It doesn’t take long, reading Caimh McDonnell, to work out that his detective intends to settle things with a hurling stick. Not as a figure of speech, but an actual ash hurley. Simple. Effective. Brilliant.
McDonnell spent years handing gags to other people, writing for Have I Got News for You and Mock the Week and a fair amount of children’s TV. He created an animated series about a squad of crime-fighting pets and picked up a children’s BAFTA nomination for it. Then, in 2016, he decided to try his hand at writing novels.
A Man With One of Those Faces introduced Paul Mulchrone, a professional people-pleaser cursed with a face everybody half-recognises. He’s joined by Brigit Conroy, a nurse considerably too qualified for the chaos heading her way, and Bunny McGarry, the Garda detective with the hurley. What catches people out is how straight the crime plays. McDonnell didn’t write a comedy with a corpse dropped in for convenience. He penned a proper crime novel, plotted with care, which also happens to be very funny.
I’ve spent a good chunk of my career playing the same game, albeit from a different island. My version of Bunny is called Clement, but there’s one glaring difference between the two men, namely Clement claims he was murdered in 1975. The tagline from the original book, Who Sent Clement? nicely sums up the hook: A tale of debts, threats, and a dead man in double denim.
If you’ve already exhausted Caimh’s back catalogue and you’re looking for similar books, there’s a lot of overlap with my Clement series. However, if you’re looking for something a little different, might I recommend taking a nose around my Start Here page? And for American readers, of which Bunny has a great many, you’ll find all of my books on Amazon US, and they’re free in Kindle Unlimited. And, for audiobook fans, they’re all available in speaky format too.
Anyway. Three writers who belong on the same shelf, and what each of them does that McDonnell does.
Colin Bateman did it first
Dan Starkey wrecks his own life early doors. He’s a Belfast newspaper columnist, married, permanently thirsty, and at a party he kisses a student called Margaret. His wife Patricia leaves him. Then come the murders, the mistaken identities, and a fortnight of the worst luck ever visited on a man with a hangover, during which the wisecracking never once lets up. In that city, at that point in its history, the alternative didn’t bear thinking about.
Divorcing Jack arrived in 1995, won Bateman the Betty Trask Prize, and reached the screen three years later with David Thewlis in the lead. Seven more Starkey novels followed across the next sixteen years, and the register barely shifts in any of them.
The McDonnell link is the amateur. Starkey has no business investigating a murder, in much the same way Paul Mulchrone has no business investigating anything at all, and both men keep making things measurably worse every time they open their mouths. Bateman also proved the thing McDonnell would prove again twenty years later: you can be extremely funny about a place where people are genuinely dying, provided you never once pretend the dying is the joke.
Christopher Brookmyre, and the crime novel with a grudge
His first book is called Quite Ugly One Morning, which does a fair bit of the work before you’ve opened it.
Brookmyre spent his twenties subbing copy for The Scotsman and the Edinburgh Evening News, then published the novel in 1996 and won the Critics’ First Blood Award for it. His hero, Jack Parlabane, is an investigative journalist with famously relaxed opinions about other people’s windows. The Scots file this sort of book under Tartan Noir, a phrase suggesting a shortbread tin rather than a genre, and Brookmyre has spent thirty years filling it with fraud, private healthcare, political rot, and men who thoroughly deserve whatever is coming down the road towards them.
Boiling a Frog won the Sherlock Award for Best Comic Detective in 2000. If somebody handed me an award with that wording on it, I’d hang it in the downstairs loo where visitors have a captive minute to admire it.
Where he meets McDonnell is anger. Both write comedy about things they’re properly cross about, and the jokes hit harder for having something solid underneath them. Parlabane and Bunny McGarry would take an instant dislike to one another, then spend the rest of the night drinking and discovering they’re annoyed about exactly the same people.
Carl Hiaasen: thirty years of research, none of it wasted
Hiaasen did three decades at the Miami Herald as an investigative reporter, chasing crooked developers, dodgy doctors, and men moving cargo through the mangroves at unsociable hours. Most reporters come out of a run like that with an ulcer and a drawer of notes nobody will print. Hiaasen came out of it with the Florida novels.
Tourist Season landed in 1986 and set the template: bought politicians, con men, developers pouring concrete over something that ought to have been left alone, and, across the later books, a former state governor who walked out of public life to live in the swamp and eat whatever the traffic leaves behind. I’ve wondered more than once how he manages his laundry out there. It occupies me more than it should.
He’s the least tender writer of the three. McDonnell will stop a scene dead to let you feel something; Hiaasen would sooner feed the man to an alligator and press on. The machinery matches, though. Both build a novel out of enormous, appalling, thoroughly enjoyable people, wind them all up, and let them run headlong into one another. And underneath the farce Hiaasen means every word of it about the wetlands, in the same way McDonnell means every word of it about the Dublin nobody photographs.
The wrong tool, wielded with total confidence
Line the four of them up, and the pattern shows itself. Not one of these heroes carries the correct equipment. Bunny has an ash hurley and a warrant card he treats as a gentle suggestion. Starkey has a hangover and a column nobody important reads. Parlabane has a press pass and a talent for other people’s locks. Hiaasen’s crowd have the swamp and whatever happens to be floating in it. None of them would survive a fortnight in a proper procedural.
That’s the whole point.
Which brings me, not remotely by accident, to Clement. In Who Sent Clement?, Beth Baxter is running a second-hand bookshop and planning a wedding when her fiancé’s past turns up wanting a word. What arrives to help is a foul-mouthed gangland fixer in double denim who last revised his methods somewhere around the three-day week, insists he died in 1975, and flatly refuses to tell her who sent him. Seven days, one increasingly frantic chase across London, and by any sensible measure the wrong man entirely for the job.
He’s also the only one who turns up. You can meet him here.
Frequently Asked Questions
What kind of books does Caimh McDonnell write?
Caimh McDonnell writes darkly comic crime fiction, most famously the Dublin Trilogy, an expanding run of novels and novellas set in his home city. A former stand-up and television comedy writer, he pairs properly plotted crime with laugh-out-loud humour, anchored by Garda detective Bunny McGarry. He also writes the McGarry Stateside books, and, as C.K. McDonnell, the comic-fantasy Stranger Times series.
Which authors are most like Caimh McDonnell?
For the same mix of real crime and real comedy, try Colin Bateman (the Dan Starkey novels, starting with Divorcing Jack), Christopher Brookmyre (the Jack Parlabane series), and Carl Hiaasen (the Florida novels, from Tourist Season onwards). Keith A Pearson’s Clement comedy mysteries, beginning with Who Sent Clement?, sit comfortably on the same shelf.
Where should I start with Keith A Pearson’s books?
If you enjoy Caimh McDonnell, Who Sent Clement? is the obvious first stop, since it drops an ordinary woman into a chaotic week alongside a blunt, larger-than-life outsider who swings first and explains later. For a personalised suggestion, the Start Here page on keithapearson.co.uk will point you towards the right book for your taste.
Do the Clement books share Caimh McDonnell’s humour?
A great deal of it, yes. Both writers keep the comedy high without ever softening the crime, and both build their books around an unfiltered outsider who solves problems entirely his own way. The difference is a thread of the unexplained running through the Clement novels: Clement claims he died in 1975 and has returned as penance, which puts a redemption story underneath the laughs.
Are Keith A Pearson’s books available in the US and on Kindle Unlimited?
Yes. Keith’s novels are available on Amazon US as well as in the UK, free to read in Kindle Unlimited, and available as audiobooks. Caimh McDonnell, Colin Bateman, Christopher Brookmyre, and Carl Hiaasen are all widely available on both sides of the Atlantic too.