Find sources: "Lancelot Curran"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( September 2017) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)

I think it was always there, and maybe these few murders we had were the conduit of that to the surface.” But how? It later emerged that they had played on Gordon’s fear that his mother might think him a homosexual. Ideas were deftly implanted in his head. Effectively he was brainwashed. I am not sure if McNamee tried to write without presenting a confirmation bias, but his portrayal of all the characters seemed hyperbolized and almost untruthful. (Maybe not so much as UNTRUTHFUL as it is potentially unfaithful to the actual events that occurred and people that existed. Perhaps that is what makes this a novel versus a non-fiction?) I found myself struggling with the portrayal of the women in the text (Doris Curran, Patricia, Hillary...etc.) because I couldn't help but feel awful that they are representative of damaging and limiting female tropes: the mad woman in the attic/upstairs, the promiscuous young woman who "deserved it", and the innocent friend. Interestingly, I find the representation of homosexuality in this novel to be more forgiving than how McNamee dealt with the women. Sure, there was an injustice (confirmation bias) done in the persecution of Iain Hay Gordon, but there was a kinder representation (and almost acceptance) of this "inappropriate behaviour" (hey, it's Northern Ireland in the 50's) than of women being complex creatures. Maybe this is true of the time, and McNamee wrote from a lot of existing secondary sources, maybe he even had the chance to interview real people for this book... I have no idea, and nor will I ever know. When one googles "Patricia Curran" her FATHER is the top hit. This is where I learned that the rest of McNamee's Blue Trilogy is centered around Judge Curran. Why is he such an attractive figure? One so untouchable and seemingly redeemable in all of this mess? his handwriting was tiny and detailed, and resembled the written manifestation of an arcane practice"....

In many murder cases, a synopsis is generally easy to put together; that is not the case with this one. First, there is a brutal murder, an investigation which results in over 40,000 statements, many of which are conflicting, and then a trial which, it could be said, was partisan. Then, 48 years later, an appeal to have the verdict overturned by the convicted man, which even led to a change in British law so that it could be heard, and the very lengthy summary of that hearing into the original case. Curran presided over the trial of Robert McGladdery for the murder of 19-year-old Pearl Gamble, near Newry, in 1961. McGladdery protested his innocence but was found guilty and hanged at Crumlin Road jail in Belfast on 20 December 1961; it was the last hanging in Northern Ireland. [ citation needed]

Nor could could they see in this immature and confused young man any sign of the disciplined criminal mind who had, a jury had found, committed a most horrific assault on a young woman, and managed to conceal every trace of evidence linking him to the crime. The roots of that noir was in places like the North and in Scotland, that sort of flinty Calvinism that created that sort of almost baroque – I’m mixing my genres here – baroqueness of noir.” Commentators think that Patricia returned to the family home around 5.30 pm on the evening before her body was discovered. She, having a distinct fear of the rather overgrown and sinister driveway may have been accompanied towards the home. It has been suggested that Patricia’s mother, disapproving of her daughter’s lifestyle, entirely conventional if judged by todays’s standards, murdered her. Patricia had had a gap year, unusually at the time, before starting her Arts degree at QUB. Judge Curran was playing poker at the Ulster Reform Club, from where, around 7 pm, he was urgently summoned; Desmond arrived somewhat later.The debris of this case is scattered throughout his family and his poor mother died bankrupt trying to clear his name." Her body was discovered 40 yards from her home hours after her death by her father Judge Curran and her 26-year-old brother Desmond, who moved her body to a nearby doctor's house, telling a policeman she was still alive despite one arm already being stiff with rigor mortis. Kieran Fagan, who was seven years old when Patricia Curran was killed, has spent the past three years investigating and writing about the case, which was riddled with inconsistencies from the outset. The tall, distinguished looking silver-haired priest, then 74, was known to his poor parishioners as Isabane — ‘The Lamp’ — a kindly, gentle figure who had passionately opposed apartheid.