Sectarianism And Decent Bombers

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It was late in the afternoon as Gerald Lynch hopped along the uneven paving that lined Gouraud Street, the heart of Beirut’s bustling Gemayze area. He wore jeans and a leather jacket against the chill spring air, his hands in his pockets as he squeezed between the parked cars.

Gouraud’s bars, as ever, welcomed those who wanted to party and forget the woes of a world where violence and conflict were a distant memory but a constant worry. Orphaned by Belfast’s troubles, Lynch appreciated Beirut’s fragile peace and sectarian divides, the hot embers under the white ash on the surface of a fire that looked, to the casual observer, as if it had gone out. Lynch scowled as he passed a poster carrying Michel Freij’s smiling face, encircled in strong black script: ‘One Leader. One Lebanon.’

From 'Beirut - An Explosive Thriller'

Gerald Lynch features in my first three books, a violent and drunken Northern Irish spy. Well, a well-mannered and teetotal one would be a bit less fun. His appreciation of Lebanon's sectarianism is visceral because it mirrors his own experiences growing up during 'the troubles' in Northern Ireland.

It's not until you drive through a wee township bedecked in fluttering Union Jack pennants, bunting and flags, with kerb stones painted red white and blue and murals on the walls that you begin to appreciate the strength and depth of feeling still in the North. Even the nomenclature is loaded: Northern Ireland or the North - or N. Ireland? I say Derry, you say Londonderry. And the next township down the road will be themed green white and gold, although you won't typically find as much bunting and never painted kerb stones in the Catholic areas. They're just more, well, Irish.

I recall my amazement standing by the 'peace wall' in Belfast (pictured above). Dividing Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods, these walls or 'lines' are found in several places in the north and are mostly higher than the Israeli separation wall. That's pretty mad, no? They're being torn down, but in the meantime have become something of a tourist attraction. Which is at the same time sort of nice and a tad perverse.

The conflation of politics and religion is absolute. Republican Nationalist Catholic, Unionist Loyalist Protestant. The conflict between these two communities goes back centuries, old wounds have never quite healed and unfairnesses never quite been forgiven, let alone forgotten. But in the past twenty years, as in Lebanon, the peace has held. The marching season is an annual incitement, a national holding of breath as everyone in their right minds hopes that it'll pass without incident or a descent into chaos. But with a little give and take, perseverance and a shared will to avoid falling back into the violence and repression, the communities of Northern Ireland have managed to preserve their mutual accommodation. It hasn't all been plain sailing, by any means.

A great deal of the credit for even getting us here belongs to a dead woman. Mo Mowlam was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in 1998 and was instrumental in pulling together the Good Friday Peace Agreement of that year. Remarkably, she achieved her feats of diplomacy knowing she had brain cancer, a fact she kept secret until forced to respond to the charming British red top newspapers, who were hurling jibes about her dumpy appearance. Her memoir, Momentum, is an exhilarating read, packed with the personality of a straight-talking, no-nonsense woman of remarkable character. Sadly, insanely, the book is out of print. Reading it was one of my more enjoyable research tasks working on A Decent Bomber.

All of this, inevitably, forms the backdrop to the book. Pat used to make bombs for the IRA and doesn't want to do it again. His old mate Brian MacNamara is in politics these days and doesn't need bombs going off, particularly as MacNamara's boss, Sean Driscoll, is standing for election. Former 'freedom fighters', they'd rather not get involved in Pat's upset apple cart and the looting of arms caches* they'd pretended weren't there any more. And then there's Boyle, the boy who watched his da shot by the IRA, who turns into an angry copper...

MacNamara pressed his hands together between his legs. ‘There were plenty big daft lads. On both sides. We depended on them.’

‘Well this one shot my Da. Dropped him there in the garden. Bang. Not even bang bang. Just bang.’

‘I’m sorry.’ MacNamara struggled to still his twisting hands, to lay them on his knees. He caught Boyle’s sideways glower.

Boyle focused back on the road. ‘Sure you are.’

Pat's loss from 'the troubles' still hurts him today. So does Boyle's. They find themselves pitched together, working to face a new threat from outside that, ultimately, unites them. I had never intended the book to be a moral tale about reconciliation, but it's in there somewhere. Inevitably, someone, somewhere will take exception to something I've written in the book, because passions still ignite and feelings still run deep. Twenty years, as anyone in Lebanon will tell you, can pass in the seeming blink of an eye.

