Most people remember the DeLorean DMC-12 car as the time machine from the Back To The Future trilogy. For people living in Belfast during the early 1980s, however, the rise and fall of the DMC-12, and its creator John DeLorean, is a wonderfully murky tale of overvaulting ambition, missing funds, cocaine trafficking and financial disaster.

The DMC-12, with its unpainted stainless steel body and distinctive gull wing doors, first rolled off the factory floor in Dunmurray, Belfast in January 1981. The man himself was just as striking – tall, handsome and rich, DeLorean was married to a model and was almost as much of a celebrity as his friends, Johnny Carson and Sammy Davis Jr.

Despite hundreds of millions of pounds in investment – much from the British government – the car never lived up to its promise and the company was in serious financial difficulties almost from the start. In October 1982, John DeLorean was arrested by the FBI for cocaine trafficking – and two months later the company was bankrupt.

Glenn Patterson – who is one of the judges in Hot Press’ Write Here, Write Now: A Story of Ireland initiative – grew up near the DeLorean factory during this time, and his latest novel, Gull, tells the story of DeLorean – the car, the factory and the man – through the eyes of a fictional character, Edmund Randall. A motor journalist who knows next to nothing about cars, Randall meets DeLorean at a motor show and is asked to join the company on a whim.

Although Randall is a fictional creation, this kind of impulsive behaviour is a well-established part of DeLorean’s character.

“DeLorean had a belief in revelations and epiphanies,” explains Patterson. “He had a lot of people in his organisation – some of them quite senior – who seemed to have been favoured for reasons other people couldn’t understand.”

When writing a novel based on real events, authors generally have to decide where to draw the line between the needs of the story and historical reality. Instead with Gull, Patterson’s research was a process of sorting fact from fiction.

“Even while it was happening there were a lot of versions of the story,” notes Patterson. “When I started to think about writing the novel, practically everything I read contradicted something else. It seemed that there were so many versions, and so many people with a particular angle on it, I was just trying to make sense of it. I thought the best way for me to do that was to introduce a fictional character or two and allow them to find their way through this strange episode, in an extraordinary period in Belfast’s history.”

DeLorean seems like a man who fictionalised much of his own life as well.
“There is an amount of that!” Patterson laughs. “There are some people who do not worry too much about their own version of themselves being contradicted. It doesn’t seem to shame them in any way. It’s about telling a good story, and I think that’s what John DeLorean did. He was an engineer, but he was also a salesman – but on the other side of that is a conman. It’s a spectrum.”

Patterson, however, does not believe that DeLorean set out to defraud people. He argues that the company deserves more credit than it generally receives.

“People always ask me if I think he was a conman,” he reflects. “My honest answer is I think he made a gamble, and in that he is not unlike an awful lot of people in the business and financial world. One thing I wanted to do in the book is tell the story of how two thousand or so people were paid and trained to assemble these cars – people who had very little experience of auto manufacturing. How they were able to produce the number of cars they did in the circumstances is actually an extraordinary feat to me. DeLorean had this great idea for a car that was compromised along the way. But he was a visionary, and the attempt to build the car in Belfast, with that workforce, is something of a triumph. There was so much stacked against them – I think the whole enterprise has been unjustly impugned.”

In some ways the DMC-12 is like a late 20th century Titanic.

“Not unlike the Titanic story, it is surprising the number of people who knew someone who worked there, or have a family connection to the factory, or just have a good story to tell you about it. It was such a big part of the city’s life for the few years it was there. Two thousand jobs was hugely significant at the time — well, two thousand jobs is always significant. Roy Mason, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, said to James Callaghan, the Prime Minister, ‘This car will save soldiers’ lives.’ What an extraordinary claim to make. You could call it hyperbole but there was certainly a belief that bringing good jobs to that part of Belfast would be more beneficial than just putting money into the economy.”

Patterson’s own recollection is that failure in Northern Ireland seemed almost inevitable.

“When the factory was closing, I remember thinking that was typical of Northern Ireland,” he says. “It was a pretty downbeat time. We generally fucked things up. Although the rest of it wasn’t something we were particularly used to — large amounts of cocaine were pretty unheard of in those years. One of the things with DeLorean was that he was an injection from another world. He brought glamour and a whole different way of doing things. At the time there was something wildly exotic about hotel rooms and suitcases of cocaine.

“What interested me is that it was a minority of people who worked in the factory that blamed DeLorean himself. The vast majority blamed Thatcher’s government. Not that they always had great things to say about John DeLorean – but a lot of the former workers I spoke to think he was framed. Their attitude was, ‘He was framed, but I wouldn’t put it past him’. But their take was he would have done anything to save the factory. Maybe he would have – anything except investing his own money, that is!”

Gull, published by Head of Zeus is out now. Glenn Patterson is a judge in the Write Here, Write Now: A Story of Ireland competition, which is run by Hot Press – and forms part of the 1916 Centenary Programme, Ireland 2016, and the Two Cities One Book Festival.