Tuesday, October 14, 2025
Tuesday, June 10, 2025
Tuesday, April 1, 2025
Monday, May 20, 2024
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
Monday, December 11, 2023
Duffy 7 starting to appear on a few best year of the lists. As always I am
grateful to the critics who pick these lists but in the case of the Duffy books I
am more grateful to the readers who nagged me into continuing with the
character... I thought I was done with Sean but as I started digging into the
history again I realized that they were a lot more crazy stories still to
tell...
Wednesday, April 12, 2023
Sunday, December 18, 2022
Sunday, December 4, 2022
Thursday, July 14, 2022
Monday, May 30, 2022
The New York Times review of The Island
the NYT review of The Island is hilarous...the reviewer begins by HATING the very concept of the book, the very idea of it...
and then, little by little...
well, you'll see:
Thursday, May 26, 2022
Friday, April 29, 2022
The Island Coming May 17
So, my novel The Island will be out in May. Its a thematic sequel to The Chain. Not a sequel but a thematic sequel...I cannot say more w/out providing spoilers. So far its gotten starred reviews in the trades, in both Booklist and Publishers Weekly. And Time Magazine has picked it as one of its books to read in May... Both the PW and Booklist reviews are v spoilerific but this one isn't so bad:
***
Saturday, April 2, 2022
Tuesday, January 5, 2021
be safe in 2021
2020 kicked our ass but if you're reading this then by god you're still alive and kicking.
I hope you stay safe and sane in 2021.
I know I haven't been very productive in 2020, I've kind of been hunkering down with my family but as the situation improves I will try to do better in the new year with new books and short stories.
And if I make it to Ireland this year I promise I'll conduct that free walking tour of the Duffyverse that we were planning for 2020.
Please look after yourselves until then.
Sláinte is táinte...
Friday, October 16, 2020
Party of Five
I'm afraid I cannot be my usual glib, sarcastic self today. I'm in shock. (Happy shock.)
Over the last 48 hours The Chain won the Ned Kelly Award, The Barry Award and The Macavity Award to go with the Theakston Crime Novel of the Year Award and the ITW Crime Novel of the Year Award.
.......................
I can only express my gratitude to all the judges of these wonderful awards and of course a huge thank you to my loyal readers for sticking by me in the dark times.
Heartfelt love and thanks...Adrian...
Thursday, July 23, 2020
Crime Novel of The Year
I am absolutely stunned to win two of the biggest awards in crime fiction in the same week. I cannot even get my head around this. Last week I thought my cup runneth over when I won the International Thriller Writers Crime Novel of the Year and today I just was given the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year.
...
I am so grateful to every reader who has ever read any of my books. I am so grateful for every single review I've ever gotten (even the 1 stars, you know who you are, Kenny) and I am so lucky I stuck at this gig when I basically quit 2 1/2 years ago.
...
If you're a writer let me tell you its a long, tough, lonely road especially if you want to make a career out of it and you'll want to quit 1000 times but hang in there, if good things can happen to me they can happen to you too. I am blessed. Go raibh maith agat.
...
I am so grateful to every reader who has ever read any of my books. I am so grateful for every single review I've ever gotten (even the 1 stars, you know who you are, Kenny) and I am so lucky I stuck at this gig when I basically quit 2 1/2 years ago.
...
If you're a writer let me tell you its a long, tough, lonely road especially if you want to make a career out of it and you'll want to quit 1000 times but hang in there, if good things can happen to me they can happen to you too. I am blessed. Go raibh maith agat.
Wednesday, October 16, 2019
why i write
I like the people who came to writing novels from working in newspapers. For them writing is a job. You get up at nine in the morning and you finish at 5. You put in a full day. You do your word count and you clock out. Stephen King says that those people who sit around waiting for the muse are amateurs. Writers write. Writers sit down at the typewriter, legal pad or computer and they write. All the writers who are popular and successful see writing as a no nonsense job and they just bloody get on with it. I like these people and I like this school of thought. I've met a lot of these writers and they are cool.
But this is not my way.
I see things differently.
For me writing is nothing to do with deadlines and word counts and getting the job done. For me a writer is a shaman. A holy man. A holy woman. A witch. A writer has been given a staff made from meteor iron and with that stick she scratches a message into clay tablets and the tablets are baked and they are put in a library and the river moves and the city fails and the library’s pillars fall and the clay tablets lie buried in the sand for four thousand years until someone finds them and reads them and understands. You are telling them a story about life and death and the meaning of life. You are talking to them across the centuries.
Spacetime in our universe began 13 billion years ago and it will last in our universe for many trillions of years and, depending upon the variables of dark energy, it will come to an end in a big crunch or a slow, silent heat death. If Einstein’s equations are to be believed everything we say or do has already been done. The equations work equally well backwards or forwards in time. The universe has already died. And we died trillions of years ago, forgotten utterly, our actions, words, thoughts, completely vanished into the void. This is why what the writer does is sacred. What you’re doing isn’t writing a meaningless string of words. You’re scratching a message in the sand in defiance of the tide and the abyss. You can’t halt entropy but for a moment you can strike a match and wave it furiously in the blackness.
Look, look at this! The writer says. I am gone. We are gone. But we were here and we saw and we loved and laughed and we dreamed. We saw beauty and we experienced pain. And we were given a task by the ones who died next to us in the lifeboat: tell them about us.
Yeah, I know, I just write hack crime novels who am I to talk? But that's the whole point isn't it? It doesn't matter what you write about, it's your attitude. Your words could be smuggled on toilet paper out of prison to one old friend or they could be texted to a million followers as you ride the subway car. It's what you think about the words that counts. An audience of one is still an audience.
So I don’t see writing as just another job. I don’t write to fill my word count. I am on a sacred fucking mission. I’m waiting for the goddess. Because I believe in the goddess. I believe in ghosts. The ghosts of the ones who went before and the ones who have not yet come. And I will witness against the beast. And I will defy the darkness and I will tell our story.
I take up my meteor iron and I scratch marks onto sheets of blank paper and what I do is consecrated.
And I will try very hard to make it good.
But this is not my way.
I see things differently.
For me writing is nothing to do with deadlines and word counts and getting the job done. For me a writer is a shaman. A holy man. A holy woman. A witch. A writer has been given a staff made from meteor iron and with that stick she scratches a message into clay tablets and the tablets are baked and they are put in a library and the river moves and the city fails and the library’s pillars fall and the clay tablets lie buried in the sand for four thousand years until someone finds them and reads them and understands. You are telling them a story about life and death and the meaning of life. You are talking to them across the centuries.
Spacetime in our universe began 13 billion years ago and it will last in our universe for many trillions of years and, depending upon the variables of dark energy, it will come to an end in a big crunch or a slow, silent heat death. If Einstein’s equations are to be believed everything we say or do has already been done. The equations work equally well backwards or forwards in time. The universe has already died. And we died trillions of years ago, forgotten utterly, our actions, words, thoughts, completely vanished into the void. This is why what the writer does is sacred. What you’re doing isn’t writing a meaningless string of words. You’re scratching a message in the sand in defiance of the tide and the abyss. You can’t halt entropy but for a moment you can strike a match and wave it furiously in the blackness.
Look, look at this! The writer says. I am gone. We are gone. But we were here and we saw and we loved and laughed and we dreamed. We saw beauty and we experienced pain. And we were given a task by the ones who died next to us in the lifeboat: tell them about us.
Yeah, I know, I just write hack crime novels who am I to talk? But that's the whole point isn't it? It doesn't matter what you write about, it's your attitude. Your words could be smuggled on toilet paper out of prison to one old friend or they could be texted to a million followers as you ride the subway car. It's what you think about the words that counts. An audience of one is still an audience.
So I don’t see writing as just another job. I don’t write to fill my word count. I am on a sacred fucking mission. I’m waiting for the goddess. Because I believe in the goddess. I believe in ghosts. The ghosts of the ones who went before and the ones who have not yet come. And I will witness against the beast. And I will defy the darkness and I will tell our story.
I take up my meteor iron and I scratch marks onto sheets of blank paper and what I do is consecrated.
And I will try very hard to make it good.
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