Books to Die For

  The murdered girl’s father is a wealthy lawyer with more than a whiff of the old regime. Her mother is a deeply unhappy individual, all the more so since she caught her boyfriend fucking her daughter, a discovery patently orchestrated by the girl. All in all it’s a pretty sordid business, with the girl turning tricks between classes in a shitbag hotel operated by a washed-up sleaze who was once a torturer in the dungeons of the secret police. Pretty soon, psychosexual tentacles are slithering all over the page.

  Back at the war, the wolfram business is hotting up. The tide is turning in Russia, and Felsen’s superiors are getting nervous. Failure is not an option. The British control the most productive mines and Salazar is happy to keep taking their money, despite much arm twisting from his beleaguered fellow Fascists. Fortunately for Felsen, mining is not the only source of wolfram. Lumps of the jet-black mineral can be grubbed from the surface of the barren hills in the north of the country. Impoverished peasants are swarming into the area, volframistas intent on getting rich as fast as possible by selling sackloads of fossicked rocks to the highest bidder. Felsen strikes up an alliance with a brutish local thug, Joaquim Abrantes. When a young British agent shows up, Felsen tortures him to death as a warning to potential suppliers. Felsen and Abrantes corner the market, financed by shipments of Nazi gold. This is vivid geopolitical cloak-and-dagger, redolent of Eric Ambler but nastier.

  The two plots switch back and forth. Coelho and his partner pursue their leads through the seedy side of late-’90s Lisbon, sweltering their way back in time to the period of the dictatorship. Felsen and his partner emerge from the war with enough of that Nazi gold to found a multinational banking corporation and bequeath it to their progeny. Sex and violence are the threads that stitch the stories together. It becomes pretty obvious where all this is leading and, in due course, it arrives there. But it’s the wrong destination, of course. The deal with the devil has a twist in the tail.

  The past is never dead. It’s not even past. Somebody famous said that. Perhaps he was thinking of A Small Death in Lisbon.

  Shane Maloney is the author of a series of six novels featuring Murray Whelan, a political fixer and accidental detective. They are written in Australian English. Like it or lump it. He is a winner of the Ned Kelly Award. In 2009, the Australian Crime Writers Association presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award and a halfway decent bottle of red. Anybody knowing the whereabouts of the wine should contact the author. Some of the Murray Whelan books have been published in translation in French, Finnish, German, Japanese, and American. Two were filmed and directed by Sam Neill. Maloney lives in Melbourne, a city on the way to nowhere. Visit him online at www.shanemaloney.com.

  Nineteen Seventy-Four

  by David Peace (2000)

  EOIN MCNAMEE

  * * *

  David Peace (b. 1967) is the British-born author of nine novels, among them the Red Riding Quartet, an intense saga of linked books detailing police corruption in the north of England, and the hunt for the real-life serial killer known as the Yorkshire Ripper. He is also the author of The Damned Utd, based on Brian Clough’s brief, ill-fated period in charge of Leeds United Football Club, which was adapted for the 2009 film of the same name.

  * * *

  2010. Leeds station, 11:45 p.m. on a January night. Me and publicist Parul have been traveling from Scotland but the Edinburgh train’s been stalled twice by suicides on the track and we’re running late for the last train to Halifax. We’ve spent most of the frozen day sitting in the darkness on the borderlands somewhere around Carlisle waiting on the forensics, the scoop-up boys, to clear the line. Everybody’s gloomy and it befits me for a darkness to come.

  We’re the last people on the platform in Leeds, which looks as if it hasn’t changed for decades, and the atmosphere of the book comes seeping in around me like moor fog. The destination board reads like a charnel house tour of Peace destinations. Bradford. Huddersfield. Sheffield.

  Nineteen Seventy-Four. The first book of the Red Riding Quartet. The most malign year in a malign decade. Fred West is cranking up, Peter Sutcliffe is settling into his groove. The genius of the book is in its portrayal of England, corrupted and degraded on every level, politically and spiritually. You could read (as people do) Ellroy into Peace’s work, but I find Blake and Milton, more Marston Moor than Mulholland Drive.

