Cathal Ó Sándair sold more books in Irish than anyone else. Over a 40-year period, Ó Sándair wrote about 160 books in Irish, mainly adventure stories destined for a teenage audience. In total, he sold more than 500,000 copies.
He was born Charles Saunders in Weston-super-Mare in 1922 to an Irish mother and an English father; the family moved to Ireland when he was two years old. They went to live in Dublin, his mother’s home county. His father, Simon, was a professional boxer who joined the Irish Army when they settled in Dublin.
Cathal attended Scoil Treasa on Donore Avenue and the Christian Brothers school on Synge Street. He was encouraged by his teachers to take an interest in Irish, and a trip to the Gaeltacht at Cois Fharraige in Connemara at age 10 cemented his love of the language.
When he was 16, his first short story in Irish was published in the Christian Brothers’ bi-weekly magazine An Gaedheal Óg. After school, he joined the Air Corps and also became a member of Conradh na Gaeilge. He started writing articles in Irish for different newspapers.
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His first book for children, Tríocha Píosa Airgid, came out in 1942. In April that year, not yet 20 years old, he contacted the publication branch of the Department of Education, An Gúm. He told them that he wanted to play his part in supporting the language by writing a few light stories for young people in Irish.
Na Mairbh a d’Fhill was published in May 1943. It was an instant success, with 1,000 copies sold in the first month. It recounted the story of the kidnapping of a professor who was working on a top-secret project for the Irish government.
When the scientist and all his papers went missing, the gardaí called in star private detective Réics Carló to help solve the case. It was here that readers were first introduced to the Mercedes-Benz-driving sleuth who was the principal character of many of Ó Sándair’s volumes.
At the time, a reviewer in the Donegal News newspaper welcomed Ó Sándair’s books as he predicted that they would give fresh impetus to the language among the youth of the country. Judging from what the journalist had read in the early editions, he believed that the books would provide young readers with “racy thrillers with pulsating action in every page and a fresh mystery in every paragraph”.
The initial print run for Na Mairbh a d’Fhill of 3,000 was sold out by the autumn of 1943. Another 3,000 were printed in September that year and yet another 3,000 copies were printed the following September.
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This success rate was unusual for an Irish-language book at the time, according to Róisín Adams, who has researched the area of Irish-language publishing for children. A typical print run of a new book would have been 1,000 copies and this would usually have been enough to satisfy demand.
In a sign of how popular his tales of adventure were among young readers, teachers reported seeing schoolchildren reading Ó Sándair’s books under their desks in English class in the 1950s. It was not all plain sailing, however, as An Gúm rejected him a couple of times early on, judging that his Irish was not up to scratch. They soon saw merit in his writing and, by the late 1940s, sales of his work would reach 30,000 copies.
The books were cheap at sixpence each and the colourful cover artwork by artist Victor Penney would have attracted the attention of schoolchildren. Réics Carló featured in about 100 of Ó Sándair’s books. The Dublin investigator was in great demand from private citizens, along with various arms of the State, both locally and internationally.
The fictional detective’s reputation spread worldwide and there were books set on almost every continent, with cases to solve in London, the Isle of Man, China, Mexico and Egypt, to name just a few of the foreign locations. In one book, Carló claimed that he could “have up to 20 cases to solve at the same time”.
In Ireland, Réics Carló was asked to help solve cases in Cork, Waterford, Donegal, Monaghan and Wicklow. Ó Sándair had knowledge of the country. After working in the Air Corps and in the Civil Service during the second World War, he worked in the customs and excise service for a number of years. He was stationed all over the country and this would have been invaluable to him to get to know local geography and customs for the locations in his novels.
Ó Sándair has not been completely forgotten. In 2022, 100 years after his birth, An Gúm republished the first two books in the Réics Carló series. In recognition of all he did for the language, there is a prize awarded at An tOireachtas each year for the best children’s book in Irish called Gradam Réics Carló – a fitting tribute for the writer who did so much to keep young readers reading as Gaeilge.
