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 Best Things In Life Are Free … Books

The generous folk at Serpent’s Tail have been kind enough to offer us three copies of Adrian McKinty's THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD to give away, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

Michael Forsythe might be, as one of his assailants puts it, ‘un-fucking-killable’, but that doesn’t seem to deter people from trying. He’s living in Lima, reasonably well-hidden by the FBI’s Witness Protection Program, but Bridget Callaghan, whose fiancé he murdered twelve years ago, has an enduring wish to see him dead. So when her two goon assassins pass him the phone to speak to her before they kill him, Michael thinks she just wants to relish the moment. In fact, out of desperation, she is giving him a chance to redeem himself. All he has to do is return to Ireland and find her missing daughter. Before midnight. Tenacious and brutal, with the hunted man’s instinct for trouble, Forsythe leaves a trail of mayhem as he tries to end the bloody feud once and for all. THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD pulsates with break-neck action and wry literary references; McKinty’s distinctly Irish voice packs a ferocious punch.

Those dulcet tones? Shurely shome mishtake. Anyhoo, to be in with a chance of winning a copy, just answer the following question.

Is the structure of THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD loosely modelled on:
(a) ULYSSES;
(b) ANNA KARENINA;
(c) THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS;
(d) Sorry, I came over all unnecessary from the heady waft of testosterone. What was the question again?

Answers via the comment box, leaving an email contact address (please use (at) rather than @ to confuse the spam-munchkins), before noon on Thursday, June 19. Et bon chance, mes amis …

Mi Casa, Su Casa: Adrian McKinty on The English Detective

The continuing stooooooory of how the Grand Vizier puts his feet up and lets other people talk some sense for a change. This week: Adrian McKinty (right) on the English detective.

