The Ned Kelly Awards

I'm really pleased to tell that you my book I Hear The Sirens In The Street has been shortlisted for Best Crime Novel at the 2013 Ned Kelly Awards. This is the Australian equivalent of the Edgars or the Daggers so it's a really big deal for me and I'm very honoured and excited. I've lived in Australia now for five years and this award nomination has really touched me and made me feel like a proper Aussie. Did I celebrate with a VB tinny in my backyard over a barbie? Well no it's too cold for a barbie here in St Kilda (4 degrees tonight) but I actually was drinking a Victoria Bitter as I got the news via twitter from the great Jon Page. VB is not normally my tipple of choice but I was watching the Ashes last night until 2.a.m. and I guess the subliminal messages finally kicked in and today I brought home an eskie full of tinnies from the aghast and disappointed beer snob bottle shop owner on Acland Street. (Its just occurred that no one in North America will understand most of that last sentence. The Ashes is a cricket match, tinnies are...oh forget it.) 
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In case you don't know I Hear The Sirens In The Street is the second novel in my series of books about Detective Inspector Sean Duffy of the RUC. This book takes place in 1982 in Belfast and involves the DeLorean scandal, the FBI, sex, violence, black Ulster humour and some other stuff. So thank you judges! Add here's to VB, The Ashes and Ned Kelly. Win or lose at the awards I'm really excited to be shortlisted with these great Australian crime writing legends.  

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The Australian Weighs In On Sirens

As you know I can't get a review of my Sean Duffy novels in the US press for love nor money (admittedly I haven't actually tried love or money...yet) but at least all the British, Irish and Australian newspapers are reviewing me. This latest review was from last Sunday's Australian newspaper and was written by the multi-talented Graeme Blundell who you non Aussies might still recognise as Natalie Portman's father in Star Wars...
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I Hear The Sirens In The Street
Adrian McKinty

Reviewed by Graeme Blundell The Australian July 14 2013

The first book in McKinty's Sean Duffy series, The Cold Cold Ground, found Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy newly promoted and posted to Carrickfergus CID in Northern Ireland in 1981 at the height of the Troubles. Now living in Melbourne, Northern Irish born McKinty took us inside the sectarian violence of the period as Duffy, a Catholic cop trusted by no one in a Protestant town, struggled with two different cases: one was Northern Ireland's first possible serial killer who was possibly preying on homosexuals and the second was the mysterious suicide of a young woman that looked a lot murder. Now in the new novel Duffy has got a man's headless body in a suitcase dumped in an abandoned factory. Army helicopters are still flying low over the lough, sirens are wailing in County Down and the distant thump thump in the background is the sound of mortars or explosions. McKinty is seriously brilliant, his flair for language matched by his remarkable feel for place, appetite for redemptive violence and gravely cool appreciation of characters who reject conformity. There are echoes of Dennis Lehane, Joseph Wambaugh, Eoin McNamee and even Raymond Chandler but McKinty is resolutely his own hard man. 

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The First North American Newspaper Review of I Hear The Sirens In The Street

First of all let me wish you all a Happy Bloomsday. Do try and read some Jim Joyce, today, you'll thank me for it...Now down to business...The first North American newspaper review of I Hear The Sirens In The Street came out in last Friday's Toronto Star (Hemingway's old newspaper). It was written by the great Jack Batten who had this to say about the book: 

Toronto Star Fri June 14 2013

Jack Batten Book Reviews

I Hear The Sirens In The Street

By Adrian McKinty

Seventh Street Books, 318 pages, $17

McKinty varies radically from other Irish crime novelists in one significant stylistic department. The difference is mostly a matter of humour. McKinty’s central figure, Detective Inspector Sean Duffy, offers the quota of laughs we’ve become accustomed to in Ireland’s crime literature, but unlike the rest of the country’s sleuths, there’s nothing mordant about the Duffy brand of funny stuff. The DI might even be described as optimistic. This is remarkable considering that events in the highly readable new book take place in 1982 when the Troubles meant that explosions, assassinations and spilled blood were daily routines.

