My Favourite "Crime" Reads of 2011

In no particular order, here are some my outstanding reads of the year. Well, everybody else is doing it ...

Megan Abbott – The End of Everything

Just WHO can you trust? Friends, family? Can you even trust yourself?

This is a book about sisters, fathers and daughters, family and friendships, truths dripping reluctantly from the owner, but more than that, it’s a book about two young girls on the verge of discovering the confusing and heady power of their gender. It’s “noir” fiction, but not as we know it.

R J Ellory – Bad Signs

Two brothers on a road trip to hell. A fascinating take on the nature/ nurture debate from one of my favourites, and one of the most consistently excellent writers in the field today.

Maybe I’m becoming a wimp as I grow older, but there were several times during the race to the end of this book that the tension became too much for me and I had to set it aside for a few minutes. Now, that is good writing!

Tony Black – Truth Lies Bleeding

Our Tone gives Gus Drury a well-deserved rest and turns his eagle-eye on the police procedural.

In my Crimesquad review in April I said, “Another area where Tony Black excels is in his depictions of those living on the edge of the law. There is no soft edge to these people. Every flaw is stripped of shadow and every bad deed gets punished. Truth Lies Bleeding is fast, sharp and brilliantly plotted. It’s only just turned spring but if I read a better example of the police procedural this year I will be amazed.”  

Nothing came across my desk to allow me to review that opinion. ‘Nuff said.

Tom Franklin - Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

An old crime returns to haunt the town’s loner, allowing us, the reader to examine our judgement of others and ultimately, our own conscience. The writing is delicious, the pace sure and steady and the sense of place offers an atmosphere that is impossible not to be seduced by. There is much to admire about this novel and a whole lot more to love and if there is any justice in the world this will become a huge bestseller.

Sam Hawken – The Dead Women of Juarez

This has to me my favourite debut read of the year. Visceral and haunting. The real-life victims of the crimes that pervade this city are in the background, their tragedy highlighted by the simple but effective ploy of showing the effect that their deaths have had on the people left behind. Time and again we see them draped in black, crushed under the weight of their grief: a much more effective device than a passage of torture. REALLY looking forward to seeing what Sam comes up with next.

Declan Burke – Absolute Zero Cool

Trying to describe this book adequately is like trying to grab a bar of soap in the bath. Just believe me when I say it is frickin’ brilliant. I'm totally in awe of Burke’s ability to craft a sentence and to unleash the bon mot. This a brave book, both in context and content. It has brains, wit and heart and the ending was pitch-perfect. Gave me a wee lump in my throat. This has got cult classic written all over it. Just off now to re-read. It’s that good!

Bill Kirton – The Sparrow Conundrum

Ahh, Bill. The man. In the interests of full disclosure I have to say that Bill is a friend (as are a few others on this list – but I knew Bill before I knew his writing) nonetheless, he has fully earned his place here. Besides, my list: my rules.

The characters that Bill Kirton serves up in award-winning, The Sparrow Conundrum are a continuous delight. My favourites were the sociopathic detective, Lodgedale and the crime boss, Eagle who surely had his head turned by a gang of bullies at a private school. Kirton is a master of the comic. If you like a change from the normal mystery/ thriller fare and you don't take your crime fiction too seriously you owe it to yourself to get a copy of The Sparrow Conundrum.

James Lee Burke – Feast Day of Fools

We’re in the Texan landscape with Hack Holland and we’re hunting a psycho. Which is nice.

Flippancy aside, JLB is one man who deserves that much used word – “awesome” in respect of his work. There is richness to this man’s writing that cannot fail to delight. He specialises in imbuing his characters with certainty of action, even while their motives are conflicted. Burke is the master of an oblique dialogue that in the hands of someone less skilled would serve only to confuse, but with him it never fails to enlighten and engage. Biblical. Epic. Awesome.

Adrian McKinty – Falling Glass

This is an archetypal tale of a man who is sent to find a woman he then falls for. What keeps the story fresh and fascinating is the quick-fire pace, the insight into his characters and the quality of the prose. Adrian McKinty is a fine stylist who says much with a few carefully chosen words and he rounds this off with touches of mythology and whispers of the arcane. A writer who deserves to be more widely read.

