The Psalm Killer - Chris Petit

It's surprising, when you think about it -that the thirty-year 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland haven't spawned their own genre. I mean, the premise has everything - ancient blood feuds, dark deeds in ordinary streets, corruption and double-dealing on a truly epic scale. Perhaps it is still too soon. Perhaps so little of the truth is out there in the public domain that building a fiction on what little we do know seems like a hostage to fortune.
None of this, clearly, deterred Chris Petit, film maker (e.g. the cult Radio On) and occasional crime novelist. Psalm Killer came out in 1996, a year before the Northern Ireland Agreement, and is set mainly a decade earlier with flashbacks to ten years before that. It therefore covers most of the period.

The protagonist is Inspector Cross of the RUC, an Englishman married into the Ulster squirearchy. Petit thus deals with the key obstacle in writing about the Troubles - which side is right and who is the good guy. Cross is an outsider, even to the RUC. His marriage is failing and he has always been a disappointment to the in-laws. He has no real opinions about the situation.  He checks under his car for bombs every morning before leaving for the office. He investigates murders.

Our antagonist, the titular Psalm Killer, is also English, an emotionally crippled soldier who volunteered to serve deep undercover in Northern Ireland. Known only by his codename Candlestick, he first infiltrates the loyalist paramilitaries, then switches to the Republicans. He disappears, ostensibly killed, only to surface again in the mid-Eighties. Unlike Cross, Candlestick does have opinions. He is apparently killing people to draw attention to his beliefs.

This brings us to Petit's central theme, which is the corruption, institutional, moral, political, that kept the Troubles going so long that by 1995 peace seemed to be in nobody's interest. Petit has done tons of research - he provides a long bibliography with useful pointers to what the main sources discuss - and he deploys his discoveries by showing rather than telling. The problem, though, is that to show so much corruption in all its multifaceted glory requires a book of considerable length. At 635 pages in paperback, The Psalm Killer is simply too long, the story so complex that by the time of the final twist - which is a good one - I could no longer remember who the surprise person was.

So, Psalm Killer has its flaws, but there is so much quality here, so much information that no one else has revealed so effectively, that it is well worth seeking out. Petit writes well. He takes the trouble to give his characters back stories and Achilles' heels that go beyond the norm. It is a fine example of a genre that should exist but doesn't. In that sense it not only defines the genre, you could say it is the genre.

I am keen to read more. Robinson, Petit's first novel from 1993, sounds like my cup of tea,

The Rising - Brian McGilloway

I started The Rising with high hopes.  Post-Troubles Ireland is a fascinating setting for crime fiction and McGilloway seemed to have taken the trouble to polish his prose in order to bring some quality to a genre that is always at risk of slipping into cliche.  Sadly he apparently only took the trouble in the early chapters and, frankly, the unique setting quickly became irrelevant.  By the middle of the book I was losing track of which side of the border Devlin was on at any given time; there seemed to be no difference, though I'm pretty sure British citizens living in Ulster might not always be so forthcoming to Garda officers like Devlin.

The Rising itself is an extreme community group cracking down on drug dealers.  Again, early on, they seem to be verging on paramilitary tactics, but it soon wears off and they're not really the drivers of the story.  The story is about drug dealers, and it's good that McGilloway ups the ante by involving the son of Devlin's former colleague and lover, but the key twist was ludicrously obvious and when I saw that coming the tension failed.

The Rising is the fourth and latest in the Devlin series.  The problem generally with police series is that the protagonist tends to develop a barrowload of personal problems, most of which have now become cliched.  Devlin doesn't have those problems.  Unfortunately that makes him boring and characterless.  The particular issue that McGilloway has handicapped himself with is that he chosen to write in the first person.  We therefore see this world solely through Devlin's eyes.  We therefore know that he is going to see out the story, so that's the effective tension gone.  Secondly, Devlin is a bit bland, largely conservative-with-a-small-c in his outlook, and thus an uncontroversial-bordering-on-uninteresting guide to his world.  The one whose inner voice we really want to hear in this story is Caroline Williams, mother of the dead boy and ex-wife of the appalling Simon - there's the character who would have given this storyline zing.

