The Godlike Genius of Preston Sturges

A director, John L. Sullivan, who wants to make a second socially relevant movie, dukes it out with two producers, LeBrand and Hadrian, who didn't want to make the first:

John L. Sullivan: You see? You see the symbolism of it? Capital and Labour destroy each other. It teaches a lesson, a moral lesson, it has social significance -

Hadrian: Who wants to see that kind of stuff? It gives me the creeps.

John L. Sullivan: Tell him how long it played in the Music Hall.

LeBrand: It was held over a fifth week.

Hadrian: Who goes to the Music Hall? Communists!

John L. Sullivan: Communists? This picture is an answer to communists. It shows we're awake and not dunking our heads in the sand like a bunch of ostriches. I want this picture to be a commentary on modern conditions. Stark realism. The problems that confront the average man!

LeBrand: But with a little sex in it.

John L. Sullivan: A little, but I don't want to stress it. I want this picture to be a document. I want to hold a mirror up to life. I want this to be a picture of dignity! A true canvas of the suffering of humanity!

LeBrand: But with a little sex in it.

John L. Sullivan: With a little sex in it.

Hadrian:How about a nice musical?

John L. Sullivan: How can you talk about musicals at a time like this, with the world committing suicide, with grim death gargling at you from every corner, with people being slaughtered like sheep -

Hadrian: Maybe they'd like to forget that.

John L. Sullivan: Then why did they hold this one over for a fifth week at the Music Hall? For the ushers?

Hadrian: It died in Pittsburgh.

LeBrand: Like a dog!

John L. Sullivan: Aw, what do they know in Pittsburgh...

LeBrand: They know what they like.

John L. Sullivan: If they knew what they liked, they wouldn't live in Pittsburgh!

***

LeBrand: Look, you want to make O Brother Where Art Thou?

John L. Sullivan: Yes!

Hadrian: Now, wait a minute -

LeBrand: Then go ahead and make it. With what you're getting I can't afford to argue with you.

John L. Sullivan: That's a fine way to start a man out on a million dollar production.

LeBrand: You want it, you got it. I can take it on the chin. I've taken it before.

John L. Sullivan: Not from me, you haven't.

LeBrand: Not from you, Sully, that's true. Not with pictures like So Long Sarong, Hey Hey In The Hay Loft, Ants In Your Plants of 1939, but they weren't about tramps, and lockouts and sweatshops, and people eating garbage in alleys, and living in piano boxes, and -

Hadrian: And phooey!

LeBrand: They were about nice clean young people who fell in love, with laughter and music and legs.

Preston Sturges - Sullivan's Travels (1941)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teTQF04jxRc

Saturday in the People's Park

On this coming Saturday afternoon (January 30th) at 2 o'clock, I'll be reading with Arlene Hunt at the Tea Rooms in the People's Park in Dun Laoghaire. The reading is part of a series called iad-T in the Park. And I'll be on RTE Radio's Arena programme on Thursday night talking about crime fiction in advance of the event. If any of you are in the area, please drop in: they serve very good coffee there, among other things. I'll be reading from City of Lost Girls, the fifth Ed Loy novel, which won't be out until April, and Arlene will be reading from her new book Blood Money.

Cool people saying nice things

While this blog lay unattended for most of last year, some very cool people said some very nice things about All The Dead Voices, and I thought I would be remiss in not bringing a few of them to your attention:

Marian Keyes in The Irish Times:

I love a good thriller and there have been excellent ones this year from Michael Connolly, Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, but my favourite has to be Declan Hughes's All The Dead Voices, the fourth book starring Ed Loy and the best yet. Hughes delivers a cracking plot and although he writes with passion and humour about contemporary Ireland, in some ways his books are reminiscent of the hard-bitten noir of the likes of Raymond Chandler.

Andrew Taylor in The Spectator:

Dublin has a special relationship with fiction, which in recent years has inspired some excellent crime novels. Among them is Declan Hughes's Ed Loy series, which gives a distinctively Irish twist to the flawed private investigator of American pulp fiction. Loy has many of the classic characteristics of the breed, including the tastes for hard liquor, lovely women and lost causes. But Hughes places his protagonist in a sharply observed contemporary Dublin; and his plots erupt from the city's faultlines.

In All The Dead Voices, the fourth novel in the series, a woman hires Loy to investigate a cold case - the murder of her father, a tax inspector with a dangerous habit of asking questions about the ill-gotten gains of powerful and superficially respectable people. Organised crime and dissident Republicanism inhabit a shady underworld of drugs, clubs and guns. This is a novel about how the present struggles to come to terms with the past: 'There's a reckoning you can make with history, a reasonable settlement, ' Loy believes. 'And then there's a kind of morbid fascination that borders on obsession . . .' On one level this is Dublin Noir at its best. On a deeper level, the real subject of Ed Loy's investigation is modern Ireland itself.

And in his books of the year, also in The Spectator:

Declan Hughes’s All the Dead Voices is an exuberantly written slice of Dublin noir: a Chandleresque private eye novel set in modern Ireland that keeps within the conventions of the genre but reinvigorates them.

Margaret Cannon in The Globe and Mail:

Fans of the classic hardboiled mystery are a difficult group to satisfy. The three are often copied, but seldom do writers actually manage to combine great character-driven novels with iconic prose styling, terrific dialogue and a stellar sense of place. Dubliner Declan Hughes delivers all that and more; this series is Chandler updated and polished to hardboiled perfection.

Ed Loy once lived in L.A., but he's returned to his Irish roots. His Dublin is the city of the Celtic dream, with ex-IRA thugs transformed into pseudo-English gentry, where skinny new mothers huddle outside the Maternity Hospital sucking on cigarettes while, across town, thin rich wives head up charity drives and husbands field race horses and ride the property roller-coaster.

Ed Loy, kitted out in his handmade linen suits, cashmere coats, Dax lace-ups, French cuffs and sterling links, is literally tailor-made to be the investigator of the hour, at £1,000 a day. He has two cases going. The first is to find the killer of a local soccer star, the brother of an old friend. The boy may have been a drug peddler or worse, but he died on Loy's watch, and Loy considers himself responsible to the family.

Then there's sexy little Anne Fogarty, whose father was murdered 15 years earlier, supposedly by her mother's lover but, Anne claims, really by one of three once-powerful IRA leaders, two of whom are now equally powerful heads of crime families and the third a leader of Dublin society. Old politics and new money make very strange bedfellows in the New Ireland.

Hughes weaves all the history, background and conflict into clear, elegant prose. This isn't a wordy novel with lots of filler, food and bad sex. Every paragraph matters, and the dialogue snaps, as Loy drifts from high Irish to Dublin drawl with wit and charm. This is the fourth novel in this fabulous series, and I've loved them all. You will too.

Oline Cogdill in Mystery Scene:

Declan Hughes has become to Ireland what Ian Rankin is to Scotland. Irish playwright Hughes' evocative look at Dublin and the city's changes are just a couple of the pleasures in his exciting fourth novel. In All the Dead Voices, Hughes focuses on Ireland's violent past, especially "the Troubles," that time from the 1960s to about 1998 when Northern Ireland's political conflicts exploded across the country and beyond.

Private detective Ed Loy tackles two cases that intersect. Ann Fogarty hires Ed to find out who killed her father, a revenue inspector, more than 15 years ago. The police had arrested the lover of Ann's mother, but the man was acquitted and Ann had never believed he was the killer. At the same time, Ed is asked to keep an eye on a rising soccer star who may be involved with a drug dealer.

Ed finds that both cases involve former members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). For the most part, these men, still hardened by their past, have tried to legitimize their business dealings. But they tend to brush off the many casualties of their violence with the mantras: "It was regrettable...It was wrong...It shouldn't have happened."

Loy is sick of the cavalier attitude that allows these former rebels to avoid responsibility for their actions. "History?" he says incredulously. "Bloodshed and glory and death." Adding to this view of Ireland's past, All the Dead Voices takes place during Easter weekend, a pivotal time of "the Troubles."

Hughes offers a vivid portrait of Ireland, depicting a country that just a few years ago was in the midst of an economic boom that has since gone bust. The excellent All the Dead Voices surpasses even last year's The Price of Blood, which earned Hughes an Edgar nomination.

Declan's iPod - Top 25 Most Played

1. Martin Wynne's/The Longford Tinker - Bothy Band - The First Album
2. No Cars Go - The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
3. Window In the Skies - U2 - Single
4. Beverley Penn - The Waterboys - This Is The Sea [Disc 2]
5. The Hardest Part - Coldplay - X & Y
6. Break Me - The Lemonheads - Car Button Cloth
7. The Untouchables (End Title) - Ennio Morricone - The Untouchables
8. Breathe - U2 - No Line On The Horizon
9. Death Theme - Ennio Morricone - The Untouchables
10. Glastonbury Song - The Waterboys - Dream Harder
11. Not Forever - Popsicle - Popsicle
12. L.A. Confidential - Jerry Goldsmith - L.A. Confidential
13. Jesus, Etc. - Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
14. Electrical Storm (William Orbit Mix - Radio Edit) - U2 - Single
15. Hammett - John Barry - Zulu: The Film Music of John Barry
16. End Titles - Carter Burwell - Miller's Crossing
17. Reckoner - Radiohead - In Rainbows
18. Do You Realize? - The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
19. There There - Radiohead - Hail to the Thief
20. Hopeless - The Wrens - The Meadowlands
21. Descending - The Black Crowes - Amorica
22. Rearviewmirror - Pearl Jam - Vs.
23. Unknown Caller - U2 - No Line On The Horizon
24. Calling On Mary - Aimee Mann - One More Drifter In the Snow
25. Victorious - Ennio Morricone - The Untouchables

The main changes this year are the new entry of two songs from No Line On The Horizon (a brilliant record) and the high placing for the joyous Window in the Skies, a song from the Rick Rubin sessions (I'd like to hear more of them). But largely this is stuff I've been listening to for three or four years, and since it's the first playlist I plump for when I can't decide what I want to listen to (the tyranny of choice) I expect to be listening to most of it in three or four years time. The only track to feature in a Loy book is the delirious pair of reels by the Bothy Band, which caused Ed to drive too fast in The Price of Blood/The Dying Breed. It has occasionally felt strange to be listening to Aimee Mann's Calling On Mary out of season (Christmas in July) but it's a great song from an extremely melancholy album, although if the yuletide blues are your thing and your body isn't coming up with the anti-seratonin automatically, Aimee will provide. And I would not be surprised to see another Christmas record, Sister Winter by Sufjan Stevens, on the list next year, as I am currently playing it ten times a day. I could say that I listen to a lot of jazz and a lot of classical music and a lot of soul and funk and that I have more songs on my iPod by Frank Sinatra than any other artist (1007, if you're asking, and that's before I've uploaded the Frank Sinatra: New York box set I got for Christmas) and where are Bruce and the Stones and Led Zeppelin, never mind all those indie bands whose names I can't remember but whose albums I buy religiously every year because they made the top ten lists in all the music magazines the previous year, but this is the music I've listened to most: the iPod doesn't lie. Not even, I regret to say, about Coldplay.

Eleven things in January

Years ago, in a column in the New Statesman, Sean French said that the tagline to the movie Love Story - love means never having to say you're sorry - was not just wrong, it was the precise opposite of the truth. In his experience, love meant always having to say you're sorry. This has been my experience also.

On Middle Abbey Street once, two old ladies, sheltering in the doorway of a shop, beckoned to me as I passed.

"Sorry to bother you," one of them said.

"We were just wondering," said the other.

"Do you think this is a shower?"

"Or is it rain?"

I took a moment.

"Rain," I said.

Both ladies thanked me, and then the second turned to her companion with the look that is second nature to old ladies the world over, the look of mild triumph that means, "See?"

My favourite book when I was a child was The Magic City by E. Nesbit. It had 333 pages. It's the story of an unhappy boy who builds a city out of bricks and blocks and ornaments and books and in the moonlight, the city becomes real and the boy enters it and finds a way out of his unhappiness. I read it fourteen times.

The first single I bought was Ride A White Swan by T. Rex. My first LP was Slayed? by Slade. I was in love with Marc Bolan when I was eight, so much so that I wrote poetry about hobbits and elves, just like Marc, and made the mistake of showing it to The Lads, who never let me forget it. I was not in love with Noddy Holder, or at least, not in that way.

Myles na gCopaleen numbered among the worst clichés about Christmas "I do always think it is a sad time" and "Above all, 'tis a time for the children." (I quote from memory.) I took these to heart at seventeen, resolving never to utter anything so crass. In the last few weeks, I gave voice, with complete sincerity and no embarrassment, to both of these sentiments.

When I was seven, I refused to go to a magic show in Our Lady's Hall because older girls told me the magician had made people's heads disappear and they never got them back. Those naughty older girls!

The first time I got drunk, I was eleven or twelve. I bought a flagon of cider, without being asked my age or challenged in any way, and brought it home and drank it in my bedroom at high speed. And felt nothing. No flights of fancy, no wit or wisdom, no falling down, no seeing the funny side. An older boy had told me that vinegar was an antidote to alcohol, so I found a bottle of malt vinegar in the kitchen and drank as much of it as I could, and was vomiting by the time my mother got home. I got the next day off school. I never told anyone what I had done.

Wrangler jeans were the thing because of the patch on the back pocket. And a Wrangler jacket! I never had one. If there is one thing I could change about my childhood, it would be to have had a Wrangler jacket when I was twelve, so that, when I reached fourteen, it would have been perfectly faded. Although that is not the one thing about my childhood I would change.

My first kiss was in a stable. The girl is dead now. The boy she kissed straight after me is dead as well. We used to pick elderberries in the Gut by the railway tracks. I went to his funeral and met a friend in the churchyard afterwards, who had arrived late and thought it was the father who had died, not the son. When I told him, at first he thought I was joking. What kind of joke would that have been?

The NME, which I read every week between 1978 and 1986 without missing a single issue, once suggested a title for a great "lost" Pogues song: Sorry About Your Coat, But I'm on Antibiotics and I Haven't Had My Tea.

If I were king for a day, I would lay railway track so that no one was further than a few miles from a station, and I would make the carriages comfortable and the food delicious and the drinks superior and the railway hotels immaculate and the tickets affordable, and I would make it illegal, possibly a hanging offense, for anyone not to use them. As Johnny Mercer knew, there is nothing better than a train:

And you see Laura, on the train that is passing through,

Those eyes, how familiar they seem.

She gave your very first kiss to you,

That was Laura, but she's only a dream.

Reviews, quotes and a trip to New York...

ALL THE DEAD VOICES has been out for couple of weeks in Ireland and the UK, and has had nice reviews in the Irish Times, Sunday Tribune, Irish Independent, Times of London and on the website Euro Crime. Here are the links:

www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2009/0404/1224243990592.html

www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/the-ira-gangland-and-another-long-good-friday-1689587.html

www.tribune.ie/arts/article/2009/apr/12/crime-all-the-dead-voices/

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/

fiction/article5986625.ece

www.eurocrime.co.uk/reviews/All_The_Dead_Voices.html

Val McDermid said: "If you don't love this, don't you dare call yourself a crime fiction fan. Declan Hughes does for Dublin what Raymond Chandler did for LA, warts and all."

Laura Lippman said: “With ALL THE DEAD VOICES, Declan Hughes once again demonstrates that the private detective novel can be vital, modern and relevant in the right hands—and the right setting. His shotgun marriage between this sturdy American form and Ireland’s forlorn, complicated history has proven to be one of the more inspired concepts in contemporary crime fiction.”

And with that, I'm out of here. I fly to New York on Tuesday, where I will be hanging out and doing all things Edgar for the week. I'll be at the MWA anthology launch at Mysterious Bookshop on Tuesday at six; I'll be at the MWA symposium on Wednesday, and at the Partners & Crime party that evening, and of course, I'll be at the awards dinner on Thursday night. I look forward to catching up with folk I'd normally only see at Bouchercon, to being in the same room as James Lee Burke, and of course to the shot in the arm that is New York City. 

All The Dead Voices - Events

I'm doing a couple of Irish events over the next while to mark the publication of the fourth Ed Loy novel, All The Dead Voices, in Ireland and the UK (it's not out in the US until July). First up, I'll be reading with the splendid Brian McGilloway in Waterstone's, Dawson Street, Dublin on Tuesday, April 14th at 6.30. Then on Thursday the 16th, again with Brian, I'll be reading at David Torrans' wonderful No Alibis bookstore in Belfast at 7.oo. 

In May, I'll be appearing at CrimeFest in Bristol (May 14-17). I'll be on a panel on Thursday the 14th at 4.30, talking forgotten authors with Mary Andrea Clark, Barry Forshaw, Sarah Rayne and Martin Edwards. I suggested Margaret Millar, who is pretty much out of print everywhere now, and her husband Ken, who was once rather better known as Ross Macdonald, but who, despite my insistence on namechecking him everywhere I go to a degree that borders on the pathological, is largely forgotten these days - witness the recent Guardian list of crime novels you had to read before you died, which found room for five from Agatha Christie, four from Michael Dibdin and three from Ian Fleming but nothing from either Millar. 

I'll also be on a panel at 9.30 on Saturday morning with Gyles Brandreth, Judith Cutler, Andrew Pepper and David Stuart Davies called: Criss Cross: Conan-Doyle & Poe Anniversary Panel - Past & Present, which will discuss the evolution of the police procedural and PI sub-genres over the years.

In July, I'll be in Harrogate for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing  Festival, where I'll be taking part in a panel called Emerald Noir on Saturday July 25th at 10.30 am with fellow Irish crime writers Ken Bruen, Brian McGilloway, Gene Kerrigan and Ruth Dudley Edwards. Coupled with the fact that it's St. Patrick's Day tomorrow, I should probably round out this post with some kind of summons to celebratory glass-hoisting and such, and normally would, but I'm off booze for Lent this year. In theory, or at least, in Ireland, you're allowed Paddy's Day off Lent, but I don't think I'm going to avail of that particular indulgence. If I were anywhere else, you bet, but Paddy's Day in Dublin is like an advertisement for sobriety, an ugly, joyless festival of drunkenness. It's too close to home; it's all A Bit Too Irish.

Edgars, Believers, Bono and Bruce...

It's not exactly breaking news any more, seeing as the announcement was made two weeks ago, but since it is the sort of thing you're at the very least supposed to mention on a blog, even a blog that has been unattended for so long it has been the subject of more than one social workers' case conference, I should mark here that THE PRICE OF BLOOD, the third Ed Loy novel (Irish/UK title THE DYING BREED) has been nominated for an Edgar in the best novel category. Surprised and delighted pretty much covers how I felt when I heard. And honoured. And I can't think of anything else to say about it that doesn't make me sound alternately like (a) I think awards are all a load of nonsense and I don't care whether I win or not, and (b) I am now deliriously full of myself and desperate to WIN at all costs. I am certainly going to go over for the ceremony; I was in town two years ago during Edgar week (my first Black Orchid pre-Edgars party was their last, sadly) and it's a very buzzy time. And in any case, it's a big night out in New York City: what's not to look forward to?

In other news, the fourth Ed Loy novel, ALL THE DEAD VOICES, is set for publication in the UK and Ireland in April and in the US in July. So far, the reaction of early readers has been positive, and a few Very Good Writers have said some Very Nice Things. But I'll maybe get to those at a later date; this post has already been far too boasty for comfort.

The other night I finished Shakespeare Wrote for Money, the third collection of Nick Hornby's marvelous Believer magazine columns about books bought and books read (the other two are called The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, and if you haven't read them, you need to). They include some of the best writing about books I've ever read - you could call it criticism, but it isn't quite, or at least, and in keeping with what you might call the ethos of the Believer, there's little that is critical in a negative way, although you do get a very strong feel for the things Hornby likes and dislikes. There's probably a clue to those preferences in the title - the fact that the writer we commonly revere as the greatest ever had to make a living, and to keep a theatre company in business, and this meant he had to pay attention to what his audience wanted (if not exactly handing it to them on a plate). Although Hornby doesn't spell it out, I assume he's making a point about what he considers the appropriate equilibrium between writer and reader - in short, that even the greatest writers of all take account of their readers, and that if they don't, they run the risk of ending up with, as Mark Steyn said somewhere of Michael Ondatjee, books that are so well-written they're impossible to read. (There's a lot I don't agree with Mark Steyn about - his political opinions, essentially - but he's a brilliant critic.) Anyway, this struck a chord with me because I had rehearsed such an argument on a panel at Bouchercon in Baltimore when the age-old debate between genre and literary fiction surfaced yet again, and made the observation that the theatre could serve as a good model to gauge whether literary fiction, in its worship of the Sentence Beautiful above all else, was drifting too far away from its readership. In the theatre, after all, you can write line after beautiful line, but if they're not dramatic, the audience will fall asleep/leave at the interval/tell their friends not to bother/find you in the theatre bar and slap you. The great post-war revolution in the British theatre - Look Back in Anger, the Angry Young Men and all that - was as much stylistic and aesthetic as anything else. In the late forties and early fifties, the great hope of the serious stage was a revival of poetic drama - Christopher Fry and TS Eliot were touted as the successors to the great Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. But their plays, although beautifully written, lacked the kind of dramatic heft needed to compel an audience's attention. Moreover, they mistook high solemnity and earnestness for seriousness. Wit, low humour, melodrama, shameless crowd-pleasing, showing-off, sex, violence, spectacle - when your art has become too serious for all, or at least some, of that, you're officially Too Serious: what A Doctor would call "dull."

Anyway, lest I give the impression that Nick Hornby spends all his time taking potshots at literary fiction, I should note that the title of the second volume, Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, refers to Marilynne Robinson's novel, Housekeeping, which he loves (as he does Gilead) and to the Motley Crue autobiography, which leaves him, like the rest of us, gaping in a kind of appalled wonder. The full gamut, if you will.

One passage is worth offering to all those who write, or who want to. Discussing a book by Graham McCann about English comedy writing in the fifties called Spike & Co., Hornby suggests that the chapter on Spike Milligan provides an invaluable writing tip, and quotes as follows: "Once he had started work on a script he disliked ever having to stop; he wrote as he thought, and if he came to a place where the right line failed to emerge, he would just jab a finger at one of the keys, type 'FUCK IT' or 'BOLLOCKS,' and then carry on regardless. The first draft would feature plenty of such expletives, but then, with each successive version, the expletives grew fewer and fewer, until by about the tenth draft, he had a complete, expletive-free script." Hornby comments: "I have found this more helpful than I am prepared to talk about in any great depth, possibly because I can build my own inadequacies right into the page, rather than let them hover around the edges." To which I can only ditto, likewise, what he said.

In other news, I have been mostly listening to a lot of U2 records, limbering up, I guess, for the new album; it seems to me that the last two records are the best they have made, and that Bono is getting better and better as a singer and a lyricist, so my hopes are very high. I've also been listening to Working on a Dream, which is a very strange record indeed. Outlaw Pete sounds like Meatloaf meets ELO, while Surprise, Surprise suggests, not the Byrds as some have said, but  the Hollies; Kingdom of Days, with string accompaniment, made me think of Roy Orbison-flavoured elevator music. Is this good or bad? I don't know. I'm reserving the right to defer my opinion. Posts on both these topics to come, and more.

Book Review

The Reapers

By John Connolly

Edgar Alan Poe is generally thought to be the founding father of crime fiction, although as befits an often lurid and historically disreputable genre, paternity has long been disputed, with accusing fingers wagging in the various directions of William Godwin, Eugène-François Vidocq and even Wilkie Collins. Certainly Poe's five Inspector Dupin stories are the first detective stories, although he didn't see them in that light, or rank them as highly as his other writing. Poe's roots lay in the Gothic and the romantic, and he produced tales not simply of mystery and imagination but of horror and terror. It was appropriate then that the Irish crime writer John Connolly should make an appearance in these pages recently to review a new biography of Poe, for it has sometimes seemed as if Connolly's entire project has been nothing less than to reintegrate Poe's morbid and sensational asesthetic into the body of mainstream crime fiction.

Not that Connolly is some kind of literary archaeologist or pasticheur; he has simply interpreted the parameters of a genre he prefers to describe as "mystery fiction" rather more broadly than many of his contemporaries. In Connolly's visionary brand of apocalyptic neo-noir, men and angels inhabit the same plane; demons are not psychological troubles but realities; the Gods may be dead, but still, they watch and wait. At the same time, the first five Maine novels, featuring PI Charlie Parker, along with the stand-alone Bad Men, were terrifically exciting, tightly plotted thrillers redolent in particular of the work of James Lee Burke and Thomas Harris: written in an uncommonly fine, supple, sensuous prose, these dark, violent, volatile books worked brilliantly within the genre while consistently provoking and subverting it.

And then something happened. It was called The Book of Lost Things, and it was a work of outright fantasy, a boy's rites-of-passage journey through a fantastical world in order to pick up the pieces of his own shattered life. It was a remarkable achievement, moving Connolly's work onto a new level, and it seems to have had liberating consequences for the books that have followed. Where occasionally in the Maine novels there had been the risk of the supernatural overwhelming the actual, of claustrophobia (The Black Angel sometimes read as if it were channeling Hieronymus Bosch), last year's The Unquiet held the disparate elements of Connolly's fictional universe in a new balance while sacrificing none of the previous intensity: confident, stylish and moving, it was by some distance the best of the Parker series.

That sense of greater harmony and assuredness carries through to The Reapers, a supernatural western set among an elite cadre of samurai-style contract killers and the most purely entertaining novel Connolly has written. The Reapers centres around Angel and Louis, Parker's murderous sidekicks, and the plot has a classical simplicity: Angel and Louis find their lives under threat from men acting for Arthur Leehagen, who seeks revenge for the murder of his son; Leehagen's rival in love and in business, Nicholas Hoyle, hires them to kill Leehagen; Leehagen lives near a deserted former mining town in isolated, open country; a team of assassins is assembled to mount the attack; when they're almost on top of the Leehagen place, Angel and Louis realise that a trap has been sprung, and that their team are being picked off one by one, and that the man on their trail is a Reaper with his own deadly grudge against Louis. The call goes out for reinforcements, the Detective (as Charlie Parker is called here) steps up to help his friends, and the stage is set for a showdown.

But in The Reapers, the men with guns do not get it all their own way. Much of the narrative is told from the point of view of a tenant of Louis's called Willie Brew, a sixty year-old mechanic and Vietnam veteran who never killed anyone but who gets reluctantly drawn into the climactic action alongside the Detective. Brew is a splendid creation in his own right, an ornery, fundamentally decent man, seen to amusing effect riffing Hope and Crosby style with his business partner and unlikely friend Arno; he also enables us to see the bloody climax plain, providing a moral counterpoint to the glamorous allure of violence.

Equally enthralling are the flashbacks to Louis's youth: to the racist America of sundown towns, where a black man was not welcome after nightfall, where a black man who broke the window of a white bar was lynched and burned alive, where Louis killed for the first time to avenge his mother's death, and was marked out and groomed for the grim fate that awaited him. Together they form a poignant backstory that supplies invaluable psychological and social underpinning for this utterly compelling tale of mystery and imagination.

The Irish Times, May 24th

Book Review

Netherland

By Joseph O'Neill

Novels are about love and sex and death and The Way We Live Now, or they are about nothing much at all. Except, of course, if they are American novels, in which case they get to be about all these things and about America too. Not America the country – one might as well read a guidebook – but America the Enlightenment idea, America the dream of yearning and infinite possibility, America as represented by Jay Gatsby's green light, "the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us."

In his remarkable new novel, Joseph O'Neill does not make any bones about his debt to Fitzgerald's great masterpiece: when, on page two, his diffident narrator Hans van den Broek, a Dutch banker who will be more spectator than protagonist in his own story, says of his time in New York, "But there's no such thing as a cheap longing, I'm tempted to conclude these days", the shade of Nick Carraway appears instantly at his shoulder. On the same page, a note of dark pastoral sounds when we are told that New York City insists on "memory's repetitive mower", which has the effect of "cutting the grassy past to manageable proportions. For it keeps growing back, of course."

The unattainable green in Netherland is not the light at the end of a dock, but the bright grass of a cricket pitch, and the dream is of cricket as a civilizing, cosmopolitan force that will rid the US of its insularity and enable it to build bridges with the immigrant Muslims and Hindus who play the game. Give It Back To The Indians, so to speak. O'Neill's Gatsby is Chuck Ramkissoon, Trinidadian immigrant, motormouthed autodidact, builder and developer and small-time gangster whose murdered body is discovered in a canal at the start of the book, and whose ebullient comic spirit is celebrated throughout its length; it is a measure of O'Neill's considerable novelistic gifts that Chuck's quixotic dream never subsides into bathos, or loses its glamorous allure.

O'Neill, an Irish-born, Dutch-raised barrister based in New York, has published two previous novels, but he is probably best known for Blood-Dark Track, a family history of his grandfathers' imprisonment during the second world war – one was interned for being a member of the IRA, the other, a Turk, was suspected of spying for the Germans – which read like an espionage thriller.

Hans van den Broek – "a member of the first tribe of New York, excepting of course the Red Indians" - falls gradually under Chuck Ramkissoon's spell as he spends two lonely, wretched years alone in New York. Anxious for the family's safety, his wife has taken their son back to London in the doom-laden aftermath of 9/11, a trial separation that is showing ominous signs of permanence. The marriage has collapsed because they are frightened, and angry at each other, and tired all the time, and because Hans, to his shame, cannot find it in himself to fight what he fears is inevitable: "that love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general, that disintegration was irresistible." He walks the streets of the city, a melancholy, acute observer of its signs and wonders: "The rinsed taxis, hissing over fresh slush, shone like grapefruits" but if you looked down "you saw a foul mechanical dark"; "The tail lights, the coarse blaze of deserted office buildings, the lit store fronts, the orange fuzz of the street lanterns: all this garbage of light had been refined into a radiant atmosphere that rested in a low silver heap over Midtown"; Times Square's billboards and news tickers are "shimmers and vapours", to be regarded "as one might the neck feathers of certain of the city's pigeons – as natural, humble sources of iridescence."

The pick-up games of cricket among the Asians and West Indians of New York provide Hans initially with a respite from desolation; slowly the players become companions and finally, undemonstratively, as is the way with men, friends. Hans has not been an especially valuable asset to the team because he refuses to alter his orthodox batting style to suit the hardscrabble cricket pitches, but in the last game of the season, he experiences his own fleeting epiphany of release and reinvention: "I'd hit the ball in the air like an American cricketer, and I'd done so without injury to my sense of myself."

Netherland ends triumphantly, numinously, with two sunsets: one in London, atop the Eye, Hans happily reunited with his family; the other on the Staten Island Ferry as it approaches pre-lapsarian Manhattan, the twin towers looming, his mother alive and by his side. In a sustained passage of intense lyric beauty that more than squares any debt to Fitzgerald, O'Neill writes: "I wasn't the only one of us to make out and accept an extraordinary promise in what we saw – the tall approaching cape, a people risen in light. You only had to look at our faces."

The Irish Times, Saturday May 10th