In The Morning I'll Be Gone - The First Newspaper Review

The first newspaper review of In The Morning I'll Be Gone came out this week in Dublin's  Hot Press. The review is by Anne Sexton and is wonderfully spoiler free. For me this book was more of a traditional mystery than a thriller (most of it is taken up with an old school locked room problem) but Anne seems to have enjoyed the noir elements too. Anyway here's what she says in Hot Press: 
...
In The Morning I'll Be Gone
by Adrian McKinty
Serpents Tail
Hot Press December 5 

Oh, a new Adrian McKinty book? Excellent! Featuring Sean Duffy? Even better! As a reviewer you should approach an album, film or book objectively, so the fact that I think McKinty is one of Ireland’s most interesting crime novelists might have been an issue. Luckily reviewers across the globe are equally enamoured. In The Morning I’ll Be Gone is the third Detective Sean Duffy novel and as with the previous two (The Cold Cold Ground & I Hear The Sirens In The Street) mixes fact and fiction. 

The actions begins in 1983 with a mass breakout of IRA prisoners from the Maze Prison. One of the escapees is Dermot McCann, a former schoolmate of Duffy’s. He’s sure that that “with the iron logic of a fairy story” their paths will cross again and this being fiction, they do. The grey, rain-soaked streets; the paramilitary tensions; the cultural and economic poverty of 1980’s Northern Ireland are all almost tangible and McKinty delivers a rollercoaster of a thriller that will keep you turning the pages until the very end. 

Anne Sexton
...
The picture to the right is the latest cover art complete with Ian Rankin blurb. After I tweeted the cover I got a nice response from Mr Rankin himself:

Ian Rankin ‏@Beathhigh4 Dec

@adrianmckinty I read it while on tour in Canada. Really terrific, Adrian. Congrats - as is becoming usual!

Hopefully that sentiment will be shared by some part of the reading public. In The Morning I'll Be Gone will be available in the UK, Ireland, Australia & NZ on January 30 and in the US and Canada in March.

Read More

The Philosophy Of Mind And Breaking Bad

In a throwaway scene from an episode of the final season of Breaking Bad, Badger and Skinny Peter (Jesse's two drug-dealing pals) are talking about the transporter on Star Trek; you know what the transporter is even if you've never seen Star Trek, the "beam me up Mr Scott" machine: a teleportation device for transporting people instantly from one place to another. It supposedly works like this: the ship's computer breaks down the person being transported into a digital scan of their atoms and sends this digital information to the surface of another planet or another ship where the computer then reforms the person, intact, atom by atom. Ah, what about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle I hear you ask? When they reassemble the atoms won't the humans all be messed up at the other end? There are 10^30 atoms in the human body and every single atom is subject to quantum uncertainty...Well, apparently everything will be fine; according to Wikipedia:  

Heisenberg compensators remove uncertainty from the subatomic measurements, making transporter travel feasible. Further technology involved in transportation include a computer pattern buffer to enable a degree of leeway in the process. When asked "How does the Heisenberg compensator work?" by Time magazine, Star Trek technical adviser Michael Okuda responded: "It works very well, thank you."^[3]

Anyway lets for the sake of argument assume that the transporter does work. What Skinny Pete was saying to Badger in Breaking Bad was not an argument about the physics but an argument from the philosophy of mind. Pete's contention was that every time Kirk gets transported somewhere it's not the original Captain Kirk but a recreation, a copy, a copy who has the same mind state and the same memories as the about-to-be transported individual but it's not the same man. The original Captain Kirk, Pete argues, is destroyed in the transporter room and a copy reassembled at the transport site. Consciousness, Pete is implying, cannot be transported because consciousness is a property that cannot be subject to measurement. The copy of Captain Kirk now on the alien planet only thinks he's the same man because he shares Kirk's memories and mindstate at the moment of transportation but unfortunately the real Captain Kirk was killed by the transporter. The copy goes on to live Kirk's life, Pete says, until he too must enter the transporter and he too dies. Throughout the course of the show, Pete argues, there are hundreds of Kirk copies that get created, while the real Kirk dies the very first time he gets transported. Pete just throws this idea out there and then Badger pitches his Star Trek pie eating contest script idea but its worth thinking about. If you want to know more about the concept there's a Star Trek wiki discussion on what happens when you transport, here. And there's a really nice philosophical analysis of the transporter concept by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, in their 1982 book The Mind’s I where they call the transporter a "murdering twinmaker." Hofstadter further explores consciousness in his fascinating book I Am A Strange Loop and Daniel Dennett examines in some depth the idea of materialism in his - rather misleadingly - titled book Consciousness Explained. Whether you believe in strict materialism or a Cartesian dualism I'm not sure I can see how the transporter could work without killing you and replacing you with a copy. 
...
But what exactly is consciousness and how does it evolve from matter? It's a huge problem in philosophy, psychology and neurology. Antonio Damasio attempts to explain some of the elements of the problem here: 

Read More

A Theory About Horror Movies

a blogpost from March of this year that got a lot of comments...
...
My older daughter was at a sleep over party last week where they watched a horror movie. It was a whole bunch of girls together and none of them seemed to be particularly affected by the film, except for my daughter who was pretty disturbed by the experience. We don't watch horror movies in our house and I think this was the first one she had ever seen. She's had bad dreams for a week now and has vowed never to watch another horror film. I'm not surprised that the movie affected her like this. I've only ever seen two horror films in my life and both of them really disturbed me, and I think I have a theory why it is that I (and possibly my daughter too) get so upset by these kinds of movies. 
...
Sociopaths (bear with me here, I know what I'm doing) have no capacity for empathy for other human beings. They can't put themselves into the shoes of other people and therefore have no problem using those people as means to their own ends. There are degrees of sociopathy, of course, and not at all sociopaths are violent, but some are, serial killers for example. Just as 1-2% of the population have sociopathic tendencies, it's my theory that on your standard bell curve there must be 1-2% of the population who have too much empathy for other humans. If I'm correct and one of those people is me we are simply not capable of watching a slasher or horror film because we have excessive empathy for the victims in the picture. The first horror film I saw was Friday The Thirteenth which involves teenagers getting serially murdered by a maniac. I did not enjoy the experience of watching that movie at all. All around me people were laughing, hiding behind their hands etc. but I was utterly aghast  at the poor kids who were being slaughtered. I thought about them for weeks afterwards, wondering how they could have escaped their fate and the emotional damage their murder must have inflicted on their siblings and parents. This, I gather, is not what is supposed to happen in a horror film...what I think is meant to happen is that you get a quick thrill from the murder and then you move on to the next shocking development carried along by the narrative. You are not supposed to be so traumatised that you want to stop the movie. But I reckon if you are one of the 1-2% of us on this theoretical empathy scale you have trouble separating fiction and reality - for people like us suspending our disbelief isn't the problem, for us the problem is remembering that all these individuals in the movie are only pretending to get hurt, the blood isn't real, the knives aren't real and no one actually died here at all. 
...
I think this may also be why I have so much trouble liking supposedly frothy middle of the road murder mystery shows like Elementary, Monk, Sherlock, CSI etc. - in a lot of these dramas the show begins with a violent murder (on Elementary it's often incredibly violent) and after that I don't really care how the mystery gets solved or what's going on in the personal lives of the detectives because I'm still reeling from the emotional trauma of the pre title murder sequence. (I also find it very bizarre that on American TV you can show someone getting their throat cut but you are still not allowed to say the word shit, a word which is in Chaucer.) In fact now that I think about it, maybe I dont have the problem at all. Maybe the problem is you. I actually wonder how anybody can enjoy programmes or films which begin with an act of shocking, lurid violence (often against young women). Why do you read torture porn novels and watch tv programmes like this? Why don't you care about the victims? How can you compartmentalize? What the hell is the matter with all of you?

Read More

Philosophy and Dr Who

In the 50th anniversary special of Dr Who, The Day of the Doctor, there was a very intriguing philosophical moment that I thought might be interesting to unpack here. It occurred during a negotiation between shape shifting aliens and humans: the aliens had assumed human form and the negotiations between the two parties were going nowhere. The Doctor arrived and wiped their memories with his magic wand (er, sonic screwdriver) so neither party knew whether they were human or alien and they had to negotiate with one another from a position of ignorance. Thus the treaty that would be hammered out between humans and aliens would have to be scrupulously fair, because when your memory came back you wouldn't know which side you'd be on. 

Rawls

...

Anyone who has studied political philosophy over the last 35 years will immediately recognize this scenario. It is the so called Original Position from John Rawls's book A Theory of Justice. Much of contemporary political philosophy has been a critique of Rawls from either a communitarian, liberal or libertarian standpoint. What Rawls says is this: imagine you had a bunch of people who were a designing a brand new society - now what if these people didn't know if they were going to be rich or poor, man or woman, black or white, disabled or abled, gay or straight, etc. - what would that society actually look like? Rawls's thought experiment allows a "veil of ignorance" to descend over the negotiators (rather like the Doctor's memory wipe) so that they would end up designing the most "just" society that they could possibly come up with. Rawls's Just Society that comes out of this Original Position has universal healthcare, laws against discrimination, equality for women, enhanced social mobility, protections for minorities etc. - To me it looks a lot like Canada or Denmark. And although what Rawls produced was only a thought experiment he says its a useful one. (Other political and ethical philosophers dispute both the idea of the veil of ignorance and what the laws of the just society would look like.) Rawls claims that we can use this conception of the Just Society to criticize cultures that are very far from his model - societies where there are great disparities of wealth, where minorities and women are not treated well etc. 

...

You can get A Theory Of Justice at all good university bookshops or online. My favourite critiques of Rawls are by the philosophers Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Nozick and Ronald Dworkin. 

Read More

Alaska Schmalaska

with the Coen brothers' new film Inside Llewyn Davies finally being released next week I'd thought I'd reblog this post about what possibly could be their next film...(or possibly the one after that)
...


The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael ChabonIn Michael Chabon’s universe Alaska isn’t a frontier bastion for singsongy dimwitted governors and moose-killing survivalists but rather is the transplanted home for two million cosmopolitan Jewish refugees crammed into the sprawling city of Sitka just south of Juneau in the Alaskan panhandle. This is the central conceit of Chabon’s THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION, a murder mystery and alternative history noir, that follows Detective Mayer Landsman’s quest to find the person or persons who killed the quiet chess master who lived in his overcrowded flop house. In what used to be called ‘the Jonbar Hinge’ among us sci-fi geeks, the moment Chabon’s Earth diverged from ours was sometime in the late 1930s, when the US government allowed unlimited Jewish migration from a Hitler dominated Europe to refugee camps in Alaska. The book is a kind of a ghost story, imaging the unlived lives of hundreds of thousands of people who, in the real world, were murdered by the Nazis. Chabon’s fantasy is that instead of this vibrant, rich, literary Yiddish culture becoming extinct in 1945, it crossed the Atlantic and survived in America. That’s the premise but what of the book? In many ways it’s a standard police procedural of the Ed McBain / Mickey Spillane school that Chabon has composed in an affectionate pulp 1940’s style. He writes in the urgent present tense with a great deal of panache and economy. Chabon’s metaphors aren’t quite as rich as Raymond Chandler’s (whose are?) and his steeliness isn’t up there with Hammett, but his jokes are as good and sometimes better. His humour is Yiddish humour. Dry, slightly surreal, dark. There’s a gag or Chandlerism every few pages: ‘She took a compliment the way some people take a can of soda that they suspect you’ve shaken first.’ The plot takes a while to get going but that’s ok, as you want to get to grips with Chabon’s Alaska, the alternate time-line and the offbeat characters. When the murder mystery does start to unfold, Chabon spins the yarn with intelligence, style and tight plotting. Alternative History novels are en vogue and a different outcome for World War II is by far the most popular scenario. Philip Roth’s THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA covered similar terrain only three years ago and we’ve also had FATHERLAND, SS GB among many recent others. Chabon himself is a fan of Philip K Dick’s AH novel THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, which towers above all contenders in the ‘Nazis win the war’ field. So although Chabon isn’t quite off in terra nova, what really stuck with me was the idea that every single person in Sitka – the former capital of Russian America (now there’s an idea for an AH novel) – was speaking Yiddish. There’s Yiddish TV, newspapers, radio, songs. Even the Irish newspaper hack talks a kind of low German. I liked this notion because although now virtually extinct as a literary tongue, Yiddish produced an extraordinary corpus of poems, plays and novels in its brief flowering, and today its influence can be felt in everything from Woody Allen films to Mel Brooks and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Irony is the default stance of Yiddish prose. Irony, embedded with black witticisms and a kind of grim fatalism. I have read a critique that Chabon’s style is ‘not Yiddish enough’ and certainly compared with Nobel Prize winner’s IB Singer’s it seems mannered and even a little forced. But actually Chabon does have a precursor in the lesser known Yiddish master Lamed Shapiro, whose American stories were influenced by the US hard-boiled school and seem strikingly similar to Chabon’s mix of paranoia, violence and defiant logic-inverting humour.

