Pierce’s Picks: “The Final Silence”

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

The Final Silence, by Stuart Neville (Soho Crime)

The Gist: As I wrote in Kirkus Reviews a couple of months back, Northern Irish author Neville’s fifth novel takes as its lead “damaged Belfast police inspector Jack Lennon, who here gets involved--disastrously--with a woman he once dated, but hasn’t seen for half a decade. Rea Carlisle, unemployed, impatient, and not quite grown into her 34 years, inherits the soulless abode of an uncle she barely knew. Things thus seem to be looking up for her … until she breaks into her late relative’s locked room and unearths a scrapbook filled with evidence suggesting the uncle had been murdering men and women for years. While her selfish father insists on covering up such dismal doings, lest they damage his political prospects, Rea turns to Lennon, who’s already burdened with worries, not limited to injuries he sustained during his last case (in Stolen Souls) and his increasing drug dependence. Lennon wants no part of Rea’s predicament. But after she meets a gruesome end, and the scrapbook disappears, he becomes the principal suspect in those misdeeds. Lennon must unravel the mystery of the dead man’s journal before he loses both his daughter and his livelihood.” Making it even more difficult for Lennon, writes Lynn Harvey in Euro Crime, is his new superior, Detective Inspector Serena Flanagan, “who seems determined to push him deeper onto the ropes.”

What Else You Should Know: Harvey adds that in The Final Silence, “human stories intertwine with ambition, deceit, and the darker regions of the psyche. Jack Lennon is already more physically battered and scarred than Ian Rankin’s [Inspector John] Rebus, but he too continues to slide down the greasy pole of his police career, notching up enemies with each lurching descent. Bad history and bad company contribute to his beleaguered state. Yet something within Lennon still urges him to play the ‘knight chivalrous’ down streets filled with the bitter legacy of Northern Ireland’s political struggles and factions.” The Irish entertainment site RTÉ Ten is especially complimentary of this yarn’s chief female players: “Serena Flanagan, the detective chief inspector who truly has the weight of the world on her shoulders, deserves her own series, while Ida Carlisle, Rea’s mother who is trapped in a loveless marriage to a politician, shows that Neville could take a break from the thriller genre with no difficulty.” Other readers, however, are more restrained in their praise. At the same time as he states that “The writing is crisp and good in the book. It practically begs you to keep turning the pages …,” a Good Reads reviewer complains that Neville’s story “felt a little uneven to me. The first part of the book was weighty in comparison to the rest … There was quite a bit of setup going on, and it was great, but when the actual meat of the novel comes it takes a slightly different turn than I was expecting, and quite a bit of the setup felt like it was for nothing.”

Brosnan Takes on Neville Debut

Former James Bond portrayer Pierce Brosnan has been tapped to star in a screen adaptation of Stuart Neville’s razor-sharp 2009 debut novel, The Ghosts of Belfast (Soho), which was published in the UK under a much less distinctive title, The Twelve. However, in this case names won’t matter at all, because the movie version currently being written by CBS late-night talk-show host Craig Ferguson and Ferguson’s head writer, Ted Mulkerin, will most likely leave the gate as Last Man Out.

The Hollywood Reporter has said that Neville’s thriller “details the story of a former IRA hitman who, released from prison after serving 20 years for murder, is haunted by the memory of his victims. He can find no peace until he takes revenge on their behalf.”

The picture will be directed by Terry Loane (Mickybo and Me, Cluck) and will be produced by Ferguson, Steve Clark-Hall, Beau St. Clair, Rebecca Tucker, and Jonathan Loughran. Filming will begin at the end of 2013. Neville’s fans don’t have to wait that long for something new, though. His most recent novel, a historical thriller called Ratlines, was released at the beginning of last month. “A brilliant character study of a man of real honour,” crowed The Globe and Mail.

Pierce’s Picks: “Ratlines”

