The Red Branch - Softcover

Dungan, Myles

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798990767836

Verlag: Etruscan Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Your undercover operation is blown before you get to San Francisco. What next? If you’re Orpen, you join the cops. Sort of. 

It’s the Fall of 1883. Irish revolutionaries are changing the face of London with American dynamite, and not in a good way. Irish-born London Metropolitan Police Sergeant, Robert Emmet Orpen is sent, badly disguised as a tourist, to San Francisco to prevent at least some of the explosives getting into the wrong hands. He realizes that he may be out of his depth when his cover is blown before he even gets as far as the west coast. Now what does he do? First, he charms his way onto the San Francisco police force, where he is assigned to the coattails of a cynical, ‘larger than life’ Civil War veteran (from the losing side). Then he finds himself caught up in a murder involving one of the two violent Irish factions vying for supremacy in one of the most Irish of American cities. Orpen is going to wish he never heard of the murderous Knights of the Red Branch.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Myles Dungan is an Irish writer, lecturer and broadcaster. He holds a PhD from Trinity College, Dublin and was the recipient of a Fulbright Award to the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. He is the author of more than a dozen books on Irish and American history (including Four Killings, Conspiracy: Irish Political Trials, Irish Voices from the Great War, How the Irish Won the West and Land is all that matters). He is also the author of two works for children, The Great Irish History Book and The Forgettables. The Red Branch is his first solo effort as a fiction writer. He has high hopes that it will not be his last.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One:  From the unpublished memoir of Robert Emmet Orpen

12 October 1883 – The Embarcadero, San Francisco—early evening

‘Were you coming for the other one, Skullcrusher?’

It was the last thing the cross-eyed lowlife heard as he staggered back into the Bay. When he went under, he looked aggrieved. Reproachful. Face like a clenched fist. As red as a slapped arse. Maybe it was the jolt of the icy water. More likely it was the certain knowledge that he couldn’t swim. He may have mentioned it once or twice as he floundered. I think he was expecting me to rescue him. Not the brightest light in the firmament.

De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine. 

I nearly broke my hand with the blow that sent Ollie ‘Skullcrusher’ Madden to his appointment with Neptune. I can almost feel the pain in my knuckles still, fifty years later, but it was well worth it. Madden and I had form, so this was a rematch. In a grimy Dublin back alley two years before, the decision had gone his way. I’d made the mistake then of following his eyes. Not a profitable exercise when you’re trying to divine the intentions of an astigmatic. That cost me my left ear. I looked on a little too passively as a leering Madden swallowed it. I was so disengaged that I missed the wind-up for the right hook that broke my nose. 

Perhaps some of Madden’s chagrin at the prospect of death by drowning was because I weighed one hundred and seventy pounds in heavy brogues, and he had the heft of a Barbary Coast whorehouse. He sank like a turd in a privy. Just so much unassimilated waste. 

Who knows, he might well have mastered the front crawl, and the capricious currents of the Bay, and made it across to the Marin Peninsula. Perhaps he bought a vineyard in Sonoma and settled down to a life of improving viticulture. No one would have recognised him anyway. The water of San Francisco Bay is so frigid that his eyes would have uncrossed as he floated. His desperate gurgles of ‘Riley, Riley’ gradually grew fainter as he drifted away from the wharf into the enveloping darkness. 

I’ll get back to Doghouse Riley in a minute. First, I probably need to explain why I was doing the danse macabre with Skullcrusher. 

I had barely arrived in San Francisco after an interminable train journey from the east coast. I had just shaken off rigor mortis and was two hundred yards from the railway station when I spotted my escort. They were as inconspicuous as shite on sawdust, so bad at what they were supposed to be doing that I assumed they were unconcerned about being detected. Madden was wearing a manky top hat that you could spot a mile off. I’m a bit hazy about some of what happened next. But even after more than half a lifetime I still remember that clownish hat.  

At the time, I knew San Francisco about as well as the already thinning patch of hair on my pate. But rather than prolong the charade, I followed my nose in the direction of the nearest available body of water. The Bay smelt as if it hadn’t been taken out and cleaned in a while, so that bit was easy. It turned out to be a good move too. 

As Madden floated off to whatever destiny the waters of the Pacific had in mind for him, I turned towards Riley with a lighter step. I ignored Doghouse’s heart-rending profanities. He’d been stupid enough to bring a knife to what quickly turned into a gunfight. What can I say? His second must have not got the message. I figured that his distress was probably on account of the bullet lodged in his shoulder. It was a flesh wound, but don’t believe everything you read about the mild discomfort of superficial injuries. This one seemed to be causing Riley all the anguish I could have wished for him. 

But when I heard the first police whistle, I thought it might look better if I was discovered ministering to Riley in his agonies. So, I inserted my index finger in the gaping wound left by the passage of the bullet, leaned into him, and asked courteously (and perhaps a tad too cheerfully), ‘Who sent you, you bastard?’ As I expected, I got no usable information, just some more eye-popping obscenities. But I was happy enough with that. My vocabulary was profiting, and it didn’t really matter. I already knew who had sent him. 

I removed the offending digit as the first curious, blue-uniformed San Francisco policeman showed up and almost fell over Reilly in the preternatural gloom. 

The police officer—another Irishman as it happened, name of Tracy, Rory to his friends, broad-shouldered and a bit cranky, but not a bad sort as it turned out—had come from the direction of Market Street. In explaining the painful tableau being enacted on the pier—painful for Riley at least—I may have tried to suggest to Tracy that I had merely chanced upon this stricken citizen and offered my assistance. Tracy was unimpressed. He was quick to identify the hapless victim though. When he recognised the distressed Doghouse, his face was suddenly suffused with an expression of blissful contentment.  

His look of amused scepticism at my cock and bull story was strangely enhanced by the fact that his eyes were of different colours—one green and one blue—and by Riley’s indignant barking. ‘That bastard Orpen shot me,’ Doghouse croaked, indicating with an unsteady hand that I was Nemesis, not the Good Samaritan. Both of us, as it happened, neglected to tell Tracy about the aquatic Madden, whose mortal remains were probably halfway to Angel Island by then.

When Tracy insisted on searching me, he found the revolver. He sniffed the muzzle. I thought I detected the merest glint of approval in the green eye. The blue was unwaveringly neutral.  

‘That bastard … shot me.’ Riley rasped between theatrical groans. ‘Him. Orpen.’ 

‘Shut up, Doghouse,’ Tracy snapped. 

Riley subsided and resumed his braying, sotto voce. Tracy returned his attention to me. His thin smile grew a little plumper. His glee had now reached the blue eye as well. 

‘While you have done the community a great service, young man, I’m obliged to ask why exactly you shot that parcel of Tipperary trash?’

‘So, where are you from yourself?’ I deflected, with practiced affability. But Tracy wasn’t having any of the ‘old sod’ guff. 

‘I’d prefer if you’d just answer the question. Why did you feel the need to put a bullet into that animal? And why did you miss all his vital organs while you were at it?'  

I bent down and picked up the knife with which Riley had been expecting to skewer me. Tracy took a precautionary step backwards.

‘He came at me with this,’ I told him. 

‘Proper order so. He’s handy enough with one of those.’ 

He produced a small notebook from under his helmet and began writing but made no effort to relieve me of the knife. Something about the man suggested that this wasn’t a mere oversight. He finished making his note, licked his pencil—in that unconventional order—and looked at me squarely. ‘However, I do need to know who you are, what you’re doing here, why you are carrying a weapon, and why your first instinct was to come up with a fairy tale about being the Angel of Mercy to that nauseating rodent in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Etruscan Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798990767836
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 310
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar