A short review of Adrian McKinty's Fifty Grand, incorporating the working girl's helicopter miscellany

I predict that Adrian McKinty won't be on Tom Cruise's Christmas list this year, probably not on Brad Pitt's either, and definitely not on Raul Castro's. I predict, too, that if the Boston Red Sox win the 2009 World Series, they will not vote McKinty a share of the winners' money.

Fifty Grand includes a gut-tightening prologue, a more nuanced view than you might expect of Mexican immigrant life in Colorado, and a refutation of Clive James's too-confident declaration that "In most of the crime novels coming out now, it’s a matter not of what happens but of where. Essentially, they are guidebooks.” And it includes revenge.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

A Fifty Grand day

Today is release day for Fifty Grand by Detectives Beyond Borders favorite Adrian McKinty. The book opens with what has to be the most gut-clenchingly tension-upping prologue in all of crime fiction, and it goes on to tell a story about Cuba, espionage and the human costs thereof.

It's also about class distinctions, exploitation of immigrants and celebrity worship in America, which means it's always timely, and its protagonist takes a dizzying journey from privilege of a kind over to something quite opposite.

In typical McKinty fashion, deadpan funny lines find their way into the action at the most desperate moments:

`Listen to me, buddy, I can make you rich. I can get you money. A lot of money. Millions. Do you understand? Millions of dollars. Goddamnit! Why don't you understand, what's the matter with you? Millions of dollars? Do you speak English? Do you understand the goddamn English language?'

I do. It was my major.

When you're done reading the book and touting it on Amazon.com and elsewhere, try McKinty's splendid Michael Forsythe trilogy: Dead I Well May Be, The Dead Yard and The Bloomsday Dead.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Getting behind "Fifty Grand"

Adrian McKinty, novelist, blogger, and scourge of factual inaccuracy, sheds light on the genesis of his new novel, Fifty Grand, and offers a chance to win a copy. Click, read, and win. Once you read this novel's opening pages, you won't put the book down. If I were choosing a baseball nine (or cricket eleven or hurling fifteen) of novels, this book would make the team for best prologue.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Fifty Grand

Honor-bound as I am by my fervent belief in the mainstream media and everything they give us, I must obey the injunction on the back of my copy of Adrian McKinty's new novel, Fifty Grand: "This is an uncorrected proof. Any quotes for publication must be checked against the finished book."

Honor-bound as I am by said media's professed belief in full disclosure and avoiding even the appearance of impropriety, I hereby acknowledge that:

a) The author and I have for some time exchanged comments of a friendly nature on each other's blogs

b) He sent me the book, signed, with a note I presume he wrote himself

c) I have drunk Guinness in his sister's pub, and

d) Sod the mainstream media. I'm writing about the book anyhow.

I can't quote from the novel, but I will say that its prologue tiptoes to the precipice of death and peers over. And this prologue thing — McKinty makes votive offerings at the shrine of Ernest Hemingway, but I'd bet he's read an old horror tale or two as well. He knows how to lure a reader in.

More to come.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

McKinty reads

In one more piece of evidence that Belfast is the center of the universe,

No Alibis invites you to an evening with Detectives Beyond Borders favorite

Adrian McKinty

to celebrate the launch of his latest novel, Fifty Grand,
on Wednesday, July 8, at 6 p.m.

Cuban cop Mercado has a score to settle on behalf of a deadbeat dad, a ‘traitor’ who skipped free from Castro’s control to set up a new life working illegally in Colorado. He settled in a ski resort popular with the Hollywood Scientology set, where a façade of legality is maintained by the immigrant cleaners and laborers working for below minimum wage while the local sheriff is bribed to turn a blind eye. Mercado Sr.’s dreams of fortune and freedom are shattered when he is killed in a hit-and-run accident. Sworn to avenge his death, Mercado has some obstacles to overcome, not least getting out of Cuba, where visas are as elusive as constant electricity.

Adrian McKinty was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. He studied politics at Oxford University, and after a failed legal career he moved to the US in the early 1990s. He found work as a security guard, postman, construction worker, barman, rugby coach and bookstore clerk before becoming a school teacher. He now resides in Melbourne, Australia.

NO ALIBIS BOOKSTORE
83 BOTANIC AVENUE
BELFAST BT7 1JL
david@noalibis.com
ph. 02890-319601
========================================

Here's part of what I had to say about Fifty Grand:

"The book opens with what has to be the most gut-clenchingly tension-upping prologue in all of crime fiction, and it goes on to tell a story about Cuba, espionage and the human costs thereof.

