The Cold Cold Ground

COLD COLD GROUND is a beautiful, thrilling heartbreaker of a book, alive with the sorrow and poetry of Ireland.  Adrian McKinty is one of the finest writers working in any genre. ---Tim Hallinan

..
It's undoubtedly McKinty's finest novel: a visceral journey to the heart of darkness that was 1980's Northern Ireland. Written with intelligence, insight and wit, McKinty exposes the cancer of corruption at all levels of society at that time. Sean Duffy is a compelling detective, the evocation of the period is breathtaking and the atmosphere authentically menacing. A brilliant piece of work which does for the North what Peace's Red Riding Quartet did for Yorkshire.---Brian McGilloway
..
THE COLD, COLD GROUND is a razor sharp thriller set against the backdrop of a country in chaos, told with style, courage and dark-as-night wit.  Adrian McKinty channels Dennis Lehane, David Peace and Joseph Wambaugh to create a brilliant novel with its own unique voice.---Stuart Neville
..
The Cold Cold Ground is a fearless trip into the nightmare world of Northern Ireland in the 1980’s:  riots, hunger strikes, murders -- a time when every action from the mundane to the extreme is a political statement, yet Adrian McKinty tells a very personal story of an ordinary cop trying to hunt down a killer.---John McFetridge
..
Adrian McKinty's The Cold Cold Ground has got to on my five best of the year [list] as it is riveting, brilliant and just about the best book yet on Northern Ireland.---Ken Bruen
..
Adrian McKinty is the voice of the new Northern Irish generation but he’s not afraid to examine the past. Through Sean Duffy, his latest protagonist, he applies his unique writing skills to our troubled history expertly. This writer is a legend in the making and Cold, Cold Ground is the latest proof of this.---Gerard Brennan
..
The sense of what it must have been like to live through the most explosive days of Northern Ireland’s Troubles is vivid but, more than that, convincing. This goes especially for the book's homely details and the off-hand observations by McKinty's Sean Duffy, a Catholic member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. If McKinty were a tour guide, he’d take visitors to parts of Belfast and its surroundings that no one else does. The world’s most exciting crime fiction these days comes from Ireland, the best of that comes from the North, and The Cold Cold Ground may be the best crime novel – and one of the best books, period – out of Northern Ireland.–-- Peter Rozovsky

Is Christopher Hitchens In Hell?

The short answer is: of course not. Hell doesn't exist. Hell was invented in the first century AD to keep back-sliding Christian converts in line. Before then there were only vague concepts of an afterlife in the Hebrew Bible; and in the Greek and Roman mythologies Hades was a gloomy sort of half life. And how could hell actually work for humans? We evolved from arboreal lemur like creatures which in turn evolved from amphibians and if you want to go all the way back a billion years ago, our distant distant ancestors were bacteria floating in the primordial soup. Consider these bacteria. If you take penicillin to kill the bacteria in your lungs during a spot of flu do the dead bacteria go to a bacterial heaven? Do house flies and viruses go to heaven? At what point along our evolutionary journey did homo sapien heaven evolve? I hope that you can see that this is a reductio ad absurdum. 
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The reason I bring this up is because of the gleeful tone of some of the Hitchens obituaries and commentary. Of course it is to be expected from irony challenged, petty crypto Stalinists such as Alexander Cockburn but it's more surprising when you encounter triumphalist bile from theologians. Islamic and Catholic apologists seem to be the most ecstatic about Hitchens's death I suppose because they suffered the most under Hitch's withering attacks. Jewish rabbis who have debated Hitchens (and mostly lost badly) have had praise for Hitch's humanism and intellect. Even the fundamentalist Protesant pastor Douglas Wilson (one of Hitch's better adversaries) wrote a thoughtful commentary on his dealings and debates with Hitch over the years. So what is the religious argument that Hitchens deserves to be in hell? From the doctrinaire Christian theologians it seems to be this: Hitchens refused to believe in a God or an afterlife that his intellect told him was completely bogus. That's it. That is sufficient reason for him to go to hell. For using his brain and following the dictates of logic and for not keeping quiet about it. Personally I'd be ashamed to make an argument like this, but I suppose that this is what passes for philosophy these days in the mighty religion of St Francis, St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Alasdair MacIntyre. 
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A more interesting assault on the non existence of the afterlife can be inferred from the work of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. Or in the lovely late Isaac Asimov short story The Last Answer which has been uploaded here.

