Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "ireland"

One of my favourite blogs is Declan Burke's excellent Crime Always Pays, which does for Irish crime fiction what the famous toucan does for Guinness. As a Welsh crime writer, I assume I'm the next best thing to an Irish crime writer, so Declan includes me today in his long-running interview series "Ya Wanna Do It Here or Down the Station, Punk." Find out what I'd want in return for strangling puppies and biting the heads off chickens....

This weekend I was the guest of Munther Fahmi, who runs the excellent bookshop at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, for a reading from my newest Palestinian crime novel THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET. Munther and I have been scheming for some time to organize an event, so it was great to finally get it together.

I knew it'd be an interesting crowd at the Colony, which manages to be something like neutral ground (although many Israelis might dispute that) in Jerusalem. There were foreign journalists and diplomats, Israelis and Palestinians among the sizeable crowd, including some old friends I haven't seen for some time. Oh, and tourists, too -- a rare species since the intifada, but I signed for visitors from Berlin and Seattle, Ireland and Serbia.

I was also delighted that one of the people on whom I based the character of a World Bank worker in THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET happened to be staying at the Colony this weekend. I was able to give him the news that I'd turned him into a woman and changed his employer. He seemed pleased with both alterations, and I hope he enjoys the book.



I've edited the photos so that you can't see how hot it became in the room. By the time I was signing the books at the end I was rather inelegantly dripping with sweat. The alternative, of course, was the honking of passing Arab wedding convoys and, as antiglobalization activist Naomi Klein discovered when the windows were opened to let in some air for her reading immediately after mine, the evening call to prayers by the muezzin at the mosque next door. (It's the Mosque of Sheikh Jarrah, named after Saladin's doctor, whose tomb it houses.)

To get on Munther's mailing list for future readings at his excellent bookshop, write to him at bookshopat@gmail.com.

The Twelve by Stuart Neville
Harvill Secker (July 2, 2009 isbn: 1846552796)
(to be published in US in October as “The Ghosts of Belfast”, Soho Crime isbn: 1569476004)

Things that seemed clear enough to kill for during a conflict become impossible to look at once the murdering is at an end. Anyone who’s lived through a war or a time of terrorism could tell you that. Most of us bury those images. Gerry Fegan, the main character of Stuart Neville’s disturbing, compelling debut novel “The Twelve,” can’t look away. The ghosts of the people he killed as an IRA operative hang around with him, watching, taunting. The result is as thought-provoking a book on the aftermath of conflict as you'll ever read.

At first it seems Fegan is merely mad with trauma, remorse and drink. A hopeless casualty who’s failed to move on, as the rest of Northern Ireland steps into a new world of peace and reconciliation. Then the ghosts urge him to avenge them, killing the IRA street bosses and police turncoats who set up their deaths. The book takes an eery leap into the supernatural reminiscent of the books of Neville’s fellow Irishman John Connelly. The ghosts become characters in the book until – without giving away one of the most chilling moments in Neville’s climax – we see the proof that Fegan isn’t crazy, or if he is then he isn’t the only one who’s crazy. Instead, he shares a bond with the other bloodied footsoldier, a British agent named Campbell who can no longer imagine life without the danger of discovery and death.


Neville’s masterstroke is to take a post-conflict situation where of necessity a lot of former bad guys are converted to good guys -- gunmen made into legislators still running corrupt business sidelines -- and to show the price paid by those who can’t shrug off their past. Just as with the Palestinian militias of my Omar Yussef Mysteries, there was always a streak in the IRA that was more interested in racketeering and extortion than it was in fighting for "freedom" – all the killing was just a pretext for being the hardest gangsters in town. Neville’s book is a thrilling record of the traces of crime and blood left behind when the politicians command us to move on.

The new blog I've started with fellow crime writers Christopher G. Moore, Colin Cotterill and Barbara Nadel has a new post from me today. It's about why I came to write so-called genre fiction. It starts like this:

Writers have it all wrong. They think they need to learn about other writers. I studied English literature at Oxford University and I read all I could find of the sort of literary criticism that makes a novel seem like a piece of East German economic analysis. Three years later, I hadn’t learned a thing — except that it was
fine to have a room you could take a girl to without having to sneak past your mother, Guinness isn’t good for you, and the deputy bank manager at Lloyd’s on Broad Street with the goatee and the bald head didn’t just /look/ like Ming the Merciless.

Then I read Dashiell Hammett. Before he published novels, Hammett was a Pinkerton detective. What he wrote was real. I could smell the places he’d been for the Pinkertons, feel the punches he’d taken, think the way he’d had to think to outwit true criminals. I’d been reading Marxist critical theorists on Daniel Defoe and French deconstructionists whose scribblings about the “stereographic plurality of significances” were intended to tell me that whatever I thought a book was about was, indeed, what it was about–except that it wasn’t, was it. Or was it?

Read the rest on International Crime Authors Reality Check.

The excellent UK crime fiction blog It's a Crime features me in a post about the growing number of Welsh crime writers. Tartan crime (Scottish writers like Ian Rankin) has long been big and It's a Crime notes the recent wave of Irish crime writers--I'm a fan of Gene Kerrigen, Bob Burke, Declan Burke and Stuart Neville. Now she says it's time for the Welsh, noting some other up-and-comers.

Let's hear it for the Taffia!

(Perhaps I should explain that to my American readers: the English slang for a Welsh person is "Taff," because the river through Cardiff the capital is called the Taff and few English ever venture further into Wales than that. Therefore a Welsh mafia would be a Taffia...Amaze your friends with that one.)