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NEWS & EVENTS

 

You can read my latest interviews and reviews below.

"Beautiful writing about ugly events with a plot that’s pleasingly serpentine."

 

"Quinn's literary descriptions of the bleak Northern Irish landscape are wonderfully evocative ... if you enjoy a gritty police procedural written with a literary twist, this one is for you"

 

"An outstanding, deeply satisfying and beautifully written police procedural that exposes harrowing truths about the fragility of Northern Ireland's peace process."

 

"It is a deeply atmospheric and poetically written Emerald noir which examines crimes with roots dating back to the dark days of the Troubles."

 

"The truth, no matter how twisted or incomplete, has the strength to filter through the tightest of defenses. I am part of the story, too, as a child of the Troubles, and going back home means I can’t escape the telling, no matter how dark the tale."

 

"INSPECTOR Celcius Daly is on the prowl again, in ''lawless" border country, and this time it is the abduction of a boy, supposedly by a group of travellers, which is keeping him awake at night."

 

"An irresistible crime drama that captures the spirit of Belfast, Silence is a beautifully written example of how enriching a novel can be if the author does not for a second neglect the importance of locale......"

 

"Quinn's masterly third mystery featuring Insp. Celcius Daly (after 2013's Border Angels) successfully integrates the bloody history of Northern Ireland with a suspenseful plot....."

 

"I could pick out several teachers at my grammar school, St Patrick’s Academy in Dungannon, who enlivened their subjects with wit and intelligence and who inspired me to pursue a career in writing, but the teacher who looms largest in my memory is the formidable black-frocked figure of Monsignor Denis Faul. As well as a religious education teacher and the school headmaster, Monsignor Faul was the co-author of a celebrated but elusive book, one that haunted me ever since I first managed to read it surreptitiously in his private study, one winter morning in my final year at St Patrick’s."

 

"It has taken time to digest the Troubles and Anthony J Quinn’s books featuring Inspector Celcius Daly, a Catholic detective in Northern Ireland, are among the best of the many crime novels that have tackled the subject – perhaps because they do so in slightly oblique and unexpected ways."

 

"IN NORTHERN Ireland, the past isn't another country, it inhabits the same tortured terrain as the present. This idea provides Anthony J Quinn with an atmospheric opening to the latest Inspector Celsius Daly thriller, Silence."

 

"It's as if every bush has a ghost willfully brushing against its thorns"

 

"Fellow ‘border county’ author, Pat McCabe, writes of such territory in dark, surreal ways, but Quinn’s descriptions are rooted in a harsher, historical reality. It’s as if every bush has a ghost wilfully brushing against its thorns, every boreen an unspoken dread confidently walking along it."

"Northern Ireland noir: ‘Bits of the past are still floating around in the darkness’"

 

"Anthony Quinn’s Celcius Daly crime novels will change the way you look at rural Armagh.

On the early-morning train to Belfast to meet Anthony Quinn, I fall asleep. Somewhere between Dundalk and Newry I wake up and find myself in a different country. The fields and hills are dusted with white. Snow has drifted into low-lying corners. Mist swirls among the hedges. This is neither the Republic nor Northern Ireland. It’s Border country at its most enigmatic and elusive: the setting for Quinn’s atmospheric crime novels Disappeared and Border Angels."

 

"Language is now Quinn's success story"

 

"Tyrone writer Anthony Quinn shares his name with a legendary actor - and now he's on the brink of attaining widespread fame in his own right. A television company is planning to make a series based on his debut detective novel - with Ciaran Hinds in mind for the lead role - and leading UK publishers Head of Zeus has just given him a five-figure advance for his third book, due for publication next year."

"Quinn spurs violence and vengeance along Ireland's dark divide"

 

"While more veteran crime-fictionists from the Emerald Isle—Ken Bruen, Tana French, Stuart Neville, John Connolly and Adrian McKinty among them—usually grab up the headlines, Anthony Quinn has quietly made a reputation for himself over the last couple of years as a purveyor of deftly plotted, dark-spirited and periodically lyrical yarns set amid the gurgling bogs and lurking mists of Northern Ireland. His first novel, Disappeared, won a spot on my list of 2012’s best crime-fiction works and went on to be nominated for a Strand Magazine Critics Award. Its sequel, Border Angels, is due out this month, and if there’s any justice in this world, it ought to earn Quinn more reader plaudits than a leprechaun has coins, and some headlines of his own to boot."

"Troubles Tales"

 

"Co Tyrone native Anthony Quinn was a social worker before dabbling in gardening and teaching yoga. He switched careers again to become a journalist and now he has written his first novel, a book categorised as fiction but one very much inspired by real-life Troubles tales. He talks to Brian Campbell ANTHONY Quinn's debut novel Disappeared has the tagline 'In Northern Ireland's darkest corner, The Troubles have never ended'."

"An extremely strong debut that heralds a new talent"

 

"Disappeared is an extremely strong debut and heralds a new talent who I feel could reach dizzying heights over time. Quinn's creation, Celsius Daly is an intriguing man and one whose company I look forward to keeping in future. There is an exacting feel to Quinn’s novel, as though his writing has been pared right down to the bone. And yet, there is also a depth to his story, as though every word has been weighed before being kept or discarded. 

"Moral decay in peacetime: bandit country"

 

"In a story that has as many twists and turns, as many dead ends, potholes and bumps as an unapproved border road, Quinn keeps masterly control of the narrative, which involves four different but interlocking hunts. It is never quite clear who is the hunter, who the quarry or who it is who actually pulls the strings. All this too in a wonderfully maintained atmosphere of gothic gloom as figures disappear in the night into the lurking menace of the primeval forest, and an erotic potential which maintains a sexual tension to the end, in which the good guys prevail. Or do they?"

"Downbeat, bracingly pragmatic and beautifully written"

 

"Set on the mist-shrouded southern shores of Lough Neagh in the post-Troubles era, the events of Disappeared are deeply rooted in Northern Ireland’s recent past, when Fr Fee envisaged “his parish as not so much a sanctuary for a God-fearing flock, but as a no-man’s land between two armies, an arena for IRA ambushes and British Army patrols.”

"Although I am a crime writer, my real interest lies in immersing my readers in the Northern Irish landscape, the geography of the country and its weather, as well as the inner landscapes of the people who inhabit it. 

The Tyrone landscape I know and love has its own geography of moods, an interweave of darkness and light, which I find constantly mesmerizing. I would like to inspire participants in the creative writing workshops to realise that the landscape they inhabit, be it rural or urban, is much more than geography. It's a part of our collective identity. It's also a window into the soul of our country and our troubled history. "

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