“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

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Interview: Chris Pavone, Author of THE ACCIDENT

It made perfect sense that Chris Pavone’s debut thriller, The Expats, became a critically acclaimed bestseller when it was published in 2011, and that it subsequently won a slew of awards. The American author had, after all, worked as an editor in the publishing industry for almost two decades. Thus he had a canny understanding of the commercial requirements of a genre novel, and an insider’s knowledge of the craft involved in writing a block-busting thriller.
  At least, that’s the theory. Until you realise that Chris Pavone is actually a veteran editor of cook books and gardening tomes.
  He began in the industry as a copy-editor, he says, initially working on fiction. “But when it came time for me to become an acquisitions editor, I turned to non-fiction and cook books and some gardening titles, some fishing books,” Chris tells me when we sit down in the Merrion Hotel. “A lot of what I thought of as ‘light’ subjects, which in many ways were a lot more straightforward-looking to me as a young, still idealistic person. There were things about the fiction side of the business that weren’t quite right to me. It seemed to me that a lot of it was driven by things that didn’t strike me as being important to the work itself, and that wasn’t really true of these other types of books I was publishing.”
  If there’s a hint of cynicism about the fiction publishing industry in those words, it’s a cynicism that is writ large in Pavone’s current novel, The Accident. The story opens with a commissioning editor receiving a manuscript of a book that will, if published, destroy a media mogul’s career and lay bare the dark heart of America’s secret service. A race against time begins as a plethora of characters scheme, plot and murder in order to prevent the publication of the manuscript.
  “The book, for me, is very much about ambition and compromise,” says Pavone. “It’s not that that’s how I see the whole world, but I wanted to write a book that thought that way. The vehicle for feeling out these people’s compromises and ambitions is this manuscript that’s at the heart of The Accident. Everybody looks at this thing in a different way. It is to some extent corrupting to some of them. ‘Is this the point at which I sell out? Is this where I become corrupted?’ Or, ‘Is my corruption still in the future?’”
  The Accident is a pulsating tale that blends thriller, mystery and spy novel tropes and confirms the promise of Pavone’s debut, even if it’s the kind of novel that Pavone, in his younger years, ignored as a reader.
  “One of the epiphanies I had was that I got into publishing because I love literature,” he says. “I loved books by people who were dead before I was born, for the most part, who had won Nobel Prizes. But then it became part of my job to read a John Grisham book every year. I had been very dismissive of popular fiction – in fact, I’d refused to read it. And then I started working on popular fiction, and I realised these books weren’t the same as Hemingway, say, but they were good in a different way. They were great in a different way. I became much more of a relativist about the qualities of a novel. Now I think John Grisham writes fantastic books. They’ve got nothing to do with what Donna Tartt writes, for example, but they’re both writers I enjoy.”
  With two decades of experience under his belt, Chris Pavone was a highly regarded editor in the industry. Why the leap from gamekeeper to poacher?
  “I loved editing, and being a cook book editor is a really a great job. It’s difficult to imagine a more indulgent grown-up job to do, that someone would send you out to restaurants to find great chefs to write a book. But being an editor is essentially about other people’s passions, and helping other people bring out the best of what they have to say to the world. Eventually I realised that I wanted to try to create something myself, and that’s what writing novels is. Not because I wanted to put myself in front of the world, but because I wanted to create something that would go out into the world.”
  As an industry insider, Chris Pavone is more aware than most that the publishing world is today struggling to come to terms with a number of seismic changes in the traditional model. He admits to being ‘a little pessimistic’ about publishing’s future, but remains on the whole optimistic that readers and booksellers will combine to survive and thrive.
  “Bookselling, I believe, is enjoying a resurgence, especially the kind of bookselling we used to think of as booksellers before the advent of chain stores – the Mom & Pop stores, the independent neighbourhood store,” he says. “A lot of the big chain stores are now gone, and independent bookstores are springing up to step into the role again. The book market has levelled out, or at least it’s not declining as fast as it was a number of years ago, and I think readers are understanding more and more what thousands of certain types of independent retailers can bring to the market. That price is not the main consideration. I mean, relatively speaking, books are very inexpensive. A book takes a long time to read, and you don’t pay all that much for it. And paying less for a book isn’t necessarily the goal of every reader.”
  That said, he does believe that the industry may have to configure its ideas about how it generates the profits that will allow it to commission new writers, particularly in the face of the digital revolution.
  “I’m paying a lot more these days for things that I’m told are free,” he says. “But all these ‘free’ things – say on-line – they’re not free. You’re just not paying for the content. But you are paying for internet service. You’re paying for phone service. You’re paying for the hardware. And you’re paying a lot more than you used to pay, you’re just paying different people. We’re now paying telecom companies instead of movie producers and TV networks and book publishers. It doesn’t cost any less, it’s just going in a different direction.”
  With two best-sellers already under his belt, and Hollywood already circling around an adaptation of The Expats, Chris Pavone is particularly pleased that some of the highest praise he has received has come from his fellow writers. As an editor turned author, was he ever worried about push-back from writers concerned that he was muscling in on their territory?
  “I had many, many worries about my first book,” he laughs, “but that wasn’t one of them. I mean, I was worried that the book wasn’t good enough, and nobody would like it, that people would make fun of my ambitions. Waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking it was all a huge mistake, and that I was going to die destitute and alone.” He grins. “Y’know, pretty much what every writer worries about.”

  Chris Pavone’s The Accident is published by Faber & Faber.

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Review: THE LONESOME HEART IS ANGRY by Paul Charles

Born in Derry, but living in London for most of his adult life, Paul Charles first came to our attention with the Camden Town-set series of novels featuring Detective Inspector Christy Kennedy, publishing his debut, I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass, in 1997.
  There have been ten Christy Kennedy books in total, and Charles has also written a pair of crime novels set in rural Donegal, but he goes back to his roots for The Lonesome Heart is Angry (New Island Books), which is set in the early 1960s in the fictional Co. Derry town of Castlemartin, which also provided the backdrop to The Last Dance (2012).
  The opening brings to mind both John B. Keane and Sam Hanna Bell’s December Bride. Michael Gilmour, Castlemartin’s resident matchmaker, is shocked when he is approached by the twins Pat and Joe Kane, local farmers in need of a wife. Unfortunately, they intend sharing a single wife. Outraged by the impropriety, not to mention the potential damage to his own reputation, Gilmour sends them on their way, only to be deeply wounded when his beloved sister-in-law, Maggie, agrees to accept the twins’ unusual terms and conditions and marries Pat Kane.
  It’s not long before Michael Gilmour’s instincts about the ‘unnatural’ arrangement are proved correct. Joe disappears after a vicious and very public fight between the brothers, and the rumours of the local gossips force District Detective Inspector Doyle – a devotee of the methods of Sherlock Holmes – to investigate the intimate lives of the Kane clan …
  The Lonesome Heart is Angry is a delightfully genteel mystery novel, one that is very firmly rooted in the ‘cosy’ end of the spectrum. Apart from a couple of instances of fisticuffs, there is little here that remotely approaches the blood, gore and violence that characterises much of contemporary crime fiction. The diminutive Detective Inspector Doyle – aka ‘Wee Doyle’ – may well be investigating the disappearance and possible murder of Joe Kane, but that narrative strand is only one aspect of Paul Charles’ own exploration of a gentler, kinder time and place. His affection for his cast of quirky characters is palpable, as is his description of the town of Castlemartin itself, a fictional version of Charles’ own hometown of Magherafelt.
  The folksy, conversational tone, however, is bittersweet. The matchmaker, the bumbling policeman and the idyllic rural setting give the novel an old-fashioned air, but Castlemartin is a town in the early stages of a cultural revolution. The soundtrack in the local cafés and fairgrounds is jarring: The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles. Charles, who has spent most of his life working as a music promoter – his clients include Tom Waits, Christy Moore, Elvis Costello and The Waterboys – even has Wee Doyle’s investigation turn on a crucial clue provided by a Beatles single. Change is coming to Castlemartin and washing away the old values, and even paragons of virtue such as Michael Gilmour and Detective Inspector Doyle aren’t able to stem the tide.
  Curiously, perhaps, and in common with John McAllister’s similarly set The Station Sergeant (2012), religion and sectarian conflict play no part in The Lonesome Heart is Angry. The citizens of Castlemartin are entirely pragmatic when it comes to rules, laws and commandments, Heaven-sent or otherwise, adapting instead to circumstance as they see fit and bending to authority, as Wee Doyle discovers when he starts asking his questions, only when it suits their own agenda.
  It all sounds deliciously idyllic, of course, but the fate of Joe, Pat and Maggie Kane suggests that no society or community can thrive indefinitely if it is composed of moral anarchists, regardless of how friendly and sociable they might appear to be. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Examiner