A Final Pitch

This is going to be my last post on The Cold Cold Ground for a long while. If there's one thing I really hate doing it's shilling for myself, but I'll have a valiant last stab at it: 

...

While The Cold Cold Ground is a crime novel it's also an attempt to capture a culture that will be completely unknown to readers who didn't grow up in Northern Ireland in the 70's and 80's. You might think you know about N. Ireland in that period but you don't. With on or two important exceptions the stuff you've read or seen has all been lies, half truths and propaganda. As far as I know this is the first book ever to look at extraordinary situation of a Catholic policeman in the RUC in the 1980's and to explore the unbelievable pressures he would have been under. No copper anywhere ever had as tough a job as that of policing Belfast in the spring and summer of 1981. (Detroit? The South Bronx? Picnics. At least once you were home you were safe.) And if you were a smart, sensitive and lippy peeler you just might have ended up like Sean Duffy in The Cold Cold Ground. If you haven't got the book yet there's nothing more that I can say to convince you, but here are representative views of some of the British and Irish press: 

"If Raymond Chandler had grown up in Northern Ireland, The Cold Cold Ground is what he would have written." --Peter Millar, The Times 

"Adrian McKinty is fast gaining a reputation as the finest of the new generation of Irish crime writers, and it's easy to see why on the evidence of this novel, the first in a projected trilogy of police procedurals." --Doug Johnstone, The Glasgow Herald

"He manages to catch the brooding atmosphere of the 1980s and to tell a ripping yarn at the same time. There will be many readers waiting for the next adventure of the dashing and intrepid Sergeant Duffy." --Maurice Hays, The Irish Independent

"What makes McKinty a cut above the rest is the quality of his prose. His driven, spat-out sentences are more accessible than James Ellroy's edge-of-reason staccato, and he can be lyric. The sound of a riot is "the distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship".

The names of David Peace and Ellroy are evoked too often in relation to young crime writers, but McKinty shares their method of using the past as a template for the present. The stories and textures may belong to a different period, but the power of technique and intent makes of them the here and now.

There's food for thought in McKinty's writing, but he is careful not to lose the force of his narrative in introspection. The Cold Cold Ground is a crime novel, fast-paced, intricate and genre to the core." --Eoin McNamee, The Guardian.

The Cold Cold Ground will be published in Australia next week. At the Fair Dinkum Crime Blog, Bernadette gave the book four stars, while Jon Page at Bite the Book said: "No exaggeration, this is one of the best crime novels I have ever read. McKinty’s last book, FALLING GLASS, was superb but THE COLD, COLD GROUND blew me utterly away. It is easily his best book to date."

...

So that's the pitch. I know many of you reading this haven't bought the book. Well if you like what I do on this blog I can only suggest that you'll really like what I do in Cold Cold. I'm a professional novelist and I save the good stuff for the books. That after all is how I make my living. 

...

If you do get The Cold Cold Ground in print, e book or audio form I'd appreciate a review if you can spare the time. 

...

Finally I'm heading out of town for the long weekend so I wont be able to respond to comments until Monday night, but I will read all comments when I get back. 

...

Slainte. Go raibh míle maith agaibh as bhur gcúnamh.

Dont Start With The Moral Objections You Blue Peter Badge Wearing Ponce: Alan Moore's New Hero

Like a sad sack supporting character from the Big Bang Theory much of my information about the outside world comes from the guy who runs the comic book shop on Chapel Street. It was he who informed me that Alan Moore (Watchman, V For Vendetta, Swamp Thing, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen)'s new comic League III 2009 will feature Malcolm Tucker as one of its lead characters. It's going to be fascinating to see what Moore does with Tucker who will be reprising his role as chief enforcer for the fictional PM Tom Rudd. Apparently the US President will be Jed Bartlett in this universe so I for one am hoping for a showdown between Tucker and either Toby or Josh or both of them. If you don't know who Malcolm Tucker is here's a little primer of the man in action. Play this at work I dare you:

Why Most Crime Novels Are Bad Part 2

good role model

Last week I did a little post on why I thought most crime novels were terrible. As a sometime crime reviewer for the press I see a lot of crime fiction and most of the ones that I am forced to read are beyond awful. I do self select good novels to read on my own time but in general the books that are mass marketed to the public are artistically worthless with recycled plots, stereotypical characters, ugly prose and a depressing lack of humour. The key to these books success is heavy marketing by publishers and a supine, unadventurous public. Of course there are good novels in amongst the tat but even good novelists fall into the success trap by turning their creation into a series which eventually leads to diminishing returns. As I discovered in the comments under my post last week there are many noble exceptions to this rule and there are  authors who fight the good fight and use their intelligence and creativity to keep their series fresh. But I wonder if this is really the best use of that intelligence and creativity. Instead of writing book #14 in the Bumrash and Crabby mysteries perhaps these successful novelists should take a long look in the mirror and try something original, experimental and different - something that would shake their readers up a bit and make them think. Something that would really challenge them as a writer and perhaps could be looked at 100 years from now as a really interesting 
contribution to the culture. 
...
This thought came to me last night when I was reading the new Michel Houellebecq novel The Map And The Territory (not, alas, as funny or as biting as Atomised) when I came upon this defintion of an artist: 

bad role model

To be an artist in his view, was above all, to be someone submissive. Someone who submitted himself to mysterious, unpredictable messages, messages which commanded you to take a path in an imperious and categorical manner without the slightest possibility of escape (except by losing any notion of integrity and self respect). These messages could involve destroying a work, or even an entire body of work, to set off in a radically new direction, or even occasionally no direction at all without any project or end point in mind.


I like this idea very much. Why not just say no to the publishers who want you to write a book a year for twenty years. All the worst offenders I can think of in this field are rich beyond the dreams of avarice and have provided for their kids and grandkids many times over. Why not just stop and take some time to think. Move to Alaska for a year or Detroit or India. Get away from your comfort zone. Learn a bit about the world. Learn a bit about yourself. Listen to the noise. Listen to the silence. And, to quote Mick Jagger, sometimes give the public what they need instead of always what they want. 

Handicapping The Oscars

I've seen most of the films up for Best Picture this year (the exceptions are The Artist and War Horse) so I thought I'd have a go at tipping the race. If you don't like the Oscars but you're a man of a certain age, you'll still enjoy the clip of Carla Bruni right. 


2/5 The Artist: The five thousand crinklies who make up the Motion Picture Academy will feel good about themselves if they vote for a silent movie that has a dog in it. 
3:1 The Descendants: Goerge Clooney is popular in Hollywood and Alexander Payne is a serious director. This could be the perfect pairing. 
4:1 Hugo: I thought the plot was a bit iffy and the film on the slow side but its got everything an aging Oscar vote will like: Martin Scorsese, Paris, an homage to old films, a curious boy, and another dog. (And there's a blink and you'll miss it cameo of James Joyce and Picasso). 
8:1 Midnight In Paris: I thought this was ok. Its essentially a piece of fluff and wouldn't have got a nomination were the director not Woody Allen. Again the Paris setting will appeal and although there's no dog there is a rather fetching Carla Bruni.  Picasso appears in this one too.
10:1 War Horse: This seems like sentimental rubbish, but Spielberg made it and they love Spielberg and its got a French and English setting which is somehow considered classy. Many horses and a few dogs. 
20:1 The Help: A dull witted heavy handed flick about race and class for the Oprah loving demo. I wouldn't have given this a hope in hell if the Academy hadn't once given Best Picture to Driving Miss Daisy (over Field of Dreams, if I recall correctly). A couple of cameo dogs.
25:1 Moneyball: A solid baseball movie with an excellent Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill. I'm only rating this low on the pecking order because I don't think Academy voters will understand it. Also no Paris or dogs or horses. 
30:1 The Tree Of Life: I love Terry Malick and his mad mad ways but this one was too silly for me. I think Academy voters will sleep through the preview DVD. There are a couple of cute dinosaurs which are vaguely dog like.
50:1 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: a hipster wankfest that will appeal to no one living outside of Brooklyn Heights.

