Rob Kitchin's Blog, page 165

Irish crime fiction festival, this weekend coming

I attend a couple of dozen of events a year.  I'm usually pretty ambivalent about most of them.  Whereas I'm genuinely excited about attending the Irish crime fiction festival to hear the views of a great bunch of Irish crime writers.  Tickets can be sought through the website.  Here's the programme.

Friday 22 November
Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College

7.00pm-8.30pm: 'A Short Introduction to Crime Fiction: Why We Write It, How We Write It, and Why We Read It', featuring Trinity College alumni.
Introduction: Corman Ó Cuilleanáin a.k.a. Cormac Millar
Panelists: Jane Casey, John Connolly, Alan Glynn, Declan Hughes, and Eoin McNamee.

Saturday 23 November
J.M. Synge Theatre, Arts Building, Trinity College

10.00am-11.15am: 'Historical Crime Fiction'.
Panelists: Conor Brady, Kevin McCarthy, Eoin McNamee (chair), Stuart Neville, and Michael Russell.

11.30am-12.45am: 'Irish Crime Fiction Abroad'.
Panelists: Declan Burke (chair), Jane Casey, John Connolly, Conor Fitzgerald, Alan Glynn, Arlene Hunt.

1.30-3.30pm: Surprise Film Screening

3.45pm-5pm: 'Crime Fiction and Contemporary Ireland'.
Panelists: Paul Charles, Declan Hughes, Gene Kerrigan, Brian McGilloway (chair), Niamh O'Connor, Louise Phillips.

Saturday 23 November, Closing Event
6pm (doors open 5.30), Public Theatre, Trinity College (€6 tickets)
'An Evening With Michael Connelly'.

I tend to be a lurker at these kinds of things, but I might get up the courage to go and introduce myself to a few of the speakers.  There's only one that I've not yet read at least one of their books.   

Lazy Sunday Service

I've made a start on The Low Road by Chris Womersley.  What I've found interesting about the first sixty pages or so is that the story is kind of placeless and timeless.  It could be set just about anywhere where there's a city with a large, sparse hinterland, and might be set any time from the 1930s to present.  It kind of feels 1970s, somehow, but I suspect it might be more recent.  And yet, it has a sense of place and a nice noirish atmosphere, which is kind of disconcerting and unsettling.  It'll be interesting to see how it develops.  Expect a review shortly. 

My posts this week:
A road map for planning, development, construction and related job creation in Ireland
Review of The Master Switch by Tim Wu
Review of Outerborough Blues by Andrew Cotto
Stranded behind enemy lines

Stranded behind enemy lines

Kiley stared out from the undergrowth at the soldiers and vehicles making their way across the fields.  In the distance smoke rose from a small village. 

‘There must be thousands of them.’

‘Now what?’ Smith asked, tending to Billy’s wounds.

‘We wait until dark, then sneak back to our lines.’

‘Or we could just surrender,’ Liddle said.  ‘Spend the rest of war behind barbed wire.’

‘Not without a fight.’

‘We’ve had a fight,’ Smith said.  ‘Ask Billy.’

‘We’re sneaking back.’

‘And if we’re spotted?’

‘We run.’

‘What about Billy?’

‘We leave him behind and hope the Jerries patch him up.’




A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of Outerborough Blues by Andrew Cotto (Ig Publishing, 2012)

Caesar Stiles grew up in a New Jersey town, playing on the railway tracks, protected from his violent father and combustible elder brother by his mother and Angie, the middle son.  When Angie was sucked under a train, Caesar, aged fifteen, ran away to drift across the country.  Eventually he returned to take care of his dying mother, his father long gone, his elder brother in prison.  After she’d passed away he boards up the house and moves to Brooklyn, buying a house in a poor, African-American neighbourhood restoring the property and working as a chef in a local bar.  His life seems to be finding a balance, then a young French girl asks him to find her missing brother, his own brother is released from prison and shows up wanting to settle an old family score, and two local developers start to tussle over his street and its gentrified potential.  Whilst he hunts for the French man, his life starts to unwind, threatening to spin out of control as his past finally seems to catch up with him.

The strength of Outerborough Blues is its strong sense of place, deeply fleshed out characterisation, social realism, and its poetic narrative.  It’s a kind of literary urban noir, full of subtext and allusion. Caesar Stiles is a compelling character with a colourful back story that is metered out over the course of the tale, and is surrounded by other well penned and distinctive characters.  Cotto vividly places the reader in Stiles world, especially the landscape of gentrifying Brooklyn, and its oddities, rhythms and gatherings.  The prose is wonderfully rich and engaging. The plot, for the most part works well, though it becomes a little complex and confusing at points as Cotto intertwines a number of different threads.  This does not though detract the pleasure in reading the book, however.  Overall an evocative and thoughtful story about trauma, home and finding oneself.

