Adrian McKinty wins another award

Adrian McKinty's novel Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly has won Australia's Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel. The award follows his capture of the Best Paperback Original prize at the Edgar Awards in New York this past spring for Rain Dogs. Here's what I had to say about Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly earlier this year.

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 Adrian McKinty's Sean Duffy series, now six novels into what was once called the Troubles Trilogy, keeps getting better and better.

The language is gorgeous, the characters are endearing, the atmosphere full both of humor and of off-hand, everyday life, menacing and otherwise. With this much good crime writing coming out of Northern Ireland, how can anyone mention the Nordic countries in the same breath? Hell, how about the rest of the world? With McKinty ably supported by a cast that includes Stuart Neville just as a start, why is Northern Ireland not routinely numbered among the world's great crime fiction locations?

McKinty's books portray their settings as vividly as do Arnaldur Indriðason's Erlendur novels, set in Iceland (and they're a lot funnier). His Sean Duffy is as endearingly flawed as Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano (Poetry and music are to Duffy what food is to Montalbano, and the two characters lead similarly complicated romantic lives, although— but you'll have to read Book Six, the recently released Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly, to complete that thought.)  McKinty's Belfast is every bit as vivid a crime fiction locale as Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseille.  And he turns as unsparing an eye on that locale as Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö did on Sweden in their Martin Beck novels

Not only that, but McKinty deftly takes on any number of traditional mystery and crime tropes, and the Duffy series and their protagonist are erudite without being condescending. McKinty has also long attacked the notion that a writer's style ought to be workmanlike and invisible. He champions David Peace and James Ellroy, for example, so you know you're bound to find a gorgeous passage or two, prose you can relish for its own sake, in every book.  And if you listen to books, you're in for a treat. Gerard Doyle, the reader of the Sean Duffy audiobooks, is a master of accents, and he gives each character a distinct voice without ever descending to bathos and exaggeration. The audio versions pair the best of crime novels with the best of audiobook readers.

(The five previous Sean Duffy novels are The Cold, Cold Ground; I Hear the Sirens in the Street; In the Morning I'll be Gone; Gun Street Girl; and Rain Dogs. I've been a McKinty fan for years. Read all my Detectives Beyond Borders posts about his work.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Don't hold it against Adrian McKinty that he can write

I have begun browsing Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly, sixth of Adrian McKinty's novels about Northern Ireland police officer Sean Duffy. Ian Rankin loves these books, and he's not wrong; I'm a fan, too.

I've read far too little of Police at the Station ... to write a review, and, since I'm reading an advance reading copy, I'm honor-bound not to quote from it in any case. I can tell you, however, that the book demonstrates once again McKinty's flair for suspenseful, funny surprisingly lyrical opening scenes, sometimes all at once, other times in varying proportions. This latest is up there with the opening chapters of Cold Cold Ground, Rain Dogs, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, and Fifty Grand. Moreover, the parts of his books that come after the first chapters are pretty good, too.

Adrian McKinty. Photo by Peter
Rozovsky for Detectives
Beyond Borders

Reviewers praise crime novels for their plots, their themes, their characters, their sociology, their psychology, their politics, their settings, their conformity with or deviation from trends, where they fit in the publishing landscape, and whether or not they're from Scandinavia.

Writing? That doesn't get mentioned much. I suspect this is because reviewers and other people are uncomfortable talking about writing at best or wouldn't know good writing if they saw it at worst.  McKinty has noted something like a puritanical aversion in some writing  circles to writing that exists for its own sake, that shows off a little. He is not constrained that way in his own work, which is one reason you should read him. That, and all that good stuff about Northern Ireland, and the jokes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

What Kirkus didn't tell you: Three more new crime novels you can read this summer

Kirkus Reviews recently published a list of twenty crime novels due for publication this summer and recommended for your consideration. It's not a bad list, but here are three novels that it missed:

1) Paradime, by Alan Glynn (Picador U.S. August/Faber U.K. May) Reviewers have invoked James Ellroy and John le Carré when discussing Alan Glynn, and if I squint and hold my head at the right angle, I can see resemblances. But Glynn's new novel is a lot more like David Mamet's 1997 movie The Spanish Prisoner than it is like anything by Ellroy and or le Carré. The novel's fever-dream narration is intoxicating, its first section in particular a kind of contemporary nightmare picaresque. (A worker for a private military contractor in Afghanistan witnesses a shocking incident, comes back to New York City, discovers that the incident won't leave him alone, and finds aspects of the result a strangely attractive escape — addictive, even.)

