“I think in your 40s there are various ways of dealing with what could be described as a midlife crisis. A relatively inexpensive one I found was to buy the music that you hadn’t been into as a teenager and have the alternative teenage experience!”

Not only did author and playwright Declan Hughes’ brainwave provide a cost-effective solution to middle-aged woes. It also laid the foundations for his new play, The Last Summer, which opens shortly in the Gate as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival.
“I had been a bit of a rock snob but always been fascinated by the whole prog side of things and metal, Rush in particular,” he says. “ I was listening to Rush on my iPod and an image flashed through my mind of some lads in denim jackets hanging around a lane in Glenageary – which is how I spent most of my youth – and the music conjured up that period so clearly. Then I realised what you would need as well was perspective, the sense of what happened to them later.”
The resulting story traces the lives of a group of friends and is split between their formative summer of 1977 and the adult reality of 2007.
“We used to go to teenage discos during that summer of 1977,” he says. “That was the summer music was on the brink, The Pistols and The Clash and all that stuff was coming so it was kind of a turning point. That’s why I chose that year, it is evocative in all sorts of ways. It really was like a musical war, you were either on one side or the other. I was young enough to get punk immediately but I had older brothers who would be like, ‘Emerson Lake and Palmer – they’re real musicians. These are just kids!’”
The soundtrack is a key element of The Last Summer as it has been in previous plays, Digging For Fire for example. Does Hughes find music is a gateway to the creative process?
“Yes I listen to it a lot. It evokes emotion. That’s the great thing about music - you get a strong sense of emotion,” he states. “ Before you have an idea things churn around in your head that you are not quite able to pin down. Music really helps focus that.”
Another common theme in Hughes’ plays is the passage of time; Digging For Fire also dealt with two sets of events, on that occasion 10 years apart.
“Time preoccupies me quite a bit now that feel like I might be running out of it!” he laughs. “You get these gestalt moments like when you are sitting at a dinner table with friends and you realise you have known each other for 30 years! It’s not a particularly profound observation but it has a texture and a weight that seems to take its toll so I wanted to look at that.”
Not one to rest on his laurels, Hughes is also working on another play and is between two books. How do the separate disciplines compare?
“I guess I brought a lot of the things I used in play-writing to the books, there is a lot of dialogue in them,” he notes. “I think for detective fiction in particular, there is a sense that you want to make the scenes real. If you start narrating too much, the reader tends not to believe it. But if you present the scene as dramatised, the reader perceives it as real as there is no-one writing it, so to speak. The real difference is time; you have more time in a book, a reader will allow more time to the writer. Things can go on a bit in a novel but on stage you don’t have that, the audience will get bored and fidgety.”
Arguably this is a Golden Age for Irish crime fiction. As an award-winning author of the genre, Hughes has several theories on the reasons for our success in the field.
“Well there’s a lot of Irish crime about, off the back of the boom,” he says. “Both gangland crime and white-collar crime and that sense of a goldrush town. Think of Hammett in San Francisco in the 20s, Chandler in LA in the ‘40s; they were wayward cities explosive with energy. A lot of rules were being broken, a lot of people getting a lot of money very quickly. That happened here in the time of the boom so you got a buccaneering energy that is a really interesting thing to try to capture.”

The Last Summer runs at the Gate, Dublin from October 2 as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival.