Brian McGilloway on the personal, the political, and the police

Brian McGilloway's novels address Northern Ireland's Troubles in striking, though oblique fashion.  His story "The Undertaking" gets the upcoming Belfast Noir collection off to a rousing start. And, in this Detectives Beyond Borders post from a few years back, he offers some thoughts on the personal and the political in Northern Ireland.

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I've pondered in recent posts Brian McGilloway's interesting choice of a police officer, or Garda, from the Irish Republic as protagonist of his two crime novels, both set along the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland. I've also wondered about the place in the books of the North's bloody sectarian Troubles.

McGilloway, who grew up in Derry in the North, sent a thoughtful reply to my posts that reminded me of what Matt Rees likes to say when asked if he plans to include Israeli characters in his novels set in the Palestinian territories. No, Rees says, because to do so might lead to unseemly and distracting side-taking.

McGilloway's novels are Borderlands and the new Gallows Lane. Without further ado, here's what their author has to say about the personal, the political, the police and the hero of the books, Inspector Benedict Devlin:

"I know you've been questioning the issue of a Northern Irish writer setting his hero in the Republic, then working with the North's PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland). The main reason for it, I suppose, was to avoid the political. During the time of writing, policing was still a hot issue in Northern Ireland. I was aware that, as a Northern writer, people would rightly or wrongly look at the books for a political angle on the presentation of the PSNI. By filtering their presentation through Devlin's eyes, it allows Devlin to direct, to some extent, the reader's reactions and makes his response to the PSNI a personal rather than political one. I hope that makes sense.

"In addition, the PSNI was changing so much that, by the time the book would have been published, their presentation would have been out of date. Some Northern Irish politicians still complain if it's discovered that Guards are coming into Northern Ireland — on the ground it's happening much more frequently than people expect, I imagine. I thought that was an interesting and unique angle from which to approach a police procedural."And of course the Guards over here have had their own problems recently — considered more fully perhaps in the second Devlin book, Gallows Lane.

"As for the Troubles — I wanted to write a non-Troubles book but, around the Border, it would be unrealistic to assume that they're not there somewhere — thus the only representation of the Troubles in Borderlands is the disembodied voice, talking about the past. It's there, but increasingly insubstantial. Or that was my intention, at least."

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My Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland panel at Bouchercon 2014, featuring Gerard Brennan, Paul Charles, Adrian McKinty, and Stuart Neville, happens at 11:30 a.m, Friday, Nov. 14, in the Regency B room at the Hyatt Regency, Long Beach. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008, 2014

Brian McGilloway, family man, plus a question for readers

Brian McGilloway is turning into a master of family melodrama.

McGilloway, author of four books about Irish Police Inspector Benedict Devlin and of one standalone novel, has always given Devlin more of a domestic life than most detective protagonists have. That life is on the whole happy, but not at all sentimentally and unrelievedly so.

 In The Rising, the latest Devlin book, especially, McGilloway  brilliantly captures the fragile texture of tense domestic interaction, the well-prepared argument that vanishes when the recipient does not react the way the arguer planned. It's exasperating when it happens in real life but thrilling to read when an author captures it well.

Who else does this? What other crime writers give their protagonists convincing family lives and make those lives integral parts of the story?

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The Rising is no mere soap opera, though, and I'll have more in a future post. For now, though, I liked this not so veiled allusion to Northern Ireland's paralmilitaries and their current aims, tactics, and activities now that the Troubles are over:

"‘They’ve started an anti-drugs organization called The Rising. Small fry really, but they’ve learned one good lesson from their previous allegiances: you want political clout in a community, you give the people what they want. They reckon if the local communities see them ‘dealing’ with the drugs problem, they’ll gain some electoral support.’"

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Gawking across borders at Brian McGilloway's Borderlands

I wonder if people from Northern Ireland ever get tired of outsiders filtering everything about their homeland through the lens of the Troubles.

