Lethem Binge

a repost from last year and, I guess, part of my ongoing influences series......If you're like me (and for your own sake I hope to God you're not) when you find a new author that you like you simply have to read everything by them that you can get your hands on, bingeing horribly on their words for weeks at a time until you just can't read anymore. I suppose Tolkien was the first author I consumed like that, devouring The Hobbit, The Lord of the...

Read More

Another Sirens Review

Still don't have your copy of I Hear The Sirens In The Street, yet? Well, that's ok, it's certainly not for everyone (one lady recently dissed me on Good Reads complaining that I put too much thought into my prose style) but it is for some people and this is what Winsor Dobbin in last Sunday's Melbourne Age thinks: CRIME FICTIONI Hear the Sirens in the Street Adrian McKinty Serpent's TailWinsor DobbinThe Melbourne Age, 26...

Read More

President Obama's Guide To Belfast

President Obama is coming to Belfast next month. They'll probably drag him to the usual tourist spots, but if I were him I'd try and see some more interesting sides of the city instead. These are the top 10 places I'd go to: 1. The Crown Bar: yes it is a bit of a tourist trap, but it's still worth visiting. A pub owned and run by the National Trust, lit by gas lamps and with its original Victorian fittings. A visit here really is like stepping...

Read More

Adrian McKinty, Parker Bilal and Paul French at the Adelaide Writers Festival

I'm blogging this (below) to coincide with the US release this week of I Hear The Sirens In The Street...And since I'm - rather embarrassingly - talking about me, I'd also like to point you in the direction of some reviews: Dana King reviewed Sirens in the New Mystery Reader, here. The lovely Connie Wilson reviewed and profiled me over at Yahoo Voices. Peter Dragovich (the Nerd of Noir) reviewed Sirens in Spinetingler Magazine, here. Finally I'm pretty excited that Steven Dougherty wrote a very sweet profile of me in The Wall Street Journal,...

Read More

Harvey Pekar

(a repost from July 12, 2010, the day Harvey Pekar died and, I guess, part of my little series on influences that began with JG Ballard last week (I'm surprisingly worked up in this little obit, I'm not quite sure why...))If its even a little bit true that our elite institutions like the BBC, The New York Times, Hollywood, The New Yorker etc. are dominated by middle and upper middle class white males perhaps it explains why we often get so many patronising...

Read More

The Israeli Flags In Belfast

I've been reading Tony's Blair's memoir A Journey which isn't as masochistic an exercise as it sounds. It's an interesting book for Blair's take on his own life and it's helping me understand some of the British policies towards Ireland in the 1990's. Tony Blair seems to have been more interested in Ireland than any British Prime Minister since Gladstone: his maternal grandparents were from the County Donegal and he used to spend his summers in that...

Read More

JG Ballard

This is the first in what I hope will be a fun little series about writers and artists that I'm obsessed by. If I don't give up after this effort I'll do pieces on the writers Harvey Pekar, Philip K Dick, Michel Houellebecq & Iain Sinclair, comedians Stewart Lee & Louis CK and the directors Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch....According to historian Eric Hobsbawm the twentieth century really began with the assassination...

Read More

15 Things I'd Like To Ban From Contemporary Crime Fiction

Crime fiction has gotten very dull lately hasn't it? I should know because I get inundated with galleys and review copies and most of them are beyond tedious, without a spark of wit or a well turned phrase in any of them. And the cliches, Jesus the cliches. And the violence. Especially violence towards women and children...It's almost impossible to read some of this stuff and it makes me wonder how and why these authors ended up writing it. Were...

Read More

Release Day

My new novel I Hear The Sirens In The Street is released in North America today! It's excellent timing to release a thriller as there doesn't seem to be any competition at all out there at the moment... Sorry what was that you said? Dan who? What? Inferno? What is that?...If you're new to me I shall endeavour to catch you up about the Duffy series: Sirens is a sequel to The Cold Cold Ground and both these books are about Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy...

Read More

The Americans

Ok so not everyone on The Americanslooks like a "real person"The FX show, The Americans, is a bit like a classic "false flag" operation. On the surface it's a TV show about FBI men looking for dangerous Soviet sleeper agents who are out to harm America during the Reagan years. For all I know that's how the show was pitched, but it's not really about that at all; in The Americans it's the Soviet sleeper agents who are the good guys and the FBI men...

Read More

It Was A Wandering Daughter Job - Dashiell Hammett's Influence on The Big Lebowski

A post from a couple of years back on The Coen brothers and their links to Dashiell Hammett:...Joel and Ethan Coen have said that the biggest literary influence on their cult stoner movie The Big Lebowski (1998) was Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. And from the title and structure of their film you can certainly see what they are talking about. Both works are classic visions of Los Angeles and both films follow similar trajectories: a foil gets...

Read More