Patrick McGinley

• Born: February 8, 1937
• Place of Birth: Glencolmcille, Donegal, Ireland

Writer Patrick McGinley is known for works that explore the fortunes of modern Irish characters as they struggle with the burden of Ireland’s historical past and its always uncertain future. In most of his novels, rural Donegal provides the setting for investigating crime and, more importantly, local language, customs, and folklore. McGinley’s intimate knowledge and appreciation of the Irish landscape and how it has profoundly influenced the lives of its inhabitants stand as his greatest strength. His darkly comic vision and ironic manipulations of the conventions of the classic detective story lend a distinctive quality to his fiction. McGinley’s characters are much more than stock figures, and they speak in a ribald, original language that is captivating and unmistakably Irish.

Biography

Patrick Anthony McGinley was born on February 8, 1937, in Glencolumcille, County Donegal, Ireland, to Peter and Mary Anne Heekin McGinley. One of five children, McGinley was educated at Cashel National School in Glencolumcille and St. Edna’s College in Galway. From 1954 to 1957, he studied literature at University College, Galway, and was interested in Middle English poetry.

After receiving a bachelor of arts in 1957, McGinley spent four years teaching in secondary school before emigrating to London in 1962. There, he worked as an assistant publisher, except for a year in the mid-1960s, when he lived in Sydney, Australia. In 1981, McGinley began serving as managing editor of Europa Publications Limited, publishers of academic and reference books.

Analysis

With the publication of his first novel, Bogmail, in 1978, Patrick McGinley was immediately hailed as a major new mystery novelist. Critics were quick to emphasize the distinctive quality of his works, a quality that raises them above the ordinarily formulaic mystery fare. Although there are mysteries and secrets in his work, these have less to do with “whodunit” than with a study of the minds of the killers and the victims. Bogmail is described as “a novel with murder,” and such a description especially fits many of his other novels. Murders occur, and indeed, they propel the plot. They are, however, almost secondary to the novels’ primary investigations of landscape, manners, and customs.

Bogmail

In many of McGinley’s novels, the focus is squarely on rural Irish life. In Bogmail, the setting is the village of Glenkeel, County Donegal, where the local pub, the center of nearly all the novel’s action, hums with talk of a persistent drought. Inevitably, all conversations turn to the weather and its effect on crops, animals, and humans. The other important setting is the surrounding bog, where the pub owner, Tim Roarty, buries the body of an employee who is corrupting Roarty’s estranged daughter. For the Irish, the bogs are extraordinary landscapes providing not only the turf for their fires but also secrets preserved from lost civilizations. Things are easily lost in a bog, but once recovered, as this body is, they can return to haunt the living.

McGinley is especially expert at capturing the randy, colloquial speech of the rural Irish. Characters speak not only a heavily inflected English but also Irish itself. The topics are, appropriately, those that would most concern country people. Thus, in one case, there is a discussion of keeping land in the family, as an old codger refuses to sell his property, fearing that it will be exploited or unappreciated. In another instance, the sexual rapacity of widows, a time-honored theme in all Irish literature, commands attention.

A repeated McGinley theme is also a distinctly Irish one: the role of fantasy in Irish experience. In each novel, truth emerges as an elusive commodity as characters lie, dissemble, or coyly tell stories. In Bogmail, the narrator interrupts a conversation to describe one character “trying to make out if she were being serious, always a problem in Ireland.” At another point in the novel, the local police officer remarks that all crime is imaginary in the country.

McGinley uses dreams to show characters leading a double existence. Each of his protagonists, as well as various minor characters, struggle with divided senses of self. In Bogmail, Roarty finds he is becoming a stranger to himself the longer he hides his crime from others.

Goosefoot

In Goosefoot (1982), a young university graduate, Patricia Teeling, leaves a family farm in Tallage, County Donegal, for a year in Dublin. Before her departure, she is offered her uncle’s prosperous farm but sets out for the city in search of herself. Throughout the novel, she contemplates the differences between city and country living and returns periodically to her hometown. There, she feels free and uninhibited as she wanders the fields and visits the pubs, where discussion of crops and cattle dominate conversation. When Patricia loses the land to a scheming cousin, McGinley could well be revealing the fate of all Ireland—as it loses its connections with its rural origins, it loses itself.

The image of a cracked mirror appears periodically to reveal Patricia’s divided experiences. She is a country girl trying to live in the city. She disdains urban life but eventually grows bored of rural ways when she returns home. She is further divided because she cannot decide what course she wants her life to take.

McGinley liberally laces all of his novels with dreams, as characters wander in and out of consciousness, searching for the significance of their existence. In a nation of dreamers, where hard definitions between reality and fantasy continually blur, dream becomes the perfect vehicle for expressing character and action. In McGinley’s hands, dreams presage events, although in oblique or exaggerated ways.

In Goosefoot, the heroine has horrifying erotic dreams. In one, she imagines herself lying astride her naked boyfriend and stabbing him in the heart for no apparent reason. By the novel's end, this dream makes perfect sense as she grows further from him, emotionally and geographically. In another dream, she imagines herself as a naked captive, tied to a bed over which hangs a long sword. Into the room walks a nude Inspector McMyler, who cuts the cords that encircle her and then stabs her as he approaches for an embrace. In the closing chapter, Patricia Teeling is briefly held captive in McMyler’s room under the shadow of an immense sword that later impales her as she tries to escape Dublin.

Truth is unstable, as characters dance around one another, never clearly revealing their fundamental natures. Each person creates a persona for the public, leading one character to comment, “In our separate ways we are all would-be novelists.”

One detective, McMyler, is an impostor and is ultimately shown to be the killer. Under the guise of being a watchful protector, he invades the victim’s life and eventually murders her. Like the murderers in the other novels, McMyler is a poor man’s Moriarty (in Bogmail, in fact, the detective continually sees his case in terms of a contest between a latter-day Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty), a master criminal who matches wits with the police and often outdoes them.

The Trick of the Ga Bolga

In The Trick of the Ga Bolga (1985), McGinley offers his densest, most intricate view of rural Ireland and its folklore. The novel’s title remains enigmatic throughout the first half of the narrative until one of the locals explains to the English immigrant, George Coote, the legend of the Ga Bolga, which he describes as a rare sexual maneuver. At the novel’s close, however, as Coote is dying at the hands of an enraged war veteran, it is revealed that the Ga Bolga was the extraordinary weapon of the mythical Irish hero, Cuchulainn, which when wielded, ensured the death of any foe. Also, in this novel, a local legend surrounds the name of a cove where Irish residents hid to escape pacification by occupying British soldiers. The eventual discovery and slaughter of the Irish escapees operates as a grim foreshadowing of Coote’s destiny.

The power of the priesthood, which is mentioned in McGinley’s other novels, is dramatically presented in this work. Father McNullis cajoles and coerces the villagers into doing his will, which involves erecting a concrete bridge over a river. As an outsider, Coote watches scornfully as McNullis connives to emulate his inspiration, Pope Julius II, by erecting his version of a timeless monument.

Many of McGinley’s novels feature the fantastic; The Trick of the Ga Bolga, however, offers the most thoroughgoing use of fantastic elements. For example, all characters have at least two names; as one character remarks to the British outsider, “Here the names we use aren’t real. Anybody who’s anybody has at least two nicknames.” The longer he stays in this headland, the more disoriented Coote becomes, finding himself in a fog, both literally and figuratively. All of this is part of the Irish national character. One character explains, “The Irish imagination is not to be inconvenienced by fact.” Earlier, the narrator comments on Ireland within the description of a treacherous country road: “Like so many things in Ireland, it was makeshift and incomplete, lacking the dependable solidity that comes from a confident history and undisturbed centuries of careful husbandry.”

In The Trick of the Ga Bolga, the split revealed by dreams appears in the figure of Coote, who escapes war-ravaged London for the unfamiliarity of rural Ireland “to find unity of experience, to escape from the criticism and counter-criticism of the split self that continues to refuse wholeness and reconciliation.” Everywhere he turns, he confronts doubles—two lovers, two neighbors who fight with each other, a nightshirt made for two, and his own two-facedness.

Coote cannot escape the eerie sensation of being two people living two very different lives whose “actions were not his own.” In the novel’s final scene, as his murderer demands to know Coote’s final wish, the injured man exclaims, “I wish to live till the true shape of my life is made plain to me—and no longer.” Like so many of McGinley’s searching characters, Coote fails to see the shape of his life as it unfolds. He imagines that there must be something else, yet he fails to recognize what exists right under his nose.

The failure to interpret palpable clues recalls one of McGinley’s ironic manipulations of mystery conventions. The detectives in McGinley’s work, usually police inspectors, are comic figures. On the one hand, they remind readers of similar figures in Agatha Christie’s novels who are well-meaning and hard-working but ultimately incapable of solving anything. Thus, in Bogmail and The Trick of the Ga Bolga, the police arrest the wrong men after lengthy, secretive investigations. The comedy is especially sharp in The Trick of the Ga Bolga, where the principal killer, Coote, confesses to Inspector Blowick, only to have the police officer discount the confession because he is convinced that Coote is operating from some misguided sense of compassion for the wrongly accused man. In both these novels, the murderers remain unknown and unapprehended by the authorities.

The Red Men

The Red Men (1987) presents the Heron clan, a father and four sons, who own and run a hotel, store, and vast acreage in an unnamed Donegal community. Following the call of commerce, literary scholarship, and the priesthood, members of the family divorced themselves from the land and the folk history of the region. As family members abruptly begin to die, they superstitiously wonder if they are not cursed. The Red Men is the first of McGinley’s works in which that staple of Irish life—the Gypsy rover—appears in the person of Andy Early. Early initially seems to be little more than a charming bit of local color, but by the novel’s close, he is as integral to the family and its twisted fortunes as any of the major characters.

The Red Men's main characters must undergo their own dark night of the soul. Their self-examination results in the knowledge that what they have taken for granted eludes their grasp. All realize that they are not exactly the people they thought they were, and their worlds are not nearly as secure as they imagined. Cut loose from their delusions and convenient explanations, they suddenly wander, some into death and others into possibilities for new and more meaningful lives.

Foxprints

McGinley’s third novel, Foxprints (1983), continues with the theme of fantasy, but the setting changes to suburban England. Here, an Irishman, concealing his identity with the name Charles Keating, puts on a series of disguises to ingratiate himself with the villagers of Wistwood. He finds himself living in Foxgloves, a mansion where fantasy has so fully replaced reality that Keating loses sense of himself and others. Once again, fiction becomes the staff of life, and facts become rare.

The elusiveness of the master criminal is dizzyingly complex in Foxprints. Soon after enigmatic Charles Keating arrives in Wistwood, a series of murders occur, each of which has its most prominent clue, some article relating to foxes. Keating becomes obsessed with the murders, to the point that he even wonders if he could be the culprit. Yet, when Keating becomes a victim, the reader remains uninformed of the killer’s identity.

Other mysteries in the novel abound—what happened to a disappearing body in the garage, why one victim was finally spared death, who one girl on a train was, even why one woman’s knees have different textures—and ultimately, these mysteries are left unexplained. McGinley has crafted too ingenious a plot to leave so many unanswered questions unless they are integral to his purpose. He is not interested in writing the traditional whodunit. Instead, he uses mystery conventions to probe the psyches of various characters.

