The Sharpest O’Toole In The Box

There was an interesting piece on Irish crime fiction from Fintan O’Toole (right) in yesterday’s Irish Times, in which he referenced Declan Hughes, Gene Kerrigan and Alan Glynn as exemplars of ‘the nearest thing we have to a realist literature adequate to capturing the nature of contemporary society …’. The gist runneth thusly:

“It is striking that the most successful Irish crime writer, John Connolly, who began his career just a decade ago, felt it necessary to set his books in the US and to insert himself directly into the American detective tradition. Connolly presumably decided that Ireland, even in the Celtic Tiger years, was not the place for crime fiction. Yet it is equally striking that in the last few years, Irish-set crime writing has not merely begun to blossom but has become arguably the nearest thing we have to a realist literature adequate to capturing the nature of contemporary society …
  “If that were the whole story, however, what we’d be getting now would be simply a local version of the established international genre. That we’re getting something rather more interesting than that is suggested by two intriguing ways in which the best writing is inflected by older Irish traditions …
  “In creating an Ireland with no faith in authority and no belief that the bad guys will be vanquished by naming their names, they get closer to reality than most literary fiction has managed.”

  The piece is short but it is wide-ranging enough to touch on the perversity of the Irish crime narrative, beginning with JM Synge’s play ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, in which the ‘murderer’ is not only discovered very early on in the story, but spends most of his time protesting his ‘guilt’, to no avail. In offering reasons for why the traditional crime novel didn’t find its place in Ireland until recently, however, O’Toole doesn’t mention the post-colonial Irish attitude summed up by Seamus Heaney’s phrase, “Whatever you say / Say nothing.” In Ireland, everyone loves to tell a story, but no one wants to be thought an informant. Hence the power of Liam O’Flaherty’s proto-noir THE INFORMER, a claustrophobic tale of treachery and insufferable guilt and the consequences of betrayal, a Greek tragedy set in Dublin’s red-light district and written in the brusque, staccato style that Dashiell Hammett would later pioneer in the U.S. (THE INFORMER was published in 1925).
  All in all, O’Toole’s is a thought-provoking piece, and could well prove a quantum leap in the ongoing struggle for the Irish crime novel to gain traction with the Irish reading public. Fintan O’Toole is one of the most clear-eyed observers among the Irish intelligentsia (he recently published SHIP OF FOOLS: HOW STUPIDITY AND CORRUPTION SANK THE CELTIC TIGER) and his tacit approval certainly won’t do Declan Hughes, Gene Kerrigan and Alan Glynn any harm.
  Naturally, given that the piece appeared shortly after yours truly went public with his decision to pack in the writing career, I’m a little sceptical about the prospects for the Irish crime novel. But it’s not just me: this week just gone by, I had conversations with two very fine Irish crime writers, both of whom were very pessimistic about the publishing industry in general, and Irish crime fiction in particular. Put bluntly, and despite high-profile awards and awards nominations for the likes of Connolly, Hughes, Ken Bruen, Tana French, Gene Kerrigan, Ruth Dudley Edwards and Brian McGilloway in recent years, Irish crime novels don’t sell, either in Ireland or (crucially) abroad. Without knowing exact figures, John Connolly is probably the exception to this rule, as he is to most rules - and apologies to any writer mentioned who is, in fact, rolling in dosh.
  Next year will see no less than three movies based on Ken Bruen novels hit the big screen, and – all going well – filming begin on Alan Glynn’s THE DARK FIELDS. On the surface, things appear to be going swimmingly for Irish crime writers, and it was heart-warming to see Stuart Neville’s THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST (aka THE TWELVE) get top billing in Marilyn Stasio’s NYT column last week. This year has been a terrific year for Irish crime writing: along with Connolly, Kerrigan, Glynn and Hughes, Fintan O’Toole could quite easily, given his terms of reference, have mentioned the likes of Adrian McKinty, Colin Bateman, Alex Barclay, Stuart Neville, Brian McGilloway, Ken Bruen, Ava McCarthy, Garbhan Downey and Sam Millar, and that’s in a year when we didn’t have any books from Arlene Hunt, Julie Parsons, Benjamin Black or Tana French. It was also the year when the Irish crime novel got its own category at the Irish Book Awards, with Alex Barclay the inaugural winner.
  All of which seems overwhelmingly positive, and a rising tide lifts all boats, but I can’t help wondering if Fintan O’Toole’s piece won’t come to be seen as the high-water mark of the Irish crime novel – usually, mainstream media picking up on a trend means sounding its death-knell. I certainly hope it doesn’t, because, leaving aside the fact that most of the writers mentioned above write well-written entertainments, they also write novels that are important in terms of our understanding of who we are and where we’re going. As Val McDermid says in today’s Sunday Independent:

“The crime novel really has become the state-of-the-nation fiction. There’s an Irish writer called Alan Glynn, who has just published a novel WINTERLAND … This is a book that speaks to absolutely now. Good writers – good crime writers in particular – have a knack of plugging into the zeitgeist.”

  As a writer, I’ve been hearing for some time now from editors and agents and publishers that what the industry wants is ‘big’ books – crime stories with an appeal broad enough to propel the book into the mainstream. CHILD 44 and THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO are good recent examples, and it’s possibly the case that Ireland, despite its potentially fertile setting for crime fiction (post-Troubles, post-economic boom) simply isn’t ‘big’ enough to capture the imagination of the reading public at large. That shouldn’t be the case, in theory at least, because, like politics, all good novels are local, and if there’s one thing Ireland is producing in these benighted times, it’s damn fine novels.
  The irony, of course, is that the best way for a country to break out of an economic slump is to start creating unique indigenous products for export, which is very much the case when it comes to most of the writers mentioned above. Has it come time for Irish crime writers to band together in a union, the better to lobby the government for investment to market their high quality exports abroad? A little investment, cleverly used, would go a long way, particularly in terms of impacting on the media. Or has the time finally come for an Irish crime writing association? Are such associations of any practical use? Or are there any other ideas out there in left field that might be beneficial?
  I know that there are plenty of Irish crime writers out there who ‘lurk’ on Crime Always Pays, and it’s your prerogative not to leave a comment, or get involved in any way, because the writing game is at heart a solitary business, and (speaking for myself, at least) joining gangs goes against the grain. But the times they are a-changing, folks, and what worked in the past just ain’t cutting it anymore. And it would be horrible, truly horrible, if we were to look back in five years time and concede that Fintan O’Toole’s piece in the Irish Times was a high-water mark, and that the tide has gone out, leaving some very fine boats stranded.
  The floor is open, people …

Sec’s Appeal: The Other John Waters Vs Secularism # 1,014

At the risk of oversimplifying John Waters’ most recent book, LAPSED AGNOSTIC, the Irish Times journalist found God through Alcoholics Anonymous, and then learned to justify an entire belief system by viewing it through the prism of his own experience.
  Now I’m delighted, for his sake, that John Waters managed to escape the demon booze, because you wouldn’t wish alcoholism on your worst enemy, but I really do wish that he’d stop trying to belittle those who have yet to share his epiphany by suggesting that they are somehow less human than he.
  He was at it again in today’s Irish Times, when he had this to say:

“Religion, rather than just another “category”, is the guiding hypothesis that makes sense of the whole, the public expression of the total dimension of human nature. No other channel has the capacity to convey the broadest truths about man’s nature and his relationship to the universe. Secularists do not like this characterisation of the situation, but it has long been obvious that they have nothing to offer society as an alternative source of ethics, meaning or hope.”

  Of the first part of his assertion, I’d suggest that science has not only “the capacity to convey the broadest truths about man’s nature and his relationship to the universe”, but is in fact the only rational approach to trying to understand the whys and wherefores of being alive.
  As for secularists having “nothing to offer society as an alternative source of ethics, meaning or hope”: leaving aside the basic human capacity to instinctively understand good from bad, and all that flows from that understanding, Waters fails to suggest how humanity managed to survive for the 100,000 years or so of its current incarnation (up to about 14,000-12,000 BC, when the first inklings of religion appear) without even a primitive system of ethics, meaning or hope to sustain it.
  Humans invented religion, the most perverse case of wishful thinking every visited on the race. And good for us, it’s a tribute to our imaginations and the brainy brains that got us this far in the struggle for survival. In the grand scheme of things, though, religion is Santa Claus for slow learners. Here endeth the sermon.

In The Name Of The Father

Rosita Boland had a rather poignant interview with John Connolly (right) in yesterday’s Irish Times to mark the publication of THE GATES, in which Connolly touched on the death of his father, and how the loss has impacted on his writing. To wit:

When Connolly left Dublin Corporation to study English at Trinity College, he had money in the bank, and a renewed vigour for education. On a summer student job in the US soon after, he called home one evening from New York and discovered his father had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He flew home the next day, and his father died soon afterwards. The cancer he died from has since become a recurrent symbolic motif in Connolly’s work: people’s bodies being horribly consumed by something they cannot control. “I think because of what happened to my father and the way he died, I have an absolute loathing and fear of that disease. I just think it’s so insidious and so appalling. It occurs in the books again and again. ‘The Cancer Cowboy Rides’ [a story in NOCTURNES] is the most explicit version of it, but again and again, with people in my books, there is this image of cancer or of being eaten from the inside.”
  Recurrent also in the books is the theme of fathers – fatherhood, absent fathers, dead fathers, men who don’t know whether they want to be fathers. “I think all young men are trying to prove something to their dads,” he says carefully. “I think his whole idea was he worked so that at some point, he didn’t have to work any more, and that work was a kind of chore he got through as a prelude to retirement, when he could do all the things that he planned on doing. And then you know, work kind of had the last laugh, because he died while he was still working.
  “He was not impressed by me wanting to be a writer, or to be a journalist. And I suppose part of me becoming a journalist and part of me going to college and doing something like English was a kind of way of saying to him, well actually, what you want is not what I want. The awful thing is, having done all that, had he seen what I do now, he would have been immensely proud.” Earlier, he said his father had a distrust of the “kind of freelance existence” that journalism and a career as a writer offered. It’s not hard to see where the roots of Connolly’s drive and work ethic came from.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

He’ll Be Having A Go At The Lilies Next

He pee’d off the literary crew when, on accepting the Booker Prize for THE SEA, he announced that it was ‘nice to see a work of art win for a change’. Then he got stuck into crime writing – allegedly. Yesterday, in a fine interview with Fiona McCann in the Irish Times, John Banville had a go at the webnauts. To wit:

Banville is full of opinions: on art, on sport, on working life, on the internet. “Most of the stuff that people churn out on the internet is rubbish. People should learn a little bit of reticence and not imagine that they have things to say.”

  Funnily enough, I read the interview on the Irish Times’ website, in which John Banville is, as Fiona McCann points out, ‘full of opinions’ …
  The interview, of course, was marking the publication of the latest Banville novel, THE INFINITIES, which I read a couple of weeks ago and thoroughly enjoyed. Told over the course of one day, as a family gathers about its dying pater familias, Adam Godley, the story is for the most part narrated by Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods – although, as Hermes points out, the gods being a rather protean lot, the first-person narrative duties do tend to switch about. The tale is a gently meandering one of mortal and immortal failings and foibles, and love stories, and minor infidelities, and quantum physics. The characters are fragmentary, deliberately so, as Hermes wafts in and out of their lives, with the story as a whole offering an incomplete mosaic of a family trapped in the amber of one day. The language, the prose style, is beautifully rendered, even if there are sentences and even whole paragraphs that billow like glass overblown – although it should be said that almost every line is shot through with sly and self-mocking humour. At the risk of displaying an unseemly lack of reticence, I’d say it’s Banville’s most engaging book for some time, an arched eyebrow of a comic novel that seems to appreciate its place in the grand scheme of things, which is, I think, because of its admittedly enjoyable angsty self-awareness, on the lower slopes of the empyrean rather than in the pantheon itself.