The novel shares some themes with Glynn's previous books, The Dark Fields (also published as Limitless), Winterland, Bloodland, and Graveland: alienation, paranoia, helplessness in the face of corporate and government power, and the uncertainty of boundaries between the two. But the action centers more on the protagonist than it does in the earlier novels, with distant but distinct echoes of mid-twentieth-century American noir. The book also seems carefully constructed, full of epiphanies that shed shocking new light on earlier scenes. And that may be one more mark of its kinship with The Spanish Prisoner.

2) One or the Other, by John McFetridge (ECW Press, August). I know of no crime writer who writes about suburbs and people who live there with the respect that McFetridge does, even though his books are set mostly in cities: Toronto and, in his three most recent novels, Montreal. But I also know of no crime writer who writes more vividly about cities, and who integrates character, crime, and history as seamlessly as McFetridge.

McFetridge's empathy with his protagonist, a young police constable named Eddie Dougherty, may remind readers of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels, but McBain never had anything like McFetridge's eye for the way big events and individual lives intersect, the lives always more important than the events. McFetridge's Dougherty books, of which One or the Other is the third, following Black Rock and A Little More Free, don't try to transcend any genre, but I can easily imagine that they would appeal to readers who love to empathize with characters and wonder about everyday lives lived in tumultuous times, whether or not the stories involve crime.

3) A Quiet Place, by Seicho Matsumoto (Bitter Lemon Press, August U.S./June UK) Too many invocations of one crime writer to describe another are silly, but Matsumoto really is reminiscent of Georges Simenon. This is true especially in his portrayals of dogged, unexceptional characters, bewildered, sometimes to the point of pathos, as they navigate the consequences of crimes they understand only dimly.

Matsumoto died in 1992, and little of his large output has been translated into English, so any new publication is welcome. A Quiet Place is a noirish tale full of sparing but sharp observations and pointed critiques of postwar Japanese society. The novel is reminiscent in that respect of Matsumoto's Points and Lines, which I named one of my favorite international crime novels in the first Detectives Beyond Borders post back in 2006.  The novel's close examination of a setting observed by the protagonist as he travels through it may remind readers of Akira Kurosawa's classic crime movie Stray Dog or of work by the contemporary Japanese crime writers Keigo Higashino and Fuminori Nakamura.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

A new book by, and an old post about, Alan Glynn (on words as self-deluding weapons)

Today's mail brought a copy of Alan Glynn's upcoming novel Paradime, and that is beyond good news. No crime or thriller writer is more alert to the scary power of language, to its manipulation by government and business elites (including, of course, Apple), and to our eager complicity in that manipulation. Have you ever been part of the conversation? Part of a narrative?  (If not, you will be. We can partner on that going forward.) If so, and if you take words seriously, and think they should mean what they say, you'll like Glynn.

Paradime is Glynn's fifth novel, following Winterland, Bloodland, Graveland, and The Dark Fields. (The last is also available as Limitless, the title of the movie adaptation that starred Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro.) All the books are excellent.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

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Words are weapons, and Alan Glynn knows weapons can be evasive and defensive as well as offensive.  Anyone who says "going forward" clearly would prefer that you not examine what he or she has left behind. (Is it any accident that going forward entered the American lexicon in a big way around the time Mark McGwire torpedoed his Hall of Fame chances by telling the U.S. Senate that he was not here to talk about the past?)

Glynn is alert to the ominous vogue uses of conversation and narrative, especially by corporations and politicians. But even the good guys in his books slip into jargon of their own, which adds to his novels' all-embracing sense of dread. Here's the crusading reporter Ellen Dorsey in his new novel, Graveland, (emphasis mine):

"Walking back to her apartment, she decides that with the lack of any intel on the perps, the only other likely route into the story is through the vics."

Perps is probably widespread enough in American usage (Graveland is set in New York) by now to have been stripped of whatever moral weight it may once have carried, and I'm not sure vics (for victims) is real slang. But intel is real, as fraught with self-importance and grandiosity as good, ominous slang ought to be. (A good test for a buzzword's bullshit quotient is how easily it can be replaced with an ordinary word. In this case, intel says nothing information would not. Its bullshit score is therefore 100.)

*

Here's Glynn on 1970s paranoia thrillers. And here's a question for you, readers: What are your least favorite buzzwords and phrases that have come into wide use since the early 1990s, say since the beginning of Bill Clinton's first administration? Why do you hate them? Here are two more of mine:

• Friend modified by a person's name, e.g., a Clinton friend. Calls attention to the clubbiness of America's controlling elites, which might be good news except that reporters embraced the construction wholeheartedly. A (fill in the name) friend may a uniquely American construction. No one in the UK would see the need to call a prime minister's associate a Cameron friend because everyone would take for granted that, having gone to the same public schools before going on to Oxford or Cambridge, of course they were friends.
• Conversation, as a neat catch-all for the vast, messy sprawl of opinions, verbal ejaculations, and seeming irrelevancies on a given subject, with the implication that the mess can be tidied up and manipulated. Trust no one who invites you to be part of the conversation, much less, as one of Glynn's characters does in Bloodland, to "change the conversation."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Modern Ireland and modern Irish crime writers: A St. Patrick's Day post

For St. Patrick's Day, here's a post from a couple of years ago about Irish history and what you can learn about it from Irish crime writers.

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 A passage in Adrian McKinty's novel The Bloomsday Dead alerted me to a certain tendency in Belfast to romanticize the present and the past (though McKinty states the case more pungently), and I may first have heard the term irregulars, for the anti-treaty military forces in the Irish Civil War, through Kevin McCarthy.

The dicey subject of Irish-German relations in the middle of the twentieth century? Stuart Neville deals with one strand of its aftermath in his novel Ratlines. (And it appears that Declan Burke may do so as well, in his latest.)  And Eoin McNamee wrote about the chilling sectarian hatred at the heart of one of Belfast's most notorious murder gangs in his novel Resurrection Man.

The strange, orphaned position of Northern Ireland, unloved by both the United Kingdom and Eire (or is that Ireland? Or the South? Or the Republic?) cannot have been portrayed more directly and more touchingly than in the passage of Garbhan Downey's (I forget in which book) where a politician from the North tells a counterpart from the South something like: "I know you regard us as the unwanted child you'd rather tie up in a sack and toss into the river." And my first inkling that Irish history was more complicated than the Manichean pieties we get in America came when Gerard Brennan took me to the Irish Republican History Museum off the Falls Road in Belfast.

I've just finished reading Part IV of R.F. "Roy" Foster's Modern Ireland 1600-1972, and I was periodically surprised and delighted when his entertaining, opinionated, analytical, non-ax-grinding history would touch upon subjects dealt with in some depth by each of the above-mentioned Irish crime writers. Foster's declaration, for example, that

"For all the rhetoric of anti-Partitionism, opinion in the Republic was covertly realistic about this point, too: the predominant note of modern Ireland in 1972 was that of looking after its own."

says in historical terms what Downey does in fictional ones, and induces a similar twinge of sympathy for Northern Ireland's people, if not its leaders.

So thanks, Irish crime writers, for writing entertaining popular fiction while casting an intelligent eye on the problematic present and past of your problematic country.

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Foster's bibliographic essay at the end of Modern Ireland mentions one Irish crime writer by name, though not for her crime fiction:

"There are few first-rate biographies for the period, one glowing exception being R. Dudley Edwards' Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure, which illuminates far more than its subject."

Looking for more? Edwards, Downey, McNamee, and Brennan contributed stories to Akashic Books' Belfast Noir collection, edited by McKinty and Neville.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

The partition of Ireland, ca. 999,997,987 BC

I have just begun reading The Origins of the Irish, which uses archaeology, geology, and linguistics to trace the beginnings of the people who would one day give the world Luke Kelly and Ronnie Drew.

The author (J.P. Mallory) and publisher (Thames & Hudson) begin their narrative in the deepest geological past, but the editing displays a delightful awareness of recent politics and history. The sub-section on the billion-year-old split of the earth's then single land mass is headed "Partition," for instance.

The next subsection, about the coming together of the two land masses that now form roughly the island's northwestern and southeastern halves is headed "The unification of Ireland."

No other headings that I can find display similar cheek, though I suspect that some observers of the Ireland of recent decades could have fun with "Age of dinosaurs."

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

The permeable borders between crime fiction and history

The latest frisson of crime-fiction recognition I got while reading Irish history comes thanks to Ronan Fanning's Fatal Path, specifically its discussion of the controversy and violence that attended establishment of the border between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland.

That lends even greater historical resonance to, say, the title of Brian McGilloway's first novel, Borderlands. And that, in turn, is all the more poignant because McGilloway never set out to write a political  novel:

"As for the Troubles — I wanted to write a non-Troubles book but, around the Border, it would be unrealistic to assume that they're not there somewhere — thus the only representation of the Troubles in Borderlands is the disembodied voice, talking about the past. It's there, but increasingly insubstantial. Or that was my intention, at least."

And now I'll take a break and read some crime fiction, though the author shares a last name with an important figure in modern Irish history.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

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

You know I've been reading Roy Foster; here's why

Tell someone you like crime fiction, and odds are you’ll get asked “Oh, yeah? Who do you like to read?” Tell someone you like history (god knows, that word can mean so many things), and you’re likelier to be asked not who your favorite historian is, but rather what historical period you like best. Why should this be? Historians are writers, too; the just-the-facts school of history went out of fashion once Herodotus came on the scene.

And that brings up (again) Roy Foster, this time his book of essays called The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland. Are you fed up with theoretical gobbledygook? You might like this bit:

“As a general rule, the more hermeneutic and convoluted the post-colonial theorizing in the text, the more reductionist, naive and reactionary the political views expressed in the footnotes.”

Tired of the sentimentalization of victims? You might like

“One of the fundamental stories of the Irish diaspora is of Irish emigrants choosing to do unto others what others had already done to them. In neither case was that a matter of kind and tender mercies.”

but only not if you’re an unreconstructed Irish nationalist.

Wary of touchy-feely microhistory but wish your unease had an empirical basis? How about

“The dangers of new, deconstructed history, with its stress on the personal and the unmediated, include complacent anti-empiricism and aggressive sentimentalism, often reinforcing each other, and often relying on assumptions that actually contradict recorded experience.”

or

“The process has also led to some well-qualified scholars endorsing (intentionally or not) an odd view of the historians' task: redefined as a duty to reinforce the self-understanding of a `people', no matter how it relates to the historical record (or the self-understanding of other people).” 

or

"But the effect of the [Famine] commemoration year (or years) was to highlight the issues of guilt and pain, driven by the idea that some sort of empathy could be achieved, and a therapeutic catharsis brought about. The language of popular psychotherapy replaced that of historical analysis. This was popularized by a strange alliance of populist journalists, local political wheeler-dealers, erratic rock stars and those born-again newly Irish Eng. Lit. academics again. Performance artists staged presentations where they wept for hours in public to demonstrate what they felt about the Famine."

Looking for thrill of new light cast on an intractable problem you'd taken for granted (I could use more of that every day)? You can't do better than

"It was not simply a `Protestant' versus `Catholic' tradition: varieties of identification certainly took religious labels, but as often as not the religious identification was simply a flag for a whole range of attitudes and values."

I know little to assess the validity of Foster's judgments about Irish history. (Read Terry Eagleton's review of The Irish Story for a dissenting judgment.) But my first experience with that history predisposes me toward Foster's approach. Like many in America, especially those who had not thought carefully about Ireland or its history, I had a vague idea that Irish = Catholic = Republican = good, and English = Protestant = Unionist = bad. I knew nothing of the Irish Civil War, nor did I know there had ever been such thing as Irish-speaking Protestant nationalists.  Then a friend took me to the Irish Republican Museum off the Falls Road in Belfast, where I saw mentions of Wolfe Tone but nothing about Michael Collins, and I thought, "Aha! This is an interesting country."  I think the same when I read Foster.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

More from Roy Foster, or Irish history can be fun, especially when Charles Haughey is part of it

Roy Foster’s Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change Since 1970 picks up where his Modern Ireland: 1600-1972 leaves off. It grew out of a series of lectures, and its more informal tone brings Foster’s delight in wordplay and verbal zest, his own and others', to the fore. Here are some of my favorite examples:

“Gerry Adams, his gaze at this point still firmly fixed on the past, liked to claim that Irish profits were being sucked away by `England', but in fact it was America that predominated.”

“(I) one looks at the Republic of Ireland over the last thirty years in religious terms, it is hard not to think of that standard exam question for students of Irish history: `Why did the Reformation not succeed in Ireland?' And answer: `It did, but it took four hundred and fifty years.'”

“…that other power struggle going on south of the border, down Merrion way: the battles within Fianna Fail.”

“To catch a vote, the playwright Hugh Leonard wrote, [Charles Haughey] would unhesitatingly `roller-skate backwards into a nunnery, naked from the waist down, singing "Kevin Barry" in Swahili'.”

“As power was assumed by a figure variously compared by his opponents to Salazar, Nixon and Dracula, the shape of a new kind of New Ireland came into view.”

“[Conor] Cruise O'Brien once remarked that he would not believe Haughey's political career was over until he saw him buried at a crossroads with his mouth full of garlic and a stake through his heart. Politically speaking, that point had finally been reached.”

“O'Neill's clipped, pragmatic, patrician tone … owed far more to the style of metropolitan Conservative Party cabals than to the sclerotic huddles of Ulster village politics.” 

Charles Haughey

Foster is no mere comedian, though, and the book is no mere cartoonish collection, like those slim volumes one finds at the cash register of bookstores full of zany things said by or about Sarah Palin or George Bush or Bill Clinton.  Foster’s good jokes are always in service of his theme, as when he quotes an outrageous eulogy to Haughey’s sympathies to Northern Ireland, which extended to running guns to the IRA, and contrasts this with the later noticeable cooling of Haughey’s zeal for the North. Rather than merely cite this as one more instance of opportunism by a political crook on a scale unimaginable in most countries, Foster ties his antics and his shifting sympathies to a changing mood in Ireland, and thereby makes him more than an adorable, venal rogue. Thirty-six years after the 1970 trial precipitated by Haughey’s gun smuggling, Foster writes:

“what seemed much clearer was how quickly he had distanced himself from the `problem of the North'. This strategy had enabled him to return to the forefront of politics by 1979 – and, once in power, his Northern policies diverged more and more from traditional pieties. Haughey's own story reflected events and movements in the nation at large.”

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

McKinty's voice: An early look at the fourth book in the Troubles trilogy

Sean Duffy is the narrator as well the protagonist of Gun Street Girl, just as he is in the previous three volumes in McKinty's trilogy about a young Catholic officer in the overwhelmingly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary at the height of Northern Ireland's Troubles. And an engaging narrator he is, too.

Here are some examples from the book's first few chapters:

"Oscillating waves of sound. A fragment of Dutch. A DJ from RFI informing the world with breathless excitement that `EuroDisney sera construit à Paris."

" ... as soon as the word `Inspector' has passed my lips I can see she has lost interest.  There are assistant chief constables and chief superintendents floating around and I'm well down the food chain."

"Fireworks behind. Darkness ahead. And if that's not a metaphor for the Irish Question I don't know what is."

