From Fact to Fiction: author Myles Dungan on the ‘joy of just making stuff up!’ for his first work of fiction, The Red Branch.
Let’s be clear about one thing first. This rube (that’s ‘Merican for ‘culchie’) NEVER had any ambition to write the ‘great Irish novel’. While I’m quite partial to reading some of the pretenders to that honour, not even with a gun to my head, a sword dangling over my neck, and a cup of hemlock at my elbow, would I succumb to the temptation to write a literary novel. No ambition in this parish to become an O’Brien (Edna or Kate), a Rooney, a Boyne or a Banville. Just don’t have the bandwidth, the moxie, or the skills required.
Crime? Now that’s a different matter entirely. I’ve been addicted to the detective and espionage genres since I was too young to realise that while Agatha Christie’s plots were as tasty as a Dairy Milk (insufficiently noir for Bournville) enduring her prose was like eating the wrapping paper as well as the chocolate. It was Simenon, even in translation, who introduced me to style. A lesson reinforced by Chandler and Hammett, and much later by Highsmith. Though I must admit I cherished Wodehouse above all of them. You must have read him, surely? The wisecracking, class-conscious creator of the greatest shamus of them all, Reginald Jeeves.
Decades (too many) of reading genre fiction instead of V.S. Naipaul must have warped my brain into all sorts of Byzantine convolutions, preparing my cerebral cortex for a stab at some sort of low rent imitation of my heroes.
Stepping into Fiction
Technically The Red Branch is not my first faltering step into fiction. A thousand or so years ago I got together with a real writer, Jim Lusby, and we jointly fashioned a crime novel, set in my workplace (RTÉ – I did a bit of work for them from time to time, still do) called Snuff. It did quite well, but neither of us earned a penny (it was pre-Euro) from this modest volume because the publisher went bust. We both took that as an omen, in our own very different ways. Jim’s interpretation of the karmic message was that he should keep at it. And he did. Very successfully. Mine was that I was intended for lesser things. Writing about Irish and American history. Which I did, and continue to do, annoying the reading public every two/three years with a new volume. A couple of An Post Irish Book Award nominations (2022 and 2024) allow me to claim the title ‘writer’ without endangering my native Irish self-deprecation by getting ‘notions’. But I didn’t win anything so let’s not lose the run of ourselves here.
I’d like to say that it was Covid which finally allowed me to give the detective genre a lash at an advanced age. However, I’m ashamed to say that my first draft of The Red Branch predated the coronavirus. To put that in perspective, I’ve stolen the names of a number of friends and associates for some of my characters. One is a serving Garda. In the first draft I turned him into a Dublin Metropolitan Police Sergeant. In the published draft, to maintain some verisimilitude, he’s a Superintendent! (Well done Paul). Time flies when you’re trying to get a novel published.
The truth is that I was between self-imposed non-fiction assignments as far back as 2018 and I discovered the joy of just making stuff up. While The Red Branch is set in ‘Irish’ San Francisco in 1883 I hope the inventions are not swamped by the research. Some of the characters are real, some of them are tightly or loosely based on actual desperadoes, cops and/or politicians. But I certainly wouldn’t be taking the manuscript into a PhD viva voce and attempting to justify the historical veracity and accuracy of the narrative. What’s great about it is that I don’t have to. I can be like Neil Jordan in the Michael Collins movie. Well, maybe not quite that cavalier. I did give the manuscript to a friend of mine, a California historian (thanks Glen) to have a look over. He assured me that I hadn’t made a pig’s trotter of the history.
Old habits die hard.
I’m glad about one thing though. I hadn’t read a single word written by Mick Herron before I finished (very very sloooooowly) the first draft. Had I done so I might not even have started. Why aspire to be the monkey when you’ve got an organ grinder like that on the shelves? Fortunately I had finished The Red Branch before I read Slow Horses. Otherwise I might just have deleted it in despair because here was a writer who was far better at doing what I wanted to do, make people giggle at a crime/espionage novel. Instead, because I’d spent quite a bit of time on it (and I probably don’t have much of that left on this mortal coil) I sent it off to Jonathan Williams. Lo and behold, he liked it enough to become its midwife, bless his red dragon Welsh cotton socks. It only took one more human being, Philip ‘Gunner’ Brady of Etruscan Press in Pennsylvania, to look kindly upon it, and here we are. It’s encouraging to think that only two people need to like your work in order for it to get published.
Going from 700+ pages of convoluted Irish history (Land is all that matters, Head of Zeus, 2024) to an ephemeral concoction with two narrators (spoiler alert – one of them is not to be entirely trusted) may seem like a bit of a stretch. But, to state the bleedin’ obvious, both disciplines are about telling stories. It’s just that while one has to meet stringent standards of accuracy the other doesn’t involve hours of archival research and fact checking.
It’s been, to quote the late lamented Cilla Black, ‘a lorra lorra fun’. But I won’t be giving up the day job just yet.
(c) Myles Dungan
About The Red Branch by Myles Dungan:
Your undercover operation is blown before you get to San Francisco. What next? If you’re Orpen, you join the cops. Sort of.
It’s the Fall of 1883. Irish revolutionaries are changing the face of London with American dynamite, and not in a good way. Irish-born London Metropolitan Police Sergeant, Robert Emmet Orpen is sent, badly disguised as a tourist, to San Francisco to prevent at least some of the explosives getting into the wrong hands. He realizes that he may be out of his depth when his cover is blown before he even gets as far as the west coast. Now what does he do? First, he charms his way onto the San Francisco police force, where he is assigned to the coattails of a cynical, ‘larger than life’ Civil War veteran (from the losing side). Then he finds himself caught up in a murder involving one of the two violent Irish factions vying for supremacy in one of the most Irish of American cities. Orpen is going to wish he never heard of the murderous Knights of the Red Branch.
Order your copy of The Red Branch by Myles Dungan online here.
And read more authors on the writing of Historical Crime Fiction on Writing.ie here.