But the vast majority of people in both communities never wants to go back. That alone is reason for enormous optimism. And if you do find something you don't like in the book, get in touch. I'll be happy to talk about it. Because, let's face it, when we stop talking is when we're in trouble...

* Demonstrating, once again, that truth is stranger than fiction, two separate arms cache finds were made in Ireland and England earlier this year. Given I'd worried about the unlikely nature of this aspect of my fiction, I was oddly a little relieved when they turned up!

A Decent Paperback

A big box of books arrived yesterday. In fact, three boxes of books did. Amazon deliverith early and so advance copies of A Decent Bomber as well as copies of the new format Olives and Beirut dropped all together onto my desk while I wasn't looking.

And I am glad.

For all the arguments I have about Kindles, there's something reassuring about a physical book. It's so very, well, booky. And I'm finding quite a few readers remain deeply - indeed emotionally - attached to these papery wodges.

I've talked before about the economics of book production. Both Olives - A Violent Romance and Beirut - An Explosive Thriller were conventionally printed and put on sale in bookstores in the UAE, Bahrain, Lebanon and, oddly, Mumbai. Both sold out their print runs a year or so back, but I have yet to see a final reconciliation from the distributor. Conventional book distribution is like a Massey Ferguson to Amazon's Concorde.

It's amazing how slow, conventional and passive the book industry is. In both cases, I shelled out a load of money up front, watched bookshops and the disty taking 50% of the cover price and wasted a great deal of time trying to gee up sloppy and lazy sales channels. It was time-consuming and, to be honest, ultimately wearying. And it gained very little except possibly making my books marginally more accessible to a relatively small audience.

The alternative is POD - print on demand. Amazon's Createspace is the platform I use for all my books. Basically, when you buy one of my books from Amazon, they print it out especially for you. There are an increasing number of 'inventory free' book print and production solutions out there now, which make enormous sense in our 'long tail' world. The cost per copy is sky-high compared to conventional print, but it's a highly efficient way to produce books for a global audience - and means a much wider choice can be effectively offered to the reader.

The quality of a POD book is, incidentally, just fab. In fact I've found readers consistently preferred the POD book when I've asked them which Olives they prefer. POD also means I can update books, for instance I found a couple of nagging errors in the MS of Beirut and they're gone now. And, of course, my restoration of Shemlan will, when I finish it, automatically turn into an updated book. Which is all rather nice.

As I've said before, if you are a writer of books and would like a kick-ass Createspace template for a 5"x8" novel format, hit me up right here.

For now, though, it's a quick bask in the glow of all my lovely new books. I'll be shelling out copies to reviewers - Talking of Books is getting a load tomorrow at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature launch event at the Intercon in Festival City. The rest I am saving for a very special date indeed...

A Decent Bomber And The Wilfulness of Characters

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A gentle tapping on his cheek. A wipe of wet cloth on his forehead. The awareness of light though his swollen lids. An insistent voice, deep, repeated his name. ‘Mister Quinlan, Mister Quinlan.’ Accented, the title sounded more like mist air.

   He took a deep, juddering breath and tried to focus. His hands flared pain. He tasted blood, his mouth dry. Cool ceramic touched his lips and he leaned forwards to sip gratefully at the icy water. His shattered ribs grated and forced him to cry out, bubbling the water. He spilled a pink dribble down his sodden, spattered shirt.

   'Can you hear me Mister Quinlan?’ Mist Air Queen Larne ‘There has been a mistake. These men have been foolish. Do you understand?’

    Quinlan nodded. He could just make out the face peering into his own, a look of concern on the dark-skinned features. He tried to speak, his fat lips throbbed and tore, a stab of pain. ‘W-who?’

   ‘My name doesn’t matter, Mister Quinlan. Some call me The Accountant. It is but a conceit. You are safe, now. Tell me, who is the bomb maker, please? The one who made the big bombs?’

   Quinlan groaned. He tried to raise his head. ‘Big?’ He saw stars, felt a deep lassitude. The cold cloth was pressed to his brow again.

   ‘You remember? The bombs your people made for London and Manchester. People still talk of them. The very, very big bombs. Boom.’