Duffy is from the north, a cop working out of a station in a town next door to Belfast. Since he’s also a Catholic, he gets it from all sides, under siege from both the IRA and the UDA. His sense of irony helps him through most crises. Cool nervy and intelligent Duffy drinks his vodka gimlets, watches The Rockford Files on television, and goes about his investigating business with a style that’s mostly unflappable.

Duffy’s latest case begins with the discovery of the dismembered body of an American tourist. The coppers, led by Duffy, chase the clues on a trail that leads our man into dangerous places in Ireland’s political and industrial worlds. If it begins to look as if the country’s unhinged violence is at last going to crush him, we readers remain certain his valour and wit will guarantee survival in the end.

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George McFly Day!

What is George McFly Day? It's the bit in Back To The Future where George McFly's box of books arrives from his publisher and his career as a science fiction writer becomes a reality. If you remember the film, in one version of the present George doesn't follow his dreams to become a writer because he's afraid of failure, but in the altered version of the present a more courageous George McFly does pursue his ambition and when his box of books comes it's a kind of vindication. What makes this George McFly day particularly interesting and exciting for me is that the box of books which arrived today from my publisher (Seventh Street Books) was I Hear The Sirens In The Street which is partly about the DeLorean scandal in Belfast in 1982 and the book actually begins with a quote from Back To The Future (the British version also begins with a Tom Waits song but I couldn't afford to pay the royalties for its use in the US edition). . .Earlier this week I also received the French and Spanish versions of the first book in the Sean Duffy series, The Cold Cold Ground, which both look fantastic. This morning my daughters Arwynn and Sophie gleefully ripped all the boxes of books apart, ably helped by Rocky, our next door neighbour's cat, who sincerely believes that he belongs in our family.

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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 FICTION

I Hear the Sirens in the Street 

Adrian McKinty 

Serpent's Tail

Winsor Dobbin

The Melbourne Age, 26 May 2013

Northern Ireland. 1982. An uncomfortable place to be a policeman, let alone a Catholic one. Sean Duffy, articulate, urbane and stubborn as they come, is a detective in Protestant Carrickfergus at the height of the decades-long sectarian war that ripped Ulster apart: ''A shooting in Crossmaglen, a suspicious van in Cookstown, an incendiary attack in Lurgan - nothing that serious.''

As for settings, it doesn't get much bleaker: ''Army helicopters flew over the lough, sirens wailed in County Down, a distant thump-thump was the sound of mortars or explosions. The city was under a shroud of chimney smoke and the cinematographer, as always, was shooting in 8mm black and white. This was Belfast in the 14th year of the low-level civil war euphemistically known as The Troubles."

It's hard to be enthusiastic about your job when your first task each morning is to check your car for a mercury tilt bomb. Forget one morning and …

When the torso of American veteran and war hero Bill O'Rourke is found in a suitcase in an abandoned factory, it looks as if the IRA might have been up to its old tricks, but then it turns out the victim has been poisoned by a mixture containing the root of a rare plant.

Duffy's investigation leads him to a desperate aristocrat, a foxy widow and an American billionaire chancer (a real one, in this case) and us on a musical journey from Saint-Saens to Blondie.

You have to drink in descriptions such as: ''Belfast was not beautiful. It had been built on mudflats and without rock foundations nothing soared. Its architecture had been Victorian red brick utilitarian and sixties brutalism before both of those tropes had crashed headlong into the Troubles. A thousand car bombs later and what was left was surrounded by concrete walls, barbed wire and a steel security fence to keep the bombers out. ''

This is probably the best police thriller I've read over the past 12 months - lyrical, poetic and mean. ''I tried to think of a curse but Irish articulacy had clearly diminished since the days of Wilde and Yeats, Synge and Shaw. Three 'shites' and a ciggie, that was the best we could come up with in these diminished times,'' Duffy muses.

This book is atmospheric, beautifully paced and precisely constructed; one that is genuinely hard to put down.

Fans of Billingham, Rankin and Lehane and their ilk will not want to miss out on McKinty, who is now basing himself in Melbourne - where he will doubtless become a valuable addition to the brotherhood of wordsmiths in Australia.

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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, here. It's all too easy for reviewers to cover the mainstream releases from the big publishing houses so I really appreciate the fact that Dana, Connie, Peter and Steven looked beyond the big publicity campaigns to seek out a peripheral voice like mine. Slainte.

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