Nick Stone – Voodoo Eyes

As a fan of Nick’s work, Voodoo Eyes was a book that was well overdue. This is Nick Stone’s first outing since King of Swords in 2007 and boy was it worth the wait. His private detective, Max Mingus is older, not necessarily wiser but still determined to bring down the bad guy. And they really don’t come much badder than Solomon Boukman. Max is a wonderful literary creation. He is washed thin by personal tragedy, partly because he feels he deserves most of it, but still he keeps on coming. The sympathetic but honest eye that Nick Stone used to chronicle the past of Haiti in his earlier work is now used to good effect on the neighbouring island of Cuba.  Stone observes with the skill of a journalist and paints a word picture as effectively as any poet. The sense of place in this piece is so vivid you leave the books pages feeling as if you had just spent a few hours on the island itself.

Amanda Kyle Williams – The Stranger You Seek

Serial killers are (to borrow the cliché) ten-a-penny in crime fiction and it takes something a little bit special to grab and hold my attention. The Stranger You Seek has got “special” in bucketloads. Keye Street is my new favourite character and it’s her voice that takes us through this cracking read.  She is spunky, sparky (he feverishly seeks another word beginning with “sp”) and (goes for) sassy. (I didn’t get the “p” in there. So sue me.)

Aspiring writers who are struggling with the concept of “voice” should read this book and they’ll receive the message loud and clear. The author uses this to great effect not only giving the reader everything they would be looking for in such a novel, but with added warmth and wit. And this (despite the tension and body count) makes The Stranger You Seek such a joy to read.

Can’t wait to see what 2012 has in store!

Laters,

M

Guest Blog: Bill Kirton

Ok, it’s back to the poetry-fest.

For your delectation and delight I have a guest spot to offer you today from talented writer and all-round good-guy, Bill Kirton.

In case you don’t know Bill he blogs HERE.

Bill is arguably the cleverest man I know (apart from him, her, him, oh and quite possibly him). Anywho, he is well-endowed (steady Thea, Marley) with the gray matter. He writes short stories, crime novels, historical-thriller-romance novels, children’s books, educational texts and even a number of pieces of drama have flown fully formed from his brain-space. (Apologies if I’ve missed anything, Bill.)

His latest work is a giggle-fest comic crime caper set in Aberdeen called The Sparrow Conundrum. It truly is hilariously entertaining. Click HERE  for more details.

He argues that he knows nothing about poetry and therefore, I thought, what better way to prove him wrong than to ask him to write a blog post for May Contain Nuts.

Over to BK…

Even though I’m not myself a poet, it’s the literary genre I most associate with many phases of my life. As an adolescent I poured the stuff out, imagining that comparing a girl-friend’s hair to ‘an autumn fall’ (yes, I was that bad) opened up chasms of love into which she couldn’t resist diving with me. (She resisted.) But since then, the words of others have caught my emotions and sensations in ways I could never dream of – Yeats with his ‘He wishes for the cloths of heaven’, Byron’s ‘Oh that the desert were my dwelling place, with one fair spirit for my minister’, and, as I staggered towards what I took to be sophistication, Marvell’s ‘Had we but world enough, and time …’ and Ted Hughes’ visceral, feral stuff. And many, many others.

But it’s not just the predictable love poetry (predictable in the sense that ‘love’ and ‘poetry’ belong together), it’s all those other wonderful word combinations and rhythms that say more things than their literal meanings seem to restrict them to. Before I retired, I was lucky enough to have a job which involved holding tutorials on French literature with young, intelligent, interested people. There were some who thought analyzing novels and poems ‘spoiled’ them, and I could appreciate why they said that. If you’re carried away by a story or by rhythms, you don’t want some boring old academic pointing out the thematic correspondences under the surface. On the other hand, realizing that these lines weren’t just pretty, one-dimensional facets of an idea but deliberately tangled truths that gave new, unsuspected life and sense to experience gave them resonances which made the initial response even more intense.

There’s a poem by Gerard de Nerval simply called ‘Je suis le ténébreux’, which has the same haunting effect on me every time it comes into my head that it had when I first read it as a student. It’s a classic example of how poetry tears through the normal fabric of perception to imply, even to touch, heights and depths of being and sensation which go unsuspected in our day to day living. The first line ‘Je suis le ténébreux, le Veuf, l’inconsolé’ sets the tone. It’s untranslatable but literally it says ‘I am the dark one, the widower, the one for whom there is no consolation’. I’m sorry, the English words don’t have the concision of the original, which then goes on to include medieval and mystical references – all musical and redolent of centuries of human passions, disappointments, regrets, extremes and mysteries which echo in the universe each of us carries.