   Christ, but that was twenty year and more ago! Quinlan wanted to say. But the cat had his tongue.

   ‘Come. You know who made them. Tell me his name, Mister Quinlan.’

   It came to him. Of course it did. Jesus, but that was Pat. Dear old Pat.

   ‘Pat,’ Quinlan croaked. ‘Pat O’Carolan.’

   ‘Where is he?’

   He tried to grin. Ah, these people. Stop, now. ‘Tipp. South Tipp.’ Another beautiful sip of water offered to his beaten lips.

   Bliss.

   ‘Where is Tip, please?’

   ‘Tipperary. The-the Republic.’ He was drooling, sloppy-mouthed. The pain clamoured, in and out of focus in waves, his battered nerves shrieked every time he moved his broken body.

   ‘And what is his code word?’

   ‘I-I don’t know any c-code—’

   The blow to his cheek came fast and with the hard edge of the man’s hand. Quinlan’s jaw crunched. Pain blossomed in his mouth, both old ache and new sharp. His tied arms stiffened and his bloody hands pulsed agony. He moaned and spat out a tooth.

   He sagged against his restraints, snivelling as he tried to breathe through the bloody mucus filling his nose and mouth. ‘Dan.’ He moaned. ‘Breen. Code word. Dan Breen. Danbreen.’

The opening scene of A Decent Bomber was actually the last piece of the book I wrote. The final pass of a number of edits, this one 'filled in' a number of scenes and events I had lazily passed over in the original writing. Sometimes it's these very events you take for granted which actually contain the most important bits in developing the book. In this case, the old version of the book opened with Pat hearing something in his yard and then two Irish Republican politicians discussing Quinlan's fate.

It wasn't enough. Quinlan had to get it, and bad, and we had to be there with him and share his treatment at the hands of some very bad people. I didn't know he had wee girls or a wife called Deirdre or that his mother had died, but somehow in the space of a couple of pages, Quinlan acquired these things (as well as a number of particularly nasty injuries). I did love Mist Air Queen Larne, too. I'm sure it's wrong to enjoy your own writing like this, a sort of literary onanism.

Similarly, Pat's niece Orla was never meant to have a girlfriend, a relationship that throws her life into turmoil. Orla had never considered herself to be you know, different and yet here she was falling for another girl she met at a party. This whole development was the last thing on my mind and I do not for the life of me know where it came from, it just happened. One minute she's on a train looking out of the window and twizzling her red hair, reflected in the window and then, bam, she's falling for another girl, trying to come to terms with this newly awakened sexuality and wondering how she's going to break the news to her Uncle Pat.

It's odd how these things can develop. That relationship, unintended in my original telling, becomes crucial to the story of A Decent Bomber. Orla, already in a state of considerable confusion, gets treated pretty badly in the scheme of things. Not only is she confronted by her strange feelings for another woman, she finds out her beloved uncle Pat isn't quite what he seemed to be. The rock and anchor she seeks in her new turbulence turns out to be a catalyst for complete chaos.

Boyle wriggled his way into the story as an uninvited guest as well. And nobody was as surprised at the way his love life turns out as I was. One minute he's in his office and the next my fingers had tapped out a scene that was the last thing from my mind. I actually sat back and questioned what the hell had just gone on there. I hadn't meant it to happen at all and then found myself having to deal with the consequences - just as Boyle must have had to have done.

Sometimes these things happen. Characters do stuff they're not supposed to, grow a life for themselves and make their own decisions. You just have to go along with it and let them do their thing. It often works out rather wonderfully - in Shemlan, for instance, it led to the whole glorious car chase across a frozen Baltic sea. I didn't even know the Baltic froze over, let alone that there were seasonal ice roads connecting the Estonian mainland with its islands. In A Decent Bomber, that unplanned relationship of Orla's ended up resolving the whole book.

What goes around comes around, in writing books as in life...

A Decent Bomber is currently available on Amazon.com and all decent book outlets on pre-order, publishing on November 5th 2015. Go and do it now, don't put it off. You know it makes sense...

A Booky Spring Cleaning

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With the publication of A Decent Bomber came the opportunity to do a quick clean of the Augean stables that is my 'back list' - the books already out there in the cruel world.

