“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Mehmet Murat Somer

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
Definitely the Ripley’s of Patricia Highsmith. If these are taken, I’ll go for the ANIMAL LOVER’S BOOK OF BEASTLY MURDER.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Quite content as myself. Really. But if I must choose a name: Vautrin of Balzac.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Porn!

Most satisfying writing moment?
When I stop typing with a wide silly smile on my face!

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Whichever one is not in the blood ‘n’ gore genre.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
The one Steven Spielberg or Pedro Almodovar will direct.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst are: Sleeping less – my natural condition; spending more time with my laptop – not fun. And my recent habit of making additions, changes or twists according to reader requests. Best? No idea.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Working simultaneously on two: Completion of my Champagne Trilogy, after THE HOLDING AND THE CATWALK, with the grand finale THE BACKSTAGE. Every piece gets in order as like a jigsaw puzzle. And another Hop-Çiki-Yaya thriller, the 8th, where my sleuth, with his Audrey Hepburn alter-ego, finds a murder in her family past.

Who are you reading right now?
Right now? The questions on this Q&A! But nowadays I am going over again COUSINE BETTE of Balzac, and enjoying the grande-dame of modern Turkish literature Ayşe Kulin’s VEDA (THE FAREWELL).

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
God shouldn’t be so cruel. I’ll do my best to persuade.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Life is joy!

Mehmet Murat Somer’s THE GIGOLO MURDER is published by Serpent’s Tail.

Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: John Banville

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT – though I would have smartened up Dostoyevsky’s tin-eared prose style.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Adrian Leverkuhn, in Thomas Mann’s DOCTOR FAUSTUS: an utter monster but a supremely great artist. I would have worked at helping him to find his inner nice person. Ha.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t know, really. I find bad books hard to read.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Putting down the first notes for my new novel, which I did a few days ago. At this stage, all is possibility, conviction, confidence, happiness. In a year or two I’ll be wading through mud up to my armpits.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
THE THIRD POLICEMAN, Flann O’Brien.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Ditto.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst is never being able to get it just right, best is being able, occasionally, to get it not entirely wrong.

The pitch for your next book is …?
My next book will be another Benjamin, called ELEGY FOR APRIL. “Quirke on the trail of another dead girl, though the real cliff-hanging question is, Will he go back on the booze?”

Who are you reading right now?
LIBERTY, by Isaiah Berlin, FROM THE OTHER SHORE by Alexander Herzen, INSIDE THE SKY by William Langewiesche, and THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY by Patricia Highsmith. Utter pleasures, utterly guiltless.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I’d say, You don’t exist, so forget it.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Since I’m two-in-one I get six words, yes? Poetic, graceful, irresistible. Dour, dark, misanthropic. You decide which set fits JB and which BB. Or do a mix and match?

John Banville’s THE INFINITIES is published by Picador.

The Devil Wears Prada. And A Red Dress, Apparently.

I mentioned a couple of days back that Niamh O’Connor has a new non-fiction tome out about Sharon Collins, aka ‘Lyin’ Eyes’, and now arrives news of Abigail Rieley’s take on the same story, THE DEVIL IN A RED DRESS, courtesy of Maverick House. Quoth the blurb elves:

Ireland has been gripped by the story of a housewife from County Clare who, when her millionaire partner refused to marry her, googled a hitman and arranged to have him killed. Over the course of almost two months, the story of Lyingeyes and Hire_hitman unfolded in a flurry of emails. The website, hitmanforhire.net might have looked amateurish and carried a disclaimer but it attracted serious interest. One person who was interested was Sharon Collins, the ‘devil in the red dress’. Desperate to get her hands on a share of her partner’s fortune, she took drastic action. She turned to Google to solve her problem. A Mexican marriage certificate was obtained but wasn’t enough. On 8 August 2006, she contacted hitmanforhire.net and started to arrange the hit. This is one of the most bizarre stories to ever appear before an Irish court. Filled with intrigue, betrayal, sex, money and would-be murder, it has all the ingredients for a best-selling thriller. This book will prove to its readers that truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction.

  Or that the truth is, indeed, at least as interesting as a good Patricia Highsmith novel, whichever is more likely to tickle your fancy ...

