This Story Really Has Nothing to Do With Being Irish

Dead Irish
by John Lescroart
p. 1989

Needing to take a little break from science fiction after my letdown with the Trilogy of Disappointment, I pounded out a quick murder mystery I’d had lying around for ages, Dead Irish, by John Lescroart, whose name I still can’t pronounce for the life of me. Dead Irish is a crime/thriller novel with a wide cast of characters revolving around the untimely death of young Irish Catholic Eddie Cochran, allegedly a suicide until the truth is slowly unraveled.

The central character in Dead Irish is Dismas Hardy, a former cop, former lawyer, [former everything in the way that only serialized private eyes can be], who currently works as a bartender for Eddie’s brother-in-law. Hardy only obliquely knew Eddie, but he is roped into investigating the young man’s death, for the sake of his young, pregnant wife, who would receive no benefits if her husband’s death were declared a suicide, and Eddie’s despairing family, who cannot believe their eldest son would take his own life.

I initially had no idea that Dismas Hardy was a serialized character. When I thought that the book was a one-off, I assumed that Hardy was investigating the death because he wanted to get into the pretty widow’s pants, which was a little tacky, considering she was pregnant with the dead man’s child and all, and also a good 15 years younger than Hardy. It wasn’t until I caught on that Dead Irish was just the first in many investigations of Hardy and the LA detectives that I realized his motives weren’t self-serving.

The fact that Dismas Hardy and his detective friend Abe Glitzky both recur in many other Lescroart novels also excused the lack of culmination to their individual storylines. A lot of threads were introduced and Lescroart didn’t really do justice to them all. The ending itself was terribly rushed, but in the context of what Dead Irish is—one in a series of neo-noir style thrillers starring a hardened ex-cop—I guess I can excuse the slapped-together ending.

I’m not overly fond of Hardy as a protagonist. Early on in the novel, one of his methods of information-gathering involves vaguely threatening dead Eddie’s teenage brother. It was mildly effective, sure, but the kid really had nothing to do with the murder and smacking him around while he was grieving was a bit unnerving, even if he was being a bit surly. At the end, when the real killer is outed, Hardy encourages him to kill himself instead of turning himself in, for no discernible reason... and he does, screwing over his detective friend, Glitzky, in the process. Hardy also shows up at a ton of crime scenes when I feel he probably doesn’t have any business being there, but it was the eighties, so maybe the LAPD didn’t care that some dude who was only a beat cop for half a minute twenty years ago is hanging around telling them what to do. Maybe they would care if they knew Hardy was handing out guns to murderers and telling them to take care of it themselves...

I feel like all of this is supposed to make me think of Hardy as something of a maverick, but I really just thought he was kind of a self-serving jerk and the LAPD were all idiots for not being able to do the legwork themselves.

I also guessed the killer after like thirty pages (of a 400 page book), but then I subscribe to the school of televised crime procedurals, in which it is always the last person you should suspect, and after you cycle through all the more obvious suspects, only then the truth will out, so really, the last person you should suspect is actually the first person you should suspect. It’s like, why else would they spend all that time on that seemingly inconsequential character if he didn’t do in the dead guy? It’s really the only thing that makes sense, from a storyteller’s point of view.

Read this book. Read another Lescroart book. Read any crime thriller at all, really. I’ve got a feeling there won’t be much variation, when all is said and done.