Feature: SILVER’S CITY by Maurice Leitch

James Doyle of Turnpike Books had a terrific article in the Irish Times last week, explaining why he has republished Maurice Leitch’s SILVER’S CITY, aka ‘the novel that pioneered Northern noir.’ To wit:

Once it seemed that Northern Ireland only produced poets, now it seems to have as many crime novelists as Scandinavia. Brian McGilloway has explained the emergence of these writers: “In the absence of a Truth Commission in Northern Ireland, fiction is the closest we will come to an understanding of the past.”
  Silver’s City began that process. Maurice Leitch created a recognisable Belfast where the motives of his characters are ambiguous and arbitrary. He brought an authenticity to the conflict in Northern Ireland that undermined the lazy clichés that had been applied until then. Leitch’s Belfast is seedy and exhausted, the world of a Graham Greene novel rather than anything that we find in Jack Higgins. The paramilitaries of Silver’s City meet around kitchen tables, they reflect the domesticity and “neighbourly murder” (in Seamus Heaney’s phrase) of Northern Ireland’s violence, the casualness of a war where your enemy lives a few streets away and the only planning needed to kill someone was to knock on their door.

  For the rest of the piece, clickety-click here …

Publication: SILVER’S CITY by Maurice Leitch

Turnpike Books republish Maurice Leitch’s SILVER’S CITY, which won the Whitbread Prize on its original publication in 1981, describing it as ‘one of the most seminal fictional portraits of the Troubles’ and the novel which ‘introduced a new authenticity to the literature of Northern Ireland’. Quoth the blurb elves:

Belfast is Silver’s city. The city always made you pay for your dreams. Silver Steele, the folk-hero who fired the first shot of the Troubles, escapes from a prison cell into a city where he is remembered only in graffiti and finds a world where he is a symbol of a cause he no longer belongs to. Silver discovers that he has swapped a cell for the illusion of freedom: he is now the prisoner of Galloway, one of a new generation of gunmen. Against the background of a city at war, Silver and Galloway engage in a private duel to the death.

  For more on Maurice Leitch, clickety-click here …