In Troubles again
Adrian McKinty returns to noir cop Sean Duffy and strife-torn Northern Ireland in `The Detective Up Late'
Adrian McKinty remembers the night he was yanked from bed in his pajamas and hauled off to a police station.
It was the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which ultimately claimed 3,720 lives and injured more than 47,000 people in ongoing clashes over the British presence there.
Young McKinty was just 9 or 10 years old. “The bombings were so bad that they erected an entire system of security barriers around the city center, and to get in every car had to be searched with a metal detector and sniffer dogs — every single vehicle had to be searched,” says McKinty, the bestselling author of “The Chain,” “The Island” and his latest, “The Detective Up Late,” which is set in Northern Ireland. “All the civilians had to be searched, patted down.”
In the midst of the sectarian strife, McKinty and his younger brother rode bikes, played in the streets and joked around.
“My brother and I cycled everywhere on our bikes. One time we found a cartridge, like a rifle cartridge. We knew that my sister worked in Belfast and had to go to the city center through those search huts every day. And so we thought, what if we put it into her handbag?” says McKinty, his young mind crafting what he imagined would be a funny gag. “It'll be hilarious.”
“So we did,” McKinty says. “It turned out not to be hilarious. It turned out to be really, really bad. We got in a lot of trouble for that.”
McKinty's sister, unable to explain why she'd had a spent rifle cartridge in her pocket, was arrested, he says. But once she'd had time to think about how this could have happened, she homed in on her two younger brothers, who were always bringing home some treasures from the street, and she had an idea how it got there.
McKinty can still recall the sound of his father's footsteps pounding up the stairs. Realizing they'd been found out, McKinty told his brother not to say a word — but that scheme collapsed immediately as his brother pointed and said, “It was him!” So they were taken down to the station. “In the police station in our pajamas, I remember crying and saying, `We're sorry. We'll never do it again,' ” he says, and it's hard not to sympathize, not only with his traumatized sister, but with McKinty and his brother, who were just kids in a brutal and dangerous situation.
McKinty recalls that the officers' demeanor suggested he and his brother weren't the first pranksters caught up in the serious conflict.
“The look in their eyes? It was like this was the 10th one of these that day,” McKinty recalls, demonstrating that he had a writer's gift for observation even then – as well as an appreciation for the dark humor of those caught up in the turmoil.
Fertile `Ground'
McKinty is speaking via Zoom from a quiet room at a gym due to loud construction work at his New York City building, and he's an engaging conversationalist and storyteller: The first 40 or so minutes of our two-hour conversation barely touch his work; instead he converses on topics like New York City bars, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Voyager program, the perils of remastering classic albums and the first time he saw “Blade Runner” in a deserted Belfast theater — he remembers coming out of the cinema to find helicopters hovering low, spotlights sweeping the sky and the streets filled with soldiers.
“It was really like leaving `Blade Runner' and walking right into a version of `Blade Runner.' ”
McKinty's award-winning Sean Duffy novels combine the area's history, his storytelling skills and a wealth of informational interviews he conducted with former police officers, paramilitaries and others. He began the series with 2012's “The Cold Cold Ground” and returns after a few years' pause with “The Detective Up Late,” which is in stores (and on audio narrated by Gerard Doyle, who's read all the Duffy books, as well as Mick Herron's “Slow Horses” series, thus far).
“I'd taken a break from this series, and I wrote a couple of standalone thrillers and I suppose at the end of lockdown I wondered if I could write another Duffy.
“I wrote the first 10 lines of the book,” he says and it felt good to come back to it. “So I ended up writing an entire novel.”
Danger zone
Duffy is a Catholic police detective serving in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which was Britain's overwhelmingly Protestant law enforcement presence in Northern Ireland. While it was a dangerous place for everyone, Catholic police officers were especially targeted. (“They view Catholics who join the police as traitors to the Republican cause,” one real-life Catholic officer, who'd survived multiple attempts on his life, told The Guardian in 1999.)
“Duffy's an ordinary cop in that world trying not to get murdered but also trying to solve ordinary crimes. So I thought that was just an interesting milieu for a detective story,” says the author.
“I did the stats on this, I think, for the first book. In the 1980s and 1990s, it had the highest deaths of any police force in the Western world, just in terms of per capita killings. But if you dig into the statistics a little bit more, about a third of those deaths are suicides. I think it was just an incredibly stressful job,” says McKinty. “We absolutely needed therapists and counselors, but they just weren't around.”
But law enforcement was a paying job, something that was in short supply, so many joined up, says McKinty.
“I knew a lot of cops. At one point I did the calculation and about a third of the boys in my primary school became cops,” he says. “You either became a cop or civil servant, or you immigrated to England or America, or you ended up in the paramilitaries in prison. There were just not a lot of opportunities.”
McKinty says these books, which he classifies as noir, are different from his thrillers.
“For a thriller, I think you've got a different set of priorities as a writer. You want the pages to turn; you want the plot to move,” he says. “For a noir, you don't really have that pressure. It can be more of a mood book; there can be more atmosphere.
“You're trying to capture a world … and Duffy's world is 1980s Belfast,” he says. “It's the apocalypse: There are bombings going off all the time. There are riots. It's just this never-ending — at least back then — civil war. The British sent in the army to keep the peace, and it hasn't worked; the army had been completely sucked into the struggle. There's intelligence agents; there's the army; there's the police. There's Catholics versus Protestants; they're battling on the street.”
Even the weather was terrible, he says.
Sound and fury
Music is an important part of McKinty's life and work — and Duffy's — but he recalls the unusual circumstances that allowed him to compile his large, diverse record collection.
“They blew up the local record shop and it caught fire. There was a bomb damage sale, and me and my brother raced over there on our bikes and said to the record store owner, `Give us the records because they're gonna be insurance write-offs. We'll take them.' So we got hundreds of albums and then he wrote it all off as against his insurance.”
The titles of the Duffy novels, which include things like “Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly,” are culled from Tom Waits songs, and Duffy is always putting on an album or judging another character's radio choices. It prompts the question of how closely McKinty's tastes line up with those of his exacting character.
“He's got this antagonistic relationship towards the '80s; he's very much a guy of the '70s,” he says. “But that's my era. I love the Smiths, Joy Division, New Order, OMD. I love all those guys. So I feel, musically, my taste is better.”
“You're trying to capture a world … and Duffy's world is 1980s Belfast. It's the apocalypse: There are bombings going off all the time. There are riots. It's just this never-ending — at least back then — civil war. The British sent in the army to keep the peace, and it hasn't worked; the army had been completely sucked into the struggle. There's intelligence agents; there's the army; there's the police. There's Catholics versus Protestants; they're battling on the street.”
— Adrian McKinty, on “The Detective Up Late”
Strong words
Despite the Duffy novels being seen by many as some of the best recent examples of crime fiction or noir — Don Winslow and Nancy Pearl are two of his fans — McKinty had famously decided to quit writing at one point. Even with numerous awards, he wasn't selling any books; he credits his wife for supporting his efforts through this.
He recalls a fellow writer telling McKinty that he should have jumped on the popular Nordic noir trend instead of writing about Northern Ireland.
“`If only you had set your books in Reykjavik, you'd be a millionaire now,' ” McKinty recalls being told. “It's probably true.”
That all changed when Winslow hooked McKinty up with his agent Shane Salerno, and the world finally caught up with the author. Now with some bestsellers to his name, success has given him the chance to revisit Duffy and some of the more vivid memories from those years when McKinty was growing up. Like that night his family's home was surrounded by heavily armed police and soldiers there to arrest a neighbor for murder... “I have a lot of stories,” he says.