Thank You!

Many thanks to all the regular readers of this blog because at least partially thanks to your votes, my book, The Cold Cold Ground, has won the 2013 Spinetingler Award for best crime novel!
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I'm really very touched. I put a lot of my heart and soul into that book. It was both harrowing and strangely fun journeying back to the 1981 of my imagination and reliving those childhood days in Victoria Estate in Carrickfergus. I don't find writing particularly easy and I'm not one of those 1000 words before breakfast types but occasionally during the writing process of this book I did feel that I was firing on all cylinders the way a top notch writer presumably feels all the time...
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Anyway many thanks to everyone who voted for me or reviewed me on Amazon, Audible, Good Reads or their blog. When you are published by a small press it's almost impossible for your book to get noticed which is why reader support and reader reviews mean so very much.
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Slainte. 

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What I'm Listening To

I'm working - reasonably - hard on the next Sean Duffy novel and I thought you might like to know what I'm listening to on my down time. I remember talking to Irvine Welsh once about his writing process and he told me that the first thing he did on starting a new novel was to prepare a mix tape (he said tape but surely he must have meant CD) to play while he was writing. I couldn't possibly do that. The slightest thing distracts me and I use it as an excuse not to write. If a tap is dripping in a house three streets over I will stop for the day. But I do listen to a lot of music in and around the writing process. Often during spell and fact checks and on those long diversionary journeys into Wikipedia that take you far far far from where you wanted to go. 
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For the last couple of weeks I've had the Handsome Family on heavy rotation. They're alt folkies from Chicago who very much channel Jim Thompson into their lyrics. Here's two of their songs for your edification. The second one might be my new favourite Christmas song. The first one, an extremely creepy murder ballad, already has 40 plays on my ipod. You can read the chilling and beautiful lyrics to Down In The Ground, here. 

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Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth

Yesterday was St George's Day so I thought I'd trot out this post from last year...
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It's not very fair to review a play on the basis of reading it rather than seeing it performed but this was my only option since Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem has only run on the West End and Broadway and I don't know if it'll make it to Australia anytime soon. I've been hearing a lot about Jerusalem for a while  now so last week I finally thought that I would read the text rather than not have any access to it at all. 
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The first thing to say is that it's a pretty funny piece and with actors doing these lines on stage I can only imagine that it would he hilarious. The story is quite straightforward. It's St. George's Day 2009. Johnny Byron is a "gyppo" who lives in the woods and gets by by dealing speed and marijuana to the surprising array of people in the local village who need a little help to get them through the day. He lives in a caravan that has been the subject of an eviction order by the local council and throughout the morning and afternoon (the day also of the local fair) many of Johnny's friends and relations come by to sponge off him, threaten him, hassle him and warn him that the council is serious this time. Johnny Byron is a self mythologising, Falstaffian antihero and his mate Ginger is a funny and worthwhile sidekick. The supporting characters are in the best traditions of Pinter and Beckett depending on which of the two you find more amusing (for me its Beckett). Jerusalem has an array of tones veering from the romantic and melancholy to the downright silly and although I'm not entirely sure it holds completely together, it mostly does. The beginning of the play was my favourite bit, reading like an extended Pete and Dud sketch complete with "I had that Cheryl Cole in me bed last night" which I imagine had the audience in stitches. It gets more serious towards the end bringing in elements as diverse as Walter Scott, Thomas Hardy and Roald Dahl.
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Jerusalem is a million miles from the traditional British "well made" play and that's a good thing. It is a bawdy, profane, profound work of art that celebrates a notion of Englishness that the English have generally been too diffident and embarrassed to talk about. If you can catch a performance of this somewhere you should go see it and failing that you can probably get the play from your local library and give it a read instead.  

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A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is a collection of essays by the late David Foster Wallace that includes several of his most famous works in the form. DFW was, in my opinion, a better essay writer than he was a novelist, but that's not as harsh a criticism as it sounds as I think DFW was one of the best American essayists of the twentieth century. In fiction DFW takes himself a little too seriously for my taste even when he's being humorous, but in non fiction, he's funnier, sharper, deeper and more observant. In A Supposedly Fun Thing there are good essays on television and writing (and a rather boring one on tennis) but my favourite piece in this collection is the one about David Lynch that he wrote for Premiere Magazine where he profiles the director without actually meeting him and reviews one of his masterpieces, Lost Highway, without actually seeing the completed movie. You might not think that this would be a successful strategy for a piece of reportage, but it is. The Lynch essay is a work of genius, up there with the best American movie criticism: just as literate as something from Cahiers Du Cinema but much funner and funnier. 
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The piece I really want to discuss though is the title essay which concludes the book. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is the story of a cruise DFW took around the Caribbean with Carnival. Although not a deliberate humorist in the style of Mark Twain this essay is probably David Foster Wallace's comic masterpiece. Just as it was a great idea to send the landlubber Twain off on the USS Quaker City, it occurred to Colin Harrison, the editor of Harper's at the time, to send the even more nautically challenged DFW off on a vessel named the MV Zenith (that DFW rechristens the Nadir). He was sent on this cruise by Harrison with the aim I think of showcasing American crassness and vulgarity on the high seas but the essay is richer and more compassionate and more interesting than that. While not exactly blue collar himself DFW has sympathy for blue collar aspirations and most of the time he is not a snob. A lot of the essay, clearly, is a pack of lies but lies for comic effect which I think is entirely forgivable especially in a tall tale of the sea. Jonathan Franzen has criticised his friend DFW for making shit up in his non fiction, but I think DFW was pledged to what Werner Herzog calls ecstatic truth - a kind of emotional truth that is truer than what actually actually happened. (Franzen has only been as funny as DFW once when he too had a very funny scene coincidentally set on cruise ship.) A Supposedly Fun Thing has moments of high comedy, low comedy, slapstick, sarcasm, dry humour and of course dead pan irony. 
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As I say the editor for this essay was Colin Harrison who was my editor for four books at Scribner's and the general editor for the one article I wrote for Harper's. Harrison does a pretty good job here. One wonders how long the first draft DFW handed in actually was because the final version runs to over two hours (for an essay) on audiobook, but, I should strees, it's two hours that fly by. I can't predict anyone else's sense of humor but I laughed out loud many times listening to this piece and there were quite a few Sedarian moments of wry amusement too. If I had to fault DFW and Harrison for one thing its the use of the word 'vector'. If you were to have a vodka shot or a glass of wine every time something is being vectored in Fun Thing you would be pretty much shitfaced by the end of it.
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If you want to check out a riposte to A Supposedly Fun Thing you can read Tina Fey's Bossy Pants which apparently includes a positive cruising story that riffs on DFW. You can read it. I think I'll give it a miss.  

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One Of My Favourite Noirs

One of my favourite noirs has sneaked its way onto youtube so if you havent seen it this is your chance before it gets deleted. The film begins at 1:33, my favourite bit begins at 58:10 and lasts for the next minute or so, an extraordinary scene where Barry Sonnenfeld's camerawork, Carter Burwell's score and Joel Coen's directing all blend seamlessly (I love the fact that the music stops as the engine stalls just to increase the tension)...The film is a slow burn classic but the existential ending is in a league by itself. And dont you love Dan Hedaya's chin in the still below?

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I Hear The Sirens

Sue Turnbull's review of I Hear The Sirens In The Street from last weekend's Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age. I pledge my undying love to any reviewer who actually gets my jokes!
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I Hear The Sirens In The Street

CRIME FICTION

By Adrian McKinty

Serpent's Tail,  $29.99

According to Ian Rankin's blurb for I Hear the Sirens in the Street, this crime novel ''blew'' his ''doors off''. To which I might add, ''and it rattled my windows too''. Given the context, Northern Ireland in the 1980s, the explosive metaphors are apt. Adrian McKinty, Belfast-born and now Melbourne resident, has a way with words. Try this selection of bons mots from the first 12 pages: entropic, simulacrum, ostinato, glissando, dissonance and kakistocracy. I had to look that last one up. It means ''government by the worst of men''. I am now deeply indebted to McKinty for introducing this useful noun into my repertoire. I intend to use it on a daily basis.

Now sample some of McKinty's cultural references from chapter one, bearing in mind the period: Chopin, Saint-Saens, Arvo Part, Paul Weller, the Bay City Rollers, Jackson Pollock, the TV series Dallas, Outlaw of Gor and Willy Loman (the salesman who ''died'' in Arthur Miller's play) - or, rather, think ''Willy Lomanesque'', since, with a deft suffix, McKinty turns a character into an adjective. Inventiveness is part of the McKinty repertoire, too.

While the eclectic vocabulary and the cultural allusions are diverting in themselves, they are there in the service of a plot, and it's not a bad one at that. Detective Inspector Sean Duffy of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and Detective Constable McCrabban have been called to a deserted factory where an overzealous, superannuated security guard opens fire on them despite their protestations:

''We're the police!!''

''The what?''

''The police!''

''I'll call the police!''

''We are the police!''

''You are?''

Duffy and McCrabban are tracking a blood trail, as reported by the nightwatchman, that leads them to a dumpster containing a suitcase into which the torso of a well-preserved man in his 60s has been stuffed. As the security guard dry-heaves behind them, the two professionals conduct their assessment of the corpse with the cool detachment of those only too familiar with dismembered bodies.

But then, this is bomb-blasted Northern Ireland, several years into a civil war. The shops and cafes are boarded up, the parks and playgrounds are vandalised while ''bored ragamuffin children of the type you often saw in Pulitzer-Prize-winning books of photography'' are sitting ''glumly on the wall over the railway lines waiting to drop objects down onto the Belfast train''. Forget the Pulitzer-Prize-winning photographer, McKinty has the ability to capture an image in words that says it all.

Duffy's daily routine is a grim one. Coffee and a quick check under his BMW for any ''mercury tilt'' explosives before he heads off on the job of identifying the torso in the suitcase - a task repeatedly diverted by other emergencies, including, for example, a ''half-hearted sort of riot'' on a depressed housing estate. It's hard to get things done in the midst of an ongoing battle.

Throughout it all, Duffy keeps his cool - and, for the most part, his sense of humour. Despite the shenanigans of civil war, this is a very funny book that benefits from a knowledge of recent history. Take Duffy's visit to the ''real'' American DeLorean car factory in West Belfast. The fact John DeLorean went bankrupt in 1982 casts an ironic glow over an encounter that ends with Duffy seducing his secretary armed with a few Starsky and Hutch moves and a bowl of spaghetti. I Hear The Sirens In The Streets concludes with a teaser for the next in the series, And in the Morning I'll be Gone. Expect more doors to be blown off.

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Where And When Does Game Of Thrones Take Place?

I've been reading reviews of Game of Thrones by newbies in the last few weeks that talk about the "medieval world" George RR Martin created for the books and while its true that Martin was heavily influenced by Tolkien, the age of chivalry and the Wars of the Roses actually Game of Thrones has a different provenance which sets the GOT universe not in the past but in the future. I shall explain. 
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High fantasy in its present form was more or less invented by JRR Tolkien. Tolkien's Middlearth is a reimagined prehistoric Europe with languages based on old Norse, old Welsh and old Irish, but that's about the only similarity to the real old Europe, Tolkien's Europe (actually Eurasia) exists on a planet in a parallel universe where (according to the Silmarillion) the sun went round the Earth and the world was originally flat. This is not the past history of our planet Earth but an alternative mythological history of a planet with a passing resemblance to our own. 
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High fantasy as a genre exploded in the US in the 1960's after the paperback publication of Lord of the Rings but followers in Tolkien's tradition were not remotely consistent (thank goodness) as to where and when their books were actually taking place. Sometimes the fantasy writers set their novels in an ancient Earth, or sometimes a parallel Earth or quite often they offered no explanation at all of where the events of the novel were taking place. One of my favourite devices was the trick Stephen Donaldson did in his Thomas Covenant series where the reader (and protagonist) wasn't sure whether the universe was real or merely taking place inside the hero's own head. Still the vast majority of these novels had swords and horses and blacksmiths and if it wasn't our world itself the planet still had a curiously Earth-like feel that perhaps wasn't entirely logical. 
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But there was another conceptual space for high fantasy, that of the Dying Earth, and in this construct, largely developed by Jack Vance, dragons, swords, magic, different races of men etc. are all possible because we're dealing with the Earth millions of years from now when the continents have changed shape, technology has fallen or been forgotten and human and animal evolution has continued along its merry way. George RR Martin was and is a huge fan of Jack Vance and has edited a tribute volume of stories explicitly set in Vance's world; therefore, it seems to me, that it makes more logical sense to regard Game of Thrones as taking place not in some version of our medieval past but in fact in the far future when, who knows, the continents might have become like they are in the map at the beginning of GOT and some humans may have evolved extraordinary physical and mental abilities that to paraphrase Arthur C Clarke are indistinguishable from magic. Dragons too may have evolved and the more useful animals such as cows and horses would still be around.
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The Dungeons and Dragons universe largely takes place on the Dying Earth (my favourite module, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, being the exemplar here) and if you're interested in this idea, let me point you to the work of Gene Wolfe whose Dying Earth Book of the New Sun is probably my favourite fantasy series in this genre. I'm also a fan of the almost completely forgotten Road to Corlay trilogy by Richard Cowper.
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Some of my other geeky Game of Thrones posts here:
Accents In Game of Thrones
Accents in Game of Thrones part 2
The time when my brother and I rather cheekily broke into the Great Wall set.
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As a final little aside it was nice to see the bridge over the River Main at Shane's Castle getting used as the scene for the duel between Jaime Lannister and Brienne. I remember having a wooden sword fight in those woods and on that bridge with my little brother when I was a kid. 

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