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 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. 

Book Of The Year

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

Can You Hear Me Now?

My audio book read at the moment is The 1000 Autumns of Jacob De Sloot by David Mitchell, which I've been listening to on my iPod on the bike or riding public transport. After a nauseating opening I'm really enjoying the book which is set in Nagasaki around 1800 and may be about to involve the Nagasaki Harbour Incident and HMS Phaeton. Or maybe not. I got the book from the St Kilda Public Library as an audio e book download which makes me feel a lot less guilty than getting it as a torrent. The audio e book process works very well and I've "checked it out" for a renewable three week period. Very cool.

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In other audio news I've learned that the great Blackstone Audio will be bringing out my new crime novel Falling Glass in an audio edition next year and also the first two books in my Lighthouse Trilogy: The Lighthouse Land and The Lighthouse Wars. You'll be able to get those books from iTunes or Audible.com or directly from Blackstone. Falling Glass and the Lighthouse books are going to be read by Gerard Doyle who has done most of my stuff. Ger and I had a skype conversation about how to pronounce certain words etc. in the kids series and I'm confident that he is going to do an excellent job as usual. He also told me a story about when he and his kid met Steven Spielberg that had me laughing my arse off.

Falling Glass Cover

Ve Haff Vays of Making You Talk

No this post isnt going to be about Kate Winslet's accent in the Reader or Dick Cheney's night-time activities in the dungeons of the Pentagon, rather this is going to be about talking books. Me own wee talking books to be exact. See, those nice chaps at Blackstone Audio want to do an audiobook of Fifty Grand and today we said yes to their fine offer. They've done four of my books as audios before including the Dead Trilogy (all of which won Earphones Awards and, incredibly, The Dead Yard won Audiobook of the year in the Mystery-Thriller category). Its a bit frakking odd to me that my books in print-form have more or less died but in audio format they're getting a second life. I have 10 times the number of ratings and reviews on Audible.com than I do on Amazon.com and I get far more letters and email about the audioversions of the dead trilogy than I ever did about the book version. One part of me is happy and one part of me is pissed off - what was wrong with the bloody book, eh? Still, back on topic, come the summer you should be able to get Fifty Grand as a hardback, paperback, CD book or digital download and if you wait a few weeks longer you can get it completely free as a bit torrent from Pirate Bay - the bastards.