On Crime Fiction And Respectability

When an author references another writer’s novel twice in one book, it’s fair to presume that he or she is drawing attention and inviting comparisons. In THE KILLING CIRCLE, Andrew Pyper twice refers to THE MAGUS, the John Fowles novel which blends a number of genre staples, among them the thriller, the war novel, the supernatural and quasi-scientific propositions.
  Asked at an advanced age what he would change if he could live his life over again, Kingsley Amis thought for a moment and said, “Well, I wouldn’t read THE MAGUS.” I love it, although I know a lot of people hate it. But the point about THE MAGUS is that it’s a literary novel that has a hell of a lot of fun with mashing up genres.
  THE KILLING CIRCLE also blends genres, most obviously those of crime and horror, although, given that its narrator is an aspiring author who lacks the imagination to create a unique story, it’s also intended as a serious meditation on the writing process. In that context, the references to THE MAGUS are presumably intended as reminders to the reader that Andrew Pyper is engaged in a literary activity, despite the genre staples.
  Which brings me to a comment Adrian McKinty – yep, him again – left on a post further down the page, vis-à-vis the consecration of crime fiction as ‘interesting and important’. To wit:

“One thing though about Banville, Rushdie, Chabon etc. writing crime novels is that they would never have ventured into the territory in the first place had not the zeitgeist begun to see crime books not as disposable pulp fiction but actually as interesting and important. When the Library of America started bringing out Chandler, Hammett, Cain and Highsmith in annotated quality hardbacks, it was a sign that the critical community had embraced those writers and no longer despised them. The rising tide began to float the boats of the whole genre.”

  Writing about the inclusion of Rob Smith’s CHILD 44 on the Booker Prize long-list for the LA Times recently, Sarah Weinman made a similar point:

“And yet, if CHILD 44 -- a serial killer novel that takes place in the last years of Stalin’s Russia -- appears at first glance to be a brash upstart, a closer look suggests that its inclusion might not be so unlikely after all. Indeed, this is the most recent example of the blurring of the line between crime fiction and literature, which raises hope that the so-called genre wars are lurching toward, if not an end, then at least a tentative cease-fire.”

  Yes, yes – but is this actually a good thing? Crime writing has always had stylists as fine as anything the literary world can offer, if only the reader has eyes to see, but the idea that respectability is about to be conferred on the genre seems somehow grotesque, and not least because the respectability is to be conferred by the literary types.
  I write crime fiction, but I’m not a crime fiction nut. As I’ve said elsewhere, crime fiction only accounts for about a quarter of my reading, or maybe as much as a third. I read for all kinds of reasons, although mainly because I’d probably go blind if I didn’t. I can read Salman Rushdie and John McFetridge, say, as I did earlier this year, and be equally impressed by both.
  But when I read crime fiction, I read it for the adrenaline buzz of knowing that it is getting under the skin of the world we live in, broaching taboos and creeping down the dark alleyways that we’d prefer weren’t so dark, or there at all, and doing it with an authenticity and immediacy that makes it utterly believable, even if I’d rather it wasn’t true. And as far as I’m concerned, respectability is far more likely to blunt that edge than hone it. To mangle Groucho Marx, I don’t want to be in any club that’d have me.
  Every writer should aspire to be as good as Rushdie, Chandler, Highsmith and Fowles. But that’s not the same thing as aspiring to write a Booker Prize nominee, or to write a novel worthy of the approval of the self-anointed adjudicators of quality.
  I hope for Rob Smith’s sake that he wins the Booker Prize. But I hope for crime fiction’s sake that he doesn’t.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD by Adrian McKinty

