Higgins lets his characters go about their business without the burden of reflection, doubt or regret.
They inhabit a natural world of deceit and scheming; friend and foe alike are told what they want to hear, each successive teller calculates which version of the truth will suit his own purpose (and it is always a 'he', except for Wanda), skimming and priming the listener to act or not act as the teller requires.
The same evasions and power struggles happen in more predictable workplaces...
A new(2016) edition with the bonus of an insightful afterword from John Banville.
The blurb tells you all you need to know as far as plot - "the youngest of the four sisters embarks on a reckless love affair, set against the backdrop of a crumbling 1930's Europe" - and there are no surprises along the way. The predictability, though, doesn't matter, I didn't read this to find out what happened next. Higgins constructs, or recreates, his atmospheric world and that is enough.
'Evening.Steam on...
Classic 50's pulp fiction. Harry Madox is a drifter, and drifts right into a maelstrom of opportunity and temptation; a bank begging to be robbed, a beautiful young girl with troubles, his boss' bored wife who is trouble.
"I was still sweltering when I went back to the room. I couldn't sleep. In the next room an old man was reading aloud to his wife from the Bible, laboring slowly through the Book of Genesis, a begat at a time, and pronouncing it with the accent on the first syllable. I lay...
John Banville has been my favourite living writer since the 80's, when my reading diet was almost completely restricted to an Irish menu, and before I got the noir bug. Then, when I converted to noir as an eager disciple, Chandler was my first Master.
So, when Banville felt the need to scratch the itch of thrills and spills through his new Benjamin Black persona, and then got the nod for a new Marlowe, I knew hatches would be battened in advance of a perfect storm of murder, mayhem, a...
Yakov’s indulgent smile said he couldn’t care less, his eyes said he might tear my head off my neck. He snatched my Moscow Mule mug and two thick fingers scooped out the lime and cucumber, tore the cucumber into two strips and bit into the lime wedge before ripping it apart. He arranged the fruit and my drink across the table; cucumber, lime, mug, lime, cucumber. The barman looked the other way. This was Yakov pushing the boundaries, flaunting his power, making it easier to insult and...
First class read that goes beyond the one-dimensional fare often served these days (can a genre be too 'popular'). Anyway, Gaynard's intricate style and assured authority reminds me of Simonen and there is no higher compliment in my lexicon. However, Gaynard goes deeper, I think, than the great man ever did in dragging the absurdities of the French establishment into the honest daylight. His knowledge of the delicate/brutal intricacies of Francophone Africa is also a revelation. I knew...
Hoke Moseley is old school, hard-boiled and hard-wired to distrust change but his Miami world of the late 80's is changing fast.
'It used to be a lot different when Hoke was still married. Four or five couples would get together for a barbecue and some beer. Then, after they ate, the women would all sit in the living room and talk about how difficult their deliveries had been, and the men would sit in the kitchen and play poker ... That had been real Florida living, but now all the white...
Jonathan is an English investigator in an east European city. He searches for a young woman who has been missing for many years. All conventional means of tracing her have been exhausted, Jonathan is drawn to the psychic Gertrude: the girl is somewhere in the city - in a small room she cannot leave.
In other hands this may have been a run-of-the-mill abduction/rescue story but Jordan doesn't do run-of-the-mill, he has a lot more to offer.
Jonathan is consumed by jealousy, a rogue cuff-link...
The Guardian ran a piece on 3/10/2014 which showed photos of the speech Margaret Thatcher had intended to deliver at the Tory conference in 1984:
"In which she planned to accuse not only militant miners but the entire Labour party of being ‘the enemy within’ and part of an ‘insurrection’ against democracy".
However, the Brighton bomb exploded the previous night so that speech was never delivered.
I extracted part of that intended speech in this scene from Two Graves for the Bishop where Paddy...
A well known song of the 1798 Rebellion tells us that Roddy McCorley went to die on the Bridge of Toome - informers had ‘sold the pass’ to the British authorities so McCorley would hang. In a less well known version of the song the informers are named – McErlane and Duffin (sometimes Dufferin), both members of the ‘Archer Gang’, and now wreaking their treachery on Maknazpy.
My Detective Swansea meets his destiny on the steps of a vibrant shopping mall; a modern cathedral dispensing the opium...
We Irish should keep these personages much in our hearts, for they lived in the places where we ride and go marketing, and sometimes they have met one another on the hills that cast their shadows upon our doors at evening." - W.B. Yeats.
Yeats penned these words in 1902 as the preface to Lady Gregory's 'Cuchulainn of Muirthemne".
Of more relevance to my story, the quote appeared on the sleeve notes to the Horslips 'The Táin' LP of 1973. I was 14 when I bought it (at the exorbitant price of...
"The Devil hath established/ His cities in the North" - Maurice Leitch quotes St Augustine, and the city in question is the Belfast of the late 70's/early 80's that Leitch knows and recreates so convincingly.
Silver is a Loyalist prisoner, his heroic status proclaimed on the gable walls of the working class Protestant areas of Belfast. He is sprung from his hospital sick bed by his erstwhile comrades but their intentions, he quickly realises, aren't benign: Silver has, despite his legendary...
Just as Horslips kick-started my regard for the Rúraíocht around about 1973/4, I should be able to almost pinpoint my first interest in Aodh Mór Ó Neill to some time around 1969/70.
I was still at Hilden Primary School at the time; a mill-school perched on the edge of the River Lagan, and part of the self-sufficient social infrastructure of linen mill, canal, workers' and managers' houses, social hall and children's play park that might have marked the redbrick vista as a suitable case study...