Go Into The Story Interview: Adrian McKinty

The author talks about his overnight success decades in the making with the new crime novel “The Chain” hailed novelists Stephen King, Don Winslow, Dennis Lehane, Lou Berney, Meg Gardiner, and many more.

Back in June, I added another writer to the blog’s Persistent Writers Hall of Fame: Adrian McKinty. Here is a money quote via Deadline:

Paramount Pictures has acquired the screen rights to Adrian McKinty’s novel The Chain in a deal that calls for a guaranteed low-seven-figure payday for the author, an Uber driver until a series of deals for the book changed his life. The book will be published by Little Brown/Mulholland on July 9.

It was such a fascinating story behind the story, I reached out to two writers intimately involved in the deal, Shane Salerno and Don Winslow, through their involvement with The Story Factory to see if I could interview Adrian. Next thing I know, I’m on the phone with the author about whose novel Publisher’s Weekly wrote, “An original premise, relentless pacing, and strong female characters lift this nail-biter from Edgar winner McKinty… Readers won’t be able to put this thriller down.”

Here is the entirety of my 45 minute conversation with Adrian McKinty.

Scott Myers: You were born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Do you remember much of the political strife in the country when you were growing up?

Adrian McKinty: Oh God, yeah. I was born in ’68 and so I basically grew up in the ’70s which is the worst part of the troubles. Soldiers were on the streets, there was a riot or a bombing every night. People were being killed left and right.

One of my earliest memories is being caught with my mom when I was about four or five years old in a fire bombing in a major department store in Belfast. I just remember my mother, something no kid should see, just have this look of terror in her eyes saying me, “Hold your brother’s hand, hold your brother’s hand.” My little brother who’s…I was about five or six. He would have been about three or four, just holding his hand.

The ’70s were apocalyptic, really. There’s no other way of describing it. When I talked to everybody who went through that, who was born in that era…I’ve got a lot of friends who are crime writers and writers from Belfast Noir. It’s amazing to me that we somehow thought this was normal.

It was only 1998 after the Good Friday Agreement and the peace process that we all began to take a deep breath and get over our post‑traumatic stress disorder, and realize that, “No, this was not normal. This was some kind of nightmare,” especially throughout the ’70s and into the ’80s. In the ’90s it began to tail off and then, thank God, peace came in ’98. For the first 30 years of my life, that was the world.

Scott: Do you think there was direct correlation between those experiences and the writer you have become?

Adrian: Certainly. For many years, I didn’t want to write about Belfast at all. I never wrote about that world, that milieu. I’ll tell you a funny story. My first book came out in 2004. This book called “Dead I Well May Be.” It was autobiographical.

It was about this kid from Ireland who comes to New York and he works in an illegal economy for two or three years, and hooks up with some very low level gangsters. About eighty percent of it was true. Just based on my life in New York in the ‘90s.

That book, it didn’t sell well, but it got good reviews. It got optioned by Universal and it got a lot of people interested in me. The BBC made me come in and pitch a TV series to them. I grew in the era of ’70s cop shows. I love ’70s cop shows especially “Starsky & Hutch,” and there was a show in Britain called “The Sweeney.” I thought why not pitch a ’70s cop shows to the BBC set in Belfast in the 1970s.

I went in and pitch this to the BBC in London. I thought it was a winner because this was early 2000s, the ’70s were coming back. There was that Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video and all the fashions are so fantastic and I don’t know, the flairs and the music. Then this setting that no one’s ever seen before on TV. 1970’s Belfast, I thought this was a winner. After my pitch was over, it was these three wise, old men at the BBC and there was this old wise owl in the middle stroking his beard. After my pitch was done which I thought had gone extremely well because I had a lot of enthusiasm and I even got photographs of the era and the clock post and everything, and passed those out in my little file.

The guy said to me, “Young man, I have to tell you something.” I go, “Yes,” just seeing the dollar signs in front of my eyes. He said, “That’s one of the worst pitches I’ve ever heard in my life.”

[laughter]

Adrian: I wasn’t sure I heard this guy correctly. I said, “One of the worst pitches?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Why?”

He said, “Well, listen, it’s like this. No one in Britain wants ever to see a drama set in Northern Ireland. We’ve had 30 years of these people with these Irish accents and it’s scaring us. Now, it’s just over. This process is just out. We never want to hear about Northern Ireland or any of those people ever again. I could never sell this to the BBC in London.”

Forget trying to sell this in the Republic of Ireland. It’s impossible. They were so embarrassed by everything that’s happening just to their north for 30 years, they never want to deal with this ever again. Completely forget trying to sell this to America.

America still thinks it’s The Quiet Man and the 1950s over here. They think people are still wearing flat caps and writing about horses and carts and stuff like that. That’s the kind of show they want, which is proven to be strangely, bizarrely accurate. Because that court series set in 1950s Dublin was sold to PBS, and that some of the Irish dramas are stuff about country girls in 1950s Ireland, and stuff like that.

As a parting shot, he said to me, “If I were you, I’d go into…” This is in London. “See, go into the big bookstore and look at the Irish crime fiction section.” I went, “What is he talking about here?”

I went into the Irish crime fiction section, and that was the joke because of course, there wasn’t an Irish crime fiction section. There was a Norwegian crime fiction section and a Danish crime fiction section, and a Finnish…even an Icelandic crime fiction section.

This is the early 2000s when “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and Jo Nesbo and all those books were storming the charts. There was no Irish crime fiction section. In fact, there were two writers from Northern Ireland in the whole store, both became friends of mine, Eoin McNamee and Cone Veitman.

There was just no other writers from Belfast and no crime writers at all from Ireland. Just this scene was completely dead. This guy said to me, “If you’re ever going to write, make sure you don’t write about Belfast.”

I heeded that advice. Then for the next eight years or nine years, I wrote about everywhere I’d ever been, except for Northern Ireland. I spent a month in Cuba, so I set a book in Cuba even though I really didn’t know a lot about Cuba.

I lived in Denver for seven years, so I set two or three books in Denver. I lived in London, I set a book in… I avoided Northern Ireland like the plague.

Then one night in like 2011, I wrote this chapter, and it was about these two kids. Me and my brother used to go up to Belfast in the ’80s and we’d watch the riots from the hill. We’d stand up on the top of the hill and we’d watch the rioters fire petrol bombs at the police, and the police would fire back with plastic bullets. The whole thing was oddly beautiful, in a way.

We couldn’t hear the noises. All we could see is the lights of these petrol bombs arcing through the sky and this whoosh in explosion that was happening, Then the police firing back with these rubber bullets that which would arc through the sky. You’d see the tracer arc, and then people would fire fireworks.

We’d just watch this and it was like some sort of perverse Blade Runner‑esque ballet, so I wrote a book that started with two coppers watching a riot from a hill. I knew it was set in Belfast, but I thought, “Maybe the book will switch action to London or America,” but it ruthlessly stayed in Belfast throughout the entire novel.

Scott: Is this the Sean Duffy series?

Adrian: Yeah, so this is the first Sean Duffy book “The Cold Cold Ground.” I knew what would happen. I knew that if I sent it to my American publishers, they would say no, which they did. I sent it to my British publishers, and they said yes.

It didn’t sell very well, but it ended up getting the best reviews of my career. I got shortlisted for an Edgar, won a couple of awards, and so then that set me on that path for the next six years of reluctantly, kind of being dragged into writing about Northern Ireland in the 1980s.

Scott: That’s six Sean Duffy books.

Adrian: Two trilogies, right.

Scott: You also had the Lighthouse trilogy and the Michael Forsythe trilogy. How did they fit in, timewise?

Adrian: Yeah. They were the ones that sort of came before while I was looking for a subject.

Scott: How many novels have you written, at this point?

Adrian: Up until today?

Scott: Yeah.

Adrian: If you include the edited collection, I think it’s 15. I added a collection of stories, a collection of noir stories set in Belfast. Me and Stuart Neville, we edited that. If you’re going to count that one…

Scott: 15.

Adrian: [laughs] I did collate the introduction for that one so… just throw that one on the bonfire. Let’s include that one.

Scott: You mentioned, you got, there’s the Edgar Award, the Ned Kelly Award and yet for most of your life it’s been a struggle from a financial standpoint. That must be incredibly frustrating to be so successful from the creative perspective.

Adrian: It was the most bizarre situation. Did you ever read that Dostoevsky novel, “The Double,” or the novella “The Double”? There’s these two versions of this character. The one version is the real him and then the other version is the more successful version of him. I thought what I get is inhabiting both of those worlds.

When I’d go home to Ireland, people would see me get reviews in newspapers, they’d hear me on the radio and they’d think I was this successful writer, “He’s bound to be a success, I see his picture in the newspaper. I see him on the TV,” or whatever.

Yet the guy was right. The guy from the BBC was absolutely right. Nobody wanted to buy these books. It was just too hard a sell. I’d sell about 400 copies in Belfast and then none, nowhere else. Everywhere else, people did not want to know about this world. It was, it was a very bizarre situation. It looked for all the world that I was this big success, but in fact I was making almost nothing as a writer.

My poor wife, she was the one who was working. Working herself to the bone. She was a university lecturer. Everything had been OK until about the year 2008 or 2009. I had been working as a teacher and she’s working as a university professor, and I had my writing as a hobby.

Then in 2008, she got a job offer in Australia and I thought, “This is my big chance to go pro and write full time, dedicate myself to my craft,” and that was the big plan. That’s when it all started to go belly‑up.

The first thing that happened was that Universal who had very kindly been renewing the option on my book for the previous seven years, I guess they got a new head of production there and he canceled the option. Then I got dropped by my US publisher. A couple of other things fell through.

Basically, I went from having a teacher’s salary and this side income as a writer to bringing in nothing at all for the next seven or eight years. It was a series of diminishing returns every year. I would get a little bit less and a little bit less, and a little bit less.

Scott: In fact, as recently as a couple of years ago, you were ready to quit writing.

Adrian: I had quit. Everything just came to a head about two‑and‑a‑bit years ago, where we got just one thing led to another and we ended up getting evicted from our house. It was the house where our kids hadn’t been born there, but they lived there for the last eight years and they’d grown up.

You do the dad thing where you put that little height chart up on the wall, just the little pencil marks of all the years. It was eight years of that. We ended up getting evicted and just seeing that look in their eyes with all their stuff on the sidewalk and my wife worried and the kids worried.

They’re saying, “Is everything going to be all right?” You’re thinking to yourself, “Is everything going to be all right?” We had so many friends rallied around and they really helped us. Everything turned out to be OK and we got a new place, but I did this blog post and I just said, “Look, I’ve tried this writing business for a long time.”

I’d been blogging, I’d been reviewing books, and doing all this other stuff and I said, “Look.” I sugarcoated it a wee bit because I knew my mom read my blog and I didn’t want her to worry.

I just said, “I’m going to be taking a break from writing for a couple of years. I’m going to go back to working full time. I’m going to get my teacher certification, so if you guys don’t hear from me on the blog for a while, don’t worry about it. There’s no health emergencies or anything, I’ve just decided to work full time and I’m on a break for a few years,” which is the way I phrased it.

In my mind, I thought to myself, “It’s going to take me a year to get my certification and then another year to get teaching, so it could be three or four years before I write another book.” I posted the blog and I was actually okay with it.

I remember that line in The Godfather Part II, where Hyman Roth says to Michael, “Look, this is the path we’ve chosen.” For good or for ill, this is the path, and that’s what I thought. This was the path I’d chosen. I’d given it my best shot and it hadn’t worked out and there’s no point in crying about it. I would go and get a proper job.

I did. I got a job in a bar almost immediately. I always liked driving, so I thought, “I’ll register as an Uber driver,” and I’d moved on. I effectively had quit.

Scott: Then it all changed and I believe it started with some conversations with another novelist, Don Winslow. How did you get to know Don? I’ve read that you reached out to him and he communicated with you. Did you know him personally, or was this just through social media?

Adrian: No, it was a lot more bizarre than that. I had met Don at a writers conference for about five minutes, about five years ago. It was one of those things where I registered him, because Winslow and Elroy were my two big idols. They were my two, the guys who I wanted to write like. It had been a big moment for him, but I doubted very much whether I had even entered…

If you’re one of the big headliners at a Bouchercon or one of those big conventions, you meet five hundred people in a day. I was very skeptical that I’d made any kind of impression on him at all.

It was unbelievable to me about two weeks after I wrote my blog post, I get this phone call and it’s Don Winslow. Clearly, I’d given him my number or my contact number, or something, all those years ago, never thinking that he would contact me.

He calls me up out of the blue and he goes, “Don Winslow.” I go, “Yeah, yeah,” I’m very excited to talk to him. He says, “Look, Adrian, I read your blog. Is it true that you’ve given up writing?” My first thought is, “What is this busy man doing reading my blog? Don’t you have better things to do with your life than reading my blog?”

Then, I said, “Yeah, Don, I have. I’ve decided to call it quits.” I explained the whole situation. Things hadn’t worked out the way I planned. He said, “Look, I’ve been reading all your books and I’ve read your Sean Duffy series. You’ve got a lot of talent. The problem isn’t you. The problem is the way you’ve been sold. It’s the way you’ve been marketed. You came up with this tiny press in America that couldn’t even get your books into Barnes & Noble. Similarly in England. You’re not the problem, the problem is the delivery system.”

I started listening to him, and I said, “That’s definitely food for thought. Thank you for saying all that Don, and I’ll take it all on board.” Then he said, “Would you mind if I gave some of your books to a friend of mine, Shane Salerno?” I said, “Yeah, give them to whoever you like.”

We had a pleasant conversation, and he gets off the phone. A couple of weeks go by, and I don’t really think too much of it. I certainly don’t go back to writing or anything, just getting on with my life.

I had done this Uber run to the airport, and I got back, and I was really tired. It was after midnight in Australia, and the phone rings. It’s this guy Shane Salerno. I don’t register who the name is at all. We start talking, and he’s talking really fast ‑‑ as Shane does ‑‑ and he goes, “Yeah, this is Don’s agent.”

He’s trying to explain and he said, “Look, Adrian, the problem isn’t with your writing, it’s with your blah‑blah‑blah.” He’s saying the same things as Don.

I said, “It’s really great that you guys are interested in me. I love the fact that you take an interest in my career. It’s the Irish guy in Australia, blah‑blah‑blah, but I’ve made this decision and I’ve quit. I’m going to move on. I’ve tried my best shot. I’ve really tried. I’ve put a bunch of books out there into the world, and none of them have connected. I’m fine with quitting.”

He’s talking away and I say, “I don’t want you to be offended, but I’m going to hang up on you and go to bed. Lovely talking to you, give my best to Don and good night.”

I hang up on him, and he calls back a minute later…30 seconds later, and says, “I haven’t pitched myself properly to you. Let me pitch myself.” He starts pitching, and he talks about his clients. He talks to me about Steve Hamilton, he goes through some kind of list.

I’m listening to these thoughts and, “Yeah, they’re all American writers, writing American subjects. Who the hell knows about me? I’m this Irish guy living in bloody Australia, writing about the subject no one gives a shit about ‑‑ Belfast and the Troubles.”

I listened for a bit more, but this time actually I’m exhausted. I just go, “Shane, again, I’m really sorry. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m going to hang up the phone and I’m going to go to bed, and it was lovely talking to you.” I hang up again.

He calls me up a third time. “Motherfucker,” I’m thinking to myself. It’s like a quarter to two. The Talmud says that you should listen to someone who tries three times. I go, “OK Shane, talk.”

He talks, and he said, “The problem is, Adrian, you need to write an American book. Do you have an American book in you?” This is where he nailed me. I’d written a short story called “The Chain” about five years earlier, and it was unfinished, and I’d put it in a drawer.

I said, “You know, Shane, it’s funny you should say that, because I’ve just had this experience with my family where I’ve realized the single most important thing in my life is my kids. I’ve looked in their faces and I’ve seen this really aching thing that a parent should never see in their kid’s face, and I’ve realized that my kids are everything to me. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my kids, even giving up writing and going back to teaching. This ties into the story I wrote five or six years ago. It was basically half finished.”

He said, “Get the story.” I said, “No, I’ll just pitch you the story. I’ve got it in my head” So I pitched him the whole of “The Chain” and Shane just went real quiet, and he said, “That’s the book. That’s the one. That’s going to get you to the next level.”

I go, “Really?” He goes, “Yeah, I want to read the first chapter.” I said, “All I’ve got is a couple of notes and some of the short story, and the story is basically from the middle.” He says, “No, I want to read chapter one.” I go, “All right. Maybe…well…OK…” He says, “No, I want to read it now.”

I go, “Shane, buddy, it’s 2:30 in the morning.” He says, “That’s fine. What are you doing?” I said, “I’m going to bed.” He said, “No, don’t go to bed. Just open up your laptop and write me chapter one.”

I go, “I don’t even know about this. We’re broke here. We have no money.” He says, “Forget the money. I’ll wire you $10,000 into your account tonight. Will that tide you over for a month?”

I go, “I can’t take your money. I don’t know who you are.” He says, “You know who I am. I’m Don Winslow’s agent. Google me.” He’s brow‑beating me down. I say, “All right. Call me back, I’m going to see what else I can come up with.”

I sat down with a laptop and my wife’s going, “Are you coming up to bed?” I say, “Something weird’s happening, I’ll talk to you in a bit.” I sat down and wrote the title, and I had these two quotes that I knew I was going to use, from Stevie Nicks and from Schopenhauer.

Then I started writing. Writing’s always been very difficult for me. It’s never been easy. It’s always been write‑a‑line‑delete‑a‑line, “That doesn’t look good, go back and edit.” Maybe once or twice in my entire career I’ve had you get in the flow state, where everything just flows… That’s really rare for me. I know, for some writers, they get it with every book. I don’t, but this time I did.

This time, before I really knew what was happening, I’d written about thirty pages ‑‑ the first thirty pages. Basically the thirty pages that are in the book. They are virtually unedited in the final version of the book. Maybe they changed a comma or something or a period, but the first thirty pages are as‑is.

I spell‑check it, and I email it to Shane. I go up to bed, and my wife’s, “What’s going on?” I tell her, “There’s this crazy guy,” and I get into bed. At four o’clock the phone rings and it’s Shane. He goes, “I just read those thirty pages. This is fantastic. We just need 300 more just like this.”

[laughter]

Adrian: I go, “OK…” and he says, “Adrian, what time is it there?” I go. “It’s four o’clock in the morning.” He goes, “Oh, man! You should go to bed. You should get some sleep. You’ve a book to write.”

[laughter]

Adrian: …so I went, “OK, buddy,” and then I hung up the phone. My wife said, “I’ll take the kids to school tomorrow. You get some sleep.” I go to sleep, and I wake up about 10:30. The house is deserted, the missus is gone, and the kids are gone.

I’m thinking to myself, “I had the craziest dream ever. It was so fucking intense.” I go, “There’s this guy, and I’m wondering if even that’s a real name. It doesn’t sound like a real name. Shane Salerno. Sounds fake.”

I’m just thinking, “That’s just the craziest dream.” Then I make some toast and I have some coffee. I put the TV on and then I flip open my laptop, and sure enough there’s nine emails from Shane Salerno. I go, “Oh shit. It wasn’t a dream. It was all real. Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into?” Eventually, I wrote the book.

Scott: “The Chain.” Here’s the premise as described in a recent Deadline article. “The Chain tells a story of Rachel, who learns that her 11‑year‑old daughter has been kidnapped. The only way to get her back is to kidnap another child. Her daughter will be released only when that next victim’s parents kidnap another child. If Rachel doesn’t kidnap another child, or if that child’s parents don’t kidnap a child, her daughter will be murdered. She’s now part of The Chain, the terrifying and meticulous chain‑letter‑like kidnapping scheme that turns parents from victims into criminals.”

You’ve talked about how you looked at your kids’ faces and you said, “That’s the most important thing to me.” Kidnapping has been a feature of many books, movies and TV series, but this is a spin, which is a kidnap victim’s parent is forced to commit a kidnapping herself. What was the inspiration for that hook?

Adrian: There were three distinct elements. I guess the first one was, I remember going way back to primary school. One of the very first things we did when in my very first week at school was Greek mythology. It might have been the very first thing I learned, the story of Demeter and Persephone.

Demeter literally goes down into Hell to rescue her daughter from the abyss. That’s the story they told us, and I thought, “Oh my God. That is so cool.” That stuck with me for forty years ‑‑ this story of a mother who goes down into Hell to rescue her daughter from the darkness. That was just one element bubbling away in my brain.

The second element was, I was in Mexico City. I was working on this book that was going nowhere. This was when we lived in Denver, and I went down to Mexico City for a couple of weeks. I thought I could write a book about the assassination of Trotsky.

It was such a hackneyed premise and terrible idea, because every angle that has been written about Trotsky has been done to death. It was going nowhere.

I was just sitting in a cantena one night feeling like this was a big waste of time, and I was reading the newspaper. I didn’t do Spanish in school. My Spanish is not good, so I was really fumbling through the newspaper.

I read this article, and it seemed to be about ‑‑ and I did a little more investigation, and it turned out to be true ‑‑ this kidnapping scheme in Mexico whereby they would kidnap one of your family, and while you’re raising the ransom, you swapped yourself for a more vulnerable…

Say they kidnapped your grandmother. You’re worried about your grandmother being in the hands of these kidnappers, so you call the kidnappers and say, “I’ll swap myself out for my grandmother. You can take me in her place, and meanwhile we’ll raise the money and pay off the ransom.”

I thought, “That’s really intriguing, this idea of kidnapping and swapping. That really intrigued me, and how bizarre that was ‑‑ one person gets swapped for another.

This other element that had been bubbling away in my brain for decades was, in my part of Ireland, it was really superstitious. This part of North Belfast, into the countryside, around my town called Carrick Fergus. The last witch trial in Ireland took place in Carrick Fergus.

