Listen to Declan Burke's talk and reading.Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode Declan Burke, crime author and journalist, reads from his novel 'Absolute Zero Cool', and explains how he had come to write the book. Recorded in front of a live audience at the Central Library in September 2011 as part of its 'Crime and the City' series.Thanks everyone for coming along, particularly on a sunny ... we don’t get so many sunny days these days so I’m sure you all have better things to be doing maybe on a Thursday afternoon, so delighted to see you here. Padraic, when he contacted me, suggested that I would do a reading for 25 minutes/half an hour from the book and then kind of get involved maybe in a question and answer session which gives me the creeping horrors to be honest because I hate reading aloud, particularly my own work, but I just find it makes for a sterile kind of environment so there’s various sections I was going to read and maybe if people were interested after each section perhaps, because they’re relatively short, maybe then engaging if anyone had any questions I’d be much more comfortable and I think it would possibly be more enjoyable for people if everyone is happy with that. I suppose the second thing to say then is the framework of the series is ‘Crime in the City’ and ‘Drugs in the City’ is that the title?Padraic: Crime and Drugs.Declan: Crime and Drugs. And when Padraic contacted me I was going oh I don’t think my book is really appropriate for that because it’s actually about two guys trying to blow up a hospital so there isn’t an awful lot of drug related crime in it. Except then (laughs) I started going through it and that’s the first half of the book alone, the drug related sections not just references, so I don’t know if that says more about me or the culture that we live in but I’m taking the ‘Drug in the City’ idea relatively broadly in that in my mind drugs or, you know, cigarettes and alcohol are equally as dangerous in the wrong hands as heroine and cannabis and what have you. So it’s in that context I’m going to read the various sections and, as I say, they’re relatively short and hopefully after each one we might have a short Q&A session if there’s anyone still left in the room. The context of the book I suppose I should explain. I had written the first draft of this book about 6 or 7 years ago and I sent it to my agent at the time and he read it and he came back to me and said I really, really don’t know what I can do with this. It was quite dark. It was about a psychopathic hospital porter who had a sideline in euthanasia and that was one of his penchants. So I put it in the drawer and I actually ended up writing more kind of comedy related crime fiction. About 3½ years ago then was just about to have our first baby and at the time I thought I was ready for this but to give you some idea of how unready I was for fatherhood the big sacrifice I was prepared to make at the time was that for a whole 6 months I wouldn’t do any writing just to be there to lend a hand or at least look useful and so forth. That lasted about 3 weeks because I think if you’re involved in writing it does become a bit of a reverse drug and the compromise I came to with Aileen was that I wouldn’t write anything new because that does take a huge amount of energy, not so much physical but psychic energy, and I would redraft something older. And 2 days later, literally 2 days later, I was standing at the window of the office looking out onto the back garden which is an essential part of the creative process I think any writer will tell you and it was if the character, the psychopathic hospital porter, his name is Karlsson, as if he had popped into the back garden and said what about me in effect, he didn’t refer to the fact that we had just had a baby but what he ... I mean the line in book is “publish or I’m damned” is what he says. You’ve created me but I only have a half life and I’m living in this kind of purgatory, you need to redraft me, you need to make me a more likeable psychopath and, you know, make me come alive in effect. And I thought it was a neat idea. It made me laugh at the time and if an idea makes me laugh it’s usually a good sign for me to kind of carry on with the idea. And the idea was that, yes, I would redraft the book and I’d try and make him a more likeable psychopath and for his part in order to grab the attention of the publishers he would plough ahead and blow up the hospital where he works. So that’s the scenario, that’s the opening section and the book then alternates with sections from the old first draft with Karlsson and the unnamed author then talking about the piece that they’ve just read, they’ve just rewritten and the reactions to it. So this is the first page of the old draft:The cancer counsellor waves a rolled up a newspaper to shoo us away from the windows so his clients won’t have to watch us smoking. We are the bolted horses. Some of my co-smokers drift away around the corner to where a breeze whips beneath a glass corridor connecting the hospital’s old and new buildings. There they huddle together, shivering. It’s a grey December day, sleet is battering the glass, the wind, cool easterly. The cancer counsellor raps on the windows, jerks his head and thumb. I flip him the bird. He opens the window and leans out, beckons me across. I stroll over. When I’m close enough he mimes writing down the name on my plastic tag. “Let me get this straight,” I say “you’re miming a disciplinary action”. This provokes him into taking out a pen, writing my name on the back of his hand. “You’re on report Karlsson.” he says “Ingrate” I say “If we didn’t smoke you’d be out of a job”, his face reddens. He doesn’t like being reminded of his role as a parasite, not many do. “Between you and me” I say “stress is the big killer”. He’s fuming as he closes the window. I try to make the connection between a patient’s cancer and my smoking but it can’t be done, there’s a fuzzy blurring of divisions, okay, and carcinogens, either side of the wire but I’m not finding the tangent point. My line for today comes from Henry G. Strauss, I have every sympathy with the American who was so horrified about what he had read of the effects of smoking that he gave up reading.So that’s section one and obviously cigarettes are the drug of choice in that particular one. Just a tangent, I didn’t mean to talk about this, but cannabis as a gateway drug is often laughed off particularly by people who use cannabis but I suppose I’m living testimony the fact that it is because I was a virulent anti-smoker before I went to college and dabbled a little in first year with – and I think as you’re supposed to do, almost obliged to do in college – and smoking cannabis didn’t last but I’m still smoking cigarettes, smoking about 40 a day 25 years later. If cannabis isn’t the gateway drug to cigarettes at least I don’t know what is. So yeah that’s the first section, that’s the first section of Karlsson’s original draft or the original draft of Karlsson I should say. If I anybody has any comments to make or wants to leave I’ll look away in the corner so it won’t be too embarrassing for anybody. We’ll plough on to page 56 then. And at this point things are not entirely running smoothly. Karlsson isn’t getting all his own way because the writer obviously believes that he should be the one to shape the narrative and tell Karlsson what he is and what he isn’t going to do. Karlsson, by the way, has abandoned the name Karlsson and his calling himself Billy because he believes it’s just a nicer name to be known by and, you know, it’s all part of his reformed psychopath role. But the writer then is being slightly intimidated by interacting with this psychopath. Now the writer, I should say the author, isn’t demented, isn’t deluded, he actually is based in a writer’s residence, an artist’s retreat, and he has been approached by this guy calling himself Billy who wants to bring the character of Karlsson to life and because he’s in a artist’s retreat the author believes that the character calling himself Billy is actually kind of an avant-garde actor who want so to bring this unpublished character to the stage as soon kind of metafictional comment on life-meets-art-meets-life-meets-art possibly, I don’t know. So that’s the general context so the author of the book isn’t sitting having coffee with some fictional character that he brought to life but he does believe he’s dealing with a flesh and blood person. So at this point Billy, being flesh and blood, has offered to chip in and write some of the sections himself, not just rewrite but write because once you start toying with any aspects of a redraft I don’t know how many times I’ve said to myself I’ll just give this one last polish, just one last ... take out the comment ... and, you know, within a week you’re up to your ankles in broken sentences and the whole thing has fallen apart so it never works out. So in making Karlsson a nicer psychopath that automatically affects every other aspect of the book and we’ve got to the point now where Billy/Karlsson is now writing sections of the book himself and here he is writing about two of his fellow hospital porters, they work in the security department of the hospital, one of them is called Tomo and the other one is called Austin.Tomo says “kill your babies”. To be precise he croaks this through a lungful of exhaled smoke. Tomo is into the late afternoon of a wake-n-bake, horizontal on the couch, the drapes pulled. Killer Tomo twiddles his controller sending his POV avatar roaming through the airport on the TV blasting away at enemy soldiers and cowering civilians alike. I advance into the apartment until I enter his field of vision. He pauses the game, smiles up at me sloppily. “Hey K, how she hanging?”. He offers a hit off his joint. I decline. “Word to the wise” Tomo I say “Frankie was looking for you all morning”. “Kill your Frankies”, “No really, he was seriously pissed, he had to watch the monitors himself there was no relief cover, Austin rang in sick too, Frankie was up and down the stairs all day”. “Kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out”. “I’m just letting you know Tomo he was seriously pissed”. Tomo frowns, he struggles into a half sitting position, “K” he says “who the fuck let you in?”, “Austin” I say, I jerk a thumb at Austin who was sitting in the armchair nearest the TV sucking on a hookah, Austin gives a thumbs up then exhales and subsides into the armchair bong tube a dangle. “Yeah well” Tomo says “now you’re here shut the fuck up about Frankie, take a hit or take a hike, but go easy” he says “it’s pure Thai”. He takes a deep draw on the joint beckons me closer, I understand he is offering a blow back so as to ease me in gently. I kneel down as he sits forward until our lips are almost touching then he exhales into my open mouth. “You might want to ring in sick for tomorrow before you start in proper” he says, “Trust me it’ll be too much hassle after the first draw”. Tomo sounds far too lucid for this to be true but the smoke floods my lungs as if they were those of an infant, new and pure. Though smooth going down the blowback causes my brain to pulse like a mushroom cloud. The effect is one of immediate bliss swiftly followed by gut sucking paranoia then a wonderfully mellow sense of sensory disorientation. Acute dehydration ensues. I go to the kitchen for water. I come back from the kitchen thirsty having somehow failed to locate either sink or fridge. Austin appears to be comatosed in the armchair. Tomo says something about how every language ever invented has been a failed attempt to discover a means of expression by which mankind might communicate the full extent of its ignorance. He says kill your babies is a metaphor for eradicating metaphors. He says it’s an irony rather than a tragedy that most people experience their lives as metaphors for how they would have preferred their lives to be. He says the real tragedy is that most people already know this. Tomo says a lot of things but I’m not really listening. Irony isn’t half as clever when you’re thirsty. People, you can carve this one in stone, you will seek in vain for irony in the vicinity of a cacti patch.So that’s the second section. And what follows on from that is that having set up Tomo and Austin as pretty serious cannabis abusers and they are missing work as a result it means that Billy in redrafting the book can then go ahead and he now has an excuse to have them sacked from the hospital because he no longer needs them as characters in his version of his story which is where we start getting into the fact that there are kind of frames within frames within frames of the story, we have the author telling you about Billy who is telling you about the likes of Tomo and Austin etc., all of which of course is between the covers of a book by someone called Declan Burke. The unnamed author in the book by the way I should say is unnamed obviously but he has published the likes of The Big O and Eight-Ball Boogie, for example, in the past which are books that I have published myself. So that’s section two.Participant 1: I’d like to know what you feel as a writer you gain by essentially technically you’ve shifted POV, I mean you know that Billy isn’t really a character and so forth so you’ve invented this for POV, what do you feel you’ve gained by making it as elaborate as you have?Declan: That’s a very good question and it’s quite a personal question, believe it or not. But I’ll answer it. I will answer it. When I wrote the first version, the first draft, I had split up from a very major relationship in my life and it was quite a dark time in my life, as they say on Oprah, and I used the experience of writing, I purged a lot of black stuff from my life, a lot of poison, went on to the page, a very, very useful exercise in catharsis for me personally, but when my agent read the book he just goes “I really don’t know what I could do with this, this is incredibly ...” you know, usually he would go through a book making notes as he goes along and very good he