I suspect that Brian McGilloway does not. Or maybe he does and, having resigned himself to this state of affairs, decides to have a bit of fun with it. He calls his debut novel Borderlands, after all, for the zone where the Irish Republic and the North meet. And the book opens with a body found straddling the border.

Mostly McGilloway hints at the Troubles through the verbal equivalent of a photographic negative: Where one would have expected to see violence so recently, one sees instead its inverse: peaceful cooperation. Here, the republic's Gardai borrow equipment from the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The protagonist, Garda Inspector Benedict Devlin, and his opposite number, Inspector Hendry of the Northern Irish police, share an easy rapport that extends to mutual kidding and even shared interrogations. Even in their absence, the Troubles are present.

Against such subtle reminders, the rare explicit references to the Troubles hit hard, as here, when Hendry replies to Devlin's inquiries about into the roots of their current case: "I told you yesterday. The main line of inquiry at the time was IRA involvement. Of course, that meant that it never went any further."

Or here, the novel's darkest and funniest passage, in which Devlin has sought out a priest both to confess a minor marital indiscretion and also to ask the priest's help in reaching a shadowy IRA contact:

"God forgives you, Inspector. Your wife, I suspect, will forgive you. Try now to forgive yourself. I absolve you from your sins, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Leave your phone on."

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Who is your favorite trained, professional, but normal crime-fiction protagonist?

"I don't care for amateur sleuth stories, but characters such as this—a trained, yet normal person—are not common enough."

That's what author/reader/friend of Detectives Beyond Borders Dana King wrote in a reply to my comments about Owen Laukkanen's co-protagonists. I had written that

"Laukkanen offers as protagonists a married, male, mid-career state police officer and a beautiful, younger female FBI agent who wind up on the road a lot as the crimes cross state lines. Romantic tension? Sure, but no soap opera, no mid-life crisis, no over-the-top, should-I-or-shouldn't-I angst. Laukkanen's Officer/Agent Stevens is much closer to Brian McGilloway's Benedict Devlin than he is to the male crime protagonists who lie by your bed in messy, unhappy, poorly dressed, divorced, alcoholic heaps."

That's two authors whose main law enforcement characters are highly trained professionals, skilled at what they do and yet believable without going over the top into domestic bathos. Their domestic lives are more than window-dressing. They're heroes and believable characters at the same time.  Stuart M. Kaminsky's Abe Lieberman was like this. Helene Tursten tried for such a balance in the first of her novels about the Swedish police inspector Irene Huss to be translated into English and achieved it in the third, The Glass Devil.

What other crime-fiction characters achieve that delicate balance?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Men, women and crime fiction

DJs Krimiblog has been discussing, in Danish and English, femkrimis, machokrimis and the notion of whether certain types of crime fiction appeal especially to men and others to women. The latest entry is a guest post from Dagger winner Martin Edwards, author of the Harry Devlin series and the Lake District mysteries.

Writes Edwards:

"Jeg skrev de første romaner, som foregik i Liverpool, med en mandlig tredje-persons fortæller, og kun én synsvinkel. Men efterhånden som jeg fik selvtillid som forfatter, gav jeg mig i kast med at variere min stil. Jeg begyndte med at indføre flere forskellige synsvinkler."

or, if you prefer,

"I wrote my early novels, set in Liverpool, from a male, third person, single viewpoint, perspective. But as I gained in confidence as a writer, I began to ring the changes. I started to introduce additional viewpoints."

Edwards has written male and female protagonists and point-of-view characters, and his guest post bears the title Krimi for alle / Crime for all. Join the discussion, and learn some Danish along the way.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

McGilloway's narrative chops

Brian McGilloway has his narrative chops down. Throughout Gallows Lane, his second novel about Inspector Benedict Devlin of the Irish Gardai, or police, I kept hearing the narrative cylinders clicking into place. "Here's a plot complication," I'd think, or "Here's a bit of romantic tension or a sub-plot echoing the main narrative thread."

