Saturday, June 2, 2018

A Gloriously Dark and Troubled Morning

There is something to be said for the fictional (and actual) detective who--in spite of his or her tendency to burnout and imbalance--still shows up and plunges ahead through a well-crafted story. When the metropolitan backdrop is Belfast and the historical context is the vaunted Troubles of the early 1980s, these matters only serve to push my reading happy buttons. The blow-off story of Adrian McKinty's Troubles  Trilogy causes readers to walk alongside Detective Sean Duffy as literary paracletes of sorts. In the Morning I'll Be Gone expands the game field to England, mixing in actual events with deliciously-told fiction in typically fine McKinty fashion.

Duffy begins the tale in morose professional waters. Suspended from his position, Duffy--a Catholic gumshoe in the Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulatory (superseded by the PSNI in 2001)--struggles to adjust to dangerous beat duty. But as if the stars become aligned by the hand of Providence, Duffy suddenly finds himself in the midst of two cases where one would tip the other. Approached by MI5, he is asked to parlay his past connections with former classmate-turned-IRA master bomber Dermot McCann so that the Brits can capture him before more damage ensues. 

Wouldn't you know it? McCann's in-laws are well known to Duffy. There is a spark of nuclear lust between Duffy and McCann's ex. Another of the sisters perished in a locked-room mystery, and the matriarch of the aggrieved Fitzpatrick family asks Duffy to investigate in clandestine fashion. If he solves the cold case, she will give him information that leads to McCann.

As the story unfolds, one senses Duffy spread even thinner across his responsibilities as both cases play off against the other. One of the MI5 agents has connection to the previous story, I Hear the Sirens in the Street. As the Conservative Party readies for a conference at Brighton, Duffy races against time to solve the Lizzie Fitzpatrick murder, connecting the dots at the last minute to find the locked room wasn't so locked after all. The information on McCann's whereabouts looks doubtful for some time, but the calm only serves to build toward a massive blow-off that finds Duffy fighting for his life and racing to prevent an attack that could cost Margaret Thatcher her own.

Even so, the story ends with Duffy's characteristic yet deepening brooding. For some time, the reader wonders if he will go on to survive in a functional manner, let alone return to the police force. In the end, the reader empathizes, if not outright sympathizes, with Duffy's loss of control and his struggle for hope. Perhaps at the end of this initial trilogy, the true victory happens to be that Duffy is willing to take another step with breath in his lungs. There is something to be said for getting up after being knocked down repeatedly. McKinty--in typical lyrical prose--shines a bright spotlight on the durability of the human spirit.

There is the customary violence that one usually tracks in a McKinty volume, but this is nothing new, and the details fit with the harshness of the Northern Irish landscape. The gritty noir feel empowers the reader to experience every bump of Duffy's BMW, every mortar round, and every dark cloud that comes in off Belfast Lough. McKinty shines in the grand way he helps us smell the sea salt in one nostril and the acrid scent of Semtex in the other. Adrian McKinty has quickly climbed the ladder to the top rungs of my favorite crime fiction authors, and I don't intend to slow down on digesting these narratives any time soon.

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