Rob Kitchin

The Rule Book is an intricately plotted police procedural set in and around Dublin, in the atmosphere of impending social and political failure that eventually led to the Celtic Tiger having its head unceremoniously expelled from its ass by the 2008 banking crisis.

The book was published in 2009, but Kitchin's 'Acknowledgements' on the final page are dated August 2008. Thus, he was probably writing the story in 2007 and the beginning of 2008. The novel shows how contemporary crime fiction, as opposed to historical crime fiction--which has the benefit of hindsight--can, in the hands of a prescient writer, capture the most salient elements of a corrupt state, although at the time of writing the writer doesn't know what is going to happen in a few months' or a few years' time.

Detective Superintendent Colm McEvoy is put in charge of the hunt for a serial killer who, after every murder, leaves behind a deliberate set of clues, but in never enough detail--until it is too late. McEvoy is a decent man, a person whose human failings are numerous, and whose grieving for his dead wife, prevents him from functioning effectively, either as father or policeman. These traits reminded me of the police officers to be found in the crime novels of Henning Mankell and Arnaldur Indridason. A big difference between Kitchin and Mankell or Indridason is that Kitchin refuses to tie everything up neatly with a pink bow at the end of the book.

You want Colm McEvoy to succeed but, at every turn of Kitchin's cruel handling of him, he screws up even worse than the time before, and the reader becomes more and more convinced of what McEvoy admits himself, that if the killer is ever unmasked it will only be by accident. Kitchin invites you to to witness McEvoy being used as a convenient scape-goat by his superior, a commanding officer who says he is there to protect him but who is, in reality, a cynical placeholder. Time and again, McEvoy is taken off the case, only to be put straight back on it, as his commanding officers (his boss and his boss's boss, right up to the Minister for Justice) realize that, if they no longer have a fall-guy, they will have to take the responsibility for failure themselves. Colm McEvoy is also undermined throughout the book by a Detective Inspector named Charlie Deegan, who brought to mind the way in which another self-serving Charlie, who went under the surname of Haughey, undermined the then solid underpinnings of the Irish State with which he was entrusted. Deegan's conduct, undermining Colm McEvoy at every opportunity, gets him taken off the case, once, but people in positions of power are ready to pull strings to reinstate him, and he too is kept on until it is too late.

Kitchin's descriptions of the hounding of Colm McEvoy and his family, by journalists from the Sun, and the influence the press had on figures of power in Ireland (terrified of having people from abroad scrutinize their incompetence) foreshadows the well-deserved wave of public disgust in the U.K. that was soon to hit News International and all who sail in her.

Kitchin dissects an Ireland where men who get into positions of power--shown here in the shape of the country's police force, but not limited to them--suffer from a lack of expertise in a field they are supposed to master; spend an inordinate amount of time trying to please the media; and pay more attention to form than substance. Colm McEvoy's boss is more interested in the state of his clothes, and how he will appear to the television cameras at the frequent press briefings, than he is in the details of the murders McEvoy has to investigate. People in authority refuse to shoulder the responsibility that should be the corollary of their well-paying jobs; push important decisions down the chain of command until they find the guy who will take the fall; plan every action in the way that will best cover their asses, and, most tellingly of all, have no idea of what needs to be done to thwart sophisticated enemies, whether they be serial killers, (or, by extension), financial whizz-kids, who are left free to run rings around the stately, plump, prevaricating authorities.

Through the prism of the Irish police force, the novel depicts a whole country that doesn't have the smarts to understand any of the challenges it has brought on itself by moving away from a rustic set of values towards items of interest dear to the gutter press: sensationalism, human weakness, the wreckage resulting from the availability of cheap and plentiful booze and drugs and the rivers of teenage vomit and drunken violence running through Dublin's O'Connell Street late on a Saturday night.

The novel points out that there has never been a serial killer in Ireland. Until four years ago, the Republic of Ireland had also not had a banking crisis that beggared belief when it happened, but for which all the signs and clues had been there for perspicacious economists like Morgan Kelly. Morgan Kelly, a man who specialized in the economics of Medieval Iceland, realized what was about to hit Ireland when he discovered, nearly by accident, that neither the Banks nor the Government were following their own basic economic rule book.

Colm McEvoy, in some ways, brought to mind the tragic figure of Brian Lenihan junior, the Irish Minister for Finance, and especially the night he was left alone to fend for himself, a distraught figure wandering the back roads of Ireland, charged by his political, banking and property-developer masters and colleagues to find a silver-bullet solution to the Irish banking crisis, a fall guy who was immediately blamed for the only remedy he could find, the disastrous state guarantee of the Irish Banks.

At the time of the novel, McEvoy is shown as a symbol of the decent people who were trying to hold Ireland together in face of an unprecedented assault on its identity. Too busy at work to get a regular wash, in dire lack of sleep, wearing a disheveled suit, now two sizes too large for him since he began to grieve for his late wife, he is obviously not up to the job he eagerly takes on. All he has going for him is a basic level of competence and a streak of honesty, but he is no match for the evil mind of the sophisticated killer, who spies on him and taunts him with clues which will eventually show that the center of everything rotten lies in what has constituted a pillar of the Irish State, ever since its founding: Maynooth.

Rob Kitchin leaves the reader with the feeling that what he or she has understood is pretty bad, but worse is still to come. Any other mind like the serial killer's--determined, sophisticated and evil--will also be free to run rings around the plodders to whom it arrogantly gives all the clues. The authorities will be incapable of catching the most powerful criminals in their midst, even when the wrongdoers disregard their own rules and make basic mistakes or, as the serial killer does at one moment, hold the door open for them while wearing a ridiculous disguise.

The Rule Book is a page-turner and will give any discerning reader of crime fiction extremely good value for his or her money.
… (meer)

At a Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in the mountains outside Dublin a young woman has been killed: affixed to a bed via a sword threading through her mouth and neck. Detective Superintendent Colm McEvoy is put in charge of the case which soon turns from a routine murder investigation into something far more sinister. The girl’s killer, who calls himself The Raven, has left calling cards and the first chapter of a book about how to commit the perfect series of murders. If he is to be believed there will be six more murders over the subsequent days and McEvoy and the team don’t have nearly enough information to even know where to start looking for him.

This book is the best I can ever recall reading in the way it depicts the wretched desperation that the police must experience in the face of something as truly awful as people being randomly and brutally killed and being unable to wade through the morass of evidence in time to save lives. So often in fictional hunts for serial killers (especially on TV shows like Criminal Minds) investigators take such things in their stride which is at least as disturbing to me as the killings themselves. The Rule Book really gave me a sense of how hideous it must be to know people are relying on you for their safety but despite the fact you’re working all hours and trying your best you just can’t get the right answers in time.

On top of feeling like he’s letting down an entire city McEvoy struggles throughout the book to deal with his own recent widowhood, the increasingly nasty office politics that inevitably surround such a high-profile case and the pure madness that is the modern media (another aspect to the story that I thought was depicted in a depressingly accurate way). He’s a fantastic character: far from perfect but never giving up despite provocation and I can’t be the only one who just wanted to give the man a hug. The other characters are also realistic though not all as sympathetic. McEvoy’s immediate superior, DCS Tony Bishop, whose skills seem to be more in the arse-covering line than the detecting line, is an all too familiar beast but there are friends too for McEvoy in the form of a humorous pathologist and a profiler brought in towards the end of the case.

When I saw that the book was a about a serial killer I was a little worried because they’re not my favourite kind of crime novel (I know there are not nearly so many serial killers in the world as there are in fiction so I sometimes struggle with the credibility factor) but the subject was handled well. Even though there are snippets of action seen from the killer’s point of view the book is really about the events that happen and the people who are investigating them. The story is full of suspense as ‘we’ (and it does feel like ‘we’) race along with police to see if The Raven can be stopped in time.

I was also pleased to find The Rule Book has a very solid sense of its location. From the iconic picture of the statue of Big Jim Larkin in Dublin’s city centre on the cover to the use of local language, particularly in dialogue, to descriptions of an interesting variety of locations in and around the city this is a very Irish book. I have visited Dublin a couple of times and I found myself easily able to transport myself back there while reading along.

On one level this is a ripping crime fiction yarn which would be pleasing enough but there’s more to it than that. It also made me ponder about the role we all play in making things impossible for police in such circumstances with our insatiable desire for gory details and our seeming unwillingness to accept that real life is rarely, if ever, as simple as portrayed on shows like CSI. The Rule Book is more polished, intelligent and compelling than we have a right to expect from a debut crime fiction writer.… (meer)

One Sunday morning DS Colm McEvoy is called to a scene where a young man’s brutally beaten body has been discovered. The DI already there frustrates McEvoy with his unilluminating single-word answers to questions about the case, but the reality is they don’t know who the man is or anything much else about him. Despite having this and several other investigations on his plate, McEvoy is then asked to check into the death of Albert Koch, one of Ireland’s’ wealthiest businessmen. Koch was elderly and his death was signed off as natural by his doctor but a local Garda is suspicious and believes the situation warrants attention by a senior officer. It soon becomes clear that Koch was murdered and McEvoy must investigate the man’s family and his past, thereby opening himself up to confrontation, political pressure and the uncovering of nasty surprises while he juggles all his other work and a fairly tenuous hold on his personal life.

There are things I would like to discuss about this book but can’t do so without giving away plot spoilers which I am loath to do both because it is generally a loathsome thing to do and because I found the story genuinely unpredictable and want you to have the same experience should you choose to read the book. Suffice it to say there is a lot going on within this story both with the various cases McEvoy is responsible for and in his private life. Although the book does jump around between events the structure is logical and the harried, sometimes jerky way that the story is revealed is perfectly suited to the harried, sometimes jerky lives that the under-resourced and badly stretched Irish police force are living.

As was the case with the first book in this series, [b:The Rule Book|6543802|The Rule Book|Rob Kitchin|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/511MXfTJvcL._SL75_.jpg|6736074], there is an almost hyper-realism to the way that police work is depicted here. Forensic answers do not materialise miraculously in shiny laboratories to offer the solution to a baffling case just in the nick of time, police officers do not have the luxury of working on one case at a time even if it is the murder of a VIP and criminals do not always get caught. With the real world economic downturn in Ireland being reflected in the book, the resources of the police are so ridiculously thin on the ground that the criminals have good reason to believe they can get away with anything. At one point some of them take a bold and horrifying action which badly injures one of McEvoy’s colleagues and further depletes the strained police force as personnel are re-deployed to deal with the new crisis.

Like many fictional coppers Colm McEvoy has some personal flaws but they haven’t overcome him to the point where all his actions have become predictable which makes for entertaining reading. It’s probably because I share this trait but I like the fact that even though he knows it’s not going to go well for him he often can’t stop himself from saying the wrong thing in many situations. In this story it has been a year since McEvoy’s wife Maggie died and her sister plans a memorial service which McEvoy is hesitant about attending, preferring to keep his grief and sense of loss private. I can also empathise with being considered odd for this kind of thinking in a world in which living as publicly as possible is considered the norm. So much of the book focuses on McEvoy that most of the other characters struggle to have terribly meaty appearances but there are some terrific scenes with some of McEvoy’s colleagues and his young daughter Gemma offers some nice lighter moments.

Because The White Gallows is so realistic there were times I was uneasy with it, such as when McEvoy seemed unable to grasp that, assuming Albert Koch’s entire family didn’t gang up and kill him Murder on the Orient Express-style, the law-abiding citizens among Koch’s relatives had every right to feel aggrieved at being treated fairly shoddily bu the police during their grief. I’m sure this is a common occurrence in the real world too and it saddens me to think that police are forced, by their experiences and their daily grind, to treat everyone as guilty until proven innocent and that people so treated are unlikely to ever have a positive view of the police force again.

I found The White Gallows a captivating and credible reading experience, though not always a comfortable one as it raised issues that are all too real. Its complexity and unrelenting grittiness reminded me a little of the setting and main character of R D Wingfield’s Jack Frost novels. I heartily recommend it to fans of traditional police procedurals and those who like their tales to unfold with the kind uncertainty that warrants staying awake long enough to read just one more chapter.… (meer)

Rob Kitchin has written a considerable amount of flash fiction and a growing list of drabbles. In an explanation in KILLER REELS, Kitchin says that the collection or 12 pieces of flash fiction "started life as a single piece of flash fiction focused on a fairly simple premise - an impending murder victim would be shown a video of the death of the previous victim and also get a sense of the movie in which he or she was about to star."

In each macabre story, the next victim is shown a snuff movie showing the death of someone who refused to give information to film "director" Jimmy Kiley and his thugs. Each of the victims has tried to cheat Jimmy in some way. Kiley eventually even turns against members of his own gang when they go against his orders. He extends his net to a crime reporter, a teenage drug peddler trading on his patch, a jockey who didn't follow instructions, a police detective who'd shown a keen interest in the operations of Kiley and his gang, a young member of a rival gang who executed one of Kiley's inner circle, and then his long time girlfriend makes a fatal mistake.

The stories are cleverly conceived and rather bizarre, and the reader moves seamlessly from one to another.… (meer)