…..but as the cost of living goes up, the Murder business deteriorates, so, for the moment, I have forsworn my evil designs and am cleaving to the saints.
- Mary Purcell, interview, 1952.
Mary Purcell is best known as the writer of historical biographies of famous religious figures including Matt Talbot, Vincent de Paul and Francis Xavier. But her first book was a crime novel, and she confessed in the interview, above, to spending her time on buses and in traffic jams thinking up plots. At this stage, however, she had already won an award from the French Academy for her book on Joan of Arc, so her destiny as a writer of historical biography was probably fixed.
Purcell was born in Co. Kilkenny; her parents were National teachers. She went to the local National school and then to the Sisters of Mercy, in Waterford, after that to the St Louis in Monaghan (later the alma mater of Nuala O Faolain and Evelyn Conlon) and to Carysfort Teacher Training College. She taught first in Kilkenny and then in Dublin. Her younger brother Patrick published four novels with Talbot Press in the 1940s, and at the time of the interview cited above (with Eason’s Bulletin), she said ruefully that there was no excuse for her, as the elder of the two, for not having written as many books as he had. Her career, however, lasted longer than his, and her writings were more highly acclaimed. Her second book, a historical novel about Joan of Arc, The Halo on the Sword, published in 1949, won an award from the French Academy; the 1951 Gill edition has an introduction, in French, by a member of that body. Her last book, the biography of Mother Mary Martin, foundress of the Medical Missionaries of Mary, To Africa With Love came out in 1987. In the 1960s and ’70s she wrote several books about preparation for the sacraments. She also edited the nineteenth-century prelate Daniel Murray’s letters, and was a familiar figure in the Dublin Diocesan Archives in the 1980s. Her biographies/historical fictions are all immensely readable – my favourite is the one about Vincent de Paul, but I found it difficult to tear myself away from her book about Francis Xavier which I read in a library, and her biography of Marie (later Mother Mary) Martin, written in her final years, is as vivid and colourful as any of her earlier books.
Purcell’s first published work, The Pilgrim Came Late, published in 1947, was a murder novel, not so much a whodunnit as a will-he-get-away-with-it. We know from the start that Luke Tierney is a conman without any conscience whatsoever. Middle-aged Janie Spillane, in the fictional Leinster town of Clonlee, now that her two overbearing parents have died, feels keenly her status as a spinster in the small town in which she is a person of some property and standing. (Four lines from an unnamed Ethna Carbery poem about peace and kindness in the little town which head off the first chapter are meant ironically; the people of the town are gossipy, judgmental and fatally credulous, too.) Janie answers a matrimonial advertisment in the newspaper and marries, on impulse, its charming author who can’t believe his luck; he had hoped, at best, to attract replies from women he could ‘borrow’ money from and disappear. A thoroughly bad lot, Tierney has embezzled money even from convents (dressed up as a missionary priest), but, plausible and pleasant, he inveigles his way into the good books of the people of Clonlee; he even saves a woman from drowning. Meanwhile he hardly works (he is an occasional seller of advertising space for newspapers), gambles at race tracks and at cards, gets as much money as he can from the besotted Janie, and manages to escape suspicion when he murders her in a house fire, mainly because of his careful planning, the high regard in which he is held locally, and confusion and incompetence at the scene. The second half of the novel, after he moves to Dublin and marries again, is told from the points of view of the various witnesses at his trial for the murder of his second wife, the glamorous Dinah, for which he is hanged. (Not a spoiler – the hanging is described at the beginning of the book.)
It is an oddly-structured but effective story, but surprisingly cruel about Janie, whose attempts to make herself look younger are mocked by the author. Maybe Purcell, who never married, despised the kind of woman who sought a man at any cost. Or maybe her well-documented fondness for races and gambling made her understand Tierney’s compulsions. His last days in the condemned cell are sensitively evoked and the reader is left feeling sorry for him. We are not invited to extend the same sympathy to the murdered Janie.
The novel’s added value for anyone who is interested in social history lies in the details of everyday life, for which Purcell has a keen eye. Flatmates Sally and Mary, the teacher and civil servant who live in the same building as Tierney and his second wife, say the Rosary every evening in the flat, sometimes before going out to their relentlessly busy social lives. (This would not have been over the top, at the time. Prayers were woven into the everyday life of young and old alike in a highly devout society.) Fuel shortages lead to highly flammable ‘coke-eggs’ being made by one character; these play a crucial role in poor Janie’s demise. Janet McNeill’s comments I quoted last week about every penny being counted, echoes in the genteel poverty of the two unmarried sisters, the O’Neills, who have to give up their holiday week in Rosslare so as to subscribe to a wedding present for Janie. (And what a fatuous present it is too – a silver tray with the donors’ names engraved.)
Outside Ireland, the war is in full swing and every so often the sufferings of those under bombardment are mentioned, without any smugness about neutrality. The army is being mobilized, and walking out on a Sunday to see the military exercises is a good way for the townspeople to pass the time. Although Purcell was nearly middle-aged when the novel was published, she shows no dislike of jazz or jitterbugging or youth culture generally, and in this she differs from the majority of writers of the period (male, female, Irish, British, right-wing, left-wing, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or agnostic). She also – through Tierney in his final days – describes Irish traditional entertainment vividly; this is his memory of a step-dancer:
…shoulders erect, muscles tensed….feet eager to start weaving their rhythmic pattern, his face rapt, inscrutable: ‘In his feet music/And on his face death’.
She doesn’t attribute the quote, but she explains the expressionlessness of the (pre-Riverdance) Irish dancer as ‘wonder, perplexity, remoteness’ in an attempt to recapture the ‘lost order and harmony’ of the music. For the man facing the gallows, there is also the macabre suggestion of hanging – dead face and feet twitching – which the author never makes explicit, but which strikes the reader forcibly.
Purcell could probably have developed into a first-rate thriller writer, but chose instead to write in another genre, very popular at the time – one of her English equivalents would have been Margaret Trouncer, about whom I might write sometime. I’ll return to Mary Purcell again, and will write about her brother Patrick at some stage too.
Mary Purcell, The Pilgrim Came Late (Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds 1947).
——————-The Halo on the Sword (Dublin: Gill 1949, 1951).
———————-Don Francisco: the story of St Francis Xavier (Dublin: Gill 1953).
——————–The World of Monsieur Vincent (N.Y.Scribner: Catholic Book Club edition 1963).
———————–To Africa With Love: the biography of Mother Mary Martin (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1987)
Eason’s Bulletin Vol 8 No 10 June 1952.
Clear Classics blog is all about my enthusiasms for fiction, mainly that of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and earlier, but more recent books occasionally feature too, and sometimes good historical works are reviewed.
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