The concluding part of Adrian McKinty’s ‘Dead’ trilogy – following on from DEAD I WELL MAY BE (2003) and THE DEAD YARD (2006) – finds his series protagonist, the Belfast-born Michael Forsythe, back in Ireland for the first time since he left Ireland in 1991. In the first novel, a betrayed Forsythe destroyed the Bronx-based gang of Darkey White in a succession of revenge killings; in the second, while hiding out on a FBI witness protection programme, he infiltrated a U.S.-based crew of rogue Republican paramilitaries with the same net result.
  Compelling thrillers written in a hard-bitten, muscular style, the novels are given an unconventional twist by virtue of Forsythe’s unusually perceptive insights. A seemingly indestructible former British soldier, the complex and well-read character is as likely to quote Euripides, Melville or James Joyce as he is to cold-bloodedly garrotte anyone who gets in his way. A borderline sociopath, he is a fascinating blend of Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne and Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley.
  In THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD, Forsythe responds to a call from Bridget, his ex-lover and the former girlfriend of Darkey White, who requests his presence in Belfast to help her find her abducted daughter. Arriving in Dublin on June 16 – Bloomsday, honouring the hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses – Michael has 24 hours to find Bridget’s daughter and thus cancel his debt of blood or face the fatal consequences.
  McKinty is a rare writer, one who can combine the often limiting staccato rhythms of crime fiction with a lyrical flair for language. Forsythe is brusque and blunt in his public exchanges, lethal when trapped in a tight spot (of which there are many in this furiously paced tale, which loosely follows the path laid down by both Leopold Bloom and Odysseus), and yet he is possessed of a poet’s soul during his frequent interior monologues. The violence is etched into the page, as if stamped there by the force of its authenticity, but McKinty never forgets that his first priority is to entertain, and he leavens the bleakness with flashes of mordant humour.
  It’s not a perfect novel by any means. McKinty, born and raised in Northern Ireland but living the U.S. for over a decade, has Forsythe rediscovering post-Celtic Tiger Dublin through an exile’s eyes, but even so there are minor omissions and distracting details. It’s possible, for example, that a young Trinity student from Kerry might refer to her mobile phone as ‘my cell’, but it’s unlikely nonetheless. And while there is no faulting the author’s ambition in his attempt to splice the post-Troubles Irish crime novel to the great literary text of the 20th century, the reader travels more in hope than anticipation that he will succeed.
  That he fails in this regard is perhaps inevitable but there is no denying that even in his failure McKinty has made an strong contribution to the fertile ground that lies between populist genre writing and esoteric literary fiction. Indeed, in the very last line, with his downbeat, tongue-in-cheek homage to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, it becomes clear that McKinty is self-deprecatingly aware of both the necessity and the impossibility of aspiring to emulate the very best a novel can be: Her throat was hoarse from crying and she couldn’t speak, but her head bobbed the affirmative, and finally, in that husky, tired New York whisper, she said simply: “Yes.” – Declan Burke

This review first appeared in the Sunday Business Post

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE REAPERS by John Connolly

Black people could be seen in town, but they were always moving: carrying, delivering, lifting, hauling. Only white people were allowed to stand still. Black people did what they had to do, then left. After nightfall, there were only white folk on the streets [ … ] Justice might be blind, but the law wasn’t. Justice was aspirational, but the law was actual. The law was real. It had uniforms, and weapons. It smelt of sweat and tobacco. It drove a big car with a star on the door. White people had justice. Black folks had the law.
  John Connolly, THE REAPERS, pg 70

Is it too late to call John Connolly an angry young man? Beneath the quietly mannered prose, THE REAPERS seethes. It seethes in a way Jim Thompson did when he was at his best, with a coolly ironic detachment. Louis, whose story THE REAPERS is, could easily have graced one of Thompson’s tales of charming psychopathic killers. Neither would he be out of place in a Highsmith novel, perhaps as Ripley’s perfect foil.
  But Louis, like Parker, is uniquely a John Connolly character. It’s possible to be fascinated and even obsessed with Thompson and Highsmith’s characters, but it is impossible to love them. Louis may not crave your love, but he deserves it.
  The reapers of the title are ‘the elite among killers’, of which Louis is one, and the plot revolves around a reckoning in blood facilitated by dying businessman who has good reason to see Louis dead. Parker hardly shows. Instead we get large chunks of Louis’ back-story, including his recruitment as a reaper and the experience that made him a sublime killer; an insight into the dynamics of Louis and Angel’s relationship, which is as much Lou ‘n’ Bud as it is Didi and Gogo; and an extended introduction to one of Angel and Louis’ associates, the blue-collar mechanic Willie Brew, who seems to have sauntered in from an Elmore Leonard novel.
  As a result the minimalist plot is very much character-driven. Connolly’s eye for the unusual, his ear for an unworn phrase and the apparently casual accumulation of subtle detail when fleshing out a character takes care of the rest.
  It’s a terrific page-turner, a charismatic exercise in the grand old art of storytelling. John Gardner, who was notoriously sniffy about genre fiction in general, and crime and mystery fiction in particular, once said that the novel should be a vivid, continuous dream. There’s more than a hint of a nightmare lurking behind THE REAPERS, and perhaps it’s that nightmare which fuels the deadpan rage between every line, but THE REAPERS is certainly the kind of compelling tale John Gardner had in mind. – Declan Burke

