I’m back with an update on my quest to read all of the Peter McGarr mysteries by Bartholomew Gill. I just finished The Death of an Irish Tradition, Bartholomew Gill’s fourth Peter McGarr mystery. So far, this one is my favorite. (And I really liked the first three.)

What is this book about?

It’s 1979, maybe a year earlier, in Dublin, Ireland. A sixty-five-year-old woman is murdered, starting a concentric ripple that encompasses the Irish Republican Army, one of McGarr’s childhood friends, a priest, a young and gifted pianist, a young drug addict, and a landed gentleman. Over the years, among these people, hate, greed, lust, revenge, snobbery, envy, jealousy, bigotry, and secrecy have combined and simmered like a Dublin coddle left to stew in a hot oven. But unlike the coddle stew, which can be pulled from the heat before burning in its own juices, there is no reprieve from the emotions that consume the characters in Gill’s fourth novel. Peter McGarr and his constabulary must sort through the tangled lives and motives of the characters, hoping to solve one murder and attempting to prevent others. The story culminates at the Dublin Horse Show, a long-standing tradition with ties to the hated British aristocracy and their rule of Ireland, which has left it a divided country.

Why did I like this book?

I love the dialogue. Gill knows when to let his characters speak and when to have them shut up. Sometimes what’s left unsaid resounds like a clap of thunder before a battering storm arrives. I find Gill’s characters interesting. And while his stories are far from rosy, I like to think that all officers everywhere, represented by the likes of McGarr and his constabulary, are doing their best to provide justice. Gill’s mysteries aren’t cozy, but they’re also not graphically violent, which I know is a relative statement depending on one’s view about what is and isn’t too violent. If it helps, I don’t like drawn out visceral violence, but I also don’t like overly cozy mysteries. I’d place Gill’s books in the middle of the visceral-to-cozy scale. (But that’s relative too.)

The murders in Gill’s books don’t always directly involve members of the Irish Republican Army; nevertheless, the IRA’s presence and its role in The Troubles of the 1960s and 70s form an undertow in Gill’s novels, whether in the background or the forefront. The IRA is shrouded in secrecy and so woven into the fabric of Irish life that McGarr approaches each murder as if it could be connected to the IRA and The Troubles in Northern Ireland, which also spills into the Republic of Ireland. It’s mostly an unspoken theme, but when reading McGarr’s books, I’m struck by the deep and lasting damage that imperialism and colonialism inflict on societies.

I think, in part, I’m intrigued by Gill’s novels because I remember the turmoil in which his stories are set. During the 1970s, I was a pre-teen and teenager, and I watched the violence in Northern Ireland play out on the TV news. I read about it in Time and Newsweek, which came to our house in the mail. I remember the bombs and the deaths of children, women, and men, along with the deaths of British Army and Irish Republican Army members. Reporters talked about Irish Catholics, Irish Protestants, self-rule, spies and traitors, and the English who’d lived for generations in Belfast but identified as British instead of Irish. When I was seventeen, I traveled to London and read signs on buses and the Underground, cautioning people not to touch unattended packages and to immediately report them to the conductor. The IRA had been setting off bombs in England. At the time, I thought the violence would never end because each death brought about a retribution.

Reading Gill’s novels has sparked my curiosity, and I want to learn more about the time of The Troubles. While reading The Death of an Irish Tradition, I received Rachael Hanel’s latest newsletter. [Hanel is a wonderful nonfiction author. To read about her and her books, click here.] Hanel recently spent time in Belfast, and she recommended some books covering The Troubles. I want to read at least one of these books before I read the next Peter McGarr mystery:

1. The Raptures, a novel, by Jan Carson
2. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
3. Four Shots in the Night: A True Story of Spies, Murder, and Justice in Northern Ireland by Henry Hemming

More thoughts about Gill’s books from a standpoint of craft . . .

Part of my interest in Gill’s mysteries is to see if and how he will develop his characters and their storylines as his series progresses. I hope Gill will present a broader view of his detectives that includes more of their personal lives. I appreciate a writer whose crime-solving characters develop and change throughout a series of books. To me it’s as important as a good plot. It becomes the mystery of a detective’s life set within the mystery of the crime.

You might remember I mentioned there was so much drinking in Gill’s first three books that I worried I’d wake up with a hangover. I questioned how Peter McGarr could even function, let alone solve crimes, considering the amounts of whiskey and beer he drank. In this book, while McGarr hasn’t come close to being a teetotaler, he drinks less. I wonder if Gill came under criticism from readers about his portrayal of the Irish as heavy drinkers.

There are still no female detectives. However, a woman has been hired as an office temp, and unlike the detectives, she knows her way around the new-fangled computers, which are starting to be used by police departments to access databases to help them gather pertinent information to assist in solving crimes. None of the male police officers in the department are interested in learning the new technology, but they all appreciate the new woman’s computer skills and her ability to quickly supply them with useful information.

McGarr’s wife, Noreen, is back, but her role in this story is small, like in the previous books. Noreen has one telling scene that gives readers a hint as to McGarr’s feelings for his petite, intelligent, beautiful, feisty wife. And I want more Noreen in the stories.

[To read my reviews of the first three Peter McGarr mysteries, click here for books one and two and here for book three.]

[For a Dublin Coddle recipe, click here. This stew has a cameo appearance in the book.]

[If you’re interested in the tangled story of the Irish and the British, I recommend the following novels: Trinity by Leon Uris, published in 1976, and In This Bright Future: A DC Smith Investigation, published in 2021. While these have mostly fictional characters and some fictionalized story lines, there is a lot of history in both of them. I read Trinity, a sweeping epic work that follows the Irish-British conflict during the late 1800s and early 1900s. I read it in the early 1990s, and some of its characters still haunt me. About a year ago, I listened to In This Bright Future. It’s an engaging story that takes the aging DC Smith back to Belfast, compelling him to solve a decades’ old mystery, while reliving his days in the British Army when he was stationed in Belfast and working undercover to infiltrate the Irish Republican Army. By the way, I recommend any of Grainger’s DC Smith mysteries. Also, Exodus and Armageddon by Uris are excellent.]

[I love it when I’m reading one book, and it makes me think of another book. For example, I’m listening to Jeeves and the Wedding Bells: An Homage to P. G. Wodehouse by Sebastian Faulks, which is set in England. At one point a character refers to another character as being judged like a horse at an Irish Horse Show — in other words: scrupulously and critically. I smiled because after reading Gill’s The Death of an Irish Tradition, I understood the reference on a deeper level.]

Happy reading!