My blogs of year

I try to catch up on various blogs every day, but there are dozens in my reader and time is short. If nothing else there are three places I check into everyday, almost without fail:

The Crime and Mystery Fiction Friendfeed – I’m not great at posting comments or acknowledging likes, but I do a lot of lurking. A great way of linking to a number of crime fiction blogs and a friendly community in which to chat about posts.

Pattinase – always interesting posts and comments and a great little community centred around the genial host and short story star, Patti Abbott. Participating in the Forgotten Friday challenge has improved my reading no end.

Crime Always Pays – the blog of the ever entertaining Declan Burke with reviews, observations and chat; an indispensible resource for anyone interested in Irish crime fiction and crime fiction in general.

A little bit more time and these are where I head next:

Reactions to Reading

You Would Say That, Wouldn’t You?

Mysteries in Paradise

DJ Krimiblog

Crime Scraps

Petrona

Crime Watch

Do Some Damage

The Game’s Afoot

International Noir

Progressive Economy

Irish Economy

A great big thank you to everyone who produces these blogs. Not only are they great little communities, but the posts, chat, reviews, news and observations have informed my reading and views. May you long continue to post.

New year resolutions

1) Read less. Aim to read 60-80 books, rather than 100+
2) Re-balance my reading to include more non-fiction and short stories
3) Write more (a) fiction, especially short stories; (b) non-fiction – articles and get to work on a couple of books.
4) Write less blog posts. Aim for one per day between The View from the Blue House and Ireland After NAMA. 365 between the two is more than enough blather.
5) Spend more time on the garden

2010 was a pretty good 'un, here’s to 2011

A big thanks to all the readers of The View from the Blue House and especially those that left comments during 2010. On the personal front, the past year has been a relatively good one, even if it was a catastrophic one for the country as the crisis deepened and it fell into the clutches of the IMF.

On the reading front. I read some great fiction in 2010, discovered loads of new authors and caught up with some favourites. A great big thank you to all the authors I’ve read over the year for taking the time to write and share your stories. I'll announce my books of the year in the next day or so.

On the blogging front. I wrote 317 posts on The View from the Blue House and about another 100 on Ireland After NAMA. More importantly, I got great enjoyment from reading a host of other blogs and developed a number of online friendships (even though I’m more of a lurker than a commenter) and I’d like to thank everyone all for their posts. In particular, the Crime and Mystery Fiction Friendfeed has been a great way to track postings and to discuss them.

On the writing front. I had two books published in 2010: The White Gallows, the second McEvoy book, and the second edition of Key Thinkers on Space and Place. I also co-edited six issues of Progress in Human Geography and put the first issue of Dialogues in Human Geography to bed and it’ll be out in March. I finished off the third McEvoy novel, Ghostland, and discovered Harry and Pete, two workshy cops on the slow road to retirement. I’m presently working on a Harry and Pete novel, Good Cop, Bad Cop, and thoroughly enjoying their company, even if they are a pair of chancers. The first Harry and Pete short story was shortlisted for Jason Duke’s red hot writing competition and led to signing with DHS Literary Agency at the end of the year. I also gave my first reading at Kildare Reader’s festival – and made a hames of it!

On the media front. My research was covered over 200 times in the local, national and international media. I also had a handful of opinion pieces published in the Irish Times and Sunday Business Post and made a short documentary for RTE. It’ll no doubt quieten down in 2011, which is probably no bad thing as it takes up a fair bit of time.

On the work front. As ever it’s generally been a pleasure to go into work given I have a great set of colleagues in the most collegial university in Ireland. The highlights were a €5.2m grant as a lead PI on a project to create a National Audio Visual Repository and securing the future of the Institute with four core funded posts and just about managing to raise the funds to keep everyone else going.

I’m looking forward to what 2011 brings. I hope you all have a great year.

December reviews

A very good month of reading in December. Some excellent reads. The book that stood out for me though was We Die Alone by David Howarth. A remarkable tale, that if a work of fiction would be dismissed as unbelivable. An amazing story of survival against all odds.

Breakfast with Anglo by Simon Kelly ***.5
Ten Days to D-Day by David Stafford ****
We Die Alone by David Howarth *****
The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler ****
And Then You Die by Michael Dibdin **.5
Raven Black by Ann Cleeves ****.5
Blood of the Wicked by Leighton Gage ****.5
Collusion by Stuart Neville ****.5
London Boulevard by Ken Bruen ****
A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey ****

Review of A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey (Oxford University Press, 2005)

A brief review to go with a brief history. I read this book a couple of weeks ago on my trip to London. David Harvey, one of the world’s leading social scientists, details the dominant political ideology shaping a number of Western countries, with its tentacles ever more influencing the political and economic relations of just about all countries as they become bound up in the global markets and global forms of economic governance such as the IMF and World Bank. At its heart, neoliberalism promotes the logic of the free market; that the state is inherently inefficient and ineffective and that services (such as health care, education and social services) are best delivered through the market and so should therefore be deregulated and privatized. Harvey explains:

‘Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practice. The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defence, police, and legal structures required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if necessary, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture.’

Harvey does an admirable job of explaining the logic of neoliberalism and in detailing a history of how its ideas have come to prominence in a number of countries. Whilst Harvey demonstrates the ways in which neoliberalism has unfolded in a variety of ways in a selection of countries, the story would have benefited from a more systematic analysis of the varieties of neoliberalism working across and within countries. Indeed, a scalar analysis from the local to the global would have been a useful addition to the text. That said, for anyone wanting a good overview of neoliberalism, this is a very useful introductory text. It also predicted the present global financial crash and explains why it was an inevitable outcome of free market financial capitalism, sustained by a political economic ideology that prioritized the interests of the market and corporations at all costs. From an Irish perspective, anyone trying to understand why the Irish economy collapsed and why the banks and the bond holders have been prioritized over citizens this book provides a compelling starting point to an explanation.

Review of London Boulevard by Ken Bruen (Do Not Press, 2001)

On the day that Mitch is released from prison after serving three years for a crime he doesn’t remember committing, Billy Norton picks him up with a bottle of whiskey and puts him up in a plush London flat. All Mitch wants to do is keep an eye on his mentally disturbed sister, and try and go straight. Norton though has other ideas, throwing a release party that half the South London underworld attends. They want Mitch to help Norton run their loan books, turning over anyone who won’t or can’t pay. Mitch wants to stay away, managing to get a job as the handyman to a once-famous, reclusive aging actress, Lillian Palmer, who dreams of making a stage comeback, but the death of Joe – a homeless, Big Issue seller – and the tug of the underworld, means that escape is futile. Instead, Mitch is drawn into a deadly game that he knows is unlikely to have a happy ending.

Ken Bruen seems to write effortlessly with a strong first person voice – the prose flows with great cadence; it’s as if it’s he’s sitting in a pub with you recounting the story over a few drunken pints. In London Boulevard he manages to convey a scene and the essential essence of characters in a few words, enabling the story to fly along. It almost feels like a movie script, which is where I think the book underplays things a little. I found myself wanting to slow things down a little in places and find out more about the back story and relationships between characters or to find out more about a particular bit of the storyline. The plot where it concerns Mitch’s re-absorption into the South London underworld and his relationship with his sister is very good, though the plotline concerning his attempt to go straight by working as a handyman doesn’t work quite so well given its plot device nature, but it does bring things to a typical Bruen noir ending. There’s also a nice use of intertextuality throughout. Overall, Bruen’s voice and writing win out to provide an entertaining slice of London noir.

P.S. I’ve just noticed that the book has recently been made into a movie of the same name – released in November 2010. Having watched the trailer - it's clear that the movie makers have rehashed the entire thing and it's hopelessly miscast with respect to the book. Why they have done this is beyond me, the book would have made a decent movie without being entirely re-written and populated with other characters.

Review of Collusion by Stuart Neville (Harvill Secker, 2010)

Bull O’Kane, paramilitary leader and master criminal on both sides of the Irish border, has been reduced to a bitter old man living in a convalescence home run by his daughter due to an entanglement with Gerry Fegan, a former IRA man who turned on his former comrades. His pride seriously dented, O’Kane wants Fegan and everyone who witnessed his demise to be wiped from the face of the Earth. To that end he hires The Traveller, a compassionless assassin, to kill everyone present on his farm the day Fegan wreaked his deadly havoc. Killing O’Kane’s former employees is relatively straightforward, but Fegan, Maria and her daughter, Ellen, have disappeared. Only Maria’s father is dying after a stroke, meaning she’s likely to break cover to travel back to Belfast to see him before he dies. And if they travel back, then Fegan will inevitably be drawn back to protect them. The troubled Inspector Lennon has his own reasons for wanting to see them, as Maria is his former partner and Ellen the daughter he barely knows. Aware that his daughter might be in danger, Lennon is desperately trying to track them down, his own colleagues trying to divert and slow his progress.

At one level, Collusion is a fairly straightforward thriller – The Traveller hunts down O’Kane’s victims and Fegan and Lennon try to stop him. It rises above average fare though by being a multilayered tale with noir sensibilities – no real heroes or neat resolutions, just people with complex, troubled and intertwined histories. The writing is excellent, with well constructed prose and scenes. The characterisation is strong and the plotting sound, with pages flying by as the end nears. I would have liked a bit more backstory and time with some of the characters, and a little more plot elaboration in places, but that’s just personal taste. And, although it’s not essential to read The Twelve, Neville’s previous novel first, it would certainly help as just about all the characters in Collusion first appear there and this is very much a sequel. Overall, an entertaining read, with the best opening scene I’ve read for a while. Whilst there are a pack of Irish crime writers flourishing at the minute, it’s not clear if one is going to break free and join John Connolly in the mega-sales league. Stuart Neville may well be that writer on the strength of his first two novels.

Orchid Blue

We braved the arctic freeze to do a quick shopping run to town this morning on 4 miles of untreated road. It's been -12 to -15 the last four nights, with the day time temperature not getting about -3 or so. As a result, the six inches of snow that fell last weekend are still here. That might not seem so bad to people used to such weather, but it rarely drops below freezing in Ireland and we are set for our coldest December since records began. Travel over the past few days has turned into chaos. The trip into town gave me an opportunity to duck into the local bookshop and pick up a copy of Eoin McNamee's Orchid Blue, which has been picking up rave reviews (e.g., The Irish Times and The Guardian) . Looks like it might be a seasonal break reading five Irish books in a row, not four. Looking forward to this one, as the other McNamee book that I've read - Resurrection Man was very good.

Authors using other author's characters

A couple of days ago, Patti over Pattinase posed a question about authors writing fiction using another author’s characters. It’s not really bothered me one way or another and it’s not something I’m particularly interested in doing myself, but we’ve been house bound for the past few days due to the weather, so we’ve been watching some DVDs – Morse and Frost. So Patti's question got me thinking about these series. Whilst some of the episodes are based on the novels of Colin Dexter and R.D. Wingfield, others have been written entirely by other writers using the characters in their own story. The entire run of Frost consists of 38 episodes, yet Wingfield only wrote 6 novels. Similarly, there were 33 episodes of Morse but only 13 novels. It’s pretty difficult, to be honest, to know which episodes were based on the novels and which were written by completely different authors. Clearly in TV land, having lots of writers scripting stories using someone else’s creations is not a problem. There seems to be something different about using them in novels, but I’m not really sure what or why? Something about TV not foregrounding the author maybe?

Ireland reading challenge

An Irish reading challenge is being hosted over on Books and Movies blog. The commitment is to read two, four or six Irish books during 2011. I'd thought I'd give this a plug as you'd really be doing yourself a favour by picking up some Irish crime fiction as there has been loads of good stuff published in the last couple of years and no doubt in 2011 - if you want suggestions try: Declan Burke, Adrian McKinty, Declan Hughes, Arlene Hunt, Tana French, Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville, Alex Barclay, Gene Kerrigan, Conor Fitzgerald, Eoin McNamee, Ken Bruen, Colin Batemen, Jane Casey, and John Connolly. I'm going to have my own Irish session over the seasonal break. I've made a start on Collusion by Stuart Neville and this will be followed by Pat McCabe's The Stray Sod Country, Ken Bruen's London Boulevard, and Kevin McCarthy's Peeler. All I need to do is shake off this damn flu and I'll be flying through them.

Review of Blood of the Wicked by Leighton Gage (Soho Press, 2008)

The Bishop of Presidente Vargas has flown in a corporate helicopter to the city of Cascatas, in the Brazilian interior, in order to open a new church. On landing he is assassinated by sniper fire. It is one of a number of murders that have happened in Cascatas in recent months, mostly the result of a dispute between the peasants of the Landless League and large landowners who dominate the local economy and wield power over the police and judiciary. In addition, street kids are being found dead on a regular basis. The death of bishop, however, brings Cascatas to the attention of government ministers and the federal police. Chief Inspector Mario Silva, a man driven by the need to deliver justice but prepared to twist the law to achieve it, is dispatched to the city. There he is met with resistance by the local state police as he tries to uncover the murderer, but as he picks away at the case, others start to turn up dead, killed by a brutal hand.

Blood of the Wicked is a crime novel meets social commentary, examining the nature of policing, justice, access to land and a livelihoods, street kids, liberation theology, and massive inequalities in wealth and power in Brazil. It would have been easy for Gage to drift into writing little more than a sermon on corruption and the injustices suffered by the peasant class in country, but he manages to keep the story of the investigation centre stage, with the social commentary drifting out through its telling. And it is a powerful tale, well told. The plotting is, for the most part, excellent, though I did feel the plot line with the journalist was closed off when it could have profitably been kept open and the deaths of several people with powerful connections would have meant the city being flooded with dozens of federal cops, not just Silva and two colleagues. But these are minor gripes. The characterization is strong across a range of characters, not just the principles, and Silva is a detective worth spending time with. Where the book excels is in its evocation of place and its social history and commentary. If you like your fiction to inform and educate as well entertain, then Blood of the Wicked is well worth a read.

Lazy Sunday Service - An Irish Panda

Thankfully, I managed to get out of London before the airports there were closed due to snow. We were delayed and the plane had to be de-iced, but we did eventually leave. Unfortunately, one of those at the meeting I attended is still stuck there and might be until Wednesday. I returned to a winter wonderland and six inches of snow. Yesterday I discovered an Irish panda whilst playing in the snow with the dogs.



Most posts this week:
Signed on the line
Review of And Then You Die by Michael Dibdin
Building on floodplains. Can't learn? won't learn?
Airport non-choices
Review of Raven Black by Ann Cleeves
Managing and resolving unfinished housing estates
A profound ad
Authors new to me in 2010

Authors new to me in 2010

Like Bernadette over at Reactions to Reading I've spent the last couple of years widening my author base having become somewhat tired with the selection in the local bookstores. The result is that of the 99 books I've read so far in 2010, 64 are authors new to me (and I can report this now as I'm not planning on reading any new to me authors between now and the new year). 10 are authors of non-fiction, the rest predominately crime fiction authors. Of these authors, most are contemporary, but I've also been trying to read some of the crime fiction canon. I've finished the Leighton Gage book and the review will go up next week.

Fiction
Blood of the Wicked by Leighton Gage ****.5
Raven Black by Ann Cleeves ****.5
The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler ****
I, The Jury by Mickey Spillane***.5
Killer Country by Mike Nicols ***.5
Halo in Blood by John Evans/Howard Browne ****
Needle in a Haystack by Ernesto Mallo ****
South of no North by Charles Bukowski ****
Smoked by Patrick Quinlan ***.5
The Green Ripper by John D. Macdonald ***.5
The Arms Maker of Berlin by Dan Fesperman ***
Saturday's Child by Ray Banks****
Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett ***
The Case of the Missing Books by Ian Samson ***
The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett ****
Client by Parnell Hall**.5
The Information Officer by Mark Mills **.5
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy ****.5
Point Blank by Richard Stark****
The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza by Lawrence Block ***
Tonight I Said Goodbye by Michael Koryta ****
Damnation Street by Andrew Klavan ****
Vodka Doesn't Freeze by Liah Giarrantano ****
Brodeck's Report by Phillipe Claudel *****
Water-Blue Eyes by Domingo Villar ***
Badfellas by Tonino Benacquista ***
Bad Things Happen by Harry Dolan ***
Then Came The Evening by Brian Hart ****
Blood Moon by Gary Disher **
Fury by G.M. Ford ***
Hand in the Fire by Hugo Hamilton ***
Killer by Dave Zeltserman *****
A Deadly Trade by Michael Stanley ***
The Goodbye Kiss by Massimo Carlotto ****
Roseanna by Maj Sjowall and Pers Wahloo ****
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston *****
The Devil's Garden by Ace Atkins ***
The American Envoy by Garbhan Downey ***
Motor City Blue by Loren Estleman ***
Paying For It by Tony Black ***
Criminal Summer by Luigi Guicciardi ***
Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas ***
The Silence of the Rain by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza ****
The Good Thief's Guide to Paris by Chris Ewan ****
Devil's Food by Anthony Bruno ****
The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain *****
Grift Sense by James Swain ****
Havana Fever by Leonardo Padura ***
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett *****
Dead Set by Kel Robertson ****
The Fugitive Pigeon by Donald Westlake ***
Shinjuku Shark by Arimasa Osawa **
Isle of Joy by Don Winslow ****
The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley ****

Non-Fiction
Ten Days to D-Day by David Stafford ****
We Die Alone by David Howarth *****
Breakfast with Anglo by Simon Kelly ***.5
Wasters by Shane Ross and Nick Webb ***
Love, Sex and War by John Cosgrove ****.5
GUBU Nation by Damian Corless ***
Kamikazi by Raymond Lamont-Brown ***
Pies and Prejudice by Stuart Maconie **
Chickenhawk by Robert Mason ****
The People's Manifesto by Mark Thomas ****

A profound ad

I saw what I thought was a quite profound billboard over a dual carriageway yesterday that declared: ‘You are not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic.’ Ironically it was next to the entrance to an underground station, although it wasn’t advertising public transport, but a satnav to try and avoid congestion (as if that is possible in central London). Regardless, the ‘you are traffic’ bit is a nice line. At the same spot, I found a nice independent bookshop – Camden Lock Books - in the underpass to Old Street station. Not a fantastic crime fiction section, but a good selection of literary fiction, and a good vibe. I limited myself to four books: John Harvey – Rough Treatment; Ken Breun – London Boulevard; Majs Sowell and Per Wahloo – The Man Who Went Up in Smoke; Jim Thompson – The Killer Inside Me. Looking forward to reading those.

Review of Raven Black by Ann Cleeves (Pan, 2006)

Catherine Ross moved to the Shetland Isles shortly after her mother’s death. Worldly wise and aloof, and let roam freely by her grief stricken father, she observes the islanders through the lens of her camera. On New Year’s Eve she travels home with a local girl her own age, Sally Henry, a shy, self-conscious girl who has never quite fitted in at school. On a dare they stop at old Magnus Tait’s cottage. A bachelor crofter, Tait, a simple man with learning difficulties, has been ostracized by the local community after the disappearance of a small child several years before. The following night, Catherine Ross disappears, her body discovered the morning after in the snow in the field opposite to Tait’s cottage by another blow-in, artist Fran Hunter. Inspector Jimmy Perez starts a murder investigation, soon joined by a team flown-in from Aberdeen. The locals are convinced of Tait’s guilt, but Perez has an open mind in the absence of any compelling forensic evidence. Piecing together the life of Catherine Ross though is no simple matter as she has managed to rile a number of people all of whom have something to hide.

Raven Black is compelling read. The plotting is strong and the prose nicely structured. Rather than follow the story from a single perspective, Cleeves elects to produce a multi-stranded narrative. The result is a multi-layered and textured story and a sense of being immersed in a community. Cleeves is particularly good at penning her characters and evoking a sense of place. The police procedural elements are realistic without the technical aspects being dwelled upon and the social relations between the cast members are believable. For a long time this was a 5 star read. I did, however, feel slightly let down by the end. On reflection, I think my issue was that the motivation of the killer was not really fully explained, nor why the victim did not fight back. Otherwise, this was a very fine read and I’m looking forward to tucking into the next book in Cleeves’ Shetland series.