TV, movies — what next for Stuart Neville?

Stuart Neville (right), author of The Ghosts of Belfast (The Twelve in the UK), will be a guest on CBS-TV's The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on Thursday, April 8.

Neville is the latest crime writer to appear on Ferguson's show, joining a list that includes Ken Bruen, Lawrence Block, Laura Lippman, Michael Connelly and Lee Child.

Ferguson has taken an option for movie rights to Neville's book. Congratulations to Neville, and let's hope this means Ferguson will plug the hell out of his investment and offer an entertaining, substantive discussion. The book deserves no less.

Update: Boy, I sure hope Stuart Neville is good. He'll have to be to make up for Jennifer Love Hewitt.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

A shite television interview with a fine writer (Craig Ferguson interviews Ken Bruen)

Once or twice during Craig Ferguson's interview with Ken Bruen on today's (OK, last night's) Late, Late Show, Ferguson stopped babbling and clowning long enough to let Bruen make an interesting observation. Ordinary people in Ireland love Jack Taylor, Bruen said, and they ask, in the wake of Taylor's having given up alcohol after sloshing his way through several novels: "Why won't you let the bastard drink?"

He also told Ferguson that Irish tourist officials "say I am singlehandedly destroying the Irish tourist industry." Kevin Burton Smith made a similar remark about Declan Hughes' fiction in his recent interview with Hughes, and the two quips point up the tendency of recent Irish crime fiction to look critically at Irish society. (Declan Burke speculated in a recent post on his Crime Always Pays blog that this new attitude may be a reaction to the 1996 murder of reporter Veronica Guerin.)

But that was about it. There was no mention of any Bruen novel other than Priest, a copy of which Ferguson held up to the camera. There was no discussion of Bruen's hellish spell in a Brazilian jail, and no mention of the Brant and Roberts novels or Bruen's collaborations with Jason Starr. Bruen came across as amiable, if slightly uncomfortable with Ferguson's antics, and if the interview introduces readers to his work, that's all for the good. But for anyone who knows Bruen's writing, there was no reason to stay up late.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Ken Bruen
Irish crime fiction