Hugo

Yes he was the Man With The Golden Gun but he also
fought the commies in the Winter War of 1940 and was
in the SAS/Long Range Desert Group giving Rommel
a bloody nose in a little thing called WW2

Martin Scorsese's Hugo is a film for cinephile uncles who want to take their nephews to see something at the movies. If you're a movie buff or a Scorsese fanboy you'll like Hugo. If you're a kid you might be pretty bored. The film was designed to be critic proof because it's about a "neglected" pioneer of silent cinema, but that's merely a canard as the script could function without any mention of cinema at all. Hugo is an orphan boy who lives in the clock tower of a Parisian train station in the twenties. He meets a girl who helps him unravel the secret of the automaton his father found in a museum before he died. Improbably the girl's adopted father, Georges Melies, built the machine. And, er, that's about it really. Although it's based on a deep, visually arresting, award winning novel, I don't think Hugo quite works as a story and despite being shot in 3D (or perhaps because of the 3D) the film has an inert, two dimensional lifelessness about it which the 2D book somehow did not have. The saving grace for me was the acting which was pretty good. Sasha Baron Cohen stood out and it was nice seeing Christopher Lee in his 272nd film (yes you read that correctly). 
...
The story I suppose is the letdown. I'm willing to overlook all the enormous coincidences that kept the plot rolling along (because its a kids movie) but maybe one of those critics who raved about it on Rotten Tomatoes can explain to me how Georges Melies claimed to have died in the war but was known to have made and shown films that failed after the war...I can't understand that one at all; I may want to fake my own death eventually but I'm not going to say that I died on 9/11. This may seem like a nitpicky point but its symptomatic of the meandering, threadless plot. And really a film about a boy living in a time piece should have a script that runs like clockwork dontcha think? 
...
Don't please misunderstand me, Hugo is not awful (and dear God if its a choice between this and Alvin and the Chipmunks 3 pick this) but it aint the masterpiece some reviewers are sayin it is. We want all Scorsese to do well, he made Taxi Driver and Goodfellas for heavens sake, but the truth is that he hasn't made a really good film since 1995. I know the critics will tell you otherwise, but they're all wrong. 
...
Sir Christopher Lee's next film is Peter Jackson's The Hobbit and he's got a couple scheduled after that. Why does he keeping doing it at his age? Because he's an old school hard working badass British thesp, thats why. 

The Times Weighs In On The Cold Cold Ground

The London Times (still I think the paper of record in the UK) weighed in on The Cold Cold Ground on Saturday. The piece was written by the well read and perspicacious Peter Millar. The first line of the review is funny but its the last line that is the killer: 
..
Times, The (London, England) - Saturday, January 14, 2012

Author: Peter Millar
...
The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty 
Serpent's Tail, 352pp £12.99 £11.69 
...
When I was growing up in Northern Ireland there were two very rare species: Catholic policemen, and people who left as students but came back. In Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy, Ulster-born Adrian McKinty has given us a hero who is traumatised enough by "the troubles" to want to do something to stop the madness of mutual murder by two tribes who have more in common with each other than anyone else. 
...
But when he is called to deal with what looks like a routine murder of an IRA or UVF informer on a housing estate in Carrickfergus, he finds something else: a corpse that has been ritually sodomised and had the score from a Puccini opera inserted in his rectum. Is he on the trail of Northern Ireland's first serial killer with a sexual rather than a paramilitary motive? In a world wherein which "ordinary criminals" are scarce, the Catholic Church considers divorce and abortion crimes and MI5 muddies the waters, Duffy finds himself in a wilderness of mirrors, scared of his own reflection. 
...
McKinty himself left Northern Ireland and didn't come back, but perhaps that distance — he now lives in Australia — has helped him to preserve a razor sharp ear for the local dialogue and a feeling for the bleak time and place that was Ulster in the early Eighties, and pair them with a wry wicked wit. 
...
If Raymond Chandler had grown up in Northern Ireland, The Cold Cold Ground is what he would have written. 

On The Road

Movies evidently take a long time to get made. In 1995 I went to the open casting for American Zoetrope's version of Jack Kerouac's On The Road and did not get a part. Finally 17 years later I find out who did. At the open casting I attended we were told it was going to be Johnny Depp as Sal Paradise. He's played three writers since then: William Blake, JM Barrie and Hunter Thompson (twice) but not Kerouac. 
...
My own Kerouacian connections aren't deep but they do exist. When I used to live in Newburyport Mass I'd occasionally drive out to Lowell to join the motely collection of drifters, pseuds and lunatics at Kerouacs grave. When I lived in Denver, we'd often go to the bar of the Colburn where Ginsburg, Kerouac and Burroughs used to hang. And of course I went to see the scroll when it came to the Denver Public Library. The DPL also used to do a Beatnik tour of Denver which was pretty good but I don't know if that still runs now or not. Anyway here's the trailer:

The Cold Cold Ground - The Guardian's Verdict

The brilliant, frighteningly clever, and hard to please Eoin McNamee reviews The Cold Cold Ground in Saturday's Guardian. Yes I'm stoked by his take but it's not enough, I still want to read your reviews on Amazon, Audible and Good Reads! ... Over to you Mr McNamee:
...
It's 1981 and Belfast is in turmoil. It's the beginning of the end, but it doesn't feel like it. The melancholy procession of dead hunger strikers from the gates of Long Kesh has begun, and tension on the street is at breaking point. When a body turns up on waste ground, one hand severed and placed on its chest, overstretched detectives are inclined to regard it as an informer killing and consign it to the file marked unsolvable. That's until Detective Sean Duffy starts to notice errant details about the corpse, such as the fact that the severed hand deposited with the body belongs to someone else. The discovery of another body seems to confirm the existence of a homophobic serial killer. The missing wife of a hunger striker appears unrelated. But in this northern endgame the murky undercurrents flow in unexpected directions.
...
The Cold Cold Ground is Adrian McKinty's 12th novel. He is one of a new generation of writers from the north who use the tools of the crimewriter's trade to examine and reshape the recent past. The detectives are wisecracking and self-aware. The material seems to lend itself to side-of-the-mouth invective, the sly one-liner. What's real and what isn't collide in the corpse-murk of hidden wars, and narratives are shaped to take account of it. Here Gerry Adams makes an appearance, a seedy loyalist takes on the persona of dead loyalist George Seawright, and its not much of a leap from McKinty's Freddie Scavanni to Freddie Scappattici, the infamous informer Stakeknife.
...
It's an uneasy technique, but there is an integrity to it. Death-squad acronyms are switched from one side to the other. McKinty is pointing to the fact that perceived reality and fiction in conflict zones are equally untrustworthy. One is as manufactured as the other, and the only thing we can do is to be aware of it. Sean Duffy is an anomaly, a Catholic cop in an overwhelmingly unionist police force, but McKinty is less concerned with that than with the camaraderies of the force. And he's good on the details: life through the observation slit of an armoured vehicle. Like all good fictional cops, Duffy has a nose for the erotics of last things, and finds himself hooked up with a beautiful pathologist.
...
The Cold Cold Ground confirms McKinty as a writer of substance. There's a gear shift from a crimewriter's craftsmanship when he casts his eye on the towns caught in Belfast's malign gravitational pull, such as Carrickfergus and Larne. McKinty is at home in these lost towns, with their Victoria Streets and Sandringham Terraces, their transgressive inner life at odds with street names that reveal a longing for home-counties certitudes. What makes McKinty a cut above the rest is the quality of his prose. His driven, spat-out sentences are more accessible than James Ellroy's edge-of-reason staccato, and he can be lyric. The sound of a riot is "the distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship".
...
The names of David Peace and Ellroy are evoked too often in relation to young crime writers, but McKinty shares their method of using the past as a template for the present. The stories and textures may belong to a different period, but the power of technique and intent makes of them the here and now.
...
There's food for thought in McKinty's writing, but he is careful not to lose the force of his narrative in introspection. The Cold Cold Ground is a crime novel, fast-paced, intricate and genre to the core. The violence is extreme and the sex is gritty. Duffy's three murder cases are isolated on the surface, but in the dark world of dirty wars, the dead are seldom unconnected, and rarely innocent as they beckon to us from the cold, cold earth.


