One always fears the worst when a celebrity writes a novel, but Ardal O’Hanlon, the actor and comedian best known for playing Father Dougal from Father Ted, has already proven his writing abilities with two previous novels, The Talk of The Town (1998) and Brouhaha (2022).
His latest, A Plot to Die For, is the first in a planned mystery series featuring an Irish celebrity gardener called Finn O’Leary. Based in London with his own TV show, Finn has taken a leave of absence to return to his hometown of Abbeyford in Ireland to spend more time with his ailing mother. He is also nursing a broken heart following the break-up of his marriage. He is immediately roped into the Tidy Towns committee by locals who see him as the secret weapon that will lead them to victory. When Finn accompanies his mother to a local choir meeting one evening and one of the singers drops dead, Finn, along with his mother and her Nigerian carer, Happiness, and local teacher Aoife, are on the trail of the killer in their trusty Yaris, much to the local guards’ chagrin.
Anyone who has ever lived in small-town Ireland knows that GDPR has no jurisdiction here, and O’Hanlon gets great comedic mileage out of the contempt in which personal privacy is held by everyone in Abbeyford.
The cosy crime genre insists on both plot and character tropes and O’Hanlon obliges but bolsters these from cliche with his self-deprecating knowingness and playful inventiveness.
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The humour sits somewhere between absurd Pythonesque wordplay and irresistibly cheesy jokes, which turns out to be an unexpected sweet spot of light relief against the current geopolitical backdrop. To give you a flavour, when Finn discovers that the local waste disposal company is called AAAAAAAAAA, he can’t help but quip, “like a cry for help.” There’s also a lightness of touch to O’Hanlon’s observations on Irish life. This line raised a smile of recognition: “They found themselves in the heart of the so-called medieval quarter outside a vape shop.” Also, extra marks are awarded for a rare sighting of the correct usage of the word “nonplussed”.
A Plot to Die For is genuinely entertaining – smart and funny, with a feel-good focus on that most Irish of values, meitheal.
Edel Coffey’s latest novel, In Glass Houses, is published by Sphere
