Computer Chess

in any other movie these two would be lucky to get cast as extras but in Computer Chess
they're sort of (spoiler alert) the romantic leads

This is now on DVD, satellite TV, iTunes and Netflix. Most of you will be bored senseless by it, but I LOVED it...
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If, like me, you were a fan of Shane Carruth's low budget utterly brilliant time travel film Primer then Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess will be up your alley. Computer Chess is a wilfully strange, satiric sci-fi film set at a computer chess tournament in 1981-2(?) where coders (mostly from MIT and CalTech) pit their chess software programmes against each other in the hope of winning glory and a cash prize. The computer chess ubergeeks discover to their horror that their conference hotel has been double booked by a very 1970’s-style couples therapy encounter group. When the two worlds collide the fun really begins. The opening ten minutes, is according to Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian “audaciously boring”. I didn’t find it boring at all but I like this “audaciously boring” idea - as if the opening act is part of a clever scheme by Bujalski to get rid of the casual viewer early and keep the film for the true fans. To further winnow the audience, except for one very surreal scene in the middle the movie is shot on authentic 1980's style analogue black and white videotape - which I think works really well. I’m not going to spoil Computer Chess by saying any more about it but if you stay with the film to the very end you’ll understand why I brought up the Primer reference. I loved this crackpot little movie. 2013 was a year of plodding witless big budget sci-fi films such as Elysium, Oblivion and After Earth but a little picture like Computer Chess shows you how to do the job right with a sharp script and a clever idea.  

The Guardian Reviews In The Morning I'll Be Gone

The perspicacious, well read and generally brilliant John O'Connell reviews In The Morning I'll Be Gone in last Friday's Guardian thusly: 

It's a sad day for fans of Adrian McKinty's smart 1980s-set procedurals featuring mordantly charismatic Belfast cop Sean Duffy. Not because his latest, In the Morning I'll Be Gone (Serpent's Tail, £12.99), is any sort of let-down, but because it concludes what has been a hugely enjoyable trilogy. In some ways, Duffy resembles Iain Banks's young male heroes – crass and impetuous, but also wickedly funny and capable of an intense, redeeming empathy. At first he is on his uppers, having been kicked out of the police force on a trumped-up charge, but he rises to the occasion when MI5 seek his help tracking down an old acquaintance who has become an IRA explosives mastermind. Having solved, in return for information, the "locked room" mystery of a barmaid who apparently fell to her death while changing a lightbulb, Duffy has a ringside seat at one of the 80s biggest terrorist atrocities. Farewell, Duffy – and I share your feelings about Robert Plant's 1983 album The Principle of Moments.

The Cold Cold Ground - The Guardian's Verdict

The brilliant, frighteningly clever, and hard to please Eoin McNamee reviews The Cold Cold Ground in Saturday's Guardian. Yes I'm stoked by his take but it's not enough, I still want to read your reviews on Amazon, Audible and Good Reads! ... Over to you Mr McNamee:
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It's 1981 and Belfast is in turmoil. It's the beginning of the end, but it doesn't feel like it. The melancholy procession of dead hunger strikers from the gates of Long Kesh has begun, and tension on the street is at breaking point. When a body turns up on waste ground, one hand severed and placed on its chest, overstretched detectives are inclined to regard it as an informer killing and consign it to the file marked unsolvable. That's until Detective Sean Duffy starts to notice errant details about the corpse, such as the fact that the severed hand deposited with the body belongs to someone else. The discovery of another body seems to confirm the existence of a homophobic serial killer. The missing wife of a hunger striker appears unrelated. But in this northern endgame the murky undercurrents flow in unexpected directions.
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The Cold Cold Ground is Adrian McKinty's 12th novel. He is one of a new generation of writers from the north who use the tools of the crimewriter's trade to examine and reshape the recent past. The detectives are wisecracking and self-aware. The material seems to lend itself to side-of-the-mouth invective, the sly one-liner. What's real and what isn't collide in the corpse-murk of hidden wars, and narratives are shaped to take account of it. Here Gerry Adams makes an appearance, a seedy loyalist takes on the persona of dead loyalist George Seawright, and its not much of a leap from McKinty's Freddie Scavanni to Freddie Scappattici, the infamous informer Stakeknife.
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It's an uneasy technique, but there is an integrity to it. Death-squad acronyms are switched from one side to the other. McKinty is pointing to the fact that perceived reality and fiction in conflict zones are equally untrustworthy. One is as manufactured as the other, and the only thing we can do is to be aware of it. Sean Duffy is an anomaly, a Catholic cop in an overwhelmingly unionist police force, but McKinty is less concerned with that than with the camaraderies of the force. And he's good on the details: life through the observation slit of an armoured vehicle. Like all good fictional cops, Duffy has a nose for the erotics of last things, and finds himself hooked up with a beautiful pathologist.
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The Cold Cold Ground confirms McKinty as a writer of substance. There's a gear shift from a crimewriter's craftsmanship when he casts his eye on the towns caught in Belfast's malign gravitational pull, such as Carrickfergus and Larne. McKinty is at home in these lost towns, with their Victoria Streets and Sandringham Terraces, their transgressive inner life at odds with street names that reveal a longing for home-counties certitudes. What makes McKinty a cut above the rest is the quality of his prose. His driven, spat-out sentences are more accessible than James Ellroy's edge-of-reason staccato, and he can be lyric. The sound of a riot is "the distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship".
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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.
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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. The violence is extreme and the sex is gritty. Duffy's three murder cases are isolated on the surface, but in the dark world of dirty wars, the dead are seldom unconnected, and rarely innocent as they beckon to us from the cold, cold earth.


• Eoin McNamee's Orchid Blue is published by Faber.

The Critical Consensus On Falling Glass

When you've finished writing a novel you have no idea how it's going to be received. It's definitely not like the moment when Paul McCartney played Hey Jude for the rest of the Beatles and everyone in the room knew that they were listening to a classic. No, books are much more subjective. For every person who loves Naked Lunch and thinks it's a masterpiece there are ten who hate it. There are exceptions...I've yet to find someone who hates Charlotte's Web but I'm sure there is a nutter out there somewhere who doesn't dig it. (Apologies if you are that nutter.)
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When I finished editing Falling Glass last October I hated the bloody book. I'd read it through half a dozen times and that was enough to kill any love I had for the jokes, the set pieces, the characters etc. I was also discouraged by the rejections I was getting from American publishers who felt it "wasn't commercial enough." My old house, Scribner, passed, Henry Holt passed, St Martin's passed. We started showing it to smaller presses who often boast about publishing "outsider voices from different perspectives" etc. and they all said no too. My Australian publishers didn't even tell me when the book was coming out and I only knew it was out here because I happened to chance upon it in a shop. 
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My UK publishers Serpents Tail liked it but they've always been very supportive of me and I did wonder if secretly they hated it and just wanted to spare my feelings. I'll chalk it up to experience I thought. No one wants to read a noir story about Irish Travellers in contemporary Ireland. I'll know better next time...
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But then the reviews started coming in...And the reviews told a vastly different story from what the voices in my head were saying. Spinetingler Magazine was one of the first out of the gate and they loved the book. Spinetingler ran a review and an extract and an interview. The next review I read was in The Guardian newspaper and the Guardian loved it too. Next came an extremely positive review in the Irish Times (and this from a paper who have sent me a few rockets in the past). Last week I got a lengthy write up at The Crime Of It All and just yesterday I got a great review in the Irish Independent from Declan Burke - a man who knows his onions where crime fiction is concerned. Declan's review was interesting because Falling Glass got the lead in the paper above John Banville's latest novel. There have been other reviews along the way on blogs, in newspapers and on Amazon. The only people I've come across who really disliked Falling Glass were a couple of listeners on Audible who couldn't get into the story or "found the narrator dry" whatever that means. My old pal Bookwitch wasn't convinced by the ending and I've had a few emails from people who also felt the same...In general though, as I said in a blog post last week, this is the best reviewed book I've had since Dead I Well May Be.
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Johnny Foreigner has also gotten on board. Serpents Tail have sold the rights to Germany, France and a couple of other EU countries which means that you can get Falling Glass in the entire British Commonwealth and most of Europe but, crucially, not North America. I have to say that I beg to differ with all the American publishers who claim that the book is not commercial in the US market. There is one place and only one place where Falling Glass is available in the US and that's on Audible.com. On Audible, as of today I've had 132 ratings, an average rating of 4.11 (out of 5), and twenty one written reviews.  By way of comparison, despite heavy advertising, a recent profile in The New Yorker, radio and TV interviews and a book tour, the latest John Banville crime novel has 10 ratings, 1 customer review and an average rating of 3.30. I'm not knocking Banville but I am knocking the US publishers who think there is no market for me or my novels. The listeners and - a fortiori - the readers are out there!
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Before I get off this solipsistic topic forever I would like to thank EVERYONE who has written a review of any of my books on Good Reads, on a blog, on Audible, in print, on any of the Amazons etc. I do read all the reviews and I take seriously what people say. I often completely disagree with you but if you've taken the trouble to review my book I will read it. And even if the corporate suits in mid town Manhattan don't want to take a chance on me, well there's nothing I can do about that, but I sure do appreciate your support. Go raibh maith agaibh

An Unsuitable Job For A Man

Really interesting piece in the Guardian today about the current state of British pop music and the fact that the five best selling albums in the UK are all by women. The Guardian wonders if this is a cyclical thing or the sign of a sea change in British musical tastes. In fact the Guardian even undersells the case a little because if you look at the British album chart you'll see that there is only one male vocalist in the top 12 best selling albums. Obviously Amy Winehouse is only there because of the recent tragedy of her death - but like Winehouse there are many powerful female singers who, crucially, write and perform their own material: Adele, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and others like Beyonce and Rihanna who have co-writing credits.
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I think it's a great thing. As I've gotten older I've found it much harder to listen to male vocalists. Singing pop songs seems like an utterly ridiculous job for a man and whenever I see some bloke doing it with his hair gelled back and wearing a shiny jacket, I'm a bit embarrassed for him. (I still can't believe I used to think Thom Yorke was cool.) It's even worse if you're fronting a band or if you're a country and western singer. When Adele or Dolly Parton or Lady Gaga or whoever is up there belting her heart out you can emotionally buy into the whole experience but grown men shouldn't be doing that should they? Men should be out fixing the fence or chopping wood for winter or whittling things not singing songs about how they feel in front of strangers. 
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I think this is also why there are so few African American singers under 30. Plenty or rappers yes, singers no. African American culture is always about five to ten years ahead of mainstream culture so maybe we're all just catching up? Who knows.
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When I used to play Dungeons and Dragons (this is the point in the post where my wife stops reading) of all the characters you could be: ranger, fighter, thief, magician, cleric, illusionist etc. the lamest of all was the bard. Nobody wanted to be a bloody bard! Even in the nerdy world of D&D it was just not a suitable job for a man. Still isn't.

Falling Glass - The Guardian's Verdict

From Laura Wilson in Saturday's Guardian.

Falling Glass, by Adrian McKinty (Serpent's Tail, £11.99)

LAURA WILSON

The latest novel from Ireland's more accessible answer to James Ellroy has as its central character an old associate of Michael Forsythe, antihero of McKinty's wonderful Dead trilogy. Killian, of Pavee (Traveller) stock, has been thwarted in his attempts to go straight by the demise of the Celtic Tiger and returned to his previous living as an enforcer. Tasked with finding the drug-addicted ex-wife of an Irish airline magnate who has gone into hiding with their two children, Killian soon realises that her disappearance is about a lot more than denying access. His conscience awakened, he takes her to hide among the Travellers. This is another winner, with pathos, insight, sardonic humour and lyrical descriptions that counterpoint the red-hot action sequences to superb effect.

The Ice Caps Are Melting!...in, er, three thousand years or so

I voted for the Green Party at the 1989 Euro Elections. They got 15% of the vote that year and became the fourth largest party in the UK. The Greens didn't have a formal leader then but their de facto leader and spokesman, former BBC presenter David Icke, was delighted: Icke noted that most of the Green vote was from young people and he promised an "inevitable Green revolution." In 1990 Icke said that wearing purple could help save the planet from evil rays. Later in that decade he told us that he was the son of God and that planet Earth was controlled by alien lizards living inside human bodies. Apparently he no longer believes that he is the son of God but he does still buy into the whole lizard theory. George Bush is a lizard alien and so is the Queen. I haven't read Icke's recent writings but I suspect that he believes that Obama also is a lizard. A lizard who was born in Hawaii (he's nuts but not insane).

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Not all greens are crazy of course, but most of them are alarmists. I do believe that the planet has been getting warmer. The evidence is quite clear if you look at it, especially in long term weather monitoring sites. Its also clear to me that man has been responsible for much of this warming since the industrial revolution. What isnt clear at all is whether this will have any noticeable short term or medium term consequences. By short term I mean our lifetimes, by medium term I mean the lifetimes of our children or other people's children. I dont believe the Deep Greens when they claim that a one or two degree increase in global temperature over the next century will cause famines, hurricanes and the end of civilization. The CET record I link to above proves that it doesn't.

