“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, November 23, 2007
Nobody Move, This Is A Review: IN THE WOODS by Tana French
Maxine blogs at Petrona. Her reviews are collected at Petrona Book Reviews.
This review is republished by the kind permission of Euro Crime.
“Yes, A Stalker Is A Person In Your Neighbourhood / In Your Neighbourhood …”
“Ahem! Ahem-hem!” (There follows much clearing of tiny throats and jostling to get to the back of the deputation). “Every once in a while, an Irish crime fiction writer slips under the radar we’re supposed to be manning – elving, rather – to ensure that every Irish crime fiction writer gets a fair crack of the whip. Now, we’re the first to admit that it’s entirely possible that this is our fault, but what matters right now is that if we don’t get some info together on Leo Farrell, author of NOT ALL STALKERS ARE BAD, then the Grand Vizier, Declan Burke, is going to cut off our supply of patented Elf-Wonking Juice and ban us from hanging out in the dungeons with HR Pufnstuf and his magical hookah. And so far, all we’ve got is this blurb:
Stalking is a recognised psychological disorder. In simple terms it is the pursuit of prey by stealth for a purpose. In the case of Walter Slater, the prey was an accountant in his workplace. The purpose was to establish a loving relationship between them. The modus operandi was in breach of the law. Walter’s apologia chronicles his bizarre and lascivious stalking, stealing and data theft to obtain insider information to help him in his dangerous project to win the beautiful Sarah.“As far as we know, Leo Farrell is a playwright, both for stage and radio, although NOT ALL STALKERS ARE BAD appears to be his debut novel. Can anyone out there help us fill in the gaps? We’d be very grateful. Without the Elf-Wonking Juice, life at Crime Always Pays Towers simply wouldn’t be worth living. And even if you don’t have any information, we’d appreciate it if you’d tell the Grand Vizier to lay off with the bull-whip. We thank you for your attention.”
Thursday, November 22, 2007
The Mighty Quinn: Just Got That Bit Mightier
Looking Good, Feeling Belgian
Whatever You Say, Say Nothing*
Gerry Adams’ publisher has hit out at the “censorious approach” of the republican movement after another of his authors – Colombian fugitive James Monaghan – pulled out of promotional interviews apparently on the orders of the IRA. Mr Monaghan has told publisher Steve MacDonagh that he will not do broadcast interviews for his new book, COLOMBIA JAIL JOURNAL, which was published by Brandon Books yesterday. The book is Mr Monaghan’s account of his arrest in Colombia in 2001 with Niall Connolly and Martin McAuley. The three men were later convicted of aiding FARC guerrillas but fled the country while on bail and returned to Ireland. Mr MacDonagh, who also published several of Gerry Adams’ [right, with James Monaghan] books, said Mr Monaghan’s contract for the book had included a provision to promote it. But he said that shortly before yesterday’s publication, to his “complete surprise”, Mr Monaghan informed him that the republican movement had told him not to take part in any broadcast interviews. As a result, a planned appearance on RTE’s popular ‘Late Late Show’ was cancelled. Mr MacDonagh said his understanding was that the order blocking broadcast interviews did not come from Sinn Fein. However, he said yesterday he has now been told Mr Monaghan’s print interviews will be “supervised by Sinn Fein”. “As far as I understand Sinn Fein will choose which publications he speaks to,” he said. “That isn’t the way Brandon (Books) does business. […] We won’t take part in such a censorious approach. With our authors, we want them to be available to all the media.” The publisher said he was particularly displeased because he had a long track record of campaigning against censorship laws in the Republic, which were frequently applied against Sinn Fein. Mr MacDonagh withdrew his planned promotional campaign for the book but Sinn Fein scheduled their own launch in Dublin last night.* With apologies, as always, to Seamus Heaney
Ready, Amis, Fire …
What do you make of the following statement: “Asians are gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered.” While we’re at it, what do you think of this, incidentally from the same speaker: “The Black community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” Or this, the same speaker again: “I just don’t hear from moderate Judaism, do you?” And (yes, same speaker): “Strip-searching Irish people. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole Irish community and they start getting tough with their children.” The speaker was Martin Amis and, yes, the quotations have been modified, with Asians, Blacks and Irish here substituted for Muslims, and Judaism for Islam - though, it should be stressed, these are the only amendments. Terry Eagleton, professor of English literature at Manchester University, where Amis has also started to teach, recently quoted the remarks in a new edition of his book IDEOLOGY: AN INTRODUCTION. Amis, Eagleton claimed, was advocating nothing less than the “hounding and humiliation” of Muslims so “they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man’s law”. […] The views quoted by Eagleton first appeared last year, in an interview Amis [right] gave to Ginny Dougary of the Times. That they passed with virtually no comment at the time says a great deal about the depoliticised state of intellectual debate in Britain. While a great deal of media time and energy is spent discussing the latest translation of WAR AND PEACE or the artwork in the refurbished St Pancras station, there has been, with a few notable exceptions, a puzzling lack of effort when it comes to something as critical as expressing support for an increasingly demonised minority in our society. Martin Amis should have been taken to task by his peers for his views. He was not. […] This is a community under attack, and not just by novelists. By every official index, violence and discrimination against Muslims have increased since 2001. The victims of physical violence will always be a minority – although Asian people are twice as likely to be stabbed to death than they were ten years ago – but what the majority experience in their daily lives is much more insidious, the kind of coded rejection that in this more enlightened age takes the place of outright expressions of racism. And, of course, hanging over them are threats of control orders, curfews, arrest and extended periods of detention without trial. Just as the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act left the Irish community in Britain feeling like a suspect nation, so the infinitely more repressive anti- terrorist legislation – including 28 days’ detention without charge rather than the old seven when the IRA were active – of today intimidates, alienates and inflames Muslims. […] I can’t help feeling that Amis’s remarks, his defence of them, and the reaction to them were a test. They were a test of our commitment to a society in which imaginative sympathy applies not just to those like us but to those whose lives and beliefs run along different lines. And I can’t help feeling we failed that test. Amis got away with it. He got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it.
Ronan Bennett wrote the screenplay of THE HAMBURG CELL, a film about the 9/11 hijackers. His latest novel is ZUGZWANG.
The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books
On a midsummer’s evening, a young Dublin woman, Lucy Dolan, prepares for a showdown that will help make sense of a heart-breaking and brutal atrocity that happened thirteen years earlier, changing her life forever. As she waits for the arrival of the charismatic figure who is the key to the mystery, she recounts her life story – a rich and extraordinary tale spanning two generations of storytellers and deal-makers, fortune-tellers and gamblers, businessmen and warlords, and the people that feared, served and betrayed them. With each twist of this tumultuous story, Lucy revisits her childhood and early adolescence – trying to get her head around the things people do in the name of love and hate, greed and desire – and she pieces together afresh the events that led to the night that still haunts her.Oooh, spooky. To be in with a chance of winning a copy, just tell us if hellfire is:
(a) Quite warm;Answers to dbrodb(at)gmail.com before noon on Monday, November 26, putting ‘Don’t be a complete Herbert’ in the subject line. Und Glück, unsere Freunde …
(b) Really, really hot;
(c) Don’t be complete Herbert, the pope said there’s no such thing as hell anymore.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Chick Lit Vs Crime Fic: Ding-Ding, Seconds Out …
Crime fiction and chick lit may have more in common than they might think. Both are equally despised by the literary establishment, one for being too grubby, the other for being too simplistic and sanitised. Both are commercial genres, aiming to entertain. And both tend to tell stories about self-absorbed characters hoping for the one big pay-off that will set their world to rights. There is a crucial difference, though. Chick lit explores the needs and wants of a character who demands instant gratification, generally that of sparkler and an expense account. The crime fiction crew are after sparklers and easy loot too, but their stories tend to explore the social backdrop that has allowed their law-breakers to emerge. The chick lit gals are eyeing themselves up in a full-length mirror of your nearest shopping centre changing-room; the crime guys are down at the station, eyeballing the latest line-up of usual suspects through the two-way mirror. Still, there’s no denying that chick lit has given the Irish reader what they’ve wanted. Bling, glitz, shopping-and-fucking – the Celtic Tiger was a chick lit novel, albeit during a bad hair decade. The better women’s writers, Marian Keyes being the best example, were astute enough to give the readers what they wanted, while also advising them to be careful what they wished for. But for the most part chick lit novels are Jilly Cooper shop-n’-bonk knock-offs, describing a world that is Thatcher’s Britain 20 years late and more than a few dollars short. The worst sin? The homogeneity of it all. The main characters are almost always thirty-something singletons, frustrated in work and yearning for a creative outlet, the consort of a heartless man and on the lookout for a slightly straighter version of their gay best friend with whom to share their immaculate taste in fashion – hell, if there really were that many gorgeous, intelligent thirty-something singletons around, why would any man, fictional or otherwise, stroll up the aisle with just one of them? Meanwhile, one joy that goes with reading the new Irish crime fiction is its sheer diversity. Ken Bruen’s ramshackle post-modern detective Jack Taylor rambling the mean-ish streets of Galway. Tana French’s coolly lyrical police procedural IN THE WOODS. Gene Kerrigan’s gritty realism, whether it’s disillusioned detectives or psychopathic thugs. Brian McGilloway’s flawed but human Inspector Devlin. Ingrid Black’s take on the post-feminist detective. Eoin McNamee’s fictionalised investigation into Princess Diana’s death. KT McCaffrey’s crusading reporter Emma Boylan. Declan Hughes’s classic PI-inspired tales of Dublin 4. John Connolly’s spooky gothic-horror crime tales. Adrian McKinty’s hardboiled first-person killer Michael Forsythe. And those are just some of the novels that have been published in the last six months or so. The stories these writers tell have something to say not just about who we are, but where we’re coming from and going to. At a time when the Irish taoiseach is before a tribunal explaining financial irregularities, and not for the first time, Irish crime writers are exploring political corruption, the brown bag culture, the exploitation of communities for the benefit of individuals. If journalism is the first draft of history, Irish crime writing is redrafting it with its stories of abductions and rapes, murders and bank robberies, not just detailing the events but fleshing out in fictional form the kinds of people who make our newspaper headlines, and why. It is, perhaps, still too soon for Irish people to confront the reality behind the Celtic Tiger headlines. After all, no one wants to leave a party too soon, and there’s always one last glass of champagne to be found, even if it’s already losing its fizz. But the hangover is in the post. The clean-up will be starting soon, and there’ll be post-mortems demanded on exactly who broke the precious crystal, stole the family heirlooms and left an unspecified mess in the laundry basket. Some of them are already written. Check under ‘crime fiction’ in your nearest bookstore.- Declan Burke
This article did not appear first in the Evening Herald
Nobody Move, This Is A Review: SATURDAY’S CHILD by Ray Banks
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Books: The Final Chapter?
“I’m beginning to think that the changes afoot in the world of publishing will actually consolidate in the near future and it’s time to face the reality. Masses of paperbacks of short useful lives aren’t particularly environmentally friendly. Neither is their distribution mechanism. Those digital readers we booklovers shun with horror just might take off. The book as we’ve known it for so long may indeed become a limited edition and at a high price.”For the record – not that you care, but now that you’re here we might as well toss in our two cents – we’re in the Luddite* camp on the Kindle issue, being of the opinion that books make for wonderful wallpaper, marvellous insulation, and, given that their basic design hasn’t needed to change for about 400 years, represent the most ideal blend of form and function since the wheel. As for hardbacks – they’re clunky, expensive and elitist. For fiction, anyway. Good riddance.
* In the interests of openness and transparency, it’s only fair that we point out that there are witnesses who can testify that CAP Grand Vizier Declan Burke once opined, aloud, that ‘yon email malarkey is only a passing fad’. So his opinion on any technological development should be taken with a Siberian mine-sized pinch of salt.
