“We like each other, do crime writers. Unlike romantic novelists, who allegedly are a coven of bitches, driven to nastiness by having to produce saccharine books, crime writers get their frustrations out on the page and get their revenge on their enemies vicariously … We find each other not just friendly and agreeable, but interesting, because we come from a bewildering variety of backgrounds … And while there are sharks and opportunists in every profession, most of our editors, publishers and booksellers truly love the genre and enjoy its practitioners.”Oooh, saucy, madam. But then, what would you expect from someone who’s latest offering is the somewhat-less-than-coyly titled MURDERING AMERICANS? Let's just be thankful she’s on our side, people …
“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
Saturday, October 13, 2007
“A Coven Of Bitches?” Hmmm, Ruth Dudley Edward’s Obviously In Town …
Friday, October 12, 2007
“More Brimstone, Vicar?”
Prophets, Profits And Irish Crime Fiction: Discuss
All Irish writers, of course, and no prizes for guessing which of names you’ve recognized. One of them won a brace of gongs at Bouchercon 2007 in the US, the biggest American awards ceremony of its kind. Another won the award for best debut novel at the same ceremony. A third debuted on the New York Times best-seller list three weeks ago.
Their names? Ken Bruen, Declan Hughes and Tana French, respectively.
But unless you’re one of their small but growing band of Irish crime fiction fans, there’s a very good chance you won’t have heard of them before.
Meanwhile we get Marian Keyes billboards and Cecilia Ahern bus posters. Displays of Cathy Kelly’s books that take up entire shop windows.
The crime fiction writers? Buried away down the back of the bookstore, jammed in between the soft porn and science fiction. An Irish crime writer hoping for publicity would be best advised to get a gun and a mask and go blag a bank for real.
Strange, isn’t it? Crime fiction and chick lit are equally reader-friendly genres, both primarily concerned with escapist entertainment. The crime writers are at least as good in the writing stakes as their chick lit peers, or else they wouldn’t be valued so highly in America (and not just America: Declan Hughes’s The Wrong Kind of Blood and Brian McGilloway’s Borderlands were both nominated for Best Debut Novels in the UK’s CWA ‘Dagger’ awards last month).
So why the disconnect between Irish crime writers and an Irish audience?
You could argue that an Irish generation reared during the hedonistic years of the Celtic Tiger has no stomach for reading about corrupt politicians, Tiger kidnappings, paedophile priests and gangland killings. You don’t get many murder-rapes in chick lit.
Fair enough, except the true crime genre is one of the fastest-growing niches in Irish publishing today. Books on the corpse-dismembering ‘Scissors Sisters’, the media-friendly murderer Joe O’Reilly, the Criminal Assets Bureau and the Miami Showband massacre are among some of the true crime stories that have appeared on Irish best-seller lists over the last 12 months.
Meanwhile, newspaper headlines are full of innocent bystanders gunned down by hired killers, and the taoiseach takes the stand again and again to explain financial irregularities.
And maybe crime fatigue is the problem. Where the crime writers are busy telling us where it all went wrong, chick lit is still promising it’ll all turn out Mr Right.
One crew is flogging hair-shirts, the other comfort pillows. No contest on the easier sale.
Prophets are never recognised in their own country. Profits generally are. - Declan Burke
This article was first published in the Evening Herald.
Symptoms Of A General Malaise
“Frances Cahill’s book about her crime-lord dad The General has sparked a feud - because she broke an unwritten family code of silence about the gangster, it was claimed yesterday. Law student Frances, who lives with her family in Wicklow, received a EUR20,000 advance for her controversial book MARTIN CAHILL, MY FATHER. The sensational biography claims the Dublin gangster thwarted a plot to kidnap Bono’s daughter and also reveals how he once carried out 100 burglaries in one night. But the book has now back-fired in Frances’ face with many of her extended family furious she has broken their unwritten rule to never speak publicly about the slain gangland boss …”Meanwhile, John Burke, public affairs correspondent with the Sunday Business Post and a former crime reporter, is less than favourable in his review, which concludes thusly:
“The author accords comparatively little of the critical tone she reserves for the gardaĆ to these acts of criminality. Most of Cahill’s criminal career - the Beit robberies, his run-ins with the Provisional IRA, the robberies, the bomb attack that maimed forensic scientist Jim Donovan - has been documented before in great detail in both print and on film, yet never before has his life been portrayed in such sympathetic terms. It is likely this book will sell well, but many will find it difficult to accommodate the comparable lack of balance by the author in her depiction of her father, a career criminal, and the gardaĆ and justice system that justifiably sought to end his reign of violent crime.”Still, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, right? And with Ireland’s appetite for true crime stories showing no discernible signs of diminishing, this one should have more legs than the Spider Olympics.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books
The author of the Modesty Blaise series is …To enter, just drop us a mail at dbrodb(at)gmail.com, putting ‘Modesty Blaise comp’ in the subject line. Vote early and often, people – the lines close at noon on Monday 15th.
(a) Peter O’Donnell;
(b) Chris O’Donnell;
(c) Rosie O’Donnell.
“Irish Crime Is Brought To You Today By The Letter Z, And The Number 2007.”
“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.”Marvellous stuff. You think our beloved leader, Patrick Bartholomew, gets a mention?
Nobody Move, This Is A Review: IF I DID IT by OJ Simpson
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Cut To The Quirke
“Haunting, masterfully written, and utterly mesmerizing in its nuance, The Silver Swan fully lives up to the promise of Christine Falls and firmly establishes Benjamin Black (a.k.a. John Banville) among the greatest of crime writers.”Pardon us while we swoon dead away. But before we do, here’s an excerpt from THE SILVER SWAN:
“HER FOREHEAD WAS CLEAR AND HIGH, and the swathe of copper-coloured hair falling back from it must indeed have been magnificent. Quirke had a picture in his mind of her sprawled on the wet rocks, a long swatch of that hair coiled around her neck like a thick frond of gleaming seaweed. What, he wondered, could possibly have driven this handsome, healthy young creature to fling herself on a summer midnight off Sandycove pier into the black waters of Dublin Bay? Her clothes, so Billy Hunt had said, had been placed in a neat pile on the pier beside the wall; that was the only trace she had left of her going, that, and her motor car, which Quirke was certain would have been another thing she was proud of, and which yet she had abandoned. Her car and her hair: twin sources of vanity. But what was it had pulled that vanity down? Then he spotted the tiny puncture mark on the chalk-white inner side of her left arm …”All together now: Sahwoooooooon …
Why I Write # 112: KT McCaffrey
KT McCaffrey’s THE CAT TRAP will be published in spring 2008.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
The Embiggened O # 943: Yet Another Little Ray Of Sunshine
“THE BIG O is a scintillating mixture of genuine wit, charm by the bucket-load and the kind of whip-crack plotting that makes “a couple of pages” turn into an all-nighter. Burke has [George V.] Higgins’ gift for dialogue, [Barry] Gifford’s concision and the effortless cool of Elmore Leonard at his peak. In short, THE BIG O is an essential crime novel of 2007, and one of the best of any year.” – Ray Banks, author of DONKEY PUNCHRay? Sorry about the, y’know, assault. But we’re told Indian burns don’t leave any actual scars …
“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 499: Sean Moncrieff
What crime novel would you most like to have written?
Usually the last one I’ve read, if it’s any good. So with that in mind, I’d love to have written ASK THE PARROT by Richard Stark, whom I have only just discovered (I am a bit of a an innocent in the world of crime fiction). During the rugby world cup you may well have heard various television windbag-pundits use the phrase ‘get the basics right’ – well, the same applies for writers. Sometimes writers forget the basic rules (in as far as you can have rules) and become self-indulgent; a trend, alas, far too common in established authors. Philip Roth, though I love his work dearly, could do with a good editor and perhaps a bit of a bitch-slapping. Or he could read anything by Richard Stark. With Stark, you don’t find out what the sky looked like that morning or what colour the landscape was or even what anyone feels: you are straight into the story, and anything you are going to find out about the characters, it will be from what they say, and more importantly, what they do. Yet even with this minimal approach, Stark is able to imply a rich back story for his characters without even telling us anything about them: he gives the sense that the story has already begun, we’ve arrived late and need to catch up. And yes, yes, I know that the more-knowledgeable-than-me among you (which is probably all of you) are already screaming at your screen that Richard Stark is only a nom-de-plume. After I read my first Stark novel, I enjoyed it so much I didn’t Google him: I didn’t want to discover that he was in reality a portly 53-year-old man from Leicester who wears Jethro Tull tee-shirts and visits naturist beaches every summer. In my imagination, he was a grizzled old geezer who has churned out every sort of potboiler; honing his skills over decades. Because after all, good writing is good writing, no matter where it is found. Curiosity, of course, got the better of me - and brought me to one of those rare moments in life when things were actually as I imagined them: Richard Stark is Donald Westlake, a grizzled old New York geezer who has probably forgotten how many books he’s written - on his website, he can’t even remember all of the titles - as well as screenplays, most notably THE GRIFTERS and least notably a really terrible TV pilot called Supertrain (I’ve actually seen it). I like the idea of people like Donald Westlake: writers who are serious but not precious about what they do. Oh yes: and we can claim him too. He is 75 per cent Irish, though he was born on July 12th, a little fact which he says “led to my first awareness of comedy as a consumer.”
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Can’t really think of anything I’m guilty about reading, apart from pornography. And technically, that’s not reading. Like most people who give out about cultural snobbery, I’m a complete snob. If I don’t like the first page, I won’t read it.
Most satisfying writing moment?
Oh, just had one of those. I suppose it varies from person to person, but when I make the commitment to actually start writing a book, it’s a bit like committing to get married to someone you’ve just met on the bus. Who has just told you about her seven kids. And her psychopathic and extremely jealous ex-husband. In other words, I generally have no idea what is going to happen. Now this doesn’t mean I'm waiting for the spirit of the characters to inhabit me or some guff like that - I have a rough plan for where it should be going. But no matter how you ‘get the basics right’, you are still waiting for something to click, some ingredient X in there that lets you know that what you’ve written has the breath of life in it. And sometimes it doesn’t come. Sometimes the characters are wooden and the story is tedious, and you have to think of a way of fixing this or dumping it altogether. I’m currently ten thousand words into a new novel, and had convinced myself that it was utter crap - until I read it back for the first time and realised that it was OK and that my main character is headed in a very clear direction . So it was a mixture of huge relief that I’ve not been wasting my time and a Eureka-type realisation that another book is definitely on the way. With any book you hit various problems and the work slows down a bit, but at the moment it feels like I can’t get the words out fast enough. It’s the greatest of all buzzes.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
Oh, I dunno. Ken Bruen springs to mind. His work has a great sense of Irish melancholia. And I like the way his heroes are all a bit crap at what they do.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Ken Bruen again, though it would have to be done just right.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The best thing is you get to live inside your own head for long periods of time. The worst thing is you get to live inside your own head for long periods of time - which isn’t always so great if you occasionally have to emerge into the outside world and deal with spouses and kids, etc. I am lucky in that I split my time between writing in the morning and doing a radio show in the afternoon: two forms of work which, obviously, are quite different to each other, so I maintain some degree of balance.
The pitch for your next novel is …?
She cosies up to me on the bus seat, grinning slightly. “Why don’t we get married?” I say. She nods slowly, as if she’s just been thinking the same thing. “OK,” she whispers. “I mean, as long as my kids - I have seven - think it’s a good idea. And I suppose I’ll have to tell my ex-husband. He’s still extremely jealous. He’s getting out of prison next week. Who knows? Perhaps this time it’s done something to help him control his murderous temper.” I shrug, as if these are the sort of problems we all have to deal with, though mine is more imminent. We’ve only just met and already I can’t remember her name ...
Who are you reading right now?
I’m just finishing THE LAY OF THE LAND by Richard Ford. Wonderful, thoughtful, funny, loveable book, which to my mind is his best work. And by the standards of Richard Ford, it’s action packed.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Notions about himself.
Sean Moncrieff’s THE HISTORY OF THINGS is available now.
Monday, October 8, 2007
The Monday Review
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD by Adrian McKinty
This review is republished by kind permission of Euro Crime