The sleuth will out

In addition to serving up potboiler thrills he also offers a subtle critique of life in the North today.

For a small country, Ireland produces more than its fair share of crime writers – even those not fans of the genre will be aware of John Connolly, Declan Hughes, Alex Barclay, Declan Burke and even Man Booker prize winner John Banville writing as Benjamin Black. For a country with a relatively low crime rate, is this pre-occupation with death not a little strange?

Not so, says Derry-born author Brian McGilloway. “All good crime novels deal with pertinent social issues. Crime fiction in Ireland is reflecting social concerns and peoples’ fear. We live in an age of anxiety. Ireland has become increasingly affluent and that brings an increase in crime. We’ve become more multi-cultural. We’re an emerging society. Crime fiction taps into that.”
Gallows Lane is McGilloway’s second novel. Like his acclaimed debut, Borderlands, which was short-listed for a Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Award, the second Inspector Devlin mystery is set between the Republic and Northern Ireland and avoids sectarian violence, concentrating instead on criminal activity in a post-Troubles society.
For McGilloway, writing crime fiction is a way of ordering the world. “The books that I write reflect my own concerns. I wrote Borderlands around the time my wife was pregnant with our first child. When you have a child you realise how vulnerable they are and how scary the world actually is. Borderlands was my way of trying to create some sense of control and moral order.”
For crime fiction to work as an outlet for our fears, a resolution is necessary. “In real life, crime clearance rates are quite low, in fiction, they’re one hundred percent.” Thus Borderlands gave birth to Benedict Devlin – named so in honour of McGilloway’s first son – a morally and ethically ambiguous Detective Inspector in an equally morally and ethically ambiguous An Garda, whose job is to hold back the chaos, but whose actions may have led to further bloodshed.
From the beginning, McGilloway decided to avoid the tenacious super-cop, the maverick hero and the hard-man loner stereotypes so beloved of mystery writers. “The first novel was called Borderlands, not just because of where it’s set, but because most of the characters are on a border. They’re not good or bad. Devlin is human – at least as human as I can make him. In crime fiction, you’ll often have a detective at a crime scene, looking at a body, wise-cracking. But I thought if you were a father, and you were looking at a 15-year old’s naked body, you wouldn’t be making jokes. You’d want to cover it. So that’s what Devlin does. Again in the second book, he reacts badly to one of the killings. That’s what a human would do.”
Devlin is a conventional man – he wants to get on in the world, he makes mistakes, he has a wife and family. He doesn’t drink much – far too much of a cliché – instead he chain-smokes. “He smokes so much because I gave up. Every time I felt like a cigarette, Devlin smokes.”
In many ways, Devlin is McGilloway’s darker alter ego. “I wanted him to be struggling to define himself in terms of being a father and a husband, as well as a policeman. If you were a policeman and dealing with horrible things, how would you be able to go home and put a child to bed, or read them a fairytale? How would you reconcile that? In the books, particularly towards the end of the second book, Devlin seems to find some degree of redemption in his family.”
Like the author perhaps? “I wanted him to have a family, because I have a young family. Devlin’s concerns, to some extent, are my concerns. He has a wife, and children and that support behind him. His wife is his moral compass.”
McGilloway avoids graphic depictions of violence. Gallows Lane is an old-fashioned – in a good sense – whodunit. “I think there’s a danger that violence can become the new pornography almost – an enjoyment of violence for violence sake.”
Certainly, there is a fair amount of bloodshed in the book, but it’s handled with a light touch. In Gallows Lane a born-again ex-convict, James Kerr, returns to Lifford, seeking redemption by forgiving those who’ve sinned against him, but soon the bodies of those associated with his past crime mount up. It looks like an open-and-shut case until Kerr is found gruesomely crucified to a tree.
If that wasn’t enough, a young woman is beaten to death on a building site – a violent death with lashings of blood and the suggestion of a vicious sex crime gone horribly wrong.
“You have to use a certain degree of violence. It’s a requirement of the genre – you can’t describe murders without describing a dead body. At the same time you have to be careful to avoid a kind of voyeuristic enjoyment. The violence has to be integral to the plot. But in crime fiction, I think the entertainment should be how the crimes are solved.”

Gallows Lane is out now on Macmillan New Writing