Strange Days Indeed

I read the latest George Pelecanos, WHAT IT WAS, last week, and very enjoyable is exactly what it was. It’s a Derek Strange ‘origins’ novel, set in 1972, with Watergate simmering away in the background; as well as Derek Strange, it features Frank Vaughn and Nick Stefanos. Derek even wanders by a record store called Nutty Nathan’s at one point …
  If it all sounds a little self-referential, it is - but in a good way, a bringing it all back home kinda way. There’s something oddly elegiac about the tone, given that it’s an origins story; but at the same time the novel fairly bops along, a swaying, swaggering, finger-clicking slice of funked-up cool. I’ll review it in a bit more depth in a week or so, when I’ve finally surfaced for air; for now I’ll leave you with an interview with George Pelecanos I had published in the Irish Times today. It starts a lot like this:

“LET ME ASK you a question,” George Pelecanos says as our interview comes to an end. “Are you a Thin Lizzy fan?” Given my Dublin connection, he has been itching to ask it all along. “I just think it’s an amazing story,” he says. “I get chills when I think that there’s a statue of Phil Lynott on a street in Dublin, that people leave flowers by the statue. I love stuff like that.”
  Music has always played an important part in George Pelecanos’s novels. From his debut A Firing Offense in 1992, his characters have prowled the mean streets of Washington DC, tapping a toe to a bewildering variety of sounds, from the swing jazz of the 1930s through the funk rock of the 1970s and on to the contemporary sounds of last year’s The Cut. In fact, it was music that taught him how to write his own way.
  Pelecanos wasn’t much of a reader until his mid-20s – “Until then I wanted to be a filmmaker, I was a real film nut” – but then he took a class in classic crime fiction. The curriculum included Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Ross Macdonald and James Crumley.
  “All these books blew me away,” he says. “I mean, even an early Mickey Spillane, that’s a good book. I got obsessed with books after taking that class. And by books I mean crime novels.”
  Rejecting the notion of a formal writing class, Pelecanos instead chose to immerse himself in reading. “It took me 10 years before I sat down to write my first novel,” he says. “By then it was the 1980s, the punk thing had happened, and I was heavily involved in that. And I got the idea that what I was going to do was write a punk rock detective novel …”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

The Woman Who Cried Wolf

Off I toddled to the Merrion Hotel a couple of weeks ago, to interview Jodi Picoult (right), who was in Dublin promoting her latest opus, LONE WOLF. I’d been expecting a very slick and seasoned pro, given that Jodi Picoult is a runaway best-seller, the kind of writer who - in person - can talk forever without actually saying anything worth quoting.
  Well, Jodi Picoult is certainly very professional, but she was also terrific fun to talk with, not least because she was very happy indeed to offer forthright opinions on hot-button topics such as sex, politics and religion, and was also gloriously indiscreet about some of her fellow scribes.
  The interview was published in the Evening Herald, and can be found here, but the version I sent in was cut off at the end, presumably for reasons of space. What follows is what Jodi said when I asked her (we’d been talking about her previous novel, SING ME HOME, and how gay characters are perceived in mainstream fiction) about how likely it was that she’d alienate some of her readers by insisting that her novels can’t just be entertainment, but need to deal with serious issues too. Quoth Jodi:

“I was on Twitter before you came in,” she says, “reading an interview in the Wall Street Journal with James Patterson, and thinking, ‘God, this guy’s killing me here.’ Basically, he wrote 13 books that are coming out next year.”
  That’s ‘wrote’ in inverted commas, of course.
  “Exactly. He gives an outline, and he gives a writer notes on it, and off it goes. And he says, look, this is commercial fiction, it’s not rocket science and I’m not a student of the craft. But I argue that you can be a writer of commercial fiction and a student of the craft. If I were to write a Patterson novel, I’d probably shoot myself in the head.
  “There’s room for all of us on the bookshelves, even the purest of escapist fiction,” she continues. “But I do believe that if you are fortunate to have a podium, you really need to think about what you’re saying. And maybe for Mr Patterson it’s okay to simply entertain, but I would always want to do more than that.”

