Dead I Well May Be

Adrian McKinty
was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, at the height of the Troubles. He studied politics at Oxford University and after a failed law career he moved to New York City in the early 1990s. He found work as a security guard, postman, door-to-door salesman, construction worker, barman, rugby coach, book-store clerk and librarian. Having lived in Colorado for many years with his wife and daughters, he and his family have moved to Melbourne, Australia.

In addition to
Dead I Well May Be
, Serpent’s Tail publishes the other two volumes in Adrian McKinty’s The Dead Trilogy –
The Dead Yard
and
The Bloomsday Dead
, as well as
Fifty Grand
and
Hidden River
.

Dead I Well May Be

‘A darkly thrilling tale of the New York streets with all the hard-boiled charm of Chandler and the down and dirty authenticity of closing time…Evocative dialogue, an acute sense of place and a sardonic sense of humour make McKinty one to watch’
Guardian

‘The story is soaked in the holy trinity of the noir thriller – betrayal, money and murder – but seen through here with a panache and political awareness that gives
Dead I Well May Be
a keen edge over its rivals’
Big Issue

‘Adrian McKinty’s main skill is in cleverly managing to evoke someone rising through the ranks and wreaking bloody revenge while making it all seem like an event that could happen to any decent, hardworking Irish chap. A dark, lyrical and gripping voice that will go far’
The List

‘McKinty’s Michael Forsythe is a crook, a deviant, a lover, a fighter, and a thinker. His Irish-tough language of isolation and longing makes us love and trust him despite his oh-so-great and violent flaws. When you finish this book you just might wish you’d lived the life in its pages, and
thought its thoughts, both horrible and sublime’ Anthony Swofford, author of
Jarhead

‘Adrian McKinty is a big new talent – for storytelling, for dialogue and for creating believable characters…
Dead I Well May Be
is a riveting story of revenge and marks the arrival of a distinctive fresh voice’
Sunday Telegraph

‘A pacy, assured and thoroughly engaging debut…this is a hard-boiled crime story written by a gifted man with poetry coursing through his veins and thrilling writing dripping from his fingertips’
Sunday Independent

‘Careens boisterously from Belfast to the Bronx…McKinty is a storyteller with the kind of style and panache that blurs the line between genre and mainstream. Top-drawer’
Kirkus Reviews

‘If Frank McCourt had gone into the leg-breaking business instead of school teaching, he might’ve written a book like
Dead I Well May Be
. Adrian McKinty’s novel is a rollicking, raw, and unsavoury delight – down and dirty but full of love for words. This is hard-boiled crime fiction with a poet’s touch’ Peter Blauner, author of
The Last Good Day
and
The Intruder

‘McKinty has deftly created a literate, funny and cynical antihero who takes his revenge in bloody and violent twists but at the same time, methodically listens to Tolstoy on tape while on stakeouts. He rounds out the book with a number of incredible fever-dream sequences and then springs an ending that leaves readers shaking their head in satisfied amazement’
San Francisco Chronicle

The Dead Yard

‘Adrian McKinty has once again harnessed the power of poetry,
violence, lust and revenge to forge a sequel to his acclaimed
Dead I Well May Be’ The Irish Post

‘
The Dead Yard
is a much-anticipated sequel to
Dead I Well May Be
and every bit as good. McKinty crackles with raw talent. His dialogue is superb, his characters rich and his plotting tight and seamless. He also writes with a wonderful (and wonderfully humorous) flair for language, raising his work above most crime-genre offerings and bumping right up against literature’
San Francisco Chronicle

‘McKinty’s literate, expertly crafted third crime novel confirms his place as one of his generation’s leading talents…McKinty possesses a talent for pace and plot structure that belies his years. Dennis Lehane fans will definitely be pleased’
Publishers Weekly

‘Expat Irishman Adrian McKinty has just put out his fourth terrific book…and he keeps getting better. He melds the snap and crackle of the old Mickey Spillane tales with the literary skills of Raymond Chandler and sets it all down in his own artful way. This is a writer going places. Hop aboard’
Rocky Mountain News

The Bloomsday Dead

‘Those who know McKinty will automatically tighten their seatbelts. To newcomers I say: buckle up and get set for a bumpy ride through a very harsh landscape indeed. His antihero Michael Forsythe is as wary, cunning and ruthless as a sewer rat… His journey in some ways parallels that of James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom on one day in Dublin, but – trust me – it’s a lot more violent and a great deal more exciting’ Matthew Lewin,
Guardian

‘A pacey, violent caper… As Forsythe hurtles around the city, McKinty vividly portrays its sleazy, still-menacing underbelly’ John Dugdale,
Sunday Times

