Fiction noir asks if price of peace was dirty bargain

Has the Northern Irish psyche been left dark and bruised thanks to the Troubles? Are our writers trying to give form to a kind of societal PTSD? Possibly. The gun man and his cohorts have swaggered on the page, espousing their warped sectarian dictum, stalking depictions of daily life. Art, as it should do, has proven a way of reaching catharsis.

Now Belfast journalist, author and broadcaster Malachi O’Doherty - who has previously written memoirs about his staunchly Catholic upbringing as well as his love of cycling, and more recently a biography of Gerry Adams - is joining the canon of Ulster crime writers with his first foray into the genre, Terry Brankin Has A Gun.

It’s a lucid, elegantly written and pacey examination of the eponymous IRA man whose past begins to catch up with him once an evangelically religious cold case detective calls to his home with questions about a particular atrocity.

The book has been a decade in the making, and Malachi describes having developed a skill for clear, controlled writing from his days as a news journalist and a love of George Orwell that was instilled in him at school by the Christian Brothers.

“I wanted to write a political novel as a means of commenting on the peace process. But it’s also about the stresses in a marriage.

“During my time as a journalist I met people who had done atrocious things, but they often seemed like ordinary people, and I didn’t see them as exactly evil - it was like they did terrible things because of the choices they made, but had life gone differently, they may never have become involved in paramilitarism.

“Terry Brankin is one such character. He’s the solictor with a dark republican past and his wife Kathleen begins to look at him differently when she starts to realise what his time as an IRA man involved.”

The novel follows Brankin as his sense of security unravels, the republican movement putting pressure on him to keep his dark secrets from the prying eyes of state forces. What is also interrogated here is the cost of our fragile peace, and the dirty bargains that have been made in its achievement.

Malachi continues: “There are also characters in the book like detective inspector Basil McKeague who are coming to the right of Jim Allister; he wants to see guilty gunmen burn in hell for all eternity, nevermind jail.

“And we have Dom McGrath, who has risen to high political office after putting a paramilitary past behind him, becoming a peacemaker.

“I’ve been trying to create a fiction that asks questions about the compromises and decisions that had to be made for the peace process to work. Was it worth it? Did we let criminals walk free too soon? I’m trying to dramatise a discussion about that.”

English publishers rejected the novel because it had an IRA gunman at its centre; across the water they didn’t see such things as familiar; they didn’t think readers would be interested in empathising with such a man.

But here, the legacy of conflict has made the gunman a recurrent trope in literature, and battle-worn and desensitised after decades of the Troubles, the anti-hero Brankin is a figure of the kind we have often heard about in newspapers; a former republican paramilitary turned professional with multiple properties in Belfast and Donegal, finding the dividends of peace have produced a comfortable life for him and those closest to him. Is it fair that such people have profitted and succeeded in life when manifold victims are now forever silent in the grave? O’Doherty’s triumph lies in creating an anti-hero whose fate embodies these questions; he is positioned somewhere between the polarities of good and evil, a man who loves his wife and possesses a degree of moral conscience but yet has no hesitation in using violence to defend his principles and kin.

“Brankin understands the life he has lived and the choices he made. He feels a degree of remorse,” adds Malachi. “But he can live with his choices. That’s the soldier in him and when he’s under pressure those inclinations may return. Can he put everything behind him? What is the moral cost of doing so?

“I think that Terry Brankin is possibly like the IRA man I never was.”

Terry Brankin Has A Gun by Malachi O’Doherty is published by Merrion Press, priced £14.99.