There was an interesting piece on Irish crime fiction from Fintan O’Toole (right) in yesterday’s Irish Times, in which he referenced Declan Hughes, Gene Kerrigan and Alan Glynn as exemplars of ‘the nearest thing we have to a realist literature adequate to capturing the nature of contemporary society …’. The gist runneth thusly: “It is striking that the most successful Irish crime writer, John Connolly, who began his career just a decade ago, felt it necessary to set his books in the US and to insert himself directly into the American detective tradition. Connolly presumably decided that Ireland, even in the Celtic Tiger years, was not the place for crime fiction. Yet it is equally striking that in the last few years, Irish-set crime writing has not merely begun to blossom but... Similar posts

The supernatural has always been a consistent element in John Connolly’s novels and short stories. This is particularly true of the Charlie Parker novels, in which Parker, a private investigator, finds himself drawn to manifestations of evil that luridly and unabashedly tap into the world’s folk narratives to prod at readers’ primal fears. It’s a clever piece of marketing, to blend two of literature’s best-selling genres, in crime fiction and horror, but it takes even cleverer writing to splice the genres convincingly. Connolly is by now the acknowledged master of the gothic noir.   In recent years, the supernatural has become less and less a presence in Connolly’s novels, to the extent that last year’s The Reapers was a revenge tale with no supernatural aspects at... Similar posts

Being the ornery kind of cynic who tends to assume that a book’s quality declines in inverse proportion to the amount of hype it generates (THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO being a case in point for yours truly), I’m delighted to say that, having just finished Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE, it’s everything it’s cracked up to be. Which is terrific, not least because I know Stuart, and it’d have been embarrassing if it wasn’t. But – huzzah! – it delivers in spades, right from page one. A tale of an ex-paramilitary killer bedevilled by the ghosts of his victims, it’s a timely offering, a superb revenge thriller that is as tender in parts as it is brutal, and a courageously genre-bending story in the way it deploys supernatural elements. No wonder John Connolly loved it.... Similar posts

It’s Sunday, they’re reviews, to wit: Stuart Neville’s THE TWELVE isn’t due until July, but Library Thing is already impressed: “The book is a savage, tender tale of the futility and fragility of the search for peace in Northern Ireland … Neville is uncompromising about violence and the truly terrible situations that his duplicitous characters and innocents alike find themselves in, but the tale itself storms along like a runaway train and all the reader can do is watch with bated breath as it hurtles towards a brilliant finale. I found the ending surprisingly unpredictable and utterly satisfying. The story is poignantly relevant, and the premise absolutely original and something which raises this novel well beyond a run-of-the-mill thriller.” Nice one … Derek Landy’s... Similar posts