More Irish history and why you should read it

Here's some more of what I've learned about Ireland's history, this time mostly from Ronan Fanning's Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922:

1) German arms shipments to Ireland date back at least to April 1914—to the Ulster Volunteer Force; unionists, not nationalists.

2) A much smaller German arms purchase by Irish nationalists, co-led by Erskine Childers a month later for maximum publicity, resulted in a bloody a crackdown by a British regiment.

3)Yes, that Erskine Childers, author of the early spy novel The Riddle of the Sands.

4) The Irish tradition of secret societies and volunteer groups long predates the alphabet soup of organizations that became familiar during the sectarian Troubles that began in 1969.

5) That "The IRA’s initial focus in what is known either as the ‘War of Independence’ or the ‘Anglo-Irish War’ of 1919–21 was the ostracisation of the police."

What does this have to do with contemporary crime fiction set in the present, or a lot closer to it than 1910 to 1922? Not much, unless one is reading Stuart Neville or Adrian McKinty or Eoin McNamee or Garbhan Downey, or Kevin McCarthy, or Anthony Quinn, or Andrew Pepper, or ...

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

A crime writer whose name is a soft drink, and an antipodean award

While I travel across the country, interesting things happen in crime fiction around the world:

If you should happen to be in Belfast next Thursday, December 12, No Alibis bookshop will present

INTERNATIONAL CRIME FICTION RESEARCH 

State, Crime and Investigation in Kondor Vilmos’ Crime Fiction 

Dr Kálai Sándor, University Debrecen. Introduction by Dr Andrew Pepper, School of English, QUB h, 5-7. University Square, House 11, Room 101 Refreshments provided.

I wonder what Dr. Pepper's students call him. And I suspect that Dr. Andrew Pepper is also crime novelist Andrew Pepper.

*

Down in the Antipodes, Paul Thomas has won the Ngaio Marsh Award for his novel Death on Demand.  I'd read Thomas' Guerrilla Season years ago and found the humor annoyingly wacky and obtrusive. But Thomas has chops, and I said back then that

" ... slowly I began to realize that damn, this man knows how to tell a story. I’ll be reading more of this guy and, without knowing anything about his body of work, I’d bet Paul Thomas could write a first-rate, not necessarily comic thriller if he set his mind to it."

Asked recently to name his favorite hero and favorite villain from crime fiction, Thomas chose Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and, for the bad guy, P.G. Wodehouse's Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts. I note Thomas' predilection for characters whose creators attended Dulwich College.  And I think the time has arrived for me to read more of this guy.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013