is at it too.Participant 1: This is Jonathan yeah?Declan: Jonathan Williams that’s right. A lovely man. And he gave up about a third of the way through and he said “There’s no point in me making notes about this because I know I’m not going to sell it” (laughs) and that was fair comment, absolutely. So to answer the question when I came back to it given that where I was in my life then I was at that stage happily married to the person I had split up from and subsequently wrote the book and we had a lovely baby girl so things were completely different and that’s where I think the character of Billy and the idea of a reformed sociopath came from and by using the kind of frame within a frame within a frame kind of scenario and I hope I’m not making it sound as if it’s complex, it’s actually pretty straightforward on the page when you’re reading it, it’s very clear as to what stage you’re at at all times, but it allowed me to differentiate between Karlsson, for example, is the sociopath, the dark stuff, the black stuff belongs to Karlsson. Billy is the intermediary then between me and Karlsson and it’s as if I’ve put this buffer of distancing an almost ironic distancing to say that I’m not responsible, Declan Burke who is married to Aileen, as the father of Lily, is not responsible for some stuff that’s actually quite bleak in this book. And that was written originally certainly with a sense of irony but if it was taken out of context could be, you know, there’s some virulently right wing fascist material in this book like. So while I think it’s worth saying in order to kind of, in the sense of kind of throwing up the question so that people can maybe batter them down again I think given that I was or had become a father I definitely wanted to distance myself from the material so that was one of the reasons for ... probably the major reason, the emotional reason, for creating those frames.Participant 1: The way that you structure it, what made you ... were you stuck when you wanted to hold on to some stuff and redo other stuff, were you stuck with the structure or is that a way of inventing, putting a new author in, which is very complex what might have been a crime novel or did it just come to you that that’s the way you’d do it?Declan: It felt very natural to do it. I wasn’t particularly stuck at any time. Touch wood I’ve never been actually ... I never really suffered that writers’ block thing. When the idea came to me it kind of came to fully formed and I could see it, start, beginning and middle, this framework will work. You know, obviously it took a lot of work and a lot of finessing certainly and there were certain aspects of the original draft that had to come out and there had to be new stuff to write to keep the structure firm the whole way through but, yeah, sometimes, very, very rarely you do get those beautiful ideas that allow you to tell a story that might have been less ... that maybe if it wasn’t working ... I think the story, the original story, worked nobody just was going to read it, that was the bottom line. So I think in this, once I had that idea and I saw how it would work the whole way through, sometimes you get an idea and you can see well that’s how the first section will work and then I’ll have to get another idea to make the second and the third act will have to fend for itself type of thing, but this one, when I seen it, for me it worked the whole way through so.Participant 1: Thank you.Participant 2: What’s a wake-n-bake?Declan: A wake-n-bake is, apparently and I’ve been told, you just, you don’t even get out of bed, you wake up, you reach over, you skin up and you just get stoned for the whole day.Participant 2: Right.Declan: Yeah. Not sure where it originating but there’s a book called Dispatches by Michael Herr, I don’t know if anybody has ever come across it? It’s a wonderful, wonderful piece of war journalism and it’s called Dispatches because he was I think the Washington Post correspondent in Vietnam so it’s a collection of pieces that he wrote, he sent back from Vietnam, and that book starts off with Michael Herr on a wake-n-bake and he’s a superb, superb writer if you haven’t read the book I would heartily recommend it.So that’s cigarettes and cannabis we’ve dealt with, moving on swiftly now to legal drugs, prescription drugs, why people take them and how people get them I suppose is what the next section is dealing with in one respect. But you’ll know at this stage that Karlsson/Billy is not a conventional thinker so he does tend to go off on tangents so if they are a wee bit too tangential for you I do apologise for that. So ...Suffering is part of the natural order. Pain is as essential as birth and decay. In scientific tests radishes were proven to scream when ripped from the earth. Can other radishes hear these screams? Who cares for the agony of radishes? The idea of stealing drugs came to me when an old lady asked one night if I had anything on the cart that might dull the pain that had her doubled up and speaking so quietly, I could barely hear her words. “No mam” I said, “I’m sorry” but it sent me thinking. There was a certain symmetrical nobility in the idea of pilfering drugs to help those who need them most like a Japanese orderly breaking into Red Cross packages to help British POWs. But that would have been a crassly stupid thing to do. Certainly I will plead with a nurse on behalf of a patient who appears to be in pain. I am not animal except in the literal sense. But even animals know not to defecate on their own doorstep. Still, the majority of people who are in pain are not in hospital. Agony cannot always be x-rayed. Anguish cannot always be pumped out. A broken heart cannot be splinted. These people would rather not pay a General Practitioner’s fee in order to obtain a simple prescription to cure an ailment they can diagnose themselves, this is where I, yours truly, Karlsson, comes in. The joy of theft is the lack of overheads. I skim from a different hospital storage facility on alternate floors every month. In this way I don’t allow a pattern to build up. This is not difficult to achieve, there is no set schedule to subvert. If the opportunity presents itself, if the nurse’s station is deserted say and I have not targeted that particular facility for some months and I have the means to transport the contraband undetected, I will avail of the opportunity. Furthermore I do not skim the same merchandise every time. The range is wide enough to qualify as eclectic, uppers and downers, anything morphine based, the deliciously bewildering pick n mix of antidepressants and the atypicals, these I offload at a competitive rate to P, my connection in town. P used to deal weed and E to students until he realised the potential of black market script drugs. Soon he will graduate to heroin, eventually he’ll become a TV salesman. I call P. “My mother in law is out of town” I say, this is his idea of code, P is a paranoid who watches too many gritty American cop shows. He has The Wire running on a perpetual loop. His mood swings