For a start there was a new cover for Olives - A Violent Romance which brings it into line with the style of the others. And it's easier to ditch the black spines because the printing's not always accurate enough to avoid the odd wee strip escaping onto the front cover.

Then an overhaul of the books' interior templates - a move to Palatino, a slightly 'roomier' font than Garamond - but keeping Perpetua as my title font. The result is a bit spacier and more accessible all round. By the way, if you're in the market for a kick-ass Createspace template for 5x8" format novels, hit me up and I'll happily share.

And then on to Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy. The book's editor, Bubblecow's Gary Smailes, ditched the 'backstory' chapters in the book to create a more accessible narrative that flowed more easily. That change, impacting some 30,000 words in all, was reflected in the original Shemlan when it published and it had the desired effect.

But it's been a while now and I've had time to think it over. In creating a more straightforward read, I was missing some of the spirit I had originally intended for the book, the contrast between Jason Hartmoor the young man full of hope and spirit and Hartmoor the lifetime diplomat whose failed marriage and lacklustre career had hardened him into unyielding and crusty later life. The story of Jason and Mai was rather sacrificed to the cuts, as well. And that was a story I wanted to tell. And, finally, the evocation of Beirut in the late 1970s and the British 'spy school' up in the Chouf was lost - and that was sort of core to my original scheme for the book.

And so I have been restoring the book, on the grounds that I only have myself to please. Well, I have you lot to please, too - but I generally find you're happy enough with what I get up to. It's the agents and publishers who seem to think whatever it is I decide to do is simply not commercial enough to bother them. And they are clearly never going to revise their somewhat dim view of what it is I do.

I'll let you know when the restored version goes up, but you can always sign up (just over on the right there) to my mailer to get the news first or to get your hands on the restored edition as a free ebook. Meanwhile I'm still trying to think up new daft schemes to get people to pre-order A Decent Bomber so it makes a wee blip on the charts come the 5th November. Any suggestions would be more than welcome, I can tell you!

The UK Mainland's Biggest Bombs

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Róisín handed the joint to Orla, who shook her head. ‘No thanks. Not my thing.’ She waved her glass. ‘Are you a student too?’

‘Sure, I am.’

‘What you studying?’

‘Terrorists. You?’

Orla searched Róisín’s face, but it was without guile. ‘Animal husbandry. How do you mean, terrorists?’

‘Just that. Terror studies.’

‘You’re kidding me. That’s a course?’

Róisín laughed, shaking her head. ‘What’s so odd about it? You look like someone just slapped your arse.’

‘I suppose it seems strange that someone would want to… well, that. Oh, I don’t know. Don’t we see enough about them every day?’

‘This nation was founded on terrorism. If it wasn’t for Michael Collins, Dan Breen and the likes of them there’d be no Ireland. We’d still be a British colony.’

Now we're into dangerous territory. Writing A Decent Bomber, I was well aware that I was going to get caught up with a thriller sub-genre that has emerged over the past decade - evil terrorist (preferably Arab) nicks big explody thing and threatens the free and decent world until our square-jawed steely-eyed hero takes him down. That's no way what this book's about and I would hope most fervently it's a million leagues smarter than that. And, for me as well as most average readers, 'it's about terrorists' is a turnoff. As Orla says, who wants to talk about that?

And yet the idea of a retired terrorist who represents an era when terrorism was 'real' coming up against the bandits and insurgents who inhabit the failed states left in the wake of our attempts at imperialism drew me.

What on earth do I mean by 'real'?

I remember, growing up in the '70s and '80s, how life went on despite the IRA. There was even something of a 'spirit' about it - they're not going to grind us down, matey. But these days, for some reason, whenever some hopeless numb-nut puts a bomb in the heel of his shoe that doesn't quite go off, or finds a liquid explosive combination, we're all made dance around airports in our socks and wave our clear plastic bags in the air. We've never been safer, our governments tell us and yet we have never been so threatened they claim in the next breath.

We're so cowed, we've spent years helping mendacious duty free companies claim back our VAT because we're just, well, compliant in airports. It's for our own good, after all.

Terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s was international, multinational. We had the PLO, the Red Brigades, Baader Meinhof, ETA and lots, lots more. Airline hijackings - and bombings - in the 1960s, '70s and '80s took place all over the world. There were over 40 incidents of terrorism in the air in the 1970s alone. One of them, Abu Nidal bringing down a Gulf Air jet (GF 771 in case you were interested) in 1983 with the loss of all on board, took place in Jebel Ali. Rather close to home! At the same time, on the ground, the world was rocked by waves of terrorist violence.

The IRA's campaigns in Ireland and mainland Britain were relentless and sustained, prosecuted in the face of an overwhelming military and police presence and the focused resource of a fully functioning, technologically advanced first world power. Despite the full machinery of the British security services, the IRA detonated a number of bombs on the British mainland, including the two largest explosions since WWII, the infamous London Docklands bomb and the Manchester bomb.

The Docklands bomb killed two people and did an amazing amount of damage. It weighed over a ton. The Manchester bomb wounded over 200 people and blew out the heart of Manchester, causing over a million pounds' worth of damage. It, too, weighed over a ton. Both were timed bombs packed into vans. The bombers were never apprehended - certainly not in relation to the bombings.

And we're shuffling around in our socks when we fly because of heel bombs.

So I thought the meeting between 'new' terror and 'old' terror might be interesting. You can clearly (and really, really should, you know) find out what happens by clicking here.

Uncle Pat And Decent Bombing

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The phone rang. For some reason its peal stilled him. He lifted the handset slowly. The sacred heart lamp was guttering. He’d have to get a new one next time he went down the road.

  ‘Hello?’

  The voice on the line had a hint of American. ‘This is Patrick O’Carolan?’

  ‘It is, sure.’

  ‘Hello, Mr O’Carolan. Your code word is Dan Breen. Could you confirm you understand me?’

  There was something else under the American note in the voice, a hint of something deep and dark. Pat’s tongue felt double the size, his voice thick. ‘Yes.’ Damn his hesitancy, it sounded like he had a stutter. He mustered his wits; his eyes squeezed shut to block out the nightmares of the past. ‘Yes, I confirm.’ As he spoke, his mind shrieked: No, tell them no. Tell them you don’t know what the fuck they’re on about and to leave me and my niece alone.

It all started with Sarah's uncle Pat. He's a mild-mannered, gentle man who keeps a small herd of milk cows on a wee farm up on the margins of the Cummermore Bog in South Tipperary. He likes tea. As a younger man, he was a bit of a Republican. The Irish kind, not the looney gun-totin' American type. Being a bit 'green' as a lad hardly marks you out in South Tipperary, you understand.

I've long teased Sarah with dark mutterings about how uncle Pat's sitting on an IRA arms cache. It's amusingly incongruous if you know Pat.

And then one day it hit me. Hang on. What if he WAS? And what if bad people came calling? Really bad people. And what if he had a past? And what if...?

I started to throw the idea around and pick it up by its ears to see if it squealed. I did a little research and yes, it could work. I worried a bit about what I was setting out to do to Pat, the placid, kind man with a Pioneer badge who'd done nothing to deserve being turned into a gun-toting leviathan. And then I got over it and started writing. That's the trouble with this writing thing, it tears away your morality and leaves you stealing people, plucking this trait from here, that sentence from there.

Don't ever chat to a writer. Seriously. You just can't trust 'em. You never know where your unplucked nasal hair, kipper tie and Bootle accent is going to turn up next...

A Decent Bomber And Rambling About Irish Life

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The yard light snapped on. Pat peered out, but the yard was empty. The dog was still by the range, her long snout on her paws. Her steady brown eyes regarded him.

‘Sure, Mikey. No, nothing at all, I have everything I need.  Sure I will, of course. Take it handy now, will you? Give my love to Anne. I will, I will. Goodbye, Mikey.’

Pat replaced the handset. Motioning the dog to stay, he lifted his coat from the hook and stepped outside. The harsh light glittered on the puddled ground. Pat stood on the threshold, scanning the yard but nothing moved in the hazy wetness of the South Tipperary winter night. He sniffed the air, a hint of turf from the hummock of sods tied over with blue plastic sheeting by the wall. He’d footed his own turf these past twenty years. Still a strong man, he was nevertheless finding it harder. Sixty this year, by God. On a whim he went back into the kitchen and lifted the white plastic feed bucket he used to carry the turf indoors. He would have his ease and a fire with a hot whiskey tonight. He went back outside, pulling his heavy coat around him.

