Interview: Joe Joyce

I interviewed Joe Joyce (right) shortly after the publication of his novel ECHOLAND (Liberties Press) last year, and it’s fair to say the conversation was wide-ranging. Enid Blyton, John Creasey, James Joyce, Franklin Roosevelt, Nancy Drew, Bill Clinton and Charles Haughey – they’re all here. To wit:

When it comes to telling stories, Joe Joyce isn’t exactly single-minded about the form he works in. A journalist by trade, he published a pair of critically acclaimed crime thrillers in the 1990s, Off the Record (1990) and The Trigger Man (1991). He reinvented himself as a playwright for The Tower (2008), an imagined meeting between the ghosts of James Joyce and Oliver St. John Gogarty. With co-author Peter Murtagh, he has published two non-fiction titles: The Guinnesses: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Most Successful Family (2009) and The Boss (1997), an account of former taoiseach Charlie Haughey’s years in power.
  The latter book in particular was very well reviewed, although a certain Charles J. Haughey was distinctly unimpressed.
  “He was very upset by the book, apparently,” says Joyce. “There was an occasion when he was meeting the other party leaders, Garrett Fitzgerald and Dick Spring – they were in government at the time – and he got very emotional and started almost crying to them about the book. Of course, one of the things with Haughey was that you never knew when he was putting on an act. Afterwards people kept asking him to sign copies of The Boss. He always wrote the same thing, ‘There is not a word of truth in this book.’”
  He laughs quietly at Haughey’s hubris, but then presses on, keen to give both sides of the story.
  “Haughey was an intriguing character in many ways. What tends to get forgotten, I suppose, is his charisma. The only way to understand him, I think, is to look on him as an actor. He modelled himself on French presidents like Francois Mitterand, people who are really big into the idea of the royalty of power, all the symbols and all the rest of it. He never wore a watch, for example. But when he walked into a room, he was absolutely the centre of it. And it wasn’t just the women.”
  That combination of traits, the journalist’s desire to present both sides of the story and the vivid imagination that excavates a story from the bare bones of the facts, is what brings to life Joe Joyce’s latest offering, the novel Echoland. Set in Dublin in 1940, it opens with young army man Paul Duggan being promoted to G2, or Irish military intelligence, as German troops blitzkrieg their way through Europe.
  With Ireland clinging to a tenuous neutrality, and rumours of invasion growing stronger by the day, it’s a time of intrigue, betrayal and espionage.
  “It’s obviously one of the defining periods of modern Irish history,” says Joyce. “From a fictional point of view, what really interested me was trying to put myself back into that situation, which is a challenge because we all know now what happened, in order to capture the uncertainty of the time. I think we tend to look on the past as a simpler time, but that’s because we know what happened. The people of the time didn’t know what was going to happen – in fact, a lot of people thought they did know what was going to happen, and were wrong.”
  Paul Duggan and his colleagues in G2 aren’t only concerned with German spies and a possible invasion by Nazi Germany. Ireland’s neutrality was also under threat from the British, who were pressurising the then taoiseach, Eamon De Valera, to join the Allied cause. De Valera’s refusal, Joyce believes, had consequences for Ireland for decades to come.
  “I think that things would have been quite different if we hadn’t been neutral. It would have had a major effect on the later years of the 1940s, and on into the ’50s and ’60s. The more you get into that period the more you realise that the knock-on effect [of Ireland’s neutrality] probably blighted Irish-American relations up until the time of Bill Clinton. There was a serious falling-out between Franklin Roosevelt and Ireland because of it, and that had a real effect on us in the 1950s and 1960s. To the extent that, even when Kennedy came here [in 1963], he was not going to talk about Partition, he was not going to get into any of that. On the other hand,” he acknowledges, “it was perfectly understandable that Ireland would want to be neutral. It was only 20 years or so since we’d been fighting the British ourselves.”
  Despite the vividly rendered political backdrop, Joyce emphasises the fictional aspects of Echoland.
  “To me it’s an historical thriller. Hopefully it’s a good read above anything else. It’s not trying to push any particular line about neutrality or government policy or anything of a serious nature like that.”
  Can we call it an old-fashioned spy novel?
  “That’s fine with me. A spy novel, a political novel … I mean, what it’s not is a crime novel. You see these kinds of books classified as crime novels all the time, when they’re absolutely not.”
  What’s the difference between a crime novel and a spy novel?
  “To me, spy novels or political novels are more about ideas than they are about action. They involve action, of course, but they’re not about solving a particular crime. They’re usually about issues to which there is no simple or indeed complex answer. The story doesn’t resolve itself on the last page, necessarily, when the bad guy gets caught.”
  A softly-spoken, self-deprecating 65-year-old, Joyce grew up in Ballinasloe in Galway reading “all the usual Enid Blyton books, Nancy Drew, The Castle of Adventure, all that kind of stuff. I graduated – if that’s the word – to all the John Creasey’s and other big crime writers of the time, mainly from the 1930s. A lot of them seemed to involve the Riviera and jewel thieves, who I see are still in business.”

