Lazy Sunday Service

I've just finished Sergios Gakas' Ashes set in Greece just prior to the 2004 Olympics. The whole book is searing social commentary on Greek society and its institutions, but one sentence in particular made me pause for thought. 'If your funeral was a ticket only affair, how much would you make?' Now there's strong assumptions here about what constitutes a valuable life, but an interesting question to reflect upon ...

My posts this week
Cover rage
Review of Outrage by Arnaldur Indridason
Animal sidekicks
November reviews
Review of LA Requiem by Robert Crais
China's ghost cities
I'm meant to be grateful?

I’m meant to be grateful?

‘To NAMA!’ Jimmy raised a pint of Guinness.

‘Fuck NAMA!’ Tom snapped.

‘We’d be bust without them. The whole lot gone.’

‘Has to be better than being slowly bled to death on life support.’

‘Ah, come-on, Tom. You’d have lost your house. Your cars. Holiday homes. Everything.’

‘House is in the wife’s name and we’ve a wee nest egg in a daughter’s account in the Isle of Man. Fuck’em.’

‘They bailed us out big time,’ Jimmy persisted.

‘They bailed themselves out. They get our developments at half price, we pay back the full whack and I’m meant to be grateful?’


A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of LA Requiem by Robert Crais (Orion, 1999)

Elvis Cole runs a PI agency in LA with the silent, brooding Joe Pike. Both are former elite soldiers and are highly skilled investigators. When Karen Garcia goes missing her father calls on Pike, a former lover of Garcia, to find her. A few hours later she's found next to a lake, shot in the head. The investigation is to be conducted by detectives from Robbery-Homicide headed up by the weasely Krantz. Pike and Krantz have a troubled history stretching back to when Pike was a rookie cop and his partner was under investigation by internal affairs. Garcia's father has some political juice and uses his influence to allow Cole and Pike to shadow the police investigation. Frustrated by Krantz's lack of cooperation and ineptness they strike out on their own, quickly discovering that Garcia was the fifth victim of a serial killer, one who seems determined to exact revenge for some unknown reason.

Without wishing to offend either author, LA Requiem reminded a lot of Michael Connelly's LA stories, especially those concerning Harry Bosch. The writing style, setting and focus seemed very similar to me - LA, Robbery-Homicide, serial killer, investigators who are Vietnam vets. This is no bad thing as I think both are very fine writers, rather just an observation. LA Requiem rattles along at quick, steady pace. Crais writes with an assured hand. The story is well crafted, with a nice layering of various subplots and back story that add to the overall narrative rather than detracting from it. Crais paints a good sense of place, the characters are well penned, and the story builds to a nice climax. There were a few elements that unsettled me a little, however. Maybe it's because I don't live in the US, but I had a hard time believing that two private investigators could get any meaningful access to a serial killer investigation, especially not through a councilman (perhaps maybe something more significant like a governor I could have gone along with). The Samantha Dolan character didn't quite seem to ring true, especially in her quest for Cole. And regardless of any material evidence relating to Pike, the fact that he escaped from incarceration would have legal consequences. Despite the niggling doubts about credibility, LA Requiem is an enjoyable read and I'll be looking out for other Elvis Cole books.

November reviews

I've five 4 star reviews for November. A reasonably good month, though on reflection I suspect I've been a little over-generous with the ratings for a couple of them (they felt right at the time). Difficult to pluck one from the pack, but I'm going for The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still by Malcolm Pryce. Whilst it was a little uneven, the first half was excellent; it was inventive, witty and engaging.

Outrage by Arnaldur Indridson ****
Call for the Dead by John Le Carre ****
The Red Coffin by Sam Eastland **.5
The Hanging Shed by Gordon Ferris ****
The Somme Stations by Andrew Martin ***.5
The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still by Malcolm Pryce ****
Greenwich Killing Time by Kinky Friedman ****

Animal sidekicks

Two books have recently arrived in the post, both of which have a lead character encumbered with an usual animal. In Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov, a journalist, Victor, shares his apartment with a depressed penguin rescued from the city zoo which could not afford to feed it. In Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, the lead character, Zinzi, wanders around with a sloth on her back which she must sustain, penance for a crime she committed. I think I'll probably read these back to back. I have to say I'm quite taken with the premise of an unusual animal sidekick. Lots of room for some imaginative storytelling. Hopefully they'll live up to expectation - they've both certainly been showered with good reviews. If you were going to pick an animal sidekick for your fictional self, what would you go for?

Review of Outrage by Arnaldur Indridason

Inspector Erlendur is away and Elinborg, one his trusty colleagues, is left to deal with any new cases. As a senior detective she is trying to balance the pressures of work with home life and looking after her three kids and husband. When the body of a young man is found in his apartment with his throat slashed she is assigned to the case. The investigation quickly alters track when a date-rape drug is found in his possession. It seems that one of his victims, or someone known to them, has exacted a terrible revenge. Despite her revulsion for his crimes, Elinborg patiently pieces together the events leading to the young man's death, whilst also trying to maintain a harmonious domestic life.

I finished Outrage just over a week before I sat down to write this review. What is unsettling is the fact that a lot of the plot had already started to slip away from my memory. I know I enjoyed reading the book a lot, but a fair bit failed to stick to the old grey cells. This has led me to reflect a little on Indridason's other translated books - all of which I've read. I've a mixed memory with respect to them. For example, I remember Jar City very well even though it's a few years since I've read it, but although Hypothermia was one of my books of 2010, I can't for the life of me recall what it was about (and I'm usually pretty good at remembering books and their plots). I think this is because Indridason's forte is ordinary characters and exposing the mundane and banal aspects of everyday life and police investigations. His stories are carefully layered and reflective, are philosophical in a literary sense, and have fairly ambiguous endings. It is the style, atmosphere and the central characters that linger not the plot. They're books that create a certain mood, rather than a visceral impact. That's also the reason why I like them so much. Outrage is a fine addition to the series, allowing one of the support characters to come to the fore. The reader finds out much more about Elinborg and her family circumstances and history, which was a nice complement to simply tracking Erlendur from book to book. Despite the fact that the stories seem to slip away from me, I'll be in the queue for the next one.

Cover rage

I've recently finished reading Outrage by Arnaldur Indridason and LA Requiem by Robert Crais (reviews shortly). In both cases, I had the same experience every time I picked the book up - the cover just didn't match the book. In the case of Outrage, the murder victim was killed in the living area of an apartment, not at a bus stop in the middle of winter. In fact I can't remember snow being mentioned once in the entire book, but that might be my memory. In the case of LA Requiem, although there a couple of trips to Palm Springs the vast majority of the action takes place in the city and the atmosphere is one of enclosure and claustrophobia, not wide open spaces. I've no real problem with generic style covers, but for me they have to be reflective of the story to some extent. Neither did in these cases. Not that it detracted from the stories themselves, which were very good. What about you, does a cover that doesn't match the book induce some mild form of cover rage?

Lazy Sunday Service

The power of blogging was revealed to me once again this week. On Monday, ten minutes after posting on the other blog I contribute to, RTE Radio 1 were on the phone asking if I'd go on their Drivetime programme to talk about the argument I'd made (starts 52.2 mins in). Thankfully it was a radio interview and not TV as two minutes in I started to have a nosebleed. With no tissues at hand and not wanting to pinch my nose in case I changed my voice too much I tried my best to keep my concentration and deal with the blood. The slot lasted seven and a half minutes. Certainly the messiest interview I've done!

My posts this week
Six reasons why the property market is going to be very slow to recover
Agents for short stories
Call for the Dead
Review of Call for the Dead by John Le Carre
Property register, house price and rental yield mapping
iphone, your phone

iphone, your phone

'It's exactly as you'd get in an Apple store,' the young man said conspiratorially. 'They retail at six hundred euro. It's yours for two hundred.'

'It's three fifty in the shop,' a lank-haired youth replied.

'But that's with a contract. Eighteen months. They sell you the phone cheap to lock you in.'

'What's the catch?'

'There isn't one. It's brand new. Never used.'

'It just fell out the back of a van?'

The seller shrugged, casting an anxious glance round the bar.

'I'll give you one fifty.'

'One seventy.'

'And it definitely works?'

'Lifetime warranty. Your life, not its, capiche?'


A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of Call For The Dead by John Le Carre (1961, Gollancz)

The day after George Smiley interviews and clears Samuel Fennan, a Foreign Office worker, of suspected espionage after an anonymous tip-off, Fennan's found dead having seemingly committed suicide. Smiley's boss at MI5 and the police seem to be content to accept that Fennan took his own life. However, after visiting the scene of death and interviewing Fennan's wife, a concentration camp survivor, Smiley is not convinced and neither is a local policeman, Mendel, who is about to retire. Unwilling to drop his investigation, Smiley quits his job and continues to work at the thin trail. A short time later he is viciously attacked and hospitalised. Undaunted, Smiley and Mendel patiently unravel clues and continue their hunt convinced that there are sinister forces at play.

Call For The Dead was Le Carre's first book and also introduced George Smiley to the reading public. It's a moderately thin read (157 pages) and the plot is relatively straightforward, with no substantive subplots. What marks Le Carre out is his voice and the careful layering and rhythm of the prose. In many ways, the storytelling style of Call for the Dead reminded me of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's Martin Beck series, which was first published a couple of years later, in that the style is social realism (rather than noirish style of American hardboiled or the more swashbuckling style of spy thrillers such as Ian Fleming) and the pace is quite sedate as the story works its way to a somewhat understated climax. Like Martin Beck, Smiley is a fairly ordinary character who works through a case patiently and dogmatically, though he is a little more impetuous and foolhardy, and shares the donnish qualities of Colin Dexter's Morse. I read a number of the Smiley books when I was a teenager and it was interesting to revisit him now, especially since the character I remember was slightly different to the one presented (I thought of him as more enigmatic and calculating). Having looked around on the internet it seems that Smiley's character did mutate a little and his back story and career timeline altered quite substantially between books. He nevertheless remains one of fiction's enduring spy characters.

Call for the Dead

I finished John Le Carre's 'Call for the Dead' at the weekend. It was his first book and introduced George Smiley. There's much to like about the book. One thing that caught my eye was that the back cover blurb which simply states:

Why did a routine security check make Fennan kill himself?

Short, to the point and does the job of piquing a potential reader's interest. There's no longer blurb on the inside either. Quite a refreshing approach.

The book also has some nice philosophical asides. Here are two of them.

What did Hesse write? 'Strangers to wander in the mist, each is alone.' We know nothing of one another, nothing, Smiley mused. However closely we live together, at whatever time of day or night we sound the deepest thoughts in one another, we know nothing. How am I judging Elsa Fennan? I think I understand her suffering and her frightened lies, but what do I know of her? Nothing.

He was going to tell Mendel how he had wrestled with Goethe's metamorphoses of plants and animals in the hope of discovering, like Faust, 'what sustains the world at it inmost point'. He wanted to explain why it was impossible to understand nineteenth-century Europe without a working knowledge of the natural sciences, he felt earnest and full of important thoughts, and knew secretly that this was because his brain was wrestling with the day's events, that he was in a state of nervous excitement.

Agents for short stories?

To date I've only submitted a relatively small number of short stories to magazines but my hit rate is not particularly good. However, rather than get reject letters (although I've had those as well), the pieces seem to just disappear. In part, this is because the magazine seems to go into suspended animation. In one case the editor quit a few days after submission and it took a while for a new one to be appointed. In another the site continued to post stories, but my submission just seemed to vanish into thin air with enquiry emails ignored. In the latest case, the site seems to have become frozen in time, with no new stories posted for a couple of months. I've no idea if there are agents for short stories - folk who will help you select the right outlet and shepherd it through the process - but I feel like I could do with one. If I had a choice, Patti Abbott or Paul Brazill would be top of the list - they know how to write good stories, have great records of getting them published, and genuinely care about other authors and the changing publishing world. That's not an out and out cry for help, but I'm happy for it to be taken as such!

Lazy Sunday Service

The gongs for the Irish Book Awards were announced last Thursday. The winner of the Ireland AM crime novel of the year was Bloodland by Alan Glynn. My review of the book can be found here, the other nominees here. My review of Winterland, the first book in the loose trilogy is here. I attended the launch of Bloodland just a couple of months back in the Gutter Bookshop and despite only being available for a short while the book has clearly made a positive impression on the reading public. Congrats to Alan. And if you haven't yet read Bloodland, get yourself down to your local bookshop; it's a real page turner. I'll be toddling down there when his forthcoming third book, Graveland, is released.

My posts this week:
Continuity
A ghost of a chance
Review of The Red Coffin by Sam Eastland
Review of The Hanging Shed by Gordon Ferris
Tactics without strategy: decentralisation and post-decentralisation
The end of a dream

The end of a dream

This was the dream. To be a professional singer. Bright lights, screaming fans, world tours, fame and fortune. It was now or never. At thirty he was already halfway over the hill.

The auditorium was massive; a sea of faces.

The music started, he sang, the song faded.

There were titters of laughter and a few boos. The panel looked pained.

He stared at his feet hoping the stage would swallow him.

‘Simon?’

‘Look, Michael, I’ll be straight with you. I’m not saying no, I’m saying never.’

The world faded to a fuzzy haze, the dream dying in public humiliation.


A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of The Hanging Shed by Gordon Ferris (Corvus, 2010)

Glasgow, 1946. Hugh Donovan is a few weeks away from being hanged for the brutal killing of five young children when he contacts Douglas Brodie, his childhood friend. As teenagers Donovan stole Brodie's girlfriend and since then the two have not spoken, going their separate ways. Brodie won a scholarship to university, then joined the police before enlisting in the army. Donovan served as a tail gunner in a bomber, becoming horribly disfigured when his plane caught fire. Despite his apathy, Brodie visits Donovan in prison and agrees to help his legal advocate Samantha Campbell investigate the case further and prepare an appeal. Both quickly become convinced that Donovan is innocent and has been set-up by the police and other forces. Those forces seem to determine to stop them discovering the truth and soon their own lives are in danger.

The Hanging Shed has all the ingredients of a successful crime novel - strong characters, a compelling plot, good pace, credible dialogue and action, and good contextualisation and back story. The tale very quickly grabs the reader's attention and the pages fly by. And yet there was something that didn't quite feel right. The storytelling seemed a little formulaic. Ferris structures the story into short chapters, each typically six to eight pages long, with each chapter ending on a mini-cliff hanger. This is great for pulling the reader through the story, but I found the formula repetitive after a while restricting the narrative in its scope and form. That's not to say I wasn't gripped by the plot, I absolutely was. And I found Brodie an interesting lead character that I'd like to spend more time with. However, it all seemed a little bit by numbers. Overall, a thoroughly enjoyable book, if a little formulaic.