Declan Burke

Good writers always influence their readers, especially when their readers are other writers. That's obvious, of course, yet “Books to Die For,” edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke and published in 2012, underscores this very obvious statement.

The idea was to ask some of the world greatest living mystery writers to write about their favorite mystery novels. Thus Joe R. Lansdale writes a brief essay about Raymond Chandler's “Farewell, My Lovely,” Laura Lippman writes about James M. Cain's “Love's Lovely Counterfeit,” Max Allan Collins writes about Mickey Spillane's “I, the Jury,” Kathy Reichs writes about Thomas Harris's “The Silence of the Lambs” and so forth. This is great stuff for any reader of crime novels, a good way to both revisit old favorites and to discover novels you missed and really must read.

Yet what struck me most about this book was how virtually every author discussed — and there are more than a hundred of them — has been influential in some significant way. Many of the contributors talk about how a particular book or author helped shape their own careers. Joseph Wambaugh, for example, tells how Truman Capote, the author of “In Cold Blood,” led him to write “The Onion Field.” Elmore Leonard says “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” by George V. Higgins made his own fiction much better.

In other cases, the influence was much broader and even more profound. What people like Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie did for mystery fiction has been commented upon many times. But how many of us have considered the impact of the Nancy Drew books, Sue Grafton's “A Is for Alibi,” Patricia Cornwell's “Postmortem” or Eric Ambler's espionage thrillers? Every year or so, it would seem, a mystery novel comes along that sends crime fiction off in a new direction, and the genre is much better for it.

Many of the entries here may surprise you. Most readers probably do not think of A.S. Byatt, Stephen King and Donna Tartt as mystery writers, yet their books are discussed here. “Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency” by Douglas Adams gets an entry, as does Mary Stewart's “Touch Not the Cat” and Daphne du Maurier's “Rebecca.” Other authors are notable for their absence. The editors do a good job of including crime novels from around the world.

This book, while not as good as almost any of the books discussed in it, is nevertheless a feast for mystery fans.… (mehr)

A series of essays, written by one hundred nineteen noted mystery authors, combine to create a unique guide to the mystery novel. Among the essays/essayists: Julia Spencer-Fleming on Margaret Maron; Deborah Crombie on P.D. James; Kathy Reichs on Thomas Harris; Meg Gardiner on Sue Grafton; Reed Farrel Coleman on Daniel Woodrell; Lee Child on Kenneth Orvis; Dennis Lehane on James Crumley; William Kent Krueger on Tony Hillerman; Joseph Wambaugh on Truman Capote.

While the elements of the mystery tale may be malleable, these essays concern that elusive “something” in each of the selected works that capture the reader’s imagination. And, as each writer describes the specialness of the author they’ve chosen for this anthology, readers will find much to appreciate in these enlightening, entertaining offerings.

Highly recommended.… (mehr)

Here is the beginning of the review for this book on my blog:


Apart from the fact that it is a challenging, pleasing, provocative, wise-cracking read, there are at least three more reasons Declan Burke's most recent novel, Absolute Zero Cool, should be made obligatory reading for every innocent young student wishing to dedicate his or her life to any form of art, and who takes on the loan necessary to enroll in an institute of higher education, whether it be for acting, painting, sculpting or "creative writing". I will come back to the three reasons, towards the end of this review.

Below are a few paragraphs describing what the novel is about, from the main character's point of view.

You are the half-finished, perhaps never-to-be-finished, creation of a struggling crime writer. Even he has put you to one side, and forgotten you, and the only people who may still be aware of your existence are his former literary agent and an employee of the Irish Arts Council. Apart from the fact that he has left you in Limbo, you don't like the way the author, a man with a strong resemblance to Declan Burke, has created you. In fact, many, many elements of his discarded manuscript displease you.

He has given you a name, sometimes abbreviated to its first initial, that would be more at home in a novel written in German, in Prague, at the beginning of the 20th century, or in a normal, classical Swedish crime novel by somebody like Henning Mankell. In the Irish crime writer's hands you have become a hospital porter, selling candy bars to your elderly charges, cleaning their vomit up after them, and committing the occasional act of euthanasia. If you could have your own way, you'd probably ask the writer's agent to propose the manuscript to somebody like Mankell, or Arnaldur Indridason, to polish up your character in a conventional, Scandinavian crime, while giving you an Irish first name, and making you more of a hero than has this author, in whose judgement you have no confidence, and from whose jaded hands you have fallen into oblivion. However, you are destined to be the creature of this Burke-like writer, and the only hope you have of getting some self-respect is by preying on him until you can get him to bend his will to your own idea of a satisfactory plot. To achieve your objective, you are willing to push him to that level of psychological distress at which he will betray his own family's security in order to satisfy your ego.

The author, who may not really be who he thinks he is, finally gets the long awaited retreat, financed by the Irish Arts Council, that will give him the peace and quiet to finish a novel that may, at long last, encounter some financial success. His wife, who has made incredible self-sacrifice so that her man can practise his craft, sends him away content in the knowledge that he now has the space in which to come up with the goods. You, however, Bill, wait for the right moment, at the retreat, and then you appear to him, screwing up any possibility of his finishing the new novel before he has come to terms with you. You make threats, you ask him to rename you, you tell him you are worthy of a more noble crime than topping old people in distresss. He tells you he doesn't have the time to take care of you.

You work out a deal with the crime writer. You propose to rewrite a large part of the manuscript yourself, saying that this will ease the burden he has to carry. He knows better...

If you are interested, you can check out the rest of the review here:
http://johnjgaynard.blogspot.com/2011/11/review-of-declan-burkes-absolute-zero.h...… (mehr)

This is the first novel of Declan Burke's I have read, although I have enjoyed his blog CRIME ALWAYS PAYS for quite a while. There is a hell of a lot of information packed into the first few pages, to set the context, and then the story takes off and becomes a real, if brutal page turner that lifts the lid on a toxic concoction of Irish parochial politics and the psychopaths who make a living on its edges.

The writing brings to mind other hardboiled Irish writers of the past few years, such as Ken Bruen or Sam Millar, or even the Scottish writer Allan Guthrie, but what makes Burke his own man is the mouth-jockey resilience of his hero, Harry Rigby and the great characterization of some of the essential bit players. Groucho Marx would have been proud to put his name to quite a few pages of the dialog. The plotting and the way the clues all click into place in the final chapters show Burke's mastery of the genre.… (mehr)