Fascinating fiction draws from author’s family and Ireland’s history

Those are the words of someone who has personally experienced the colourful complications, some would call them contradictions, of living in Northern Ireland!

The short but characteristically perceptive observation is from the opening chapter of Blackwatertown, a recently published book by Paul Waters, a former BBC Radio and TV journalist and reporter who was born, brought up and worked in Belfast.

He currently lives in Buckinghamshire.

Blackwatertown is described as “a fascinating story with intricate twists and turns… extremely intriguing” by Frederick Forsyth, columnist, journalist and best-selling author of The Day of the Jackal, The Fox, The Kill List, The Odessa File and numerous other internationally-acclaimed titles.

Before becoming one of the planet’s most prolific and successful writers, Forsyth was a spy and an RAF pilot. Waters also boasts unusual routes into the literary world.

He has taught in Poland, driven a taxi in England, busked in Wales, been a night club cook in New York, designed computer systems in Dublin, presented podcasts for German listeners and organised music festivals for beer drinkers.

While he’s particularly proud that he once made dinner for iconic footballer Pelé, Paul has covered US politics, produced the World Service’s live coverage of the 9/11 attacks on America, instigated a G8 Summit in a South African township, gone undercover in Zimbabwe, reported from Swiss drug shooting-up rooms and smuggled a satellite dish into Cuba.

Quite a CV!

“Blackwatertown is fiction,” he admits “but it draws on murky episodes from Ireland’s past and my own family history. I grew up and worked as a journalist in Belfast during ‘the Troubles’ - and later in Dublin. Like many families, my own has been caught up in the run of history, politics and violence since before the creation of the border.”

Blackwatertown is a real place, on the Blackwater River, on the Tyrone-Armagh border.

“If you know it,” says Paul “you’ll notice that it’s not exactly the same as my fictional version.”

The main character in the book is the demoted Police Sergeant Jolly Macken, who hated the name he’d been given, describing it as a ‘verbal albatross that had been hung round his neck’.

The story is set in the 1950s, “based on events that have been recorded by history and some true stories that have not,” says the author, adding “but it’s just a story. The names have been changed to protect the guilty”!

Coincidently, Paul’s great uncle was RUC District Inspector Michael Murphy, a former Irish Guard and WWI veteran.

He’s got a photo of him escorting Princess Elizabeth during her inspection of a Royal Ulster Constabulary guard of honour at Belfast City Hall in June 1949.

He’s got an earlier picture from 1946 of his great uncle Mike with King George VI “on the left, in naval uniform. He looks a bit starstruck. No wonder, when you realise he’s walking beside the celebrated DI Murphy of B District”!

Michael Murphy, OBE, KDM, MM later led the Northern Ireland contingent at the King’s funeral in London.

But back to Blackwatertown, where Police Sergeant Jolly Macken finds it hard to tell friend from enemy.

When he’s banished to the quiet Irish border village Macken vows to find out who killed the man he’s replacing - even if it turns out to be another officer.

Over the next seven days he falls in love with the bewitching Aoife, uncovers dark family secrets, accidentally starts a war and is hailed a hero and hounded as a traitor.

Macken has always had trouble fitting in.

As a Catholic, he’s viewed with suspicion by the rest of the mainly Protestant police force. But he’s also isolated from his fellow Catholics because he serves the British Crown.

When Blackwatertown explodes into violence, who can Macken trust? Which side should he take? Are anyone’s hands clean - even his own? And is betrayal the only way to survive?

Blackwatertown sits in lush countryside “on the centuries-old border between Elizabethan and Irish-controlled Ireland (east/west) and not far from today’s Irish border (north/south)” says Paul.

The action happens during a little-known insurgency in the 1950s.

The intertwining of fact and fiction is based on murky episodes from Ireland’s past and Paul’s own family history, “and is perhaps a reminder” says Paul “of how complacency during peacetime can foreshadow future eruptions of violence - pretty village, pretty flame - to steal Srđan Dragojević’s film title. Bad things happen in beautiful places.”

But away from fighting over flags and frontiers “policing is also about fractured families, sometimes helping to heal them.”

Blackwatertown is also inspired by personal tales of a family which “you may have encountered through Seamus Heaney’s poem Bye-Child,” says Paul, who was “lucky enough to hear Heaney read his work a few times. After you’ve read Blackwatertown, you may like to check out Bye-Child for yourself. My Blackwatertown is fictional. You can visit the real Blackwatertown. Green fields, a river and a bridge. And things are much calmer these days!”

Full details on the book and the author are at www.paulwatersauthor.com