"It's also about class distinctions, exploitation of immigrants and celebrity worship in America, which means it's always timely, and its protagonist takes a dizzying journey from privilege of a kind over to something quite opposite.

"In typical McKinty fashion, deadpan funny lines find their way into the action at the most desperate moments."

McKinty flew all the way from Australia for this reading. Go hear him, buy a book, and stake him to a pint of correctly poured Guinness. It's the least you can do.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Another chapter, this time from Adrian McKinty

Crime Scene NI (may its tribe increase!) posts this reminder that the opening chapter of Adrian McKinty's next novel, Fifty Grand, is available here. The chapter has much of what I loved about McKinty's Michael Forsythe novels: rhythm, tension and, amid the grimness, a brief, funny exchange of dialogue.

McKinty talks about Fifty Grand and other interesting subjects, including crime fiction, dumbing down and Dan Brown, in this interview on Crime Always Pays.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Adrian McKinty
Irish crime fiction
Northern Ireland crime fiction

Crime Factory and classical gas

Who's in Issue #1 of Crime Factory? Ken Bruen, Adrian McKinty, Scott Phillips and Dave White, for a start. (A hat tip to Crime Scene NI.)

Bruen offers an excerpt from an upcoming novel, Killer, that looks to be as good as anything I've read by him, and it contains as pertinent a bit of self-reference as any I've read in crime fiction.

McKinty's contribution is a "making of" journal about his novel Fifty Grand, and Phillips offers an appreciation of Charles Willeford and what Willeford meant to his own writing. Lots of places publish crime fiction. Crime Factory offers glimpses of some of the sharp minds that create the stuff. May it live long.

*******

Over at A dead man fell from the sky ... , meanwhile, blogkeeper/author/classicist Gary Corby has been soliciting nominations for song titles of antiquity. My humble suggestions include:

"Get Bacchae (to Where You Once Belonged)"

"You Can Call Me Alcestis"

"Liver and Let Die" (This one's about Prometheus)

"Saturday Night's All Right for Phaëtōn"

You might also like a contribution from another reader that I wish I had come up with:

"I Want A Girl Just Like The Girl That Married Dear Old Dad" by Oedipus

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

More good lines to ease you into the new year, and a chance to win a book

I quoted one good line from Liam O'Flaherty's The Assassin yesterday. Here's another, this one more typical of the novel:

"(W)hen man feels weak and timid, it is then that he broods lovingly over misery, sin, death and the violent salvation of upheaval."

And lo, it transpires that Declan Burke took the working title of his big new Irish crime-fiction project from O'Flaherty's very next paragraph.

Yesterday's line was funny; today's is chilling. I'll wrap up the roundup up of good lines with one of each type from Adrian McKinty's Fifty Grand, and then later this week, a gem from Bill James.

First, McKinty:

"Listen to me, buddy, I can make you rich. I can get you money. A lot of money. Millions. Do you understand? Millions of dollars. Goddamnit! Why don't you understand, what's the matter with you? Millions of dollars? Do you speak English? Do you understand the goddamn English language?"

I do. It was my major.

and

Damn it. The other line you get when I can find the note where I wrote down what page it's on.

What good lines have you come across in your recent reading?
=====================

U.S. readers, you still have one chance to win a copy of Jo Nesbø's The Redbreast if you can answer this question correctly:

The novel's opening chapters include an amusingly vapid radio interview with a U.S. president just arrived in Norway for a major international summit conference. In what city did this real-life conference take place? What two other world leaders also attended?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Pest is (usually) prologue

If I ever run a competition for best prologue, I may have to specify best prologue from outside Northern Ireland. That's because Adrian McKinty's Fifty Grand has probably sewn up best-prologue honors for the foreseeable future, and Brian McGilloway's prologue to Bleed a River Deep is pretty damn good, too.

McKinty's is full of menace, deadpan wit and suspense. Here's how McGilloway's opens:

"The last time I saw Leon Bradley with a gun in his hand ... "

McGilloway wastes no time obeying Raymond Chandler's dictum, and it gets better. There's a nice twist and a violent climax, but the little story breaks off just before its dénouement, leaving matters to be resolved in the novel that follows.

Why mention these two fine examples? Because I'm usually wary of prologues, suspicious that they're lazy shortcuts for authors who don't know how to begin and so begin with the end. How do you feel about prologues? If you don't like them, why not? If you do, what makes a prologue effective? Feel free to cite some good ones.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

All come to look for America

"He has no personal name at all. His dadda is in far Amurikey."

"Which of the two Amurikeys?" asked MacCruiskeen.

"The United Stations," said the Sergeant.

