Nothing whatever to do with Parnell, Davitt and Devoy!

Perilously late in life I’ve started to make stuff up.

Sorry, no, I’m not completely losing it (though others might argue to the contrary). Nor have I developed any beguiling conspiracy theories about how cats are really our rulers and clouds contain messages that only the initiated can read. 

It’s just that I’ve written a detective novel called The Red Branch and that the adventurous Etruscan Press in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania (once a big Irish town) have foolishly offered to publish. Why an American publisher? Because it’s set in 19th century America. San Franciso in 1883.  

Did you know that in the 1880s San Francisco unwittingly provided a consignment of dynamite to be used by Irish republicans to blow up some of the more interesting parts of London and remodel the British capital? That bit is 100% true.

That’s the starting point of The Red Branch, a mash up of detective and espionage fiction set in ‘Irish’ San Francisco with a cast of less than charming underworld psychopaths, crooked politicians, eccentric cops and an imported Irish detective trying to keep his head above water, or at least keep his head!      

While most of the story is made up, as good stories should be, there is also a vein of historical fact running through the novel. Some of the characters are real 19th century San Franciscans. There are even a couple of genuine Anglo-Irish spooks. But most of the characters, like the plot, are complete fiction. No footnotes. No citations. 

Ah, the liberation! 

Here’s the blurb.

‘It’s 1883 and the Fenians are at it again, bombing high profile targets in London (Scotland Yard, the House of Commons etc). Some of the dynamite is coming from 6000 miles away in San Francisco. Because he’s Irish, expendable, and an annoying pain in the ass, a young London Metropolitan policeman, Robert Emmet Orpen, is despatched on a secret mission to the city by the Bay. His job is to infiltrate the Fenian front organisation in San Francisco, the Knights of the Red Branch. 

His cover is blown before he sees his first cable car.

He finds himself on the San Francisco police force, competing for the attention of the flamboyant southerner, Sergeant Wellington Campbell, and the feisty Californian medic, Ophelia Williams. He ends up investigating a bloody revenge killing while going ten rounds with the seamier side of California’s murderous politics, and San Francisco’s Irish-American turf wars. 

The Red Branch is part-detective, part-espionage, part-thriller, where the Rogues Gallery of malevolent characters and the sequence of deadly events are often observed with a wry sense of humour, and where you will be trying (and hopefully failing) to get your bearings until the final page.’  

It will be in bookshops at the end of the month and is currently available for pre-order. 

I keep waiting for a bolt of lightning to smite me for my effrontery. But I just didn’t want that mocking inscription on my headstone, you know the one.

‘He talked a lot of shite about a novel, but he never did write it.’