  I’d hitchhiked this country in the ’70s. Up and down the M6 and the M1. Taken lifts with the misfits and the loners, not to mention the decent types who wouldn’t see a youngster with a cut-price combat jacket and faux-defiant attitude stuck on the Bullring on-ramp for the rest of his life. I’ve done the squats and the ferry queues and the Special Branch men in badly fitting sports coats. Read the malice. Saw how you can slip up.

  In Nineteen Seventy-Four a young journalist, Eddie Dunford, joins a Yorkshire newsroom. He starts to report on a child killing. As he delves into the crime, an occult weave of political and sexual corruption reveals itself. The writing is brilliant, staccato, an edge-of-reason whirr. There’s a rawness to the prose, and it’s all the better for it.

  The central image of the book is that of swans’ wings stitched into a child’s back. Angels and devils. It’s an image that Peace now regards as a cruelty too far. There’s a point at which you have to turn your eyes away, where the unflinching have to flinch. As a father, it’s hard not to concur. As a reader, it won’t leave you alone.

  2011. Me and Marc and Jon are sitting on a sunny rooftop in London discussing a TV project about the Birmingham Six12 when it comes back, the jolt, the grimy fist in the kidneys, the doubled-over handcuffs slammed down on the back of your hand. It’s the 1970s. No way out. A memory returns, it could be straight from Eddie Dunford’s notebook . . .

  1986. I’d been a journalist for eight weeks. I’m at a badly attended press conference for the Birmingham Six. It’s nine in the morning and I’m hungover: still drunk, truth be told, didn’t get home the night before and picked up the call to attend the conference. A kindly woman gives me a cup of tea and finds me a Silk Cut Red. Turns out the woman is Annie Maguire—AUNT ANNIE’S BOMB FACTORY. Her son, Patrick Maguire, gets up to speak. It’s desolate. Scooped up at fourteen along with his mother and other innocents, and sent down at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. He’s lost his youth. Sent down as a child, released as a man. He presents it as plain fact. There’s no getting it back. Convicted? December 7, 1974, and sentenced to four years.

  The North of the 1970s keeps coming up in Peace’s work. It’s a malign outworking of the parapolitical swirl of British politics of the decade. What’s going on is beyond rational. You reach for a word. Occult. Relating to the supernatural. Inscrutable. Concealed. Available only to the initiate.

  Nineteen Seventy-Four, Nineteen Seventy-Seven, Nineteen Eighty, Nineteen Eighty-Three. The Red Riding Quartet. The books are seen as difficult and I made it more difficult for myself by starting at the last and reading back toward the first. Just an accident: I wasn’t keeping an eye on the book world, and the first three had passed me by. I read them as I found them in bookshops. So Nineteen Seventy-Four was a crescendo, an explosion of squalor and pity. I’m not sure if reading them in reverse order was a good thing or a bad thing. Sometimes it’s good to be off-balance as a reader. But it meant that the work hadn’t finished with me.

  2006. It’s the Kilkenny Arts Festival. I’m programming the literature strand and I’m at war with the organizers. They should be down on their fucking knees with gratitude as Gordon Burn and David Peace take to the stage. It’s the time of the prostitute murders in Ipswich and I realize that no matter how much I thought that I’d got it with Peace, I still hadn’t got it. When he starts to read you realize that the style isn’t high literary grandstanding. It’s demotic. Clear as a bell. How we speak. What we say. And in this case it’s children missing their mothers and their mothers are murdered prostitutes. The refrain is Without Mummy. Going to the shops. Without Mummy. Waking up in the morning. Without Mummy. Going to sleep.
Going to sleep without Mummy. Not mawkish. It reaches inside you.

  Knowing how it works zones the humanity of the work but doesn’t take the concentration out of reading it. You need to bring deep focus to what you’re doing. You need to be on your game. Alert. Initiate.

  Nineteen Seventy-Four . . . It acknowledged a psychic landscape that I’d been writing about for years. The occult cat was out of the bag. I’m grateful for it.

  Irish author Eoin McNamee made his debut in 1994 with Resurrection Man, a novel set in Belfast during the Troubles, and among the notorious Shankill Butchers, which set the tone for his fictionalized versions of recent Irish history. He has also published The Ultras (2004), and 12:23 (2007), and the first two parts of a proposed trilogy: The Blue Tango (2001), which was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, and Orchid Blue (2010). McNamee has also written a series of spy thrillers under the pseudonym John Creed, featuring the intelligence officer Jack Valentine.

  The Ice Harvest

  by Scott Phillips (2000)

  EOIN COLFER

  * * *

  Scott Phillips (b. 1961) worked as a photographer, translator, and screenwriter before publishing his first novel, The Ice Harvest, in 2000. Set in his native Wichita, Kansas, the novel was short-listed for the Edgar Award, the Hammett Prize, and the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger, and was adapted for a film that starred John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton. Phillips published a prequel, The Walkaway, in 2002, which was set in the 1940s. Phillips has subsequently explored other genres. Cottonwood (2003) is a Western set in California, while Rut (2010) is a dystopian tale set in the near future. The Adjustment (2011) is a post-WWII noir thriller.

  * * *

  Every Christmas I get a dozen comedy-crime books as gifts. Perhaps because I try to write humorous novels, people think that I must spend my time reading them. The tagline on ten out of these twelve books will name-check Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen, and guarantee the reader that this book will catapult the author into the big time alongside the aforementioned Elmore and Carl. As all readers have learned to their cost, these taglines often exaggerate quite a bit, so much so that, whenever I see Elmore Leonard’s name on the cover of a book he didn’t write, I tend to give it a wide berth.

  The problem with writing comedy-crime is that crime is not inherently funny: when you try to force a comic structure on this genre, you are pulling the literary rug from under yourself. That’s not to say that funny things do not happen to criminals or at crime scenes, but they are generally darkly comic, ironic, sardonic, or pathetic. The comedy lurks below the tragedy or bubbles through in the gallows humor of the homicide cops. Custard pies are rare.

  So to find a book that is genuinely hilarious but also atmospheric and completely effective as a noir thriller is indeed a treat. Scott Phillips managed to achieve all of this in his debut novel, The Ice Harvest, and what’s more, he made it look easy.

  The Ice Harvest tells the story of one Christmas Eve in the life of Charlie Arglist, a shyster lawyer who has been operating on the far side of Wichita’s ice-blue line for many years. Tired of his sordid existence as a failed father and a manager of strip clubs, Charlie decides to make a fresh start and skip town with the million bucks he has been gradually skimming from the owner of the clubs, mob boss Bill Gerard.

  Fueled by seasonal sentimentality and a hip flask of strong liquor, Charlie decides to visit each of his clubs one last time before a late-night rendezvous with his partner in crime. Charlie is mere hours away from making a clean break. What could go wrong?

  Everything, as it turns out.

  A blizzard of epic proportions descends on the town, transforming his simple route into a hazardous maze where black ice and snowdrifts confound him at every intersection. The clubs are deserted, the girls are touchy, and the barmen are psychotic to a man. Relatives pop up to drunkenly sabotage his plans, and a simple act of kindness involving a photo of a local politician in a beyond-compromising position backfires with catastrophic results. Coccyxes are bruised, bones are broken, and the bodies pile up to block Charlie’s way out of town. He ricochets between strip clubs, bars, and massage parlors like a drunken pinball. As his escape plan slowly and bloodily unravels, Phillips expertly layers the tension to almost unbearable levels.

  All of which doesn’t sound very funny. But it is. Totally hilarious in every way, from acerbic one-liners to unashamed slapstick—which, as I’ve said, should not work in a noir novel, but does here, and resoundingly so. Phillips’s narrative is so authentically banal that we feel sorry for this poor schmuck who is just trying to get out of his sordid life with a few bucks in a bag, and we totally buy the increasingly ludicrous situations that mount up until the big showdown is inevitable.

  Of course it doesn’t hurt that there are strip joints and naked ladies to keep us distracted as we read. And even though the joints and ladies are in no way glamorized, we are still given an insight into the seedy attraction of this world that exists underneath, and parallel to, our own, frequented, perhaps, by guys that we actually know and salute every day. And so you have to envy Charlie his ability to limp into these establishments unhindered by any sense of morality or trepidation, and envy, too, how unflustered he is when surrounded by gyrating strippers clad in little more than attitude and tattoo ink.

  Scott Phillips succeeds in peeling back the carpet of dirty snow and giving us a long look at Wichita’s underbelly with such detail and authenticity as to convince us that this guy spent a lot of time wallowing in the underbelly at one time or another. Or perhaps he’s just a good writer. Whichever one it is, there’s not a false note in the entire book. As Charlie zigzags between the familiar, workaday world and the exotic underworld, we realize, with a not unpleasant frisson, that such a place might exist in our own tranquil town. Through Charlie’s everyman character, albeit an everyman in the process of ripping off a mob boss, we get a glimpse of the sleazy side and maybe secretly relish the idea of one day paying a visit there ourselves. The far-off humps are greener and so on and so forth. Obviously this is other guys I’m talking about. Lowlifes. Not me.

  But it’s not just the sleaze that makes this book great. The characters are finely constructed and refreshingly unheroic. There is barely a spark of decency to be found in the entire novel, which increases the enjoyment quotient hugely. The blizzard is layered into the story so well that it almost becomes a character in its own right, foiling Charlie at every turn, knocking him on his ass and turning his automobile into a chariot of death. Scott Phillips is a wonderful storyteller who strings the reader along expertly, weaving in clues as to Charlie’s intentions and his dodgy past, evidence that quickly mounts up, funneling us toward a bloody finale. And when the endgame does arrive it is handled with a mordant wit and an abrupt brutality that lives up to everything the reader could hope for.

  When I found The Ice Harvest I knew nothing about it, and so was not expecting much more than a competent thriller. What I got was a modern classic that has become one of my favorite novels, and no small source of inspiration. Scott Phillips has, with this one book, made me a fan for life, someone who will buy whatever Phillips writes as soon as it hits the shelf. There are only five modern crime authors about whom I can make the same claim (I’m sure those not on the list are crapping themselves), but in my head, that claim means something. Of course, if I ever meet Scott I will play it cool and pretend that I haven’t gotten round to The Ice Harvest just yet.

  Writers’ rule number one: never let them see you read.

  Eoin Colfer is the author of the internationally best-selling Artemis Fowl, which was recently named the public’s favorite Puffin Classic of all time. Other titles include The Wish List, The Supernaturalist, and the Legends series for younger readers. Eoin’s books have won numerous awards, including the British Children’s Book of the Year, the Irish World Literature Award, and the Children’s Book of the Year in Germany. The BBC made a hit series based on his book Half Moon Investigations. In 2009, Eoin was commissi
oned by Douglas Adams’s estate to write And Another Thing . . . , the concluding episode of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, which became a worldwide best seller. His first crime novel, Plugged, was released last year on an unsuspecting and largely innocent public. Visit him online at www.eoincolfer.com.

  Tell No One

  by Harlan Coben (2001)

  SEBASTIAN FITZEK

  (translated from the German by Ellen Clair Lamb)

  * * *

  Harlan Coben (b. 1962) is the New Jersey–born author of more than twenty novels, including the Myron Bolitar series of mystery stories featuring a former-basketball-player-turned-sports-agent and occasional investigator, but it was Tell No One, published in 2001, that catapulted him to a new level of fame. The novel was subsequently filmed by director Guillaume Canet and released as Ne le dis à personne in 2006.

  * * *

  Of all the questions one gets asked as an author, the most difficult to answer—other than “Where do you get your ideas?”—is “Which of your colleagues’ books can you recommend?”