Merry Christmas From St Kilda

Learning To Love David Fincher

This wont hurt a bit

On the plus side he did cut Gwyneth Paltrow's head off at the end of Seven, but on the minus side he killed Newt and Hicks at the beginning of Alien 3. I don't know if those two really cancel out, Hicks was cool. 
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Fincher got his start doing FX on Return of the Jedi and after some video work he got hired to try to bail Alien 3 out of the mess the production had fallen into. He partially succeeded and Alien 3 is not the disaster some people say it is. After A3 came the creepy and stylish serial killer drama Seven whose titles alone are better than most films. Then came The Game which was a journeyman effort about Michael Douglas having a mid life crisis and falling into a paranoid conspiracy. In 1999 Fincher's reputation was sealed with the fantastic Fight Club - a film about what it means to be a man at the close of the twentieth century. If you haven't seen Fight Club you are not a hetereosexual white male 20 - 40 living in the Western World. Fincher's next film was Panic Room which I didn't care for but I thought Zodiac (the true story of the hunt for the Zodiac killer) was a return to form if not quite in the same league as Seven. 
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I have not seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button but I have to admit that it doesn't really seem like my cup of tea at all: Fincher is not Steven Spielberg and shouldn't try to be. In fact even Steven Spielberg shouldn't try to be Steven Spielberg unless its the Steven Spielberg who made Jaws. I saw The Social Network on a plane last year and I felt that it didn't really hang together - but for that I blame Aaron Sorkin's script which was full of ad hominem stuff, non sequitors and a boring court room setting that wasn't even in a court room. (Incidentally they gave Sorkin an Oscar for this script so what do I know). 
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Which brings me to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I had 4 major problems with the book: 1) As a locked room mystery it didn't work because we were not given all the information. 2) Cally Blomqvist's character seemed like nothing more than a middle aged male's wish fulfillment fantasy 3) Larsson wanted to have his cake and eat it too: deploring violence against women but giving us lots of it in lurid sadomasochistic detail. 4) The bad prose, extreme length and heavy handed cliches made the book pretty dull (I give Larsson a pass on this one because if he had lived the novel would have been given a tighter edit).
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From the opening titles of Fincher's Dragon Tattoo it becomes clear that we are not in Sweden but in that dark, weird, edgy, introverted territory that should be known as Finchlandia. The palate is muted and the furtive camera work makes even a pristine snow field seem sinister. The acting is low key but believable and always engrossing and the story has been tightened into an economical three acts. I'm not a fan of Daniel Craig but he is reasonably effective here and the actress playing Lisbeth is convincing. But for me the vibe is the star in this flick. Some of the mood seems to have been cribbed from Let The Right One In which is fine by me because I loved that creepy picture. With the right material Fincher is really able to show off his technical ability and his skill at directing actors. As the film played out I found myself forgetting the rather silly book and all the other baggage I had with Dragon Tattoo and instead I found myself falling into the story. The hooks went in and I didn't mind them being in. Incredibly this Hollywood remake of a Swedish film of a dodgy novel is Fincher's best movie in some time and although it is no masterpiece (and far too luridly violent) it is a considerable improvement over its source material. 

Hitchens On Tea

As regular readers of this blog will know I am a big fan of Christopher Hitchens. His death, although not unexpected, is still something of a shock. The IQ of the planet has certainly diminished a few notches. There's a nice piece on Hitch in the New York Times here, a collection of his Vanity Fair pieces here, and his editor at Slate has put together some of her favourite pieces, here. 
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I think my favourite Hitch moment was his savaging of the SDP politican Shirley Williams on Question Time following her mealy mouthed response to a question about Salman Rushdie's knighthood. His TV appearances alone would secure his place in the history of our culture. If you do go a hunting let me recommend a series of clips called HitchSlap which a youtuber has compiled of Hitch's more ascerbic moments...
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And courtesy of Slate Magazine here is his lovely essay (a tribute to his hero Orwell) on the making of the perfect cup of tea:

Now that "the holidays"—at their new-style Ramadan length, with the addition of Hanukkah plus the spur and lash of commerce—are safely over, I can bear to confront the moment at their very beginning when my heart took its first dip. It was Dec. 8, and Yoko Ono had written a tribute to mark the 30^th anniversary of the murder of her husband. In her New York Timesop-ed, she recalled how the two of them would sometimes make tea together. He used to correct her method of doing so, saying, "Yoko, Yoko, you're supposed to first put the tea bags in, and then the hot water." (This she represented as his Englishness speaking, in two senses, though I am sure he would actually have varied the word order and said "put the tea bags in first.") This was fine, indeed excellent, and I was nodding appreciatively, but then the blow fell. One evening, he told her that an aunt had corrected him. The water should indeed precede the bags. "So all this time, we were doing it wrong?" she inquired. "Yeah," replied our hero, becoming in that moment a turncoat to more than a century of sturdy Liverpool tradition.

I simply hate to think of the harm that might result from this. It is already virtually impossible in the United States, unless you undertake the job yourself, to get a cup or pot of tea that tastes remotely as it ought to. It's quite common to be served a cup or a pot of water, well off the boil, with the tea bags lying on an adjacent cold plate. Then comes the ridiculous business of pouring the tepid water, dunking the bag until some change in color occurs, and eventually finding some way of disposing of the resulting and dispiriting tampon surrogate. The drink itself is then best thrown away, though if swallowed, it will have about the same effect on morale as a reading of the memoirs of President James Earl Carter.

Now, imagine that tea, like coffee, came without a bag (as it used to do—and still does if you buy a proper tin of it). Would you consider, in either case, pouring the hot water, letting it sit for a bit, and then throwing the grounds or the leaves on top? I thought not. Try it once, and you will never repeat the experience, even if you have a good strainer to hand. In the case of coffee, it might just work if you are quick enough, though where would be the point? But ground beans are heavier and denser, and in any case many good coffees require water that is just fractionally off the boil. Whereas tea is a herb (or an herb if you insist) that has been thoroughly dried. In order for it to release its innate qualities, it requires to be infused. And an infusion, by definition, needs the water to be boiling when it hits the tea. Grasp only this, and you hold the root of the matter.

Just after World War II, during a period of acute food rationing in England, George Orwell wrote an article on the making of a decent cup of tea that insisted on the observing of 11 different "golden" rules. Some of these (always use Indian or Ceylonese—i.e., Sri Lankan—tea; make tea only in small quantities; avoid silverware pots) may be considered optional or outmoded. But the essential ones are easily committed to memory, and they are simple to put into practice.

If you use a pot at all, make sure it is pre-warmed. (I would add that you should do the same thing even if you are only using a cup or a mug.) Stir the tea before letting it steep. But this above all: "[O]ne should take the teapot to the kettle, and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours." This isn't hard to do, even if you are using electricity rather than gas, once you have brought all the makings to the same scene of operations right next to the kettle.

It's not quite over yet. If you use milk, use the least creamy type or the tea will acquire a sickly taste. And do not put the milk in the cup first—family feuds have lasted generations over this—because you will almost certainly put in too much. Add it later, and be very careful when you pour. Finally, a decent cylindrical mug will preserve the needful heat and flavor for longer than will a shallow and wide-mouthed—how often those attributes seem to go together—teacup. Orwell thought that sugar overwhelmed the taste, but brown sugar or honey are, I believe, permissible and sometimes necessary.

Until relatively few years ago, practically anything hot and blackish or brackish could be sold in America under the name of coffee. It managed both to be extremely weak and extremely bitter, and it was frequently at boiling point, though it had no call to be. (I use the past tense, though there are many places where this is still true, and it explains why free refills can be offered without compunction.) At least in major cities, consumers now have a better idea how to stick up for themselves, often to an irksome degree, as we know from standing behind people who are too precise about their latte, or whatever it's called.

