It’s Good to Talk: Why Dialogue is Fundamental

The reasons why humans developed complex speech are still contested, but as a writer it doesn’t really matter if it’s due to a uniquely shaped hyoid bone, a descended larynx or the FOXP2 gene. What matters is that the brain of ‘the speaking animal’ is hard-wired to respond to speech.
 Humans have been talking to one another for anywhere between 70,000 and 200,000 years, which really isn’t that long, evolutionarily speaking. But it’s still a lot longer than the 5,000 years or so that we’ve been writing things down.
 It took another couple thousand years before the Iliad, originally an oral epic told by wandering bards, was written down circa 750 BCE. And then – sticking with the Western canon – it was another few hundred years before Greek tragedy and comedy tiptoed onto the stage.
 About 1,500 years after that, Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji, with which she effectively invented the novel form; although in The True Story of the Novel, Margaret Anne Doody argues that the ‘ancient novel’ first appeared a thousand years earlier, in Greece and Rome, courtesy of – among others – Xenophon, Chariton and Petronius.
 Either way, the novel has been around for a long time, but nowhere as long as we’ve been talking to one another. And there’s a very good chance that this is why, as Elmore Leonard says, no one ever skips dialogue. It also goes a long way towards explaining the visceral immediacy of the theatrical experience, and why cinema is the most lucrative art form in history.
 It also suggests that as writers, as novelists, we should be trying to tell our stories through dialogue as much as is practicably possible. That’s not to say we’re shoe-horning in casual chats for the sake of breaking up the prose; it means that we’re progressing the story and developing our characters in their own words.
 Why is direct speech more valuable than reported speech? Because, just as we’re hard-wired to respond to speech, we’re also predisposed to believe people when they speak. To quote Tony Davies, from his book Humanism:

“If, as was often said, man is the speaking animal, then we exist most fully not in the intimate interiority of private thought and feeling but in the communality of linguistic exchange. ‘Language most shows a man,’ wrote Ben Jonson, in a vivid phrase borrowed from the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives: ‘Speak, that I may see thee.’ […] The human being is fashioned and defined in language, and belongs inseparably, in its public and private aspects alike, to the medium of discourse.”

Event: Classic Crime Novels at Lucan Library

I’m delighted to be taking part in Lucan Library’s ‘Classic Crime Club’ series, as part of which I will be talking about the great American crime novels from the 1970s to the 1990s. Among the titles under consideration will be George V. Higgins’ THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, Sara Paretsky’s INDEMNITY ONLY, Donald Westlake’s COPS AND ROBBERS, Sue Grafton’s A IS FOR ALIBI, James Ellroy’s WHITE JAZZ and Elmore Leonard’s GET SHORTY.
  The event takes place at 6.30pm on November 19th at Lucan Library, Newcastle Road, Lucan, Co. Dublin. It’s a free event, but booking is advisable on lucan@sdublincoco.ie.

First Look: THE BIG O in German Translation

The lovely people at Edition Nautilus, my German publishers, will release THE BIG O early in 2016, in a translation by the award-winning writer Robert Brack. I had an absolutely terrific time in Germany last year, spending a week criss-crossing the country to mark the publication of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, and I’m really looking forward to going back again for another tour next May.
  To mark the publication of THE BIG O, the following short interview appears in the current Edition Nautilus catalogue:

1. When I first read “The Big O”, I thought that you must have invented a whole new genre here: ‘Screwball-Noir’, maybe. How on earth did you find this twisted plot and these characters?

“I’m not sure who coined that phrase ‘screwball-noir’, although it has been used to describe “The Big O”. It sounds to me like a contradiction in terms – screwball is generally light-hearted and funny, whereas noir is bleak and doom-laden. I did deliberately set out to write a comic crime novel with “The Big O”, because I wrote it after completing the early drafts of “Absolute Zero Cool”, which seemed quite dark in tone to me, and I wanted to try something rather different and fun. I’ve always been drawn to characters in crime novels whose clever schemes fail because the criminals themselves are nowhere as clever as their schemes – prisons are full of people who thought they were smarter than they really are. There’s also a line from the Rolling Stones song ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ that goes, “All the cops are criminals / and all the sinners saints …” – I though it might fun to write a book about those kind of characters, to see how they might interact.”

2. The title “The Big O” is probably a reference to “The Big Sleep”, even though there is not much Chandler in it, is there?

“There isn’t very much Raymond Chandler in “The Big O”, although I’m a huge fan of his books – in fact, if it wasn’t for Raymond Chandler, I probably wouldn’t have started writing crime fiction. I have written some private eye novels in the past, and they were strongly influenced by Chandler, but ‘The Big’ element of the title has more to do with classic crime fiction novels featuring those words – “The Big Heat”, for example, or “The Big Sleep”, or “The Big Combo”, “The Big Nowhere”, or “The Big Steal”. As for the influences on “The Big O”, in my mind I was very much influenced by American writers such as Elmore Leonard, Barry Gifford and George V. Higgins – although I hasten to add that I am acutely aware of how far short I fell by comparison with greats such as they.”

3. Your German readers only know “Absolute Zero Cool” so far, even though “The Big O” was published before. And the protagonist in “AZC” is writing “Crime Always Pays”, which is the second volume of “The Big O”. You are obviously creating an entire Declan-Burke-Cosmos - showing a remarkable variety in style. Was your idea to try out a completely different genre in crime fiction?

“There has been a variety of styles in the six novels I’ve published to date, certainly. There has been private eye novels, comedy crime caper novels, a spy novel and “Absolute Zero Cool”, which is a book I’m still not sure how to describe – I think it’s more of a novel about the crime novel, or the crime writer, rather than a crime novel in itself, which is why I have the protagonist in AZC writing “Crime Always Pays” (the sequel to “The Big O”). As to why I have tried different styles, I think it’s because, as a reader – and I will always be a reader first, and then a writer – I like to read widely, and not just in one genre, or one strand of a genre. Life would become boring very quickly, I’d imagine, if you only ever read private investigator novels; and that’s also true, for me, for writing – I think I would quickly get bored of writing the same kind of book all the time. It’s also true that I’m a fan of almost all kinds of crime fiction, from the so-called ‘cosy’ mysteries right through private eyes and hard-boiled noir and spy fiction, so when it comes to writing my own books I try to pay tribute to the wide and varied kinds of storytelling styles you get within the crime fiction genre.”

4. A beauty surgeon with a loose crown on his tooth; a criminal with a Saint’s name doing a hold-up in an Oxfam store, a getaway car driver suffering from narcolepsy ... honestly, which one of those if you favourite or was the most fun to write?

“That’s a very hard question for me to answer! It’s like asking me which of my children I love most … I guess, if I really had to answer the question, I would say that I particularly loved Rossi and Sleeps. Rossi is a criminal with huge ambitions, and a very inflated sense of his own abilities, and I developed a great sympathy for him as I wrote the book, mainly because Rossi was born into a life where he had very little opportunities, but through no fault of his own. And Sleeps, who is the narcoleptic getaway driver and something of a quiet philosopher, was an absolute joy to write – in fact, I’m currently considering writing a novel that will feature Sleeps as the central ‘hero’.”

5. I think it’s great how your women characters are, in spite of all their bad habits and quirkiness, very positive and tough, very hard to impress. Are there real-life models for this?

“The short answer to this question is ‘Yes, there are.’ The longer answer is that if those women – and in particular, one woman – ever found out that I was writing about them, my life would not be worth living! Actually, now that I think of it, she doesn’t read German, so I should be okay to say that the main model for Karen in the novel – she is the main character, in my mind; “The Big O” is really her story – is my older sister, who was always very independent, self-sufficient, creative, positive and tough when I was growing up. In fact, she blazed a trail that allowed me to follow. So Karen, in the book, is very much my way of paying tribute to my sister, even if, to the best of my knowledge, my sister has never taken part in a stick-up …”

Reviews: Irish Times crime fiction column, August 29th

“Life, unlike crime, was not something you could solve,” observes the retired Parisian police inspector Auguste Jovert in Mark Henshaw’s The Snow Kimono (Tinder Press, €22.50), the Australian author’s first novel since he published his debut, the award-winning Out of the Line of Fire, 26 years ago. Jovert is ruminating on his conversations with Tadashi Omura – a former Professor of Law at the Imperial University of Japan, and a devotee of himitsu-e puzzles – who opens the novel by spinning Jovert an engrossing yarn about Kumiko, the young girl he raised as his own daughter after his old friend, Katsuo, went to prison in disgrace (the theme of fathers and their strained relationships with daughters is a constant: Jovert, formerly a ‘specialist interrogator’ with the French Territorial Police in Algeria, has recently received a letter from a young woman in Algiers who claims to be his daughter). What transpires is a story that is almost the antithesis of the conventional detective novel, a subtly wrought meditation on human frailty in the framework of an extended confession, with Jovert playing the part of reluctant confessor to an elaborately woven and beautifully detailed declaration of guilt.

  Andrea Carter’s debut Death at Whitewater Church (Constable, €22.10) opens in the northeast corner of Donegal, where solicitor Ben O’Keefe lives a life that ‘was sort of a half-life’, filling in time as an observer and facilitator of the lives around her. While helping to survey the deconsecrated church at Whitewater near the village of Glendara, Ben discovers a human skeleton in the church’s crypt; when it emerges that the remains are recent, and likely those of Conor Devitt, who disappeared six years previously on the eve of his wedding, a murder investigation begins. The shadow of the Troubles hangs over the events of this contemporary-set novel, although the story itself takes its cue from the Golden Age of mystery fiction, with Ben O’Keefe – an amateur sleuth who is by her own admission far too nosy for her own good – something of a latter-day Miss Marple as she surreptitiously investigates the cat’s cradle of possible motives for Conor Devitt’s death. Ben O’Keefe is an engaging character, one reminiscent of Jane Casey’s Maeve Kerrigan in her exemplary public professionalism and private self-doubt, and Death at Whitewater Church is a charming debut that bodes well for Carter’s future.

  A Little More Free (ECW Press, €14.99) is Canadian author John McFetridge’s second novel to feature Montreal Constable Eddie Dougherty. Opening in 1972, as Montreal hosts the legendary ‘Summit Series’ of ice hockey matches between Canada and the USSR, the story finds Dougherty investigating the deaths of three men who burned to death in a nightclub fire, and also the robbery of millions of dollars worth of paintings from the Museum of Fine Arts. McFetridge’s previous novels (this is his sixth) have been compared with those of Elmore Leonard, but the Eddie Dougherty novels have more in common with the work of Michael Connelly: Dougherty is a smart, pragmatic but deep-thinking cop who winkles out the truth by virtue of dogged police-work. One of the most enjoyable aspects of the Dougherty novels is the way McFetridge opens a window onto Canada’s recent and turbulent past (both of the cases Dougherty investigates are historical events), with the title of A Little More Free alluding to the wider backdrop of Dougherty’s investigation, which leads him into the murky world of US Army deserters and those fleeing the Vietnam War-era draft.

  Julia Heaberlin’s third novel, Black-Eyed Susans (Penguin, €19.50), is a cleverly constructed tale that advances along parallel narratives. In 1995, in conversation with her psychiatrist as she prepares to testify in court, Texan teenager Tessie tries to remember the details of her miraculous escape from a serial killer who dumped her body into a pit containing the bones of some of his previous victims. Meanwhile, in the present day, the older Tessie, now calling herself Tessa, is convinced the killer has tracked her down, which means that Tessie’s testimony two decades previously sent the wrong man to death row. With Terrell Goodwin’s execution date looming, can Tessa finally unlock the dark secrets buried in her subconscious and save an innocent man’s life? A superb psychological thriller strewn with gothic motifs (Edgar Allen Poe, and particularly his story ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, is regularly referenced), Black-Eyed Susans is a haunting account of Tessa’s painful journey towards understanding the unpalatable truth of her life-defining experience (“I am sane, and I am not, and I don’t want anyone to know.”), which also functions as an engrossing exploration of the morality of the death penalty.

  Jamie Kornegay’s debut novel Soil (Two Roads, €20.99) centres on environmental scientist Jay Mize, who has relocated his wife Sandy and young son Jacob to a corner of rural Mississippi in order to create a self-sustaining farm in anticipation of the climatic apocalypse Jay believes is imminent. Devastated when floods destroy his crops, and terrified of being accused of murder by the sociopathic Deputy Danny Shoals when the receding waters reveal a corpse on his land, the increasingly paranoid Jay decides to dispose of the body himself rather than alert the authorities. A slow-burning noir influenced by the Southern gothic tradition, Soil is a hugely impressive debut in which the central narrative of Jay’s psychological breakdown and his family’s destruction leads us into the darkest recesses of the South’s history (Jay’s ancestry is tainted by the worst kind of Jim Crow legacy). Kornegay is superb at evoking the minutiae of small-town America, and despite their different settings – Soil vividly depicts the sweltering Mississippi delta – this heart-breaking tragedy bears comparison with Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan and Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. ~ Declan Burke

  This column was first published in the Irish Times.

