Talking Of Books Reviews A Decent Bomber

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In a little under half an hour, Dubai Eye Radio's 'Talking of Books' program will review A Decent Bomber. Half an hour after that, they'll be interviewing me about the book.

I can't pretend I'm not a little nervous. For a start, this isn't really a great time to be talking about terrorism in your novel. But beyond that, it's a very public grilling for the book. Will they love it? Hate it? Be 'meh'?

I can't get a thing done. I'm just marking time. *sigh*

Time. Ulp. Listening in. Here we go. Oh golly, they liked it...

A book of real quality. Sensitively drawn characters. A book of real style and you find yourself experiencing, smelling Ireland. This is tangibly plausible. I love the complexity of the character of Pat. What I liked particularly about the book was that the plot never stopped to explain characters, the dialogue and plot carry their development. The dialogue is very natural, he has a very fine ear, McNabb. It was real and honest, the dialogue was true to the characters. They're frightening, the characters. It's a white-knuckle ride and a real page-turner.

This isn't a light book. It's a line-up of misery and pain. There's no plot humour, but the dialogue has lovely touches of gentle irony, very Irish humour. This is an extremely good book, more than a thriller, you could draw parallels with Le Carré.

Clearly a book to buy, people... :)

The interview was fun. They didn't like Boyle and Mary's shenanigans and I explained I wasn't so happy myself, two of my characters just ran away and did stuff they weren't supposed to.

Did I pick the name Pat O'Carolan for a reason? As it happens, yes, the troubador was a knowing reference and Pat was Sarah's Uncle Pat, whose wee farm up in Cummermore started the whole scheme going. Orla wasn't supposed to have the romantic involvements she ended up with, either.

How come conventional publishing hadn't picked me up? Dunno, these days don't really care that much either. I explained how Shemlan, my last book, had been about a man dying of cancer whose life is revealed to have been utterly pointless to him, about how I'm cruel to my characters. And about how that - or a book about an ex-IRA man - might not gel with what a risk-averse publisher's idea of a self-marketing book was.

Why thrillers, there are elements of literary fiction in here? That was nice of them to say, but I like to think I write a smart thriller. thrillers are fun, although Birdkill - my next book - is a little more complicated on a psychological level and perhaps a little more screwed up generally.

I told about how my developmental editor/reader for Beirut had told me to put more 'gunplay' into the book and how I regret having taken that advice, now preferring to rebel rather than produce formulaic books that are 'on genre'. They liked the interplay between Driscoll and MacNamara, the politicians in A Decent Bomber who are trying to pretend this stuff isn't happening. I confessed I had enjoyed playing with the idea that they are conflicting with the PSNI where before they had fought the RUC, but this time they were denying themselves rather than last time when they had been asserting themselves.

It's amazing how quickly half an hour can pass when you're talking about your books, but pass it did. I'll post the podcast when it comes around. So far I've sold a tad over sixty books in all. We're hardly troubling the NYT list here, people...

Book Post: I Love Book Clubs

(Photo credit: MEGATOTAL)

It's getting busy with the LitFest around the corner, interviews here, blogposts there. Here's a LitFest blog post in which I answer the immortal question, "Can you teach someone to be a writer or is it an inherent quality?" among others!

I'm scheduled to talk at a school, moderate a session, participate in a panel and, as usual, sit in looming empty space next to someone like Eoin Colfer as he wrangles a signing line stretching to Ras Al Khaimah.

And, by sheer coincidence, I got invited to a book club meeting. Did I ever before mention I love book clubs? I did? Good. Because I do. Who else would buy things from you, invite you to their house/favourite coffee shop and ply you with hooch/coffee and food/cake whilst spending three hours talking to you about your favourite topics (in my case me and my books) and then thank you for coming?

It's insane.

I  attended a meeting of a book club in the Arabian Ranches last night. Ten members, all women, seemed to think they were a daunting sight, but you'd not have walked into a sea of friendlier faces in most pubs or gatherings.

There was quite a lot of curiosity. Do authors have Tourettes or anything like that? Should you feed them anything special in case they start biting book club members?

We sat around the table outside and chatted, mostly sort of Q&A. Everyone was very curious indeed. What started me writing? What does it take to write a book? How do you know you're any good at it and that sort of thing, but then we also started to look at characters, their motivations and what made them tick. The club had read Olives - A Violent Romance before, so I was expecting recrimination over the dirty thing I do at the start of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller (the book the club has just finished reading) but everyone was very forgiving.

I got a hard time over whether Lynch is sufficiently realistic as an Oirish person, our hostess being a 'Dub' herself and therefore unwilling to let my 'Darby O'Gill' Norn Irish spy go without a spirited attempt at skewering me for getting it wrong. Luckily I had remembered to put a Magdalene Laundry and a paedophile priest into the mix and so managed to avoid being filleted. All you need to craft proper Irish characters are laundries and priests. And maybe the odd 'top of the mornin' to yer'.

