First Chapter
By Anne Cunningham
If you think Cork is all hilarity, with the Young Offenders and ice-cool jazz festivals, and the beautiful Shaky Bridge and aul’ ones crooning The Banks of My Own Lovely Lee, then think again. Cork is murder these days. At least that’s how the ‘Real Capital of Ireland’ looks from the lens of two Cork authors, each with brand new crime novels just arrived in the bookshops.
In Amy Cronin’s Blinding Lies (Poolbeg €14.99) Kate Crowley is desperately trying to get out of Cork. She’s the prime suspect in the murder of gangland lowlife David Gallagher, who happens to be her sister’s ex and father to her two young nieces.
He also happens to be a violent and nasty savage and he’s lying dead in Kate’s house, shot in the neck.
In her haste to get away, Kate has left her passport and all her belongings behind. And obviously she can’t go home for them.
She needs to join her sister in France. Without her passport? Best of luck with that.
In the meantime, she’s hiding out in a dingy Cork hotel (although I’m sure there are no dingy hotels in Cork).
Meanwhile Anna, an old schoolfriend of Kate’s, is busy working as a typist in the fictional Lee Street Garda Station. While typing up reports, Anna spots a link between a spate of recent house burglaries and sexual assaults in the city.
When she points this out to the garda superintendent, she’s told to stop playing Nancy Drew and stick to the knitting, lowly civilian that she is.
But when Anna learns of Kate’s alleged involvement in the murder of David Gallagher, she simply can’t stand idly by.
This is an accomplished debut with plenty of twists and turns to keep the reader guessing.
In Catherine Kirwan’s Cruel Deeds (Hachette €15.99), Cork is as much part of the story as her characters. This novel reminded me of what Morse did for Oxford. It also reminded me of Louis McNeice’s lines about Dublin, easily adapted to describe Kirwan’s Cork, with ‘her seedy elegance {…} The glamour of her squalor/The bravado of her talk’.
This is Kirwan’s second novel but reads like her 22nd. Quite apart from the plot, she has a panache to her pen that’s not so common in the crime genre these days, and the keenly observed minutiae she draws our attention to, right throughout the narrative, bring the crime novels of the great P.D. James to mind.
Finn (cool name until you discover it’s actually short for Finola!) is a young partner in a legal firm. One of the senior partners, Mandy Breslin, has been murdered. Her body is found in an abandoned house – a stinking hovel, really – in a part of town where you’d not expect to find someone of Mandy’s wealth and status.
What was she doing there? And why was she killed? Was it the husband (isn’t it always)? Or the lover, although nobody knows who the lover is? Or a disgruntled client, perhaps?
Finn is handed the task of preparing a report for the Law Society before the hounds of the press (!) descend with fangs exposed and attempt to bring the firm into disrepute. And almost immediately Finn suspects she’s being made the patsy for the inevitable fallout.
She’s got a friend in the Cork gardaí with whom she’s hoping to trade secrets, but things have been rather cool between them since Finn started dating an ex-addict who’s got a colourful history.
Turns out this guy has a history with the victim, too. If you like Catherine Ryan Howard and Liz Nugent (and who doesn’t?) this very stylish whodunnit is for you.
It’s back to the actual capital of Ireland, as opposed to the ‘real’ one, for Patrick Osborne’s Baxter’s Boys (Orla Kelly Publishing €11.99) and a story about a Sunday League football team who have nothing going for them.
Far from the elegance, seedy or otherwise, of McNeice’s Dublin, this is the Dublin of Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown and Fiona Scarlett’s Boys Don’t Cry, a bleak townscape of corporation flats, unemployment, crime and drugs, broken families and hopelessness.
But there’s plenty of fun to be had in these pages too, and Osborne has managed to capture the typical working-class Dub sense of humour with considerable finesse.
Davey Byrne is a petty criminal and part-time delivery courier. His best friend Fran is trying to hold on to his young daughter but it’s looking like she will be taken away.
The friends find themselves in Pa Baxter’s football team, a mixed bunch of miscreants and idlers along with some high-profile and low-profile criminals.
Pa Baxter himself is a Scouse with a dream of bringing a Sunday League football team to the final. He’s a scruffier, more frayed around the edges version of Jack Charlton and while the accent is different, the confidence and swagger could be Charlton himself.
The story follows the team members and their struggles, but not just on the football pitch. The characters have to find a way through their various personal and family crises, by legal means or otherwise, and so the football league is really just a backdrop for this theatre of comedy and tragedy.
If you liked the spirit of the movie The Fully Monty, then you’ll love this book. It’s ultimately a feelgood, funny novel about family, friends, loyalty and all the other good stuff. With some football thrown in as well!
Footnotes
The Mother Tongues Festival is the largest festival celebrating linguistic diversity through the arts in Ireland.
Its mission is to showcase the country’s rich artistic and cultural tapestry and connect people through the power of language. Most of the activities are happening at venues in Tallaght and it runs from February 21 to 26. See mothertonguesfestival.com for the full programme.
If you fancy a weekend in beautiful County Clare, the Ennis Book Club Festival is on next month, from March 4 to 6. Guests include Claire Keegan, John Banville, Michael Harding and Fintan O’Toole.
See ennisbookclubfestival.com for full details.
The Dublin International Film Festival is on from February 23 to March 6 and full programme along with ticket bookings can be obtained from diff.ie.