"Likely he is rich by now if he is in that quarter," said MacCruiskeen, "because there's dollars there, dollars and bucks and nuggets in the ground and any amount of rackets and golf games and musical instruments. It is a free country too by all accounts."

— Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

====================================

A strip mall. 7-Eleven. Liquor store. Smoke shop.

Bits of tire. Fenders. License plates.

A gender reassignment clinic.

What is this place?

"America."

America.

"I don't feel good."

— Adrian McKinty, Fifty Grand

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Don't hold it against Adrian McKinty that he can write

I have begun browsing Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly, sixth of Adrian McKinty's novels about Northern Ireland police officer Sean Duffy. Ian Rankin loves these books, and he's not wrong; I'm a fan, too.

I've read far too little of Police at the Station ... to write a review, and, since I'm reading an advance reading copy, I'm honor-bound not to quote from it in any case. I can tell you, however, that the book demonstrates once again McKinty's flair for suspenseful, funny surprisingly lyrical opening scenes, sometimes all at once, other times in varying proportions. This latest is up there with the opening chapters of Cold Cold Ground, Rain Dogs, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, and Fifty Grand. Moreover, the parts of his books that come after the first chapters are pretty good, too.

Adrian McKinty. Photo by Peter
Rozovsky for Detectives
Beyond Borders

Reviewers praise crime novels for their plots, their themes, their characters, their sociology, their psychology, their politics, their settings, their conformity with or deviation from trends, where they fit in the publishing landscape, and whether or not they're from Scandinavia.

Writing? That doesn't get mentioned much. I suspect this is because reviewers and other people are uncomfortable talking about writing at best or wouldn't know good writing if they saw it at worst.  McKinty has noted something like a puritanical aversion in some writing  circles to writing that exists for its own sake, that shows off a little. He is not constrained that way in his own work, which is one reason you should read him. That, and all that good stuff about Northern Ireland, and the jokes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Cuba: Libre or not, here I come

Now that American newspapers are drastically cutting their coverage of foreign news, readers may have to turn elsewhere to gain perspective. They could do worse than crime fiction.

First assignment: Adrian McKinty's new Fifty Grand and Lawrence Block's old Killing Castro, reissued by Hard Case Crime. Block's book is about a Dirty Dozenish gang of assassins who come together to do just what you'd expect from the book's title, and it offers relatively early discussion (the book first appeared in 1961) of where Fidel Castro went wrong. McKinty's is about one person's suffering and manipulation at the hands of a range of antagonists that includes the Cuban government, and he saves his ire for Raul Castro. Neither book is likely to earn its author a friendly reception at a Castrista piss-up.

Read the books back to back, then prepare a book report on both. Samples of each are available by clicking on the titles in the preceding paragraph. And now maybe I'll go read some Leonardo Padura. (Nathan Cain of Independent Crime links to a list of Padura's favorite Cuban novels. The Old Man and the Sea makes the list.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A thinking man's exploration

That's two critical clichés in one post title; I must be a weak-minded critic. Maybe the coincidence was too much: that two consecutive books on my crime-fiction list should each exemplify what I think reviewers mean when they use a particular critical trope.

The thinking man's crime novel in this case is Adrian McKinty's Fifty Grand, for its nuanced view of migrant life in the United States and for its final pages. The novel offers a bang-up prologue of even higher tension than those to McKinty's Michael Forsythe books. Its final twist resembles those in Jean-Patrick Manchette's novels, in which the powerless are stripped by the powerful of almost everything that anchors them in this world.

In between, McKinty's first-person narrator/protagonist lives the life of an illegal Mexican immigrant in Colorado, a life replete with indignities, but also with astute observation and quiet moments of daily life and the odd behavior of one town's movie-star colony. The author is at least as interested in imagining his way into the lives of people different from himself as he is in telling a suspenseful story.

The exploration belongs to Bill James' In the Absence of Iles, twenty-fifth novel in the superlative Harpur and Iles series. The middle novels of the series especially, from Astride a Grave (1991) to Eton Crop (1999), are dark and humorous explorations of aspirations to respectability among the criminal classes and of the strange lives of odd, sometimes improvised families on both sides of the law.

Before that, James had written about a police undercover operation gone wrong, in the series' third book, The Halo Parade (1987). He returned to the theme several times in later novels, notably Kill Me (2000), in which an officer selected to infiltrate a criminal gang meets an exceedingly weird psychologist at a training course intended to prepare her for the operation.

Now, though, James explores the issue more thoroughly, concentrating and consolidating his fascination with police undercover work, its perils and its effects on those who send officers into harm's way.

