Adrian McKinty lets off the brakes
He's back with `The Island' after nearly stopping writing
Bestselling author Adrian McKinty is recounting a trip he and his wife took to a remote island in Australia.
“The first thing we saw when we landed was guys walking with shotguns,” he says of the place, which had been occupied by the same family for generations. Racing to make the last ferry off the island, McKinty narrowly missed hitting a woman on a bicycle when she suddenly emerged from a side road in front of his car; the woman was deaf and hadn't heard his car. “I honked the horn and jammed on the brakes. We stopped about 10 feet from her bicycle. I turned to my wife and said, `If I hit her, we wouldn't have gotten off this island alive.' ”
McKinty says he told his agent the story, who said, “That's your next book.”
In “The Island” (from Little, Brown and due Tuesday), Dr. Tom Baxter takes his wife and his two children with him to Australia for a medical conference. During some downtime, they take a ferry to a remote island to sightsee. Like what McKinty found in real life, the island is settled by a family that has been there for generations, and Baxter has an encounter with a deaf woman on a bicycle.
Deviating from McKinty's own experience, however, the woman dies and someone has to pay.
“I wrote the first 30 pages with no outline at all to see
if the story's a goer,” McKinty says of his process. “It's the classic hero's journey. The hero's comfortable at home, he goes out into the world, terrible things happen and the hero tries to make it back. And then hopefully the journey itself is a geographical and temporal journey, but the hero has changed in an interesting way by the end.
“That change is really important for succeeding. In `The Island,' all the characters change. And in so doing they are able to help one another and survive,” says McKinty
Before his recent success, McKinty pondered the survival of his writing career. Having written many favorably reviewed novels, including his series featuring Belfast detective Sean Duffy, his books have collected numerous awards and been shortlisted for many others.
But no one was buying them.
An Oxford University alumnus, McKinty was paying the bills doing odd jobs — teaching, working at a bar and driving an Uber. But at age 49, McKinty and his family of four got evicted, and he saw it as a sign that it was time to find a steady job. So, he announced to readers on his blog that he was stepping away from writing.
One of those blog readers was bestselling author Don Winslow, whose own success came after years of writing well-reviewed, slow-selling novels. Winslow called McKinty and begged him not to quit, convincing him that he just needed proper representation in the publishing world.
Winslow sent some of McKinty's books to his agent, Shane Salerno. Returning late from another day as an Uber driver, McKinty got a call from Salerno in the middle of the night. The author reiterated that he had stopped writing and thanked him for his interest. Within minutes, Salerno called two more times, finally convincing McKinty to send him the first 30 pages of what would become “The Chain.”
“This is the book that will change your life,” Salerno told McKinty. It did. “The Chain,” published in 2019 by Little, Brown, became a New York Times bestseller and is being turned into a feature film with Edgar Wright set to direct.
“I feel like a bit of a fraud, because people say to me, `You're the poster boy for never giving up.' That's not really the story. The story is, I did give up,” McKinty says, looking back on it. “It's an odd situation 'cause if your books don't sell and they don't get good reviews, if you're not a fool, you'll quit, 'cause the world is telling you, `Find another line of work.' And if your books do sell and you make a fortune at it, it's also the world sending you a very clear message. But what do you do if the books don't sell but the newspapers are telling you they're great? I was in that bind for nearly 10 years.”
This year, “The Island” was sold to Hulu to be developed as a limited series. These days McKinty is turning his attention to a new novel, a genre piece outside his usual wheelhouse.
His recent success after 25 years of writing is applauded by most of his readers, though he says there are a few holdouts. Despite the change in fortune, his approach is largely the same.
“I wrote books for myself and put them out there and nobody would buy them,” he says. “The formula hasn't changed. I'm still writing them for myself, but I'm reaching a bigger audience now.”
“I feel like a bit of a fraud, because people say to me, `You're the poster boy for never giving up.' That's not really the story. The story is, I did give up.”
— Author Adrian McKinty