Edgar Awards

Although it will obviously cramp my gloomy, dour pessimistic persona I'm pleased to announce the fact that Gun Street Girl has been shortlisted for the 2016 Edgar Award (best paperback original). It's my first time ever getting shortlisted for an Edgar so I'm actually pretty damn thrilled. This morning I got a can of Guinness and walked over to West 84th Street where Edgar Allan Poe used to live (the house is long gone but the site can't be missed cos there's 2 massive stone ravens outside it) and had a quick, sneaky can of the black stuff in the 22F (-6C) air. I gave Edgar and the ravens some too and they seemed to appreciate it. 

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Cheers also to Gordon McAlpine my stable mate at SSB who is in my category and to my old buddies Val McDermid & Michael Robotham who got shortlisted in other categories. 

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.

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...