Saturday, November 3, 2018

Informers in 20th Century Ireland by Angela Duffy

The following article was one on a series in this months Crime Writers Association e-newsletter.  The book had sounded like a fascinating read and was firmly placed on my TBR list some time again.  However, I could not help reproducing the article here for those interested in the author's perspective on writing the book.


I didn’t set out to write a book

Angela Duffy
I didn’t set out to write a book. Even the thesis on which Informers in 20th Century Ireland is based was only an excuse to go on being a hyper-mature student, but then I started a whole series of obsessions – all of which are in the book. I bored other postgraduates with stories (but hey! I had to listen to theirs too), which concept is utterly forbidden to the historian, so I called them case studies instead; my writing style, after many years of writing fiction, wasn’t academic; my research methods were unconventional and consisted mostly of talking to people (many of whom are now old and tried friends); and I’m still not sure why Diane, my supervisor, is still speaking to me. Though after each holiday-cum-research trip to Ireland there was always a summoning email so that she could hear about Sean in Ennis who would laugh when he saw me and say “You’re going to get shot, you know!” or the time I was kidnapped, or my exit from the archives in Dublin for a fire drill completely forgetting that I had a large wodge of precious documents under my arm. In addition I wrote the thesis (and therefore the book) backwards.

As for my case studies: they’re full of skulduggery, secrets and mayhem, all of which I like, and there is a more serious side to the book, as there should be. This is history, it really happened, and a great deal of the collusion and torture I have depicted went on in our name – yours and mine. And its effect on me has been to give me a love of research which just won’t go away – I always think of it as panning for gold: sometimes nothing, sometimes just little bits (never to be despised because one of those little bits consisted of two seemingly identical telegrams providing proof positive of one man’s guilt) and the occasional nugget when you want to dance around the archives shouting “Zoweee!”
And Diane’s final verdict: “If I can survive Angela I can survive anything!”

1 comment:

Family said...

Who is this woman and does she know the families.

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