Given my Mother In Law has read Beirut and responded with 'Fair play, Alexander,' no Irish person holds any fear for me. Lynch has passed muster with the heavyweights and we had a lot of fun with the whole thing. Mind you, if I'd been Joe O'Connor it would have been all 'Love the priest, Joe, ain't he gas?' and 'Great nun scene there, Joe. Don't ye love a nice nun?'

I noted I wasn't asked about my 'Hasn't Mary Got A Lovely Bottom' t-shirt...

Ah well, to be sure. A few remembered highlights, although there was a lot more in our conversation, including lots about my journey to publication, the state and nature of publishing in general and how publishers and Amazon respectively pay authors and that kind of thing...

Is Lynch's behaviour with Leila consistent with 'tradecraft'? 
Sure, did you ever see Lynch employing any conventional 'tradecraft' ever? He's a mess, a maverick product of the system gone irredeemably native. Lynch works because he understands the Middle East doesn't work, because he's more effectively hidden by being en clair than if he went around skuldugging.

Is he a rougher James Bond? 
No, he's the anti-Bond. He doesn't use gadgets beyond a memory key, he doesn't have Aston Martins, he uses servees shared taxis. He's not a loyal servant of the Crown, he's a dodgier proposition altogether. I guess that's why I like him.

How much research do you do? Like the Lebanese politics and the whizzbangs?
A whole load. You write from recollection, but you have to double check every recollected fact. In Olives, for instance, Paul remembers Joshua and the walls of Jericho as being from Joseph's Technicolour Dreamcoat. Now that was a flawed recollection and it would be valid for the character to have flawed recollection except it jars readers and they 'spot the mistake'. So you can't actually afford flawed recollection, someone, somewhere will have expertise in yachts (can the Arabian Princess really go from point a to point b in that time? Yes, I checked every sailing scrupulously for that very reason) or the Czech police (the cars are in their livery) or Oka warheads (they're real and yes, the Russians 'lost' about 180 of them) or how to kill a man with superb single grower extra brut champagne (I often check a bottle of Lamiable Extra Brut to ensure it hasn't lost its potency. No problem, I consider it a service to my readers).

Where did Gabe Lentini's 'castrato' voice come from?
My head. It just seemed fun to have a really burly tough guy speaking with Mickey Mouse's voice. It also helps to differentiate him as, as one club member pointed out, there is a quite stellar cast in Beirut and there are an awful lot of characters flying around at any given time.

Isn't Lynch rather, well, naíve at times?
He's certainly unconventional but I wouldn't call him naive. He sometimes takes the alternative road - the road less travelled - and it doesn't always work out for him. That's the problem with being a maverick. Most of the time, of course, it works brilliantly.

We wouldn't have read this if it hadn't been for Olives. It's outside our comfort zone.
A couple of members felt this, although most seemed not to. That's interesting, because Beirut seems to have attracted more female than male readers, which has surprised me. A couple of female reviewers have been clearly taken aback by the wanton violence and bad language in the book, but that's okay. I was taken aback writing it.

You kill an awful lot of people in this book...
Better out than in...

All your women have breasts.
Yup. Great, isn't it?

Is Michel Freij modelled on Saad Hariri?
Oh lord, no. He's mephistolean, that's all. He's modelled on a thousand over-privileged Lebanese sons of the terrible old men who have too much money and power. But on Hariri specifically or intentionally? Absolutely not.

Did I intend Beirut when I wrote Olives?
No. I had thought of an interlinear to Olives where I would take Paul to Beirut with Lynch looking after him and then manage the other side of Olives' story, Lynch's machinations. But then Beirut happened, mostly as a result of a dream that became the Hamburg scenes in the book and it took off from there. The Olives screenplay, titled When The Olives Weep which I've finished, tells more of that 'other story' than the book - necessarily, because of the way film works. At least, the way I think film works!

Are you doing another Lynch book?
I wouldn't say no, but my next project, whatever it is, won't be one. Maybe in the future. There's a Lynch short story out there somewhere, but I'll tell you about that later.

And so we went on into the night. I had a lovely evening and tried to answer every question or point as honestly and interestingly as I could. As usual, it's shocking how much people invest in a book, how much care they put into your work. And it's always so nice to be answerable to them. Honestly.

Book Post: Twits

(Photo credit: sharnik)

People's approach to censorship is strange. In a country that brought in copies of '50 Shades of Grey' I had someone concerned at my answer to an interview question, "Why did you start writing?" to which I responded, "I gave up smoking in 2001 and needed to find something publicly acceptable to do with my hands".

They weren't sure whether that could run or not.

