Diary: The German Tour for THE BIG O

Well, that was a blast. The first leg of the German tour to promote THE BIG O (Edition Nautilus) was terrific fun, taking me from Berlin to Erfurt, on to Braunschweig, back to Berlin, hence to Hamburg, and finally to Unna, for ‘Mord und Hellweg’, the biennial crime fiction festival billed as the biggest in Europe.
  It’s been a crazy week. Highlights included hearing scenes from THE BIG O performed by actors (in German, natürlich – a bizarre experience for yours truly); a reading in front of an audience of 250 in a brewery in Braunschweig, which offered as much beer as you can drink with your admission ticket (why aren’t all literary events held in breweries? – discuss); a reading in a mortuary (!); a guided tour of Hamburg’s St. Pauli and Reeperbahn district (I made my excuses and left, eventually); and trying to explain the term ‘screwball noir’ to German audiences when I haven’t the faintest idea of what it might mean in English.
  The experience, as before, was made utterly painless by my friend, guide and translator, Robert Brack, who is better known in Germany as a best-selling and highly accomplished crime author. For some reason, his novels (35 and counting) have yet to be translated into the English language, although I’d imagine some savvy publisher will do so very soon.
  So – that’s it for the first leg; I’ll be back in Germany again in 10 days’ time, for a couple of sold-out gigs in Berlin. By which time I might even have come up with a definition of ‘screwball noir’ …

What Is This Thing We Call ‘Screwball Noir’?

Yep, it’s self-aggrandizing Saturday, this week courtesy of Lily Courthope over at Amazon.com. Lily, bless her, has taken umbrage at the Publishers Weekly review of our humble tome (right), and takes them to task thusly:

“Don’t you feel sorry for those PW reviewers?”: November 15, 2008

This is not the first time that I’ve marvelled at the staid, moribund quality of a PW review. I’m pretty sure that if an author isn’t named Hemingway, Fitzgerald or Faulkner, they just don’t get it.
  And that’s too bad because author Declan Burke has created a frantically paced comedy of errors that is a lot of fun to read. No, I won’t be writing a thesis any time soon about kidnapper Ray’s probable identity crisis, but when was the last time you read a line as funny as the one (right near the end of the book) in which he at last reveals his true identity? And that line is just the froth on this comic concoction.
  This book reminds me of some of my favourite movies: Libelled Lady, His Girl Friday, and of more recent origin, Snatch. Screwballs, every one of them. Some darker than others, some more romantic, but all of them with wild plot turns and breath-catching scenes that keep the viewer/reader fixed in place, waiting for the next laugh.
  If you’re looking for deep meaning and deathless prose, go check out the latest bestselling, yawn-worthy, overwrought work of ‘literature’ (or even another PW review); if you’re looking for a good time, call 1-800-THE BIG O.

  God bless you, Lily Courthope! So what is this thing we call ‘screwball noir’, people? Examples, please …

The Embiggened O: Thus Spake Mr And Mrs Kirkus

You learn something new every day. For example, yesterday I learned that in Kirkus Reviews, ‘a star is assigned to books of unusual merit, determined by the editors’. Which is nice, because they gave our humble offering THE BIG O a starred review, with the verdict running thusly:

Imagine Donald Westlake and his alter ego Richard Stark moving to Ireland and collaborating on a screwball noir, and you have some idea of Burke’s accomplishment.

  Which is nice, especially given last week’s unpleasantness with Publishers Weekly. In fact, it’s a hell of a lot better than nice. I know that a lot of writers say they don’t pay attention to reviews, good or bad, but as a tyro trying to break through with his second novel, I can’t afford the luxury of being that blasé. I’m still at the very early stage where, if you’ll forgive the tortured metaphor, I’m like the first amphibian to take a tentative step onto dry land, and gasping for the oxygen of publicity.
  Given that context, to be mentioned in the same breath as Donald Westlake and his doppelganger Richard Stark is fairly mind-blowing, as you might imagine.
  And given the wider context, which is that THE BIG O was originally a co-published novel in cahoots with Marsha Swan of the tiny but perfectly formed Hag’s Head Press, which in turn involved stumping up half the publishing costs, which in turn amounted to a chunk of mortgage money shortly after I’d lost the job I was working in at the time, the Kirkus review is deeply, deeply satisfying, and a vindication of the leap of faith my wife Aileen took with me at the time.
  Yes, I know I’m making a mountain out of a molehill here. But the good days can be few and far between when you’re starting out as a writer, and it’d be wrong not to celebrate them when they do come along, not least because everyone who’s given THE BIG O and yours truly a little nudge along the way is entitled to share in the good karma. Happy days, people.