“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

Monday, August 16, 2010

Smarter Than The Average Alec

“Surely there are Italian policeman who are not obsessed with their stomachs?” I wrote that line, which appears in the post / column below, on the basis that virtually every fictional Italian policeman I’ve come across in the past appears to have a food fetish, to the point where it’s ripe for parody. Is it a trope unique - Anthony Bourdain notwithstanding - to Italian crime fiction? I tend to skip over the various menus, cooking instructions and food porn descriptions on the basis that food is a fuel for me - I like it when it’s tasty, I don’t mind when it’s not.
  Anyway, shortly after writing that column, I read Conor Fitzgerald’s THE DOGS OF ROME, which features the Rome-based Chief Inspector Alec Blume. The good news is that Blume is not a foodie - at one point he even snacks on dry breakfast cereal - and the better news is that THE DOGS OF ROME is an unusually assured debut. It’s a gripping police procedural that manages to illustrate meticulous nature of an investigation and the complexity of the politics of Italian policing without ever getting bogged down in detail, while Blume himself is something of a rara avis, being possessed of a melancholic Scandinavian disposition despite the Rome setting.
  Fitzgerald is an Irish writer, albeit one long domiciled in Italy, while Blume himself is an American who has most of his life in Italy. The combination gives both men an insider’s eye for detail and an emotional distance from their subject matter, and the result, written in a style that is both taut and elegant, is a very fine debut indeed.

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