I’d need this to be a few thousand words long to even try to do justice to the importance of poetry, but Michael’s no doubt already tapping his virtual watch and making wind-up gestures, so I’ll end with a little example which, coincidentally, was presented to me this weekend. I was visiting my daughter. Her husband’s an actor and had just come back from a tour to Japan. He’s curious about everything and, though he speaks no Japanese, he learned several phrases. He also learned this (which I’m spelling phonetically, so I hope Japanese speakers will forgive the crudity):

Ta bi bi to to

Wagana Yo ba re n

Hatszu shi guri

It means:

I am a wanderer

So let that be my name

The first winter rains.

I have no idea what it means or signifies culturally, but those 14 words open huge perspectives, internal and external, and say as much as an entire 2000-word story. For me, more than anything else, poetry shows the commonality between me and others distant in time and/or space. François Villon wrote ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan’ (‘Where are the snows of yesteryear’) in the 15^th century and it couldn’t be more modern.

Vive la poésie.

Bob and my Kindle

The Great Kindle experiment, for me at least, is over. For now. Why, I hear you chime in response?

Because the dog ate it.

I’ve not had to say that since I was ten and a teacher asked me where my homework was. 

Yes, like many other people’s dogs, our Bob has a taste for the written material. I could just about handle it when he ate Lee Child’s latest hardback. Next up for a gnashing was Jim Butcher’s “Changes” and that earned Bob a swift rebuke. For “rebuke” read a loud voice, a skelp on the bum with said book and being ejected into the back garden.

The wee fella was watching and said, ‘Dad, you over-react. It’s only a book.’

Only a f~/&*ing book? Luckily, I had finished both books. (BTW, Jim Butcher is very, very, very good. You like vampires, wizards and fast violent action? JB is your man.)

Next up for use as a teething toy was myKindle. I was in the middle of Bill Kirton’s The Figurehead as well. i was reading into the wee hours, eventually went up to bed and yes, I left it in the wrong place and yes, it is now gubbed. Bob was satisfied with a chomp at the top right hand corner of the machine so the bottom half of the screen is perfectly readable. I just have to guess at what Bill is saying for the first ten lines of very page.

See me? Not a happy chappy.

If any of you kind people at Amazon are reading this and you would like to donate a kindle to the May Contain Nuts community leader – i.e. me – please don’t dilly dally. First class should get it here before Sunday.

To be honest though, my reading habits hadn’t really changed that much. I bought the thing early December. I downloaded about half a dozen books and read one and a half. (The half read piece being the afore-mentioned The Figurehead. Bill, I’m trying to give you as many mentions as possible; is this ok?)

In comparison, over the same period of time I have read, oh at least a dozen novels. True, most of them are free, but still.

Conclusion? I’m never going to go full-on-digital with my reading material. I LOVE browsing in book shops. I LOVE holding the weight of paper in my hand and flicking through the pages.

However the e-book debate rages on with the media desperate to tell us that the paper book is dead, long live the e-book.  We’ll see. The only thing that’s for sure is that the times they are a-changing. And some “mid-list” – gawd, what a horrible term – authors are seeing their books sell in previously unimaginable numbers. Which is nice.

Allan Guthrie, one of the finest crime-writers in these here shores has a blog where he talks about e-books that sell. Go HERE   for a wee read.

Friend of this blog, all-round good-guy and wonderfully talented crime-writer Declan Burke is selling his e-book. Got a spare pound or two?  click HERE Give him a try. Guaranteed enjoyment. Word.

What do you guys think? Have you made the switch to E? 

In conversation with...

BILL KIRTON

 In 3 words describe The Figurehead.


Love and death.

Now you have another 21 words - give us some detail of the plot.

In Aberdeen in 1840, a shipwright dies and John Grant carves a figurehead, solves a mystery and starts falling in love.

Do you ever write naked?

I live in Aberdeen, ergo naked writing = hypothermia. Anyway, why let reality spoil my mental image of myself as a Lord Byron figure (without the bad leg)?

Why 1840?

I wanted it to be 19th century, near the Romantics because my PhD was on Victor Hugo’s theatre and I like all that excessive Romanticism stuff anyway. Narrowing it down was easy because Aberdeen Library had an ordnance survey map of the city in 1840. Then I discovered that the Scottish Maid, the first ship to have a clipper bow, was designed and launched in Aberdeen in 1839, exactly 100 years before my birthday. And sail was being threatened by steam, and a new-fangled thing called a propeller was being demonstrated, and emigration to the Americas, Australia and New Zealand was big business – so it’s a great time. (And there’s no DNA or CSI to worry about, either.)

Suits me. I hate all that DNA malarkey. If I want a science manual I’ll go to the non-fiction department thankyouverymuch. You've published crime and now with The Figurehead there appears to be an element of romance. You going soft on us?

This harsh exterior hides a gentle, tender soul. Anyway, The Figurehead is still a crime novel. It just so happened that the carver, John Grant, and half his model, Helen Anderson, started fancying one another so who was I to stop them? I think it’s a shame that we have to be genre-labelled, anyway. It’s inhibiting. I only became a crime writer by accident.

You have a bad leg? Awwww. What other faults would you like to tell us about?

No, no. Byron had the bad leg – club foot. It hurt like eff, so he drank hock and soda water to take his mind off it. (Works for me.)

As for my own faults, my first impulse was to claim that I’m almost flawless (‘almost’ because my generosity, compassion and modesty are excessive). But it’s hard to signal something as a joke in writing, and self-deprecation doesn’t always work. I was once very embarrassed in the USA where I directed As you like it for the URI Theater Department. After the last show, they gave me some lovely, thoughtful gifts and, in my thank you speech, I said the show had been wonderful thanks to the director. They all applauded and agreed but no doubt thought I was a wanker when all I wanted was to get a laugh.

So let’s see – there’s selfishness, laziness, occasional gluttony (eating whole tubs of Ben and Jerry’s as I watch football), impatience with politicians and an extraordinarily low attention span. Those are just a few off the top of my head – interview my wife to get the rest.


I called her. She says she’s going to keep all the good stuff until you have shuffled off this mortal coil, and then make a fortune.


When it comes to violence in fiction how far should you go?

This is a perennial problem, isn’t it? I remember writing a blog about it way back and I’m still puzzled by our appetite for (or tolerance of) it. It’s clear that lots of readers expect to find a bit of gore dripping off the pages. One psychologist/critic (can’t remember who) said crime writers ‘stylise’ murder, make it acceptable by turning it into something other than a grotesque invasion of one person by another. I don’t buy that. I think we’re satisfying some incomprehensible but very real appetite. We rubber-neck at accident scenes, the papers dwell on the gruesome details of stabbings, rape, torture, murder. Unlike with their politics, they’re not forming our tastes and opinions, they’re meeting a demand. I don’t imagine for a moment that many of us would be capable of doing any of those things ourselves but the fascination with them is definitely there.

Having said all that, I have a nagging concern that we don’t really know what we’re unleashing when we invent our nasty episodes. The arguments about video games apply to our violent scenes, too – copycat killings, kids using knives so casually, and the whole excitement and glamour of violence. It’s fine for me to sit here, sun shining on the garden outside, and decide to eviscerate someone with a blunt breadknife and wrap up the bits in cling-film. My imagination can conceive of it but I’d never be able to do it. But we don’t all share the same morality and there may well be readers who find such words and images ‘cool’. That makes me shudder more than the fictional gore-fest.


See question above and tell us what you think about any responsibility that the author might have...

I’ve sort of answered that already (even if it’s by a ‘don’t know’). But I think there’s another angle on it. Just as writers get caught up with their characters and their autonomy, so they get dragged into their motives and the situations in which they find themselves. In a way, it’s possible that the writer’s an accomplice but the real responsibility lies with the character.

OK, I need to explain that. When I wrote my first procedural, I decided it had to have some nastiness because that sells books. That sounds glib, irresponsible maybe because the scene I wrote, towards the end of the book, is quite shocking. But I didn’t sit here dreaming up torments – they all came straight out of the character involved and the motives behind the violence. It was a necessary part of that person’s psyche and essential to the plot. Mind you, it still didn’t stop my agent at the time happily introducing me to a friend as ‘a nice man who has very nasty thoughts’. When asked to do readings or give talks, I never read such passages, though, and I actually find them disturbing when I look at them now. So the writer in me writes them and enjoys the process, but the reader in me finds them hard to take. Over to you, Mr. therapist.


Hey, I’m not your therapist, dude. Although I am available for a fee and therefore happy to make some shit up to earn it...and what responsibility does someone like yourself have who is, and I quote "almost flawless"?

I knew I shouldn’t have given you that whip to beat me with (see what I did there?). It’s actually scary to think that what I write could have a consequence other than just entertaining the reader, and nowadays I don’t exploit the commercial potential of violence at all. There was a rape in my second book (which I rewrote after my wife read and commented on it and gave me insights into the victim’s responses which I hadn’t had myself). Again, it’s nasty and again it’s necessary. Luckily, when the late Susanna Yager reviewed it in the Sunday Telegraph, she acknowledged that it wasn’t ‘there to titillate, but to carry the story forward and ultimately bring about the climax to a thoughtful and thought-provoking book’. I think if I were to discover that something I wrote provoked or informed actual violence to a real person, I’d feel very guilty. So I acknowledge the responsibility – and yet I still go on writing that sort of thing when it’s necessary. Is that me copping out? Come on, you’ve reviewed umpteen crime novels, you tell me.


 I like what Stephen King says about a contract between the writer and the reader and the writer’s duty to write about his/ her character with honesty. Anywho, this isn’t about me. For once. So...moving on...when giving writerly advice, Oliver Wendell Holmes said that when writing about a frog you should inhabit your frog-ness. How do you inhabit your frogness?

The temptation to discuss my genuine Francophilia is strong but I’ll resist it. One response that your question does provoke, though, is that doing something and thinking about how you do it are distinct things. On one hand, you’re the writer – absorbed in the work, unaware of self or the passage of time, part of the fiction that’s being created – on the other, you’re stepping back from the process, analysing it objectively in full awareness of who you are and what your aims and intentions are too. So my answer is that I definitely do ‘inhabit my frogness’ but if I start trying to say how I do it, I might be inventing something which wasn’t necessarily true. (Interestingly – to me anyway – this answer reflects what I was saying about my attitudes to violence as writer and reader – the writer is wrapped up in it, part of it and can therefore do it; the reader is further from it, more capable of the necessary objectivity you need for analysis.)


Talking about Stephen King - we were, people. Keep up. What was the best piece of writing advice you ever received?

I’ll tell you a secret. At school and university, I used to write the occasional letter to the editor and even an odd article here and there. I was too idle to actually become a student journalist or anything and writing was just for fun. So the aim was rarely serious but a couple of times I got very enthusiastic responses from teachers, lecturers, even profs. And yet no one ever suggested that I should look for a career involving writing. With hindsight, it was the obvious route for me to follow.

So some people said nice things but I don’t think I can pinpoint a specific piece of writing advice given to me personally. As a student, reading old critics such as G Wilson Knight and others made me realise for the first time how writing can have so many layers of significance (not that I’m claiming that for my stuff). And the ‘rules’ of Elmore Leonard are brilliant and spot on. I only ever give two bits of advice myself – read what you’ve written aloud to test for rhythms, gaps, mistakes, etc. and cut, cut, cut.


Are you a plotter or a pantser (as in, you fly by the seat of your pants - and if you know where that expression comes from, do tell)

As part of my slavish desire to please you, I checked the expression and it’s probably British from WW1 – planes with few or unreliable instruments, so the pilot made his judgements on how the aircraft was moving, shuddering etc. – all of which he felt through his chair. But for once, your question’s easy to answer. I’m a rudimentary plotter but, once the words start appearing, the pantser takes over. I have a general overall idea of where I want to get to but I let the characters take me there (or somewhere else if that’s what they decide). I even laugh at their jokes. Maybe authors should all be sectioned to protect society.


I’m liking this slavish desire you have to pleasing me. Now...while I come up with ways in which I can take advantage of this tell us all how to buy a copy of The Figurehead and what formats it is in.

The formats take me into new territory. It’s the first time I’ve had a book published simultaneously as e-book, e-serial and paperback. It’s already available in the USA but an ISBN number glitch has delayed it in the UK. I’m assured that’ll be cleared up very quickly. People who registered with Virtual Tales (the publishers) get the first 4 chapters free and a 40% discount on the cover price. I don’t know if that offer’s still open but all you have to do is send a blank email to figurehead@virtualtales.com to find out. The relevant web page is at http://www.virtualtales.com/Mystery/Crime/Figurehead.html. Most of all, it would be nice if readers went into their local bookshop and, if it’s not on the shelves, expressed, in very loud voices and at great length, their amazement at such a shocking lapse on the part of the manager.



Like this, people... “ohmyGOD, you DON’T have a copy of The Figurehead by Bill Kirton?

If what you have read here doesn't slake your desire for all things Bill, he can be found on his blog and the link is on the right-hand side of this page. No. The other right. Or you could post a question in the comments section and as he, by his own admission, is a devoted fan of May Contain Nuts, he will spot it and reply quicker than a very quick thing.