By Jason Steger
For most children the journey to school is frequently one of reluctance but rarely one of danger. But when Adrian McKinty was growing up in Northern Ireland, things were different. Not many families in his Carrickfergus street had a car so he would often get a lift from a neighbour, an officer in the British Army whose son went to the same school. In those days of the Troubles, the army had a controversial presence on the streets of Belfast and so each day the man – a potential target – would check under his car for a bomb before doing the school run.
That was the theory. One day in February, McKinty was sitting in his living room waiting for the all-clear. "Come on, boys," he said. "It's too cold to check under the car – let's go." So into the back seat piled McKinty and his little brother, with the others in the front – seemingly oblivious to the danger they were in.
Domestic incident: Crime writer Adrian McKinty at his St Kilda home while his daughter Sophie eats a cup of Milo.Credit: Simon O'Dwyer
A tilt-switch bomb goes off when the car to which it is attached starts going up or down hill. Mercury runs down a vial allowing for contact, detonation and explosion.
"I'm sitting in the back seat going f---ing hell," McKinty says. "As we approach the first hill, I started getting weepy but I couldn't show it. I remember Dolly Parton's Little Sparrow was on the radio, the most tragic song and I was really getting carried away. And it was particularly galling that no one gave a s--t. I was so furious and so sad for myself."
Outlet: Gun Street Girl by Adrian McKinty.Credit: Jason Steger
There was no bomb, nor on the next few occasions McKinty got the lift until he put his foot down and told his mother he'd put his feet down and walk to school.
Novelists often demur at the idea their writing is cathartic. Not McKinty. The Belfast-born crime writer is happy to concede that his books have been good for him.
"I honestly think there is a whole generation of kids [in Northern Ireland] who went through post-traumatic stress disorder, a whole generation who went through stress and they're having to deal with it. Yet nobody ever goes to the psychiatrist or counsellor.
"Whereas I've found this amazing way of dealing with it, this catharsis of getting it out on paper. It's been amazing for my mental health – I've found this outlet for all these things."
There have been quite a few books from him over the years but those four novels set in Belfast featuring Sean Duffy are the ones for which he is best known and that have helped his peace of mind.
Duffy is that rare beast: a Catholic detective in the ranks of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. He has a degree in psychology from Queen's University Belfast, a taste for good literature and music, and lives in the heart of protestant Carrickfergus; on Coronation Road to be precise, in the house in which McKinty was born.
Which causes no end of problems for Duffy, not least with the paramilitary commander Bobby Cameron who lives a few doors away.
The beauty of the books is the way McKinty makes use of real events and characters in the scarred history of Northern Ireland as a skeleton for the structure of the books. The novels books have been populated by the likes of John DeLorean, Gerry Adams, Ian Paisley and, notably, Margaret Thatcher. Her appearance in In the Morning I'll be Gone is briefer than her cameo in Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty but almost as memorable, particularly when Duffy thinks she's going to kiss him.
He interviewed Adams years ago for his Oxford thesis on freedom of speech, about the time when the British government banned Sinn Fein from being broadcast.
"You'd see Adams on screen but all of a sudden an actor would be there reading what he said. I went interview him about that and have about three hours of tape. I have kept them and endlessly recycled them. I interviewed a lot of guys because they also banned the UDA. Most of the Adams words come from that time although some things have been paraphrased. But I can back all those up – the lawyers made me do that for the first book; they trust me now."
Sinn Fein has never complained, but McKinty copped some flak from the other side of the divide because he "dared to criticise someone like Peter Robinson or Ian Paisley or dared to say the Ulster Volunteer Force was involved in protection rackets".
It's easier to write about people who are dead, so Paisley's death last year gives McKinty a free hand with him. He tells a story of Paisley in an open-topped car and clad in a camel-hair coat driving down a street in Belfast looking something like General Erwin Rommel of the Afrika Korps. When some local boys started taking the mickey by giving him Nazi salutes, he responded in kind, trundling down the road with arm aloft. McKinty swears it's true.
Duffy was in part inspired by a friend of McKinty's brother who was a Catholic policeman. On one of his first days on the job he had the misfortune to escort Michael Stone, a protestant paramilitary, to hospital after he had killed three people at an IRA funeral and had subsequently been badly beaten.
Along the way, Stone launched into a rant about how much he hated Catholics and just wanted to kill as many of them as he could. "Don't you f---ing hate the Catholics," he asked, turning to the young policeman. According to McKinty, the policeman edged as far away as the handcuffs would let him and said calmly "no, not really".
It took McKinty a long time to start writing about the Troubles. He left Belfast for a law degree at Warwick University and then on to Oxford and a masters in political philosophy. He shifted with his American girlfriend to New York, on to Denver and now they are ensconced in St Kilda. He writes and she, Leah Garrett, is a professor at Monash University.
It was after Dead I May Well Be, his New York novel, came out in 2004 that McKinty first considered writing about Northern Ireland. He had originally pitched a cop show set in '70s Belfast along the lines of The Sweeney.
"Seventies nostalgia with the added frisson of the Troubles in the background. They couldn't have been more horrified. This guy said 'we won't be able to sell it in Northern Ireland, nobody wants to watch anything to do with the Troubles; we can never sell it across the water in England – they just want to forget it ever happened. And as for selling it to the US, that's a joke; they have a very nostalgic view of what Ireland is'."
Although there had been novels about Belfast and the Troubles – Brian Moore's Lies of Silence and Glenn Patterson's The International, for example – everyone he asked told him the same thing: don't touch the Troubles. And he took the message on board for years. But a few years back he had his epiphany – the thing that no one wants you to write about is exactly what he should be writing.
"That first Sean Duffy [The Cold Cold Ground] took me about six weeks. All this stuff came pouring out like a dam had just broken."
His new Duffy – Gun Street Girl (all the titles come from Tom Waits songs) – bounces off the time when the former US marine Oliver North acquired an Irish passport and tried to buy armaments as part of the Iran Contra affair. "It's totally unbelievable that story – and yet it happened. As soon as I heard he tried to buy missiles from the UVF I thought that was the most stupid thing I'd heard in my life and I had to do something with it."
Between Duffy three and four, he published The Sun is God, a very different sort of novel for him. It is set at the beginning of the 20th century in Papua New Guinea where a possible murder has been committed among a cult known as cocovores, who worship the sun and eat only coconuts in the expectation that the combination will bring them nirvana or something like it.
What we are unlikely to see soon is a book set in Australia. "I've lived here for about seven years and am still being surprised about the culture and things going on. I have thought about it, but the terrain is well covered here, especially in Melbourne where there are about 10 crime writers doing every aspect."'
Gun Street Girl is published by Serpent's Tail at $29.99.