Bloodland, by Alan Glynn

I happened to be reading Bloodland at the same time a blog post came out from the excellent Martin Edwards, addressing the question, How Many Characters in a Novel? Too many characters was actually the main complaint members of my book group had about the last book under discussion here, Creation, by Gore Vidal, a problem I thought could have been ironed out a bit by a simple list of characters at the beginning to refer back to. Edwards is talking specifically from the point of view of mystery writer, though, and this has some bearing on Bloodland, which I would call a mystery in the broader sense, though I have seen others refer to it as a classic conspiracy novel.

I suspect that in today's reading climate, where everything possible must apparently be done to keep the reader from giving up and turning on the television or  some other device, the opening of Bloodland will be off putting for some. After an initial scene in Africa, you have three more starts to the book, all involving dyads or triads of men. I'm pretty game  to try complex openings, but even I had some worry whether I was going to be able to keep track of all the players--Ray and Jimmy and Phil and Larry and Dave. You get the picture. And then about forty pages in another group of men are introduced.

I bring this up only to say, don't be put off by this. You'll figure it out. Everything's connected--which is also a theme of the book as a whole. And the men, as you get to know them, are distinct characters.  You won't confuse them.

The basic idea of the story is that Jimmy Gilroy, a talented but unemployed young reporter who's lost his job in the moribund newspaper industry, has landed a little gig writing a combination bio and exposé of a scandal ridden celebrity, including her tragic death in a helicopter crash. Unwittingly, by taking the assignment, he has just pulled the small thread by which a very large web is going to unravel. His first glimpse of this result is when he's called by Phil Sweeney, an old friend of his dad, who asks that he back off the "last days" angle of the story. Instead of seeing this as a favor he owes the older man, Jimmy is offended and hangs up. This action is what sets the plot--or perhaps I should say plots--in motion.

Bloodland is extremely ambitious in scope, which is why we need not just one protagonist but many as it unfolds. Glynn adeptly connects American and Chinese depredations in the Congo to the crash of the Irish housing market, celebrity scandal and presidential ambitions. What has perhaps not been noted enough is that it is also a meditation on fathers and sons. At least two of the main characters are father haunted, and while the fathers may be gone, the friends of the fathers remain, trying to steer the course of the future through these adoptive ties to the sons.

For a failed reporter, Jimmy is perhaps a little too lucky as the story unfolds, and I wasn't entirely convinced that as he finds his way through the labyrinth of collusion and deceit the very powerful men he confronts would have been quite so panicked as they prove in response to his investigations.

Though it's true--they do have some very big things to hide...  
 

Crocodile Tears, by Mark O'Sullivan

I got a bit depressed the other day when I read an article about the decline of the paperback over at Slate. True, the article basically says that things may not be as grim as all that, but the gradual or not so gradual trend away from paperbacks in favor of ebooks seems to be unstoppable. Maybe it's the right moment to put in a good word for paperbacks, then. Mark O'Sullivan's Crocodile Tears seems an excellent book to use as an example.

I happened to win my copy of Crocodile Tears, but that didn't create much of a bias, as I had already been interested in it and was planning to send off for a copy of it anyway. Its appearance in my mailbox came as a pleasant surprise.

I recently listened to an agent's podcast about what hooks a reader--what gives a reader a feeling of solidity about a book and assures him or her that they are in for a good read. I thought at once of Crocodile Tears, because more than just having a good cover, which it does, or jacket blurbs, which, oddly, it doesn't, the book itself has a reassuring solidity--you feel that the publisher took some time in thinking the design of the book through, and that some care went  into the project. So even before you begin reading the text, you have that sense the agent mentioned of being in capable hands and off for a good ride.

Crocodile Tears is a crime novel set in Dublin. It shares some characteristics with the work of another Dublin writer, Declan Hughes, in its portrayal of the decline and ruin of a  privileged Irish family, complete with great house and troubled past. It also bears some similarity to the fiction of Alan Glynn and Declan Burke, who have both written crime novels set in Ireland of the  contemporary era, which is to say, post boom.

At heart, though, this is a police procedural, with the typical police team dealing with various crimes that emerge out of the first death. Its main protagonist is Detective Inspector Leo Woods (and one small gripe I had about the book was that this ponderous title was used in so many instances where "Leo", or "Woods", or "DI Woods" would have done just fine), and he is a sad and complicated man. Suffering from Bell's Palsy, which paralyzes and distorts one side of his face, Leo is portrayed as in some ways beyond help for his personal afflictions, which are spiritual and psychological as well as physical. As readers, or at least as this reader, we are never quite persuaded that he is as far beyond the pale as he thinks he is, which perhaps opens up material for future books. All of the police are in fact captured midstory--Detective Sergeant Helen Troy, who has just recently been promoted to this new position but is carrying a lot of  familial baggage with her; Superintendent Aoenghus Heaphy, who has undergone a painful and cosmetic enhancement under the impression that it will help him rise; the super capable but preoccupied Detective Garda Ben Murphy, and so on. These are the kinds of characters that will only get better if the series continues.

The story is satisfyingly complex, and takes us not only into the rarified heights of wealthy neighborhoods, but to failed housing estates and abandoned hotels as well. O'Sullivan sets his tale during a record cold spell, which only adds to the bleak atmosphere he is creating.

I Hear the Sirens in the Street, by Adrian McKinty

 I'm a little tardy in getting a post out about this novel by British standards, and a little early by American standards. The truth is, I read this book in an earlier prepublished form and it's taken me a while to buy and get to the official version. Anyway, as a bridge between English and American editions, I'm probably roughly in the right place, though wholly by accident, which is typical.

I've written quite a few posts now about McKinty's books, as you can see HERE. But what I thought I'd talk about in relation to I Hear the Sirens in the Street is something that I don't find commented on in better reviews than my own. Here's an example of one such (be careful, though, as its a bit spoiler heavy). Yes, we can all see the descriptive accuracy, the lyric gift, the deep themes of revenge, the very occasional heart-stopping violence. I think I've even mentioned that they are often very funny, in that dry Northern Irish sort of way.

But I think that one thing few reviewers have made enough of is their quality of delight. If I say they are delightful, you'll think I mean that they are charming and sweet and cozy, which would definitely be giving the wrong impression. What I mean, though, is that the language itself consistently gives your brain a delicious little dose of something that it wasn't expecting. It's not in the plotting, it's not in the jokes, it's not in the casually thrown in erudition--or not alone in them. It's the sensibility behind the story that provides it.

With "The Troubles" trilogy (which is so far just "The Troubles" duo) it's been interesting to see that some reviewers favor the first over the second, and some the second over the first. Personally, I think this is probably like asking, which Game of Thrones (technically, A Song of Fire and Ice) novel did you prefer? It's one story, people! Two crimes, sure, but basically, one story of  guy who finds himself in a Northern Ireland whose hopes and dreams are fading fast, on the outside of more things than he's on the inside of--and yes, you can take that as saltily as you want to--smart enough to know it makes sense to leave, and still--not leaving. Not permanently. Not yet.

In the meantime, though, Sean Duffy is islandbound. He starts out on a routine police investigation and is immediately shot at by an aged security guard. Things don't really get better...

Another shotgun blast.

The security guard had taken the time to reload and was determined to have more fun.

“Stop shooting!” McCrabban demanded again.

“Get out of here!” a voice replied. “I’ve had enough of you hoodlums!”

It was a venerable voice, from another Ireland, from the 30's or even earlier, but age gave it no weight or assurance - only a frail, impatient, dangerous doubt.

This, every copper knew, was how it would end, not fighting the good fight but in a random bombing or a police chase gone wrong or shot by a half senile security guard in a derelict factory in north Belfast. It was April 1st. Not a good day to die.

“We’re the police!” McCrabban insisted.

“The what?”

“The police!”

“I’ll call the police!”

“We are the police!”

“You are?”

I lit a cigarette, sat down and leaned against the outer shell of the big turbine.   

 

You can actually read tons of the beginning of the novel on McKinty's blog--that is, if you're the mistrusting sort who isn't going to take my word for the thing. Go on ahead--I'll never know.   

 

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.
    

The Cold Cold Ground, by Adrian McKinty--American style

Now that The Cold Cold Ground has finally arrived in California, I thought I'd repost the meandering review I wrote of the book when it came out in England at the beginning of the year. It really is one of my favorite crime novels and I encourage people to seek it out for any number of reasons. Plus, I can put up the American cover.

Let's cut to the chase here--I love this book. "Love" isn't usually a word I use in describing my reaction to a crime novel, although even an occasional reader here on this blog may have deduced that I am a mad fan of Adrian McKinty's writing. I'd tend to say exciting, well-written, fast paced--things like this. But for reasons both idiosyncratic and more universal I do love this book.

Let's get the subjective part over first. The events of this novel largely take place in Belfast and neighboring towns in the spring of 1981. McKinty was still a child during this historic, tragic moment of Northern Ireland's recent history--and lived through them as a child--but I was a youngish adult, traveling through England and Europe for the first time. I didn't get to Northern Ireland, of course--probably wouldn't have even dared if I'd thought of it. But the Hunger Strikes which form a part of the background of this story were much on the mind of everyone in England that we met, that and the Royal Wedding, as well as the assassination attempt on the Pope and other things that mark this novel as accurate to its specific moment. So, for me, there is an odd nostalgia that goes along with this story, and it had an almost uncanny ability to restore the memories of a long forgotten time. It helped, I suppose, that we visited our old professor in Yorkshire, and he had some very definite opinions about Ian Paisley and Margaret Thatcher and everyone who was involved in Northern Ireland at that time, so that I was not completely ignorant of events, as normally I very well might have been.

