Adrian McKinty

• Born: 1967
• Place of Birth: Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland

• TYPES OF PLOT: Espionage; hard-boiled, thriller
• PRINCIPAL SERIES: Michael Forsythe, 2003-2007; Sean Duffy, 2012-

Contribution

Adrian McKinty has joined the long line of talented Irish writers. In each of his novels, he exposes readers to the long war waged in Ireland between Roman Catholics and Protestants. In particular, McKinty’s fast-paced, intensely violent mystery novels provide insights into a dark period in Irish history known as the Troubles, during which Republican and Loyalist paramilitary organizations in British-ruled Northern Ireland engaged in various forms of violence from the late 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. McKinty’s characters—especially his dark, popular protagonist Michael Forsythe, who illegally immigrates to New York City to escape the Troubles in Northern Ireland—are all products of this violent era in Irish history. McKinty, who has been described by crime-fiction specialist Otto Penzler as “the super-talented Irishman,” joins a number of Irish writers who have recently gravitated to crime writing such as , the winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize for The Sea (2005). Irish writer Frank Court, author of Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir (1996), describes McKinty as “a cross between American mystery writer and Damon Runyon.”

McKinty’s novels contribute to an emerging genre known as Irish noir, which, scholars suggest, has been created by the collision of older political and social violence with newer crime-based violence, produced as a result of the prosperous economic era that made Ireland into the Celtic Tiger.

McKinty has won many awards and has received countless accolades since his writing career took off in 2003. McKinty’s Dead I Well May Be (2003), which was adapted to screen, was short-listed for the Crime Writers’ Association’s Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award. The Dead Yard (2006) was named one of the fifteen best novels of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. He has also won numerous Irish Times and Boston Globe awards, has been recognized by the New York Times for multiple Best Thriller awards, and won Time magazine's Book of the Year Award in 2019 for The Chain (2019). The Island (2022) was also a New York Times Best Seller.

Biography

Adrian McKinty was born in 1967 in Carrickfergus, County Down, a town five miles outside Belfast in British Northern Ireland. Soon after his birth, Northern Ireland entered a violent period known as the Troubles, centered on the clash between the Unionist government in Ulster and the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which sought, through militant means, to reunite the six counties in Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland in the southern part of the island. The Troubles, which could at any moment have escalated into a full-scale civil war, seriously affected the daily lives of everyone living in Northern Ireland at that time and no doubt shaped the people’s political and social perspectives. In 1972, when McKinty was only five years old, twenty-six protesters in Derry, Northern Ireland, were shot by members of the British Parachute Regiment. This incident, known as Bloody Sunday, dramatically intensified the violence and caused an increase in enlistment in the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which was campaigning for Northern Ireland’s independence from Britain. McKinty’s youth was thus shrouded in scenes of horrific violence. The author once described his hometown Carrickfergus, as “old school—no cars, much drunkenness, wives in their place and many, many fights.” Hardly surprising then, that his background in Northern Ireland provides much of the material for his highly suspenseful, brutally violent novels.

McKinty attended Oxford University, where he studied politics and trained as an attorney before immigrating illegally in the 1990s to New York City, where for five years he worked various odd jobs, including security guard, teacher, construction worker, mail carrier, bartender, salesman, and rugby coach. At one time, he sold books at the Barnes and Noble on 82nd Street and Broadway in New York City. During this time, McKinty lived in Harlem but traveled, for a time, to India before eventually returning to the United States. He took a job as a schoolteacher and settled in Denver. As is true with many successful writers, his various jobs and his sojourns in various geographic locales provided McKinty with myriad experiences from which to create interesting settings and unusual, dynamic, bigger-than-life characters.

Analysis

A new generation of Irish mystery writers continues to proliferate partly, as one critic argues, in response to Ireland’s changing social landscape. Although Ireland was once one of the poorer nations in Western Europe, thanks in part to its membership in the European Union, Ireland prospered from the 1990s to the early 2000s, becoming known as the Celtic Tiger. However, a rise in crime and violence typically accompany a rise in prosperity, and Ireland was no exception. This meeting point between wealth, misdeeds, and fear gave rise to a new literary genre called Irish noir, a blending of American hard-boiled crime fiction with twenty-first century Irish settings, social mores, and dialogue that illustrates the collision of primitive deep-seated violence with the modern world.

