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The Blue Tango of Eoin McNamee
To keep up his spirits during the three days that he was being interrogated young British RAF conscript Iain Hay Gordon whistled 'The Blue Tango' by Ray Martin. Then he whistled his life away by confessing to the stabbing-to-death of 19-year-old Patricia Curran, daughter of the North's Attorney General, Judge Lance Curran (later Lord Chief Justice). In March 1953, four months after her murder, Gordon was found 'Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity', and spent seven years in a mental institution until given early release by the late Brian Faulkner on condition that he change his name and disappear.
However, Gordon spent the next forty years protesting his innocence until last December his conviction was overturned in the Appeal Court in Belfast.
Out of the circumstances surrounding this murder Eoin McNamee has written a fascinating recreation, mixed with some hypotheses and surmise, and springs quite a few surprises along the way. McNamee risks leaving his reader feeling insecure and frustrated - because the line between fact and fiction (or speculation) is not always sign-posted. Sometimes, also, the prose can be a bit sententious - as distinct from the portentous language which he worked brilliantly in 'Resurrection Man'. However, it is a measure of his sureness that in the round he carries it off.
Apart from one or two anachronisms McNamee has created a grey 'fifties feel' to the period, the dialogue, the sensibilities of the time. The post-war atmosphere. The codes and morals. Card games in a back room of the Reform Club; the Attorney General enjoying membership of the Orange Order and the Black Preceptory; the RUC's function as a personal tool of the unionist authorities. A character from a fairground. A 'homosexual' barber. Catholics in their place. A Chief Superintendent John Capstick called in from 'the Yard' to take over from a local, decent, too-conscientious detective, Inspector McConnell.
McConnell believed Gordon to be innocent and that the real killer was to be found in Judge Curran's dark house, The Glen, which Chief Constable Pim barred him from searching or from questioning the Currans about their alibis. Although it doesn't quite aspire to a Gothic suspense there are shades of Manderley in The Glen, where blood stains are found on floorboards under a carpet years later, shortly before the house burns down.
Judge Curran's father was a butcher, yet the son rose to the highest legal post in the land. The judge was a heavy gambler, in constant debt to a Catholic bookmaker. His wife Doris had aspired to high society, suffered from her nerves, doted on her son Desmond, a lawyer by day and an evangelist by night who wore hair suits in bed and flagellated himself. Doris, like Gordon, ended up in an asylum. Doris constantly fought with her wayward daughter, Patricia, who had a reputation for sexual promiscuousness.
Iain Hay Gordon, the fall-guy, was a lonely man who frequented amusement arcades, talked to strangers, asked them to go for a walk, offered to buy them chips. He was putty in the hands of the establishment. His mistake was to come under the spell of Desmond Curran who was involved in "the battle for moral rearmament of the Province". Desmond invited him to visit The Glen and it was there that Gordon met Patricia. He became obsessed with her death, talked about it too much. His second mistake was to ask a fellow conscript to lie for him, realising that at the purported time of her death (though this was never properly fixed) he had no alibi.
Though the murder of Patricia Curran officially remains unsolved, the sleuth McNamee unearths some home truths, and there is some fine writing, in this excellent docudrama.
Buy this book on Amazon UK: The Blue Tango
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© 2007 Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison