“It was actually easier [than Bust] because we can now literally anticipate where the other is going to go, we have the same vision, dark sense of humour, it’s like writing with a psychic twin, though Jason might say … psycho! We never had one disagreement and mainly, we have great fun. We’re working on book three and falling over each other with ideas … but we’re totally in sync now, it’s uncanny how we’ve meshed our writing so completely.”Which is nice. Next week: John Banville on how JD Salinger shared his Liquorice All-Sorts while co-authoring the ‘darkly allegorical’ Flopsy And Cottontail Go To The Mall II: This Time It’s Personal.
“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.” – Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Baby, You’re A Starr
Brought To Book # 132: KT McCaffrey on Gerard Murphy’s Death Without Trace
- Girls in frilly dresses cleaned the tables like the semi-innocuous afterthoughts of a Victorian wet dream.You get the idea. The plot – which in this case is less important than the characters and style – sees Madigan being hired by the glamorous wife of a professor of neurobiology to keep an eye on her husband, whom she suspects of having an affair. Madigan, when not listening to Steve Earle, Warren Zevon, Tom Waits or Van Morrison, gives the case his attention but soon finds himself out of his depth in the city’s underworld of crime. If you’re familiar with the intrepid PI John Blaine (Vincent Banville’s gem of a creation) you’ll identify with, and enjoy, Madigan in Death Without Trace.- KT McCaffrey
- There she was, a smile stretched between her cheeks, warm as a two-bar heater.
- It’s a poor mouse that depends on only one hole.
- A small slice of new moon sat over the cathedral like a piece of half-chewed orange peel.
Death Without Trace is available at the Collins Press. KT McCaffrey’s latest novel, The Cat Trap, will be published in November by Robert Hale
Here We Go A-Carrolling
FM: Can you recall where your love of superheroes came from?Michael? We believe there is help available. But you must want to be cured.
MC: “I can! Some time in the early 1970s my dad went to London. In those days travelling from Dublin to London was a big thing. Ireland was in the middle of a very long recession, and we were by no means a wealthy family. Anyway, while he was over there Dad bought me a copy of The Mighty World of Marvel, a black-and-white comic that reprinted some of the early Marvel stories. I’d never seen anything like it! The Incredible Hulk, The Amazing Spider-Man, Fantastic Four… I was completely blown away. Shortly after that, the UK Marvel comics started being imported to Ireland, so I was able to get a reasonably regular fix. Around that time I was also lucky enough to see one of the original Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons on a friend’s television set (we didn’t own a TV at the time - I told you we weren’t wealthy, didn’t I?), and one of my friends owned a little Batman figure with a parachute. I was hooked on superheroes, and especially loved Spider-Man, but what really impressed me was the Marvel UK reprint of The Avengers. My first issue was #16 - “The Old Order Changeth” – the one in which Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch joined the team. I actually still have that comic. Well, most of it: the cover is long gone and I coloured in the splash page …”
Great Literary Spats Of Our Time # 1: Marisa Mackle vs James Joyce
“And don’t tell me you read Ulysees (sic) and thought it was a great book. You, I and everybody else knows you’re being a twit. Joyce was totally taking the piss when he wrote it. It’s rubbish. And this is from somebody who has a 2:1 in English from UCD and has my books (sic) as compulsory reading on 3 (sic) top university degree courses in Europe.”See what she did there? ‘Uly-sees’. Geddit? Fair puts Finnegans Wake in the ha’penny place, no? Marisa 1, Speccy Guy 0. And okay, we know what you’re going to say – Joyce’s novels are compulsory reading on three or four top university courses in Europe too. But you fell for it! Because he’s dead and, like, totally disunfabulous! Ha! Marisa 2, Dead Eye-Patch Guy 0. You go, girl …
Next week: Marisa Mackle vs William Shakespeare, who can’t even spell.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 173: John Connolly
What crime novel would you most like to have written?
I always take the mature view on these things, and assume that if I had written one of my favourite books then it wouldn’t be as good. I think Ross Macdonald’s The Chill is a near-perfect crime novel, the only perceived lapse being the death early on of possibly the most interesting character, although the effect is quite shocking so I suppose it was intentional on Macdonald’s part. I find myself defending Macdonald regularly against those who see him as Chandler’s poor relation, or pressing him on those who haven’t read him but believe that, say, The Big Sleep is as close as crime fiction ever got to being literature, which it isn’t. Chandler's a fabulous writer, but Macdonald was always the better novelist.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Wilbur Smith novels. The period novels are much better than the modern-day ones, as the dialogue doesn’t sound as clunky if it’s being spoken in the 1600s or 1700s, or by ancient Egyptians. I had to interview him a few years ago, and so read Monsoon in preparation, as it was the book that he was publicising at the time. I hadn’t read him since I was a teenager, and had vague memories of some ropey sex and a woman having a wee behind a rock (in the book, I hasten to add, not in my teenage life) but Monsoon was great fun. The ropey sex was still there, though. One phrase stands out in my memory: “She gasped at the sight of Tom’s wondrous man thing.” I thought: I have a man thing, but it’s not wondrous. What’s so special about his? Does it light up? Does it play a tune ...?
Most satisfying writing moment?
Probably finishing The Book of Lost Things. I’m a pretty harsh critic of my own work, but I felt that it represented as good a book as I was going to be able to write at that time, or perhaps ever, which is a bit depressing in a way. Something always gets lost in the act of transferring the nebulous book in your head to the page, which is very frustrating. You never quite manage to write the book that you set out to write, or at least I never do. I think the least was lost in the writing of The Book of Lost Things. It’s an odd little book, but I’m very fond of it and proud of it.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
You know, I’ll dodge that bullet by saying that the best Irish crime novel probably hasn’t been written yet. Crime fiction wasn’t our genre for such a long time, and now Irish writers are really starting to make an impact, but it’s early days yet. I think we’re going to see some fantastic Irish crime novels emerging over the next few years. As things stand, there have already been some very good ones.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Urk! The other difficulty is that I don’t read as much Irish fiction, crime or otherwise, as I should, so I’m a bad person to ask. Perhaps, in common with British crime writers, Irish crime fiction might be better suited to television. I think Declan Hughes’ books would be interesting to see on television. That said, I don’t watch those two-hour Morse / Rebus / Wire In The Blood series. I don’t have the patience for them, although I’ll happily watch back-to-back episodes of The Wire or Deadwood. I think it’s to do with pacing.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
I’m a worrier. I worry that I’m going to be dropped by my publishers, that I’m going to write a bad book . . . (I may have written a bad book already, but it seems that people can’t agree which one it is.) I’m not sure that I enjoy the process of publishing itself as much as I thought I would. When I see my book on a bookshelf I just think, man, I hope it’s doing okay. Then again, I rarely ask my publishers how the books are doing in terms of sales. I think I’m afraid of the answer. The best thing, for me, is that I can make a living and pay my bills by doing something that I love, however hard I may find writing sometimes. And I like meeting readers. There’s something flattering, and humbling, when people take the time to come along to a bookstore to listen to you talk about your book.
The pitch for your next novel is …?
I’m hopeless at pitches as well. Let’s see: it’s an Angel and Louis book – they’re two kind of minor characters in the Parker novels – in which they get in over their heads when they try to kill a wealthy businessman who has targeted them in an act of revenge for the death of his son. It’s much lighter than the Parker novels, and stylistically a bit different. It’s not as tortured, I suppose.
Who are you reading right now?
I made the mistake of trying to read the last Harry Potter book, which took me two weeks - the pacing (there’s that word again) just seemed to me to be all wrong - and I was resentful of the time it had taken when I was done. I tend to flick between fiction and non-fiction, so now I’m one chapter into Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. I do have a pile of other books sitting by my desk that I want to get to: Joe Hill’s 20th Century Ghosts, the new Philip Kerr and Martin Cruz Smith books, the new Paul Charles, the new James Lee Burke and, hey, the most recent Wilbur Smith. Ropey sex, here I come . . .
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Gradually getting better . . .
John Connolly’s The Unquiet is currently on a best-seller list near you
The Embiggened O # 297: Which Witch? Bookwitch!
