A brace, misty morning at Lough Neagh, Northern Ireland, near the border with the Republic of Ireland. Inspector Celcius Daly is called after a fisherman finds a dead man. This is Brian Carey, a police officer from across the border, and the trail leads to the small town of Dreesh, where Carey detected a smuggling ring.
The fog through which Daly stumbles at the beginning of the novel becomes the central metaphor of Stranded. The longer Daly's investigation lasts, the more obscure the case becomes. The Irish writer Anthony J. Quinn has his policeman in his fifth case (the first translated into German) immersed in a mystically charged atmosphere. Daly joins the line of the great lonely cops of literary history. His life escaped him after his father's death and the failure of his marriage, in the job he is an outcast since he found out against a supervisor, who then killed himself: "He wondered if he became a workaholic, not to the fact to face the fact that his life had no goal at all. "
Inspired by sleep deprivation, guilt-ridden, and ghost-haunted by Inspector Celcius Daly, the reality of the tattered island of Ireland, still firmly in the grip of its bloody recent history, is once again jeopardizing its fragile peace from approaching Brexit is.
Eileen Quinn / Polar
Author Anthony J. Quinn
The novels of the Daly series play in the borderland between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which has played a central role in the exit negotiations since the Brexit vote in 2016. About strategies such as the backstop and the so-called "hard limit" along with the fears that old conflicts could break out again, was also in this country much to read. Less well-known is that gangsters have the border area firmly in hand. "Bandit Country" is called the area, and especially with the smuggling of gasoline and fuel oil can make a fortune.
Around a dozen gangs are said to be operating in "Bandit Country", it is said that "Stranded" is about a gang that operates out of the fictional town of Dreesh. The organization is led by Tom Morgan, a former IRA member. Its former commanders, "those once-cocky, violent monsters" who, since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, had left the "morass behind to take up posts in the highest political circles" still hold their protective hands over Morgan.
The already explosive melee situation in the border area, where the gangsters have long been prepared for all eventualities of Brexit, is fueled by the fact that the area has never recovered from the catastrophic consequences of the real estate crisis. Impressively, Quinn demonstrates how entire communities can be corrupted, how the inhabitants have lost their morality and self-esteem with their wealth acquired on the spot. Dreesh looks like a ghost town, populated by living dead: "This village is a single wasteland, one bankruptcy followed the next, all were carried away, and the only work left was the digging of graves for the suicide victims."
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DISPLAY
Anthony J. Quinn
aground
Publishing company:
Polar Verlag
Pages:
300
Price:
EUR 20,00
Translated by:
Robert Brack
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It is an extremely bleak scenario that Quinn designs, a complicated web of interdependence between politics, police and organized crime that is becoming increasingly unclear who manipulates whom and for what purpose. Corruption is omnipresent, loyalty and betrayal become a business model. There is no limit to the greed and willingness to do anything in this no-man's-land to somehow get a piece of the pie.
And Daly, that broken hero, this shadowman who investigates in a shadow world, is increasingly desperate because the truth about the colleague's death seems so close but still intangible. Why is not Morgan, whose criminal activities everyone knows, not arrested long ago? Does this have something to do with the mysterious Detective Hunter, who seems to have all the strings in his hand, but makes himself as rare as Samuel Beckett's Godot? And what role does the Green and Blue Fishing Club, an organization of policemen from both sides of the border, seem to pursue in addition to their hobby of fishing, also tangible financial interests?
Ireland, the green island, the longing country of many, especially German tourists - at Quinn it turns into a hellhole, its color palette consists of mud brown and dirty white with occasional sting of blood red. With "Stranded" Quinn has managed a Noir, as he can not be darker, more complex and more contemporary.