Next time you are in a Starbucks or its equivalent and want some tea, don't be afraid to decline that hasty cup of hot water with added bag. It's not what you asked for. Insist on seeing the tea put in first, and on making sure that the water is boiling. If there are murmurs or sighs from behind you, take the opportunity to spread the word. And try it at home, with loose tea and a strainer if you have the patience. Don't trouble to thank me. Happy New Year.

The GOP Field's Fiction Favourites

You know I don't do politics here on the blog don't you? Growing up in Northern Ireland in the poisoned atmosphere of the 1970s and 1980s killed all interest in politics for me and on the rare occasions when I've met career politicians I have found them to be profoundly creepy, self involved and boring. I have being following the Republican fight for the Presidency in an abstract sort of way and have come to some admittedly flimsy conclusions about the candidates based on their selection of favourite novel. If I was going to pick a GOP candidate solely on this criterion this is how I'd rate them: 
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7. Jon Hunstman Jnr: Couldn't find a favourite novel or book for Huntsman. He doesn't even seem to have a favourite movie unlike all the other candidates. Do the children of billionaires not read? 
6. Michele Bachmann has to go in second last place I'm afraid. After a lot of searching I couldn't discover if she reads fiction. Her list of favourite non fiction books is here and its not terrible. She says she has a love/hate relationship with Garrison Keillor's works but then so say we all. 
5. Mitt Romney's favourite novel is Battlefield Earth by L Ron Hubbard which is one of the worst science fiction novels I've ever read. The prose is as clunky and dull as the characters and about the only saving grace is the fact that much of it takes place in Denver. 
4. Rick Perry likes the novels of Vince Flynn. I haven't read Vince Flynn but I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that he sounds like a Tom Clancy sort of guy which would really be saying something. If I'm wrong about Flynn please let me know. 
3. Ron Paul likes Ayn Rand's books so much that he named his son after her. I've read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and strongly disliked both of them. Hate is too strong a word here, for at least I recognised them as novels but really this is philosophical fiction for light weights. If you want to read good didactic philosophy in a fictional setting try The Symposium. 
2. Rick Santorum. Apparently his favourite novel is The Lord of the Rings. Nothing wrong with that. I read it three times before I turned 13 and although its not currently in my Top 20 list I hold it affectionately in my heart. 
1. Newt Gingrich. Gingrich has been coy about picking just one favourite but he's got a pretty interesting list on the Freakonomics blog here. Among his novel selections are Lincoln by Gore Vidal and The Godfather by Mario Puzo, both great books. He also likes All The Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren and Shogun by James Clavell which I dug too. (Not afraid of a weighty tomb is Gingrich.) These four are all middle of the road, fairly safe choices but they are 4 books that I liked, so as far as I'm concerned Speaker Gingrich wins the contest and gets my hypothetical (I'm a registered independent) vote. 
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More favourite books by famous people here.

My Favourite Books Of 2011

I read 52 books this year which is a little bit above my normal average. I've posted my 10 favourites below. Not on this list are the new books by Dec Burke, Stu Neville, Eoin McNamee, John McFetridge, Brian McGilloway, Gerard Brennan and Ken Bruen which I read in manuscript last year and which were are all absolutely brilliant. (If you're not reading Irish crime fiction because you don't read crime fiction, man, are you missing out on where the real talent in Irish writing is these days.) (McFetridge, although a Canadian, counts because his antecedents are from that apocalyptic hell hole known as Larne). Also not on my list are the audiobooks I listened to this year as you can very often get a good book ruined by a bad narrator or a mediocre book elevated by superb narration and its sometimes hard to figure out whats going on. (Maybe I should do a top 10 audiobook list?) Ok, enough blather, here's my top 10.
10. World War Z - Max Brooks. I'm not really into zombies but this book had its moments of fun and fright. 
9. Hollywood - Charles Bukowksi. I'm not really into Bukowski either but boy is this novel hilarious. As good a satire of Hollywood as you'll read anywhere and it's all actually true. 
8. The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 - Christopher Andrew. All you ever wanted to know about British spies in the twentieth century. Except for the stuff that's been redacted. What's been redacted? Well we don't know because it's been redacted. 
7. The City and the City - China Mieville. Two cities in Eastern Europe share the same geographic area. A detective from one is trying to solve a murder that may have been committed in the other. It gets weirder.
6. Arguably - Christopher Hitchens. The polemicist and rabble rouser's best collection of essays yet. Probably his last. 
5. Master and Commander - Patrick O'Brian. This is the fourth time I've listened to this book and it's still fantastic. (Ok, so I'm breaking my self imposed audiobook rule already but this is the exception that proves the rule). One of the reasons I hated the film of M&C was the fact that it entirely missed the point of the novel which is about friendship and loyalty in the aftermath of the great 1798 rebellion in Ireland. I like the audiobook narrated by Patrick Tull, others rave about David Case.
4. The Rest Is Noise - Alex Ross. A history of classical music in the twentieth century by the New Yorker's music critic.
3. If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho - Anne Carson. Carson translates all the bits of Sappho that have turned up over the centuries. Somehow the ellipses are as beautiful as the bits that have survived. 
2. Conquest of the Useless - Werner Herzog. Herzog's account of the making of Fitzcarraldo in the Peruvian jungle. It was a nightmare and he knew it was going to be a nightmare which makes the nightmare all the more interesting. 
1. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet - David Mitchell. I think this might have appeared on my list from 2010 also as I read it right at the end of the year. Mitchell's best book since his masterpiece, Cloud Atlas. The Dutch and the Japanese misunderstand each other in eighteenth century Nagasaki. There's a love story, a naval battle and the greatest Go game in the history of literature. 

Falling Glass Wins!

A big thank you to everyone who voted for Falling Glass as it's been awarded the Crime Always Pays, Irish crime novel of the year. As Declan Burke explains on his blog it was a bumper year for Irish crime fiction and certainly any of the terrific books in the category could have won. I think as a novel Falling Glass slipped between the cracks a little bit. It got good reviews in The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Irish Independent etc. etc. but it didn't really set the world on fire. To do that I suppose you need the right zeitgeist and a little bit of luck. Still it's been the little engine that could and I'm very happy to take the CAP Irish crime novel of the year award. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago the audiobook version has already been picked as Audible's Best Mystery or Thriller for 2011. 
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Falling Glass is out in mass market paperback in the UK and Ireland in a fortnight and it'll be out in mass market in Australia and NZ soon after that. The cool looking German version will be out in April 2012. There is no US version, alas, because (to quote a well known US publishing house) its not commercial enough. Thank you very much to everyone who voted for me or reviewed Falling Glass online, I really appreciate it. 

The Cynical Hearts of Wieden and Kennedy

I remember the moment when I decided that I was never going to buy another pair of Levis Jeans. It was not, as you would expect, a midlife crisis style epiphany when I suddenly realised that I wasn't a kid anymore but a man who should be wearing cords or slacks or whatever it is that men wear. No, it was nothing like that, it was when I saw Levi's 'America' ad which had a series of images celebrating America over a scratchy recording of Walt Whitman reading his poem America that also, er, celebrates America. What got me upset was the hypocrisy of this because the ad came only a year or two after Levis closed down its last plant making jeans in America. That's the play isn't it? Move your stitching factories to sweatshops overseas, hike the prices and then hire a cool ad agency whose job it is to fool the public into thinking that nothing has changed. Wrangler, that sponsor of rodeos and bull riding and stock car races, also makes none of its jeans in America. But these great companies do.
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The Levis ad was made by Wieden and Kennedy who are also responsible for the Microsoft Ads and the Nike commercials among many others. (Mr Wieden came up with the "just do it" tag line which is enough cultural vandalism for one lifetime.) The Levis America ad is part of a new campaign for Levis called Go Forth which targets young wannabe individuals. I saw the latest commercial in this campaign in the cinema before The Ides of March (above, right). This ad has already generated some controversy. It was banned in the UK following last August's riots and nutcase/political commentator Glenn Beck saw it and said he wants to boycott Levis in protest because it will cause youth rebellion or something. The ad is a reading - by a Native American actor - of the Charles Bukowski poem The Laughing Heart. I can't believe that Bukowski would have been happy to see his poem used in this context and the idea that somehow the meaning of life can be enhanced or discovered through a pair of trousers made in a third world sweat shop surely doesn't convince even the naivest of the Millennium generation, does it?
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In the second youtube clip I've uploaded Adam Curtis explains where some of this cynical advertising stuff came from on the Jarvis Cocker Radio show.

