Peter Quinn on The Thrill of the Trilogy

Peter Quinn is the author of Hour of the Cat and The Man Who Never Returned the first two books in the Fintan Dunne trilogy.  He has participated as a guest commentator in several PBS documentaries, including the Academy Award-nominated film, “The Passion of Sister Rose”.  He was an advisor on Martin Scorsese’s film “Gangs of New York”. 

My introduction to the triune came early.  Each morning as my classmates and I made the sign of the cross, my first-grade nun stressed that the Trinity--one God in three separate and distinct persons, Father, Son and Holy Ghost--was essential to our faith and, ergo, to our salvation.  Since my six-year-old brain couldn’t make much sense of it, I was happy to be told the three-person God was a mystery beyond human understanding and had almost driven mad the theologians who’d tried to solve it.

Still, it stuck.  Three in one, one in three. The holy trifecta. In the large stained glass window on the south wall of our Bronx parish church, St. Patrick held up a shamrock.  One stem, three petals: They glowed a single emerald green as the sun lofted behind them.  For that moment at least, the riddle of the Trinity ceased to bewilder.

Over the years, as I wandered amid the thickets of secularity, I learned that, as well as a marker of religious dogma, three brought to whatever it was associated with a special aura, whether exciting (Triple Crown), silly (Three Stooges), erotic (ménage à trois), scary (Third Reich), exceptional (triple play), or sad (strike three).  Just by being three, ordinary things gained a special cachet.

When I set out to become a writer of books, I imagined one would suffice.  A historian manqué, just shy of a Ph.D., I first stumbled into speech writing.  I decided to try it for a year, save enough to go back to school, finish the dissertation, and turn it into a book.  “The best-laid schemes o' mice and men”, 
as Scottish poet Robert Burns put it “gang aft agley”.  I ended up scribbling for two New York governors and five chairmen of Time Inc./Time Warner across a span of three decades.

On the plus side, my job involved indoor work and required no manual labour.  It paid the mortgage and tuitions, and included a defined benefit plan; on the minus, it was frequently stressful, sometimes grinding, and always anonymous.  Occasionally a speechwriter or two has slipped from behind the curtain and gained fame crafting words for mouths other than his/her own.  But as I saw it, once you take the king’s shilling, you do the king’s bidding, and whatever praise or blame ensues is the sovereign’s alone.

As time went on, I felt a growing need to put my name on words I could publicly claim as mine.  I got to my office two hours early in order to attempt a novel.  Having grown used to churning out large chunks of copy in short amounts of time, I calculated I’d have a finished manuscript in a year or two.  Robert Burns proved right again.  Ten years later, I left the delivery room cradling my long-gestating mind child, Banished Children of Eve, a six-hundred-page saga of Civil War New York.

The first agent I submitted it to was dismissive.  I hadn’t written one novel, she wrote, but

“sausaged three in one”.  I was stung.  Yet the more I thought about it, the more I realized its truth.  My novel was the story of Irish famine immigrants, the frightening, fecund mongrel world of mid-19th-century New York, and the impact of the Civil War.  These were the three petals.  Minstrel-songster Stephen Foster was stem and sausage skin.  His music is the book’s leitmotiv.  There are worse things to be accused of, I decided, than being a Trinitarian.  I stuck with three in one, and that’s how it was published.

I drew a great deal of satisfaction from at last having my name on writing all my own, so much so that I decided one wasn’t enough.  I had other stories I wanted to write.  Faced by commercial constraints as well as those of my own mortality, I knew the next had to be shorter.  Unfortunately, hard as I tried, I couldn’t get the hang of the short form, which required the precision of the pointillist.  I preferred the Jackson Pollack School, buckets of paint splashed across expansive canvases.

With the second novel, I decided to reverse the first: In place of three packed in one, one would be divided in three.  The stem I started with was Fintan Dunne, Irish-American ex-cop and private eye, a veteran of World Wars I and II, whose formal education ended in the Catholic Protectory, an orphanage cum reformatory in the Bronx.  In hardboiled style, Fin is a man who, if he ever had any illusions about human nature, had them kicked out of him so long ago he can’t remember what they were.

Fin is what the writer William Kennedy calls a “cynical humanist”.  Distrustful of all authority, sceptical of most causes, uninterested in heroics, he is reluctant to get involved.  Whatever the case, he knows from the outset that there are no perfect endings, no spotless souls, and that some mysteries are better left unsolved.  Still, despite his understanding of the futility of good intentions and the hopeless fallibility of everyone--including himself--Fin can’t help but try to see that some modicum of justice is done.  

