Tag Archives: Peter McGarr

Review of Two Books: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe (2018) & McGarr and the Method of Descartes by Bartholomew Gill (1984)

Posted on by
4

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe is nonfiction. Published in 2018, it tells the story of The Troubles in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants during the 1970s, and its aftermath during the 1980s through the early 2000s.

McGarr and the Method of Descartes by Bartholomew Gill is fiction. Published in 1984, it tells the story of Detective Chief Inspector Peter McGarr who strives to prevent the assassination of a Loyalist Protestant he loathes in order to prevent yet another cycle of violence between Catholics and Irish Protestants.

Both books tell stories involving the Irish Republican Army, the British Army, the Loyalist and Catholic paramilitaries, the informants, and the civilians who are swept up into tragic violence. In both books people are blown up, shot, executed, arrested, imprisoned, tortured, beaten, and burned out of their homes. Gill’s book is fiction, but it mirrors much of what happens in the real world of Keefe’s book.

I started out reading both books at the same time, sometimes reading a bit of each in a day, and other times reading them every other day. I’ve done this before with books. However, I stopped toggling back and forth after I repeated an episode from Gill’s fictional story to someone as if it had been a real episode from Keefe’s book. But in a sense it was real because the episode in Gill’s book was a fictionalized account of numerous real events that Keefe reported about in his book. Switch names and change some of the fictionalized details, and Gill’s event would be real. Gill captures the realism of the events and the emotional trauma that Keefe so deftly writes about in his nonfiction book.

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

Keefe’s book starts with the kidnapping and murder of thirty-eight-year-old Jean McConville, a widow and mother of ten children ranging in age from twenty to six. The IRA accuses McConville of being an informant for the British Army in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Without a trial of any sort, she was abducted from her home in Belfast, driven across the border into the Republic of Ireland, shot to death, then buried in an unmarked, secret grave.

Keefe’s book is highly engaging, well organized, and clearly written — important because he covers a slice of history that is complex and involves dozens of key people. He uses McConville’s abduction as a starting point to tell the story of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, but Say Nothing covers more than McConville’s disappearance and murder. As readers learn about The Troubles during the 1970s, Keefe leaves them with an understanding of the history behind The Troubles, the trauma caused by the conflict, and the negotiated peace that somehow feels tenuous.

I read Say Nothing on the advice of a nonfiction writer, Rachel Hanel, whom I admire. She recently reread and recommended it in her newsletter, stating, “It’s still my favorite nonfiction book of the past 10 years.” Keefe’s book was made into a limited TV series that can be watched on HULU. I have not watched it, but other people have told me it’s very good.

McGarr and the Method of Descartes by Bartholomew Gill

During the investigation of a murder, DCI Peter McGarr and his investigators uncover a plot to assassinate Ian Paisley, a bigoted, loud-spoken, but charismatic Protestant minister beloved by many Irish Protestants. (By the way, Ian Paisley was a real person who was all these things.) McGarr abhors Paisley, but he also detests the IRA, the British Army, all paramilitary groups, and anyone else who conspires to use violence in order to push Ireland and Northern Ireland back into the nightmarish times of The Troubles during the 1970s. Racing against the clock and up against a group of formidable foes steeped in a long tradition of deception and intimidation, McGarr and his team work to prevent Paisley’s assassination.

I read McGarr and the Method of Descartes because I liked the first five books in Gill’s series, which he published from the late 1970s through the early 2000s. I’m intrigued to see how Gill’s characters and stories will evolve in the series. I want to learn more about Noreen, and McGarr’s past, and if women are going to become an integral part of the police force. In Gill’s sixth book McGarr’s wife, Noreen, has a minuscule role, unlike the fifth book where she has her own story arc. But after a debate with McGarr and a sleepless night, she delivers the best lines in the book to her husband before he leaves their house to try and stop Paisley’s assassination.

The female computer expert, Ruth Bresnahan, is back in her biggest role since she joined the squad. The men on McGarr’s team know she is smart and rarely wrong, and they are intimidated by her. But McGarr isn’t bothered by her smarts. He respects her intelligence, doggedness, and energy. He believes in a way she is “worth two of any of the men on the staff.” He has her read into the case and takes time to mentor her. She plays a key part in helping McGarr and the team as they attempt to save Paisley’s life.

Bartholomew Gill’s sixth Peter McGarr book is excellent. It is his darkest story yet. But The Troubles in Northern Ireland was a dark time. I’m glad I read most of Keefe’s nonfiction book along with Gill’s novel. The talents of each writer made me appreciate the other’s book. Reading Keefe’s book gave me a great appreciation for the world Gill developed while fictionalizing actual events in Ireland that were barely dry behind the ears. On the flip side, Gill’s book gave me a great appreciation for Keefe’s ability to capture the human emotion and the tragic toll The Troubles wreaked upon generations of Irish people, both Protestant and Catholic.

A point both books make . . .

Colonialism and imperialism inflict a lasting impact on people who have been subjected to outsiders invading their lands and stripping their rights. The trauma of the oppressed and the entitlement of the oppressors are passed down from generation to generation.

On one side, children of the conquered sit at the knees of their parents and grandparents and learn about the atrocities their people have endured and the acts of heroic resistance they have performed.

On the other side, children of the conquerors sit at the knees of their parents and grandparents and learn about their superiority over other people and their imperial destiny.

Conditions become untenable, things fall apart. Childhoods vanish. Neighborhoods sunder. People die.

Book Review: Death of an Irish Tradition by Bartholomew Gill (Originally Published as McGarr at the Dublin Horse Show, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979)

Posted on by
4

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!

Book Review: McGarr on the Cliffs of Moher by Bartholomew Gill (Also published as The Death of an Irish Lass), Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978

Posted on by
2
Penguin Books edition, 1982. I love the pocketbook edition. It’s been well loved over the last forty-three years. Sometimes as I read it, bits of the aged cover flaked away, and I imagined all the other hands that held this book.

I’m back with a quick review of the third mystery in the Peter McGarr series by Bartholomew Gill. I said I’d keep you updated about how Gill’s series progresses. [To read my thoughts about Gill’s first two novels, click here.]

McGarr on the Cliffs of Moher debuted forty-seven years ago. I believe it’s out of print because Amazon sells only used copies. I bought well-worn copies of Gill’s first three books from ThriftBooks. In my review of Gill’s first two McGarr mysteries, I said if I liked the third book, I would buy a couple more. Well, when I finished reading The Cliffs of Moher, I bought Gill’s fourth and fifth mysteries, once again from ThriftBooks.

What’s McGarr on the Cliffs of Moher about?

Shortly after traveling from America to visit her parents in Ireland, May Quirk is found dead in a pasture near the Cliffs of Moher. She has been run through the chest with a pitchfork. May was born and raised in Ireland, but shortly after becoming a young woman, she left Ireland for New York City, partly to follow a young man whom she loved and partly to seek opportunity and adventures not available to her in Ireland. In New York her romance with the young man falters, but they remain friendly. May finds success as a well-respected journalist.

CID Peter McGarr has a list of suspects, each with a motivation worthy of murderous intent. Did the man she originally left Ireland with kill her in a jealous rage? He had returned to Ireland about the same time she did. Did the country farmer down the road from her parents kill her? The farmer has been obsessed with May for years, believing God intended them to be together. Did the man who discovered May’s body in the field kill her? He doesn’t seem to have a motive, but he was so drunk on the night of May’s murder he can’t remember passing out next to her body. Did someone in the Irish Republican Army have her killed? If threatened, the IRA is capable of swift and cruel violence. Did May’s current lover, who is married, kill her? He wanted to marry her, but he’s an Irish Catholic with a passel of children, and May seemed uninterested in becoming anyone’s wife.

Why did I like this book?

It’s a page-turner. Once I start reading one of Gill’s books, I don’t want to put it down. The dialogue is snappy, with just the right amount of levity. I like the rivulets of sarcasm permeating McGarr’s conversations with suspects or other people who try to get in the way of his investigation. So far Gill’s books have interesting plots, and I’m kept guessing about whodunit. Finally, McGarr’s books are quick reads with well-written prose that often sparkles, but they don’t require deep thought on my part. And for this reason, while I enjoy them, they don’t rank as high as some other detective series that I have read.

Back to my thoughts about Gill’s books from a standpoint of craft . . .

You might remember I mentioned there was so much drinking in Gill’s first two books that I often felt like I’d wake up with a hangover in the morning. The consumption of alcohol in this book surpasses anything found in the previous two, partly because a lot of scenes are set in pubs in Ireland and New York. I don’t know how some of the characters can drink so much and still walk, talk, and think, let alone commit crimes or try to solve them. I have moved beyond the idea I might be vicariously hungover in the morning to seriously thinking I might need a vicarious twelve-step program after reading the series. I wonder if McGarr can keep up his pace of drinking throughout the series.

I’m still waiting for McGarr to have some sort of crisis of the soul. We don’t learn much about him in this book either. It’s mentioned again that he grew up in poverty, but that doesn’t seem to have affected him in any visible way. But where does all that drinking come from? Is Gill perpetuating a stereotype about the Irish love of whiskey and beer? In Gill’s stories there is a fine — but uncommented upon — line between McGarr and other characters, some of whom seem to be able to drink without getting drunk, and others who cannot hold their liquor. McGarr is one of the characters who can hold his liquor and solve crimes.

I’m waiting to see if female detectives will become part of the Irish constabulary landscape. However, it’s still the 1970s in McGarr’s world, and it’s a male dominated society.

McGarr’s marriage is another curiosity. His wife, Noreen, is twenty-one years younger than him. He married late in life because he considered himself a confirmed bachelor. In this book we learn why he married, but I’ll let you discover the reason for his marriage. It’s tossed in as a single sentence, but the sentence is striking and not easily missed. I always like to discover these little gems in a story for myself, rather than being told. The McGarr marriage could become an interesting side story. There are many ways Gill could play it.

The pages have mellowed into a yellow brown. It’s hard to imagine they were ever white.

So, I bought the next two books because I’m still curious to see if and how Gill develops his characters. In the meantime, his crime mysteries are entertaining reads just as they are.