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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McKinty's stock rises; analysts say buy

The Wall Street Journal profiles Detectives Beyond Borders favorite Adrian McKinty on the occasion of the U.S. release of I Hear the Sirens in the Street, a novel as good at its title.

The article also invokes McKinty's "Dead" trilogy: Dead I Well May Be, The Dead Yard, and The Bloomsday Dead, the books that got me reading McKinty.

Not many newspapers devote space to crime fiction these days, so props to the folks at the Wall Street Journal. Something is happening, and you know what it is, Mr. Dow-Jones.

*

McKinty's novel The Cold Cold Ground recently won a 2013 Spinetingler Award for best novel. That's a worthy feat; those Spinetingler folks and the people who follow them are some of the sharper and more discerning minds in the crime community. And hey, we Spinetingler winners have to stick together.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Another chapter, this time from Adrian McKinty

Crime Scene NI (may its tribe increase!) posts this reminder that the opening chapter of Adrian McKinty's next novel, Fifty Grand, is available here. The chapter has much of what I loved about McKinty's Michael Forsythe novels: rhythm, tension and, amid the grimness, a brief, funny exchange of dialogue.

McKinty talks about Fifty Grand and other interesting subjects, including crime fiction, dumbing down and Dan Brown, in this interview on Crime Always Pays.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Beyond pundits and onto politcs

I so enjoyed the jabs at the Boston Red Sox and conservative media blowhards in Adrian McKinty's The Dead Yard that I devoted all of yesterday's comment to them. (Since I wasn't writing for the Media Formerly Known as Mainstream, I'm allowed that sort of thing.)

Now I'd like to say a few words about politics and history, since Northern Ireland's Troubles may well haunt the imaginations of Irish writers for quite some time. That prime minister of Northern Irish crime fiction blogging, Gerard Brennan, wondered recently why The Dead Yard was the least popular of McKinty's Michael Forsythe novels in the U.K. Here's part of what he wrote:

"Maybe it’s because this is McKinty’s ‘Troubles’ book. ... We have seen a hell of a lot of work based on the ‘Troubles’. Ireland and the UK are coming down with IRA stories. Some are better than others, and in this case, much better, but at the end of the day, people are looking for new settings and themes. America, however, still has quite an interest in this kind of thing, especially among the Irish-American communities. With the luxury of distance, they maybe have a romantic idea of the struggle and are open to more from this sub-genre. And McKinty has given it to them in spades."

The Dead Yard sees Forsythe infiltrating a breakaway IRA cell in the United States on the verge of the Good Friday Agreement in 1997. At this stage, everyone wants to silence these guys (and women), not least the main IRA, and McKinty manages the not easy feat of making them pathetic and terrifying at the same time.

I suggested to Gerard that if we in America still have an interest in stories about the Troubles, it might be because we're ready for McKinty's deromanticizing of them. Of course, though my name is Peter O'Zovsky, I'm not Irish. I don't know how crime fiction about the Troubles resonates in the numerous large Irish communities in America.

(For another view of the Troubles and their afterlife in Northern Irish crime fiction, see Brian McGilloway's comments to this blog about his novel Borderlands. McGilloway wrote, in part, that

"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.")

I don't know what if any relevance this has, but I think McGilloway is about ten years younger than McKinty.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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The Dead Yard

The Dead Yard, second in Adrian McKinty's three-book series about Michael Forsythe, moves in harsher, more serious territory than its predecessor, Dead I Well May Be.

For one thing, the first book's third act, a long section in which Forsythe recovers from an ordeal, regains his place in the world, and gathers the physical and emotional resources he needs to resume his adventure, is here compressed to 2 1/2 pages — or, more strictly speaking, to a single brutal and vital sentence. That leaves more room for the central narrative, and a violent narrative it is.

For another, the betrayals are more numerous, and they hit harder. This book's violence is more graphic as well. But the main difference is that The Dead Yard is more direct in its harsh judgment of a nation battered for ages by a foe of overwhelming power, sentimental about its failures, overweening in the pride at its meager successes:

"`Sorry, I don't know much about baseball, nothing actually. We don't play it in Ireland. I've only heard of Babe Ruth, oh, and Joe DiMaggio of course, because of Simon and Garfunkel, and yeah, Lou Gehrig because of the disease. Oh aye, and Yogi Berra, you know because of the cartoon.'

"`What did I tell you about Yankees players?' Kit snapped, her face turning bright red ... '

"They were all Yankees? Jesus. Sorry. Who are the famous Red Sox?' I asked.

"`I don't want to talk about it now,' Kit said, still a little ticked off. Petulant and furious, she looked even more fetching.'"

Oh, yeah: In a moment of extreme stress, Forsythe also thinks harsh thoughts about Ireland and some of those who presume to fight for Ulster against the British.

Yankee fan McKinty's dig at the Boston Red Sox and their hysterical fans is the book's second-cleverest (and just maybe a metaphor). The cleverest concerns a trio of American conservative media pundits.