Reviews: Irish Times crime fiction column

Stephen King’s Finders Keepers (Hodder & Stoughton, €29.50) opens in 1978 with the murder, during a home invasion, of ‘America’s reclusive genius’ John Rothstein, the author of the acclaimed Jimmy Gold trilogy. The police suspect the burglars were after the cash Rothstein kept in his safe, but the reader already knows better: the killer is Morris Bellamy, John Rothstein’s most avid fan, who has come in search of the notebooks and the novels it’s rumoured the author has continued to write ever since he ceased publishing. A sequel-of-sorts to King’s Mr Mercedes (2014), which also featured retired police detective Bill Hodges, Finders Keepers reprises the kind of murderous literary obsession King wrote about in Misery (1987). Rothstein is a Salinger figure, of course (his last published short story is ‘The Perfect Banana Pie’), but while King does on occasion use Rothstein as a stick to beat the American literary establishment, the story evolves as a clash between those who want Rothstein’s notebooks only for they are worth in terms of ‘the Golden Buck’ and those who cherish them as cultural treasures. Littered with literary references, the novel is a hugely enjoyable thriller that unfolds in a style reminiscent of the late, great Elmore Leonard.

  Disclaimer (Doubleday, €19.50), the debut novel from former BBC arts documentary director Renee Knight, begins with Catherine Ravenscroft vomiting with the shock of discovering that she is the anti-heroine of a novel called The Perfect Stranger: “ … the details are unmistakable, right down to what she was wearing that afternoon.” (To hammer home the message, the traditional disclaimer in Catherine’s copy of the book has red line drawn through it.) The mystery behind the events of ‘that afternoon’, which took place some two decades ago when Catherine was holidaying in Spain with her five-year-old son Nicholas, provide both Disclaimer and the novel-within-a-novel The Perfect Stranger with their narrative drive, as Catherine strives to discover exactly how retired English teacher Stephen Brigstocke, the author of The Perfect Stranger, came by his information, and why he might want to destroy her life by revealing her terrible secret. In the process Renee Knight broaches the taboo subject of ‘the mother who put herself before her child’, exploring how Catherine’s actions led to tragedy and the destruction of two families. An enthralling take on the ‘domestic noir’ sub-genre, Disclaimer is equally fascinating – unsurprisingly, perhaps, given Renee Knight’s former career – as a commentary on subjective truth.

  Prodigal son Jay O’Reilly returns home to the ‘no man’s land, the border, bandit country’ of South Armagh in Jarlath Gregory’s The Organised Criminal (Liberties Press, €12.99), where his father Frank holds sway as the area’s most notorious smuggler. When Frank offers Jay a life-changing criminal opportunity, Jay throws it back in his face, but soon Jay has been overtaken by events and is plotting to destroy his father’s empire from within. The Catholic Church and ‘the Troubles’ cast long shadows across Gregory’s story, which provides a cultural and historical context for Frank’s activities while simultaneously damning him for taking advantage of his own people. “Have you forgotten what it was like,” Jay asks his friend Martin, “the last time this town fell into the hands of people with guns?” The frequent narrative digressions and occasional diatribes do slow the pace of The Organised Criminal, but overall it’s a fascinating post-Troubles tale of moral ambivalence in a community still struggling to accommodate its very particular history.

  The 11th novel in Norwegian author Karin Fossum’s Inspector Sejer series, The Drowned Boy (Harvill Secker, €20.55) opens with Sejer and his colleague Skarre attending the tragic death of toddler Tommy Zita, who fell into a pond beside his family home – or so his mother, Carmen, claims. Prompted by Skarre’s instinct that something isn’t quite right about the scene, Sejer interviews Carmen and her husband Nicolai, curious in particular as to how they both reacted on the night Tommy was born and they first realised he was a Down syndrome child. Fossum’s Inspector Sejer novels are invariably morally and psychologically complex affairs, but The Drowned Boy might well be her crowning achievement to date. Essentially a whodunit with only one real suspect, the story is notable for its empathy for both victim and killer alike as Fossum employs a spare style and austere tone (beautifully translated here by Kari Dickson) to explore the limitations of justice and truth as Sejer quietly goes about his business according to his life’s guiding principle, the deceptively simple belief that, “It’s important that everything is right, it’s fair.”

  Philip Kerr’s police detective Bernie Gunther is a superb example of that crime fiction staple, the moral individual who finds himself in conflict with the corrupt apparatus of the State. Bernie, to be fair, is a more errant knight than most, not least because he serves the Nazi administration, and never more so than in the tenth Bernie Gunther offering, The Lady from Zagreb (Quercus, €28.50), which opens in Berlin in 1942 with Bernie a reluctant speaker at the International Convention on Crime. Subsequently commissioned by Joseph Goebbels to investigate the whereabouts of a missing man who was last heard of joining a monastery in Croatia, Bernie finds himself negotiating the killing fields of the Balkans and witnessing the worst excesses of the genocidal Ustaše. Kerr has Gunther mockingly reference Sherlock Holmes on a number of occasions, and the overall mood is enjoyably knockabout Chandler, but the juxtaposition of Gunther’s gallows humour and the bitingly satirical undertone (such as when Gunther is seconded to the Nazi’s ‘War Crimes Commission’) lend themselves to a bracing fatalism as Kerr explores the darkest corners of the human psyche and what Gunther describes as the impossibility of a restoration of the moral order. ~ Declan Burke

  This column was first published in the Irish Times, June 6th.

Review: GRIND JOINT by Dana King

The opening of a new casino gives the depressed Pennsylvania town of Penns River a welcome economic boost in Dana King’s Grind Joint (Stark House), even if some of the town’s more upstanding citizens are concerned about the origins of the venture’s start-up capital. When the body of a drug dealer is discovered dumped on the casino’s steps just before its grand opening, it appears that their worst suspicions are confirmed: the casino will serve as a ‘grind joint’, a clearing house for dirty money. When detectives Ben ‘Doc’ Dougherty and Willie Grabek begin their investigation, however, they quickly find themselves stymied when confronted by vested interests that include mobsters, politicians, ex-spooks and certain high-ranking members of their own department. Rooted in the Slavic ethnic heritage of Western Pennsylvania, Dana King’s style – this is his fourth novel – has been compared to the work of the late Elmore Leonard, and it’s easy to see why: Grind Joint is a compelling tale of small-town gangsters and cops rooted in vernacular dialogue, and blackly comic in the way the bad guys’ ambitions easily exceed their abilities. In truth, Grind Joint reads more like a proto-Leonard story, one more reminiscent of George V. Higgins, whose The Friends of Eddie Coyle exerted a major influence on Leonard’s style. There’s a chilly and occasionally unsettling quality of realism to King’s unflinching appraisal of the devastating impact of economic downturn on small-town America, which leads its protagonists to perform increasingly convoluted moral gymnastics. ~ Declan Burke

  This review first appeared in the Irish Times.