The Embiggened O # 1,219: The Stick Hasn’t Been Born Yet That Could Beat An Irish Stew
“Think of the ironic humour of Donald Westlake’s John Dortmunder novels, and throw in the black humour of a Carl Hiaasen Florida-misadventure novel. Mix up the humorous, determined, demented heroes and anti-heroes of these two fantastic authors and (I’m not done yet!) toss in some hardboiled writing, a lot like Elmore Leonard’s, and you have Declan Burke’s writing. Think of it as an Irish Stew of writing.”An Irish stew, eh? That’s us, alright: thick, gloopy and, y’know, nutritious … Meanwhile, over at It’s A Crime! Or A Mystery!, Crimefic has the latest instalment of her ‘Books for Christmas’, as recommended by page-blackeners of the crime fraternity. First off, the lovely Donna Moore – author of GO TO HELENA HANDBASKET – cheats disgracefully by mentioning THE BIG O in a quick round-up of the books she won’t be choosing, and then Brian McGilloway, he of BORDERLANDS fame, pitches in with this:
“If I have to pick one, I couldn’t, so I’ll go for two. For a new discovery, I’d have to say Declan Burke’s THE BIG O, which I read in one sitting a few months back. This is an extremely funny crime novel that takes Irish crime fiction in a whole new direction. Under the cracking comedy of the book lurks some very subtle and highly skilful plotting and prose. Declan’s just got a US deal, so catch THE BIG O before it gets any bigger.”Blimey! With all that good karma floating around, who needs Elf-Wonking Juice? Thank you kindly, people – feel the love …
We Kid You, We Kid You Not
The mother of fourteen–year–old twins Rich and Jade dies in a car crash and they are told they must go and live with their estranged father, who they have never met before. Neither the children nor their father get on, but when Rich and Jade witness him being kidnapped they are drawn into a dangerous crisis that could engulf not just their family but the whole world ...But probably won’t. Meanwhile, Eoin Colfer (below) – whose work to date has targeted younger readers, via the Artemis Fowl series and the hopefully not for much longer standalone HALF MOON INVESTIGATIONS – is planning to go after that pesky adult audience. Quoth El Colf:
“When I’ve finished [Artemis 6] I’m doing an adult thriller which I’ve been asked to, and I’m hoping to do that very quickly, as it’s quite short … I did a story last year for a collection called DUBLIN NOIR, which is part of a series called NEW YORK NOIR, CHICAGO NOIR, a fantastic series. And I thought ‘Oh my God, all these guys are famous detective writers’, so I thought ‘I’m going to do the funniest story I have ever written,’ and all of the swearwords that have been stored up over the years are going into this!”And there was us thinking he’d been using Fowl language all along … Oh come on, people, it’s Tuesday!
Monday, November 19, 2007
Happiness Is The New Black
For one thing, these days Banville is revelling in the freedom afforded by his guise as a crime novelist. “On the brink of old age, I’m suddenly having fun,” he says. “I didn’t realise writing novels as so easy until I became Benjamin Black – you just sit there and make it up as you go along. I mean, John Banville will work on a sentence for half a day; Benjamin just goes, ‘Bugger it, that’ll do.’”Nice to see Banville mellowing out last, eh? Erm, not quite …
“I needed to take a serious break from what I was doing,” he says. “The road I was on was too straight, and I had to take a side road. The John Banville book I’m doing at the moment will be slightly different because of Benjamin Black. The difference will be minimal but significant. I had to stop writing in the first person and start writing, as Beckett would say, in the last person. I needed a change.”Okay. But surely now, with two Quirke novels under his belt, the crime fiction world is his oyster with Guinness chasers, right? Nope …
“Somehow, that genre doesn’t allow for humour. And that, if anything, would drive me away from crime fiction. It’s all so bloody gloomy and deterministic. And it’s because everything is moving towards a denouement, towards a close. Life is funny because there is no end to it, it’s an open joke. But crime fiction is not like life – it can’t be, because everything is going to be explained at the end. And that doesn’t happen.”Laugh? We almost emigrated. Still, there is some good news, folks – Banville / Black “has already completed a third Benjamin Black novel, to be serialised in the New York Times, which took him six weeks to write …”. Six weeks, according to our crude calculations, being roughly what it takes John Banville to write an entire paragraph. Ah well, quality over quantity every time, eh ? What’s that? You want it good and fast? Bloody peons …