Adrian McKinty and Declan Burke made for an awesome double act at last night's No Alibis event. Both writers opted not to read from the books they were there to launch (McKinty's Falling Glass and Burke's Absolute Zero Cool). Instead they entertained the audience with a frank and oft times scathing dialogue about the state of the modern publishing model. A lot of what was said I wouldn't dare write about here for fear that I might be sued for libel. What I can tell you is that it was a fascinating insight into the minds of a pair of excellent writers who are masters of their trade.
Incidentally, Stuart Neville, David Park and Andrew Pepper were among the crowd. I wish I had the presence of mind to snap a few pics but I haven't been at the top of my game this week. I'm sure they'll pop up on the No Alibis website and/or Facebook page at some point. I'll post a link when they do.
If you didn't get to the event you should make it up to yourself by buying Falling Glass and Absolute Zero Cool as soon as humanly possible. Both books are a master class in crime fiction that doesn't conform to the old and tired model.
Showing posts with label Andrew Pepper. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Andrew Pepper. Show all posts
Friday, 19 August 2011
Wednesday, 1 June 2011
Andrew Pepper at No Alibis Tonight!
No Alibis invite you to celebrate the launch of Andrew Pepper's latest Pyke novel, BLOODY WINTER, on Wednesday 1st June at 6:30PM.
Andrew Pepper is a lecturer in American Writing and Contemporary Crime Fiction at Queen's University, Belfast. His first novel, THE LAST DAYS OF NEWGATE, was shortlisted for the CWA NEW BLOOD AWARD. He lives in Belfast with his partner and children.
A body is discovered in a ditch outside the town of Dundrum in County Tipperary. The local land agent tells Knox, a young Irish policeman with divided loyalties, that it is the body of a vagrant and that the landowner Lord Cornwallis wants the case dealt with swiftly and quietly. The potato crop has failed for a second time and the Irish people are dying in their thousands. However when Knox examines the corpse it is clear that this man died wearing a Saville Row suit. Keeping his investigations secret, it becomes clear to Knox that the stranger came from London. Three months earlier Detective Inspector Pyke receives a letter from the daughter of a family friend. She has married a wealthy industrialist who owns ironworks in Merthyd Tydfil and her son has been kidnapped. Lured by the promise of a substantial fee and wanting to escape the tensions of Scotland Yard, Pyke agrees to go to Wales to investigate. There, he discovers a town riven with social discord following the brutal suppression of a workers strike and the importation of cheap Irish labour. The kidnapping is linked to a group of rebels but Pyke soon begins to suspect the case is not as clear cut as it seems. What are the links between the rebellion in Wales and the unrest in Ireland, and has Pyke finally bitten off more than he can chew?
To book your spot, email David, or call the shop on 9031 9607.
Monday, 27 October 2008
An Interview - Andrew Pepper
Andrew Pepper is the author of a series of crime novels set in mid nineteenth-century London featuring Pyke including The Last Days of Newgate (2006), The Revenge of Captain Paine (2007) and Kill-Devil and Water (2008). He lectures in English and American writing at Queen’s University Belfast.
Q1. What are you writing at the minute?
A new Pyke novel that I’m provisionally calling London Descending (though this has yet to meet with publisher approval!). Pyke has joined the Metropolitan Police’s newly formed Detective Branch as Inspector and his new role, and a violent robbery-gone-badly-wrong, eventually bring him into confrontation with figures in the police force and the shadowy links between church and state.
Q2. Can you give us an idea of Andrew Pepper’s typical up-to-the-armpits-in-ideas-and-time writing day?
When I get a whole day to write, which is a rarity, I like to be at my desk, and PC, by nine in the morning and write until I can’t see straight anymore; could be mid-afternoon, could be sometime into the night. I have two or three note books on the go, where I scribble down ideas, passages, plot structure, character notes etc., together with files of notes on particular subjects I’ve had to research (i.e. for the current novel, the Metropolitan police, the Irish in London, the Anglican and Catholic churches in London, witchcraft, Satanic practices etc.) and piles upon piles of books that I might need to consult. I tidy up when things start to smell.
Q3. What do you do when you’re not writing?
My real job is lecturing in English at Queen’s so I have to fit in my writing as and when time becomes available. I suspect it’s like that for a lot of writers, at least the ones who aren’t up there nudging the Pattersons and Connellys off the shelf space. When I’m neither at work nor writing you might find me in the pub.
Q4. Any advice for a greenhorn trying to break into the crime fiction scene?
Publishers are odd, fickle creatures: they seem to want new crime novels and authors to be both wholly original and just like so-and-so. Since this is technically impossible, it’s to try and forget what publishers want and try and write something that excites you, because if it doesn’t excite you it won’t excite anything else. I’ve tried to learn to listen to my instincts: when the writing is going well, you can just feel it – it can be very exhilarating. But when it isn’t, you have to stop and try and figure out what has gone wrong. Oh, and get an agent. Obviously. Which is almost as hard as finding a publisher.
Q5. Which crime writers have impressed you this year?
Denise Mina & Brian McGilloway. I’ve just finished Derek Raymond’s I was Dora Suarez which was re-issued this year by Serpent’s Tail and is insanely brilliant. The trio of U.S. crime writers who contributed to The Wire – Pelecanos, Lehane and Price – deserve a mention but generally I think the assumption that American crime writing is necessarily better, more innovative, more daring etc. than British and/or Irish and/or European crime writing needs to be consigned to the waste bin.
Q6. What are you reading right now?
The Terrorists by Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo.
Q7. Plans for the future?
I’m going to write two more Pyke novel; one, provisionally called London Descending (described above) set in 1844 and the other, set two years later in 1846 in which Pyke returns to Ireland. From the year, you can perhaps guess the context. As an English writer with an English character, I step into that particular arena with extreme caution.
Q8. With regards to your writing career to date, would you do anything differently?
I’d like to have more time to write the novels. I know I’m incredibly lucky to be published at all but the notion that a-book-every-year is sustainable for a writer in the long term seems an absurdity to me, as the quality will inevitably diminish over time. I’d also like to devote more time and energy into marketing and publicising my novels but unfortunately writing them, and doing my job, takes up every working hour.
Q9. Do you fancy sharing your worst writing experience?
No writing experience is intrinsically ‘bad’ but carrying on with a bad idea and trying to write through the pain can feel like pushing a fat man in a shopping trolley through a bog. I’ve written some dire novels (unpublished of course) in the past but as terrible as they are, nowadays with the passing of the years I can even look at them with some modicum of affection.
Q10. Anything you want to say that I haven’t asked you about?
That just about covers it.
“It is a problem with literary imitations that they can never be as untypical or as groundbreaking as their originals… But Andrew Pepper’s Kill-Devil and Water is unusually successful as Dickensian narrative…. Pepper’s novel, like the best crime writing in a contemporary setting, is tough on the institutional causes of crime: slavery, pornography, prostitution. Set partly in nineteenth century Jamaica, partly in London, its intricate plot hinges on mistaken or mislaid identities, something which almost all faux-Victorian crime novels, set in an era before DNA testing and computerized data, exploit, and the relationship between identity, family and race is especially well done. In its urgency and rawness – and the disturbing moral ambiguity it shares with the original Newgate novels – Kill-Devil and Water goes further than simply clever and diverting appropriation.” TLS (13.08.08)
Q1. What are you writing at the minute?
A new Pyke novel that I’m provisionally calling London Descending (though this has yet to meet with publisher approval!). Pyke has joined the Metropolitan Police’s newly formed Detective Branch as Inspector and his new role, and a violent robbery-gone-badly-wrong, eventually bring him into confrontation with figures in the police force and the shadowy links between church and state.
Q2. Can you give us an idea of Andrew Pepper’s typical up-to-the-armpits-in-ideas-and-time writing day?
When I get a whole day to write, which is a rarity, I like to be at my desk, and PC, by nine in the morning and write until I can’t see straight anymore; could be mid-afternoon, could be sometime into the night. I have two or three note books on the go, where I scribble down ideas, passages, plot structure, character notes etc., together with files of notes on particular subjects I’ve had to research (i.e. for the current novel, the Metropolitan police, the Irish in London, the Anglican and Catholic churches in London, witchcraft, Satanic practices etc.) and piles upon piles of books that I might need to consult. I tidy up when things start to smell.
Q3. What do you do when you’re not writing?
My real job is lecturing in English at Queen’s so I have to fit in my writing as and when time becomes available. I suspect it’s like that for a lot of writers, at least the ones who aren’t up there nudging the Pattersons and Connellys off the shelf space. When I’m neither at work nor writing you might find me in the pub.
Q4. Any advice for a greenhorn trying to break into the crime fiction scene?
Publishers are odd, fickle creatures: they seem to want new crime novels and authors to be both wholly original and just like so-and-so. Since this is technically impossible, it’s to try and forget what publishers want and try and write something that excites you, because if it doesn’t excite you it won’t excite anything else. I’ve tried to learn to listen to my instincts: when the writing is going well, you can just feel it – it can be very exhilarating. But when it isn’t, you have to stop and try and figure out what has gone wrong. Oh, and get an agent. Obviously. Which is almost as hard as finding a publisher.
Q5. Which crime writers have impressed you this year?
Denise Mina & Brian McGilloway. I’ve just finished Derek Raymond’s I was Dora Suarez which was re-issued this year by Serpent’s Tail and is insanely brilliant. The trio of U.S. crime writers who contributed to The Wire – Pelecanos, Lehane and Price – deserve a mention but generally I think the assumption that American crime writing is necessarily better, more innovative, more daring etc. than British and/or Irish and/or European crime writing needs to be consigned to the waste bin.
Q6. What are you reading right now?
The Terrorists by Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo.
Q7. Plans for the future?
I’m going to write two more Pyke novel; one, provisionally called London Descending (described above) set in 1844 and the other, set two years later in 1846 in which Pyke returns to Ireland. From the year, you can perhaps guess the context. As an English writer with an English character, I step into that particular arena with extreme caution.
Q8. With regards to your writing career to date, would you do anything differently?
I’d like to have more time to write the novels. I know I’m incredibly lucky to be published at all but the notion that a-book-every-year is sustainable for a writer in the long term seems an absurdity to me, as the quality will inevitably diminish over time. I’d also like to devote more time and energy into marketing and publicising my novels but unfortunately writing them, and doing my job, takes up every working hour.
Q9. Do you fancy sharing your worst writing experience?
No writing experience is intrinsically ‘bad’ but carrying on with a bad idea and trying to write through the pain can feel like pushing a fat man in a shopping trolley through a bog. I’ve written some dire novels (unpublished of course) in the past but as terrible as they are, nowadays with the passing of the years I can even look at them with some modicum of affection.
Q10. Anything you want to say that I haven’t asked you about?
That just about covers it.
Thank you, Andrew Pepper!
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