Two years on, we're still buzzing from reading Bill Beverly's Dodgers, and never waste an opportunity to press a copy into someone's hand at Christmas and birthdays.
It's also the perfect book to stick in the bag this summer - the best of good company, no matter the distance or weather.
Billed as "The Wire meets On the Road", Beverly's debut follows four youths who have been dispatched on a mission to the Midwest by an LA gang boss.
Michael is the cocky and charismatic driver; Walter is the logistics 'man'; Tyrone is the 13-year-old shooter and his older brother East is the deep thinker who seems the most determined to see the job through to the end.
While the whole enterprise feels doomed from the outset, Beverley wrings huge amounts of tension from the will-they-won't-they set-up as the quartet burn up the miles between their hometown and Wisconsin.
And with every road sign they pass, your own heart aches that little bit more.
A lecturer in American literature and writing at Trinity University in Washington, DC, Beverly has himself learned from the best.
Dodgers won the Crime Writers' Association's Novel of the Year award in the UK, and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in the US.
Best of all, it now has pride of place on many a shelf in many a sanctuary.
"As somebody who had spent a lot of time writing only for in-house audiences - meaning my family house - it was enough of a triumph just that somebody outside of the property line was willing to read it," says Beverly.
And what a triumph.
Here, he talks about bringing Dodgers to life - and his Irish inspirations.
I had been a short story writer for 20 years, and had spent a lot of time proving that I wasn't much good at it.
I took a class with an American writer - a guy from LA named Dan Barden - who pointed out that I had a story that deserved to go longer. In classic short story form I was beginning to 'turn out the lights on the party' at about page 15.
So I took that story, which was about a Tennessee football coach and I wrote about an 800-page draft of it, of which at least 50 pages are pretty good writing.
When I was able to finally cut ties and put the book in a box, I thought, 'Well, if I ever make this mistake again of writing a novel, it will be something bloody, short, and saleable!'
A year went by. I took a shower one day and thought up the story of Dodgers.
I told my wife about it, and my wife is a shrewd judge of everything. She said, 'You should write that'.
At the very beginning I started writing Dodgers as a screenplay.
The fractured syntax of the first couple of chapters is reflective of that commandment, that when one writes a screenplay your stage directions are to be kept as short as possible: 'Morning. Taxi passes'. I got three chapters in, realised that I was far out of my depth and I had no idea of how to begin to develop these characters in a screenplay format. I kind of drew a slash across the page and began typing out paragraphs. I went back and retooled the first three chapters into fiction, but there are traces of the screenplay genesis still. I think East as a character is the candle that shows the book along - shows the story along - and perhaps the 'thing' about the book readers have attached to most.
East is not immediately a very appealing character.
He seems in the beginning to be rigid and perhaps even a little cruel. To have him slowly shift to the centre of the book and become more and more sympathetic, and more and more visible and understandable to readers, is something I hope the book manages to accomplish.
East had lived in my head and I'd done relatively little about him for many years.
He still lives in my head. East is still up there driving the bus, at least part time! Once he was there he was fairly easy to figure out, to maintain, to slip into the perceptions of. There were other characters in the book who were much harder, and of the four, Walter was the character who was by far the most difficult to figure out, who changed the most. His name changed at least twice and he was, I guess, a sort of wildcard in early drafts and might even have been eliminated from the book. But his blankness became a kind of resource and he was able to rescue me a few times. It's a lesson for me: throw in a 'spare tyre' and you never know when you'll be able to use it!
There's a whole tradition in American writing and film that mixes the crime narrative with almost a sort of romanticism.
Terrence Malick's really lyrical film Badlands, and Denis Johnson's books Jesus' Son and Angels, are real and certainly gritty - propulsive - but they're also hallucinatory, transitory stories. I think I learned a lot, certainly from Johnson. He and James Baldwin are my favourite American stylists. I've learned a great deal about the English sentence from those two writers.
I grew up on Dubliners.
The story The Dead... Joyce's treatment of detail in that story... There's a moment where the title character, Gabriel, remembers Greta as they were when they were much younger. His granular, almost pixelated memory of details with her, and the importance they have taken on - that is a moment I have taught again and again to my creative writing students as underlining the absolute crucial importance of illuminated details. That story is among the three or four or five most important stories in the language for me. I grew up on Yeats as well. I wish I knew Yeats more deeply than I do, but I am an enormous fan.
I have a daughter who was born on my 40th birthday at about two o'clock in the morning at home.
I was a square enough fellow. I managed to keep a job and pay the mortgage and make a house and a home for her. But I really did want to kind of show her something. And it's been really wonderful, after being a guy who writes short stories in his spare time and publishes none of them, to get it done. I dedicated Dodgers to her and she has taken author photos and it's lovely to have shared it with my family and students in that way. It's something in which I have taken the greatest pleasure.
Dodgers is published by No Exit Press.
