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 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. 

How My Novel Climbed 97,388 Amazon Places In A Single Morning

So how do you get your novel to climb 97,000 Amazon places in a single morning? The answer is that you get it mentioned on National Public Radio. NPR may not have a huge listenership compared to some commercial stations in the US but it's a listenership that buys books. On Friday last the great Nancy Pearl, "America's Librarian", went on Morning Edition to talk about some undiscovered literary gems from her personal library. The very first book she mentioned was The Cold Cold Ground. (You can listen to the entire story, here.) Nancy described it as "one of the best crime novels she had ever read" and the host of Morning Edition read out the first paragraph of the book. Within minutes TCCG began climbing on the Amazon rankings and by the end of the day it had cracked the famous Amazon 100. Now of course this was only a temporary blip and soon it had begun to fall back down again. But still it was nice to get a little glimpse of the dizzy heights of best sellerdom even if it was only for a brief period of time. 
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It was especially pleasing for me that this happened to The Cold Cold Ground, a book that I worked really hard on, was well received in the UK and Ireland, which won a couple of awards but which was utterly ignored in the American press because it didn't have a big publisher and a big ad campaign behind it. Apart from the honourable exception of The Arizona Republic I didn't get any newspaper reviews in the American papers (there was however a nice write up about me as an author in The Wall Street Journal). It shows you how difficult it is for a new or newish writer to break through if you don't have a marketing juggernaut behind you (or you don't live in Brooklyn). If a crime fiction reviewer is sharp enough or is well read enough to have heard of your book, chances are their editor will spike the review because the paper needs to appeal to a broad audience and the audience demands reviews of all the old favourites plus all the new Nordic Noir books. Classic Catch 22 then: you can't get reviewed because no one's heard of you and no one's ever going to hear about you because you can't get reviewed. So it's very nice to know that at least someone looks outside the box for the unconventional and the different. And to have that someone be the great Nancy Pearl is especially sweet. 
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If you want to look at my current fading amazon ranking or even buy the book itself you can do so, here. And thank you again NPR and the well read and wise Nancy Pearl! I enjoyed my moment in the sun. 

George McFly Day!

What is George McFly Day? It's the bit in Back To The Future where George McFly's box of books arrives from his publisher and his career as a science fiction writer becomes a reality. If you remember the film, in one version of the present George doesn't follow his dreams to become a writer because he's afraid of failure, but in the altered version of the present a more courageous George McFly does pursue his ambition and when his box of books comes it's a kind of vindication. What makes this George McFly day particularly interesting and exciting for me is that the box of books which arrived today from my publisher (Seventh Street Books) was I Hear The Sirens In The Street which is partly about the DeLorean scandal in Belfast in 1982 and the book actually begins with a quote from Back To The Future (the British version also begins with a Tom Waits song but I couldn't afford to pay the royalties for its use in the US edition). . .Earlier this week I also received the French and Spanish versions of the first book in the Sean Duffy series, The Cold Cold Ground, which both look fantastic. This morning my daughters Arwynn and Sophie gleefully ripped all the boxes of books apart, ably helped by Rocky, our next door neighbour's cat, who sincerely believes that he belongs in our family.

Adrian McKinty, Parker Bilal and Paul French at the Adelaide Writers Festival

I'm blogging this (below) to coincide with the US release this week of I Hear The Sirens In The Street...And since I'm - rather embarrassingly - talking about me, I'd also like to point you in the direction of some reviews: Dana King reviewed Sirens in the New Mystery Reader, here. The lovely Connie Wilson reviewed and profiled me over at Yahoo Voices. Peter Dragovich (the Nerd of Noir) reviewed Sirens in Spinetingler Magazine, here. Finally I'm pretty excited that Steven Dougherty wrote a very sweet profile of me in The Wall Street Journal, here. It's all too easy for reviewers to cover the mainstream releases from the big publishing houses so I really appreciate the fact that Dana, Connie, Peter and Steven looked beyond the big publicity campaigns to seek out a peripheral voice like mine. Slainte.

Thank You!

Many thanks to all the regular readers of this blog because at least partially thanks to your votes, my book, The Cold Cold Ground, has won the 2013 Spinetingler Award for best crime novel!
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I'm really very touched. I put a lot of my heart and soul into that book. It was both harrowing and strangely fun journeying back to the 1981 of my imagination and reliving those childhood days in Victoria Estate in Carrickfergus. I don't find writing particularly easy and I'm not one of those 1000 words before breakfast types but occasionally during the writing process of this book I did feel that I was firing on all cylinders the way a top notch writer presumably feels all the time...
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Anyway many thanks to everyone who voted for me or reviewed me on Amazon, Audible, Good Reads or their blog. When you are published by a small press it's almost impossible for your book to get noticed which is why reader support and reader reviews mean so very much.
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Slainte. 

Funny Ha Ha

I got pretty surprising news this week that my first Duffy novel, The Cold Cold Ground has been longlisted for The Last Laugh Award at CrimeFest. It was Colin Bateman who told me about this, who, of course has been longlisted himself. The Last Laugh Award is for the Best Humourous Crime Novel published in the British Isles in the last year. I don't know if you've read The Cold Cold Ground, but if you have you'll know that it isn't exactly a laugh riot, indeed its a pretty serious noir set against the background of the Hunger Strikes in 1981. However there are quite a few jokes in the novel and one of the things I did try to do with the book was capture Belfast's famous propensity for black humour. In Ireland's literary tradition moral seriousness has always been modulated by wit, black humour and irony - and I feel that in Ulster this has been taken to an even darker and more interesting degree by a population who frequently use humour as a coping mechanism. (Perhaps one of the reasons my books don't do particularly well in America is that their sarcasm and irony is accepted at face value?) Anyway much of The Cold Cold Ground was funny to me and I'm delighted that the judges of CrimeFest seem to have gotten the joke. 
Here's that longlist in full:


Colin Bateman  The Prisoner of Brenda
Agatha Raisin  Hiss and Hers
Simon Brett  Blotto, Twinks and the Bootleggers 
Hannah Dennison  A Vicky Hill Exclusive!
Ruth Dudley  Edwards Killing The Emperors
Hesh Kestin  The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats 
Adrian McKinty  The Cold Cold Ground 
Catriona McPherson  Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses
Eileen Robertson  Blackmail for Beginners
James Runcie  Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death
Anne Zouroudi  The Bull of Mithros

The Cold Cold Ground

As of today The Cold Cold Ground is finally available in bookshops in the USA and Canada! (And if you can't get to a bookshop it's officially now available on Amazon.com and B&N.com too.) If you're not aware, TCCG is a mystery novel set in the Northern Ireland of 1981. TCCG takes place largely on the street where I was born and raised when I would have been about 13 years old, but it's not about me, it's about DS Sean Duffy a young detective in the RUC under incredible pressures from all sides of the sectarian conflict. Basically I wanted to do 2 things with the novel: 1. Tell a cracking good detective story; 2 Capture the zeitgeist and mood of what Belfast was like during the Hunger Strikes. 

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There have been 2 reviews of TCCG so far in the American press - Booklist and The Library Journal - and both gave The Cold Cold Ground starred reviews. (You can read those if you scroll down past the blogposts about Vertigo and Downton Abbey). TCCG came out in the British Isles in January and here are some representative views of the British and Irish press: 
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"If Raymond Chandler had grown up in Northern Ireland, The Cold Cold Ground is what he would have written." --Peter Millar, The Times 

"Adrian McKinty is fast gaining a reputation as the finest of the new generation of Irish crime writers, and it's easy to see why on the evidence of this novel, the first in a projected trilogy of police procedurals." --Doug Johnstone, The Glasgow Herald

"Written in a terse style, the novel is a literary thriller that is as concerned with exploring the poisonously claustrophobic demi-monde of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and the self-sabotaging contradictions of its place and time, as it is with providing the genre’s conventional thrills and spills. The result is a masterpiece of Troubles crime fiction: had David Peace, Eoin McNamee and Brian Moore sat down to brew up the great Troubles novel, they would have been very pleased indeed to have written The Cold Cold Ground." --Declan Burke, The Irish Times

"He manages to catch the brooding atmosphere of the 1980s and to tell a ripping yarn at the same time. There will be many readers waiting for the next adventure of the dashing, funny and intrepid Sergeant Duffy." --Maurice Hays, The Irish Independent

"What makes McKinty a cut above the rest is the quality of his prose. The names of David Peace and Ellroy are evoked too often in relation to young crime writers, but McKinty shares their method of using the past as a template for the present. The stories and textures may belong to a different period, but the power of technique and intent makes of them the here and now. There's food for thought in McKinty's writing, but he is careful not to lose the force of his narrative in introspection. The Cold Cold Ground is a crime novel, fast-paced, intricate and genre to the core." --Eoin McNamee, The Guardian.

"Tropes are tropes for good reason. The important crime-fiction ones are present and accounted for here -- a serial killer who purposely leaves clues, a cop who's on to him, procedural and forensic nitty-gritty. Yet McKinty can startle with bouts of lyrical scene-setting that could only come from the fingertips of someone who grew up in the environment. He tells us of "arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon... The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife". He educates us about shopkeepers boarding-up their windows when a riot was due, or the ritual of paramilitaries leaving a silver 'Judas coin' by the corpse of a bumped-off informant. Your reviewer was born the year The Cold Cold Ground (a Tom Waits' lyric, by the way) is set in, and such passages work better at painting a picture than any episode of Reeling In The Years." - The Irish Sunday Independent

Jon Page at Bite the Book said: "No exaggeration, this is one of the best crime novels I have ever read. McKinty’s last book, FALLING GLASS, was superb but THE COLD, COLD GROUND blew me utterly away. It is easily his best book to date." 

Audible.com picked the audio version of Cold Cold Ground as one of the best books of 2012.

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So that's the pitch ladies and gentlemen. I know many of you reading this haven't got the book, well if you like what I do on this blog I can only suggest that you'll really like what I do in TCCG. Slainte.

The Booklist Review of The Cold Cold Ground

And here, mes amis, is the second American print review of The Cold Cold Ground. From Booklist:

*Starred Review* 

Irish novelist McKinty returns to his roots with the first book of the Troubles Trilogy, set in his hometown during the time he grew up. At the height of conflict between the Catholic IRA and Protestant paramilitary factions in 1981, Sean Duffy, a Catholic police sergeant in the Protestant town of Carrickfergus, near Belfast, gets an unusual case. Two gay men have been murdered, their right hands severed (the classic modus for killing an informant) and switched between the two bodies. Duffy initially suspects a serial killer, but when no more gay men are targeted, he comes to believe that the second killing was done simply to cover up the first, in which the head of the IRA’s feared internal security force was the victim. Even after the case is reassigned, Duffy defies orders and keeps digging, coming up against corruption and collusion. Everything in this novel hits all the right notes, from its brilliant evocation of time and place to razor-sharp dialogue to detailed police procedures. McKinty, author of the Forsythe and Lighthouse Trilogies, has another expertly crafted crime trilogy going here, and readers will want to see what he does in the concluding two books. --Michele Leber

You can get The Cold Cold Ground right now on Amazon.com, here. 

Or you can get it right now from Barnes and Noble, here.

And of course you've been able to get it on Audible since January, here.  Audible has already picked TCCG as one of its "best of 2012 so far" (You should see who else is on that list. . .TCCG seems to be the only book not written by a celebrity or with an Oscar winning celebrity narrator. So thank you Audible!)

The Library Journal Review Of The Cold Cold Ground

The first American print review of The Cold Cold Ground will appear in November 1st's Library Journal and is reproduced below. I feel I should point out that the Library Journal are notoriously parsimonious in handing out starred reviews. I think I've only ever gotten two starred reviews from them in the past. Anyway here's their review of the US edition of The Cold Cold Ground: 

*Starred Review*

McKinty, Adrian. The Cold Cold Ground: A Detective Sean Duffy Novel.

Seventh Street Bks: Prometheus. (Troubles Trilogy, Bk. 1). Nov. 2012. c.328p. ISBN 9781616147167. pap. $15.95. M

What better cover for a serial killer than the political hunger strikes, car bombs, and street riots of Northern Ireland’s “troubles”? Det. Sean Duffy, a rarity as a Catholic cop, doesn’t step back from digging deep into a case in which gay men are being killed and mutilated with symbolic messages (such as cut-off hands) and more obscure, artistic clues. But as Duffy learns more about the victims, he wonders if their deaths aren’t politically motivated after all. Then, when a local missing woman turns up dead and is presumed to have killed herself, initially only Duffy senses that she was murdered and that her death connects with those of the gay men. By now, he has managed to alienate some powerful folks in the activist movement, and he might have to be silenced, too.

VERDICT: For fans of Stewart Neville’s crime novels, a new and harrowing Irish trilogy is underway. At turns violent and labyrinthine, McKinty’s (Dead I Well May Be) fine police procedural is also the ultimate page-turner. I cannot wait for Book Two!

Pretty sweet huh? I'm over the moon, actually. And there's more good news. Although The Cold Cold Ground won't officially be released in the USA until November 10th you can get it early, right now on Amazon.com, here. 

The Cold Cold Ground

As of today The Cold Cold Ground is finally available in bookshops in the USA and Canada! In case you're not aware, TCCG is a mystery novel set in the Northern Ireland of 1981. As far as I know its the first book ever to look at the extraordinary situation of a Catholic policeman in 1980's Ulster and to explore the unbelievable pressures he would have been under. The book takes place largely on the street where I was I born and raised when I would have been about 13 years old. Basically I wanted to do 2 things with the novel: 1. Tell a cracking good story; 2 Capture the zeitgeist and mood of what Belfast was like during the Hunger Strikes. 

...
There have been 2 reviews of TCCG so far in the American press, both in trade papers; Booklist and The Library Journal both gave The Cold Cold Ground starred reviews and you can read those if you scroll down past the blogposts about Vertigo and Downton Abbey. TCCG came out in the British Isles in January and here are some representative views of the British and Irish press: 
...
"If Raymond Chandler had grown up in Northern Ireland, The Cold Cold Ground is what he would have written." --Peter Millar, The Times 

"Adrian McKinty is fast gaining a reputation as the finest of the new generation of Irish crime writers, and it's easy to see why on the evidence of this novel, the first in a projected trilogy of police procedurals." --Doug Johnstone, The Glasgow Herald