Thus, an officer demonstrating for a gathering of police chiefs, particularly Assistant Chief Constable Esther Davidson, the skills required to work under cover:

"The cloth held to his shoulders in the affectionate, unruffled, congratulatory way a midwife might present a just-born baby to its mother. ... Not much of the waistcoat showed under his buttoned-up jacket, but Esther could tell it fitted right, and the pockets contained nothing bulky to destroy the general line. ...

"But then he turned his back for a moment and when he slowly spun and faced them once more seemed suddenly ... seemed suddenly what she'd originally expected: nervy and hesitant. ... His body signalled prodigious cringe now. ...

"Esther realized they were watching a performer who could have made it big in the theatre."

or

"Esther felt she had fallen into a sort of voodoo superstition, as if scared that to flout any part of the instructions from A and B and the rest of the Fieldfare performers would bring big punishment — big punishment signifying loss of the Out-located officer and failure of the operation."

James makes several interesting choices to narrow the focus on the officers who plan the undercover operation that drives the book, not all of which can be revealed without spoilers. One that can is that, shockingly for an author who has given crime fiction some of its funniest, grubbiest and most shabbily noble criminals, James gives no criminal anything more than a passing mention through the novel's first hundred or so pages.

==================

More later, but for now, the novel's finest example yet of James' typical dark, wry humour, this from Officer B, the cool-headed counterpart to the flamboyant Officer A discussed above:

"Family enmities are generally more vicious than any others. Think of the punch-ups and knifings at typical weddings, christening parties and funerals."

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Who is reviewing the reviewers?

I am. So is Seana Graham. Declan Burke takes a peek, too, from time to time, and that's a good thing.

The occasion is a review in the Guardian of Adrian McKinty's novel Fifty Grand. I've always been partial to reviews that establish context, that show the reviewer knows his or her subject, that could interest even a reader unfamiliar with the matter at hand.

I like that the Guardian begins by invoking McKinty's "Dead" trilogy and goes on to find traits common to that superb series and the new book. This tells me that the reviewer, John O'Connell, prepared well, embraced his subject and took his job seriously. A reviewer owes his readers no less.

Seana Graham's Things You May Have Missed blog takes up this subject in a post aptly titled What the Guardian knows that The New York Times doesn't. And Declan Burke's Crime Always Pays is apt to snap its jaws at lazy reviewers' hindquarters when they deserve it.

With newspapers devoting less and less space to books coverage, the coverage that remains had better be good. Because we're watching.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

2010 Spinetingler Award winners

This year's list of winners in the Spinetingler Awards has an international flavor. OK, an Irish flavor. All right, Northern Irish.

Stuart Neville's The Ghosts of Belfast won for best novel by a new voice and Adrian McKinty's Fifty Grand for best novel by a rising star. (Spinetingler breaks down its categories by the number of books the author has published. Michael Connelly's The Scarecrow won in the "legends" category, for authors who have published lots and lots of books. He beat a field that had international presence of its own, in The Complaints by Ian Rankin and Tower by Reed Farrel Coleman & Ken Bruen.)

My favorite international contender, Jacques Tardi & Jean-Patrick Manchette's West Coast Blues, fell short in the comic/graphic novel category, and a guy named Peter Rozovsky did the same in his bid for a historic second Spinetingler victory, losing as best reviewer after sharing last year's award for special services to the industry.

I'll be brave. Meanwhile, congratulations to the winners.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Strictly business in New York

This evening's Soho Crime event at Partners & Crime in New York was more meet and mingle than rap and read, and time passed too quickly for me to do all the meeting and mingling with the authors that I'd have liked to do. Still, editors, publicists, booksellers and a collector and fan with apparently wide Irish crime-fiction contacts made for an enjoyable and possibly productive evening.

Eliot Pattison, one of the six featured meeters and minglers, writes series about Tibet and colonial America, but he's a big fan of Irish and other Celtic music, it transpires. We didn't get the chance to chat about his Tibet books, of which I've read two and bought a third at the event. But he did tell me about some good places to hear Celtic music. (The other authors were Cara Black, Garry Disher, Mick Herron, Henry Chang and James R. Benn. I'd particularly have liked more time to talk technique with Disher.) I also saw a copy of Adrian McKinty's Fifty Grand on display, and a Soho editor told me about a new title they're really excited about: Stuart Neville's Ghosts of Belfast. There's something to this Irish crime fiction thing.

Alas, my train ride home called to mind another Irish crime novel. Three passengers on the Amtrak Quiet Car, where cell-phone use is barred, were using their cell phones. The serial killer in Ken Bruen's Calibre would have known what to do about that.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009