Slaughter's Hound, by Declan Burke

I think sometimes the form of the crime fiction series lulls us into thinking we know what to expect out of its novels. Indeed, this is usually half the intent. Drumming up a little business for the brand. Personally, I have nothing against this formulaic approach. When a series has gone on too long, I just stop reading it. No harm, no foul.

I suppose, then, I was looking forward to the second Harry Rigby book for the usual, but as it turns out, the wrong reasons. As anyone who read Eightball Boogie will know (and you really should read it first as this one has some spoilers for that earlier one), that story ends leaving Harry in some challenging straits, and a lot of time has passed since then as this book opens. So let's just say it's kind of the opposite of the Sue Grafton series, where Kinsey Millhone can remain the same age through several volumes of the alphabet series, or maybe even more.

Time, then, has passed, and it has not passed well for Harry Rigby. He is currently driving a cab and running various errands, not all of them on the licit side of the line. One of them involves bringing some grass to an old friend. It gives nothing away to say that that friend takes a fatal dive off a tall building, because it happens within the first two pages. The rest of the book concerns the whys and wherefores of this fateful fall. 

This is a dark tale, and it gets progressively darker as it goes along. In the middle, it reminded me a bit of Ross MacDonald, and also of his Irish literary descendent, Declan Hughes, with its tale of doomed families and the ruin that attends them. But there is a kind of go for broke quality to this book that I haven't really found in the aforementioned illustrious writers' work, and it took me till nearly the end of the book to realize that Burke has laid it all out for us in the very title of the work, and in a helpful author's epigram, in which he notes that the great warrior  Cú Chulainn's name really means Hound of Ulster and that he owned a number of war hounds called archú, who were known for their love of slaughter.  So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen--a quiet stroll by the river this is not. Instead, it is a tale steeped in the tradition of the Irish myth cycles, where deeds are great, but, well, bloody. So don't say I didn't give you fair warning.

But now that I have, don't be scared off. This is also a smart, and funny--yes, funny--tale of contemporary Ireland, and Harry is down and out partly because a lot of people are. It's just that he reaches a deeper level of loss than most, which propels him on a grim trajectory that in retrospect seems fated, as that of mythic heroes always do.

Burke is also a writer of gorgeous sentences, and just so I don't leave you the impression that the book is all havoc, let me end with the beginning...

(filched from his website)
"It was  a rare fine night for a stroll down by the docks, the moon plump as a new pillow in an old-fashioned hotel and the undertow in the turning tide swushing its ripples silvery-green and a bird you’ve never heard before chirring its homesick tale of a place you might once have known and most likely now will never see, mid-June and almost midnight and balmy yet, the kind of evening built for a long walk with a woman who likes to take long walks and not say very much, and that little in a murmur you have to strain to catch, her laughter low and throaty, her humour dry and favouring lewd, eyes like smoky mirrors of the vast night sky and in them twinkles that might be stars reflecting or the first sparks of intentions that you’d better fan with soft words and a gentle touch in just the right place or spend the rest of your life and maybe forever wondering what might have been, all for the want of a soft word and a touch gentle and true.
It was that kind of evening, alright. That kind of place.
You ever find yourself there, say something soft, and be gentle, and true.
Me, I found myself hunched over the charred dwarf that had once been Finn Hamilton, parts of him still sizzling in a marinade of oily flesh and melting tar, and all around the rank stench of singing hair and burnt petrol, seared pork.
Midnight, and balmy yet."

Now do yourself a favor and go out and find the rest.
    

Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime in the 21st Century, edited by Declan Burke

Any occasional reader of this blog must wonder at times how it is that a blogger who deliberately titles her blog Not New for Long as an excuse not to keep up with what's in, what's hot, what's happening in the world of literature can be so up to speed when it comes to Irish crime fiction. That's a long and complicated matter, my friends, and I'd go into it, but since I can sense the real question peeping out from underneath that one, I won't bother. Your question really is, how can you too be up to speed, or possibly a little ahead of it, when it comes to the cutting edge in what some people like to call Emerald Noir?

I'm here to give you part of the answer. For some time now, in addition to reading a bunch of blogs, I've also been dabbling in the anthology Down These Green Streets, in which a host of contemporary Irish crime writers responding to the requests of Dublin novelist and critic Declan Burke have turned in essays on various aspects of the crime story in Ireland present and past. The scope of the talent that's been squeezed in between these pages is pretty amazing. When you've got the likes of Ken Bruen, Adrian McKinty, John Connolly and Declan Hughes to contribute their thoughts on the matter, you are going to have a pretty substantive volume. And there's more! Much, much more.

I thought I would write this book up when I came to the end of it, but in fact, I've been dabbling in it for some time and it seems unlikely that I will even know when I do reach the end of it, so I thought I'd give it a mention before it goes out of print--which I hope won't be for some time yet.

In the meantime, some highlights, pretty much at random:

A fascinating piece by Ruth Dudley Edwards on the life of Liam O'Flaherty, author behind the movie The Informer.

