The Blue Tango

Eoin McNamee

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Review

In 1953 Iain Hay Gordon was convicted of the murder of Patricia Curran, nineteen-year-old daughter of a prominent Northern Ireland figure, Judge Lance Curran.  As a result, Gordon spent seven years in a mental institution.  In December 2000, the Appeal Court decided that his confession to the police should be ruled out, and overturned his conviction.

Eoin McNamee begins by setting out the facts of the case – a notorious miscarriage of justice - and then his narrator moves into the realms of speculation, imagining the shadowy world inhabited by the victim, Patricia Curran.  She is high-spirited, has a reputation in town – is seen as a loose woman.  And her family: Judge lance Curran, a cold and ambitious man, deeply in debt; her mother, a neurotic, with whom she has screaming rows; her brother Desmond, the barrister, who spends his time trying to save sinners at the bar and in bars, a man who makes no attempt to conceal his disapproval of his sister’s life.

Iain Hay Gordon, a shy and lonely conscript, perhaps a homosexual, and prone to delusions of grandeur, is approached one day by Desmond who gives him a religious leaflet.  This leads to a lunch at the Currans and a meeting with Patricia.  When she is brutally murdered not long afterwards, the hapless Gordon is excited by his connection with the drama, and so makes himself an easy scapegoat for the police, who desperately need a conviction.

This is not a whodunit, it is a novel about the characters involved in a tragedy, in the strong (rather than the everyday) sense of the word.  The spare style of the prose can only emphasize the awful and inexorable sequence of events, in which the lives of Patricia Curran and Iain Hay Gordon become entwined.  The narrator does not offer a solution to the crime, but points the reader to a number of clues.  A wonderfully atmospheric and sinister book, every bit as compelling as a first-rate thriller. - review by Dan Fenton