Bonding, Un-Bonding then Bonding again.

Over the last couple of years I've really enjoyed watching the "Spec Savers Crime and Thrillers Awards"on ITV3. It's definitely a guilty pleasure though some of the awards are baffling. (Foyle as the "people's detective" anyone ? ).TV shows aren't my main interest. The books are. "Bad Catholics" by James Green was a delight I discovered through the 2009 shortlist as was "Blacklands" by Belinda Bauer (winner of this year's gold dagger).

Through the awards show I also started to take note of the "Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award". I was especially interested to discover that Jeffery Deaver had won this award back in 2004 for his novel "Garden of Beasts"( an historical thriller set against the backdrop of the 1936 Berlin Olympics). His acceptance speech apparently played a major part in Deaver being asked to pen the new James Bond novel. It's scheduled for release in Spring 2011 and I'll undoubtedly buy it.

I enjoy Deaver's novels and I was won back to the Bond books by "Devil May Care" the 36th. "official" novel as penned by Sebastian Faulks.

Around the age of 16 or 17 I was a mega fan of Fleming's original Bond novels. I read them all within a span of 5 or 6 months, including Kingsley Amis' pseudonymous "Colonel Sun" . Of course, the Bond films were huge at the time and influenced my reading of the books. I enjoyed both but the contrasts between the two media made me realise that not all books make good films. "You only live twice" is among the best of the novels and also one of my favourite films in the series (with a screenplay by Roald Dahl). The two have nothing in common other than the title. The novel wouldn't have made a good film although the content is among the finest writing produced by Fleming. He seemed to have made a major effort to absorb Japanese culture and the title, if memory serves, comes from haiku which Bond writes in preparing to confront Blofeld for the final time.

By the time the novels were being written by John Gardner and Roger Moore was starring in the films much of my fervour for all things Bond had evaporated. Re-reading some of the novels also made me aware of annoyances which I'd missed first time round. There are fairly frequent anti-semitic and racist references peppered through the books, most notably hints at Goldfinger's Jewish roots and Blofeld's mixed ethnicity.

I was particularly annoyed by a dialogue between Bond and "Tiger" Tanaka of the Japanese secret Service in "You only live twice". During their conversation Bond explains the inability of some of the American GIs to appreciate Japanese culture in general and saki in particular because their ancestry equipped them better for ploughing muddy fields in Ireland or Poland. My Uncle Tommy, God rest him, was evacuated from Dunkirk with the rest of the British Expeditionary Force in 1940 and was captured and imprisoned by the Japanese army while later serving in Burma. I don't think that rice wine appreciation or the history of the No play were ever included among the entertainments offered to British or American prisoners in the Far East.

And yet......well, years pass and you make allowances for people as you get older. It's possible to see them as a product of their times to a great extent. Even if, as many have written, Fleming was a snob I must admit that I was touched when I read about him apologising to the (NHS) ambulance men as they prepared to take him to hospital in the throes of his final, fatal heart attack ("Sorry to be such a bother..."). Clearly a gentleman of the old school. John Pearson's biography of Fleming also softened my opinion of him to a large extent.

Head and shoulders above the rest of the Bond novels for me is "Live and Let Die", despite its casual racism (Harlem and Jamaica form much of its backdrop). This opinion may have something to do with the fact that it was the Bond novel which I had most trouble buying. Most were readily available at second hand markets like "the Barras" but "LALD" eluded me until the film came out in 1973. (The copy residing in my attic has the original movie poster on its cover).

My theory about the novel is that it's great because it's a SECOND novel. There is a myth that second novels or albums are more difficult for authors or musicians to produce. The success of "Casino Royale" was apparently something of a surprise to Fleming. In turn this seems to have have had much the same effect on him that the Villiers supercharger had on the performance of Bond's beloved Bentley.

"LALD" seethes with creativity as if Fleming is throwing everything he can into an intoxicating cocktail of pirate treasure, Fu Manchu -inspired villainy, Caribbean colour and post-war American pulp fiction. Even though the Bond novels are notoriously lacking in humour Fleming even allows himself a (dark) joke. Felix Leiter is dumped in a motel room after being nibbled on by a shark when captured by "Mr. Big" ,the book's main villain. Pinned to Leiter's chest is a note : "He disagreed with something that ate him". The book also has a thrilling keel-hauling sequence which was eventually used (much less effectively) in one of the Timothy Dalton movies ("Licence to Kill"). Now, if you'll excuse me, I've written myself into the mood to go and look out my copy of "Diamonds are Forever" to see if it's improved over the years......

Irish Noir

Even if Ireland wasn't always in my thoughts at this time of year, the TV and radio news would have brought it to my attention anyway. The "Celtic Tiger" seems to have chipped its teeth on the rock of bank debts gone bad. Some people have been predicting this catastrophe for a long time. While the economy struggles Irish crime fiction goes from strength to strength; that seems to be a characteristic of recessions / depressions.

Among the foremost of Hibernian crime writers is Ken Bruen, an author who is justly appreciated by the American audience and a true master of "Noir" fiction. A new film based on Bruen's novel "London Boulevard" is about to open in the UK starring "A-listers" Colin Farrell, Keira Knightley and Ray Winstone. I usually worry about what the process of film adaptation does to beloved books. Anyone who has read the original novels can only gawp in amazement at the utter incompetence of "8 Million Ways to Die", "Burglar" and "What's the worst that could happen?" (a film that sets out to answer the titular question straight away by putting Martin ("Big Momma's House") Lawrence in a starring role).

Fingers crossed I do have high hopes for "London Boulevard". As mentioned the cast is top notch and, here's where my heart lifts, the screenplay is by William Monahan who penned "The Departed". It's always wise never to underestimate the damage that Hollywood can do to any novel but I have a good feeling about this one. I also hope that Ken Bruen shifts a ton of books on the back of this movie. He deserves to be better known in the UK. In 2011 he'll even get a second bite at the cherry when the movie version of "Blitz", starring Jason Statham, gets released. More power to him!

Bruen's series of novels featuring Jack Taylor are extraordinary. They're the kind of books that I try to savour but inevitably end up reading in one or two sittings. They've even had an effect on my diet, which is no bad thing.

In each of the early novels"The Guards" and "The killing of the tinkers" Taylor is revealed as a man of enormous appetites; whiskey, Guinness, coke, speed, you name it. He's also partial to Celtic comfort food in the form of fish and chips. In both books the author describes the texture, the perfume and the perfect warmth of an idealised "Chippy" with loving care to the extent that I could feel my mouth watering (Proust can keep his madeleines). Unfortunately in both books as Taylor heads home clutching his supper he gets beaten up . Very badly. I can't say that these disturbing scenes have had a profound Pavlovian effect on my Irish Catholic habit of fish suppers on a Friday but now I do tend to have a good look round when I leave the shop.

November: mist and melancholia.

Remembrance Sunday is over for another year but memories still linger. In the Catholic tradition this has always been the month of the Holy Souls, certainly part of the season of mists but with more melancholy than mellow fruitfulness.

Late Autumn always brings with it a kind of pleasant sadness that seems to resonate particularly with Celts. The poet Paul Verlaine captures this mood perfectly in his "Chanson d'automne". ("The long sobs of Autumn's violins wound my heart with a monotonous languor.") Despite the commercialisation and Americanisation of Hallowe'en the final day of October and the first few days of November cast a shadow that lasts through to Winter.

At this time of year my thoughts often turn to Derry/ londonderry. For a long time I've looked on dear old Stroke City as my other home town. My family spent a lot of summers there in the '60s and '70s and I visited now and then until my Da died nine years ago (he had moved back to the city of his boyhood after my Mammy passed away). As coincidence would have it this was on the 26th of October.

Grief has a quality to it that makes you feel as if you've retreated from the world. Events pass you by and if you notice anything outside your immediate circle of loss it's as if you're seeing it though an inverted telescope. I was vaguely aware of a lot of strange revelry going on in the city. It puzzled me as I struggled with sudden bereavement. People in ghost costumes danced at the periphery of my vision with no hallucinogens or alcohol involved, at least on my part. Pieces fell into place and the puzzle resolved itself over the years: Derry had become the centre for Europe's biggest Hallowe'en festival.

The night of the 1st of November (All Saints Day) used to be a focus of some attention in Derry and throughout Ireland. This is the eve of All Souls Day and I can remember my Aunt Vera telling us about the old tradition of leaving bread and water out for the Holy Souls. She remembered one All Souls Eve in particular when, as a little girl, she'd been naughty, though she was unspecific about the details. My Granny threatened to make her stay downstairs with the food and the drink....and the visiting Holy Souls. (The Carlins have always been masters of child psychology). Nothing materialised from the threat of course but it made an impression on Aunt Vera. Me too as I write this more than 40 years later.

Derry has given me a big chunk of memories. Most of them are happy and some a little melancholy. I'm currently adding to them through the crime fiction of Brian McGilloway. As well as being an excellent writer he's the head of the English department at St. Columb's college in Derry. The Inspector Devlin novels capture the sense of the northwest of Ireland and the border between the North and South perfectly. Appropriately enough McGilloway's debut novel was "Borderlands" and involves the investigation of a crime which straddles the border between the UK and Eire.

(Before "The Troubles" began in earnest one of the childhood amusements that boggled my mind was to take a walk out from the Creggan estate ,part of Londonderry and firmly in the UK, to the border with the Irish Republic. My cousins and I dawdled to the border in about 20 minutes so that we could stand with one foot in each country or just spend our time jumping back and forth. By the mid 70s this unmanned border crossing between Donegal and County Derry was blocked off by a trench and barbed wire).

The Devlin novels are also exceptional in that the author has gone out of his way to avoid many of the cliches that so often adhere like limpets to fictional policemen. Benedict Devlin is no maverick, hard-drinking loner. His family life is an important part of each book. For more background there's an excellent interview at the "It's A Crime" website.

Comic books and Hallowe'en.

I've never made any secret of the fact that I have a great affection for comics, particularly American comics. My favourite comic company is D.C. comics. In my mind their product is always associated with crime and mystery fiction. That's not just because the acronym stands for "Detective Comics", the company's flagship title, nor because they have featured a huge variety of detectives over the years from the hardboiled Slam Bradley through Roy Raymond "T.V. Detective" to Bobo, the Detective Chimp. (I don't think this character had any conscious influence on my adoption of our mutt Bobo from the Dog's Trust last year. He may have been at the back of my mind when I bought my "deerstalker" hat though.) I formed the association between D.C. and mystery because it was through one of their comics that I first became aware of the "fair play" detective story.

Despite trawling through the internet I've not been able to track down the story title. I know that it involved Batman and Robin solving a murder where the victim had left a clue as he was dying. He was an amateur artist who worked in a travelling circus and was slain while working on a painting. Even as he was dying he managed to scrawl a cryptic clue onto the corner of the canvas: a minus sign ( -) followed by the letter Q.

I know that in a previous post I've written that I'll never give away the solution to a mystery but I have to if I'm going to illustrate how I became hooked on detective stories. Please take this as a spoiler alert and, if you're an aficionado of early Batman and Robin stories in particular, skip the following paragraph if needs be.

Anyway, of the 4 or 5 suspects one had the surname Dial. The Batman, being the world's greatest detective and able to tell that an ex-con thrown into the mix was only a red herring, knew that Dial was the murderer. The story was written long before key pad telephones and I certainly read it when we still were on a "party line" and had to spin a DIAL when making a call. The only letter of the alphabet missing from such a dial is the letter Q, hence "minus Q". This struck me as being unbelievably clever especially since I was only about 7 or 8 at the time. Looking back I should probably have been puzzled by the convoluted path that a dying man's thoughts could take but I was overawed by Batman's deductive skills.

The Mysterious demise of F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre.

The "Fortean Times" is a magazine that I've been buying every month for a long time. I see it pretty much as an entertainment but I must admit that SF writer Ken MacLeod turned it into a guilty pleasure for me with the incisive comments on his blog back in January.


Most issues contain a "necrolog" or collection of obituaries about individuals who existed on the fringes of the weirdness which the magazine serves up. The latest came as something of a shock when I read about the death of an author by the name of F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre.


It was a fairly long obituary and each new paragraph seemed to cram in more and more outrageous details of a very eccentric individual's life.From his tales of being abused as a child in Scotland (or possibly Wales), through his time living with Australian aborigines to his final years in New York where he had abducted and tied up a neighbour the details of his life seem increasingly preposterous. By the time I'd finished reading I was 75% sure that it was a hoax. You can judge for yourself. A more detailed story in the New York Times makes it seem even more incredible.


MacIntyre wasn't the most productive of writers but I'd read and enjoyed several of his short stories over the years. He was a regular contributor to the "Mammoth Book of...." series produced by Robinson publishing. I particularly remember a Sherlock Holmes pastiche involving Ambrose Bierce, Aleister Crowley and the early days of silent film. It appeared in "The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures" and was entitled "The Enigma of the Warwickshire Vortex". It combines many of MacIntyre's enthusiasms to entertaining effect.


Interest in the occult along with his fantasy and science fiction meant that his death was bound to be flagged up by "Fortean Times" but, in researching the details of his death on line, I also discovered that he regularly reviewed films on IMDB and was well known (or infamous) among cinephiles. The discussion on this message board will give you some sense of this. A website dedicated to the silent film comedienne Mabel Normand contains a rather cutting variation on MacIntyre's "necrolog".

Ultimately it's a rather sad end for an enigmatic character but I suspect that he would have taken a perverse pleasure in the mystery he left behind. Is his review of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" a sardonic joke or a very strange suicide note ?

Never Tell Whodunit !

The word on the street is that you should always give your taxi driver a good tip if you're being dropped off at the St. Martins Theatre in London where Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap" will have been running for 58 years come the 25th of November. Fail to do so and he, or she, is likely to punish you by shouting out the name of the murderer. This would make for rather a frustrating 2 hours 20 minutes of theatre-going.

I've never managed to read "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" because I made the mistake of reading a "spoiler" synopsis of the plot. A few weeks back (September6th.) there was a post on Martin Edwards' excellent blog ("Do you write under your own name?") which pointed out that there are two types of mystery readers- those who try to solve the mystery ahead of the author's revelation and those who simply go along for the story. Like Martin I'm firmly in the former group. Let's face it, Dame Agatha was a great entertainer but no-one reads her for her literary style. Take away the puzzle and the novels fire blanks, hence my inability to finish " 'Ackroyd".

When Anne and I visited Rome my second bedside book was "Shutter Island" by Dennis Lehane. I really enjoyed it ,as I have most of Mr. Lehane's novels, but the edge was taken off it slightly by a spoiler I happened to read on another website. This made me resolve never to give away plot details and aslo never to knowingly read another spoiler.

All of this reminds me of an idea thought up by the wonderful and much missed Bob Shaw in his comic SF novel "Who goes here?". One of the main characters enjoys reading but is often disappointed in novels picked at random. His solution: find a book that you really enjoy then use futuristic mind-wipe technology to erase it's plot and characters from your memory. By keeping the book you're then guaranteed a wonderful reading experience. Forever. If that technology becomes available I'll give "Roger Ackroyd" another try.

When does a crime novel become a travel guide ?

My Open University German exam is a thing of the past, though I've picked up my Monday evening class at the Goethe institute again. Anne and I have been back from Rome for over a week now and I note, with genuine shock, that it's almost a month since I last posted. Time for a major effort.

One thing I enjoy almost as much as a holiday is the discovery of a new crime series to savour. Heading for Rome I managed to combine the two. I'd bought "A Season for the Dead" the first in the "Nic Costa" series of police procedurals by David Hewson. The Roman setting appealed to me and I found myself caught up in a thrilling plot to the extent that the 3 hour flight passed me by completely. I finished the novel on our second evening in Rome with a single regret. I hadn't bought the second in the series.

The plot involves a series of gory murders seemingly influenced by the martyrdom of several early saints and overshadowed by politics in the Vatican. For the very first time I found myself learning about a city while reading crime fiction during my visit.

We walked along the bank of the Tiber and I was able to tell Anne a little about the church and hospital on Tiber island (cribbed from the novel, of course). In our visit to San Giovanni's church, St. John Lateran, I was also able to pick out the massive statue of St. Matthew from among the other, equally monumental apostles. He was the one carrying his own skin in a basket. His martyrdom entailed being flayed alive. Anne also pointed out that his name was in foot high letters on the pedestal making me feel, yet again, like her Dr. Watson.

Anyway, Rome was wonderful and we plan on going back next Autumn. In addition I've found a new series to follow. What's even better is that I can claim that the books are educational, the literary equivalent of a tasty, healthy Mediterranean diet.