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  In his early fiction, Donnelly took flight from these dismal surroundings, preferring exotic settings and fantastical plots. His first three novels were set entirely in countries and regions where Donnelly had never been: Borneo, Panama, the Maghreb. Rather than alcoholics and Glasgow hard men, the novels are populated by shamanic tribes, arms dealers, pirates of the Malacca Strait, warlords and savages. In short, these were the kind of books based not on personal experience, but on other books – and on movies, comics and cartoons.

  It was not until Blades or Shadows (1979) that Donnelly adopted his native Glasgow as a fictional setting. The city he depicts is a vision of hell. The dark, polluted streets and piss-sodden alleys bear witness to lives of unremitting bleakness. The pubs where much of the novel’s action takes place (though ‘action’ is a dubious word) are sordid to the point of hallucination. Drinking is constant, joyless and brutal. Sex, when it happens, is cursory and humiliating. Fat, toothless whores grope the cocks and balls of the men who sit drinking lager amid clouds of cigarette smoke. The men listlessly swat the whores away, having scant interest in sex and probably no capacity for it either. A brawny, sullen man who habitually downs three whiskeys for every pint of Foster’s he drinks, swings a punch at a particularly foul whore who attempts to entice him by juggling her enormous tits in his face. The punch knocks her to the floor; the other drinkers watch indifferently before returning to their conversations or their pints.

  The novel’s climax is a long, desultory, expletive-ridden dialogue between Sam, a red-headed youth of twenty-two without prospects, interests or aspirations (he is the novel’s protagonist), and a much older man with a drink-ruddy face and a rasping cough, named Phil the Club. The dialogue’s binding theme is human isolation: both agree it cannot be escaped (Sam adds: why would you want to?). A huge woman named Jolene, ‘with layers of chin you could sink a fist in’, briefly joins the conversation. Sam tells her to fuck off. Phil and Sam broach such topics as Scottish independence, page-3 girls, English women, the IRA, Celtic and Rangers, the Queen, the greatest footballers of all time, the greatest footballers of the decade, and infidelity.

  At the end of the dialogue, Sam staggers out of the pub to throw up against the wall. Phil the Club (who has drunk as much as Sam, if not more) orders another pint, which he drinks as he has drunk all the others: in three vast gulps. The novel ends with Phil sitting on his stool, gazing into the gloom of the pub. The author compares him to the Buddha.

  In Mitchelmore (1985), Glasgow is again the setting. The city is evoked no less pessimistically. This time, a series of horrific murders in Glasgow’s most run-down areas provides the skeleton of plot on which the novel is fleshed out. Jake Mitchelmore is the detective charged with investigating the murders. Initially he pursues his duty with a marked lack of energy or conviction. It is unclear whether he believes the murderer cannot be caught, or if he simply has no desire to do so. Mitchelmore is a lugubrious man, given to ruminating dourly while gazing into the black waters of the Clyde, or at the faces of the Glaswegians who flow past him on the streets, ‘a river of derelict souls, lurching towards Nightmare’.

  All of the victims – seven, at the point when Mitchelmore takes on the investigation – are male, between the ages of twenty and fifty-two, and all are football fans. Four are fans of Celtic, two are fans of Rangers, and the other – this is the detail that eventually brings Mitchelmore to the brink of madness – follows Hearts. The men have come to grief on deserted streets or in lanes while returning from the brutal drinking sessions which are the leitmotif of Donnelly’s Glasgow fiction. More often than not, the victims are killed by a single blow to the back of the head, sometimes while pissing against a wall.

  Two theories are proposed. First, that two killers are responsible, and Glasgow is playing host to a tit-for-tat series of attacks among football fans gone to the dark side. In this theory, one of the killers is a Celtic fan, while the other follows Rangers. (So why did the Hearts fan have to die? wonders Mitchelmore.) Second, that the murders have been committed by a lone individual – a serial killer, though Donnelly refrains from using the term throughout the novel, for reasons best known to himself.

  Mitchelmore soon discounts the first theory – the multiplication of motives is dangerous and inelegant. Despite the opposition of his superiors (and his rivals), Mitchelmore knows in his heart of hearts that the crimes are those of a single, profoundly disturbed individual, probably an alienated young man from the inner city whose parents were alcoholics or abusers – a young man, in fact, not unlike Mitchelmore in his youth, before he found his direction in life through a career in the force and a passion for training pigeons.

  ‘I see you,’ whispers Mitchelmore one night, drunk, peering out the window of the high-rise flat where he has lived since his divorce eight years ago. ‘I know you, I feel you. I . . . taste you.’

  To the concern of his senior officers, and of Nancy, the social worker with whom he has become romantically involved, Mitchelmore loses interest in anything outside of the football-fan murders. His relationship with Nancy falls apart – Mitchelmore hardly seems to notice. He no longer drinks in his local. He takes to sleeping at his desk, waking with a start to find himself peering at an assemblage of photographs: the victims’ wounds; the locations of their deaths; the crowds outside the Ibrox and Parkhead on match days; derelict flats and dank, gloomy hallways with no obvious link to the case. Mitchelmore starts drinking in the inner-city pubs once frequented by the victims, concealing his loyalty when in Rangers pubs (he is a Celtic supporter), saying little, watching, waiting (but waiting for what? Even he seems not to know).

  His sergeant, Duncan Shearer, suspends Mitchelmore. ‘You’re losing it, Jake,’ he rasps. ‘Get a grip, before there’s no way back.’ Needless to say, Mitchelmore pays little heed and continues his obsessive investigation. One more murder is committed which may or may not be connected to the others: a Rangers fan is stabbed outside a chipper near the Ibrox. Mitchelmore is certain that this is the next killing in the series. By now, the reader has ample reason to doubt Mitchelmore’s judgement, indeed his participation in a shared reality. Winter sets in. Mitchelmore, no longer in contact with friends, family or former colleagues, drinks more heavily. He gets into fights. A whore wanks him off down a lane but he is too drunk to come. He throws up. He collapses. Owed rent, his landlord appears at Mitchelmore’s flat and finds he has not been sleeping there with any regularity. The muted roar of inner-city Glasgow closes in over Mitchelmore. Christmas arrives. The city is cold, and silent but for the wind blowing through the lanes, past shuttered-up pubs and factories. A child cries in the distance. A dog whimpers and gnaws on its own leg. Here the novel ends.

  After Mitchelmore, Malcolm Donnelly abandoned Glasgow as a fictional setting. His subsequent novels, Queen of the Narcos and Jazz Vendetta, published after four- and five-year intervals respectively, were set in Harlem, Peru and Nigeria, and saw a return to the fantastical storylines and buoyant mood of Donnelly’s earlier work. He died in 1999, following complications of the large intestine.

  Fredrick Mulligan, Life in Flames

  Bald and toothless apparently from early manhood, Limerick-born Fredrick Mulligan was hardly the most handsome of Irish writers, but he did manage to invent (and exhaust) a new fictional genre, the so-called Paddy-slasher. His influences were mostly non-literary – indeed, in his only traceable interview (which he gave to a short-lived magazine named Tuning Fork), he claimed never to read at all. ‘Books are a quare thing,’ he said. ‘A French fad, surely. I only got into writing because any fucker can do it. All you need is a pencil.’ Mulligan drew inspiration from the ‘video-nasties’ of the early eighties, and such directors as Dario Argento, Abel Ferrara, George A. Romero, and especially Ruggero Deodato (of Cannibal Holocaust notoriety).

  Mulligan left Limerick at nineteen and spent the subsequent decade in London, working on the sites, drinking copiously, and having affairs with anyone who came into his purview that would l
ook past his formidable ugliness. ‘Women, men – never gave a bollox,’ he later explained. For three years he shared a house in Kilburn with five or six other young Irishmen. Then he moved into a basement bedsit north of Kentish Town. It was in that cramped bedsit, by lamplight after hard days on the sites, or hungover at weekends, that Mulligan wrote his collection of short stories, Hounds of Hell and the Rum-Beast of Kilmacud, and his only published novel, Slaughterchaun. The stories and novel read like transcripts of early first-person-shooter video games such as Doom or Wolfenstein 3D (games which Mulligan never lived to see, but doubtless would have approved of ). In Slaughterchaun, narrative thrust is eschewed in favour of unrelenting carnage, gunplay and mutilation. Jack, a muscular and sexually omnivorous Limerick farmer, blasts his way across a ravaged Ireland swarming with vicious and depraved faery-folk. Armed with a shotgun, a blowtorch and a haversack full of rudimentary explosives, Jack joins forces with Priest, a clergyman who has lost his faith after seeing his congregation decimated by the faery horde, their innards gorged upon and their corpses incinerated. ‘God has left us?’ roars the priest into a gully at one point. ‘Very well, then I am the Black Christ of Annihilation!’

  Dialogue is wooden and preposterous; characterisation non-existent. The climactic chapter, ‘Mound of Corpses’, has a body count in the hundreds, as wave upon wave of winged banshees, leprechauns and faeries descend from the blood-red skies upon our beleaguered heroes, who are now inexplicably perched on the summit of Carrantuohill. After hours of blasting, Priest turns the shotgun on himself, blowing out the tip of his spine after reiterating his contempt for God, church and man. Jack flees to a cave to re-gather his strength and draw up plans for a new resistance. The novel ends with a fevered prayer to the blackest gods of hate and vengeance.

  Mulligan evidently intended a sequel. Slaughterchaun, alas, was to be the last book he ever completed. Aged thirty-one and jaded with London life, he returned to Limerick. He lived in a caravan in the countryside several miles outside the city, where he bathed every morning in a river, drank cheap flagons of cider, and made several attempts at a new novel, provisionally titled Banshee Inferno.

  The words, however, would not come. Three nights before his thirty-third birthday, Mulligan wrote a few half-coherent lines on a page torn from a gay porn magazine, and pinned it to a nearby tree. Then he drank a bottle of whiskey, doused his caravan in petrol, lay on his bed wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, and incinerated himself.

  Banned on first appearance, Mulligan’s books have never been published in Ireland to this day.

  Martin Knows Me – the Lonely Struggleof David Haynes

  Failure can be a kind of career. Bitterness too. Unlike most young Irishmen who emigrated to London in the eighties, David Haynes went not in flight from a barren economy (he left behind steady work as a reporter at the Derry Star, where he had covered the arts, sports and agriculture), but as a literary pilgrim. Enamoured of contemporary English writing, Haynes’s most ardent devotion was reserved for Martin Amis, whose career and personal life he followed avidly. Harbouring dreams of becoming a fiction writer himself, Haynes believed that London would provide a more amenable backdrop for such a project than his troubled native city.

  Living alone in an apartment off the Charing Cross Road overlooking Soho, Haynes spent many evenings during his first years in London rereading all the Amis novels that had then been published. Determined to grasp the sorcery of the master’s style, he would type out the novels in their entirety on the typewriter he used for his journalism. By day, when he wasn’t writing articles or chasing down sources, he would walk the streets, alleys and inner-city parks evoked in Amis’s feverish fictional universe.

  After three years in London, Haynes lost his job at the Irish Post, where he had written on various issues of interest to the London Irish community. Taking a job as a waiter at Berconi’s, an Italian restaurant in Soho, he decided that the interruption to his journalistic work was an opportunity to focus on his literary ambitions, which until then had remained largely nominal.

  The novel that resulted from this decision, Martin Knows Me, was rejected in its early drafts by nineteen publishers in the UK and eight in Ireland. A smattering of phrases amid the rejection letters, suggesting mild interest in Haynes’s future output, sufficed to keep his determination alive: he kept on writing. Working each night at the restaurant until two or three, Haynes would return to his flat, fix a cafetière, and write for five or six hours. Then he would read a little, and sleep until it was time for the evening shift.

  Though he made several attempts to move on from Martin Knows Me, Haynes’s unpublished first novel continued to tug at him. He believed in the book, or at least in its potential – to abandon it would be traumatic. In the earlier drafts, Martin Amis had appeared as a distant, ambiguous figure, haunting the thoughts of the sensitive and ambitious narrator (also named Martin), as he came of age against an oppressive backdrop of sectarianism and narrow-mindedness: Amis was an emblem of the young man’s yearning, disaffection and thirst for culture (or merely glamour). In later drafts, the novel’s tone is considerably darker: the plot now involves a troubled writer who moves to England seemingly with the intention of becoming Martin Amis, or possibly murdering or sleeping with him. Though these later drafts contained, in the words of a young female intern at a literary agency to which Haynes submitted the typescript, ‘some uncomfortable insights’ and ‘moments of real skill’, they failed to attract much attention.

