“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

Saturday, October 3, 2009

CRIME ALWAYS PAYS: That Crucial First Week In Full

It was only last week that CRIME ALWAYS PAYS went live on Kindle, and already there’s so, so much to report. For one, CRIME ALWAYS PAYS knackered Mack Lundy’s Kindle mid-flight. Sorry about that, Mack. That blip was supposed to be a dry-run for my cunning plot to activate the virus I’ve coded into the text of CRIME ALWAYS PAYS in order to knacker the entire Kindle system on October 28th ...
  Sales-wise, it’s fair to say, things could have gone better. CRIME ALWAYS PAYS entered Amazon’s Kindle charts at # 8,245 and soared almost immediately to # 1,235 before it promptly plummeted out to # 13,889. On a chart, the graph would resemble the orbit of Halley’s comet. So that’s not good.
  On the other hand, the book did get the latest in its many write-ups from the lovely Book Witch. Quoth Ms Witch: “It’s simply a very amusing and mad crime novel, which any crime fan should enjoy.” So that’s good.
  Then Duane Swiersynski announced on Twitter that he’d bought a copy, which was good, but there’s been radio silence ever since, which is not good. Duane? I operate a value-for-money payback guarantee, so if it didn’t buzz your bajingas, just let me know where I should send the cheque.
  And then … Actually, no, that’s it. Just as well, really. It was all getting a bit frenetic there on Monday, and I am, to be quite frank about it, a parcel of vain strivings, loosely tied, methinks, for milder climes than these. Or words to that effect …
  In a nutshell, then, the week was a pretty fair reflection of the amount of work I put into promoting CAP, which amounted to little more than a blog post and a couple of tweets on Twitter. Now, it’s still early days, and the UK Kindle is coming this month, apparently, so that might make a difference – but even at this early stage it looks as if my avant-garde experiment in laissez-faire promotion is paying off handsomely. What I’m trying to prove in this experiment is something I already know, which is that it’s impossible to achieve a working wage in the publishing industry without having to work ten times as hard as you would in a job that pays minimum wage. Even the fact that I’m talking about writing books as ‘the publishing industry’ is fairly damning. The fact is, though, that it is an industry, and as with all industries, it’s the best capitalised endeavours that will rise to the top. Which is to say that, generally speaking, publishing a book these days is a pointless endeavour, if your aim is to reach the maximum number of readers possible for your particular kind of book, unless you’ve got pretty explicit incriminating photographs of the guy or gal behind the advertising budget. Forget quirky titles, and great stories, and viral marketing, and book trailers, and blogs and word-of-mouth and every other one-off fluke success story you’ve ever heard – as far as I can make out, it’s all about the promotional spend.
  Apart from the paltry few hours it took me to write CRIME ALWAYS PAYS, the spend on the book has been pretty minimal – about $20, or thereabouts. Which is why it is currently languishing at (checks Amazon Kindle listings on Friday night) # 5,711. Which is, okay, better than it was earlier this afternoon, but still not causing Dan Brown any sleepless nights.
  Meantime, I’m using the time that I’m not blogging / promoting / shilling to write. It’s going well, thanks for asking – I’m having fun screwing around with conventional notions of ‘story’, ‘novel’ and ‘book’. If I’m honest, I’d have to say that it is by a country mile the least commercial story I’ve ever written, and if I’m totally honest, I’d have to say that that’s deliberate. One reason for that is because, in the last year or so, I’ve had three books picked up by an editor at a pretty reputable U.S. publisher, and three times he has failed (no fault of his own) to get them past the bean-counters. Two of the three were straightforward enough, being a crime caper and a PI story, while the third was (to be fair to the bean-counters) rather more unconventional. The problem for me is that it’s the unconventional one that I found to be the most fun to write; and, if I’m not going to get published anyway, then I might as well keep writing, in the scarce few writing hours I have every week, the stuff that’s fun.
  It’s also, I think, a bit of a reaction to an industry that is becoming increasingly sterile and homogenous. There’s no getting away from the fact that that’s a very subjective take on things, and obviously it depends very heavily on the books I’ve been reading. I’ve read some terrific novels this year – Gene Kerrigan’s DARK TIMES IN THE CITY, Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE (aka THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST), Robert Wilson’s THE IGNORANCE OF BLOOD, Ed O’Loughlin’s NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, John Connolly’s THE GATES, Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND, Scott Philips’ COTTONWOOD, John Banville’s THE INFINITIES – but apart from re-reads – James Ellroy’s LA CONFIDENTIAL and Raymond Chandler’s FAREWELL, MY LOVELY – the only books that truly blew me away were GENIUS, a biography of Richard Feynman by James Gleick, 1974 by David Peace, and I AM ALIVE AND YOU ARE DEAD, a biography of Philip K. Dick by Emmanuel Carrère.
  The Richard Feynman biography was mind-blowing because it incorporates a history of 20th century quantum physics, which, as is always the case when I dip into quantum physics, is akin to leaving my brain behind on a roller-coaster to fend for itself – I don’t know much about what’s going on, but it’s a hell of a ride. The same, I suppose, applied to 1974, but what I particularly liked about that was David Peace’s ability to bypass my eyes and lodge his words directly in the cerebral cortex – I’d imagine it’s the way a trained composer, say, ‘reads’ music off the sheet. What I liked about the Philip K. Dick book was the way Carrère screwed around with the biographical form, blending Dick’s professional and personal fictions and fantasies to the point where they became something of a double-helix, and it was virtually impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
  I have no idea of how well, or otherwise, the three books sold when they first appeared. I do know that all three, if not exactly life-changing reads, had the capacity (had I read them at a more impressionable age) to change the way I perceived books: to re-evaluate what a book can deliver, and the way in which a story can be told. I’m not trying to say that they were ‘unputdownable’ (the Feynman book, especially, required putting down on nearly every second page), or that the writers were such slick craftsmen that the pages seemed to turn on their own, so that I found myself transported to a world of the writer’s creation, blah-de-blah, nor offer any of the absurdly reductionist opinions that the commercial publishing world seems to value so highly. I don’t read to be ‘swept away’, or ‘entertained’, or distracted from my commute or to while away the hours on a beach – I read to be challenged and provoked, to be goaded into a greater awareness of my place in the grand scheme, etc. Most books these days, and fiction in particular, seem to want to be the literary equivalent of either Valium or Viagra, but life’s too short, and the world too wide, to waste it on third-rate knock-offs of stories that were already old by the time Aristophanes got around to spoofing Athenian intellectuals with CLOUDS – of which, I should say, bringing us full circle, CRIME ALWAYS PAYS is a fourth-rate example, which may well account for why it is currently (checks Amazon Kindle rankings on Saturday morning before uploading post) languishing at # 14,199. Hence the new departure.
  All of which is a roundabout way of saying that, if I’m going to be a pathetically failed writer, then I’ll be a pathetically failed writer on my terms, not the industry’s. Yes, that ‘clunk-click’ you hear is yours truly bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted – and yes, you’re perfectly entitled to wonder whether I’d be so critical of the industry had one of my books being bought for a tidy sum in the last year or so. The answer, I’m pretty sure, is ‘Yes, I would’ – although I wouldn’t be blogging about it. I’d probably just bitch about it in private, and then go and write something similar to fulfil the contract, and put the interesting story that I’d really like to write on the back-burner, for another year at least.
  I guess I’m pretty lucky. I’m happy and healthy, I like my job, I can pay my bills, and I can – given that very few people in the publishing industry care either way – write whatever the hell I want to write. I’ll probably end up publishing the new story to the web next year, to the electronic equivalent of a few embarrassed coughs, but hey, it’s mine own. Life is good.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: FEVER OF THE BONE by Val McDermid

