Keep Away from Those Ferraris by Pat Fitzpatrick

published 2013

 
[Clothes descriptions from various points in the book]

She’s sitting opposite me now wearing a black trouser suit and white blouse combo with black pumps. Her hair is naturally blonde and she’s got great skin for a fifty-year-old woman. She could do with losing a couple of pounds, but she’d still get a stare or two in the supermarket aisle...

I give her a weary look. Shit, she’s gorgeous. I think Irish men have an extra thing for women with a tan. It just seems cleaner or something, I don’t know. Anyway, looking at her sitting there in a tight white vest and skinny black jeans and cherry Converse, there’s no other way to put it. She’s gorgeous….

His black Hugo Boss suit looks well though, and as always he’s wearing a shirt that couldn’t have cost less than one hundred euro.


observations: Col of Col’s Criminal Library is a good blogfriend, and there is a definite point where our tastes in crime books coincide. And Col bravely continues to visit Clothes in Books even when the subject is at the other end of the spectrum – some serious novel about relationships and feelings. He usually comments that he would not read the book in any circumstances, but at least he made an effort. There’s been slim pickings for him over here for a while, but luckily while on a recent holiday to Ireland I picked up a book that I think will appeal to him, so I am presenting it to him here with my compliments, and the news that it is only £1.99 on Kindle right now, and blow the embargo.

I came across Pat Fitzpatrick while reading an Irish newspaper: he made a joke in a column saying that David and Victoria Beckham had a friend who was now a player at Shamrock Rovers in Dublin, but:

It's fair to say the Beckhams won't be paying him a visit in that part of Dublin. They wouldn't want some future child asking, "Tell me again why you called me The Red Cow?"

Now you need at least 3 pieces of trivial information and pointless celebrity gossip to understand this joke, but when you do it is hilarious, and I laughed so much I had to see what else he had written, and I read some more pieces, then bought this book.

It’s a highly entertaining thriller about the bold bad days of the Irish economy – the Celtic Tiger – and how it all went wrong. The hero, Noel Byrne, is a financial journalist in Dublin who gets caught up in various scams and is being blackmailed by several people at once. The opening of the book has him standing ready to make a TV broadcast:

This is the night I get to deliver a live news report in the firing line of two snipers. Both have orders to shoot if I don’t say exactly what they want me to say. That’s bad enough. What’s worse is they both want me to say different things.

-- then the book rewinds to tell us how he got there. BTW the Ferraris of the title are a shady family of Italian origin, not the cars.

The book is full of violence, drink, drugs, cold-hearted sex, swearing and completely immoral behaviour, so I’m guessing Col will like it. It feels as though Fitzpatrick knows his stuff about finance, and he certainly does a good job on his characters. Some of it probably went right past me - I’m sure an Irish resident would get extra jokes and observations. But I found it very entertaining and clever in an outrageous way – not for the easily shocked…

The clothes described in the book certainly sum up a certain style of the time.