Vote For Me!

My novel Fifty Grand has been longlisted for the prestigious Theakston Best Crime Novel Award. There are 14 other books on the long list and to make the short list of five the general public is required to vote for their favourite.
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If you want to vote for Fifty Grand you can do so here.
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To be honest I think making the shortlist seems like a bit of a tall order. I'm up against several huge beasts of best sellers and I imagine those books will have a hard core fan base in the thousands. I suspect the five shortlisted books will also be the five books who sold the most copies. . .but you never know, do you? So I'd certainly appreciate your vote.
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Fifty Grand's always been a bit of an ugly duckling. I've gotten some barmy reviews from left wingers who say my portrayal of Cuba is fascist propaganda; I've also been attacked by right wing nuts who say that my description of immigrant life in New Mexico and Colorado is blatant commie propaganda. They can't both be right, can they? I then had to deal with some potential libel issues and a breach of copyright suit from the Church of Scientology (because I quoted from one of their rather eccentric questionnaires). Fifty Grand also seems to stir up strong passions among online reviewers (I got almost no print reviews in the US (thank you Henry Holt!)) who generally either love or hate the book. Some of the online reviews are pretty heavy but on the other hand I got a really nice review in The Guardian and Fifty Grand won the 2010 Spinetingler Award which is also voted on by the general public.
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Anyway if you hated Fifty Grand you can go to the Theakston Prize website and vote for somebody else. If you liked it you can go there and vote for me.
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The system they have in place to prevent double voting isn't the greatest one so if you want to vote Chicago style, feel free. (I voted only once and not for me.)
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And finally, for the Amazon reviewer who didn't believe Cuba could possibly be as bad as I've portrayed it and claimed that I hadn't been there at all...here's a link to an article I wrote for The Times about just one of my trips to Havana, and here's a link to the blog of Yoani Sanchez, a young Cuban woman, who despite being daily intimidated and on one occasion beaten up by Raul Castro's secret police, still bravely tells it like it is.
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Slainte and thank you for your vote!

Vote For Me!

I'm reposting this because there's only one day left if you want to vote and if I win I can cash in on the longshot money and pay off my debt to the Asian gambling syndicate that I lost our life savings to:
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I've been nominated for a Spinetingler Magazine Award for my novel Fifty Grand. If you liked Fitty G you can vote for me at Spinetingler Mag, here. I'm in the rising star category and funnily enough I'm up against my old pal Brian Evenson. Don't vote for Brian, though, he's the head of Creative Writing at Brown and he must be raking it in. All right vote for him if you want, his book, Last Days was brilliant. Another mate of mine Stu Neville is up in the new voice category for his excellent Ghosts of Belfast.

Books For Christmas

The Guardian newspaper has picked my novel Fifty Grand as one of its books of the year and as a recommended book for Christmas (thank you Justine Jordan). Fifty Grand also got a nod as one of the books of the year by John O'Connell in the The New Statesman and I got a hat tip from Chris Mullin in The Observer. So far so good in Britain! but this is a novel which has struggled a bit in the US. The reasons for this are many: the bad economy didn't help; it also wasnt good that my editor left Holt two months before publication and that my replacement editor left two weeks before the pub day. Editors are crucially important in getting blurbs for books and getting them into the hands of reviewers. With 50G review copies were only sporadically sent out, were not followed up on, and there was no budget for publicity. I also think the subject matter may have been too controversial for some American reviewers. Still the success of Stuart Neville's Ghosts of Belfast shows you what a dedicated publishing house can do (it also helps that the book is f**king brilliant) and in the UK the success of Fifty Grand is all down to the hard work of Rebecca Gray, Anna-Marie Fitzgerald, Pete Ayrton et alia at Serpents Tail; and in Oz, Kate Hyde at Allen and Unwin. Word of mouth of course also helps and if you were one of the people who reviewed Fifty Grand on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk or Good Reads or Audible.com rest assured that I not only read your review but showed it around the family and probably sent it to my agent to prove that "some people like me". Thank you very much, I really appreciate it.

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Blurbs are important too and I'd like to thank Ken Bruen for being an early champion of Fifty Grand. Finally a word about the blogosphere. Because I didn't get reviews in the likes of The New York Times, The Washington Post etc. I was more dependent than ever this year on bloggers for their support, so a big thank you to Declan Burke, Gerard Brennan, Peter Rozovsky, Dana King, Brian Lindemuth, Seana Graham, Sandra Ruttan, Brian O'Rourke, Liam Hoyle, Dan Wagner, Jolie Jordan, John McFetridge and many others - without you I'd be up the bloody creek. Thank you guys and gals. If there are going to be Adrian McKinty crime novels in the future (something I'm thinking quite hard about right now) it will largely be down to your support. Go raibh maith agaibh.

Blowing My Own Trumpet

I am a Presbyterian from deepest County Antrim in Northern Ireland which means that - among many other hang ups - talking about myself does not come naturally. However in Saturday's Guardian, there was a review of my latest novel, Fifty Grand that I thought I should share with everyone here. I am professional writer after all and these things matter. The review was written by John O'Connell, a man who is not only smart but completely au fait with modern crime fiction; so, overcoming my reticence, (essentially what this entire blog experience has been about) here is the Guardian's verdict on 50G:

Fifty Grand

by Adrian McKinty

The Guardian, Saturday 8 August 2009

Adrian McKinty's wonderful Dead Trilogy confirmed him as a master of modern noir, up there with Dennis Lehane and James Ellroy. Fans nervous about where he might venture after the retirement of his "un-fucking-killable" antihero Michael Forsythe at the end of The Bloomsday Dead can, however, relax. Fifty Grand is a blast: a standalone effort which again showcases McKinty's brutal lyricism as well as his sensitivity to the indignities of the immigrant experience. Forsythe eescaped to New York from Troubles-torn Belfast. Mercado, the heroine in Fifty Grand, is a hot-shot Cuban cop who has fluked a visa to Mexico City so that she can travel from there, via a coyote road, to the Colorado town of Fairview. Here, for reasons she doesn't understand, her father worked as a pest controller and posed as a Mexican - even though, as a defector from Cuba, he was entitled to a green card. Mercado is on a mission to avenge his death in a hit-and-run accident; also to find evidence that he didn't mean to abandon her on the eve of her all-important 15th birthday.

To do this she must make herself invisible. And Fairview, an upscale ski resort favoured by Hollywood types, is the easiest place in the world for brown-skinned people to pass unnoticed. Illegals are run by Esteban, a spineless pimp; Mercado's duties as a maid include hiding drugs, which Esteban supplies, in celebrities' bathroom cabinets and being sexually available at all times.

On the list of suspects her journalist brother has drawn up for her are an up-and-coming actor, Jack Tyrone, and his manager, Paul. Though dim and narcissistic, Jack has an open, ingenuous quality which attracts Mercado, and it's thanks to him that she - and we - get to hear some hilariously bitchy, self-serving film chat, much of it centred around Tom Cruise, whose huge house looms at the top of the hill - at once a goal and a rebuke. These scenes generate a frisson of verisimilitude as Cruise does indeed spend much of the year in Telluride, the Colorado resort on which Fairview is clearly based.

Mercado's soft spot for himbo actors belies her cop's acumen and awesome defensive skills. En route from Mexico, the Land Rover transporting her and her fellow wetbacks to their new life in "the land of Frank Sinatra, Jennifer Lopez, Jorge Bush" is held up by a couple of chancers. When one of them tries to rape her, Mercado shows us exactly what she learnt in her PNR training in a fight scene of fist-chewing gruesomeness: "I was covered in blood and brains and bits of skull."

McKinty keeps the fish-out-of-water satire to a minimum. It's enough for Mercado to be beguiled in Starbuck's by the scent of vanilla, then floored by the realisation that her espresso costs more than the average daily wage in Havana. Besides, Fifty Grand is as much about Cuba as it is about America - a country "on Deathwatch, waiting out the Beard and his brother's final days" (ie Castro) ; frantically trying to appease a freshly Democrat America. "Now," Mercado observes drolly, "we were supposed to gather evidence and arrest people in the modern manner."

The mystery of Mercado's father's death is resolved easily - perhaps too easily. But it doesn't matter. What matters is Mercado herself, the one-time winner (she tells us proudly) of the Dr Ernesto Guevara Young Poets' prize. It's a pleasure to be around someone so sharp and resourceful, noticing what she notices and feeling what she feels.

I Invested 16 Bucks And Now I Have Fifty Grand!

"There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings."
---Quentin Crisp

I have a book coming out tomorrow. It's called Fifty Grand. You may be able to get it in bookstores but you may not. Shelf space is at a premium in most chain bookstores and managers will usually only stock authors who are proven unit shifters. You can however get 50G on Amazon or Powells or B&N.com and if you have a local mystery or indy bookstore they might have it. I worked very hard on this book and put a lot into it and although I'm not the best person to judge I think its a pretty tight read. If you do happen to get it I would certainly appreciate a review on Amazon or B&N or Good Reads.
Go raibh céad maith agat.

Adrian

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.

Fifty Grand

Last year I spent a lot of time in Cuba researching a book called Fifty Grand. I wrote much of the novel at the atmospheric Ambos Mundos Hotel in Havana where Hemingway wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls. Its your standard murder mystery/ Scientology/ Hollywood/Cuban Secret Police/conspiracy novel, but I like it. 50G won't be out until early next year but if ya want to read chapter 1 then please click: here (comments much appreciated). 50 G will be published by Holt in the US and Serpents Tail in the UK.

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All this week I'll be working on the page proofs and when I'm done with them I'd like to give them away to a reader/collector. If someone could suggest how I do this in the form of a fair competition or draw, I would greatly appreciate it. The proofs might look a bit messy so I'm not a 100% sure anyone will be that interested but if I get assassinated by Cuban Intelligence or a Scientology Clear then they might be worth a few quid. (The first few comments below are from when I originally posted this back in July (we didnt all lose our minds))