‘Thoroughly enjoyable… [McKinty] maintains the bloody action all the way from Lima to Larne with panache and economy. His hero, the “unf***ing-killable” Michael Forsythe, is a wonderful creation’ Hugh Bonar,
Irish Mail on Sunday

‘Packed with sharp dialogue and unremitting action’ Marcel Berlins,
The Times

‘Compelling thrillers written in a hard-bitten, muscular style, the novels are given an unconventional twist by virtue of Forsythe’s unusually perceptive insights… a fascinating blend of Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne and Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley… McKinty is a rare writer’
Sunday Business Post

‘A tangled and bloody odyssey through Dublin and Belfast… [a] well-paced, edgy thriller’ Terence Killeen,
Irish Times

‘A gut-punching gangster story… this illegitimate spawn of a book, with Tony Soprano morality and James Joyce literary weight, ends the Michael Forsythe trilogy’ Gerard Brennan,
Belfast Newsletter

Hidden River

‘McKinty is a cross between Mickey Spillane and Damon Runyon – the toughest, the best. Beware of McKinty’ Frank McCourt

‘A roller coaster of highs and lows, light humour and dark deeds…Once you step into
Hidden River
, the powerful under-current of McKinty’s talent will swiftly drag you away. Let’s hope this author does not slow down anytime soon’
Irish Examiner

‘[A] terrific read…this is a strong, non-stop story, with attractive characters and fine writing’
Morning Star

Dead I Well May Be

Adrian McKinty

A complete catalogue record for this book can
be obtained from the British Library on request

The right of Adrian McKinty to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Copyright © 2003 Adrian McKinty

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real
persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published in 2003 by Scribner, New York

First published in 2004 by Serpent’s Tail
First published in this edition in 2009 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
website:
www.serpentstail.com

ISBN 978 1 84668 699 3

Printed in the UK by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon, CR0 4TD

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

And if you come, when all the flowers are dying
And I am dead, as dead I well may be …
—F. E. Weatherly, “Danny Boy,” 1910,
adapted from “The Londonderry Air” (trad.)

PROLOGUE: BELFAST CONFETTI

N

o one was dead. For once they’d given a good, long warning and there’d been no fatalities. We arrived after it was all over, and when the forensics officers were done, the policemen raised the yellow tape to let us through. We carried the glass from vans, a sheet at a time, to foremen and builders’ mates who forklifted it up to carpenters on cranes and cherry pickers.

We climbed the stairs, put on our gloves, unloaded the pallets. We caught our breaths and took in the view.

The gray certainty of a December sky. Cold fathoms of paralyzed lough. Sea rain and peat smoke drifting over the shipyards and the town.

We walked back to the huge spindle-sided vehicles and carried more sheets, all of them precut and lying there in sailcloth and plastic, well wrapped, and seemingly long ready for an event such as this.

Sore fingers, aching backs.

We worked hard and drank water and smoked and a man brought beer and chicken-salad sandwiches from Marks and Spencer.

Someone had bombed the Europa Hotel again, no casualties but every window within a half a mile was out. It was the stuff of glaziers’ dreams and the cops were on overtime and the army on foot patrol and the journalists chasing copy for the morning papers. TV crews, radio reporters, still photographers, the gloaming dark, the broken glass like diamond on the leadened streets.

We labored, talked.

A fog had oozed down from Cave Hill and Black Mountain, bringing
cold and damp to the tangle of runaway alleys off Sandy Row. We were underdressed and a foreman gave us knit caps and hard hats and that helped a little.

All of us had met only a few hours ago outside the bookie’s when a man said he was looking for fit guys to move pallets of glass into and out of vans. The pay was fifty pounds the day and a bonus for a clean job.

And everyone, including those on disability, had of course said yes. Unemployment was at 35 percent and the man could have offered half the wages and still we all would have come. In any case the market rate was unimportant since the Europa’s insurers were footing the bill and the insurers were indemnified by the British government and ultimately, if you traced it back, the burden was falling on the taxpayers of Surrey and Suffolk and Kent, and really, if you lived in one of those places your worries were small and undisordered and you could well afford it.

The fog encouraged levity and more than once we put our hands to our throats and pretended we’d been dragged off by Jack the Ripper.

The real tragedy, of course, wasn’t the modern Europa Hotel but the Crown Bar opposite, whose stained glass windows and gaslight had been fixtures since the 1840s. The bar was a gem owned and operated by the National Trust—its crystal sea patterns and ship anchors and Celtic turns utterly destroyed and in pieces on the pavement.