<<< Apr 30, 2003 >>>

Declan launched his just-published first novel at the weekend in Galway. It's called Eight Ball Boogie, a crime novel in the American hard-boiled tradition, set in a fictional city that's based loosely on his (and my) home town of Sligo, Ireland. It's also a cracking read -- dark, edgy, sharp, funny, and a genuine page-turner (even though I *knew* what was coming next, having read an earlier draft!). Here's the section Delcan read out at the launch, which introduces the enlarged and disembellished version of Sligo:

"They reckoned the population around ninety thousand, and even if you discount all the Shinners who voted twice, that’s still a fair-sized burg. Which was the plan. They took a town, just sitting there minding its own business, there not being too much of it to mind, and ripped out its guts. Relocated the locals to breeze-block suburbs that sprawled out both sides of the river, south behind the lake, halfway up the mountains; they’d have poldered the bay if they’d thought anyone was dumb enough to enjoy wet sand between their toes. Threw up a new inner town, a high-rise jungle of credit finance depots, international call-centres, multi-storey shopping malls, a software research plant masquerading as a university, most of which was financed by American corporates, most of which was offset by indigenous grants, lo-interest loans, repatriated profits. Midtown was all wide streets, tree-lined, Norman Rockwell’s wet dream parachuted into the Atlantic seaboard. It all took about five years to finish and no one laughed, not once. My office was over in the Old Quarter, where Midtown bled into the docks, north of the river heading west. Five or six bustling blocks bisected by railway lines, pot-holed streets and alleyways that always seemed to wind back to the quays. Too noisy to be residential, the passing trade too random to make it worthwhile for shopping centre malls, the Quarter got to keep all its crumbling buildings, cracked pavements and old sewers. The Quarter drew a volatile crew. Crusties laughed at the skate-kids, who went by sniggering. Winos, bums and buskers worked the crowds for the same chump changed. College kids slumming it got a thrill rubbing shoulders with fairies, dips and wide-boys on the make. I’d been sleeping on a couch in the back room of the office for a couple of months by then, getting used to the idea, starting to fit in with the faces on the streets. Mostly I liked them, respected their lack of ambition, their social inhibition. The kind that lived around the Quarter, they needed to know there was a pawnshop in the vicinity, an Army Surplus Store, a tattoo parlour. The bars had tinted windows, the porn shop didn’t and the greasy spoon cafes should have at least though about it. There were antique shops, a joint that sold organic Thai food and away too many second-hand bookstores. Out in the back lots that sloped down to the river, a couple of auto repair outfits kept things black and oily. The bards played jazz, trad and drum ‘n’ bass, and in the summer the air hummed with the thick smell of patchouli oil and melting tar. AT night you could get stoned just driving around with the window down. The Quarter was a good place to live, a good place to work, if your girlfriend was blind and your clients were even more desperate than you. Denise was blind but that was only part of the problem. Denise and me, we had issues. I had only one, but Denise liked to share." -- Declan Burke, Eight Ball Boogie, 2003.

< before / after >