In the shadows of mountains

The city in the photo is in fact Denver, home to the Carrickfergus, County Antrim native and the setting for “Hidden River,” a tale of crime and dark intrigue in the shadow of the Rockies.
McKinty is one of a crop of young Irish fiction writers who have chosen to set their stories on ground well removed from their native island.
Two of them, Belfast’s Ronan Bennett and Dublin’s John Connolly, write for publishing imprints that all come under the umbrella of publishers Simon & Schuster.
So does McKinty.
As it happens, the three writers have never met. And nobody at the publishing house has come up with the bright idea of a “three Irish authors” tour.
Which is maybe just as well. Separately, each of the three has carved out a distinct, non-Irish geographic niche in his writing.
Bennett has set his novels in Africa and the England of the mid-17th century. Connolly has set his novels in New York, Louisiana and, most recently, Maine.
For McKinty, the chosen ground is, at least for the immediate future, Denver and the surrounding landscape of Colorado, its plains to the east of the city and those famous mountains to the west.
The road to the Rockies for the 36-year-old writer has been a long and revealing one.
McKinty first stepped out into the broader world beyond Carrickfergus and Belfast by way of Warwick University in England.
He studied law but later discovered that he was not cut out to be a lawyer.
He then studied political philosophy at Oxford University. But having been an eyewitness to some of the bloodier years of the troubles, McKinty wanted to experience life, and express his views on it, beyond the limits imposed by an academic discipline.
He took himself off to India for six months and found that even in that extraordinary country there were echoes of Ireland’s troubles.
“I visited a mosque that was attacked by Hindus, and then a Hindu temple that was attacked by Muslims,” he said.
India, then, wasn’t the entire answer. So McKinty did what so many young Irish did in the early 1990s: he headed for America. His first stop was New York.
But he did not land in the new world all alone. While in Oxford, McKinty had met his future wife, Leah Garrett, an American-born Columbia University student doing postgraduate work in English.
“I followed her back. She’s the missus,” said McKinty in a phone interview from his Denver home.
Life in New York took a predictable turn for the new immigrant arrival. Predictable in that it was hectic, ad hoc and varied. He found employment, among other things, as a security guard, construction worker, barman and bookstore clerk.
At one point, McKinty even landed a job as a rugby coach.
McKinty married Leah in 1995 and began to settle in to something more akin to a career. He became a librarian at the Columbia University Medical School Library.
Always drawn to reading, McKinty was now surrounded by books, albeit highly specialized ones.
He stayed at the library for three years and might have knuckled down for a longer haul, only Leah won a Fulbright Scholarship and a ticket to study in Jerusalem.
“So we spent 1998 and ’99 in Jerusalem, and also Cairo,” said McKinty.
Leah was on her way to becoming a professor of English. Her husband took up rugby again and learned Hebrew swear words in the front row of the scrum.
All the while though, a novel idea was taking form in McKinty’s mind. He had taken careful note of, and written copious notes about his daily working life in upper Manhattan, the Bronx and New Jersey, where he had once worked for a rather dodgy construction company.
When the couple came back to New York, the book idea had taken firmer hold but McKinty first went back to organizing the books of others. He took a job as a librarian again, this time in a law library downtown.
2000 saw the couple move west after Leah was given offered a position at the University of Denver. McKinty took up English teaching at high school level.
What would be his debut novel, “Dead I May Well Be,” now went down on pages even as McKinty imparted the mysteries of “Catcher In The Rye” to eleventh graders.
“It was in my head for some time,” said McKinty of his first novel.
“The story is full of New York and Jersey, mobbed up guys, union guys, illegal immigrants. I used to write down all these things I would see when working in the city.”
His eye and ear for detail were clearly well honed. The first agent McKinty approached snapped up the proposed novel. And that agent had to go no further than Simon & Schuster to have the book published.
“I was very, very lucky,” said McKinty.
And clearly, a very good storyteller. The reviews for “Dead I May Well Be” were little short of rave.
McKinty was compared to Mickey Spillane, Damon Runyon and “Mystic River” author Dennis Lehane.
The San Francisco Chronicle described ‘Dead’ as “too literary to be called a crime story and too damn fun to be called literary.”
It was no surprise that it was named in Booklist’s top ten for debut crime fiction novels. It was also shortlisted for a Dagger Award.
And this was only the beginning. Scribner, the Simon & Schuster division that brought the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald to the world, contracted McKinty to write three additional novels.
“Hidden River” is the first of them. Set in Denver, it is a murder mystery in which the central character launches himself on a path to finding the truth behind a crime, while at the same time seeking his own redemption.
“Only the redemption part doesn’t quite work out,” said the author.
“I enjoyed writing ‘Hidden River’ because I was able to write about Denver,” said McKinty.
“I’ve lived here for five years now. It’s an interesting place with a fascinating landscape.”
McKinty’s next novel, “Bandit Country” will not, however, be set in Denver, but Boston, where McKinty also worked for a while during his early U.S. years. The planned setting for the final tale among the four is Dublin.
The varied settings for McKinty’s novels hint at restlessness.
And that would be true. Adrian and Leah are now proud parents of a young daughter, but that doesn’t preclude moving to another town, or even another country.
For the moment, however, home is nestled in the shadow of the Rockies.
“I’m Denver’s author laureate,” McKinty joked.
It might not be a joke for long. The city might want to think about hanging on to him.