give him emotional whiplash. He says “Usual place, 10 bells”, he hangs up. I ring back. “Remind me”, I say, “where’s the usual place?”, “The usual for fuck’s sake”. “I go to a lot of places that are usual” I say. “Strand Hill” he says, “Strand fucking Hill” this is code for Rosses Point, the swanky resort across the bay from Strand Hill. I like the idea of dealing illicit contraband at the Point. “Okay,” I say “see you around 10”. “At 10” he grinds his teeth. “10 on the fucking dot” he even sounds like he’s sweating. So I turn up at 20 past just to be cuntish. When I get in his car he sees hypnotised by the flicker of the lighthouse beam, his complexion is pasty. “You alright man?” I say “You don’t look so good” but he’s not listening. “Give me the shit” he says. I hand it over. He gives me the money. He starts babbling about an upcoming skiing holiday in Bulgaria then confuses it with a skiing holiday he took a few years ago in the Italian Alps. I cut in, make my excuses. P drives for home seemingly unaware that two distinct arks in time have just intersected. I smoke a cigarette before I follow him back into town, the last place I want to be is behind a driver who is unaware that he is trapped at a tangent point between then and when.So there be another section. I’m fascinated, to be honest, about the use of script drugs, about legal drugs, about prescription drugs, I mean how wide spread it is and how dependent people can come to be on prescription drugs through no fault of their own or necessarily their doctor. But it certainly is ... I would say it’s more prevalent than that of illegal drugs. We hear all about heroin, we here about cannabis seizures at Dublin airport etc., etc., I don’t know what the statistics are but I would imagine that far more people are addicted to prescription drugs than are to the harder drugs, the class As particularly. There’s actually a relatively small core of registered addicts in this country that are addicted to the class A drugs, 30,000 as far as I know, which is quite small when you think about all the headlines you see about heroin etc. And I know that not all heroin addicts, for example, are registered, not by a long shot, but I would imagine if you measured that statistic versus the people who are in regular receipt of prescription drugs I’d say it would be dwarfed and of course that’s not fascinating in its own regard to the facts and figures but it’s the pain, it’s what’s being treated by those prescription drugs that I think is absolutely fascinating and heartbreaking and I would love to see a graph of the last 5 years in this country, for example, to see the usage of prescription drugs providing people most in need of them can still afford their prescription drugs but I would love to see a graph of the usage and how often and how much is being prescribed because, you know, this country is sick, you know, I mean it is sick metaphorically and literally. You know, the health service, the fact that Billy Karlsson is a hospital porter is incredibly important to the book obviously but it’s incredibly important to me because I think what’s being done to the health system in this country is an absolute disgrace, you know, sometimes I ... the riots in Athens, for example, you know, part of your brain is saying I wish the Greeks would just realise the extent to which they’ve dug their own grave really in terms of their financial scenario and the other half of you is going fair play, you know, because especially in this country we seem to be incredibly passive while ‘the elite’ carry on regardless, you know, and it’s the ordinary people that are suffering and continue to suffer. And, you know, if we say metaphorically the country is sick what’s the answer? We close down the hospitals? I mean that’s almost a Kafkaesque response like, you know. I was listening to a guy on the radio the other night and he was saying we lived in the year of absurdonomics where ... and I agree with him because one of the economists who actually I think is quite good but he was saying in The Irish Times there 2 weeks ago that the debt forgiveness scenario that’s on the table at the moment could be sorted out if we just throw 5 or 6 billion at the situation and I was going if we just throw 5 or 6 billion at the situation (laughter). This morning on the news the big news was that France has released 1 billion of seized Libyan assets back to the new ... the interim Government and that’s going to get Libya back on its feet at least in the short term. 1 billion is going to get Libya back on its feet in the short term. We’re talking about throwing 5 or 6 billion at debt forgiveness. We live in an absurd time, an absolutely crazy time and I will say, just to go back to the prescription drugs thing, I would love to know what the extent of it and I wouldn’t even necessarily characterise it as abuse of prescription drugs because, you know, there’s a lot of people out there who need it, badly, badly need it and understandably so. Here endeth the sermon, sorry about that! (laughter)Participant 3: I think the Irish health service spends about 3 billion a year on drugs.Declan: Right.Participant 3: About that, I think what it is.Declan: Okay.Participant 3: So probably most likely the prescription drugs go in through that 3 or 4 billion.Declan: Okay.Participant 3: And there’s financial profit as well ...Declan: Sure, sure.Participant 3: ... and if you think about the States where it’s quite normal for obviously anecdotally it’s quite normal for office workers to be taking whatever is the latest upper or downer of choice, you know, it was normal for people to be taking Prozac in an office environment so.Declan: Sure. And variations thereof, yeah.Participant 3: And I think it’s not quite ... maybe it will get worse here.Declan: Yeah well I mean Americans have a reputation for being a Prozac nation, I can’t remember who wrote that book but there was a book with that provocative title and, you know, there’s any variations on Prozac, for example, and I think part of the problem with the Irish health service is that there are non-brand drugs that will be far cheaper than the brand ones and that was an ongoing and it still is an ongoing situation so I think it could be done far more cheaply but essentially, you know, and I don’t want to be too simplistic about it but, for example, they’re threatening now to close down the emergency ward in Tallaght Hospital because it hasn’t come up to ... because it falls down on various aspects of safety and health and safety because they’ve had to strip back their budget because they’re not getting ... meanwhile (laughs) we’re just lobbing billions at these gamblers on the international markets and I don’t know about you but I’m looking over my shoulder at Iceland and looking at what they’re doing and Iceland were the laughing stock of the world 3 years ago. Who is laughing at the world now, you know? But again ...Participant 4: Do you explore that passivity that you’re fingering there in your book?Declan: Yeah I do. It’s an angry book and it’s too angry. It shouldn’t be. I mean a work of literature shouldn’t be angry I think. Yeah absolutely I think that the ... and not just books, I think that ...Participant 4: So we’ve just wiped off Beckett and a huge number of people who were angry?Declan: Well I think that the artist can be angry but I think that, you know, the great artists have the wit which I don’t have (laughs), have the wit to distance themselves from their material because if what you’re reading is ... I mean anger is a real unformed emotion, you know, it’s raw and it tends to explode and it tends to go off and a lot of people tend to get hurt in the fallout. You know, quiet and cold rage I think would be more appropriate for this but, you know, like I’m not ashamed, I’m not embarrassed by the fact that it’s angry, I mean these are times when I think a lot of people are angry, you know. I’m not criticising the Irish people for being passive because what else do you do? I mean, you know, you can’t have a one person march up O’Connell Street, you know. There have been marches, there have been very, very rare marches but we don’t want to go the way they did in Athens either and start bombing banks well (laughs) let me rephrase that, we don’t want to go the way they did in Athens and see people killed when they bombed banks. (laughter) I certainly don’t. But if I was to wake up tomorrow morning and hear that a few banks had gone up in flames it would certainly brighten my September I’ll tell you that for nothing. But yeah I think the book is too angry and I think a great writer doesn’t let emotions cloud the work, that’s my personal opinion.Participant 4: I’m quite hard of hearing ...Declan: Sorry.Participant 4: ... so I’m not hearing everything that you read because I’m not sure the room has T-loop and if it has that it’s on, but I felt that by choosing your kind of character that you chose really below the radar that you kind of defused some of that anger because he’s commenting all the time in a kind of wry way on the situations like how does his smoking effect the patients and that so with my limited hearing I felt that you had managed to sublimate that anger quite well in what you’ve read so far. So I didn’t have a problem with it.Declan: Okay. Well, you know, I can only give you my reaction to the book and I’m obviously not the best person to judge. That said I mean the idea of the hospital porter at one point Karlsson says that one of the huge benefits to being a hospital porter is the fact that you’re so systematically underestimated by the rest of society. And on two different occasions he’s asked, you know, ‘well what are your plans, like what do you want to be when you grow up?’ in effect. And he’s kind of outraged that the idea of being a hospital porter isn’t enough, that it wouldn’t be regarded as being a function that’s important in society. Okay he doesn’t get paid enough as ... as much as we’ll say the average bank manager (laughter) but the role he performs in society is far more important, for example, so he believes, but as he says sacrifice is passé in this day and age. And the fact that society underestimates him is not the reason that he sets out to blow up the hospital but it certainly facilitates his undercover work as he goes about the job, so.Anybody else? Well it looks like we’ll have time for one more section rather than two you’ll be delighted to hear so the last section I was going to read, again we’re back to Karlsson and we’re roughly halfway through the book now and at this stage his plans for blowing up the hospital are fully in train although the reader is not privy nor is the writer (laughs) is not privy to what his plans are either. But the character that was mentioned in the context of the Tomo and Austin piece, Frankie, who is Tomo and Austin’s supervisor, he was looking for them, so he is the main character here. Karlsson has gone to ... after work they’ve gone together for a pint. Previously, a few pages previously, Frankie had agreed to buy a quart of dope from Karlsson.I meet Frankie for a pint after work. We play some pool in an upstairs pool hall betting on the outcome of each frame, double or nothing each time. “Frankie man you’re sharking me over here, you’re a fucking hustler, Paul fucking Newman, man”. Frankie is a big man, muscles are hulking but he’s a surprising delicate touch with a cue, I like him. Despite his obvious limitations which include a deprived socioeconomic background Frankie is ambitious, he always has a plan. Frankie wins six games on the bounce. I concede and shake his hand in the process palming the ounce of dope “Call it quits I say, what do you reckon?”. Frankie is agreeable, he has just scored a couple of weeks worth of low grade bliss, in the process he has implicated himself in the tragic elimination of my superior, should the truth about tampered breaks emerge Frankie cannot take to the witness stand unless it is to confess his gross negligence, he would have to admit to a dereliction of duty in the pursuit of illegal narcotics, behaviour unlikely to impress prospective employers. We go downstairs. The pints are on Frankie. He tells me about his latest plan which is to translate his experience at the hospital into a company that will provide security staff for bars and nightclubs. The pitch is that the cost of employing Frankie’s well-trained bouncers will be less prohibitive than paying out insurance claims to customers who have been manhandled by delinquent primates. He has been to the bank, laid out the business plan and all lights are green bar one tiny hitch. Frankie needs to go back to college. He needs a piece of paper that says he understands management theory, basic accounting tax laws, etc., ad nauseam. Frankie’s dilemma is that he can’t afford to take 2 years out to go to college but he can’t afford to not either. His girlfriend and future life partner, Joanne, is not an especially demanding woman, but Frankie wants to achieve security and respectability on her behalf. Joanne’s interpretation of security and respectability includes a 3-bed suburban semi, at least one car in the driver and a non-negotiable one fortnight per year in sunnier climes. Aspirations such as these require cold cash or at least the illusion of cold cash that lending institutions can create. Thus Frankie’s ambitions are reduced to hard currency, this is the process by which Frankie will be brought to heel, this is how Frankie becomes a meek cog in a machine that despises both meekness and cogs. “What about you?” he says, “Anything cooking?”. He asked this because the income of a hospital porter isn’t sufficient to qualify as adequate by the modern world’s expectations which appear to be index linked to inflation thus I should be plotting my escape. It does not occur to him that such a question would be offensive to a hospital porter who believed he was providing an invaluable service to society by taking on a job no one else wants. Sacrifice is passé. There is no percentage in martyrdom these days, in the western world at least. “Not really,” I say, “I’ve enough on my plate working out how to blow up the hospital”. “Blow it up?” he says. “Blow it up, close it down, what’s the fucking difference?” he nods, “It’s some fucking dump alright, once I’m gone those fuckers can kiss my hairy hole”. He sups again frowning. “You know” he says “I can’t think of anyone who wants to be working there, not one fucking person, you’d only be doing them a favour if you blew it sky high”. “Apparently a building that size only needs to move four or five feet in any direction, gravity does the rest”, he nods, drains his pint and looks into the glass as he swirls the creamy head around the bottom “Want to go again?” he says. Cassie has book club tonight so I nod, “My twist” I say. “Put your money away Frankie, your money is not good here”. The pints arrive. I toast him. “Here’s to going back to college” I say. “To blowing up the hospital” he says. We touch glasses and drink deep.That’s that. That’s probably a good example or a bad example I should say of, you know, it being too angry, you know, the “blow it up, close it down, what’s the fucking difference” I mean that’s clunky, you know, I mean I obviously liked it at the time that’s why it went in (laughs) looking back on it now maybe, hmm, a bit too obvious, a bit too raw, but there you go so.Padraic: We might take a few questions now if people have any? I have one just to start off. So far you’ve been published by Lilliput. Then your second novel you co-published with a smaller publisher, Hag’s Head, then you published your own book on Kindle and now you’ve put out two books through Liberties Press. Do you think that’s inevitable for a writer now? And what did you enjoy or what were the upsides and downsides of each?Declan: I don’t think it’s inevitable by any means. Most writers will have war stories like, for example, I was telling Padraic before we started off that The Big O which was my previous novel it was picked up by Harcourt in the US and they did a terrific job on it, made a beautiful hardback book and 6 weeks before it was due to come out the editor who had signed me up lost her job in a merger between Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin or Harcourt and Dunder Mifflin as a friend of mine refers to them. And she lost her job and they lost interest in the book The Big O, they published it because the wheels were in motion but, you know, it died a death, they didn’t back it at all. So those kind of war stories, you know, once you start talking most writers will say ‘oh yeah well wait till I tell you about my editor or my publisher, oh my God’. So yeah I mean it depends, it differs from writer to writer, some writers will be lucky enough to be picked up from the get-go, signed up to, you know, a 3, 4, 5 book deal and things will progress through the mid list and they’ll become bestsellers and they will live happily ever after. For most writers I would think because the way the industry is going and particularly because of the impact of e-publishing and Kindle and the Sony Readers etc., that there’s going to be an awful lot more writers I think self publishing and publishing on a very, very small budget so I think you’re going to see a lot more of even the bigger publishers not so much splashing out the 4 or 5 book deals but, you know, taking a ... much in the way that the music industry has gone. I mean 10 years ago or 15 years ago a band would be taken on by a music label and, you know, given three albums to break into the top 5 or the top 10 or whatever it is and, you know, maybe a couple of top 10 hits on the singles chart, these days in the music industry it’s, you know, if you don’t hit number one with your first record you’re done, you’re dropped, good luck. It’s becoming the same thing in the books industry, the publishing industry. And that’s just the way it is, you know, I mean I wouldn’t ... like it’s been a rollercoaster ride, there’s been ups and downs and there’s been some terrific experiences. The one of publishing ‘The Big O’, co-publishing with Hag’s Head, Hag’s Head Publishing Press is in effect Marsha Swan, it’s a one woman operation and she’s an American lady, she’s living back in the States now. But it was a wonderful experience because it was 50/50 costs and profits (laughs) ‘profits’ but what it did was it just gave me an insight into the industry really from the grassroots up, literally from putting the first words on the page to write the book to once it was published I was the distribution wing (laughs) of the book, I mean I was literally walking into Waterstones and various book shops with it clutched in my sweaty palms and, you know, ‘Would you please put my book on your shelf’ and quite a lot of the shops did, you know, and the big chains, you know, they were good enough to take a wee punt on it. We only published 880 copies and it sold out and it eventually got picked up in the States by Harcourt so it had a happy ending of sorts. So it was hard work and I would much rather to have it being published by one of the big five publishers and then handed a cheque for a million quid and say, you know, go and write another five books but, you know, it doesn’t work that way for 95% of the writers. As I understand it roughly speaking 5% of published authors pay for the other 95% of writers to get published and when I say 5% we’re talking about the likes of James Patterson and J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown, the writers that come in for a lot of flak for being not marvellous writers in effect by the critics and particularly ... if it wasn’t for these people writing the kind of books and publishing the kind of books they do there’d be very, very few books on your book shelves and on your library shelves these days, you know. So yeah tough times at the moment but then I don’t think it was ever easy to get a book published and it depends hugely of course on the kind of book that you’re publishing, yeah.Padraic: Then another question, you started the blog when you co-published the second novel and on the first post it’s really clear that it’s a promotional tool for the novel.Declan: Absolutely yeah.Padraic: But in the year since then it’s really taken off, last month you’d 20,000 visits, you’ve interviewed a number of crime writers.Declan: Did I? (laughter) Oh wow.Padraic: So how has the blog worked out for you and how has that integrated into things like Green Streets?Declan The blog worked out terrific. I’ll just say like we didn’t have a penny to promote The Big O, literally not a red cent, and I had been doing some blogging for another company and I liked the idea of it, I like the immediacy of the publishing thing because I work as a journalist and even when you’re writing, you know, you write a piece, you send it in on a Tuesday, it might pop up in the paper on a Saturday, there’s still a delay I mean of four days and especially in the culture in which we live, this immediate gratification. So the idea of blogging is quite nice because you write a piece and you blog it and 30 seconds later it’s live to