Tana French and the Dublin Murder Squad

In her Dublin Murder Squad series, a brilliant command of voice and character help Tana French get away with murder: lush prose and lengthy novels. The Secret Place drops the black detective Antoinette Conway, the squad's lone female, in a murder investigation at a privileged Catholic girls' school. French then tells the story from the point of view of Steven Moran, a distrustful and ambitious young "floater."

The tyranny of the greater good: Louise Penny and others

The tyranny of the greater good is a powerful concern in The Kingdom of the Blind. As the most deadly opiates ever made threaten to spill onto the streets of Montreal, Penny's protagonist finds his task of protecting the public more taxing than ever. Tom Nolan explains, "The better he does his job, the harder life gets for Armand Gamache."

The idea of cops having to bend rules and fight an inimical press and an unsympathetic public is a trope used by many contemporary mystery writers. Ian Rankin, Tana French, and Val McDermid also portray police officers -- sympathetic protagonists all -- who are willing to bend the rules for results they feel responsible for judging to be the greater good.

Implications of Illeism

Image of Anna Burns from The Independent

Booker winner Anna Burns mentions "ear bashings from those who speak of themselves in the third person plural." Referring to oneself in the third person is called illeism. Except in young children, it's considered egotistical, unsavoury, even pathological. Chris Bourn gives some background and a dissenting view. But these discussions are about third person singular. Only the Queen can call herself we, and that's just a quirky historic precedent.

Great lines from The Ivory Grin by Ross Macdonald

In a diner, ex-cop Lew Archer observes a sleazy private eye talking to a woman: "His mouth was working overtime, talking him back into his own good opinion."

Later, in a doctor's office, he faces a tough-looking nurse who points a pistol at him. He keeps calm and makes a request: if she won't drop the gun, could she at least put the safety on? After watching her change personae, he comments, "She had assumed a mask of respectability and a voice to go with it." Interviewing an old woman whose son has disappeared, he says, "Her hands twisted and plucked at each other like nervous scorpions."

Detective stories are often sociological documents. The world portrayed in the Lew Archer novels is shockingly real, a cold-bath reminder of society's glaring flaws. 

More bons mots from Diana Athill

The great London editor Diana Athill (think Jean Rhys, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Norman Mailer, Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant, Philip Roth, VS Naipaul, Simone de Beauvoir) was also a talented writer. Her first book, a memoir, came out in the 1960s under the title Instead of a Letter. Fifty years on, Granta published her correspondence with American poet Edward Field as Instead of a book: Letters to a friend.  

Here are some of her epistolatory gems:

"I don't see the singingness of words entirely as an evil, although it can certainly lead writers astray."

In reference to the Fellows' Common Room at All Souls: "an exquisitely comfortable book-and-print-lined room, marinated in centuries of intellectual privilege."

Aging Fellow John Sparrow's little verse (quoted below) struck her as being "like a spell against decay:"

I'm accustomed to my dentures
To my deafness I'm resigned
I can cope with my bifocals --
But oh dear! I miss my mind.

Reading a book about postwar economics, she comments that although "one never ...had much time for politicians, but the extent of their idiocy when fully revealed is gobsmacking."

Delighted at Edward's having dedicated a book to her, she comments, "poems, like short stories, are difficult to read...because you read one and go greedily on to the next one, and the next and the next, until you realize that your eyes have started bouncing off them without taking them in."

The Hay Literary Festival, held in Hay-on-Wye, Powys, Wales she calls "much the nicest of all the literary festivals." This year it goes from May 23 to June 2, and Anna Burns will be there.

Ian Rankin: In a House of Lies

The latest Ian Rankin novel portrays the decline of the press as a group of trained and responsible journalists who do research and check facts. DI Siobhan Clarke reacts angrily when a journalist, Laura Smith, asks her to do a trade: inside info in exchange for a heads up on a breaking story that casts the police in a bad light. Smith's response to the police officer's refusal to bargain is food - however unappetizing - for readerly thought.

"Know how few of us are left out in the wild, Siobhan? Journalists like me, we're an endangered species. It's all bloggers and social justice warriors and gossip hounds. How many of them can you put a name to? Maybe you better start trying, because soon they're going to be all that's left."

