Crime Always Pays

Neville’s next novel, COLLUSION, is in part a sequel to THE TWELVE. It follows one of the minor characters from his debut, a policeman investigating his missing wife and child, but the novelist says the similarities between the new book and its predecessor end there. “The Twelve is about frustration, about knowing that people will never be held to account for what they did. COLLUSION will not touch on those issues. It has nothing to do with party politics or Stormont.”
  Decades of fatuous Hollywood IRA flicks may have given audiences Troubles fatigue, but there is now an appetite for understanding Northern Ireland. “I think the next 10 years are going to be a very interesting time,” Neville says. “You have to remember that great fiction never emerges until a conflict is over. Look at the Second World War: while that was going on, the only things coming out were propaganda films, but in the years after, it inspired so much. Part of the reason is that, after the fact, you don’t need to be so politically sensitive.”

Former paramilitary killer Gerry Fegan wanders New York City, hiding from a past he escaped at a terrible cost. But he made a fatal mistake: he spared the life of Bull O’Kane, a ruthless man who will stop at nothing to get his revenge. Too many witnesses survived a bloody battle at his border farm, and now he wants them silenced, whether man, woman or child. O’Kane calls the Traveller, an assassin without pity or remorse, a killer of the purest kind. Back in Belfast, Detective Inspector Jack Lennon, father of one the witnesses, is caught up in a web of official secrets and lies as he tries to uncover the whereabouts of his daughter. The closer he gets to the truth about the events on O’Kane’s border farm, the more his superiors instruct him to back off. When Fegan realises he can’t shake off the trail of violence that has followed him across the world, he has no choice but to return to Belfast and confront his past. The Traveller awaits Fegan’s return, ready for the fight of his life. A fast-paced thriller about duty and revenge, COLLUSION is a blistering sequel to THE TWELVE, one of the most highly acclaimed debuts of recent years.

Money ... Power ... Drugs ... Women. Just another day at the office ... Boston journalist Dave Schumann is in line for a major posting from the US Secretary of State. But instead, his big smart mouth gets him exited to Derry, the rainiest city in Ireland. There, the new envoy is forced to contend with psychotic drug smugglers, a leftie shock-jock who wants to burn him live on air and a renegade security team who are monitoring his every move. Schumann’s letters to his father and friends reveal his increasingly precarious – and hilarious – struggle to cope with the most thankless job on earth. And that’s before he discovers there’s a spy in the camp who has dark plans for the Presidential visit.

Death and violence are all Pavel Sunic has ever known. Only one person matters to him, his sister Ana. When she pays the ultimate price to secure his release from a Bosnian prison, he vows to avenge her death. The bloody path he creates leads to Dublin.
  Quick Investigations is suffering. With his partner Sarah Kenny still missing, John Quigley struggles to keep the business afloat. When Rose Butler approaches him to investigate the death of her daughter Alison, John takes the case even though the evidence points to suicide.
  Yet why did the promising doctor and mother of two choose to die alone in a shabby hotel room? What was her relationship with Ivan Colbert, a disgraced surgeon? And just how dangerous is the dead woman's husband?
  Torn between his case and his personal life, John is stretched beyond capacity. And the arrival of Pavel Sunic threatens to bring the whole pack of cards crashing down.
  Blood Money: first do no harm, second, run for cover.

West Cork, November 1920. The Irish War of Independence rages. The body of a young woman is found brutally murdered on a windswept hillside. A scrap board sign covering her mutilated body reads ‘TRATOR’. Traitor. Acting Sergeant Sean O’Keefe of the Royal Irish Constabulary, a wounded veteran of the Great War, is assigned to investigate the crime, aided by sinister detectives sent from Dublin Castle to ensure he finds the killer, just so long as the killer he finds best serves the purposes of the Crown in Ireland. The IRA has instigated its own investigation into the young woman’s death, assigning young Volunteer Liam Farrell - failed gunman and former law student - to the task of finding a killer it cannot allow to be one of its own. Unknown to each other, an RIC constable and an IRA Volunteer relentlessly pursue the truth behind the savage killing, their investigations taking them from the bullet-pocked lanes and thriving brothels of war-torn Cork city to the rugged, deadly hills of West Cork.

Last year was something of an annus mirabilis for Irish crime writing, with superb novels on offer from John Connolly, Declan Hughes, Gene Kerrigan, Stuart Neville, Adrian McKinty and Brian McGilloway, among others. It was also a year, as that list suggests, that was rather light on X chromosomes. This year, however, sees a whole slew of Irish women crime writers hit the shelves, a fact to be celebrated not so much for its quantity as for the sheer diversity of crime novel on offer.
  Sunday World crime correspondent Niamh O’Connor has published non-fiction titles in the past, but IF I NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN is her debut fiction. A police procedural featuring DI Jo Bermingham, its edgy tone taps into O’Connor’s personal experience of her day job.
  “I needed an outlet for this perverse reaction I was having when various gangland bosses got knocked off,” she says, ‘which was a feeling of ‘good riddance’. I’d heard and seen first hand the devastating injuries suffered by Dr James Donovan, who founded the forensic science laboratory, and who was blown up in a car bomb by the ‘General’, Martin Cahill, because of his incredible work making society safer for the rest of us.”

Aifric Campbell’s debut, THE SEMANTICS OF MURDER (2008), offered a sophisticated, literary take on the murder mystery novel. While there is a violent death at the heart of THE LOSS ADJUSTOR, however, the mystery being investigated here is the nature of the loss that has left the narrator, Caroline – Caro to her very few friends – perilously close to emotional stasis, unable or unwilling to engage with life in all its glorious messiness.
  Ironically, Caro works as a loss adjustor for a London insurance company, putting a price on the losses people incur every day through theft, fire, or random act of God. So why has this intelligent, attractive and professionally successful woman so few friends? Why so very few lovers? Why, at the age of 27, did she go seeking sterilisation?

A GONZO NOIR is a story about how a struggling writer – one Declan Burke, coincidentally enough – is approached by a character called Karlsson, the latter being a character from an m/s Burke wrote some years ago, but which got shelved for its lack of commercial appeal, principally because Karlsson is a hospital porter and something of a psychopath, given to alleviating the pain of old patients in a terminal fashion. Trapped in the half-life limbo peopled by fictional characters who never see publication, Karlsson has a suggestion for Burke: make him a nicer psychopath to give the novel more commercial appeal, and give the story more oomph. To this end, Karlsson will collaborate on a rewrite of the m/s, which will involve him blowing up the hospital where he works. If Burke doesn’t play ball, then Karlsson will turn his psychopathic tendencies on Burke’s wife and baby daughter …

“A genuinely original take on noir, inventive and funny. Imagine, if you can, a cross between Flann O’Brien and Raymond Chandler.” – John Banville, Booker Prize-winning author of THE SEA

“A GONZO NOIR is unlike anything else you’ll read this year … Laugh-out-loud funny … This is writing at its dazzling, cleverest zenith. Think John Fowles, via Paul Auster and Rolling Stone … a feat of extraordinary alchemy.” – Ken Bruen, author of AMERICAN SKIN

“Burke has written a deep, lyrical and moving crime novel … an intoxicating and exciting novel of which the master himself, Flann O’Brien, would be proud.” – Adrian McKinty, author FIFTY GRAND

“Stop waiting for Godot – he’s here. Declan Burke takes the existential dilemma of characters writing themselves and turns it on its ear, and then some. He gives it body and soul … an Irish soul.” – Reed Farrel Coleman, three-time Shamus Award-winning author of EMPTY EVER AFTER

“A GONZO NOIR is shockingly original and completely entertaining. Post-modern crime fiction at its very best.” – John McFetridge, author of EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE

“A harrowing and yet hilarious examination of the gradual disintegration of a writer’s personality, as well as a damned fine noir novel … Burke has outdone himself this time; it’s a hell of a read.” – Scott Philips, author of THE ICE HARVEST

“The subtext of the story is the impact of technology on culture and commerce, and the unfailing collapse of any industry that allows itself to be blinded by sloth, short term greed, and general mediocrity of attitudes.
  “Anyone with an imagination about the future of technology and commerce knows that the printed book on paper is already on its way to obsolescence. The wrangling and beefing and whining about prices and protecting demand for printed books by publishing executives is both amusing and tragic.”

