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With IN THE MORNING I'LL BE GONE, Adrian McKinty comes to the end of his "Troubles Trilogy," set in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and featuring Detective Sean Duffy, that Catholic cop in the Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Duffy's career choice is fraught with contradictions and ironies, and so, it must be said, is Duffy who, as a student, once begged to join the IRA in the wake of the Bloody Sunday killings in 1972. His old schoolmate, Dermot McCann, was the one who turned him down.
Now, twelve years later, Duffy has been manipulated by events into working for MI5 in order to track down and arrest McCann, who disappeared and went to ground following his spectacular escape from the Maze prison. McCann is thought to have been picking up a few tricks of the terrorist trade in the Libyan desert and to be planning an outrageous attack that has to be prevented at all costs. But where is he? No one seems to know.
But MI5 thinks that Duffy may be in a singular position to find out. Having arranged to having him sacked from the RUC, they promise the restoration of his shattered career if he can find McCann before he does whatever they are terrified he will do. Duffy is placed squarely in the centre of conflicted loyalties and inevitable betrayals as he turns to the friends and acquaintances of his youth for information. Most want nothing to do with him, but one, McCann's ex-mother-in-law, a woman who has lost a daughter in an apparent accident in a locked pub, will finger McCann if Duffy can prove her daughter was murdered and by whom.
So what apparently was promising to be an IRA hard man thriller makes an astonishing turn into territory rarely visited since the Golden Age of mysteries - it becomes a locked-room puzzle, and a pretty good one at that. In an article in the Guardian earlier this year, McKinty lists his top ten locked-room mysteries and claims that the reader should be able to read these twice - once to try to figure the trick out before the detective, the second time to savour the clues and how they misdirect.
Maybe. But if I re-read the Troubles Trilogy (and I have every intention of doing just that one day) it will not be for the cleverness of the puzzle but for the quality of McKinty's prose. The opening paragraph of the book could serve handily as an example for a writing class of how to start a book, convey a considerable amount of information without appearing to be doing anything of the sort, and establish the dominant ironic, sardonic tone of voice which will carry the main character to the end of the tale, the reader along with him, and to do all that in under a hundred words. The locked room problem may be a wave of the hand back to a simpler past, but what really absorbs attention is the historical present, the time of the Troubles, of bitter absolutes and impossible choices.
IN THE MORNING is set thirty years ago in 1984, the year of the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, during which then prime minister Margaret Thatcher narrowly escaped with her life from her hotel room that was partially destroyed by an IRA-set bomb. Other well-known figures have walk-on roles - Gerry Adams, Ian Paisley, and a pair of American politicians, Joe Kennedy II and Peter King, then a New York Nassau County office-holder. These latter two attract considerable scorn on Duffy's part as they proudly proclaim their support for the IRA, with a watchful eye on the Irish diaspora back home in the USA and a grand indifference to the violence of the terror campaign in the country they are merely visiting and will soon leave. Paisley and Adams at least remain in the pot they are so happily stirring.
Like the two earlier books in the trilogy, the title of this is drawn from a song by Tom Waits, whose creaking, booze-soaked sound is the perfect note to accompany Sean Duffy's despairing quest to open the locked door of a pub and so save the life of a woman he wholly despises. If he succeeds, there will be no medals for Duffy - maybe a ticket out of the country to a warmer place and clearer choices, if he chooses to take the trip. His devoted followers will surely hope he won't.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, March 2014
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