Around Halloween bizarre tokens would be left, and you always brought your dog in. Sometimes cats would be killed, strange goings‑on. We used to get these chain letters which kids throughout the world got in the 70s, but in Ireland we took them really seriously.

There are all these runes down the side, and all these weird hexes and curses. It was said unless you make three copies of this and send it on to three of your friends your parents would be killed. I found these to be terrifying, and so did most of my friends.

There was this idea of these chain letters and the kidnappings, and what happened was, my forth or fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Carlyle, she found out all about these chain letters and how terrifying they were to us.

She said, “Bring them all to me.” We brought them all to her, and she made a big bonfire of them outside the class one day, and she was the woman that broke the chain. That made a huge impression on me. This woman had taken on all this bad luck, and all these curses, and all these hexes upon herself.

For decades afterwards, when I left Ireland, I’d come back. I’d say, “How’s the sisters?” I’d go through the whole family. At the end, I’d say, “And by the way, how’s Mrs. Carlyle doing?” expecting some horrible disaster had befallen her out of the omen, some freak accident. She was fine. [laughs] Decades went by. She’s still alive. She’s still in good health at the age of eighty-eight.

I was always expecting something terrible to happen. Those were the elements that were bubbling in my head. The exchange kidnappings, these chain letters, this woman that breaks the chain. Then this idea of a mother literally going into Hell to rescue her daughter. That was all bubbling away.

That night in Mexico City, I sat down and I started writing a short story based on those elements. I couldn’t get them to gel. I wrote about five pages of the story in longhand. Then I came back to Denver and couldn’t get any work done. As you do with stories, you file it away. There it sat in a drawer for about five or six years. Maybe my subconscious was working on it.

Certainly, it was no part of my conscious entity until Shane said to me, “Have you got an American story in you?” Suddenly, it all came to fruition, the idea of my kids and all these other elements. I said, “Yeah.” I pitched him “The Chain” in one go.

Scott: How did that work then? You write these thirty pages. Shane says, “We need three hundred more.” You hadn’t worked the rest of the story out in your mind. Were you getting feedback from Shane and/or Don? Were you working this thing out through the rest of the thing on your own?

Adrian: Then it got really complicated. I said, “Yeah, I’ll write more of the book.” Then, just about the end of that year, Leah had got a job offer to come to New York, Hunter College. We decided to do this big family move from Melbourne. The kids were Australian kids. They had Australian accents. They’d lived in Australia all their lives. They didn’t know America.

We had to do this big family decision. I had to tell Shane, “Look, I’ve got to put the book on hold. We’re moving.” He was going, “No! No! No!” I said, “Look, we’re moving the family from Australia to America.” Then we eventually moved to America at the beginning of last year.

That time was very helpful because by that time I had the whole book worked out more or less. I knew I was going to set it in Massachusetts. I knew I was going to set it in this place called Plum Island that I knew really well. My wife’s from that part of the world. I went up there. I did the research. I walked the territory.

Then, when it came to write the book, by that stage I had about a 100 pages in the can. The rest of the book was quite straightforward to write. I sent it to Shane. He was always, “Cut, cut.” I think I turned in a draft that was about 95,000 words. He was very much, “Lose 10,000 words and it’s perfect.” I said, “How can I lose 10,000 words?”

When you interrogate the text, you realize that you can lose 10,000 words quite easily. You trim the action here. This bit’s unnecessary. We sent it to Don. Don had really interesting take on a couple of elements. That was it. Last summer or maybe into the autumn, I can’t quite remember, we sent it to a publisher. Little Brown, they accepted it.

Scott: Sounds like a screenwriter at work, “Cut, cut.” Shane’s background, right?

Adrian: That was his big take on everything. He was fine with the characters. He was fine with the story. He was fine with first, second, and third acts. He was fine with everything but he thought the word count was too bloated for a thriller. It wasn’t so ridiculously off my norm. Normally, I’d turn in a book around 90,000 words. This was about 95.

He wanted it really lean. He wanted it to come in about 85 or 86. It really helped the book. The first 30 pages were really lean. Then I thought, “We need description here. We need back story.” Then I realized, probably we don’t need all that stuff. I made the next 60 or 70 pages just as lean as the first 30. I think that really helped the book.

Scott: Shane’s probably thinking that the leaner, the tighter it is, the more amenable it might be in terms of movie rights. That turned out to be prescient. I checked Deadline, June 18th, there’s a headline, “Paramount makes seven‑figure film deal for The Chain.” Could you describe how that deal went down?