Highly recommended.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Exit lines

I've sung the praises of Adrian McKinty's Dead I Well May Be, noting among other things that its ending screamed sequel!!! but nonetheless worked beautifully. I wrote that I had finished the novel with a strong expectation of what the protagonist might get up to in later books, but that this was perfectly consistent with what McKinty had had him doing throughout the novel.

This put me in mind of a cinematic sequel-screamer from 1977 that did feel like a setup. This movie ended with some froggy-voiced dude shot off into space and, as I left the theater, unimpressed, I rolled my eyes and said to my friend: "Sequel!" The movie was Star Wars, which goes to show I know a sequel-screamer when I see it.

More recently, I read an interesting offhand comparison between the endings of 1960s comedies such as The Italian Job and their remakes. The 1969 version left the thieves teetering on a precipice, the outcome of their heist in doubt. The 2003 remake transferred the action to the United States and turned the story into an orgy of greed and wish fulfillment: Everyone gets what he or she wants, with no hard choices about whether to go after the gold if it might mean sending the thieves over the cliff.

And now, gentle readers, I invite you to join me and turn your minds to last things. What endings of books or movies screamed sequel!!! to you? Did the endings work? More generally, tell me about your favorite endings or ones you liked less well.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Dark, epic zest from Adrian McKinty

What do we learn from Dead I Well May Be, Adrian McKinty's first novel about a Northern Irish crook/killer/thinker/survivor named Michael Forsythe let loose in America?

We learn that whoever said revenge is a dish best served cold did not work from Michael Forsythe's recipe book.

We learn that an author can get readers feeling they are inside a first-person narrator's head simply by omitting quotation marks. This heightens the illusion that everything we read is filtered through the narrator rather than quoted by the author.

We learn the virtue of patience and the simple heartbreak of death.

We learn that humor can work even in grim situations, and McKinty's humor is among the grimmer ones in crime fiction. This is one of the lighter examples, but you'll get it anyway because it's also one of the funniest: "Carolyn's her real name, but she wants everyone to call her Linnie. That should have been a clue right there. She's no Bridget, though she is pretty. Pale, thin, blond. fragile. She's from Athens, Georgia, but likes the B-52's rather than R.E.M. Another clue."

Forsythe is under siege from quite a number of hired killers at the time, but he still offers a rock and roll reference that's right up there with Jo Nesbø's all-timer about the Rolling Stones in The Devil's Star.

Michael's grim, sometimes hellish journey through the last two thirds of the book may evoke for the literary-minded any number of the world's great epics. Think of the book as Dirty Harry meets Dante if you must.

That last two thirds also wiped away the one quibble I had with the book's zesty opening chapters: McKinty's use of retrospective foreshadowing, of the "I missed the chance that night, the last chance I would get because the world caved in the next morning" type. I almost always find the device obtrusive and unnecessary. I suspect McKinty used it as a reminder that Forsythe is narrating events that had happened to him before the time in which he is narrating them.

I could have done without such reminders, but I forgot my objections rather quickly once the book moved into the harrowing middle section. Among other things, the events of this section are nightmarish enough that a narrator looking back on them would understandably use them as a point of reference for everything that went before and that followed. So disregard my quibble and read the novel. It's a hell, or an inferno, of a tale.

(Dead I Well May Be is the first of a series that continues with The Dead Yard and ends with The Bloomsday Dead. Based on the first book's conclusion, I would suggest reading the novels in order if possible.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Zest

Zest has always been one of my favorite words, long before I knew it also meant the peel, esp. the thin outer peel, of a citrus fruit used for flavoring. I love the word because it sounds like the qualities it embodies: Gusto. Flavor. Hearty enjoyment. And that's the opening chapter of Adrian McKinty's Dead I Well May Be, as life-embracing a piece of literary zest as I can remember since I started reading about murder, cheating, robbery, squalor, despair and violent death in my spare time.

Here's the start of Chapter One. Pay special attention to the first four words:

"I open my eyes. The train tracks. The river. A wall of heat. Unbearable white sunlight smacking off the railings, the street and the godawfulness of the buildings. Steam from the permanent Con Ed hole at the corner. Gum and graffiti tags on the sidewalk. People on the platform – Jesus Christ, are they really in sweaters and wool hats? ... I'm smoking. I'm standing here on the elevated subway platform looking down at all this enormous nightmare and I'm smoking. My skin can barely breathe. I'm panting. The back of my T-shirt is thick with sweat, 100 degrees, 90 percent relative humidity. I'm complaining about the pollution you can see in the sky above New Jersey, and I'm smoking Camels. What an idiot."

Just one bit more, because I want to keep the post shorter than the chapter:

"Here I should point out that every time you hear Scotchy speak you must remember that each time I put in the word fuck there are at least three or four that I've left out."

Is that great, or what?

A short prologue, more effective than most examples of its kind, begins "No one was dead." How's that for a grabber?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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