  He read English and Sociology at UCG, then embarked on a career in journalism, during which he wrote for the Guardian and the Irish Times. The publication of those critically acclaimed crime novels in the 1990s suggested that a successful career as an author beckoned, but it wasn’t to be.
  “A lot of things got in the way of the writing,” he says, “from having to earn a living to health issues. Serious health problems held me back for the best part of 10 years. Why start all over again? Because it was always something I wanted to do.”
  What got him back writing again, for the play The Tower, was an imagined conversation between the ghosts of James Joyce and Oliver St. John Gogarty. Did he ever stop to consider the audacity of writing dialogue for James Joyce?
  “I know, the arrogance of it. Jesus, when I think about it now …” He shrugs. “I hadn’t written anything for a very long time, and that was the first thing I wrote in my so-called second coming. I live quite close to the Martello tower in Sandycove, and I was just walking by it one day, wondering what these guys might say to one another if they met now.”
  Instead of the world-famous James Joyce, however, it was the largely overlooked Oliver St. John Gogarty’s reinvention of himself at an advanced age that intrigued Joe Joyce.
  “What really got me interested was when I was in Renvyle House Hotel in Connemara, which Gogarty had owned and run as a hotel, and they had various things up on the wall, framed newspapers and telegrams and so forth. They had a piece there about Gogarty leaving Ireland when he was 61, going to live in New York – and I could see that age coming at me, and it seemed like a great idea, that you could start over again at 61. So that’s what fascinated me.”
  Gogarty, who served as the inspiration for Buck Mulligan in Joyce’s Ulysses, wasn’t just a poet and author, but a politician, athlete and doctor besides.
  “Gogarty was as smart a guy as Joyce, possibly even smarter, but he was a man with too many talents. And why is one writer remembered and not the other? Basically what it came down to, I think, was discipline.” A wry smile. “With which I totally empathise.”

  Echoland by Joe Joyce is published by Liberties Press (€13.99)

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Taoiseach, Nazi, Soldier, Spy

As all Three Regular Readers will be aware, Stuart Neville’s new book, RATLINES (Harvill Secker), involves the historical figures of former Irish taoiseach Charlie Haughey and former Nazi commando Otto Skorzeny, both of whom try to manipulate the fictional Albert Ryan, an ex-British solider and currently (in 1963, when the book is set) a G2 operative, G2 being the Irish military’s secret service. Hence the inspired headline ‘Taoiseach, Nazi, Soldier, Spy’ that ran across my interview with Stuart when it appeared in the Irish Times on Wednesday. It opened up a lot like this:

“One of the first things I became aware of was the divisiveness of his legacy,” says author Stuart Neville of former taoiseach Charles J Haughey. “When you consider that you can watch videos on YouTube of people dancing on his grave, that gives you a measure of how strongly some people feel about him.”
  Charles Haughey appears as a character in Neville’s latest novel, Ratlines, which is set in 1963. As Ireland eagerly awaits the arrival of John F Kennedy, a number of former Nazis and Nazi sympathisers are discovered murdered. Albert Ryan of G2, the Irish military’s equivalent of MI5, is commissioned by Minister for Justice Charles Haughey to investigate the murders, but Haughey is himself on first-name terms with the former Waffen SS commando Otto Skorzeny, a man famous for rescuing Benito Mussolini from captivity in 1943.
  “I was vaguely aware of Haughey when he was in power,” says Neville, who was born in Armagh and grew up in the 1980s, “because I’d have had an above-average interest in politics. But I’d have been very aware of him by the time the Moriarty Tribunal came around.”
  Neville is fascinated by all facets of Haughey’s career and legacy, “over and above the ‘cute hoor’ caricature that he became known for”, he says. “He’s a gift of a character. You couldn’t make him up. He was a very progressive politician in many ways, and terribly conservative in others. A complicated man. Like anybody in real life, and any good character in a book, he’s not black-and-white, there’s lots of light and shade there.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