Do The Write Thing

It’s not very often I wind up on a list of writers alongside Raymond Chandler, Stephen King and Elmore Leonard, so it was quite the surprise to stumble across this offering from Henry Sutton over at Dead Good, in which Henry talks about ‘Writers Trapped on the Page’ (right now I seem trapped in page 2 of my work-in-progress, but that’s a conversation for another day).
  Henry, the author of MY CRIMINAL WORLD, is no stranger to the idea of a writer getting a little too involved with his characters. To wit:

“Writers have long emerged on the page in the genre’s long and bloody canon. Whether directing the action, playing havoc with the plot, or as victim or perpetrator. Often epigraphs by Friedrich Nietzsche seem to accompany these texts, particularly those that appear to address the issue of creativity itself and simply supply further proof that writing fiction can be a pretty criminal activity. Take the line by Nietzsche that Stephen King used for Misery: ‘When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.’ So the abyss is what? Writing a novel? But beware, when fully engaged with that process, weird things can happen.”

  For the full list, clickety-click here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Luca Veste

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?
Difficult question straight out the block! I would have said something classic before this year, such as a Mark Billingham, Steve Mosby or Elmore Leonard possibly. However, this year I read THE SHINING GIRLS [by Lauren Beukes] and have been thinking about off and on ever since. A time-travelling serial killer ... why the hell didn’t I think of that?!

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
I read mostly within the genre of crime, with some horror, and the very odd sci-fi or fantasy novel. So, most characters in crime fiction we meet at their lowest ebb, horror characters are generally going through some very scary shit stuff. I’d have to learn all sorts of new stuff for Sci-Fi and Fantasy characters and I’m very lazy. I’ll go for Windsor Horne Lockwood III from Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar series. Endless pots of cash, awesome fighting skills, and charisma to boot. What’s not to like?

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t really call anything I read a ‘guilty pleasure’ as I’m quite okay with anything I choose to read - no matter what it does for hard fought for street cred. YA is probably on the low-end of the street-cred spectrum (bizarrely), so I guess I’ll say Michael Grant’s GONE series. Superb characters, pacing, and pathos. There’s tons of great stuff happening in the YA genre that is often overlooked.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Any time I get what is in my head down in words is extremely satisfying. To choose a specific moment however, it was writing the final words of the first draft of DEAD GONE. Back then, it was called something different, was 25,000 words shorter than what it is now, has a completely different second half, and a really weird timeline. But, I finished a novel for the first time. The idea of sitting and writing 80-100,000 words was so completely foreign to me, that even getting into the tens of thousands was a bit special. Actually finishing the book ... that was a big moment. A more satisfying moment may be coming up however, when I finally put the second book to bed. Now that has been a difficult process ...

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
I imagine you get some really classic answers for this question, with the rich history the genre has in Ireland. It’s also a great time in Irish crime fiction, with the likes of Jane Casey, William Ryan, and Tana French. However, I think there’s an absolute star in Irish crime fiction right now in Stuart Neville. THE TWELVE is one of the best debut novels I’ve ever read, and would be heartily recommended to all.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
If I was being truthful, I’d go for Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE again here (seriously, it’s that good ... read it if you haven’t already), but that would be cheating, probably. I’ll also discount what I would go for second, as that would be ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL by some bloke called Declan Burke or something, as he appears to be asking the questions. That would make for a very trippy movie. Instead, I’ll go for BROKEN HARBOUR by Tana French. Everything about that novel screams for a movie to be made. It would be a very bleak film, but excellent I think.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Best thing – Sitting down and putting words onto paper/screen, making characters come to life which have until then existed only as fragmented thoughts. Worst thing – Sitting down and being unable to put those fragmented thoughts onto paper/screen, as they make no sense when made reality.

The pitch for your next book is …?
DEAD GONE is about a serial killer weaving his merry way through the streets of Liverpool, killing victims using infamous psychological experiments. With each victim comes a connection to the City of Liverpool University and a note explaining the experiment carried out. DI Murphy and DS Rossi are on the case, soon realising they’re facing a killer unlike one they’ve ever faced before .. .one who kills to discover more about life.

Who are you reading right now?
I’m reading two books at the moment (one paper, one ebook – I’m having the best of both worlds). One is A TAP ON THE WINDOW by Linwood Barclay – the usual ‘extraordinary things happening to ordinary people’-style thriller, which always works for me. The other, THE TESTIMONY by James Smythe – I’ve only just started reading this, after putting it down in favour of other stuff a month or so ago. Something’s happened, some kind of "event", and people are telling the story after it has occurred. No idea what’s going on at the moment, but I’m enjoying it!

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Does he also ask me which one of my two daughters is my favourite? Or Steven Gerrard vs Kenny Dalglish for favourite ever Liverpool player? I don’t like this God guy ... he is unnecessarily mean with his demands. I’ll go for read. And then like the good recovering Catholic I am, completely ignore God and write in secret, only no one could ever see it...

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Dark, uncompromising, and twisted.

Luca Veste’s debut is DEAD GONE.

A Singular Joint Endeavour

Dana King is both a friend of this blog and a good friend of your humble correspondent, so I’m delighted to announce that he has just published GRIND JOINT (Stark House). I’m hopelessly compromised in terms of letting you know what I think of the book, of course, but suffice to say that Charlie Stella has penned the Introduction, during the course of which Charlie compares – very favourably – GRIND JOINT to the work of Elmore Leonard. Quoth the blurb elves:

A new casino is opening in the rural town of Penns River, Pennsylvania but just where the money is coming from no one really knows. Is it Daniel Hecker, bringing hope to a mill town after years of plant closings? Or is the town’s salvation really an opening for Mike ‘The Hook’ Mannarino’s Pittsburgh mob to move part of their action down state? Or could it be someone even worse? When the body of a drug dealer is dumped on the casino steps shortly before its grand opening, Detectives Ben Doc Dougherty and Willie Grabek have to survive their department’s own inner turmoil and figure out not only who is behind the murder, but what it means to whoever is behind the operation itself. Between the cops, the mob, and the ex-spook in charge of casino security Daniel Rollison, a man with more secrets than anyone will ever know, Grind Joint is a mesmerizing mix of betrayal, police action, small town politics, sudden violence and the lives of the people of a town just trying to look after itself.