Now, I sometimes groan when this happens, preferring to be lulled into an insensibility to all authorial string-pulling. But that wasn't the case here. I could see what McGilloway was doing with his story, but I liked the plot turns just fine — and there are plenty of them: multiple crimes, multiple roles, multiple suspects and multiple motives. McGilloway must be doing something right as a plotter, and if I ever feel more analytical than I do at this moment, I'll try to figure it out.

Until then, I'll let you do the work for me. What are your thoughts on plot? Do you like to analyze as you read, or do you prefer to be swept up and carried away?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

My Bouchercon panels: Requiems for the Departed

Sure, the messy birth of the political entity called Northern Ireland offers a rich setting for grim stories, but Irish crime writers can reach further back into their country's past for source material. Four years ago, a bunch of them did, in an anthology called Requiems for the Departed.

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Myths don't work unless they're with us, around us, even in us.

That's why the Requiems for the Departed collection is so powerful. Its stories invoke Irish myth, most of them updating settings and, often, names, but retaining what seems to this non-expert the unsettling power and bringing it to crime fiction.

The contributors are an all-star list of Irish crime writing, some of whom readers of Detectives Beyond Borders may know (Stuart Neville, Adrian McKinty, Ken Bruen, Brian McGilloway, Garbhan Downey) and others whose names may be new (Arlene Hunt, John McAllister, Sam Millar, and quite a number more).

He was around when the myths were real.
Bog body ("Gallagh Man"), National
Museum of Ireland, Dublin. Photo by
your humble blogkeeper.

Bruen's story is brash and chilling, McKinty's. Neville's, and McAllister's the stuff to keep you awake at night, and McGilloway's a little police procedural with a delightfully comic ending. (The story features his series character, Inspector Benedict Devlin and offers evidence that myth can mix easily with a contemporary setting.)

Pop on over to Crime Scene. N.I. for all kinds of good stuff about the book from co-editor Gerard Brennan.

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Gerard Brennan, Adrian McKinty, and Stuart Neville, will be part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 called Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland. The panel happens Friday, Nov. 14, at 11:30 a.m. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010, 2014

Finn du siècle, or Owen Laukkanen's balancing act

Finno-Canadian, really, but who's counting?

I very briefly regretted reading The Professionals, Owen Laukkanen's first novel, only after I'd read (and thought highly of) his second, Criminal Enterprise. References in the second book rob the first of a bit of its suspense. But I quickly adjusted and concentrated on how Laukkanen built that character in a way that held my interest even though I knew more or less what would happen to him.

Built is an important word in this discussion because Laukkanen assembles his ingredients with the care of a skilled pastry chef, though the result is a pretty explosive pastry.

Here's what I mean: The kidnappers in The Professionals (like the bank robber in Criminal Enterprise) turn to crime because their college educations are useless in today's job market. Laukkanen gives us enough of that background to distinguish them from other fictional criminals, but not so much that he whacks us over the head with sociology.

On the right side of the law, Laukkanen offers as protagonists a married, male, mid-career state police officer and a beautiful, younger female FBI agent who wind up on the road a lot as the crimes cross state lines. Romantic tension? Sure, but no soap opera, no mid-life crisis, no over-the-top, should-I-or-shouldn't-I angst. Laukkanen's Officer/Agent Stevens is much closer to Brian McGilloway's Benedict Devlin than he is to the male crime protagonists who lie by your bed in messy, unhappy, poorly dressed, divorced, alcoholic heaps. Stevens is an ordinary guy occasionally called upon to do extraordinary things. And then are the two rich college girls who fall in with the gang and don't do quite what one might expect without, however, behaving exactly counter to type, either.

But really, the books are thrillers. Heists happen, cops investigate, and Laukkanen lets us know just enough about each to hold our interest until the two collide.

(Laukkanen's third novel, Kill Fee, is due for release in March.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013