Adrian: One of my books had been optioned by Universal before. I’d been quite intimately involved in that process. Those guys were great. I’d worked with this guy Steve Golin who recently passed away. I loved that guy. He was so nice to me and so smart.

I’d worked with Steve Golin. I’d worked with Dave Kanter. I’d worked with John Hancock. They were all incredibly smart people. My experience of being out there was really good. Every time I went out to LA I thought, “This is great.” Hanging out with these really smart people. We’re bouncing ideas off of each other. It was a really great experience.

The thing is, it hadn’t worked out in the end. I found myself, I’d gotten so involved in this that I was really, really disappointed when it all, through fault of no one really…You know what it’s like. For every 100 books that get optioned, 10 get turned into a screenplay. For every 10 screenplays that get written, one gets turned into a film. It’s the odds.

I’d gotten so involved last time and then got really disappointed. I said to Shane, “Look, I don’t want to know about anything. I don’t want to know until there’s a contract to be signed.” He said, “Are you serious about that?” I said, “Yeah, absolutely. I just don’t want to know.”

I explained the whole situation to him. I said, “I got so involved last time.” He said, “OK. That makes total sense. All you want to do is focus on your family and focus on the writing.” I said, “Yes. That’s exactly right. All I care about is my family and the writing.” He says, “OK. I’ll take care of everything.” I had no clue what was happening at all.

Then he calls me up. He said, “Look, Adrian, the story’s going to break this afternoon on Deadline.” He says, “You should get your wife. We need to talk all this through.” I got Leah. We put him on speakerphone. He told me the parameters of the deal. I couldn’t believe it.

I thought he was kidding. I said, “No, no, no. You’re joking.” He said, “No, no. These are the parameters of the deal.” I said, “Wow!” I was absolutely flabbergasted along with everybody else when the deal broke later that afternoon.

Adrian McKinty

Scott: This is what Shane does with The Story Factory. He takes writers who are talented and struggling and manages, like Steve Hamilton you mentioned earlier. It’s pretty remarkable what he does over there.

Adrian: Yes. This is what he told me. He said, “I read your books.” He said, “I hated the covers. I hated the way they were presented. I hated the author photograph. I hated the shoddy printing that they’d done. I hated the fact that they only came out as paperback originals. I hated everything about them except for the prose.”

He said, “I loved the stories and I could tell you were a really interesting writer but you had just been so badly treated by these publishers who clearly hadn’t respected you and hadn’t respected your talent or your voice and certainly hadn’t known how to market you.” He said, “Look if you sign with me that will never happen again.” I kind of believed him and kind of didn’t.

Then every promise he made came true. I would have two pieces of advice for people. One, hang in there as long as you possibly can. You never know. You might be able to turn the ship around. You can’t turn the ship around if you’ve quit. Two, if Shane Salerno ever calls you at three o’clock in the morning, take the call. Take the bloody call.

Scott: I wrote about you at my blog Go Into the Story and your experience with “The Chain.” I added you to my Persistent Writers Hall of Fame.

I wrote, “There are a lot of assholes in the entertainment industry and, yes, some of them are writers. But, in my experience, most writers are good people. They know very well the challenges which confront each and every one of us in our daily battle to create something out of nothing putting words on the page hoping they amount to something.”

I’m wondering now, given the experience you had with Don Winslow and Shane Salerno, if a struggling writer were to connect with you, do you think you’d be inclined to provide words of wisdom to them?

Adrian: Oh my God. You’ve got to pay it forward. The fact that Don Winslow called me out of the blue for no reason whatsoever. To call this writer he had met for five minutes three or four years earlier. The only reason he called me was because he knew I was struggling. He didn’t think that I should quit.

The fact that he put his best friend in contact with me and the fact that I had the gall to hang up on this guy twice, he’s done his due diligence. He said, “You know, Don, I talked to this guy. He just kept hanging up on me. What was I supposed to do?” He persisted. He kept talking to me even though I’d hung up on him. Wow. You absolutely have a duty to pay it forward.

I’ll tell you something funny that happened to me. I lived in Australia for ten years. I’m still really connected to the Australian crime fiction community. You’re 100 percent right. Most writers, in fact, almost every writer I’ve met has been really nice.

Certainly, in crime fiction, they are the most supportive group of people you will meet in your lives. People support each other. They read each other’s books. I’ve done this. They’ll do copy editing for them. They’ll do editing for them. They’re a really supportive group of people.

