“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.” – Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian
Friday, July 13, 2007
News Flash Or Flash News? YOU Decide!
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Funky Friday’s Free-For-All: Because Every Cloud Has Its Silver Friday
How Late Late It Was, How Late Late
Here’s One We Made Earlier: Fast One by Paul Cain
"The bigger they come, the faster they fall. Ray Chandler proposed that a writer should have a man come through the door with a gun already in his hand should things ever threaten to calm down, and perhaps that’s why he called Fast One ‘ultra hard-boiled’. With a body count of Cecil B. DeMille proportions, Paul Cain’s only novel (he also published a collection of short stories, Seven Slayers) arrived in 1933, after a serialisation in Black Mask. The joins show, much in the same way as gaps appear between explosions in a fireworks display. The terse, virtually monosyllabic prose seems hammered into the paper (Last line: “Then, after a little while, life went away from him.”) as gunsel Gerry Kells wreaks havoc in the criminal underworld of Depression-era LA, his hypnotic paranoia eventually justified as various kingpins conspire to rub him out. Harder than Chandler, bleaker than Hammett, sparer than James Cain, Fast One is an incendiary device in book form."The big question: can anyone tell us if a movie was ever made from Fast One? Ta.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Mmmm, Pleasanter and Pleasanter …
“That hunger for potential franchise material is something London-based literary agent Michelle Kass experienced firsthand when she came to Los Angeles in May with her client Derek Landy’s novel Skulduggery Pleasant, a fantastic tale of a young female detective who teams up with a wisecracking ghost. Kass and Landy were wooed by several major studios, even meeting with Steven Spielberg, before executive Kevin McCormick persuaded them that Warners was the right home for the project with a deal that gave Landy around $1 million, along with the right to script the film and be involved with creating his own video game.”Still, at least yon Landy isn’t dating Nicole Kidman and Keira Knightley, eh?
Sliding For Home
Flick Lit # 139: The Story of Sailor and Lula / Wild at Heart
“Findin’ out the meanin’ of life and all is fine, far as it goes, but dead’s dead, you know what I mean?”Barry Gifford doesn’t mince words. Wild at Heart – The Story of Sailor and Lula (1990) is a novel written by an author who is also a prize-winning poet, which partially explains his ability to pack 44 chapters into 156 pages, and also goes some way towards explaining the impressionistic, imagistic style he employs. Each chapter is a short, punchy vignette in which Sailor and Lula outline their philosophy on life while striving to stay one step ahead of the law and the potential killer Lula’s mama has set on their trail. A seamless blend of ’40s hard-boiled brevity and the on-the-road Beat of the ’50s, Wild at Heart comes on like some deranged, addled offspring of Horace McCoy and Jack Kerouac as he struggles to draw breath in the steamy, sultry atmosphere of a William Faulkner short story. On his release from prison after serving a term for manslaughter, Sailor Ripley breaks parole and takes to the road with Lula Pace Fortune in order to escape the oppressive grasp of Lula’s disproving mother, Marietta. The plot doesn’t get any more convoluted than that; what sustains the narrative is the colourful cast of characters the couple encounter on their flight west towards California. By turns bizarre, grotesque and lethal, the collection of misfits only serves to confirm Lula’s heartfelt conviction that the world is indeed ‘wild at heart and weird on top.’ Imbued with Southern gentility and decorum, Gifford’s style has been described by critic Patrick Beach as ‘chicken-fried noir’ and – as per the rules of hard-boiled fiction – a happy ending is never on the cards for the star-crossed lovers. “Safe?” exclaims Marietta’s friend, Dal. “Safe? Ain’t that a stitch. Ain’t nobody nowhere never been safe a second of their life.” The frisson generated by a blend of uncertain direction and inevitable danger crackles from the back seat of Lula’s white ’75 Bonneville convertible. A distraught Lula can force Sailor to dump a crazy hitchhiker when the kid gets a little too weird for her liking, but she remains all too aware of the overwhelming forces – not least of which is Fate – ranged against the pair.
