The river Foyle, in the north-west of Ireland, is the border between two jurisdictions. The river’s east bank, running from Strabane north to Derry Londonderry, is on the British side of the border, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The west bank, running north from Lifford to Letterkenny is on the Irish side of the border, in the Republic of Ireland. Currencies are different, governance (from Belfast and London on the east bank and from Dublin on the west) is different. There are two different police forces.
People negotiate this border region on a daily basis, living and working full lives on either or both sides. Recent civil conflict, and continuing community and political tensions, underscore their lives.
Among the many achievements of Brian McGilloway’s crime fiction is that the severance delivered by this border is present but not dominant. He has produced an admirable body of work that made an impact on publishers and readers when it first began in 2008 and which continues to be read right up to now, with the latest title published in 2022. The work includes series with named detectives and stand-alone novels.
Bleed A River Deep (2009) is the third novel in McGilloway’s Detective Inspector Devlin series, set among members of An Garda Síochána, operating out of Lifford, on the west bank of the Foyle, the Irish side. It is a police procedural, seamlessly finding its place in that tradition, rooted in a cross-border locality and reaching for universality via story, character, action and theme.
Benedict “Ben” Devlin presents an old-fashioned moral resolve in a credibly contemporary manner. He behaves like a modern cop, in his relations with his colleagues in An Garda Síochána and his allies in The Police Service of Northern Ireland across the river.
I read the book directly after reading Denis Lehane’s latest novel Small Mercies, also a police procedural set in a context of civil conflict, amidst community and political tensions. Both books, very different in their own way, greatly aided my recovery from a period of illness and hospitalisation.
The border in Lehane’s book is territorial and racial. The book is driven by Mary Pat Fennessy’s urge for justice, an urge that is more brutal than the urge for justice that impels Inspector Devlin.
Devlin retains his cool, even when gun-play arises, depending squarely on the domestic support he receives from his family and his religious practice.
Bleed A River Deep is written in lambent, limpid and unhurried prose that draws the reader along its course in the same way as the Carrowcreel River, the key location of much of the book’s action, meanders through mountains in Donegal. The heart of the story is overlapping venality in business and crime.
There are economic and war refugees, including a rarity: a Roman Catholic Chechen, a victim of illegal trafficking, who, with no other option available, is offered sanctuary by Devlin’s family when she falls foul of violent criminals.
The storytelling is seemingly gentle, but always edgy, with tensions between Devlin and his boss never far from the surface. There are guns and weapons – side-arms, sawn-off shot-guns, knives, explosives and baseball bats – used with fatal conviction, sometimes laced with regret.
McGilloway uses a world known to him, echoing real events such as contested gold-mines in the mountains, Irish-American politicians mining political capital on visits to the “old” country and the occupation of corporate officers by activists. The setting of the novel is a consistent and known place. It is a semi-rural, yet far from sleepy, outback.
I had read most of Brian McGilloway’s other crime fiction as well as many works by Elmore Leonard and Sara Paretsky, all satisfying in their different ways, when I wrote my own police procedural Oak and Stone (Merdog Books, 2019). I made a conscious choice to set it in a known and consistent world I could recognise.
McGilloway creates a fiction that holds the reader for its duration in the manner of a complex device, drawing the reader towards it, feeling intrigued, rather than a complicated system that makes the reader recoil, feeling confused.
Bleed a Deep River by Brian McGilloway is a book for readers who enjoy intelligent, organically plotted and deftly paced police procedurals. It can be read at any time, not only after a period of illness. It will revive you regardless.
Highly recommended.
Bleed a River Deep, Brian McGilloway, book, Pan Macmillan, London, 2010
Brian McGilloway’s website
www.brianmcgilloway.com
Interview with Brian McGilloway
https://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/people/everything-you-need-to-know-about-ni-crime-writer-brian-mcgilloway-3321784
www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter
