Eoin McNamee's wonderful novel is at once a gripping thriller and a danse macabre through a shadowy world of corruption and sexual intrigue
Eoin McNamee
A Northern Irish-born novelist whose books centre on death – usually violent – set in Troubles-era Ulster. The Blue Tango concerns the real-life murder of a politician’s daughter
In 1952, Patricia Curran, the 19-year-old daughter of Lancelot Curran, Northern Ireland’s former Attorney General, was found dead, stabbed 37 times. This grisly killing is at the heart of McNamee’s novel and in 2014 the author would return to Lancelot Curran in another novel, Blue Is the Night. As well as grappling with the difficulties of ‘true crime fiction’ McNamee has written espionage thrillers under the pseudonym John Creed, 12:23 about the final days of Princess Diana and scripts for the Netflix series Vikings: Valhalla.
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