Sam Smyth has broken more good stories than this columnist has had healthy breakfasts. The most tenacious of journalists, he is also the most affable, which is why on numerous occasions over the years he could be observed lending a conspiratorial ear in the Horseshoe Bar as spin doctors breathed sweet somethings into his ear, and two hours later regaling fellow hacks in Mulligan's of Poolbeg Street with glorious gossip.
His unerring journalistic instincts and his sheer likeability were no doubt also the reasons for the large turnout in McGrattan's of Fitzwilliam Lane the other night. The occasion was the publication of his new book, Thanks a Million Big Fella, and while the pedant shudders at the missing comma from that title (shame on you, Blackwater Press), the aficionado of honest muck-raking revels in this heady chronicle of those bizarre bedfellows, Charles J. Haughey and Ben Dunne.
Moya Doherty of Radio Ireland and Riverdance (about which Sam has also written a book) was scheduled to perform the official launch, and I'm sure she accomplished this in fine style, but the party atmosphere was such that she hadn't done so ninety minutes into the evening, at which point your columnist had to depart - leaving behind him Michael McDowell, Eamon Dunphy, John McColgan and more journalists than you'd find at a Presidential inauguration or an Aer Lingus junket.
Among those wishing Sam well was Emily O'Reilly, political correspondent for the Sunday Business Post. Will she be returning to her other job as presenter on Radio Ireland, from which she has taken extended leave, or have we heard The Last
Word from her on the beleaguered station? She wasn't saying, and indeed seemed more preoccupied with her forthcoming book.
Entitled Veronica Guerin: The Life and Death of a Reporter and due from Vintage in January, this looks like being genuinely controversial, taking a provocative view not just of the murdered journalist's obsession with the criminal underworld but also of the use made of it.
The British heavies have already started their Books of the Year supplements, and a few Irish novels are receiving prominent mention - chief among them Anne Haverty's One Day As a Tiger and John Banville's The Untouchable.
Max Davidson in the Daily Telegraph describes the former as "the most charming debut for years . . . not an anatomy of sexual perversion - more a meditation on the human heart," while Carol Birch in the Independent waxes just as enthusiastic, declaring it "my favourite novel of the year . . . A man's fixation with a sheep may not sound like promising material for fiction, but . . . Haverty has produced one of the most acutely observed depictions of rural Ireland of recent years".
In the Telegraph, John Coldstream says of The Untouchable that "no novel burrowed deeper beneath my skin", and he asserts that "prose of great elegance, applied to a sardonic narrative, created an atmosphere at once austere, chilling and utterly believable". In the Sunday Times, Ruth Rendell confesses that "lately I have found John Banville elusive, but in The Untouchable he was unerring".
Other Irish books meeting with approval include Brian Moore's The Magician's Wife ("an elegant, perfectly constructed fable about sex, power and illusion," according to A.S. Byatt), Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes and (from A.S. Byatt again) Paul Muldoon's Selected Poems: "He really is an original genius . . . witty and profound."
Jeremy Lewis in the Independent opts for another Northern poet, Derek Mahon who, in The Yellow Book, "proves again that he is the best Irish poet of the Heaney generation, elegant, urbane and classical in form. No doubt his preference for writing about metropolitan angst in Paris or New York rather than peatcutting or sectarian strife has contributed to his undervaluation."
It's strife rather than peat-cutting that deters our nearest neighbours, according to Terry Eagleton in the Independent, though I think he's overstating the case somewhat when he roundly declares that "the English tend not to visit Ireland much, perhaps fearful that they will get their heads shot off in Connemara". Hmm, the thousands upon thousands of English people who visit our shores each year might disagree.
Anyway, Terry makes this fatuous statement by way of prefacing his enthusiasm for An Atlas of the Irish Rural Land- scape, published by Cork University Press, which he says was "previously a rather sleepy little outfit" that has now been "galvanised by an enterprising new editor".
Last, but certainly not least, in the Telegraph William Trevor has nothing but praise for Mary Kenny's Goodbye to Catholic Ireland: "She misses nothing in her long, lively trawl through a golden age and its eventual tarnishing . . . a marvellous book, informative, lucid and thankfully free of academic pretension."
The Books Upstairs sale is officially over, but some of the books remain. Of especially good value the day I was there were David Thomson's excellent Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles, reduced from £20 to £9.99, and John Updike's In the Beauty of the Lilies, marked down from £16 to £6.99. Drop in - they might still be there, along with other intriguing titles.