the world which can also be a bad thing (laughs), you know, blog in haste repent at leisure (laughter) as they say. But it was a promotional tool in part in order ... I mean nobody cared or cared even less than they do about Declan Burke and his novels so in effect what I did was I wanted to talk about ... there was quite a number of ... well I thought there was quite a number of Irish writers, crime writers, coming through writing some very, very good stuff. People will be very familiar with the name John Connolly, for example, and then perhaps Declan Hughes, Tana French, Juliette Parsons and Colin Bateman. When I started the blog I thought that, you know, if I got maybe 20 names and kind of piggyback what they were achieving particularly in the States to bring people to the blog so that therefore they would become of my own book and I was absolutely stunned not just by the number of Irish crime writers that were out there but the quality was absolutely fantastic. I was very, very pleasantly surprised. Very disappointed originally to find out that Cormac Millar, who is sitting among you, the handsome gentleman in the blue shirt, (laughter) had got there before me and had set up his website all about Irish crime fiction but one of the really nice things about blogging over the last, I don’t know what it is, 4 or 5 years now at this stage, has been that it’s completely the reverse almost of the newspaper industry, for example, where everybody is in immediate competition with one another. The bloggers and online website people, the community, the blogosphere as they call it, are incredibly helpful and friendly and welcoming and bend over backwards to help you out, whereas instead of kind of protecting our own little patch they’re throwing the ... the land is open to everybody to come and stake their own claim type of thing and there is no staking claims everybody is sharing the kind of same information. A simple example is I will tell the people who read my blog about Cormac Millar’s book and he will tell people who read his blog about my book as often it’s not the same people that’s reading the two blogs, the two websites. But there’s a nice ... there’s a lovely kind of crossover with ... there’s a couple of other Irish blogs now but there’s an incredible network and community across the world of various crime fiction/crime writing blogs and websites and that’s been one of the really nice aspects but I have to say I really enjoy doing it but if it hadn’t been for the explosion of quality, particularly in terms of Irish crime writing, then nobody would have come to read the book and the names I’ve mentioned along with those, the likes of Ken Bruen, I think I mentioned Tana French, Arlene Hunt, Jane Casey is a new name coming through, Conor Fitzgerald is a new name coming through, Kevin McCarthy. Really I could go on, Cormac himself actually, a very fine writer. I could go on and on. I would say there’s at least fifty Irish crime writers currently publishing. Now the quality is not sky high all the time, it can be patchy at times and that’s fine, that’s, you know. As John Connolly says if I can paraphrase John Connolly he says “95% of crime writing is shit but that’s because 95% of everything is shit” and if we’re lucky we get to read only the 5% so. If you want to know what to read Cormac Millar, he’s your man.Cormac: ThanksPadraic: So we should open this up to ... is there any more questions? Does anybody have anything they want to ask about or make a comment? I’ll keep going otherwise but it’s probably not fair.Participant 5: If there was one thing that keeps you going in writing what would that be, you know, with the novel? There’s probably more than one. (laughter)Declan: (laughs) Sometimes it just does come down to just one thing, you know, sometimes you’re hanging by a thread. I mean I work full-time and I work as a freelancer which is pretty, you know, it’s more time consuming that simply just the 9 to 5 so the days can be long and we have a baby girl so. I mean I need to get up at 5 in the morning to write from 5 till 7, that’s ... and then the house comes to live at 7 o’clock, if I don’t do it then it doesn’t ... so when the alarm goes off at 4.50 and sometimes you are lying in bed going, what was the ...? Why did I want to ...? (laughter) Or I knew there was ... and ultimately when all else falls away as it frequently does (laughs) it’s just words, it’s simply about messing with words, getting the words in the right order. And there have been days, not many of them, but there have been days when, you know, you’ve spent 2 maybe 3 hours if you’re lucky at the desk and you’ve written one sentence, one sentence, twelve, fifteen, twenty words long but it’s right, it’s good, it works. (laughs) That doesn’t sound like an awful lot but, you know, at some stages of writing a book that can be an awful lot, you know. I mean I think there’s an apocryphal story about Joyce running down one of the Parisian boulevards waving his cane in delight, you know, and asked he’d done a terrific day’s work, he’d written one word but it was the right word. The right word. (laughter) So yeah words in the right order and the best order you can put them, that’s the first reason and I think ultimately it’s why you keep plugging away. Also because of something like that you didn’t get it right that time so when you start on a new book it’s ‘this time’, ‘this time I’ll get it right’, ‘this time it’ll be ... it won’t be perfect but it’ll be really, really ...’ so this time next year I’ll be sitting here, well hopefully I’ll be sitting here, talking about my new book and how it’s not right and how I’m writing something new that’s going to fix all that and it’ll all be top notch so.Participant 6: Do you start off with an idea in the beginning or do things just come to you and you’ll start off thinking I might write about this and then you went talking about something totally different? Do you have a kind of rough plan at the start?Declan: Yes, yes and yes. Sorry? I didn’t catch that?Participant 6: Do you have a kind of rough plan at the start?Declan: Oh God I wish I did! And every time I start off I say this time I’m going to plot, I’m going to be really meticulous, at least I’m going to know what’ll happen in the first, second, third act but the problem is I sit down and I just like tinker around with words and I’ll write down a couple of ideas and off I’ll go. But yeah it generally starts with an idea. For example, this one, you know, what if a guy tried to blow up a hospital. Oh, that’s interesting to me, and you kind of go from there. As often it’s not for me it’ll be a setting, it’ll be a place, I’ll spot a place, oh that would be a fantastic place to set a scene or given the kind of books I write, that would be a fantastic place to kill a person, wouldn’t that be marvellous (laughter) to hang somebody from that particular ... (laughter). So yeah an idea, a setting, it could be one line, I mean it could be anything that kind of pops into your head and gives you enough impetus to sit down and