Through A Glass, Brightly

I am a fan and a friend of Adrian McKinty, maybe even in that order, so I’m delighted be able to say that his award-winning novel FALLING GLASS will finally be published in the U.S. next week. Waaaaay back in June of 2011, I had this to say about said tome:

McKinty is a very fine writer, as many have pointed out before (he is currently on the longlist for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year for his previous offering, FIFTY GRAND), and he invests his hardboiled prose with a muscular poetry that lends itself to deliciously black humour (Chapter Six opens with the memorable line, “The place stank of dead Mexicans and no one was even dead yet.”). All of which would have made for an excellent crime novel, and the Pavee’s nomadic lifestyle provides a neat backdrop for Killian’s peripatetic wanderings; but as always with McKinty, there’s more: his novels are as much novels of ideas as they are page-turning thrillers, and here he provides a rare insight into the world of the Pavee, its traditions, mythologies and language.

  There’s a lot more in that vein, you won’t be at all surprised to learn, around about here. But for a more up-to-date take on FALLING GLASS, try next week’s Booklist review, the gist of which runs thusly:

“The mystical and marginalized Pavee subculture is molded brilliantly by McKinty into the perfect pivot for a novel exploring the concept of honour outside the law. A sure bet for Lee Child’s crew, but there’s also a scratchy whisper in McKinty’s voice calling to George Pelecanos’ fans.” — Christine Tran, Booklist

  So there you have it. Lee Child meets George Pelecanos. What are you waiting for?

Through Falling Glass, Darkly

It’s a personal thing, but reading an Adrian McKinty novel depresses the hell out of me these days. The latest offering, which I’m getting to a little late, is FALLING GLASS, which I read on holidays a couple of weeks ago. It’s a story about Killian, an enforcer and debt collector who takes on a well-paying job to find Rachel, the former wife of a wealthy Northern Ireland businessman, who has absconded with his two children. Naturally, things do not go swimmingly for Killian, in part because the woman has very good reasons for going on the run, but also because another man, a Russian veteran of the Chechen conflict, is also tracking her down. What gives the novel its heft, and sets it apart from a conventional chase-and-shoot narrative, is the fact that Killian is of Pavee origin, Pavees being an indigenous Irish minority also known as tinkers, itinerants and Travellers. They are not, Killian tells us, gypsies; the Pavee are a branch of the European Roma, and a people whose roots are buried deep in Irish history, despite their nomadic way of life.
  McKinty is a very fine writer, as many have pointed out before (he is currently on the longlist for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year for his previous offering, FIFTY GRAND), and he invests his hardboiled prose with a muscular poetry that lends itself to deliciously black humour (Chapter Six opens with the memorable line, “The place stank of dead Mexicans and no one was even dead yet.” (pg 91)). All of which would have made for an excellent crime novel, and the Pavee’s nomadic lifestyle provides a neat backdrop for Killian’s peripatetic wanderings; but as always with McKinty, there’s more: his novels are as much novels of ideas as they are page-turning thrillers, and here he provides a rare insight into the world of the Pavee, its traditions, mythologies and language. Moreover, Killian is a man striving to settle down, to leave behind both the wanderings of the Pavee and the world of crime. To this end he is currently studying at an Ulster university, studying architecture to be precise, a perverse choice for a man who was reared on the promise of the open road:

This is why we shrink from people. We Pavee. Why we don’t want their talk. Their hypocrisy and lies. We don’t want them breathing near us. Humans were never meant to be this close to one another. We weren’t meant to be in buildings. Architecture is based on a gigantic lie. Cities. We huddle for security, closer and closer until, like now, we are on top of one another. Stuck in these glass and steel and brick structures with all these other confused, unhappy people. (pg 206)

  Neatly juxtaposing Killian’s pursuit of Rachel with his internal journey towards some kind of rapprochement between his conflicting instincts, building tension all the while, FALLING GLASS is easily one of the finest novels of the year to date. That in itself is depressing, because as a writer, reading a great novel always serves to remind you of how far you have to travel yourself; but what’s truly depressing is that McKinty, despite being something of a byword for quality and class among a select group of aficionados, is nowhere as well known as most of his peers on the Theakston’s list, for example. I’ve long maintained that the fact that McKinty isn’t as recognisable a name, nor as bestselling, as the likes of Lee Child, Val McDermid or Mark Billingham, say, is proof positive that the current model of publishing is a joke, and not a particularly funny one.
  All of which aside, and taking it on its own merits, FALLING GLASS is a superb crime novel with a fascinating backdrop, the kind of page-turner that makes you want to stay your hand even as it reaches to turn the page. It should be Adrian McKinty’s break-out novel; but then, all of his novels should have been break-out novels. It’s a variation on the theme of no good deed goes unpunished, certainly, but exactly what is it about a body of work of consistent excellence that deserves the cold shoulder from the reading world at large?

Nobody Move, This Is A Handful Of Reviews

A busy old weekend on the reviewing front, folks, with sundry big-ups popping into ye olde inbox. To wit:

“Adrian McKinty’s wonderful Dead Trilogy confirmed him as a master of modern noir, up there with Dennis Lehane and James Ellroy … 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 … 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.” – John O’Connell, The Guardian

“Clearly influenced by Child and Joseph Finder, Black drives his hero into the tightest spots with a force and energy that jump off the page. He still has a little to learn when it comes to depth of character and pacing, but that won’t take long. Lock is clearly going to be around for a long time. With a spine-tingling finale that reminded me of Die Hard, this is a writer, and a hero, to watch.” – Geoffrey Wansell, Daily Mail

“I for one am a big fan of the police procedural as a genre, and [Rob] Kitchin gives us an excellent version [in THE RULE BOOK], emphasizing not the lurid crimes committed by the serial killer but the sometimes plodding pursuit of the killer in the detectives' meticulous methodology … Kitchin’s skill in maintaining that pace as well as the naturalism of the characters and setting is quite impressive in a first novel.” – Glenn Harper, International Noir

“Neville is the kind of fierce new voice that the thriller genre cries out for. His prose is sharp and deadly, his characters never less than complex. And for all THE TWELVE could easily have been a simple drama of revenge, a kind of Death Wish with an Irish accent, it feels somehow deeper and any answers you think have been offered are tempered with further questions. This is a thinking man’s thriller, as philosophical as it is visceral, and a novel I urge you to out and read.” – Russel McLean, Crime Scene Scotland

“THE TWELVE is a tough, uncompromising thriller, technically very well paced and solidly constructed in the best, tragic, noir fiction tradition, though possibly not one for the faint-hearted.” – Mike Ripley, Euro Crime

“Ruth Dudley Edwards, a fundraiser for the families, gives an insider’s account of the campaign, starting with the harrowing details of the blast. First responders tell of the difficulties of identifying headless bodies and of limbs lying in the street amid the debris. Blood ran from the doors of buses pressed into service as ambulances — the injured screaming at every speed bump on the way to the hospital. She hints at the drinking, the marriage break-ups and the suicide attempts that were the ripple effect of the atrocity. The victims squabble and at times come close to buckling under the strain as they move forward towards a court showdown that most experts predicted they would lose.” – Liam Clarke, The Sunday Times

A Bloom By Any Other Name

Further to Adrian McKinty getting lumps kicked out of his latest novel, FIFTY GRAND, in the Irish Times this week, and in the interest of balance, we present a little nugget that slipped through the net from last month, in which Fintan O’Toole gits jiggy with James Joyce’s ULYSSES in – oh yes! – the Irish Times. To wit:

Is there a middle way between solemn worship on the one side and touristic antics on the other? How about thrillers? Anyone who can read a good thriller is half way towards being able to enjoy ULYSSES. Murder stories have a lot in common with Joyce’s masterpiece. They venture down the mean streets of the city. Their plots depend on a concentrated unfolding of time in which everything has to be carefully sequenced. Chance encounters acquire significance. The city, unknown at first, gradually yields up its hidden mysteries.
  This is why thriller writers have long been drawn to ULYSSES and also why thrillers can serve as excellent introductions to the book. Adrian McKinty’s recent hard-boiled, fast-paced THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD is as dark and violent as any thriller fan could demand, but it also serves as an intelligent homage to ULYSSES – not so much to its content as to Joyce’s way of telling a story …

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

The Revolution Will Be Televised, With Endorsements

Kudos yet again to the Irish Times for its Book of the Day review slot, although today’s offering was a terrible review of Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND. By which I mean, the reviewer didn’t like the novel, but the review itself was terrible. It kicks off like this:

SERIOUS CRIME fiction these days is a fickle gamble, especially for newer writers. Genre boundaries have become blurred. Crime thriller enthusiasts are perhaps among the hardest readers to impress because of their love for both the list of illustrious luminaries and equally because of the powerful abilities of this same elite to bring their main characters to life. It’s called character stamina …

  Leaving aside ‘character stamina’ (?), what’s all this about ‘crime thriller enthusiasts’? Do those who love chick lit not have a list of illustrious luminaries? What about sci-fi lovers – don’t they have their own geniuses? Do not those who prefer literary fiction, or poetry, love their luminaries for their ability to bring their characters to life?
  The review goes downhill from there, losing wheels at a rate of knots. This bit stands out, though:

Some of Hollywood’s hottest names pop up in the storyline, including Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Matthew Broderick. Seeing their names made me increasingly uncomfortable as to how they might feel about being associated with the image of the resort’s labour conditions, bent sheriff and sleazy drug dealers.

  Happily, the reviewer was in no way uncomfortable with trashing a brilliant writer’s novel on the basis that he, the reviewer, preferred the works of Jeffrey Deaver and David Baldacci.
  Seriously, some days you’d wonder why you bother your hole.
  And then, just when you think the day can’t get any worse, the ever-fragrant Sarah Weinman pops up with the worst cover (see above) in the history of publishing.
  It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better, people …

Two Tales, One City

Work commitments – not to mention an irrational phobia of bowler hats – will keep me away from Belfast next Wednesday evening, although maybe that’s just as well, given that there’d be something of a conflict of interest were I to wander north. For lo! There’s not one but two quality book launches happening that evening in Belfast, the first for AFTERMATH, Ruth ‘Cuddly’ Dudley Edwards’ new tome about the Omagh bombing. Quoth the blurb elves:

The Omagh bomb was the worst massacre in Northern Ireland’s modern history - yet from it came a most extraordinary tale of human resilience, as families of murdered people channelled their grief into action. As the bombers congratulated themselves on escaping justice, the families determined on a civil case against them and their organisation. No one had ever done this before. It was a very domestic atrocity. In Omagh, on Saturday, 15 August, 1998, a massive bomb placed by the so-called Real IRA murdered unborn twins, five men, fourteen women and nine children, of whom two were Spanish and one English: the dead included Protestants, Catholics and a Mormon. Although the police believed they knew the identities of the killers, there was insufficient evidence to bring charges. Taking as their motto ‘For evil to triumph, all that is necessary is for good men to do nothing’, families of ten of the dead decided to pursue these men through the civil courts, where the burden of proof is lower. This is the remarkable account of how these families - who had no knowledge of the law and no money, and included a cleaner, a mechanic and a bookie - became internationally recognised, formidable campaigners and surmounted countless daunting obstacles to win a famous victory. How these mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers turned themselves into the scourge of the Real IRA is not just an astonishing story in itself. It is also a universal story of David challenging Goliath, as well as an inspiration to ordinary people anywhere devastated by terrorism.

  The launch for AFTERMATH takes place at the Bookshop at Queen’s University on Wednesday 8th, with the gig kicking off at 5.30pm and featuring Michael Gallagher, Brett Lockhart QC and Jason McCue as speakers.
  Meanwhile, over at No Alibis on Botanic Avenue, Adrian McKinty (right) will be doing a reading from FIFTY GRAND, to mark the UK publication of said opus, that event kicking off at 6pm. I’ve pretty much run out of superlatives to describe FIFTY GRAND, so suffice to say that if you scroll down a smidgeroo, you can avail of the opportunity to win a signed copy of this very, very fine novel.
  Happily, Belfast is a pretty compact city, and those of you dedicated to the cause can scoot along to Queen’s for the AFTERMATH launch, and then nip around the corner to Botanic Avenue for the McKinty jamboree. If you time it right, you might even get to skip the boring bit (McKinty reading) and cut straight to the entertainment (McKinty trying to juke out of paying his round for the rest of the evening). Bon chance, mes amis …

I’d Love To Set A Thriller On The Moon, But …

Atmosphere or no, it’s amazing there aren’t more thrillers set on the moon*. Exotic locations are growing more and more popular with the crime fic fraternity, to the point where it can be argued – I think some po-faced critic did so recently, actually – that the novels are becoming as much travelogues as they are thrillers. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – I discovered Paul Johnston, for example, because he set the first Alex Mavros novel on a Greek island – but there can be times when writers overstep the mark and wallow in exotica to the exclusion of formerly vital components of the crime novel, such as tension and dead bodies.
  Anyway, kudos are due yet again to the Irish Times for their ongoing support for crime fiction, which this weekend manifested itself as a double-page spread feature on exotic locations for crime fic novels. To wit:

“BAD THINGS happen in beautiful places,” the doyenne of British crime fiction, PD James, recently observed. She’s so right. When we’re sunning ourselves on some idyllic beach or downing grilled prawns and dry white wine in some sheltered harbour, we like nothing better than a good murder – fictional, of course – to keep us entertained. A strong sense of place is one of the most attractive elements of a top-notch crime novel, and it needn’t be a remote wilderness place, either; it can be a pulsating city neighbourhood, or even a single apartment building. Arminta Wallace suggests some striking locations for a spot of summer sleuthing.

  The locations Wallace picked are Louisiana, Yorkshire, Venice, Boston, Bangkok, Donegal, Alaska, Shanghai, Botswana, Reykjavik, Washington DC, Sicily, London, Breslau, Dublin, Paris, New York, Edinburgh, Seville, Istanbul, Los Angeles, Nairobi, Maine, Sweden and Norfolk, although I’m sure Peter Rozovsky could suggest a few more. I’m thinking, off the top of my head, Tibet, Egypt, Australia, Greece and Brazil …
  And in the week that’s in it, given that it’s getting its UK publication, how the hell could they miss out on Cuba and Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND?
  Quibbles apart, it’s a fine piece. Clickety-click here for all the details …

* Funnily enough, Duncan Jones – aka Zowie Bowie – has just directed Sam Rockwell in Moon, a Phil Dick-style existential thriller of paranoia, cloning and double-cross set on the moon, which is due out in Ireland on July 17, and comes warmly recommended by your genial host. Oh, and expect to see every newspaper feature dealing with Moon titled ‘Space Oddity’.

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books

We’re celebrating the UK publication of Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND today, folks, and while it feels kind of odd to be giving away signed copies of a book that will be worth a small fortune in years to come, I already have a signed first edition, so I can afford to be generous. What’s rare is wonderful, right? First, the blurb elves:

Cuban cop Mercado has a score to settle, on behalf of a deadbeat dad, a ‘traitor’ who skipped free from Castro’s control to set up a new life working illegally in Colorado. He settled in a ski resort popular with the Hollywood set, where the facade is maintained by the immigrant cleaners and labourers who work for below minimum wage while the local sheriff is bribed to turn a blind eye. Hernandez Sr’s dreams of fortune and freedom came to a swift end when he was killed in a hit-and-run accident. Sworn to avenge his death, Mercado has some obstacles to overcome - not least getting out of Cuba, where visas are as elusive as constant electricity. Segueing back and forth between heat-soaked Havana and the icy luxury of the mountainside resort, FIFTY GRAND is an audacious thriller from an acknowledged talent - and an incendiary debut for a new hero.

  Nice. To be in with a chance of winning a copy signed by the fair hand of the maestro himself, just answer the following question.

Is ‘Adrian McKinty’ almost an anagram for:
(a) Kinky Hadrian;
(b) Drincky Nadir;
(c) Dinky Radical;
(d) Where, Exactly, is the Dignity in All of This?

  Answers via the comment box please, leaving a contact email address (using (at) rather than @ to confuse the spam-munchkins) before noon on Tuesday, July 7th. Et bon chance, mes amis …

Norn Iron In The Soul

It’s all happening north of the border this week, folks. Yesterday was a big day for Stuart Neville (right), with his debut novel THE TWELVE officially hitting the shelves, although you wouldn’t know it from his interweb malarkeybus, where he’s virtually yawning with ennui … And this despite the fact that Publishers Weekly named THE TWELVE one of its top Fall debuts. Personally, I fell out with PW after I got a dodgy review there, although I never quite made it to the level of wishing cancer on the reviewer, or posting his / her phone numbers and email addresses. Which suggests that I don’t care about my books enough, or at least as much as Alice Hoffman and Alain De Botton do. Maybe I should take up another hobby … Anyway, back to Stuart – he’s currently hosting a competition giving away free copies of THE TWELVE, so get your small but perfectly formed ass over here post-haste …
  Elsewhere in Norn Iron, the tall but perfectly formed ass – oops, sorry – tall but perfectly formed Garbhan Downey launches his latest novel tomorrow, Saturday, at 1pm in Easons in Derry. (You’ll note in passing that I write ‘Derry’ as opposed to ‘Londonderry’, which immediately marks me down as a rampant Taig and / or Croppy who refuses to lie down, or just someone who’s too bloody lazy to write ‘Londonderry’ when you can get away with ‘Derry’). WAR OF THE BLUE ROSES is published by the Guildhall Press, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

WAR OF THE BLUE ROSES is a rollicking black comedy set in the world of gardening and international politics. A US sponsored gardening competition in the little country village of Mountrose ends up throwing three governments into turmoil when it sparks a worldwide race to grow the world’s first blue rose. The Irish premier is forced to team up with semi-reformed gangsters to stop British and American politicians shanghaiing the Mountrose Prize and walking off with a billion-dollar patent. Bugging, burglary, sabotage, murder and sexual deceit – it’s all part of the rose-growing business. And the bad guys are even worse …

  Nice. Finally, a little bird tells us that Adrian McKinty is appearing at Belfast’s No Alibis next Wednesday at 6pm to celebrate the launch of the rather terrific FIFTY GRAND, of which CAP is currently giving away two signed copies. I’d love to make it up there for the festivities, but I’m not sure it’ll happen … which is a shame, because I’d imagine it’ll be a very nice turn-out indeed. Plus, the chap is flying in all the way from Oz just to do a reading. Plus, it’s his round since the last time he was home. Plus, his sister owns a pub. You can see where I’m going with this … Oh, and did I mention that FIFTY GRAND is a dynamite novel? I did? Well, I’m telling you again …

A GONZO NOIR: In Which The Log-Rolling Dilemma Rears Its Ugly Log

As all three regular readers of CAP will be aware, my latest opus – BAD FOR GOOD: A GONZO NOIR – is being sent out to publishers for the by-now traditional mass rejection. Notwithstanding the fact that it may never be published, I’ve already started asking other writers for blurbs, which is a necessary evil in this day and age. As all three regular readers of CAP – one of whom, I’m reliably informed, is Adrian McKinty (right, currently topping the ‘Who is the Sexiest Irish Crime Writer?’ poll) – will also be aware, I think Adrian McKinty is a terrific writer. I got in touch with him after reading DEAD I WELL MAY BE, which is as good a novel of any stripe as I’ve ever read, and we’ve stayed in touch since. As well as being a top writer, he’s a good bloke, and at this stage he’s a mate.
  In saying all that, I asked him to read BFGAGN as part of my ongoing bid for world domination because he’s one of my favourite writers – his latest, FIFTY GRAND, is in my not-entirely-humble opinion one of the best novels published to date this year. Anyway, the point of telling you all that is that you may or may not want to take what he says about BFGAGN below with a Siberian mine-sized pinch of salt. To wit:

“What happens when the voices in a writer’s head come to life? In Declan Burke’s funny and intelligent A GONZO NOIR we find out. Burke has written a deep, lyrical and moving crime novel about the difficulty of writing a crime novel. Dangerous fictional creations and real people and fictionalised real people battle for a writer’s soul in an intoxicating and exciting novel of which the master himself, Flann O’Brien, would be proud.” – Adrian McKinty, author of FIFTY GRAND.

  I’m not questioning the man’s integrity, you understand. I’m just saying, it’s best to be up-front and honest about these things. It’s a small matter of principle …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: FIFTY GRAND by Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND is officially on sale today, and if that’s not enough to send you into dizzy paroxysms of delight, then it suggests you haven’t encountered Adrian McKinty’s unique stylings before. It also means you’re in for a rare treat when you do read FIFTY GRAND, because it’s a terrific novel from a writer who isn’t just a superb wordsmith, he’s a man with important things to say about this world of ours. Trust me on this: FIFTY GRAND is already one of the Top Five Crime Novels of 2009. Peace, out.

Taking its title from a Hemingway short story, Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND opens in Cuba before moving on, via Mexico, to Colorado, as a Cuban cop, Hernandez, goes illegally undercover in the US to investigate her father’s death. The Hemingway homage is a brave one, inviting ridicule and accusations of hubris, but McKinty has long been purveying a blend of muscular lyricism in which collide the brutalities of the crime novel and a knowing, self-effacing literary style.
  His sixth novel for adults (he also writes the ‘Lighthouse’ series for children), FIFTY GRAND offers a challenging conceit, which is to put the tough, spare rhythms associated with classic hard-boiled novels (think Hemingway himself, James Ellroy, James Cain) into the mind of a first-person female protagonist. The result is an incendiary, adrenalin-fuelled thriller, but one that also functions as a blackly hilarious social satire of the skewed values of pre-Obama America, as Hernandez, in the role of exploited illegal immigrant, infiltrates the glitzy world of Colorado’s ski-resort set, cleaning up the mess left behind by Hollywood‘s jet-set.
  Most successful of all, however, is McKinty’s ability to slip inside Hernandez’s skin. The undercover Hernandez is thrown back on her own resources as she investigates her father’s death and brings those responsible to a very particular kind of justice, without recourse to conventional resources. As vulnerable as she is tough, as scared as she is determined, as fragile as she is lethal, she makes for a highly unusual, creepily authentic and utterly compelling anti-heroine.

  This review was first published in the Sunday Independent

Big Mcs: Super-Sized

All three regular readers of CAP will know that I think Adrian McKinty is a terrific writer, and that his latest, FIFTY GRAND, is probably his finest. Publishers Weekly is the latest to weigh in with a nice pre-pub review, with the gist running thusly:

“Irish crime writer McKinty delivers an intelligent novel of suspense about cultural identity … in trademark fashion, McKinty winds up his provocative tale with a violent and memorable final act.”

  The cover on the right, by the way, is the U.K. paperback. Tasty, no?
  Meanwhile, Ava McCarthy’s THE INSIDER continues to garner ye olde rave plaudits, with the latest coming courtesy of the Op-Ed pages of the Irish Times, no less. Quoth the Old Lady:

“This a storming debut thriller with a central character who is a clear-eyed, non-sentimental soul sister of Val McDermid’s Kate Brannigan or Sara Paretsky’s VI Warshawski. In Harry Martinez, the writer has a strong, attractive and super-smart central character who is ripe for another adventure.”

  McDermid and Paretsky? Very nice, ma’am. Very nice indeed …

The Best Things In Life Are Free … Books

Adrian McKinty is giving away signed copies of his forthcoming opus, FIFTY GRAND, which I’m pleased to say is a terrific novel, arguably his best, and a book you’ll be hearing a lot about in the coming year. If there’s any justice in this world, it’ll win prizes galore and they’ll need aircraft carriers to keep up with the demand. That’s a big ‘if’, I know, and every writer needs a slice of luck and good timing, but someone once said that luck is opportunity meeting preparation, and McKinty’s done the preparation, and then some. I don’t often say this kind of thing, but trust me when I tell you that FIFTY GRAND is among the finest novels I’ve read in the last five years. Not that my opinion generally counts for sweet bugger-all in these here parts, but I think I’m right on this one. Only time, that notoriously doity rat-fink canary, will tell …

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.

The Great FIFTY GRAND Giveaway

Adrian McKinty (right) has an interesting little notion going over at his interweb malarkey in relation to his forthcoming opus FIFTY GRAND, to wit:

“All this week I’ll be working on the page proofs and when I’m done with them I’d like to give them away to a reader / collector. If someone could suggest how I do this in the form of a fair competition or draw, I would greatly appreciate it. The proofs might look a bit messy so I’m not a 100% sure anyone will be that interested, but if I get assassinated by Cuban Intelligence or a Scientology Clear then they might be worth a few quid.”

  Nice. Just one thing, squire - don’t come crying to us if the CI and SC wallahs hook up for one last gig to bring you down ...

Mi Casa, Su Casa – Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty (right) keeps on telling us that he’s not going to start blogging seriously until later this year – his latest post is entitled ‘A Portrait of the Artist with a Spray Can’ – because he doesn’t have the time right now. Happily, he does find the time to write the occasional piece for Crime Always Pays, the latest of which concerns itself with Jim Thompson’s hinterland of Oklahoma. To wit:

Oklahoma!

A terrific new voice in American noir, Victor Gischler, sets his novels in rural Oklahoma. Now, I don’t know Victor, but I like his books (one of his titles is SHOTGUN OPERA, which tells you a lot about the fellow’s panache) and I don’t know a lot about Oklahoma either, except that from about the age of 15 onwards I always wanted to go there.
  You probably think it was because of the musical. No. In fact the musical was a deterrent. When I was a kid, every Sunday afternoon my father used to play ‘Surrey With The Fringe on Top’ in waltz time on the piano. That’ll cure you of any love of Rodgers or Hammerstein or Howard Keel. When I’d think about Oklahoma! I’d get a feeling of existential dread.
  I read THE GRAPES OF WRATH around then too, which is about Okies heading west, but obviously I was too young to really get that book as I remember becoming turned on by the ending, something that’s not supposed to happen.
  Nah, it wasn’t Broadway and it wasn’t John Steinbeck; what had gotten me into Oklahoma was Jim Thompson (right). Like a lot of kids I’d done the progression from fantasy to science fiction to detective books to noir. But where Raymond Chandler wrote about the lives of the rich and famous, and Hammett gave us the stylish and the cool, Jim Thompson wrote about blue collar scuzzballs pulling scams on one another in hell-hole one horse towns all across west Texas and the Oklahoma panhandle.
  Jim Thompson’s sad sack characters were defeated before they even started the book. Their schemes were distinctly small time: ripping off a gas station here, or a drug store there for sums like twenty bucks or even a few quarters. These weren’t sly confidence men, or brilliant detectives or cool-under-pressure gumshoes, these were skeevy bums with three day old beards in patched clothes, who smelled bad. They were hobo criminals, low-lives, grifters.
  Grifters: I hadn’t heard the word before reading Jim Thompson’s novel of the same name but I quickly got the idea. If you’ve seen The Sting or even Stephen Frears’ movie version, you’ll have acquired an inflated notion of the grift. A grifter isn’t about the big con, the big gesture, the big score. He’s small time and he knows it. A grifter is self made. He was born poor, he has no skills, no family, no luck, but he (or quite often she) his two important talents: he’s just a little bit smarter than the average guy and he has absolutely no qualms about taking your money.
  Thompson’s grifters, thieves and sharks, sometimes became sociopaths, most famously in THE KILLER INSIDE ME, which I won’t spoil if you haven’t read, but let’s just say that the sheriff isn’t exactly Tommy Lee Jones in No Country For Old Men (and the fact that Thompson’s father was a disgraced Oklahoma county sheriff, gives the story an added frisson).
  Thompson’s books were exciting, edgy and cool and made me long for America. Right after I’d gotten off the boat - actually an Aer Lingus DC-10 - and started work as a ridiculously under-qualified bouncer in the Bronx (I’m 5’ 10” and back then about 158 pounds) I began planning my Oklahoma trip.
  Once I’d saved enough my wife and I drove out from New York.
  We pulled an all-day shift until we got to Tennessee and then spent some time in Cormac McCarthy’s (and Quentin Tarantino’s!) Knoxville. Then it was the usual Graceland, Beale Street tour before jumping the Big Muddy and heading straight for Anadarko, my Mecca of all things America.
  Anadarko wasn’t quite what I was expecting.
  There are few Native Americans in Jim Thompson’s books but Anadarko is a majority Indian town. It’s a rough place, with a lot of bars and a lot of drunks. I grew up in Victoria Estate in Carrickfergus which had more than it’s fair share of wife beaters, violent nutcases and alcoholics, but Anadarko might give Carrick a run for its money. Locals call it Dodge or Darko or The Bad. As a town Anadarko didn’t really know what to do with itself. It once had oil, but it didn’t have it anymore and what it did have seemed to be pubs, fast food restaurants and more pubs.
  I expect it’s changed a bit since I was there in the ’90s; it’s probably filled now with Apache and Kiowa heritage centres and the like. But back then you could see where Thompson was coming from.
  On our trip we discovered that the great American poet John Berryman was also from Anadarko. Inversing me, Berryman was obsessed by Ireland and came to Dublin looking for inspiration; unfortunately the inspiration didn’t stick and only a couple of years later he committed suicide by jumping off the Minneapolis Washington Avenue Bridge. Berryman once wrote a poem for my wife’s aunt Amy, Dream Song 113, which contains the line: “The body’s foul, cried god, once, twice, & bound it—for many years I hid it from him successfully—I’m not clear how he found it,” which sums up carnality in Thompson’s books pretty well. In Thompson’s world relations between men and women are complicated, distrustful, poisoned, and sex is grubby, hurried, desperate, yet somehow very, very important.
  Berryman’s stock has risen since his death, Thompson’s rose, fell, rose again and fell again. He’s probably better known through his screenplays (The Killing, Paths of Glory) and the movies made from his books – The Getaway, The Grifters, After Dark My Sweet, Coup de Torchon – but his best books are better than any of the films. You can read all of them in about two weeks, none are very long and some are distinctly more interesting than others. Memorable ones for me are SAVAGE NIGHT, POP. 1280, THE KILLER INSIDE ME and THE GRIFTERS.
  And if you’re going to make a pilgrimage to Anadarko, it’s an easy drive from Oklahoma City. Unless you’re going there in a surrey, when it might take a little longer. – Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND will be published by Holt later this year. Meanwhile, THE DEAD YARD gets the ‘wee review’ treatment from Gerard Brennan over at Crime Scene Northern Ireland

