Dead I Well May Be by Adrian McKinty
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Illegals Across 110th Street

Thanks to Adrian McKinty I now know that it is possible to walk across the George Washington Bridge in New York City. This is somewhat interesting. Nevertheless, it is difficult for me to imagine a reason why anyone would do it. And this about sums up my experience of Dead I May Well Be: interesting but pointless.

Michael, the hard Ulsterman, born to fight on Belfast streets, trained by the British Army to do his fighting with more than fists, and honed to a revengeful edge by a short, sharp stint in a Mexican prison, is a murderous loner. Incongruously, he reads The Economist and War and Peace and makes various classical and biblical references, frequently just before eliminating yet another nefarious colleague.

The Count of Monte Cristo was less effective than Michael in dealing with those who betrayed him. But despite his vulnerability - as an illegal alien, as a white man in Harlem, as a serial murderer in the Tri-State area - he seems always to attract a protector, someone as lethal as he is but higher up the criminal food chain, just in the nick of time. Michael is an Irish drunk at least; but he could be psychopathic as well. In any case, neither the drink nor his mental illness adversely affects his trigger-finger, which never hesitates.

I understand that the book has been made as a film. Given that it is written as a script, with just the right flashbacks and sexual cuts, I’m not the least surprised. The story itself is a sequence of sometimes exotic, always remorseless acts of violence. I had suspected initially that McKinty was trying to demonstrate the differences in the criminal cultures of Europe and America. But as the tale progresses it is clear that there is no point to the repeated violence, except to repeat the violence.

There does seem to be a hint of social commentary dropped occasionally between the lines about the gang warfare on Upper West side of Manhattan. “For as exciting as the Mob story was in New York in the early nineties, the grander narrative wasn’t their decline, their collapse, their self-immolation. No, the big story was the drug-addled slaughter taking place nightly in Harlem and the South Bronx and Bed-Stuy. The big story was who was moving into the vacuum created by the decline and fall of the Mafia.” Who knew that the Irish replaced the Italians and were in turn replaced by the Dominicans as the creme de la crime in NYC? But as I said, while this is mildly interesting, it is essentially pointless.

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