Interview: Adrian McKinty

Jason Steger interviewed Adrian McKinty for the Sydney Morning Herald last week, most of the conversation centring on the Sean Duffy series of novels, of which GUN STREET GIRL (Serpent’s Tail) is the latest. Sample quote:

It was after Dead I May Well Be, his New York novel, came out in 2004 that McKinty first considered writing about Northern Ireland. He had originally pitched a cop show set in ‘70s Belfast along the lines of The Sweeney.
  “Seventies nostalgia with the added frisson of the Troubles in the background. They couldn’t have been more horrified. This guy said ‘we won’t be able to sell it in Northern Ireland, nobody wants to watch anything to do with the Troubles; we can never sell it across the water in England – they just want to forget it ever happened. And as for selling it to the US, that’s a joke; they have a very nostalgic view of what Ireland is’.”
  Although there had been novels about Belfast and the Troubles – Brian Moore’s Lies of Silence and Glenn Patterson’s The International, for example – everyone he asked told him the same thing: don’t touch the Troubles. And he took the message on board for years. But a few years back he had his epiphany – the thing that no one wants you to write about is exactly what he should be writing.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Launch: BELFAST NOIR, ed. Stuart Neville and Adrian McKinty

BELFAST NOIR (Akashic Books), edited by Stuart Neville and Adrian McKinty, will be launched at the Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast, on November 22nd. To wit:

An event for crime fiction fans guys, one that is certainly not to be missed!

No Alibis Bookstore invite you to the Crescent Arts Centre on Saturday 22nd November at 6:30pm for the launch of BELFAST NOIR. This FREE event sees a variety of authors come together in a new anthology.

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. Brand-new stories by: Glenn Patterson, Eoin McNamee, Garbhan Downey, Lee Child, Alex Barclay, Brian McGilloway, Ian McDonald, Arlene Hunt, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Claire McGowan, Steve Cavanagh, Lucy Caldwell, Sam Millar, and Gerard Brennan.

From the introduction by Adrian McKinty & Stuart Neville:

“Few European cities have had as disturbed and violent a history as Belfast over the last half-century. For much of that time the Troubles (1968–1998) dominated life in Ireland’s second-biggest population centre, and during the darkest days of the conflict—in the 1970s and 1980s—riots, bombings, and indiscriminate shootings were tragically commonplace. The British army patrolled the streets in armoured vehicles and civilians were searched for guns and explosives before they were allowed entry into the shopping district of the city centre . . . Belfast is still a city divided . . .
  “You can see Belfast’s bloodstains up close and personal. This is the city that gave the world its worst ever maritime disaster, and turned it into a tourist attraction; similarly, we are perversely proud of our thousands of murders, our wounds constantly on display. You want noir? How about a painting the size of a house, a portrait of a man known to have murdered at least a dozen human beings in cold blood? Or a similar house-sized gable painting of a zombie marching across a postapocalyptic wasteland with an AK-47 over the legend UVF: Prepared for Peace—Ready for War. As Lee Child has said, Belfast is still ‘the most noir place on earth.’

