Megarry comes sleuthing south

EUGENE McEldowney remembers the first time he saw a drug addict. "It in London, about 1962. I had taken the Tube into the city centre, and there was this guy trying to get up the escalator. About 18 or 19, he was in bits, shaking and sweating. I was absolutely fascinated by him, in a horrified sort of way. It blew my mind how anyone could allow themselves get into such a state where they were so obviously in misery. Why?"

An all night chemist shop was open then in Piccadilly and addicts could get prescriptions filled there at midnight, for the next day as part of a recovery programme.

In subsequent years however he began to realise that no one sets out in pursuit of such misery. "People don't really believe that will happen to them," he said. But in 1962 the drug abuse phenomenon was still new and comparatively rare. It was just another feature of the bohemian way of life.

We were talking about his latest novel The Sad Case of Harpo Higgins, his third in the Megarry series. Though it is not about drug addiction, it is dominated by Harpo, an addict who pervades the book even though it begins with his murder. It is a sympathetic portrayal.

Unlike the first two books in the series, A Kind of Homecoming, and A Stone of the Heart, The Sad Case of Harpo Higgins is set in Dublin, where McEldowney works as a journalist with The Irish Times. "I had said all I wanted to say about the North - the morality of police using informers, how people can be drawn into the paramilitaries. It was painful writing about the North. My background was a factor probably he is from Belfast - "it is so complex and you have to try to see all sides of the argument. It's not black and white, goodies and baddies. I have read so much trash about paramilitaries as mindless killers, psychopaths without motivation, at each others' throats for kicks, that sort of thing. There is very little attempt to understand. It is far too simple."

Besides, he likes Dublin. He wanted to write about it. He has lived there over 20 years. He has developed a "feel" for the place. This affection seeps out of the pages of Harpo. Familiar cityscapes emerge from between the lines with the warmth of an old friend. Especially Howth, where he himself lives.

And of course drug addiction is such a feature of contemporary life in Dublin. What intrigues him is how little reference there is to this in any contemporary Irish fiction. Apart from the play One Last white Horse by Dermot Bolger, some of Vincent Banville's writings, and John Banville's Mephisto, which touches on drugs, he cannot recall any contemporary writer who has written on the subject. It baffles him.

BY NOW Megarry, his RUC detective, has exorcised the demons that had been besetting him his vendetta against the IRA, who had murdered his father, his sense of failure as a husband and father. He has settled in himself, become more tolerant, of himself and others. He has become "wise." He is 53 and recovering from a mild heart attack, while resting with in laws in Howth. A Garda friend asks for his help in solving Harpo's murder, and the rest . . . is the novel.

"By now I know instinctively what Megarry (no relation) will do," he says of his creation. Writing this novel was therefore easier.

But he is intrigued by the attitude of Irish writers generally to the crime genre. "They don't consider it worth rating," he believes, "it is not regarded as serious." A view he disputes, pointing out the genre's "very respectable pedigree" through Graham Greene, Arthur Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Edgar Allan Poe, and including Erskine Childers.

"It makes the same demands as, any other genre - the same requirements of character, atmosphere, setting, dialogue, are there in all. But plotting is primary." Something must happen. People cannot stand around navel gazing. Pace is very important. In fact there are additional responsibilities involved for crime writers, not lesser ones. People who buy crime expect "a rattling good is a cracking good plot".

There is also an intellectual challenge involved, a battle of wits between writer and reader as to who `dun' it, and why. And there are rules. You cannot cheat the reader. No identical twins stuff, or wheeling in the milkman at the end. The denouement has to arise logically from the story. It must become self evident."

He believes it is the vicarious thrill of murder, "the thrill, the chill of murder" which fascinates people and makes the crime genre so popular. They can experience terror at arms length, "by proxy", yet know all will be well in the end, as order will be restored through the main character/detective. "They know the moral centre will hold." But above all he considers his novels as "entertainments, quoting Graham Greene. He makes no grandiose claims for them beyond that.

He came to writing late in life, six years ago to be precise. The beginning was "shattering in its banality". Like most journalists, he had been toying with the idea of "the book" for years. Then one evening he was talking about this to the author Rose Doyle, who said "if you don't start doing it, you are never going to do it". He sat at his Amstrad and wrote a 100,000 word novel. It was "unwieldy, worthy, opinionated, turgid", and rejected by six publishers.

He started again, and A Kind of Homecoming was born. He writes between three and five hours a day. Maeve Binchy told him "you must write every day", and he does, regarding that as "a great piece of advice". His belief is that writing is above all a craft, "and should be approached like making shoes or whatever. You just have to sit there. There's a whole reservoir of ideas in everybody. It's quite amazing, what comes out when you open the tap."

HIS work in progress was begun just before Christmas. He sat down and wrote the line "There was a gale blowing the night Larry Dowdall was killed." Though half way through writing the novel now, he has only just recently realised himself who the murderer is. He enjoys that sort of journey; gets "a great kick" out of it. It is "very very fulfilling, very rewarding, very enjoyable, but it is hard work". As with any craft it gets easier with practice however. Which is probably why he is now thinking of trying something different. Another genre perhaps.

Meanwhile A Stone of the Heart, his second novel (now out in Mandarin paperback), has been receiving glowing reviews in the US, where it was published in November. Megarry's fame spreads.