The Kindleness Of Strangers

I’ve been faffing about on the fringes of the ebook revolution for a while now, and slowly realising that there are benefits to digital books that aren’t immediately apparent. One such benefit is that books that are out of print - such as a personal favourite of mine, Adrian McKinty’s DEAD I WELL MAY BE - not only come available again, but will remain published for the foreseeable future, and in theory at least, forever. The fact that the mainstream publishing industry allowed as fine a novel as DEAD I WELL MAY BE fall out of print in the first place is not only a disgrace, but something of an indictment of its shortcomings.
  Anyway, I thought I’d offer a quick round-up of some Irish crime titles now available on ebook. The list is by no means exhaustive, and is intended as no more than a sample: if you’re an Irish crime writer and you’d like your own (or most recent) title added to the list, just drop me a line with the link enclosed.
  The list:

DEAD I WELL MAY BE, Adrian McKinty
CITY OF LOST GIRLS, Declan Hughes
THE WHISPERERS, John Connolly
TIME OF DEATH, Alex Barclay
CROSS, Ken Bruen
FALLING GLASS, Adrian McKinty
LIMITLESS (aka THE DARK FIELDS), Alan Glynn
THE MIDNIGHT CHOIR, Gene Kerrigan
PEELER, Kevin McCarthy
LITTLE GIRL LOST, Brian McGilloway
THE COURIER, Ava McCarthy
PERIL, Ruby Barnes
ANOTHER LIFE, John J. Gaynard
ORCHID BLUE, Eoin McNamee

  By the way, I’ve also started a discussion group on Amazon, specialising in Irish Crime and Mystery Novels - if you’re a writer who fancies adding your own title(s) to the list, clickety-click here …
  Finally, my own Kindle adventures continue, as the publication of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE as an ebook has given rise to a number of readers’ reviews on Amazon, but also reviews elsewhere. Over at Not New For Long, Seana Graham was kind enough to say the following:

“Emulating a master like Chandler is a risky thing and you not only have to have guts, you’ve got to have a gift. And Burke’s got it. Everyone’s going to have their favourite line or ten by the time they get through with this one.”

  Meanwhile, Glenna at Various Random Thoughts had this to say:

“Declan Burke nails it, with a sense of humour to boot. EIGHTBALL BOOGIE is dark, edgy, fast paced and funny with a protagonist that isn’t perfect, but will do anything he has to do to do what needs to be done.”

  I thank you kindly, ladies. Your reward will be in heaven, if not before.

It’s Not Quite Dead Yet

I don’t know about you, but I like good books. I’m not too demanding: a gripping story, fascinating characters and an inventive use of language are generally enough to make me happy. Like, say, Adrian McKinty’s debut, DEAD I WELL MAY BE, which at the time I read it seemed not entirely unlike a Bourne novel rewritten by Cormac McCarthy.
  The folks at National Public Radio seem to like it too, given that the novel has been chosen as one of its ‘Killer Thrillers’ - “the 100 most pulse-quickening, suspenseful novels ever written”, according to the NPR.
  Marvellous news for McKinty, and for Tana French and Ken Bruen, both of whom are also flying the Irish flag. Or so you’d think. Quoth McKinty over at his interweb lair:

“Somehow DEAD I MAY WELL BE has been long listed as one of National Public Radio’s ‘Killer Thrillers’. I say somehow because unlike every other book on the list DEAD I WELL MAY BE isn’t even in print anymore.”

  Now, between you and me, the fact that DEAD I WELL MAY BE went out of print isn’t just a disgrace, it’s something of a metaphor for how rotten is the state of Denmark, if we can in turn accept ‘Denmark’ as a metaphor for ‘the publishing industry’. In fact, so disgraceful is it that I can’t muster the requisite anger and indignation - it’s kind of bone-crushingly depressing, to be honest. I can rant and rave about the fact that I can’t get published, and people are perfectly entitled to say, ‘Listen, mate, you’re actually not very good - get over yourself.’ They can’t say that to McKinty, because the man is a brilliant writer, and has the critical kudos and awards to back him up.
  What to do? Well, you can vote for DIWMB over at the NPR site here - the poll closes on August 2nd. And once you’ve done that, you can hoppity-skip-jump over here, because it appears the good folk who decide such things are reprinting DEAD I WELL MAY BE. And not a moment too soon, even if it is (or appears to be) a POD edition.
  God bless your cotton socks, NPR.

The Simple Art Of Murder One, Deceased

Bad news and good news, folks. Twenty Major gets in touch to let us know that Murder One, helmed by the legendary Maxim Jabukowski (right), is closing down, which is little short of a disaster, in terms of what it suggests for the immediate future of publishing, and particularly crime writing. Like, if London can’t even sustain one outlet offering the simple art of specialized books, what chance does anyone who isn’t a chainstore-friendly marquee name have of making any kind of splash?
  Hmmmm, he murmured, clenching his mental buttocks, it’s going to be a tough couple of years.
  On the plus side, Ken Bruen has blurbed Adrian McKinty’s forthcoming opus according to the 11th Commandment, or ‘Thou shalt not damn with faint praise’. To wit:

“Adrian McKinty has been blowing us out of the mystery water for quite some time now. THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD—superb, DEAD I WELL MAY BE, phew-oh, but he has totally taken over the whole field with FIFTY GRAND. Think Don Winslow’s masterly POWER OF THE DOG combined with José Latour and the sheer narrative drive of Joe Lansdale and you'll have some idea of this amazing novel. It has riveting mystery, politics of just about every shade, thrills on almost every page and the most compelling heroine in a Havana female detective named Mercado. I've rarely read a novel that had it all—human and drug trafficking, Hollywood excesses, illegals, ferocious vengeance—but what I found most compulsive was the wondrous compassion of the book. It moved me in ways I never anticipated. This is going to be the BIG BOOK of 2009.”—Ken Bruen, author of THE GUARDS

  Lovely, lovely, lovely. As I’ve said elsewhere in these pages, and on numerous occasions, McKinty’s a superb writer, in the top rank of his generation. I read FIFTY GRAND last April and thought it was his best novel since DEAD I WELL MAY BE, which was so good that I did what I almost never do and pulled the old Holden Caulfield bit and contacted McKinty and told him it was brilliant. Which it is.
  Anyway, if FIFTY GRAND doesn’t go gangbusters for McKinty this year, I’m buying a fedora so I can throw my hat at it. Because if writers like Adrian McKinty can’t make the whole writing thing work, even in the kind of climate that has Murder One closing down, then there’s something seriously and perversely wrong with the industry, and I don’t have a whole lot of interest in making it according to its warped values. Peace, out.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD by Adrian McKinty

The concluding part of Adrian McKinty’s ‘Dead’ trilogy – following on from DEAD I WELL MAY BE (2003) and THE DEAD YARD (2006) – finds his series protagonist, the Belfast-born Michael Forsythe, back in Ireland for the first time since he left Ireland in 1991. In the first novel, a betrayed Forsythe destroyed the Bronx-based gang of Darkey White in a succession of revenge killings; in the second, while hiding out on a FBI witness protection programme, he infiltrated a U.S.-based crew of rogue Republican paramilitaries with the same net result.
  Compelling thrillers written in a hard-bitten, muscular style, the novels are given an unconventional twist by virtue of Forsythe’s unusually perceptive insights. A seemingly indestructible former British soldier, the complex and well-read character is as likely to quote Euripides, Melville or James Joyce as he is to cold-bloodedly garrotte anyone who gets in his way. A borderline sociopath, he is a fascinating blend of Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne and Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley.
  In THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD, Forsythe responds to a call from Bridget, his ex-lover and the former girlfriend of Darkey White, who requests his presence in Belfast to help her find her abducted daughter. Arriving in Dublin on June 16 – Bloomsday, honouring the hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses – Michael has 24 hours to find Bridget’s daughter and thus cancel his debt of blood or face the fatal consequences.
  McKinty is a rare writer, one who can combine the often limiting staccato rhythms of crime fiction with a lyrical flair for language. Forsythe is brusque and blunt in his public exchanges, lethal when trapped in a tight spot (of which there are many in this furiously paced tale, which loosely follows the path laid down by both Leopold Bloom and Odysseus), and yet he is possessed of a poet’s soul during his frequent interior monologues. The violence is etched into the page, as if stamped there by the force of its authenticity, but McKinty never forgets that his first priority is to entertain, and he leavens the bleakness with flashes of mordant humour.
  It’s not a perfect novel by any means. McKinty, born and raised in Northern Ireland but living the U.S. for over a decade, has Forsythe rediscovering post-Celtic Tiger Dublin through an exile’s eyes, but even so there are minor omissions and distracting details. It’s possible, for example, that a young Trinity student from Kerry might refer to her mobile phone as ‘my cell’, but it’s unlikely nonetheless. And while there is no faulting the author’s ambition in his attempt to splice the post-Troubles Irish crime novel to the great literary text of the 20th century, the reader travels more in hope than anticipation that he will succeed.
  That he fails in this regard is perhaps inevitable but there is no denying that even in his failure McKinty has made an strong contribution to the fertile ground that lies between populist genre writing and esoteric literary fiction. Indeed, in the very last line, with his downbeat, tongue-in-cheek homage to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, it becomes clear that McKinty is self-deprecatingly aware of both the necessity and the impossibility of aspiring to emulate the very best a novel can be: Her throat was hoarse from crying and she couldn’t speak, but her head bobbed the affirmative, and finally, in that husky, tired New York whisper, she said simply: “Yes.” – Declan Burke

