Crime Fiction/True Crime
A June of Ordinary Murders, Conor Brady
After forty years as a journalist, former Irish Times editor Conor Brady published his first piece of fiction earlier this year, a crime novel titled A June of Ordinary Murders.
The book takes place in 1887 Dublin, and follows Sergeant Joe Swallow as he investigates a series of seemingly unconnected murders around the time of the Queen’s Jubilee visit. In the 1880s the Dublin Metropolitan Police classified crime in two distinct classes. Political crimes were ‘special’, whereas theft, robbery and even murder, no matter how terrible, were ‘ordinary’. In June 1887 the mutilated bodies of a man and a child are discovered in Phoenix Park and Detective Sergeant Joe Swallow steps up to investigate. Cynical and tired, Swallow is a man living on past successes in need of a win.
In the background, the city is sweltering in a long summer heatwave, a potential gangland war is simmering as the chief lieutenants of a dying crime boss size each other up and the castle administration want the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee to pass off without complication. Underneath it all, the growing threat of anti-British radicals is never far away. With the Land War at its height, the priority is to contain ‘special’ crime. But these murders appear to be ‘ordinary’ and thus of lesser priority. When the evidence suggests high-level involvement, and as the body count increases, Swallow must navigate the waters of foolish superiors, political directives and frayed tempers to investigate the crime, find the true murderer and deliver justice.
The Irish Independent says of A June of Ordinary Murders “Brady handles the political atmosphere of the time with aplomb. A June Of Ordinary Murders pulsates with a vivid sense of a country on edge as the land wars rage and preparations get under way for a royal visit.
His descriptions of the oppressive heatwave that settled on Dublin that month are equally impressive, as "the human waste that accumulated in thousands of dry lavatories baked and stank in the heat".
Threaten to Win: Brian O'Connor
When you meet Brian O'Connor he seems like a gentle, mild mannered chap, but when it comes to his opinions, think cat and pigeons. The Irish Times racing correspondent writes a "Tipping Point" column on Mondays that tends to get people’s back up, including comedian Dara O’Briain, who took to Twitter earlier this year, to vent spleen.
O’Connor had claimed O’Briain’s choice of expletive – ‘feck’ – said something ‘lame’ about his comedy.
O’Briain tweeted: "Just got a call from some telly people. We managed to get 29 f**ks into that edit of TITS on in December. Happy Christmas! Ho fuckin' ho!" He went on: "To illustrate: if you "Fecked" someone or something, it would usually mean to throw/fling/project it."
And on: "Interesting etimological fact: "feck" is similar to "f**k" in most uses but has no sexual content."
And on...
But O’Briain isn’t the only one whose hackles have been raised.
On the subject of golf, O’Connor observed: "never in the history of human kind has a sport turned so many otherwise normal, functioning people into arse-licking, clubhouse-stalking, tuppence ha’penny peeing down on tupponece, polo-shirt wearing inadequataes."
133 Rejections to Get Published
My first novel, The Istanbul Puzzle, a real mystery, has recently been released by Avon a division of Harper Collins. So far, it will be published in 14 countries. More will follow, so they say.
My story, getting from wanting to be a published to achieving it is an example of how to do things slowly. I think it’s probably just me. I like to rush things normally. I like shortcuts when I am driving home. I look for the short line in the bank. I wanted to get published fast, obviously!
But fate, in love with irony, made me wait. Here’s how it happened.
Back in 1998 I wanted to write a screenplay. I was bored with the office treadmill. I bought a book, as you do. It told me to write a novel. In 2000, when I came back to Ireland, after ten years in the UK and getting fired once too often, I decided to put my dream to the test.
Jane Casey - The Reckoning
There is something serene about Jane Casey that utterly belies the darkness of the books she writes. Brought up in Dublin, Casey is elegant and cultured, her Irish accent subtle. On meeting her you might guess that she has a degree in English from Oxford, or an MPhil in Anglo Irish Literature from Trinity, that she is married to a criminal barrister, but you would never guess that she is one of Ireland’s and the UK’s leading crime writers whose latest book The Reckoning revolves around the torture and murder of two convicted paedophiles.
Nominated for a second time for the Irish Book Awards in the Crime Fiction category, The Reckoning is Jane Casey’s third book, a fast paced thriller featuring Detective Constable Maeve Kerrigan. To the public the killer in The Reckoning is a hero who targets criminals who are a menace to society. Even the police don't regard the cases as a priority. But young and inexperienced, Kerrigan wants to believe that murder is murder no matter what the sins of the victim. Only, as the killer's violence begins to escalate, is she forced to confront exactly how far she's prepared to go to ensure justice is served…
Originally working as a senior editor in children’s books, Jane Casey started writing when she had an idea for a story that just wouldn’t go away ‘I had this idea in my head for about eighteen months - what if you have this huge tragedy that everyone had forgotten about: nobody really remembered that your brother went missing, but that it totally affected the course of your life and puts you in a position where you make some really bad choices.’
Arlene Hunt's The Chosen
Arlene Hunt is an Irish author who has made her mark firmly on the Irish crime writing scene with six best sellers. I caught up with her just before the launch of her seventh book The Chosen, to get some advice for aspiring crime writers and to find out exactly why she has made a departure from her 'big six' publisher to found her own publishing company Portnoy.
Arlene's first crucial piece of advice for writers is 'don’t worry about your book being a bestseller, it probably won’t be; your family might buy it, friends, some people you went to school with and maybe an aunt or two but unless you’re extremely fortunate your book won’t be a ‘bestseller’. The key is to focus on the story, on writing the best book that you can and getting it done.' Arlene explains 'like most people with ambitions to write I think I talked about it a lot first, I might be still talking about it now if my husband hadn't put a stop to my eternal waffle'. She explains that once she figured out how to type she began to put her ambitions into action.
Arlene’s first step on the road to publication was to get an agent, namely Faith O’Grady from Lisa Richards Agency. Finding a publisher as an emerging writer is a daunting and sometimes disheartening prospect, however Arlene divulges that with 'the cocksuredness of youth' her 27-year-old self had no doubts. Then her first book was rejected. But this rejection proved to be only a temporary setback. Her second book sold and in a two book deal, her first was picked up and published first.
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