‘Wait a minute, Doc,” says Marty McFly in the movie Back to the Future. “Are you telling me that you built a time machine . . . out of a DeLorean?”
That quote sets the scene for Adrian McKinty’s new novel, I Hear the Sirens in the Street. The second in his crime trilogy featuring Inspector Seán Duffy, the book is set in Belfast in the early 1980s, and the millionaire sports car manufacturer John DeLorean plays a cameo role.
For the Belfast-born author, who recently visited Ireland before returning to his current home in the Australian city of Melbourne, it was more like ‘Back to the Past’ – and not in a good way – as the sirens once again cranked up to full volume on Belfast’s streets.
“My God,” he says, “I must be bringing some massive jinx around with me. Belfast: rain and riots. Melbourne: fire and heat. I think I should start contacting people saying, ‘Pay me not to visit your city’.”
McKinty’s debut novel, Dead I Well May Be, was shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award in 2004. It, too, was part of a trilogy with The Dead Yard and The Bloomsday Dead. He followed up with a young adult sci-fi series, The Lighthouse Land, The Lighthouse War and The Lighthouse Keepers.
“I love the trilogy form,” he says. “I like the idea that you can establish a character in book one. And then in the second part you can take the characters down to their darkest point. And then in the third part you have total freedom, either to give them redemption – or just to kill them.”
He pours himself a cup of tea, adds milk and sips. Here is a man who could do away with the likeable hero of I Hear the Sirens in the Street, Inspector Seán Duffy, in a heartbeat. A Catholic detective trying to keep body and soul intact in the maelstrom of Protestantism that is the RUC in the early 1980s, Duffy is armed with a black sense of humour, an eclectic library and a CD collection that includes Joy Division, Plastic Bertrand and Tom Waits – fans will have spotted that the title of the new book is a line from the song A Sweet Little Bullet from a Pretty Blue Gun.
Long-running series
It’s easy to see Duffy becoming as popular as Ian Rankin’s Rebus – the books have already been optioned for TV by the production company that made Messiah – but so far, McKinty has been fighting shy of committing himself to a long-running crime series.
“It’s a lot less challenging for the author – but also for the reader,” he says. “You know the character has got to live for the next book. Okay, there’s going to be trials and tribulations, but in the end everything’s gonna be fine. With a trilogy, you just don’t know.”
McKinty studied in England, and was heading for a lucrative career as a lawyer – until he spent a post-degree summer working with a criminal-defence team.
“We got some awful people off,” he says. “There was this guy who’d been abusing his wife for years, and finally threw her down the stairs – and she’d finally been brave and turned him in. And we got him off. He got a two-year suspended sentence, and all the lawyers were celebrating like this was a huge victory. He even took us out to dinner. I just thought, ‘I can’t do this’.”
He switched to a postgraduate philosophy course at the University of Oxford. “I got a lot out of it. It helps train you to think and to use logic.” Good for plotting? “No, not really. But it is useful for putting yourself inside characters’ heads and saying, ‘Now, what would they be thinking, and why would they be thinking that?’ ”
While at Oxford he also met his future wife, an American, returned to New York with her and spent three years “doing all the things that illegals do – working in bars, on construction sites, all that”.
He also worked as a driver for a teamsters’ union safety inspector. “He would get out at a building site and meet with people, and then the people would give him an envelope and he would put it inside his jacket pocket. Then he’d have a beer or a cup of coffee or whatever – and then he’d go on to the next building site and do it all over again.
“I was a very naive young lad, and didn’t realise that he was being paid off, to keep the union from striking during those building projects. But about 15 years later I got this letter from the FBI asking if I’d be willing to come in and testify on a grand jury as part of an investigation into corrupt union practice.”
Did he go? “You must be joking. For about six months I lived in terror of the follow-up letter saying I had no choice – but it never came. They must have got somebody else. I wouldn’t cross those scary union guys for any money.”
Stories and dialogue
McKinty started writing crime fiction during a stint as a high-school teacher in Denver, Colorado. “I had a lot of stories and a lot of remembered dialogue and I thought, ‘Well that’s all a book is, really – it’s just stories and dialogue’.”
His first novel was taken on by the third agent he approached, and published by the second publisher. “We got lucky – and it really is luck,” he says. “A specific editor in a specific place likes the book, and you’re in. A different editor on a different day goes, ‘Oh, this isn’t for me’, or doesn’t even look at it, and that’s it. You hear it over and over again. Twilight, Hunger Games, Fifty Shades of Grey – same story.”
Having set novels in New York, Denver and the UK, he finally got around to writing about his native Belfast in The Cold Cold Ground. “I was really, really reluctant to do that story,” he says. “I’ve asked myself ‘Why was that?’ and I think it’s, there’s this feeling in the North that you just don’t talk about it, you know? The fire is barely cool and you don’t want to go in and poke around in those embers. I mean, who would have thought that a flag going up and down a pole could cause a week of riots? So keep your voice down, this is all in the past, let’s keep a lid on it.”
But then he got an idea with a Belfast setting – and once he started, it was like turning on a tap. “All these characters and all these memories just came flooding out. Stuff that I’d completely repressed for years.” It helps explain the rhythmic realism of his characters and dialogue to know that he has drawn on a cast of characters from the estate where he grew up.
“UDA men and low-level mafiosi and eccentric neighbours,” he says. “There was one guy who lived three doors down, who went to prison for a triple homicide. He’s out now, of course, because of the Good Friday Agreement. I used to play with his son . . . who is now in prison in Scotland.”
Growing up on a Protestant estate, how did McKinty come up with the idea of a Catholic detective?
“Ah, it would have been so boring just to have a bunch of Protestants solving these cases,” he says. “Duffy is a little bit more educated than the police around him, a little bit more middle-class, and a Catholic at a time when the RUC is maybe 85 per cent Protestant.
“That’s so great for a writer, because there’s all these fracture lines coming together. And it generated all these interesting ideas. Does he trust his colleagues? Do they trust him? Does he trust his Protestant neighbours?”
Does he survive the final part of the trilogy? “Well,” says McKinty, “we’ll have to see.”
I Hear The Sirens In The Street by Adrian McKinty is published by Serpent’s Tail
An Adrian McKinty reader
Dead I Well May Be(2003). McKinty's debut novel and the first in his Michael Forsythe trilogy. Irish thugs battle Dominican gangs in pre-Giuliani New York – what's not to like?
The Cold Cold Ground(Serpent's Tail, 2012). The precursor to I Hear The Sirens In The Street and the first in the Sean Duffy trilogy. You don't need to read these in any particular order, but once you read one, you'll want to read the other: and you'll be signing up for part three, due to hit the shelves in 2014.
Falling Glass(Serpent's Tail, 2011)
Killian is a Traveller, a debt-collector and a finder of missing persons; a hit man with a conscience. But when he’s offered a cool half million for a job, he suspects his conscience may be in trouble. And he’s right.