Book Of The Year

Audible.com has picked Falling Glass as its best mystery or thriller of the year. I am absolutely delighted and also amazed; there are thousands of mysteries released as audiobooks every year and if you look at who I topped in this category its quite the collection of superstars. These are big names whose publishers supported their books with massive amounts of advertising, book tours and media appearances. Because I have been unable to find a US publisher Falling Glass had zero advertising, I didn't do a book tour and I did zero media. Falling Glass got the top spot on its writing and more importantly, I'm sure, because of the excellent performance by that brilliant actor and narrator Gerard Doyle. 
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I give a lot of credit to the editors at Audible who saw through the hype machines of the big publishers and picked the book they liked the best. I thank also the writers who reviewed Falling Glass on their blogs, the 207 listeners who rated the book on Audible and the people who took the time and trouble to review Falling Glass on Audible's web site, on Amazon proper and Good Reads. I really do appreciate it. I always read reviews and though I often violently disagree I take them all on board. A big thank you also to Mr Doyle and everyone at Blackstone Audiobooks. 
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Despite this award and the great reviews in the British press I still don't have a US publishing house. Why? Well, the book business is an arcane world. Publishers and editors say they like to try the new and the different but in fact they don't. Apart from the rebel badasses at Serpents Tail everywhere its the same story: if you don't fall neatly into one of their genre boxes they don't know what to do with you. I've always had that problem and rather than pander to the lowest common denominator I've always wanted to write my own books in my own way. Sometimes you pay the price: Here in Australia my publishers Allen and Unwin were so unconvinced by Falling Glass they didn't email me about it or tell me when it was coming out and it was a huge surprise when I just happened to see it in my local bookshop. It's hard enough to write a book but when you struggle to get noticed even by your own local publisher you do sometimes wonder what's the bloody point.
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But maybe the struggle is the point. I bet if I put my mind to it I could write a knock off Michael Connolly or Lee Child and make boatloads of cash. But I don't want to. I'm not that much of a cynic and books are too important to me. I don't want to write for money or for the whims of editors in corner offices, I want to write the books that move me and make me think and make me excited. My readers get invested not just in the characters and the story but also in the words and sentences that make up the story. My readers like irony and judicial profanity. My readers like a good joke and a well turned phrase. My readers admire wit. My readers know who Seamus Heaney is. My readers DONT HAVE TO HAVE EVERY LAST THING EXPLAINED TO THEM. My readers aren't prudes. My readers don't have to be told why its wrong to pour a shamrock on the head of a pint of Guinness. My readers can spot the gag in the sentence that begins chapter 2 of Falling Glass. My readers can recite poems from memory. My readers aren't frightened by a page without dialogue. My readers can name the Presidents back to 1932. My readers are sometimes poleaxed but seldom banjaxed. My readers are a select group and, you know what, I'm really glad about that. Slainte. 

George McFly Day!

In an early Christmas pressie for me my author's copies of The Cold Cold Ground arrived today! The book looks fabulous and I'm really pleased with it. (The kids incidentally are dressed up for their school Matsuri Day.)
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Is The Cold Cold Ground any good? Well, I'm not a terrific judge of my own stuff but here are a few words from people that I admire in the crime fiction family:

COLD COLD GROUND is a beautiful, thrilling heartbreaker of a book, alive with the sorrow and poetry of Ireland.  Adrian McKinty is one of the finest writers working in any genre. 

---Tim Hallinan


It's undoubtedly McKinty's finest novel: a visceral journey to the heart of darkness that was 1980's Northern Ireland. Written with intelligence, insight and wit, McKinty exposes the cancer of corruption at all levels of society at that time. Sean Duffy is a compelling detective, the evocation of the period is breathtaking and the atmosphere authentically menacing. A brilliant piece of work which does for the North what Peace's Red Riding Quartet did for Yorkshire.