Sailor stroked Lula’s head.A collaboration between Barry Gifford and David Lynch must have seemed an unlikely prospect after the publication of Gifford’s collection of ‘film impressions’, The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1988), in which Gifford refers to Lynch’s critically acclaimed Blue Velvet (1986) as “One cut above a snuff film.” Collaborate they did, however, and while Lynch applied his trademark visual hyperbole to the project, the movie remains faithful in tone and narrative to Gifford’s novel. However, Lynch infected the dream-like innocence of the tale with nightmarish overtones. The recurring motif is that of a perverse vision of The Wizard of Oz. It appears – and with Lynch no one can ever be really sure – that the director was offering his own inimitable version of how the American Dream has evolved into a nightmare. Elvis Presley – the ultimate poor-boy-made-good – is reincarnated in the poses Nic Cage strikes, his cornpone philosophy, and Cage even sings a couple of classic Elvis tunes. Wild at Heart, asserts Richard Scheib, is ‘a ’50s rock ‘n’ roll movie gone to hell’. That runs counter to Catherine Texier’s claim, in the New York Times Book Review, that “Gifford’s characters inhabit a surreal world that is both hilarious and sad ... naively sentimental yet tough as nails.” Lynch sustains Gifford’s vision of the ‘naively sentimental’ through Sailor and Lula’s unbreakable devotion to one another, but also exaggerates the surreal, investing the minor characters with a menace and threat that goes far beyond that imagined by the author. The result is a movie that evolves from a road trip into a head-trip, a hallucinatory experience in which the worst possible imaginable consequences are only a fairy-tale reference away. Lynch, however, has rarely been in such command of his material and his authority is transmitted to the screen by a superb ensemble cast that includes Harry Dean Stanton, Willem Dafoe, Isabella Rossellini, Crispin Glover and Diane Ladd. Critics and fans remain divided over the merits of Wild at Heart (the movie did secure the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival) but one thing is certain – Wild at Heart redefined the road movie genre, pushing the parameters so far as to ensure that even the neo-realism of Oliver Stone’s notorious Natural Born Killers struggled to match its swaggering bravado. As Lula herself would say: “Dreams ain’t no odder than real life … Sometimes not by half.”– Michael McGowan
“It ain’t gonna be forever, peanut.”
Lula closed her eyes.
“I know, Sailor. Nothin’ is.”
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
The Inaugural Crime Always Pays ‘Best First Line Of A Novel That Will Never Be Written’ Award: # 1: Nick Stone
“The first film I ever saw and loved was Peckinpah’s The Getaway with Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw. My mother took me to see it in Haiti when I was six.”Seriously – how could you not keep reading on after that kind of opener?
Moloney Talks, Baloney Walks
Nobody Move, This Is A Review: End Games by Michael Dibdin
This review is reproduced with the kind permission of the Irish Times.
Monday, July 9, 2007
The Embiggened O # 2,431: The Future’s So Bright We Gotta Wear Critical Mick’s Shades
“Mick says: the dialogue, characters, plot and action were swift, sharp and entertaining enough to merit the suspension of disbelief. The same way that Training Day is a great movie despite the yawning implausibility of its crucial coincidence. Yes, the same way that 2006’s Running Scared ran so fast and slick. Winners all, big time. Riding the movie theme hard into this review’s conclusion: The Big O is the stuff Tarantino or Guy Ritchie would make into a film, a great fun film like Snatch, Layer Cake or Get Shorty. Filled with as many great characters as Pulp Fiction or (my personal fave 90’s crime flick) Things to do in Denver When You're Dead. Burke’s The Big O would inspire a classic full of tough crooks, wise cracks, drugs, flash and boobies. “Wow,” viewers would say. And then the hippest moviegoers, leading their hot redheaded dates outta the cinema, slipping on their designer shades, would say, “Yeah, but have you read the book it was based on? The book was better.””Huzzah! We’ve been Micked and lived to tell the tale! That’s another one to tell the grandkids …
*Actually, he was very Critical. But we cut out the bad bits. As you do.
“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 291: Brian McGilloway
What crime novel would you most like to have written?
I’m stuck between The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins and Last Car to Elysian Fields by James Lee Burke for totally different reasons. Can I pick two? I just have.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t really feel guilty reading anything. Any of Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels would certainly qualify under the ‘pleasures’ though.
Most satisfying writing moment?
My four year old son picking up a copy of Borderlands in a shop to see his name in the dedication at the start after he started learning how to spell in school. That’s the best so far, and will be kind of hard to beat, I think.
The best Irish crime novel is …
I’m not sure I’ve read enough to make a judgement. The Killing Kind by John Connolly is one of my favourite crime novels by an Irish writer. I read it a few summers ago in one sitting.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Again, I’m not sure I’m qualified to judge. A book I’d love to see on the small screen would be The Rye Man by David Park. A great book about a teacher starting in a new school, which I was reading when I started teaching. You’ll need to read it to get the crime element.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is the self-imposed solitary confinement to write and having plot points clogging up your brain for days. The best thing is cracking those plot points when you least expect it.
Why does John Banville use a pseudonym for writing crime?
Maybe he thinks it sounds harder. Like Benny Blanco from the Bronx in Carlito’s Way.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Words on pages? Border-based mysteries? You decide.
Brian McGilloway’s Borderlands was short-listed for the CWA Duncan Lawrie Debut Dagger