But beyond all this, the real reason I'm crazy about this book is that it's actually the one I've wanted McKinty to write since I first began reading him. In Dead I Well May Be, we get a tantalizing look at life in Northern Ireland as the story opens, where we meet Michael Forsythe signing up for some illegal work in Belfast. No sooner do we start to settle into that life, though, than Michael finds himself fleeing the country entirely. Dead I Well May Be is a wonderful book, but there was a part of me that felt when we abruptly find him again in Harlem in a whole new life that I had been a bit cheated of something. The Northern Ireland that Michael Forsythe slips out of is not quite the Northern Ireland of 1981, but they are older brother and younger brother to each other. There is a bomb at the beginning of Dead I Well May Be, there are more than one in The Cold Cold Ground. One thing that most of us in the world are fortunate enough not to have experience of is what its like to try and live a normal life alongside of such violence with such random victims. This book, despite being a story about a crime, begins to tell us that.

The hero of our tale is Sean Duffy, a Detective Sergeant who has recently been transferred to Carrickfergus, a small coastal largely Protestant town within close reach of bellicose Belfast, but still separated enough to have its own culture and concerns. The police station is small and would be more likely to focus on insurance fraud and bicycle theft if it had its druthers, but the police force isn't exempt from getting out in full riot gear if Belfast or some other hot spot calls for support.

Duffy is a Catholic in a community that is self-protectively Protestant and could and sometimes does become hostile toward him. He's also a university trained man who was set for an academic career when one of Belfast's more violent moments touches him too deeply to ignore and sets him on the course that leads him to join the police. In other words, he's more than one kind of outsider. His stance, therefore is somewhat distanced as compared to others, and and he refuses to lead from a knee jerk partisanship in his reaction to events. (Although this doesn't make him a stranger to flareups of anger in other circumstances.)

The plot is a tight police procedural, with a couple of crimes floating around and investigating these takes Duffy and his team into many neighborhoods of Belfast and environs. Places like the Falls Road will sound familiar to anyone with even a nodding acquaintance of The Troubles, but McKinty knows both what they are and what they have been better than most. Here's how Duffy describes Rathcool to a colleague as they walk its "drab tenements and crumbling 1960s tower blocks.":

Rathcool comes from the Irish Rath Cuile meaning 'in the centre of the fort'. Once this was a royal palace for the kings of the Ulaidh. Now look at it. Concrete towers and row upon row of soulless terraces.

Most people could look it up on Wikipedia and then tell you of the recent history of Rathcool. Some might even give you that Gaelic meaning. But not everyone will give you the deep history of a place as they are describing the site of a run down tenement. Its the book's depth as well as its breadth, geographic and otherwise, that sets it apart.

Although Duffy is investigating a possible serial killer and things occasionally blow up in the background, don't be misled into thinking this is a grim tale. There's always humor running through McKinty's work, sometimes quietly, sometimes a groan-making pun. His ironic stance on situations that others have invested heavily in positions on always makes you look at things a bit differently.

Carrickfergus is a little world. I'm glad McKinty came back to it, at least for awhile.

(If you'd like to get a sense of the opening paragraphs, here is a LINK.)

 

Falling Glass--a reprise

The fall double header of Adrian McKinty's fiction began today in the U.S. (The second book, The Cold Cold Ground, is out in November.)Although many of his American fans may have gotten their hands on these books already after their British publication last year, for all intents and purposes, the U.S. is an untapped market. So I thought I'd repost this review from last year, as it seems possible that it might reach a few new readers.

In 2003, a new sort of crime fiction protagonist slipped into our midst, much as he had slipped illegally into the U.S. in the fictional realm. The book was Dead I Well May Be and the hero, or anti-hero, was Michael Forsythe, a young guy hailing from the environs of Belfast. A small, wiry guy, (at least the way I pictured him)  you probably wouldn't have noticed him on the streets of New York, where he did the dirty work for an Irish gang, but he turned out to be a figure to be reckoned with--as his enemies (and readers of the three Dead trilogy novels) would shortly come to know. Those who have been lucky enough to happen upon these books have been clamoring for more Michael Forsythe ever since. His tough, indeed ruthless way of achieving his ends was counterbalanced by his wit, his literary sensibilities, and his vulnerability, a kind of too open stance despite his bravado, which readers seem to have picked up on. When all's said and done, he's a thug, but readers do not love Michael Forsythe for this, but despite it. You may thrill to his acts of derring-do, but all the while understand that from the beginning his path is not so much a choice as a fate.

