Authors: Michael Russell

The City of Strangers (52 page)

BOOK: The City of Strangers

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When Seán Russell was arrested in Detroit, as a potential threat to George VI, then across the river in Windsor, Ontario, he was with the Clan na Gael leader Joseph McGarrity. It was McGarrity who put together the IRA Sabotage Plan in Britain with Russell, and McGarrity whose visits to Berlin laid the foundation of IRA links with German Intelligence when war came. The character of Dominic Carroll draws significantly on McGarrity, but as I have no reason to think McGarrity’s personal relationships were as bitterly played out as are my character’s, it seemed unreasonable to use his name. The IRA’s ciphers did use lines from a cheap edition of Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter
as a basis for a transposition code, certainly into the late 1920s; messages using this code were not decrypted until a few years ago.

Conspiracies involving the Duke of Windsor, the abdicated Edward VIII, are ten a penny. This one suggests no involvement by him of course. The duke’s longstanding admiration for Hitler was well known, as was his predilection for keeping company with people plotting against Britain and his brother, even if he didn’t plot himself. There were those on the fringes of Irish Republicanism, especially in America, who thought quite irrationally that the ex-king’s pro-Nazism somehow translated into sympathy for Irish Republican aims. Errol Flynn was one of them, though he may have been mixing the duke up with King Richard returning from the crusades and himself with Robin Hood. What I remember is a conversation with someone who was at the time the queen’s press secretary. He said that while Queen Elizabeth would ‘carry her silence on it to the grave’, what she could never forgive the Duke of Windsor for had nothing to do with the abdication; it was his willingness, declared repeatedly to a ragbag of Britain’s enemies before and during the war, to replace her father ‘in the interests of peace’.

Owen Harris is a fictional version of Edward Ball, tried and convicted of the murder of his mother, Lavinia Ball, in 1936; he was found guilty but insane. The circumstances were very much as the story describes, down to the details, including the undiscovered body dumped into the sea. Ball, like Harris, was an occasional employee of the Gate Theatre, and the argument that may have provoked the attack on his mother was about her refusal to fund his boat ticket for a Gate tour, though it was to Egypt not America. The first Gate tour to the US didn’t happen until 1948. Ball was eventually set free but among campaigners for his release many believed him innocent. I don’t know what Micheál Mac Liammóir made of Edward Ball, but he was probably very glad that, unlike Owen Harris, Ball never did make it on tour.

Acknowledgements

As before, the number and variety of books, etc. that contributed something to this story is greater than I can remember; this time even pieces of jazz. There is one particular book, however, that has contributed uniquely both to the atmosphere and the substance of the story.
Decoding the IRA
, by Thomas G. Mahon and James Gillogly, deciphers and contextualises a collection of IRA messages, many of them between Ireland and America, which have not been read since they were sent in the 1920s. The book is a masterful work of decryption that could almost certainly not have been achieved without the imaginative use of modern computers, but it is its vivid re-creation of time and place through these cryptic communications, and its window into the IRA, that is unlike anything else. Only the message I have quoted at the beginning of the book is real, but in the casual content of that message, ‘annihilation of all spies’, it sets the tone of
The City of Strangers
. Another remarkable book of immersion is John Roy Carlson’s
Under Cover
, an investigative journalist’s contemporary journey through the pro-German and pro-fascist underground of America in the late 1930s. A book to read simply because it is a remarkable piece of writing is Richard Cobb’s
A Classical Education
;
it is the story of the friendship between the English historian Cobb and Edward Ball, the character Owen Harris is based on. It is the content of this book that enabled me to write Harris as I have, though there is far more strangeness to find in Cobb’s writing. The poem declaimed by Owen Harris in the Dizzy Club is Louis MacNeice’s ‘Bagpipe Music’
.
As ever, the archive of
The
Irish Times
provided starting points throughout that only the atmosphere of its inky pages can give;
The
New York Times
delivered the underwhelming review of
John Bull’s Other Island
that so infuriates Micheál Mac Liammóir. The story Tom Gillespie reads in
The Magnet
is one of the last Greyfriars’ tales Frank Richards published before the outbreak of war. Full of the usual absurdities and Bunterisms as it is, it also captures, in a boat full of schoolboy friends floating lazily up the River Thames in the bright summer of 1939, something of England that, for better or worse, was about to disappear forever. But it is, as always, the deep countryside of West Wicklow around Baltinglass that remains, wherever Stefan Gillespie may happen to find himself, somehow at the heart of it all.

About the Author

Michael Russell read English at Oxford before spending three years working in farming in North Devon, trying to get someone to pay him to write. He worked for Yorkshire Television as a Script Editor, on
Emmerdale Farm
, working his way up to Series Producer. He also spent several years in the Drama Department, first as Script Consultant then Producer, before leaving ITV to write full-time. He was a regular contributor to
Midsomer Murders
and scripted the last ever
Touch of Frost
which topped the ratings. He lives in Ireland with his family, where he is doing what he always wanted to do, writing novels.

Find out more about Michael Russell and his writing:

www.michaelrussellforgottencities.com

Facebook.com/michaelrussellforgottencities

@forgottencities

Also by Michael Russell

City of Shadows

Copyright

Published by HarperCollins
Publishers Ltd

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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins
Publishers
2013

Michael Russell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9781847563477

Ebook Edition © October 2013 ISBN: 9780007460076

Version: 2013-10-03

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