It’s all black and white for Darragh

THE Polka Dot Girl is the new novel by Crusheen-based author Darragh McManus. Offering a unique twist on the classic noir-style mystery, Darragh’s latest book takes the reader from the 3D, highly saturated imagery they are used to and transposes them back to a black and white world that is inhabited entirely by females.

 

For this work of fantasy fiction, Darragh drew inspiration from Humphrey Bogart and Raymond Chandler and admits that while writing The Polka Dot Girl, he was visualising everything in black and white.

“It’s another crime novel but mystery novel would be closer to what it is. It is my attempt to write a sort of old-style Raymond Chandler mystery novel. It is more like a book version of the Humphrey Bogart movies. Everyone likes those old black and white movies, with the fast-talking detectives and people in fedora hats and chainsaws. I was almost visualising it in black and white when I was writing it.

“I thought it would be interesting to take the macho environment of a noir detective story (a la Chandler, Hammett and co), instantly recognisable to all of us, and make all the players women. So you have the iconic, almost stereotypical, noir characters –world-weary detective, cynical coroner, self-destructive victim, assured femme fatale, psychotic killers and so on – and they’re women, every one. They act and talk like these characters always do – tenderly, violently, bitterly but they’re women. There is an intriguing tension between the darkness and edge of noir and the fact that the protagonists are female,” Darragh explained.

The main character in the book is detective Eugenie Auf der Maur. Gutsy, smart and likeable, ‘Genie’ thought she knew the strange, all-female world of Hera inside-out. She was wrong and following the discovery of Madeleine Greenhill’s bludgeoned body, Genie gets drawn into a labyrinth of sex and money, power and religion, double-cross and corruption. Nothing is as it seems and nobody can be trusted as she becomes obsessed with finding the girl’s killer.

The book begins with her receiving a call to go to a murder scene by the docks, where Madeleine Greenhill’s body has been pulled out of the water.

“It turns out that Madeleine is the daughter of the Queen bee of Hera City. So Genie is thinking this is going to get really complicated politically because this woman holds so much power over the city. She starts investigating it and it does get very complicated,” Darragh said.
Despite having to write for female characters, Darragh said it was really easy to do and said if he was to substitute male names for female names “the story would probably still the same. I thought it would be interesting because those books are full of tough characters”.
He explains that typically in the Chandler novels there would be violence, death, fast talking and gun slinging and women characters in the books traditionally would be mothers or in a caring role.

“I thought it would be an interesting twist to write like this. Where the idea comes from is I’ve read so many interviews and women are always going on about how there are no good roles for them outside of playing girlfriends, mothers or the granny. So I thought ‘I’ll write something that has nothing but female characters’,” he said.

Darragh is from Tipperary originally but settled in Crusheen, where he has been living for the past 10 years. He currently works as a freelance journalist. This is his second novel. The previous one, entitled Even Flow, was released in September and was a thriller about a gang of vigilantes in New York.

Darragh started work on The Polka Dot Girl in 2008, when he wrote the opening chapters but then began working on it seriously in early 2009 and landed a publishing deal in 2010.

He is looking forward to seeing how the book is received. “This book is the kind of thing that people will either really like or they really won’t like at all. It is fantasy. There is no historical background, no quasi-scientific explanation for how a society of women can evolve or have children. The place just is. Men aren’t mentioned or ignored or conspicuous by their absence: there are no men, there never were, the issue is irrelevant.

“Similarly, while characters in a relationship are by necessity with another woman, there’s no homosexuality per se, because there’s no heterosexuality because there are no men. Hera is a Gotham City-type place, murky and glamorous and evocative, outside of time and geography. Stylistically, The Polka Dot Girl is more lyrical and reflective than hard-boiled. It’s partly an homage to classic mystery fiction but with its own aesthetic and distinctive voice. It is its own book and its own world,” he explained.

Darragh is never far away from exercising his pen and has a few other books in the offing. “You are always tipping away on something. The last book I finished was a young adult novel. It had fantastic elements in the story but it is set in a modern Irish townland. It has elements of Irish mythology.

“I’d describe it as Fionn McCumhaill meets Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That’s finished and out with publishers at the moment and I’m working on a second young adult book and on a novel as well,” he concluded.