“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.” – Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian
Friday, May 25, 2007
This ‘Funky Friday’s Free-For-All’ Malarkey: It’s Just Another Name For An Interweb Mash-Up Baloohaha Thingy, Isn’t It?
The Embiggened O # 937: All We Hear Is Radio Ga-Ga. And Trumpets
DWF: WTF?
Nobody Move, This Is A Review: The Wire (HBO)
Speed Dating With Destiny: Tony Herbert Cocks A Snook
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Making Hay: Barclay, Bateman Hit The Festival Circuit
“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 419: Sam Millar
What crime novel would you most like to have written?
No Country For Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. That book has put me into more arguments with my publisher for failing deadlines. I keep rereading it and rereading it and …
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Nelson DeMille. A master storyteller. Fluent and effortless. Oh, and Marvel comics and Stan Lee.
Most satisfying writing moment?
Getting a phone call from my agent in New York informing me that Warner Brothers had bought the rights to On The Brinks. I had about ten quid left in my bank account (now I have even less).
The best Irish crime novel is …?
Anything by Maeve Binchy. I think all her books are a crime.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
On The Brinks.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
People thinking I’m rich / People thinking I’m rich.
Why does John Banville use a pseudonym for writing crime?
Why do men wear women’s clothing? You would have to ask him that. If he tells you, please let me know. Perhaps he wants to be a tough guy, and slug it out with the rest of us losers in the down and dirty ring of crime writing, without his legion of adoring fans finding out that he’s a roughneck underneath all that suave complexity. Anyway, I guess it’s better than using a condom …
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Should Be Banned (so says Ian Paisley).
Sam Millar’s Darkness of the Bones is available in all good bookshops, and most of the bog-standard ones too
This Week We're Reading ... Running Mates and Pulp Culture
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
The Thick Plottens: Yep, 'Tis The Mid-Week Interweb Mash-Up Baloohaha Thingy
Lost Classics # 113: The Polling of the Dead by John M. Kelly
The Ultimate Good Spoof: Richard Ford Graces The Bored, Sorry, Boards
Et Tu, Carson? Betrayal Hits The Streets
Guns, Gams And Gratitude: Dashiell Hammett Remembered
Monday, May 21, 2007
Lights, Camera, Anton
“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 419: Seamus Smyth
What crime novel would you most like to have written?
The one that sold most.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
My bank statements, when there’s money enough to indulge myself in them.
Most satisfying writing moment?
I’ve never written anything I was satisfied with.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
I like Ken Bruen’s way with a pen.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Wish I knew. It would mean I’ve read a ‘great’ book.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Punching the keys and a story not turning up.
Why does John Banville use a pseudonym for writing crime?
I used a pseudonym once, because I didn’t want anyone to know I wrote it.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
It never brags.
Seamus Smyth’s Quinn is a stone-cold classic. Fact.
The Embiggened O # 1,007: In Which We Discover It's Actually Possible To Bust A Lung Blowing Your Own Trumpet
Nobody Move, This Is A Review: Christine Falls by Benjamin Black (Picador)
The Bateman Cometh
Sunday, May 20, 2007
The Monday Review / Interweb Mash-Up Super-Baloohaha
Politically Incorrect Latest: Dudley Do-Wrong Does It Again!
"There are many consolations for those of us consigned to the category of genre fiction, not least that we are much more popular than our self-consciously literary condescenders. I eschew the company of literary writers; I adore the crime writers. We laugh at the pretensions of those who think themselves our betters and we enjoy each other because our backgrounds and preoccupations are so disparate and therefore so interesting. We include, among our number, vets and spies and solicitors and teachers and nurses and linguists and journalists and erstwhile prostitutes, criminals and murderers."Erm, how come we haven't run into any of these 'erstwhile' nurses then, eh? For more of the same, jump over to The Telegraph ... but beware, fancy-pants literary-types, Ruth ain't taking no prisoners.
The Boyne In The Striped Pyjama Party
Hmmmm ... The Mysterious Affair Of The Turned-Down Turndown, You Say?
"Then came the problem," says the New York Times: "the book’s contents turned out to be a tad rougher than, say, the Gideon Bible, and at the last minute, the Ritz started getting cold feet. 'They submitted the manuscript and we rejected it,' said Julia Gajcak, vice president for marketing and communications of Ritz-Carlton. 'There were some language issues, and there was some racy content.' By racy content they meant bad parenting, deaths of family members and swearing, which were a bit too abundant for the hotel's taste."The collection, suitably purged of 'racy' material, will be available in Ritz Carlton rooms this summer. We'd love to include John Connolly's f#%king racy response to the censorship, but unfortunately this is a family blog ...
Flick Lit # 312 : Stray Dogs / U-Turn
Fleeced in a Vegas poker sting, owing big, already down two fingers, John Stewart figures his luck can’t get any worse. Then his classic ’64 Mustang blows a radiator hose on the outskirts of Sierra, Nevada, a dust-bowl hell-hole populated with freaks, geeks, blind Indians and corrupt cops … A one-off throwback which turns and twists like an itchy scorpion riding a switchback, Stray Dogs (1997) deserves a place in the pantheon on the basis that John Stewart is arguably the unluckiest man in the history of the crime novel. His luck isn’t so much bad as evil. Ripped off by the town’s mechanic, then robbed while buying a soda, he sees the money scraped up to pay off his debts vaporised in a shot-gun blast. Cue a seductive femme fatale, Grace, and then her husband, Jake; first he, then she, propositions John with offers to kill the other …
Ridley shopped Stray Dogs around as a novel but eventually rewrote the story as a movie script. Enter Oliver Stone. He decided to shoot Stray Dogs as a homage to Sam Peckinpah’s post-noir classic Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) and generally re-define the parameters of neo-noir in the process. The result was a brooding, sweltering, low-fi masterpiece. The cast alone was worth the price of admission – Sean Penn as Stewart, Nick Nolte as Jake, and a smouldering Jennifer Lopez as his young Indian bride Grace. The supporting characters included Billy Bob Thornton, Joaquin Phoenix, Claire Danes, Bo Hopkins, Jon Voight and Powers Boothe. With Ennio Morricone providing the cheesy mock-Spaghetti Western soundtrack, the cast chewed up and spat out the scenery along with the lurid dialogue. But Stone’s cinematography represents serious business indeed. Building on the excesses of Natural Born Killers, Stone jump-cuts, scissor-edits, inserts black-and-white stock, deploys hand-held shots, bleached out sequences, time-lapse effects and hallucinogenic montage. The overall effect is one of extreme dislocation that reflects the traumatised thought process of Penn’s sleazy, tortured anti-hero. Shot on a schedule of 42 days, Stray Dogs hit a hitch when Stone discovered that Ridley was planning on publishing the novel before the movie hit the screens. Cue wrangles, bitterness, name-changes for characters and the movie itself, which finally, tortuously, evolved into U-Turn. No doubt John Stewart would have sympathised.- Michael McGowan