Mais, Il Est Le Plus Populaire de L'autre Côté de La Sheugh

JG Ballard has always been more respected in France than in England (or America) where - until very recently - he was still considered to be a minor science fiction writer. Fortunately that is now changing and when the news slipped out last autumn that Ballard had terminal cancer a serious reappraisal began of Ballard's life and work. I finished Ballard's final book The Miracles of Life in the wee hours of this morning. It's an episodic autobiography which fills in the details he left out of his biographical novels Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women. Miracles of Life of course talks about his time in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Shanghai, but also about his early struggles with his sanity, the death of his young wife, his nasty feud with Kingsley Amis, the invective heaped upon him after the publication of Crash and his rather skeptical attitude towards his 'home' country. It's a great book, written with a very clear eye in dispassionate prose. I'm a Ballard completist, having read every one of his novels, essay and short story collections. The fact that this is the very last one is bitter sweet.

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I was listening to Radio 4 a few weeks ago and the director of the opera Dr. Atomic was on talking about how Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman etc. were all "war criminals" for working on the Manhattan project and how Japan would have surrendered anyway without the A Bomb being dropped. I suppose this is now what is taught in the core curriculum of UK schools. Ballard of course has no time for this thesis and points out in Miracles of Life that but for the A bombs he and all the prisoners in the Shanghai camp would have been massacred along with millions of Chinese civilians in and around Shanghai since the Japanese Imperial Army in China had plans to fight to the last man and kill as many people as possible. It was only the dropping of the atomic bombs that forced Hirohito to surrender the Imperial forces en masse (and even on the day of the broadcast there was an attempted coup) saving hundreds of thousands of allied troops and millions of Japanese and Chinese lives. The dropping of the bombs was a terrible thing, but, Ballard argues, it prevented an even more terrible thing.

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If you haven't read any Ballard, Empire of the Sun is a good place to start but my favourite era is the period 1973 - 1979 when he produced four extraordinary novels: Crash, Concrete Island, High Rise and The Unlimited Dream Company which I'd be happy to talk about in the comments below.

More Wicked Dope on Fitty G (Is That What The Kids Say?)

The Publishers Weekly review of Fifty Grand came out this week. It's a very nice review but I have to warn anyone who reads it below that it is rich in SPOILAGE. You have been told. If you want to get 50G you can preorder it on Amazon.com for an April delivery and it should be in most chains and mystery bookstores in May. The picture to the right is from the UK paperback original edition which will be out in July. If you're a tightwad (er, financially strapped) and you're feeling lucky I'll be giving away some first edition hardbacks in May in exchange for an Amazon review.

Fifty Grand Adrian McKinty. Holt, $25 (320p) ISBN 978-0-8050-8900-4

Irish crime writer McKinty (The Bloomsday Dead) delivers an intelligent novel of suspense about cultural identity. After a hit-and-run driver kills Alberto Suarez, a Cuban defector who’s been working as a rodent exterminator in Fairview, Colo., his daughter, Mercado, a talented young Havana cop, feels duty bound to avenge his death. She obtains a visa to Mexico City under a false pretext and later slips across the U.S. border to get to Fairview, which has become the happening place for the Hollywood cognoscenti. Since someone has to clean up after the wild parties, drugs and general debauchery that keep the town’s underground economy bustling, Mercado joins the silent community of illegal workers living on “Wetback Mountain.” As she investigates her father’s death, she discovers that his secrets, like those of Fairview itself, were far more extensive than she could have realized. In trademark fashion, McKinty winds up his provocative tale with a violent and memorable final act. (May)

A Tizzy in Tazzy

I just spent a pleasant 48 hours in Hobart, the capital and largest city of Tasmania. It's a small place with a charming boat-filled harbour, at least 9 bookshops, a dozen good fish restaurants and a few decent pubs, all of which, though, close at 11pm. (Last night I had to go to a rather seedy casino to get an after hours drink.) Hobart is like a cross between Inverness and Wellington, New Zealand, though not quite as happening as either Wellington or Inverness which may surprise residents of those relatively sleepy places. I liked it a lot though as I like most port cities. And the harbour isn't just a marina but has real ships in there including a Russian icebreaker, a French Antarctic research vessel and the Sea Shepherd cutter Steve Irwin. I didn't really know much about the Sea Shepherds before coming here but apparently they are an organisation militantly opposed to whaling - an aquatic version of the Animal Liberation Front, seemingly more violent than either Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. A crewman proudly talked about the number of boats they had sunk or otherwise put out of action which rubbed me completely the wrong way as did their version of the skull and crossbones disturbingly flying from the prow and main deck. (I'm from a naval family, so perhaps I'm a little too sensitive about this.) Anyway, the Steve Irwin was an interesting vessel and their hearts are definitely in the right place if not their piratical tactics.

