Never mind the navel-gazing stuff that almost invariably wins the Booker, Whitbread, Orange and IMPAC awards - Douglas Kennedy's thriller, The Big Picture, is a thumping good read.
But don't take my word for it - take W.H. Smith's, who have just bestowed the 1998 Thumping Good Read Award (yes, there is such a thing) on Douglas's bestselling novel.
As you may gather from its no-nonsense title, this prize doesn't depend on the agonised deliberations of an elite judging panel, but rather on the enthusiastic recommendations of readers. From these, a shortlist is drawn up, and from that an overall winner is chosen by six of W.H. Smith's highest-spending customers.
Douglas is very chuffed at being so honoured, and speaking from his home in London, this former administrator of the Peacock Theatre says that the book (for which its American publisher famously shelled out $1.2 million) is now in development at 20th Century Fox, while rights to his new novel, The Job, which is due out in August, have already been sold to MGM.
So hurray for Hollywood? Well, yes and no, the no being what happened to the movie of his first novel, The Dead Heart. The author had worked on a couple of drafts, but somewhere along the way he found that it had acquired a new title ( Wel- come to Woop Woop) and that it had also been turned into, would you believe (he didn't), a musical.
So with The Big Picture and The Job, he's letting them get on with it: "I wish them well, but the novelist's job is to write novels and to stay away from the movie-making process", a sentiment shared by Elmore Leonard who, on being told by Quentin Tarantino that the white Jackie Burke of Leonard's original book had become the black Jackie Brown of the movie, simply shrugged: "My novel, your movie." Topping that, Douglas throws in David Mamet's observation that "writing for the movies is like the beginning of a love affair - it's full of surprises and you're always getting fucked".
Meanwhile he's genuinely thrilled by the W.H. Smith award. Sometimes, he feels, literary awards can "come down to a complicated matter of politics," and here he cites Dr Johnson's remark that "the mutual civility between authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life". Thus he's delighted that the Thumping Good Read accolade was a gift from readers rather than fellow-writers.
On publication of The Job - which concerns the shock to the main protagonist's sense of security when the New York company in which he works is threatened by a takeover - he'll be embarking on a fourteen-city American tour. As for his own job and the financial security it's afforded him in the last couple of years, he simply says: "It's very nice and rare to make that kind of money."
MONEY concerns Ian Hamilton, too - indeed, he goes so far as to call his new book of essays The Trouble with Money.
The trouble with Ian Hamilton is that he writes too little - too little poetry (a first, outstanding, book in 1970, another in 1988, and nothing since) and too little literary journalism.
There was, of course, the biography of Robert Lowell, followed by the not-quite-biography of J.D. Salinger, and earlier there had been those two indispensable magazines, The Review and The New Review, which against all the financial odds he kept in existence for almost twenty years.
But in recent times admirers of his shrewd insights and elegantly accessible prose have had to make do with the occasional offering in the London Review of Books, TLS, Granta or New Yorker - not nearly enough, especially given the general dearth of good critical writing.
Now, suddenly, there are two books in the space of as many months. The temptation is to wonder what's going on, but it's best just to give thanks - lovers of Matthew Arnold will certainly be cheered at how persuasively Hamilton has re-established, in a study that is slim only in length, this neglected poet's true stature.
And The Trouble with Money is a bracing collection of thirty-five essays, reviews and profiles, ranging in subject from Ford Madox Ford, Louis MacNeice, Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney to Glenn Hoddle, Julie Christie, Channel crossings and biographers misgivings.
Two books from Hamilton in two months! What next? A volume of poems?
DUBLIN poet John F. Deane has just returned from St Paul, Minnesota, where he received the second annual Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry at the University of St Thomas's Centre for Irish Studies.
The award, worth $5,000 dollars, is named after a man who taught English at St Thomas from 1948 to 1950, who served on the university's board of trustees and who has had a longstanding commitment to honouring Irish poets. The inaugural award went to Eavan Boland.
Meanwhile, back in Ireland, John Banville's novel, The Untouchable, has won this year's Kerry Ingredients Book of the Year Award, the adjudicators of which were William Trevor and Arts Show series producer Ann Walsh. The author will receive the award from BBC journalist Fergal Keane next Wednesday at the official opening of Listowel Writers' Week.