write the next line or flesh out that particular place, that setting. Or just I ... as often as not you think well it’s a really good idea and then you start kind of fleshing it out slightly and then it just falls apart because, you know, maybe it’s a good idea for a short story maybe but not necessary for a novel or whatever. But that’s one of the things, every time I write a book and this is ... I’ve actually written about nine or ten, I mean I’ve only had four published, but every time I start off I completely forget about how bloody hard it is and how you get the original idea and you charge through the first 20/25/30,000 words and it’s going terrifically and then suddenly you start to, hmm, I should have thought this through a bit more, you know, I should have made out that ground plan as you say but things do occur to you as you go along and that’s one of the joys of it. That’s one of the flukes, that one thing tends to lead onto another and that’s really one of the ... and you’ve got to the 25,000 word mark and you say well what happens now and it has almost suggested itself to you and then the next 10,000 words are covered and then the next 10,000 words and it’s an evolving process and then you finish the first draft and you go back and you’re oh it’s complete rubbish, how did I think that was any good and you start to rework it and redraft it and more ideas, you know, more things will suggest itself. There was a creative writing teacher, he’s dead now unfortunately, he was fantastic. He wrote a couple of books. His name escapes me now I’m afraid but he basically said, you know, you have to trust your imagination and if you write a particular kind of story or write a particular line or whatever it is you may not know why you’ve written it at the time in the context of the piece but when you come back to redraft for example it’ll stand up in like an iceberg out of the story and say well that’s what the story is about, why didn’t I realise that the first time. And on top of that I should also say that, you know, every writer has their own method, every writer has their own reason for writing and every writer will get across the finishing line in their own way, you know, it’s one of the wonderful things why it makes talking to the writers about books so interesting because there is no single formula, there is no single magic way of doing it, you know.Participant 6: Yeah.Participant 7: Concerns with the language and so on are, you know, very kind of literary fiction why do you put what you’re doing into crime fiction? What is the attraction for you about crime fiction?Declan: The attraction for crime fiction, look that’s quite a loaded question (laughter), if we were at a crime fiction convention now you’d probably be hounded out of the room and thrown into a pond to see did you float. Participant 7: Well Graham Greene is a major American writer ...Declan: Pardon?Participant 7: ... well Graham Greene is a major American writer, much better than Michael Herr for instance.Declan: Well he is, he is.Participant 7: So I mean I don’t think Graham Greene started off with crime fiction but it just ...Declan: He did. I think Graham Greene is part of the problem why crime fiction is not taken as seriously, in my opinion, as it should be. I mean he referred to his crime narratives as his entertainments (laughter) which is a rather dismissive term I would have thought. And to my mind his entertainments are far more interesting than his more heavy handed theses on whether, you know, God cares about Graham Greene or not but I don’t see absolutely any problem or any ... it’s not a juxtaposition for me, crime fiction and quality of language, I mean I really don’t ... you know I write crime narratives.Participant 7: No sorry could ... my question isn’t to justify why you’re in crime fiction but what the attraction of crime fiction is for you ...Declan: For me?Participant 7: ... rather than make you justify why you’re attracted to it.Declan: The attraction of writing it or of reading it or ...?Participant 7: Yeah, the attraction of doing it, yeah.Declan: Right, well the attraction of when I first set out was that I thought it was easy to do (laughs), that’s what I thought at the time. I suppose it is easy to do. I mean it’s easy to do any kind of book, you know, it’s difficult to do a good book but that’s neither here or there. Crime fiction tends to follow a fairly ... well, you know, it’s a time honoured narrative art, there’s usually three acts, you know, and it’s that whole order/disorder/order generally and it runs all the way back to classical Greek tragedy, for example. And if it survived 3,500 years then there’s probably not an awful lot wrong with that basic structure. So once you have that structure that’s fine but that’s just a framework, you know. It’s what you do with that and for me what crime fiction and implicit in what I’m saying is well written crime fiction, James Lee Burke that you’ve mentioned is a very good example of a guy who really knows his way around a sentence, you know. Cormac McCarthy, for example, has turned to writing crime narratives. James Ellroy is superb. Elmore Leonard in his kind of more conversational vernacular style is to me as good a writer as any of the literary path. So what crime fiction that, you know, implicitly embodies great writing does is that it tends to broach subjects that are taboo quicker than literary fiction does. It tends to get to topics sooner. It tends to be more timely and relevant. It tends to be an awful lot more exciting than the literary fiction. Now a lot of crime fiction tends to sacrifice language for example, it tends to sacrifice aspects that literary fiction would hold sacred. Crime fiction tends to concentrate on plot, character much more than language we’ll say, there’s a different primacy given to each level. But then, you know, to go back to John Connolly’s 95% of everything is shit to me the great writers, the great crime writers, are on the same par as the great literary writers, past and present, you know. Like I think Hemingway, for example, I think Raymond Chandler is a Hemingway with a sense of humour so I mean I don’t know if you’ve read Raymond Chandler or not but ...Participant: Yes.Declan: Hemingway is a wonderful stylist but he’s dry as a bone, you know, you’re not going to ‘oh I’m really in the mood to be entertained now I think I’m going to read some Hemingway’ (laughter) no, you’re not, you’re going to pick up a Chandler, you know, and you’re going to get a really good story, you’re going to get a fascinating insight into a time and a place, you’re going to get a connection between low level criminality and the highest levels of marbled justice and you’re going to giggle at least once a page and that’s not a bad average.Padraic: Okay folks we’re going to have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming along and thanks to Declan for coming in and talking to us.Declan: Well thank you everybody for coming along as well. (clapping) Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
