Irony - Isnt That Like Tinny and Bronzy?

Among the more idiotic things I've been told by editors over the years is that "crime fiction readers are impatient with irony". And of course I hear superior Brits talk all the time about how Americans don't understand sarcasm and/or irony. What about Jon Stewart you'll ask and be told that Jon Stewart represents New York not America or some such nonsense which is then followed by a long rant about The Office and the genius of Ricky Gervais. But when you read the Amazon customer reviews for the JL421 Land Cruiser/Tank (this year's howling wolf t shirt) you see that these customer reviews come from all over the US not just New York or LA - to my mind this is proof that we all pretty much have the same sense of humor and that irony and sarcasm work everywhere that Mr Bean is not popular.

The Worst Journey In The World

Funny how things turn out, I watched Deliverance on TV last night and this was going to be a piece about Roger Ebert's two and a half star review of the film and how he got it so wrong about what is obviously a classic. But in reading Ebert's review I was pretty surprised to see that he spends most of it talking about one of my favourite books: The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. ACG was a member of Scott's ill fated expedition to the South Pole and when he came back he wrote a book about the winter journey he made with two other men to get the eggs of the emperor penguin. It is really the stuff of nightmares: perpetual darkness, temperatures of -40 degrees, inadequate food and supplies and all for a scientific quest which turned out to be completely pointless. The two men he went with on the winter journey for the eggs, subsequently went with Scott on the summer journey to the South Pole and died with Scott and his entire team.
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I read The Worst Journey in the World in high school and didn't really appreciate it. But then I read it again when National Geographic Magazine picked it as the #1 adventure book of all time, calling it the War and Peace of travel narratives. I think they're right about that. It's an amazing book, telling a grim story in beautiful prose. You can read more about ACG's tragic life here and more about the disastrous Scott expedition here. Roger was wrong about Deliverance but I'm going to let him off this time because of our shared love for this strange, dark, brooding, lyrical, wonderful book.

American Gods - Neil Gaiman

Is there any point reviewing a ten year old novel that's been a massive popular best seller from a critically acclaimed author and is soon to be turned into a blockbuster movie? Well when you put it like it there probably isn't: American Gods has been praised to the skies and its sold in the millions and Neil Gaiman is an intelligent, charming and personable fellow. I met the chap once and I liked him. I've enjoyed other Neil Gaiman novels and of course I'm a fan of his classic comic, The Sandman. My copy of American Gods is covered with reviews and there's even a Q&A section at the back of the book for use in book groups. By any standards this is a successful book. And yet?

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And yet I didn't like it very much at all. The central premise was good and some of the scenes were executed beautifully, but in general I thought American Gods was pretty poor. The main idea is this: as immigrants arrived in America from Europe they brought their gods with them - these gods became manifested through the immigrants' belief in them and the more people believed in the gods the more powerful they became. We follow a character called Shadow as he is released from prison and gets a job working for a down at heel Odin who isnt very popular anymore. I like this notion but unfortunately the novel spirals out of control pretty quickly after that. Shadow's wife is killed and comes back as a ghost, a leprechaun character is introduced and is only interested in drinking and fighting, Television has become a god and is somehow manifested through Lucille Ball who in a yucky scene attempts to flash Shadow on a motel room TV. The book just gets sillier after that until I was skipping pages and wanting the whole thing to end. There was a bit of a Terry Gilliam vibe working here - bad bloated indulgent Terry Gilliam not dangerous, funny inventive TG. And it made me wistful for the book Gaiman wrote with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens; I wished he'd written this one with Pratchett too as we would have had Gaiman's enjoyable premise enlivened with some good comedy.
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The tone of American Gods is uncertain, neither gothic nor comedic nor naturalistic and it is not brilliant enough to have become sui generis. Gaiman's aesthetic role model for his big American novel seems to have been Stephen King but I really wish he'd stayed closer to his English roots and chanelled Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and PG Wodehouse instead.
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And yeah I appreciate that this is a minority view but thats why you come to this blog isn't it?

