Irish soldier Emer Harte is a flawed person, which fits her well into the family of fictional characters down the years written by Kildare author
Martin Malone,
writes Brian Byrne. In his latest novel,
The Devil’s Relics, she’s an MP serving with UNIFIL in Lebanon, job and location directly out of the writer’s own military experiences and with which his regular readers will be familiar. What is clear in the undercurrent of the story is that the author retains a very deep love of the area and its people from his several tours of duty there.
The constantly broken countries in and around the locations for The Devil’s Relics are not just places of warfare but also prime hunting grounds for those seeking to make big money. In this instance, smuggling ancient artefacts looted from the ruins of where many of our civilisations of today originated. These days we only have to read headlines and ledes in our news media of choice to have a real sense of the Lebanon-Palestine-Israel triangle of horror where the innocent are inevitably the biggest losers. A story set there is all too grimly familiar.
The Devil’s Relics is time-lined before the current warfare between Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, but since conflict is endemic there over generations that hardly makes much difference. This isn’t a political tale or a conflict story. It’s a detective novel where these are merely the background noises. A gangland story where the bad-hats are brutal and their own personal mafia have infected the international peacekeeping operation, including the Irish contingent.
Military police officer Emer Harte, scheduled to go home to Ireland where she’s hoping to pick up the shreds of her post-divorce personal life, is tasked to navigate the complexities of finding a missing female Irish soldier. In an environment where she doesn’t know whom to trust, either among her Irish colleagues or the security forces on different sides of the borders of where she works. The assignment isn’t made easier when she finds herself with a target on her own back.
The Devil’s Relics is not a tidy story, either in plot or outcome. The former ensures that the book is a page-turner, because we can’t easily guess what’s going to happen next. But we do want to know — I stole hours from my other work to find out for myself. The book’s last pages leave open more than a possibility that this novel is not the last time we will read about Emer Harte.
Full disclosure, Martin Malone is a friend. I first met him when he was trying to find voice and words as a writer of fiction. Never easy and rarely a viable life choice among the many who try make it so. He has struggled through the minefields of his craft for years with a similar doggedness that his Emer Harte character shows in this, his latest book.
I know he won’t mind me saying that it hasn’t made him rich. For Martin Malone — ‘Murt’ to those who know him more closely — the most important thing has always been his compulsion to tell stories. Stories which reflect the truths he has experienced both as a citizen of Kildare and as soldier of Ireland and the United Nations. No less than any of us he is now moving on in years. He has achieved some real riches in life, loving companionship and a degree of success in his passion for telling stories. Not just for their own sake but to let the rest of us know about the peoples and circumstances which have been part of the making of his life.
Through his decades as a writer of nine novels, several collections of short stories, radio plays and a stage play, Murt has been published by several imprints, and he has also learned the reality of being an author — that it’s a hard and lonely path where mostly only formulaic novelists achieve blockbuster status. The Devil’s Relics doesn’t run to a formula. With his wife Valerie, Murt Malone now runs his own small publishing operation, Owl Fella’s Press, both a tilt to his age and to reality. But it’s also a statement about taking control of what one does. And what might be.
As I read and finally finished The Devil’s Relics, I was seeing the story in my mind as if it was a movie. That alone says that Murt was delivering what he set out to do. There’s a real potential here, perhaps even for a TV series. Before Netflix notices, there’s opportunity for our several and increasingly successful globally Irish film production companies to pick up an option.
It’s time Kildare’s Martin Malone got wider recognition for his storytelling skills.
The Devil's Relics is available in Woodbine Books, price €17.
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