"Drown All the Dogs" By Thomas Larry Adcock

I was brought up to treat books as sacred, or at least semi-sacred. You didn't write in them, you didn't deface them, you took good care of them. Probably because they were library books. Still, those were the rules.

For the last ten or twenty years I've been buying books, mostly in the bargain bins. Occasionally I will find an author I like and buy a new book, but I'm not really keen on spending a lot of money on a book. I would just as soon have a used paperback (as long as the pages aren't falling out) for a couple of bucks than a new hardback that cost me $25.

Recently I have started to notice what I was reading, instead of just consuming a book like a TV show. I started to notice particular passages that I thought were well written or illuminating. I also found that unless I made note of exactly where I found that passage, it was almost impossible to find it later.

All this combined in my latest read. I picked up a used paperback copy of this book somewhere, probably cheap, maybe even free. It's kind of old and beat up. I'm not sure why I picked it up. I certainly didn't like the title. I mean, I like dogs, why would anyone want to drown them? But it was a murder mystery, and paperback versions of murder mysteries are usually pretty good entertainment.

This book was a lot more than I bargained for, however. It was full of interesting passages and history, and since it was a cheap old paperback I overcame my inhibitions and marked it up as I saw fit.

I read this book twice, once in January and again this month. After I finished the first time I could not remember how it turned out. Reading it again was just as enjoyable as the first time. How it turns out is really of no consequence. The murder mystery is really only a frame to hold this portrait of Irish history and the Irish people who made it. It's a story of haters and the propogation of that hate, as opposed to those who are willing to forgive. It explains a lot about the way the world is and why there are so many places that never seem to get over their hatred. This story is very well told.

Here are some of the more memorable passages. I have commented on some of them. Some of them are just great all by themselves.

"Hock," he said, "you've got an imagination that's very full and active, and just this side of being lunatic. It's what I always look for in a detective." (Page 17)

"There's polite politicians, then there's Finn and his gang, but they're all the same: great snorting hogs ever in pursuit of power, which makes them violent fools. Of course this is doubly so of Irish politicians, since Ireland has never held any power in the world. Hell, my American friend, Ireland hasn't once produced a battleship." (Page 27)

This reminded me of "Poland" by James Michener. Poland has a history of being overrun by one country after another. Russia, Austria and Germany all took a turn at it. Poland had a democracy of sorts early on. Problem was it took a unanimous vote to get anything done, and as disagreeable as people are, seldom did that ever happen. I suspect Ireland had a similar problem. They did not have a strong leader who could get the people to band together to fight their common enemy. They were too busy arguing among themselves.

"The world's gone cockeyed and a moral truth doesn't have a tinker's chance against the devil without vast armies; and God's very own sweet army doesn't have a chance without spies and betrayals and secret codes and treacheries and propaganda and the very thickest plots and all manner of deception and cruelty required to preserve a man's civilization ..." (Page 44)

"I'd just walk into the theater whenever, right in the middle of a picture; it didn't matter. I could always stay on past the end, and wait for the next performance - until I caught up with all the scenes I'd missed at the beginning."
"We all went to the movies that way," Ruby said. "We were all young once." (Page 78)

I found this curious. I never went to the movies like that, and I don't know of anyone who ever did.

"We all know little bits and pieces of things in our lives, boy. But we need the faeries - the good and the mischievous - to fit them all together. This is what's happening to you. And oh, but it's a wonderful gift you're receiving." (Page 105)

"A good story - about your father? He was an upstream swimmer." Liam shook his head. "From the day he was born, Aidan changed everything and everybody around him. Now it's the helpless nature of some people to make a commotion of themselves. That's all right, I guess, as long as they realize they're different - and that most others are happy enough to be docile and obedient. But the trouble is, most people just naturally don't like upstream swimmers. Most people resent that what's too different from them. For the likes of your father, it's a vexing life then." (Page 122)

I don't know if I am an "upstream swimmer", but I suspect I am at least a cross current swimmer.

"Mum knew very well what she was doing. She was intoxicating us. Curiosity drunked us more than whiskey ever done to Daddy. Furthermore, every time the old man's back was turned, and many a time it wasn't, she'd feed us subversive notions.
"She had certain visions of us, and meant us to see the same. We were both of us bright and worthy, she decided, but different as could be; I was her practical one, Aidan possessed a mind in need of soaring.
"To me, she said, 'Liam, it'll serve you well to know it's not work that makes money, it's money that makes money. There's no way you're likely to see this principle put to practice in Carlow here, so I'm seeing to it you go to London and learn, for London's where the money is.' (Page 131)

For an Irish peasant woman to have such dreams, and to be able set her boys on a path to achieve such dreams, that is the real miracle.

I am off in a corner by myself wondering about a guy who once so loved a woman twenty-five years ago that he married her, then one awful day he hated her so bad he diced her all over the kitchen linoleum. The way I see it, this big murder story is no story at all. The real story is what happened during those twenty-five years ... Here now would be The Truth. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the messy and complicated truth so help me God. (Page 133)

You read about these in the papers occasionally. Sad stories, all.

"There's a line in the novel spoken by the character Thomas Hudson, from his deathbed: I was just beginning to learn there toward the end. No one thing is true - it's all true."
Cavanaugh lifted snowy eyebrows, then let them fall, and said, "Your father would have appreciated that. He was often saying how literature was something permanent, and politics only a pale and temporary thing." (Page 176)

I only included the first paragraph to give context to the second. Thomas Hudson is a character from Ernest Hemingway's book "Islands In The Stream" .

Cavanaugh said, as if to a dim student, "We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
"And so it's all just - nothing?"
"No, it's something all right. History is a pack of tricks we play upon the dead . Your father used to say that, it's from Voltaire ." (Page 177)

I had always heard that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and as we see it being replayed over and over again, I think fictional Cavanaugh has it right.

I shook his hand, and said, "Hockaday. Nice eyeshade."
"Thank you. Nice Yankees cap."
I liked the man immediately, and I am almost always right when I make a quick judgment like that. He was practically a full generation younger than me, and of course he lived here in Dublin, but somehow I felt that Oliver Gunston and I were two of a kind; that we had shared experiences, or outlooks. Or maybe it was only that I once wanted to be a journalist myself ... or something. (Page 188)

That happens to me occasionally, and sometimes the reverse. How about you?

"What can I tell you? Irony's like gravity, it's a law." (Page 193)

I turned over the medallion. "And the verse reads, 'When nations are empty up there at the top ... When order has weakened or faction is strong ... Time for us all to pick out a good tune ... Take to the roads and go marching along'?"
"Hock, what is all this crap anyways?"
I thought of my dream of war on the plane coming over, and of my father's ghost voice warning about a world gone cockeyed. And I said, "It's spies and betrayals and secret codes and treacheries and propaganda and the very thickest of plots and all manner of deception and cruelty required to preserve man's civilization ..." (Page 216)

My pal Slattery at the New York Post , who is nobody's stenographer and everybody's idea of a tabloid crime writer, once advised, "Hock, times change and worms turn, no matter what side of an iron curtain they're on. The Russkis used to have Pravda , now it's us. Over in Moscow, they're enjoying the shock of a relatively free press. Here, we should be reading our papers like the Russians did for all those years. You have to always ask yourself, How come they're telling me this? There used to be guys like Izzy Stone asking that for you, making the interesting connections between the official line and the real deal, but nobody's hiring too many Izzy Stones anymore. (Page 241)

"Oh, well then, New York bein' a city where your best friend in all the world is the one not hittin' you over the head, I suppose you'll manage in our Goff Street." (Page 246)

"You're leading now to the Dublin Men's Society of Letters?"
"Exactly. I'll get to that footnote directly. But you should first know that what was hardly obscure - then or now - was the basic contempt Yeats held for the Irish government in which he himself served as a senator in the twenties. Oliver, you'll recollect from my class what Yeats called Cosgrave government ?"
So, Gunston was a prize student.
Guston thought for a moment, then answered, "He said the government was 'something warm, damp and soiled, middle class democracy at its worst.'" (Page 264)

Yeats and Cosgrave are real parts of Irish history, the "Dublin Men's Society of Letters", not so much.

"Dear God, tonight as we partake of they kindest bounty, know that we'll be eating and drinking to the glorious, pious and immortal memories of thy own Sainted Patrick and our great good brother Brian Boru - who assisted, each is his respective way, in redeeming us Irish folk from toffee-snouted Englishmen and their ilk. We ask a blessing, if you please, on the Holy Father of Rome - and a shit for the Bishop of Canterbury. And to those at this table unwilling to drink to this, may he have a dark night, a lee shore, a rank storm and a leaky vessel to carry him over the River Styx . May the dog Cerberus make a meal of his rump, and Pluto a snuffbox of his skull, and may the Devil jump down his throat with a red hot harrow, and with every pin tear out a gut and blow him with a clean carcass to hell. Amen." (Page 324)

Up until we get to the part about the Bishop of Canterbury, I thought it was a fair prayer. And okay, the Catholic Irish don't like the Anglican English. But after that, geez, it sound more like a voodoo curse than any kind of prayer. Do people really pray like that?

This pistol is mentioned several times in the book.

Mauser WTP .25 caliber automatic pocket pistol

Links to more bits of history that are mentioned in the book.

H.O.S. (Hearts Of Steel)

Lord Brougham, Mrs. Gerrard, March 23, 1846

"leather Sam Brown belts"

This line appears several places and was apparently written by Yeats and appears in his book Samhain. "We wish to grow peaceful crops, but we must dig furrows with the sword."


Paintings

These paintings are mentioned early on when Hockaday arrives at his Uncle's house outside Dublin.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, circa 1750, Study of the Head of Tiepolo's Son, Lorenzo (Page 88)
I did not find it on the net, but I did find this one. This is one of a pair of paintings by Tiepolo that sold for a million bucks back in 2000.

Annibale Carracci, 1591, Portrait of a Young Boy (Page 89)

Girolamo Ferrabosco, circa 1640, Portrait of an Elegant Man (Page 116)

This picture is by Furini, but it is a picture of St. John the Evangelist.

Francesco Furini, circa 1630, St. Sebastian (Page 116)
I found pictures of St. Sebastion, but not by Furini.

Update March 2016. Replaced one missing picture.
Update October 2016 replaced one missing picture with larger one.