Best of Crime with Dominic Nolan

Welcome to my latest BEST OF CRIME feature, looking at crime writers' top picks, from their favourite author and fictional detective to their best writing tip. 

Today I'm delighted to welcome 

DOMINIC NOLAN

for his Past Life blog tour

to share his BEST OF CRIME ...

... AUTHORS

An emphasis on quality over quantity may account for Kent Anderson not being better known. His first novel, Sympathy for the Devilwas published in 1987, but the nearly decade-long gap between that and his follow-up, Night Dogs(1996), feels like a mere interlude given the further 22 years it took for Green Sunto complete his trilogy about soldier-turned-cop-turned-professor-turned-cop Hanson in 2018. The books trace Hanson from the killing fields of Vietnam, to his stint as a beat cop in Portland, to his return to uniform riding solo through the streets of 80s Oakland, and in doing so follow in Anderson's own footsteps. An intense, poetic, and sometimes hallucinatory tale of a man trying to form some kind of moral order from the violence both he and the world have wrought. 

Barry Gornell has written two very perfect, very gothic Highland noirs. Wealthy incomers from the city disrupt the simple routines of a rural loner, stirring up past and future tensions in The Healing of Luther Grove, and The Wrong Childexplores the savage consequences in a small village of a disaster that killed 21 school children, leaving a sole survivor. I read somewhere that he was doing for the Highlands what Daniel Woodrell does for the Ozarks, which seems about right. Outlaw fiction at its best.

... FILMS/MOVIES

I'm always snoring on to people about Night Moves, one of the great revisionist noirs of 70s Hollywood. Directed by Arthur Penn, off the back of Bonnie and Clydeand Little Big Man, it was scripted by Scottish novelist-turned-screenwriter Alan Sharp, whose work in that period stands up to anyone's (The Hired Hand,Ulzana's Raid, Billy Two Hats, etc). Gene Hackman, ex-footballer P.I. escapes his troubled marriage by taking a job looking for a missing girl (the first major role for a young Melanie Griffiths), but the case sprawls and he quickly loses his grip on it and never really regains it. Classic inquiry into the post-Watergate American psyche. 

The Reckoning sports an exhilarating turn by Nicol Williamson as a working class boy done good in a big company in London, who returns home to Liverpool when his father dies. Discovering there is more to the death than he was initially told, he goes looking for revenge, threatening his future in the company and his relationship with his well-born wife. It's a similar premise to Get Carter, but predates both that film and the Ted Lewis novel is was adapted from. 

... TV DRAMAS

Being too young to see the work of Dennis Potter or Alan Clarke on the BBC first time round, watching Homicide: Life on the Street as a teenager was the first time I realised what the form was capable of, that it didn’t have to be the smaller brother to cinema. In the early seasons, each episode felt like a short play, less concerned with the solving of crimes than it was with exploring existentially what it meant to be murder police in a city like Baltimore (the show was based on a true crime book by David Simon, who produced its later seasons and went on to create The Wire). 

Bob Peck's grief-torn Ronald Craven in Edge of Darkness, a policeman who witnesses his daughter brutally shot-gunned before his eyes and then rushes headlong into a reckless investigation of her death, is a searing and idiosyncratic creation. He brushes up against the sharp edges of Thatcherite Britain - secret services, the nuclear military-industrial complex, his own murky history in Northern Ireland, and even guilt-shaped hallucinations of his eco-daughter - on his way to a climax that is both melancholy and restorative. Troy Kennedy Martin said he had written a story about a detective who turned into a tree. Why wouldn't you want to see that?

... FICTIONAL KILLERS

Jean-Patrick Manchette said, “the mystery novel is the great moral literature of our era,” and Aimée Joubert was the great avenging angel of his own literature; a Marxist terrorist-cum-contract-killer who stalks France’s ruling classes through the pages of Fatale, using their wealth to turn them against one another and put them on track to a climactic bloodbath. As Manchette said of his own writing: “Attack! Attack! Time is running short!” 

... FICTIONAL DETECTIVES 

There are so many great detectives who I could drone on about for hours, but I’m particularly partial to Frank Marker. Across the seven series of ITV’s Public Eye, Frank (played by Alfred Burke) plied his trade in London, Birmingham, Brighton, Windsor, and Chertsey. He worked out of small, grubby shopfronts, and lived in bed-sits or lodging rooms. He never worked big cases, and half the time never brought the mundane inquiries he did make to any satisfying conclusion. He went after and missed his big score on several occasions, did a spell inside after working with a dodgy solicitor, and seldom maintained any lasting relationships, with friends or lovers. He was the epitome of small-time struggle, and that’s why he’s so fascinating.   

... MURDER WEAPONS

In 1599, the corrupt governor of Macas, a small Spanish settlement in Ecuador, decided to tax his native subjects, ostensibly claiming the gold was needed to celebrate the coronation of the new Spanish king, Philip III. The Jivaro people, unhappy with the arrangement, collected all the gold they could and waited for the governor to visit the mining town of Logroño. There, the Jivaro attacked, killing all the men, capturing the women, and imprisoning the governor. They stripped him naked in the town square and set up a large forge to melt all the gold. Forcing the governor’s mouth open with a bone, they poured the liquid gold down his throat, the steam from which burst his lungs and bowels before the gold congealed again, blocking up his insides.

It’s an idea that’s going to fester in Boone’s mind… 

    

... DEATH SCENES

Newton Thornburg’s Cutter and Bone has one of those endings that makes you whisper, “Oh shit,” to yourself, and immediately read it again to make sure it really happened. It’s not just the broad scope of what happens that makes it so darkly brilliant, but the way Thornburg wrote it, right down to the most perfect of final sentences. 

Inexplicably, almost all of Thornburg’s novels have remained out of print in America since their initial runs in the 70s and 80s. Serpent’s Tail reissued three of them as part of their Midnight Classics range at the turn of the millennium, copies of which can usually be found 2nd hand, but they do offer most of his major works in digital editions.  

... BLOGS/WEBSITES

I find maps an invaluable resource, and the National Libraries of Scotland offer a vast range of maps for free online, including a good selection of OS sheets up to 1960. Their website is excellently constructed so you can match their map sheets with google maps, either overlaid or side-by-side and locked-in. https://maps.nls.uk/index.html

... WRITING TIPS

Don’t be afraid of being shit. First drafts aren’t final drafts, so if they’re dreadful it doesn’t matter—this is the beginning of a process. The only page of writing that can’t be fixed is a blank one. Let the crap spew forth. 

... WRITING SNACKS

Tea. I like a strong breakfast tea first thing, and a mellower blend of an afternoon. When travelling, always bring your own tea. You absolutely cannot trust a hotel teabag. 

About DOMINIC NOLAN

Dominic grew up and still lives in North London. He worked various day jobs, ranging from call centre operator to fraud investigator, before selling his first novel, Past Life – the story of Boone, a detective who suffers a catastrophic loss of her memory and, struggling to reintegrate herself back into her past life with her husband and teenage son, decides to reinvestigate the missing person case that led to her getting hurt in the first place. Boone will return in a follow-up to Past Life in 2020.

Find Dominic Nolan on Twitter - @NolanDom

About PAST LIFE

Publisher's description

Waking up beside the dead girl, she couldn't remember anything.
Who she was. Who had taken her. How to escape.

Detective Abigail Boone has been missing for four days when she is finally found, confused and broken. Suffering retrograde amnesia, she is a stranger to her despairing husband and bewildered son.

Hopelessly lost in her own life, with no leads on her abduction, Boone's only instinct is to revisit the case she was investigating when she vanished: the baffling disappearance of a young woman, Sarah Still.

Defying her family and the police, Boone obsessively follows a deadly trail to the darkest edges of human cruelty. But even if she finds Sarah, will Boone ever be the same again?

Past Life is being published by Headline on 7 March 2019.

Look out for more BEST OF CRIME features coming soon.

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