La Hunt Becomes The Hunter

It’s a busy old time for Arlene Hunt (right, hunting). Firstly, the paperback edition of THE CHOSEN was published this week, which I’m sure was very time-consuming in itself, but on top of all that Arlene had to find time to bask in the wake of a very nice review in New York’s Irish Echo. I’ve no link, I’m afraid, but the gist runs thusly:

“THIS IRISH author writes with the same deftness as John Connolly about a locale outside Ireland and does so very convincingly … Great writing, convincing development and a satisfying denouement. This is an impressive addition to the serial killer genre which has obvious movie potential.” - Seamus Scanlon

  Seamus Scanlon, by the way, is a very fine (and award winning) short story writer, of whom you’ll be hearing quite a lot over the next couple of years.
  Back to la Hunt, however, and you’ll need to get your proverbial skates on if you want to sign up for ‘Crime Writing with Arlene Hunt’, a six-week course that takes place at the Irish Writers’ Centre on Parnell Square in Dublin 1. The course kicks off on April 25th, and runs for six Wednesdays from 6.30pm to 8.30pm, all of which will set you back the princely sum of €165. For all the details, including how to book, clickety-click here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Stav Sherez

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 POWER OF THE DOG (Don Winslow) or THE COLD SIX THOUSAND (James Ellroy). Two novels that grip, rattle and roll, opening up windows into unwritten history and secret desire. Everything about these books works, from the uncompromising nature of the material to the Cubist accretion of sentences, the micro-processing of history into narrative, and the sheer plunging Shakespearean complexity of the characters.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
All my favourite fictional characters have terrible lives and worse ends, so that’s a tricky one. But [Lee Child’s] Jack Reacher would be cool: the existential drifter and classic Saturday-matinee Western hero who rides into town and dispenses justice and retribution before fading back into the sunset. I think we all nurture dreams of leaving our lives behind, sundering aside the weight of possessions and personal ties and setting off into the dusty unknown. I would also love to be James Crumley’s CW Sughrue because his life seems like a lot of wild-eyed fun and bad craziness.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Derrida and Wilbur Smith.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When you get a sentence just right, and you know it’s right, and there’s no doubt about it.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
It would vary, depending on the day, month, year. At the moment it’s probably WINTERLAND by Alan Glynn.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I’d like to see Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE on screen

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst: Reading through drafts and wondering when exactly did you forget how to be a writer. Coming up against your own limitations every single day. Best: Not having to wear shoes.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Eleven days before Christmas. Eleven dead nuns. A snowstorm over London. A killer on the loose.

Who are you reading right now?
Volume 2 of William Burroughs’ collected letters, which I’ve been waiting 19 (!) years for. And dipping back into William Vollmann’s RISING UP & RISING DOWN. It’s his attempt to construct a moral calculus and perhaps the only truly necessary book of the 21st century.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Read. Definitely. I couldn’t imagine a life without the pleasure of reading other people’s books.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Dark. Dark. Dark.

A DARK REDEMPTION by Stav Sherez is published by Faber and Faber.

Philadelphia, Here We Come!

Yours truly had a piece published in the Irish Times yesterday about how the latest generation of Irish crime writers - including Claire McGowan (right), Eoin Colfer and Laurence O’Bryan - are increasingly turning to foreign settings for their novels, rather than set them here on the Emerald Isle. Is this a simple matter of where said novelists are based? A personal fascination with a particular location? Is it a commercially driven development made by author savvy enough to realise that Ireland just doesn’t cut it as ‘sexy’ enough as a location for crime fiction, or an inevitable reflection of our emigrant experience?
  I’m kind of hoping it’s not the last reason, given that my current tome is set here in Ireland, as is my tome-to-be. Then again, this is probably the first time the words ‘Declan Burke’ and ‘commercially savvy’ have appeared in the same sentence.
  Anyhoo, on with the piece, which opened a lot like this:

THEY’RE QUITE fond of Irish crime novels over at the LA Times. Eoin Colfer is better known for his young adult novels featuring Artemis Fowl, but it’s PLUGGED, his debut adult crime novel, that is currently shortlisted for the LA Times Crime/Mystery Book of the Year.
  In 2011, two of that category’s five shortlisted novels were written by Irish authors, Tana French and Stuart Neville; in 2010, Neville won the award for his debut novel, THE TWELVE.
  In a nutshell, those LA Times nominations reflect the wider popularity and critical acclaim Irish crime writers are receiving in the US. John Connolly and Ken Bruen blazed a trail that was followed by French and Neville, Alan Glynn, Alex Barclay, Benjamin Black, Declan Hughes, Arlene Hunt, and more.
  They in turn paved the way for a new generation of Irish crime writers, one that differs from its forerunners in one crucial way: its reluctance to set its novels in Ireland.
Eoin Colfer’s PLUGGED, for example, is set in New Jersey.
  “Originally,” says Colfer, “PLUGGED was set in Dublin but it just never felt right to me, perhaps because noir novels are traditionally set in the US, or the fish I had created was not far enough out of water. When I moved it to New Jersey the whole thing clicked in my head and that’s about as much as I can explain it. It felt right. Daniel was an Irish guy out of his depth in America. As his adopted countrymen might say, it had the right vibe.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …