weather conditions – blistering sun in summer, savage blizzards in winter – the novel is an elegy for a forgotten generation but also a cautionary fable against mythologising their world (“Every house is in a dark wood,” warns Frank after his experience in WWII, amplifying the recurring fairytale motif, “every house has a wicked witch in it, doesn’t matter if she looks like a fairy godmother …”). All told, it’s an engrossing, bittersweet love letter to a people whose experience of a relentlessly changing world taught them to appreciate its natural charms but never underestimate its perils. ~ Declan Burke

  Some Luck by Jane Smiley is published by Mantle.

  This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Review: THE BLACK LIFE by Paul Johnston

Paul Johnston’s The Black Life (Crème de la Crime, €18.99), his sixth to feature the Greek-Scottish private detective Alex Mavros, is rooted in the past, although it’s a past that becomes more relevant with each passing day. Hired to investigate the apparently miraculous reappearance of Aron Samuel, a Jewish man thought to have died in Auschwitz, Mavros travels to the city of Thessalonika. Soon he finds himself embroiled in a tale that links the extermination camps of the Third Reich with the recent rise of the fascist Greek political party, Phoenix Rises. What follows is a powerful novel on many levels. Johnston doesn’t shy away from describing the hellish activities at Auschwitz, and he further explores the extent of the collaboration that existed between Greek citizens and the German authorities when it came to deporting the Jewish population of Thessalonika. He also investigates the activities of those Jewish men and women who took their revenge on former Nazis in the post-WWII years, weaving the narrative strands through a political tapestry that includes the beliefs of Mavros himself, whose own family suffered terribly for their Communist leanings during the reign of the Colonels. Harrowing in places, it’s a gripping private eye novel that offers a chilling snapshot of modern Greece. – Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.