Colin Irwin "In Search of the Craic: One Man's Pub Crawl Through Irish Music"

British journalist Colin Irwin may have spent much of the seventies and eighties as  assistant editor of Melody Maker and written about singer-songwriters, folk rock, and traditional folk for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent,  Mojo and fRoots but his real passion, from what I can gather through reading In Search of the Craic lies in the traditional Irish music that might find its way from time to time into concert halls and major venues but is best sampled in the environment from which it emerged.

Doing that, at least as far as Irwin is concerned,  involves an extended pub crawl through the back blocks of the Irish countryside with the occasional spell in a major centre and regular encounters with characters who may or may not be legends of the genre (though he tracks down plenty who are).

Late nights, early morning, the black stuff by the bucket load and an abundance of music provide the fuel that powers a book that's part travelogue, part music history, part whimsical observation and high on the Enjoyable Read Index.

On the strength of this one I'd be interested in tracking down his In Search of Albion: From Cornwall to Cumbria: A Ride Through England's Hidden Soul though I think I'll be giving his biographies of Dire Straits and Abba the big flick pass.

Steve Almond "Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life"

I suppose in a different generation and a more promising geographic location I, too, could have been a Drooling Fanatic. By author Almond's definition DFs mourn their failure to make it as rock stars or one-hit wonders or near-misses or bar bands or wedding bands or KISS cover bands or midget KISS cover bands which explains the different generation remark.

It didn't take me long to realise anything approaching rock star status was out of the question, whereas a decent collection of music could help get me into slightly hipper circles than would otherwise have been the case. I was way too early for Kiss, who struck me as a formulaic quest for a section of the demographic that was at least a decade behind my back. While you could see where they were coming from, it wasn't territory you really wanted to revisit.

On the other hand, wannabes, geeks, professional worshippers ... who acquire albums compulsively … and cannot resist telling other people sounds awfully familiar. Some personality traits exist beyond musical generations.

Almond's DFs, in other words, equate reasonably closely to Hughesy's music freaks, and a glance through the contents when I spotted this title on the shelves in the local library suggested a read that might fit in with some aspects of my writing projects.

As things panned out, given that generational shift (Almond fits into the circa-Nirvana grunge scene the way I fitted into the classic expressions of late sixties experimentation) there wasn't much that fitted in with the projects, though there was plenty of familiar territory.

A career in journalism and a spell teaching writing means we're talking a bloke who writes well, delivers his points with verve and gusto (well he would, wouldn't he? He's a music freak writing about his obsession) and the result is an entertaining read that demonstrates the music freak isn't going to be disappearing off the face of the Earth any time soon.

He seems to suggest that we're all, potentially, Drooling Fanatics, a proposition Hughesy's inclined to discount, but that's probably the geography and demographic I've been associating with over the past forty years.

Almond, on the other hand, thanks to journo spells in El Paso and Miami and exposure to live music scenes where people I've never heard of can manage to carve out an almost viable musical career while still flying under the radar of mass recognition has plenty of first person experiences that fit into the Drooling Fanatic side of things.

Looking at it, he was probably in the right place to get hit badly by the music bug in areas far enough from the big time to leave him free to explore local music in between visits by passing megastars, though he manages to get a couple of newspaper paid gigs to cover the Grammys and similar exercises you and I might see as junkets but working journos know are located in an adjacent postcode to Purgatory.

An interesting read that had me rolling over to the iTunes store to check out a few of the lower profile acts he name-checked and enthused over without having the investigation move too much further than an Oh, yeah, this Ike Reilly dude's got a few albums out and a click on the sound samples that sounded like things I've heard before somewhere without paying it all that much attention. A glance at the eleven tracks on Nil Lara didn't suggest anything out of the pleasantly Latin, so it's probably a case of you really needed to be there at the time.

Exposure to an abundant supply of strong drink would, of course, have helped. Almond probably wouldn't have got a lot out of the equivalents in these parts (Kieran McCarthy springs to mind here).

On the other hand, his lists, starting from Bands Shamelessly Overexposed by the 'Alternative' Press through Ten Things You Can Say to Piss Off a Music Critic, Rock's Biggest Assholes and The Many Silly Names of Rock Star Spawn may not be serious, but are entertaining reads.

