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Publication Order of Inspector Celcius Daly Books

Publication Order of W B Yeats Books

The Blood Dimmed Tide (2014)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Anthony J. Quinn is an Irish journalist and author best known for writing a series of detective thrillers – the Inspector Celsius Daly crime mystery series. Quinn was born in County Tyrone in Northern Ireland and attended college at the Queen’s University, Belfast, where he studied English. After college, he held down several jobs that included yoga teacher, organic gardener, lecturer, and social worker before he got into journalism. It is quite bizarre that he would work in such jobs given that Quinn asserts that he was overly shy as a child and needed a speech therapist to him help get over his communication difficulties. Nonetheless, he had always loved writing as a child and had written several poems during his formative years. He would write his first novel “Disappeared” in 2012 to much critical acclaim. The novel made the shortlist for the Strand Literary Award and got positive critiques from The Times Magazine, the Daily Mail, and Kirkus Reviews. The novels have been described as some of the best crime novels, a magnificent meditation, an irresistible and hypnotically expressive take on the destructive legacy of the troubled times.

Growing up on an isolated farm, Quinn was painfully shy to the point of almost being mute. As toddlers, Quinn and Eileen his sister would invent their own language, which they stubbornly continued to use even as they grew older. It was left to Rhoda their older sister to translate for their parents who could not understand their weird language. Even as a child, he always believed that language needs to be defined from the perspective of the speaker. The siblings were eventually forced to stop using their language, which developed in him quite the resentment towards English, which perhaps explains his communication issues. Still, his mother and grandfather were very influential figures in the career path that he would ultimately follow. They spent a lot of time telling him enthralling stories of cures, curses, bewitched cattle, mischievous fairies, spirits, shape shifters, and ghosts from Irish lore. As a seven-year old, his mother used to encourage him to read, and he was a regular visitor to the old Dungannon Library in his hometown, where he spent a lot of time reading the Enid Blyton adventures. He would spend most of his teenage and young adulthood years writing moody poetry from reading a lot of Yeats. He currently lives in County Tyronne with his family. He still works his day job as a writer with the Tyrone Times.

Like many of his contemporaries, Anthony J. Quinn never had it easy publishing his novels as his manuscripts were rejected many times. In fact, he asserts that he was rejected about forty times before he got a deal to publish “Disappeared” with Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Press. Even after the novel was published, it never got much traction in Ireland and the UK, given its focus on the Troubles. He was first inspired to write the series of novels because he felt that not many of the writers from the UK did justice to the people and the landscape of Ireland. He wanted to bring to light the darkness and mood enhancing beauty of the Irish landscape by expressing it through his own experiences as a journalist and his life during the Troubles. The lead character in the series is Celcius Daly, a solitary, insomniac, maverick detective. When we first meet the protagonist in “Disappeared”, he is an enigmatic character whose very colleagues suspect him of colluding with the wife of an Irish Republican Army foot soldier. Even as the suspicion makes it even harder for him to do his job as an investigator, his outsider status makes him a more perceptive and empathetic character, which more than makes up for his shortcomings. What is so different about Anthony J. Quinn’s novels is that they include real-life characters such as WB Yeats to make for some exciting narratives. While they are classified as police procedurals, they are more historical thriller than literary fiction with a fine sprinkling of the supernatural. His novels have been so popular that the first title “Disappeared” is set to be adapted into a new TV series starring Ciaran Hinds as the lead. Since publication of the first title, he has published two more in the Inspector Daly Celsius Daly Mystery series of novels, several standalone novels and short stories that have done very well.

“Disappeared” the first novel in the series is a dark novel set in Northern Ireland’s darkest corner’s where the passions of the Troubles still reign supreme. Even as Belfast no longer has to fear terrorist bombs going off at all times of day and night, the fight is still very much alive for many people. Things come to a head when David Hughes a Retired Special Branch agent goes missing. He had come out of retirement to look into the cold case of Oliver Jordan that had disappeared years ago – presumably taken by the IRA. Soon after a former spy is found brutally killed, just a day after an unknown person places his obituary in the paper. While Ireland has been relatively calm, ancient animosities between the Protestants and Catholics boil beneath the surface. Celcius Daly is a Catholic detective in the relatively Protestant state and knows just how high stakes sectarian strife can get. To unravel the mysterious murders, he needs to dig deep into several decades of history that Ireland does not wish to relive.

“Border Angels”, the second novel in the Inspector Celcius Daly Mystery series is set in the dark, windswept, and cold border between the Republic and Northern Ireland. For the girls trafficked into the border area from the impoverished regions of Eastern Europe, the conditions could not be more warlike. The girls are forced to live and work in a Dunmore brothel. When the pimp decides to take one of them for a drive, she makes the decision to escape. But while she is scanning the road for the best place to make her escape, the car explodes into flames. The police wake up to a woman’s footprints in the sand and the pimp’s burnt out body in the car. Even as his colleagues in forensics take care of the charred corpse, Celcius Daly is obsessed with the footprints and who they belong to. Where did the woman go and where did she come from are some of the questions he will have to find answers to.

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