  To order your copy, clickety-click here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Frank McGrath

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?
FREAKY DEAKY (Elmore Leonard). The opening is so well done.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Jason Bourne.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
James Schuyler (NY poet), Billy Collins, Roger McGough … (“Time wounds all heels.”)

Most satisfying writing moment?
Having a poem published in the TLS - and getting paid £25 for it - in 1981!

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
CHRISTINE FALLS - Benjamin Black.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
CHRISTINE FALLS - Benjamin Black.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst - when you look back on a piece of work that seemed inspired when you wrote it, to discover it is dross. Best - when you look back on a piece of work that seemed rubbish when you wrote it, to discover it is quite good.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Meet Daniel Hennessy - artist, mental patient, sociopath. Released on compassionate grounds due to terminal illness, Danny has one last mission to perform,

Who are you reading right now?
Short Stories (Chekhov); THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (Jordan Belfort); THE REASON I JUMP (Naoki Higashida); CADILLAC JUKEBOX (James Lee Burke)

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Read.

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

Frank McGrath’s THE CUT is published by Longboat Publishing.

Review: SCREWED By Eoin Colfer

You’ll have heard by now, no doubt, that Disney has given the green light to a movie based on the first two books Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series, and excellent news it is. There’s no word yet as to when the movie will be made or released, but it might be no harm to start bracing yourself now for Artemis-mania.
  Anyway, I reviewed Eoin Colfer’s adult comedy caper, SCREWED, for the Irish Times last month. It ran a lot like this:

SCREWED by Eoin Colfer (Headline)
When did crime fiction get so serious? The banter between Holmes and Watson, Poirot’s peacock posturing, Philip Marlowe’s zingy one-liners – for some of the genre’s most accomplished practitioners, humour was an essential element when it came to creating fully-rounded characters.
  These days the fashion is for dark, gritty realism. There are crime writers who employ humour to a greater or lesser degree, such as Colin Bateman, Elmore Leonard, Janet Evanovich, Carl Hiaasen and Christopher Brookmyre, but comic crime fiction remains, relatively speaking, a rarity.
  This may well be because many of the genre’s fans refuse to read comedy crime, for the very good reason that murder is no laughing matter. That interpretation, however, is another variation on the canard that comedy is necessarily a more trivial form than tragedy. Raymond Chandler once suggested, rather glibly, that if a writer was ever in doubt as to what should happen next, he should have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand. But whether the man is holding a gun or a custard pie is irrelevant; what matters is the man.
  Humour, and in particular a well-honed appreciation of the absurdity of human self-delusion, has long been a staple of Eoin Colfer’s work. As a best-selling author of children’s fiction, he struck gold with the blackly comic teenage criminal mastermind Artemis Fowl, and also wrote And Another Thing … (2009), the sixth instalment in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Colfer’s Half-Moon Investigations (2006) was a private eye novel, although the quirk there was that Fletcher Moon was a 12-year-old shamus prowling the mean streets of his school’s playground.
  It would have been a surprise, then, and possibly even a criminal waste, had Colfer abandoned comedy for his first adult crime offering, Plugged (2011). That novel featured Daniel McEvoy, an Irish Army veteran who once served in Lebanon and still suffered the psychological scars. A casino bouncer in the upscale New Jersey town of Cloisters, McEvoy got caught up in the murderous scheming of Irish-American mobster Mike Madden, and a ramshackle comedy caper ensued, in a style reminiscent of the late Donald Westlake.
  Dan McEvoy returns in Screwed, now the co-owner of the casino but no less indebted to Mike Madden. Commissioned by Madden to deliver a package of bearer bonds to a New York address, McEvoy understands that he is being set up as a patsy, but is nonetheless sucked into a turf war. The politics of gang warfare mean nothing to McEvoy, who is far more concerned with how the war might impact on his personal relationships. Armed with a unique set of lethal skills, he sets about defending his own tiny patch of turf.
  On the basis of that set-up, you might imagine that any movie adapted from Screwed would probably feature Liam Neeson growling threats into a mobile phone. McEvoy, however, is a decidedly unconventional crime fiction hero. Despite his army training and combat experience, he is a man plagued by self-doubt. McEvoy may well be skilled at killing a man at long or short range, but his thought processes are so tortuous – the novel is told in the first person – that the intended victim is more likely to expire from natural causes before McEvoy makes up his mind about the morality of a necessary murder.
  Indeed, McEvoy is in many ways everything the crime fiction hero should not be. The legacy of a drunken, abusive father has left him conflicted about his own capacity and appetite for violence. So far is he removed from the bed-hopping, womanising stereotype that he refuses to take advantage of Sofia, with whom he is besotted, on the basis that she occasionally confuses him with her long-lost husband, Carmine. The macho caricature of bad genre fiction is further undermined by the fact that McEvoy’s business partner and friend is the ‘super-gay’ ex-bouncer Jason, while McEvoy’s sharp eye for women’s fashion comes courtesy of his addiction to Joan Rivers’ Fashion Police TV show.
  Suffice to say that Dan McEvoy is a complicated man, and Colfer takes great pleasure in drop-kicking him into a story that reads a lot like a Coen Brothers’ take on The Sopranos. Indeed, part of the pleasure of Screwed is Colfer’s awareness of the conventions of the genre, and his willingness to bend them out of shape. The irreverence is refreshing right from the beginning, when the novel starts with McEvoy explaining how Elmore Leonard has decreed that no story should begin with a description of the weather, ‘but sometimes a story starts off with weather and does not give a damn about what some legendary genre guy recommends.’ Fair enough, but McEvoy then neglects to tell us what the weather is actually doing.
  That whimsical quality is probably the novel’s defining feature (“Men have climbed into wooden horses for eyes like that.”) but instead of proving a narrative distraction, the offbeat style is an integral element of Dan McEvoy’s attempt to cope with the way his life appears to be spiralling out of control. In Plugged, this quality occasionally veered off-course to become self-consciously wacky and zany, but Screwed is noticeably more controlled and direct in terms of its narrative thrust.
  It takes a very deft touch to weld the darker elements of noir to slapstick comedy, but Colfer’s aim has a laser-like focus and the joins very rarely show. The result is a hugely enjoyable caper that also functions as an affectionate homage to the genre. – Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

EIGHTBALL BOOGIE by Declan Burke

‘Down in the Old Quarter, you flip a double-headed coin, two out of three it comes down on its edge.
  ‘Last time, it doesn’t come down at all ...’

When the wife of a politician keeping the Government in power is murdered, freelance journalist Harry Rigby is one of the first on the scene. But Harry's out of his depth: the woman’s murder is linked to an ex-paramilitary gang’s attempt to seize control of the burgeoning cocaine market in the Irish northwest. Harry’s ongoing feud with his ex-partner Denise over their young son’s future doesn’t help matters, and then there’s Harry’s ex-con brother Gonzo, back on the streets and mean as a jilted shark …

Praise for EIGHTBALL BOOGIE:

“Harry Rigby, the ultimate anti-hero, fights his own demons (including a death wish except for protecting his son) and some of the corrupt and powerful in and around his home town when murder comes a knockin’ at Christmas ... nothing short of brilliant writing is the highlight of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE ... absolutely brilliant writing.” - Charlie Stella

“There’s a lot to like in Declan Burke’s debut, including some cracking plot twists. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants an entertaining way to spend a few hours.” - Val McDermid

“I have seen the future of Irish crime fiction and it’s called Declan Burke. Here is talent writ large - mesmerizing, literate, smart and gripping. If there is such an animal as the literary crime novel, then this is it. But as a compelling crime novel, it is so far ahead of anything being produced, that at last my hopes for crime fiction are renewed. I can’t wait to read his next novel.” - Ken Bruen

“Burke writes in a staccato prose that ideally suits his purpose, and his narrative booms along as attention grippingly as a Harley Davidson with the silencer missing. Downbeat but exhilarating.” - The Irish Times

“Harry Rigby resembles the gin-soaked love child of Rosalind Russell and William Powell ... a wild ride worth taking.” – Booklist

“One of the sharpest, wittiest books I’ve read for ages.” - The Sunday Independent

“Eight Ball Boogie proves to be that rare commodity, a first novel that reads as if it were penned by a writer in mid-career ... (it) marks the arrival of a new master of suspense on the literary scene.” - Hank Wagner, Mystery Scene

“The comedy keeps the story rolling along between the sudden eruptions of violence … Burke’s novel is not just a pulp revival, it’s genuine neo-noir.” – International Noir

EIGHTBALL BOOGIE on Kindle UK (£3.99)

EIGHTBALL BOOGIE on Kindle US ($4.99)

Return Of The Mc

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that John Connolly’s Charlie Parker novels have been e-bundled, and that it’s a very good idea indeed. Shortly afterwards I stumbled across a similar package, this one from the excellent John McFetridge, aka the Canadian Elmore Leonard, who has bundled his Toronto-set novels. Quoth the blurb elves:

Road rage or a premeditated killing? DIRTY SWEET is a fast-paced crime story that follows each character to a surprising end. In EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE, detective Gord Bergeron has problems. Maybe it’s his new partner, Ojibwa native Detective Armstrong. Or maybe it’s the missing ten-year-old girl, or the unidentified torso dumped in an alley behind a motel, or what looks like corruption deep within the police force. In SWAP, Toronto’s shadow city sprawls outwards, a grasping and vicious economy of drugs, guns, sex, and gold bullion. And that shadow city feels just like home for Get — a Detroit boy, project-raised, ex-army, Iraq and Afghanistan, only signed up for the business opportunities, plenty of them over there. Now he’s back, and he’s been sent up here by his family to sell guns to Toronto’s fast-rising biker gangs.

  Looks like a very sweet deal to me, and I warmly recommend all three novels.
  For a review of DIRTY SWEET, clickety-click here …

On Putting The Big O Into Boon

Inspired by the inimitable Rashers Tierney (if you haven’t read STRUMPET CITY yet, I humbly advise you to do so), you find me this morning in panhandling mode. As the more eagle-eyed among you will know, I published the e-book of THE BIG O early last month as the latest stage in my bid for world domination, and so far it’s been going well. Only last week Eoin Colfer was kind enough to describe the book as something of a scuffle between Jim Thompson and Elmore Leonard in an alleyway – at least, I think he was being positive about it.
  Anyway, THE BIG O is available through Amazon at $4.99 / £4.99, which may or may not be your idea of a bargain. The point of this post, though, is not to sell you the book, but to beg a boon. There are three readers’ reviews of THE BIG O up on Amazon, all three of which arrived within a couple of days of publication. Which was (and remains) marvellous, but – at the risk of sounding ungrateful – it’s a sparse kind of marvellous.
  Essentially I’m here today to ask you, providing you have read THE BIG O, and have the time, and have no great ideological issue with Amazon and / or people asking for reviews, if you’d be kind enough to say a few words on its behalf.
  If you’d rather not, fair enough. I fully understand.
  If you’re happy to do so, the link is here, and I thank you kindly in advance.
  Normal service will be resumed tomorrow …

“There Was A Young Man Called Bill Ryan …”

William Ryan, the author of the Captain Korolev series of novels, will be leading a creative writing workshop in the Limerick Writers’ Centre on May 25th. Not a workshop on how to write limericks, you understand – the emphasis will be on developing characters for fiction, and the workshop will cost you the princely sum of five euros. Sounds like a bargain to me.
  If I’m not very much mistaken, as I very often am, the workshop will coincide with the Limerick launch of William Ryan’s latest tome, THE TWELFTH DEPARTMENT (Mantle), which is published on May 23rd. Quoth the blurb elves:

Moscow, 1937. Captain Korolev, a police investigator, is enjoying a long-overdue visit from his young son Yuri when an eminent scientist is shot dead within sight of the Kremlin and Korolev is ordered to find the killer. It soon emerges that the victim, a man who it appears would stop at nothing to fulfil his ambitions, was engaged in research of great interest to those at the very top ranks of Soviet power. When another scientist is brutally murdered, and evidence of the professors’ dark experiments is hastily removed, Korolev begins to realise that, along with having a difficult case to solve, he’s caught in a dangerous battle between two warring factions of the NKVD. And then his son Yuri goes missing . . . A desperate race against time, set against a city gripped by Stalin’s Great Terror and teeming with spies, street children and Thieves, THE TWELFTH DEPARTMENT confirms William Ryan as one of the most compelling historical crime novelists at work today.

  Meanwhile, William Ryan and I had a very enjoyable conversation on the business of writing in the last couple of weeks, the result of which has been posted at Shotsmag and the Mystery Tribune. To wit:

“There’s a bigger issue at play here too, and it taps into your question about ‘being Irish’. I was born and raised in Sligo in the Northwest of Ireland, but my cultural experiences growing up were American movies and books, British books and music, and football, European movies, Dutch beer … all these things, and more, were as important in forming my appreciation of culture as any and all of the Irish elements. And if I’m going to write, and be true to my experience of what brought me to the point where I want to write, then I’d be a hypocrite not to include, or at least acknowledge, those influences. That’s why EIGHTBALL BOOGIE (and to a lesser extent its sequel, SLAUGHTER’S HOUND) is so heavily influenced by Raymond Chandler in particular, and the American hardboiled novel in general. Why THE BIG O is influenced by Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen and Barry Gifford.
  “I don’t know, maybe it has something to do with living in a post-colonial country. Ireland has been overlaid with any number of cultures over the past thousand years, and more. And then there’s the fact that emigration has played such an important part in Irish history, and that emigrants bring back all these cultural artefacts and incorporate them into the mix. Do we even know what ‘being Irish’ means?”

  For the rest, clickety-click on Shotsmag or Mystery Tribune.

O Fortuna: Eoin Colfer on THE BIG O

One of the less enjoyable aspects of publishing a new book – or releasing a previously published book in e-format, as is the case with THE BIG O – is asking for blurbs. Not least, of course, because you’re always conscious that you’re putting the writer you’re requesting a blurb from in a difficult position. There’s a decent chance they’ve never heard of you; or they’ve heard of you and think you’re a total plank; or they might like you personally, but not be a fan of your work; and that’s without factoring in that any well-known writer is (a) very busy with the business of being a well-known writer and (b) very probably fending off blurb requests on a daily basis.
  I’ve been very lucky when it comes to receiving blurbs, I have to say. The most recent example comes courtesy of Eoin Colfer, and runs like this:

“If Elmore Leonard met Jim Thompson down a dark alley at midnight they might emerge a week later with thick beards, bloodshot eyes and the manuscript for THE BIG O … raises the bar on its first page and keeps it there until the last word.” – Eoin Colfer

  As you can imagine, I am very pleased indeed with that.
  Okay, that’s the trumpet-blowing over with. Now the hard sell: THE BIG O is available for $4.99 / £4.99 at the links below, and if you have read the book, and feel moved to leave a review on those pages, I’d be very grateful indeed.
  Finally, a very happy St Patrick’s Day to you all. See you on the other side …

THE BIG O by Declan Burke (US)

THE BIG O by Declan Burke (UK)

It All Goes Better With An E: THE BIG O Goes Digital

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed the arrival of a new book in the right-hand column of Crime Always Pays – or a new book cover, to be precise. For lo! A mere six years after it first appeared in print, THE BIG O is finally available as an e-book (at $4.99 / £4.99 / €4.99).
  First published by the marvellous Marsha Swan of Hag’s Head Press back in 2007 (actually, I co-published the book with Marsha, on a 50/50 costs-and-profits arrangement, and great fun it all was too), and subsequently published by HMH in the US, THE BIG O for some reason never made it into digital.
  Shortly after HMH picked it up, the editor (the wonderful Stacia Decker) who signed me moved on to pastures new with the Donald Maass Literary Agency, and THE BIG O – beautifully published in hardback though it was – became something of an orphan (pauses to sniffle, chokes back a sob).
  Anyway, I bought back the rights late last year because I’m particularly fond of the story, which is a black comedy about a kidnap-gone-wrong, and I hated the idea of it languishing in a kind of publishing limbo. It’s also true that its sequel, CRIME ALWAYS PAYS, was also stuck in said limbo, and while I did go ahead an e-publish CRIME ALWAYS PAYS, there wasn’t a huge appetite out there for the sequel to a book that wasn’t readily available.
  I’ve always felt that that was a pity, because the book did receive some very nice reviews. A sample looks like this:

“Imagine Donald Westlake and his alter ego Richard Stark moving to Ireland and collaborating on a screwball noir and you have some idea of Burke’s accomplishment.” – Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Burke has married hard-boiled crime with noir sensibility and seasoned it with humour and crackling dialogue … fans of comic noir will find plenty to enjoy here.” – Booklist

“Carries on the tradition of Irish noir with its Elmore Leonard-like style ... the dialogue is as slick as an ice run, the plot is nicely intricate, and the character drawing is spot on … a high-octane novel that fairly coruscates with tension.” – Irish Times

“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

“THE BIG O is a big ol’ success, a tale fuelled by the mischievous spirits of Donald E. Westlake, Elmore Leonard and even Carl Hiaasen … THE BIG O kept me reading at speed – and laughing the whole damn time.” – J. Kingston Pierce, January Magazine

  So there you have it. As you might imagine, I’m very keen to spread the word about the e-availability of THE BIG O, so if the spirit so moves you, I’d be very grateful for any mention you could give it on your blog or Twitter account, or Facebook, or to your friends by quill and ink … Oh, and the Amazon page looks rather bare, so if you’ve read THE BIG O, and have the time to post a quick review, I’d be very grateful indeed.
  Meanwhile, if there’s anyone out there who’d like to receive a review copy of THE BIG O, just drop me a line at dbrodb[at]gmail.com.
  Thanks kindly for reading, folks. I really do appreciate your time.

The Embiggened O

As all Three Regular Readers will be aware, THE BIG O originally appeared in 2007 courtesy of Hag’s Head Press, and was then published in the US in 2008 by Houghton Mifflin. A kidnap-gone-wrong tale, it garnered some very nice reviews (see below), but a combination of factors – not least the merger between Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt – resulted in the book being holed below the waterline, commercially speaking, even before it appeared.
  Herewith be a sample of said reviews:

“Imagine Donald Westlake and his alter ego Richard Stark moving to Ireland and collaborating on a screwball noir and you have some idea of Burke’s accomplishment.” – Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Burke has married hard-boiled crime with noir sensibility and seasoned it with humour and crackling dialogue … fans of comic noir will find plenty to enjoy here.” – Booklist

“Carries on the tradition of Irish noir with its Elmore Leonard-like style ... the dialogue is as slick as an ice run, the plot is nicely intricate, and the character drawing is spot on … a high-octane novel that fairly coruscates with tension.” – The Irish Times

“Declan Burke’s THE BIG O is full of dry Irish humour, a delightful caper revolving around a terrific cast … If you don’t mind the occasional stretch of credulity, the result is stylish and sly.” – The Seattle Times

“Delightful … darkly funny … Burke’s style is evocative of Elmore Leonard, but with an Irish accent and more humour … Here’s hoping we see lots more of Declan Burke soon.” – Kansas City Star

