Book Club podcast with Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty flew home from Melbourne to take part in the inaugural Noireland crime fiction festival in Belfast’s Europa Hotel and discuss his Edgar award-winning crime novel Rain Dogs with Martin Doyle, Books Editor of The Irish Times.

The last but one of his acclaimed Sean Duffy series about a Catholic RUC man standing his ground, Rain Dogs is a locked-room murder mystery with a twist set in the in the author’s native Carrickfergus, with a plot that echoes the real-life Kincora child abuse scandal.

One of the many pleasing features of McKinty’s writing is the fun he has giving walk-on parts to real-life figures from Gerry Adams and George Seawright to John de Lorean and, in this novel, Muhammad Ali and Jimmy Savile, both of whom McKinty has met. He discusses this, in particular the satisfaction of having a sense of agency over real-life villains in the fictional world he creates, as well as recounting the terror of getting a lift to school each morning from a soldier who sometimes chdecked for bombs under his car and sometimes ddiblt, dependent on the weather.