Maggie D'Arcy Mysteries

I read several obscure things this week that I don’t think would be of general interest. I read a (short) book about William S. Burroughs’ time in Vienna in the 1930s as a medical student, and a book about an Austrian professor who was part of the surprisingly large German contribution to the study of the Irish language at the time of the Gaelic revival. I can only recommend those to people who are deeply interested in these subjects already. I have also been reading Sarah Stewart Taylor’s Maggie D’Arcy mysteries. I’m currently in the middle of the third in the series, The Drowning Sea. I don’t know if these are of general interest, but this third one does relate to the theme of the Big House in the Irish novel, which I have discussed previously.

The Drowning Sea takes place in West Cork, on a peninsula on the south coast of Ireland jutting into the Atlantic. The remains of a grand house rot away at the end of this peninsula until a developer comes along to renovate it and turn it into a hotel. A body is found in the nearby waters of the inlet, and there is some question whether this will foil the renovation plans. It’s a story that connects the new, monied Ireland to its troubled past. Since the body turns out to be that of a Polish construction worker employed on the development site, the story at first appears to belong to the present. But Maggie D’Arcy is in the midst of research into another possible crime related to the house, the disappearance of a guest of the old Anglo-Irish family who used to own the place. There may be a connection to the current murder.

I love mysteries, so I am able to suspend disbelief about the fact that the Long Island detective, D’Arcy, is always stumbling across murder victims, even on vacation. Or about the fact that all of her cases seem to conspire to bring her closer to her lost love in Ireland. If you can put all of that to one side, the great thing about the series is Stewart Taylor’s skill at capturing voice, especially an Irish voice. The dialogue suggests she has a genuine ear for it. And the stories are both steeped in history and successfully contemporary. For instance, she delves into the lives of the Polish community members in the town—and one homicide detective from Dublin who happens to be Polish.

I assume The Drowning Sea was at least partly inspired by the famous murder case in West Cork, that of the French woman Sophie Toscan du Plantier in 1996. West Cork was still quite an isolated area at the time, dotted with very small towns and villages where everyone knew everyone, so the murder created a huge sensation that has never fully quieted. The region has become much more built up since then, although it was already starting to attract “blow-ins” from other places, as evidenced by the presence of Toscan du Plantier. (The engrossing podcast “West Cork” delves into the case and its fascinating surroundings.)

Stewart Taylor’s nod to that famous case seems to be that the victim is found by a French-speaker, a Belgian tourist. And she picks up on that thread of the old Ireland of ancestral villages overlaid by tourists and summer people and wealthier Irish visitors down from Dublin. The element that really appealed to me was the sense of decay in her vivid descriptions of the big house. Several different characters chime in with observations on this theme: one who used to clean it describing how doing the floors there was like trying to sweep sand, another who went over for dinner when the family was still there remembering that a sheet of wallpaper peeled off during the meal—and no one mentioned it. It reminded me of Elizabeth Bowen’s attempts to preserve her family house, Bowen’s Court. She struggled to maintain it for years, but ultimately did not have the funds for such an operation and had to sell. She thought the new owner would restore it, but he tore it down instead. These days, when professors from the university in Cork try to take their classes to visit the inspiration for several of Bowen’s novels, they have to content themselves with walking over the remains of the foundation.

There is an echo of Bowen in one of the characters in The Drowning Sea, Lissa Crawford, a daughter of the big house in the story who still laments the fact that she had to sell the place. She is a visual artist rather than a writer, but similarly cannot get the place she grew up out of her head.

There is a richness to the background that elevates the story above the average crime novel. But don’t get me wrong, it is very much a crime novel. I appreciated the feeling of being in good hands while reading it. Stewart Taylor has done her research, and even manages some lyricism here.