A Winter's Tale

Alan Glynn’s Winterland has been described as the perfect post-Celtic Tiger mystery. Dealing as it does with murky property deals and corruption in high places, one could be forgiven for thinking Glynn had been staring into a crystal ball when he wrote it.

“I don’t claim to have had any great prescience on the matter at the time,” he says. “The boom was still in full flight when I was writing it. I changed a bit of it – little tweaks – because there was quite a long time between the publishers accepting it and it coming out. Publishing moves at a snail’s pace!”
Winterland has a clever, engaging premise. One night in Dublin a small time crook, Noel Rafferty, is assassinated in a pub. It looks like a routine gangland hit, but later that evening, a second Noel Rafferty – the petty crook’s uncle – is killed, this time in a road accident. Believing this cannot be coincidence, Gina, sister and aunt to the dead men, starts asking questions, questions no one wants to answer. Noel senior made his money on the back of some decidedly dodgy property deals, and there are powerful people determined to stop Gina uncovering the truth.
On the one hand, Winterland can be read as a simple page-turner. As the story unfolds, a conspiracy reaching to the highest government levels unravels, but the book can also be read as a hubristic tale of the boom years.
“One of the central images in the book is the building. There is a structural flaw in the building and I think I was aware that that could operate on some level as a symbol – as an in-built flaw to the whole economic structure that we were enjoying at the time. I didn’t want to make it heavy-handed or push it too much, but it was definitely in my mind.”
“There’s a book I was reading around the time, The Edifice Complex (The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World, Deyan Sudjic) about how throughout history various people have been associated with building projects, skyscrapers and even ancient buildings and the link between ego and construction like that.”
If the building can be seen as a cautionary tale, even more timely is the fact that Glynn uses his two Noel Raffertys to explore how Irish society treats street-level and white-collar crime, who gets punished and who gets off scot-free.
“It’s very current at the moment – the whole idea of holding people accountable at the highest level. There are banking enquiries going on in the States and here and the Iraq enquiry in the UK. But at a high level people never seem to get nailed for anything and that happens in the book too.”
As a murder mystery set firmly in Ireland, Winterland is a departure from Glynn’s last novel. The Dark Fields is an almost sci-fi thriller set in New York about an illegal drug called MDT-48 that can radically boost intelligence. But if the milieu and the genre are slightly different, there is a common thread throughout the two – conspiracy and corruption.
“Looking back on most of the stuff I’ve written, that’s pretty much there all the time. I suppose I’ve been influenced a lot by American movies from the ‘70s. I was a teenager at the time and I remember seeing things like The Parallax View, All The President’s Men, Three Days of the Condor and of course Chinatown. That fed into my imagination. I think a lot of the stuff that you take in at that age stays with you. I just felt that a lot of what I was working on in Winterland fitted into that. Here in Ireland we’ve kind of come of age in terms of our paranoia and corruption.”
The theme of corruption continues through the novel he’s currently working on.
“It’s called Bloodland. It’s not a sequel to Winterland exactly. Thematically it’s similar but on a slightly broader canvas. It’s partly set in Ireland, in New York and in the Congo. I’m dealing with the resource wars that are going on in the Congo, specifically to do with coltan mining. What was going on when Conrad was writing Heart of Darkness is still going on, almost on a bigger scale.”
While many an author will stick with the genre that got him or her published in the first place, Glynn’s bumpy career trajectory meant a change of direction was possible. The Dark Fields was a critical, if not commercial success, but his career stalled when his next novel was rejected and Glynn was left without a publishing contract.
“When the American publisher picked up Winterland in early 2008 it made a huge psychological difference, just the relief that somebody wanted it! After The Dark Fields I had another novel set in New York, which didn’t get published. As the previous novel had not been taken up by anybody and The Dark Fields had been out a few years back, I kind of felt I could do anything I wanted really. It’s not like I was on a roll! A lot of people liked The Dark Fields and it did well, but it didn’t sell in huge numbers. Winterland is in many ways like a second first novel for me.”
These days, Glynn’s continuing success seems assured. Winterland has attracted positive reviews and a movie of The Dark Fields is in the pipeline.
“The movie of The Dark Fields has been bubbling under the surface for seven years, so I got out of the habit of being excited about it. They can seem to be about to happen, then one person pulls out and the whole thing falls apart. At the moment it seems like it’s really going to happen in the next few months. Hopefully! I thought publishing was slow, but movies? Glacial!”