I got Adrain McKinty's 4th Sean Duffy novel, Gun Street Girl, today and am settling in to read it. I've already done his first three books -- In the Cold Cold Ground; I Hear the Sirens in the Street; and In the Morning I'll Be Gone -- and while he's not big on inventive plotting his sense of low-key if not merely-tolerable paranoia is very interesting. They're all set in Belfast, which isn't quite the same as Derry, but they do give me a taste of the area as it was in the 80's.
Sean's a Catholic cop in the very Protestant RUC, which was so notoriously brutal, partisan and anti-Catholic it had to be renamed after the Good Friday Agreement because of all the connotations the Royal Ulster Constabulary raised; in 2001 it became the PSNI -- Police Service of Northern Ireland -- and is still overwhelmingly Protestant, but a goodly portion are now Catholic...and I digress...
McKinty's style is something like a Northern Ireland version of Raymond Chandler, with a shattered, fraying Belfast his substitute for a corrupt, decaying Los Angeles. He works in actual events -- in his third book, Sean helps keep Thatcher from being assassinated in the bombing of a hotel in Brighton -- and provides twice as much cynicism as Philip Marlowe could ever have worked up. His stories are a bit predictable, but I don't know if that's from me having plotted my own version of dark and cynical or if it's just that I've read too many mysteries to be surprised, anymore.
In fact, I can't think of the last time a book has surprised me. Maybe that's why I focus so hard on characters and let them lead me places -- letting them provide the surprises. Which they have, many times. So maybe I'm spoiling myself. We shall see.
I also got another book that I bought based solely on liking the writing style of the snippet I read -- The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton. It's set in a boarding house just outside London during WW2. I didn't realize till after I ordered it that he also adapted the scripts for Hitchcock's Rope and the British film, Angel Street (and Gaslight, its American incarnation).
I have a feeling this may be the book I prefer, as a reader.
Sean's a Catholic cop in the very Protestant RUC, which was so notoriously brutal, partisan and anti-Catholic it had to be renamed after the Good Friday Agreement because of all the connotations the Royal Ulster Constabulary raised; in 2001 it became the PSNI -- Police Service of Northern Ireland -- and is still overwhelmingly Protestant, but a goodly portion are now Catholic...and I digress...
McKinty's style is something like a Northern Ireland version of Raymond Chandler, with a shattered, fraying Belfast his substitute for a corrupt, decaying Los Angeles. He works in actual events -- in his third book, Sean helps keep Thatcher from being assassinated in the bombing of a hotel in Brighton -- and provides twice as much cynicism as Philip Marlowe could ever have worked up. His stories are a bit predictable, but I don't know if that's from me having plotted my own version of dark and cynical or if it's just that I've read too many mysteries to be surprised, anymore.
In fact, I can't think of the last time a book has surprised me. Maybe that's why I focus so hard on characters and let them lead me places -- letting them provide the surprises. Which they have, many times. So maybe I'm spoiling myself. We shall see.
I also got another book that I bought based solely on liking the writing style of the snippet I read -- The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton. It's set in a boarding house just outside London during WW2. I didn't realize till after I ordered it that he also adapted the scripts for Hitchcock's Rope and the British film, Angel Street (and Gaslight, its American incarnation).
I have a feeling this may be the book I prefer, as a reader.
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