Cormac Millar's Blog

Those wonderful people at Letshost.ie ...

2010-05-01T02:49:00.000-07:00

... may be able to save my site, by undoing the change of CNAME. Or maybe I am the victim of an international cyberconspiracy, orchestrated by pinstripe-suited villains who snigger "fnarr, fnarr" while disconnecting my web life support machines. Actually, loday's new post is mostly an experiment to see if the blog is still working. Being the First of May, I could perhaps sing "The People's Blog Is Deepest Red," but would anyone hear me?

It gets worse

2010-04-30T16:06:00.001-07:00

Google has now hidden my entire site. Click it today (30 April 2010) and you read "Google Error. Not Found. The requested URL was not found on this server." Wiped off the face of the Internet. These blog posts, on the other hand, are working better than ever. The Google giveth, the Google taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Google.

DOA

2010-04-28T15:24:00.000-07:00

Hearing my blog was about to be rubbed out, for technical reasons that I don't understand, I dutifully followed Google's instructions to migrate the content, and eventually saw a screen message congratulating me on my blog having gone live at a new address, http://blog.cormacmillar.com -- but when I clicked on the link, there it wasn't. And isn't. D'OH!

A Theorem on Power

2009-12-12T14:59:00.000-08:00

The nature of power is such that decisions tend to get passed up the hierarchy to a level where nobody knows or cares what's involved. This partly explains the poor quality of decisions.
A possible objection to the above: But didn't Stalin have a wonderful grasp of detail? I answer: Yes -- the wrong detail. He was an excellent murderer, but a poor governor.
Which leads to a malign corollary: The nature of power is such that those who rise to the top tend to be those who are happy to take decisions on matters they don't understand.
George Santayana defined a fanatic as one who redoubles his efforts when he has lost sight of his goal. The great leader, on the other hand, simply redefines everybody's goal to fit his personal compulsions.
Democracy provides little defence against these ills. People like the smack of firm government.

Advice to a Young Writer

2009-12-12T14:52:00.000-08:00

Don't buy a Brother printer.

Gosh! How unkind...

2008-10-26T16:23:00.000-07:00

In his engaging, informative, unsettling collection of essays on recent history, Reappraisals (New York, The Penguin Press, 2007), Tony Judt passes judgment on a number of warmongers and charlatans, including nice Tony Blair. The importance of Tony's earnest tone is neatly caught by Judt: "He conveys an air of deep belief, but no one knows in quite what. He is not so much sincere as Sincere."

On keeping one's own voice

2008-10-17T16:09:00.000-07:00

John Coltrane, listening to Stan Getz, is said to have said, "Let's face it: we'd all play like that, if we could". I know how he felt. Yet how often one thinks, as one listens to some great maestro murdering a piece of music, "I never could hope to play like that, and if I could, I wouldn't". Such arrogance is needed, at times, to keep your own voice alive.

Absolute, not relative

2008-10-17T15:58:00.001-07:00

"There are no difficult violin pieces. Either you can play it, or you can't" -- Nathan Milstein (quoted on Yossi Zivoni's website).

What's worth writing about?

2008-10-12T04:43:00.000-07:00

Disjunctions of the world,
contradictions of the heart.

The power of words recalled

2008-10-11T16:02:00.000-07:00

One of the most affecting books I've read in recent years is EXTRACTS FROM THE RED NOTEBOOKS, by the English journalist Matthew Engel. It's his personal scrapbook of quotations on many topics, and words spoken by and about some individuals who have shaped our world for good or ill. The saying themselves are often witty, or appalling, but it is their sequencing and juxtaposition that give the book its cumulative punch. The idiocy of Bush Jr, the saccharine ooze of nice Tony, the yapping and flapping of Thatcher and her acolytes, are beautifully caught in a sprinkling of words, none of them wasted. Most of the time, Engel's chosen quotations show a gentle but devastating sense of humour, proving that the power of a joke or an anecdote is largely created by the listener who knows when to laugh, or cry. The book was compiled and published to raise money for teenage cancer (from which his son Laurie Engel died, aged thirteen). It's still on sale at Amazon. See http://www.laurieengelfund.org/

A sample of EXTRACTS FROM THE RED NOTEBOOKS, quoted from Adam Sisman's biography of A.J.P. Taylor: "One don who had criticized Alan [A.J.P. Taylor] for his journalism was asked to appear on television for the first time. The invitation specified the fee. 'Thank you for your kind invitation, which I am delighted to accept,' replied the don. 'I enclose a cheque for £35.'"

Reincarnation: A Poem

2008-10-11T15:45:00.001-07:00

I want to come back
As Natalie Clein's cello,
Aged 231 and still doing nicely.

[Form: Hypermetric haiku.]

Similarly unique?

2008-08-22T14:56:00.000-07:00

Matthew Quick's fiction debut THE SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK, featured in Publishers Weekly on June 30, 2008, featured the following accolade from his publisher Sarah Crichton: "Quick has this buoyant, one-of-a-kind voice that is unlike any voice I've read. I just kept thinking 'Nick Hornby'."

Michael Connelly's THE OVERLOOK: Classic crime novel with political insight

2008-02-02T04:51:00.000-08:00

At a time when many novels (even good ones) are too long, too self-indulgent, Michael Connelly's THE OVERLOOK (2007) was a delight. Harry Bosch faces a kidnap and murder case with frightening political implications. An innocent woman has been trussed up by blackmailing terrorists while her doctor husband was forced to steal radioactive materials. Are Al Qaeda plotting a radiation attack on Los Angeles? Who can stop them? What means are justified? In taut, clear steps the investigation builds layer upon layer of alarming evidence: the terrorists are about to strike, while the police, the FBI and the local Homeland Security czar jostle for position in the race to stop them. Much lower down the food chain, Harry Bosch, wandering through the case in his own speculative style, manages to pull the whole teetering construction inside out by noting a few insignificant local details -- at which stage the book collapses into an old, simple, true pattern. This gem of a story shows why crime writing, more than most other genres, can expose social realities and illusions. The blindness of paranoid politics in Bush's America is beautifully caught. It's all done with brilliant plotting and lightness of touch: there's no hint of political preaching, no heavy ideological message. Without equating post-9/11 America with Soviet Russia, it might be interesting to compare THE OVERLOOK to a much gloomier story, "An Incident at Krechetovka Station," in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's WE NEVER MAKE MISTAKES. These very different stories show the demands of the individual against the needs of state security. And in their different ways, they show why we need fiction to understand what's going on.

The Wrong Kind of Critic

2007-04-19T03:33:00.000-07:00

I had to read 85 books, as a judge for the 2007 CBI Bisto Children's Book Awards. A weird experience. You hack your way through stuff that you'd normally put back on the bookseller's table. You also get to enter compelling worlds. You read great books, and some less so. Good ideas that didn't quite come off. Bad ideas that did. And what do you learn? Obvious things, really. For a writer of genius, genre can be the springboard of imagination. For lesser writers, or condescending types, it's a straitjacket. Plus, it's astonishing how far you can get in the marketplace by sticking to the bleeding obvious and hammering out trendy messages with all the subtlety of a pneumatic drill. Good stuff also makes its way through the marketplace, now and again.
At its best, young people's fiction has an amazing emotional reach.
Of course the idea of competition distorts everything. Life is not a competition. Neither is literature. But prizes are newsworthy, so competition must be good.
Reading 85 books takes time. More time than you can easily spare. As the pressure mounts, you feel yourself turning into the wrong kind of critic -- the demi-semi-clever kind who swallow books whole and spit them out half-digested, the ones whose heads are filled with the clamour of their own judgmental clichés. Worse still, you find yourself sympathizing with the hostile reviewers of your own work. They didn't like your book; they were forced to pretend to read it; the review is their revenge. Others liked it, but didn't get it.
W.H. Auden confessed, “When some obvious booby tells me he has liked a poem of mine, I feel as if I had picked his pocket.”
We came up with a pretty decent shortlist. And there was some wonderful stuff that didn't make the final cut. In children's books as in other fields, Irish writers can be world-class.

HIGH-CONCEPT INTERNATIONAL THRILLER

2006-12-23T02:59:00.000-08:00

JUNK MALE. Special Agent Jack Goodman comes home from Guantánamo to attend his father's funeral. Turns out the old man died of an overdose of fake Viagra, sold by an evil Internet spammer linked to Al Qaeda. Posing as a replica watch enthusiast, Jack tracks the bad guys back to their lair in Afghanistan and blows them to bits. Flushed with success, he sets up the World Wide Web Fraudster Elimination Corporation. First of a series.

FASCIST PIG PASSES ON

2006-12-11T15:21:00.000-08:00

Creepy plump mass-murderer, torturer and thief Augusto Pinochet (91), former usurper and dictator of Chile, finally went to his eternal reward on December 10th, 2006. His grieving family will continue to grow fat on his embezzlements. The Church and the Army gave him a suitable sendoff. But as the lawyer for some of his victims observed, when Pinochet arrives in Hell he will find it strangely familiar, resembling some of his own torture chambers.
The corpulent corpus of Henry Kissinger, Pinochet's erstwhile puppet-master, is 83 and still apparently alive. Eating, drinking, sleeping, dressing - that sort of thing.
The odiousness of tyrants is not mathematical. Pinochet, in his gory days, killed only a few more than the amateur terrorists of Northern Ireland over three decades. Peanuts, compared to Stalin (20 million or so). Six thousand of Stalin's victims for every one of Pinochet's. So do we hate Stalin, or Hitler, six thousand times as much? It would be difficult. Augusto lacked charm.

MOST UPLIFTING PROMOTIONAL SITE

2006-11-30T16:23:00.000-08:00

This posting has nothing to do with crime writing. Instead, it celebrates the romance of commerce.

When baby Debbie Macomber was baptized, the candles flickered in the church. A sign of future greatness, says Debbie's mom on Debbie's site, www.debbiemacomber.com

Debbie wrote in her journal in 1973: "the greatest desire of my life is to somehow, some way, be a writer", and by 2006, sure enough, she had sold 60 million books, mostly published by Silhouette and Harlequin.

Her website is truly a marvel. After you've sampled and hopefully purchased some dozens of Debbie's books, try the book-themed gifts -- the gardener's kneeling pad (featuring cover art from the bestselling Susannah's Garden), the mugs, the t-shirts, the Gourmet Seattle Blend Ground Coffee (as drunk at the Lighthouse Restaurant in the Cedar Cove series), the Cedar Cove Zippered Carry-All Tote, the Knitting Notion Bag (as used in A Good Yarn and The Shop on Blossom Street) and the Variety Tea Pack -- from Debbie's Store, one of 21 different subsections on her singularly uplifting site.

Readers can get more directly involved. The October 2006 winer on the Readers' Recipes page is for Caramel Snack Mix. A November winner had not yet emerged at the time of writing.

CRIME WRITING: WHY BOTHER?

2006-11-28T15:14:00.000-08:00

At its best, crime fiction can detect the cracks in society's façade, the bits that don't fit, the revealing anomalies -- maybe even reach more existential targets, finding what the Italian poet Eugenio Montale called the broken mesh in the net that hems us in, "the dead point of the world, the link that won't hold, the thread to be untangled that might finally place us in the midst of a truth". Montale was talking not about crime fiction but about lemon groves at midday, where one could almost expect to uncover "il punto morto del mondo, l'anello che non tiene, / il filo da disbrogliare che finalmente ci metta / nel mezzo di una verità" ("I limoni", c. 1922). At its best, mystery writing can do just that: finger the flaws that disclose reality. Interviewed by Publishers Weekly (October 23, 2006), the Indian writer Vikram Chandra, author of SACRED GAMES(London, Faber, 2006) reveals that his take on the crime novel, "especially the noir novel, is that as the detective follows the crime, he moves through society, from high to low, and uncovers things that explain the culture".

WORSTSELLERS & MIDLISTERS

2006-11-25T04:10:00.000-08:00

Linking to authors' websites from my list of Irish crime writers, you will find quite a few claims of bestseller status. Some are true, but most of us could never live by our writing. Well-respected authors often sell in minuscule quantities, and brilliant reviews do not correlate with brilliant sales. The "bestseller" claim is still worth making, however. A mass-market paperback can do well on the mistaken assumption that the original edition was a success, and "By the bestelling author of XYZ" makes a nice strapline. Most previous bestsellers seem to have been "#1", rather than #5.

My first book did actually wander onto an Irish bestseller list (presumably due to a computer error), and I have had the odd sensation of watching customers buyng my books, or reading them on trains, which many writers have never witnessed. So, relatively speaking, I have been "blessed".

