The Blue Tango (Ulverscroft Large Print: Thriller) - Hardcover

Mcnamee, Eoin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0708947093 ISBN 13: 9780708947098

Publisher: Ulverscroft, 2003

Synopsis

At 2.20am on 13th November 1952 the body of nineteen-year-old Patricia Curran was carried into the family doctor's surgery. She had been stabbed thirty-seven times... The Curran family were tainted by scandal - Judge Lance Curran, weighed down by gambling debt; Desmond, lost in religious zealotry - and there were rumors of savage disagreements between Patricia and her mother. In a storm of publicity, Chief Superintendent John Capstick uncovers a complex web of deceit. Determined to secure a conviction, his focus falls on a peripheral figure, a young army conscript, Iain Hay Gordon, who finds himself fighting for his life in the shadow of the gallows.

About this title

Review

When the daughter of an Irish judge was found stabbed 37 times in the early hours of 13 November 1952 in the Northern Irish village of Whiteabbey-the setting of Eoine McNamee's The Blue Tango--the story made front page news for almost a year. Iain Gordon, an Englishman stationed at a nearby RAF base was arrested and then tried on circumstantial evidence. Only last year his original conviction was overturned and he was finally released. The real killer of 19-year-old Patricia Curran was never caught and Blue Tango is the tantalising fictional reading of the case.

McNamee's novel, intricately researched and meticulously capturing the tense mood of rural post-war Northern Ireland, makes clear the cultural significance of the Curran murder. Patricia Curran was beautiful, headstrong and in full-blown rebellion against the emotional wasteland of her family and struggling to determine a life for herself. She was like a stormwarning of the changes that would sweep over that future generation of women who were determined their lives would be a contrast to their mothers. But the media spin of the 1950s interpreted her protest merely as sluttish behaviour (she had had lovers, including a married man) and the story was often reduced to a homicidal peep-show.

McNamee dissects the detectives who were involved in the case, has interviewed witnesses and studied the newspaper accounts of the period, but the inner thoughts and motivations of those involved are purely his own invention. His fine talent is in transporting the reader back into that stifling world where a few brave souls were struggling to emerge into the 20th century while fighting off their country's most archaic traditions. --Julie Wheelwright

Review

"McNamee is a writer of such vision and such deft, angry prose that anything by him is worth a look."

About this edition

• Publisher: Ulverscroft
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0708947093
• ISBN 13: 9780708947098
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416