The Australian Reviews Police At The Station

its tough to get newspaper reviews for the sixth book in what essentially is a cult series, but there have, fortunately, been a few. Here's Peter Pierce in the Weekend Australian: 

There are abundant talents in the crime fiction business, one of them an immigrant to Australia from Northern Ireland, via the US. Adrian McKinty had originally planned a Troubles trilogy, set in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and featuring detective (and sometimes inspector, depending how much strife he has caused) Sean Duffy, a bleakly joking, poetry-quoting Catholic in the Protestant-dominated Royal Ulster Constabulary.

McKinty is alert both to the deep past and the present agonies of the province. In the Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly, and it’s perhaps the best of the lot in the wit of its dialogue, inwardness with the sectarian bitterness of the damaged province, and — essentially — in having a complex and memorably flawed hero in Duffy. In a brilliant opening scene — deadly and funny — Duffy is taken into an ancient word, ‘‘a relic of the Holocene forest that once covered all of Ireland’’, where ‘‘a huge fallen oak lay like a dead god’’. His captors are an IRA hit squad intent on silencing Duffy before he detects a long-rumoured mole within the upper tanks of the RUC.The first three books were so successful that Melbourne-based McKinty has stretched to a sixth, 

As Duffy ruefully reflects, ‘‘there’s no future in this country’’. That means there isn’t one either for his partner Beth, who is writing a thesis on Philip K. Dick at Queen’s University, or their infant daughter Emma.

Meanwhile Duffy is able to skip a St Patrick’s Purgatory pilgrimage with his father because a drug dealer has been killed with a crossbow bolt on a housing estate which may be, ‘‘[an Ulster Volunteer Force-] ridden shithole filled with whores, druggies and scumbags’’. Duffy arrives at ‘‘the unhappy window between people returning from their morning dole appointments and daytime TV kicking in’’.

The novel is sympathetic, funny and despairing in depicting the social landscape that McKinty acutely recalls from his youth. Belfast is a paradigm for future cities: ‘‘mined and fractured, walled and utilitarian’’. Textile plants and shipyards have closed, and the showdown is staged in a dank, abandoned factory. Some, such as the dour, upright, hilariously deadpan Sergeant McCrabban (a triumph of the series) resist the collapse stoically.

Duffy prefers mordant wit that graces nearly every page. When the Bulgarian translator called in to help with the crossbow murder praises the local beer, Duffy reflects that ‘‘Harp was an acquired taste like coprophagia or getting pissed on by hookers’’.

More direly, he has to repulse an attack on his house, investigate the murder and find a scheme to entrap his suspect.

McKinty handles all this business with intelligence and elan. Crime is the subject, but Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly will prove to be one of the best novels to be published in any genre this year. 

The Cartel Wins The Dagger Award

I was shortlisted for the Dagger Award this year, so you'd think that I'd be bummed out I didn't win last night. I'm not. The winner was The Cartel which is a book I believe has raised the bar for crime fiction and that can only be a good thing. Really good crime writing is really good writing, period...Here's my review from last year which originally appeared in a slightly different form (no swearing and fewer histrionics) in the newspaper. My prediction at the end proved prescient...
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Don Winslow's The Power of the Dog was one of the great American crime novels of the last twenty years. Indeed Winslow, Dan Woodrell and James Ellroy so raised the bar of American crime fiction in the early 2000's that every other writer in the genre has been struggling to keep up. You can't get away with weak prose and poor characterisation in US crime writing any more. (If you're a shitty prose writer and you don't care about your characters you should probably write literary fiction - they still tolerate that kind of thing over there.) 

The Power of the Dog told the story of Art Keller a DEA agent fighting the drug wars in the 1970s and 80s particularly in Mexico where he ran afoul of Adan Barrera, the dauphin of the Sinaloa Cartel. Bloody, violent, scary and brilliant The Power of the Dog was not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. But Winslow was not being deliberately sensationalist he was just telling it like it was. The Power of the Dog, like Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian or Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand unpacks the foundation myths of America - the Republic was not founded and maintained by philosopher kings but by violent men fighting other violent men for land and power and money. 

The Cartel is the sequel to The Power of the Dog which again takes up Art Keller's story. Dog ended with Keller divorced and trying to live in anonymous motels as his various Mexican enemies tracked him down. He has been cut loose by the Feds and must survive on his wits and his dwindling financial resources. After Adan Barrera escapes from his prison and resumes his quest to be the patron of patrons of all the cartels in Mexico, Keller is recalled to the life by the DEA. 

The Cartel is a fictionalised account of what's really been happening in Mexico for the last decade and as such it is terrifying. We get to see the Narco wars between the cartels, the corruption of all branches of the Mexican army and police and finally the appearance of the good guys - the Mexican Marines and in particular their special forces unit the untouchable FES. The Cartel isn't so much a crime novel as a war novel and Keller and his comrades are soldiers in that war. If you don't like war novels this probably is not the book for you as there are some pretty strong scenes of combat and violence. My favourite part of the novel comes near the end when an old Mexican gentleman named Don Pedro defends his house against the Zeta Cartel, Straw Dogs style...

Keller's character - Catholic, half Mexican, smart, honourable, is brilliantly drawn as is the character of his nemesis the chilly, intelligent, cunning Adan Barrera. Winslow's women are written as well as his men and there are many extraordinarily brave women in the book who are based on real people; indeed The Cartel is a tribute of sorts to the incredibly courageous Dr Maria Santos Gorrostieta (right) who appears, thinly veiled, as Keller's love interest (and who was - in real life - tortured to death by the narcos). 

No novel is without its flaws and I'll admit that I became disheartened by all the murder, mayhem and mutilation in the final third of the novel. But that's part of the point of the book too. The war was relentless. And lest that put you off let me emphasise again, that The Cartel, like The Power of the Dog, is a crime masterpiece. It is being taken very seriously by serious reviewers (that cool image (top above right) is from the New Yorker review.) If there were any justice they'd be giving it the National Book Award or the Pulitzer and at the very least it should get the Edgar and the Dagger next year. 

The Sydney Morning Herald Reviews Rain Dogs

CRIME FICTION
RAIN DOGS
By Adrian McKinty. Serpent's Tail. $29.99.

The release of a new Sean Duffy novel by Adrian McKinty is always one of the highlights of a crime reader's year. Born and raised in Northern Ireland, McKinty now resides in Melbourne where he writes some of the best Irish crime fiction currently being produced.

Rain Dogs is the fifth book in his series about Duffy, a Catholic officer in the Royal Ulster Constabulary in the 1980s. Hated by both sides of the sectarian divide Duffy lives in the middle of a Protestant housing estate, where he has to check his car for bombs each day and deal with the anti-Catholic sentiment of his neighbours.

The death of a young journalist in the snowy courtyard of Carrickfergus castle seems like an unfortunate suicide, but some of the details are not quite right. Despite instructions from above, Duffy and his team continue to sift through the clues and the links between the death and a diplomatic visit to Carrickfergus by a group of Finnish investors. Gradually they find evidence of a possible, high level conspiracy.

This is a first-rate crime thriller that commands attention from the opening pages and keeps the reader gripped until the end. The writing is tight and the story is well plotted... The tale unfolds at a good pace with McKinty ably balancing the steady unfolding of the investigation, including some interesting forensic detail, with episodes of exciting action and a suspenseful trip to Finland.

As usual, the characterisations are very strong and McKinty excels in his depiction of the period from a fictional encounter between Muhammad Ali and a group of local skinheads to a telling description of landing at Belfast airport:

"As we were on the final approach we could see a riot kicking off along the Falls Road … we watched Molotov cocktails arc through the air and crash into riot shields. One of the joys of landing at Belfast."

McKinty's wry sense of humour is also well on display and he peppers his story with small details that enhance his depiction of the period, but which will also darkly amuse readers...A funny & very engaging tale that sets an early high standard for this year's crime fiction. Highly recommended.

Jeff Popple is a Canberra reviewer.

Booklist Reviews Rain Dogs

Booklist Feb 1 2016

Rain Dogs.

McKinty, Adrian (Author)

*Starred Review*


Mar 8 2016. 290 p. Prometheus/Seventh Street, paperback, $15.95. (9781633881303). e-book, (9781633881310).

The chronicles of Carrickfergus detective Sean Duffy open a sardonic portal to 1980s Belfast; every detail rings true, from the persistent threat of mercury-tilt car bombs to the complex criminal motivations that breed in a climate of unrest. Financial Times reporter Lily Bigelow is covering a Finnish technology giant’s highly publicized visit. 

The morning before the Finns’ scheduled departure, Lily’s body is found in Carrickfergus Castle, an apparent suicide from the castle walls. Duffy isn’t convinced, but the only other explanation is a locked-room murder, and it’s unlikely that he’d see another of those after solving the killing of Lizzie Fitzpatrick in a locked pub (In the Morning I’ll Be Gone, 2014). Duffy traces Lily’s movements in Belfast, telling his boss that he’s tying up loose ends for the inquest. His investigation reveals a strong motive for murder; Lily was secretly investigating an anonymous tip implicating iconic celebrity Jimmy Savile, the visiting Finns, and powerful political players in a sex-abuse ring. 

Duffy is warned off the case by his superiors and dangerous representatives of the aforementioned suspects, so it’s no easy feat to figure who murdered Lily Bigelow, not to mention how they managed to do it in a locked castle. McKinty manages a second locked-room success and folds in the recent headline-snatching Jimmy Savile scandal to boot; another great standout in a superior series, combining terrific plotting with evocative historical detail.
— Christine Tran 

The Sunday Times Reviews Rain Dogs

Come On Feel The Noise: Slade House by David Mitchell

Fifteen pages into Slade House my heart sank as I realised that for the third novel in a row David Mitchell had chosen to write about a fictional war between soul sucking vampires and the protectors of the human race known as horologists. This dreary theme, a subplot in Mitchell’s Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, became the main story of 2014’s The Bone Clocks with Slade House apparently a kind sequel to that book.

The story begins in 1979 when Nathan Bishop and his mum are invited for a soirée at the posh Lady Grayer’s house somewhere in the English West Midlands. The party is a ruse to get Nathan up to the attic where he is attacked by the immortal Grayer twins: Norah and Jonah. The action moves on nine years to 1988 where another victim, a policeman, is lured into the spider’s web.

Thus proceeds the book, victim after victim, until the palpably foreseeable conclusion. Coming in at a slight 233 pages this is Mitchell’s shortest novel by a long way. My hunch is that Slade House was initially a chapter of The Bone Clocks which got cut when the book became unmanageable. Those of us who have read a lot of Mitchell will not be surprised by the appearance of a character from De Zoet and The Bone Clocks in the denouement to the story who arrives to save the day. Indeed but for a change of location and personnel Slade House has almost exactly the same supernatural arc as the two previous Mitchell novels.

Perhaps the time has come for David Mitchell’s editor to invite him in for a chat about his future. Mitchell needs to be firmly guided away from the baleful influence of Neil Gaiman, JK Rowling, Terry Pratchett and Michael Moorcock and back onto the straight and narrow of sophisticated, psychologically penetrating English literature. Every writer has their obsessions. For JG Ballard it was empty swimming pools and low flying aircraft but Ballard’s pools and planes were always used inventively. Evelyn Waugh’s worship of the rich got us some good jokes and Graham Greene’s fixation with Anglo-Catholicism produced some crapulous soul searching. Mitchell’s soul sucking vampires are not half so interesting.

English fantasy writing can be a terrain for exploring big metaphysical and moral issues – Angela Carter was a writer who had the heft and ability to do this – but it takes great skill to navigate the fantasy minefield chock full of camp and cliché. Kazuo Ishiguro’s recent novel, The Buried Giant, is an other example of how not to do it. If he keeps going the way he’s going David Mitchell’s next novel will be indistinguishable from Clive Barker or Stephen King, which some of you will think is a jolly good thing; but for many of us this would be a disappointing path for a writer who debuted on the list of Granta’s Most Promising Young British Novelists a dozen years ago and who should have won the Booker Prize for the magnificent Cloud Atlas.

The Bone Clocks

David Mitchell was in Melbourne the week before last and very popular he was too. His talk was excellent. Mitchell is a really smart, interesting guy. Here's my review of his latest for the Sydney Morning Herald which is now available in pbk. Jason, my editor, wanted more of a career survey than just a regular review, which I was happy to do because I'm a David Mitchell completist (I'll read everything he publishes)

David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks

Some novelists take an uneasy book or two to find their voice, others say everything in an audacious debut and then subsequently disappoint; rarer are the cases of the writer who arrives seemingly fully formed, producing mature, thoughtful books from the get-go and then at decent intervals over their literary career. The English novelist David Mitchell is an example of this latter type.

Mitchell burst onto the world literary scene in 1999 with an extraordinary debut novel, Ghost Written. Largely set in Japan, where Mitchell was living at the time, it is an alluring polyphonic tour-de-force that brings in such themes as magic, animism, Buddhism, Japanese millennial cults and international terrorism. Mitchell followed up Ghost Written with the slightly more conventional Number9dream (2001), a Bildungsroman about a Japanese student and his complex relationship with his wealthy family.

Cloud Atlas (2004) was the novel that confirmed Mitchell’s place as one of British fiction’s most interesting talents. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and spanning a multiplicity of genres and time periods, Cloud Atlas was a series of superbly intertwined short-stories that revolved around ideas of loss, betrayal, duplicity, racism and grief. It was in Cloud Atlas too that we began to see something of Mitchell’s bigger plan with intriguing call-backs to his earlier books and the reuse of previous characters and settings.

Mitchell’s fourth book was the more subdued, semi-autobiographical Black Swan Green (2006) about a year in the life of a 13-year-old English boy with a stammer in the small village of Black Swan Green in the West Midlands. Set in the early 1980’s, this was a more intimate novel although it too had its wider resonances with the appearance of characters from Ghost Written and Number9dream.

Mitchell’s next offering, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (2010), told the tale of Jacob De Zoet, a young Dutch merchant who falls in love with a Japanese woman in eighteenth century Nagasaki. A full blown historical romance with fantastic elements De Zoet was a triumph: dark, lyrical and wilfully strange, this was a seasoned and witty reflection on love and loss and good and evil.

In 2013 Mitchell translated a Japanese teen’s Asperger’s Syndrome memoir and wrote a powerful essay in the Guardian newspaper about coping with his son’s autism in austerity challenged rural Ireland.

David Mitchell’s sixth novel, The Bone Clocks, is a recapitulation of many of the concepts and conceits of his earlier works. It begins with the story of Holly Sykes, a lippy Anglo-Irish teen, who runs away from home in Gravesend, Kent, in 1984. Holly and her little brother Jacko both have supernatural abilities: Jacko has precognition powers and Holly hears voices (the Radio People) that appear to be the internal monologues of other people. While Holly is fleeing home sinister forces come after her and successfully kidnap Jacko. The action shifts seven years forward to 1991 where dissolute Cambridge University student Hugo Lamb has just met Holly Sykes, now a chalet-maid at a ski resort in the Alps. Hugo is abducted by a mysterious and somewhat prolix group who call themselves Anchorites of the Dusk Chapel of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Monastery of the Sidelhorn Pass.

The Anchorites explain that they are not only able to teleport and see into the future but that they have also discovered the secret to eternal life. Hugo is offered a humdrum but safe existence with Holly or immortality (with a rather unpleasant murderous catch).

We jump forward thirteen years to 2004 where Holly is marrying her childhood sweetheart and then to 2015 where Hugo’s Cambridge chum novelist Crispin Hershey runs into Holly at the Perth Writers Festival. Holly has written a successful book about her childhood, The Radio People, while Crispin’s latest offerings have perplexed his audience. (There’s a very funny aside where Crispin takes to task reviewers who might dare to complain about serious English novelists writing fantasy books.) Holly and Crispin share a bizarre magical experience out on Rottnest Island, off Freemantle, before going their separate ways. We then slip back in time to a fascinating section of The Bone Clocks which takes place in an Aboriginal community just outside of nineteenth century Perth. This is the extraordinary moment when you realise that The Bones Clocks is a kind of sequel to Mitchell’s previous book, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. Doctor Marinus, a delightful character from De Zoet, re-appears in The Bone Clocks in a way that, unfortunately for me, robbed him of some of his previous charm.

The Anchorites, it turns out, are the bad guys, who are in a war with the Horologists - a group of benign immortals who are trying to protect the human race from the Anchorites’ predatory ways. Hugo must decide whose side he’s really on in this battle between darkness and light. The final part of the novel skips into a gloomy dystopian future where the ice caps have melted, the internet has collapsed and China is the hegemonic world power.

Although sometimes described as a “magical realist” Mitchell’s vision is very much in the English school of modern fantasy writing following a template laid down by writers such as Michael Moorcock, Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman. Mitchell’s long tenure in Japan has given him an appreciation too for the gothic fables of novelist Haruki Marukami, whose recent IQ84 is particularly resonant in The Bone Clocks.

Already long-listed for the 2014 Booker prize It is unlikely that Mitchell’s new novel will disappoint many of his admirers, but on finishing the book I found myself a little let down. The internal logic of The Bone Clocks is not particularly rigorous and many of the magical battles felt rather silly and Harry Potterish. Like Gaiman or the British writer JG Ballard, Mitchell seems to have the most fun in the exploration of big ideas from fantasy or science fiction, but he clearly has the skill to dramatize the humdrum existence of every-day life. For all the showiness of Mitchell’s arcane set pieces and impressive ‘world-building’ the bits of his novels that I think are the most enjoyable are his funny, touching interactions between ordinary people in realistic settings. Perhaps Mitchell needs to become more of a miniaturist, a voyager into what JG Ballard himself called the ‘inner space’ of our contemporary existential predicament, rather than the outer space so beloved of futurists and sci-fi novelists.

At one point in The Bone Clocks the reincarnated Doctor Marinus speaks of his love of the German Romantic poets; the most precocious of those poets, Novalis, famously declared his intention of concentrating his craft on the interior life of man because “inward goes the way full of mystery.” This is still good advice and as dazzling as Mitchell’s new book is I hope that next time he will turn his powerful lens inward and focus it a little closer to home.

The American Dream Always Comes True: Mad Men's Unironic Denouement

Happy endings all around: Everyone got what they wanted in the final episode of
Mad Men (except for Betty who was disposed of like the wife
in the golf joke in episode 1) 

I was there at the beginning so I felt I had to be there at the end. Like the Sopranos, the show where Matthew Weiner cut his teeth, Mad Men ended with a whimper not a bang. When I reviewed the pilot episode a million years and two trouser sizes ago I said that it was an "intelligent, reflective television show that cast a witty and introspective light on the recent past." 
...
Mea culpa. Mad Men wasn't as smart or as introspective or as piercing as it or I thought it was. As if digesting fully David Foster Wallace's criticism that "irony is the song of the bird who has learned to love its cage" Mad Men decided to ditch irony and go for sincerity as the series progressed. In the final season Don quits McCann Erickson, has a mid life crisis, drives through the west having adventures like John Steinbeck in Travels With Charley or Kane in Kung Fu and then in a hippy colony comes up with the idea for the I'd Like To Buy The World A Coke ad and returns to work. That was it. Mid life crisis leads to a great idea for an ad for sugar water. This was basically the plot of every season of Mad Men. Mid life crisis, attempt to introspect or extrovert or find love and this attempt leads to a great ad idea for a client. Mad Men wasn't a rejection of post war American materialistic culture it was an attempt to shore it up. It wasn't Matthew Weiner's critique of his parents generation. It was a love letter to these parents. Even Ad Men Get The Blues: ahhhh. Occasionally Mad Men would have a straw man hippie attack Don as "the man", but we were supposed to know better. Don was on a journey, Don thought about things, you're wrong greasy hippie. But the greasy hippie was right. The Mad Men martini shakers, Mad Men tie clips, Mad Men whisky decanters attest to the fact. Mad Men wasn't a TV show at all really, it was just a vector to sell us ads on AMC, DVD box sets and Mad Men merchandise. 
...
You don't have to have an interesting political message if you can dazzle us with your writing. True Detective, for example, had a hoary old plot and old fashioned archetypes but my God the writing on that show: the brilliant structure, the superb dialogue, the idea that working class characters could be philosophically literate. Mad Men's writing declined precipitously after the first season when the ideas began to run out and then even dumb TV critics noticed that it was going in circles (but they thought the circles meant something). In the final episode the inconvenient first wife gets terminal cancer, the flighty second wife never gets mentioned at all and everyone else gets a happy ending: Peggy and Stan get engaged, Eyepatch guy gets to be head of advertising at his father in laws company, Roger marries again, Joan forms her own company, even Pete Campbell (who I guess we're supposed to forget raped a German aupair in Season 2) goes off with Trudy to run LearJet and become super rich. Everybody wins except boring Betty and Don takes the cake by creating the most iconic ad of the 70s.  
...
I'm not going to talk in depth about the overrated acting on Mad Men

Jon Hamm can do two emotions, this:     :|    and this:     :\   

but I will talk about Mad Men's production values. Mad Men always looked cheap compared to an HBO or a BBC show. The sets looked fake, the few exteriors that were filmed were always in California, the back projection in the car driving scenes always looked terrible. (In a sitcom you can get away with horrible back projection but it doesn't work in a drama that's going for neorealism.) For a programme that made a boatload of cash for the network, the cast and the showrunners they sure didn't spread a lot of that cash around to the people who did the actual filming.
...
I suppose we get the culture we deserve. And we deserved Mad Men. We're a shallow, silly lot, who don't like to challenge the status quo and prefer things the way they are. We're not going to swim the Hellespont or work in an orphanage in Lesotho. We're going to watch telly and drink Coke and eat caramel corn. The Prime Minister of the UK is man who went to Eton and Oxford like a score of Prime Ministers before him. The 2016 Presidential Election will be another round of Clinton V Bush. Mad Men was perfect for us & that's why there's been so much lamenting about its departure. But don't worry, like a bad Coca Cola ad or an insincere politician or an entirely invented pop band there will be another Mad Men along soon enough to distract you and me from what's really going on. 

Gun Street Girl - The First Review & How To Win A Proof

Jon Page, from Bite the Book, got himself a VERY early galley of Gun Street Girl. He read the galley and reviewed it over on his excellent site, here. I've worked on the book quite a bit since this first draft, tightening the story a little and adding a few more jokes. (In fact I'm still working on the book now.)
...
The novel of course takes place in Ulster but the wider net of the narrative brings in the biggest American political scandal of the Reagan administration, a famous cause celebre from 1980's Oxford and the chaotic weeks in Belfast that followed the signing of the Anglo Irish Agreement in 1985. The book begins with an echo of and on the same night that Rorshach's journal begins in Alan Moore's Watchmen, which also has one or two sneaky resonances throughout the text. Anyway, old chums, this is what Jon Page thought:
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Sometimes a recurring crime character is brought back and the story feels forced or the attempt feels lame. But then there are those rare times when, despite the series being over, the character comes back and exceeds what has been done before. And that is exactly what Adrian McKinty has done with Sean Duffy.

In the last Sean Duffy book, In The Morning I’ll Be Gone, it appeared the series had finished with a bang. Adrian McKinty had flagged his intention to halt the Duffy books at three and had given us a more than satisfactory conclusion. Better to finish wanting more than for a fantastic character to get stale. However an idea came to McKinty for a book four, but he still resisted until he literally dreamt how he could end that book, and that was what he needed to begin writing book four in the Sean Duffy series. He wrote about that experience, here. And yes, the ending really is one of the best things McKinty has done.

Not only has McKinty done justice to the previous books with Gun Street Girl but I think he has actually exceeded himself. The Sean Duffy trilogy was already something special and Gun Street Girl not only reaffirms that but makes it even better. The year is 1985 and The Troubles are still in full, nasty swing in Belfast with the flames about to be fanned by the so-called Irish-Anglo Agreement. Sean Duffy is now an Inspector in charge of CID at Carrick RUC. When a local bookie and his wife are killed in what looks like a professional hit Duffy only takes a passing interest in the case letting his detective sergeant take the lead and blood two new detectives. However when the case takes a nasty turn Duffy dives in up to his neck of course ruffling any (and all) feathers that get in his way. Conspiracies loom and the bodies start piling up as Duffy quickly uncovers a sinister plot well above his pay grade. But to crack this case he’s going to need someone to talk and the first thing they teach you in Northern Ireland is to never talk, especially to the RUC, even when you’re supposed to be on the same side.

[money quote coming up:]

Full of McKinty’s trademark wickedly black humour and with the usual taut plotting this just may be the best book in an exceptional series so far. Sean Duffy has come a long way from The Cold Cold Ground and everything he's been through is starting to leave scars. I was reluctantly happy to see the series finish after three books but after book 4 I think there is even a little more life in this awesome series to come. At least I hope so!
...
Still reading all the way down here? Good for you. Serpents Tail are having a competition whereby they are giving away some early galleys of Gun Street Girl. If you click this link you'll be taken to the competition page. Alas this compo is open only to British and Irish readers (because of postage costs).
...
You can, of course, read the first five chapters of Gun Street Girl, for free, here...

Review This Book!

Hey folks, I'd really appreciate some reviews of my novel The Sun Is God on amazon, amazon.co.uk or good reads. All the time on Twitter I get asked "how come you don't write more standalone" novels and my answer is usually because nobody bloody buys them! Readers prefer series and although I enjoy writing standalones more than series (because you dont know what is going to happen at the end) I probably won't do any more of them if they just continue to tank in sales...As of this writing I have 2 reviews for SIG on Amazon.com (a 3 star and a grumpy 2 star) and 4 reviews on amazon.co.uk (an average of 4 stars). I have a feeling that this book might resonate a little better with British readers who understand the context (and how people used to talk in 1906) but hopefully all the American readers wont be as annoying as Ms 2 star above. 
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This little appeal is my version of kickstarter. I'm not asking for your money in return for a stupid T shirt, all I'd like is a minute or two of your time to review one of my books. C'mon people, I've got 269 followers on here and I get a healthy number of comments for every blog post. I've never once charged for content and I've pretty much responded to every comment I've gotten over the last 5 years, so do me a friggin solid, eh? 
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As a weird little standalone with an unconventional untrendy setting, I havent had many newspaper reviews either of The Sun Is God but I did get nice notices in The Times and The Irish Times and I'm copying the entire review from David Prestidge on CFL below because this was a reviewer who really got what I was trying to do: 
...
Adrian McKinty has made his name with three crime trilogies, the latest of which featured Catholic cop Sean Duffy in the midst of sectarian turmoil in 1980s Belfast. So, The Sun is God is a bit of a departure. Here we meet Will Prior, once a junior officer in The Military Foot Police who served during The Boer War.

When he becomes involved in a  serious incident at a concentration camp set up by the British to contain the Boers near Bloemfontein, he becomes a hero overnight, at least in the eyes of his military superiors. For Prior, however, it is the start of a nightmare both literal and metaphorical. Angrily casting aside his Distinguished Service Order he gets himself dismissed from service and seeks a new life in the colonies.

Prior fetches up in a place which McKinty describes (from personal experience) as being as close to hell on earth without there being devils dancing around with sharp tridents. German New Guinea in 1906 was hot, wet, malarial and home to every kind of flying, stinging, scuttling insect and arthropod. Prior is manager of an ailing rubber plantation near the principal settlement of Herbertshöhe. His days are spent languidly enough, living with his native servant-mistress, Siwa, but his peace is disturbed when government officer Hauptmann Kessler seeks his assistance.

Prior’s police background is useful to the colonial administrators. Corpses are ten-a-penny in Herbertshöhe, but one particular mortuary resident is causing Governor Hahl concern. On a tiny island ten miles away, an eccentric group of sun worshippers have set up a community dedicated to becoming one with nature, and eating only coconut. They call themselves The Cocovores. One of them has died, ostensibly of malaria, and the corpse has been sent back to the main island for burial. The postmortem reveals that Herr Lutzow actually died from drowning so Governor Hahl despatches Prior, Kessler, and a visiting English anthropologist, Bessie Pullen-Burry, to investigate.

the real life August Engelhardt, leader of the Cocovores...

The mismatched trio find a bizarre world of nakedness, drug taking, totem worship, and a relaxed view of sexuality. Alarmingly, Miss Pullen-Burry begins to join in, while Prior and Kessler struggle with both the debilitating climate and the charismatic Cocovore leader – August Englehardt. Answers of any kind, let alone straight ones, about the death of Lutzow are impossible to find.

Surprisingly, many of the characters in The Sun is God actually existed, and the broad events described are largely factual. In the author’s preface, however, he states that ‘where the interests of the novel and strict historical accuracy have collided I have put the demands of the former first.’

Don’t be deterred by McKinty’s enigmatic assertion that the crime remains unsolved to this day. Here, the crime is solved, and with great effect, in one of the best climaxes to a novel I have read in a long time. I do wonder if this is more a period drama than a crime novel, but of one thing I am certain – this is brilliant writing. There is wonderful sleight of hand in the final pages, when rescue comes from an unlikely source. McKinty handles the mood and tone like a master. There is wry comedy, social satire, horror, compassion and tension. This is a brave and successful change of direction from a fine writer, who spoke to us about his earlier work here.

Serpent’s Tail
Print/Kindle
£2.57

CFL Rating: 5 Stars
...
Anyway if you can help me out with an amazon or good reads review I wd really appreciate it, esp Amazon.com where the combined 2 1/2 star rating looks like shit and now that Amazon mirror their reviews over onto audible and amazon.co.uk its a real PR disaster...
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And if you'd like to review any of my other books, well, I'd very much appreciate that too. 

go raibh maith agat

George McFly Day

What is George McFly Day? It's the bit in Back To The Future where George McFly's box of books arrives from his publisher and his career as a science fiction writer becomes a reality. If you remember the film, in one version of the present George doesn't follow his dreams to become a writer because he's afraid of failure, but in the altered version of the present a more courageous George McFly does pursue his ambition and when his box of books comes it's a kind of vindication. This particular George McFly day is for my book The Sun Is God which is a murder mystery novel set in the South Pacific of 1906 among a group of aristocratic German nudists who believed that eating only coconuts would make them immortal. Amazingly this is a true story which I have only slightly fictionalised.
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You can read the first newspaper review of The Sun Is God, here. It's from the knowledgeable Declan Burke in The Irish Times. Money quote: 

Based on an improbable but true story, the novel offers a fascinating twist on the traditional “locked room” mystery, as only the island’s miserable few inhabitants can be considered suspects in the alleged murder. Prior, as reluctant a sleuth as has ever shuffled into the genre, makes for a blackly humorous guide to a palm-fringed, sun-drenched idyll that is both heaven and hell. McKinty’s novel is an ambitious offering that incorporates a terrific subplot exploring pre-first World War colonial tensions between Britain and Germany. But it’s the investigation of the central mystery, with its undertones of Paradise Lost, that proves most entertaining.

David Mitchell's Influences

This is not a review of David Mitchell's new novel, The Bone Clocks, which I finished yesterday. I'm reviewing The Bone Clocks for the newspaper in September and I'll reread it & write a comprehensive review then. No, this is a blog post about what I think are main influences on the book. I will say in parenthesis that I thought the novel was very good and quite the change of pace from his last work, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, which was a historical romance set in eighteenth century Japan. 
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Like Thousand Autumns, The Bone Clocks takes place in a world the reader initially thinks is our own but which isn't quite our Earth because of the existence of magic. In brief The Bones Clocks is about a cult of immortals with magical powers who provide the link between a series of long sections told from the perspective of different characters. Temporally the novel runs from the mid 1980's to the middle of the twenty first century. In Latin America these types of novels are known as magical realism but David Mitchell's writing is very dry, sceptical and English and not really anything like the works of the magical realist bigwigs such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende (but it does owe a debt to the intellectual and speculative ideas of Jorge Luis Borges). 
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Mitchell was born in 1969 so he's a little bit younger than me, but he grew up in 70's Britain and now lives in rural Ireland so we've got something of the same cultural background. Where Mitchell leaves me behind however is the 15 years he spent living in Japan which has had a profound influence on his style. Much of Mitchell's recent writing reminds me of the work of the Japanese master Haruki Murakami with the strong visual influence of manga and the cinema of Hayao Miyazaki.
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Other influences that I can sniff out in The Bone Clocks are Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Thomas Pynchon, Kinglsey and Martin Amis (The Alteration & Time's Arrow) Michael Moorcock, Iain Banks, Philip K Dick and of course JG Ballard.
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Like I say I'm not allowed to review The Bone Clocks here but if all this sounds like an interesting and heady mix to you you can pre-order The Bone Clocks now at all good bookshops or at the usual online outlets.  
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One more thing, if you don't mind a slight spoiler and you really enjoyed 1000 Autumns of Jacob De Zoet highlight the following hidden text: Dr Marinus from Jacob is a character in Bone Clocks...dont ask me how - that wd be telling.

Next Goal Wins

Sunday in our house was all about the football. On Sunday morning I took my daughter Sophie up to her Under 9 league game for South Melbourne Womens FC; on Sunday evening Leah, Arwynn, Sophie and myself went to see the extraordinary football documentary Next Goal Wins at the ACMI (the Australian Centre for the Moving Image); and of course on Sunday night at midnight I watched Liverpool FC's desperate last ditch attempt to win the English Premiere League for the first time in nearly 25 years. 
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Sophie's team won the game, Liverpool didn't win the league but in this post I only want to talk about Next Goal Wins, the best documentary I've seen since Man On Wire. NGW is the story of the American Samoa football team who after a drubbing 31:0 by Australia went to last on the FIFA World Football rankings and stayed there for a decade. American Samoa didn't win a single game in all this time and didn't score a single goal. They were rightly called the worst team in the world and then to cap it all a tsunami hit Samoa destroying their pitch and wrecking the town. The Bad News Bears looked like Good Luck Charlies in comparison to these guys. Things only began to change when, after their latest humiliation 8:0 by New Caledonia, the American Samoa Soccer Federation placed a desperate ad on a US Soccer website asking for a coach. Exuberant 50 something Dutchman Thomas Rongen was the only applicant and thus got the job. 
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A third of the way into Next Goal Wins Rongen arrives in Samoa and starts making changes. He introduces the slide tackle, he improves the players fitness and ball handling and he brings back 2 players who have quit the team and moved to America (including the disillusioned goalkeeper from the 31:0 loss to Australia.) He also recruits a player who is 1/2 Samoan but who once played semi professional soccer in Germany, and he gives a first team place to Jaya, a transgender Samoan, who is more of a team mascot & occasional sub but who is the only player who really masters the slide tackle and subsequently becomes the hardest tackling defender on the squad. Rongen has his own demons to conquer: his only daughter was killed in a car crash at the age of 18 and hanging with the religious, laid back, kindly Samoans gradually works a transformation on the hard as nails Dutchman. World cup qualifying looms. American Samoa hasn't won any kind of game in 17 years and has never won a FIFA sanctioned event. The players of American Samoa only want to avoid disaster, maybe get a single goal. . .so what happened? Well, as Borges says: humiliation, unhappiness & discord are the ancient foods of heroes... 
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If Next Goal Wins doesn't make the shortlist for best documentary at next year's Oscars I'll be very much surprised. It's a classic. Trailer below:
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The Sunday Times Reviews In The Morning I'll Be Gone

The great John Dugdale of The Sunday Times reviews Duffy#3, In The Morning I'll Be Gone, in today's paper thusly: 

 Adrian McKinty’s In the Morning I’ll Be Gone (Serpent’s Tail £12.99, ST Bookshop price £10.99), sees his smart, irreverent Northern Irish detective Sean Duffy carrying out a secret mission in 1984. Duffy’s former schoolmate Dermot McCann has escaped from prison, and MI5 wants the IRA bomber traced. Duffy’s inquiries get nowhere until he meets McCann’s mother-in-law, Mary, whose younger daughter supposedly died in an accident in a pub. Mary believes she was murdered, and promises to reveal the terrorist’s whereabouts if he identifies the killer.

The novel hence becomes a locked room mystery within a manhunt killer, a clever and gripping set-up that helps makes Duffy's third outing easily his best so far. Like its predecessors it weaves a fictional narrative into real events. In this case with its climax at the [deleted because of spoilers] McKinty's reworking of history has wider resonance...

I'm afraid that's as far as I got in the story before the paywall kicked in, but it sounded like he liked it. Of course there could be a huge kick in the pants in the next paragraph. If you're a Times subscriber you can read the whole thing, here. (Do be careful of that spoiler alert though). 
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And while its not my place to tell you how to spend your Amazon voucher, Christmas bonus or Book token (do such things still exist?) I will say that Duffy#1 won the Spinetingler Award for best crime novel, Duffy#2 was shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel and now we have the knowledgeable Mr Dugdale saying this is in fact the best of the three. . .

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 Most Interesting Man In The World's Final Journey

My review of Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Broken Road from yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age.
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In 1933 Patrick Leigh Fermor was 18 years old and washed up: he'd been expelled from school, couldn't get into university and had no idea what to do with his life. So, inspired by the likes of Peter Fleming, Robert Byron, and Alexander Kinglake, Fermor decided to walk from London to Constantinople with the vague idea of making a book out of his adventures. A Time of Gifts (1977) is the story of that trip, or at least the first third of it, being an account of his wanderings across a newly Nazified Germany and into Hungary. The forty years between the journey and the publication gave Fermor time to contemplate the meaning of all that he saw, and, rather like a fine single malt, four decades of maturation led to perfection. A Time of Gifts was hailed as a classic of travel writing: a bright, buoyant and learned book in which a young man's enthusiasm for the road was tempered by an older man's wisdom. Gifts is packed with beautiful descriptions, funny incidents and thoughtful commentary on the people and places he encounters.      

Nine years after A Time of Gifts, Fermor published Between The Woods And The Water the continuation of his travels along the Danube to the Iron Gates on the Romanian border. Fans eagerly awaited the promised conclusion to the journey but twenty six years passed after volume two and Fermor died in 2011 with, sadly, no sign of volume three.

            Paddy Fermor was born in London to a father who was both emotionally and physically distant (while the boy went to a series of boarding schools Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor continued his work with the geological survey of India) and a kind but rather stiff mother. After his epic Constantinople walk, with no career plan, Fermor moved permanently to Greece and he was there when World War 2 broke out. The British SOE recruited him as a secret agent operating behind enemy lines in Nazi occupied Crete, where, somewhat incredibly, his small band of partisans managed to capture the German general in charge of much of the island: a tale which was later told in the book and the film Ill Met by Moonlight.

            Fermor’s literary reputation was established by the books he wrote about his post-War travels in the Americas and his time spent in Greek monastic retreats. Gregarious, witty and ebullient, Fermor seems to have known everyone who was anyone – the great and the good all making the pilgrimage to his beautiful villa in Greece. He was rumoured to be one of the models for his friend Ian Fleming’s James Bond and even recently for the hilarious Dos Equis beer ads about “The Most Interesting Man In The World.”

            The Broken Road, begins with a sort of apology from the editors, Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper, who note in their introduction that this third volume of A Time of Gifts was not only unfinished at the time of Fermor’s death but in fact barely begun.  The Broken Road was “reconstructed” from a contemporary diary and a “hasty” unpublished account Fermor had written in 1963 which he had left unrevised until he was well into his nineties. Cooper and Thubron note that Fermor’s prose is what makes his writing so unique and it’s alarming to be told that The Broken Road is “unpolished” and raw.

            This worry somewhat dissipates however when you begin reading the actual book. If The Broken Road is the stream of consciousness, unvarnished Fermor then he was even more of a genius than we all thought. Read this description of an Orthodox religious rite in Bulgaria: “They evolved and chanted in aromatic clouds of smoke diagonally pierced by sun shafts. When all was over, a compact crocodile of votaries shuffled their way around the church to kiss St Ivan’s icon and his thaumaturgic hand, black now as a briar root, inside its jewelled reliquary.”

            Every chapter of The Broken Road gleams with delicious imagery and wonderful characters and Fermor is his customary romantic self, hooking up with attractive girls left and right. There are fairs and festivals and Fermor charms his way into castles and haylofts, but there is an air of melancholy too, for this was a land that was to be put to the sword by first, the Wehrmacht, and then the Soviets; as Fermor himself explains: “Nearly all the people [in these pages] were attached to trails of powder which were already invisibly burning.”

            The book ends in northern Greece and true to its title we never do quite make it to Constantinople itself. Still, as a record of an antebellum world, in a brief Golden Age before the apocalypse of World War 2, we are lucky to have had so careful and eloquent an observer as Patrick Leigh Fermor.     

In The Morning I'll Be Gone - The First Review

The first review of In The Morning I'll Be Gone came in last week. It's from Jon Page of Bite The Book and here it is (below). Remember Jon only reviewed the galley so the actual book is bound to be funnier, crisper and all together even more brilliant. The heart of In The Morning is pretty much an old school locked room mystery, a subgenre of mystery writing that I've always loved and always wanted to try. Anyway here's what Mr Page had to say:
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Every great trilogy knocks you out with the first one, takes it up a notch with the second one and then blows you away with the final chapter. There a few great trilogies. Many fail at the second hurdle let alone the final one. But not Adrian McKinty. The Sean Duffy books are a truly great trilogy and destined to become a classic of the crime genre and the third and the final volume is the best yet.

Things were not looking good for our hero at the end of I Hear The Sirens In The Street. Sean Duffy had been demoted out of CID and dispatched to the border lands. His career in the police force appeared to be over. That is until a mass breakout occurs from the infamous Maze Prison in September, 1983. One of the IRA’s most dangerous men, Dermot McCann, is on the loose and planning a campaign of terror against Britain. MI5 are prepared to do anything to bring him in, including giving Sean his old job back.

Sean has a connection to Dermot but no one is giving anybody up in Northern Ireland. Sean’s digging instead leads him to an unsolved murder. A locked room mystery that has got everybody stumped. But the key to unearthing Dermot’s whereabouts maybe be found in figuring out this seemingly unsolvable mystery.

As with the previous two books McKinty skillfully blends humour and the grim realities of living in war torn Belfast in 1984 with a gripping, realistic mystery. Sean Duffy is perfectly flawed and damaged but determined to do the right thing, even if that means doing a couple of wrong things. It is a tragedy that this series must come to an end because what McKinty has been able to produce has been very special and he has taken his writing to a new level. There’s a fine line between social commentary and compelling mystery and not many writers, crime or literary, can do both. McKinty has not only been able to pull it off brilliantly but he has done so over three amazing books.


I’m going to miss Sean Duffy but I also can’t wait to see where Adrian McKinty goes next.

Autobiography - Morrissey

Morrissey trying to conquer the world of literature and attempting to bring back the cream
denim jacket look; only one of these goals is hubristic...

I was half way through writing my review of Morrissey's Autobiography (which as you can see from a couple of posts ago (below) is already one of my favourite books of the year) when I read Terry Eagleton's review, here, in the Guardian and decided not to finish mine because his was so much better. Eagleton noticed many of things that struck me: the devastatingly brilliant evocation of 1960's Manchester, Moz's curious devotion to AE Housman (its hard to take Housman seriously after reading the classic essay Inside The Whale by George Orwell) the odd ad hominem attack on Julie Burchill, the 50 pages devoted to the contract dispute with The Smiths (about 40 pages too long)  etc. etc. Unlike all other Englishmen who were born in the 1950s and have written memoirs Morrissey - wonderfully - never mentions England's 1966 World Cup victory but he does recall fainting at the sight of George Best and watching every single Miss World contest with his mother. And he savages the sadistic dollards who seemed to be in charge of the British educational system from its beginnings right up until the 1980's. Anyway in lieu of a full review I'm giving you the first half of Eagleton's review instead. I've always liked Terry Eagleton, he was one of my philosophy tutors, and his course on literary theory at Oxford was the best series of lectures I've ever attended.
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Terry on Moz: 

Not content with being voted the greatest northern male ever, the second greatest living British icon (he lost out to David Attenborough) and granted the freedom of the city of Tel Aviv, Morrissey is now out to demonstrate that he can write the kind of burnished prose no other singer on the planet could aspire to. There are, to be sure, a few painfully florid patches in this superb autobiography ("Headmaster Mr Coleman rumbles with grumpiness in a rambling stew of hate"), but it would be hard to imagine Ronnie Wood or Eric Clapton portraying the "Duchess of nothing" Sarah Ferguson as "a little bundle of orange crawling out of a frothy dress, the drone of Sloane, blessed with two daughters of Queen Victoria pot-dog pudginess". Morrissey despises most of the people he meets, often with excellent reason. 

He is scurrilous, withdrawn and disdainful, an odd mixture of shyness and vitriol. The dreamy, heart-throbbish photo on the cover of the book, the nose rakishly tilted above the Cupid's-bow lips, belies what a mean old bastard he is. He finds an image of himself in (of all people) the minor Georgian poet AE Housman, who preferred art to humanity and whose ascetic, spiritually tortured life seems to echo Morrissey's own. He admires wayward, bloody-minded types much like himself, and takes a sadistic delight in discomforting interviewers. "Why did you mention Battersea in that song?" a journalist asks him. "Because it rhymes with fatty," he replies. Taken by his father at the age of eight to watch George Best play at Old Trafford, he swoons at the sight of such artistry combined with such rebelliousness. Years later, others will swoon at his own mixing of the two.

Some of his bloody-mindedness springs from a damaged childhood. Born into a working-class Irish-Mancunian family, Steven Patrick Morrissey sang his way out of what struck him as a soulless environment, as other working-class Irish Mancunians have written or acted their way out. The vitriol started to flow early: his bleak mausoleum of a Catholic primary school was ruled by Mother Peter, "a bearded nun who beat children from dawn to dusk", and by the time he was 17 he was already emotionally exhausted. Manchester, still in its pre-cool days, was a "barbaric place where only savages can survive … There are no sexual guidelines, and I see myself naked only by appointment." His eloquent contempt for his fellow citizens is terrifying: "non-human sewer-rats with missing eyes; the loudly insane with indecipherable speech patterns; the mad poor of Manchester's armpit." The final indignity is to be turned down for a job as a postman at the local sorting office. At the hour of the birth of the Smiths, which gave him the exit from Manchester he craved, he felt himself dying of boredom, loneliness and disgust. "I would talk myself through each day," he writes, "as one would nurse a dying friend."

Not long afterwards, hordes of young people throughout the world are wearing his face on their chests. He returns to the streets where he grew up, now with a police escort, to sing to 17,000 fans from a stage overlooking an odious Inland Revenue office where he once worked. Having failed to find love from one man or woman, he can now find it from thousands. Mick Jagger and Elton John are eager to shake his hand. He enjoys his celebrity, but the sardonic self-irony of the book seeks to persuade us otherwise. There is a relish and energy about its prose that undercuts his misanthropy. Its lyrical quality suggests that beneath the hard-bitten scoffer there lurks a romantic softie, while beneath that again lies a hard-bitten scoffer. Implausibly, he claims to be "chilled" by road signs reading "Morrissey Concert, Next Left". It's true, however, that having spent years yearning to be seen, he now spends years longing to be invisible. Living in Hollywood is hardly the best place for that. He deals with his own egocentricity by being wryly amusing about it: his birth almost killed his mother, he comments, because even then his head was too big.