Pat plucked aside the tarpaulin and dumped the musty oblongs into the bucket. Straightening, his hand on his back, he was stilled by the strong sense of a presence he felt when the yard light came on. He pushed the kitchen door open with his back and dropped the bucket just inside. He whistled for Kirstie. She bounded past him.

He strode along the wall of the house, following the edge of the light. He wanted to call out, just for the reassurance of sound. The darkness beyond was absolute, no light pollution here on the hillside, his farm the only building for a mile and more around. Kirstie returned to pad by his side. The cow shed was all bovine warmth and hay. The cows shifted, their tails swishing and hooves thumping dully on the muddy concrete.

Back into the drizzle, past the milking shed. The dog whined, pushed ahead then halted, growling. Pat shouted. ‘What’s your business?’

Sometimes it was pretty hard trying to squeeze my head into a winter's night in South Tipperary or a drizzly Dublin day. Surrounded by blue skies, sand and sun there were times when the smell of turf smoke and the sound of rain dripping from rooftops would come easily and times when it was maddeningly elusive.

I was frequently rescued from this dilemma by a Grooveshark playlist put together by bro-in-law Brian. You just slip on the cans, hit play on the iPad and, yessss, here we are again. I'm sure someone cleverer than I would identify it as a form of neuro-linguistic programming - a sort of proto-Pavlovian experience, but it worked like a wonder. Dropkick Murphys, Thin Lizzy,  The Stunning, Fight Like Monkeys, The Frames and others would propel me back to the drizzle and dark of an Irish night, the creak of a farmyard door and feet on flagstones, a turf fire and a hot whiskey.

Music's always been a big deal for me writing, a given tune playing in the car while I'm thinking about a scene will influence the way things develop; sometimes a piece will shape the development of a whole chapter or sub-plot. L'autre Endroit by Silence shaped the Aleppo souk scenes in Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy more than I did, while George Winston's music created the moods of Olives - A Violent Romance as surely as if he'd been tapping the keys on my notebook.

The winter countryside in Ireland still smells of turf fires and people still 'foot' their own sods of turf up in the bogs. It's back-breaking work, little pyramids of turf left out to dry and then stacked in reeks by the side of the house or in a shed for winter. You can buy Bord Na Móna briquettes, but they're not the same, although one bloke is gleefully selling them to the Americans for a staggering $49 a bale so their houses can 'smell like Ireland'. There's no smell quite like the smell of turf, mind.

Of course, all this talk of turf fires and whiskey leaves one open to the accusation of writing up life in Ireland as a 'Darby O'Gill' sort of thing, especially when you're talking to city types. I recall one Dublin paper snootily referring to Tipperary-born comedian Pat Shortt as 'the hick comedian Shortt', as if Ireland needed to excise its rural character or was in some way ashamed of its 'culchies'.

Shortt's 'hick' comedy is, although admittedly and unabashedly slapstick, remarkably observed and enjoyed precisely because we've all met 'mountainy men', loudramans stuck to the local bar and the other characters that populate the enjoyable world of his Tipperary village of Killinaskully. Here's a taste of the stuff - a warning, you might find this utterly impenetrable.

But the one thing you're guaranteed to find in A Decent Bomber* (apart from bombs, of course) is rain. When we were married, in June, our wedding day was the first sunny day of the year. And one of the first quaint madnesses to strike me visiting Ireland was someone looking out across a landscape of unremitting drizzly grey and proclaiming, 'Soft day, thank God.'

* Available now on pre-order from all good book retailers such as Amazon.com. Ahem.

Pre-Orders, Book Marketing And, Ahem, A Decent Bomber

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Quinlan passed out; a merciful release.

He should have expected them, should have seen the signs of quickening interest in his daily movements. The tailing moped; the sallow, bearded fellow he never saw before and then glimpsed all too often.

They came when Deirdre took the girls for a sleepover with their wee cousins. He had just poured a whiskey when the doorbell rang. His hand flew back from the latch as the door burst open. Their silent, brutal assault buried him under a flurry of expertly dealt blows. They pinioned his hands with nylon ties.

