So long 2009

All years have their ups and downs, but for me personally 2009 had more ups than downs - in fact, in many ways, it's been a bit of a stellar year. I'm probably a little unusual in that respect vis-a-vis most people in Ireland as the year has generally been an unmitigated disaster with rapidly rising unemployment, wages cuts, collapsing house prices, severe flooding, and general all round misery.

From my perspective though:
The Rule Book finally saw the light of day.

The 12 volume International Encyclopedia of Human Geography was published.

Rethinking Maps followed shortly afterwards.

I submitted two new books - Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life (MIT Press) and the 2nd edition of Key Thinkers on Space and Place (Sage)

We put up the Atlas of Cyberspace up as free PDF download (my only book to briefly break into Amazon top 100 sales rank) and gave it a new life.

I finished a ten year stint as Editor of Social and Cultural Geography

I was appointed Editor of Progress in Human Geography

I got the green light to start a new journal, Dialogues in Human Geography (Sage)

The first books in the Key Concepts series I edit were published (Sage) and the first books in the Irish Society series were commissioned (Manchester University Press).

I travelled to some interesting places: Armenia, Ohio, Kentucky, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Germany, UK

We moved into the Blue House back in January

I started two blogs - The View from the Blue House in July, and Ireland After NAMA in November.

I discovered the world of blogging in general and some great blogs and communities

My reading got a new burst of life as I discovered loads of new authors whose other works I want to read and I read loads of fabulous books.

On the negative side, I've taken a 20 percent cut in my take home pay and been trying to fight a rearguard action on cuts to the institute I run. 2010 will be an interesting year on that front. I'm genuinely worried about the hole Ireland finds itself in and the government's handling of the crisis, and my fear is that things are going to get worse before they get better and it'll be a slow climb back to where we were. I also failed to find either agents or publishers for Saving Siobhan and The White Gallows.

I doubt I'll have another year like that any time soon. So long 2009, you were a rare vintage ...

Review of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (Harper Perennial, 2007)

In 1940 the United States reluctantly creates a Jewish enclave at Sitka in Alaska. In 1946 an atomic bomb is dropped on Germany and two years later the Jews are forced from Palestine. With few places to go, Jews from around the world flock to Sitka. Sixty years later over three million Jews are crammed into the densely populated space and the date of Reversion back to full U.S. sovereignty is fast approaching. No-one is quite sure what will happen then, but the rush to find a new homeland in a world that does not want them is on. Detective Meyer Landsman though has his own problems – separated from his wife, he’s a drink problem, is living in crummy room in a downbeat hotel, has too many open homicide cases, and is haunted by the death of his sister. Then a fellow resident is murdered, shot in the back of the head, whilst playing chess. His new boss, his ex-wife, tells him to blacklist the case, but Meyer is hooked by a nagging feeling that there is more to the death than it first appears. Aided by his homicide partner, Berko Shemets, his first cousin, he starts to investigate. Soon he gunless, badgeless and up to his neck in trouble, but determined to uncover the reason for the chess player’s death.

If I was going to have a go at characterising The Yiddish Policemen’s Union I’d say it was the bastard child of Raymond Chandler, Philip K. Dick and William Gibson. Chabon, like these authors, is a wordsmith, crafting beautiful, lyrical and weighty sentences. He also has their imagination and vision to create entire worlds. Unlike them, he’s created a story that is needlessly long, the narrative bloated by unnecessary back story and superfluous description. This serves to highlight his craft, but it’s at the expense of the story, so that the pacing is uneven, dissipating the tension that should have been present. The result was a reading experience similar to watching an overly long, indulgent movie with great cinematography, but a plodding, uneven storyline. Fans of well crafted prose will undoubtedly love the book, but the bottom line for me is always the story. With at least a twenty five percent cut in length, and prose as concise and sharp as Chandler or Gibson, this could have been a classic (the story is there, it’s just wrapped up and deadened by too much descriptive prose). As it stands, for my mind, the book illustrates what happens when you try to write genre fiction in a literary style without fully appreciating what makes a genre appealing to its readers (or at least this reader). Chabon sure can write, but sometimes less is more.

A Nowhere Man

I spent part of Christmas day writing a piece of flash fiction - the idea was appealing enough that I had to let it unfold. Originally I was thinking that it might form the start of a short story, but now I'm wondering whether there's something more there. I thought I'd post the opening section and invite some critical feedback. I know it's difficult to judge a story on the opening gambit, but we all do it whilst browsing in a bookstore, so what I'm interested to know is whether this piques your interest. The story is set in 1924 in Ireland, immediately after independence and the civil war.


‘Harry? Harry!’ His pyjama top was sodden with sweat, his massive back twisting away from her gentle touch. ‘Harry, love.’

He woke with a start, momentarily lost, sucking in air.

‘You were having one of your nightmares,’ she explained, tugging him over onto his back.

His boyish face was ashen, unseeing, grey-blue eyes bloodshot. Nightmare seemed too tame a word for the hell he’d just re-lived. Great showers of soil and blood erupting all around, the thunder of artillery and the rattle of machine guns, the cries of the wounded and dying, the vicious tug of barbed wire, then the searing pain of shrapnel tearing through his left thigh, the brains of Private Conor Costello coating his face.

‘You alright, love?’

He blinked, his eyes darting left.

She was leaning up on her elbow, gazing down at him, wearing a once white, long sleeved nightdress. She pulled a tight, concerned smile and tucked a lock of her long, red hair behind an ear, moving a slender hand to his chest.

He let out a long sigh and swallowed hard, laying a huge hand over hers, giving it a light squeeze.
Costello had been eight years his senior, but he’d made the young officer promise that he’d take care of his wife and four children if he failed to make it back to Ireland. Harry Rutherford doubted that had meant sharing his wife’s bed, but things rarely turned out as Harry expected.

When he enrolled at Trinity College Dublin in September 1914 to study law, he’d expected the nascent hostilities with Germany and the Austro-Hungarians to be over by Christmas. When he dropped out of university before completing his first year of study to enlist in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, he’d expected his father to be understanding and supportive. As a junior officer in the 8th Battalion, he’d expected war to be rational, honourable and heroic. During Easter 1916, as he choked on deadly chlorine gas at the Battle of Hulluch in Northern France, struggling to drag on his cumbersome gas mask, he’d expected that if he survived the mayhem and madness he would be returning to the Ireland he left. And when the shell exploded just a few feet in front of them as they advanced towards Ginchy in the Battle of the Somme, he’d expected to go the same way as poor Costello.

Instinctively, Harry moved his hand to his face as if to brush off the warm blood and tissue. ‘What time is it?’ he asked, disguising his movement to pinch the bridge of his nose and then rub his eyes.

‘You’ve plenty of time, yet,’ Mary Costello answered, tugging the sheet and rough, wool blankets up over his barrel chest, dropping down from her elbow to lie by his side, her head resting on his shoulder. ‘It’s barely gone five o’clock.’

When the telegram arrived in September 1916 to inform her that her husband had died for a King and Country which she didn’t consider to be her own, she’d never anticipated anybody but her children would share her bed again, let alone a Protestant policeman seven years her junior; a man who as a member of the Dublin Metropolitan Police had probably aided the British in the war for independence.

She knew what the neighbours thought of their tryst, but the neighbours could go to hell; they hadn’t had to live with the loneliness, the hunger, the cold and damp, the humiliation of being a single mother barely able to make ends meet. To try and save her modesty Harry ghosted in through the back yard late at night loaded with supplies, and slipped out again in the wee hours.

He tipped his head down so his cheek rested on her crown. ‘I’d better go,’ he mumbled. The only way to shift the vivid memories was to fill his lungs with cold morning air and plod the city streets. ‘I’ve got a couple of things I need to do.’

Mary didn’t move. ‘Harry …’

‘Sorry.’ He eased himself up, swinging his legs out of the bed, rubbing at the knotted scar tissue at the top of his left thigh.

‘Harry, stay a while longer.’

He reached down and picked his crumpled, uniformed trousers from the floor and shoved a hand into a pocket, withdrawing a couple of creased notes, placing them on the bedside locker. ‘For the children.’

‘Thanks, but there’s no need …’ she lied.

‘I know,’ he said standing, confirming the lie, ‘but they deserve a treat.’

She watched him dress, taking a clean shirt from the wardrobe, pulling on his tatty uniform. Tall, broad and sturdy, he would have made an excellent rower. At twenty eight he should by now have found himself a nice, young wife, settled down and started his own family. She felt a tinge of guilt and wondered how long Harry’s nightly visits would last and what she’d do once he’d gone.

He lent down and kissed her on the cheek. ‘I’ll see you tonight. I’ll bring a ham.’

‘Take care, Harry.’

‘Like always.’ He crept to the door, slid through it and down the stairs, and quietly exited the rear of the decrepit house. It was still dark, the sky overcast, a light drizzle falling, the air tinged with the taste of peaty smoke and the smell of stinking drains. He placed his hat over his short brown hair, his pug ears sticking out, and pulled his cape around him, tugging up the collar. There was a café on the South quays which catered for dockers that was open all hours. He would pick up a hearty breakfast and some information before heading to Pearse Street station. He set off at a brisk pace, splashing through oily puddles, a noticeable limp in his gait.

Blogs of the year

Like many people my feed reader is set to collate dozens of blogs. After I've been away for a few days there are usually hundreds of posts to be read. In such situations I usually just click the 'all read' button. There are some blogs though that I make an effort to read and work back through the posts I've missed. Picking just ten of these as my must-read blogs of the year has proven a difficult task, but these are the ones I've plucked for:

Big Beat from Badsville
Crime Always Pays
Crime Scraps
Dilbert
International Noir
Do Some Damage
International Crime Authors Reality Check
Killer Covers
Pattinase
Progressive Economy

Thanks to all those that write them. And if I have to pick an absolute favourite for 2009 then it's Do Some Damage. A consistently entertaining read.

There is quite a long list of blogs that teetered on the edge of this list, many of which are consolidated on the Crime and Mystery Fiction friendfeed (which I always find time to check into daily).

The Lazy Sunday Service

Kerrie over at Mysteries in Paradise is running her annual collection of best crime reads, 2009 (nominated books do not have to be published in 2009). To participate click here.

My posts this week
Back to square one
The microgeography of the Live Register in Ireland
Saving Siobhan
Finished and famished
Another (expected) twist in the banking crisis
Review of Stiff by Shane Maloney
New earnings and employment data
Review of The Herring Seller's Apprentice by L.C. Tyler
Happy Christmas
Review of Frost at Christmas by R.D. Wingfield

Review of Frost at Christmas by R.D. Wingfield (1984, Corgi)

Its ten days until Christmas and Tracey Uphill, a precocious eight year old, has failed to return from Sunday school after her young mother is delayed by a late punter. The case is initially assigned to the fastidious Inspector Allen, but when he becomes ill it’s passed to irascible Inspector Jack Frost. Into the bargain comes the reluctant Detective Constable Clive Barnett, the Chief Constable’s son, reassigned from London to provincial Denton. With the snow falling and the temperature below freezing, finding Tracey is a priority, but wherever Frost goes chaos follows and soon he is juggling a number of cases, bumbling from one clue to another, messing up the paperwork, and bamboozling his boss, Superintendent Mullet.

Frost at Christmas is the first book in this delightful six book series. Frost is introduced as a befuddled, conniving, sarcastic, and insolent cop, promoted beyond his capabilities, who tackles crimes seemingly without rhyme or reason. Every one of his actions seem designed to be as inefficient as possible and annoy those around him, yet Frost receives loyalty from most of his colleagues as, at heart, he’s a lovable rogue whose two commitments are to catch the bad guys and to share any plaudits. Wingfield’s characterization is excellent, with every character well penned. The writing is light and comic, the story racing along at a cracking pace. My only gripe was the improbability of the interconnections between the plotlines, which were really not needed as what ties the strands together is Frost, not spurious sub-plots. Frost at Christmas was an entertaining Christmas day read, and I’d recommend the series to all crime fiction fans. My review of Winter Frost is here.

Happy Christmas

Happy Christmas to all who read The View from the Blue House. I hope you have an enjoyable day (and were gifted some some great reading!).

We're still iced in and its due to snow again this afternoon. Thankfully, a neighbour has gifted us two chicken fillets for our Christmas meal to save us from tuna surprise. Thank heavens for neighbours!

Roll on the great melt ...

Review of The Herring Seller’s Apprentice by L.C. Tyler (Pan Macmillan, 2007)

Having persuaded her sister, her lover and bank manager to invest in one of her business ventures, Geraldine Tressider disappears leaving her car and a suicide note at beach in West Sussex close to the home of her ex-husband, Ethelred, a crime fiction author. Everyone is convinced Geraldine has absconded with the money until the body of a woman matching her description is found strangled to death at a local scenic spot. The crime fits the pattern of a serial killer operating in the area. Unconvinced, Elsie Thirkettle, Ethelred’s no-nonsense, chocolate-loving agent, who despises both authors and fiction, presses her charge to investigate further. It soon becomes apparent that Geraldine had transferred her ill-gotten gains to Switzerland and the day after her death the money was withdrawn by a mystery woman. It appears that Geraldine was murdered for profit, the question is by whom?

The Herring Seller’Apprentice is a lightly satirical turn on cosy crime fiction. Although competently written, it did little for me. I suspect that this is partly a matter of taste. Cosies are not my crime fiction of choice. I am a great fan, however, of fiction that tries to play with and subvert the genre such as that by Malcolm Pryce, Jasper Fforde and Donna Moore. But even on this level, the book felt a little flat and insubstantial. The whole thing felt too contrived and knowing. The result was I almost stopped reading the book a couple of times, but in the end soldiered onto the end. There were a couple of nice passages, especially near the beginning discussing the relationship between author and agent, but not nearly enough for my palate. My view though is definitely out-voted by other blogs; for more positive reviews see:

Eurocrime, Fleur Fisher reads, DJ Krimiblog, Martin Edwards, Grey Dove, It's a Crime

Review of Stiff by Shane Maloney (Text Publishing, 1994)

Murray Whelan is the electorate officer for the Minister of Industry, Charlene Wills, the sitting Labour representative from Melbourne Upper, a multicultural district to the north of the city. His home life is a mess – his wife has upped sticks to Canberra and he’s looking after his young son, Red, in a house that’s seen better days – and his work life is not much better, spending his days fending off disgruntled voters, fixing relations with a variety of local self-interest groups, and smoothing over internal party squabbles. When a recent immigrant from Turkey is found frozen to death in a local meat packing plant he thinks nothing of it until one of Wills’ ministerial advisors, the snake-oiled, Angelo Agnelli, sends him off to investigate whether it’s anything the Minister needs to worry about. Whelan knows that this is probably a wild goose chase, but agrees to take a look to keep Agnelli and Wills happy. Pretty soon though it’s clear that there is more to worker’s death than a simple accident and, what is more, Whelan’s attention is definitely unwanted. And if he won’t drop the case, and walk away, then somebody is prepared to silence him before he discovers the real reason for the death. What should have been a straightforward look-see, instead has him struggling to stay alive.

In many ways Stiff is more of a political satire, than crime novel. Yes, the story charts Whelan’s attempt to uncover the reason for the worker’s death, but this adventure is used as a foil to expose and point fun at the machinations of political wheeler-dealing at the grassroots level. Mahoney is particularly good at detailing the life of an electorate officer - the slippage from ideologue to party hack, the flotsam of constituents, and the tedium of organising local party meetings. In Whelan he has created an interesting character; someone who is world weary, reflexive, crafty, and who has his own unrealised, political ambitions. The other characters are also well drawn and the dialogue realistic. The story itself though is a little contrived and the ending is telegraphed a little too early. All in all, Stiff is an enjoyable read, with enough snide humour and interesting insights into the political and social landscape of Australia in the late 1980s to keep the reader hooked to the end.

Finished and Famished

I've just sent off the full draft of the second edition of Key Thinkers on Space and Place, so I can finally relax and enjoy the seasonal break. At 245K words its a bit of a tome. As well as updated versions of the 52 entries of the first edition, it also includes pieces on another 14 theorists. Hopefully it will be out sometime towards the end of 2010.

We're still stuck at home after the snow at the weekend. Freezing temperatures and fog has meant that there has been no melting so far and none of the surrounding lanes or secondary roads have been cleared. We decided this morning to try and make it to the local town to get some provisions, but didn't manage to move the car more than three feet before the wheels started spinning and we lost all traction, so we gave that up as a bad idea. The snow and ice is not due to start melting until late Christmas day, so it's going to be a strange Christmas dinner as we're presently living off our stock of canned food. At the moment it's going to be tuna surprise - the surprise being what we find to cook with it.

Saving Siobhán

Yesterday's post was lacking a bit of context, so I thought that today I would post the short synopsis to Saving Siobhán, so you can get a sense of what kind of book fell at the second hurdle.

It is election time in Ireland and a lot more is about to change for Grant and his wheelchair-bound friend, Mary, than their political representatives. Patrick has disappeared and his sister Siobhán abducted. The kidnappers have left behind Siobhan’s little finger, along with a simple instruction – find Pat quickly or receive more fingers. Soon Grant and Mary are caught between a vicious Dublin gangster and an ambitious politician. To make matters worse, when someone they confront is found floating face down in the River Liffey, Inspector McGerrity Black, Dublin’s finest rock-a-billy cop, is hot on their trail. With election day looming and Siobhán fingers turning up on a regular basis they race through County Kildare suburbia, Dublin’s saunas, Manchester’s gay village and rural Mayo, crossing paths with transvestite farmers, gombeen property developers, and sadistic criminals, as they desperately seek a way to save themselves and their friends while all the time staying ahead of the law. As first dates go, it’s one hell of a rollercoaster ride for Grant and Mary.

Saving Siobhán is a very different kind of book to The Rule Book (which was a straight police procedural) being a black comedy, crime caper (with a dash of romance thrown in). It's written in a style that avoids ‘thick’ description, instead using dialogue and action to drive the narrative along. This allows the text to move at a very quick pace, meaning that Saving Siobhán starts quite pacy and then gets faster and faster, maintaining and cranking up the tension without a change in style. While the novel starts as a single thread, it soon splits into a set of interwoven subplots that all converge at the story's climax.

Anyway, that's the bare bones of the story. Not everybody's cup of tea, but the kind of book that appeals to me (riotous escapism)! If anybody has any tips re. the short synposis, they'll be gratefully received.

Back to square one

After a five month wait I received news today that an agent has decided not to represent my novel ‘Saving Siobhan.’ Like the The Rule Book, this is a novel that won’t fall over the second hurdle. Of the ten or so agents I've sent this to, about half have asked to see the whole manuscript. After a few months delay they then then tell me that crime fiction is an incredibly tough market and they’re not quite sure it’s for them. For example, from this morning’s email: ‘I like many things about this novel: the quick pace, the natural dialogue, the humour. However, today's crime fiction market is incredibly tough …’ The trouble with Saving Siobhan, according to the agents, is it’s either too niche to gain enough sales or too mainstream that it’ll disappear in the pack! I was hoping for somewhere in the middle – mainstream but enough of a twist to make it distinctive.

The thing that I think I find most frustrating in these cases is not that the piece has been rejected, but that the process wasted so much time. At least a fall at the first hurdle only takes a couple of weeks, six at the most. It typically takes four to six months for a second hurdle decision, during which time it’s not possible to send the script to another agent. I wasted a couple of years doing this with The Rule Book. I was going to spend part of the Christmas break writing fiction, but this has taken the wind out of my sails. Oh well, time to hunt out the Writer’s Handbook and see who to hassle next.

Lazy Sunday Service

I woke up this morning to find the surrounding landscape covered in a couple of inches of snow and it's been snowing on and off all day. In between the snow showers we've been for a long walk with the dogs and checked the cupboards to see how long we can last without having to risk the roads to get to the shops. When the lanes get impassable they stay so until they melt. Given the weather forecast predicts blizzards perhaps we might have a white christmas after all, if a bit of a hungry one.

My posts this week
Review of Ship of Fools by Fintan O'Toole
Reading on the edge
Deadline chasing
International misery index
Getting to grips
Review of Calumet City by Charlie Newton
Saturday Snippet: Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland

Saturday Snippet: Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland

Emily Tempest’s life is split between the aboriginal world of her long dead mother and the white world of her mining father. Neither completely out of place nor fully at home in either an aboriginal camp or a rough and tumble mining town, she spends time in both. In the following two passages, Hyland describes wonderfully the two worlds.

‘Li’l Emmy, parnparr,’ said Gladys Kneebone as we sat by the fire half an hour later. ‘Didn’t they feed you down south?’

Gladys herself was a battleship on stilts. She wasn’t much older than me, but she’d exploded in every direction. She was immensely tall, immensely fat, wearing a green dress and a coiffure that looked like it had been fashioned with a splitting axe. She thrust a pannikur of head-banging tea into my hand, fossiked through the embers with a stick and offered me a leg of … a leg of what? I wondered warily. Rabbit?

‘Good tucker that one,’ she exclaimed.

I took a look at the scorched carcass grinning up from the ashes. Jesus, a fuking cat! Been a while since I’d had one of those. What the hell, I decided, it couldn’t be any worse than some of the crap I’d endured in roadhouses on the way up here.

It wasn’t. Kind of stringy, kind of greasy, kind of …well, catish but I managed.

Many of the adults I remembered from my childhood – Stumpy Doods, Spinifes, Timothy Windmill – drifted over and had a quiet word, shook my hand or threw their wary arms around me. Cissy Whiskey slipped in through the ruck, touched my face as if it was a sacred object and gave me the long lost daughter spiel. Cissy was famous for her ash-baked damper. I must have eaten tons of the stuff, smothered in golden syrup and washed down with sweet black tea. Despite the damper, Cissy herself was as skinny as a picket, with piercing eyes and an aureole of white hair.

* * * *

He appeared to be offended by the look of alarm that shot across my face. I was, I supposed, insulting the place he’d chosen to make his home. But Bluebush! What a dump! The sort of town which it’s easier to buy a silencer that a decent coffee. When we visited town, I’d never leave my father’s side; as a little black kid, you could feel the antagonism radiating out from the whitefellers when you passed them in the street.

And what a mob they were themselves. A bigger collection of dikheads and drop-kicks you’d have to travel a long way to find; boozers, bruisers and substance abusers, rockjaw Germans and lockjaw Yorkshiremen, grease monkeys and gamblers, meatworkers, meat-heads, missionaries, maniacs, men on the run, men on the dole, men on the Witness Protection Program. Peddlers, pushers, whores and bores, deperadoes of every denomination. You name it, they were there, drawn to the town like flies to a carcass.

My review is here

Review of Calumet City by Charlie Newton (Bantam Books, 2008)

Ghetto cop Patti Black is as tough as they come; street smart with the courage to take on the Gangster Disciples that haunt Chicago’s meaner neighbourhoods. Her tactical unit are preparing to deliver a stolen-property warrant to a GD haunt when they receive news that somebody has tried to kill the mayor. An hour later they are in a major gunfight that drifts to another house; a house that was once owned by the mayor’s wife and whose basement is found to contain the remains of woman. A woman that Patti knows well – her foster parent whose husband, Roland Ganz, had systematically raped her over a four year period in a house in Calumet City ending in pregnancy at 15, flight, her son being adopted, and a few years drunk before she got her life back together sufficiently to start a new life. Then Assistant State Attorney, Richard Rhodes, is kidnapped. Richey from the home. Then Patti is contacted by a third victim, Danny Del Paso, now in a maximum security prison to warn her that a contract is out on her life. Gwen, the final child, also then contacts her to say that ‘he’ has her child and he's after Patti’s son. She might not have seen her son for over twenty years, but Patti will do anything to protect him from the monster she endured. Only the re-emergence of Roland has sent her into a flatspin, unable to make rational decisions, teetering on the edge of her sanity. To make matters worse, her mentor, Chief Jesse Smith, seems implicated in corruption with the mayor's office and both the FBI and Internal Affairs are also after her. Unsure who to trust, she stumbles from one high octane situation to the next, all the time knowing that her former tormentor is drawing closer.

Calumet City starts with a bang and the pace continues to build from there, the tension being steadily ratcheted up as Patti bounces from one crisis to the next whilst slowly disintegrating mentally as the pressure mounts. The writing is taut, and Newton quickly hooks the reader in and drags them along; compelled to find out what happens next. Whilst the story relies on too many coincidences and entanglements, at one level it doesn’t really matter - the entertainment and the realism of ghetto policing compensates for the lack of overall plot realism that blends gang violence, city politics, child sex abuse, torture, murder, religious fervour, and one woman’s attempts to maintain her sanity and protect her unknown son. For my money it’s more a thriller than a police procedural, but it certainly blends the two. Overall, a flawed but compelling edge-of-the-seat, rollercoaster of a story.