The Revolution Will Be Televised, With Endorsements

Kudos yet again to the Irish Times for its Book of the Day review slot, although today’s offering was a terrible review of Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND. By which I mean, the reviewer didn’t like the novel, but the review itself was terrible. It kicks off like this:

SERIOUS CRIME fiction these days is a fickle gamble, especially for newer writers. Genre boundaries have become blurred. Crime thriller enthusiasts are perhaps among the hardest readers to impress because of their love for both the list of illustrious luminaries and equally because of the powerful abilities of this same elite to bring their main characters to life. It’s called character stamina …

  Leaving aside ‘character stamina’ (?), what’s all this about ‘crime thriller enthusiasts’? Do those who love chick lit not have a list of illustrious luminaries? What about sci-fi lovers – don’t they have their own geniuses? Do not those who prefer literary fiction, or poetry, love their luminaries for their ability to bring their characters to life?
  The review goes downhill from there, losing wheels at a rate of knots. This bit stands out, though:

Some of Hollywood’s hottest names pop up in the storyline, including Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Matthew Broderick. Seeing their names made me increasingly uncomfortable as to how they might feel about being associated with the image of the resort’s labour conditions, bent sheriff and sleazy drug dealers.

  Happily, the reviewer was in no way uncomfortable with trashing a brilliant writer’s novel on the basis that he, the reviewer, preferred the works of Jeffrey Deaver and David Baldacci.
  Seriously, some days you’d wonder why you bother your hole.
  And then, just when you think the day can’t get any worse, the ever-fragrant Sarah Weinman pops up with the worst cover (see above) in the history of publishing.
  It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better, people …

I’d Love To Set A Thriller On The Moon, But …

Atmosphere or no, it’s amazing there aren’t more thrillers set on the moon*. Exotic locations are growing more and more popular with the crime fic fraternity, to the point where it can be argued – I think some po-faced critic did so recently, actually – that the novels are becoming as much travelogues as they are thrillers. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – I discovered Paul Johnston, for example, because he set the first Alex Mavros novel on a Greek island – but there can be times when writers overstep the mark and wallow in exotica to the exclusion of formerly vital components of the crime novel, such as tension and dead bodies.
  Anyway, kudos are due yet again to the Irish Times for their ongoing support for crime fiction, which this weekend manifested itself as a double-page spread feature on exotic locations for crime fic novels. To wit:

“BAD THINGS happen in beautiful places,” the doyenne of British crime fiction, PD James, recently observed. She’s so right. When we’re sunning ourselves on some idyllic beach or downing grilled prawns and dry white wine in some sheltered harbour, we like nothing better than a good murder – fictional, of course – to keep us entertained. A strong sense of place is one of the most attractive elements of a top-notch crime novel, and it needn’t be a remote wilderness place, either; it can be a pulsating city neighbourhood, or even a single apartment building. Arminta Wallace suggests some striking locations for a spot of summer sleuthing.

  The locations Wallace picked are Louisiana, Yorkshire, Venice, Boston, Bangkok, Donegal, Alaska, Shanghai, Botswana, Reykjavik, Washington DC, Sicily, London, Breslau, Dublin, Paris, New York, Edinburgh, Seville, Istanbul, Los Angeles, Nairobi, Maine, Sweden and Norfolk, although I’m sure Peter Rozovsky could suggest a few more. I’m thinking, off the top of my head, Tibet, Egypt, Australia, Greece and Brazil …
  And in the week that’s in it, given that it’s getting its UK publication, how the hell could they miss out on Cuba and Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND?
  Quibbles apart, it’s a fine piece. Clickety-click here for all the details …

* Funnily enough, Duncan Jones – aka Zowie Bowie – has just directed Sam Rockwell in Moon, a Phil Dick-style existential thriller of paranoia, cloning and double-cross set on the moon, which is due out in Ireland on July 17, and comes warmly recommended by your genial host. Oh, and expect to see every newspaper feature dealing with Moon titled ‘Space Oddity’.

Suffer, Little Children

Those of you who have read Ken Bruen’s THE MAGDALEN MARTYRS and perhaps thought that Ken was, as writers tend to do, exaggerating the horrors of the ‘Magdalene laundries’ for dramatic purposes, might be interested in the findings of the report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, published earlier this week. The report details systematic abuses – including physical and psychological brutality, gang-rape and torture – on an industrial scale, all of which were perpetrated by members of the Catholic Church’s various bodies. Yesterday’s Irish Times editorial, under the heading ‘The savage reality of our darkest days’, had this to say:

The key to understanding these attitudes is surely to realise that abuse was not a failure of the system. It was the system. Terror was both the point of these institutions and their standard operating procedure. Their function in Irish society was to impose social control, particularly on the poor, by acting as a threat. Without the horror of an institution like Letterfrack, it could not fulfil that function. Within the institutions, terror was systematic and deliberate. It was a methodology handed down through “successive generations of [Christian] Brothers, priests and nuns”.
  There is a nightmarish quality to this systemic malice, reminiscent of authoritarian regimes. We read of children “flogged, kicked . . . scalded, burned and held under water”. We read of deliberate psychological torment inflicted through humiliation, expressions of contempt and the practice of incorrectly telling children that their parents were dead …

  For the full editorial, click here …
  Those inclined to defend, rebut, apologise for or otherwise try to contextualise the horror by way of the ‘one bad apple in a barrel’ argument should realise that some apples are bad going into the barrel, some apples are made bad by the barrel, and some barrels are better than others at creating bad apples.
  Last week I mentioned that the Minister for Justice, Mr Brian Lenihan, is pressing ahead with his plans to put the crime of blasphemy on the statute books in Ireland. Given the findings of the report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, he might make better use of his time by banning religions, and particularly those who make a virtue of deviant sexual practices, such as celibacy.

THE SCARECROW: Outstanding In Its Own Field

I was shocked, horrified and on the verge of calling the Culture Cops when Gerard Brennan announced a few weeks ago on CSNI that he’d never read a Chandler novel, although – as is the case with most people, I suspect – there are more gaps in my own reading than there is reading. I’ve only ever read one Sherlock Holmes story, for example, that being THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, and it didn’t really do it for me. Should I be tarred and feathered?
  Anyway, THE SCARECROW is the first Michael Connelly novel I’ve read, and I very probably wouldn’t have read it had I not been reviewing it for the Irish Times, which continues to fly in the face of the global trend for cutbacks in print newspaper book review trends with its laudable ‘Book of the Day’ review on its Op-Ed pages. Appropriately enough, THE SCARECROW features Jack McEvoy, last encountered in THE POET, a journalist who is ‘pink-slipped’ by the LA Times as the novel opens, a device which gives Connelly plenty of opportunities to sound off about the decline and fall of newspaper journalism. To wit:

  Eschewing linguistic pyrotechnics, Connelly writes as McEvoy would, as a responsible journalist recording facts rather than a hack bent on exploiting vulnerable people for the sake of a headline. It’s a fine line for a thriller writer to walk, but Connelly pulls it off with aplomb.
  Where there is authorial intrusion is in Connelly’s account of the worm’s-eye view of the evisceration of American journalism.
  Clearly appalled at the ongoing downsizing of newspapers, and the resultant shrinkage in quality journalism, Connelly puts his words into the mouth of the cynical McEvoy: “Like the paper and ink newspaper itself, my time was over. It was about the internet now. It was about hourly uploads to online editions and blogs. It was about television tie-ins and Twitter updates. It was about filing stories on your phone rather than using it to call rewrite. The morning paper might as well have been called the Daily Afterthought.”

  Zing, etc.
  For the rest of the review, clickety-click here …

Lingua Franca

Arminta Wallace conducted a rather nice interview with Tana French (right) in yesterday’s Irish Times, in which Tana offers some thoughtful insights into what makes the crime novel tick. To wit:

A central preoccupation of many of the current crop of Irish crime novels is, she points out, the theme of how to strike a workable balance between past and present. “In Declan Hughes’s THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD, the past literally surfaces from underneath a building site to shake up the present. Patrick Dunne’s investigator, Ilaun Bowe, is an archaeologist by trade. And just about everything I do is about keeping hold of our traditional identity while not getting stuck in the past.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, to my everlasting chagrin, I haven’t a baldy as to who Patrick Dunne is. For shame, sirrah, etc. Steps are being taken to rectify the situation as you read.
  Also meanwhile, and also in the Irish Times, Shane Hegarty had a piece on Ireland’s twenty most essential blogs. And golly-gosh, there was our humble offering nestling in amongst all the real bloggers. Is this it? Has Crime Always Pays gone mainstream? Mother of Mercy, is this the end for Rico?
  Only time, that notorious doity rat, will tell …

And If You Tolerate This …

I’m in the process of writing a feature about Irish women crime writers, and one of the questions asks if any of the ladies have a theory as to why there’s been such an upsurge in Irish crime writing recently. One of them pointed me in the general direction of today’s front page headlines, to wit:

Long-running drugs feud claims another innocent victim

Shot dead because he looked like gang's real target

999 caller told the operator he strangled Dublin mum

Man due in court over Larne murder

Dublin dad is charged with making child porn

Three men jailed for failed Securicor cash van heist

Dissidents co-operating with each other more, says IMC

Charged: 3 on €675m drug boat

  It surprises people when I tell them that there’s roughly 50 Irish crime writers currently being published. Actually, the wonder is there isn’t more.
  Meanwhile, our thoughts go out to the families of Carmel Breen, Shane Geoghegan and Kenneth Nicholl. RIP.

“In The Desiccated Murk Of A John Banville Novel …”

Declan Hughes reviewed Benny Blanco’s THE LEMUR for the Irish Times yesterday, and I choked so hard on my cornflakes I needed a good Heimliching from a 300-pound gorilla. To wit:

“This is not Banville writing as Black, this is Black writing as Banville, and John Glass is that familiar figure: Banville Man. Banville Man, furrowed brow wreathed in smoke, forever caught between a swoon and a sneer; Banville Man, the rumpled aesthete whose exquisite nerves are ever besieged by the crass and the vulgar (“For God’s sake, Louise. The ‘chopper’!”); Banville Man, whose loathing of the hell that is other people is surpassed only by his loathing of himself.
  “And in the desiccated murk of a John Banville novel, where no one expects much by way of character or action, where a bogus back-story is the least you might imagine a man to have, that’s all par for the course.”

  I actually liked THE LEMUR, on the basis that I thought it was good fun to read Banville playing around with the genre conventions. But this is much more fun – we haven’t had a good old-fashioned writers’ spat in, oooh, never. And what gives this one a frisson is that Banville used to be the literary editor-type with the Irish Times.
  Ding-ding, gentlemen, seconds out …

Lest We Forget

On the 10th anniversary of the Omagh bombing, today’s Irish Times’ editorial asks a stark question. To wit:

The revulsion that followed Omagh had within it an element of shame. Why did it take the obscenity of Omagh to create a genuine, shared sense that such vile deeds are utterly beyond the Pale? And given the effect that the reaction to Omagh had on terrorism in Ireland, what might have happened had we reacted earlier?

Excuse me? ‘We’? With due and heartfelt respect to the families of the Omagh dead, I haven’t the slightest intention of taking even one iota of responsibility for the actions of the sadly deluded killers on all sides during the 30 years of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’. I never planted a bomb, I never wanted a bomb planted, and I never cheered when a bomb went off. Peace, out.

On Blowing Up Hospitals

Six or seven years ago, when I was writing the first draft of what eventually became A GONZO NOIR, I had a good long think about what would constitute the most disgusting act an ostensibly sane and civilized person could execute in order to make a political point. In the end I decided that blowing up a hospital ticked all the boxes – a media-friendly act that would illustrate exactly how depraved my protagonist was.
  The story was written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. But while the attack on the Twin Towers was an outrageous assault on civilians, and by extension Western civilisation, I picked a hospital for my fictional target in the firm belief that the hospital, secular or not, is a sacred institution, above and beyond that of a church, mosque or synagogue, or even a school.
  How naïve was I? Quoth Monday’s Irish Times:

The first round of Ahemdabad’s bombings took place near busy markets, followed by explosions some 25 minutes later in and around two hospitals where the injured were being rushed.
A doctor, his three-month pregnant wife and another doctor were killed in explosions at two adjoining hospitals within a two-mile radius. “Never before have we seen such ruthless bombings of hospitals. The terrorists’ objective was to strike the defenceless and deepen the fear,” a senior security official said.