Even when I was in the doghouse, I had people like Ian Rankin, and Val McDermid, and Daniel Woodrell would email me and say, “You know, Adrian, hang in there,” and stuff like that, which is incredible that they would.

A few weeks ago, this is before the movie deal broke…I’m still connected to the Australian writing. I read this book in the airport. I was in the airport in Savannah. It was this book called, “Only Killers and Thieves” by this guy called Paul Howarth. It was on the bottom shelf. It’d come out as paperback.

I liked the title and I liked the cover. I flipped it over. I said, “Oh my God! It’s an Australian writer.” I started reading this in the plane from Savannah to New York. I thought it was incredible. I loved this book. As soon as I got in, I said to my wife, “I’m going to tweet about this. I’m going to do 50 tweets about this book.” This is what you’re supposed to do.

This writer who hasn’t gotten any attention. There’s a big Australian prize called the Miles Franklin Award. I thought, “If I tweet enough about this book maybe I can get it onto the long list.” It had come out with no reviews. It hadn’t been reviewed in any of the Australian press. There was a couple of tiny reviews from English newspapers. That was it.

As is the case with most books, it had just disappeared. I went in and did this Twitter storm. I connected with the guy. “Hey man, I loved your book, blah‑blah‑blah.” Then the Miles Franklin longlist came out. It wasn’t on it. It wasn’t surprising. No one in Australia had read it. There’d been no reviews on it. I was incensed by this.

I tweeted to Russell Crowe. Russell Crowe has three million followers. I tweeted to Russell. I said, “Russell, you gotta read this book. This book is right up your alley. It’s in your neighborhood.” It was set in Queensland. It’s a wild‑west story set in 1870s Queensland. I said, “It’s in your neighborhood. You would absolutely love this book.”

Amazingly, Russell Crowe tweeted me back and said, “All right, Adrian. I’m listening. Pitch me the book.” I pitched him the book. Then Russell Crowe and I had this conversation on Twitter. I said, “Man, you got to option this book. At the very least, you’ve got to read it and you should probably option it.” We had this conversation.

Then Paul DMed me. He said, “Oh man, thanks so much.” I thought to myself, “This is just part of it, Adrian. You’ve got to pay it forward. You’ve got to help other writers and especially if you’re enthusiastic about their books.” I don’t know, maybe Russell will option the book. At the very least he’s going to read it. I browbeat him into reading it.

That’s the way it should work. If you love fiction, which I do and if you love other writers, which I do, then, my God, be a cheerleader for them. You’ll only get happiness back. About ten people have tweeted me since then, “Oh my God! I read this book, Only Killers and Thieves. Wow! What a story!” You feel so happy when people find stuff that you’ve pointed them towards.

All my mates in Northern Ireland, now that there is a crime writing scene, despite of the BBC, in defiance of the BBC, there is a burgeoning great Northern Ireland crime writing scene. In something like the early ’90s, there were four crime novels published in Ireland a year. Last year, there were 47. Next year there’s going to be over 50. Times have changed for the better.

Scott: This has been great. It’s such a fun story. The story behind the story.

Adrian: I want to make sure people realize, this isn’t a story of me breaking through. This is a story of friends and family helping me break through. This is a story of people reaching down, Don, and Shane, and my wife doing the hard work of the family, working at a job and bringing the money in while I was off on my ego trip for all those years.

As much as people want to slap me on the back. I don’t want the credit. I want the credit to go to Shane, and Don, and to all my friends and family who are the ones who are the real heroes of the story.

“The Chain” has sold in 35 countries and has been named an Amazon Best Book of the Month for July 2019. Here’s the book’s tagline:

VICTIM.
SURVIVOR.
ABDUCTOR.
CRIMINAL.
YOU WILL BECOME EACH ONE.

It has movie written all over it.

Some takeaways:

• Don’t give up. If writing is your passion, keep writing. If it brings you joy, that is a success in and of itself — you, the creative, aligning yourself with what Joseph Campbell called your “rapture.” And if you get published and — heaven forbid — make money at it, that is icing on the cake.
• Write strong story concepts. Adrian came up with a unique spin on kidnapping which transforms a traditional story type into a different narrative altogether.
• Pay attention to the experiences you have in life. Adrian pulled together three disparate sources of creative inspiration to come up with the central conceit of “The Chain.”

Congratulations to Adrian. Kudos to The Story Factory for helping to change Adrian’s life.

And to all you writers out there… this is a story steeped with inspiration.

Onward!

Twitter: @adrianmckinty.