The English Detective, Reconsidered

“At this year’s Oscars, Tilda Swinton declared that the Best Actor winners were examples of a triumphant Celtic spirit. Swinton, who was born in London and went to the same school as Princess Diana, thinks of herself as Scottish. The other big Oscar winner, Daniel Day Lewis, also born and raised in London, considers himself Irish. Irish indeed is the default nationality for uncomfortable Englishmen everywhere. Some sneak themselves in so successfully we forget that they’re actually from over the sheugh, while others fail miserably. Jeremy Irons is never going to convince anyone of his essential Mickness but Shane McGowan, that wonderful living (still, I think) stereotype was born and went to school in Tunbridge Wells.
  “Now, I don’t mind sharing my Irishness with anyone. As far as I’m concerned, if you want to call yourself Irish but you and your family have been living in, say Boston, for the last hundred and forty years, well then that’s okay. We all do it: sometimes I cheer for the Kenyan marathoners because only a few thousand generations ago my very own ancestors were traipsing round the Great Rift Valley hunting antelope. No, what makes me sad about all of this is the rejection of Englishness.
  “I think it began in the seventies, perhaps through a combination of football hooliganism, economic recession, colonial guilt and Kevin Keegan’s haircut: a perfect storm which produced a generation who considered Englishness an embarrassing, guilt-ridden appendage. For five centuries before 1978 it was good to be Anglo-Saxon, but then almost overnight it wasn’t. On a recent podcast even The Greatest Living Englishman, Stephen Fry, admitted that he really wanted to be Oscar Wilde.
  “Literary fiction hasn’t produced new role models. The best English writers have always come from humble origins but these days brainy escapers tend to write screenplays or code for video games. Reading has become an almost cult behaviour with the consequence that the literary universe has gotten more clubbish, more exclusive and more out of touch than ever.
  “Movies haven’t helped either. I have never seen a Hugh Grant film in my life (I’m saving that experience for an eternity in hell) but I’ll bet Grant’s stuttering, foppish, sarcastic, allegedly witty characters do the English no favours. There’s a thin line a being a wit and a complete cunt, as that wannabe Irishman John Lydon once said.
  “So where does an Englishman (Swinton aside, women don’t usually have this problem) turn if he’s looking for an archetype? Music? Fuggedaboutit. The Gallagher brothers are no-talent has-beens, Tom Yorke is a doom-saying mystic and Duffy’s a girl. And Welsh. All the most famous Englishmen these days are, God save us, chefs.
  “No, I suggest that the confused Englishman reject all of this and embrace an older role model, that of the sophisticated, smart, unruffled, classic English detective.
  “Sherlock Holmes (right) sprang from the mind of a Lowland Scot but essentially he’s as English as soft-boiled eggs, warm rain, rudeness in restaurants, kindness to animals, cruelty to children, etc. On TV he’s usually a chilly savant but in the books he’s a moody dope fiend, prone to fisticuffs, occasionally witty and of course hyper-intelligent. The downside is Holmes’ snobbishness and his fawning attitude towards royalty, but you can forgive him his milieu. If more Brits behaved like Holmes they’d still miss penalties in crucial football games but at least they wouldn’t blub about it.
  “If Sherlock Holmes isn’t your cup of tea, there are many others. We’ll skip over Lord Peter Wimsey (see snobbishness above) and go straight to Philip Marlowe. Courteous, smart and funny; a seducer of violet-eyed heiresses, a resister of femmes fatale. And cool. Sherlock Holmes is a lot of things but he’s not hip. Marlowe is, in spades. If cool were America, Holmes would be a hick town in Kansas and Marlowe would be the East Village. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Wasn’t Philip Marlowe born in Santa Rosa, California? Didn’t that American actor Humphrey Bogart play him in the movies? How can he be English? He just is, that’s all.
  “Like Chandler himself, Marlowe was born Stateside but obviously, like Chandler, he went to school in London and spent his formative years in England, becoming - again, like Chandler - a naturalized Brit. Marlowe likes poetry, chess, the aesthetic, the Old World, ancient books over modern, the nineteenth century over the twentieth, metaphor over simile, violet over blue. His phoney accent doesn’t fool me, he’s a Brit through and through. His name is English, his clothes are British, the weather owes more to London than Santa Monica and his stance has a certain trans-Atlantic panache. Both he and James Bond are late thirties but Marlowe’s world weary cynicism is more appropriate than Bond’s boyish enthusiasm as a response to the anomie and existential crises of our nightmare epoch. Marlowe’s your man if you went to blend your own rye whiskey and look through rainy windows at the poor deluded fools dreaming their lives away while the world goes to hell about them.
  “If neither of those guys work for you, you could look at Inspector Wexford and Adam Dalgliesh but for me the apotheosis of the type has to be Chief Inspector Morse of the Oxford Constabulary. Morse has the virtues and vices of the classically educated man. He is continually outraged by the psychopathology of every day life. He hates deadlines, cell-phones, meetings, workshops, press conferences, television, gossip mags, celebrities, chilled beer … As Brian Wilson once said, he just wasn’t made for these times. Who is? With insanity everywhere, Morse starts drinking when the pubs open and swallows his last dram before bed; and unlike the Hugh Grants of this world, Morse’s sarcasm isn’t there to amuse and titillate. Morse’s sarcasm is a slate-black irony directed at the God who isn’t there, the chaos that robs us of any chance of love and the meaninglessness of it all. As Nabokov pointed out, “the cradle rocks over the abyss” and for Morse the abyss is always with us. For a trillion years we’ll be dead until the universe itself dies in a whimpering heat death, our petty lives not even a glimmer of a spark in all that long grim durée. Morse knows that the only thing we can do is enjoy the achingly brief time we have. Following Epicurus, Morse says drink good beer, listen – really listen – to the best music, drive your car and relish it (easy if you’ve got a Mark 2 Jag), and if you can, try to salve the pain of the grief-stricken.
  “Yeah, I like Morse just as I like the English, but I’d like them better if Englishmen rejected the lines given them by Richard Curtis and rediscovered their old clichés: the stiff upper lip, coolness in a crisis, dry wit, and the broody imperiousness of Holmes, Marlowe (right) and Morse. The classic English detectives, like real Celts everywhere (and unlike poor foot-in-mouth Tilda Swinton) know when to talk and when to embrace the silence.” – Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty’s THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD is published by Serpent’s Tail

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

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.

Books Of The Year # 7: THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD By Adrian McKinty

Being the continuing stooooooory of our ‘2007 Round-Up Of Books Wot My Friends Wrote’ compilation, by which we hope to make some friends for 2008. To wit:

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 was first published on Euro Crime

Holt The Back Page

It can’t be easy being Adrian ‘Squinty’ McKinty (right). A good-looking cove, very much in the ‘craggily indented coastline’ kinda way, he’s also the author of fine cerebral thrillers, in particular the ‘Dead’ trilogy, the third part of which, THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD, get its mass-market paperback release today, December 21. But that’s not all. For lo! Yon McKinty is currently working on a new standalone, which has already been sold to Holt, the gist of which runneth thusly:

“A big, badass revenge thriller that travels from the slums of Castro’s Havana to an elite Hollywood party town in the Rocky Mountains, following a daughter’s single-minded pursuit of her father’s killer.”