Crime Times

Hoo-rah! The Times wades into the escalating war on who the greatest crime writer might be, producing its own list of the Top 50 ‘Greatest Crime Writers’, producing something of a shock-horror (appropriately enough, given her subject matter) with its nomination for the greatest, Patricia Highsmith (right). The CAP panel of judging elves would very probably have plumped for Leonard, Chandler and Ellroy for their Top Three (the order depending on how hard they’d been hitting the Elf-Wonking Juice on any particular afternoon), but no one ever listens to the elves, so who gives a rat’s caboodle? Anyhoo, The Times publishes its Top 50 list tomorrow, but we have a sneak preview at this very link right here courtesy of the ever-friendly Times folk, where they’re also promising “explanations of how the list was created, who was on our judging panel, and some fun little sidebars about translating Crime Fiction to TV and Film, etc.” Without further ado, albeit with a tiny little trumpet parp, herewith be the illustrious Top Ten:

1. Patricia Highsmith
2. Georges Simenon
3. Agatha Christie
4. Raymond Chandler
5. Elmore Leonard
6. Arthur Conan Doyle
7. Ed McBain
8. James M. Cain
9. Ian Rankin
10. James Lee Burke

Mi Casa, Su Casa: Adrian McKinty On James Ellroy

The Grand Vizier writes: The motives behind ‘Mi Casa, Su Casa’ are twofold. First, the idea is to give guest bloggers the few molecules of oxygen of publicity Crime Always Pays can provide. Secondly, even we’re sick of listening only to ourselves, and we reckon some new voices will provide fresh perspectives on crime fiction in general, and Irish crime fiction in particular. And so, with minimum fanfare – a tiny tootle there, please, maestro – we introduce the first of what we’re hoping will be an ongoing and extensive series of guest blogs, in which Adrian McKinty (right) waxes lyrical about ‘the Tolstoy of crime fiction’.

The Rebirth of Cool: James Ellroy’s THE COLD SIX THOUSAND

In 2007 I taught a course in American crime fiction at Naropa University in Boulder. I looked at the evolution of the American crime novel, from Poe through Hammett and Chandler, and I ended with James Ellroy’s LA CONFIDENTIAL, which appeared in 1990. I had put Ellroy in the curriculum because most of the students had seen movie versions of his fiction; however, I admitted to the class that I was not a huge fan of Ellroy’s writing. I had read his earliest crime novels and three of the titles in his celebrated LA Quartet without being completely convinced. His best books seemed to be LA CONFIDENTIAL, THE BIG NOWHERE and WHITE JAZZ, but for me these novels were, at best, flawed masterpieces. Ellroy’s plots tended to get away from him and his subtext about the greed and corruption of policemen, DA’s, politicians, Hollywood – everyone really – in 1950’s Southern California did not resonate with me on a deep level. None of his characters were particularly captivating and it seemed that Ellroy himself often got bored with his corrupt cops and ex-cops, frequently killing them, and moving the story on with a different lead.
  In these early novels Ellroy’s (right) descriptions are beautiful but chilly and his dialogue, although authentic and rich, lacks a sense of humour.
  I shared some of these observations with my class but one of my students disagreed with me in the strongest possible terms and asked me if I had read AMERICAN TABLOID or THE COLD SIX THOUSAND. I admitted that I hadn’t and she suggested that I should.
  The following month at Denver Airport I picked up a copy of THE COLD SIX THOUSAND and began reading it in a long security line. I finished it the same night at four in the morning in a hotel in Vancouver. A week later I read the book again. THE COLD SIX THOUSAND, I decided, was no ‘flawed masterpiece’ but rather one of the best books I had read so far this decade.
  James Ellroy’s biography is the stuff from which serial killers or junkies or mental patients or, rarely, great writers are made. His mother was murdered in 1958 when he was only 10 years old – the killer was never found. Ellroy’s father was a right-wing nut who drank heavily, had affairs, and whacked his son around to toughen him up. Ellroy took on the persona of a teenage neo-Nazi to torment his Jewish neighbours and he became a compulsive petty thief and burglar. As he got better at breaking into people’s houses his compulsions grew weirder. He would often spy on pretty Jewish girls, wait until their homes were empty, break in and sniff their underwear. Frequently arrested, LAPD cops became surrogate older brothers who eventually put him on the straight and narrow. Ellroy describes these early years in the brilliant memoir MY DARK PLACES. The LAPD and the discovery of crime fiction, he says, were the two things that saved his life.
  His early novels did well, but it was the success of the movie version of LA CONFIDENTIAL that seems to have given Ellroy the confidence and financial freedom to write fiction the way he always wanted to.
  Ostensibly THE COLD SIX THOUSAND is the story of a Las Vegas cop who arrives in Dallas on the day of the Kennedy assassination, but really it is the story of the 1960’s themselves and all the madness of Vietnam, Cuba, race riots, demonstrations and the hippy movement. But not content with writing a book about a whole decade, Ellroy decided to reinvent his prose style completely. Gone are most of the verbs and adverbs, the prose descriptions, the purple patches. What’s left is the distilled essence of the narrative, the bare bones, as rich as bad news from the AP wire, as lyrical as a haiku. This is how he describes ex-FBI agent Ward Little’s attempt to take Las Vegas for his boss Howard Hughes (Drac):

