The Temple Of Doom

Yep, Peter Temple (right) slid the CWA’s Duncan Lawrie Dagger into his entirely metaphorical scabbard for The Broken Shore, voted best crime novel of the year on Thursday night. There’s one in the eye for the bloody Poms, eh? In a doom-laden night for Irish crime writing, neither Declan Hughes or Brian McGilloway managed to get their hands on the New Blood Dagger, Gillian Flynn winning that award, and the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, for Sharp Objects, appropriately enough. Worst of all, though, was our belated discovery that our lame pun – y’know, Peter Temple writes the Jack Irish novels – is a non-runner given that Temple’s 'Irish' is actually pronounced 'I-reich'. Buggery … Mind you, we can now blame the man we stole the lame pun from, the one and only Mr After Dark, My Sweet …

Funky Friday’s Free-For-All: If Music Be The Food Of Love, Eat On

We don’t know John Connolly (right, in a manner of speaking). Never met the guy, and with the exception of Critical Mick – the exception to every rule, including the rule of exception – we don’t know anyone who has. So why do we love JC so and want to have his Charlie Parker-shaped babies? Because he spaketh thusly to Mojo magazine: “What I love is that people would come up to me and say I went out and bought a Go-Betweens album after hearing them on your CD. You feel like you’ve done some good in the world.” To those not in the know, The Go-Betweens are the finest band ever to come out of the Southern Hemisphere, and rival only The Tindersticks in the tiny little hearts of the Crime Always Pays elves. Anyhoo, moving on … to yet another John Connolly interview! In the New Zealand Herald, no less! Crikey, worse than Uncle Travelling Matt Fraggle, that lad … Anyway, less of the Connolly jive, more of other writers wibbling on about the page-blackening process. To wit, Jason Starr’s funkadelic take on the writer’s choice of POV, Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, and Brad Kelln’s so-crazy-it-might-just-work plot to conquer the free world by publishing a free novel on the free interweb and taking readers along for the free ride, for free. How cool is that? Almost as cool as Ray Barboni from Miami, seen below teaching Gene Hackman a thing or nineteen about hoodlum protocol … the most important rule being that you never say, “Look at me, Ray,” to Ray Barboni. And that’s it for another week, folks – be sure and drop by again next week, y’all.

This Week We’re Reading … The Dead Yard and Half Moon Investigations

The Dead Yard being the second in Adrian McKinty’s ‘Dead’ trilogy, in which Michael Forsythe – Bourne with an evil sense of humour – goes undercover to infiltrate an Irish paramilitary splinter group operating out of New England. A pounding pace, rugged prose and a palette of pop culture references put this one in the Pelecanos bracket, but it’s McKinty’s turn of phrase that marks him out as an original – even if, hailing as we do from the Yeats County, we could have done without the various references to the ‘cow fuckers from Sligo’. Fabulous stuff, and The Bloomsday Dead yet to come: our cup runneth over. Meanwhile, Half Moon Investigations by Eoin Colfer details the adventures of Fletcher Moon, a 12-year-old PI investigating the disappearance of a lock of hair. The rules of underage fiction dictate that there’s a refreshing absence of gore, violence and generalised psychosis, but on the basis of its seamless writing, sly humour and reading-as-pure-pleasure, this tucks effortlessly into Elmore Leonard’s slipstream. Colfer is obviously a fan of Chandler et al, and he has distilled essence of the hardboiled style here, with the emphasis very much on style. Writers will read it and weep; less self-conscious readers will be wearing a smile throughout.

The Missing In Action

Rejoice, o ye legion-like fans of Paul Kilduff (right) – the city slicker returns to the bookshelves next year with The Missing, in which a motley crew of investigators go in search of mysteriously vanished London lawyers, bankers and their ilk on an odyssey that takes them from London to Germany and on to the hedonistic fleshpots of Marbella. Huzzah! In other news, the former Headhunter is also diversifying into non-fiction with Ruinair, a humorous look at the world of cheap air travel, the title of which has absolutely no relevance whatsoever to any particular low-fare airline, o ye legion-like eagle-eyed lawyers. Anyhoo, you can catch The Missing in action if you jump over here, including all the blurb and an extract from the prologue. Which is nice …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 2,003: Paul Carson

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?
Bangkok 8 by John Burdett.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Any of Colin Bateman’s books.
Most satisfying writing moment?
Having a crisis of confidence after labouring over a first chapter for three months, deciding writing just wasn’t my thing, walking away from PC and sitting down for long re-think. One hour later I came up with idea for prison doctor and Betrayal was born. It flowed like water.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Ambush, by me. It’s got all the right ingredients and is under evaluation as I write by a major TV/film production company (then again, Scalpel was optioned for about 10 years and never saw the light of day!).
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst: it’s bloody hard work and you do have to take the bad reviews on the chin. Best: seeing the books on the shelves and on the bestseller lists.
Why does John Banville use a pseudonym for writing crime?
Kindest evaluation: to distinguish his literary writing from his more commercially minded book. Lots of writers use this (Martin Waddell pens the most wonderful children’s picture books under his own name and has a separate name for his teenage-audience works). A spiteful and mean-spirited interpretation would be that Banville isn't really comfortable with crime fiction and doesn't want to be so obviously selling his soul. Personally I couldn't give a damn and I suspect he couldn’t give a damn either. Life’s too short to bother with such trivia.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Pacy, racy, spicy.

Paul Carson’s Betrayal is available in all good book shops