The torture was methodical. Quinlan shrieked himself hoarse, flailing around tied to the kitchen chair until he hurled himself to the floor. They righted him and beat him as dispassionately as they’d pulled out his thumbnails.

And not one word. Not a question. It made it all worse, to think there was nothing they wanted he could give them to make it stop.

They started on his fingers. He called to God, he called to his dear, dead mother. He begged them. Dear Jesus, how he begged. They beat him again to shut him up. His mind slammed down to buy him respite.

And so starts A Decent Bomber, my fourth serious novel and the first not set in the Middle East. I've been making a wee fuss about it being on pre-order and (sorry if you follow, know or are somehow linked to me. It'll go away if you buy the book, honestly) will continue to do so for a while.

Why am I so bothered about pre-orders? Because on the 5th November, when the book publishes, every pre-order will count as an order on the day. If you collect enough pre-orders, the book rockets up the sales charts and comes to the public notice. Briefly, probably not in a chart topping sort of way, but nevertheless in a more attention-getting way than shouting 'buy my book' from Dubai will do.

Book marketing in general is something of a nightmare for the self-published author. And, actually these days, for publishing houses, too. There's a lot of noise out there with all this self-publishing lark and a lot of people trying to find ways of getting their book in front of people. As the 'traditional publishing' model breaks down (catalogues and sales teams knocking on bookshop doors to flog this season's new offerings), even quite large publishers can be found on Twitter retweeting every time a reader says a given author's book is quite nice. There's a hint of desperation in the air.

It's hard to get horses to water and drinking, especially in today's online world. McNabb's Law of Clicks refers - thousands of impressions don't necessarily mean sales. Book bloggers have 'To Be Read' lists stretching for months ahead. It's amazing how many go out of business, breathless blogs with 'I love to read' in their headers shuttered and strewn with cobwebs, that aspiration to share great reads submerged in tottering piles of desperate authors pushing their dubious wares. Tracking coverage in Middle Eastern 'major media' shows a distinct lack of correlation between media coverage and book sales - even rave reviews in national media.

One challenge in marketing A Decent Bomber is that the book is set in Ireland and the UK. Without a Middle Eastern angle, its target market is really in the Western world - where I am not. Anything I can do to get people in the UK/US talking about the book, sharing it, recommending it or otherwise focusing their attention long enough to click on an Amazon link to swap $2.99 for 350 pages of mayhem will be considered.

Funnily enough, you can help. Tell the folks back home about it. Encourage them to tell their friends and family about it. Share a link to the book on Facebook. Let's face it, the sooner you do, the sooner it'll go nice and quiet around here again...

Book Research Madness

It's funny, but it's not until you set out to write a book you realise how little stuff you know. I've said it before but can't help repeating it - I don't know how writers did this before Google. Really.

Yet again, how researching A Decent Bomber didn't get me nicked, I don't know. Surely someone, somewhere is looking out for people from the Middle East displaying an interest in supplies of ammonium nitrate and detonators? Maybe they are, and a whole team of over-excited NSA types has just been stood down. 'Calm down, lads, it's just another bloody author'...

I now know how you make a one ton bomb. It's a bit like being able to touch your nose with your tongue. There's not much call for the skill...

Meeting former IRA man Brendan Curran was a big deal for me, not least because it made me realise the book I had written didn't achieve the aim I set out for it. I'll confess I was nervous about the meeting, which started with me spotting a 50mm brass shell on the sideboard and him asking me the immortal question, 'So. What are you about, then?'

Ulp.

My serious and dedicated research in Belfast consisted mainly of getting hammered with the in-laws and staying in the lavish Merchant Hotel. If you're ever in Belfast, go for a few late night drinks at The Spaniard - the nearest thing to a Hamra bar I've ever encountered outside Hamra itself.

It's a bit like researching Shemlan by eating lazy afternoon mezze with friends - oh, this author's life! It was nice that an anti-internment march the next day plunged Belfast right back into 1990s timewarp, with armoured squad cars and water cannon on the street.

You have to find out all sorts of things. Cow diseases, train timetables, bullet impact velocities and the like. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to actually kill a cow if you're not using an RPG. The organisational chart of Tipperary police was one delightful evening's work. Ferry timetables, capacities and freight sailings get jumbled up with the colour of this police station wall or the reception layout of that hotel. Visiting locations (suspicious drive-by's of Banbridge nick) and checking facts, distances and even number plate series conventions all come into it.