That's where Almond, with the provincial background in regional newspapers differs from your common or garden metropolitan rock critic. They may be in the right locations to catch the cool gigs, check the latest trends from close up (after all, they're where the action supposedly is, aren't they?) enjoy the junkets that come with prominence and access, meanwhile, for the humble journo toiling away in the back blocks…

Sort of like the sixty-year-old fan tucked away in the wilds of north Queensland, innit?

An interesting read. As noted, your reaction is going to reflect your own experience, though that’s hardly a surprising conclusion.

Andy Neill "Had Me a Real Good Time: The Faces Before, During and After"

Given the fact that the Rod Stewart quotient in Hughesy's vinyl, CD and digital music collections is limited to a digital An Old Raincoat and multiple versions of the first two Jeff Beck Group albums you might wonder why I'd bother with this hefty wrist-breaker, and after the half way point I was kind of wondering myself.

With close to five hundred pages, when the author's finished with Every Picture Tells A Story on p. 238 you'd reckon there wouldn't be a whole lot more that justifies a detailed analysis.

A quick look at the early chapters when I spotted the book on the Recent Arrivals display near the front door of the local library, however, revealed Jeff Beck Group and Small Faces content, and that was about enough to justify borrowing the thing.

Who knows? a read might do enough to push me over the side and I could end up buying Gasoline Alley, Every Picture and it might even persuade me to try the tip of the toe in the water as far as The Faces catalogue was concerned.

Rock biography is a tricky genre, and Andy Neill set himself a difficult task when he set out to tell a story that ends up combining a couple of fairly distinct strands where incidental characters will need an introduction to an audience that may not necessarily be familiar with them.

The biographer can't assume prior knowledge, readers familiar with solo Stewart might not be familiar with Jeff Beck and Beckophiles might not need background on Faces roadies and support staff. As I said, tricky.

Then there's the difficult issue that comes with personality. As a general rule people who've been fortunate enough to be gifted with prodigious talent tend to have picked up less savoury personality quirks along the way. Let's just say reading through The Faces saga tends to support that belief, note that practically nobody (including Ronnie Lane) emerges with an unsullied reputation and leave it at that.

We are, after all, talking figures with significant egos and odd perceptions of the world around them, and it's here that Neill's thorough approach comes into play. He mightn't be the most stylish rock biographer going around, but when you're working in the area style and gloss come a distant second to comprehensiveness and content. The tome is thoroughly footnoted (a big tick as far as historian Hughesy's concerned) with a seemingly exhaustive combination of chapter by chapter source notes and bibliography, a selective discography and listing of BBC TV and radio appearances, and apparently complete 1969-75 concert file.

Neill runs through each major player's career leading up to the Small Faces and the Jeff Beck Group, corrects various long-standing myths and unsubstantiated rumours. The Small Faces transformation from Mod R&B through Top of the Pops hysteria to the Itchycoo Park Ogden's Nut Gone Flake psychedelic period gets a thorough working over.

Stewart's transformation from CND folkie to vocal front man through the Hoochie Coochie Men, Steampacket and Shotgun Express to fronting the Beck Group leaves an impression of a man who was determined to make it, but needed to find a niche.

The ructions that split Steve Marriott from the Small Faces and into Humble Pie with Peter Frampton, the breakdown of the original Jeff Beck Group are explained, and there's a thorough account of the emergence of the new-look Faces, with vocalist Rod Stewart and guitarist Ron Wood joining the Small Faces rhythm section (Ronnie Lane and Kenney Johes) and keyboard player an McLagan.

The delicate balancing act between Stewart's solo work and the Faces' collective entity and its subsequent breakdown are carefully chronicled and the significant bit players including original Small Faces keyboards man Jimmy Winston, Lane's whisky-swilling replacement Tetsu Yamauchi, Stewart's original mentor Long John Baldry, pianist Nicky Hopkins, assorted Rolling Stones, their manager and Immediate Records boss Andrew Loog Oldham all get the appropriate guernseys along the way.

At the same time there's nothing that emerges from the saga that has really prompted me to head out and chase down First Step, Long Player, A Nod Is as Good as a Wink... to a Blind Horse or Ooh La La, though those early Stewart albums may end up joining An Old Raincoat in the iTunes Library if they're priced below $10 at the same time as I have an inclination to spend some money and a lack of alternative inspiration.