The discussion started off today's Twitter Book Club meeting. We talked about Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy, of course - but also Olives and Beirut.

What made you focus on Shemlan - how had you found out about MECAS and its role in the little village? 
I'd known about it for years, but only relatively recently found it becoming an itch I had to scratch, buying up esoteric books about MECAS and others peripheral to it but which mentioned the Centre, including Ivor Lucas' memoir of an unexceptional life of a diplomat, which was to inform much of Jason Hartmoor's backstory. And then, of course, I had to go up there - a first visit with pal Maha found the centre, subsequent visits saw me lunching like a little pasha with friends at the glorious Al Sakhra (Cliff House) restaurant which is so central to the plot of the book. It is a truly beautiful place, BTW...

Olives was a novel whereas Beirut and Shemlan went more robustly down the Tom Clancy route. Guilty as charged, but I think (IMHO) Shemlan is more nuanced and closer in spirit to Olives than Beirut.

How can Lynch kill a trained killer with his bare hands? 
He gets lucky a couple of times, that's all. He's not fit and drinks too much. In fact, Lynch drinks when he's happy and drinks when he's sad. At least he's given up the fags.

Where did you get Gerald from? 
He was the result of a meeting I had with a prominent businessman who gave me the "I've been 20 years escaping being Gerry" line. I left the meeting punching the air as I built my spy in Olives around that memorable quote - a negation of a humble Irish upbringing.

Will there be more Lynch books? 
Not right now, not the next book. But possibly in the future. He was never actually meant to be in Shemlan, he gatecrashed it. I don't know how the book would have turned out if he hadn't.

Why do you do messy murders of characters we like? 
Because I can. I'm laughing when I do it. I enjoy the idea that I can, occasionally, shock my readers. If you're not expecting it, the unexpected can be quite a powerful thing - particularly when books follow a 'formula'.

Lynch. He's an SOB in Olives, a hero figure in Beirut and a nice guy in Shemlan. 
Not sure about nice guy, but as I've often said, Olives is told in the first person by the young man who Lynch is blackmailing. He's hardly about to tell us what a great guy our Gerald is. In all three books, Lynch is a self-serving maverick who does his own sweet thing but manipulates and bullies those around him to get results.

Olives and the narrative arc. Is Paul too passive? 
I've just finished writing the screenplay for Olives, which I've given When The Olives Weep as a working title, and it's been a fascinating exercise. And it's shown me there's a clear narrative arc in there, it's just not obviously based on the compelling need of one character and that characters odyssey to fulfil that need. Paul is a more passive player, but he still embarks on a journey to fulfil his purpose. It's just he doesn't know what it is. His confusion shouldn't hide the fact he's got to act to get though all this.

And he makes choices we think we would be better than to make. 
Sure, which is what I set out to do with the book. We all like to think we'd be altruistic and heroic and not weak or vacillate when the chips are down. Which is where we're kidding ourselves.

How long did Shemlan take to write? 
It was done in two tranches - about halfway finished (but relatively clearly plotted) when I published Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and finished subsequent to that. The last portion of the book  the Estonian scenes especially, was finished at incredible speed as I smashed away at the keyboard with my Bose Wife Cancelling Headphones pumping high volume death metal straight into my cortex. It took a bit of editing afterwards, but it was really fun to write.

We talked about more, of course, lots more: about my rejections and why I finally turned my back on 'traditional' publishing and let my agent go, about characterisation and the body count in Shemlan, about selling books, online and offline distribution and about what I'm up to next. We talked a lot about the souq in Aleppo and how beautiful it was in a very in your face sort of way and how it had, eventually after much soul searching, to find its way into the book untouched by the war that, of course, has utterly destroyed the huge Ottoman maze that was the world's largest covered souq and one of its oldest. Well, at least I did...

As always, great fun. I love book clubs.

Beirut - Explosive Thrills At TwitBookClub

Dubai's Twitter Book Club - or @TwitBookClub as it's fondly known - is a regular gathering of book reading types enabled by that most real time of fun technologies, Twitter.

They normally meet at Wild Peeta (the famously social shawarma joint) at Dubai World Trade Centre, but that's temporarily out of order so this Saturday will see them meeting at Café Nero DWTC instead (at 11am, as you asked). The TwitBookClub website is linked here.

This'll be the first book club outing for Beirut, and should be interesting. It was certainly an eye opener talking to book clubs about Olives last year, readers' perspectives are a wonderful thing indeed to encounter. You find people question motives, examine reactions and generally go about prodding and tweaking your work in ways you simply wouldn't have thought possible. Beirut, being quite a badly behaved book, will probably respond to a tweak with a hefty kick in the groin, but let's see...

