Even without the screen, where they have all featured, Harry Hole, Carl Morck or Harry Bosch have come up so often in crime novels I have read, the ground is more than adequately covered.
If asked to pick a favourite investigator, it would be Sarah Lund from The Killing, arguably the best crime drama ever made. The Scandinavians can do it like no others. The actress who played Inspector Lund in The Killing, Sofie Gråbøl, featured in a drama I just finished watching three days ago. This time, in Chestnut Man: Hide And Seek, she was not a detective but the mother of a murdered teenager.
When, in the past year, I read Night Train by Martin Amis, and was accosted by the statement from Detective Mike Hoolihan, a woman, I Am Police, the thought occurred that the time had come to once again pick up literature outside the novel sphere and read the account of someone who can authentically say I am Police.
Pat Marry, whom I had the pleasure of meeting once, served in An Garda Siochana for thirty years, reaching the rank of Detective Inspector. His police career began at twenty five, eight years after his application to join the force was turned down because he was too young. The young man refused to give up, and forty years ago stepped out from Templemore Garda College and onto a path that would lead him to marry murder, in that he became wedded to solving some of Ireland's most brutal killings. Regular news watchers of a certain age profile will readily recall the high profile murders of Rachel O'Reilly and Adrian Donohue, both of which ended in convictions and life sentences for those found guilty.
Marry takes the reader on a well plotted course while emphasising that at the start of his own career there was no such thing as a well plotted course. Detectives simply had to learn on the job where 'the dead became a natural part of your world.' As a murder detective death by natural causes was not his speciality. Overcoming his natural misgivings about a close proximity to death was solved by 'spending a night with a corpse' and the 'loud farts' that the recently deceased emitted. The author has the knack of making death if not murder per se morbidly entertaining.
The technical evolution of An Garda is revealed through successive investigations. More science-driven expertise became available, the heavy gang tactics being displaced by forensic scrutiny. Whereas the Heavy Gang adopted the motto of the Saigon police - if a suspect is innocent beat him until he is guilty - Marry had neither the need nor the inclination to apply the heavy hand. There would be few scandals flowing from the laser light touch of DNA.
The book covers crimes I no longer remember, if I ever knew about them to begin with. In December 1995 in Belfast, where I lived, the IRA was killing people it viewed as being inhabitants of the world of illicit drugs. So while the killings of Christopher 'Syd' Johnston, Martin McCrory and Fra Collins made the daily news bulletins and updates, the rape-murder in Blanchardstown of Marilyn Rynn the same month may not have registered. Partition had succeeded in ways possibly not conceived of at its inception, placing ear plugs and eye masks along the border.
Whether investigating Mary Gough's death or that of Rachel Callely, Marry enters into a friendship with the deceased, believing they hold the answers to their own murder. The logic, when narrated, induces a chill:
. . . there is a particular silence at a murder scene, one you don't hear anywhere else in your life. It's the silence of goneness, of someone suddenly ripped out of the world when they didn't want to go.
They can't speak but Marry sets out to become the ventriloquist through whom they can detail to the world what caused their demise. A scientific eye might raise a quizzical brow thinking it is a style that places too much emphasis on the subjective. Yet there can be no quarrel with success which is frequently guided by the hunch that interacts with rather than behaves independently of the lab.
Marry is not a firm's man and is unafraid to speak out about the culture and hierarchical deficiencies that in his view prevent the force from achieving better results. Like many bureaucracies, An Garda seems staffed by too many who fail to see what is in front of their noses because their position within the hierarchical structure depends on them not seeing. That failing prioritises loyalty over ability leading to an inhibition of initiative
Pat Marry rings authentic in a way that his colleague on the force, Gerry O'Carroll, never did, either in his columns or media interviews. Brawn over brain, intimidation before intellect led to huge embarrassment for O'Carroll particularly in the Kerry Babies case. Nothing like that dogged Marry's career. Despite my curiosity in the genre, I don't intend picking up O'Carroll's autobiography The Sheriff. Fiction presented as fiction is great. Fiction dressed up as fact - the sort of book that finds its true use value in stabilising an old settee that has lost a caster.
As for the literary output of Pat Marry, told matter of fact, bereft of self serving waffle, the average reader and criminology student will find plenty in these pages to prompt them to go for the remainder of Marry's books. Just don't expect to find them stamped 'Remainder.'
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