So, although McKinty has warned fans that his latest novel, Falling Glass, includes Forsythe, but without a starring role, he's still worth considering here as a background, a prime mover, or something more elemental, like the weather. This is Killian's book, not Michael's and I believe readers will be happy it is so. But it's still worth keeping Forsythe in mind, and possibly even read a Dead trilogy novel or two first if you haven't, because it's useful to have the Michael Forsythe frame of reference when you're considering Killian's alternatives. Let's just say that Forsythe is not incidental to the novel, but crucial to it.

Killian has traveled down much the same road as Forsythe. In fact, at a fateful meeting in an early novel, Killian failed to protect someone from Forsythe, which led to one man's death and allowed Forsythe to live to tell--or not tell--the tale. Killian has left his past in the Irish tinker culture to commit petty and not so petty crime for a number of years, but the advent of the Celtic Tiger prosperity had allowed him to dream of the straight life, just as the departure of prosperity is now leaving him little option but to do 'one more job' in order to sort out his own financial nightmares.

The successful dispatch of one job quickly leads to the offer of another even more lucrative task. And it's to be a good deed, isn't it? Rescue two wee bairns from their drug addicted mother, who has broken custody rights and fled with them. Although Killian halfheartedly asks a time or two why the police haven't been called in, the money is too good to really ask this question seriously.

The fact that Killian is a tinker is not incidental to the tale, nor just a bit of colorful lore, thrown in. To be a tinker is to take part in the nomadic life of the human race, which belongs to a different value system than the settled peoples of the world entirely. It is a last remnant of oral culture, and is tied, as McKinty does tie it, to Homeric times and Homeric values. I found this rumination on a non-capitalistic culture surviving within a capitalistic one very thought provoking, especially in the context of the bust that followed the Irish boom. Killian starts the novel with a bunch of useless apartments, a one time seemingly sound investment that, as for so many, has turned out to be at best a headache and at worst a nightmare. By the midpoint of the story, he has reconnected to his tinker past, and gradually finds his true identity among them. That identity includes songs, fairs, fests, but also true honor and true hospitality.

I found myself thinking a lot about Laurens Van der Post's work, both fiction and nonfiction, on the culture of the Bushmen. It was not only white settlers who were their enemies, he claimed, but settled black Africans as well. At the time, I thought that it was because these two culture's were antithetical, but something about McKinty's book made me understand that the tinkers and Bushmen and the Romany gypsies are not so much opposites of our culture, as simply a past that has been despised and repressed. It seems like it might be a good time for that repressed to return.

Lest I give you any impression that this is not a crime novel, it certainly is. It's a fast-paced tale featuring more than one foe for Killian and more than one decision to make about where he really stands. Killian is no pacifist, and he has occasion to take up a weapon or two before the course of the book has run. But the superb ending is a duel of another order, and one well worth waiting for.

 

Wee Rockets, by Gerard Brennan

I've been a bit remiss about getting around to reading Wee Rockets, mainly because it just takes me longer to get around to ebooks than their paper counterparts. What can I say? I'm old school. Also, I work in a bookstore.  But as I've very much enjoyed Mr. Brennans' work in the past, I have persisted and think it's high time I wrote a few thoughts on the matter.

When I first heard about Wee Rockets, which I learned would be about a bunch of young kids in hoodies in Belfast, I must say that I didn't know they would be such tough characters. I was maybe thinking more along the lines of the Artful Dodger and other beloved street urchins.

But these are not those kids. When we come into the story, Joe Phillips' crew is just setting out to mug an old lady, and this is not their first crime, even though, as the story tells us, none of them is over fourteen years old. (And some are a lot younger.) And the community has begun to notice.

For this reason, and not because of any crisis of conscience, Joe, who is the tallest of the bunch and therefore the most conspicuous, is looking to leave the gang behind him. But not before Stephen McVeigh, after trying to rally the Beechmount community behind him, decides to go after the gang as a kind of lone vigilante. In essence, these two fateful decisions propel the book. Well, that and the surprise visit of a long lost relative.

Never having been a pre-teen boy (and they are all boys, there is nary a girl in sight, though Joe seems to have a healthy enough interest in grown women), you might think that this violent and sometimes brutal tale about boys stealing to gain access to cheap cigarettes,booze and weed would hold little interest for me. But it's perhaps exactly the inside view that makes it so interesting. How many books have you read about what it's like to grow up in a working class Catholic neighborhood just as the Troubles are starting to recede? Yeah--same here.

Brennan has many strengths that makes this not just another crime story. He has a great gift for structuring a story, for one thing. There are a lot of characters in this short book, and a lot of plots to keep whirling in the air, but he manages this in a very understated sort of way. You don't really realize how difficult it is until you stop to think about it. The book has humor despite its darkness, and I must say that though I'm sure the author drew on some autobiographical details to write his characters, I have to hope that his obvious talent for thinking up criminal activity all went on to the page and wasn't tested in the real world at an earlier time...   

There are elements of the story that could be told here in Santa Cruz, which though affluent and mostly calm, does have its gang problems. But as I've stepped back from the story a little, I think there is a lot about its particular milieu that leaves these kids with too much time on their hands. It's not just absent fathers and working moms that are the problem. This story is set in the aftermath of a war, and the power vacuum that came in the wake of that is evident. Who does have authority? is one of the questions the book asks. The fact that young kids can rush around mugging people with impunity means that the social fabric is pretty tattered.

There is a telling sentence fairly far into the book. It's almost a throwaway. Joe is sitting in a car parked near Queens' University, though he doesn't know precisely where. "He'd never been in this part of the city. Hadn't thought he ever would."

Hadn't thought he ever would. It was fairly stunning to me to read that, but it made the over the top behavior of the kids seem more credible to me. It isn't just that these young Beechmont hoodlums don't expect to go to college. They don't even expect to visit its vicinity. It's not just transportation that's stopping them. It's that as much as they identify with their Beechmount neighborhood, they are also limited by it.

In one scene far into the book, one character takes another out to dinner. When the woman starts yelling at her date, he tells her that her Beechmount is showing. "This is a classy place, you know."

The woman has the pride to walk out on him, but, tellingly she doesn't have quite enough self-confidence to stare the other diners down and have her meal anyway.

Now frankly, most of this book's target readers aren't going to be reading it for these sorts of sociological reflections. They're going to be reading it for the fast paced, gritty and sometimes shocking little tale that it is . And I say, have at it!

The Cold Cold Ground. Again.

You didn't listen to me the last time, did you? Well, don't worry about it, hardly anyone ever does. I'm giving you a second option. You can listen to this guy instead...

Smoke, by Nigel Bird and The Point, by Gerard Brennan

Bit of a problematic blogpost, this one, but I'm going to do it anyway. I happened to read these two novellas, both nominated for the Spinetingler Award, one right after the other, and found the parallels striking enough  that I thought I'd do them together, rather than separately. Unfortunately, in the time that's elapsed between now and then, Smoke seems to have been withdrawn from circulation for the moment, due, I'm guessing, to some larger troubles at the press it was published by. That's a can of worms that I don't really want to get into here, but I'm going to assume that Smoke will be made available again soon by one means or another.

I read Smoke in ebook form, while The Point I read as a physical book. I think I enjoyed reading in the old school form marginally more, but with novellas, it isn't a terribly large issue either way, and I actually think novellas are highly suited to the ebook format.

Smoke begins with a simple enough school incident. Our hero, Jimmy, gets pantsed by the school bullies and as he of course decides to take his revenge, events soon spiral out of control. I was a little slow on the uptake here, but Smoke actually continues on from a  fine short story I read in the Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 8 called "An Arm and  a Leg", and I wish I'd reread that one before reading this story. If republished, I think including both in one volume might work rather well.

The community is Tranent, a working class British community where let's just say a lot of illicit activity is going on. I don't know that you'd call it tight knit, but it's the kind of place where everybody knows everybody else's business, including what's hidden under Nan's bed. There are a lot of skillfully interwoven story arcs to this brief tale, and everyone is pretty much after everyone else's loot, or even life.

Gerard Brennan's The Point focuses on another working class community, this one a  rough Belfast neighborhood. When brothers Paul and Brian find themselves needing to lay low, though, they head for Warrenpoint, a  seaside resort town that they remember as idyllic from their otherwise not so idyllic childhoods. There they meet Rachel, a girl with some troubles of her own. The encounter of the three of them, not to mention the various thugs that they inevitably get involved with, leads them to their own madcap festival of mayhem. I liked the brief titled chapters of this one, which helped keep things moving right along.

I still find myself a bit surprised to be reading crime fiction that centers on so much violence, boozing, drugs and sex. Not to mention dog fights. These are "guy books" in a big way, so I think it's fair to say straight off that they might not be for you, if I have any idea of who the typical readers of this blog are. Which, actually, I don't. If you're looking for fast paced gritty thrillers with more than  a bit of edge, these are just up your alley. I admire the talent and craftsmanship of both writers and will continue to read more.

While you wait for Smoke to be reborn, why don't you check out Nigel's short pieces on Smashwords? Oh, and did I mention that he is in the probably all too often mentioned here Grimm Tales as well? In fact, he won first prize in the original story contest for "Sing a Song of Sixpence".   