Go To School As Your Favourite Literary Character

My daughters' school, St Kilda Primary, had a non school uniform day yesterday when you were allowed to come as your favourite character from a book. My eldest daughter picked Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and my youngest went as Lotte from the Charlie and Lola books. There were a lot of Spidermen and Harry Potters, there was quite a bit of crossdressing and there was one kid who had no shoes on under a blanket which was probably Bilbo Baggins but could possibly have been Huck Finn or Shoeless Joe Jackson (from WP Kinsella's The Iowa Baseball Confederacy).
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It was a very successful event and it got me thinking about how about great it would be if adults were allowed to come to work as their favourite literary characters. If you were feeling pissed off and troublesome you could be Captain Ahab or Holden Caulfield or Yossarian. If you were in a mood to be sarky you could go as pretty much anyone from the works of Oscar Wilde or Jane Austen. Everyone at the office would know to avoid you on the Dostoyevsky or Emily Bronte or Cormac McCarthy days and they'd happily share your booze and biscuits on the Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett days.
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Of course the problem with this stupid idea is that unless you actually work in a bookshop no one will get any of your references: almost nobody reads anymore, libraries are closing, book stores are going bankrupt - if you went to work as one of the cast of Jersey Shore, sure they'll know who you are, but a literary character? No chance.

My New Yorker Year

This is the first paragraph of the letter the New Yorker sent to my house telling (not asking) me that they were renewing my subscription for another year at 120 dollars a pop: (note the punctuation)

Dear Adrian McKinty:

Thank you for subscribing to The New Yorker.  the best conversation you could imagine on art and technology.   Politics and personalities.   Film and theater.   Fiction and fashion.   Culture and commentary.

Brilliant, eh? The letter is signed by "Michael Spencer, for the New Yorker". I looked up "Michael Spencer" on Google and I discovered that he is a billionaire British businessman born in Kuala Lumpur, the owner of a spread betting firm (not sure what that is) called City Index and the former chairman of the Conservative Party. This can't be the same man, I thought, until I read that he went to Corpus Christi College Oxford where apparently anybody including Ed and David Miliband can get in with piss poor A level results as long as they are connected. Maybe explains his strange choices of grammar? Or perhaps he could be the Michael Spencer who is a professional surfer from Australia. This Michael Spencer lists his favourite word as "bob" and his least favourite word also as "bob". Hmmm. That could be our man too.

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The New Yorker letter goes on to explain that I will be charged for another year "shortly" unless I "call the Customer Service Department at any time." (My italics.) I immediately called the CSD and after being informed that my call was going to cost a fortune because it was only toll free if you called from the US, I was then informed that the Customer Service Centre was closed. I called again an hour later and got the same magilla. I guess I'll keep calling until I get through because there's no way on God's green Earth I will ever get the New Yorker again. Most months I got two issues and they would come on the same day. Once six weeks went by without an issue and then I got three together. And like a reversal of that old Woody Allen joke in Annie Hall: these portions were small and inconsistent and the filling was terrible. Oh my God those articles, even the rare good ones (on Scientology for example) were easily 5-10,000 words too long. And the bad ones...Christ: long, ponderous, pointless and a little bit bonkers. Reading them is like actually listening to that twitchy guy on the 13 hour plane flight who arrives late and is wearing adult retainers and a big University of Oklahoma ring and ALWAYS sits next to you. 

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I appreciate that like Saturday Night Live, the New Yorker has never been as good as people remember it being, but has it been this bad? Special venom most go to the editor who still thinks that Woody Allen is a funny prose writer and accepts every piece he submits. Even Woody Allen hates the comedy in the New Yorker. This editor also publishes a lot of "humour" pieces by Nora Ephron and Steve Martin and sometimes by writers under the age of 60.
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Malcolm Gladwell made his appearance in several issues over the year telling us the bleedin obvious. There were articles about "fashion icons" and actors and of course I mustn't forget the New Yorker's pop music critic Sasha Frere Jones with her insightful looks at PJ Harvey and Bjork and Radiohead and other up and coming acts from 1990.

If I can't get through to Michael Spencer I am going to write him a letter:

Dear Michael Spencer:

Thank you for your letter.  hope the surfing/hedge fund business is going well.  Chicken and chiquitas.  Prisons and pensions.  Non sequitors and legal executors.

