Adrian McKinty
Adrian McKinty
Adrian McKinty is an Irish crime novelist who has won the Ned Kelly Award and been shortlisted for the Edgar Award, Dagger Award, Anthony Award, Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1968 and grew up in Victoria Council Estate, Carrickfergus, County Antrim. He read law at the University of Warwick and politics and philosophy at the University of Oxford. He moved to...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
CountryIreland
believer slowly stuff throw tinker word words
I've never been a believer in the word-count thing. I write slowly and tinker with the words and the word order, and I throw a lot of stuff out.
dragged rover
I was knocked down and dragged by a police Land Rover in a hit-and-run.
major man school
I used to get a lift to school every day with a man who was a major in the British Army.
grow street
I think if you grow up in a culture where the army is out on the street sighting you with rifles, it has to have some kind of psychological impact.
followed met studied
I studied law at Warwick University, then philosophy at Oxford. I met my wife Leah there. She is American, so I followed her to New York.
came few longer proper stories
I had a few stories and longer pieces published, but my first proper novel came in 2003, called 'Dead I Well May Be.'
noir
Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat.
england secondary
After secondary school, the big thing to do was apply for uni in England or Scotland and then just stay there.
attempt bbc embarrass generally lack lower privately themselves truly unless writers
Because of England's lack of social mobility, unless they make truly heroic efforts, writers who are privately educated and then go on to Oxbridge or an institution like the BBC will generally embarrass themselves when they attempt to have a go at working- or lower middle-class characters.
certain daughters fathers guthrie recite ride sing song time turned wandering woody
Irish fathers still have certain responsibilities, and by the time my two daughters turned seven, they could swim, ride a bike, sing at least one part of a Woody Guthrie song, and recite all of W. B. Yeats's 'The Song of Wandering Aengus.'
bad christmas good stealing tree
I don't know if that's a year's bad luck, or if that's how it works. But stealing a Christmas tree - that can't be a good thing, karma-wise.
agent bad bicycles days english ireland met neither readers riding widows
Every publisher or agent I've ever met told me the same thing - that Irish readers don't want to read about the bad old days of the Troubles; neither do the English and Americans - they only want to read about the Ireland of The Quiet Man, when red-haired widows are riding bicycles and everyone else is on a horse.
drawing australia novelists
Drawing Dead is a brilliant noir from one of Australia's most exciting new novelists.
numbers fire house
With gas cookers and chip pans in every kitchen, the chip-pan fire was by far the most popular method these Proddies had for burning their houses down. The second technique was the ever popular chimney fire and number three had to be the drunken cigarette drop on the carpet. Mind you, why they'd be cooking chips at this hour was anyone's guess.