Awkward cop makes an elegant debut

CRIME: DECLAN BURKEDUBLIN SWELTERS IN the notorious heatwave of June 1887 as Conor Brady's debut novel opens. The authorities at Dublin Castle are more concerned with the city's simmering political tensions. With Prince Albert Victor due in Dublin to celebrate Queen Victoria's golden jubilee against a backdrop of violent Land League agitation, the castle is concerned that any one of a number of subversive organisations might attempt an assassination.

So when Det Sgt Joseph Swallow of Dublin Metropolitan Police’s G division is sent to the Chapelizod Gate in Phoenix Park to investigate the discovery of the badly mutilated bodies of a man and a young boy, the authorities are initially relieved that the murders are “ordinary” rather than politically motivated.

In all the best crime fiction, however, a juicy murder tends to minimise the distance between the criminal fraternity and the higher echelons of society, and such is the case in A June of Ordinary Murders. The death of career criminal Cecelia "Pisspot Ces" Downes makes matters trickier for Swallow, as her grasping lieutenants jockey to fill the power vacuum left in her wake, and the subsequent discovery of a young woman's body in the Grand Canal complicates things even more.

Brady weaves a police procedural that does full justice to the complex nature of the social, political and criminal labyrinth that was Dublin in the summer of 1887. He paints a vivid picture of the city as it bakes beneath the unrelenting sun, employing Joe Swallow’s sharp eye and the character’s ambitions as an amateur painter to deftly sketch both its landmarks and its less salubrious corners.

The novel is set at the dawn of what we would now consider to be the age of forensic science, and we find Swallow dabbling in such radical innovations as ballistics and reconstructive portraiture. There’s also the occasional nugget of historical delight to be gleaned, such as the archaic notion of a “dying declaration”, a legal concept that held a man’s final words to be sound as evidence in court, on the basis that no dying man would knowingly lie.

Swallow himself is very much in the mould of the classic fictional policeman, a man ostensibly dedicated to upholding law and order and seeking out justice, even if, as he points out, "the statue of blind Justice" at Dublin Castle "topped the archway with her back to the city". A man of his times, he's not above blackmailing a prisoner, or threatening to have him murdered, in order to elicit information. As was the case with Kevin McCarthy's RIC Sgt O'Keefe in the war-of-independence novel Peeler(2010), Swallow frequently has his loyalties and character called into question: is he a full-blooded Catholic Irishman or a willing stooge for the British establishment?

It’s a mature and elegant debut, although it’s not without faults. While some of the characters, usually those of the lower classes, speak in a deliciously thick Dublinese, Swallow and his cohort have impeccable diction, a contrast that tends to jar. And Brady has a habit of having his characters regurgitate information, such as when details gleaned at the scene of a crime are later repeated in a police briefing. This has the effect of slowing the pace further in a tale that is already more sedate than readers of crime thrillers might expect.

That said, and to paraphrase one of Joe Swallow's metaphors, Brady is working in oils rather than dashing off a watercolour, creating a multilayered tale that offers much more than plot twists and narrative thrills. A former editor of The Irish Times, Brady is also a recent member of the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission who has written a history of the Garda Síochána, Guardians of the Peace(1974). On occasion, contemporary resonances surface in his historical fiction: "I always thought that the law came before politics and that good police work would be backed up by the people at the top," an embittered Swallow says. "I'm not sure that anyone in authority shares that view. There's big stakes being played for in this country. And there won't be much tolerance extended to an awkward policeman who won't do what he's told."

Not in the Dublin Metropolitan Police of the 1880s, perhaps, but Brady’s “awkward policeman” is an intriguing addition to the swelling ranks of Irish crime writing.

Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His latest novel is Absolute Zero Cool(Liberties Press)