Please cancel my subscription to the New Yorker. I can in fact imagine better "conversations," than the ones I had the honour to eavesdrop on in the New Yorker. Most people's imaginations will stretch that far, unless, I suppose, you are in duress in a doctor's waiting room, are an in-bred nincompoop from the Upper East Side or Gwyneth Paltrow.

Adrian McKinty

For Those Of You Awaiting "The Rapture"

For many evangelical Christians May 21 2011 was the date of The Rapture, the end of the world, when Jesus would return and earthquakes would devastate the planet and there would be gnashing of teeth and angels with pointy sticks would punish the unbelievers. Alas, as you can see from the date of this blog post, it is now May 22 in Australia, and we're all still here...Sorry guys, I guess you feel a bit foolish. It's ok. This Peter Cook sketch from one of the Amnesty Concerts will make you feel better:

When Will The Oil Run Out?

I haven’t found an adequate answer for this question on the net (just a lot of silliness and/or propaganda) so I’ve had to do the sums myself. Current world consumption is about 26 billion barrels per year. World Oil Consumption has been falling for the last two years but I think an average growth rate of 1.5% - 2% per year seems reasonable based on the expected continuing industrialisation of China, India and the Third World. That means that world oil consumption will have doubled to about 50 billion barrels per year in around 2045 when oil consumption may level off due to energy conservation measures and plateauing populations and industrialisation. There is - approximately - (no one really knows for sure) 1.3 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves across the world. If we use, say, 1 trillion barrels over the next 34 years that will leave us with only 300 billion barrels when world oil consumption hopefully(!) levels off at 50 billion barrels a year in 2045. That means that post 2045 there will only be a six years supply left. By this metric all the oil in the world will run out in 2051.
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However, there are many unexplored regions of the world and it wouldn’t be outrageous (but it would generous) to suggest that there could be another 1 trillion barrels of oil in the Arctic, in the Antarctic, off Greenland, in Russia and in other inhospitable regions. But one trillion only buys us another twenty years or so at the 50 billion per year consumption rate so the oil runs out in 2071 (and thats assuming a levelling off of oil consumption after 2045). But what about the Bakken formation in N. Dakota and the oil sands of Alberta and Venezuela as well as other places around the globe? Well now we’re talking big numbers. At the moment most of those massive deposits are uneconomic but if we’re running out of oil fast then by golly they will quickly become economic. In Canada and Venezuela alone there could be as much as 4 trillion barrels of oil that may be recoverable with advanced technologies. This will buy us another 80 years. Let’s throw in the remaining world oil sands fields for good measure and that brings us up to an even 100 years.

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So when does all the oil run out? Add this all together and I reckon the answer is August 6th 2171 at 7.15 pm British Summer Time. If no one’s invented a fusion reactor by then it’ll be back to the glorious days of clipper ships and steam trains. Hurrah!

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(And please don’t get me started on the topic of world coal reserves).

Vote For Me!

My novel Fifty Grand has been longlisted for the prestigious Theakston Best Crime Novel Award. There are 14 other books on the long list and to make the short list of five the general public is required to vote for their favourite.
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If you want to vote for Fifty Grand you can do so here.
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To be honest I think making the shortlist seems like a bit of a tall order. I'm up against several huge beasts of best sellers and I imagine those books will have a hard core fan base in the thousands. I suspect the five shortlisted books will also be the five books who sold the most copies. . .but you never know, do you? So I'd certainly appreciate your vote.
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Fifty Grand's always been a bit of an ugly duckling. I've gotten some barmy reviews from left wingers who say my portrayal of Cuba is fascist propaganda; I've also been attacked by right wing nuts who say that my description of immigrant life in New Mexico and Colorado is blatant commie propaganda. They can't both be right, can they? I then had to deal with some potential libel issues and a breach of copyright suit from the Church of Scientology (because I quoted from one of their rather eccentric questionnaires). Fifty Grand also seems to stir up strong passions among online reviewers (I got almost no print reviews in the US (thank you Henry Holt!)) who generally either love or hate the book. Some of the online reviews are pretty heavy but on the other hand I got a really nice review in The Guardian and Fifty Grand won the 2010 Spinetingler Award which is also voted on by the general public.
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Anyway if you hated Fifty Grand you can go to the Theakston Prize website and vote for somebody else. If you liked it you can go there and vote for me.
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The system they have in place to prevent double voting isn't the greatest one so if you want to vote Chicago style, feel free. (I voted only once and not for me.)
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And finally, for the Amazon reviewer who didn't believe Cuba could possibly be as bad as I've portrayed it and claimed that I hadn't been there at all...here's a link to an article I wrote for The Times about just one of my trips to Havana, and here's a link to the blog of Yoani Sanchez, a young Cuban woman, who despite being daily intimidated and on one occasion beaten up by Raul Castro's secret police, still bravely tells it like it is.
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Slainte and thank you for your vote!