• Eoin McNamee's Orchid Blue is published by Faber.

My Hot Yoga Nightmare

This was the fourth image that came up
on my Google Image search for Yoga

Hot yoga is the fastest growing recreation or past-time in the western world. One in four Americans under the age of twenty five has now tried hot yoga or is currently going to a hot yoga class.* I used to say "I'm as intellectually curious as the next guy" until one day the next guy was Isaiah Berlin so I've stopped saying that now, but thats not really that relevant, what's relevant is the fact that I'm a little bit curious about yoga and hot yoga in particular. 
...
Why? I'll tell you why. I've had a bad left knee for a long time now and in the last year it was diagnosed as a "pre arthritic condition" whatever that means. Basically it hurts in the morning and I can't really run on it or play soccer which is annoying, but I do swim nearly every day and most of the time the pain is completely manageable. So I'm not complaining but I am looking for non surgical solutions to the problem and I have tried many different things including acupuncture, massage and a variety of medications. Recently on the advice of several people I decided to try hot yoga. It was not a good experience. 
...
First lets understand what hot yoga is. It is NOT called hot yoga because the room is full of hot chicks. Yes the room is full of hot chicks but you can't concentrate on them because the room has been heated to 120 degrees. They have the place this temperature because, I kid you not, its hot in India and that's where yoga came from. That's the logic. On this principle bananas should only be eaten in a humidor. I have no proof of this but I'm reasonably certain that our yoga instructor spent her formative years running a V-C prison camp in Laos. She was a small, energetic woman with a powerful set of lungs and she used these to good effect. She screamed at us from the beginning of the class to the end, yelling at us not to drink water as it disrupted the timing and telling us to work harder and to hold the poses longer. After five minutes I wanted to leave but I was frankly terrified of this lady. Is it likely that she would have hurled a shuriken throwing star at my neck as I was slipping out? No. Is it impossible? Again, no. 
...
I quickly discovered that I was in front of one of the heaters that kept blasting hot air at me every few minutes. That plus the constant screaming and the pain of the poses and the denial of water cracked me like an egg. I would have talked. I would have told them anything. I would have signed anything. But there was nothing to sign. Just more pain and more yelling. 
...
An hour and fifteen minutes went by the way time goes by at a Noam Chomsky lecture. When it was finally over we were advised to rest on the mats for a few minutes and then shower but I ran into the street instead. I felt like Dieter Dengler, or maybe like someone who more than two people reading this blog would have heard of. The yoga place I went to happens to be next door to the biggest brothel in Melbourne, possibly the biggest brothel in the Southern Hemisphere, so there were quite a few dodgy characters hanging around and a desperately panting man, pouring with sweat, in flip flops & wife beater t shirt was not that uncommon a sight. I got in the car, drank my water bottle and an old one I found under the seat and blasted the aircon. 
...
The result? Well my knee did feel better for a day or two after the hot yoga experience but there's no way I can bring myself to go back. I'll take the bad knee over the demented V-C Colonel any day of the week. 
...
*None of these "facts" are remotely true and to be honest I'm surprised you even thought they were. 

The Cold Cold Ground - The Irish Independent's Verdict

Castlemara Estate, Carrickfergus, 2011

Maurice Hayes reviews The Cold Cold Ground in Sunday's Irish Indy. I love the review but be careful, there are some spoilers near the end...And as usual I'd appreciate your reviews on Amazon, Good Reads or your blog. Over to you space cowboy: 

Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy introduced by Adrian McKinty in the first of a trilogy of detective stories set in Northern Ireland in the middle of the Troubles, could well become a cult figure.

A Catholic member of the RUC (one of the 7pc) equally at risk of being murdered by the IRA for his profession and by loyalists for his religion, an Irish speaker from the Glens of Antrim, fluent in several languages, with a degree in psychology and an interest in opera, tempted to join the IRA after Bloody Sunday and propelled into the police by a pub bombing, courting a pathologist girlfriend among the corpses, he is a very unusual copper indeed.

McKinty has established a good track record in the genre and in his return to his native sod for he shows that he has not lost his touch or his eye for the bizarre and the macabre, or his ear for the Belfast accent and argot.

The plot has Duffy assigned to investigate what appears to be a serial killer of homosexuals who taunts the police by placing clues strewn with obscure references to operas, and the apparently unconnected suicide of the estranged wife of a hunger striker.

Set against a backdrop of riots in the middle of the 1981 hunger strikes and the death of Bobby Sands, McKinty creates a marvellous sense of time and place; an evocation of darkness and horror, of corruption and collusion, of the fraught life of a policeman, of the domination of areas by paramilitary groups at war with each other and with the British state but colluding on drugs and criminality, the immediacy of death and the cheapness of life.

Taken off the case when he stumbles on an IRA connection, warned off by Special Branch and army intelligence protective of their agents and informants, Duffy keeps doggedly on, defying the rules and risks to himself and his girlfriend until he secures a confession and a very rough sort of justice for the murders which turn out not to be homophobic, but an attempt by a mole to cover his tracks.

Real people walk in and out of the story.

There are a couple of nearly recognisable loyalist warlords, and a character based loosely on Freddie Scappaticci is central to the story, and the old chestnut of whether Gerry Adams might be Stakeknife.

In the speed of the action and the twists of the plot, small details do not always matter, but a few will grate with local readers.

In the main, though, he manages to catch the brooding atmosphere of the 1980s and to tell a ripping yarn at the same time.

There will be many readers waiting for the next adventure of the dashing and intrepid Sergeant Duffy.

My Favourite Films Of 2011

I knew he couldnt programme the GPS

I don't get to the movies as often as I'd like for two reasons: it costs 17 dollars a ticket in Melbourne (and yes the USD and Australian dollars are at parity) and secondly because most films are terrible. But I do love going to the pictures and here's a little list of some of my favourites of the year. 
10 Bridesmaids: two very funny scenes and a lot of filler which is more than most films which are all filler. 
9 Archipelago: Joanna Hogg's film about a family holiday to the Isles of Scilly. No one saw this which is a shame because it's a kind of To The Lighthouse for our times.   
8 Moneyball: The true story of how Brad Pitt and a bunch of geeks turned the Oakland A's into that mighty baseball franchise it is today...oh wait, uh...
7 Cold Weather: No one saw this either. A murder mystery/family drama set in a very rainy Portland. 
6 Drive: Everyone saw this. Hollywood stunt man by day gettaway driver by night. It sounds crap but it isn't. 
5 Killing Bono: I haven't seen this one, but I was sold on it just by the title alone. 
4 We Need To Talk About Kevin: Lionel Shriver's excellent book turned into a great movie. 
3 Into The Abyss: A Werner Herzog documentary about death row not quite up there with his classics such as Grizzly Man and Encounters At The End Of The World, but still very compelling.  
2 Meek's Cutoff: Kelly Reichardt's feminist, minimalist Western about a bunch of settlers getting lost on the Oregon trail. The lovely Michelle Williams stars.
1 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: OK so I haven't actually seen this one either, but I loved the book and the BBC series and the director is the guy who made Let The Right One In which is one of my all time favourites. I know its a risk putting a film I haven't seen at number 1 but hey thats the kind of guy I am.  