Neill's book, with its fairly detailed description of the circumstances that led to descriptors like drunk, loose, fun and shambolic being associated with The Faces was probably never going to change that. They may have rocked the joint, they weren't the only ones to cut a swathe through the U.S. concert scene, and as for suggestions that they were the world's second greatest rock band…

The biography, while interesting and comprehensive ends up, like its subject, interesting but definitely non-essential.

But I'll be rereading the Jeff Beck and Small Faces content before it goes back to the Library.

James Lee Burke "Rain Gods"

I've remarked elsewhere that James Lee Burke could probably come up with a convincing and totally chilling psychopath and/or sociopath in his sleep. The Dave Robicheaux novels are literally crawling with 'em, and there's a liberal sprinkling across his other titles as well.

With that ability to conjure them up there may be a willingness to kill them off, which makes me hope the other lead character in the Hackberry Holland series proves to be an exception to the rule.

One hopes that the final Hackberry Holland novel has already been written, and is scheduled for posthumous publication because on the basis of Feast Day of Fools and Rain Gods I hope we're in for an extended series that won't quite be the same if he manages to definitively kill off the Preacher..

Rain Gods slipped by unnoticed two years ago, and my enjoyment of Feast Day of Fools meant I had no choice to go back and read the prequel, and the reading experience was definitely worth it. A glance at the James Lee Burke Wikipedia entry has a Dave Robicheaux scheduled for next year and I've got my fingers crossed in the hope of a Hackberry Holland in 2013.

The landscape along the Texas/Mexico border is probably the appropriate environment for a bible-quoting sociopathic psychopath, and there's probably quite a few of them lurking out there in the border badlands, but one hopes there aren't too many like Preacher Jack Collins out there in the flesh.

I'm not aware of any literary or personal link between Burke and Warren Zevon, and the I'll Sleep When I'm Dead Zevon biography doesn't feature an index but reading these two stories it certainly seems there's a fair bit of the old eternal Thompson gunner still stalking through the night here.

With nine illegal aliens machine gunned and buried in a shallow grave behind a church, and Iraq veteran, Pete Flores, and his girlfriend, Vikki Gaddis on the run from a collection of players who want them removed from the picture, terminated, as the saying goes, with extreme prejudice Sheriff Holland and Deputy Pam Tibbs set out to piece together a picture that's complicated by personal agendas and vendettas among a variety of underworld influences.

It's a complex jumble of threads with Preacher Jack at the centre of things, a psychopath who seems to see himself as an avenging angel and manages to draw information from a variety of reliable sources that lesser mortals such as you and I might be inclined to dismiss.

So, with Pete Flores and Vikki Gaddis on the run from the people on the fringes of the killings (Pete was involved, and knows a bit too much for his own good), the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other forces of nominal law and order who are pursuing their own larger agendas and Hackberry Holland, haunted by back pain, Korean War nightmares and obsessive memories of his late wife, Rie, most writers would have left it at that and proceeded from there.

Burke, on the other hand, starts with a dozen major characters and half a dozen plot lines, throws extra players into the mix where needed, brings them back as necessary and ties things together rather deftly at the end, leaving enough room for Preacher Jack to reappear in Feast Day of Fools as the Epilogue notes sightings of an emaciated man who foraged in landfills and Dumpsters and wore rags that were black with grime and a rope for a belt and whose beard grew in a point to the middle of his chest.

After a spell in the wilderness, you just know, even without having read the sequel, that he'll be back.

Once again, Burke demonstrates his skill as a master storyteller, writing with a clarity most of us would envy and few could hope to emulate and delivering a multifaceted story where nothing is quite what it seems and tortured souls operate in their own distinct and strangely moral universe.

A masterpiece that deserves to be reread to pick up the details you missed last time around…as the reader savours the elegant mastery of language on offer. One might be tempted to apply tags like his best so far, but when each successive volume attracts the tag it seems easier to say another James Lee Burke and leave it at that.