  According to the Irish Times, ‘The little-known “Indian Mujahideen” or Islamic warriors group claimed responsibility for the Ahemdabad attack in a lengthy e-mail to television news channels minutes before the first bomb exploded at about 6.30pm on Saturday.’
  In other words, the communiqué was not intended as a warning, as the IRA was wont to do when it planted its bombs, giving the authorities the chance to evacuate the building. The point of the exercise was to demonstrate how little value the perpetrators place on human life and the utter contempt they have for those they consider their enemies, even those non-combatants lying helpless in a hospital.
  I know the argument – one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter. But does any political objective justify the deliberate targeting of hospitals?
  I don’t want to diminish their responsibility by suggesting that the men – and rest assured they were men – who planned and executed this attack were insane, or evil. I believe they were sane, logical human beings.
  But civilised?
  ‘Civilisation’ is a remarkably elastic concept. But there’s only so far any elastic can stretch before it snaps.

There’s No Coke Without Ire

Being whimsical types, the elves were struck by the lead editorial in Saturday’s Irish Times. The context of the piece is the increase in drug-related gangland crime in general, and cocaine-related deaths in particular. Three high-profile deaths associated with cocaine abuse occurred in Ireland last week, two happening after students ate damp cocaine, while a post-mortem on model and socialite Katy French (right) revealed that she had consumed the drug in the hours before her death. In the inevitable navel-gazing that followed, the former Old Lady of D’Olier Street, the paper of record for Ireland’s middle-class, weighed in with the following:

The cocaine culture
Cocaine kills. So does heroin. And so do the gangland suppliers of these illegal drugs. Yet the consumption and supply of potentially lethal substances continues to increase without any forceful public reaction to the undermining of social and community values and the rule of law. Recent cocaine-related deaths and gangland murders underline the need to shake ourselves out of this waking nightmare.
  President Mary McAleese addressed the issue last month. The only way to stop gangland criminals from flourishing, she said, was for people to refuse to buy the illegal materials they sell. It wasn’t an original insight. But it placed responsibility for vicious gangland murders and the devastation of communities where it ultimately belonged: on the heads of those citizens whose personal decisions prop up the criminal underworld.
  That is an uncomfortable reality, particularly for those middle-class people who behave as if their personal social habits are somehow disconnected from the rest of life. Drug users choose not to think about the gun-feuds and murders that form the backdrop to their cocaine supply. They blank out deaths from overdoses and adulterated materials. If they are young, they think they are bullet-proof and that the negative consequences of drug-addiction will happen to others.
  The past 10 years of unprecedented economic growth have made the Republic wealthy beyond its dreams. With that wealth has come lifestyle changes and a diminution in social responsibility. Drug abuse has spread out of working-class neighbourhoods where – lamentably – we have been prepared to accept and tolerate it. Yet a common code of values that links us all and encourages personal commitment is at the heart of a healthy society. We need to recognise and give effect to such a social contract if crime gangs are to be challenged and illegal drug use controlled. […]
  Government policies haven’t worked. Its initiatives lacked resources and sufficient urgency. That must change. We are experiencing a wave of illegal drug-taking that is swamping all sections of society. Young people are dying. And the crime bosses are growing more powerful and dangerous. Their corrupting influence is spreading. In this situation, we all have a responsibility to make hard choices.

If anyone can come up with a better manifesto for Irish crime fiction, we’re all ears. And if that sounds a tad cynical, then bear in mind that the crime writers, along with the first drafters of our grubbier history, the tabloid journalists, have been pretty much saying what the Old Lady said on Saturday for well over a decade now. Meanwhile, our sincere condolences to the French, Doyle and Grey families.