At the launch of his book in New York in January, Alan Glynn's agent gently prepared him for any possible disappointment by saying that sometimes it takes a while for new books to make it on to the bookshelves. But there was no letdown, writes Bernice Harrison.
Doing a typical first-time author's recce of the major bookstores in Manhattan, Glynn found The Dark Fields all over the place in Barnes and Noble, Borders, Shakespeare & Co - the lot.
With singing reviews for the pacey thriller starting to come in, his agent sold the film rights of the Dublin-born author's book to Miramax. He'd already sold the rights in Japan and a slew of European countries as well as to Bloomsbury for the UK market and Little Brown for the US.
For an Irish author, it's an unusually international start to a writing career. But The Dark Fields is not a typical Irish first novel. It is set in New York, where freelance copywriter Eddie Spinola stumbles upon the ultimate designer drug, MDT48. The little white pill turns him from a low-grade slob into a Midas stock-market player. The drug speeds up his brain's ability to process information to the extent that he can see patterns in the stock market. He can learn a language in a day, speed-read the most academic textbooks or dense novels and, what's more, he loses weight and becomes fantastically attractive to women.
It's a Viagra for the brain and,with all that it has given him, Eddie doesn't want it to stop. That's until the ominous blackouts, the blinding headaches and his discovery of a trail of dead and dying people connected to the drug.
"It's a thriller, but more of a psychological one," says Glynn. "There are no car chases and there's a low body count."
In his quiet-spoken, laconic way, he concedes that it is fast-paced. With Eddie's mind racing to experience more of, well, everything, the book keeps up a similar tempo as the story unfolds with a rawNew York energy.
Glynn lived in Manhattan in the late 1980s before moving to Italy, where he stayed for five years teaching English. Now 41, he lives in Dublin with his wife, Eithne Kelly, and the couple are expecting their first child in early summer. When he came home in the mid-1990s, he continued teaching full-time, but his intention was to knuckle down and start writing seriously.
The Dark Fields is his first published novel, but not, he admits wryly, his first book. In 1997, after years of writing, he found an agent, Antony Harwood, who took on his first manuscript but couldn't find a publisher. Despite the rejection slips, his agent stood by him and hawked around his second book - but again there were no takers.
"It was such wall-to-wall rejection; the second book's rejection was real heartache, very discouraging," he says.
Knowing that it would be two more years of his life before he would have another book ready, he even asked his agent if he should change his subject-matter or the way he wrote, something that would make doors open faster. Harwood, who sounds more like a literary guardian angel than a 10 per cent man, sent him home with the instruction to write exactly what he wanted and advised that if it was going to work, then it was going to be on those terms.
Halfway through The Dark Fields and with a basic outline of the story, Harwood again went knocking on doors. Little Brown snapped it up, the "buzz" started and other publishers came knocking. After 10 years of part-time writing and earning nothing for it, Glynn was suddenly able to jack in the day job to write full-time.
"The story is the key to the stuff that I write," he says, adding that the idea for The Dark Fields came when he started to imagine a meeting between a guy and his ex-brother-in-law.
"It's such an odd relationship that I just started wondering what these two guys could possibly talk about," he says. For most of us, that would result in an embarrassed 10-minuter with more silences than conversation, not a designer drug-fuelled express train through downtown New York via the evil machinations of the pharmaceutical trade.
To keep up with Eddie's voracious appetite for knowledge and experience, Glynn had to bone up on an extraordinary variety of diverse subjects, from the workings of day-trading geeks to getting his musical references down pat for Eddie's new interest in concert-standard piano playing.
He also went to revisit his old downtown haunts in New York, where he had worked as a magazine copy editor.
He researched others so that when Eddie breaks into the Upper East Side monied world, each description rings true.
His next book is, he says with obvious relief, up and running. The transition from part-timer with a day job to full-time writer hasn't been as easy as he thought. Instead of finishing teaching on a Friday and starting nine-to-five writing on a Monday, Glynn says that for a while he became an expert in displacement activity - channel surfing, roaming around the house, "even ironing, for god's sake".
He's settled down now into the luxury of full-time writing and the next book is also a thriller set in New York. "I just felt that there was still energy left over from The Dark Fields and that was energy I could use," he says.
The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn, is published by Little Brown at £10.99