Verbal Magazine

Gallows Lane

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This is the second in what promises to be an excellent series featuring Inspector Benedict Devlin of the Garda Síochana by Derry writer Brian McGilloway. As in the first book, Borderlands, the action takes place in and around Lifford, on the border of Donegal and Tyrone. 

The location has great scope for a crime writer. Lifford is a small town but the shadow of the Troubles looms large over the border lands. The current situation is well represented here, with the Guards and the PSNI making small overtures to each other as befits the police forces of two towns linked by a bridge but until recently separated as if by an iron curtain.
The action in Gallows Lane is precipitated by the return of a small time criminal, James Kerr, recently released after serving a six year sentence for the armed robbery of a post office in the North. Devlin’s boss, who remembers Kerr as a troublemaker, instructs him to keep an eye on the young man and to run him out of town at the first opportunity. Devlin discovers that Kerr has found God in prison and wants to make his peace with the gang members who shot him and left him to take the rap for the robbery. Devlin has a bad feeling about this mission - which is amply justified when bodies start showing up, showing signs of torture. A series of physical and sexual assaults on young women, one of them fatal, so stretches the small force that the NCIB – the Garda equivalent of Scotland Yard – are called in from Dublin.
McGilloway expertly conveys the atmosphere of a small, country town where many of the residents have pasts they are anxious to conceal in this new era of peace. He also tackles police corruption, an issue very much in the public eye at the moment, particularly in Donegal. As in Borderlands, the Troubles show up incidentally (an arms find, an appearance by a Special branch operative); influencing the situation without actively driving the action, which is taut and fast paced.
The role of Inspector in a crime series is a time honoured one, Morse and Rebus being the most recent examples.  Devlin is unusual in this company for his stable, even boring, home life, but he is all the more believable for that. His reaction to a death threat is more comprehensible than those who shrug such danger off as ‘all part of the job’, as is a colleague’s “I don’t want to die for people who don’t really give a shit.” This depiction of the Gardaί as real and imperfect adds to, rather than detracts from, the suspense. All of the characters here, even the off-the-wall ones, are well drawn and recognisable.
McGilloway has written another compelling book here, with no clichés or easy answers. Borderlands was Macmillan New Writing’s best selling release and this should do even better. There are plans for at least three more Devlin novels, I am pleased to hear; read this and you will be, too.

Gallows Lane will be launched in the Verbal Arts Centre, Bishop Street, Derry, on April 3rd at 7.30pm.

Michele Cunningham

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