The red eye

Very early start today.  Up at 5.30am, out the door by 5.45.  In the radio studio at the headquarters of the national radio station at 7am and on air at 7.15am.  If you want a listen then its online here. We published our report into the housing crisis in Ireland this afternoon and the Prime Time programme broadcasts tonight.  Spent the morning recording voice-over links and the afternoon answering journalist queries and writing an editorial for The Irish Times.  All interesting but stressful stuff.

Review of Damnation Street by Andrew Klavan (Harcourt, 2006)

Scott Weiss is an experienced PI with an uncanny ability to be able anticipate and read people and situations.  John Foy is a skilled gun for hire who has a face that's almost impossible to remember.  Both are obsessed with Julie Wyant, a prostitute with a difficult past who is on the run from both.  Weiss knows that as he tracks down Wyant he is leading Foy to her.  But to leave her to fend for herself will just delay the inevitable.  And so plays out a game of cat and mouse, each man determined to destroy the other and find Wyatt.

I might not have read Damnation Street if it hadn’t been for the fact that I’d finished a book and it was the only one to hand.  I’d started it three or four times to give up by page 5 or 6.  I just found the style irritating – simple, staccato sentences and no great hook.  Surrounded by a selection of books, the others just seemed more tempting.  However, by page 10 or so it was starting to improve and by page 30 or so I was hooked.  And a fine read it turned out to be – well crafted, enjoyable plot, good subplots, interesting characters, and solid show don’t tell writing.  There might not have been too many surprises, and a whole raft of worn tropes and cliches are used, but as I’ve said before, at this stage, there seems little room for a fresh perspective on the PI genre; Klavan has produced a fine noir version that has enough twists and turns to keep the average crime reader more than happy.  Having been hesitant at starting Damnation Street I’d now be interested to read the two other Weiss books.

Review of Tonight I Said Goodbye by Michael Koryta (St Martin’s Minatour, 2004)

Former marine turned private investigator Wayne Weston has seemingly committed suicide in a Cleveland suburb.  His wife and young daughter are missing and the police believe that Weston may have murdered them before turning the gun on himself.  Weston’s father thinks that theory stinks and hires PIs Lincoln Perry and Joe Pritchard to investigate, much to the annoyance of the local cops and FBI.  Both Perry and Pritchard served locally – Perry bounced out for assaulting the lawyer his fiancé left him for, and Pritchard has recently retired.  They quickly determine that Weston was working for a local tycoon and also had connections to the Russian mob.  Neither are happy at Perry and Pritchard’s involvement.  Then Weston’s best friend is shot dead as he meets Perry and Pritchard and the case takes a twist that ultimately leads back to revealing Weston’s fate.

Tonight I Said Goodbye is a solid piece of entertainment - good pace, plenty of action, well judged characterisation, effective dialogue, decent sense of place, and sound plotting (even though one aspect of the ending was telegraphed from quite a long way out).  There’s a little bit too much in the way of reflection and description in places, but Koryta writes in an easy-going manner that is deceptively rich and which draws the reader in and tugs them along.  There are plenty of twists, albeit none complete surprises, and the book builds in tension to become a real page-turner.  Just as with police procedurals, there are probably few new angles to be explored in the PI genre at this stage: what a reader is after then is a competent story that’s told in a strong voice – Koryta delivers on that score.

Lazy Sunday Service

This has been my slowest week of posting since starting the blog a year ago.  Just too many things going on.  Due a decent bout of insomnia I did, however, manage to read two novels - Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indridason and Dead I May Well Be by Adrian McKinty.  Both were very good reads.  Excellent, in fact.  For a first novel, Dead I May Well Be is an astonishingly rich piece of writing and damn fine entertainment.  Hypothermia is a well paced and layered piece of storytelling with great emotional depth and reflection.  More in the next few days as I draft reviews.


My posts this week:
Review of Gallows Lane by Brian McGilloway
Review of Almost Blue by Carlo Lucarelli
Lights, camera, action, bed

Lights, camera, action, bed

The last few days have been a bit frantic.  Out of the house at 7.30pm and back at 9pm.  Eat then sleep.  Then repeat.  Most of the time has been taken up with filming and recording for Prime Time.  I'm pretty poor material to be working with.  My dialogue was too 'academic' - "now, can you say that again but normally so that someone on the street can understand it."  Or, "can you say that without it sounding like a lecture?"  I was speaking too quickly.  I fluffed lines constantly.  I discovered I have a complete inability to memorize lines.  And due to nerves I could barely formulate questions for the people I was interviewing.  I spent most of the time paranoid I'd say something daft that they would include in the film - and it's pretty difficult to be recorded over three days where you don't say something stupid or something that you would in private but not in public. Interestingly, giving a lecture to an audience of 500 barely phases me, but I found this quite unnerving, though it got easier as we progressed.  I'm not sure how many hours of film/audio recordings they have but a fair few - maybe six or seven - that will now have to be edited down to 8-10 minutes.  It includes several retakes of the same thing or variations on a theme or the same thing but in a different place.  Lots of filler shots of walking around estates, or walking and talking through fields or along roads.  I might have to go back in and do voice-overs on Wednesday.  All interesting stuff, but completely exhausting.

Review of Almost Blue by Carlo Lucarelli (Vintage, 2003, Italian 1997)

Simone spends his days in his room, pretending to be asleep every time his mother knocks on the door, the rest of the time scanning the airwaves of Bologna eavesdropping on CB radios, mobile phones, police and taxi frequencies, and internet chat played through a voice synthesiser, charting the social lives of its citizens.  Blind since birth he hears the world as colours and whilst turning the dial he picks up on a cold green voice that sends shivers up his spine.  It is the voice of a serial killer reeling in his next victim; a disturbed young man who listens to music constantly to drown out the bells ringing in his head.  Detective Inspector Grazia Negro works for the Unit for the Analysis of Series Crimes in Rome and she’s spotted a pattern in what seem like unconnected murders in Bologna.  On her first major case, with her blue voice, she needs to persuade the local authorities to take her analysis seriously, but more importantly she needs to catch the killer before he strikes again, and before he can track down the one person who can identify his voice.

I think Lucarelli is one hell of a writer.  He immediately plunges you into a story and he writes in a show don’t tell style that is pared back and yet full of insight (see my post on how it paints a short but effectively portrait of the city).  The story charts the interactions of the three principal characters, with Simone and the serial killer written in the first perspective.  The characterization is excellent, and there are some nice observational touches.  The plot is relatively straightforward and well structured.  My two gripes are the same as with the three previous Lucarelli novels I’ve read – there is not enough in the way of back story (the reader literally gets dropped into the characters’ lives for the week or so the story lasts but knows little else about them) and the story itself seems somewhat underdeveloped.  I’m not a fan of padding for the sake of it, but Lucarelli pares back the story to just about the bare minimum.  The result is the book feels like a TV episode as opposed to a full movie.  A very well written TV episode, but without the benefit of previous episodes to frame things for the reader.  The result is I’m left kind of conflicted – delighted with the writing yet somehow short-changed.  It makes me hungry for his other works, but worried that they’ll also give a high that doesn’t last long enough. 

Review of Gallows Lane by Brian McGilloway (Pan, 2008)

When James Kerr arrives back into Lifford, an Irish border town, after serving time in the North for driving the get-away car in an armed robbery, he sets in train a sequence of events centred on Gallows Lane, where an arms and drugs cache has just been found.  Inspector Ben Devlin meets the born-again Kerr at the border, but he soon slips away after professing the need to sort one thing out before leaving the area for good.  Not long after a stranger is seen lurking in a garden off Gallows Lane, and then the owner, an Englishman with strong republican beliefs is found hanging from a tree.  Distracting Devlin from the case are station politics and internal rivalries, an upcoming interview for promotion, a break-in at a local pharmacy, and the slaying of a young girl, beaten to death on a building site.  As the summer heatwave builds, so the bodies start to pile up, and Devlin not only has to contend with solving two sets of murders – one seemingly centred on Kerr, the other around the young girl – but also threats and attacks against himself, and detectives from Dublin muscling in on his cases.

It took me a little while to get into Gallows Lane.  The first 100 pages or so seemed ponderous, and somehow lacking, and I wasn’t sure about some of the police organisation and procedural elements.  Slowly, however, I was drawn ever further into the book, all the careful groundwork laid out in the early stages gaining its significance as the various threads are pulled ever tighter.  McGilloway’s skill is in the plotting and sense of place.  He weaves several subplots in and through each other, although as with Borderlands some of the story is a little over the top, some situations are clearly plot devices, and I had difficulty believing the resolution of two strands.  The result is a slow burner that shifts through the gears into a real page turner.  He also does a good job of setting the reader in small town Ireland and the landscape along the Donegal/Derry border.  Where the book struggles a little, I feel, is with characterisation.  Devlin is well drawn and an interesting enough character – a committed family man that seems vulnerable to temptation, prepared to cut corners, occasionally hot tempered and prone to panic attacks.  Many of the other characters, however, are underdeveloped.  For example, we get little sense of Devlin’s wife, or the principal victims or perpetrators, or some of his colleagues, with little in the way of back stories and motivations.  This is partly due to the large cast and partly due to the pacing, where characters are getting little ‘page time’.  Regardless, McGilloway’s Inspector Devlin series is developing nicely and I’m looking forward to the next two books.  Comparisons are often made to Rankin and Dexter, but I think Robinson and Booth are probably nearer the mark.