"Written in a terse style, the novel is a literary thriller that is as concerned with exploring the poisonously claustrophobic demi-monde of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and the self-sabotaging contradictions of its place and time, as it is with providing the genre’s conventional thrills and spills. The result is a masterpiece of Troubles crime fiction: had David Peace, Eoin McNamee and Brian Moore sat down to brew up the great Troubles novel, they would have been very pleased indeed to have written The Cold Cold Ground." --Declan Burke, The Irish Times

"He manages to catch the brooding atmosphere of the 1980s and to tell a ripping yarn at the same time. There will be many readers waiting for the next adventure of the dashing, funny and intrepid Sergeant Duffy." --Maurice Hays, The Irish Independent

"What makes McKinty a cut above the rest is the quality of his prose. His driven, spat-out sentences are more accessible than James Ellroy's edge-of-reason staccato, and he can be lyric. The sound of a riot is "the distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship". The names of David Peace and Ellroy are evoked too often in relation to young crime writers, but McKinty shares their method of using the past as a template for the present. The stories and textures may belong to a different period, but the power of technique and intent makes of them the here and now. There's food for thought in McKinty's writing, but he is careful not to lose the force of his narrative in introspection. The Cold Cold Ground is a crime novel, fast-paced, intricate and genre to the core." --Eoin McNamee, The Guardian.

"Tropes are tropes for good reason. The important crime-fiction ones are present and accounted for here -- a serial killer who purposely leaves clues, a cop who's on to him, procedural and forensic nitty-gritty. Yet McKinty can startle with bouts of lyrical scene-setting that could only come from the fingertips of someone who grew up in the environment. He tells us of "arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon... The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife". He educates us about shopkeepers boarding-up their windows when a riot was due, or the ritual of paramilitaries leaving a silver 'Judas coin' by the corpse of a bumped-off informant. Your reviewer was born the year The Cold Cold Ground (a Tom Waits' lyric, by the way) is set in, and such passages work better at painting a picture than any episode of Reeling In The Years." - The Irish Sunday Independent

Jon Page at Bite the Book said: "No exaggeration, this is one of the best crime novels I have ever read. McKinty’s last book, FALLING GLASS, was superb but THE COLD, COLD GROUND blew me utterly away. It is easily his best book to date." And hey it turns out that Audible.com has just picked the audio version of Cold Cold Ground as one of the best books of the year!  which is very nice of them. 

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So that's the pitch ladies and gentlemen. I know many of you reading this haven't got the book, yet; well if you like what I do on this blog I can only suggest that you'll really like what I do in TCCG. If you do get The Cold Cold Ground in print, e book or audio form I'd appreciate a review if you can spare the time.

Catching Cold In The USA

The US cover without review quotes

Its been a while since I've had a crime novel published in America. Three years in fact. My last novel to come out Stateside was Fifty Grand which was brought out by Holt in 2009. This was not a pleasant experience. Two months before Fifty Grand was due to be released my editor left the company (editors dont just edit the book, they're the ones that get you reviews, PR and the oxygen of publicity) and three weeks before the pub date her replacement editor left. The book had no one looking after it and there was no book launch, no PR, no advertising and I had to beg Holt to send out review copies. (In the end I sent out review copies out of my own pocket.) The book died an ignominious death of neglect which was a shame because Fifty Grand went on to get good reviews and was shortlisted for the Theakston Best British Crime Novel Award. What was even more galling for me was the PR blitz Holt set in motion for John Banville, who had decided that he was going to write crime novels under the name Benjamin Black. Black's novels were everything I was opposed to in crime fiction: cliched, mannered, dull, cozy, old fashioned and pandering to an Americanised nostalgic vision of Ireland; but Holt pushed Banville out there like he was the second coming of Dashiell frickin Hammett. After that I decided I was never going to allow any of my books to be published by a major corporate US house again and I said as much in print. It was a bold statement but there weren't really any takers for my books in America so it was all a bit moot anyway. 
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Early this year, however, I was approached by an editor called Dan Mayer who was starting a new imprint in the autumn of 2012 called Seventh Street Books. (Seventh Street, of course, is where Edgar Allan Poe lived). Dan said that he wanted to publish new, outsider voices who had something urgent to say and who rejected the moribund cliches of much contemporary crime fiction. He told me that he had read The Cold Cold Ground and wanted to publish me. I had heard this line from editors before: we want outsiders, we want new voices, we want original ideas and then you look at their list and its Marcia Clark from the OJ Simpson trial and a celebrity chef who has had an idea for a mystery novel. But Dan seemed different. For a start he got on my good side by praising the work of Declan Burke and then when he asked me questions about The Cold Cold Ground his observations were smart, knowledgeable and pertinent. Publishing is full of bullshit artists but Dan evidently wasn't one of those. (I was once in a meeting with an editor who told me that he had "been to Ireland twice to golf at St Andrews and Troon.") Dan appeared to be that rare bird who cared about the literary heritage of crime fiction and was in a position of power to create a list that embraced his vision. 
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So anyway this is a long preamble to pretty exciting news for me. The Cold Cold Ground is being published in the US this November by a brand new imprint: Seventh Street Books. I've made one or two minor changes to the American version and the novel will come with a new cover as a paperback original at a very reasonable fifteen dollar price (10 bucks on Amazon). You can look at the Amazon listing here (and you can "like it" if you want too). I hope the book does well. The critics have been very very kind in the UK, Ireland and Australia so it might be pushing my luck to hope for a similar ride in the US but we shall see...

The Cold Cold Ground

This isn't the cover. This was just me messing around on, er, Paintbox
and trying to come up with a Chip Kidd style image...

Great review of The Cold Cold Ground in Sunday's Irish Independent. What's odd is that the Irish Independent already reviewed the book back in January and loved it then too. But I'm certainly not complaining. Here's the thoughtful, careful review by the intelligent and well read Hilary White (below) and honestly if you haven't got Cold Cold Ground by now there's pretty much nothing I or the critics can say to convince you is there?
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The Cold Cold Ground
Adrian McKinty
The Hunger Strikes and subsequent rioting after the death of Bobby Sands in 1981 have been pored over by academics and psychologists, but the arts seemed to lag when it came to making a vocal examination.
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Steve McQueen's 2008 film Hunger was a landmark, asking many questions about the mucky fatalism of the strikers but also how they were driven there. The Cold, Cold Ground is the twelfth novel by migrant Irish writer Adrian McKinty, and it uses that chapter of the Troubles as a backdrop, quickening an otherwise genre work into something that sizzles with ambient dread.
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McKinty's other chief tool is Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy. A finely hewn protagonist, Duffy is a Catholic copper living in a Protestant Carrickfergus neighbourhood. Catholic RUC officers never went down particularly favourably with either side of the sectarian divide, and if Duffy seems analytical and highly aware of his surroundings, it's because he has to be.
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He is witty, cultured and erudite, but our author understands that character flaws are needed in the DNA of any good crime hero. Duffy is thus a functioning alcoholic and weed smoker, is prone to objectifying the women he encounters and shows one or two moments of bemusing insecurity. If you want your reader to take a character to heart, this is how to do it.
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When the bodies of two homosexuals turn up with little clues left near their cadavers, Duffy is suspicious. A serial killer operating in Troubles-ravaged Belfast? You don't bring an apple to an orchard. It is "too gothic for Ulster" and besides, if you happened to find that you were indeed a psychopath, there was a range of tooled-up zealots in the "alphabet soup" of paramilitaries to fall in with. Meanwhile, his gut is also telling him that the apparent suicide of the missing wife of a hunger striker is somehow connected to all this. Red herring cameos are made by Gerry Adams and homophobic Unionist firebrand George Seawright. Duffy's brain itches furiously. He over-thinks the clues and traces left by the killer, which disrupts that part of us that wants to work it out for ourselves. Sometimes a blunt wallop can work just as well as an explosion where finales are concerned. In the perversely hate-filled era in which the tale is set, it is perhaps the only way McKinty could wind things up and still maintain his story's vital sense of place.
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Tropes are tropes for good reason. The important crime-fiction ones are present and accounted for here -- a serial killer who purposely leaves clues, a cop who's on to him, procedural and forensic nitty-gritty. Yet McKinty can startle with bouts of lyrical scene-setting that could only come from the fingertips of someone who grew up in the environment. He tells us of "arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon... The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife". He educates us about shopkeepers boarding-up their windows when a riot was due, or the ritual of paramilitaries leaving a silver 'Judas coin' by the corpse of a bumped-off informant. Your reviewer was born the year The Cold, Cold Ground (a Tom Waits' lyric, by the way) is set in, and such passages work better at painting a picture than any episode of Reeling In The Years.
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McKinty had always intended for this to be the first part of a trilogy about Duffy. He has said that his flawed hero will go on to visit the 1984 Maze Prison escape, the US and the DeLorean car company. It's probably safe to say that Irish crime fiction's current purple patch won't be fading any time soon.

McKinty and Doyle For The Win!

McKinty and Doyle is not alas a 70's themed cop show. No, Gerard Doyle in fact is the guy who narrates most of my audiobooks, but he's also a very talented actor who could do a 70's cop show if he wanted. Ger has won several awards for his work on my stuff including Audible's Best Mystery of 2011 (for Falling Glass) and the Audie Award for Best Mystery or Thriller of 2007 (for The Dead Yard). Most of this I'm sure is down to Doyle's dry, impeccable narration...Anyway the partnership of McKinty and Doyle has just picked up another prize from AudioFile Magazine, winning an Earphones Award for the audio version of The Cold Cold Ground. I couldn't be more chuffed. This is the review of TCCG in April's AudioFile magazine: 
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THE COLD, COLD GROUND 
Adrian McKinty...No question, THE COLD, COLD GROUND is an exciting launch for what is sure to be an anticipated crime series. Great detective stories are built on three key elements—setting, story, and protagonist—and this one deploys each one magnificently. The setting—Northern Ireland in 1981, during the hunger strikes—is portrayed with frightening detail. The clever story evolves slowly as plot points are pinned to cultural biases that transcend “The Troubles”—for example, homosexuality and unwed motherhood. Police detective Sean Duffy wins us over chapter by chapter with his tenacity, his swaggering, witty dialogue, and his record collection—he spins The Velvet Underground when in need of a lift. The audiobook exceeds all expectations because of narrator Gerard Doyle. His storytelling is understated, and his dialect work is remarkable. This is the ninth collaboration between author and narrator, and this team totally rocks. R.W.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award  AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine [Published: APRIL 2012] 

The Cold Cold Ground - The Sunday Times's Verdict

image from Rich Pangburn

In their crime round up last Sunday, the Sunday Times (UK) reviewed The Cold Cold Ground. This is what they said: 


The first in a trilogy, Adrian McKinty’s impressive The Cold Cold Ground (Serpent’s Tail £12.99/ebook £12.99) is set in Belfast in 1981, a time of hunger strikes, riots and sectarian killings. DS Sean Duffy, a university-educated Catholic cop living in a Protestant area, heads the investigation when a man’s body is found in a car, with a music score grotesquely hidden within the cadaver. Later deaths suggest a “Northern Ireland Ripper” could be at large, possibly homophobic, possibly with paramilitary connections. McKinty’s publisher compares this series to David Peace’s Red Riding novels, and there are similarities besides the period, such as the weaving in of figures who are either real (Gerry Adams) or in light disguise. Duffy’s constant wisecracking, however, lends this novel a black humour reminiscent of Jacobean drama, imbuing it with a very different atmosphere from Peace’s bleak Yorkshire noir.


The Sunday Times joins an impressive list of papers below (and many who dont have web reviews) who have loved TCCG. In fact the only sort of negative review (and it wasnt that negative) of the book I have found anywhere was in the Irish Sunday Times. I've gotten a shedload of great blog reviews too, the latest this week from Paul Brazill. The thing I love the most though is to get reviews from you! So far 17 customer reviews on Amazon.com, 38 on Amazon.co.uk, 55 on Audible.com and even one on Amazon.de. If you haven't got TCCG yet, check out what they say below and get the book (you wont be disappointed) and after that I would love it if you could leave me a review. Slainte. 

The  Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/06/cold-cold-gound-adrian-mckinty-review

The Irish Times: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2012/0204/1224311231508.html

The Irish Independent: http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/review-fiction-the-cold-cold-ground-by-adrian-mckinty-2982300.html

The Times (London): http://adrianmckinty.blogspot.com/2012/01/times-weighs-in-on-cold-cold-ground.htm

The Glasgow Herald: http://www.heraldscotland.com/books-poetry/reviews/adrian-mckinty-the-cold-cold-ground-serpents-tail.16368721

The Sydney Morning Herald: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/in-belfasts-cauldron-20120203-1qx31.html

A Final Pitch

This is going to be my last post on The Cold Cold Ground for a long while. If there's one thing I really hate doing it's shilling for myself, but I'll have a valiant last stab at it: 

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While The Cold Cold Ground is a crime novel it's also an attempt to capture a culture that will be completely unknown to readers who didn't grow up in Northern Ireland in the 70's and 80's. You might think you know about N. Ireland in that period but you don't. With on or two important exceptions the stuff you've read or seen has all been lies, half truths and propaganda. As far as I know this is the first book ever to look at extraordinary situation of a Catholic policeman in the RUC in the 1980's and to explore the unbelievable pressures he would have been under. No copper anywhere ever had as tough a job as that of policing Belfast in the spring and summer of 1981. (Detroit? The South Bronx? Picnics. At least once you were home you were safe.) And if you were a smart, sensitive and lippy peeler you just might have ended up like Sean Duffy in The Cold Cold Ground. If you haven't got the book yet there's nothing more that I can say to convince you, but here are representative views of some of the British and Irish press: 

"If Raymond Chandler had grown up in Northern Ireland, The Cold Cold Ground is what he would have written." --Peter Millar, The Times 

"Adrian McKinty is fast gaining a reputation as the finest of the new generation of Irish crime writers, and it's easy to see why on the evidence of this novel, the first in a projected trilogy of police procedurals." --Doug Johnstone, The Glasgow Herald

"He manages to catch the brooding atmosphere of the 1980s and to tell a ripping yarn at the same time. There will be many readers waiting for the next adventure of the dashing and intrepid Sergeant Duffy." --Maurice Hays, The Irish Independent

"What makes McKinty a cut above the rest is the quality of his prose. His driven, spat-out sentences are more accessible than James Ellroy's edge-of-reason staccato, and he can be lyric. The sound of a riot is "the distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship".

The names of David Peace and Ellroy are evoked too often in relation to young crime writers, but McKinty shares their method of using the past as a template for the present. The stories and textures may belong to a different period, but the power of technique and intent makes of them the here and now.