Mi Casa, Su Casa: Adrian McKinty

More good news and bad news, folks. The good news is that Adrian McKinty (right) has started a blog (which is currently hosting a rather interesting letter to the Joycean scholar who reviewed THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD in the Irish Times), with the bad news being that that means he very probably won’t be writing this kind of malarkey for Crime Always Pays anymore. Boo, etc. The other good news is that Ol’ Happy Chops won’t be doing very much with the blog until later this year, so we might still get some quality writing out of him yet. To wit:

Kerouac, L. Ron Hubbard and South Park: Denver Before Its Moment in the Sun

For four days next month the eyes of the world will turn to Denver, Colorado, where the Democratic Convention is being held. Sure it’s all going to be about speeches, balloons and scoring coke and hookers on Colfax Avenue, but what if you want to get deeper than that? What if you want to find out about the real Denver?
  I lived in the Mile High City for nine years so I know a bit about it. Modesty forbids me from mentioning my own Denver novels HIDDEN RIVER and FIFTY GRAND. Oh wait, I just did. Sorry.
  Jack Kerouac is Denver’s big name author. Kerouac came to town in pursuit of America, the open road and his man-crush, native Denverite, Neal Cassady. It was in Denver that Kerouac bought his first house, had his first serious tequila bender and began planning ON THE ROAD. Sniffing after Kerouac came William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, who spent many a fertile hour in the Colburn Hotel cooking mescaline, injecting bug spray and writing the occasional poem.
  Thomas Pynchon followed a little later, Denver cropping up in several places in his work, but most importantly in AGAINST THE DAY, in which we are transported back to the bawdy turn-of-the-century city where you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a gin joint, a prostitute or another lunatic swinging a cat. AGAINST THE DAY contains my favourite line in all of literature, a graffiti written on a Denver wall: “Roses is red/shit is brown/nothing but assholes/live in this town.”
  But surely the highlight of Denver’s literary legacy has to be its prominence in L. Ron Hubbard’s BATTLEFIELD EARTH. The first time I tried to read BATTLEFIELD EARTH it got thrown out of a train window, when I was 14, by me. Years later I read it again, because a girl asked me to do it for an article she was writing. The girl is now a rich and fairly well known TV historian and I’m a substitute teacher living in Melbourne, Australia. Let me summarize the book for you, so you don’t make my mistake.
  In 3000 AD, Earth is ruled by the Psychlos, nine-foot-tall sociopathic aliens. Humans are slaves called “man animals” who toil bare chested in open cast mines. The hero of the book is Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (yes, really) an escapee from Psychlo clutches who makes his way to the ruins of the Denver Public Library where he finds a copy of the US Constitution in a display case. Inspired perhaps by the commerce clause of this austere legal document Jonnie decides to lead a revolt against the alien overlords. After a few setbacks the revolt gathers momentum and then we only have about 900 pages to go. Interestingly, the Denver Public Library has no display cases containing the US Constitution and all five of its copies of BATTLEFIELD EARTH have been stolen. A Psychlo conspiracy perhaps?
  I haven’t seen the film version of BATTLEFIELD EARTH but by all accounts it’s up there with Swept Away, Gigli and other modern classics.
  If you’re an L. Ron Hubbard fan then allow me to suggest a field trip while you’re in town. Jump on I-70, drive west for a few hours and you’ll come to Tom Cruise’s house in Telluride, Colorado. Mr. Cruise welcomes visitors, especially if you’re carrying a copy of his and (potential McCain VP) Mitt Romney’s favourite novel. Seriously, just park right outside the big metal gates and start yelling “Tomcat! Tooomcaaat!” You’ll have lots of fun. Tom’s sister is in charge of security at the Cruise Lair and is famous for her sense of humour.
  Strangely, Denver is also home to those nemeses of Scientology - Matt Stone and Trey Parker, creators of South Park. The Denver suburb of South Park is near Evergreen where Parker went to high school but South Park itself is probably modelled on either Boulder, Co. where the boys attended college or Colorado Springs about forty minutes south which is the HQ of Focus on the Family and is reputedly the “most right-wing town in America.” Trey Parker’s childhood home can be found easily but leaving little brown gifts dressed as Santa on the front porch is a joke well past its sell by date.
  If the idea of making a Christmas Turd or being pepper-sprayed by Tom Cruise’s security guards doesn’t excite you, then head back to Denver and out on the I-76 to Fort Morgan, where Philip K. Dick rests forever opposite a sugar cane refinery in the grim Fort Morgan Municipal Cemetery. There are always a lot of interesting characters at Dick’s grave, many from Japan, Finland and that comic-book shop you always walk by but never go in. Get them talking about the nature of reality and whether Dick could be alive in a parallel universe and you’ll happily watch the morning pass by.
  Finally, let me mention David Icke’s book THE BIGGEST SECRET, in which the former BBC reporter and Green Party co-chair claims that “lizard aliens from Mars, through their allies, the Freemasons,” have been running the planet Earth from a secret bunker at the Denver International Airport. Once I lost my bag at DIA and had to go to a basement storage area to retrieve it. I see now that I was lucky to get out alive.
  To sum up: If you’ve never been to Denver before, don’t worry about it, for most people it’s that place they groggily drive through on the way to Vail. But take my advice and go. Even if the Democrats have left town you can still cheer for Obama, eat an Illegal Pete Famous Fish Fajita and put an offer on my house on Pennsylvania Street. Now that property prices have collapsed I’ll take anything: crayons, a box of old keys, interesting (or not) house plants. I might even consider a soiled copy of BATTLEFIELD EARTH. – Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND will be published by Holt later this year.