Maybe I would be happier with the author's other series, the DC Lucy Black thrillers...

Disappeared - Anthony Quinn

Disappeared is Anthony Quinn's first novel, and allowances must be made.  On the positive side, a story about the 'disappeared' of the Ulster Troubles is current and compelling.  Quinn's descriptions of the shores of Lough Neagh are spellbinding and sometimes downright beautiful.  On the negative side, the plot is preposterous, there are far too many characters to keep track of, and pretty well all of them are more interesting than Quinn's lacklustre protagonist DI Celsius Daly yes, the name is the only interesting trait).  On the whole, the positives just outweigh the negatives.  I read it to the end, otherwise it wouldn't be here on my blog.  The denouement was a bit disappointing - somewhat of a deus ex machina.  Also, am I right in thinking that diesel isn't easily flammable, thus not the weapon of choice for your averagely intelligent teenage arsonist?

Personally, I won't be revisiting Inspector Daly again in a hurry.  That shouldn't put anyone else off - I hated the first Rebus novels when they came out, and look what happened with them.

Ties of Blood - Graham Reid

Where was I in late '85?  I can't imagine how I missed these six thematically linked TV plays, but I clearly did.  I remember the Billy trilogy from '82, which made Reid's name and introduced the telly-goggling world to Kenneth Branagh, but these...

Anyway, I'm glad I know them now.  Reid, himself a Belfast man who served in the British army, does not deal with the troubles as a sensational bloodfest.  Instead he focuses on those on either side of the conflict who have to live with it - local people, some Protestant, others Catholic, and the army of occupation.  In each play locals and army come together, usually for sexual purposes, and thereby cause conflict with their peers.  The excellent drawing on the cover above, by one P J Lynch, hits the subject matter perfectly.

Inevitably, the consumer is going to like some plays more than others.  For me, my favourites were the first and fifth, McCabe's Wall and Invitation to a Party.  McCabe's Wall is about bred-in-the-bone hostility.  McCabe's IRA sympathies date back to 1916 and he would sooner alienate his children than compromise his principles.  Invitation to a Party is a more complex piece; British soldiers are honey-trapped but the two lairy lads escape whilst the honourable soldier wanders innocently into a completely separate trap.  The play which didn't engage me was the last, The Military Wing.  A military hospital in which the nurses have military rank is just too weird for me to identify with.

Google as I might, I can't find what Reid has been up to over the last twenty years.  He seems to have hit his stride as he turned forty and then slipped into semi-obscurity.  Obviously his subject matter is no longer contemporaneous but I have no doubt Belfast still has issues, especially now the hardliners are making something of a comeback.  He has also lost his canvas, which was the sorely-missed Play for Today, but other writers of his vintage have coped by writing series and feature-length films.

I'm definitely on the lookout for the Billy scripts.

In the Cold Cold Ground - Adrian McKinty

I don't know why it's called In the Cold Cold Ground, because nobody is except, at the very end, a character so peripheral to the plot that we don't even meet her.  That small quibble notwithstanding, this is a superb crime novel set in Northern Ireland in 1981 and thus blending murder, spies, and sectarian terrorism.

It is the first in a series featuring Sean Duffy, a Catholic CID man in the RUC.  It is hardboiled but, refreshingly, Duffy doesn't drink to abnormal levels and he doesn't beat up women on an impromptu basis.  He doesn't even try to get himself killed on a daily basis.  He gets taken off the case, sure, but gets back in not by being a maverick but by solving the secondary case which his superiors don't even consider a murder.  The authorial sleight of hand is masterly.

In the blurb on the back someone describes McKinty as "the finest of the new generation of Irish crime writers."  I wouldn't know, I'm afraid.  The only other Northern Irish crime writer I'm familiar with is Eoin McNamee, and I like him a lot.  (Interestingly, here is McNamee reviewing The Cold Cold Ground for the Guardian.)  Now I like McKinty too - for the Troubles stuff I like him even better than McNamee, because McNamee is best at the vintage, real-life stuff.  I am certainly on the lookout for more.

Adrian McKinty's blog, highlighting the second Duffy novel I Hear Sirens in the Street, is here.