I met Val McDermid at last year’s Bouchercon, introduced by Marian at the Sleuth of Baker Street desk. Neither of us gushed, exactly, possibly because neither of us had read the other’s books, but probably because Val McDermid meets more wannabe writers on a daily basis than she could shake a metaphorical razor-studded dildo at. Which is to say that, while her literary reputation precedes her, FEVER OF THE BONE is my first McDermid read. The review runneth thusly:
THE CHARACTERS of DCI Carol Jordan and Tony Hill will be familiar to many people who have never read a Val McDermid novel. Jordan and Hill were the double-act at the heart of the UTV series Wire in the Blood , which ran from 2002 until it was cancelled earlier this year, in which Jordan (for the first three series, at least) played a tough cop to Hill’s sensitive, complex psychological profiler.
  The pair take centre stage again in Fever of the Bone , the sixth in McDermid’s Jordan-Hill series, and her 23rd novel in total. Opening with a teenage murder victim discovered in Worcester, the story soon reverts to Jordan and Hill’s fictional stamping ground of Bradfield, in Yorkshire, where a number of sexually mutilated teenage corpses are discovered. The pressure quickly builds on Jordan to find the serial killer, but this time she has to work without her trusted confidante Hill, as her new boss, suspicious of her motives in employing the freelance profiler, has decreed that she must use internal police resources.
  Hill, for his part, finds himself in Worcester, partly at the behest of a local police force keen to use his unique talents, but also to tidy up the estate of his late father, a man about whom all Hill ever knew was that he had abandoned his son at an early age.
Val McDermid is renowned for her compulsively readable police procedural novels, in which she takes pains to get right the detail of real police work (or “old-fashioned coppery”, as one character describes it).
  One of the pleasures of Fever of the Bone , for example, is McDermid’s description of mutually suspicious police forces reluctant to give up any scrap of information that might give a rival force some glory, and the politicking that goes on both within a particular police force and between competing forces, a frustratingly tiresome process that has, of course, ramifications for any officer investigating crimes that straddle jurisdictions.
  McDermid is also celebrated for her willingness to engage with contemporary issues (the murdered teenagers, for example, all come into contact with their killer on Bebo-style internet site called Rigmarole), and her ability to explore convincingly the darker end of the crime-writing spectrum.
  Not only do her detectives investigate the kind of murders that haunt the darkest of nightmares, but her profiler, Tony Hill, takes the investigation – and the reader – a crucial step further by inhabiting the minds of sick and twisted killers, who often have a sexual motive.
  That’s an explosive combination, if not particularly original, but McDermid the writer has one more trick up her sleeve.
  Unlike many of her best-selling peers, McDermid understands that it’s the internal workings of her characters that make a novel tick, as opposed to their implausible feats of detection and a superhuman ability to give and take physical punishment. There are times, in fact, when Fever of the Bone reads like a soap opera rather than a thriller, as McDermid deftly introduces a host of characters from the previous five novels, and then proceeds to broaden their experiences.
  The most poignant example of this is Tony Hill’s slow and painful exhumation of the man his father truly was, as opposed to the caricature he’d had rammed down this throat by his vindictive mother.
  Touching, gripping and entertaining by turns, Fever of the Bone is a hugely satisfying novel. There are caveats – it seems unlikely, for example, that a serial killer would spend months carefully grooming a series of victims, and then strike at them all within a short space of time, and continue to do so even knowing the police are hot on the trail – but those caveats are minor indeed. – Declan Burke
  This review was first published in the Irish Times

Monday, September 28, 2009

You Can Never Be Too Rich Or Too Glynn

You will, if you’re one of CAP’s three regular readers, have encountered the name of Alan Glynn before, as often as not in conjunction with the latest rave for his forthcoming novel, WINTERLAND – John Connolly, George Pelecanos, Val McDermid and Ken Bruen are among those who just about stop short of acclaiming it a cure for all mankind’s ills. I interviewed Alan for the Evening Herald last week, with the opening gambit running thusly:
Alan Glynn is a man of many talents. Not only has he written two superb novels, one of which has been optioned in Hollywood, he has also, in writing the prophetic novel WINTERLAND, pretty much single-handedly caused the crippling Irish recession.
  “Oooops,” he says, “sorry about that. But you’re right, the first draft of WINTERLAND was written during the boom, although I don’t think I was trying to predict anything or be Cassandra-ish. I did revise it in the light of what has happened more recently, but the central concern, or target, of the story is something that applies equally in times of boom or bust -- which is that all-too-familiar dynamic in Irish life where people tell lies, cover them up and create all sorts of collateral damage, sometimes spread out over decades, and never take responsibility.”
  For the rest, clickety-click here

Sunday, September 27, 2009

The TIES That Bind

Off with yours truly to the Fingal Readers’ Day in Blanchardstown in north Dublin yesterday, there to take lunch with the ever-lovely Niamh O’Connor, whose BLOOD TIES was published last week by Transworld Ireland. Quoth the blurb elves:
Husband against wife … Wife against husband … Discover what happens when the bonds of family break …
  Find out more about the gruesome case of the so-called ‘Scissor Sisters’, whose bloody slaughter of their mother’s lover ended with an unsolved mystery as to the final resting place of the victim’s head – see the only interview with killer Charlotte Mulhall since she entered prison.
  Read the most up-to-date account of the murder of mother-of-two Rachel O’Reilly, including her husband’s latest appeal.
  And get the full story behind the sensational case of Sharon Collins and the ‘Lying Eyes’ hitman-for-hire scandal.
  As a leading crime reporter for the Sunday World, Niamh O’Connor has interviewed killers, has sat in court as justice was done, and spoken to the condemned in prison to give us the inside stories on three of Ireland’s most notorious murder cases.
  Meanwhile, the point of the Blanchardstown excursion for yours truly was to interview Stuart Neville, whose terrific novel THE TWELVE is about to be published Stateside as the equally terrific THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST. Stuart being a self-confessed ‘affable chap’, it was all very pleasant indeed, with none of the pyrotechnics you can probably expect when Stuart hosts James Ellroy at Belfast’s Waterfront on November 7th, in a gig organised by No Alibis. To wit:
No Alibis Bookstore is very pleased to announce that we will be hosting an event with none other than the Demon Dog of American crime fiction, James Ellroy, in early November to celebrate the release of the final book in his Underworld USA trilogy, BLOOD’S A ROVER. This event will be held in the Waterfront Hall, Belfast, on Saturday 7th November at 8:00PM. Tickets are now on sale, and are priced £12.
  Twelve quid to see James Ellroy, when it was eighty-odd quid to see Beyoncé earlier this year? Now that’s a steal …