The Audio Version

In response to the plethora of emails and twitter questions (ok 2 emails and 1 twitter question) I can inform the world (ok ok 3 people) that Gerard Doyle told me that he's reading In The Morning I'll Be Gone this week and will be recording the book in the next fortnight for Blackstone Audio. As usual Doyle had lots of whinging complaints polite queries about how to pronounce various things in the book, queries that I was occasionally able to answer. 
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If you're a fan of audiobooks, and I for one am a huge fan, I hope you already know about Audible.com. I've been on Audible as a listener for several years now and I have the plan whereby I get one credit a month to download any audiobook I want. This works well for me as it usually takes me 3 weeks - 1 month to listen to an audiobook. I think there are 4 criteria that go towards making a good audiobook: 1) you need a good text to begin with 2) you need a reader whose voice is clear but which also exudes a lot of character 3) the book should ideally last more than 6 hours so you get your money or credit's worth 4) it must never ever be abridged or substantially different from the original text.
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My books have been on Audible since the beginning of the service and I was surprised and delighted last Friday to get a check from Audible as part of their honorarium programme. With absolutely no obligation to do so Audible decided to give all the authors on Audible in a certain quarter period (I think it was the last two quarters of 2012) a honorarium of 1 dollar per book. My check came at a time when the post Christmas bank balance was looking decidedly dodgy and while not a King's ransom it was free money and there's few things in this life that beat free out-of-the-blue-cash. So thank you Mr Doyle for recording In The Morning I'll Be Gone and thank you Audible for providing a great service and for the lovely honorarium check. 

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!)

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. 

Falling Glass Freebie Competition!

Haven't got your copy of Falling Glass yet? Well your laziness/tightfistedness/lack of interest may have paid off. I have got one signed first edition copy of Falling Glass to give away to a reader of this blog! And if you've already bought a copy, firstly my starving children thank you but secondly as an added bonus I'm also going to include the first half dozen pages of the book I'm working on right now which is so secret even I don't know what the hell its about.

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Ok so it's a pretty easy competition. Falling Glass is the story of an Irish Traveller called Killian who is in the people finding business. In a deleted chapter I had Killian flashback to a birthday party he celebrated with another old character of mine Michael Forsythe. At an early stage the editor and I agreed that the chapter slowed the book down so I cut it. I don't think the chapter ever appeared anywhere, either in an ARC or even in an internal Serpents Tail galley; therefore the only people who know the date of Killian's birthday are the editor and me.

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This then is the question: What is Killian's birthday? It's going to have to be a pure guess - there's no way - I think - you could work it out from the novel. The person who gets closest to the actual date will win the book and the mystery manuscript. Please put your answers in the comments below along with some kind of contact info. The competition will close exactly 48 hours after the time and date stamp on this blog post. (Don't forget that's Melbourne time folks, i.e. 11 hours ahead of GMT).

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I will give you one clue. Killian's birthday is the feast day of a well known Saint. Not necessarily an Irish Saint. But not necessarily NOT an Irish Saint either.

For All You Budding Henry Higginses Out There

When I was a kid Northern Ireland was such an insular and static society that you could easily tell where someone was from by their accent. Where I grew up, Carrickfergus, I could spot someone from West Belfast, South Belfast, Larne, Ballymena etc. as soon as they opened their mouth even though these places are geographically only a few miles apart. It was also not difficult to spot someone from Derry, Armagh, North Down etc. Northern Ireland then had half a dozen regional accents and I was familiar with at least three different Scottish accents and maybe a dozen English ones. Society has gotten a lot more fluid since the 70's and 80's and regional accents have somewhat faded, but not completely.
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In this little clip legendary UTV newsman Julian Simmons shows how to change Northern Irish accents in the blink of an eye. At about 22 seconds in he switches from a South Belfast received pronunciation to a broad, camp West Belfast drawl. I dont know if anyone outside of Northern Ireland will notice the difference but it is quite striking.
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I dug this clip up because I mentioned Julian doing the recorded airport announcements at Belfast International Airport (which he used to do in the 80's) in my new novel Falling Glass. Gerard Doyle (the audiobook reader) wanted to do know what Simmons sounded like and hey presto the internet came to my rescue. Whether Doyle will be able to do both of Simmons's accents or even one of them remains to be seen, but his little preview for me on Skype was impressive.

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.