McKinty makes the Ned Kelly shortlist

Kelly's Horse, by Sidney Nolan

Detectives Beyond Borders friend Adrian McKinty is a finalist for what may be the world's only literary award named for a man who wore a metal trash can over his head. The prize is the Ned Kelly Award for best novel, Australia's highest honor for crime fiction, and the shortlistee is Adrian McKinty, for I Hear the Sirens in the Streets.

Here's what Detectives Beyond Borders said about McKinty's novel, the follow-up to his The Cold Cold Ground:

"Like its predecessor, Sirens is a serious portrait of one man's progress through troubled times (early-1980s Belfast and Carrickfergus, the author's home town). Like The Cold Cold Ground, it feels organic. Every joke, every grim encounter, or musing on the crappy Irish weather, or setback or advance in the police investigation contains the seeds of the whole. And it's a hell of a whole; these books are as smart and fun and harrowing as crime fiction gets."

McKinty's competition includes Blackwattle Creek by Geoffrey McGeachin, whose name has come up here a time or two.

The awards will be presented by the Australian Crime Writers Association Sept. 7 as part of the Brisbane Writers' Festival.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

McGeachin and Cleave are tops down under

The Detectives Beyond Borders research branch has been so busy preparing for Bouchercon that it has neglected some antipodean crime-fiction honors.

Congratulations to Geoff McGeachin, whose Diggers Rest Hotel took Australia's Ned Kelly Award for best novel. McGeachin is a funny guy whose novels Fat, Fifty & F***ked  and D*E*D Dead! I've discussed here, and he once sent me some Vegemite along with a package of books, for which I should thank him, I think.

Over in New Zealand, Paul Cleave's Blood Men is the second winner of the Ngaio Marsh Award for best crime novel. Cleave told New Zealand's Herald on Sunday newspaper last week in an article that bears the headline "Paul Cleave: Too dark for home market"  why he was surprised to win the award. As always for things New Zealand, a hat tip to Craig Sisterson.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Ask for this one by name!

Some tasty bits so far in Fat, Fifty & F***ked, Geoff McGeachin's sheila-and-Clyde tale of a bank manager who loses his job, robs the bank, and hooks up with a woman whose profession is not what you'd think.

There's the biker gang that runs a clean, efficient motel and a relaxed and caring old-people's home on the side, complete with wine cellar and motorcycle-maintenance classes. There's the sympathetic small-town cop who offers tips to the nervous, novice robber/protagonist. And there's the story's wistful fantasy of hitting the road to escape from an indifferent family life and a career that was one big lie.

A shadowy spy agency lurks in the background, more menacing than the one in McGeachin's D*E*D Dead!, and I'll be interested to see how that element works with all the sweeter stuff.

And it is sweet, sweeter than the Vegemite that came with the book.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

D-E-D Dead!, or light makes right

This one got me thinking about a conversation I once had with a pastry chef who said the precision her work demanded made it the hardest of the kitchen crafts.

Geoff McGeachin's D*E*D Dead! is a comic spy thriller, though you might have guessed that from the title and cover. Its tone is light, and the reading is breezy, made so by a number of ingredients added in just the right amounts. But I suspect hard work and careful planning went into that light tone, and don't think it condescending if I call the book a confection.

What makes it light? McGeachin does not linger long over killings. His hero (and a hero he is) questions his profession but does not agonize over it.

Scenes set in Bali make me want to visit, an ambition I'd never had before. I don't know if McGeachin has spent time in Bali, but if he has, I'd guess he loved it. Clues and teasers are planted throughout the novel, obvious enough for the reader to detect them, but clever enough to create suspense. Details of military supply operations and Balinese life and history are folded into the story without ever turning into information dumps. And that includes mention of terrorist attacks in Bali and touching observations about the island's recovery.

McGeachin was a photographer, and so is his protagonist, Alby Murdoch, the latter as a cover for his job with Australia's Directorate for Extraterritorial Defence, or D.E.D. The operation he uncovers is just wild enough to be the stuff of comedy, but rendered convincingly enough to be plausible.

McGeachin's other novels include Dead and Kicking, Sensitive New Age Spy, and one of my favorite titles, Fat, Fifty & F***ed. Like many an Australian crime story from Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab on, D*E*D Dead! is set in part in Melbourne's suburb of St. Kilda, which must be one of the world's great crime-fiction neighborhoods.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Aussie humour

Geoff McGeachin, probably a pretty funny guy himself, to judge by the titles of his novels (Fat, Fifty and F**cked, D.E.D. Dead and Sensitive New Age Spy), posted some illuminating comments here recently that included a link to an article about Australian humo(u)r. Not only is the article surprising and entertaining, it's on an official Australian government Web site.

The article is not about crime fiction, but its discussion of such themes as black humor and, especially, anti-authoritarianism, will be no surprise to readers of, say, Shane Maloney.

My favorite bit is this, from the comedian Mark Little:

"The country itself is the ultimate joke; the wave you body-surf into shore after a day at the beach could contain a shark or a rip-tide and, when you get back, your house could have been burnt to the ground in a bush fire. That's where the whole 'no worries' thing comes from."

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Australian crime fiction