On a chilly evening in 1961, 19-year-old Pearl Gamble made her way home from a dance at the Orange Lodge in Newry. The next morning her body was found. She had been beaten, strangled and stabbed, her clothes removed.
Circumstantial evidence led the police to Robert McGladdery, who had been dancing with Pearl earlier that evening. Having decided they had found their man, McGladdery was tried, convicted and has the distinction of being the last man hanged in Northern Ireland.
Eoin McNamee’s Orchid Blue uses this real-life case to construct a narrative that is part political and social commentary, part noir crime novel. It is a book that asks questions but refuses to give the reader any easy answers.
Orchid Blue operates in a world of shadows and it is not all clear whether McGladdery was guilty – or not. While McNamee doesn’t exonerate him, there is a strong suggestion that the execution may have been a miscarriage of justice.
“I had to build a fiction around it, but the actual events are all completely faithful to the original,” says McNamee.
While McNamee points to tantalising other answers, he refuses to draw conclusions.
“I wanted to point to the fact that there were ambiguities in the case against McGladdery, that there were other possibilities. It was strong in some places, weak in others – and the police didn’t consider other possibilities.
“I was halfway through the book and I felt I was missing something,” he adds. “I realised I hadn’t read all the way through Judge Curran’s summary to the jury. I went up to Belfast to read through it in the Central Library. I saw as I read through it that I had been very unfair to the man – he was actually correct in his summing up. Then I got to the end and I felt as if someone had put a cold hand down the back of my neck. The last two paragraphs of the summing up undermined McGladdery’s case completely.”
The presiding judge, Lance Curran, is key here and his name will be familiar to fans of McNamee’s last novel Blue Tango. In 1952 Lance Curran’s 19-year-old daughter, Patricia, was stabbed to death. Iain Hay Gordon was charged, found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to a mental institution. Within a few years, he was quietly released and told to assume a different name. Nearly 50 years later Gordon took steps to clear his name and was exonerated. This should have made Curran unfit to hear McGladdery’s case, but the politically connected judge asked for it, and the old boys’ network ensured he got it.
Orchid Blue is not a crime novel as such. McNamee time-shifts the narrative, so that readers previously unaware of the case know its conclusion.
“I wanted the narrative hook to be, ‘What happened here?’. It’s about the journey towards the hanging, not what actually happened,” he says.
In most crime fiction, knowing the ‘whodunnit’ beforehand would break the narrative tension. In Orchid Blue the opposite occurs – knowing the answer does not allow the reader access to any final truth.
“There are no tidy fictional denouement. The reality of the thing is much more complex and obscure. It’s not like genre crime fiction in that all the threads aren’t tied up. I’m more interested in who was Pearl Gamble, who was Robert McGladdery, who was Lance Curran. I’m more leading in that direction instead of trying to write to some neat conclusion. In life, there are no neat conclusions.”
Whether or not Orchid Blue is a crime novel is debateable, says McNamee, although he notes that it shares many similarities with classic noir fiction.
“I think putting something forth as a ‘crime novel’ is kind of a publishers’ marketing ploy. I suppose I lift techniques and pacing and structure from classic crime novels. In that sense, it is.”
The inspector of the constabulary, Eddie McCrink, is a classic noir hero. McCrink knows that influences other than good detective work are shaping the case against McGladdery. But from the policemen below him, to the politicians above him, McCrink is blocked at every turn.
“He is the man with the universe stacked against him. But you persevere, you try in your own flawed way to find truth and justice in a system in which there is no real justice.”
The book suggests various undercurrents that were at play in Northern Ireland’s political and justice systems in the ‘50s and ‘60s. However, McNamee’s intention was not to make a statement specifically about this time and place. His aim is universal, not parochial.
“I’d like to think it’s about law, politics and the idea of justice anywhere really, not just the North in that particular period. I try to create a particular atmosphere – but I like to think you could take these fictions and if you changed Royal Avenue in Belfast to Mulholland Drive in LA it would be like Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain or people like that.
“My theory is that noir is a Calvinist genre – the story of a man alone against an unfeeling universe. That’s very Calvinist, it’s very Ulster if you like. My pet theory is that ideas from Calvin were brought by Ulster Presbyterians to the States. I’m just re-importing the genre back to where it came from!”

Orchid Blue is out now