There's food for thought in McKinty's writing, but he is careful not to lose the force of his narrative in introspection. The Cold Cold Ground is a crime novel, fast-paced, intricate and genre to the core." --Eoin McNamee, The Guardian.

The Cold Cold Ground will be published in Australia next week. At the Fair Dinkum Crime Blog, Bernadette gave the book four stars, while Jon Page at Bite the Book said: "No exaggeration, this is one of the best crime novels I have ever read. McKinty’s last book, FALLING GLASS, was superb but THE COLD, COLD GROUND blew me utterly away. It is easily his best book to date."

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So that's the pitch. I know many of you reading this haven't bought the book. Well if you like what I do on this blog I can only suggest that you'll really like what I do in Cold Cold. I'm a professional novelist and I save the good stuff for the books. That after all is how I make my living. 

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If you do get The Cold Cold Ground in print, e book or audio form I'd appreciate a review if you can spare the time. 

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Finally I'm heading out of town for the long weekend so I wont be able to respond to comments until Monday night, but I will read all comments when I get back. 

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Slainte. Go raibh míle maith agaibh as bhur gcúnamh.

The Times Weighs In On The Cold Cold Ground

The London Times (still I think the paper of record in the UK) weighed in on The Cold Cold Ground on Saturday. The piece was written by the well read and perspicacious Peter Millar. The first line of the review is funny but its the last line that is the killer: 
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Times, The (London, England) - Saturday, January 14, 2012

Author: Peter Millar
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The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty 
Serpent's Tail, 352pp £12.99 £11.69 
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When I was growing up in Northern Ireland there were two very rare species: Catholic policemen, and people who left as students but came back. In Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy, Ulster-born Adrian McKinty has given us a hero who is traumatised enough by "the troubles" to want to do something to stop the madness of mutual murder by two tribes who have more in common with each other than anyone else. 
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But when he is called to deal with what looks like a routine murder of an IRA or UVF informer on a housing estate in Carrickfergus, he finds something else: a corpse that has been ritually sodomised and had the score from a Puccini opera inserted in his rectum. Is he on the trail of Northern Ireland's first serial killer with a sexual rather than a paramilitary motive? In a world wherein which "ordinary criminals" are scarce, the Catholic Church considers divorce and abortion crimes and MI5 muddies the waters, Duffy finds himself in a wilderness of mirrors, scared of his own reflection. 
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McKinty himself left Northern Ireland and didn't come back, but perhaps that distance — he now lives in Australia — has helped him to preserve a razor sharp ear for the local dialogue and a feeling for the bleak time and place that was Ulster in the early Eighties, and pair them with a wry wicked wit. 
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If Raymond Chandler had grown up in Northern Ireland, The Cold Cold Ground is what he would have written. 

The Cold Cold Ground - The Guardian's Verdict

The brilliant, frighteningly clever, and hard to please Eoin McNamee reviews The Cold Cold Ground in Saturday's Guardian. Yes I'm stoked by his take but it's not enough, I still want to read your reviews on Amazon, Audible and Good Reads! ... Over to you Mr McNamee:
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It's 1981 and Belfast is in turmoil. It's the beginning of the end, but it doesn't feel like it. The melancholy procession of dead hunger strikers from the gates of Long Kesh has begun, and tension on the street is at breaking point. When a body turns up on waste ground, one hand severed and placed on its chest, overstretched detectives are inclined to regard it as an informer killing and consign it to the file marked unsolvable. That's until Detective Sean Duffy starts to notice errant details about the corpse, such as the fact that the severed hand deposited with the body belongs to someone else. The discovery of another body seems to confirm the existence of a homophobic serial killer. The missing wife of a hunger striker appears unrelated. But in this northern endgame the murky undercurrents flow in unexpected directions.
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The Cold Cold Ground is Adrian McKinty's 12th novel. He is one of a new generation of writers from the north who use the tools of the crimewriter's trade to examine and reshape the recent past. The detectives are wisecracking and self-aware. The material seems to lend itself to side-of-the-mouth invective, the sly one-liner. What's real and what isn't collide in the corpse-murk of hidden wars, and narratives are shaped to take account of it. Here Gerry Adams makes an appearance, a seedy loyalist takes on the persona of dead loyalist George Seawright, and its not much of a leap from McKinty's Freddie Scavanni to Freddie Scappattici, the infamous informer Stakeknife.
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It's an uneasy technique, but there is an integrity to it. Death-squad acronyms are switched from one side to the other. McKinty is pointing to the fact that perceived reality and fiction in conflict zones are equally untrustworthy. One is as manufactured as the other, and the only thing we can do is to be aware of it. Sean Duffy is an anomaly, a Catholic cop in an overwhelmingly unionist police force, but McKinty is less concerned with that than with the camaraderies of the force. And he's good on the details: life through the observation slit of an armoured vehicle. Like all good fictional cops, Duffy has a nose for the erotics of last things, and finds himself hooked up with a beautiful pathologist.
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The Cold Cold Ground confirms McKinty as a writer of substance. There's a gear shift from a crimewriter's craftsmanship when he casts his eye on the towns caught in Belfast's malign gravitational pull, such as Carrickfergus and Larne. McKinty is at home in these lost towns, with their Victoria Streets and Sandringham Terraces, their transgressive inner life at odds with street names that reveal a longing for home-counties certitudes. What makes McKinty a cut above the rest is the quality of his prose. His driven, spat-out sentences are more accessible than James Ellroy's edge-of-reason staccato, and he can be lyric. The sound of a riot is "the distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship".
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The names of David Peace and Ellroy are evoked too often in relation to young crime writers, but McKinty shares their method of using the past as a template for the present. The stories and textures may belong to a different period, but the power of technique and intent makes of them the here and now.
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There's food for thought in McKinty's writing, but he is careful not to lose the force of his narrative in introspection. The Cold Cold Ground is a crime novel, fast-paced, intricate and genre to the core. The violence is extreme and the sex is gritty. Duffy's three murder cases are isolated on the surface, but in the dark world of dirty wars, the dead are seldom unconnected, and rarely innocent as they beckon to us from the cold, cold earth.


• Eoin McNamee's Orchid Blue is published by Faber.

The Cold Cold Ground - The Irish Independent's Verdict

Castlemara Estate, Carrickfergus, 2011

Maurice Hayes reviews The Cold Cold Ground in Sunday's Irish Indy. I love the review but be careful, there are some spoilers near the end...And as usual I'd appreciate your reviews on Amazon, Good Reads or your blog. Over to you space cowboy: 

Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy introduced by Adrian McKinty in the first of a trilogy of detective stories set in Northern Ireland in the middle of the Troubles, could well become a cult figure.

A Catholic member of the RUC (one of the 7pc) equally at risk of being murdered by the IRA for his profession and by loyalists for his religion, an Irish speaker from the Glens of Antrim, fluent in several languages, with a degree in psychology and an interest in opera, tempted to join the IRA after Bloody Sunday and propelled into the police by a pub bombing, courting a pathologist girlfriend among the corpses, he is a very unusual copper indeed.

McKinty has established a good track record in the genre and in his return to his native sod for he shows that he has not lost his touch or his eye for the bizarre and the macabre, or his ear for the Belfast accent and argot.

The plot has Duffy assigned to investigate what appears to be a serial killer of homosexuals who taunts the police by placing clues strewn with obscure references to operas, and the apparently unconnected suicide of the estranged wife of a hunger striker.

Set against a backdrop of riots in the middle of the 1981 hunger strikes and the death of Bobby Sands, McKinty creates a marvellous sense of time and place; an evocation of darkness and horror, of corruption and collusion, of the fraught life of a policeman, of the domination of areas by paramilitary groups at war with each other and with the British state but colluding on drugs and criminality, the immediacy of death and the cheapness of life.

Taken off the case when he stumbles on an IRA connection, warned off by Special Branch and army intelligence protective of their agents and informants, Duffy keeps doggedly on, defying the rules and risks to himself and his girlfriend until he secures a confession and a very rough sort of justice for the murders which turn out not to be homophobic, but an attempt by a mole to cover his tracks.

Real people walk in and out of the story.

There are a couple of nearly recognisable loyalist warlords, and a character based loosely on Freddie Scappaticci is central to the story, and the old chestnut of whether Gerry Adams might be Stakeknife.

In the speed of the action and the twists of the plot, small details do not always matter, but a few will grate with local readers.

In the main, though, he manages to catch the brooding atmosphere of the 1980s and to tell a ripping yarn at the same time.

There will be many readers waiting for the next adventure of the dashing and intrepid Sergeant Duffy.

The Audio Version

The beardy Mr. D. 

This weekend I've been listening to the audio version of The Cold Cold Ground. Normally I can't read anything I've written after it's completed but with the audio, somehow, it's different. Gerard Doyle is the narrator of Cold Cold and he's really done an amazing job differentiating the characters and coming up with voices. (His Gerry Adams impression roughly in the middle of the book is to die for.) I am not the only one to have noticed this. In the reviews of Cold Cold on Audible I've gotten a few three stars and four stars but so far Doyle has a perfect five star record for his narration. Doyle not only reads the books beautifully but he does a tremendous amount of research. I skyped with Doyle several times as a consult on Cold Cold and last time he even went as far as calling up a Professor of philology at Queens University Belfast to get the right pronunciation of words in Shelta, the language of the Tinkers. I do listen to a lot of audiobooks when I'm riding my bike around town or going to the dreaded gym (currently I'm listening to a Y/A steampunk novel called Leviathan which is narrated by Alan Cumming) but if you haven't yet got hooked on Audible I can thoroughly recommend audio listening as a benign vice. 
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You can get Cold Cold Ground on Audible, here and if you do like it I'd love it if you left me a rating or even better a review. Cheers.