“I hardly read Irish writers any more, I’ve been disappointed so often. I mean, what the FECK are writers in their 20s and 30s doing, copying the very great John McGahern, his style, his subject matter, in the 21st century? To revive a useful old Celtic literary-critical expression: I puke my ring. And the older, more sophisticated Irish writers that want to be Nabokov give me the yellow squirts and a scaldy hole …
“The role of the Irish writer is not really to win prizes in Ireland; their role historically has been to get kicked out of the country for telling the truth. And there’s not quite enough of that going on. Just when we need a furious army of novelists, we are getting fairly polite stuff published by Faber & Faber that fits into the grand tradition … At the moment Ireland has one, massively developed, lyrical realism arm which is all biceps, and the other arm, the odd, freaky, tattooed arm, needs to be built up. In a way I’m trying to rally a few young writers around a flag which hasn’t been waved in a while. You can’t save the world with a novel, but it can put a tiny featherweight on the scales.”

“But surely that’s a business model, a standard template for ambition? The conviction that what you’ve got is good enough to release into the wild and stands a reasonable chance of selling is at the heart of launching any new product.”

“What worries me is the loss of income for writers in what is a pretty healthy market, the loss of good editors from publishing houses and the disdain for writers by retailers – people who depend on them. If they are not careful the core talent of the book trade may well combine in new types of ventures – collectives and transparent relationships where writers and editors go into business together on a 50:50 basis and are enabled by web platforms, ebooks and print on demand… disintermediation of a more radical sort.”

“CRIME ALWAYS PAYS is part road movie and part farce, reminding me sometimes of Elmore Leonard, sometimes of Allan Guthrie (particularly SAVAGE NIGHT), sometimes of Donald Westlake (particularly the Dortmunder books), and sometimes of the Coen brothers (particularly Blood Simple) – sometimes all at once.”

“You’re going to hell, Jack Nightingale.” They are the words that ended his career as a police negotiator. Now Jack’s a struggling private detective – and the chilling words come back to haunt him. Nightingale’s life is turned upside down the day that he inherits a mansion with a priceless library; it comes from a man who claims to be his father, and it comes with a warning. That Nightingale’s soul was sold at birth and a devil will come to claim it on his thirty-third birthday – just three weeks away. Jack doesn’t believe in Hell, probably doesn’t believe in Heaven either. But when people close to him start to die horribly, he is led to the inescapable conclusion that real evil may be at work. And that if he doesn’t find a way out he’ll be damned in hell for eternity.

America - the land of opportunity, a place where economic prosperity beckons: but not for PI Jack Taylor, who’s just been refused entry. Disappointed and bitter, he thinks that an encounter with an over-friendly stranger in an airport bar is the least of his problems. Except that this stranger seems to know rather more than he should about Jack. Jack thinks no more of their meeting and resumes his old life in Galway. But when he’s called to investigate a student murder - connected to an elusive Mr K - he remembers the man from the airport. Is the stranger really is who he says he is? With the help of the Jameson, Jack struggles to make sense of it all. After several more murders and too many coincidental encounters, Jack believes he may have met his nemesis. But why has he been chosen? And could he really have taken on the devil himself?

Good news for those who, like myself, don’t own a Kindle (and thus have up to now not been able to get Declan Burke’s Kindle-only crime novel, CRIME ALWAYS PAYS). Kindle is now available as an i-phone or ipod-touch app (free), and Crime Always Pays is quite legible on an ipod-touch screen (plus it’s only US$1.25. PLUS Kindle is now also available as a free downloadable application for the PC, and soon to be available for Mac. Is this Kindle-strikes-back, after the rollout of the iPad?

THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSELL is the whimsical title to Bateman’s latest offering, and the second title in a year from a new Bateman series which features a hero who goes under the moniker of Mystery Man. I use the word “hero” advisedly: Bateman’s protagonist is the owner of a Belfast bookshop specialising in crime fiction, and a man who likes to dabble in puzzles and the solving of crimes unlikely to put him in any serious danger. He is a whinging hypochondriac, a coward and misogynist, a bookworm nerd who nonetheless gets the girl and saves the day. He may well turn out to be Colin Bateman’s most endearing creation.

A young man emerges from a car crash on a remote road in Boston. Although he walks away unscathed the crash has claimed an innocent life. Sixteen years later Melanie Yeats walks into a Garda station with her hands stained in blood. As she gradually reveals her story the detectives are left with more questions than answers. What is the connection between Melanie, her missing husband, the car crash in Boston and the death of a young woman? Is Melanie a murderer or a victim? Whose blood is on her hands? Where will her story lead them?