This review first appeared in the Sunday Business Post

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD by Adrian McKinty

The concluding part of Adrian McKinty’s ‘Dead’ trilogy, following on from DEAD I WELL MAY BE and THE DEAD YARD, THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD finds the seemingly indestructible Michael Forsythe back on home ground in Ireland for the first time since he left Belfast in 1991. It’s not what you might call a happy homecoming, however; the daughter of his former lover, the flame-haired Bridget, has gone missing in Belfast, and Bridget needs Michael to help track her down. Among the many snags in this scenario is that Michael has spent the last decade living in an FBI witness protection programme designed to keep him off Bridget’s radar, given that his final revenge killing was that of her husband-to-be and Bridget has since assumed control of a criminal empire. Arriving into Dublin on June 16 – Bloomsday, honouring the hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses – Michael has 24 hours to find Bridget’s daughter and thus cancel out his debt of blood, or face the fatal consequences. McKinty is a rare writer, one who can combine the conventionally muscular prose of crime fiction with a lyrical flair for language, and the blend is a compelling one. Forsythe is himself a fascinating character, brusque and blunt in his public exchanges, lethal when trapped in a tight spot (of which there are many in this furiously-plotted tale, which loosely follows the path laid down by both Leopold Bloom and Odysseus), yet possessed of a poet’s soul during his interior monologues. The violence is graphically etched into the page, as if stamped there by the force of its authenticity, but McKinty never forgets that his first priority is to entertain, leavening the bleakness with flashes of mordant humour. If there’s a disappointment it’s that this is being touted as the final Forsythe novel, and one hopes otherwise; but if THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD is the last we’ll see of this Irish rogue cannon, then the pathos-drenched finale is fittingly poignant. – Declan Burke

This review is republished by kind permission of Euro Crime

Brought To Book: Michael Haskins on Dead I Well May Be

"DEAD I WELL MAY BE is the first in Adrian McKinty’s trilogy about transplanted Irishman Michael Forsythe. To escape the Troubles in Belfast, Forsythe finds his way to New York City and its surrounding boroughs. Still young in years, but old in life’s hard experiences, Forsythe finds survival in the Irish underworld of New York not much different from life in Belfast. McKinty’s raw and gritty writing captures the seediness of New York’s ghetto streets and the struggling mixture of diverse people as well as any writer has done today. Forsythe’s youthful plunge into love as a safe haven from the weariness of daily survival is so well written that the surprise ending sneaks up without warning. Along the way, Forsythe cultivates a credo for himself based on loyalty to friends and love for a woman, so strong that his overcoming a series of excruciating experiences is believable; maybe because we would all like to think, under the same circumstances, we would be as faithful to our beliefs. McKinty’s take on what he sees and writes about in America brings a refreshing look at the backside of the country, because it avoids the high-tech tricks that are used today to move a story along. McKinty does this the old-fashioned way, by making us uncomfortable with what we know is the truth."

Michael Haskins’ CHASIN’ THE WIND will be published in spring 2008

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: Dead I Well May Be by Adrian McKinty

Take Parker. Put him in a Cormac McCarthy novel and give him a sense of humour. Okay, now you have the basics of Michael Forsythe, a young Belfast lad knocking around the lower levels of an Irish mob in New York during the early ’90s. Cynical, smart, funny, ambitious and ruthless, Michael has what it takes to rise to the top, although it’s that kind of charisma that finds him taking liberties with the girlfriend of the boss and sent on a drug deal to Mexico, there to be double-crossed, framed and left for dead. Sketched out like that, Dead I Well May Be sounds like a throwback / homage to the B-movie noirs of the ’40s and ’50s, but what makes it one of the most invigorating novels of the last decade is Michael’s distinctive voice as he effortlessly blends poetry, Greek philosophy, quantum physics, social observation, pop music lyrics and a whole lot more in a deadpan delivery that is the narrative equivalent of a Lee Marvin stare. Beautifully detailed, grittily realistic and infused with an intoxicating sense of imminent apocalypse throughout, the first instalment in the ‘Dead’ trilogy (The Dead Yard and The Bloomsday Dead complete the triptych) is the kind of novel to restore your faith in the power of storytelling. Because McKinty doesn’t just tell a great story, which is a skill in itself; he’s a great storyteller, and that’s a rare gift. - Declan Burke