TYPU is a thoughtful, introspective, novel - my only real existential criticism is that I don’t think the AH scenario really adds that much to the narrative and I wonder if the novel might not have worked just as well in our universe. Chabon said that the AH was necessary because ‘the Yiddish world is dead’, and while it is true that the Nazis destroyed Yiddish Europe (and the survivors mostly migrated to Israel where they had to speak Hebrew), Yiddish did not die out completely. My own wedding ceremony was in Yiddish at a Yiddish-Bundist commune in Putnam Valley, New York, and anyone who’s been to Kiryas Joel, NY, will find an entire town of 20,000 Haredi Jews with Yiddish newspapers, Yiddish street signs, Yiddish coffee shops, Yiddish schools, self published Yiddish spy novels. And yes, Kiryas Joel even has Yiddish speaking policemen.

Read More

In The Morning I'll Be Gone - The First Review

The first review of In The Morning I'll Be Gone came in last week. It's from Jon Page of Bite The Book and here it is (below). Remember Jon only reviewed the galley so the actual book is bound to be funnier, crisper and all together even more brilliant. The heart of In The Morning is pretty much an old school locked room mystery, a subgenre of mystery writing that I've always loved and always wanted to try. Anyway here's what Mr Page had to say:
...
...
Every great trilogy knocks you out with the first one, takes it up a notch with the second one and then blows you away with the final chapter. There a few great trilogies. Many fail at the second hurdle let alone the final one. But not Adrian McKinty. The Sean Duffy books are a truly great trilogy and destined to become a classic of the crime genre and the third and the final volume is the best yet.

Things were not looking good for our hero at the end of I Hear The Sirens In The Street. Sean Duffy had been demoted out of CID and dispatched to the border lands. His career in the police force appeared to be over. That is until a mass breakout occurs from the infamous Maze Prison in September, 1983. One of the IRA’s most dangerous men, Dermot McCann, is on the loose and planning a campaign of terror against Britain. MI5 are prepared to do anything to bring him in, including giving Sean his old job back.

Sean has a connection to Dermot but no one is giving anybody up in Northern Ireland. Sean’s digging instead leads him to an unsolved murder. A locked room mystery that has got everybody stumped. But the key to unearthing Dermot’s whereabouts maybe be found in figuring out this seemingly unsolvable mystery.

As with the previous two books McKinty skillfully blends humour and the grim realities of living in war torn Belfast in 1984 with a gripping, realistic mystery. Sean Duffy is perfectly flawed and damaged but determined to do the right thing, even if that means doing a couple of wrong things. It is a tragedy that this series must come to an end because what McKinty has been able to produce has been very special and he has taken his writing to a new level. There’s a fine line between social commentary and compelling mystery and not many writers, crime or literary, can do both. McKinty has not only been able to pull it off brilliantly but he has done so over three amazing books.


I’m going to miss Sean Duffy but I also can’t wait to see where Adrian McKinty goes next.

Read More

Literary Geography

If you are a literature groupie you might enjoy this list. It's my top places - obviously highly subjective - where you can soak up the atmosphere of a particular writer or a certain milieu. It was going to be a top 10 list but there was too much I wanted to cram in. I'm giving you my list in reverse order but really its not in any order if that makes any sense...


14. The Eagle and Child Pub, Oxford, England. The bar where JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis used to go to read aloud their works in progress and get criticism and advice from their peers. Large chunks of The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia books were composed here. They serve real ale and Philip Pullman and even Alan Moore have been known to pop in. Consequently it's a kind of a nerd paradise and it's where I met that lucky(?) lass...the future mother of my children.


13. Dostoyevsky's House, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Ok the whole thing's fake, the furniture isn't period and no one knows exactly what his apartment really looked like, but it is as close as we're going to get to the real McCoyski. When I was there they had a free walking tour map where you could follow Raskolnikov and other characters' routes through the city and that's a great thing to do as long as you don't kill an old lady at the end of it.