When the naked, blood-encrusted body of a well-known property developer is discovered on a graveyard slab, the media frenzy surrounding the story is overwhelming. Investigative journalist Emma Boylan is assigned to the case but she soon discovers that she will be playing second fiddle to a rival male reporter, much to her displeasure. Peeved at being sidelined, Emma embarks on a line of inquiry that leads her deep into the dark side of London's West End. Dead bodies continue to turn up amid the most elaborate theatrical settings imaginable. Undeterred, she probes further into disturbing deeds that have been a long time hidden. Now she must peel away layer after layer of deception until events collide and spiral into a terrifying, spectacular climax …

When Garda Inspector Benedict Devlin is summoned to a burning barn, he finds inside the charred remains of a man who is quickly identified as a local drug dealer, Martin Kielty. It soon becomes clear that Kielty’s death was no accident, and suspicion falls on a local vigilante group. Former paramilitaries, the men call themselves The Rising. Meanwhile, a former colleague’s teenage son has gone missing during a seaside camping trip. Devlin is relieved when the boy’s mother, Caroline Williams, receives a text message from her son’s phone, and so when a body is reported, washed up on a nearby beach, the inspector is baffled. When another drug dealer is killed, Devlin realises that the spate of deaths is more complex than mere vigilantism. But just as it seems he is close to understanding the case, a personal crisis will strike at the heart of Ben’s own family, and he will be forced to confront the compromises his career has forced upon him. With his fourth novel, McGilloway announces himself as one of the most exciting crime novelists around: gripping, heartbreaking and always surprising, The Rising is a tour de force – McGilloway’s most personal novel so far.

Ireland, 1970s. Returning home to County Cavan after five years at sea, Anton O’Neill (Anthony Fox) finds himself sucked into the Troubles that have erupted across the border in Northern Ireland. A political innocent, he becomes a pawn in the hands of ruthless terrorists, all the while striving to stay one step ahead of the hardboiled Detective Lynch (Gerard McSorley). With a baby on the way, Anton has big decisions to make – but he’s quickly discovering that sometimes it’s the decisions that make you. Made on a miniscule budget, Anton at times displays the kind of naïveté that bedevils Anton himself, and some of the dialogue is unforgivably clunky. For all that, and particularly given its humble origins, the movie represents something of a call to arms to the indigenous film industry, especially in the context of the series of more lavishly funded and abysmally executed Irish movies we’ve been subjected to in the last couple of years. Vivid cinematography and strong performances in the key roles make for a compelling drama, with Fox (who also wrote the script) marking himself out as a name to watch.

Lenny Abrahamson’s Adam & Paul is a rough diamond that follows ‘dying sick’ junkies Adam (Mark O’Halloran) and Paul (Tom Murphy) on their day-long purgatory through inner-city Dublin as they try to beg, borrow, scam or steal the money that will get them their next fix, with only an occasional toke to take the edge off. If that sounds like a bleak prospect, then be assured that script-writer O’Halloran has read and appreciated Beckett for his combination of black despair and blacker humour: rather than wait around for the elusive Godot, our latter-day Pozzo and Lucky tramp the streets in a Ulysses-style odyssey, encountering various friends, enemies and (for the most part) people who veer clear. Abrahamson makes wonderful use of Dublin’s grimmer environs, O’Halloran has a wonderful ear for vernacular dialogue, and the central roles are excellently played, with Murphy just about claiming the laurels. Hauntingly dark and frequently touching, Adam and Paul is also hilarious: when the pair mistake a Bulgarian (Caramitru) on a park bench for a Romanian refugee, the enraged Bulgarian denounces Dublin as ‘a shit-hole’ on the basis that the city is full of “maniacs, liars and fucking Romanians.” Assured and provocative, albeit indulgently sympathetic to its characters’ addiction, this as good a film as you’ll see all year.

