Joe McCoubrey – all about me!
Like most people I’ve had the usual life experiences of drifting between full and part-time jobs. In my early years I mended car tyre punctures in a local garage, worked behind a grocery shop counter, joined the Civil Service at Stormont, and dabbled in photography. Then I found my true calling.
Before fiction took over my life, I had twenty years of hard reality. I edited an Irish newspaper through the worst of the Troubles. That sentence carries more than any author bio can: the 2am phone calls, interviewing devastated families, and filing stories without the whole truth – because the whole truth could not safely be told.
That job taught me two things. The official version is rarely the full one. And the most compelling detail is usually the one you cannot print — not because it is false, but because you cannot prove it or because publishing it could put someone at risk.
Every book I have written began with something I half-knew but could never prove. Change the names. Move the town. Give the story the ending real life denied it. Suddenly, it can be told. That is why a newspaperman turned to thrillers: one part ambition, and two parts unfinished business.
A serving Garda officer once told me the Mick Boyle books were “as close to real-life investigations as fiction gets”. It is the only review I have ever framed. For me, it proved that those twenty years of professional experiences had found their way onto the pages of my books.
Away from the keyboard, my family keeps me firmly grounded: a wife who inspires and encourages me, three daughters who make me proud, and five grandchildren who keep me smiling — and moving faster than I sometimes thought possible!