“I’ve just read The Big O. It’s rather like The Commitments, hardboiled … The Big O is about an interesting group of people, who are all more or less into crime of some sort. It’s not so much black and white, as various shades of grey. But they are very likeable, even though they use the f-word most of the time … I’m not going to give away the plot, which centres on kidnapping, but I can tell you it all builds up to a hilarious ending.”Bleedin’ rapid, as Jimmy Rabbitte might – and in fact does – say himself. Why not hitch a ride on a broomstick all the way over to Bookwitch, folks, and tell Ann we said she’s the sweedest Swede we know …
Donovan But Not Quite Dusted(ovan)
Q: Sunless used to be Doctor Salt, which was already released in the UK. Can you explain what caused you to rewrite the book, and how it's different?Glad that’s cleared up. Oh, and anyone uttering the words ‘cherry’ ‘bite’ ‘of’ and ‘second’ in a grumbly tone will be summarily lashed to a gurney and sedated until Christmas. You have been warned.
A: “As I look now at the final manuscript of Sunless, I realize that it’s the novel I set out to write almost four years ago. I would go so far as to say that Doctor Salt, which was published in 2004 in the UK, was a first draft of Sunless. I wrote it too fast, and the sense I was after just wasn’t in the novel. When Peter Mayer said last year he wanted to release Doctor Salt in the US, I saw the chance to write the real novel, if you like, and this I hope I’ve done in Sunless. Sunless is vastly different from Doctor Salt. Where there were two narrators in the first novel, now there is one. The plot is simpler, a linear line from the young boy who loses his brother to the teenager who begins to experiment with his mother’s tranquilizers, to the criminal who loses his mind to meth. The language changes with the narrator’s state of mind, as if the reader has also taken a pill and is trapped with the results and must sit and watch the novel change. And in Sunless the relationship between politics and the commercial peddling of drugs to Americans is better articulated, or articulated for the first time. The novel suggests how drug companies essentially invent disorders in order to sell drugs to cure them, and how this practice reflects a wider willingness on the part of people to believe what they are told and what they are sold. But in the end it’s a novel of loss and the effects of loss on a human being. That you can’t cure grief with a pill.”
Flick Lit # 312: Out Of Sight
Monday, August 13, 2007
The Mysterious Case Of The Pointless Pseudonym
"In his thoughtful foreword, Ian Rankin asks if it is possible to hope that crime fiction is finally getting the respect that has long been owing to it. He is pleased that the genre is getting increasing coverage in the major media, and yet “…when a famous prize-winning literary novelist recently turned his hand to crime fiction, he felt obliged to put it out under another name.” My (educated) guess is that Rankin is referring to Christine Falls by Benjamin Black, alias John Banville. I think we can also consider the possibility, where this particular example is concerned, that Banville wants this projected series to be more readily identifiable by being issued under his pseudonym. Certainly no effort was made to conceal his true identity; the inside jacket flap proclaims Christine Falls to be “the debut crime novel from Booker Award winner John Banville.” (The sequel, The Silver Swan, is due out in March of 2008.) The other way to look at this phenomenon is to ask the question: what is the next (really bracing) challenge a Booker-winning literary novelist would want to take on? Why, writing quality crime fiction, naturally! (So take heart, Ian.)"Hmmmm. A noble thesis, Mr Books to the Ceiling, sir – but only if you’re prepared to overlook the ‘quality crime fiction’ of Mefisto, The Book of Evidence and The Untouchable. Ah, that pimpernelish Mr Banville, he eludes our vain grasping yet again …
“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 343: Eoin Hennigan
What crime novel would you most like to have written?
Hammett’s Red Harvest.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Jim Thompson.
Most satisfying writing moment?
Killing off one of my favourite characters in her first scene!
The best Irish crime novel is …?
I’ve been living outside Ireland for a long time so I’m not too familiar with the scene.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Although it’s not a novel, I’d love to see Paul Howard’s The Joy inspire an Irish prison movie.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst – Finding the energy after a long day at work. Best – the satisfaction of getting something on paper with that energy!
The pitch for your next novel is …?