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

Interview: Adrian McKinty, author of THE SUN IS GOD

“There’s this true story about when Oliver North came to Ireland,” says author Adrian McKinty, “it’s a crackpot idea, but he gets himself an Irish passport and calls himself Tom Clancy, because Clancy is his favourite spy novelist and he’s being a spy.”
  McKinty is outlining the backdrop to what will be his next novel, the fourth in a series centring on Sean Duffy, a Catholic RUC officer in operating in Northern Ireland in the 1980s. Rooted in historical events such as the hunger strikes and the Brighton bombing, the books feature cameos from well known historical figures, including George Seawright, Gerry Adams and John DeLorean. Oliver North, notorious for his role in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal, pops up in the next book.
  “So [North] goes to the IRA and says, ‘Can I get some missiles?’ And they take one look at him and go, ‘Who’s this joker?’ They won’t have anything to do with him. And he goes to the UVF, and he asks them for missiles, and they go, ‘Oh yeah, of course.’”
  Born and raised in Carrickfergus, Adrian McKinty left Northern Ireland to read politics and philosophy at Oxford. He has lived in the United States and Australia for most of his adult life, publishing his first novel, Orange Rhymes with Everything, in 1998. The acclaimed Dead I Well May Be (2003) was his first crime novel, and today he is regarded as one of the leading lights, along with John Connolly, Tana French and Eoin McNamee, of the current wave of Irish crime writing.
  After writing three novels in a row set against the bleak, claustrophobic backdrop of 1980s Northern Ireland, however, McKinty found himself gasping for artistic breathing space. His current offering, The Sun is God, is set in the South Pacific in 1906, and is rooted in the bizarre but true story of a German cult of nudists – the Cocovores – who ate only coconuts and worshipped the sun.
  “Mostly it was because I was so excited by the story,” says McKinty. “It was a murder case that took place in a German nudist religious cult – and no one has told this story? But to be honest, I was a bit fed up about reading background material about Northern Ireland in the 1980s, because you know what they’re all going to say. And it was really fun to look at another part of the world, at a different time.”
  In the novel, Will Prior is a former British Army military policeman and a disillusioned veteran of the Boer War. Prior is living a dissolute life as a rubber plantation manager in German New Guinea when he is approached by Hauptmann Kessler to help investigate a suspicious death on the island of Kabakon, where the Cocovores have established their community.
  “I liked that Pat Barker book, The Ghost Road, and there’s a character in that called Billy Prior. I really liked that name, but I couldn’t call him Billy, because even that was too Northern Ireland,” he laughs.
  Perversely, McKinty’s radical departure in terms of setting arrives just as Northern Ireland-set crime writing is beginning to flourish. Belfast Noir, a collection of short stories which McKinty co-edited with Stuart Neville, will be published in November, and features Northern Irish crime writers Eoin McNamee, Brian McGilloway, Claire McGowan, Ruth Dudley Edwards and Gerard Brennan. Does Belfast Noir represent a coming of age for Northern Irish crime writing?

  “I think so, yes. I mean, I think it’s interesting, in the first place, that you’re allowed to talk about this now. I mean, the situation has normalised to the extent where this is not totally taboo, we can actually talk about these subjects now. Five or six years ago, even, the attitude would have been, ‘No, let’s not talk about this yet.’”
  What was particularly pleasing to McKinty was the way in which non-crime fiction authors such as Lucy Caldwell and Glenn Patterson seamlessly fitted into the collection.
  “I think if you grow up in a culture where the army is out on the street sighting you with rifles,” he says, “it has to have some kind of psychological impact.”
  In The Sun is God, Will Prior’s previous experience of horrific violence has dulled his humanity to the point where he is nowhere as smart, noble or interested in justice as the conventional detective in a crime novel should be.
  “One of the things I liked about Will Prior – and this probably won’t be popular at all – is that he doesn’t actually solve the crime,” says McKinty. “He gets it all wrong. Now, we’ve seen that kind of thing before, many times, but it’s always done for comedic effect. But I thought, what about doing it when it’s not for comedic effect – he’s just wrong. And I know readers hate that. They’ll put up with anything except for an incompetent lead. They’ll put up with drinking, racism, womanising – but if you have someone who’s not good at their job, they hate it.”
  Prior’s ineffectiveness is in part due to the fact that the crime on Kabakon Island – if crime it was – remains unsolved, but it’s also a reflection of McKinty’s spiky refusal to be chained to the genre’s conventions, and contains an echo of Francis Bacon’s idea – often quoted by Eoin McNamee – that the job of all art is to deepen the mystery.
  “Even today,” says McKinty, “nobody knows the truth about Kabakon Island. I’ve done a lot of research into it, and no one actually knows the answer. It probably was a murder, but no one knows for sure, or who did it, or why. You can only speculate on what happened.”

  The Sun is God by Adrian McKinty is published by Serpent’s Tail.

  This interview was first published in the Irish Times.

Interview: Glenn Patterson

I had an interview with Glenn Patterson published in the Irish Examiner last week. It began a lot like this:

Born in Belfast in 1961, Glenn Patterson grew up through the Troubles, when virtually everything anyone ever heard about Northern Ireland was violence, bombs and sectarian strife. His latest novel, THE REST JUST FOLLOWS (Faber), begins in the early 1970s and spans almost four decades, but for an author who says he writes ‘in the spaces in-between’, it is by no means a ‘Troubles novel’.
  “What I really wanted to do with this book was to take a group of people and follow them from their pre-teens through to their early middle-age,” says Glenn when we sit down in Dublin’s Brooks Hotel. “They were going to have to live through a whole load of other stuff that I’d lived through, but also that the whole city of Belfast went through as well. Some of that has to do with the economy, some of it has to do with the politics and the Troubles – but it’s all just the stuff of the world that they all have to live through and deal with.”
  While the Troubles serves as a muted backdrop to the story, it’s much more a celebratory tale of how three teenagers – Maxine, Craig and St. John – grow up making the same kinds of mistakes and experiencing the same kinds of joy as kids in cities all over the world. Glenn mentions David Holmes, the Belfast-born DJ, whom he interviewed for a TV documentary a couple of years ago.
  “We were talking about growing up in Belfast – for him it would have been the 1980s and into the ’90s, when he was starting to DJ in Belfast. And he said that he was really happy that his children didn’t have to grow up in what he grew up in. But then he paused and he said, ‘But I’m really glad that I did.’ I think it’s very hard to regret your own teenage years. So much of who we are has to do with what happened to us at that age that it doesn’t really matter what was going on in the public domain. That’s your only chance to be that age.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Interview: Adrian McKinty

I had an interview with Adrian McKinty (right) published in the Irish Examiner last weekend. It ran a lot like this:

As every good crime writer knows, desperate times call for desperate measures. So when Irish author Adrian McKinty found himself without a tree on Christmas Eve, and staring at a small forest of firs in a Melbourne suburb, he took matters – and an axe left behind by an absent Russian tree dealer – into his own hands.
  “I don’t know if that’s a year’s bad luck, or if that’s how it works,” McKinty tells me via Skype from Melbourne. “But stealing a Christmas tree – that can’t be a good thing, karma-wise.”
  It’s unlikely to be a bad year for the Carrickfergus native. In the Morning I’ll Be Gone, the third novel in McKinty’s Sean Duffy trilogy, has just been published to glowing reviews. Duffy is a Catholic policeman serving in the RUC during the 1980s, and the Troubles is about to hit another low point. The book revolves around the Brighton Bombing in 1984, when the IRA targeted Margaret Thatcher during a Conservative Party conference.
  The release of official British government documents relating to that period earlier this month gives the historical backdrop to In the Morning I’ll Be Gone another layer.
  “There was a story in the Guardian that when the Brighton bombing happened, the British government were negotiating with the IRA’s Army Council for a ceasefire, and that negotiations were quite advanced,” says McKinty. “And then the Brighton bomb happened, obviously, and those negotiations were put back by about five years. It looks to me like this was one faction of the IRA Army Council working against another faction, and that the operation hadn’t been completely authorised, or that it was a power-play within the Army Council. The whole thing is fascinating. And then there’s the fact that Thatcher escaped, as well. There’s a lot about that bombing that I think we’ll never find out the truth about.”
  Although the new book is being billed as the concluding act of a trilogy, McKinty believes that the Troubles provide a sufficiently bizarre backdrop to provide Sean Duffy with ample motive to return.
  “There’s that crazy story that no one’s ever talked about,” he says, “when Oliver North came to Ireland looking to get weapons to the Iran contras. He tried to get weapons from the UVF, and found they were a bunch of jokers. Then he tried to get them from the IRA and the IRA didn’t trust him. So then he had to go to the Israelis. That could be a fun story.
  “It certainly won’t be a Lee Child-style seventeen book cycle,” he says, “but there’s maybe a couple more Duffy stories left. That said, if I only ever write the trilogy then I’m happy enough – or as happy as I ever get in my dour Presbyterian world.”
  Renowned as a hardboiled noir novelist, McKinty set himself the challenge of including the classic mystery fiction trope of a ‘locked room mystery’ at the heart of his latest offering.
  “I’ve always been a secret locked room fanatic,” he enthuses. “I read my first one when I was about ten or eleven, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express with David Niven and Peter Ustinov on the cover. That was the first grown-up one that I’d read. It’s fantastic, this meta-theory thing where everyone is the killer, which was brilliant because I was used to reading the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and The Three Investigators. So I asked the librarian if she had any more like Orient Express. The first one I read was Murders in the Rue Morgue, which I totally hated – I just thought it was ridiculous, the idea of an orang-utan with a cut-throat razor … But then she gave me some John Dickson Carr novels, and I was hooked.
  “Later on I graduated on to noir,” he says, “and didn’t read locked room mysteries any more, but a few years ago I read one I really liked called The Tokyo Zodiac Murders [by Soji Shimada]. So I thought to myself, ‘Is it possible to do a locked room mystery within a noir setting?’ A good one, which doesn’t involve any tricks or misleading the reader. Where the reader has as much information as the detective does, and there’s no cheating, there’s no supernatural bullshit or magicians’ tricks.”
  This year will also see McKinty publish, along with co-editor Stuart Neville, the short story collection Belfast Noir. The latest in a global round of city-based collections from Akashic Books, the book will be, McKinty believes, another manifestation of a culture coming to terms with itself and its recent past.
  “I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen’s University set, in the 1970s and ’80s – y’know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson – that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic Renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory,” he says. “Those guys were kicking down the door and saying there was a high culture in Northern Ireland, and you can attain that even in the face of what must have seemed to them at the time like the abyss. Belfast was a city on fire, and there was no hope. And yet they were producing this incredible poetry. That creates a sense of confidence, culturally speaking. And in the ’90s you had people like Colin Bateman and Eoin McNamee coming along and saying, ‘It’s okay to talk about all this. We can even make fun of it. We can turn it into art.’ So all along it’s been a process of people finding the courage and the confidence to really deal with the issues.”