I have generally gone much easier on promoting Beirut than I did with Olives (if you're a regular, you will no doubt have noticed and possibly even been appreciative), which has had the direct  impact of a lower uptake - noise begets noise, so a softly softly approach has really meant little conversation around the book, fewer reviews and so on. This, one suspects, might be about to change.

In the meantime, do feel free to buy and speedread Beirut - An Explosive Thriller in time for this Saturday's meeting (it's in all good UAE bookshops as well as available from Amazon, iBooks et al) or, if you've read the book and you'd like to complain or apply for a refund, I'll be at Café Nero on Saturday facing a branch loaded with Tweeters!!!

Olives and The Book Club

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The Expat Women's Book Club meets regularly at Paul Café in Jumeirah's Mercato shopping mall and had decided to 'do' Olives - A Violent Romance as their book choice having scanned through a list of the books that are to be at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. We made contact on GoodReads.com and before I knew it, the day had come when I was to 'Come at 8.45 so we can meet at 8.00 and have some time to dissect your book before you arrive.'

That sounded ominous...

I duly rocked up to find a group of about 12 ladies in a secluded corner of Paul (I didn't actually count, I thought it might have looked rude, you know?) with copies of Olives strewn around the table. I pulled up a chair and got ready to hear The Verdict.

'Right,' said Mary-Anne, who had organised the meeting. 'First I should tell you we really enjoyed it, so you can relax on that score...'

The rest of the meeting was bliss - an hour talking to people who had read my book, enjoyed it and wanted to ask questions about it. What more can life offer someone who's written something? Why did this character do this? Why did that happen? Why does Aisha wear red underwear? Who are the baddies? Why doesn't Paul flee the country? What's the publishing process been like? What will I get up to next?

The time flew and I found myself having to think about my own book in a way I hadn't before, seeing it through other people's perceptions of the characters and the plot. It was a strange and very rewarding experience, I can tell you. On one occasion I got caught out not knowing an event had happened in the book one eagle-eyed reader had asked me about. Oh, blushes!

Here, as a result, are five things you likely didn't know about Olives:

1) Paul is mildly OCD
Paul's got a touch of obsessive compulsive disorder in his makeup. He's always counting steps to see if they'll be an even number, because if they are this or that thing will be alright. There's a slight echo of that in Aisha, the girl who thinks of olive trees as serried ranks of courtiers as she walks through them. One reader suggested I might have been better calling the book, 'The Olive Princess' which I actually fervently agree with - it was a decision I nearly took at the very end of the process (the book's working title has always been Olives) and didn't.

2) Paul becomes a smoker in the book
As the book progresses, Paul takes up smoking. The Jordanian member of the club was hugely amused by this, knowing how prevalent smoking still is in Jordan. It's also symbolic of Paul's increasing 'Jordanisation' in the book.

3) Anne is Merrie Englande
Paul's girlfriend Anne is a metaphor for England and its pull on Paul as he adjusts to a new life in a strange country. One club member looked at Anne's part of the story from Anne's perspective which, I confess, I hadn't been conscious of doing myself before. Lucky, then, it all worked for her! Anne's role towards the end of the book really represents Paul's determination to follow his course and finally take sides once and for all.

4) Paul's dilemma is TE Lawrence's dilemma
To love what you betray and betray the thing you love - Lawrence tried to balance loyalty to his country with loyalty to the Arab cause, whilst the conflicting purposes of each ensured he betrayed both. It's one reason why the book references Seven Pillars of Wisdom and, specifically, the dedication. I actually contacted Lawrence's estate and got their blessing for the quotes, by the way. They're out of copyright. Similarly, the Mahmoud Darwish quote is fair do's, qualifying as 'fair use'.

5)No, I don't identify with Paul

I think as 'the Brit' in the book, there's a tendency for people to ask if there's any of me in him and my answer is invariably 'I hope not'. There's been quite a lot of 'I don't like Paul' feedback, but I think that might be missing the point a little as you're not actually supposed to like him - I know this was me making life difficult for myself. Paul, as blogger Sara pointed out with a precise nail/head occlusion, Paul is the side of all of us that we know is there, but would prefer to think isn't - that we'd be braver, wiser and more true to ourselves than we actually are. He's young and callow and emotionally a little inept. There's actually a lot more of me in 'bad guy' Gerald Lynch. My reader for Beirut (my next book, which is a much 'harder' thriller and whose main character is our Gerry) complained, calling Lynch 'A violent, unpredictable drunk'. My response was 'yes... and?'.

Mary Anne was evidently somewhat perplexed by the juxtaposition of the evil Lynch with the witty, urbane and charming* young man sat beside her. What can I say?

I'm not going to make such a big fuss about every book club meeting, don't worry (oh, long-suffering reader), but this was my first. And I owe everyone there a huge vote of grateful thanks.

* Would you be sick quietly, please? Thank you.