And all because there's an Internet and somewhere in it is Nigel who knows the air speed of an African swallow. Unladen.

A Decent Bomber is available on pre-order from Amazon, iBooks and all good ebook outlets. It's also available in paperback from Amazon, Createspace or on order from your local bookstore.

Publishing A Decent Bomber

Perpetua (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For what it's worth, I've been embroiled in a last minute flurry of edits and changes, a lot of book formatting and layout and quite a bit of uploading.

It's all quite exciting. For a start, I find layout therapeutic, a load of rote tasks performed with the assistance of a glass or two of Bombay's finest and some quinine-laced fizzy stuff. Page down, change headline to 22 point Perpetua, body font Palatino Linotype first para no indent, second para 0.5cm indent.

I've been messing around a lot with font sizes, templates and margins and think I've got quite a good combination going now, so I'm trying to reformat all of my print books to meet the new grid. Slightly more space and a slightly larger font/leading. After much soul searching, Garamond is going and Palatino is this year's body text bikini model.

Like people give a hoot? Yes, I think easy on the eye is good if it's unobtrusive and the reader finds it more comfortable. Do I care too much about type? Oh, yah. Seriously. Perpetua, and I'm sure you'll think I'm odd saying this, is my typographical Musar; the Orrefors of the world of letters. I have long admired the odd life and achievements of eccentric stone cutter (and enthusiastic rutter) Eric Gill - the William Morris contemporary who gave us the London Underground's typographical identity, which persists today, as well as WH Smith's logo - and Perpetua was, to my mind, his finest lifetime achievement. Seriously.

Sorry. Sidetracked again.

Check spellings, get annoyed at Microsoft's daft blue-lining of things that are patently right. Catch SNAFU, wince, change.

Then the MS, updated to reflect my Createspace edits. Lose all the italics in the book, damn, spend an hour replacing them using the Createspace file as a reference. Fine. Review some of those itals and lose a couple. Find an awful literal sitting there in the text snarling at you like a drugged-up bullfrog. Excise the bastard like one of George Bush's colonic polyps. You'd have thought I was experienced enough not to have to deal with these things. Oh no.

The manuscript is now complete and uploaded to Createspace, Amazon KDP and Smashwords and so A Decent Bomber is available for pre-order from Amazon as a Kindle book, from iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and many other brilliant, decent even, ebook platforms. It publishes 'officially' on November 5th, but every pre-order means another heave up the rankings on that day, so I'll be irritating everyone I know between now and then to pre-place their orders. The Createspace book, the paperback, will go 'live' sometime in the next week.

I won't, once again, be doing a conventional print run. It's simply not worth it. Olives took five years to make back its Dhs15,000 investment and I still don't have a final report from the distributors, despite the book having sold out before last year's Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

But I'm happy. Truly happy. Two years in the writing, albeit with very many breaks and stops, A Decent Bomber is now a novel I can say has merit and personality enough to be a readable thing.

Which is nice...

A Decent Bomber

Back in February, I glibly declared here on da blog, A Simple Irish Farmer was finished. This turns out to have been deeply premature as today, the 19th September, I actually finished it.

In the meantime I have wailed, gnashed and generally hooned around wearing sack cloth. I have written another book (a psychological thriller called Birdkill) and spent a lot of time not working on the book about an IRA bomber pulled out of retirement which I have come to title A Decent Bomber after someone in publishing who knows that she's talking about told me ASIF was the pantsest title she had ever heard for a book.

Beta reader feedback, together with the need to fix some things in the book that simply didn't work that well and which made it a weaker and less enjoyable read than it should be, meant I had quite a bit to do. In fact, this has generally been my experience with my books so far - Olives is a markedly different book to the one I finished back in 2004, while Beirut needed a total restructure following its reader's report and Shemlan lost 30,000 words to that slash-happy servant of evil, editor Gary Smailes.

So now A Decent Bomber has gone out to a bunch of agents in the US, mainly because the UK bunch have an aversion to Irish books. And, depending on what happens with them, it'll likely be publishing in December.

In the meantime, both A Decent Bomber and Birdkill's covers are gracing my lovely website as I phase out my various book websites and consolidate all there.

So now you know.