---Brian McGilloway


THE COLD, COLD GROUND is a razor sharp thriller set against the backdrop of a country in chaos, told with style, courage and dark-as-night wit.  Adrian McKinty channels Dennis Lehane, David Peace and Joseph Wambaugh to create a brilliant novel with its own unique voice.

---Stuart Neville

The Cold Cold Ground is a fearless trip into the nightmare world of Northern Ireland in the 1980’s:  riots, hunger strikes, murders -- a time when every action from the mundane to the extreme is a political statement, yet Adrian McKinty tells a very personal story of an ordinary cop trying to hunt down a killer.

---John McFetridge

Adrian McKinty's The Cold Cold Ground has got to on my five best of the year [list] as it is riveting, brilliant and just about the best book yet on Northern Ireland.

---Ken Bruen

Adrian McKinty is the voice of the new Northern Irish generation but he’s not afraid to examine the past. Through Sean Duffy, his latest protagonist, he applies his unique writing skills to our troubled history expertly. This writer is a legend in the making and Cold, Cold Ground is the latest proof of this.

---Gerard Brennan

The sense of what it must have been like to live through the most explosive days of Northern Ireland’s Troubles is vivid but, more than that, convincing. This goes especially for the book's homely details and the off-hand observations by McKinty's Sean Duffy, a Catholic member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. If McKinty were a tour guide, he’d take visitors to parts of Belfast and its surroundings that no one else does. The world’s most exciting crime fiction these days comes from Ireland, the best of that comes from the North, and The Cold Cold Ground may be the best crime novel – and one of the best books, period – out of Northern Ireland.

–-- Peter Rozovsky

The Ides Of March

cute as a baby goose: Ryan, er, Gosling

George Clooney's new political film The Ides of March may be proof that we are getting collectively stupider as a society. Compare a movie like Ides to great 1970's fare such as The Conversation, or The Candidate or All The Presidents Men and you'll see how far we've slipped. Ides of March is like the opening titles of Trumpton: clunky, slow and you can see the clockwork turning long before any of the characters. The shocking revelation at the heart of this film is that, gasp, politicians say one thing and do another. No, really, that's it. Someone once said that you will never lose a dime in Hollywood underestimating the intelligence of the public which might be true but you'll never get our respect either will you? 
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As my mind drifted from the Slot A into Slot B story I wondered if Clooney is anything more than a competent director. He has a decent visual eye but he does not stir strong performances from his cast: Ryan Gosling has a one note smirk throughout, Marisa Tomei's scenes made me wince for her and asking Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman to play schlubby is like asking Robin Williams to "give us one more take completely over the top." 
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I wonder too about the logic. Does an intelligent young woman wrestling with the decision to have an abortion really want to instigate casual sex with her good looking boss? And not once but twice? Perhaps insane women do and as further proof that all women in this man's world are either dupes or mad the young intern (SPOILER ALERT) conveniently tops herself. Sheesh, that was lucky, script wise I mean. The internal plotting and logic of this film are dubious and would not have survived the writers room on The West Wing even in its sunset season.  
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Before I end this dreary topic I also want to say something about Chris Matthews, Charlie Rose and Rachel Maddow prostituting their journalistic integrity by appearing in a fictional political movie. Maybe I'm old fashioned but I hate this. I like the days when journos wore ties even in war zones and they would sue if someone put them in a TV show or a novel. Now nobody cares. Even Paxo did The Thick Of It. Look, I expect nothing less from Charlie Rose who has always been a slavering celebrity groupie of almost Liptonian proportions but I expected better of Matthews and Maddow. Sure Matthews has a man crush on handsome Irish charmers (his new JFK hagiography is one aspect of that) but occasionally in interviews he'll remember that he's supposed to be a journalist. And Maddow I don't get at all. Presumably she's immune to Clooney's baritone and that thing he does where he looks up at you from his own shoes. What happened to the pair of them? Is the fairy gold from Hollywood really that bewitching? 

Irish Poem Of The Month