Perdido Street Station

I listen to a lot of audiobooks driving in the car or riding around on my bike. It's very rare that I will listen to a book as an audiobook and then read it as a book book. China Mieville's Perdido Street Station is one of the few recent cases where I've done that. I have no idea who did the audio because I got it as a torrent but it was read and produced very well. Reading it is a different experience - much less intense and immersive, but I still liked it a whole lot.

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It's a fantasy novel set in the city of New Crobazon which is a cross between William Burroughs's Interzone (Tangier) and London. The city is populated by many different sentient and semi sentient races and other peculiar creatures. It's a steampunk nineteenth century city with science complimenting a ubiquitous low level magic. We follow the story of Isaac (a human) and Lin (who has a more or less human female's body with a beetle's head (not quite the full Kafka)) who are in a frowned upon and possibly illegal relationship together. Lin is an artist with a repulsive new client (who wants a self portrait) and Isaac is a scientist/thaumaturge who gets a job working for a garuda - a desert dwelling sentient bird like creature - who has lost his wings and wants Isaac to make him a new set.
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That takes you to about page 100 of 600. If you like fantasy you really should try Perdido Street Station and if haven't read any fantasy novels since The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings this could be a good place to start. As I've said in another place - Perdido Street Station is one of the best and most important fantasy novels since the 1970's and China Mieville is certainly a pretender to Neil Gaiman's throne as the genre's most exciting talent.

Bin Laden's TV Viewing Habits

Blogger went down yesterday Friday the 13th! I assume it was a hack attack. I lost a couple of posts and the comments on them. Here's one I've partially reconstructed...
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Last Saturday the Pentagon released a strange two minute home movie of Osama Bin Laden watching satellite TV. What we were supposed to take from the movie was Bin Laden's vanity, i.e. the only thing he watched for any length of time were news reports about himself. What I thought was interesting was the fact that any time a black person (President Obama for example) came on the box Bin Laden immediately hit the menu button; he did the same any time a woman came on. The latter is more easily explained - jihadis are not supposed to look at women who are not their wives under any circumstances. In Iraq some hostages have reported that their captors only ever watched cartoons for fear of catching a glimpse of a woman on TV. Bin Laden's beef with black people? Well he is a Saudi and I've been told by a number of people that Saudi Arabia might be the most racist country on Earth...On the other hand Wednesday's Washington Post, quoting Bin Laden's diary says that he was actively trying to recruit minorities to the cause (without any success). It all reminded me of an old - still funny - Dave Chappelle routine from a few years back that I've uploaded below (warning for those easily offended the f word is used once).

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Ok I'll come clean this entire "argument" was just an excuse to show the Dave Chappelle clip. If you want a rather more nuanced and interesting look at Osama Bin Laden and iconography check out my old buddy's Girish Shahane's latest column for Yahoo India, here.

The Legality of Osama Bin Laden's Killing

Interesting story in the New York Times today. Osama Bin Laden's son, Omar, says that the US unlawfully killed his father and that by raiding his compound and killing him the principles of international law "have been blatantly violated." That old fraud Noam Chomsky said the same thing earlier in the week. It's fascinating that neither of these two gentlemen have law degrees (or a law degree and a masters degree in Jurisprudence and Legal Theory like your humble correspondent) but I assume that before they issued their statements they must have familiarised themselves with Article 51 of the UN Charter which states:

Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.

Article 51 goes on to stress the importance of the Security Council in sorting out disputes. The Security Council has of course condemned the 9/11 attacks and authorised action against Osama Bin Laden the man who organised them. But even more important than that and the key to understanding Article 51 are the two words "inherent right". Let me unpack that a little. The UN charter is merely a treaty signed by most of the world's sovereign states. Treaties are important but they exist in the pre existing legal framework of customary international law, rather like the thin layer of icing on a thick sponge cake.

Bin Laden and Chomsky presumably also have read the classic work on this subject,  De Jure Belle Ac Pacis, by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius. Chapter 4 of this text is all about the killing of belligerents in wartime. I need not remind loyal members of this blog of Grotius's remarks but I'll quote them for any strangers who might have popped by: 

V. The lawfulness of injuring or destroying the person of a public enemy is supported by the testimony of many of the best writers, both poets, moralists, and historians. In one of the tragedies of Euripides, there is a proverb, which says, that “to kill a public enemy, or an enemy in war is no murder.” Thus the custom of the ancient Greeks, which rendered it unlawful and impious to use the same bath, or to partake of the same festivities and sacred rites with a person who had killed another in time of peace, did not extend to any one who had killed a public enemy in war. Killing an enemy is indeed everywhere called a right of war.

“The rights of war, says Marcellus in Livy, support me in all that I have done against the enemy.” And the same historian gives the address of Alcon to the Saguntines, where he says, “You ought to bear these hardships, rather than suffer your own bodies to be mangled, and your wives and children to be seized and dragged away before youreyes.”

Cicero in his speech in defence of Marcellus passes a high encomium upon the clemency of Caesar, who, “by the laws of war and the rights of victory, might have put to death all, whom he had spared and protected.” And Caesar observes to the Eduans, that “it was an act of kindness in him, to spare those whom the laws of war would have authorised him to put to death.”


But the rights of war, for which these writers plead, could not perfectly justify the putting prisoners to death, but could only grant impunity to those who availed them selves of the barbarous custom. There is a wide difference however between actions like these, and destroying an enemy by proper means of hostility. For, as Tacitus says, “in the leisure hours of peace the merits and demerits of every case may be examined and weighed, but, in the tumult and confusion of war, the innocent must fall with the guilty”: and the same writer, in another place, observes, that “there are many actions, which the principles of humanity cannot entirely approve, but which the policy of war requires.” And it is in this, and no other sense that Lucan has said,“the complexion of right may be assigned to what is wrong.”


VI. This right of making lawful what is done in war is of great extent. For in the first place it comprises, in the number of enemies, not only those who actually bear arms, or who are immediately subjects of the belligerent power, but even all who are within the hostile territories, as appears from the form given by Livy, who says, that “war is declared against the sovereign, and all within his jurisdiction.” For which a very good reason may be assigned; because danger is to be apprehended even from them, which, in a continued and regular war, establishes the right now under discussion.


What does this mean? The US (and all sovereign nations) have a right to self defence under customary international law as well as a right to self defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. That right extended to the killing of Osama Bin Laden and those who assisted him in his compound. Whether you agree with the killing or not is a moral question, but the legality of the SEAL team's actions is not in any serious doubt.

Just Kids - Patti Smith



Patti photographed by Robert Maplethorpe
for the cover of her first album, Horses