James Lee Burke "Feast Day of Fools"

Here's a perfect example of Hughesy's need to write something down to remind himself of what he's read. Feast Day of Fools is the third title inJames Lee Burke's Hackberry Holland series, and while I have a copy of 1971's Lay Down My Sword And Shield on the shelves, there's no sign of 2009's Rain Gods in the same area, though I have vague memories of reading a Burke title from the Gold Coast Library at some stage over the past couple of years.

Then again, there's quite possibly a copy sitting in a pile of books over at The Actor's place, but whatever version of reality applies here there's something missing in the sequence as far as Hughesy's memory is concerned, and where a James Lee Burke series is concerned those memory factors are a key ingredient in the enjoyment of the reading process.

While it's not totally necessary to read these books in sequence, and latecomers to the eighteen-title Dave Robicheaux series are going to have difficulty in that regard, there's always a degree of carry over from one title to the next and while each title stands comfortably on its own there are nuances in there that only really come out if you've read the preceding title.

That applies a little more than it usually does in this case. We first encountered Hackberry Holland, cousin of Texas attorney Billy Bob Holland (Cimarron Rose, Heartwood, Bitterroot, In the Moon of Red Ponies) as far back as the 1970s in Lay Down My Sword and Shield, though there's a fair time lapse between that story of a Texan attorney and Korean War POW being pushed by his wife, his brother, and friends in the oil business to run for Congress and becomes caught up in a civil rights conflict and the later volumes.

In the intervening period since the early days of the United Farm Workers he's been a civil rights lawyer and ended up after the death of his wife as the local sheriff in a small community on the border between Texas and Mexico.

Rain Gods takes place in that setting with the machine-gunned bodies of nine young Thai women found in a shallow grave behind a church, an Iraq veteran and his girlfriend running for their lives, a serial killer known as Preacher Jack Collins, the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and assorted cold-blooded killers running along intersecting plot lines (in these cases Google is your friend) as Sheriff Holland and his deputy Pam Tibbs try to figure things out.

References to those nine Thai women and your actual Preacher Jack turn up again in Feast Day of Fools, and while you don't actually need to know the back story from last time around it'd definitely help when it comes to elucidating the tricky and apparently long-standing interaction between Hack Holland and the bible-toting and quoting serial killer.

The action starts when Native American alcoholic semi-vagrant Danny Boy Lorca witnesses a man tortured to death in the desert, reports it to the authorities and the investigation leads more or less directly to the door of La Magdalena, Anton Ling, a mysterious Chinese woman known to assist illegal immigrants crossing the border.

While she claims to know nothing about the case, the dead man's companion, a government agent the killer had planned to sell to Al Qaeda, had sheltered there, and has now found his way into the company of serial murderer Preacher Jack. The killer, a former mercenary named Krill is haunted by the unbaptised deaths of his children, also turns up on her doorstep, as does his illiterate and psychopathic offsider Negrito and the Reverend Cody Daniels, an ex-convict who's looking for salvation and/or revenge (seemingly it's a case of whichever comes first).

Holland repeatedly turns up on the doorstep as well, apparently spellbound by La Magdalena's resemblance to his late wife, much to the dismay of Deputy Pam Tibbs who has her own interpersonal aspirations as far as Hack is concerned.

Psychopaths, illegal immigrants, drug smugglers and gun runners, Russian mobsters, corrupt employees of the federal government, figures from Hack’s distant past and immigrant-hating rednecks roam across the desolate landscape, and there are enough conflicts of interest to bring the strangest combinations into an uneasy alliance against mutual enemies before an enigmatic ending that sets things up for a sequel.

Burke is a master craftsman whose prose shimmers and deserves to be savoured, a story teller who gets better each new time around and Feast Day of Fools is right up there with his very best efforts.

Which, of course, from where I'm sitting ranks it right up there with the very best there is.

Peter Robinson "Before the Poison"

Having voraciously devoured almost everything in Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks series the sight of a new Robinson title in a book shop is almost invariably followed by a hit on the credit card balance.

A glance at the blurb on the back cover (a what's he got Banks into this time? sort of thing) suggested we were talking a Banks-free zone this time around, and the opening sequence, where convicted murderer Grace Fox in hanged in January, 1953 seemingly confirmed those suspicions.