The Ratlines Are Singing

There is good and bad news about Stuart Neville’s forthcoming tome, RATLINES (Harvill Secker). The good news is that it sounds like an absolute cracker. Quoth the blurb elves:

“Right at the end of the war, some Nazis saw it coming. They knew that even if they escaped, hundreds of others wouldn’t. They needed to set up routes, channels, ways out for their friends. Ratlines.”
  Ireland, 1963. As the Irish people prepare to welcome President John F. Kennedy to the land of his ancestors, a German is murdered in a seaside guesthouse. He is the third foreign national to die within a few days, and Minister for Justice Charles Haughey is desperate to protect a shameful secret: the dead men were all former Nazis granted asylum by the Irish government. A note from the killers is found on the corpse, addressed to Colonel Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s favourite WWII commando, once called the most dangerous man in Europe. It says simply: ‘We are coming for you. Await our call.’
  Lieutenant Albert Ryan, Directorate of Intelligence, is ordered to investigate the crimes. But as he infiltrates Ireland’s secret network of former Nazis and collaborators, Ryan must choose between country and conscience. Why must he protect the very people he fought against twenty years before? And who are the killers seeking revenge for the horrors of the Second World War?

  Hitler, Charlie Haughey and JFK? Now that’s what I call a set-up. The bad news, unfortunately, is that RATLINES isn’t actually published until January 3rd, which is the best part of four months away. Mind you, an ARC of said tome sits on my shelf as you read, and I’ll be getting to it early next month. Joy.
  Incidentally, there’s a short story about Lieutenant Albert Ryan in DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS (Liberties Press, 2011), and it’s a very beautiful thing. If you haven’t read it, and can’t track down a copy of GREEN STREETS, the story is also available in THE SIX, a short collection of short stories available free here. No, don’t thank us, we’re just doing our job …

Those Dying Generations: Why I’m Voting Stephen Donnelly, Independent

It’s election day here in Ireland, as you may or may not know, or care, but given the traumatic events of the last couple of years, and the collapse of not only the Irish economy but the trust of the Irish nation in its political class in particular and authority in general, it’s arguably the most important Irish election since the foundation of the State. I genuinely believe that today marks a fresh start in Ireland, which might be an odd thing to say when it appears from the polls that the centre-right party Fine Gael, currently on 40%, is headed for an overall majority.
  In essence, though, Fine Gael is doing little more than replacing its doppelganger, the centre-right Fianna Fail; and maybe I’m wrong, but my sense is that this administration, even if it runs the full five years, will go down in history as a holding government, a bridge between the worn-out politics of the post-Civil War generations and a political outlook that governs with one eye on the future rather than the past.
  In the Wicklow constituency, where I’ll be voting, Independent candidate Stephen Donnelly (above, right) seems to me to come closest to encapsulating the coming change. His policies, as detailed below, are by turns brash, ambitious, naïve and heartfelt:

Give banking debt back to the banks.
Renegotiate the IMF bailout.
Start a National Reconstruction Bank to fund job creation.
Attract investment for jobs in Wicklow.
Improve education standards for our children.
Reform the political system - change the people and change the rules.