And once you've read The Point, which won the  2012 Spinetingler novella award, you can then go on to Mr. Brennan's Wee Rockets, which I have ahead of me as well.

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.

The Cold Cold Ground, by Adrian McKinty

Let's cut to the chase here--I love this book. "Love" isn't usually a word I use in describing my reaction to a crime novel, although even an occasional reader here on this blog may have deduced that I am a mad fan of Adrian McKinty's writing. I'd tend to say exciting, well-written, fast paced--things like this. But for reasons both idiosyncratic and more universal I do love this book.

Let's get the subjective part over first. The events of this novel largely take place in Belfast and neighboring towns in the spring of 1981.  McKinty was still a child during this historic, tragic moment of Northern Ireland's recent history--and lived through them as a child--but I was a youngish adult, traveling through England and Europe for the first time. I didn't get to Northern Ireland, of course--probably wouldn't have even dared if I'd thought of it. But the Hunger Strikes which form a part of the background of this story were much on the mind of everyone in England that we met, that and the Royal Wedding,  as well as the assassination attempt on the Pope and other things that mark this novel as accurate to its specific moment. So, for me, there is an odd nostalgia that goes along with this story, and it had an almost uncanny ability to restore the memories of a long forgotten time. It helped, I suppose, that we visited our old professor in Yorkshire, and he had some very definite opinions about Ian Paisley and Margaret Thatcher and everyone who was involved in Northern Ireland at that time, so that I was not completely ignorant of events, as normally I very well might have been.

But beyond all this, the real reason I'm crazy about this book is that it's actually the one I've wanted McKinty to write since I first began reading him. In Dead I Well May Be, we get a tantalizing look at life in Northern Ireland as the story opens, where we meet Michael Forsythe signing up for some illegal work in Belfast. No sooner do we start to settle into that life, though, than Michael finds himself fleeing the country entirely. Dead I Well May Be is a wonderful book, but there was a part of me that felt when we abruptly find him again in Harlem in a whole new life that I had been a bit cheated of something. The Northern Ireland that Michael Forsythe slips out of is not quite the Northern Ireland of 1981, but they are older brother and younger brother to each other. There is a bomb at the beginning of Dead I Well May Be, there are more than one in The Cold Cold Ground. One thing that most of us in the world are fortunate enough not to have experience of is what its like to try and live a normal life alongside of such violence with such random victims. This book, despite being a story about a crime, begins to tell us that.

The hero of our tale is Sean Duffy, a Detective Sergeant  who has recently been transferred to Carrickfergus, a small coastal largely Protestant town within close reach of bellicose Belfast, but still separated enough to have its own culture and concerns. The police station is small and would be more likely to focus on insurance fraud and bicycle theft if it had its druthers, but the police force isn't exempt from getting out in full riot gear if Belfast or some other hot spot calls for support.

Duffy is a Catholic in a community that is self-protectively Protestant and could and sometimes does become hostile toward him. He's also a university trained man who was set for an academic career when one of Belfast's more violent moments touches him too deeply to ignore and sets him on the course that leads  him to join the police.  In other words, he's more than one kind of outsider. His stance, therefore is somewhat distanced as compared to others, and and he refuses to lead from a knee jerk partisanship in his reaction to events. (Although this doesn't make him a stranger to flareups of anger in other circumstances.)

The plot is a tight police procedural, with a couple of crimes floating around and investigating these takes Duffy and his team into many neighborhoods of Belfast and environs. Places like the Falls Road will sound familiar to anyone with even a nodding acquaintance of The Troubles, but McKinty knows  both what they are and what they have been better than most. Here's how Duffy describes Rathcool to a colleague as they walk its "drab tenements and crumbling 1960s tower blocks.":

Rathcool comes from the Irish Rath Cuile meaning 'in the centre of the fort'. Once this was a royal palace for the kings of the Ulaidh. Now look at it. Concrete towers and row upon row of soulless terraces.

Most people could look it up on Wikipedia and then tell you of the recent history of Rathcool. Some might even give you that Gaelic meaning. But not everyone will give you the deep history of a place as they are describing the site of a run down tenement. Its the book's depth as well as its breadth, geographic and otherwise, that sets it apart.

Although Duffy is investigating a possible serial killer and things occasionally blow up in the background, don't be misled into thinking this is a grim tale. There's always humor running through McKinty's work, sometimes quietly, sometimes a groan-making pun. His ironic stance on situations that others have invested heavily in positions on always makes you look at things a bit differently.

Carrickfergus a little world. I'm glad McKinty came back to it, at least for awhile.

(If you'd like to get a sense of the opening paragraphs, here is a LINK.)

The Killing of the Tinkers, by Ken Bruen

After the last post on this blog, readers could be forgiven for assuming that I ran out and picked up the first Ken Bruen novel I saw. But in fact, by sheer coincidence, I had actually been reading this, the second Jack Taylor novel that very day, a read which I had been looking forward to since reading The Guards back in April. These books are deceptively quick reads, and once you start you're likely to skip along too fast, at least if you're anything like me.

In this one, Jack has returned from what seems to have been a rather bungled time in London. It is not exactly a "hero returns in triumph" sort of scenario. In fact, he's actually added to his collection of addictions. And that's not the only thing he's acquired, either. But Taylor is almost immediately offered what seems like a pretty sweet deal involving free lodging in exchange for trying to figure out who has been killing the Irish tinkers, who, as Taylor is later told, should more accurately be referred to as "the clans".

Of course, the deal is not as sweet as it first looks. Associating with the clans is not the best way to make yourself popular, Taylor discovers, as he wanders around Galway trying to understand the situation, and of course giving us an insider's tour of the place in the bargain. He--and Bruen--also give us a literary tour of things both author and character have read. It's an education in itself, in crime fiction perhaps especially, but you'll get William Burroughs and Thomas Merton and Khalil Gibran too before you're done.

It's funny, because I was listening to an interview that Rick Kleffel did with Jonathan Lethem on the radio the other night on his new book The Ecstasy of Influence. This is Letham's twist on that old trope "the Agony of Influence" and his idea is that you should welcome and embrace all the previous works that have shaped you. He said that novels tend to hide their influences by the nature of the way they are written.

Maybe, but this is not the way Ken Bruen writes a novel, much to my pleasure and continuing edification.

All the Dead Voices, by Declan Hughes

I finished this fourth book in the Ed Loy series a couple of days ago and as usual with Hughes' work, I enjoyed it a lot. I'm not going to say too much about the plot here, as really you should start at the beginning of Loy's story with The Wrong Kind of Blood. The series starts with Loy returning to Ireland after twenty years away, ostensibly to bury his mother. But his American Dream is in tatters too, and he's not going back right away--as I guess you can tell from the fact that this current work is set in Ireland too and he hasn't been back to the States in between.

I like the homage that Hughes pays the late Ross MacDonald's work in the Loy series. Ireland has a lot of family secrets to dig up and apparently no tradition of P.I.s with shovels until the advent of Loy. This fourth novel is a bit outside the usual pattern, although there's no need to panic--a ruined family or two lies at the heart of the tale. But All the Dead Voices takes on the consequences of the Troubles and there's more mention of paramilitary organizations than we're used to dealing with in Hughes' works. Actually, a good companion novel from north of the border would be Stuart Neville's recent Collusion.

Personally, I missed seeing more of Loy's old friend Tommy Owens in this book, as he always provides a bit of comic relief, albeit usually of a criminal kind. He's there, though, for a few crucial plot points. And that'll have to do.

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.

Goosefoot, by Patrick McGinley

What an odd little tale! I read this book because I'd once read McGinley's most well known novel, Bogmail, and had enjoyed it (though not quite as much as the person who had recommended it to me), and had at some point picked up this one. It was an impulse to pull it off the shelf the other day and read it instead of something else I was meant to be attending to.

The story opens with Patricia Teeling at a crossroads in her life. She has just finished off an agricultural degree, which her very simpatico Uncle Lar has done most of the funding for. Lar of course wants her to take over his very shipshape farm, but Patricia wants to try city life and sow some wild oats before she settles down, almost certainly for life. So she quickly finds a teaching job in Dublin, leaving the Irish midlands behind.

And there her troubles begin.

I have to say that I read this book almost completely wrong. I took it to be a rather convincing novel of a young woman's quest for her own authentic path, which includes finding a vocation and also a mate. The fact that all the men in her life are either very limited or very dicey--except for Uncle Lar, of course--and that having experienced the city she is no longer a country girl and still not yet an urban one--makes this path particularly difficult.

Actually, though, this is a crime novel. Though no one in the book seems particularly avid to solve the crime, this is still the case, and I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that McGinley never loses sight of the fact, even if we do. I see in the Wikipedia article that he is an admirer of Flann O'Brien, and this I think explains a lot about his approach. The same article links to a New York Times book review of the book when it came out, and although I think it's the kind of review that gives too much away, it's definitely worth reading afterwards.

And it also makes the book worth reading again after you come to the end.

Ghosts of Belfast and Collusion by Stuart Neville

I read Stuart Neville's Collusion last week, and find myself in a somewhat dissenting opinion from many reviews I've read. Although it is its own tale,with its own hero, I think that readers will be doing themselves a disservice if they don't read Neville's previous novel The Ghosts of Belfast, or, as it's known across the pond, The Twelve, first. It's not that you can't read Collusion on its own, it's that you're basically wrecking TGoB if you do. Collusion ties up too many of Ghosts loose ends to read in reverse order. But do what you will, I can but advise.