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

Ratlines, by Stuart Neville (Soho Crime):
Coming off the success of three novels (beginning with The Ghosts of Belfast) set in his native Northern Ireland, Stuart Neville now transports readers south and back half a century to the Republic of Ireland, where homicide threatens to overshadow what could be one of the country’s proudest moments. It’s 1963, and American President John F. Kennedy is planning a visit to Ireland, his family’s ancestral home. But trouble is brewing. An aging German national has been found shot to death in a coastal guesthouse. It’s the third such slaying in a fortnight, all of the victims former Nazis who were granted asylum in Ireland after the end of World War II. Hoping to curtail this string of killings before it develops into a national or even international scandal, Minister of Justice Charles J. Haughey (“a politician with boundless ambition and the balls to back it up”) orders Lieutenant Albert Ryan of the Directorate of Intelligence to investigate. Quietly, of course, since Dublin officials don’t wish to draw excessive attention to their history of harboring ex-Nazis. Ryan’s known as a big, tough young cuss who actually volunteered to fight with the British Army, despite his hometown’s disgust with the Crown, and who has since kept a heel on the Irish Republican Army. He is also, though, a man with a conscience, and his conscience is disturbed by the notion of protecting war criminals. Especially Otto Skorzeny, an erstwhile SS colonel--“once called the most dangerous man in Europe”--who has set himself up as a “gentleman farmer” and minor celebrity in County Kildare. A legendary tactician, Skorzeny believes he can control Ryan, use him as a shield against whoever’s threatening Nazi “refugees” like himself, and as a shovel to unearth his enemies. To ensure the younger man’s cooperation, Skorzeny even tosses into his path a fetching redhead, whose job it is to report on Ryan’s thoughts and plans. However, as Ryan probes the case further, checking into allegations that a Jewish cabal is behind the recent slayings and attracting sometimes violent attention to his person, he discovers that Skorzeny is running a network that helps war criminals escape Europe. Can Ryan bring down this tale’s killers before they make good on their promise to remove Otto Skorzeny from among the living? Does he want to? Author Neville’s combination of smartly conceived characters, high-strung tension, and moral quandaries makes Ratlines a pell-mell-paced treat.

READ MORE: “Taoiseach, Nazi, Soldier, Spy,” by Declan Burke
(The Irish Times).

Neville Conquers L.A.

Northern Irish writer Stuart Neville last night won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (in the Mystery/Thriller category) for his 2009 debut novel, The Ghosts of Belfast. The announcement was made during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

Also nominated for this honor were Bury Me Deep, by Megan Abbott; The Hidden Man, by David Ellis; Black Water Rising, by Attica Locke; and A Darker Domain, by Val McDermid.

For a list of winners in all categories, click here.

Neville on Top

Last week, author and blogger Declan Burke presented the six contenders on his shortlist for the Crime Always Pays Irish Crime Novel of the Year Award. Today he’s announced the winner of that competition, chosen in a vote among Irish crime writers. It’s The Twelve, by Northern Irish wordsmith Stuart Neville (a book published in the States as The Ghosts of Belfast).

The runners-up, in this order, were: The Lovers, by John Connolly; Dark Times in the City, by Gene Kerrigan; Winterland, by Alan Glynn; All the Dead Voices, by Declan Hughes; and Fifty Grand, by
Adrian McKinty.

“Personally,” Burke remarks in today’s post, “I think all six are terrific novels, and I’m not just woofing: I think that any country, regardless of its size, should be proud of producing six novels of that quality (in any genre or none) in a given year. The bar has been well and truly raised, and it augurs well for 2010.”

More Irish Troubles

It’s been one hell of a fine year for crime fiction--and it’s only September. Here’s one more novel that is sure to find placement at or near the top of many Best of 2009 lists: The Ghosts of Belfast, by Stuart Neville (Soho Crime).

Just when you thought the invasion of excellent Irish crime writers--a group nicknamed “Celtic Noir”--had ended, along comes Stuart Neville with his first novel. Such impressive colleagues as John Connolly, Ken Bruen, and Gene Kerrigan have joined in advance praise for The Ghosts of Belfast (which was published in the UK as The Twelve). Bruen calls it “the book when the world sits up and goes ‘WOW, the Irish really have taken over the world of crime writing.’”

This story’s central character, Gerry Fegan, is a former Irish Republican Army (IRA) “hard man,” a killer in Northern Ireland, now reduced by the coming of peace to a shambling drunk, haunted by the ghosts of 12 victims who follow him everywhere. In a Belfast bar, Neville writes, “Fegan looked at each of his companions in turn. Of the five soldiers, three were Brits and two were Ulster Defence Regiment. Another of the followers was a cop, his Royal Ulster Constabulary uniform neat and stiff, and two more were Loyalists, both Ulster Freedom Fighters. The remaining four were civilians who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He remembered doing all of them, but it was the civilians whose memories screamed the loudest. ...They’d been with him since his last weeks in the Maze prison, seven years ago. ... He told one of the prison psychologists about it. Dr. Brady said it was guilt ...”

The only way that Fegan can kill off his ghosts is by tracking down his IRA superiors, the people who ordered that he commit those murders. This he does with violent precision, one by one, until he is alone again. Along the way, author Neville condenses the fear and hate that troubled Ireland for so long, at the same time creating a memorable character with ease and a cool, deceptively straightforward writing style.