Diana Athill describes the writer's dilemma

How brilliantly the great writer and editor Diana Athill expresses the problem I face now. It's finally time to offer my manuscript to agents and publishers, and I desperately need a dose of her casual self-understanding:

"I am gravely tempted to...[fill in the blank with any of a number of distracting tasks] - but probably that is the subconscious throwing up a diversionary tactic."
(p 101)

Charles Cumming: the pulse of the past beats in the present

With its preoccupation with the potentials of the internet and social media for good and ill, Charles Cumming's latest thriller has its pulse firmly in the present. Humourously, Cumming applies layers of timeworn spy tropes. After Robert Mantis makes the approach, author Kit Carradine goes to an internet cafe and tapes over the camera. Seeing that Mantis has no internet domain or checkable credit record, and is "not listed as a director at Companies House nor as a shared freeholder on any UK properties," the new recruit is satisfied that he's "a genuine Service employee." But for Carradine, the exciting game of spydom is cut short. "His career as a support agent, a counterpart to Maugham and Greene, and his attempt to live up to the example set by his father, had ended in ignominy." In real life, Cumming was approached by MI6, but didn't accept their offer. Unless he did, and writing thrillers is his cover.

Zadie Smith interviewed by Jael Richardson at a packed Stanley Theatre

Thursday evening, Leslie Hurtig, the Artistic Director of Vancouver Writers Fest, realized a dream when she brought Zadie Smith to the city to address fans in the sold-out Stanley. After reading from Feel Free, she responded to interviewer Jael Richardson's questions. The need for freedom keeps her moving forward artistically. Writers must free themselves "from needing to be liked," think their own thoughts and say what they see. "Part of a writer's job is finding language for new experiences."

It is of vital importance to say what you see and avoid being caught up in the masses who are "bullied into speaking in one voice." The pressure to write comes from within: "I never wrote a book except from a feeling of necessity."

Regarding the writing process, she commented on the need of writers "to sometimes restrain our natural instincts." With her "generative imagination," she creates large casts of characters with little effort. Different writers have different abilities, and in the novel form, it's possible with care and attention to hide what you can do less well.

An interesting cultural observation on fame was the comment that "it's strange being known and not knowing those who know you." Intimacy is difficult, but "fame is much worse." Yet a recent survey showed that a whopping 8 out of 10 British school children wanted to be famous. What drives that, she wonders, and what will come of it?

When Richardson asked her if she had a sense of cultural betweenness, Smith responded that it was necessary to avoid being too hardline, even to maintain some "moral flexibility." Proud rootedness in a single place is not something she values; indeed, people who use this to define their identity can be dangerous. "To take the accidents of birth as deep realities is absurd," she said, illustrating with the fact that her son is an accidental American with British parents -- her husband was born in Northern Ireland -- and Jamaican grandparents.  The reason? She was too pregnant to be allowed on a plane back to London to give birth. In our times, such wide-rooted families are no longer unusual.

Not belonging, on the other hand, can be extremely powerful -- "it helps you see around the sides and provides the gift of radical empathy." On the notion of class, she feels it was "freeing" to come from the lower middle and working class, when "your parents haven't achieved." Middle-class life, on the other hand, can be stultifying," as children are defined as the sons and daughters of a person with a certain high status job, and can easily be bamboozled into following parental paths.

Currently, she spends her time between New York and London, and finds it "Interesting, moving between two dumpster fires." Responding to a question about Brexit, she admitted her unwillingness to even think about this "epic act of self-harm," and fears the Brexiters might win again if a second vote were to held, though her husband, poet Nick Laird, is more optimistic.

Author quotations: Donna Leon

Donna Leon routinely strews witticisms and wry observances of the human condition through her Venetian mysteries.

Taken from Through a Glass Darkly, the following comment comes from an elegant and revealing exchange between two colleagues at the Questura in Venice. Both the conscientious and philosophical Comissario Guido Brunetti and the talented and discreet information-gatherer Signorina Elettra work for the impeccably dressed but spectacularly inefficient Giuseppe Patta.

When Brunetti needs information, Miss Elettra can always find it, and the scrupulously honest Commissario is careful not to ask how. Thus, in one of their cautious exchanges outside the social climbing boss's office, "She smiled with what a less astute person might have mistaken for sincerity."