I followed Fin as he fought with eugenicists and fifth columnists (Hour of the Cat), wrestled with the still-unsolved case of New York’s most-famous missing jurist (The Man Who Never Returned), and burrowed into the Cold War’s intricate machinations and betrayals (Dry Bones).  I’ve seen the city and the world through his eyes as he experienced two world wars, the Great Depression and the gloom-and-boom of the Eisenhower era, the rollercoaster years W.H. Auden accurately labelled “The Age of Anxiety”.

I’m grateful for our three-legged journey.  Fintan has been great company every step of the way.  Now that we finished our last caper and said our goodbyes, I’m hopeful that I’ve told his story the way he wanted it told, and that the three tales together--separate and distinct yet parts of the same whole--capture him in a jaded emerald glow.

You can find out more information about Peter Quinn and his work on his website and on his blog. You can also find him on Facebook.

Dry Bones is out now (£16.99, Duckworth)

Peter Bradshaw's Night of Triumph

Today's guest blog post is by Peter Bradshaw who is the Guardian film critic. He also co-wrote and acted in David Baddiel's sitcom Baddiel's Syndrome.  The debut crime caper from Peter Bradshaw Night of Triumph brings us back to VE night, 1945, when the teenage princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, were allowed to leave the palace incognito and join the parties and festivities with their subjects.  The Palace was forced to issue a statement that the episode was without incident; but what if…?

I have never attempted pure crime fiction, but my new novel has a criminal person and a criminal act near its centre: Night of Triumph, based on the true story of how Princess Elizabeth was allowed out of the Palace on VE Night 1945 to mingle incognito with the crowds.  I have certainly enjoyed placing my trembling toe in the murky waters of procedural detail.  In 2003, when I was writing my second novel, Dr Sweet And His Daughter, the fact that it was about an ordinary chap who becomes a hero for accidentally killing someone in a convenience store forced me to engage with how the criminal justice system might look to some ordinary middle-class guy who is astonished to find himself up close and personal with the police.  I interviewed a good friend of mine, a barrister, about what happens and when and why and how, and every detail he disclosed was a separate gleaming jewel in a fictional Aladdin’s cave.  It was thrilling.  No wonder writers and readers are intoxicated by genre fiction.  When my lead character was arrested near the beginning of the book, simply reciting the words of the caution was a thrill: “You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court.  Anything you do say may be used in evidence.”

For this new book, looking into various aspects of the legend of VE Night, I became inspired by one of the most fascinating books I have ever come across about the 1940s and the home front: Donald Thomas’s An Underworld At War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War.  Naively, I think I assumed that just as normal party politics was suspended for the duration of the war to create a National Government, then surely regular criminal activity would have been temporarily put on hold in the interests of patriotism and tackling the larger criminal: Adolf Hitler.

Nonsense, of course.  Crime flourished.  It wasn’t simply the question of cheap goods on the “black market” — though it’s surprising how many people now don’t grasp that these goods were cheap and furtively available because they had been stolen — but the fact that a dedicated class of persistent and professional criminals used the chaos in embattled London as a cover for wrongdoing and pure greed.  Bombed buildings were frequently looted.  Once the inhabitants of damaged houses were removed to places of safety, their homes were horribly vulnerable to being stripped of valuables.  Officials and wardens would return to the charred shells of houses to find that the gas meter had been emptied of sixpences.  In addition, my reading uncovered the shocking and undiscussed rumours that the wardens themselves may have succumbed to the temptation to help themselves.  There is a whiff of pure evil about the crime being discussed here, a whiff that it would not have had in peacetime, because home-front crime was highly damaging to morale and the petty thieves were Hitler’s useful idiots.

In Night of Triumph, I made my character Mr Ware one of them.  He is a nasty piece of work, a lowlife and a deserter who has found the war a six-year-long career opportunity in crime.  I wanted him to be a Greeneian character in some ways, but without the introspection — the more reflective qualities are given to the book’s lead character, Princess Elizabeth.  In my book Elizabeth is unworldly, perhaps more unworldly than was actually the case — but it is this unworldliness, combined with dangerous carnival of VE Night, which brings her into contact with Mr Ware.  There is taboo and terror in their encounter.

What to write next?  I am drawn to the 1940s period, perhaps especially to that of the post-war Attlee government.  In addition, I am fascinated in the idea of a straight crime novel.  Crime poses unique challenges.  The details have to be right.  The narrative has to grip, and of course, there is no alibi for slack or indulgent writing.  Surely, my criminal adventure cannot end here.

*Night of Triumph by Peter Bradshaw is published by Duckworth 31 January, £12.99