And The Winner Is … Irish Crime Fiction!

The short-lists for the various categories in the Irish Book Awards have been announced, and there are five – count ’em – Irish crime writers up for a gong. And that’s not five crime writers in the Best Crime Novel category, because the IBA doesn’t do anything so gauche as a dedicated crime fiction award. No indeed. Instead they spread the crime writers over a variety of categories – Eoin Colfer, John Boyne, John Connolly, Benjamin Black and Patrick McCabe were nominated across the board last year. This year’s nominees? A trumpet-parp, please, maestro, for Ronan Bennett (ZUGZWANG), Benjamin Black, twice (THE SILVER SWAN), Eoin Colfer (right) (THE LEGEND OF THE WORST BOY IN THE WORLD), Derek Landy (SKULDUGGERY PLEASANT) and Tana French (IN THE WOODS). The winners will be announced at the Gala Awards Dinner in Dublin’s Mansion House Round Room on April 24, by which time the Grand Vizier is hoping that barring order Tana French has against him will be lifted for the evening.

And If You Tolerate This, Then Your Children Will Be Next

A Minister for Propaganda Elf writes: Given that Damien Mulley and Sinead Gleeson were kind enough to link to this post, and thus generated a few comments on our behalf, the Grand Vizier has ordered that we re-post the piece to save ourselves the grief of having to scroll down half the page in order to respond. Scrolling down, Jeez … Fairly takes it out of you, doesn’t it?