One way that the Irish have come to terms with the violence in their country is through the art of storytelling. Psychiatrists explain that storytelling can be viewed as a survival mechanism used by cultures to sublimate or diminish their fears. The act of writing or telling shadowy tales of horror and violence makes evil seem less frightening. Described by one critic as “a stunning new noir voice, dark and stylish, mythic and violent—complete with an Irish lilt,” McKinty, whose own early life was steeped in violence and suspicion, writes novels that fit easily into this new Irish noir genre.

Although noir, the genre made famous by American writers such as and , features tough-talking male protagonists and is set in cities in early twentieth century America, Irish noir, is typically set in dark, shadowy, and moody Dublin. Indeed, the Gaelic dubh linn translates as “dark pool.” However, Irish noir is often transplanted to other sinister, shadowy geographic locations such as, in the case of McKinty, inner-city Boston and New York City, locales that fit the noir genre. Both cities contain large Irish communities complete with pubs and have drawn violent IRA men on the run. In this regard, McKinty also uses Mexico effectively in his noir novels, but he has recently come under criticism for using Denver, Colorado, as the setting of Hidden River (2005). As one critic points out, Denver does not work quite as well as a backdrop for the dark horror and violence that, in addition to his lurid descriptions of pain, fear, and brutality, have come to define McKinty’s novels. According to one critic, his novels tend to mirror the real-life violence that has plagued Northern Ireland.

There are no good guys in McKinty’s novels. His heroes are really antiheroes who are, without exception, dark, complex, and brooding: bad boys, drug addicts, and murderers who just might descend into madness before the readers’ eyes if they are pushed too far. It is not difficult to understand these horrifically violent heroes, because they are products of dark, shadowy, noir worlds and have rarely, if ever, encountered trustworthy people. In McKinty’s novels, everyone, even the seemingly sweet, innocent young women favored by his heroes, is corruptible. No one can be trusted.

In addition, McKinty is an intellectual. His novels are replete with entertaining literary and historical allusions that range from ’s Faustus to .

Orange Rhymes with Everything

In his first novel, the 1997 thriller Orange Rhymes with Everything, McKinty uses two unnamed narrators, a Protestant terrorist and his disabled teenage daughter, to illustrate Northern Ireland’s ongoing historical, cultural, and religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. In New York, a patient with Irish Loyalist leanings and intent on returning home to Northern Ireland at any cost breaks out of a mental institution. Soon, bodies begin to pile up as he makes his way home to see his estranged teenage daughter, who lives an ordinary, rough, working-class life in dark and violent Ulster.

Dead I Well May Be

McKinty’s second novel, Dead I Well May Be, takes its title from the lyrics of the famous Irish ballad “Danny Boy.” First-person narrator Michael Forsythe, a nineteen-year-old illegal immigrant living in New York City to escape the Troubles in Belfast, finds life just as violent and unpredictable in his adopted country as it was in Ireland. Fearless, clever, and in need of money, Forsythe gets a job working for Darkey White, the ironically named Irish mobster. In between fighting various ethnic gangs for control of the dark streets of the Bronx and Harlem and dealing with various crack addicts, murderers, and prostitutes as Darkey’s enforcer, Forsythe manages to fall in love with his boss’s luscious girlfriend Bridget. After Darkey discovers Forsythe and Bridget have betrayed him, Forsythe winds up in a horrific Mexican prison for his involvement in a drug deal gone wrong. After escaping, he predictably returns to New York to exact revenge on the Irish mobster.

Hidden River

Hidden River, which has been compared to Raymond Chandler’s noir Farewell, My Lovely (1940), presents another flight from Ireland to America, this time by a twenty-four-year-old disgraced former Royal Ulster Constabulary officer turned heroin addict. Alex Lawson, another of McKinty’s brooding antiheroes, leaves Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, to investigate the death of his former girlfriend, the Irish-born Indian Victoria Patawasti, who was murdered in Denver. He also needs to leave Ireland quickly, as he is being pursued by a heroin dealer to whom he owes money, police investigators, and crooked Ulster police officers. Lawson, who remains addicted to heroin, soon is wanted by the Colorado police after a suspect falls from a balcony. Lawson’s investigation reveals that Victoria was in fact killed by her boss, the enormously rich Charles Mulholland, who is married to the beautiful, quirky Amber, the iconic mysterious noir femme fatale, whom, predictably, Alex finds attractive.

The Dead Yard

The Dead Yard, the popular sequel to McKinty’s acclaimed Dead I Well May Be, opens in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, where McKinty’s primary antihero Michael Forsythe is taking a long-deserved holiday. However, Forsythe is arrested after a riot breaks out at a soccer match between Ireland and England and finds himself threatened with long-term incarceration back in the horrific Mexican prison from which he earlier escaped. However, a typical McKinty noir femme fatale, this time the voluptuous British intelligence agent Samantha, offers him a chance for release if he takes an Federal Bureau of Investigation assignment to infiltrate an Irish terrorist sleeper cell in Massachusetts. After saving the life of Kit, the teenage daughter of McCaghan, the cell’s leader, Forsythe is immediately integrated into the renegade Sons of Cuchulainn. He stays at McCaghan’s palatial beachside estate in the company of Touched, McCaghan’s star sadistic killer, McCaghan’s new wife, and Kit and her boyfriend, Jackie. Predictably, Forsythe develops a fondness for Kit but this does not save her and the rest of her family from a violent end in the Maine wilderness at the hands of Forsythe.

The Bloomsday Dead

In The Bloomsday Dead (2007), a sequel to The Dead Yard, Michael Forsythe arrives in Dublin on June 16, otherwise known as Bloomsday, the annual remembrance of the life of Irish writer in which celebrants relive the events in his famous novel Ulysses (1922), the action of which takes place on June 16, 1904, in Dublin. Forsythe is working as a security guard in Lima, Peru, keeping tourists, prostitutes, and others in line, when two Colombian hit men force him into a hotel room to take a call from his old girlfriend, Bridget Callaghan, in Ireland. He is told to find her daughter or be killed, so he returns to Ireland. Like Joyce’s hero Leopold Bloom, in a one-day odyssey, Forsythe manages to penetrate the IRA network, is kidnapped, escapes, infiltrates the Irish mob, and finds Bridget’s daughter on a cliff in the company of her kidnappers and, unexpectedly, her own mother.

The Troubles Trilogy

The Troubles Trilogy, comprising McKinty's first three Sean Duffy novels, chronicles the dark and dismal period of conflict in and around Belfast during the 1980s known as the Troubles. McKinty pulls from his own past and upbringing and sets the trilogy in his hometown of Carrickfergus during the times of his youth. The three booksThe Cold Ground (2012), I Hear the Sirens in the Streets (2013), and In theMorning I'll Be Gone (2014)Catholic cop in the Protestant RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary),

Principal Series Character:

• Michael Forsythe is a young, highly articulate illegal immigrant from Ireland living in New York City. After he joins the Irish mob in America and takes on investigations throughout the world, he finds that the troubles he left behind in Belfast have followed him.
• Sean Duffy is a a Catholic police sergeant who works in the Protestant town of Carrickfergus in the 1980s, the time and place of McKinty's upbringing, during the height of the conflict between Catholic IRA and Protestant paramilitary factions. Duffy is an unconventional detective, willing to push limits and norms to solve crimes.

Bibliography

"Bio." Adrian McKinty Author, 2024, officialadrianmckinty.com/bio/. Accessed 22 Aug. 2024.

"Books." Adrian McKinty Author, 2024, officialadrianmckinty.com/books/. Accessed 29 Aug. 2024.

Anderson, Patrick. “A Hero and His Heroin.” Review of Hidden River, by Adrian McKinty. The Washington Post, 20 Dec. 2004, p. C04.

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. Random House, 2007.

Bruen, Ken, ed. Dublin Noir: The Celtic Tiger Versus the Ugly American. Akashic Books, 2006.

McCarthy, Jerry. “Literature: The Dark Side of the Boom.” The Sunday Times, June 4, 2006.

McKinty, Adrian. “Irish Heroin Addict in America.” Interview by Patrick Millikin. Publishers Weekly, 6 Dec. 2004, p. 44.

Sennett, Frank. Review of The Bloomsday Dead, by Adrian McKinty. Booklist, 1 Dec. 2006, p. 28.