  Leaving aside the moral aspects of Irish taxpayers having to fund the IMF / ECB bailout, which is largely linked to the gambling debts of an elite gang of financial incontinents, I believe that the banking debt and the bailout will have to be negotiated as a matter of course, on the very simple basis that you can’t get blood from a stone. As I understand it, the mood in Europe is one that it makes no sense to run Ireland into the ground and get no money at all out of the country; better to ease the conditions and make sure that there’s some kind of constant cash flow being milked.
  The idea of a National Reconstruction Fund for job creation is a laudable one, even if it’s largely a retread of the old IDA, and I’d wonder where said funding might come from - presumably from telling the IMF / ECB to take a walk.
Attracting investment for jobs in Wicklow is again laudable, although it smacks of insularity and the parish-pump politics that has bedevilled this country for generations now. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to argue with improving education standards for children.
  It’s in the reform of the political system that I think Stephen Donnelly and his fellow independents will matter most in the new Dail. For the most part, Independents have a bad name in Irish politics right now, largely due to the pork-barrel antics of the likes of Jackie Healy-Rae and Michael Lowry, which at one point last year led to a major European newspaper running a picture of the gombeen-looking Healy-Rae in his flat cap under the headline, ‘Is This The Man Holding Europe To Ransom?’
  I’m hopeful that Stephen Donnelly represents an entirely new kind of Independent. I’m hopeful that - the ‘jobs for Wicklow’ policy aside - he’s one of a new breed that will be inclined to work for the good of the country as a whole, not just his own constituency and voters. I’ve argued in the past that too many elected Independents would be a bad thing in terms of their potential to destabilise any government dependent on their whims; now, with Fine Gael headed for an overall majority, or more likely a coalition government with Labour, a rash of Independents buzzing about Dail Eireann might well be exactly what this country needs.
  Because what this country needs in terms of true political reform is a brand new political party, one that has no ties to the Civil War, that owes no debt to either big business or the unions; one that is young, brash, naïve and ambitious, and preferably left-leaning, an anti-Progressive Democrat party to counter-balance the centre-right politics of what has historically been a Fine Gael-Fianna Fail hegemony.
  There have been a few abortive attempts to establish new parties in recent years, and there are a number of embryonic parties running candidates in this election, but the nature of Irish politics is such that it’s very difficult for a new party to gain traction with the electorate unless, as was the case with the PDs, they’re a disaffected rump of an established party.
  What may well trump Irish political history is the election of a record number of Independent candidates, enough of whom will share a common cause to establish not just a technical group in the Dail to provide it with speaking rights, but a platform on which can be established a coherent political party in its own right. It won’t happen overnight, of course, but given the number of credible Independent candidates going forward for election, it’s certainly a possibility.
  And so I’m voting for what I believe to be the most credible local Independent candidate, Stephen Donnelly. Where previously Independent TDs such as Jackie Healy-Rae and Michael Lowry had the capacity to destabilise the Dail and hold Irish democracy itself to ransom by their pork-barrel demands, a group of organised Independents have the capacity to destabilise the Irish political system itself, to prove that the tired old men (and they’re mostly men) and their tired old ideas have run their course. At the risk of sounding ageist, I’m voting for Stephen Donnelly not just on the basis of his policies but because he is young, and because for the first time in my life I’m not voting for myself, but on behalf of my three-year-old daughter.
  To mangle Yeats entirely, this is no longer a country for old men. The country of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, of Labour and Sinn Fein, is with O’Leary in his grave, even if Enda Kenny and Michael Martin, and Eamon Gilmore and particularly Gerry Adams, have yet to realise they’re little more than the living ghosts of ‘those dying generations’, the death rattle of insularity, petty vengeance, violence and power for its own sake, the last gasp of a political system that has given us ‘leaders’ of the calibre of the snake-oil salesman Bertie Ahern and the venally corrupt Charles J. Haughey.
  “Age and guile,” as PJ O’Rourke once said, “beat youth, innocence and a bad haircut.” Except Stephen Donnelly has a bald head on young shoulders. The future is surely ours.

McIlhatton, You Blurt, We Need You, Cry A Million Shaking Men

The multi-talented Sir Gerard of Stembridge popped up on Crime Always Pays last week, Sir Gerard being the evil-ish genius co-creator (with Father Ted’s Dermot Morgan) of Scrap Saturday, the classic radio sketch show that lampooned the not-so-great and not-very-good of Irish politics and public life in the late ’80s and early ’90s. But Christ on a moped, bad and all as it was back in the quasi-mediaeval fiefdom of Charles J. Haughey’s reign, things were never as bad as they are now. Any chance of another Scrap Saturday run? That lovely new 4FM must be crying out for original material …
  Anyhoo, Sir Gerard is a veritable renaissance man, turning his hand to radio, movies, plays and novels as the mood takes him. Late last year we had the Hitchcockian home invasion flick ‘Alarm’, and already this year we have the novel COUNTING DOWN, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

Meet Joe Power, approaching forty and counting down . . . Counting down the days until he sees his son. Counting down the number of years he spent with his wife before it all fell apart. Counting down the inches he has to lose off his waist to be a babe magnet again. Counting down all the fools who want to tell him to get his act together. Counting the hours until he can take one of his exhilarating night walks and encounter . . . well, who knows what, but one thing is sure, he’ll be the one to come out of it alive. Counting down every moment knowing that one day, it will be his last . . .

  Nice. Now, if only we can persuade Sir Gerard to run for taoiseach, all will be well again. Won’t it?

On Politics In The Irish Crime Novel, Or Lack Thereof

Our German friend Bernd Kochanowski from International Crime adds an interesting coda to the comment he left on the post On Publishing and Being Damned, to wit:

BTW: He (the reviewer) is also unhappy that the new Irish crime fiction is almost apolitical and doesn’t reflect the events that shook Ireland for years.

  The reviewer in question was casting a cold eye over Tana French’s IN THE WOODS, and is presumably referring to what we in Ireland like to euphemistically refer to as ‘the Troubles’.
  In other words – and we’re taking Bernd’s word for this – said reviewer is disappointed that Irish crime writers aren’t dealing with the consequences of the 30-year conflict that involved the Provisional IRA, the INLA, the British Army, the RUC (latterly the PSNI), the Gardai, and more Loyalist paramilitary armies than you could shake a cat-o’-nine-tails at.
  To which we reply, ‘Tosh, piffle and balderdash, sirrah!’
  Case for the Defence # 1: Adrian McKinty’s protagonist Michael Forsythe is an ex-British Army soldier. In THE DEAD YARD, he goes undercover to break up a gang of renegade Republicans. In THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD he engages with (and generally vaporises) any number of ex-paramilitaries on his return to Belfast.
  Case for the Defence # 2: Sylvester Young’s SLEEPING DOGS LIE, in which ex-IRA men travel to the U.S. and become embroiled in a complex plot involving a number of security agencies.
  Case for the Defence # 3: Ken Bruen’s AMERICAN SKIN, in which an ex-IRA man wreaks mayhem in the U.S.
  Case for the Defence # 4: Declan Burke’s EIGHT BALL BOOGIE, in which former paramilitaries diversify into more prosaic criminality, specifically coke-trafficking.
  Case for the Defence # 5: David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER, in which former paramilitaries and an ex-RUC officer find themselves called to account for their actions twenty years previously.
  Case for the Defence # 6: Colin Bateman.
  Case for the Defence # 7: Sam Millar.
  Case for the Defence # 8: Authors such as Peter Cunningham, Jack Holland and S.J. Michaels, who were writing about ‘the Troubles’ as far back as the late ’80s and early ’90s.
  I could go on, but hopefully the point is made. Besides, and pertinently in the context of the reviewer’s comments being made during a review of IN THE WOODS, Tana French’s novel had a political subtext that perhaps was too subtle for the reviewer to pick up on. The novel opens on an archaeological dig, where the body of a young girl has been found, said dig being conducted hastily on the basis that the bulldozers of the property developers are due in the very near future.
  In Ireland, many such developments are highly controversial and politically charged, the most obvious example being that of the M3 motorway, currently planned to run through the Tara Valley (right), an archaeological complex dating back to 2,000 BC.
  Furthermore, the ongoing tribunals of investigation were initially set up to investigate the links – if such could be proved – between property developers and politicians, specifically to discover if politicians had been bribed to facilitate the rezoning of land in favour of property speculators. Among the many politicians to find themselves under serious scrutiny at these tribunals, to put it mildly, were two former taoisigh, or Irish prime ministers, Charles Haughey and Bertie Ahern.
  To suggest that IN THE WOODS is an apolitical novel is to deliberately ignore, or be utterly ignorant of, recent Irish history. Here endeth the lesson. Peace, out.

Moloney Talks, Baloney Walks

Veteran Irish journo Ed Moloney’s The Secret History of the IRA has gone into a second edition, this one offering information the author couldn’t publish back in 2002 – namely, the part played by Ireland’s latter-day bogeyman, former taoiseach Charles Haughey, in facilitating the process that led to the IRA’s ceasefires and ultimately the cessation of hostilities in Northern Ireland. “Remarkably comprehensive yet coolly incisive ... an extraordinarily courageous and ultimately optimistic book that brilliantly elucidates past horrors,” said the Boston Globe on the book’s initial release, while the Washington Post made it ‘A Rave’: “Moloney brings a sharply intelligent reporter’s eye to a tangled history often baffling to outsiders.” Mind you, some disgruntled readers beg to differ. And they couldn’t all be ex-IRA, could they?