The plight of the "midlist" author ("midlist" being a euphemism for "commercially unknown") is regularly canvassed in trade publications. One lives in constant fear of being dropped by one's heartless publisher. One is paid less per hour than the people who pack the books in the warehouse. And so on and so forth. Writers can be great grumblers.

Why do we do it, then? Because we can. Because we have to. But also because we might break out and make some real money. It's exactly the same principle as being a minor drug dealer, as described in the wonderful FREAKONOMICS by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (published on this side of the Atlantic by Penguin). Levitt and Dubner's chapter "Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?" point out that minor employees in the crack cocaine distribution business get paid less than the minimum wage, and work in conditions of extreme danger. Why would anyone take such a job, they ask. Because at the top end -- if and when you become a bona-fide drug baron -- the rewards are simply enormous. Winner takes all. But you can never reach the top unless you've started at the bottom. Ground-level drug peddlers do it "for the same reason that a pretty Wisconsin farm girl moves to Hollywood".

That rings true, at any rate. The waitresses on Sunset were certainly among the loveliest in their profession.

"To the kids growing up in a housing project on Chicago's south side," Levitt and Dubner write, "crack dealing was a glamour profession. For many of hem, the job of gang boss - highly visible and highly lucrative - was easily the best job they thought they had access to. Had they grown up under different circumstances, they might have thought about becoming economists or writers."

FREAKONOMICS spent 35 weeks on the US besteller lists in 2005, so the authors probably made the right decision. The rest of us will have to wait and see.

GRANDMAMA'S NEW BOOK

2006-10-15T15:58:00.000-07:00

Surrounded by writers: my mother published fifty books, my sister is a poet, my wife has written a history book, my daughters have published stories and studied Creative Writing ... and now my grandmother Geraldine Plunkett Dillon, despite having died in 1986, has published a 342-page book of memoirs (All in the Blood, A. & A. Farmar, Dublin 2006; ISBN-10: 1-899047-26-3; ISBN-13: 978-1-899047-26-0). The book is edited with tact and expertise by my cousin Honor O Brolchain. The main reason why people might want to read it is because Geraldine's brother Joseph Mary Plunkett, poet and revolutionary, was one of the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation and was executed for his part in the Easter Rising in Dublin. Maybe also because it captures the end of the Edwardian era in Ireland, and contains many vivid and sometimes scurrilous comments on events and people of the time (including members of her own immediate circle: her mother the Countess comes badly out of the book, and that much-loved national icon Grace Gifford, tragic wife of Joe Plunkett, is harshly portrayed). The Plunketts were a highly eccentric, occasionally deranged, family group. I remember my grandmother as a dangerous and caustic old lady, reading Private Eye in the nursing home where she died aged 94. She was always wonderful company but my feelings towards her were mixed: she had been mean to my mother, yet my mother loved her without quarter. In an epilogue Honor offers a just and loving portrait of this multi-talented woman:

"Gerry was a gourmet cook, a dressmaker, embroiderer, carpenter, plumber and electrician. She kept cows, goats, pigs, hens and ducks, could tan a hide, cure bacon and make costumes and sets. By temperament she was busy, impatient, not violent but mildly explosive and endlessly inventive. She had an extraordinarily active brain -- in later years she would sit in front of the television, arguing with it, playing double Patience or Bezique and reading (at great speed) novels in French or the Book of Job, Tristram Shandy or Francis Thompson, Georgette Heyer or detective stories or the latest book by an old comrade while drinking strange concoctions [...] She moved to a nursing home when she was ninety-one and started writing her memoirs all over again. [...] She was not perfect but she was outstandingly good. She said you needed a sense of humour to survive all that her family had been through; she had one and she did."

THIRTY-THREE YEARS ON...

2006-10-04T16:43:00.000-07:00

Penguin have scheduled the mass-market paperback of THE GROUNDS for 4 January 2007. A good day: our 33rd wedding anniversary. I'm one of the Irish generation that married young. Very young. Would do it again if she'd have me.

To mark the launch, I'm enhancing my two sites: www.cormacmillar.com and www.kingscollegedublin.org -- the latter being the web offering of the fictional university featuring in THE GROUNDS. Oddly enough, a presumably real librarian on the web claims to have visited the King's College Dublin campus, while one London lawyer is described as a graduate of the place. Life overtaking Art.

The Cormac Millar site has recently gained a listing of more than fifty Irish crime writers. Advertising my competitors? There's plenty of room in cyberspace.