Twenty-First Century Works

McGinley continued writing mystery novels in the twenty-first century. Set in the sparsely populated village of Leaca, Cold Spring (2013) describes the murder of one of the few villagers and the fallout that occurs as tension and fear rise in the search for justice and the guilty party. Bishop's Delight (2016) follows two journalists investigating the mysterious disappearance of a politician. The journalists juggle truth and lies in their search for the missing man. McGinley also wrote That Unearthly Valley: A Donegal Childhood (2011).

A Different View

In McGinley’s novels, victims, not detectives or criminals, command the most attention. In most mysteries, victims are figures who remain in the narrative shadows—the reader must be concerned that they die but must never become too emotionally engaged by them either. In McGinley’s novels, the protagonists are usually the victims, victims of their own insecurities and misgivings about themselves and victims of others who would prey on them.

As many scholars of mystery and detective fiction have noted, the genre is fundamentally conservative. Especially in the hands of writers such as Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Dorothy L. Sayers, it often posits an ordered world violated by crime. The role of the detective is to solve the case and thus restore order where it belongs. The suggestion is that the world is a fundamentally rational place and that senseless crime is merely an occasional aberration.

McGinley frequently plays with this view, and his protagonists are forced to reject convenient notions of order and accept the world’s unpredictability. In Bogmail, the “spoilt priest,” Roarty, views the world as one absent of God and takes on himself the divine role of “benefactor of humanity” in his slaying of Eales.

In The Trick of the Ga Bolga, Coote, a man who escapes chaos in search of sanity and order, must eventually reconcile himself to the bitter fact that life is uncontrollable. As the village idiot tells him, “There’s a thing called Life that goes its own way in spite of all that Tom, Dick and Harry do to stop it. We’re only in control a fraction of the time. Someone else is doing the driving.” Reluctantly, Coote must acknowledge that reason and logic are powerless against chance and necessity.

McGinley’s works, apart from their distinct individual merits, represent the ever-expanding possibilities for mystery fiction. Some theorists have argued that mystery fiction has generally reached a creative dead end. However, McGinley demonstrates that mystery fiction can remain healthy and vigorous through wit and ironic manipulations. His use of Irish speech, life, and manners gives his fiction an originality often absent from other mystery fiction. Furthermore, his works illustrate that the best mysteries are never bound by a fictional formula but may exploit that formula to offer keen and fresh perceptions of the human condition.

Bibliography

Brown, Richard E. “Patrick McGinley’s Novels of Detection.” Colby Quarterly, vol. 33, Sept. 1997, pp. 209-22. digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol33/iss3/4.

Cahalan, James M. The Irish Novel: A Critical History. Twayne, 1988.

Clissmann, Anne. Flann O’Brien: A Critical Introduction to His Writings. Barnes & Noble Books, 1975.

Kenner, Hugh. “A Deep and Lasting Mayonnaise.” The New York Times Book Review, 21 July 1985, www.nytimes.com/1985/07/21/books/a-deep-and-lasting-mayonnaise.html. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Knowles, Nancy. “Empty Rhetoric: Argument by Credibility in Patrick McGinley’s Bogmail.” English Language Notes, vol. 39, Mar. 2002, pp. 79-87.

McGinley, Patrick. Interview by Jean W. Ross. In Contemporary Authors, vol. 127, edited by Susan M. Trosky. Gale Research, 1989.

Roy, David. "Author Patrick McGinley on 'Concoction of Filth' That Disgusted Donegal." Irish News, 27 July 2017, www.irishnews.com/arts/2017/07/27/news/back-to-the-bog-patrick-mcginley-on-the-new-edition-of-his-debut-novel-bogmail-1092825. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Shea, Thomas F. “Patrick McGinley’s Appropriation of Cuchulainn: The Trick of the Ga Bolga (1985).” New Hibernia Review, vol. 5, no. 3, Fall 2001, pp. 114-27. doi.org/10.1353/nhr.2001.0054.

Shea, Thomas F. “Patrick McGinley’s Impressions of Flann O’Brien: The Devil’s Diary and At Swim-Two-Birds.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 40, Summer 1994, pp. 272-81.