Review of The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu (Knopf, 2010)

In The Master Switch, Tim Wu draws on Schumpeterian theory of creative destruction and Christensen's notion of disruptive innovations to examine the rise and fall of information empires.  He makes the argument that various forms of information industries - the telegraph, the telephone, movie-making, radio, and television have been subject to what he terms the ‘Cycle’, wherein a disruptive new technology challenges an established hegemonic order, as with telephone confronting the wireless, slowly replacing it and itself becoming hegemonic.  Over time, dozens or hundreds of new disruptive players jostle for market position moving quite rapidly to a single monopoly player or cartel that dominates the landscape.  Eventually this monopoly player or cartel is challenged by a new disruption and is toppled, or resists by using the power of the state to stifle what is an inevitable change.  Providing a detailed genealogy of the industries already listed, and how they were initiated and developed through various power struggles and were eventually toppled or mutated, Wu asks whether the present period of disruption through internet technologies will follow the same Cycle pattern and become dominated by a handful of players who control the ‘master switch’, or will it be different given net neutrality and the global rather than national scale of operations?  He discusses this by counter-posing Apple with Google, who have very different business models, with the former seeking to replicate the Cycle.  The analysis is compellingly presented through a very engaging and accessible narrative.  I have two critiques.  The first is that the story told is highly American-centric and whilst his model of the ‘Cycle’ works in the US, it is not clear how applicable it is with respect to different contexts.  The second is that, the conclusion is a little ambiguous as to whether the Cycle will be repeated or resisted in the present age.  Otherwise, this is an excellent read.

Lazy Sunday Service

Last week was hectic, with a trip to Lisbon, meetings in Dublin, and a visit to Galway.  It was also a week of leaving items in my wake: a washbag, a power cable, a book, and no doubt other items I've not yet realised are elsewhere.  It was also a week of limited reading.  I completed reading Timothy Wu's The Master Switch and made it most of the way through the draft of my own work in progress, but did not manage a page of Andrew Cotto's Outerborough Blues, despite it being in my bag at all times.  I suspect my fiction reading might also be curtailed next week as I need to referee a bunch of academic papers and read a doctoral thesis.  If that pattern continues on for a while I'll soon be going cold turkey!

My posts this week:
Review of Severance Package by Duane Swiercynski
Lisboa rendezvous
Four critiques of open data initiatives
Why we need a housing strategy ASAP

Lisboa rendezvous

Robinson ambled down the hill towards the shouts and laughter drifting up from the brothels near to the Cais do Sodré.  He still found the streetlights of Lisboa a novelty after the blackout of the blitz.  He turned onto the Rua do Arsenal and stepped into the doorway of a bar.  A few moments later his shadow appeared at the intersection, an attaché from the German embassy.  Robinson ducked into the smoke-filled taberna, jostling his way through a crowd of sailors and exited into a tatty courtyard.  Rafaela, his contact in the city office, waved hesitantly from a window opposite.



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of Severance Package by Duane Swierczynski (Minotaur Books, 2008)

With a new born son, Jamie DeBroux, is not happy to be having to go into work on a Saturday morning.  He’s even less happy when the boss announces that he is terminating everybody’s contract forthwith, with the termination involving a fatal drink, the doors exiting the 36th floor rigged with lethal sarin gas.  A moment later and the boss is on his back, a bullet lodged in his brain and all hell has broken loose.  DeBroux thought he was working as a press officer for a financial company; it turns out that it was a top secret organisation targeting terrorist bank accounts.  Everyone else on the floor seems to be equipped with specialist operative skills and it appears that it’s every person for themselves.  All DeBroux wants is to make it back home to his wife and son, but the least well equipped he’ll be lucky to survive at all given the rising body count.

Severance Package starts at a quick clip and never lets up in pace.  Taking the form of a locked room escape drama, with a small number of operatives trapped on the 36th floor of a Philadelphia skyscraper pitted against each other, the story is laced with black humour and is full of twists and turns.  And over the course of a few hours Swierczynski cranks up the tension through a continuous conveyor belt of engaging action sequences.  Indeed, the strength of the story is the plot, with the characters having just enough back story to give them substance.  I thought it was a blast.  If I was a movie producer, I’d snap the options on Severance Package as it’s a ready-made action movie script, one that has three very strong female lead roles.  Overall, great fun with a lovely sucker punch ending.

Lazy Sunday Service

I'm heading to Lisbon in Portugal tomorrow for two nights to attend a meeting.  I'd normally have a book set there to accompany me, but I've failed to source one this time.  Along with the present novel I'm reading, Andrew Cotto's Outerborough Blues, I'll be taking a full first draft of the academic book I'm writing at present.  Thankfully it's finally all come together.  Now onto edits and revisions.

My posts this week:
Review of Then We Take Berlin by John Lawton
Review of The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter by Malcolm Mackay
October reads
Snap inspection

Snap inspection

‘Hi!’ Colin looked up from the laptop.  ‘What are you doing back here?’

‘Why shouldn’t I be here?’ Claire snapped.

‘Because you should be at work?  Is everything okay?’

‘Where is she?’ Claire left the kitchen, moving to the living room.

‘Where’s who?’

‘That bitch from your office.  Sally.’

Colin trailed after her, blocking the doorway.  ‘There’s nobody here but me.  Why would Sally be here?’

‘You know why!  I saw the way you were flirting at Geoff’s party.’

‘We were just chatting.  Nothing more.  Look, Claire ...’

Behind him he heard the back door closing with a faint click.




A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.