I read this last year and I'm not sure why it's taken me until now to write a little something about it. Perhaps because I reread it again this afternoon during a very long bath when I should have been doing something else. Something that I have already been paid to do but haven't quite got around to doing yet - we all know that feeling, right? Er...
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Anyway Just Kids. Patti Smith is born in Chicago and grows up in New Jersey. The family are blue collar Catholics and Patti is one of those skinny dreamy kids who runs wild outdoors and invents games and imaginary playmates. She's intensely creative and seems to inhabit her own world. Her primary interest is art and poetry. She gets pregnant as a teen and lives at home and then when the neighbours begin to talk moves in with her aunt. She carries the baby to term, has it adopted and moves to New York.
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She lives in squalor for many years and falls in love with another young misfit called Robert Maplethorpe who also dreams of becoming an artist. They move in together in Brooklyn and talk about getting married. She has a succession of low paying jobs to support his endeavours in painting and as time progresses they gradually drift apart. He flees to San Francisco and comes back announcing that he is gay. She accepts this and they decide to remain friends. She gets a job in a bookstore and starts going to poetry readings. They live together in the Chelsea Hotel and gradually get absorbed into Andy Warhol's scene at the Factory. She meets Alan Ginsberg and has an affair with Sam Shephard who initially conceals the fact that he's a famous playwright and married. Eventually of course she becomes a singer and a punk rock icon and he becomes a photographer and artist.
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Patti Smith has two huge things going for her in this book: she has a way with a words and she has an interesting story to tell. Her prose is spare, economical, beautiful and her narrative is full of compassion, wonderful details and humour. This was one of my favourite reads of 2010 and it holds up very well on a second go round. Highly recommended.

Bin Laden and Bonanza

I havent been the biggest fan of Adam Curtis over the years but I thought this little doc was quite arresting: its a pop culture history of the 60s (more of a collage really) and in this section it contains some interesting information about Osama Bin Laden, Charles Manson and the TV show Bonanza.



One thing Curtis could have mentioned was the Chinese cook on Bonanza, Hop Sing, played by Victor Sen Yung. After Bonanza ended Sen Yung was in a real life skyjacking on a Pacific South West Airlines flight and was shot in the back by the FBI during the rescue mission. He survived until 1980 when he unfortunately died from carbon monoxide poisoning during the making of clay pots at his home kiln.

Che Guevara's Biggest Mistake

(The last of the old posts; normal service should resume tomorrow...)

I was somewhat taken aback while watching The Motorcycle Diaries to discover that young Ernesto Guevara and his best friend decided to ride around South America on a Norton. This isn't going to turn out well, I thought and was proved correct about 30 minutes in. Unless you're rich and can afford a Brough Superior (TE Lawrence owned 7 of them) or you're willing to travel to India to get an Enfield, British motorcyle enthusiasts fall into two camps: those who ride Nortons and those who ride Triumphs. Over the years I've had countless conversations on the relative merits of the two companies and their machines. It's not a moot point, because although both went bankrupt in the 1970's now both are going again and making bikes in small but profitable numbers. The Norton however has a reputation for looking good on the outside but for breaking down under the slightest bit of pressure. I've ridden Nortons before and they're very cool but I wouldn't trust one to get me to the local chippie. It wasn't a big shock in The Motorcycle Diaries when Che's Norton went kaput, couldn't be fixed and the boys had to travel around by bus instead. So what should young revolutionaries of today ride? There's only one answer. What was Brando's bike in The Wild One? - a Triumph. What was the bike that almost killed Bob Dylan & is proudly displayed on his T shirt in Highway 61 Revisited? - a Triumph. James Dean's motorcyle of choice? - a Triumph. What did Steve McQueen ride around on in The Great Escape? - a Triumph 650 (though it should have been a BMW). What did travel writer Ted Simon explore the world on? - Uh huh. Which bike did Evel Knievel use to jump the fountain at Caesar's Palace? - yeah that's right. What was Dean Martin's machine in the cult cheese fest The Ambushers? Yes.
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The gift of a Norton Commando 850 was a major plot device in last year's AMC series Rubicon...interestingly at no point did we ever see anyone ride the Norton. We saw it in bits all over the hero's floor but it was never actually moving.

Irish Poem Of The Month - May

Derek Mahon

As It Should Be

We hunted the mad bastard
Through bog, moorland, rock, to the star-lit west
And gunned him down in a blind yard
Between ten sleeping lorries
And an electricity generator.


Let us hear no idle talk
Of the moon in the Yellow River.
The air blows softer since his departure.


Since his tide burial during school hours
Our kiddies have known no bad dreams.
Their cries echo lightly along the coast.


This is as it should be.
They will thank us for it when they grow up
To a world with method in it.