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A little story went largely unnoticed in the Guardian this week. It was about the Greenland Ice Cap, the one that Greens are always telling us is about to slide off Greenland into the north Atlantic and subsequently melt and flood the world. Apparently yes, it is melting as the planet warms but to disappear completely will take at least three thousand years. Of course in three thousand years our current holocene era may be over and a new Ice Age might well have begun. We are due for an Ice Age right about now if the cyclical evidence of history is to be believed and if it isn't to be believed can someone please tell me why not?

12 Stories for Christmas

Ooops, wrong Chekov

Nice idea from the Guardian. The books editor called up twelve of his mates contacted twelve prominent authors and asked them to read their favourite short stories. There's a series of 12 free podcasts you can listen to on iTunes or on the Guardian's home page. I listened to the first one, Philip Pullman reading Chekov, and it was great. A strange minimalistic story about a chap seeing a pretty girl on a train, which reminded me of that bit in Citizen Kane where Kane's buddy is wistfully talking about a girl he saw once for a few seconds on the Hudson Ferry and can't stop thinking about her half a century later.

The Guardian's Top 25 Sci-Fi Films

"I dreamt music."
"That's funny I was dreaming about unicorns."
"Unicorns? Oh, shit."

All this week the Guardian film critics have been compiling their lists of the 25 best art house, comedy, action, sci-fi films etc. I've looked at the other lists and pretty much agree with the critics picks. The number 1 romantic comedy for example is Annie Hall and I'd be hard pressed to argue with that. I certainly haven't seen all the films on the other lists but good geek that I am I have seen everything on the Guardian's sci-fi list and there are a few things on there that bother me. First I'll give you the list and then my complaints.

1) 2001: A Space Odyssey
2) Metropolis
3) Blade Runner
4) Alien
5) The Wizard of Oz
6) Solaris
7) ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
8) Spirited Away
9) Star Wars
10) King Kong
11) Close Encounters of the Third Kind
12) The Terminator/Terminator 2: Judgment Day
13) The Matrix
14) Alphaville
15) Back to the Future
16) Planet of the Apes
17) Brazil
18) The Lord of the Rings trilogy
19) Dark Star
20) The Day the Earth Stood Still
21) Edward Scissorhands
22) Akira
23) The Princess Bride
24) Pan's Labyrinth
25) Starship Troopers


Ok, 2) Metropolis should be number 17) or lower - it's a film for film buffs only, influential certainly but overrated as a film. 5) The Wizard of Oz should not be on the list, it's a musical or a gothic film or something not a sci-fi/fantasy film. At 6) Solaris? Are they kidding? I assume they're talking about the seven hour Russian version in which nothing happens, three or four times, in space, whereas the book is actually pretty fast paced and interesting. Read the book and tell me this film isn't a travesty. Ok, 7) E.T. - I'm sorry but I have always hated that film: is it the score, the crying, the sentiment? I don't know, I hate it. 8) Spirited Away is a cartoon. There should be a separate category for cartoons. I don't dig cartoons. Period.  14) Alphaville is not a good film. Its pretty dull and dull witted. It's only on there because they wanted something French. 21) Edward Scissorhands I've never liked either. In fact the only two Tim Burton movies I've enjoyed are Ed Wood and Mars Attacks. 23) Akira is another friggin cartoon. 24) Pan's Labyrinth is not a cartoon but the villain twiddles his moustache villainously which is pretty cartoon like. Hell Boy was better. 25) Starship Troopers? An allegory about the rise of fascism, or a fascistic film about allegories. Who knows? Who cares? Man I hated this movie. It was just so dumb and lame from start to finish. Here's a good rule of thumb - if Denise Richards is in a movie it's going to be utter rubbish unless Neve Campbell is also in that movie. Stick to that and you'll be fine my son. Ok, so here's my list of the top 10 sci-fi movies:


1) 2001: A Space Odyssey
2) Blade Runner
3) Alien
4) Star Wars
5) Planet of the Apes

6) Terminator 2: Judgment Day

7) Back to the Future

8) Silent Running

9) The Matrix

10) Brazil

And here's sci fi lists Top 100 sci-fi movies. I completely forgot about 12 Monkeys.





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.