People in the North are really taciturn and reticent, and they don’t really like to talk about the past. Adrian McKinty Read Quote
I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen’s University set, in the 1970s and ’80s – you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson – that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory. Adrian McKinty Read Quote
I’ve always been a secret locked-room fanatic. I read my first one when I was about ten or 11, Agatha Christie’s ‘Murder on the Orient Express,’ with David Niven and Peter Ustinov on the cover. Adrian McKinty Read Quote
A specific editor in a specific place likes the book, and you’re in. A different editor on a different day goes, ‘Oh, this isn’t for me’, or doesn’t even look at it, and that’s it. Adrian McKinty Read Quote
I love the trilogy form. I like the idea that you can establish a character in book one. And then in the second part, you can take the characters down to their darkest point. And then in the third part, you have total freedom either to give them redemption – or just to kill them. Adrian McKinty Read Quote
I find it easier to write in the winter in Melbourne. When the weather is good you want to go out for a walk, ride a bike, go to a cafe or something. When it’s raining, when it’s a miserable day, I just sit down at my desk and get some work done. Adrian McKinty Read Quote
With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension. Adrian McKinty Read Quote
When a locked-room mystery doesn’t work, the solution makes you groan, and the book gets hurled across the room. Adrian McKinty Read Quote
Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat. Adrian McKinty Read Quote
In the crime fiction section, you may just find a novel that talks about the place where you’re from and speaks to you about your life – or the life yours could have become if a little misfortune had come your way. Adrian McKinty Read Quote
