Cannongate Crime, UK Articles
Canongate Crime
by Ken Neil
Originally published in The Herald [Glasgow], March 2, 2000.
Released from the pen this month is a set of hard-boiled novels from Canongates’s new imprint, Canongate Crime. Its trawl through the underworld has set loose a posse of writers from various parts of the globe. These unusual suspects have in common a certain stylishness and a taste for shining their torches into some of the darker corners of human behaviour.
Safe House
Andrew Vachss
Canongate Crime, £10
Andrew Vachss’ protagonist Burke is a remarkable creation, unrepentantly criminal yet burning with outrage at the evils that men do. In Safe House he and his penitentiary-schooled motley crew are hired to aid a mysterious woman who keeps a safe haven for victims of stalkers. Their efforts pitch them into an uneasy alliance with a government deep-cover operative on a lethal stand against a group of Neo-Nazi bombers. Vachss writes real fairytales of New York where justice is dispensed not by the legal system but at the hands of outlaw citizens. He weaves into them a moral ambiguity whereby Burke’s gang are crusaders against pond life whom even the bottom feeders would spit out, but only if they can make a profit. His fiction has always challenged taboos, tackling such issues as paedophilia and child prostitution, giving voice to the impotent and disenfranchised who struggle against a tide of indifference to their plight.
More Canongate Crime titles are promised over the year, including Douglas Winter’s high-octane gun-running thriller Run. A sub-imprint, Canongate Crime Classics, will revisit the work of such masters as Chester Himes and Charles Wiulleford.
Crime Pays for Canny Novelists
Originally published in the Sunday Times [London], February 27, 2000.
Crime writing is sexy, or so the author Ian Rankin tells us in his introduction to Canongate’s collection of crime fiction, launched next month.
“Crime writing is currently in, which is where it should always have been. Forget Miss Marple and arsenic in the crusted port. Today’s crime writers deal with the real world, real problems, real dramas.”
To celebrate the genre’s newly acquired street cred, the hip Edinburgh publishing house run by the equally hip Jamie Byng is bringing out novels by Jon Jackson, Chad Taylor, Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Vachss. None of them is British – Taylor is from New Zealand, the other three are American.
So what does that say about the state of British crime writing? “Absolutely nothing,” insists a spokesman for Canongate. “It’s just a coincidence. I can assure you we will be publishing British writers.”
Wherever the writers hail from, few would argue crime-writing is the healthiest it has been for years. According to the author Mike Ripley, a new crime novel is published in Britain every 13 hours and well over 500 new titles come out yearly.
It’s perhaps no surprise that Canongate is championing authors from across the Atlantic. Their hard-edged social realism sits well with today’s youth, raised on a diet of Tarantino films and NYPD Blue.
Indeed, some of Canongate’s authors seem as gritty as their characters. Vachss has made saving children from abuse his life’s work, as a lawyer and a novelist. His fictional hero Burke is a criminal who hires himself out as a private eye. Burke shares Vachss’ short moral fuse, along with his hatred of paedophiles. Canongate has chosen to publish Safe House, the latest adventure.
Bourdain’s offering is Bone in the Throat. Described as a cross between The Godfather and Ready, Steady Cook, its main characters are a chef with a heroin habit and a bunch of mobsters. Bourdain, a chef in New York, says he got into the business for the sex and drugs.
Jackson grew up in northern Michigan and Detroit and now lives in the Montana Rockies. His book Hit on the House introduces the dry, quirky Detroit Detective Sergeant Fang Mulheisen to British readers.
Taylor’s previous books include two novels, Pack of Lies and Heaven – now a film by Miramax. His latest offering for Canongate, Shirker, is a terrifying examination of murder and sexual compulsion.
Our love of the genre can be traced back to the American Edgar Allan Poe who is credited with creating the first detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, more than 150 years ago. However, the first crime novelist is said to be Britain’s Wilkie Collins, along with Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of course, gave us Britain’s most famous detective.
According to Rankin, the creator of the Inspector Rebus novels, American crime fiction has never really broken faith with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. However he recognises that a new breed of feminist private eyes appeared in the 1970s in the shape of Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone.
These days crime writing is a broad church, he adds. And the quality of writing is better than ever. He agrees with fellow novelist Val McDermid, who says that if the 1930s was crime fiction’s golden age, then today is platinum.
Canongate launches its crime series on March 16, when Anthony Bourdain and Ian Rankin will appear at The Filmhouse, Edinburgh at 6.15pm.