It was a funny old weekend for Twenty Major (right), even by his usual standards. On Saturday, George Byrne in the Evening Herald (no link) opened his review of Major’s debut novel, THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX PARK, by referring to “the postings of Twenty Major, whose rants and observations on Irish society, life and the world in general are generally acknowledged to be leagues ahead of the barely-literate ‘dear diary’ standards of the medium.” The general gist of a broadly positive review (which name-checks Kinky Friedman and Christopher Brookmyre) runs thusly: “Treading a frequently blurred line between comedy, farce, thriller and social commentary, THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX PARK (a very Colin Bateman-esque title that ) does possess an infectious energy […] and a few cracking ideas.”
  Also on Saturday, over in the Irish Times (no link; premium content), Colin Murphy opened his review of the novel with something of a damned-with-faint-praise gambit: “THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX PARK by Twenty Major is the worst book I have ever finished.” The very negative review finishes: “The book concludes with an acknowledgments section. The last line, directed at the readers of his blog, is: “Thank you all, you magnificent c***s.” That, really, is all you need to know: either it includes you, or it doesn’t. It is, though, likely to include the twenty-something male sitting across from you on the bus home, who will be chuckling over Twenty’s violent nihilism, toilet truths and use of the word ‘c**t’. He and his mates are going to make this a bestseller.”
  On Saturday night, at the Irish Blog Awards, Twenty Major won three awards, chief among them ‘Best Blog’, the third time in a row he has won the award (congratulations to Sinead Gleeson, by the way, another three-in-a-row winner with The Sigla Blog).
  On Sunday, the Sunday Times (Irish) Culture section (no link) carried a feature by Kathy Foley, herself a blogger, called ‘Blog roll’. The piece opened with Twenty Major as its hook, Foley segueing from Major’s book deal with Hodder Headline / Hachette into a verdict on the novel: “[I]t’s a tepid, flimsily plotted satire filled with half-cocked gags.” The gist of the article is this: “We have few, if any, counterparts to the American blogging elite, whose online dispatches zing with flair, attitude and insight, not to mention – in some cases – intellectual rigour. We simply don’t produce the vibrant and considered style of blogging that dominates the US scene, where there are compelling blogs on every topic imaginable – from architecture to zoology – each with energetic, articulate writing and comments sections brimming with vitality.”
  The first thing to say here is that you could replace ‘blog’ and ‘blogging’ with ‘newspapers / magazines’ and ‘journalism’ in the above quote and it would be just as valid an opinion. The second thing is that Irish blogging is still in its infancy by comparison with America, so like-for-like comparisons are premature if not entirely unfair, particularly given the vast difference in the respective populations.
  Thirdly, most non-internet journalists seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that blogs and blogging are intended as replacements, or poor substitutes, for newspapers and journalism. The reality is that the vast majority of blogs come into being to fill a specialist niche not being catered for in the mainstream media (Crime Always Pays to promote Irish crime fiction is a case in point; The Voyage, the well-deserved winner of the ‘Best Specialist Blog’ award on Saturday night, a category in which Crime Always Pays was nominated, is another). Indeed, in another feature in the Sunday Times’ Culture section, reporting on a new Irish music magazine, State, Mick Heaney says, “The growth of the blogosphere has had a huge impact on music publishing: American sites such as Pitchfork Media are as influential as any print equivalent, and are free … State has responded by setting up a complementary website, State.ie, run by the blogger Niall Byrne, aka Nialler9. Whereas the print edition is aimed at older readers, State.ie aims to draw in a new, younger audience.”
  A ‘new, younger audience’ … ‘the twenty-something male sitting across from you on the bus home’. There appears to be a generation gap opening up between print / mainstream media and the various incarnations of on-line web presences. It’s almost inevitable that Twenty Major’s novel, springing as it does fully formed from a blog, will suffer a credibility deficit when reviewed in mainstream publications, and not least because it’s a comedy crime caper novel. There are already echoes of the initial reactions to rock ‘n’ roll, when the raw, primal sound of Elvis et al was damned as jungle music made by uppity white trash.
  THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX PARK may not be the literary equivalent of the Sun Sessions but it is nonetheless a pioneer in terms of Irish blog-to-shelf publishing. Another Irish blogger, Fiona McPhillips, has her book TRYING TO CONCEIVE published in April. Sean and Keiran Murphy are soon to publish their BOOK OF SWEET THINGS through the Mercier Press. Eoin Purcell, a commissioning editor at Mercier, has also signed up ‘Grandad’ from the Head Rambles blog to write a novel.
The blog-to-shelf route to publishing means, of course, that all these books will arrive on the shelf with an audience already in place. Many members of that audience will in turn blog about their reaction to the books, spreading a virus-like word-of-mouth. As Colin Murphy notes in the Irish Times, Twenty Major’s book will very probably be an Irish best-seller on the strength of its appeal to a young male demographic, most of whom will be web-literate if not necessarily bloggers themselves. Taken to its logical conclusion, this development means that blog-to-shelf books will have no need of the traditional reviews in print publications.
  In essence, the current media revolution involves a move away from the traditional pulpit-audience lecture to a more democratic peer-to-peer discussion. In an Irish context, THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX PARK is the latest manifestation of this trend. Is it so surprising, then, that the novel was panned in the print media on the very weekend when Twenty Major’s peers yet again voted him Ireland’s best blogger?

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD by Declan Hughes

Declan Hughes has done a great job with this, his debut novel. THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD introduces us to Ed Loy, a PI who has returned from LA to his native Dublin for his mother’s funeral. Although his plan is to bury his mother and get the hell out of Dodge, he gets caught up in a missing person’s investigation that leads to a cluster of brutal murders. Organised crime, dirty politics, drugs, guns, property development; this noir story gets acquainted with the modern Dirty Ol’ Town and shares a bottle of Jameson with it. Then things get ugly.
  Hughes is a great writer who enjoys taking a minute to stop and take in his settings. At times his prose takes on a poetic quality. Take this gem: “We were standing on the terrace of the Bayview Hotel, watching a bloated old moon hoist itself slowly above the sea.” Gorgeous, right? Well, the novel is full of this kind of stuff, which I enjoyed for the most part. But to be completely honest, I’d have trimmed a few of these instances. At times the pacing was a little bogged down by description, and a harsher edit would have helped this.
  Hughes can also be a teensy bit guilty of superfluous writing. Example: “Tommy was sitting in the porch, rolling up a three-skinner, heating a small block of dope with a cigarette lighter and crumbling the edges into the tobacco.” Another writer might have gone with, “Tommy skinned up in the porch.” But I’m being very picky here. You might argue that I had trouble finding something negative to weigh up my review of this book – and I’d concede the point. My defence? Strong work is hard to critique.
  Happily, these instances take nothing away from an impressively well-constructed plot with some clever twists and a very satisfying denouement. I thought Ed Loy’s character was a real good ‘un. Heroic, but with enough flaws to make him interesting and likeable. I’ll be very interested in how his life develops as this series continues. The second Ed Loy mystery, THE COLOUR OF BLOOD is available now, and I plan to revisit Hughes’ dark and brooding work as soon as I can. – Gerard Brennan

