Book review: A salacious tale of murder on the border of fact and fiction

Eoin McNamee has always been concerned with the dark, seedy underbelly of crime in and around the North.

His debut novel, Resurrection Man, released 30 years ago and to be reissued by Riverrun in September, was turned into a film starring John Hannah and James Nesbitt, and was loosely based on the Shankill Butchers. He was Booker Prize-nominated for 2001’s The Blue Tango, based on the 1952 murder of Patricia Curran, daughter of a Northern Irish judge. 

The Bureau is McNamee’s eighth novel. He says the idea for his latest book was sparked by a conversation with a producer on Netflix’s Vikings: Valhalla, where he worked in the writers' room. He mentioned how he had owned a bureau de change on the border in the 1990s.

“That’s like The Sopranos,” she said. So it was, he told the Irish Independent in 2021.

Indeed, McNamee is a character in The Bureau. Owen is the son of the owner of the titular bureau de change, a front for money laundering, and is kidnapped by some clients, who are owed money. Owen had “become accustomed to the smells of the bag over his head, the organic reek. There was a smell he feared more. Earth and worm mould”.

Needless to say, Owen survives. He’s truthful about what happened. Had they harmed him? No.

“He seldom thought about it. He did not wake from sleep with a start. But something was forestalled in him then, another life that he might have had, nothing seemed as much of consequence afterwards.”

The real McNamee says: “My writing has always been concerned with real events and making novels around them. In this book, for the first time, they aren’t just public events but events specific to me and my family. There has always been blood on the floor in the books but this time some of the blood is mine.”

Ultimately, Owen is a side character in the book. It begins with Paddy Farrell and his paramour Lorraine Farrell, found dead in an upstairs bedroom. A murder-suicide where it seems she had deliberately set out to leave a trail.

McNamee charts their tragic demise. Lorraine had thought she could walk among the wannabe gangsters, rogue lawyers, nervous policemen, and alcoholic judges that pepper this world. She was bored of the “local boys and their cars and how they liked to have you pinned”, where you’re “always marked”.

Certain desires ran unchecked in the border country, writes McNamee. What you coveted, you took. But Lorraine is the other woman. When Paddy is jailed, she is not allowed to visit him. His weekends are spent with his wife, going for a steak dinner and line dancing, Lorraine watching them from her car. The feeling in her lingers, grows, is prodded by others. Their demise is fated.

The bureau, meanwhile, is a rented shopfront on Water Street in Newry in the early 80s. There’s a gangland feel to it, an “aristocracy of ruin”.

A host of characters passes through its doors, all interested in one thing: money. The “getting of it, the love of it, the spending of it. If money had a religion, then this place would be its church, its grimy roadside chapel, godless.”

The Bureau is salacious and engrossing, its action, like the border roads, illicit, as McNamee builds his gritty world. Crimes and murders are plainly stated but McNamee utilises what was read about in the Sunday World and what is told to Vincent Browne to remind us these are real people, these are real deaths. 

Given his writing work with TV, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see McNamee turn this from book to screen.