...
It was July 2011 and I was facing something
of a crisis. I had missed the deadline for my new novel by six months and I still
had no book. I’d been writing thrillers and mystery novels at a pace of a book
a year for the previous eight years and now the well had run completely dry.
I’d been teaching during the day and at night staring at a blank computer
screen with bleary eyes.
Half
a year of worsening writers block and no pages at all.
And
then one morning very late or very early I wrote: “The riot had taken on a
beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson
tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic
bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed
prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs. Helicopters everywhere: their
spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife.”
When
I woke up the next day I read the paragraph and liked it but I was immediately
alarmed because I knew that this passage had taken place in Belfast. When my
first novel had come out in 2003 it had been well reviewed and I’d been called
in to pitch a TV show to the BBC. I’d offered them a Sweeney/Starsky and Hutch
style crime drama set in Belfast during the 70’s and had been told in no
uncertain terms that this would not fly. A wise old owl at the Beeb advised me
to avoid Northern Ireland as a subject matter at all costs because “nobody in
Ireland wanted to think about The Troubles ever again, no one in England wanted
to think about Northern Ireland ever again and the Americans still thought of
Ireland in terms of The Quiet Man and wouldn’t know what the hell I was talking
about.”
In
2003 the Irish crime fiction scene was on life support with maybe a dozen titles
per year. I saw that the Wise Old Owl was right. So, for the next eight years,
I’d written about pretty much everywhere I’d ever been to in my life except
Belfast.
Until
now. Not only was this 2 a.m. paragraph Belfast but it was Belfast in 1981 right
after Bobby Sands’s death in the dark heart of The Troubles. I called the book
The Cold Cold Ground and assumed my publishers weren’t going to be too happy with
a Troubles era novel – but when everybody’s telling you not to write about a
certain subject it’s almost certainly the subject you should be writing about. I
sent the synopsis to my US publishers who promptly turned it down but
fortunately my UK publishers said yes.
I
grew up alienated from literary fiction which I saw as a genre for and about
upper middle class people, consequently I’ve always wanted to use crime fiction
as a vector for making art; in Cold Cold Ground I tried to do exactly that as
well as discussing a lot of interesting themes, particularly race, religion,
gender and sexuality. I set the book in the terrace where I was literally born
and raised, in a working class housing estate in Carrickfergus. I wanted a
protagonist that would generate a lot of friction and fracture lines with the
people of that street so I made him Catholic, a policeman, Bohemian,
middle-class and I gave him a Derry accent.
When
the novel came out it not only got the best reviews of my career but it
actually sold, which was a complete novelty. I’d always been well reviewed but
no one had actually gone out and bought the bloody books. I think readers can
sniff out authenticity. Before I’d been making stuff up but now I was telling
the truth. Not what Werner Herzog calls the truth of accountants, but artistic
and emotional truth. Thirty years had passed and people were ready to hear
about had really happened during Belfast’s thirty year suicide attempt from
1968-1998.
I
thought The Cold Cold Ground was going to be only book I’d ever do on The Troubles
so in the end I tried to say too much and I forgot things. I remembered the
bombings and murder and racism and homophobia but I forgot that in the midst of
tragedy Belfast has always used jet black humour as its coping mechanism.
In
the subsequent books in what became the Sean Duffy series I managed to wrangle
the tone closer to the way it actually was back then. Chiaroscuro works because
the darkness and light are in balance.
Rain Dogs begins in the winter of 1987. A
young woman is found dead in Carrickfergus Castle just outside of Belfast. The
woman is a reporter for the Financial Times who was allegedly depressed and
suicidal. Rain Dogs starts as a conventional locked room mystery, becomes an
almost meta reflection on locked room mysteries in general, detours to Finland and
the “abortion special” overnight ferry to Liverpool before bringing it back to Belfast
again.
Two
men I met in real life – Jimmy Savile and Muhammad Ali – are catalysts for the
book and both of them make an appearance in the novel.
Rain
Dogs is the fifth book in the Sean Duffy series and by this stage I understand
the characters well enough to let them tell their story through me. Duffy still
lives in the house where I was born (113 Coronation Road, Carrickfergus) and he
is still a man out of joint with his neighbours, 80’s music, Thatcher, Reagan, the
RUC, the Provos and the whole scene. The book won the Edgar Award which was a
completely unexpected international breakthrough.
There
is one more Sean Duffy novel after Rain Dogs, the economically titled Police At
The Station And They Don’t Look Friendly, but Rain Dogs works as a standalone
and it ends on the kind of rickety transition that I love to see in novels and
music. Happiness for Sean is out there, as it is for all of us, fleeting and frail, just a little snowdrop
of light, but definitely there, burrowing out of the dark earth where it’s been
hiding all along.