Northern Irish author/editor and pretty much everything else, Gerard Brennan, who takes a look at crime writing from north of the border, with thoughts on such Norn Iron writers as Colin Bateman, Stuart Neville, and Adrian McKinty and with a special title nod to the often overlooked The Truth Commissioner by David Parks, which is a personal favorite of mine.

A terrific analysis of three earlier Irish crime novels by the currently on-a-roll Alan Glynn, including a great bit on The Third Policeman.

Declan Burke's own interview with John Banville on his alter ego Benjamin Black.

And the list could go on and on.

I know there are some of you who think you'd like to read some of these authors if only you could stop compulsively reading the Scandinavians.  But some day that bubble will burst, my friends, and then where do you want to be? Swimming miserably in the icy cold water toward the Irish shore, or sitting comfortably in an Irish pub, with a great Irish crime novel already halfway read?

Yeah--I'll see you there.

Award nominees and a miscellany of other news

As I'm reading several things at the moment and getting to the end of none of them soon, I thought it might be fun to mention a few exciting things in the book world.

First, two authors I think are terrific, Declan Burke and Alan Glynn, are on the shortlist for the Irish Book Awards, which you can vote on HERE. I haven't gotten to Bloodland yet, but I've read two other books by Glynn and  so I'm certain he is worthy of consideration. Burke's Absolute Zero Cool, which I have read, is super. And this says nothing at all about the other nominees. Why not check out the site and at least make a list for your TBR pile?

A flukey surprise of going to the site is that I discovered Anna Carey who was once a part of a reading forum I participate in, is up for another Irish Book Award in the children's category for The Real Rebecca. I have bought it since finding out, but haven't got a chance to read it, but knowing her through the virtual world as I did, I am sure this book deserves to be on the list.

Two more books from Irish or more specifically Northern Irish writers are not up for awards yet, but that's because they are barely or not even out yet. Gerard Brennan's The Point is getting heaps of praise before it's even hit the streets and I am super excited that it is probably being lofted my way even now. And you too can now order it from Book Depository now.

And the one I have read, although in not quite final form, is Adrian McKinty's The Cold, Cold Ground.
I loved this book, even unfinished. It's not going to be out till January, but you owe it to yourself to preorder it here and now. You know how January is. The holidays are over and the resolutions fade fast and you have nothing much to look forward till at least spring. Treat yourself to this now, and you will have a very pleasant surprise waiting for you just when you think there is nothing much left to live for.

Absolute Zero Cool, by Declan Burke

This is a novel of so many excellent parts that I don't really know where to start. Why don't you take a look at this video of John Connelly helping to launch the book for Liberties Press? I mean, who would you rather listen to, really--him or me? I know which I'd choose.



If you watched the video, you will know that this is not your average crime novel, in either content or design. Having read two of his other books, I can attest that Mr. Burke is quite capable of writing a really good book in the more conventional forms, but that is not what he is setting out to do here. The conceit is that the character "Declan Burke" is visited, while on a writer's retreat, by a character who was thought up for a book that never made it to a final draft. Karlsson--or Billy, as he now apparently wants to be called-- asks to be let out of the limbo that is the fate of an unfinished character. He turns out to be a hard guy to say no to.

I believe I would have been a bit bewildered by this book, which I might have expected to be a caper, though of the darkly comic kind, if I had not been clued in by an early blurb of Adrian McKinty's, mentioning another Irishman who wrote sui generis fiction, Flann O'Brien. Having read O'Brien's The Third Policeman not that long ago myself, I was more prepared for the 'outside the crime fiction box' story than I might have been.

Although much of the book is about the hammering out of a novel between the fictional Karlsson and the, well, equally fictional Declan Burke, the book's dark energy is really Karlsson's, I think. He has a Mephistophelian charisma, if not what you could really call charm. When Karlsson, as Billy, meets Declan Burke at the writer's retreat, he is missing an eye, and sports an eyepatch. I was curious about that throughout the book, and may have missed a beat when it was explained, but an Irishman with an eyepatch always has some relation to Joyce, I suppose. For me, though, and this is just my own take on the thing, the one-eyed nature of Billy has everything to do with his monomania and, forgive the pun, lack of perspective. His relentlessly dark vision of our life on earth is persuasive, at times funny, and yet always bracing. He is the classic case of the guy who is too smart for his own good, by which I mean beyond the reach of help, because this is where he chooses to put himself.

The title of the book refers to the coldest possible temperature, which is more theoretical than actual, in which all energy is frozen. Nothing moves. This reminds me of Dante's version of hell, which is not heat, but ice. Karlsson, who want to bring everything down, is perhaps an agent of such a space, but Karlsson, much as he would like to go his own inexorable way, is, despite himself, still moved by love and loss, even as the book draws toward its close.

Karlsson is certainly an aspect of Declan Burke, for where else could he have come from? But Declan Burke, as either character or author, has learned a thing or two more about life, thanks to marriage and a child, than poor Karlsson ever dreamt of in his philosophies. Karlsson, I think, is aware of the lack.

Don't worry, Karlsson. You can always hope there will be a different sort of ending in the  movie.