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!)

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.

Werner Herzog's Reading List

Werner Herzog's unorthodox film school, The Rogue Film School has 12 rules or guidelines. The first one should be "Do Not Talk About Fight Club" because really that's what he's setting up, either that or a cult, not a film school, however the last five are not only pretty amusing but they also contain Herzog's reading list:

8.Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.

9.Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.

10.Related, but more reflective, will be a reading list. Required reading: Virgil’s “Georgics” and Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”. Suggested reading: The Warren Commission Report, Rabelais’ “Gargantua and Pantagruel”, “The Poetic Edda”, translated by Lee M. Hollander (in particular The Prophecy of the Seeress), Bernal Diaz del Castillo “True History of the Conquest of New Spain”.

11.Required film viewing list: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, dir. John Huston), Viva Zapata (1952, dir. Elia Kazan), The Battle of Algiers (1966, dir. Gillo Pontecorvo), the Apu trilogy (1955-1959, dir. Satyajit Ray), and, if available, “Where is the Friend’s Home?” (1987, dir. Abbas Kiarostami).

12.Follow your vision. Form secretive Rogue Cells everywhere. At the same time, be not afraid of solitude.
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Something struck me about the list of the books mentioned in #10. I couldn't figure it out for a while but then it came to me: The Conquest of New Spain, Hemingway's Short Stories, Virgil's Georgics and The Icelandic Eddas were the books that Michael Forsythe was reading in my novel Dead I Well May Be. Does this mean that Werner and I are on some kind of wavelength or are these merely the books that you read before you turn you into a borderline sociopath? Perhaps these are the texts that all young men should read and then subsequently grow out of. I'm not sure. But they certainly are all of a piece. I'd add Christopher Logue's War Music and maybe Kinsella's translation of the Tain Bo Cuailnge.
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Incidentally, if I were forming a cult like Werner Herzog (and I'm ruling nothing out at this stage) I'd only have one book on my reading list and that would be The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin. I'd have my acolytes cultivate disenchantment and pessimism not ecstatic truth and Aristotlean virtue. I'd probably get a lot of goths.

McKinty Behind Bars

This review of Dead I Well May Be on Amazon.com caught my eye:

Mesmerizing enough to calm the Block , October 25, 2008
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G. Love (Bridgeport, CT USA) - See all my reviews I read this book in a mater of hours because I couldn't put it down. Then I read it out loud to a group of older boys incarcerated in Juvenile Detention. This excellent crime thriller kept all of the young men intrigued and well-behaved for days at a time as I parceled the book out little by little. They begged for more when the book was over and I ended up buying copies of each book in the series for their library. This book and the others in the series are extremely well written and instantly captivating. While the subject matter may be above the average high school student, Adrian McKinty's books will captivate even the most reluctant readers!

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Thanks for the review Mr. Love, and I'm a little curious if you read or skipped the long section explaining in detail how to escape from prison.

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Oh and come on Scribner bring DIWMB back into print! Why make people get it used or as a UK import? Don't you care about the future of America?

Dead I Well May Be - A Review

Archmage in chief of Detectives Beyond Borders, Peter Rozovsky has posted his review of Dead I Well May Be over at DBB. Among his many talents Peter is a professional copyeditor, so he doesn't miss a trick. When he reads a book he pays close attention to the text and what he says is always considered and worth listening to. Peter is a well read and very smart guy. What did Peter say about my debut crime novel, my baby? Was he cruel? Jump on over and find out.