Prize-winning thriller writer slammed down the phone on his big break
As Adrian McKinty scoops crime’s most coveted award, how he almost ditched his dream to drive a taxi…
IT HAD been a long, arduous day’s taxi driving and Adrian McKinty had finished his shift cleaning vomit from the back of his car when he took the call that would dramatically change his life. His series of critically acclaimed crime novels had flopped commercially and the Belfast-born writer was broke. Six weeks earlier, having been evicted with his young family from their home, Adrian announced in an online blog that he was putting down his pen to retrain as a teacher.
Now he was working in a bar and driving an Uber taxi as the family tried to get their finances in shape. Frankly, the last thing he wanted to talk about after another long, troubling day was a book. But the call from US super-agent and film producer Shane Salerno led to an astonishing reversal of fortune.
“I’d had a terrible day and I don’t think Shane knew what time it was. He called me at midnight,” recalls Adrian. “He was so American on the phone, he rubbed me up the wrong way. I just said, ‘Mate, I can’t deal with this now. No offence but I’m knackered and I’m going to bed’, and I hung up.”
Fortunately, Salerno persevered and, on his third attempt at calling that night, managed to talk the disillusioned author into writing The Chain, a gripping thriller championed by the Daily Express.
That book has since secured Adrian, 52, a seven-figure movie deal, with a script by Jane Goldman, screenwriter of a host of hit films including Stardust and the Kingsman and X-Men movies. Last night, some two years after being persuaded to quit Uber and start writing again, Adrian was crowned winner of the highly coveted Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award.
“It’s a mercy for my Uber customers,” he laughs. “I had one of the lowest ratings ever for Uber. I’m a bit of a nervous driver; I never killed anyone but I’m not the world’s fastest or most confident driver either.”
The world-famous Harrogate crime writing festival is digital only this year because of the Covid-19 lockdown but its flagship award, supported by the Daily Express, was as hotly contested as ever. Sadly, with the physical festival on hold until 2021, Adrian was not able to celebrate his win as is traditional over drinks at its home, the Old Swan Hotel, crime queen Agatha Christie’s former Harrogate haunt. And, because of Covid-19, he is yet to meet Hollywood-based Salerno in person. But his win has been overwhelming nonetheless.
“I was not expecting this. I’m over the moon. I’m really just in some kind of alternative reality,” he says. “The past two years really have been the most extraordinary of my professional life.”
It is a story of triumph over adversity as gripping as any book. The son of a secretary and shipworker at iconic Titanic builders Harland & Wolff, Adrian grew up on a Carrickfergus council estate in County Antrim before winning a scholarship to Oxford University. He met his US-born wife
Leah in the city’s Eagle and Child pub where Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien used to meet Narnia creator C S Lewis to read aloud to one another from their books.
“One night my wife-to-be wandered in knowing nothing about The Lord Of The Rings and I tried that chat-up line, ‘Are you in here because of Tolkien?’ She looked at me in horror. Her eyes were going, ‘Oh my God,