12. The Site of Pushkin's Duel in the Woods, The St Petersburg Suburbs, Russia
Since we're in Petersburg we might as well stay here. Pushkin wrote a poem about a young man who threw his life away on a pointless duel in the forest. Rather tragically he then, er, threw his life away on a pointless duel in the forest. There's a statue marking the spot which was hard to find but worth it: when I went to see it there was a beautiful blonde girl in a white dress leaving flowers for Pushkin and weeping for him as if she'd just heard the news. No, unfortunately, she wasn't the good kind of crazy.


11. The Colburn Hotel, Denver, Colorado
Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassady and William Burroughs used to go to Ginsberg's room in the Colburn to take acid, mescaline and other pharmaceuticals and watch the sun set setting behind the Front Range Mountains. I've never enhanced my experience in such a way but the sun sets are nice.


10. Les Deux Magots, St. Germain, Paris
This place is on all lists like these. The cafe that was the centre of the literary universe for periods in the twenties and again in the fifties. Who mooched cafe au laits and wrote here? Who didn't? Its patrons included: Scott Fitzgerald, Joyce, Dos Passos, Djuna Barnes, Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, Beckett and many others. I mean ok so it's an expensive tourist trap these days but you still have to go here once in your life if only to experience the rudest wait staff in the Western World.


9. The British Museum Round Reading Room, Bloomsbury, London
This is where Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital and where anybody who was anybody in British letters did their research and writing. Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Auden, Orwell, Waugh, Maugham, Amis etc. all used the RRR at some point. Now that the British library has moved to St Pancras anyone is allowed in to visit the RRR and if you go there early before the hordes of screaming children it can be quite pleasant.


8. The Piano Bar of the Ambos Mundos Hotel, Havana, Cuba
This atmospheric joint is where Hemingway wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls. Be warned the current pianist has an inexplicable fondness for Celine Dion.


7. The Bar of the Ritz Hotel, Paris
The Ritz Hotel was "liberated" by Ernest Hemingway and a few American infantrymen in August 1944. A massive drinking session ensued. Sergeant JD Salinger showed up and Hemingway bought him a few cocktails having been impressed by his early short stories. Oh if those old whisky bottles could talk...


6. Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts
Final resting place for Hawthorne, Emerson, Alcott and Thoreau and a short hike from Walden Pond State Park where you can visit a reconstruction of Thoreau's cabin. There are many great literary cemeteries in the world (Westminster Abbey and Highgate in London; Montmartre, Montparnasse and Pere Lachaise in Paris; the lovely Novodevichy Convent & Cemetery in Moscow) but this is a very special place. For me it's the epitomy of tranquil, quiet, autumnal loveliness and I wouldn't mind spending all eternity here myself (but not for a while yet).

5 Garcia Lorca's House, Granada, Spain
After the somewhat dull symmetries and broken fountains of the Alhambra why not walk down the hill to the home of Spain's greatest twentieth century poet. You won't be disappointed.


4 Dashiell Hammett's Apartment, Post Street, San Francisco
When I visited there was someone actually living here but he was kind enough to let me in anyway. Since this is also technically Sam Spade's apartment too it can be a big thrill for fans of The Maltese Falcon.

3 Robert Louis Stevenson's House, Apia, Samoa
I haven't actually been here but it's very high on my to do list. Mark Twain visited and was impressed and if I remember correctly Paul Theroux dropped by too. Anyway it looks charming and I'd like to go.

2 Trotksy's House & Frida Kahlo's House

Ok neither of them are really writers (though Trot had a nice turn of phrase) but these houses are definitely worth a visit. They're very close to one another in the pretty Coyacan section of Mexico City which was actually a port in the time of stout Cortez. (A mind boggling fact when you see what it looks like now). Trotsky's house was and is a mini fortress and he's buried in the front garden. Frida Kahlo's home is one of the most beautiful interior spaces I've ever been in. She turned the house into a full blown extension of her personality and her art blossoms in every corner.


1 Ernest Hemingway's House, Havana, Cuba
It's quite the scene. Michael Palin wrote an entire book about how no one is allowed to sit in Hemingway's chair. But as you can see...

Hope you liked my little trawl through the literary geography. Let's do this again sometime, I've got a great story about how I tried to beat Dylan Thomas's record in The White Horse Tavern...

Read More