The Cold, Cold Ground

with his tiny congregation.
    “ Misereatur tui omnipotens Deus, et dimissis peccatis tuis, perducat te ad vitam ternam,” he says. “Indulgentiam, absolutionem, et remissionem peccatorum tuorum tribuat tibi omnipotens et misericors Dominus. Amen. Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat: et ego auctoritate ipsus te absolvo ab omni vinculo excommunicationis, (suspensionis), et interdicti, in quantum possum, et tu indiges. Deinde ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti .”
    Outside the confessional it is a different world and we exchange unembarrassed pleasantries.
    “It was the lovely day today, wasn’t it?”
    “Aye, it was, Father, and can you believe that it’s supposed to snow tomorrow?”
    “Oh, and my roses just coming through!” he says and shakes his head.
    I drive home.
    Coronation Road is quiet.
    I drink a glass of supermarket plonk and pour myself a pint of vodka and lime.
    I eat bread and cheese.
    I flip on the news: a shooting in Crossmaglen, a suspicious van in Cookstown, an incendiary attack in Lurgan – nothing serious: news.
    I stay up late to watch the Oscars.
    Chariots of Fire is the only film that I’ve seen.
    It wins Best Picture but they give Best Director to Warren Beatty for Reds .
    “The British are coming!” the winning producer yells and right on cue a helicopter gunship stuffed with soldiers passes low over Carrickfergus on its way, perhaps, to less benighted destinations.
    To be continued …

ABOUT … The Cold Cold Ground
    I was born at home on Coronation Road, Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland in 1968. Coronation Road was one of the many red-bricked terraces in a Protestant housing estate in a town five miles north of Belfast. The street where I grew up and Victoria Estate itself was controlled by two rival Protestant paramilitary factions: the UDA and the UVF. The paramilitaries ran protection rackets, administered “street justice”, dealt drugs, etc.
    In 1980 Carrickfergus’s major employer, ICI, shut down and almost the entire town was, overnight, thrown out of work. Carrickfergus was relatively untouched by the Troubles, but things changed in 1981 when the IRA hunger strikes began and the whole of Northern Ireland was engulfed by rioting, bombings, assassinations and, for a time during the summer of ’81, after the death of Bobby Sands, it seemed that Ulster was on the verge of civil war.
    The central idea of The Cold Cold Ground was to follow a young police detective trying to do his job in the midst of all this chaos. He’s a bright Catholic cop in a primarily Protestant police force, who has recently moved to Carrickfergus. The homicide he’s asked to solve is what looks like an ordinary execution of a police informer, but it quickly becomes clear that the case is far from ordinary. The victim is homosexual and when more gays are killed it looks like the Ulster police are dealing with their first ever serial killer. The police resources are stretched thin by endemic rioting and the case is further complicated by the factthat in 1981 homosexuality was illegal in Northern Ireland and punishable by up to five years in prison.
    I remember 1981 extremely well. I remember the bomb attacks in Belfast and trouble in the Estate. I remember getting a lift to school from a neighbour who was a captain in the British Army: he had to check under his car every morning for mercury tilt switch bombs and sometimes when it was raining or cold he would skip the check and my little brother and I would be in the back seat waiting for the first hill when the bomb might go off …
    I wanted to set a book in this claustrophobic atmosphere, attempting to recapture the sense that civilization was breaking down to its basest levels. I also wanted to remember the craic, the music, the bombastic politicians, the apocalyptic street preachers, the sinister gunmen and a lost generation of kids for whom all of this was normal.
    The Cold Cold Ground is a police procedural, but a procedural set in extremely unusual circumstances in a controversial police force cracking under extraordinary external and internal pressures …

ABOUT … Adrian McKinty

    I was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. After studying philosophy at Oxford University, I emigrated to New York City where I lived in Harlem for seven years, working in bars, bookstores, building sites and finally the basement stacks of the Columbia University Medical School Library in