AN AWARD-winning crime novelist is evicted from his home and forced to give up writing and become an Uber driver to pay the bills, before surprise phone calls from a top American writer and film producer convince him to give it one more try, leading to him being offered a seven figure novel and movie deal.
This may seem like a plot for a novel, but for Carrickfergus writer Adrian McKinty, who has received numerous awards and whose books have been translated into more than 20 languages, the stark reality of trying to make a living from writing was given a surprising twist.
"On the surface I had released the six Sean Duffy books set in Belfast. I'd been doing this gig for 15 years and was winning all these awards and getting great reviews. On the other hand, they were selling two or three thousand copies a year and I wasn’t providing any income for the family.
"I had been teacher before I started writing full time so I decided to go back and get my teacher certification. I also got a real job bar tending and turning my car into an Uber," explains 51-year-old McKinty, who is based in New York.
Frustrated, he penned a blog about giving up writing. This gained the attention of American crime writer Don Winslow (The Cartel, The Force), whom he had only met briefly at a conference years earlier.
Winslow phoned McKinty, telling him how he too had been frustrated by the paltry proceeds of his critically acclaimed books and had considered giving up, but urged the Co Antrim man to keep writing and referred him to his friend Shane Salerno (Avatar, Armageddon, Hawaii Five-0) with whom he had collaborated on adaptations of his books.
Another phone call followed in the early hours of the morning from Salerno, who asked McKinty if he had ever though about setting a novel in America? As it turned out, he had. In Mexico city five years earlier, while trying to write a novel about Trotsky, McKinty learned about instances where people volunteer to swap themselves for a kidnapped family member while a ransom is raised.
"I found this so interesting and combined this with the idea of chain letters I used to get in the 70s and 80s which said something like 'if you don't make three copies of this and pass it on your mother will die'. Some people find them silly, but I found them really scary."
"Shane wanted to read this book, but I told him it was all still in my head. He said 'What are you doing now?' and when I told him I was going to sleep, he told me bed was 'over-rated' and for me to send him the first 30 pages," McKinty recalls.
At around three in the morning, McKinty gave it a go, writing the start of what would become The Chain, and sent it off. His phone rang again at 4.15am, with Solerno offering to wire him a £10,000 advance.
The Chain tells the 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 is now part of The Chain, a terrifying and meticulous chain-letter-like kidnapping scheme that turns parents from victims into criminals and plays on the notion that parents will do anything for their children.
"What I say to people after they finish reading The Chain, is 'now get some sleep'," says McKinty, who has two daughters aged 12 and 16 and admits he even had nightmares when writing the book.
In researching the book, McKinty had a personal wake-up call on internet security.
"My girls are into Instagram and all that social media stuff. I was complete naive idiot. I had been using Twitter for five years and didn't know that my location was turned on and if I did a tweet people could tell exactly where I was."
Just before The Chain was published, McKinty received a further surprise phone call from Salerno telling him that Paramount Pictures had acquired the screen rights to the novel.
"It's unbelievable really," admits McKinty, whose advice now to other authors is 'never give up'.
"I never imagined any of this could happen, but I hoped it would and I got very, very lucky."
And will we see the return of Detective Sean Duffy? "I would like to keep doing those books. He's not dead, he's still alive. I did my best in them and I thought they were an accurate portrayal of Belfast in the 1980s. You don't know what is going to happen in the future, but I hope people rediscover those books now."
:: The Chain by Adrian McKinty is published by Orion and is out now.