Lumme! Holt also publishes Benny Blanco, aka Benjamin Black, aka Lord Lucan, but that’s not Squint’s fault and it’d be unfair to blame him retrospectively. So when can we expect to see the new McKinty offering? Erm, when it’s ready, apparently. Like, which would you prefer, to get it fast or get it good, eh? What’s that? You want it fast and good? Righty-o, we’ll get out the cattle prod so …

The Embiggened O # 1,012: “Rollin’, Rollin’, Rollin’ / Keep Those Logs A-Rollin’ …”

This week’s big-up for our humble offering THE BIG O comes with a public health warning, people: Adrian McKinty (right), who pens the honey-sweet words below, is a mate of Crime Always Pays’ Grand Vizier Declan Burke, and McKinty’s novels – DEAD I WELL MAY BE and THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD in particular – have been getting serious hup-yas around these-here parts in recent times. The big question: are we guilty of blatant ‘log-rolling’ (as Detectives Beyond Borders’ Peter Rozovsky so delicately puts it), or is there an outside chance the reviews are actually worth the electronic paper they’re printed on? YOU decide! Meanwhile, here’s McKinty’s verdict:

“Declan Burke’s crime writing is fast, furious and funny, but this is more than just genre fiction: Burke is a high satirist in the tradition of Waugh and Kingsley Amis and his stories pulse with all the contradictions of contemporary Ireland. Burke has a deep respect for and understanding of the classic traditions of the hardboiled school but he never forgets that his first duty is to give us a damn good read. A must for fans of Ken Bruen, Michael Connolly and Eoin McNamee.” – Adrian McKinty, author of THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD

Adrian? Ta very much, sir. And while you’re there, there’s an itch just between my shoulder blades I can’t quite reach. Any chance you’d give my back another scratch? Cheers.

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

This Week We’re Reading … Who Is Conrad Hirst? and The Bloomsday Dead

Kevin Wignall’s up-coming Who Is Conrad Hirst? (to be published on November 13) is being flagged as a Jason Bourne-style thriller, but while the eponymous anti-hero is a frighteningly proficient hitman, Wignall’s creation is a far more philosophical character – indeed, the whole point of the exercise is for Conrad to answer the question posed in the title. That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of action, because there is, but the page-turning pace is leavened by a more satisfying quality of self-analysis than is generally to be found in straightforward thrillers. Powerful stuff from the author of For The Dogs, and there’s a strong chance it’ll propel him into the big leagues. Meanwhile, The Bloomsday Dead concludes Adrian McKinty’s ‘Dead’ trilogy, with the indestructible Michael Forsythe back home in Ireland to conduct a search for the kidnapped daughter of flame-haired Bridget, Forsythe’s femme fatale nemesis from the trilogy’s opener, Dead I Well May Be. With the plot unfolding over the space of one day – June 16, aka Bloomsday, which honours the hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses – the pace is frantic from the get-go, charging along in an adrenaline frenzy as Michael takes on anyone from Peruvian hitmen to the IRA as he seeks closure on the life he has been forced to live for the last decade. As always with McKinty, the writing is of a superior quality, the graphically etched outbursts of violence shot through with a quirky poetry that mines a particularly dark seam of humour. The only disappointment? That this is touted as the final Forsythe novel. Say it ain’t so, Joe, sorry, Adrian …

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

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 719: Adrian McKinty

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...
What crime novel would you most like to have written?
The Big Sleep is hard to beat. The prose, the style, the attitude … I’m also a big fan of Jim Thompson - The Grifters is one of my favourites. And now that we’re on to this, I also wish I’d directed Blood Simple, one of the greatest noir movies ever.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Anything by Alan Moore, but I don’t feel that guilty about it.
Most satisfying writing moment?
Sad to say I’ve yet to have a truly satisfying writing moment.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
One of the gems by Ken Bruen, but I ain’t gonna pick one.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Her Last Call to Louis MacNeice. Love that book and it really should be a movie.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is that your friends and family think you’re rich when in fact you’re still dirt poor. The best thing is no heavy lifting.
Why does John Banville use a pseudonym for writing crime?
Banville thinks of the crime genre as a low form of writing, in fact he barely considers it writing at all. It wouldn’t do at all to have the great literary name John Banville connected with such a tabloid medium.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Sparkly, cosy, pixie-dust.

Adrian McKinty’s The Bloomsday Dead is the must-buy novel this year

Dead Man Tells More Tales: Yep, It Has To Be Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty took a bow at No Alibis last week to read from the final part of the Michael Forsythe trilogy (Dead I May Well Be / The Dead Yard / The Bloomsday Dead), which was released in March. "Trademark dark lyricism, one great red herring, and a masterful plot twist," reckons Frank Sennett at Booklist, and most of these reviews tend to concur ... which is nice. If you missed out on Dead I May Well Be, jump over here for an extract. Tell 'em Danny Boy sent ya ...