A Paragraph In A Notebook

6 years ago this week I wrote the first paragraph of what wd subsequently become book 1 of my Sean Duffy series. I wrote the paragraph in a notebook in longhand and forgot about it for about 6 months and when I found it again, I thought, I wonder what that's about and I began thinking. . .As Harold Bloom says we're all living under the anxiety of all our influences. Many influences jump out at me as I look at the paragraph. 'beauty of its own' is probably an echo of Yeats; the 2nd sentence is a deliberate homage to Gravity's Rainbow complete with the American word gasoline instead of petrol; the torpedoed prison ship is probably a reference to the sinking of Montevideo Maru; 'Knockagh Mountain' always struck me as amusing because Knockagh in Irish means 'mountain' so this is kind of a joke; the lovers/Afterlife line reminds me of a bit in Ursula LeGuin's Tombs of Atuin;  no one spoke, words...inadequate is something that Samuel Beckett said at the end of his life and of course its what Wittgenstein famously claimed; don't know where the 'God of curves' bit came from but I dig it....Anyway it all became paragraph 1 of book 1 and here it is, exactly as it appeared in my notebook:
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The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife.
        I watched with the others by the Land Rover on Knockagh Mountain. No one spoke. Words were inadequate. You needed a Picasso for this scene, not a poet.
        The police and the rioters were arranged in two ragged fronts that ran across a dozen streets, the opposing sides illuminated by the flash of newsmen’s cameras and the burning, petrol-filled milk bottles sent tumbling across the no man’s land like votive offerings to the god of curves.
       
       

The Australian Reviews Police At The Station

its tough to get newspaper reviews for the sixth book in what essentially is a cult series, but there have, fortunately, been a few. Here's Peter Pierce in the Weekend Australian: 

There are abundant talents in the crime fiction business, one of them an immigrant to Australia from Northern Ireland, via the US. Adrian McKinty had originally planned a Troubles trilogy, set in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and featuring detective (and sometimes inspector, depending how much strife he has caused) Sean Duffy, a bleakly joking, poetry-quoting Catholic in the Protestant-dominated Royal Ulster Constabulary.

McKinty is alert both to the deep past and the present agonies of the province. In the Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly, and it’s perhaps the best of the lot in the wit of its dialogue, inwardness with the sectarian bitterness of the damaged province, and — essentially — in having a complex and memorably flawed hero in Duffy. In a brilliant opening scene — deadly and funny — Duffy is taken into an ancient word, ‘‘a relic of the Holocene forest that once covered all of Ireland’’, where ‘‘a huge fallen oak lay like a dead god’’. His captors are an IRA hit squad intent on silencing Duffy before he detects a long-rumoured mole within the upper tanks of the RUC.The first three books were so successful that Melbourne-based McKinty has stretched to a sixth, 

As Duffy ruefully reflects, ‘‘there’s no future in this country’’. That means there isn’t one either for his partner Beth, who is writing a thesis on Philip K. Dick at Queen’s University, or their infant daughter Emma.

Meanwhile Duffy is able to skip a St Patrick’s Purgatory pilgrimage with his father because a drug dealer has been killed with a crossbow bolt on a housing estate which may be, ‘‘[an Ulster Volunteer Force-] ridden shithole filled with whores, druggies and scumbags’’. Duffy arrives at ‘‘the unhappy window between people returning from their morning dole appointments and daytime TV kicking in’’.

The novel is sympathetic, funny and despairing in depicting the social landscape that McKinty acutely recalls from his youth. Belfast is a paradigm for future cities: ‘‘mined and fractured, walled and utilitarian’’. Textile plants and shipyards have closed, and the showdown is staged in a dank, abandoned factory. Some, such as the dour, upright, hilariously deadpan Sergeant McCrabban (a triumph of the series) resist the collapse stoically.

Duffy prefers mordant wit that graces nearly every page. When the Bulgarian translator called in to help with the crossbow murder praises the local beer, Duffy reflects that ‘‘Harp was an acquired taste like coprophagia or getting pissed on by hookers’’.

More direly, he has to repulse an attack on his house, investigate the murder and find a scheme to entrap his suspect.

McKinty handles all this business with intelligence and elan. Crime is the subject, but Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly will prove to be one of the best novels to be published in any genre this year. 

Desert Island Books

BIG thank you to Ian Rankin who was on the "desert island books" segment of Simon Mayo's BBC radio 5 show. The premise is that you're stranded on a desert island only with 6 books and Mr Rankin chose The Cold Cold Ground as one of his books. Ian obviously has a lot of clout, on Wednesday night The Cold Cold climbed 33,000 places on Amazon.co.uk to be the 200th best selling book in the entire country. This is a super nice pat on the back from a guy I really look up to. Nice bit of timing too...

You can listen to the segment here 

Muhammad Ali 1942 - 2016

I met Muhammad Ali just once at a strange place: Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford in June 1992. It was exam time and I should have been revising like mad but there was no way I was passing up the chance to meet Muhammad Ali. He was, of course, a shadow of his former self by then, suffering from various early onset Parkinson's symptoms that were almost certainly brought on by boxing, especially that last terrible competitive fight against Larry Holmes where Ali's brain took a pummelling. Boxing it must always be remembered is an awful sport if it can even be called a sport at all. But Muhammad Ali was from 1962 - 1974 the greatest fighter in the world, maybe the greatest boxer there has ever been. That period '62 - '74 can pretty much be summed up as the era of Muhammad Ali, George Best and the Beatles. All six had Irish roots. Best was born in Belfast and the Beatles were all 2nd generation Micks from Liverpool. Muhammad Ali's original name was Clay but his maternal family were Gradys from Co Clare. Grady comes from the Irish Grádaigh, meaning "noble". Ali visited Ireland many times over the years, to fight at Croagh Park, to appear on the Gay Byrne show and on his last visit to tour the home of his ancestral grand parents in Ennis, Co Clare.
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That day in Blackwells was pretty emotional. Ali was touring a book and many of the hardbitten hacks in the British tabloids hadn't seen him for over a decade, not since he was the lippy, skinny, sarky promoter of his own fights, always by far, the wittiest man in the room. In 1992 he looked old, gaunt, grey. Some of the hacks in the front row were even starting to well up as Ali stood there holding his book, shaking and saying nothing. "You're the greatest, champ!" one reporter said as tears rolled down his face. Ali smiled and started fumbling in his tracksuit pocket. He took out a ten pound note, reached across the stage and gave it to the man. Then he winked and said into the microphone "I told him to say that." Everyone laughed. The Champ, brought low by disease and time, still bloody had it. 
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I wanted to take the emotion of that little encounter with Ali and do something with it in my writing. I imagined a slightly younger Muhammad Ali coming to Belfast during the Troubles. He never did come to Belfast during the Troubles but I write fiction for a living so it wasn't difficult coming up with a scenario about what might have happened that day. Here's me reading Chapter 1 of Rain Dogs - the complete Muhammad Ali bit... Or if you're not into the whole youtube thing, you can read the entire thing here, too. RIP, Champ. 

Time in Ireland well spent...

I was on BBC Arts Extra, here supposedly talking about Rain Dogs but mostly just gabbing away. I'm on at the 16 minute mark.

I was on TV3, here. Had to get up early for this one so I haven't played it back because I wasn't sure I was fully on my game....

Last night I met up with Stu Neville, Brian McGilloway, Gerard Brenann and Steve Cavanagh and we had a few jars in Robinsons Bar, Belfast. I say a few...we were the last people to leave and I got home at one thirty in the morning, not entirely sure how I did get home.

The Sydney Morning Herald Reviews Rain Dogs

CRIME FICTION
RAIN DOGS
By Adrian McKinty. Serpent's Tail. $29.99.

The release of a new Sean Duffy novel by Adrian McKinty is always one of the highlights of a crime reader's year. Born and raised in Northern Ireland, McKinty now resides in Melbourne where he writes some of the best Irish crime fiction currently being produced.

Rain Dogs is the fifth book in his series about Duffy, a Catholic officer in the Royal Ulster Constabulary in the 1980s. Hated by both sides of the sectarian divide Duffy lives in the middle of a Protestant housing estate, where he has to check his car for bombs each day and deal with the anti-Catholic sentiment of his neighbours.

The death of a young journalist in the snowy courtyard of Carrickfergus castle seems like an unfortunate suicide, but some of the details are not quite right. Despite instructions from above, Duffy and his team continue to sift through the clues and the links between the death and a diplomatic visit to Carrickfergus by a group of Finnish investors. Gradually they find evidence of a possible, high level conspiracy.

This is a first-rate crime thriller that commands attention from the opening pages and keeps the reader gripped until the end. The writing is tight and the story is well plotted... The tale unfolds at a good pace with McKinty ably balancing the steady unfolding of the investigation, including some interesting forensic detail, with episodes of exciting action and a suspenseful trip to Finland.

As usual, the characterisations are very strong and McKinty excels in his depiction of the period from a fictional encounter between Muhammad Ali and a group of local skinheads to a telling description of landing at Belfast airport:

"As we were on the final approach we could see a riot kicking off along the Falls Road … we watched Molotov cocktails arc through the air and crash into riot shields. One of the joys of landing at Belfast."

McKinty's wry sense of humour is also well on display and he peppers his story with small details that enhance his depiction of the period, but which will also darkly amuse readers...A funny & very engaging tale that sets an early high standard for this year's crime fiction. Highly recommended.

Jeff Popple is a Canberra reviewer.

Edgar Awards

Although it will obviously cramp my gloomy, dour pessimistic persona I'm pleased to announce the fact that Gun Street Girl has been shortlisted for the 2016 Edgar Award (best paperback original). It's my first time ever getting shortlisted for an Edgar so I'm actually pretty damn thrilled. This morning I got a can of Guinness and walked over to West 84th Street where Edgar Allan Poe used to live (the house is long gone but the site can't be missed cos there's 2 massive stone ravens outside it) and had a quick, sneaky can of the black stuff in the 22F (-6C) air. I gave Edgar and the ravens some too and they seemed to appreciate it. 

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Cheers also to Gordon McAlpine my stable mate at SSB who is in my category and to my old buddies Val McDermid & Michael Robotham who got shortlisted in other categories. 

Booklist Reviews Rain Dogs

Booklist Feb 1 2016

Rain Dogs.

McKinty, Adrian (Author)

*Starred Review*


Mar 8 2016. 290 p. Prometheus/Seventh Street, paperback, $15.95. (9781633881303). e-book, (9781633881310).

