Lucky break gives writer Adrian McKinty a shot at Ned Kelly

Not that long ago, Adrian McKinty was facing eviction from the Melbourne home he shared with his wife and children.

Crime writer Adrian McKinty in St Kilda, Melbourne. Picture: David Geraghty.

Not that long ago, Belfast-born Adrian McKinty had a series of crime novels under his belt, was working as an Uber ­driver but was facing eviction from the Melbourne home he shared with his wife and children.

Early one morning, still behind the wheel of the Uber, he received a phone call out of the blue that changed his life. American entertainment hotshot Shane Salerno was on the line, suggesting McKinty write a crime novel set not in Belfast like his Sean Duffy books but in the US.

McKinty ditched the novel he was working on — about Leon Trotsky — and wrote a US-set thriller in which parents have to kidnap and threaten to kill children to save the lives of their own children.

That novel, The Chain, was published in 2019 and became a best-seller and film-to-be. It lifted McKinty, now based in New York, onto the same stage as the other writers he will now compete with for the inaugural international prize at the 2020 Ned Kelly Awards for crime writing.

Also on the best international crime fiction shortlist, announced on Wednesday, are megaselling Americans Michael Connelly (The Night Fire) and Karin Slaughter (The Last Widow) and McKinty’s Irish compatriot Jane Casey (Cruel Acts). It was another legendary American crime writer, Don Winslow, who steered ­Salerno to McKinty.

“I am so thrilled to be short-­listed for a Neddie,’’ McKinty, a dual winner of the award for local crime fiction, said. “The first award I ever won in my life was a Neddie in 2014 (for the Sean Duffy novel In the Morning I’ll Be Gone) when I believe I drank all of Brisbane dry and almost caused an international incident. I’ve been saying for years that Oz crime fiction punches way above its weight and when you look at the nominees this year you know this is true.’’

The shortlist for best local crime fiction includes Nick Gadd’s blackly funny Death of a Typographer and Pip Drysdale’s The Strangers We Know. Also in contention are Dervla McTiernan, also born in Ireland, for The Scholar, Christian White for The Wife and the Widow, Dave Warner for River of Salt and David Whish-Wilson for True West.

Dan Box, a former reporter on The Australian, is on the true-crime shortlist for Bowraville, which this newspaper first produced as a podcast. Fellow journalist Kate McClymont is short-listed for Dead Man Walking: The Murky World of Michael McGurk and Ron Medich. Rounding out the true-crime shortlist are Phillip Rooper and Kevin Meagher for Shark Arm and Angela Williams for Snakes and Ladders.