Starting a story fifty-something years ago opens the possibility of a case reopened, so there could have been an opening for Banks in that regard, the accidental discovery of something that brings the case back to attention or something along those lines, but here the something is a house and the investigator isn't a police officer.

Yorkshire native Chris Lowe wants to return home after the death of his wife and buys an isolated semi-stately home (Kilnsgate House) sight unseen. After a successful career as a film score composer he has visions of working on his movie soundtracks there once he's managed to get this piano sonata out of the way.

Partly due to the aforementioned isolation, Kilnsgate has been largely unoccupied for close to sixty years, and Lowe discovers a few previously undisclosed details about the place from real estate agent Heather Barlow who turns up with a basket of supplies shortly after he has moved in.

Heather's marriage is on the verge of a break-up, and there's definitely a degree of chemistry evident from the start, so a mixture of introspective musing on past affairs and possible developments makes a significant counterpoint to Lowe's musings on a once notorious but now largely forgotten murder scandal with excerpts from Grace Fox's wartime journal and a volume of Famous Trials by Sir Charles Hamilton Morley which goes a long way to filling in the back story, which runs something like this:

On a wintry New Year's Eve a snowstorm isolates Kilnsgate House, where a dinner party has been followed by the sudden death of Dr Ernest Fox, the apparent victim of a heart attack. Allegations that Grace and her much younger lover planned to do away with her husband soon emerge, along with suggestions Dr Fox was about to take up a position in the south (a move that would separate the lovers). As it turns out, Grace and her husband seem to have quarrelled about the appointment, though the argument doesn't stem from the obvious motivation.

Grace is convicted and executed, the lover, an artist, moves to Paris where Lowe tracks him down and garners further details about the past, and the gradual unfolding of events leads Lowe to South Africa with the whole matter seemingly nutted out only to learn that he's barking up an entirely wrong tree.

Actually, he's "so far off target they'd have to send out a search party for the truth."

The truth, as it turns out, has been signalled fairly comprehensively on the way through, particularly in the latter sections of Grace's journal, and while there's no way of confirming the objective truth you're left (or at least I was) with the feeling that if it actually was homicide Grace's wartime experiences make it an understandable act.

Things aren't quite the way they seemed as far as Mr and Mrs Lowe are concerned either, and there's a neat twist involving the victims' son and his own offspring.

All in all, an intriguing read that isn't going to parlay itself into a series unless Robinson can pull some rather spectacular rabbits out of the authorial hat. It's difficult to see how Mr Lowe and Ms Barlow are going to find further cases to follow up, and this isn't a plot line that would have worked with Inspector Banks and his colleagues either.

Or rather, it might have, but you'd have to forego the Chris Lowe first person narrative, wouldn't you?

As stated, Before the Poison is an intriguing read that had me turning the pages over about a day and a half, which says something about Robinson's writing ability.

Peter Leonard "All He Saw Was The Girl"

Another lively little read set in Detroit and the environs of Rome from Peter Leonard. He apparently wants to get away from Detroit, and does a pretty good job of it here.

Secret Service agent Ray Vanelli's wife is having an affair with Mafia hard man Joey Palermo in Detroit and when Palermo learns she's married and establishes her husband's occupation decamps to his uncle's villa outside Rome, followed by a husband who wants his missus back.

Meanwhile two American exchange students hijack a taxi in Rome at the end of a drinking binge. and while they're being held in jail they cross paths with a couple of dudes from 'Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia. Chip Tallenger is the son of a rich US Senator, and Dad's able to extract them from this particular predicament but the story attracts the attention of the Italian press and a captioning error on the attached photo has the 'Ndrangheta dudes plotting a kidnapping but snatching the wrong student.

Ex-ice hockey player McCabe is, however, able to escape and sets about turning the tables to get the ransom money back by kidnapping the girl who lured him into the honey trap, who happens to be the head kidnapper's girlfriend and Joey Palermo's cousin.

That's all you need in the way of a plot outline, and the to-ing and fro-ing has things rattling along very nicely all the way to the end where, predictably, McCabe gets the girl.

Overall another well-written action packed effort you race through to see how things sort themselves out. An easy and highly entertaining  read, but a read oncer to borrow from the library rather than buy and place on the shelves…