THE TWELVE by Stuart Neville (32)
THE LOVERS by John Connolly (21)
DARK TIMES IN THE CITY by Gene Kerrigan (17)
WINTERLAND by Alan Glynn (15)
ALL THE DEAD VOICES by Declan Hughes (15)
FIFTY GRAND by Adrian McKinty (11)

This year has been a vintage one for the Irish crime novel, as writers tackle our post-boom neuroses. But it could become a high water mark, too, warns the retiring Declan Burke

Few literary agents come much bigger or more influential than Darley Anderson, and few have keener snouts for new talent. Twenty years ago, when he was getting his agency off the ground, he signed the unpublished Martina Cole and set about turning the thriller writer into a bestseller. Eleven years ago, he secured an advance of £350,000 for John Connolly’s debut novel, Every Dead Thing, the then 29-year-old Dublin crime writer having been rejected by half a dozen publishers before he approached Anderson. For reasons such as these, the publishing world listens when Anderson speaks.
  It’s especially depressing, therefore, to see what Anderson looks for in authors, which he outlined in candid terms to a publishing trade journal last month: plot first, characters second. “Good writing is the last thing,” said Anderson, “and we can work with authors on that.”
  The success of his stable of writers is testament to the wisdom of Anderson’s approach, but is formula is a depressing one for anyone who appreciates good crime writing. Plot and character are the staples of any good genre novel, but they are equally integral to movies, plays and even computer games. In reducing the crime novel to its most basic building blocks, and marginalising the author’s voice, Anderson is doing what the market requires. Artistry is an option extra that can be applied if and when necessary.
  Many in the new generation of Irish crime writers have taken a different tack. There is no school of Irish crime writing, but writers such as Gene Kerrigan, Alan Glynn, Declan Hughes and Stuart Neville have something in common in the way they have looked for cues to America, where noir novels take inspiration from the trinity of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, writers for whom matters of style were inextricably linked with matters of content. Their novels sold to a mass market but they also came to be recognised as works of art, and as having something to say about the societies in which they were set.
  In what may well come to be regarded as the watershed year for Irish crime fiction, Kerrigan, Hughes, Glynn and Neville this year published books that straddle the line between crime fiction ‘entertainments’, as Graham Greene referred to his crime narratives, and the social, or realist, novel. Political corruption, the fall-out from Northern Ireland’s Peace Process and the parlay of paramilitary gains into socially acceptable wealth were some of the themes explored. Angry, fresh and bracingly polemical, the novels are important contributions to our attempt to understand who we are and where we are going.
  They have a fair wind behind them. Writing about crime has become increasingly popular in Ireland over the last decade, and particularly in the last five years or so. The seismic shudders generated by the murder of Veronica Guerin shouldn’t be discounted, but the post-Troubles fall-out, the economic boom, an increasing urban anonymity and the commercial success of ‘chick lit’ have all contributed to a growing number of writers utilising crime narratives to tell their stories about modern Ireland.
  Connolly, who sets his supernatural thrillers in Maine, blazed a trail in the U.S. that Ken Bruen and Tana French have followed. There are movies being made from Irish crime novels, and awards are being won. Literary authors such as John Banville and Eoin McNamee write crime fiction under nom-de-plumes. All told, 2010 should be the year in which the Irish crime novel finally breaks out onto the international stage.
  If it does – and I hope it does – I won’t be along for the ride. Last month, and despite having two published novels under my belt (Eightball Boogie in 2003 and The Big O in 2007) I decided to hang up the gumshoes and abandon crime fiction. The problems of any struggling writer don’t amount to a hill of beans, but there can come a point, especially with a young family and a hefty mortgage, when the rational decision is to withdraw.
  For most aspiring writers, the business of writing involves working two to four hours per day, five or six days per week, all in the quixotic hope that someone, somewhere will like your book enough to pay you an advance that is enough, if you’re lucky, to pay two months’ worth of mortgage. Any business requires sacrifices to make it a success, but if you’re a writer, you’re asking others to make those sacrifices on your behalf, and that can come to seem wrongheaded, or worse, when you’re taking large chunks of time to write books that the market doesn’t want.
  Any sensible reflection on failure involves the realisation that, for one reason or another, one simply wasn’t up to delivering what was required. My problem, according to various rejection letters, was that my books aren’t big enough. By big, publishers mean books that will translate to an international audience and be easily adaptable for the movie screen. Ireland, in its post-Troubles, post-boom incarnation, is fertile ground for a writer, particularly given the prevalence of both blue- and white-collar crime, but the advice I’m being given is that Irish-set crime novels simply don’t have the appeal to cut it on the global stage.
  It’s not just me. In the last week alone I’ve had conversations with two well-respected and well-reviewed Irish crime writers, both of whom were pessimistic about their immediate futures because their books simply aren’t selling; one has already made the decision to stop writing. Their loss would not only impact on the potential of the Irish crime novel, it would raise a serious question mark as to whether the Irish crime novel can continue to generate the kind of momentum that would see it reach a tipping point of market acceptance.
  There are reasons for optimism. Hughes’s The Price of Blood was this year shortlisted for the Mystery Writers of America’s prestigious Edgar award in the U.S., while Kerrigan’s Dark Times in the City was nominated for the CWA Gold Dagger award in Britain. A fortnight ago, Neville’s debut The Twelve received top billing in the New York Times’ weekly review of crime fiction. Glynn’s recent release, Winterland, has been widely praised by reviewers.
  As any writer will tell you, however, you can’t eat good reviews. In any case, a review is just one person’s opinion. While Neville’s novel was recently praised by a South African reviewer for how it dealt with post-conflict politics, Hughes’s was given a negative verdict by a New Zealand reviewer on the basis that raking over the Troubles is in nobody’s interest. It’s telling, too, that Neville’s novel was published under its original title, The Ghosts of Belfast, in the U.S., but was rebranded for the British market because of perceived apathy or even antipathy to anything related to Northern Ireland.
  The next few years will be crucial for the development of the Irish crime novel. Are our stories big enough to compete on the international stage? Connolly sets novels in the U.S., and Bruen has recently taken to setting his standalone works in America too. Adrian McKinty’s most recent offering, Fifty Grand, was set in Cuba and Colorado, while Alex Barclay’s Blood Runs Cold, and her forthcoming Black Run, are also set in Colorado. French has proved that Irish-set crime novels can be both international best-sellers and award winners, but on current form she is very much the exception to the rule.
  Right now there is a very real danger that what appears to be the Irish crime novel’s annus mirabilis will in fact come to be seen as the high-water mark from which the tide rolled back, leaving some very fine writers high and dry.
  It’s a Catch-22 situation: to survive in the current publishing climate, Irish authors will have to write the big novels that publishers want; but doing so means they will no longer be writing the novels that made this year such a stand-out for the Irish crime novel. – Declan Burke

  Not every author will change course or stop writing, of course. Many will persevere despite their economic circumstances and the lack of commercial success. Some will do so because they have no choice but to write the kind of novels they do. Personally, I hope they survive and thrive, because the realist literature being created by the new wave of Irish crime novelists is too important to be allowed wither away.
  That said, it would be a terrible pity if, having as a nation finally matured beyond Seamus Heaney’s “Whatever you say, say nothing” to broach the taboos that have historically blighted Irish society, we were to be left with “Whatever you say, keep it yourselves.”

THE DARK PLACE by Sam Millar (Brandon Press)

Little children look away now.
  There’s a tagline running across the back of Belfast writer Sam Millar’s new crime novel, THE DARK PLACE, which I really hope isn’t true. It reads: “While most writers sit in their study and make it up, Sam Millar has lived it ...” For no-one, but no-one, deserves the type of punishment Sam metes out to his detective hero Karl Kane in this darkest of tales.
  Kane is beaten to near-death twice, force-fed narcotics, raped by a crazed (and possibly venereal) vamp, cuckolded by at least one partner, and then blown up in an underground tunnel.
  The people around him don’t fare much better either – his daughter is kidnapped by a particularly monstrous serial killer, his father develops late-onset Alzheimer’s and his best friend gets his throat slit helping our man track down the villain ...
  But for all the gore, Millar is a riveting story-teller, leading the reader from crisis to catastrophe at a frenetic pace. And he skilfully punctures the darkness with moments of sharp humour too, getting great mileage out of Kane’s bawdy relationship with his new girlfriend. Indeed, the sarcastically suggestive pre-coital interchanges between Kane and Naomi are as highly charged as anything Chandler or Hammett ever scripted.
  Like Marlowe, Kane has a touch of the white knight about him, and his idealism – and refusal to do the wrong thing – saves the book from its occasional lurches into horror-schlock. Indeed, if the book has a failing, it is that Millar has an inclination to lay it on too thick.
  But then, what do I know? I sit in the study and make it up. Sam, I suspect, while he mightn’t have lived all of it, certainly has spent a lot more time in dark places than me.
  If ever a novel were aptly named. - Garbhan Downey

John Connolly – THE LOVERS
Alan Glynn – WINTERLAND
Declan Hughes – ALL THE DEAD VOICES
Gene Kerrigan – DARK TIMES IN THE CITY
Adrian McKinty – FIFTY GRAND
Stuart Neville – THE TWELVE

“I know how Irish crime writers can get Irish people to buy books. Just start an Irish crime writers calendar. Proceeds will go to charity. The more you show the more the calendars you will sell. The picture taken for each month would have copies of the respective author’s books covering – shall we say – strategic spots. Now, you would have to convince the female contingent to get on board, but a man with your charm should not have a problem. Obviously, you, Declan [Hughes], John [Connolly] and Brian [McGilloway] would have to be buried in months no one cares about. But Arlene Hunt and Alex Barclay – Christmas and Summer – there you go.”

“When you’re working to make a sentence as perfect as it can be,” says French, “or to make a character real and vivid and three-dimensional, how and whether you do that isn’t dependent on where the book will be shelved.”

“Like a lot of boys, I was curious about the darkness, and I quite liked being scared a little, as long as I was in control of the medium.
  “I can’t ever remember closing a book because it frightened me, but there were a couple that I tended not to read when alone in the house, or when I was sitting up in bed at night. After all, I might have been adventurous when it came to my literary tastes, but I wasn’t stupid.
  “Recently I have been put in the unfamiliar position of having to defend my latest book, THE GATES, from accusations that it may be a bit frightening for younger readers who don’t get out enough …
  “When the Victorians bowdlerised the fables, removing much of the violence and peril, and indeed the punishments visited on the wrongdoers at the end, they took away their power and their purpose. Without terror they have no meaning.”

“It is striking that the most successful Irish crime writer, John Connolly, who began his career just a decade ago, felt it necessary to set his books in the US and to insert himself directly into the American detective tradition. Connolly presumably decided that Ireland, even in the Celtic Tiger years, was not the place for crime fiction. Yet it is equally striking that in the last few years, Irish-set crime writing has not merely begun to blossom but has become arguably the nearest thing we have to a realist literature adequate to capturing the nature of contemporary society …
  “If that were the whole story, however, what we’d be getting now would be simply a local version of the established international genre. That we’re getting something rather more interesting than that is suggested by two intriguing ways in which the best writing is inflected by older Irish traditions …
  “In creating an Ireland with no faith in authority and no belief that the bad guys will be vanquished by naming their names, they get closer to reality than most literary fiction has managed.”

“The crime novel really has become the state-of-the-nation fiction. There’s an Irish writer called Alan Glynn, who has just published a novel WINTERLAND … This is a book that speaks to absolutely now. Good writers – good crime writers in particular – have a knack of plugging into the zeitgeist.”

A robbery at a pawnbroker’s. Three people murdered. A headache for the new head of the Detective Branch ... Now part of the Metropolitan Police’s Detective Branch, Pyke must find the culprit and quickly, especially as the identity of one of the victims threatens to expose his own criminal past. A valuable religious artefact appears to have motivated the robbery but when the main suspect commits suicide in police custody, the investigation falters. A few months later, the rector of a wealthy parish is brutally murdered and the manhunt that follows seems to implicate an former prisoner, now looking for redemption. But Pyke’s suspicions take him in another direction and lead him to a dissolute former Catholic priest and rumours of Devil worshipping. And when a City Alderman dies in suspicious circumstances, the trail of blood leads first to a charismatic mesmerist and an alluring painter and then to the murders of two boys five years earlier. With time running out and the murderer threatening to kill again, Pyke must face up to forces within the police and the church who would rather the secrets of the past remained buried forever.

“Religion, rather than just another “category”, is the guiding hypothesis that makes sense of the whole, the public expression of the total dimension of human nature. No other channel has the capacity to convey the broadest truths about man’s nature and his relationship to the universe. Secularists do not like this characterisation of the situation, but it has long been obvious that they have nothing to offer society as an alternative source of ethics, meaning or hope.”

“I have seen the future of Irish crime fiction and it’s called Declan Burke. Here is talent writ large – mesmerizing, literate, smart and gripping. If there is such an animal as the literary crime novel, then this is it. But as a compelling crime novel, it is so far ahead of anything being produced, that at last my hopes for crime fiction are renewed. I can’t wait to read his next novel.”