"Twelve-year-old Islay. Good stuff if you liked peat, smoke, earth, rain, despair, and the Atlantic Ocean, and who doesn't like that?"

"Home. The music on the turntable was classic Zep, and I let the plagiarizing bastards take me through a shower and a shave."

I expect exciting things will happen to Duffy, as they do in The Cold Cold Ground, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, and In the Morning I'll Be Gone.  But even more important than coming up with a good story is knowing how to tell it well, and McKinty can do that.  So yes, the Duffy books will teach you something about the grit and everyday tension of living in Northern Ireland amid murderous sectarian strife. More important than that, they're also lots of fun.
© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Northern Ireland comes to New York, and an alter kocker takes a header

Child of a Belfast father. (Photo 
by your humble blogkeeper)

This Northern Ireland crime thing just won't stop. No sooner had I returned from New York University's Glucksman Ireland House and the U.S. launch of Belfast Noir than I found a copy of Gun Street Girl, fourth volume in Adrian McKinty's Sean Duffy trilogy, waiting for me. I suspect the book may come up next week during the Belfast Noir: Murder and Mayhem in Northern Ireland panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach.

Lee Child spoke about his family connection to Belfast and his childhood bewilderment and then growing awareness of the sectarian strife known as the Troubles. He also may have earned the bitter jealousy of other authors present by his disclosure that he does no rewriting at all, made sharper by Stuart Neville's declaration that Child's story for Belfast Noir was "the cleanest piece of copy I have ever seen in my life, not a comma out of place."

Mr. Child had trouble recalling our first meeting until I reminded him that it had occurred shortly after a bird crapped on his jacket one year at Crimefest (Bristol), in England. Though Mr. Child favors dark sport coats, I can state with some confidence that he has had his jacket cleaned or perhaps even acquired a new one since the shit hit the writers.

The only crimp in the evening came from the disagreeable older gentleman who, in his haste to squeeze past me in the row of the seats we shared, did not bother to say, "Excuse me" or heed my suggestion that he allow me to stand up so he could pass. Naturally it was my fault when the old prick tripped, went flying, and landed on his belly, complaining out the side of his mouth as he fell that "this guy (me) wouldn't get out of the way."  My reply to him was phrased and addressed rather more directly.

(I should make it clear that this was no frail oldster. He was in better shape than I. Nor did I swear at him, you dirty-minded rabble.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Brian McGilloway on the personal, the political, and the police

Brian McGilloway's novels address Northern Ireland's Troubles in striking, though oblique fashion.  His story "The Undertaking" gets the upcoming Belfast Noir collection off to a rousing start. And, in this Detectives Beyond Borders post from a few years back, he offers some thoughts on the personal and the political in Northern Ireland.

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I've pondered in recent posts Brian McGilloway's interesting choice of a police officer, or Garda, from the Irish Republic as protagonist of his two crime novels, both set along the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland. I've also wondered about the place in the books of the North's bloody sectarian Troubles.

McGilloway, who grew up in Derry in the North, sent a thoughtful reply to my posts that reminded me of what Matt Rees likes to say when asked if he plans to include Israeli characters in his novels set in the Palestinian territories. No, Rees says, because to do so might lead to unseemly and distracting side-taking.

McGilloway's novels are Borderlands and the new Gallows Lane. Without further ado, here's what their author has to say about the personal, the political, the police and the hero of the books, Inspector Benedict Devlin:

"I know you've been questioning the issue of a Northern Irish writer setting his hero in the Republic, then working with the North's PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland). The main reason for it, I suppose, was to avoid the political. During the time of writing, policing was still a hot issue in Northern Ireland. I was aware that, as a Northern writer, people would rightly or wrongly look at the books for a political angle on the presentation of the PSNI. By filtering their presentation through Devlin's eyes, it allows Devlin to direct, to some extent, the reader's reactions and makes his response to the PSNI a personal rather than political one. I hope that makes sense.

"In addition, the PSNI was changing so much that, by the time the book would have been published, their presentation would have been out of date. Some Northern Irish politicians still complain if it's discovered that Guards are coming into Northern Ireland — on the ground it's happening much more frequently than people expect, I imagine. I thought that was an interesting and unique angle from which to approach a police procedural."And of course the Guards over here have had their own problems recently — considered more fully perhaps in the second Devlin book, Gallows Lane.

"As for the Troubles — I wanted to write a non-Troubles book but, around the Border, it would be unrealistic to assume that they're not there somewhere — thus the only representation of the Troubles in Borderlands is the disembodied voice, talking about the past. It's there, but increasingly insubstantial. Or that was my intention, at least."

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My Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland panel at Bouchercon 2014, featuring Gerard Brennan, Paul Charles, Adrian McKinty, and Stuart Neville, happens at 11:30 a.m, Friday, Nov. 14, in the Regency B room at the Hyatt Regency, Long Beach. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008, 2014

My Bouchercon panels: Requiems for the Departed

Sure, the messy birth of the political entity called Northern Ireland offers a rich setting for grim stories, but Irish crime writers can reach further back into their country's past for source material. Four years ago, a bunch of them did, in an anthology called Requiems for the Departed.

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Myths don't work unless they're with us, around us, even in us.

That's why the Requiems for the Departed collection is so powerful. Its stories invoke Irish myth, most of them updating settings and, often, names, but retaining what seems to this non-expert the unsettling power and bringing it to crime fiction.

The contributors are an all-star list of Irish crime writing, some of whom readers of Detectives Beyond Borders may know (Stuart Neville, Adrian McKinty, Ken Bruen, Brian McGilloway, Garbhan Downey) and others whose names may be new (Arlene Hunt, John McAllister, Sam Millar, and quite a number more).

He was around when the myths were real.
Bog body ("Gallagh Man"), National
Museum of Ireland, Dublin. Photo by
your humble blogkeeper.

Bruen's story is brash and chilling, McKinty's. Neville's, and McAllister's the stuff to keep you awake at night, and McGilloway's a little police procedural with a delightfully comic ending. (The story features his series character, Inspector Benedict Devlin and offers evidence that myth can mix easily with a contemporary setting.)

Pop on over to Crime Scene. N.I. for all kinds of good stuff about the book from co-editor Gerard Brennan.

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Gerard Brennan, Adrian McKinty, and Stuart Neville, will be part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 called Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland. The panel happens Friday, Nov. 14, at 11:30 a.m. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010, 2014

My Bouchercon 2014 panels: Belfast Noir

It's tough writing about a volume of short stories, since, even more than with novels, one wants to avoid giving away spoilers and narrative twists.

Suffice it to say that Belfast Noir, out in November from Akashic Books, looks like one of the strongest, possibly the best entry in Akashic's "City Noir" series, and I don't say that just because the book's two editors plus one of its contributors will be part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 in November.

The pieces are well-chosen and the volume intelligently planned. Its four sections recognize not just Belfast's violent recent past, but the realities of its quotidian present. Most of the stories depict no violence directly, but violence, and the possibility or memory thereof, loom always. That's a lot more effective than whipping out a kneecapping or rolling down the balaclavas whenever the action lags.

I especially like Brian McGilloway's "The Undertaking," which opens the collection with hair-raising humor and suspense.  Akashic's Dublin Noir also opens with a comic story (by Eoin Colfer), and that story was the highlight of the volume for me. I don't know if it's an Irish thing, but  comedy is a wonderful against-type way to open a collection of crime stories. Oh, and I'll also want to read more by Lucy Caldwell.

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Belfast Noir's editors, Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville, will be part of my Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland panel at Bouchercon 2014 Friday, Nov. 14, at 11:30 a.m.  So will Gerard Brennan, who contributed a story to the collection. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

My Bouchercon 2014 panels: The Bloomsday Dead's best paragraph

Adrian McKinty suggested in a comment on this blog that the great Northern Ireland crime novel will be written by a woman. Declan Burke called David Park's The Truth Commissioner "a very brave stab at writing ‘the great post-Troubles Northern Irish novel’," whereupon I immediately added it to my to-read list.