Actually working on two right now, one is a mystery told from 15 different POVs, the other a hardboiled reverse narrative.
Who are you reading right now?
The Ice Harvest by Scott Phillips
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Hardboiled, experimental and deceptive.
Eoin Hennigan’s The Truth, It Lies is available in all good bookshops
Nobody Move, This Is A Review: The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
Sunday, August 12, 2007
The Monday Review: Yet More Hup-Ya Frippery From The Interweb Margins
Crime Always Pays: How The Celtic Tiger Funded The Irish Crime Fiction Boom
What the hell are they putting in the water in Ireland?
“When I was a child,” Bruen’s private eye Jack Taylor remarks in the short story The Dead Room, “we had one murder a year. But that is indeed another country.” Taylor, Bruen’s existential poet of Celtic Tiger Ireland, isn’t known for his restraint. But Bruen is correct when he says that, in Ireland as recently as ten years ago, a murder was front-page news for a week at a time.
Then came modern Ireland’s watershed, our ‘Where-were-you-when- JFK-was-assassinated?’ moment: the murder of the high-profile investigative journalist Veronica Guerin, shot to death in 1996 by a hitman while she sat in her car. Suddenly it seemed as if crime was everywhere in Ireland. Revulsion was widespread and outspoken. Political careers were made in the subsequent rush to legislate to combat the crime wave that had spilled over from internecine tit-for-tat killings into the public domain. And Irish writers, naturally, rose to the challenge of offering the panacea of narrative closure by introducing a host of tales that reassured the ordinary decent citizen that crime could and would be fought and defeated.
It’s a neat theory but it’s a little too pat. Ironically, Geurin’s murder came at a time when the 30-year killing spree in Northern Ireland, euphemistically called ‘the Troubles’, was winding down into ceasefires that would be fitfully broken but never again erupted into open war. The apparent explosion in ‘headline crimes’ – particularly murder – can be too easily explained by the former paramilitaries segueing from politically motivated crime to crimes of a more prosaic nature. So common have such crimes become that in Ireland today a murder would have to be of a particularly graphic or tragic nature to make the front page, above or below the fold. In the recent Irish general election, the public perception of widespread lawlessness meant that crime was one of the central issues which every party had to credibly address. Nonetheless, one of Ireland’s most respected columnists, Fintan O’Toole, writing in the Irish Times [in the run-up to the election], could extrapolate from the cold statistics to say, “It is important to bear in mind that the population has risen rapidly in recent years and that crime has in fact not risen in proportion.”
So, again – why the sudden boom in Irish crime writing?
As always, there is no one factor responsible. The Booker Prize-nominated Brian Moore, for example, wrote crime-based novels under the pseudonym Bernard Mara during the 1950s, and also the more literary The Colour of Blood (1987) and Lies of Silence (1990) while the conflict in Northern Ireland was ongoing, but crime novels rooted in ‘the Troubles’ were rare. Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man was published in 1994, the year the IRA announced the ceasefire that would, eventually, lead to a cessation of politically motivated murder, but his The Blue Tango (2001) and The Ultras (2004) appeared in a post-conflict environment. Sam Millar is another Northern Irish writer who has written about the conflict retrospectively, while newer Northern writers, such as Garbhan Downey and Brian McGilloway, write crime stories in a de-politicized context.
Down South, many writers do root their novels in gangland crime – TS O’Rourke, Seamus Smyth and Neville Thompson explore the underbelly of the beast from within – but the Irish crime fiction canon is a broad church. Traditional private eyes (Ken Bruen, Vincent Banville, Declan Hughes) jostle for room on the shelves with the police procedural (Ingrid Black, Eugene McEldowney, Brian McGilloway), the amateur sleuth (Cormac Millar, KT McCaffrey, Gemma O’Connor, Colin Bateman) and the historical detective (Cora Harrison). Indeed, many Irish crime writers, such as Alex Barclay, John Connolly, Michael Collins and Adrian McKinty, wholly or mostly set their novels outside of Ireland.
