How a life-changing phone call led an Irish author to publish international bestseller The Chain

It's been one of the most talked about thrillers of the summer.

But for The Chain's author, Adrian McKinty, it's been a long time coming.  The Carrickfergus-born author had received amazing reviews and awards for his novels about Belfast detective Sean Duffy. However, none had been met with commercial success. After his family were evicted from their home in Melbourne around two years ago, the novelist decided to give up writing - which started a chain of events that led to one of this summer's most buzzed-about books. He told Her:

"It was quite a...situation. We were evicted and they put all our kids' stuff out on the pavement while we were waiting for the moving van to come. "My daughter said to me, 'daddy, is everything going to be OK?' And I'm saying, 'yes, everything's going to be fine' - but I'm thinking, 'is everything going to be OK? I don't know.' "Then I decided that this whole writing bullshit I'd been doing for the last six years, it was all nonsense and I'd been living a fake, inauthentic life.  "To the world, I was this successful writer. But in reality, I was this complete failure who had done nothing to help my family - and here we were, with our furniture on the street, having been evicted." 

He put up a post on his blog, explaining his decision, and went to the labour exchange the next day where he got a job at a bar and registered his car as an Uber.  [caption id="attachment_478022" align="alignnone" width="1500"] Adrian McKinty
Credit: Leah Garrett[/caption] Around a month later, he got a phone call from American crime writer Don Winslow, who asked him if he could pass on his books to his agent, Shane Salerno. Adrian continued:

"About two weeks go by. I'd had a really long, stressful day. I got home around quarter past 12 in the morning - the phone rings, and it's this American agent.  "He says, 'Hi there, I'm Shane Salerno, I'm calling from Hollywood, California. I'm Don Winslow's agent. I hear you're this writer whose in a bit of trouble, and I was wondering if I could help you out.'"

He recalled how he listened to the agent talk about "Hollywood, California and all that other stuff" before he told him he was definitely "done" with writing. After a bit more of late night back-and-forth (and a few hang ups), Salerno asked if he had an "American story" that they could relaunch his career with. Adrian continued:

"I thought to myself, it's funny he says that.  Because when I was looking at my daughter on the street after the eviction, and she said to me 'daddy, is everything going to be OK?', I was looking into her eyes and I'm just going 'yes, everything is going to be OK because I will do everything in my power for these kids'.  "It took me back to that story of The Chain, which had been going on my head for around six years, and I go [to Shane], 'yeah, OK.' I pitch this story to Shane, and he goes all quiet. "Then he says, 'That's brilliant. I love it, that's the story that will relaunch your career in America - send it to me.'"

He told Salerno that he didn't have a book - or even a first chapter - to send over, as the book existed only in his mind at that point. The agent continued to try and convince him to write the first chapter and send it to him, then-and-there. Adrian said:

"I said to him, 'I'm not going to do that, I'm going to go to sleep because I've got a job to do tomorrow.'  "He said, 'Listen, Adrian, I can tell that money is a big obstacle here. So I'll tell you what I'm going to do, I'm going to wire $10,000 into your bank account tonight. You can take the next few weeks off and start writing this book.'" 

The author tried to insist he didn't want to take Salerno's money, as he didn't want to "take charity from a stranger". "'It's not charity'," he recalls Salerno saying. "'It's an advance on your advance for this book'."  After a bit of convincing, Adrian sat down at 2.30am and opened his laptop to write the first chapter of the book - and things took off from there. He said:

"I found myself at 2.30am, opening my laptop and starting a new file. "I write the title page, The Chain - and he wanted the first chapter, but I got on a real roll. I wrote the first 30 pages, and they're basically the first 30 pages that are in the book [now], unchanged." 

The Chain tells the story of Rachel Klein, a Boston philosophy lecturer whose daughter, Kylie, gets kidnapped. The only way for her to get her daughter back is for her to pay the ransom to an encrypted Bitcoin account - then to abduct someone else's child. If a mistake is made, or the authorities are told about what is going on, your child is killed - it's all about making sure The Chain continues on. With the inspiration behind the shadowy Chain a mix of the idea of exchange kidnapping and chain letters, Adrian admitted that the story was originally going to be much different - and shorter. He said:

"[When I was first coming up with the idea,] I thought to myself, 'there's this idea of exchange kidnapping and there's this idea of chain letters - what if there's a chain kidnapping scheme?' "I was in the hotel room and got the hotel stationary. I wrote about five or six pages of a short story, from maybe the middle of the book - when Rachel's scouting for targets, that kind of idea. "I thought the short story could be really cool. But when I got back to Australia and started looking at it, I thought that this short story - what I thought was going to be a short story - would take me 30, 40 pages to write. "It's going to be too long for a short story, too short for a novel - it's just not going to work. I gave up, put it in a drawer and didn't think about it again for six years or so."

Since its release earlier this summer, the nail-biting thriller  has landed on the New York Times' bestseller list - and Paramount Pictures has even acquired the film rights in a seven-figure deal. And the author reckons that the reason the book has struck such a chord with readers is down to its universal themes. He explained:

"Like, what would you do for your loved ones? You don't have to ever have kids, but it's just - what would you do for someone you love, how far would you go if it was a choice between their life and your life? Or someone else's life and the life of your loved one? "Those kind of questions are universal. "[And] the journey that Rachel goes on, it's not just geographic, it's about morality. She does terrible things in the book, really terrible things. I think it's about halfway through the book that she says to herself, 'I've become the monster, I'm as bad as the woman on the phone calling me three days ago.' "I think it's quite interesting how you can choose to go a certain path, and it's just incrementally eating away and eventually you become evil. I think it's an interesting idea about what it takes for people to do these things."

The Chain is out in bookstores across the country now. 

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