March 2023 - True Crime Book Club - Past Titles - LibGuides at Westwood Public Library

"Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland" by Patrick Radden Keefe

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
Call Number: 364.152 Keefe
A stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions "Masked intruders dragged Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow and mother of 10, from her Belfast home in 1972. In this meticulously reported book--as finely paced as a novel--Keefe uses McConville's murder as a prism to tell the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Interviewing people on both sides of the conflict, he transforms the tragic damage and waste of the era into a searing, utterly gripping saga." -- New York Times Book Review Jean McConville's abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress--with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes. Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past-- Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.

A saying at the time of the Troubles went, “If you’re not confused, you don’t know what’s going on." The times were certainly confusing: for those on the outside of the conflict, let alone those on the inside. Does Patrick Radden Keefe clear up the confusion for his readers? In what way has reading Say Nothing increased your understanding of Northern Ireland's decades-long struggle?
Keefe has zeroed in on the murder of Jean McConville. Given the level of brutality and carnage that took place for so long, why might the author have used that particular episode as the opening of his book?
In what way would you describe Say Nothing as a murder mystery?
Which individuals do you feel more sympathy for than others? What about those individuals whose actions disturbed you? Despite all the carnage, are you able to find any humanity in those who committed acts of violence? Does it matter that they acted in service to a cause, one they believed in passionately?
What is the significance of the book's title, "Say Nothing"? What are the ways that phrase resonates throughout the book?
Had you heard about the Troubles before this book? If so, what did you know?
1. If not, did you find yourself researching to find out more?
Would you read another book by this author? Why or why not?
If you got the chance to ask the author of this book one question, what would it be?
What do you think about the author’s research? Was it easy to see where the author got his or her information? Were the sources credible?

Jean McConville

In 1972, the I.R.A. abducted and “disappeared” Jean McConville, a mother of ten children, most of whom were teen-age or younger.
- Her case became one of the most notorious unsolved murders of a long period of unrest in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles.
from Belfast, Northern Ireland, was kidnapped and murdered by the IRA and secretly buried in County Louth in the Republic of Ireland in 1972 after being accused by the IRA of passing information to British forces
In 1999, the IRA acknowledged that it had killed McConville and eight others
- claimed she had been passing information about republicans to the British Army in exchange for money and that a transmitter had been found in her flat
She was a widowed mother of ten, the McConville killing was particularly controversial. Her body was not found until 2003, and the crime has not been solved.

The Troubles

The Troubles were a violent sectarian conflict from about 1968 to 1998 in Northern Ireland between the overwhelmingly Protestant unionists (loyalists), who desired the province to remain part of the United Kingdom, and the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nationalists (republicans), who wanted Northern Ireland to become part of the Republic of Ireland. The other major players in the conflict were the British army, Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR; from 1992 called the Royal Irish Regiment), and their avowed purpose was to play a peacekeeping role, most prominently between the nationalist Irish Republican Army (IRA), which viewed the conflict as a guerrilla war for national independence, and the unionist paramilitary forces, which characterized the IRA’s aggression as terrorism. Marked by street fighting, sensational bombings, sniper attacks, roadblocks, and internment without trial, the confrontation had the characteristics of a civil war, notwithstanding its textbook categorization as a “low-intensity conflict.” Some 3,600 people were killed and more than 30,000 more were wounded before a peaceful solution, which involved the governments of both the United Kingdom and Ireland, was effectively reached in 1998, leading to a power-sharing arrangement in the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont (Britannica).

"Casualty" by Seamus Heaney
"The poem is set in the northern province of Ulster in 1972, the infamous year of Bloody Sunday, when the British army killed 13 civil rights protesters in the Bogside area of Londonderry. The elegy takes the form of a kind of triptych memorializing a regular patron of the pubs, a fisherman known to Heaney who becomes a casualty of the sectarian urban warfare in the north. Although Heaney named the man in an interview—he was Louis O’Neill—he remains unnamed in the poem, a deliberate withholding that underscores the way the violence pulls even those who have no designated role onto the stage of history to play their accidental, anonymous part" (Weiner, Poetry Foundation).
Belfast During the Troubles
A visual look at Ireland during the Troubles.
Belfast Now
A look at the current city of Belfast.
Northern Ireland's Peace Walls
A visual look at the Peace Walls that now line the roads throughout the Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland's border towns.

grew up in Dorchester, Massachusetts
went to college at Columbia
- masters degrees from Cambridge University and the London School of Economics, and a law degree from Yale
lives in New York
an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine
author of the New York Times bestsellers Empire of Pain and Say Nothing
- nonfiction books: The Snakehead and Chatter
- most recent book is Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks
the writer and host of WIND OF CHANGE, an 8-part podcast series, which investigates the strange convergence of espionage and heavy metal music during the Cold War, and was named the #1 podcast of 2020 by The Guardian
Limited series optioned by FX (no date of publication as of now)

Say Nothing received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, as well as the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and was selected by Entertainment Weekly as one of the “10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade.”
Patrick Radden Keefe, author of SAY NOTHING and the new EMPIRE OF PAIN | Books Connect Us podcast

There Will Be Fire by Rory Carroll
Call Number: 363.325 Carroll
A race-against-the-clock narrative that finally illuminates a history-changing event: the IRA's attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher and the epic manhunt that followed. A bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army exploded at 2:54 a.m. on October 12, 1984. It was the last day of the Conservative Party Conference at the Grand Hotel in the coastal town of Brighton, England. Rooms were obliterated, dozens of people wounded, five killed. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in her suite when the explosion occurred; had she been just a few feet in another direction, flying tiles and masonry would have sliced her to ribbons. As it was, she survived--and history changed. There Will Be Fire is the gripping story of how the IRA came astonishingly close to killing Thatcher, in the most spectacular attack ever linked to the Northern Ireland Troubles. Journalist Rory Carroll reveals the long road to Brighton, the hide-and-seek between the IRA and British security services, the planting of the bomb itself, and the painstaking search for clues and suspects afterward. In There Will Be Fire , Carroll draws on his own interviews and original reporting, reveals new information, and weaves together previously unconnected threads. There Will Be Fire is journalistic nonfiction that reads like a thriller, propelled by a countdown to detonation.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Call Number: 364.15 Capote
Publication Date: 1993-04-01
The most famous true crime novel of all time "c hills the blood and exercises the intelligence" ( The New York Review of Books ) -- and haunted its author long after he finished writing it. On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. In one of the first non-fiction novels ever written, Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, generating both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.
The Vanishing Triangle by Claire McGowan
Call Number: 364.154 McGowan
Ireland in the 1990s seemed a safe place for women. With the news dominated by the Troubles, it was easy to ignore non-political murders and sexual violence, to trust that you weren't going to be dragged into the shadows and killed. But beneath the surface, a far darker reality had taken hold. Through questioning the society and circumstances that allowed eight young women to vanish without a trace―no conclusion or conviction, no resolution for their loved ones―bestselling crime novelist Claire McGowan delivers a candid investigation into the culture of secrecy, victim-blaming and shame that left these women's bodies unfound, their fates unknown, their assailants unpunished. McGowan reveals an Ireland not of leprechauns and craic but of outdated social and sexual mores, where women and their bodies were of secondary importance to perceived propriety and misguided politics--a place of well-buttoned lips and stony silence, inadequate police and paramilitary threat. Was an unknown serial killer at large or was there something even more insidious at work? In this insightful, sensitively drawn account, McGowan exposes a system that failed these eight women--and continues to fail women to this day.
Armed Struggle by Richard English
Call Number: 941.6 English
The IRA has been a much richer, more complexly layered, and more protean organization than is frequently recognized. It is also more open to balanced examination now--at the end of its long war in the north of Ireland--than it was even a few years ago.Richard English's brilliant book offers a detailed history of the IRA, providing invaluable historical depth to our understanding of the modern-day Provisionals, the more militant wing formed in 1969 dedicated to the removal of the British Government from Northern Ireland and the reunificationof Ireland. English examines the dramatic events of the Easter Rising in 1916 and the bitter guerrilla war of 1919-21; the partitioning of Ireland in the 1920s and the Irish Civil War of 1922-23. Here, too are the IRA campaigns in Northern Ireland and Britain during the 1930s, 1940, 1950s and1960s. He shows how the Provisionals were born out of the turbulence generated by the 1960s civil rights movement; examines the escalating violence; the introduction of British troops to the streets of Northern Ireland; the split in the IRA which produced the Provisionals; the introduction ofinternment in 1971 and the tragedy of Bloody Sunday in 1972. He then examines the struggle over political status, culminating in the Hunger Strikes of the early 1980s and moves on to describe the Provisionals' emergence as a more committed political force throughout that decade, a politicizationthat made possible the peace process that has developed over the last decade.English offers a dazzling synthesis of the motives, actions and consequences of the IRA. Neither romanticizing the IRA nor condemning them out of hand, this is a balanced, definitive treatment of one of the world's leading revolutionary movements.
Voices from the Grave by Ed Moloney
Call Number: 941.708 Moloney
A candid and brutal account of murder, abduction, and violence during the Troubles in Northern Ireland-from two men on opposite sides of the conflict. After 'the long war' in Ireland came to an end, very few paramilitary leaders on either side spoke openly about their role in that bloody conflict, but in Voices from the Grave, two leading figures from opposing sides reveal their involvement in bombings, shootings and killings on one condition: that their stories were kept secret until after their deaths. In extensive interviews given to researchers from Boston College, Brendan Hughes and David Ervine spoke with astonishing openness about their turbulent, violent lives. Hughes was a legend in the Republican movement. An 'operator', a gun-runner and mastermind of some of the most savage IRA violence of the Troubles, he was a friend and close ally of Gerry Adams and was by his side during the most brutal years of the conflict. David Ervine was the most substantial political figure to emerge from the world of Loyalist paramilitaries. A former Ulster Volunteer Force bomber and confidante of its long-time leader Gusty Spence, Ervine helped steer Loyalism's gunmen towards peace, persuading the UVF's leaders to target IRA and Sinn Fein activists and push them down the road to a ceasefire. Now their stories have been woven into a vivid narrative which provides compelling insight into a secret world and events long hidden from history.
We Don't Know Ourselves by Fintan O'Toole
Call Number: 941.708 O'Toole
Born to a working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, O'Toole served as an altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school, much as his forebears did. He was enthralled by American Westerns suddenly appearing on Irish television, which were not that far from his own experience, given that Ireland's main export was beef and it was still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down Dublin's streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come. O'Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism. In O'Toole's telling, America became a lodestar, from John F. Kennedy's 1963 visit, when the soon-to-be martyred American president was welcomed as a native son, to the emergence of the Irish technology sector in the late 1990s, driven by American corporations, which set Ireland on the path toward particular disaster during the 2008 financial crisis.