Even so, he remains for the most part icily unillusioned, like a monk passing through a whorehouse. His contempt for the music industry is visceral, and he prefers to spend his time reading Auden and James Baldwin. (Spotting Baldwin in a Barcelona hotel, he decides not to approach him, since even the mildest rejection would apparently mean he would have to go and hang himself.) The solution to all problems, he tells us, "is the goodness of privacy in a warm room with books". David Bowie tells him that he's had so much sex and drugs that he's surprised he is still alive, to which Morrissey replies that he's had so little of both that he feels much the same. Tom Hanks comes backstage to say hello, but Morrissey doesn't know who he is. The press lie that he is a racist, that he opened the door to a journalist wearing a tutu, that he hung around public toilets as a youth and that he would welcome the assassination of Margaret Thatcher. The Guardian runs a disapproving piece on him adorned with a photo of somebody else. When he discovers that a Smiths record released in Japan includes a track by Sandie Shaw, he begs the people around him to kill him. "Many rush forward," he adds.

You can read the rest of the excellent review, in the Guardian, here. I'd say that I was a little bit more criticial of the book than Terry who practically gushes towards the end of his piece. I mean there are flaws in Autobiography. Because of Morrissey's somewhat baroque style for example I'm still not clear what his dad for his living and whether his parents are still alive. Is he gay? Bisexual? Celibate? Moz thinks that's none of our business and maybe he's right but why not just tell us that instead of being so coy about it. I wonder too if the last 100 pages of the book couldn't have been a little more tightly edited. Yeah it can't be easy to edit Morrissey but that's why they pay you the big bucks at Penguin isn't it? And finally a book like this is crying out for an index, indexers don't charge that much so why Penguin Classics didn't pay for one is beyond me. Still, these are quibbles, I rated this an A in my books journal and it goes next to David Peace's Red or Dead as one of my favourites of the year. 

The Australian Weighs In On Sirens

As you know I can't get a review of my Sean Duffy novels in the US press for love nor money (admittedly I haven't actually tried love or money...yet) but at least all the British, Irish and Australian newspapers are reviewing me. This latest review was from last Sunday's Australian newspaper and was written by the multi-talented Graeme Blundell who you non Aussies might still recognise as Natalie Portman's father in Star Wars...
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I Hear The Sirens In The Street
Adrian McKinty

Reviewed by Graeme Blundell The Australian July 14 2013

The first book in McKinty's Sean Duffy series, The Cold Cold Ground, found Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy newly promoted and posted to Carrickfergus CID in Northern Ireland in 1981 at the height of the Troubles. Now living in Melbourne, Northern Irish born McKinty took us inside the sectarian violence of the period as Duffy, a Catholic cop trusted by no one in a Protestant town, struggled with two different cases: one was Northern Ireland's first possible serial killer who was possibly preying on homosexuals and the second was the mysterious suicide of a young woman that looked a lot murder. Now in the new novel Duffy has got a man's headless body in a suitcase dumped in an abandoned factory. Army helicopters are still flying low over the lough, sirens are wailing in County Down and the distant thump thump in the background is the sound of mortars or explosions. McKinty is seriously brilliant, his flair for language matched by his remarkable feel for place, appetite for redemptive violence and gravely cool appreciation of characters who reject conformity. There are echoes of Dennis Lehane, Joseph Wambaugh, Eoin McNamee and even Raymond Chandler but McKinty is resolutely his own hard man. 

TransAtlantic

My review of Colum McCann's TransAtlantic from last week's Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald...

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Ask a random American to name the first person to fly across the Atlantic and they will probably tell you “Charles Lindbergh!” It’s something every school child knows and it is, of course, completely wrong. The chilly narcissist and Nazi sympathiser, Lindbergh, was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic but it was the British aviators Alcock and Brown who were the first men to fly non-stop across the ocean in pursuit of a prize offered by The Daily Mail. If Colum McCann’s wonderful new collection of short stories TransAtlantic sells only a fraction of his National Book Award winning, Let The Great World Spin, then many more Americans are going to know about the daring adventures of Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown.

            TransAtlantic begins in 1919 with the two aviators contemplating their modified Vickers Vimy bomber “all wood and linen and wire,” months after the Great War has “concussed the world.” Dipping in and out of his account of their flight from Newfoundland to Ireland in all its icy, claustrophobic detail, McCann transports us back to the men’s boyhoods, their prisoner of war experiences, and the electric moment they meet at the Vickers factory: “Alcock and Brown took one look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate. The obliteration of memory. The creation of a new moment; raw, dynamic, warless.”

            The second story in TransAtlantic takes place in Dublin in 1845 during the visit of the great African American writer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Douglass is feted everywhere for his eloquence and his talk of liberation, but the festive mood is tempered by the news drifting in from the countryside that the potato crop has failed.

            The action then skips forward 150 years to 1998 as a weary American politician, Senator George Mitchell, criss-crosses the Atlantic in a desperate attempt to bring to an end the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ which have been raging for nearly three decades. Suffering through verbose speeches and endless cups of tea in meetings with The Reverend Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, Mitchell flies to Washington to brief President Clinton, and then back to London to talk to Tony Blair. He wonders how he ever got involved in any of it. He only said he would go for a week and “before he knew it, it was a year, then two, then three. The shadows of Harland and Wolff falling over Belfast. The vague hope of helping to turn back the long blue iceberg, the deep underwater of Irish history.” McCann, in this passage, cleverly mentioning without mentioning Belfast’s most famous trans-Atlantic gift to the world, the RMS Titanic.  

            Parts 2 and 3 of TransAtlantic unpack and interweave these stories taking us from a bleak homesteader’s shack on the American prairie to a wedding in dour 1920’s Belfast, to the death of a young man during the ‘Troubles’, a victim of the conflict’s confusing and fissiparous alphabet soup of paramilitary groups. The book ends with the story of one letter carried in Teddy Brown’s mailbag that had lain un-opened for almost a hundred years.

            Colum McCann was born in Ireland in 1965 and moved to New York in the 1980’s. Like so many Irish writers before him exile has given McCann the space and perspective to write objectively about his homeland, and the most exhilarating sections of TransAtlantic are these forays into darkest Ulster or gentile Dublin on the cusp of chaotic industrial revolution and apocalyptic famine.

The thematically linked short story collection has been around for centuries but it was Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller that showed how subversive and post-modern a genre it could be. TransAtlantic bears comparison with Calvino and with David Mitchell’s, Cloud Atlas, and while not quite as revolutionary or as dazzling as those masterpieces it is McCann’s most accessible and intellectually stimulating book since 2003’s Dancer.

 TransAtlantic could so easily have fallen into cliché but by skilfully avoiding the Titanics and the Lindberghs and other obvious voyages “over the water” McCann has shone a light on adroit fictional archetypes and genuine heroes who deserve to be better known in America and across the globe.