It is these latter writers, perhaps, that offer the first clue as to why Irish crime fiction has mushroomed in the last decade. Ireland is a much less insular place today than it was ten years ago, but while Ireland has always looked to the US and the UK, it was as much for emigration destinations as it was for cultural inspiration. It wasn’t always the case that the best and the brightest left for foreign shores, but certainly it tended to be the more adventurous and imaginative. Today, with the so-called Celtic Tiger economic boom creating ‘zero percent’ unemployment, those who might once have emigrated have stayed home. Yet they still take their cues, particularly in terms of popular culture, from the US and the UK. This is especially true of film and TV, yet until recently the Irish literary legacy – the Nobel Prize-winning exploits of Beckett, Yeats and George Bernard Shaw were celebrated as proof of Ireland’s God-given literary superiority, particularly when set alongside James Joyce’s reputation – fostered a certain amount of self-censoring snobbishness among Irish writers (Brian Moore writing thrillers under a pseudonym, for example, and subsequently disowning them). Happily, that is no longer the case. “I always say that my influences are American,” claimed Ken Bruen in an interview with Village magazine last year, “Chandler (right), James M. Cain, James Ellroy, which doesn’t get me a lot of friends. But those are the guys who taught me what I know. They’re the books I loved reading.”
In the final analysis, however, it is the great motivator of crime fiction itself – filthy lucre – that has made the single most important contribution to the rise in Irish crime fiction. Money is the great leveller, and in an Ireland where the vast majority of the population have benefited from the economic boom, the erstwhile great and good can no longer depend on deferential treatment, while the moneyed classes are no longer deserving of their pedestal. Familiarity breeds contempt, and the privacy that money used to buy no longer commands respect in Ireland.
The writer Laura Lippman, interviewed recently in the Wall Street Journal, said of Declan Hughes’ The Colour of Blood, “He’s a good writer and Ireland today as a setting has a sense of shame and secrecy that the US has lost. One of the hard things about being a crime writer now is determining what secrets people will still go to great lengths to keep.” Hughes is indeed a fine writer, but the Ireland of today has so radically transformed itself that Brinsley MacNamara’s caricature of a ‘valley of squinting windows’ could today more accurately, if clumsily, be described a ‘canyon of panavision lenses’. The case of the former Irish taoiseach, or prime minister, Charles J. Haughey, represents another watershed in modern Irish history. Once the charismatic, Machiavellian tribal leader who nobly led the country through its darkest economic times, Haughey’s reputation is only one of many that has been flayed in recent years by a series of tribunals exposing the darkness at the heart of the Irish body politic. His personal finances, and the extent to which his flamboyant private life was funded by businessmen, was a matter of horror at first, then ridicule. These days, the recently deceased Haughey is a byword for corruption, sleaze and money-grubbing greed.
Historically speaking, it was said of the economic relationship between Ireland and the UK that, if the UK sneezed, Ireland caught a cold. Culturally speaking, the same applies today, and not only to the UK, but to the US as well. If it happens there, runs the theory, it’s only a matter of time before it happens here – crime, and myriad kinds of crime, included. The truth about ourselves is finally squirming out there, and the Irish public is showing an insatiable appetite for books and movies that broach the taboos and tell the stories that only crime fiction can credibly tell – even if, as in the US and the UK, the perverse dichotomy between falling crime levels and the rise in crime fiction exists here too. “Crime does not pay – not so!” wrote Karl Marx (left), alluding to the fact that the criminal produces not only the crime, but the measures society takes to prevent and detect crime. In Ireland today, one of those by-products of crime – real or imagined – is the crime fiction writer, and no one knows better than he or she that crime always pays.- Declan Burke
This article is reprinted by the kind permission of Crime Spree magazine
“Oh Go On, Just A Tincture Of Sherry Then.”
“The A-Z of Irish Crime is an in-depth reference book on modern Irish crime concentrating mainly from 1996 to present day, focusing on key gangland figures and murders. The book also focuses on key criminal agencies, weapons of gangland Ireland, drugs, missing persons and all serious crime. An A-Z of Irish crime has not been done before. This should be a comprehensive, original book giving a wide perspective of crime throughout Ireland.”Erm, it ‘should’ be? You’re not exactly filling us with confidence over here, folks …