Holmesexual Subtext

The Mrs and I went to Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows a couple of days ago. It wasn't terrible but I don't think it had quite the same energy as the first film in this series. There was a long portion in the middle of the flick where I wanted to leave but I'm glad I hung in there because the ending was good. It's intriguing watching a new Sherlock Holmes movie at the same time as the BBC series Sherlock is running on the telly, because you can appreciate how certain ideas in the Zeitgeist have influenced two completely different teams of screenwriters on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In the original stories for example women have almost nothing to do but faint, however in both Guy Ritchie's films and the BBC series the women are somewhat more interesting and have a wee bit more to do. The drug angle is fascinating too, Robert Downey Jnr plays Holmes as a jittery coke fiend (perhaps channeling his own life in the 80's) whereas in the BBC series the dreaded drug of choice is tobacco (I'd love to see Michel Houellebecq's sarcastic commentary on that).
...
Both teams of screenwriters are agreed that the gay subtext in the partnership between Holmes and Watson is ripe for humour. Purists should note that there has always been a bit of a gay subtext in the Sherlock Holmes stories. London in the 1890's was full of rent boys and readers of the Strand Magazine (where the Holmes stories first appeared) can't possibly have been the stuffy Victorian prudes we think of today. In the Guy Ritchie film Holmes drags up, tries to stop Watson's wedding, gets him in a clinch on the floor of a train and to cap it all his brother Mycroft is wonderfully played by an out and proud (in the film and real life) Stephen Fry. The BBC's treatment of the subtext is subtler and a bit funnier. Holmes is a pale, tall, handsome, aesthete and when Watson goes to live with him everyone assumes that they are a gay couple. Benedict Cumberbatch's aloof, diffident Holmes couldn't care less but Watson is continually trying to explain to people that they aren't a couple in the best Seinfeld tradition of "not that there's anything wrong with that." Martin Freeman is such a great comic actor that his discomfort cracks me up every time. 
...
Interestingly I was at the gym yesterday and ABC1 were showing an old Sherlock Holmes episode from the late 1980's series. I only saw about twenty minutes of it but it looked like a good "closed room" mystery. A translator for the Foreign Office gets an important treaty stolen from his office and has a nervous breakdown as a result. I'm pretty sure the villain is the guy who played Blake from Blake's 7 but I missed the last two thirds of the episode and didn't see how he actually did it. Of course in the 1980's series there is no (or very little) gay subtext at all. 

The Audio Version

The beardy Mr. D. 

This weekend I've been listening to the audio version of The Cold Cold Ground. Normally I can't read anything I've written after it's completed but with the audio, somehow, it's different. Gerard Doyle is the narrator of Cold Cold and he's really done an amazing job differentiating the characters and coming up with voices. (His Gerry Adams impression roughly in the middle of the book is to die for.) I am not the only one to have noticed this. In the reviews of Cold Cold on Audible I've gotten a few three stars and four stars but so far Doyle has a perfect five star record for his narration. Doyle not only reads the books beautifully but he does a tremendous amount of research. I skyped with Doyle several times as a consult on Cold Cold and last time he even went as far as calling up a Professor of philology at Queens University Belfast to get the right pronunciation of words in Shelta, the language of the Tinkers. I do listen to a lot of audiobooks when I'm riding my bike around town or going to the dreaded gym (currently I'm listening to a Y/A steampunk novel called Leviathan which is narrated by Alan Cumming) but if you haven't yet got hooked on Audible I can thoroughly recommend audio listening as a benign vice. 
...
You can get Cold Cold Ground on Audible, here and if you do like it I'd love it if you left me a rating or even better a review. Cheers. 

The Story of Nordic Noir

This is an interesting BBC documentary explaining where Nordic Noir came from. The same team have also done a documentary on Italian noir. Hopefully they'll realise soon that the magnetic pole in world crime writing is gradually shifting across the Irish Sea...