Both those gents, being Irish and having grown up there, one in the North, one in the South, are obviously far more qualified than I am to speculate on this matter. But the notion of "the" great anything is dangerous, at least in the hands of an outsider such as your humble blogkeeper. It carries with it the whiff of a suggestion that once one has read "the" great novel, one can move on to other subjects. I hope that the great Troubles or post-Troubles Northern Irish novel will mark a beginning for discussion and examination, not an ending. After all, life will go on in Northern Ireland even after the great novel appears.

In the meantime, McKinty has written a worthy contender for best post-Troubles Northern Irish paragraph, in The Bloomsday Dead, after the protagonist, Michael Forsythe, has returned to Belfast:

"They say the air over Jerusalem is thick with prayers, and Dublin might have its fair share of storytellers, but this is where the real bullshit artists live. The air over this town is thick with lies. Thousands of prisoners have been released under the cease-fire agreements — thousands of gunmen walking these streets, making up a past, a false narrative of peace and tranquility."

I have my own ideas about why that paragraph works, but I'd like to hear yours. Let us discuss! While you're at it, let me know what you think about the whole notion of The Great Novel.

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Adrian McKinty will be part of my Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Irelandpanel at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, California. The fun starts at 11:30 a.m, Friday, Nov. 14, in the Regency B room. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008, 2014
 
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Bob and Ray meet Jim Thompson in Gerard Brennan's The Point

Lots of Northern Ireland crime writers take the Troubles and their aftermath as a subject. Here's Gerard Brennan's take in his delightful comic (and dark) novel. The Point (The scene is two young hoods surprised by a young woman as they burgle her apartment):

"`The IRA knows a lot about you, wee girl,' Paul said. `You better stop what you're doing.'

"`What are you talking about?' she asked.

...

"Brian shoved him ... `What the fuck was that for?' Paul asked.

"`You know what it was for.'

"`Ach, fuck off. Maybe if she thought the IRA was really watching her she'd make an effort to do a dish or two. You saw the state of the place.'"

At the risk of wallowing in identity politics, Brennan is a few years younger than, say, his compatriot crime writers Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville. I wonder if that renders him more able to joke about the Troubles because he's farther removed from them. I'll have to ask Brennan about this the next time I see him. In any case, The Point is Bob and Ray meets Jim Thompson, Give it a look.

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Gerard Brennan will be part of my Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland panel at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, California. The fun starts at 11:30 a.m, Friday, Nov. 14, in the Regency B room. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Stuart Neville's Ratlines: Out of a different past

Several of Northern Ireland's brilliant cohort of crime writers write not just about their land's sectarian Troubles, but also about the conflict's afterlife (or persistence, if one prefers). Brian McGilloway, Garbhan Downey, and Anthony Quinn are just three who demonstrate that the Troubles continue to reverberate after the Good Friday Agreement.

Stuart Neville became an instant leader of the group with The Ghosts of Belfast, whose very title proves the continuing sensitivity of the subject. (The 2009 novel was released in the U.K. under the powerful but less politically charged title The Twelve.)

Neville crossed over the border and further into the past for his 2013 novel Ratlines.  The time is 1963, the occasion the murder of a Nazi given shelter in Ireland after World War II, and the novel's title a reference to the networks by which Nazis were helped to safety and, in some cases, to prosperity after the war.

Neville does a nice job imagining and investigating the sorts of corruption attendant on such arrangements, and not just the moral corruption that offers succor to evil men, either.  This novel's world has plenty of room for theft, dishonesty, and violence among the criminals themselves, and among the people who pursue them as well.  The book also contains flashes of just the sort of agony that haunted Fegan, the ex-IRA killer of The Ghosts of Belfast.   And, though I have never talked politics with Neville, I suspect after reading Ratlines that he is no fan of nationalism of whatever kind.

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Stuart Neville will be part of my Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland panel at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, California. The fun starts at 11:30 a.m, Friday, Nov. 14, in the Regency B room. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014