Today’s
guest blog is by debut author Michael Russell.
A former script editor for Yorkshire Television working on Emmerdale
Farm, he subsequently became Series Producer.
He also spent time in the Drama Department starting as Script Consultant
before moving on to become Producer.
Michael is also a regular contributor to Midsomer Murders and wrote the last ever-televised series Touch of Frost. Michael now lives in Ireland with his family
and a large Rhodesian Ridgeback dog.
If
you’ve spent much of your life writing crime, mystery, detective (what do we
call it?) drama for television, there is a good chance that when you suggest a
romantic comedy as your first novel, everybody will tell you it would be much
better as, well, crime, mystery, detective fiction. And in my case everybody was right! Perhaps because for me a genre in which there
are always stories, real, page-turning, tangible stories doing the driving, is
irresistible. They don’t have to be
hard-boiled or blood-curdling or limb-ripping (well maybe at times), but there
is a pace you get when the stories drive the characters and the characters
drive the stories, back and forth, like grand slam tennis, that is not like
anything else however good for energy, whether the writer is Raymond Chandler
or Dorothy L. Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie, John Buchan or
Chester Himes. Moreover, with luck and a
fair wind, the rest of us can at least tuck in behind them!
So
why did I want to write a series of detective novels set in Ireland (and simultaneously
Europe and America) during the lead up to the Second War and the war itself? I mean, other than to ignore the advice that
I should write about what I know. It is
good advice, but praise be that so many writers do ignore it!
What
inspired me, living in Ireland now, was the peculiar position Ireland had
during that war. It was ostensibly; even
aggressively neutral (can you be aggressively neutral?). Yet when German pilots crashed in Ireland,
they were interned for the duration of the war; Allied airman were given a pint
of Guinness and put on the next train to Belfast. Ireland maintained an embassy in Berlin
throughout the conflict, and Germany had an embassy in Dublin, but on the west
coast of Ireland flying boats shuttled Allied and American generals and
diplomats back and forward across the Atlantic to plan the war. British and German diplomats drank at
adjacent tables in the bar at the Shelbourne Hotel. Before the war, the German director of the National
Museum was a Nazi spy.
Nevertheless,
Irish life at the edge of Europe went on, pursuing its own quiet purposes,
sometimes as if nothing much was happening, and trying to keep a lid on the
turbulent undercurrents left behind by the war against Britain and the civil
war that had ended barely sixteen years earlier. Detective Sergeant Stefan Gillespie emerged
out of all that one lunchtime in 2000, as if he had been waiting for me, when
an Irish film producer asked me to think about a detective story set in Ireland
during the Second World War. As is the
way with producers, the project disappeared as abruptly as it arrived, but
Stefan Gillespie didn’t go away. Not
only would he not stay quietly in his bottom drawer, he started to develop a
life of his own. Moreover, as I began to
write about him I realised the world he lived in wasn’t so unfamiliar after all. I knew it better than I thought.
My
grandmother came from Donegal to England in the 1920’s and she lived there till
she died. But in many ways she never left
Ireland. On her mantelpiece were two pictures
among the family photos; one of President Éamon de Valera, the other of the
Sacred Heart. On Sundays, she read not
only the News of the World but the Irish Press from cover to cover. The stories she told me as a child were all about
war and mayhem in Ireland during the war for independence and the civil war. They were a great deal bloodier (and
therefore much better) than the stories anybody else’s grandmother told.
And
Stefan Gillespie kept growing. Before
long there wasn’t only one story in my head, there were several, and they
didn’t just find the detective sergeant in Dublin and his native Wicklow Mountains. They took him to Danzig, where the seeds of
the war were being sown in 1935; to New York in 1939, where the IRA was
planning how to take power in Ireland once Germany defeated Britain; to Berlin
where the Irish ambassador had abandoned any pretence of neutrality and become
an embarrassingly shrill, and very un-neutral apologist for Hitler; to London
during the Blitz where an Irish murderer was being protected by MI5; to Rome
and the hotbed of intrigue and blind-eye-turning that was the Vatican. But whatever trail Stefan Gillespie takes the
story always begins with some seemingly small tragedy or act of brutality in
Ireland, a death or a crime that unravels, somewhere, to touch the storm
blowing through the world beyond the island of Ireland. That is how it starts in ‘The City of Shadows’. A man is killed in a Dublin street. A woman disappears. Two bodies are discovered in the Dublin Mountains... In addition, Stefan Gillespie meets a woman
who… well, the romance didn’t entirely fall by the wayside…
City of Shadows is set in Dublin 1934: Detective Stefan
Gillespie arrests a German doctor and encounters Hannah Rosen desperate to find
her friend Susan, a Jewish woman who disappeared after a love affair with a
Catholic priest. When the bodies of a
man and woman are found buried in the Dublin mountains, Stefan becomes involved
in a complex case that takes him, and Hannah, across Europe to Danzig. Stefan and Hannah are drawn together in an
unfamiliar city where the Nazi Party are gaining power. However, in their quest to uncover the truth
of what happened to Susan, they find themselves in grave danger...
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