The chronicles of Carrickfergus detective Sean Duffy open a sardonic portal to 1980s Belfast; every detail rings true, from the persistent threat of mercury-tilt car bombs to the complex criminal motivations that breed in a climate of unrest. Financial Times reporter Lily Bigelow is covering a Finnish technology giant’s highly publicized visit. 

The morning before the Finns’ scheduled departure, Lily’s body is found in Carrickfergus Castle, an apparent suicide from the castle walls. Duffy isn’t convinced, but the only other explanation is a locked-room murder, and it’s unlikely that he’d see another of those after solving the killing of Lizzie Fitzpatrick in a locked pub (In the Morning I’ll Be Gone, 2014). Duffy traces Lily’s movements in Belfast, telling his boss that he’s tying up loose ends for the inquest. His investigation reveals a strong motive for murder; Lily was secretly investigating an anonymous tip implicating iconic celebrity Jimmy Savile, the visiting Finns, and powerful political players in a sex-abuse ring. 

Duffy is warned off the case by his superiors and dangerous representatives of the aforementioned suspects, so it’s no easy feat to figure who murdered Lily Bigelow, not to mention how they managed to do it in a locked castle. McKinty manages a second locked-room success and folds in the recent headline-snatching Jimmy Savile scandal to boot; another great standout in a superior series, combining terrific plotting with evocative historical detail.
— Christine Tran 

The Sunday Times Reviews Rain Dogs

Frank McCourt's Grocery Bag

(a blogpost from way back in 2009)
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In March 2004 I had just published a novel called Dead I Well May Be to a great chorus of indifference. Although the book had gotten good reviews in the trades it was ignored (i.e. not reviewed at all) by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly etc. I was an Irish guy living in Denver and I had written a crime novel about pre Giuliani New York - the incongruities were probably too much for most reviewers to cope with, especially when their job was (and is) to cover the big names. Anyway Dead came out and more or less died. Simon and Schuster weren't interested in publishing anything else by me and I went back to teaching high school, figuring that maybe I'd try my hand again at this writing lark a few years down the line. It was a snowy Colorado day in March 2004 (let's for the sake of the story pretend it was St Patrick's Day) and I was doing class prep and probably feeling a bit depressed about the whole rotten writing business when I got an email from Sarah Knight at Scribner who told me that Frank McCourt had somehow read Dead I Well May Be and not only liked it but had written the following blurb:

If you're a writer embarking on a new work beware of reading anything by Adrian McKinty. His prose is so hard, so tough, so New York honest you'll find yourself taking a knife to your work. He is a cross between Mickey Spillane and Damon Runyon - the toughest, the best.
After the blurb got attached to the book funny things started to happen. Simon and Schuster announced that they were going to bring out a paperback edition and wanted to know if I had any other books up my sleeve. Then I got an English publisher, Serpent's Tail. Then I got a French publisher, Gallimard. I even got a Russian publisher. The book was optioned (briefly, but even so) by Universal Pictures and in the autumn of 2004 it was short-listed for a Dagger Award.
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Frank McCourt passed away on Sunday and I'm not saying that I owe my entire career (such as it is) to him, but I do think he gave me an adrenalin shot to the heart when I was flatlining. The blurb was unsolicited and completely out of the blue, McCourt merely wanted to help out a young writer, just as he helped out his friends, colleagues, and especially students for 50 years in New York City. RIP Francis, I owe you and I'll miss you.
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Incidentally the blurb came to Simon and Schuster's offices in long hand and apparently was written on one of McCourt's old grocery bags. They had to call him up and ask if he'd really sent it. He said he had. I asked them if I could have the grocery bag with the blurb on it and they sent it to me.
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It's currently on eBay priced at a very reasonable 75.00 dollars. (Kidding!)

Oxford, David Cameron, Gottfried Von Bismarck, Pigs Heads and Gun Street Girl

the kind of people I steered well clear of at Oxford

If you've read the 4th Sean Duffy novel you're probably aware that fictionalised versions of two real people show up in the Oxford chapters: Gottfried Von Bismarck and a chap who is a bit like Prime Minister David Cameron. Both had left Oxford by the time Duffy visits the city, but both attended parties given by the Bullingdon Club and the Piers Gaveston Society. At one of these parties Olivia Channon, the daughter of a cabinet minister, died of a heroin overdose. And a thinly veiled version of these events is what Duffy comes to investigate. These Oxford parties have become big news this week in the UK and yesterday on the front page (above the fold) of that scurrilous rag, The New York Times. How did this all blow up now 30 years later? In revenge for not giving him a job the Tory billionaire Lord Ashcroft has written a biography of Cameron in which he alleges that the young David attended drunken parties given by the Bullingdon Club and Piers Gaveston which involved heroin, cocaine, cross dressing and, ahem, pigs' heads. The New York Times attempts to spin its coverage of this story as a dissection of the British obsession with class but actually its just old fashioned gossip mongering and its the Daily Mail you should read for the real dirt. 

When I was at Oxford there were no debauched parties. As a working class kid from Belfast on a full scholarship I could not afford to get rusticated. And I went to Oxford because I was a super geek who was really into philosophy (no, really) and at Oxford you could meet in person and even have tutorials with some of the biggest guns of contemporary political theory (my particular area of interest). In my three years there I met Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, Michael Sandel, Terry Eagleton, Stanley Fish, John Gray, Michael Ignatief, Bernard Williams et. al. I used to have gentle tutorials with Gerry Cohen in his rooms at All Souls College (the weirdest of the Oxford colleges), semi confrontational tutorials with John Gray at Jesus and the seminars where Dworkin and Williams discussed "abortion, euthanasia and the meaning of life" were probably the intellectual high points of my life. 

It is true however that Oxford was still full at that time (1991 - 1993) of upper class twits and whenever I would encounter those racist, spoiled, privileged snobs (particularly in the Oxford Union) I would file the encounter away for future use. Even back then everyone knew that there was a good chance you could end up writing a novel yourself or appear as a character in someone else's novel. Inspector Morse was at the height of its popularity and was filming everywhere and before going up to Oxford I read Decline and Fall, Brideshead Revisited, Zuleika Dobson etc. so I knew what to expect. Cambridge was the place to go if you wanted to become a scientist or a traitor, Oxford was where you went if you wanted to become a politician or a writer.

It was reading Gottfried Von Bismarck's obituary in The Daily Telegraph a few years ago, however, that really got me thinking about an Oxford book. The Daily Telegraph is famous for writing the best obits in the business and Von Bismarck's obit is one of the finest achievements in the genre. The Oxford milieu bubbled away in my mind and when I finally got round to writing Sean Duffy #4 I knew that Gottfried von Bismarck and a David Cameron/George Osbourne type figure would have to appear in the book. Duffy goes to Oxford to see if there is a link to his present case (a double murder and suicide in Belfast) and of course there is, though not quite in the way he thinks... 
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Incidentally Gun Street Girl also contains a few other celebrity cameos, some of whom I talk about in the Afterword and some of whom I don't talk about for legal reasons. This week a very famous American actor is in the news because he resents the implication that he has beat up multiple wives, lovers and girlfriends. I heard one story about his behaviour on a visit to Ireland that may or may not be in the book too.*
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*(Please don't attempt to guess at this actor's name in the comments below as he's proven himself a very litigious chap and to save you and me from a defamation suit I'll have to delete the comment.)

The End Of Theocracy In Ireland

"yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

--Molly Bloom

The triumph of the "yes" vote in Friday's gay marriage referendum in Ireland is another nail in the coffin of the power of the church in Ireland. The Catholic Church vehemently urged its parishioners to vote "no" to gay marriage but the parishioners didn't listen and the yes vote won by a comfortable margin. Ireland is the only country in the world where gay marriage has become law by a popular vote in a plebiscite rather than by a vote from parliamentarians or a diktat imposed by a Supreme Court. 

The Catholic church's power has been waning in the Republic of Ireland for decades. The 1937 Constitution of Eire brought in by Eamon De Valera in consultation with the fundamentalist Archbishop John Charles McQuaid is a remarkably sectarian document that begins thusly:                                                                                                

In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred We, the people of Éire, Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial.

No "We hold these truths to be self evident" or "We the people"; nope in Ireland the laws come direct from heaven and heaven's administrators are the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church was given control of the schools and many aspects of life in the Republic. Drunk with power the church spent the next five decades abusing altar boys, raping kids, beating boys and girls, sending unmarried mothers to work as slaves in laundries etc. etc. etc. In the 1990s two things began to happen. First, the Celtic Tiger economy allowed many young Irish people to stay at home and work rather than emigrate. Second, an emboldened Irish media began to report on negative stories about the church. With the dissenters staying home rather than leaving and with scandal after scandal finally making the papers a tide of revulsion against the theocrats began. Once the floodgates opened and the Catholic Church began obfuscating and lying about the decades of abuse heaped upon children in its care the sensible people of the Irish Republic turned their back on what Christopher Hitchens called a "creepy cult of professional virgins." The gay marriage referendum is a sign of how far the Church's status has fallen. The church desperately wanted a no vote - the people voted yes. The next thing the Irish will have to do by plebiscite is change their - still - extremely restrictive law on abortion that regularly kills women (!) but, you know, one step at a time...Also it cannot be forgotten that the Catholic church controls education in the Irish Republic and in half the schools in Northern Ireland, but again one step at a time... 

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In Northern Ireland things, however, are still pretty damn terrible if, like me, you believe in the sensible libertarianism of John Stuart Mill. Abortion is illegal in Ulster (the only place in the UK where this is the case), racism is still endemic in parts of Belfast and gay marriage is a long way off. Indeed Northern Ireland is now the only part of the UK or Ireland where gay marriage is not permitted. Northern Ireland is roughly 50:50 Protestant/Catholic; northern Catholics appear to be only slightly more conservative than their fellows down south but it's the unionists particularly the DUP who have blocked gay marriage in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Prominent members of the DUP would like to see creationism taught in schools as part of the science curriculum and many of their elected representatives believe that the Bible is literally true and that the scientific consensus on man made global warming is some kind of global conspiracy. Sheesh. The north still has some catching up to do if it wants to enter the twenty first century. Yes, you can attempt to impose a liberal morality on a reluctant population (Brown v Board of Education is an example where this has worked) and in Ulster the recent gay cake saga has attempted to do a similar thing, but its much better if the morality comes from the bottom up. (I agree with Simon Jenkins on this one) 
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I wonder what would happen if a referendum on gay marriage were held in Northern Ireland? I think the politicians on all sides might be surprised by the results. There is some evidence that in the quiet privacy of the ballot booth the people might vote yes despite the Biblical rantings and ravings of their elected representatives. The population of Ireland is getting younger and young people have no truck with this kind of nonsense. The theocrats and Biblical literalists are on their way out. Plug Alert. You only have to read my, ahem, award winning novel, The Cold Cold Ground, set in the nightmare year of 1981 when homosexuality was punishable by 3 years imprisonment to see how far we have come since then. 
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Ireland is marching into the future and there's not much the people in silly hats (mitre, bowler or beret) can do to stop it. 

Banged Up Abroad

Cullen Thomas

In a recent interview I was asked about my 'guilty pleasure' in TV watching. I told the interviewer I didn't really believe in the concept of guilty pleasures but then I remembered this blogpost from a couple of years ago...
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A long time ago I remember watching Barry Norman on the BBC's old Film programme getting himself worked up about Midnight Express. The prison experiences are indeed very harrowing Norman said, but, he wondered "why should we even care about what happens to a self confessed drug smuggler?" Evidently for Barry Norman drug smugglers were not and could never be a hero of a major feature film. A fortiori then Norman must surely hate the National Geographic Channel's TV series Banged Up Abroad, as the vast majority of its subjects are incompetent or wannabe drug smugglers. I don't share Norman's moral concerns about rooting for a drug dealer as most of the people featured on BUA are generally sympathetic - stupid, yes, but sympathetic.
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If I believed in the concept of the guilty pleasure Banged Up Abroad would probably be my current guiltiest squeeze. Every episode begins the same way: a naive Brit or American is in a hot foreign country and is persuaded by a smooth talking new friend/boy-friend/girl-friend into smuggling drugs from said hot foreign country into Europe or North America. Taped up with cocaine or heroin or hash and sweating bullets the scheme invariably goes wrong and the naive Anglo-Saxon gets caught and is thrown into an overseas prison. Actors play the younger version of the subject and they narrate their own story in a studio usually (especially with the Brits) with self mocking ironic detachment. Some of the prisons are so chaotic and corrupt that the subject's life is in jeopardy and they must literally fight to survive from day to day. Other prisons are a little more humane but none of them resemble the gentle Scandinavian prisons which are more about reform than punishment. (A few of the less successful episodes have the subject getting kidnapped by terrorists etc. but this, I feel, is stretching the purity of the format.) Why is Banged Up Abroad so compelling to me? Well, for a start I can easily imagine myself getting banged up abroad, not necessarily because of drug smuggling, but maybe because of an incident in a bar that gets out of hand or a violation of local laws of which I am unfamiliar. The fantasy of escape from a barbaric foreign prison has been a staple of literature for centuries, perhaps millennia (St Peter, I think, pulled a daring prison escape somewhere in the New Testatment) and while very few of the subjects on Banged Up Abroad actually manage to escape, it's not difficult to put yourself in their shoes, wondering if you could do the time and if not how you would try to get yourself out. This idea is so obviously interesting to me that I even wrote a novel all about it called Dead I Well May Be...

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If you're only going to watch one episode of Banged Up Abroad try to find the one starring Cullen Thomas who gets arrested for trying to smuggle drugs into Korea with his girlfriend Rocket. Cullen's prison experiences are fascinating: after some initial self pity and suffering Cullen transforms himself through a kind of zen process of meditation and self analysis into a mature and thoughtful young man. For Thomas getting arrested for drug smuggling is, in a way, the best thing that ever happened to him, giving his existence meaning and allowing him to live what Plato called the examined life, or what the poet Novalis felt was the greatest journey of all, the journey inwards into the depth of one's own experiences: "nach innen geht der geheimnisvolle Weg." Thomas used the prison time to become a more reflective and interesting person rather than in his phrase "letting the time use him." He has also written a rather good book about his experiences that can be got on Amazon.com, here.  And surely even Barry Norman wouldn't disapprove of that.

My Most Viewed Blog Post Of 2014

This is the original edit of my piece on locked room mysteries for the Guardian newspaper that I published in January. I explain how I got hooked on the genre and why I wanted to write one of these in the first place. The piece below is longer than the original newspaper article with a little more exposition on my favourite books and my 'rules' about what makes a good locked-roomer...

My Ten Favourite Locked-Room Mystery Novels
Adrian McKinty

When I was ten years old I remember the first proper mystery novel that I read. It was a paperback of Agatha's Christie early classic Murder on the Orient Express. Orient Express, you’ll recall, is the one where everyone did it, which delighted me no end and I was immediately hooked. I began to work my way through the other Agatha Christies at Belfast Central library and it was probably the sympathetic librarian there who put into my hands The Murders In The Rue Morgue, the first real locked-room mystery that I came across.
     Since Rue Morgue I’ve read dozens of locked-roomers (or ‘impossible murders’ as some prefer to call them) and I have developed firm opinions about the genre. I have no truck whatsoever with the ones that have a supernatural solution or where the author doesn’t give you enough information to solve the case for yourself. Some purists don’t like locked-room problems that involve magician’s tricks (a staple of Jonathan Creek for example) but I’m of the opinion that as long as the mechanics of the trick are explained to the reader (or viewer) well before the solution, these can be permissible.
     A locked-room problem lies at the heart of my new novel, In The Morning I’ll Be Gone in which an RUC detective has to find out whether a publican’s daughter who fell off a table in a bar that was locked from the inside was in fact murdered and if so how. The first thing I had to do was to assure the reader I was not cheating about the facts: the pub was indeed locked and bolted from the inside, there were no secret passages, no concealed rooms and certainly no supernatural element. Then, of course, I had to give the reader all the necessary information so that she or he could solve the case at the same time or before the detective. And by all the information I mean: facts, psychology and motive. When it works you should be able to read a locked-room mystery twice, the second time spotting the clues and seeing how the whole thing fits together and, hopefully, enjoying the iron logic of the solution.
     When a locked-room mystery doesn’t work the solution makes you groan and the book gets hurled across the room. In The Murders In The Rue Morgue an elderly Frenchwoman is killed in a locked room on the fourth floor. The solution – spoiler alert – is that the murder was done by a tame orang-utan who climbed in through the open window with a straight razor. Even at the age of ten I wasn’t happy with that. (I think it was George Orwell who said that the even more ridiculous plot point in Rue Morgue was the idea that an edlerly Parisian lady would go to bed with the window open). More recently The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo found itself flying across my kitchen when I realised that the locked-room problem at its heart (actually a locked island) was a cheat because the reader had been clumsily misinformed about the essential facts.
     The golden age of the locked-room mystery in Anglo-American detective fiction has largely passed but in France Paul Halter has been churning out original impossible murder novels since the mid 1980’s and In Japan the great Soji Shimada virtually invented the Shinhonkaku “logic problem” sub-genre which is still extremely popular today.
     I think there are four elements that make a really good locked-room mystery novel: 1. An original puzzle. 2. An interesting detective and supporting characters. 3. Lively prose. 4. An elegant solution to the puzzle. Mixing classic and contemporary with no supernatural activity allowed these are my ten favourite locked-room/impossible murder novels:

10. The Moonstone (1868) – Wilkie Collins. Rachel Verinder’s cursed Indian diamond ‘The Moonstone’ disappears from her room after her birthday party. This is only a rudimentary locked-roomer, but as the first and still one of the best detective novels it had to be on my list.

9. The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941) – John Dickson Carr. Dr. Gideon Fell investigates an alarming number of ‘suicides’ at a remote Scottish castle. The deaths have taken place in locked or completely inaccessible rooms. Dickson Carr was rightly known as the “master of the locked-room mystery” and this entire list could, with some justification, have been made solely from JDC books.

8. And Then There Were None (1939) – Agatha Christie. (Originally published under two equally unfortunate titles.) Eight people with guilty secrets are invited to an isolated island off the coast of Devon where they begin to be murdered one by one. When there are only two of them left the fun really begins.

7. Suddenly At His Residence (1946) – Christianna Brand. In another part of Devon Sir Richard March has been found poisoned in his lodge. A sand covered pathway leading to the lodge is rolled daily by the gardener. Only one set of footprints is found leading to the lodge and they belong to Claire, who discovered the body. A witty and engaging mystery from a writer who was another locked room specialist.

6. The Big Bow Mystery (1892) – Israel Zangwill. Mrs Drabdump’s lodger is discovered with his throat cut, no trace of a murder weapon and no way a murderer could have got in or out. Arguably the first proper locked-roomer and still a classic of the form.

5. The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908) – Gaston Leroux. Miss Stangerson is found severely injured, attacked in a locked room at the Chateau du Glandier. Leroux provides maps and floor plans showing that a presumptive murderer could not possibly have entered or escaped. Amateur sleuth Joseph Rouletabille has to figure out how the attack was done. Another early classic.

4. The King Is Dead (1951) – Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay & Manfred Lee). King Bendigo, a wealthy munitions magnate, has been threatened by his brother Judah, who announces that he will shoot King at exactly midnight on June 21st at his private island residence. King locks himself in a hermetically sealed office accompanied only by his wife, Karla. Judah is under Ellery Queen's constant observation. At midnight, Judah lifts an empty gun and pulls the trigger and at the same moment, in the sealed room, King falls back, wounded with a bullet. No gun is found on Karla or anywhere in the sealed room. Furthermore the bullet that wounds King came from Judah’s gun which didn’t actually fire. Good, huh?

3. La Septième hypothèse (1991) – Paul Halter. In pre War London Dr. Alan Twist and Inspector Archie Hurst are visited by a man named Peter Moore, secretary to Sir Gordon Miller, a mystery author. According to Moore, Sir Gordon had a strange visitor who gave him a murder challenge. The two men tossed a coin and whoever lost had to commit a murder and try to pin the blame on the other. Peter Moore is subsequently found dead. There are only two possible suspects and both have ironclad alibis. Seven solutions present themselves in this ultra twisty novel.

2. The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981) – Soji Shimada. The book begins on a snowy evening in the Shōwa period of pre war Japan. A wealthy artist, Heikichi Umezawa, is finishing up his great cycle of paintings: 12 large canvases on Zodiacal subjects. As he works on the last one his head is smashed in with a blunt object. The studio is locked from the inside and the suspects have alibis. Over the next four decades many of Umezawa’s family members are also gruesomely killed, most in ‘impossible’ ways. In a series of postmodern asides Soji Shimada repeatedly taunts the reader explaining that all the clues are there for an astute observer.

1. The Hollow Man (1935) – John Dickson Carr. Someone breaks into Professor Grimaud's study, kills him and leaves, with the only door to the room locked from the inside, and with people present in the hall outside the room. The ground below the window is covered with unbroken snow. All the elements are balanced just right in this, the best of Dickson Carr’s many locked-room problems.

Best of the Year Lists

I've made a couple of best of the year lists that I thought I should tell you about. I mean why not, right? It's nearly Christmas and you may be looking to get books for people as last minute presents...I appreciate that I am not exactly a trustworthy source regarding the quality of my own material so instead of taking my word for it why not put your faith in some national media sources instead... 

1. The Mail On Sunday (Britain's best selling Sunday newspaper) has picked In The Morning I'll Be Gone as one of its top 5 mysteries of 2014. This is very nice of the Mail as the rec comes with a huge big pic of the book (thanks to my mum for telling me about this).  

2. The Toronto Star (Canada's top selling newspaper (so says my buddy John McFetridge who spotted this one)) has also picked In The Morning I'll Be Gone as one of the best mysteries of 2014.


3. Slate Magazine has picked The Sun Is God as #2 on its list of Neglected Books of 2014. Thanks to Seana Graham for spotting this one. 


4. Booklist, the magazine of the American Library Association, has picked In The Morning I'll Be Gone as its #3 mystery of 2014. 


5. ABC Radio: The great Angela Savage - ABC's crime reviewer - picked In The Morning I'll Be Gone as one of her top five mysteries of 2014. 


6. The Australian (the best selling broadsheet newspaper in the country) picked In The Morning I'll Be Gone as one of its top 6 summer reads of the year. 


Both of these books, of course, are available at good bookshops or at the usual online retailers. 

Barry Award

award photo courtesy Stu Neville...

On Friday night my second Sean Duffy novel, I Hear The Sirens In The Street, won the 2014 Barry Award in the best mystery (paperback original) category. The awards were announced at this year's Bouchercon crime fiction convention which was held in Long Beach, California. Stuart Neville was gracious enough to pick up the award on my behalf as I couldn't get there this year. Many thanks to the judges, to Deadly Pleasures magazine and to everyone who voted for me. I really do appreciate it. You can find the full list of winners in all four categories, here. And thank you again Stuart for picking it up for me and to Seana Graham for cheering like a - nice - banshee. 

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This is going to sound a little bit like solo trumpetry but as this blogpost may become a google gravity well for people searching McKinty Awards or Sean Duffy Series Awards etc. I'd like to stress, for those people who have never heard of me, that each of the Sean Duffy books has won a different crime fiction award: 

Sean Duffy #1 The Cold Cold Ground won the 2013 Spinetingler Award

Sean Duffy #2 I Hear The Sirens In The Street won the 2014 Barry Award (best pbk original)

Sean Duffy #3 In The Morning I'll Be Gone won the 2014 Ned Kelly Award

The series has been shortlisted for numerous other awards & Duffy #1 has also been shortlisted for the 2015 Prix SNCF Du Polar and that can still be voted on, here, if you are so inclined. Merci.

Gun Street Girl - The First Review & How To Win A Proof

Jon Page, from Bite the Book, got himself a VERY early galley of Gun Street Girl. He read the galley and reviewed it over on his excellent site, here. I've worked on the book quite a bit since this first draft, tightening the story a little and adding a few more jokes. (In fact I'm still working on the book now.)
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The novel of course takes place in Ulster but the wider net of the narrative brings in the biggest American political scandal of the Reagan administration, a famous cause celebre from 1980's Oxford and the chaotic weeks in Belfast that followed the signing of the Anglo Irish Agreement in 1985. The book begins with an echo of and on the same night that Rorshach's journal begins in Alan Moore's Watchmen, which also has one or two sneaky resonances throughout the text. Anyway, old chums, this is what Jon Page thought:
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Sometimes a recurring crime character is brought back and the story feels forced or the attempt feels lame. But then there are those rare times when, despite the series being over, the character comes back and exceeds what has been done before. And that is exactly what Adrian McKinty has done with Sean Duffy.

In the last Sean Duffy book, In The Morning I’ll Be Gone, it appeared the series had finished with a bang. Adrian McKinty had flagged his intention to halt the Duffy books at three and had given us a more than satisfactory conclusion. Better to finish wanting more than for a fantastic character to get stale. However an idea came to McKinty for a book four, but he still resisted until he literally dreamt how he could end that book, and that was what he needed to begin writing book four in the Sean Duffy series. He wrote about that experience, here. And yes, the ending really is one of the best things McKinty has done.

Not only has McKinty done justice to the previous books with Gun Street Girl but I think he has actually exceeded himself. The Sean Duffy trilogy was already something special and Gun Street Girl not only reaffirms that but makes it even better. The year is 1985 and The Troubles are still in full, nasty swing in Belfast with the flames about to be fanned by the so-called Irish-Anglo Agreement. Sean Duffy is now an Inspector in charge of CID at Carrick RUC. When a local bookie and his wife are killed in what looks like a professional hit Duffy only takes a passing interest in the case letting his detective sergeant take the lead and blood two new detectives. However when the case takes a nasty turn Duffy dives in up to his neck of course ruffling any (and all) feathers that get in his way. Conspiracies loom and the bodies start piling up as Duffy quickly uncovers a sinister plot well above his pay grade. But to crack this case he’s going to need someone to talk and the first thing they teach you in Northern Ireland is to never talk, especially to the RUC, even when you’re supposed to be on the same side.

[money quote coming up:]

Full of McKinty’s trademark wickedly black humour and with the usual taut plotting this just may be the best book in an exceptional series so far. Sean Duffy has come a long way from The Cold Cold Ground and everything he's been through is starting to leave scars. I was reluctantly happy to see the series finish after three books but after book 4 I think there is even a little more life in this awesome series to come. At least I hope so!
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Still reading all the way down here? Good for you. Serpents Tail are having a competition whereby they are giving away some early galleys of Gun Street Girl. If you click this link you'll be taken to the competition page. Alas this compo is open only to British and Irish readers (because of postage costs).
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You can, of course, read the first five chapters of Gun Street Girl, for free, here...

Ned Kelly

Much to my amazement and delight my novel In The Morning I'll Be Gone has won the 2014 Ned Kelly Award. The award was announced at the Brisbane Writers Festival after a great evening hosted by the BWF and the Australian Crime Writers Association. I gave a speech but I have no idea what I said. (I have a vague recollection of doing a John Connolly impersonation and people laughing.) But I was happy. Many thanks to the Ned Kelly judges, to ACWA, to Michael Robotham who hosted the whole thing and to my British, Aussie and American publishers for steadfastly supporting me when nobody outside my immediate family (and not even many of them if I'm honest) was buying my books. Thank you Serpents Tail, Allen & Unwin, Seventh Street Books and Blackstone Audio who all had faith in me even though the numbers were telling a different story...
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The Ned Kelly is definitely the coolest of all the crime fiction awards and if you think about it, its only the one that's given for an entire continent. I mean how badass is that? Coincidentally Sidney Nolan who painted the iconic image of Ned Kelly below went to St Kilda Primary School where both my daughters went. Last night was my daughter Sophie's school concert and Sidney Nolan was one of the characters in the story and when the school time travellers meet him (dont ask) he's in right in the middle of painting his famous series of Ned Kelly pictures. 
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If you haven't read In The Morning I'll Be Gone, I reckon its a pretty good place to start if you're new to me and my books. Its set in Northern Ireland in 1984 but it isn't all depressing and everything. Parts of it are funny. And there's a locked room mystery. And Michael Forsythe makes an appearance. And Duffy burns down a drug den. Oh, and the IRA blow up Thatcher at the end. Spoiler alert. This is what the judges said about the book: “In his use of humour with the grim realities of Belfast in 1984, coupled with a wonderfully constructed locked room mystery, McKinty has produced something really quite extraordinary. There’s a fine line between social commentary and compelling mystery and not many writers, crime or literary, can do both.”

The First Five Chapters of Sean Duffy #4: Gun Street Girl

Click the link below to read the first five chapters of Sean Duffy #4. Remember this is a work in progress so a lot of this may change and/or get deleted. If you're wondering about page 1, yes it is an intentional echo of Bob Dylan's Desolation Row and the beginning of the Alan Moore comic Watchmen (the book begins exactly the same night that Rorschach's journal begins). I initially wanted to begin the book with a chapter of static which I've never seen done before in a mystery novel, but I thought better of that... Feel free to read online or print out and read at your leisure. Do keep going until chapter 5 because I think that one is pretty funny...Comments/suggestions are much appreciated...(preferably here rather than the actual chapters because its easier for me to reply). Slainte.
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http://adrianmckinty.blogspot.com.au/p/1-ascanner-darkly-sssssssssssssssssssss.html

More Sean Duffy?

It's been over a year since I wrote a Sean Duffy novel and in the intervening time I've mostly been goofing off. I've tried to write a couple of things here and there but they've gone nowhere. A while ago I had an idea for a 4th Sean Duffy novel but initially I was reluctant to write it as I really dug the way the third book ended. Come on McKinty if you write another book in this series there's no way you'll ever get an ending that pleases you as much again - you'll bloody ruin it, you fool! I thought. And if you look at my bibliography you'll see that I'm not a big fan of series anyway. Trilogies I dig, standalones I dig, but 3+ books? Not my thing. I was completely torn: I had a cool idea for a book but I loved the way book 3 concluded Sean Duffy's adventures. So I took the safest way out and did nothing. 
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Months went by and then one night I dreamed the ending of book 4. When I woke up I wrote it out and printed it and put it in a drawer. I left the pages in the drawer for a week, reread it, realised that final scene needed an epilogue, wrote the epilogue and put that away for a week. And then I read the complete ending of book 4 (final chapter plus epilogue) and I liked it. I really liked it. It was - in my mind - as good as the ending of book #3. I still didn't have the book yet but I had an ending and an idea for what happened in the middle. And I had a title Gun Street Girl (another Tom Waits song). I pitched the book to my publishers and they suggested that I start writing it and for want of something better to do I did.
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I'm not going to say anything about the plot here because I'm still working on the book and things could change. (ST have produced a cool preliminary cover which incorporates one of the ideas from that final chapter dream) but its not done yet. However I am happy with the book so far and it definitely doesn't ruin the mythology of the trilogy. It does however ruin the nice alliterative "Troubles Trilogy" which is how they pitched the series in the US and I can't think of any words relating to Ulster or Northern Ireland that begin with Q for quartet. (My buddy John McFetridge is publishing a great series of detective novels set in 1970's Montreal and when he's got 4 of those it'll be easy: The Quebec Quartet.) Maybe I should just do what Douglas Adams did when he published Mostly Harmless - the tagline of that book was "The fifth book in his increasingly inaccurately named Hitch-hiker Trilogy."