Anthony Quinn on his Troubled upbringing

With a hat tip to Crime Always Pays come a link to this essay by novelist Anthony Quinn about his childhood in Northern Ireland. (I wrote about Quinn's novel Disappeared here and here.)  The interview will explain much about why Northern Ireland remains fertile territory for some of today's best crime writing.

By coincidence, I read the interview a day after the obituary of a former reporter for my newspaper included this excerpt from his 1981 article about the funeral of Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands:

“In a grimy gray drizzle, under ragged black flags that lifted and waved balefully in the fitful air; to the wail of a single piper, on streets winding through charred and blasted brick spray-painted with slogans of hate; by silent tens of thousands, past fathers holding sons face-forward that they might remember the day, past mothers rocking and shielding prams that held tomorrow’s fighters, past old men who blew their rheumy noses and remembered their own days of rage …  Bobby Sands was carried yesterday to a grave of raw Ulster mud.”

And that, in turn, leads to the even more felicitous coincidence that this week marks the UK release of Adrian McKinty's I Hear the Sirens in the Streets, which would be the best book I've read in 2013 if I hadn't read it in 2012.  Sirens follows on the excellent Cold Cold Ground. Read both, and find out what McKinty fans like Daniel Woodrell and Ian Rankin are talking about.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013