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On a happier subject I walked south out of Hobart to the town of Taroona where Tazzy's very own royal (on nearly as many Aussie gossip mags as Nicole Kidman or Katie Holmes) - Princess Mary of Denmark was born and raised. It was a nice little walk to Taroona and got the blood flowing, though it poured mercilessly on me the entire trip back to Hobart. On my return, for professional reasons, I checked out the bookstores, used and new and got a great Peter Matthiessen travel book about Africa and a Graham Greene biography. Locally though, the brilliant Richard Flanagan and knitting books seem to be whats popular.

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But this isn't a NY Times 36 hours in Phoenix feature. I didn't really do a serious investigation, just wandered and pretty much did my own thing. I was surprised to find a good Cambodian restaurant where I had lunch and an even better Iranian place where I had dinner. I also ate at a curry house frequented by the Indian cricket team, which was ok and at a floating fish and chip barge which was delicious. The Tasmanians are a laconic, self depreciating and funny lot and the Belgian-Flemish couple I met up with and went searching for a late night watering hole with were also pretty funny too (and brave to the point of foolhardiness if half of their What We Smuggled Into Beijing story is true).

I Am Your Bold Deceiver

A comment thread on Peter Rozovsky's site Detectives Beyond Borders has finally driven me to take action about something that's been bothering me since my move to Australia. Bagels. Here in Melbourne they are sold by a man called Mr. Glick who foists a baked roll with a hole in the middle of it on an unsuspecting populace. Mr. Glick is a master of the challah, but his bagels are an insult to the name. They have no density or chewiness or crunchiness or any of the qualities that make up a decent H&H or Zabar's NY style bagel. They are imposters, frauds, sorry excuses even for a roll. I haven't wanted to rock the boat since I moved here, but I have been silent too long. As Edmund Burke famously said "all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." Mr Glick (or Glicks Junior) if you can't make a decent bagel please stop selling those cheap knockoff ones which sully the name of a fine food. As my old grandmother never used to say: "Dershtikt zolstu veren!"

Du hast mich gefragt und ich habe nichts gesagt

I got news over the weekend that the Dead trilogy has been sold to a German press by Simon and Schuster. So soon you'll be able to read Dead I Well May Be in German, French, Russian, Japanese, Danish, Serbo-Croat and Bulgarian. Marco and I are trying to get an Italian translation off the ground and thanks to the good people of Serpents Tail you can get the book in the whole of the British Commonwealth. You can also get it as an audio from audible.com or as a kindle edition from Amazon. One of the few places you can't get a new copy of Dead I Well May Be is the United States where the book has been out of print since last year. Strangely Simon and Schuster still keep The Dead Yard and Bloomsday Dead in print - the second and third parts of the trilogy, but not the first. I don't pretend to understand the publishing world but this does seem odd to me.

We Have Our Winners!

Thank you every one for entering the Fifty Grand competition and to those who didn't win I send commiserations and a whiff of consolation - I will be giving away a couple of the actual first edition hardback books in May. Anyway enough talk about those losers! Lets talk about winners. The correct answer was: 61. I had 61 drinks at the Ambos Mundos hotel in the composition of the first five chapters of Fifty Grand which came to a staggering bar bill of over 300 dollars. An obscene amount of money in Cuban terms. (Hangs head in shame). So who wins? Well no one really got that close, but the four closest were Michael Stone, Bookwitch, Cavalieresq and Alan Buckingham. Just missing out were Catherine Gardner, Keith Rawson, Leatherdykeuk and Declan Burke (which is just as well because Declan has actually been drinking with me and people might have shouted "fix!")

