the cold cold ground - adrian McKinty

Coffee. Toast. Jeans. Sweater. Trainers. Car. I checked underneath for bombs.

The great irony with mystery novels is that, more often than not, the mystery itself is largely beside the point. It’s the circumstances surrounding the mystery that matter; setting and cultural context are frequently the determining factor between a passable narrative and a great one.

Such is the case with The Cold Cold Ground, the first of Adrian McKinty’s series revolving around Detective Sean Duffy - a Catholic copper in the predominantly Protestant RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) in Northern Ireland circa 1981… a time when the country was still very much in the thorny thick of the Troubles. Amidst a backdrop of the Thatcher administration, nightly rioting and bombings throughout Belfast, and the IRA hunger strikes, Duffy believes he may have a serial killer on his hands… one with a complex methodology who appears to be targeting homosexuals. When the first victim - Tommy Little - turns out to have high-ranking IRA ties - and may or may not be connected to the recent suicide of the ex-wife of an IRA solider incarcerated in the infamous Maze Prison - Duffy has to tread carefully and unravel the case without igniting a political powder keg. 

There was a big plate of wobbly yellow iron placed over a large pothole at the top of Coronation Road. In any other country in the world you just would have driven over it, but here, time and again, coppers had been blown up by explosive devices such as these. You dug a hole in the road, you filled it with C4 and nails, you covered it with a plate of iron to make it look like it had been done by a road crew as a temporary fix. You blew it up by remote. There was a 99 per cent chance that this really was a temporary fix by a road crew, but I wasn’t going to drive over it.  

If this sounds like resolutely grim subject matter, it is… and it isn’t. McKinty has a firm grasp of the social and political fabric of this particular era of Irish history - it’s a fantastic setting for a mystery series, the Catholic and Protestant factions mingling about as easily as nitric acid and glycerin. The murder scenes are unflinchingly gruesome (severed appendages; rolled up sheet music for Italian operas inserted in the rectum), but McKinty’s serrated gallows humor beats back any creeping despair (Duffy, romancing pathologist Laura Cathcart, suggests they go to the cinema “before they all get blown up”). As a lead character, Duffy is charismatic, a highly capable sleuth (as a Catholic policeman, allies are few and far between), unafraid to ruffle a few feathers… and more than a bit of a trainwreck in his personal life (even by Irish standards, the amount of self-medicating he does via vodka gimlets is extreme).

Of course, the other great irony with mystery novels is that most mystery writers aren’t actually that great at writing mysteries. They’re functional mystery writers - like McKinty, their real skills lie elsewhere - and The Cold Cold Ground isn’t a particularly accomplished mystery. It mixes real life fact with fiction (you might want to familiarize yourself with the British intelligence asset known as “Stakeknife”) in somewhat brazen fashion… but goes beyond the normal amount of misdirect smoke; in this case one almost chokes on it. There are minor narrative missteps, of the sort associated with a nascent series still finding its footing (a mild homosexual dalliance on Duffy’s part goes absolutely nowhere - and was probably one too many ingredients stewing in an already crowded pot to begin with). But what knits the book together are the specificities of this world - the violent codes of brotherhood and, really, just the violence itself (of all the evocative brutality McKinty captures on the page, the payoff to the paraffin heater Duffy lights nightly is particularly harrowing).​

McKinty has an interesting history. He was forced to step away from writing briefly because his books weren’t generating enough income… but at the urging of Don Winslow and Shane Salerno, he produced the high-concept thriller The Chain, which proved a breakout bestseller (Paramount optioned the film rights, with Edgar Wright currently attached to direct). However, he remains committed to the Sean Duffy series - his initial “Troubles Trilogy” has since expanded to six novels, with at least two (possibly three) more on the way. It certainly makes sense. Unlike those who leisurely solve crimes in sleepy English hamlets with inordinately high crime rates, an RUC detective’s work on the blood-and-shrapnel-soaked streets of 80s Belfast is truly never done.