“Faster than a stray bullet, wittier than Oscar Wilde and written by a talent destined for fame.” - Irish Examiner

“THE BIG O is everything fans of dark, fast, tightly woven crime fiction could want ... As each scene unfolds, tension mounts and hilarity ensues.” – Crime Spree Magazine

  So there you have it. It’s been a long and interesting journey for THE BIG O ever since it first appeared, and said journey takes a new twist next week when, having bought back the rights from HMH, I e-publish the novel for the very first time.
  I’ll be posting a link to the e-book next week, but for now I’m going to run a competition with a bit of a difference, and one aimed at those readers who have already read some of my books to date (EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, SLAUGHTER’S HOUND, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL).
  The idea is that, if you’ve read any of those books, and have the time and inclination to post a review to Amazon, Goodreads, etc., then you’ll be entered into a draw to win one of five signed hardback first edition copies of THE BIG O.
  If you’ve already reviewed a book of mine, of course, or posted about one on your blog or website, then you automatically qualify.
  All I need you to do is post the link to your review / blog post etc., in the comment box below. Naturally, I’d be very grateful if you could find it in your heart to click the Twitter button, give it a mention on Facebook, et al …
  The competition will be open until noon on Thursday, March 7th. Et bon chance, mes amis …

Review: GHOST TOWN by Michael Clifford

A venal solicitor, a woman scorned, a gangland boss, a desperate ex-con, a tabloid journalist: from the very beginning of Michael Clifford’s GHOST TOWN (Hachette Books Ireland), it’s clear that happy endings will be at a premium.
  This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Clifford’s work. A political journalist with the Sunday Times and Irish Examiner, he has also written and co-authored a number of non-fiction titles about the less edifying aspects of Irish political life in the last decade.
  The large cast of criminally-inclined protagonists who constantly butt heads here is reminiscent of an Elmore Leonard novel, although GHOST TOWN isn’t written in Leonard’s laconic, blackly humorous style. Clifford’s prose is direct and unadorned, as you might expect from a working journalist, the lack of frills and relentless narrative momentum suggesting the work of Michael Connelly.
  If there’s one novelist GHOST TOWN evokes more than any other, however, it’s Clifford’s peer, the author and journalist Gene Kerrigan. The comparison is most valid in terms of Clifford’s ability to draw characters, and particularly those we might be inclined to class as villains, in a more fully rounded way than is often the case in mainstream crime fiction. While it might be stretching the point to suggest that Clifford sympathises with those who flout and break the law, there’s no doubt that he is aware, and is keen to make the reader aware, of the extent to which crime’s roots are buried in an individual’s environment.
  The character of Joshua ‘The Dancer’ Molloy, for example, who is in many ways the novel’s fulcrum and main metaphor, was a superb prospect as a footballer in his early teens, but later succumbed to the easy money offered by a toxic version of ambition that seeps into the fabric of Dublin’s deprived housing estates. An ex-con and recovering alcoholic whose twin goals in life are to stay alive another day and be reunited with his young son, Molloy is a fragile, pitiable but ultimately defiant avatar for a modern Ireland that is still trying to find its feet after being forced to kick its addiction to cheap credit.
  Indeed, so relevant is it to Ireland’s current woes, many of which were self-inflicted, GHOST TOWN could well be set next week. Pitched against the backdrop of the recession and the ongoing seismic shudders of the burst property bubble, this is a timely tale in which - as is the case with Tana French’s forthcoming BROKEN HARBOUR - the ‘ghost estates’ that blight Ireland physically and psychologically are crumbling momunents to greed and hubris.
  In fact, the novel’s arc can be traced through its various properties. Opening on a west Dublin housing estate haunted by the victims of successive governments’ laissez faire policies, diverting through a coveted mansion in the prosperous suburbs of south Dublin secured on the promise of a property boom on a paradisical West African coastline, and climaxing on an upmarket ‘ghost estate’ where the unfinished villa-style buildings rot from neglect, the novel implicitly suggests that the various criminals who populate his pages, despite their delusions of grandeur, are little more than toys in a vast game of doll’s house.
  But who is it that plays with the dolls? And will they ever truly answer for their actions?
  Great crime fiction is honour-bound to tell the truth of its time and place, to expose the culture’s flaws and failings. On that basis, GHOST TOWN is a very fine addition to the canon of Irish crime fiction. - Declan Burke

On Winning The Goldsboro ‘Last Laugh’ Award, And Failing Better

I genuinely did not expect ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL to win the Goldsboro ‘Last Laugh’ Award at the Bristol Crimefest, not least because the shortlist included two of my all-time favourite writers - Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen - along with a slew of very good contemporary authors, among them a previous winner in the shape of the very gracious Len Tyler.
  In fact, I’d been in touch recently, by email, with Elmore Leonard’s PR guy and right-hand man, and had told him that if Elmore was to win, I’d be more than happy to pick up the award for him, given that I’m travelling to the States in the near future and would love an excuse to visit Elmore Leonard.
  Then David Headley of Goldsboro Books read out the shortlist of nominees, and the winner, and I was halfway to the podium and still in a state of shock when I realised that the only winner’s speech I had prepared was one on behalf of Elmore Leonard. Hence the blithering idiot (the non-Jeffery Deaver guy above, right) who bumbled his lines in front of an audience of wordsmiths, their publishers and agents.
  I do remember saying something about how my wife, before I left, told me not to bother coming home unless I won (which sounded vaguely like the Spartan mother’s blessing, ‘Come home behind your shield, or on it.’), so that winning was something of a pity, because I was really starting to warm to Bristol …
  I’ll write a longer post during the week about the Crimefest weekend in general, but for now I have to hit and run. Suffice to say that I was very pleased indeed to be sitting beside my good friend Peter Rozovsky when the winner’s name was read out; had he not been there to shake my hand, and confirm that it wasn’t some deranged acid flash-back hallucination, I may well have remained sitting in my seat all night, getting more and more paranoid that everyone was staring at me. And thanks too to Brian McGilloway, who took the photo above, and was kind enough to broadcast it to the world on the night.
  I’m still not the best of it, mind. I was very tempted to check out of the hotel early on Sunday morning, in case they’d made a mistake.
  Anyway, I’m back home now, and the prize is taking up pride of place on the office windowsill, and I’m slowly starting to descend from the improbable high of it all. It feels good, it really does.
  One final word, which occurred to me late on Saturday night, and which might be of use to any writers out there who are finding it difficult to find a publisher: ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL went through fourteen publishers, all of whom said no, before finding its place with Liberties Press. To paraphrase Sammy B: fail, fail again, fail better …