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Ok I need email addresses from all four of you. As soon I get an email address (and thus a postal address) the books will be winging their way by airmail to your humble or not so humble abode. Michael and Miss Witch I know you have blogs but I couldn't figure out what your email addresses were (see what happens when you get all fancy and switch to live journal?) I feel I should give a shout out to Liam and Seana who were the most wrong, and a final thank you to everyone who played and didn't win - better luck next time, est queadam fiere voluptas.

It Is Better To Giveth Than Receiveth

Or so they sayeth. Anyhoo...about that Fifty Grand giveaway competition I promised in the last post. First some background: In 2007 I went for a vacation to Cuba, primarily to visit Ernest Hemingway's house (right), a trip I have talked about in some length here. However I soon found that Havana was a very amenable place to get some writing done and without having a subject in mind or really with any clear idea where the book was going I ended up writing the first five chapters of Fifty Grand in long hand at the piano bar of the Ambos Mundos hotel. The reason I picked the bar of the Ambos Mundos was because legend had that it that that's where Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls and I was kind of hoping that some of the magic would rub off. It didn't. Not really. 50 G is nothing like a book Hemingway would have written, however the geography did get me started and those 5 chapters are largely unchanged in the final book
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Anyway as I was writing I was making notes in my journal and along the margins I noted what drinks I had ordered and how much they cost. That gave me the idea for this book give away. The competition my friends is this: How many drinks did I have in the composition of the first five chapters of 50G? The four people closest to the correct answer (and there is one distinct double figure answer that has been checked by my good lady wife) will be airmailed one of these incredibly rare signed ARCs of Fifty Grand.
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Coupla clues: 1) the Ambos Mundos is an expensive place and I had to make the drinks last a while. 2) I drank four different things: coffee, beer, mojitos and cuba libres - I 'm after the total of all the drinks I had in the writing of those five chapters...Is all that clear? Hope so. The closing date for this competition will be Monday 9th March 8pm Melbourne time, which is 9am in the UK and 4 am on the Eastern Seaboard of North America. Good luck and don't forget your email address or click the email follow on if you have a google ID.
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The final word: what do I get out of this? Well I'd appreciate it if the winners of the book would review me on Amazon or Goodreads or Amazon UK or your own blog. Doesn't have to be a good review, just a review would really help. Thanks a million.

This Is Adrian For God's Sake Why Would He Want To Destroy The World?

I wouldn't but with Fifty Grand lingering around the half million mark in Amazon sales (which means that there are half a million things selling better) the banshee of panic has descended upon the McKinty household. How can I get the book to inch up the Amazon rankings? In these difficult times it's all about marketing (as it is in not difficult times too) and as I see it there are five main approaches:

1. Attempt To Jump on a Bandwagon
What do you think the pic to the right is all about about from just being adorable?
2. Pick A Fight
I'm done with soft targets like Bono and Abba, I'm going into the hornet's nest. President Amadinnerjacket of Iran - your beard sucks! You heard me right pal, I could grow a better beard on a weekend bender to Glasgow than you've apparently been able to grow in your whole life. What do you say to that scrofula face? Hey, any chance of an attention grabbing (but non lethal) fatwah?...And if that doesn't work just wait till you hear what I have to say about the King of Thailand
3. Generate Fake Controversy
Did I mention that I wrote this book while injecting Alex Rodriguez with steroids, while he was partying with Madonna at a naked debauch at Rush Limbaugh's house? I didn't? Well I just have.
4. Demonstrate How Much Better Your Product Is Than The Competition's
See the thing about that Che movie is that Soderberg never actually visited Cuba. Or if he did (I cant be bothered to do the research on this) he got shown round a series of Potemkin villages and probably stayed at the Hotel Nacional which is run by the freakin Cuban secret police. Whereas I lived the life, man, got drunk with real Cubans, bribed real Cuban cops, got knocked over by a real Cuban car and got solicited by thousands of real Cuban hookers, etc. etc.
5. Have a Competition That Gives Away Books
Ok lets try that one then. My box of galleys came and I reckon I can afford to give away about four of them (I'd give away them all but the postage from Oz is shocking). Therefore my next post will be that long delayed and promised signed Fifty Grand ARC giveaway, so if you want to blag a signed galley stay tuned. Oh and what the hell a book to the person who can ID who's speaking in the title quote for this post.