“It’s Like Rai-ai-ain / On Your Wedding Day …”

Rhian from It’s A Crime! is kind enough to whisper in our electronic shell-like about Paul Nagle (right), whom she met at the London Book Fair. Nagle’s debut novel IRONIC is due in October, with the blurb elves wibbling thusly:

Lex Goldman stands accused of killing a young NYPD officer. His trial, set in the full glare of the world’s media, has captured the zeitgeist: the impregnable power of immeasurable wealth against the cold steel edge of justice. But who exactly is the elusive Lex Goldman? From the gold mines of apartheid-era South Africa to the cut and thrust of Wall Street, from Colombia’s notorious cartels to international terrorism, the twists and turns of Lex Goldman’s charmed life leave a deadly trail of intrigue, deception and covert cover-ups, all in the insatiable pursuit of wealth. Has Lex finally overstepped the mark? Has his luck at last run out? The coolheaded young prosecutor Kal Woodson, on a mission to stamp out such abject abuse of power and position, certainly believes so, and will do everything in his power to make it stick. A classic thriller in the true sense of the word, IRONIC, by first-time novelist Paul Nagle, is a roller-coaster ride of a novel, played out on an international stage as it hurtles towards its final bitter irony ...

Hurrah! CAP Towers has been suffering from a severe irony deficit for some months now. Will IRONIC cure our entirely metaphorical anaemia? Only time, that notoriously verbose stoolie canary, will tell …

Messrs Connolly And Hughes Would Like To Announce …

Perennial messers John Connolly and Declan Hughes launch THE REAPERS and THE DYING BREED, respectively, at Dubray Books on Grafton Street in Dublin next Thursday, May 8th, and have been kind enough to extend an invitation to toddle along to anyone who happens to be in the general vicinity (possible consequences pictured, right). For no further information whatsoever, or at least not yet, you could always check out Dec Hughes’ interweb yokeybus, The Parting Glass; and for even less information, if that were possible, try John Connolly’s blog – albeit with the kicker that there’s a smashing piece on Ross Macdonald’s THE CHILL, which is the first book in JC’s on-line book club. The Grand Vizier has deigned to allow the elves and HR Pufnstuf the evening off to attend, although the flying monkeys are still grounded after the recent ‘unpleasantness’ with the belly-dancing dwarves in the Duke pub. Anyhoo, Critical Mick, sir? If you bring the picinick basket, I’ll bring the blanket and the Yogi Bear quips …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 2009: Andrew Taylor

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?
I’d like to say CRIME AND PUNISHMENT or THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY but (to be brutally honest) the one I’d really, really, really like to have written is my next one.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I’m delighted to say that guilt and reading don’t go together for writers. Or not for this one. My tastes are catholic. I work on the assumption that everything I read must in some way feed into the great creative mulch from which my own novels spring like constipated bog monsters in very slow motion. Most satisfying writing moment?
When a book is going well. It’s like being God on a good day (see below).
The best Irish crime novel is …?
This is a difficult one for an author who labours under the disadvantage of being only half Irish ... At first I thought almost anything by the humane, satirical and eminently clubbable Ruth Dudley Edwards (if pressed I’d say MATRICIDE AT ST MARTHA’S is my favourite). I enjoy Declan Hughes too – he’s going places. But the one I keep coming back to, time and again, is Flann O’Brien’s THE THIRD POLICEMAN, which does what all great novels ought to make you do: it makes you think, and much else. It’s also got my favourite all-time, all genre fictional ending. Longman’s (who had published AT SWIM TWO BIRDS) turned the book down in 1940. “We realize,” they wrote with infinite snootiness, “the author’s ability but think that he should become less fantastic and in this new novel he is more so.” It wasn’t published until 1967, after O’Brien’s death, and then only because of the persistence of an Irish publisher, Timothy O’Keefe.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
See above.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Writing / writing. Trite but true.
The pitch for your next novel is …?
Set in the 1930s, BLEEDING HEART SQUARE is partly based on a celebrated real-life Victorian murder case with links to my grandmother’s family. The novel deals with a young woman who flees from her abusive aristocratic husband to an uncertain refuge with her unknown father. He drinks his life away in a place where, according to legend, the devil once danced and tore out the heart of a beautiful woman. Now someone is sending raw (and sometimes rotting) hearts in the post and the British Union of Fascists are out on the streets. A seedy plain-clothes policeman haunts the square, detecting his nightmares. An unemployed journalist wants to win back the woman he loves but she seems to care more for a public-school communist with large private income. And no one has seen the woman who owns the house in Bleeding Heart Square for more than four years.
Who are you reading right now?
Tobias Smollett’s THE EXPEDITION OF HUMPHREY CLINKER and Harlan Coben’s new one, HOLD TIGHT. An interesting combination. There’s pleasure in reading more than one thing at once. They interact – in my case, most recently, with Stieg Larsson’s THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, a book weighed down with too much hype, but much of it is justified.
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
First I say to him, You bastard. But of course it would have to be writing, if I couldn’t find a way to change God’s mind. As God Himself knows, it’s much more fun to create.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Not there yet.

