Review of Our Friends in Berlin by Anthony Quinn (2018, Vintage)

London, 1941. The city is being blitzed nightly, Germany is still in the ascendancy, and some in Britain would like to see them win, or sue for peace. Working for British intelligence, Jack Hoste poses as a Gestapo agent, pulling German sympathizers into his web. Marita Pardoe, wife of an interned fascist politician, and considered the most dangerous agent in Britain remains hidden, however. He turns to Amy Strallen, a friend of Marita’s from before the war to try and make contact. Strallen is co-owner of a Mayfair marriage bureau. Her business is thriving, but she’s yet to find love herself. Hoste intrigues her, but a relationship founded on deception is always going to be a brittle affair, especially when the stakes are so high. Quinn’s tale is as much a character study of Jack and Amy and their tentative and strained relationship as it is about clandestine activity in Britain. Marita acts as the lynch-pin of their dalliance, but remains somewhat of an enigma throughout. Building up the backstory of both, Quinn charts their brief, doomed intersections as Jack pursues Marita at all costs. The telling is understated, painting espionage as fairly mundane with occasional flash points, and there are a couple of twists along the way. The result is an engaging, thoughtful, low-key tale of deception, trust, loyalty and love. 

Review of Silence by Anthony Quinn (Head of Zeus, 2015)

Spooked at a police checkpoint, Father Aloysius Walsh speeds away to his death. For the past few years he had been collecting evidence of collusion between serving police officers and loyalist paramilitaries, plotting a murder triangle in Armagh in the late 1970s. Inspector Celcius Daly arrives at the scene, along with Special Branch, and starts to investigate despite their warnings to steer clear. At a hotel a few miles away a former British agent who served at the heart of the IRA waits for Father Walsh, but is instead visited by a journalist. The agent, journalist and Daly all want the murders and the involvement of the police exposed, but for different reasons. For Daly the reason is personal – his mother’s name is written on Walsh’s murder map. His colleagues want Daly to drop his investigation and the agent silenced. Daly, however, needs to know the truth of his mother’s death even if that means revealing dirty police secrets of the past.

Silence is the third book in the Inspector Celcius Daly series set in the borderlands of Northern Ireland. Daly is an introverted and stubborn loner cop who lives in a run-down cottage near to Lough Neagh. In this outing he’s investigating the death of a Catholic priest who had been investigating the death of Daly’s mother, along with others, in 1979. Daly had been told his mother was caught in the crossfire of a skirmish between the police force and Republican terrorists. Father Walsh’s research shows she was killed in cold blood by Loyalist paramilitaries colluding with serving police officers. The police force wants to keep the collusion under wraps to protect its reputation and the officers involved. Daly is only interested in the truth. With his usual single-mindedness he starts to gather evidence to supplement that collated by Father Walsh. Unlike much crime fiction that is driven primarily by the plot and the interactions between a fairly large cast of characters, Silence is an in-depth character study of a man struggling with himself and his past, and the landscape and history of the Irish borderlands. Quinn dwells on Daly’s inner turmoil, the atmosphere and sense of place, and the secrets of a dirty war. The result is a highly reflexive, literary crime tale that juxtaposes the present fragile peace with the need for truth and reconciliation.  The prose is often delicious, there’s some nice intertextuality with Stuart Neville’s work, and a clever knowing nod to the storytelling with a passage in which a journalist details how she’s going to tell the story of the 1979 murders through a fiction piece starring Daly (Quinn is a journalist).  Where the story suffers a little bit is the ending which seemed a little truncated and the denouement lacked conviction and resolution. In addition, there was one element that did not ring true for me and bumped me out of the story. Nonetheless, an interesting piece of introspective crime fiction.

Review of Border Angels by Anthony Quinn (Head of Zeus, 2015)

Lena Novak has been trafficked to a brothel in a run-down farm on the Northern Ireland side of the Irish border run by a ruthless Croatian.  One her customers, an ex-IRA man and Maze prisoner turned businessman and community development champion decides to rescue her.  Only the escape goes badly wrong leaving a man dead and Lena on the run.  A short time later her knight in shining armour is also dead having seemingly committed suicide, leaving a financial mess of embezzled peace monies in his wake.  Inspector Celcius Daly investigates, quickly becoming beguiled by the mysterious Lena.  What he discovers is a dark world of illegal immigrants, prostitution, vicious pimps, shady deals, and no easy answers. 

Border Angels is the second Inspector Celcius Daly tale set in the Irish borderlands.  Daly is a sombre, listless, melancholic character, who’s experiencing a mid-life crisis.  Recently divorced and living in his father’s isolated, run-down cottage on the edge of Lough Neagh he’s also somewhat alienated by his work.  In this tale he’s investigating the death of a Croatian thug, burned to death in his car, and the apparent suicide of ex-IRA businessman whose empire was about to collapse.  The link between them is Lena Novak, a young woman trafficked into prostitution who’s determined to win her freedom and to extract revenge on the man who enslaved her.  Told through a sober voice that doesn’t shy away from the stark realities of sex trafficking and illegal immigration, Quinn charts the hesitant and uncertain dance between Daly and Novak, where at various points other people cut-in, including a republican hit-man and Novak’s pimp.  The result is a meandering story that is told in a flat, lyrical style, with a strong sense of place, that matches Daly’s melancholy and uncertainty. 

No Alibis for McGilloway and Quinn

Monday evening I finally got to No Alibis bookshop in Belfast where I listened to readings and a conversation between Brian McGilloway and Anthony Quinn, with Andrew Pepper asking the questions.  It was an excellent event in a wonderful venue and I had the bonus of going to dinner with them afterwards.  The next day I went back and bought a bag of books.  Definitely a place I'll be visiting each time I go back to Belfast.

Frei Betto, Hotel Brasil
Parker Bilal, Dogstar Rising
Peter Coris, The Dunbar Case 
Didier Daeninckx, Nazis on the Metro
Bill James, Easy Streets
Brian McGilloway, Little Girl Lost
Andrew Pepper, The Detective Branch
Anthony Quinn, Border Angels

Review of The Blood Dimmed Tide by Anthony Quinn (No Exit, 2014)

1918 and the trade in mysticism and séances is booming in London given the carnage in France and Flanders.  WB Yeats, Ireland’s most famous literary figure, is living in London with his young wife.  He’s haunted by both his long-term, failed romance with the actress and nationalist, Maude Gonne, and by the ghost of a young woman washed up on the shore in his home county of Sligo.  Yeats visits spiritualists, along with Charles Adams, an apprentice ghost hunter for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and disillusioned medic.  Determined to solve the death of Yeats’ ghost, Adams travels to Sligo by steamer, along with a disguised Maude Gonne, now a central figure in the nationalist movement, The Daughters of Erin, and Wolfe Marley a British agent.  There, below the imposing mountain of Ben Bulben, he is plunged into a society in turmoil -- Ireland is on the brink of revolution, republican and nationalist movements mobilising support, the Irish gentry, part of the British aristocracy, is anxious about the future, and the local police seem to have their own agenda.  Feeling distinctly out of place and unsure who to trust, Adams starts to investigate the death of Rosemary O’Grady.

Anthony Quinn has a very nice passage in The Blood Dimmed Tide that contrasts the Anglo-Saxon faith in science and reason and the Celts belief in the magical and mystical.  It’s the central tension developed in the story, but also an important distinction with regards to readership, I think.  Quinn is no doubt a fine writer and storyteller, as is evidenced by his first novel Disappeared, but I struggled my way into the first part of The Blood Dimmed Tide exclusively, I would hazard, based on my Anglo-Saxon scepticism with the supernatural and paranormal.  Any story involving WB Yeats, however, is inevitably going to have to be rooted in these concerns given his lifelong obsession with them -- he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890 and belonged to the ‘Ghost’s club’.  As the story unfolds, it shifts from being rooted in the supernatural to explore various tensions between mysticism and science, nationalism and unionism, law and criminality.  The result, for me at least, was a progressively more entertaining amateur sleuth story set at an interesting time in Ireland’s history, populated by a couple of its most famous figures (Yeats, Maude Gonne).  Overall, an out of the ordinary tale, that might at first appeal more to Celts, but won this Anglo-Saxon round.

Review of Disappeared by Anthony Quinn (Mysterious Press, 2012)

David Hughes, a retired Special Branch spymaster, is slowly losing his mind at the same time as he’s beginning to be haunted by ghosts.  Having run a network of Republican informers throughout The Troubles in Northern Ireland, Hughes has deep knowledge of where the skeletons are buried on both sides, knowledge that could upset the peace process.  Both Special Branch and the IRA want him to hold his silence, but can he be trusted to keep his secrets now that he is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease?  Shortly after one of Hughes’ informers, Joseph Devine, is found dead, Hughes disappears.  Recently returned from Scotland, Inspector Celcius Daly is assigned both cases.  He quickly makes a connection to Oliver Jordan, murdered twenty years earlier by the IRA for being a suspected informer.  But then Daly starts to become sidelined as Special Branch take a more active role in the investigations.  Their view is the truth is sometimes best left buried, whereas Daly believes in justice regardless of the potential consequences, a position that few of his colleagues share given their experiences of the Troubles.  He continues to hunt for Devine’s killers and to locate Hughes, but all he seems to find are ghosts.

The premise for Disappeared is a compelling one: what happens to secrets, informers and controllers when a dirty war ends and a peace process unfolds?  What happens to families who are tainted by lies, deception and compromises, who want to know the truth about their loved one’s death and to recover the body for formal burial?  And what would be the consequences of key players seeking atonement for past actions or breaking their silence to reveal damaging truths?  Quinn places the reader in modern day Armagh and the coastline of Lough Neagh to explore these questions, showing how wars never really end, but tail away in a set of ugly cover-ups and revisionist history making.  It takes a few pages for the plot to find a sure path, but then the story unfolds through a compelling narrative.  This is aided by just the right mix of characters with suitable back stories, and some nice interchanges as they dance around each other, all seeking a satisfactory resolution, but not one they share.  The characterisation of Hughes, with his developing Alzheimer’s, Inspector Daly, and Dermot Jordan, the son of an IRA member murdered for being a suspected informer, are particularly nicely done.  Throughout, Quinn evokes a strong sense of place and history.  Overall, a thoughtful and engaging read.  I’ll definitely be reading the next book in the series.