  That confidence isn’t limited to poetry and fiction.
  “Glenn Patterson has a story in Belfast Noir about the energy of punk music in Northern Ireland. In ’78 and ’79, Stiff Little Fingers were doing songs like ‘Suspect Device’ and ‘Alternative Ulster’. And The Undertones were creating this amazing pop music that was defiantly apolitical. But it was all about the confidence to talk about whatever you wanted to talk about. So it’s all a part of a culture that’s been slowly finding its own voice, to speak and to turn the light within, onto itself.”
  Adrian McKinty grew up in Carrickfergus but left Northern Ireland to study politics and philosophy at Oxford. He published his first novel, Everything Rhymes With Orange in 1998, but it was the publication of his acclaimed crime debut, Dead I Well May Be, that put him on the map in 2003. Since then he has published nine adult titles and a trilogy of young adult novels, placing him at the head of a generation of new Irish crime authors such as Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville, Gerard Brennan and Anthony Quinn. It’s a generation that isn’t afraid to write about Northern Ireland’s troubled past, and how history informs the present.
  “People in the North are really taciturn and reticent and they don’t really like to talk about the past,” he says. “I mean, my dad worked in the shipyards for 20 years, and I remember asking him one time about the Titanic. And he said, ‘Oh, no one ever talks about that.’ I said, ‘Seriously? You work in Harland & Wolff and no one ever talks about the Titanic?’ And he said, ‘No.’ And I think that’s just symptomatic about the whole culture. It was the same during the Troubles, there were all these things that no one wanted to talk about, lest the dyke broke and all the darkness came pouring out.
  “I’m not surprised the Richard Haass talks broke down,” he continues, “because one of the things they broke down over was the whole ‘truth commission’ idea. There was just too many people who didn’t want a ‘truth commission’. They don’t want the truth to come out. But it’s our job, as writers, to do exactly that.”

In the Morning I’ll Be Gone by Adrian McKinty is published by Serpent’s Tail.

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.