Adrian McKinty + Willie Nelson = Literature

Adrian McKinty has produced another solid mystery set amidst the Troubles in Northern Ireland-- Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly-- and this time Detective Sean Duffy is doggedly investigating a murder committed by crossbow, and along the way he has his requisite adventures of a Fenian in a strange land (the IRA and the RUC are more porous and intermingled than you might imagine) and the book is chock full of the usual McKinty-esque musical allusions (the title is a line from a Tom Waits song . . . who I coincidentally saw last night, playing a crippled Vietnam vet in The Fisher King) and the rest of the references run the gamut from The Butthole Surfers to Morrissey to Rachmaninoff (there's also a few literary allusions, including a nod to one of my favorite Orwell works: Homage to Catalonia) but the throwaway moment that elevates this book over the top, and makes it a work that should be passed down through the ages, a timeless piece that should represent our era, the Odyssey of our generation, is when Detective Duffy tries to break the ice and tells my favorite joke, the Willie Nelson joke . . . I just heard this joke for the first time a couple months ago and the earliest link to it on the internet is 2011 but I'm willing to excuse the anachronism (and the joke could easily be from the '80s . . . because Willie Nelson has been old since I was a kid, and-- remarkably-- he's still the same amount of old) and now, if you check the comments, Adrian McKinty himself provides the origin story of the joke, the first ever celebrity cameo on Sentence of Dave.