Who says crime doesn't pay?

Stuart Neville’s award-winning debut novel was a twist on the Troubles thriller, and his second enters the same world. It’s time for an about turn, he says

IT'S NOT often a debut novel wins an Los Angeles Times Book Award, but that's exactly what happened when Stuart Neville's The Twelve, set in Belfast, won the best mystery/thriller section in 2010. A year later, Neville was shortlisted again, for Collusion. He didn't win the award recently, which is probably just as well given that his gast was already well and truly flabbered.

“It was a shock to be nominated the first time,” he says, “and an incomprehensible shock to actually win it. So the idea of being nominated again hadn’t even crossed my mind. It was probably more surprising this time than the first time around.

“I think it’s an indicator of how open American readers have become to fiction from all around the world rather than their crime fiction having to be set in New York or LA or any of the world’s big cities. It’s a sign of the times, given the globalisation of crime fiction.”

Despite the hard-boiled prose and rapid-fire dialogue that dominate his thrillers, Armagh-born Neville is a quietly spoken man who chooses his words with great care, pausing frequently to clarify his thoughts. Perhaps he’s still a little shell-shocked at his meteoric rise, which began when he posted a short story to a website.

"I had written The Twelve, which at that time was called Followers, and it had sprung from a short story itself. After doing some revisions on the novel, I wanted to revisit the main character, Gerry Fegan, so I wrote another short story about how he bumps into an old acquaintance in a Boston bar. I submitted the story to an online crime fiction magazine called thuglit.com, which sadly is no more, and it was published in February 2008. A few weeks later, I got an e-mail from a man called Nat Sobel, who mentioned he was a literary agent, and he rattled off his list of clients, the first of which was James Ellroy, who just so happened to be my favourite author. Anyway, Nat said he'd read the story, and he was interested in seeing the novel I'd mentioned in the bio. So I duly gathered myself off the floor and sent him the manuscript, and shortly after I had an agent."

The Twelve, which was published in the US as The Ghosts of Belfast, quickly became a smash hit. The tale of a former paramilitary killer haunted by the ghosts of his victims, and driven to redeem himself by eliminating those who had ordered him to kill, the novel garnered mouthwatering praise from Ellroy, John Connolly and – oh yes! – Simon Le Bon. It also featured on the New York Timesand LA Timesbest of 2009 lists. Shortly after, Neville was flying to LA to appear on The Late Late Showwith Craig Ferguson, who subsequently optioned the movie rights.

"I've heard absolutely nothing about it since then," Neville says, laughing. "It could well be that Craig is beavering away somewhere, but I've not been kept in the loop. But then, reading about Alan Glynn's experience of it taking 10 years to see The Dark Fieldsappear as the film Limitless, that actually gives me a little bit of hope, and I'm not expecting things to happen overnight. Anyway, with the film business, everything is a long shot at the best of times." Despite the novel's political backdrop, Neville shies away from the suggestion that it's an example of post-Troubles fiction.

“I really just wanted to write the story as a straightforward thriller. That was my third attempt at writing a novel, and up to that point I had consciously avoided writing about Northern Ireland, and specifically about the Troubles. It was a subject I really did not want to deal with. When the short story that inspired the novel came along, it was one of those situations where I knew straight away there was potential for a good novel. The thing I’ve learned about myself and my writing over the last few years is that I’m completely story-driven, and the story will always take precedence over everything else. So, if the story demanded to be set in Belfast, then so be it.”

The follow-up novel, Collusion, was unabashedly political in its subtext, although not necessarily in the way the title might lead people to believe.

" Collusionis a very dirty word in Ireland," he says, "a very loaded word in Northern Ireland particularly, but it's understood in a very narrow context, and usually as shorthand for collusion between the security forces and Loyalist paramilitaries. But what nobody seems to talk about is that collusion went on pretty much between every organisation involved, including between Loyalists and Republicans, who were presumed to be mortal enemies. That was a very specific point I wanted to make, and that book is probably the closest to polemic than anything I've done."

Although Gerry Fegan reappears in Collusion, he won't be appearing in Neville's next offering, Stolen Souls.

" Stolen Soulsis a much more streamlined thriller. Because the first couple of books, whether it was intentional or not, both have this very strong political slant, I really wanted to make a very definite step away from that. And I wanted to give a nod to some of the thrillers I really enjoyed reading when I was younger. I was a big fan of those thrillers that were maybe 200 pages long and were just punch-punch-punch, that go full tilt from first to last page, no flab.

"So Stolen Soulsreally does hit the ground running, and doesn't let up until the last page. There are far fewer organisations with three-letter acronyms, for starters [he laughs]. It can be hard to keep track of that kind of thing. It's much more of a ticking-clock kind of thriller, and I hope that it'll work for readers.

"I'm working on my fourth novel at the moment and it's a complete departure from anything I've previously done. That said, the intention is to come back to Jack Lennon [the main protagonist in Collusion] for the fifth book, which at the moment I'm jotting down a few ideas for. But to be honest, I'm wary of getting tied into writing a series, and of having always the same protagonist, and your books becoming variations on a single theme. What I prefer is the James Ellroy approach of having a persistent world, which different characters move through, which is how I see the relationship between The Twelveand Collusion. You can offer readers a common thread to pick up on, but at the same time you're not limiting yourself to your hero getting into a situation and having to fight his way out, again, in every book.

“I can totally understand why someone like John Connolly makes such massive departures from the Charlie Parker books into books aimed at younger readers. I think that that’s a very good way of dealing with that potential problem, and he does that particularly well.” That ability to adapt and grow is just one aspect of the confidence that characterises the current wave of Irish crime writers, he says.

“I don’t personally buy the Celtic Tiger argument that was bandied about a few years back,” he says when asked why Irish crime writing is so fertile right now. “This idea that there was no interesting crime until there was money in people’s pockets. I think it’s more to do with the change of mindset and more of a confidence issue. The crime was always there, but I think people just didn’t have the confidence to write to about it; they felt they had to write about American crime or UK crime. Now they can write about their own backyard, which is refreshing.”

Collusionby Stuart Neville is published by Harvill Secker. Stolen Soulswill be published in October. An original short story, The Craftsman, features in Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century(Liberties Press), published later this month.