“Little planned. Little sowed. The Boys reaped. Bribes/PR/extortion. Blackmail / philanthropy. It took four years. Drac owns Las Vegas now.”

  Other writers might have spent a chapter on that episode.
  Critics complained that Hemingway wrote as if he was dictating the book for a telegraph operator; Ellroy could be the called the crime novelist for the email and text message generation. He seems to have taken seriously the famous claim of Joseph Conrad that “a work of art should justify itself in every line.” In THE COLD SIX THOUSAND not a single word is wasted, every sentence moves the plot, every paragraph tells a story. And what a story. The assassination of JFK, the hit on Martin Luther King, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and a supporting cast that includes Nixon, Howard Hughes and J. Edgar Hoover.
  After reading THE COLD SIX THOUSAND I devoured the prequel to that book, AMERICAN TABOLID, and ideally it should be read first, although it isn’t quite as brilliant. There is also a rumoured third novel to come, which will conclude Ellroy’s look at this period, roughly 1958 – 1973. If it’s only half as good as the others in the trilogy it still might be the best crime novel of 2008.
  Many people won’t be able to get past Ellroy’s machine-gun prose style or his racist characters or the completely insane conspiracy theory at the heart of THE COLD SIX THOUSAND but stick with the book and you’ll be rewarded. Ellroy’s phrases and dialogue rattle around in your brain. You start to think like Ellroy. You start to talk like him. Returning from Vancouver, my wife asked me if I’d managed to get that James Ellroy novel I was after. I told her: “I scoped the book, I bought the book, I read the book, I dug it.”
  In interviews Ellroy sometimes describes himself as “the Tolstoy of crime fiction.” His boast is inaccurate. He’s not that ponderous. He is, though, one of the greats. I believe that THE COLD SIX THOUSAND elevates Ellroy into the pantheon. It is perhaps the most important American crime novel since Patricia Highsmith’s THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY and it certainly proves that Ellroy is a worthy successor to Chandler, Hammett, Cain and Jim Thompson.
  I would guess that future lecturers won’t be as ignorant of Ellroy as I was and that any good course in American crime fiction will not only explain the revolution that began with THE MALTESE FALCON but also talk about the new revolution that started after James Ellroy began firing on all cylinders. – Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty is the author of the ‘Dead’ trilogy. He is currently working on a novel for Holt.

The Boy Who Followed Ripley

The Crime Always Pays elves wouldn’t have thought John Boyne (left) – nominated yesterday on the long-list for the 2008 IMPAC Award for THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS – the most overtly crime-minded Irish author out there, although maybe we should have been tipped off by the title of CRIPPEN: A NOVEL OF MURDER. Anyhoo, it was a pleasant surprise to stumble across Boyne’s essay on Penguin’s interweb yokeybus, in which Boyne offers an insight into the inspiration behind NEXT OF KIN, to wit:

“Readers of this novel will recognise the debt that I owe to Patricia Highsmith [right] in the creation of Owen Montignac. I have always been an avid fan of Highsmith’s fiction, particularly the five Tom Ripley books, and admire the manner by which she consistently created flawed, damaged characters, capable of both extraordinary moments of cruelty and unexpected bursts of humanity. For me, Ripley is one of the most well-rounded characters in fiction and I hoped to create such a dichotomy of characteristics in Owen Montignac.”

Well said, that man. In the wonky world of Crime Always Pays’ crude understanding of algebra, ‘Patricia’ + ‘Highsmith’ = ‘Genius’.