In Ghosts of Belfast, former IRA hitman Gerry Fegan must settle some scores--with himself, among other people. Not to be too flip about it, but he sees dead people. The people he sees are the ones he's helped make dead. He seeks revenge on their behalf against the very people who used him to achieve their ends. The story is basically the unfolding of this idea. It's effective, well written and in some ways tidy. Collusion comes along to remind us that things are never as tidy as all that. 

This second novel does include characters from the first, including Fegan. Its central character, however, is new to us. Jack Lennon, a Northern Irish cop, bears a relation to Fegan that neither of them know about. His role is to get to the bottom of some mysterious killings that seem to come out of Northern Ireland's recent past. His interest is also more personal--he wants to be sure his ex-wife and daughter are kept safely out of the way.

The reason this novel is called Collusion is quite clear--it's even spelled out at a certain point in the novel. What's a bit hard for an outsider to Northern Ireland's politics and history to fathom is how much of the tale that unfolds is based on endemic collusion in the real world, and how much of it just makes for good storytelling. The relentless pace of the book, starting right from its slam dunk opening, guarantees a satisfying read for thriller readers, and it's obvious that it would do well on the big screen. Neville cites some of the sources for his central premise at the end. But an American reader is left wondering a bit. Was collusion between all parties really so pervasive in the North's recent history, or is Neville using a bit of poetic license to underscore his premise. In some ways, I think that only someone who had lived through these times or whose parents had would really be able to know the answer.

(This post is part of the Ireland Challenge 2011. Only one book counts towards my goal of 6, as I read Ghosts of Belfast awhile ago.)

The Dead Yard, by Adrian McKinty

I have just recently finished reading the Dead trilogy, with Belfast's Michael Forsythe as hero or anti-hero or something. I wouldn't recommend reading the series in the order I have, but as the first is out of print in the U.S. right now, do what you must.

The Dead Yard is the second book in the series, although chronologically, this story actually fits in somewhere before the coda at the end of the first novel, Dead I Well May Be. Starting off on the island Spanish island of Tenerife, somewhere off the east coast of Africa, the action swiftly moves back to the east coast of America, which is a different clime entirely.

It doesn't give too much away, I think, to reveal that Michael becomes embedded in a disaffected Irish group who are hoping to make a big splash to gain favor back in the home country.

I've heard that some find this middle novel darker than the others, but frankly I'm surprised at that. Our introduction to Michael Forsythe in Dead I Well May Be very quickly throws us into the dark and violent world he lives in, and shows him to be if not a willing participant, at least a compliant and resigned one.

As a person who is not particularly drawn to violence as a selling point, I have had to think a bit about why this series works for me. True, the writing is tight and at times gorgeous, and the darkness of the series is relieved by the author's periodic wit. Still, we are left with the conundrum of the appeal of the central character. I must admit that I was a bit baffled by it, especially in reading this second, but for me, third of this very compelling series.

And then I thought of Odysseus.

Now let me say right out front that at its heart,this is an action series. If you liked Matt Damon in the Jason Bourne movies, then you should be saying your prayers that someone in Hollywood will see the commercial potential of this series. But it remains true that these books are more literary at their roots and so the Odysseus reference seems fair.

Michael Forsythe starts in Belfast, and though this may be a spoiler, ends in Belfast. He does, in effect, live out his own odyssey, and spends his time in various lands with various snares, just as Odysseus does. Although the third book, The Bloomsday Dead, actually models itself on the plan of Joyce's Ulysses, which in turn is also based on The Odyssey, I don't mean to imply that this is a deliberate pattern of the books. But I will say that thinking about the character of Odysseus may prove helpful in thinking about the character of Michael Forsythe. Because the chief word that springs to mind for both characters is "cunning". Not kind, not compassionate, although both characters do at times exhibit these traits, but cunning. Like Odysseus, Michael Forsythe makes survival his highest value. Odysseus does this because he intends to return home, no matter the pain, and no matter the cost. Forsythe never makes this goal plain, even to himself, but in fact, there is a Penelope, though not as Penelope ever imagined herself, and there is even a Telemachus of sorts, though the less I say about that the better.

I believe that Odysseus is a type of human consciousness and Michael Forsythe is a reflection of that type. Although we see Odysseus in a heroic light, Forsythe casts a different sort of light. In a way, he shows the limits of the heroic mold. Odysseus survives by embodying the heroic values of courage, resourcefulness, foresight, and yes, cunning. So does Michael. But in these, our latter times, the ending is not so neat. Michael Forsythe, at the end of the day, is not a Hero, but a human being. And human beings carry within them the history of all their actions--an anti-heroic tale indeed.