(If you were one of the unlucky people who missed part one go HERE and be delighted and amazed.)
Part Deux ...
Me - Backto your man, Harry. One of the many things in Eightball Boogie that fascinated me was hisrelationship with his psycho brother. Tell us where that came from.
Declan - Anothertough question. The honest answer is that I don’t know - if I did, I probablywouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of writing a book about it. But thesethings tend to be buried pretty deep in our psyches, and take quite a bit ofexcavating.
As withall the ostensibly bad guys in my books - Rossi in THE BIG O, Karlsson inABSOLUTE ZERO COOL - I have a lot of sympathy for Gonzo, who is Harry’s brotherin EIGHTBALL BOOGIE. He’s an exaggerated version of the milder kind ofsociopath that people tend to meet in their lives - the bullying boss at work,the aggressive moron who lashes out at the end of the night after one too manybeers, the passive-aggressive manipulator we’ve all met at some point in ourlives. Gene Kerrigan makes the point that most criminals aren’t all thatdifferent to law-abiding citizens, they simply want to pay their mortgage offquicker, and are prepared to do whatever it takes to achieve their goals. To acertain extent, Harry and Gonzo are two sides of the same coin, brothers whogrew up the hard way and whose lives were directed down slightly differentpaths by their individual experiences. Harry, possibly belatedly, discovers abrake on his impulses at a particular time in his life; Gonzo doesn’t, andfeels free to do whatever he needs to do in order to get what he wants. He’s atypical bully, a borderline sociopath who doesn’t have the ability to empathisewith other people. Given that EIGHTBALL is a crime novel, it was inevitable, Isuppose, that Gonzo would at some point end up with a gun in his hand, butthat’s not what was interesting to me. What I was interested in was why Gonzobecame that bully in the first place, in the factors that created hisparticular pathology.
EIGHTBALLBOOGIE is told in a first-person narrative, and Harry is a freelancejournalist-cum-private investigator (he calls himself a ‘research consultant’)as a nod to Chandler’s Marlowe, so it’s Harry’s story; but the epigraph I usedat the start of the book, from Jim Thompson’s THE KILLER INSIDE ME, is dedicatedin my mind to Gonzo: ‘Yeah, I reckon that’s all unless our kind gets anotherchance in the Next Place. Our kind. Us people. All of us that started the gamewith a crooked cue, that wanted so much and got so little, that meant so goodand did so bad.
So Gonzois Harry’s doppelganger, in a way, his alter-ego. But I suppose too that bothHarry and Gonzo are aspects of my own personality. In a parallel universe, Iturned out like Gonzo; in another parallel universe, I ended up like Harry.Happily, I live in this universe, and don’t have to be either.
Me - Another pleasure for me in Eightball Boogie is yourfacility for the bon mot, the wisecrack and the banter. Go on make me jealous -does this come naturally to you or do you have to work at it? And part 2 ofthis question - did you feel you had to add the humour to leaven the darkerstuff?
Declan - Well,you’re very kind, sir, and I appreciate the good word. To be honest, at thisremove, I think there’s probably too much wise-cracking in EIGHTBALL - thereare times, I think, when it distracts from what’s happening. I’ve written asequel to EIGHTBALL called THE BIG EMPTY, and Harry is less inclined to crackwise in that one, although there’s no pretending that he doesn’t have a smartmouth. But when THE BIG EMPTY opens, Harry’s just out of prison after doingfive years, and that’s an experience that’ll teach even the smartest arse whento keep his mouth shut.
By thesame token, he’s just a slightly subdued version of the Harry we meet inEIGHTBALL - my sense of humour tends to veer towards the absurd and thesurreal, which is probably why I enjoy Chandler’s one-liners so much. And mostof the humour in EIGHTBALL is in there because I was writing an homage toChandler, in part, and I did deliberately over-egg the pudding because I wantedpeople to know that I wasn’t just trying (and failing miserably) to imitateChandler’s style, I was trying incorporate that kind of style into acontemporary Irish setting - which is itself, of course, an absurd thing to do.
I’mafraid that the answer to your first question is yes, that I find comedy easyto write - or far easier, I should say, than writing consistently seriousmaterial. I’ve tried in the past to write a serious novel, but it either flopsmiserably, or it twists itself into something funny. It’s probably a failing ofmine that I can’t write anything without raising an arched eyebrow above it,but then, the crime novel these days verges on self-parody as it is, so all I’mdoing is giving the conventions a bit of a tickle once in a while. Maybe someday I’ll run out of gags, and then I’ll get to write a proper, serious novel.It’d be a nice change of pace, if nothing else.
Thatsaid, I’m a big fan of the notion peddled by the ancient Greeks that tragedy issimply underdeveloped comedy, although they had a different interpretation of‘comedy’ than we do. Still, I can’t see why you shouldn’t write a novel thathas something serious to say, and not leaven the darkness in the process, asyou suggest. Elmore Leonard, Kurt Vonnegut, Spike Milligan, Colin Bateman, CarlHiaasen, Barry Gifford, Chandler himself - there’s a very good reason why I’veread virtually everything those writers have written. Eoin Colfer’s PLUGGED,incidentally, is a welcome addition to those ranks.
Me - Awee birdy (well, your blog) tells me you're bringing to market a book aboutthis new and exciting wave of Irish Crime Fiction. Tell us about that.
Declan - DOWNTHESE GREEN STREETS: IRISH CRIME WRITING IN THE 21st CENTURY is a collection ofessays, interviews and short stories written by Irish crime writers about thephenomenon that is the current explosion in Irish crime writing. And it’s notsimply a case of quantity, as the roll-call suggests: John Connolly, TanaFrench, Eoin McNamee, Adrian McKinty, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Arlene Hunt, GeneKerrigan, Stuart Neville, Jane Casey, Colin Bateman, John Banville, DeclanHughes, Niamh O’Connor, Alan Glynn, Brian McGilloway, Alex Barclay, Ken Bruen …they’re all writers who can hold their own in any company, crime or otherwise.
It just seemed to me that a whole generation of writers was coming through atthe same time, all writing during a period of time in Ireland that has provedconvulsive - from the murder of Veronica Guerin and the IRA ceasefires inNorthern Ireland in the mid-1990s, through the rise of the Celtic Tigereconomic miracle, and then the decline and fall into economic meltdown - and Ithought it might be an interesting exercise to have the writers themselvesexplore the reasons - personal, political, commercial, literary - why theychose to write crime fiction.
Hopefully it’ll appeal to crime fiction fans allover the world, though, because the writers mentioned above have already proventhat Irish crime writing can compete with the best the international stage hasto offer.
Me - NowI'm going to do to you what you do to your victims, sorry guests on your own excellent blog (If you're not a follower, get your butt over there pronto) CRIME ALWAYS PAYS - God dictatesyou can only read OR write, which do you go for?
Declan - Read.Read, read, read, read, read. Don’t get me wrong, I love to write, and Godknows I get like a hungover bear if I don’t get to write when I need to. But ifI had to make a choice, and being all too aware of my own limitations as awriter, and all too aware of the fact that there are writers out there that Icouldn’t match in a thousand years of trying, then I’d be happy to sit back andread until my eyesight fails.
To write is to be; to read is to live.
