News From Across the Pond

 

The Irish Independent takes a look at rising crime fiction writers from Ireland (although I would add that some of these authors aren't just "rising," they've already arrived and checked into their 5-star hotels), including Declan Hughes, Tana French, John Connolly, Arlene Hunt, and Andrew Nugent. Arlene Hunt thinks part of the appeal of Irish crime writing is its realism. "People can relate to the characters," Hunt says. "It's not just about escapism; they like to hear the spoken word and the different accents and not just read about glamorous characters gambling in casinos in the south of France." Connolly sees a bright future ahead for Irish crime fiction, saying that, while a lot of modern crime fiction adheres to conventional formats and constructs, this isn't the case with Irish crime writing, where "interesting things are happening. The great hunt in British publishing is to find the Irish Ian Rankin."

The Guardian profiled Lee Child as a British author who "beat the Americans at their own game" (pointing out that a planned Hollywood film adaptation could turn his hard-boiled creation of Jack Reacher into the next Bond or Bourne). As to why Child chose to write an American character who lives in the U.S., he said "America suited the book I wanted to write much more than Britain. British crime stories tend to be very internal, psychological, claustrophobic, very limited in terms of geography. If you think about Ian Rankin, it's a small area of Edinburgh. I wanted to do something that was more wide-ranging in terms of geography, empty spaces, distant horizons."

The UK's Independent talked with author Karin Slaughter, a female crime writer who "doesn't flinch from extreme violence." As the article states, it's the victim's perspective that matters to Slaughter, who vividly remembers the trauma caused by the notorious Atlanta child murders, in which 29 African-American boys were raped and murdered, in her own neighbourhood, when she was nine. "I was living in this middle-class suburb really insulated from the world then suddenly my life changed and we had to check in with our parents and couldn't go down certain roads and there were all these new limitations," she recalls. "It really affected me."

The Manchester Evening News had an article on Eric Allis, who began writing a crime fiction novel with co-author Bruce Kennedy Jones, an investigative journalist, while Allis was in prison serving time for bank theft. A career criminal, Allis turned his life around by educating himself while incarcerated and becoming a journalist himself. The Allis/Joned novel, The Last Straight Face was subsequently published, and the duo are working on a sequel.

And the Inverness Courier featured Scottish crime writer Grace Monroe, who dedicated a debut book to the Law Society of Scotland "without which this book would not have been possible" (a tongue-in-cheek reference to a falling out with the Society which led to a career change). Grace Monroe is actually the work of two authors, Maria Thomson and journalist Linda Watson-Brown who have just published their second thriller. As to the falling out, it was a very public case in which accusations that they were abusing the legal aid system led to the Maria Thomson and her husband losing their home and law business and travelling to the other side of the world to Hawaii to get away from their problems in Scotland. The Thomsons were cleared of any wrong-doing, but not before Scotland's most expensive defamation action and Maria staging her own hunger strike in a bid to clear her name.