In the early hours of November 13th, 1952, Patricia Curran, aged 19, was found dead in the grounds of her home, The Glen, outside Whiteabbey, near Belfast. The body was discovered by her only brother, Desmond, a solicitor and Moral Rearmament activist, and her father. He was Judge Lancelot Curran, Northern Ireland's Attorney-General, and later Lord Chief Justice.
Patricia had been stabbed 37 times. The RUC officer in charge of the police operation, Inspector Albert McConnell, was hobbled from the start. Sir Richard Pim, cadaverous diabetic and Chief Inspector of Constabulary, refused McConnell permission to search The Glen and interview the Curran family (Desmond, Lancelot and wife Doris) after the body was found. Pim said they had suffered enough. Pim inclined to the view that the murderer was a maniac, hopefully of Polish provenance. Polish Free Army units were stationed in the Whiteabbey area.
When McConnell failed to deliver (which was hardly surprising) Pim imported Chief Inspector John Capstick of Scotland Yard. The Essex policeman and his assistant, Detective Sergeant Denis Hawkins, interviewed hundreds of Polish Free Army soldiers. Eventually, Capstick charged Iain Hay Gordon, a Scottish national serviceman stationed at Edenmore RAF base near Whiteabbey, with Patricia's murder. Capstick finessed Gordon into signing what turned out to be a false confession by promising to withhold from Gordon's mother, a Scottish school teacher of orthodox opinion, the suggestion that her son was homosexual.
At the trial, Gordon pleaded guilty but insane. He was sent to Holywell Hospital. He received no treatment, however, as the superintendent did not believe he was insane. Seven years later, Brian Faulkner, then Minister for Home Affairs, ordered his release. Gordon went to Glasgow. Over the following years, with the help of his mother and father, Gordon protested his innocence, and sought to have his sentence quashed. He finally succeeded last year. He is not the man who murdered Patricia Curran.
This controversial and complex case is the basis of Eoin McNamee's new novel. The book is a combination of what is known with a considerable amount of extremely well-judged invention. It's so well done I couldn't tell where reportage ended and invention began.
McNamee's enterprise will not be to everyone's tastes. Firstly, there is the troubling fact that Desmond Curran is still alive. The book may offend him. Secondly, some readers will wonder why McNamee couldn't either have written a work of fiction, or non-fiction, rather than this hybrid. There's no answer to this except to say writers have always written hybrids, in order to explain a "truth" they don't have the "facts" to explain. Shakespeare "lied" in his history plays in order to show how the Tudor state was created by civil war. Similarly, McNamee "lies" in The Blue Tango to show how he thinks it was, first, that Iain Hay Gordon was selected as the fall guy, and second, that he agreed to confess to a murder he did not commit. McNamee also explores how everyone connected to the case (even Capstick) were able to persuade themselves that what they knew was wrong, was right. McNamee is very good on intentional self-delusion.
The Blue Tango therefore, is a novel about a miscarriage of justice (something to which these islands are no stranger). Given the particulars, it could easily have reeked of Anglo-phobia, and anti-Unionism. It doesn't. Everyone, even Capstick, is likable and nowhere does McNamee put the boot into the sclerotic Unionists who organised Gordon's conviction. McNamee is content simply to describe without comment. This is a blessed relief. To paraphrase Keats, one resists books that have designs on one.
The Blue Tango is also an astonishing piece of narrative organisation. Besides it's eight major characters who have to be brought to life (and are), the story of the warped crime investigation is extraordinarily complex. McNamee, however, never fumbles the story-telling. I never once had to look back over what I'd read because I'd lost my thread. That's impressive in the crime fiction genre.
Finally, if Gordon didn't, then who did kill Patricia? Lancelot and his wife, Doris, certainly knew Patricia was dead before her body was found. Patricia's personal effects, though not present at the crime scene when the body was discovered, were certainly there the next morning. And four years after Gordon's conviction, blood stains were found in an upstairs bedroom of The Glen. The only people who knew who killed Patricia were the Currans but McNamee is silent as to who among them had the most talking to do.
Though McNamee invents, he never speculates. This is a remarkable book and, in time, like December Bride, it will come to be seen as a classic which captures the peculiar character of the Northern Irish people, whose national character mixes extreme violence with sublime voluptousness in equal measure.