Gary Donnelly

I recently attended a CWA talk given by Leigh Russell, author of the successful Geraldine Steel crime thriller series amongst others. Leigh was speaking about how to sell a million books. So I was there, front row, with fellow Endeavour Media author and mate Paul Sinclair. Leigh’s best advice was to buy a bookshop, boom boom.

Seriously, though, she spoke well, wise words from a woman who knows; get a good publisher, keep working and be lucky. And be receptive to being lucky, by at least partly making your own luck via the second suggestion above.

Questions were taken and I had a few. Foremost being should I change my name to Lee or Leigh, what with her success and Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, it sounded liked a good start. Weirdly enough she didn’t entirely disagree.

My next question was about ideas, or more specifically, prioritising them. I’m big on ideas but small (er)  on time to write, scribbling not being my full-time profession as yet (I write this on Saturday morning after early breakfast but before the kids’ sporting enrichments). ‘Lucky you,’ replied Leigh, ‘can I have a few?’ A humble question indeed from a woman who has written twenty-odd best sellers.

But perhaps not such an absurd proposal.

Cut back to the previous Sunday and I was enjoying a cold beer in the warm sunshine (I do other things apart from beer drinking, but I sneak it in when I can). We were at an annual family reunion on my wife’s side, and I got speaking to a cousin of a cousin, Amanda. Talk turned from novel writing to creativity in general and to the genesis of ideas. Amanda said ideas were butterflies from the universe, we don’t actually own them, they find us, choose us. Sometimes they alight on our consciousness. If we welcome and make use of them, we can watch these beauties grow, but if we don’t… Off they fly, they land on someone else, and though that person might see its colours and contours a bit differently from you, it’s essentially the same creative energy,  but now it’s theirs to grow.

Now, in case you’re wondering, Amanda wasn’t puffing the magic dragon, not that kind of party really. I left her chatting to my wife’s sister who’s an artist that can hold her own when it comes to selling original interpretations door to door (often it’s the moon that’s to blame I’m told). Scoff as I did, what Amanda said stuck, and I couldn’t let it go.

If you write books, or even if you are planning to, I bet you know what I mean.

That feeling, that absurd vulnerability that joins you like a shadow at your desk. It whispers that somehow, if you don’t get cracking, if you don’t finish up that all-important first draft, then someone, somewhere will finish it before you. Irrational as it is, you honestly fear “they” might write your book first, and it will be lost to you even as you struggle to complete it.

Or, maybe, that’s just me?

But in case your thinking that I’m puffing the magic dragon, listen to this. I met a guy once who did moderately well with his first crime thriller, but told me that his original book idea, a great idea involving serial murder with a religious twist, literally appeared on the shelves as he finally got round to writing it.

I kid you not.

I had an idea, a fleeting image in my mind some years ago, but I knew then that it was a super opening for a novel and a great set up. I wrote a very rough first few pages but let it die, or, perhaps, let it fly away. What became of this? Well, a few years later I read something alarmingly similar but published by another crime writer. He did well off it too. I can show you my dated drafts, you will probably recognise the premise.

Losing the butterfly is not the only way to lose your ideas. A mate of mine, whose father, a very famous film and screen actor who sadly has since passed away, once told me that his old man had an awesome idea for a screenplay. He sent it to someone in Hollywood, never heard back, and let it go. He saw his movie idea advertised on the side of a London bus a couple of years down the line. You have probably watched the film, most people did.

Try blaming that on the moon.

Intellectual theft aside, more often than not we lose great ideas simply because we fail to nurture them and when you’re a novelist, that means writing them. This week I laid down the first 2000 words of a new novel, and a new series if my feeling is right. And what a feeling. But earlier in the week, while travelling to work I wrote a thousand words of a different, stand-alone, that came to me out of the blue. Like a butterfly landing on my hand, you might say. Both voices were strong and clear and I want to breathe life into each.

Leigh said that she once wrote two books a year while still a teacher and it almost finished her. But she didn’t say she regretted it. I have no idea whether I can do the same, but I’m going to try. God knows I’ve wasted enough time making excuses for not writing in the past. And I know for a fact that hard graft rarely leaves you feeling cheated. The real regrets in this life are the opportunities, experiences and great ideas that we allowed to fly away.

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Vengeance, Roger A Price’s second book in his Detective Vinnie Palmer series, follows on from the tearaway success Nemesis. Liked Nemesis? You’ll love this. Palmer’s back on the job, but I don’t envy him. When the first few chapters serve up a pig’s heart on a paper plate, a murder, arson and the suggestion of political intrigue you know that one of the very best of British crime thriller writers is going to take you on a car chase of a story. Buckle in; it’s breakneck from start to finish, with a twisting, deftly weaved plot that qualifies Vengeance for the sometimes overused accolade of ‘unputdownable’. Roger braids different story lines with a skill that makes it seem easy, and gets the balance between gritty, violent realism and old school chivalry spot on. His attention to police procedural detail adds a ballast of authenticity to the whole story and his creative reach, taking us from the regional details of the England’s North West to the troubled history of Northern Ireland, suggests a writer really starting to flex his muscle. Looking forward to re-joining the Vinnie and Christine (for goodness sake man kiss her!) in book three. Two successes in a row, and like Vinnie Palmer, I don’t believe in coincidences. Roger rocks.

And more often than not, it also puts a smile on an author’s face. Well, most of the time. It can depend on what’s written of course. And how many precious stars have been judged worth.

An old friend of mine who is doing very well for herself in the YA fiction world was understandably aggrieved to have been given a low star judgement. Never a welcome visitor, but made all the worse that this was before the book had even been released! That was harsh, no doubt about it. But the reality is that when you put you work out there, you are at the mercy of the judgements of others, most of them public. These days being a troll is no longer something people achieve by playing Dungeons and Dragons. I remember putting a couple of ideas together a few years ago for the #PitchCB agent try organised by Curtis Brown. While reading fellow author’s attempts, I noted that there were people who lurked in the shadows of Twitter with the express purpose of putting the ideas of aspiring writers down, like it was a new sport. Tough audience as Homer said.

Still, I encourage you; please do review. If only to add a small sentence and an honest star rating, it really matters. Why? Not just because it makes the heart of a fresher author skip a little to see that another person has not just read but taken the time to comment on their work. Though of course, that matters to us. No, I think it is more important than that. It says something vital about the art of storytelling and the place of the reader in that little act of magic. Stories, as the old saying goes, begin with the writer and end with the reader. Seamus Heaney once said that a poem ceased to belong to him after he’d published it and sent it out into the world. It became a shared thing, it multiplied in the minds of many and like poetry, a novel takes on a published life of its own. I have a mate who keeps sending me photos of people he believes look exactly like my two main characters Sheen and Aoife McCusker. More power to him, but they are his characters now, as he has imagined them, and I love that fact that they are alive for him.

I don’t think I’m very big in Japan, but I’m doing alright in Australia. Had a bumper week in my own modest terms while the e-book was on discount and promoted through BookBub. And… I have two reviews! One is a five star, the other is a two. So, numerically, it all balances out. Have to say though; the lady who hit me with that two star slap has a special place in my heart. Margaret ‘Couldn’t finish it’ (which puts her in fair old company; my own Mum has politely demurred. The grit, noir and blood on the blade are not for everyone).

Still. Margaret, I want to thank you, because even though you put the book down, you took the time to review, you felt that you had to have your say. And that means it touched you, maybe in a way that neither of us a likely to fully grasp. Or, maybe, it just wasn’t your fancy. But one thing I do know, it’s your fancy now. And while I love to entertain, take joy when a reader enjoys, the idea that my story is out there, reimagined and reproduced is the greatest thrill of them all.

So to Margaret, and to all those who have taken the time, this one is for you.

Want to join the party? ‘Mon in, if you’ve read it, review it! After all dear reader, you too are the author now.

I have a confession. I read this book for the first time when I was in my teens, like so many others of my generation no doubt. So this review, though my first for ‘Salem’s Lot, is in fairness based on my recent half term re-read. But no matter, the book gets better and more terrifying and inspirationally landmark as a reader and writer with every heart stopping visitation.

Prior to reading the book, I watched the classic US television series that serialised the novel, starring David Soul, and James Mason and produced by Richard Kobritz. For many years both sort of co-existed in my mind, one propping up the other in a horror double whammy that remains my benchmark for creepy, believable storytelling. One reason why the television series was so very scary is that it managed to recreate the same tone and tenor which King conveys to the reader through the pages of his long novel. Both create a believable, photographic portrait of modern small town American reality of its day, while at the same time dissolving slowly the boundaries of what we accept as possible until the sinister occultism of the book stands behind you, fang mouthed and watching. The book is masterful in part because King does not hurry the reader. He increases the sense of suspense and menace in slow, unpleasant pulses; and they catch us, like the deepening shadows of a dusk that, once so safely distant, is suddenly upon us, and heralding the creatures of the night. King is a fan of Arthur Machan’s The Great God Pan, and his homage is there throughout ‘Salem’s Lot. Never more so in his portrayal of infectious panic that slowly spreads through the rational protagonists and so to us, the reader, when we are left with nothing to do but believe that all is not what it seems and never will be again.

I’ve never had the honour of meeting Stephen King, but I did meet David Soul in a pub in London’s West End about fourteen years ago. My mate Paddy was working the show he was performing in and we all stood and had a pint. The conversation moved to ‘Salem’s Lot. Soul was aghast to learn that I’d watched the whole thing aged six! My Dad, who now freely admits that he was too scared to watch it alone, lodged me into the crevice of the sofa next to him and made me his wing man. I remember he was eating cheese and having a beer. When I asked him could I have some cheese, he cautioned against it as he’d heard it could give a child nightmares before bed! Ah now, only in Belfast. I think he probably let me have a sip of his beer. Or two.

I first read ‘Salem’s Lot as a teenage fan, but I now revisit it as a writer. Oh, but a man has to be careful. King wrote this thing on his wife’s typewriter in the back room of a rented caravan he and his young family were living in at that time. He was working full shift as a High School teacher, not unlike the day job I now do, but he was, unlike yours truly, a young fella with no grey in his beard.

And ‘Salem’s Lot is what he produced.

To approach such facts from the wrong angle could be incline a forty something writer to down tools and walk off the job at hand. After all, King’s vampire epic is better than what many of us can ever hope to create. But, be that as it may, I’m not that man. I see the hope in the horror and I return to this book as much for lessons on how to weave the poetic and page turning, on how to be brave with the pace and be true to the tale one hopes to tell, however outlandish and improbable. I also go to King because he’s a guy who managed to do the lot (sorry, that one just slipped out). He worked a day job, more than one, he had a young wife and the ups and downs of a real marriage, and he had a young family and wrote books. Not the books others wanted him to write, not the books that would follow a market trend. The books that lit a spark in his dark mind and kept him returning to that little room where the magic happened.

I was interviewed for an Irish TV channel last week about my novel Blood Will Be Born and was asked whether someday I’d like to write full time. I felt like I fumbled the answer, but what I wanted to say was yes, of course, but, also to quote King who once said that art is here to support life and not the other way round. ‘Salem’s Lot, perhaps more than any other King novel has been a support for me. From guidance on the craft, to assurance that one’s story is worth telling, to a reminder that a good story, perhaps even a great novel, is possible while life insistently, and very rightly, gets in the way. But mostly, it’s been a support in the very best way that a terrific story, beautifully constructed and characterised and masterfully unfolded always is. It’s the window into another world, this one best entered with the lights out and a cross and holy water at hand, whether you believe in any of those things or not.

When reading ‘Salem’s Lot, first time, or tenth time, it’s best to go prepared, because all is not as it may seem.

This review is also available at www.goodreads.com

Richard O Rawe’s biography follows Gerry Conlon’s life from his jubilant, warrior eyed exit out the front of the Old Bailey in 1989, to his death from cancer aged just sixty in 2014. Not the stuff of the Hollywood movie In The Name Of The Father, directed by Jim Sheridan in 1994, in which Conlon was portrayed by the charismatic chameleon of the big screen Daniel Day-Lewis.  And yet, the events of this book are by far the most important part of his life story; the triumph of truth over lies, of forgiveness and grace over hate and retaliation, and of release from the most damning and hopeless of all prison cells, those in which we incarcerate ourselves

O’Rawe was Conlon’s childhood friend, and paradoxically it is because of this intimacy that he manages a largely dispassionate and empirically balanced account of Gerry Conlon’s experiences. While growing up together and when reunited later in life they were able to tell each other to ‘wise up’ as and when required (get real, be honest in Belfast terms). O’Rawe brings this rectitude to his writing too. He tells the truth about the callous and ultimately indiscriminate bomb attacks undertaken by the IRA in 1974 for which the Guilford Four and the Maguire Seven were wrongly convicted. As far as the IRA was concerned, ‘…if civilians got blown to smithereens, then so be it; it was their own fault.’ He acknowledges that Gerry Conlon was a petty criminal who cracked under extreme duress, signed a false confession admitting to carrying out IRA bomb attacks and also implicated innocent members of his own family. But he also gently reminds us that while some to this day still view him as perpetrator rather a victim because of this human weakness, Gerry Conlon was in fact the first casualty of his own signature. The blame for both mass murder and then the massacre of justice should be laid at the doors others, but not with Gerry Conlon.

The psychology of human induced disaster is a complex field. When isolated errors happen the consequences are usually contained. But when man made catastrophe strikes more often than not numerous mistakes and malpractices have aligned like a key in a lock. In an attempt to understand, some use terms like Conformity, Group Think, or Attribution Bias. Others speak of conspiracy.

For O’Rawe the initial miscarriage of justice against Conlon and the perpetration of this across long years was the result of an institutionally corrupt barrel rather than a single rotten apple. The prevalence of ‘noble cause corruption’ permeating the police, forensics and judiciary in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, the apparent suppression of an alibi witness for Gerry Conlon by the Crown, and the dismissal of an IRA confession to the crimes for which Conlon was serving time paint a bleak picture. The darkness followed Gerry Conlon long after his release. Tortured by nightmares and flashbacks, unable to create meaningful romantic relationships and blowing his compensation money on drugs and wild living, he was a man on the run from himself. And despite his encyclopaedic memory, Conlon struggled to recall the face of his father Giuseppe, so deeply did the guilt of his death in prison in 1980 remain locked up inside him.

Despite this gloom, it is the light and the hope that makes O’Rawe’s biography so important. We follow Colon’s unapologetic lust for life after his release when he lived in north London. He details how Gerry Conlon moved from one all-consuming reason for being to the next, and the passion, determination, interpersonal finesse and courage he brought to all he did. Conlon certainly made the most of his freedom; from the publication of his book Proved Innocent in 1990, to the realisation of In The Name Of The Father three years later, Conlon made things happen. His determination to do everything he could to free the Birmingham Six became a leitmotif in the last years of his life when he carried out unceasing work on behalf of miscarriage of justice victims internationally with MOJO. From the Aboriginal people of Australia to Native Americans in the USA Gerry’s work eclipsed the wasted years in prison and the time he’d wasted as a free man imprisoned to hard drugs.

And yet, it is the story of personal rehabilitation which Gerry Conlon finally managed which is the greatest message of hope. O’Rawe details the healing work of Gerry’s psychotherapist Barry Walle in every bit as much detail as he does the litany of failures and corruption that sent Conlon down. In 2005, the Guilford Four and Maguire Seven received an apology from Prime Minister Tony Blair. Gerry’s relative Patrick Maguire was just thirteen years old when he had been wrongfully convicted of having nitro-glycerine, and for many years was full of hatred for Gerry Conlon whom he blamed. That day he shook Gerry’s hand and spoke words of reconciliation. It took a long time, but in the end Gerry Conlon was, as he said on his death bed, ready to meet his father because he had finally forgiven himself. In contrast to his tortured sleep while alive, I hope he now rests in peace. I wonder if those people who played a part in his wrongful conviction and imprisonment can sleep as easy in their beds at night.