  Seven years had passed. David Haynes was still in London, still waiting tables, still unpublished. He was now in his mid-thirties, no longer a young man, and with little to show for it. Over the course of a harsh winter, the truth, buried for so long beneath the furies of work and the late-night chatter of his typewriter, pushed itself to the surface: Haynes could not write. At least, he could not write like Martin Amis. The revelation was the trigger for a prolonged psychic unravelling. More than once, Haynes found himself weeping helplessly while standing in the kitchen at Berconi’s, embarrassing nearby chefs. In his apartment he would sit for hours by the window, gazing into the darkness till a dreary sunrise filled out the cobbled sleaze of Soho. During this period, Martin Amis was at the summit of his powers and acclaim, before the dethroning he was to undergo in the nineties. Haynes could no longer bear to read anything by or about Amis – too lacerating were the reminders of the glamorous life and mercurial talent, the precision and swiftness of intellect which would never be his.

  Some months prior to his breakdown, Haynes had met a quiet, twenty-three-year-old German girl named Ann-Sophie, who had been working as an au pair in London. Haynes began writing to her more frequently, confiding his distress at the possibility of seeing himself as an utter failure. Through their correspondence the two became very close, and before long it was decided: Haynes would move to Heidelberg to be with Ann-Sophie.

  Though the outline of a new future was becoming visible, Haynes needed to feel some sense of closure. Several days before moving to Germany, he resolved to go and see Martin Amis, who was due to give a talk at Kings Place in Islington. On the night of the event, Haynes arrived alone and sat near the back of the auditorium, which filled to capacity. There was a surge of anticipation as the lights dimmed – it was enough to muffle the sound of Haynes’s first gasp, his first sob. Amis walked on-stage, sat down in a leather chair, and began speaking.

  Afterwards, Amis sat at a table in the foyer to sign books. Haynes joined the queue, determined if not to speak to Amis, then at least to stand before him and look him in the eye. Perhaps in that way he could convey some inkling of the ardour, the ecstasy, the sorrow he had known.

  When there were only four bodies separating him from Amis, Haynes’s nerve failed: he ducked out of the queue and hurried away, out of the foyer and into the street. He walked through London one last time, intensely aware of the city night, its monstrous poetry; he knew that once he left this place, he would never return.

  David Hayn
es moved to Heidelberg, where he married Ann-Sophie. They went on to have two children, Romaine and George, and ran a café that proved popular with students. Apart from the odd poem, which he chose not to show to anyone, Haynes never wrote again.

  The Turk Inside

  She came to London when she was twenty-one. Now she’s older, I doubt she lives in London any more but I can’t be sure (she deleted her old email account, changed her phone).

  She got work as an exotic dancer at a club near Russell Square. It was expected of all the girls there that they slept with the owner, the manager and probably another rank or two along the pecking order as well. The owner was an oily, brutal Turk. As you know, people come to London to make money, they stamp on other people and they laugh about it, never any remorse. It’s horrible, unbearable.

  She slept with the Turk, he gloated over it. That’s the kind of man he was. There’s no moral to this story, no kind of comeuppance at all. The Turk is happy still. He abides in splendour and he’s slept with more women than you or I ever will, despite his ugliness. I think of this man as a harvester of souls. He is my shadow self, the projection of my own shrieking, sick and mutilated will to power. I’m a total fucking wreck. He is me, on some level. The Turk.

  She slept with the Turk. Him first and then me. She was very beautiful (I think she still is). She had a room in a flat in Canary Wharf that seems, when I picture it, to have had no windows in the corridors, only a warm electric light. She was on the nineteenth floor. There were some nights in there, and mornings across the river with croissants and coffee, looking back over open waste-ground at the clustered skyscrapers of the business district. I wasn’t in love with her. Then I was, but it was too late because I had scared her, or she just felt scared, which in the end are one and the same thing. The tables had turned. Life is like that, and there’s nothing funny or poetic about it. More like a mockery.