Sam Millar

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Sam Millar (* 1955 in Belfast ) is a Northern Irish former IRA activist and crime writer. He is the presumed brain behind the spectacular robbery on the value transport company Brink’s in 1993.

Life

Sam Millar is the grandson of a member of the Protestant Orange Order . His mentally ill mother disappeared without a trace when he was eight years old. After leaving school at 15, he worked in a slaughterhouse . When he and his brother witnessed the violent events on the so-called Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972 , his radicalization began .

Millar joined the IRA, helped plan a bomb attack, and was first sentenced to a prison term in 1973, from which he served three years. As early as 1976, Millar was convicted again and was taken to the Long Kesh maximum security prison , where he joined the Blanket-Man protest . After his release, Millar immigrated illegally to the United States via Canada in 1984 . He lived near New York City and made a living as a street vendor, dealer, and doorman before realizing his dream of running his own comic book store.

When an opportunity arose in 1993 through his friend Sam O'Connor to rob the depot of the Brink's security transport company, the accomplices looted $ 7.4 million - the fifth largest subscript text heist in American criminal history.

Millar was caught, but since only possession of the stolen money, but not theft, could be proven beyond doubt, he was sentenced to only five years in prison. After 16 months, under an agreement between the United States and Northern Ireland, he was transferred to Belfast to serve the remainder of his sentence. In 1997 he was released and started writing.

plant

When Millar published his autobiography On The Brinks in 2003, it became a bestseller and Warner Bros. secured the film rights to it. However, when the Bush administration accused the writer of “glorifying terrorism”, the company withdrew from the project. In 2008 Millar started Bloodstorm (German: The Beasts of Belfast ) with his series around the Belfast private detective Karl Kane. The Dark Place (German: Die satten Toten ) followed in 2009 and Dead of Winter in 2013 . The first two titles in the series were published in German in 2013. He himself describes his novels as a mixture of Gothic horror and crime thriller. His hero is - like himself - shaped by the loss of his mother at the age of eight, physical violence and police arbitrariness. "His guilt-ridden hero, the detective Karl Kane, corresponds to the prototype of the detective that Raymond Chandler describes in 'The simple art of murder' ..." "Millar does not write with a raised index finger, but with an outstretched middle finger ."

Millar was shortlisted for the Grand prix de littérature policière , received the Brian Moore Award and the Aisling Award for Art and Culture .

In 2014 he published an extended version of his autobiography, which was published in German in 2015 under the title True Crime .

Publications

  • 2003: On the Brinks. (Autobiography)
  • 2003: Dark Souls.
  • 2005: The Redemption Factory.
  • 2006: The Darkness of Bones.

Karl Kane series

  • 2008: Bloodstorm.
  • 2009: The Dark Place.
  • 2013: The Dead of Winter.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b www.literaturbuffet.com ( Memento from December 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (Accessed November 30, 2013)
  2. ↑ www.karl-kane.de ( accessed on November 30, 2013)
  3. ↑ Kurt Lhotzky at www.literaturbuffet.com ( Memento from December 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed on November 30, 2013)
  4. ↑ Marcus Müntefering on www.spiegel.de (accessed November 30, 2013)
personal data
SURNAME Millar, Sam
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Northern Irish author
DATE OF BIRTH 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH Belfast