New Hope For The Dead

With his acclaimed ‘Dead’ trilogy now complete, where to now for one of crime fiction’s most thoughtful practitioners, Adrian McKinty? Eh? EH?

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for Michael Forsythe. Released in mass-market paperback in December, THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD (first published in March 2007; to be released in pback on June 12) sounded the death knell for Adrian McKinty’s ‘Dead’ trilogy, which began in 2003 with DEAD I WELL MAY BE.
  For the most part concerned with the indestructible Forsythe’s run-ins with the Irish mob in America, the trilogy offers an irresistible blend of the thriller genre’s traditional hi-octane action and quip-happy protagonist, albeit filtered through the mind of an unusually cerebral and literary-minded thug. Bloomsday, of course, is celebrated on June 16, the day on which James Joyce’s ULYSSES is set. THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD, which gently riffs on ULYSSES throughout, finds Michael Forsythe back on Irish soil for the first time in over a decade, with outstanding accounts due to be settled in blood.
  Born and raised in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, McKinty today lives in Colorado, married with a young family and writing very much in the American idiom.
  DB: Does it make any sense for Irish readers to claim you as an Irish crime writer?
  AMcK: “Yeah, that’s interesting isn’t it. My models were all American writers from the ’30s, Chandler, Hammett, James Cain, and later Jim Thompson, but the world I grew up in, Carrickfergus in the ’70s and ’80s, is so rich with incident and detail that I think every book I write has a bit of that in it. I remember the Hunger Strikes and [the] Enniskillen and Omagh [bombings] like they were yesterday, and the Ulster vernacular and black humour has fortunately dripped deep into my soul. Every time an editor asks me to remove the words craic, sheugh, shite and eggy, I know I’m still operating from an Irish standpoint.”
  DB: Why are Irish crime fiction writers starting to pop up now, all of a sudden?
  AMcK: “It’s the economy and the culture, I think. Crime fiction thrives in an urban environment and expanding economies. Greed, money, power, betrayal – these are all touchstones – some would say clichés – of the genre. Ireland was largely stagnant economically from 1945 to1990 and only in the last decade have we had all of these juicy tropes working so well.”
  Ken Bruen and John Connolly are long established as favourites with the American reading public, but both established their reputations by setting their novels in London and Maine, respectively. Adrian McKinty, despite setting his novels in the United States (with occasional jaunts to Central and South America), is one of a new breed of Irish crime writers (which he dubs, half-seriously, ‘the Celtic New Wave’) that includes Brian McGilloway, Gene Kerrigan, Tana French and Declan Hughes.
  DB: Did you have a sense of yourself as a pioneer when setting out to write DEAD I WELL MAY BE?
  AMcK: “No, Ken Bruen (right) was first. But I did think that Ireland was ready for this genre. Ireland punches above its weight in terms of literary culture and the fact that crime fiction was almost non-existent was a vacuum that needed to be filled. For years people thought of Ireland as a cross between ‘The Quiet Man’ and DUBLINERS. Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon etc. are geniuses, but they didn’t help give us a real picture of a country that is increasingly urban, diverse, young and exciting. Crime writers under forty are in touch with a culture and a society that the older generation, frankly, isn’t.”
  DB: Michael Forsythe, on the other hand, is a veritable treasure chest of pop-culture references, asides and in-jokes, and it seemed like he could keep going indefinitely. What was the thinking behind ending the ‘Dead’ series?
  AMcK: “I never wanted to do a series. It was 50/50 that I would kill Michael at the end of book one, and 60/40 that I would kill him at the end of book three. In fact, if the trilogy ever gets brought together in one volume, I think as an appendix I’ll give the alternative endings for books one and three. I don’t like characters that live in this world and somehow survive everything that’s thrown at them. Most of the hoods I grew up with in North Belfast are either in prison, on parole (i.e. retired) or dead. Fictional characters who take hit after hit in book after book and don’t have nervous breakdowns are hard to take, so Michael either had to die or I had to stop writing about him, or both.”
  DB: How did it feel to wave him goodbye?
  AMcK: “I was depressed. I knew I could do a couple more things with him. I lived in the East End of London for a year and I would have loved to have brought Michael into that environment. I even had a title picked out, ENGLAND, YOUR ENGLAND, which is a riff on that Orwell essay about nuns cycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist. But on reflection I knew I couldn’t sustain my interest in the concept for a whole book. So I suppose ultimately it was relief that I was done with him.”
  DB: Is that how the process starts, with a setting? Or is it a face, a name, an incident – what?
  AMcK: “With DEAD I WELL MAY BE, THE DEAD YARD and THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD, I wrote the last chapter first and worked backwards. I knew the place I wanted to end up and I just had to get there.”
  DB: THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD is the most overt example, but your novels are littered with literary references. How do you respond to the notion that the vast majority of crime fiction is deliberately, and unnecessarily, dumbed down?
  AMcK: “There’s no reason to dumb down anything, especially in Ireland, where people read a lot. I had an editor at Simon & Schuster who always said that we should write for the lowest common denominator, eliminating words and references that the ordinary Joe wouldn’t get. I’ve never understood that. If you miss a reference you generally just skip it and move on, or if you’re curious you look it up. If the LCD rule were true, no one would read Thomas Pynchon and he’s a bestseller.”
  DB: What are the best and worst aspects of writing crime fiction?
  AMcK: “The downside is that you usually always have to kill someone. I’d really like to do a crime book where no one dies. I used to play [the computer games] ‘Halo’ and ‘Doom’ and attempt to get through the levels just by running past the bad guys without killing anyone. It was fun. And I like that French movie ‘Pickpocket’, where no one dies, but it’s still a very tense and exciting movie. And the best aspect of crime writing? You get to kill people! It’s great.”
  DB: Everyone writes with an invisible presence peering over their shoulder at the page. Who’s looking over Adrian McKinty’s shoulder?
  AMcK: “I suppose it would be the Platonic ideal version of myself, a more hardworking, dedicated me urging me on.”
  DB: Who’s the one person, dead or alive, you’d like to ring up and say, “Man, I just read your new book and it’s a hell of a read”?
  AMcK: “There’s a lot. I’d love to call up Jim Thompson and say, “Jim, don’t listen to the critics, or your publishers, or your wife, you’re bloody brilliant.” I’d tell Scott Fitzgerald “Lay off the booze, mate. Fifty years from now all those bestseller types are going to be forgotten but you are going to be more famous than ever.” I just read a book about Cuba that blew my mind, by Reinaldo Arenas, but unfortunately he died of AIDS a few years ago, I would love to have met him. Still alive – if they’d take my call, I’d ring Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie and Ken Bruen.”
  DB: Is there any one book you can remember reading in your youth and thinking, “Yeah, I’d like to be a writer”? Or was it a more gradual process?
  “No, it was much more a gradual process, although Chandler and Hemmingway did get me very excited about the possibilities of fiction.”
  DB: Okay, then – pretend for one moment that you have to be another writer, and assume responsibility for his or her canon of work. Who would it be, and why?
  AMcK: “Cormac McCarthy (right) is such a bad ass. He’s followed his own rules, virtually invented his own genre and especially in his early Tennessee work he showed us a whole rich, complex world of Irish rednecks living in the mountains – people the rest of the US look at with contempt. I like his Texas stuff too, and although I wouldn’t want to appropriate his entire canon, if someday I could write a book half as good as BLOOD MERIDIAN I’d die a happy man. Last year he went on Oprah, which took the edge off his hipness for me, but I think I can blank that from my mind.”
  DB: You teach to earn a living, which – given that you have a young family – very probably involves huge sacrifice on your and their behalf. What are the moments when you feel that that sacrifice is worth it?
  AMcK: “Working for a living and hanging out with the kids when I get back home means that I basically have to write at night. It’s a drag but when I think of Faulkner shovelling coal in a power station or Henry Miller picking cigarette butts off the ground, I realise that I’ve actually got it pretty easy.”
  DB: Ever wonder what your kids will think if they ever read your books?
  AMcK: “Oh my God, the kids are barred from even looking at the covers for at least ten years. Torture, murder and violent death won’t be good for anyone’s sleep.”
  DB: Does a writer have any responsibility regarding the morality (or otherwise) of his or her characters?
  AMcK: “No. As Sam Goldywn said, if you want to send a message, get Western Union. Oscar Wilde demolished the idea that art has to be moral or uplifting. It doesn’t, it just has to be good. I’m much more offended by bad writing than by characters who do bad things. I’m also offended by poor fact-checking. THE DA VINCI CODE is a great example of both problems: ‘He entered Westminster Abbey, a church redolent with history including the marriage of Lady Diana and Prince Charles.’”
  DB: Picture the scenario: a publisher introduces a series in which contemporary writers rewrite the classics for a modern audience. What work would you choose, and why?
  AMcK: “Is Bond a classic? I’d love to do a Bond. I’d also love to do a Sherlock Holmes. It would be great to make Holmes a villain. I imagine him in the ’30s thinking, ‘That Oswald Mosley [notorious British Nazi sympathiser in the 1930s] is a jolly good chap.’ Could be hilarious.”
  DB: Finally, a word or two about the upcoming FIFTY GRAND. What’s the skinny?
  AMcK: FIFTY GRAND came about from an eye-opening visit to Cuba. I went there primarily to see some literary sights connected with Ernest Hemingway (right), Jose Marti and Garcia Lorca but I very quickly got sucked into the landscape and culture. The place really gets into your blood and I found that I couldn’t shake it, so I went back for a longer deeper visit. All island peoples are unique in their own way and coming from Ireland - which has a big neighbour right next door too - I think I appreciated Cuba’s problems without excusing the current regime who seemed to have screwed up the country in a spectacular way. Once I had the context and the geography, the story just flowed from there. I live in the mountains of Colorado so I thought it might be fun to take a Cuban cop and throw him way out of context ten thousand feet up in the snow.”

Adrian McKinty’s FIFTY GRAND will be published by Holt later this year.