With gas cookers and chip pans in every kitchen, the chip-pan fire was by far the most popular method these Proddies had for burning their houses down. The second technique was the ever popular chimne...
The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant y...
A black Mercedes Benz 450 SL pulled up. It was your classic hood auto beloved of terrorists, pimps and African dictators.
More guilt, guilt, guilt. That's the Irish condition.
Revenge is the foolish stepbrother of justice. I understood
Ireland in shades of black and green under the gibbous moon. Ireland under the canopy of grey cloud, under the crow's wing and the helicopter blade. A night ride over the Lagan valley and the bandit c...
A cocked .38 doesn't feel the same as an unprimed revolver. The frame tightens differently, the trigger is on a hair and this tension is communicated to you and the people around you.
I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1970s and '80s - you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson - that was proba...
But this was Northern Ireland in 1981 which was slightly less conservative than, say, Salem in 1692
I had gone to New York with no plan at all. I did a lot of jobs - barman, teacher, security guard, postman and construction worker - and I was meeting many eccentric characters, and they were saying f...
I don't know if that's a year's bad luck, or if that's how it works. But stealing a Christmas tree - that can't be a good thing, karma-wise.
The minutes ticked past. This is why peelers need a book. A wee paperback to stick in your pocket.
If you really have to get shot, Belfast is one of the best places to do it. After twenty years of the Troubles, and after thousands of assassination attempts and punishment shootings, Belfast has trai...
What’s news? She put the magazine down and looked at me. Philip K. Dick is dead. Who’s that? I asked.
Coruscation.
A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what’s going on.
Thumbs through Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café and is momentarily
Don’t trust whitey and whitey is fucking everywhere. We walked
Who do you think's after you, Shane, my lad? Or is it just the dark you're afeared of?
A locked-room problem lies at the heart of my new novel, 'In The Morning I'll Be Gone,' in which an RUC detective has to find out whether a publican's daughter who fell off a table in a bar that was l...