Gerard Brennan can be found right here.

Follow That CAB

The second episode of Dirty Money, TV3’s series on the Criminal Assets Bureau and its war on Irish organised crime, screened last night, CAB being a unique and largely successful Irish experiment in targeting criminals’ assets whether or not it could be proved individuals had broken any actual laws in accumulating them. CAB came into being in the wake of the murder of the Sunday Independent’s investigative reporter Veronica Guerin (and, lest we forget, that of Detective Jerry McCabe), and the series is narrated by Guerin’s then peer and rival, Paul Williams of the Sunday World (the series is loosely based on Williams’ best-selling account of the period, THE UNTOUCHABLES). Marred by excessive Sunday World branding, and a faux hardboiled delivery on Williams’ part, it is nonetheless a fascinating account of a watershed in the Irish public consciousness, not least for its impressive array of talking heads, which includes most of the main players from the time. The first vid we posted had no sound, mainly because we're monkeys when it comes to the techie stuff, but our second attempt (featuring the relevant ministers Ruari Quinn and Nora Owen, and the then Garda Commissioner Pat Byrne) tries to answer John McFetridge's question in the comment box, about how you get the country to care about such matters. You take the Twenty Major approach, if Ruari Quinn is anything to go by ... Roll it there, Collette …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 2,099: R.S. Downie

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 Elmore Leonard. The man is a genius.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Janet Evanovich, Marian Keyes, anonymous estate agents on ‘Rightmove’ selling seaside houses I’m never going to live in.
Most satisfying writing moment?
13 October 2005. Sitting at home contemplating the futility of life, as you do when you’ve managed to fail interviews for several jobs, including your own, and you’re going to have to stop wasting time writing and find something useful to do for the rest of your sorry existence. The agent phoned and said, ‘We think we ought to tell you what’s been going on down here ...’
The best Irish crime novel is …?
STAR OF THE SEA isn’t really a crime novel is it? Oh, sorry – it’s you who asks the questions. STAR OF THE SEA, then.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Colin – no, Bateman’s – BELFAST CONFIDENTIAL. Or anything else involving Dan Starkey that hasn’t been filmed yet.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst – when it all goes wrong you can’t blame another department. Best – you can say you’re working without getting out of bed. Plus ‘I want to buy that book’ becomes ‘I really need to ...’
The pitch for your next novel is …?
Exasperated Legionary medic goes home to Gaul to sort out his family’s debt problems, and manages to make everything significantly worse.
Who are you reading right now?
Sarah Bower, Roland Vernon, White and Folkens’ THE HUMAN BONE MANUAL, and the Book of Amos.
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Read. There’s more CJ Sansom and Simon Scarrow waiting out there, and I’m tired of being the social outcast who hasn’t read LABYRINTH or Lemony Snicket.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Right now, halfway thro’ a novel and realising the great ideas in my head don’t look so great on paper ... the words are ... not very nice. No, those aren’t the words themselves, I mean ... oh, never mind. How can I write a novel when I can’t answer a simple question fluently? Oh. Yes. I remember now, officer. You ask the questions.

R.S. Downie’s RUSO AND THE DEMENTED DOCTOR hits the shelves on March 6.