Andrew Taylor’s BLEEDING HEART SQUARE is published on May 29

What Lilyput Did Next # 204: Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright …

A Minister for Propaganda Elf writes: Herewith, and by popular demand (or least the occasional demand from Granny Viz, Ms Witch and Princess Witch) be the Princess Lilyput’s latest outing, this time playing with the disturbingly psychedelic Tiger-Lily, who may or may not be prompted to join the general revelry by the Grand Viz (just out of picture). Those with a delicate sensibility be warned: all goes swimmingly until the last third or so, when Lilyput appears to be afflicted by what might politely be described as ‘nappy issues’. Roll it there, Collette …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE REAPERS by John Connolly

Black people could be seen in town, but they were always moving: carrying, delivering, lifting, hauling. Only white people were allowed to stand still. Black people did what they had to do, then left. After nightfall, there were only white folk on the streets [ … ] Justice might be blind, but the law wasn’t. Justice was aspirational, but the law was actual. The law was real. It had uniforms, and weapons. It smelt of sweat and tobacco. It drove a big car with a star on the door. White people had justice. Black folks had the law.
  John Connolly, THE REAPERS, pg 70

Is it too late to call John Connolly an angry young man? Beneath the quietly mannered prose, THE REAPERS seethes. It seethes in a way Jim Thompson did when he was at his best, with a coolly ironic detachment. Louis, whose story THE REAPERS is, could easily have graced one of Thompson’s tales of charming psychopathic killers. Neither would he be out of place in a Highsmith novel, perhaps as Ripley’s perfect foil.
  But Louis, like Parker, is uniquely a John Connolly character. It’s possible to be fascinated and even obsessed with Thompson and Highsmith’s characters, but it is impossible to love them. Louis may not crave your love, but he deserves it.
  The reapers of the title are ‘the elite among killers’, of which Louis is one, and the plot revolves around a reckoning in blood facilitated by dying businessman who has good reason to see Louis dead. Parker hardly shows. Instead we get large chunks of Louis’ back-story, including his recruitment as a reaper and the experience that made him a sublime killer; an insight into the dynamics of Louis and Angel’s relationship, which is as much Lou ‘n’ Bud as it is Didi and Gogo; and an extended introduction to one of Angel and Louis’ associates, the blue-collar mechanic Willie Brew, who seems to have sauntered in from an Elmore Leonard novel.
  As a result the minimalist plot is very much character-driven. Connolly’s eye for the unusual, his ear for an unworn phrase and the apparently casual accumulation of subtle detail when fleshing out a character takes care of the rest.
  It’s a terrific page-turner, a charismatic exercise in the grand old art of storytelling. John Gardner, who was notoriously sniffy about genre fiction in general, and crime and mystery fiction in particular, once said that the novel should be a vivid, continuous dream. There’s more than a hint of a nightmare lurking behind THE REAPERS, and perhaps it’s that nightmare which fuels the deadpan rage between every line, but THE REAPERS is certainly the kind of compelling tale John Gardner had in mind. – Declan Burke