Come Ye Back, Danny Boy

I don’t know if there’s room in the world – or need, for that matter – for more than one Irish crime writer who hails from Sligo, but I’ll go ahead anyway and let you know that Dan Kavanagh re-releases the Duffy novels early next month. Here’s the blurb elves on the first, aka DUFFY (Orion):

Things aren’t going so well for Brian McKechnie. His wife was attacked in their home, his cat was brutally killed and now a man with a suspiciously erratic accent is blackmailing him. When the police fail spectacularly at finding out who’s after him, McKechnie engages the services of London’s most unusual private eye. Duffy is a detective like no other. A bisexual ex-policeman with a phobia of ticking watches and a penchant for Tupperware. But what he lacks in orthodoxy he makes up for in street-smart savvy and no-nonsense dealings. Intrigued by McKechnie’s dilemma and the apparent incompetency of his ex-colleagues, Duffy heads to his old patch, the seedy underbelly of Soho, to begin inquiries of his own. Helped by some shady characters from his past, Duffy discover that while things have changed in the years since he was working the area, the streets are still mean and the crooks walk arm in arm with the blues. Full to bursting with sex, violence and dodgy dealings, DUFFY is a gripping and entertaining crime novel with a distinctly different and entirely lovable anti-hero.

  So who is Dan Kavanagh, I don’t quite hear you breathlessly ask?

Dan Kavanagh was born in County Sligo in 1946. Having devoted his adolescence to truancy, venery and petty theft, he left home at 17 and signed on as a deckhand on a Liberian tanker. After jumping ship at Montevideo, he roamed across the Americas taking a variety of jobs: he was a steer-wrestler, a waiter-on-roller-skates at a drive-in eatery in Tucson, and a bouncer in a gay bar in San Francisco. He is currently working in London at jobs he declines to specify, and lives in north Islington.

  There you have it. There’s an excerpt from DUFFY to be had over at Dan Kavanagh’s web-lair here, where – curiously – it is suggested that if you like the work of Dan Kavanagh, you might want to try that of Booker Prize-winning author Julian Barnes. Well, why not?

On Putting The Boot Into The Booker Prize

I like to think that Dan Kavanagh got mouldy drunk on Guinness somewhere in London last night. It’s been many years since I’ve read Julian Barnes, who last night won the 2011 Man Booker prize for his latest novel - or novella - THE SENSE OF AN ENDING, and while I vaguely remember liking both FLAUBERT’S PARROT and A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 10½ CHAPTERS, I don’t remember an awful lot more about them. Which probably says a lot more about me than it does about Julian Barnes and his novels.
  On the other hand, I do remember hugely enjoying PUTTING THE BOOT IN, a crime novel Barnes published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, not least because said Dan Kavanagh’s official biography made him out to be something of a rogue, and one who hailed from my home patch of County Sligo into the bargain. Anyway, I did a short write-up of PUTTING THE BOOT IN - which is only one of the Dan Kavanagh novels; there were four in total, as far as I know - back in 2008, which you can find roundabout here.
  So there you have it - a Booker Prize winner with a rather decent half-canon of crime novels under his belt, as announced by Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5 and a thriller writer who chaired the judging panel. A cunning black ops sortie by the crime fraternity? Have we shuffled another step closer to the day when a fully-fledged crime writer scoops the establishment’s glittering prize? You’d hope not, or at least I’d hope not - but it is starting to look like an inevitability …

Lost Classic # 264: Putting The Boot In by Dan Kavanagh

A phlegmatic London PI, Duffy is commissioned by the manager of his local professional football club to investigate a series of unfortunate incidents that seem designed to foil the Athletic’s bid to escape relegation to the Fourth Division. In tandem with that plot runs Duffy’s investigation of himself, as the bisexual detective examines his place in the scheme of things when the threat of AIDS looms large over London’s swinging scene of the early ’80s. Beautifully understated, as you might expect when you learn that Dan Kavanagh – allegedly born in Sligo in 1946 and a Sunday football goalkeeper since his failed trial with Accrington Stanley – is in fact a pseudonym for Julian Barnes, Putting The Boot In (1987) features bone-dry wit (“Nor do I,” said Duffy, though as a matter of professional principle he never put anything past anybody.”), a knowing familiarity with crime fiction tropes and very English kitchen-sink dramas, and a delightfully accurate portrayal of the quiet desperation of both Third Division and Sunday league football. The second of a quartet of Duffy stories, this is long out of print but well worth grubbing around the second-hand shops for – and there is a four-novel omnibus available on Amazon UK.- Michael McGowan