The Winter Guest by WC Ryan

 published 2022

set January 1921

I’ve written often about novels set in the Big Houses of Ireland, and recently specifically did a post on Annabel Davis Goff’s three books which – I didn’t really lay this out in the post – cover a short century of Irish history. Fox Walk dealt with the aftermath of the Easter Rising, as does this book. (This Cold Country was set during WW2, The Dower House in the 1950s and onwards.)

The Winter Guest has a similar setting to Fox Walk – I didn’t set out to read another book about the Ascendancy, but then I will never turn one down…

Here we have a WW1 veteran heading off to Kilcolgan House in the West of Ireland after an ambush goes wrong – there’s a car with three dead bodies in it, and one of the deaths is raising serious questions. Tom Harkin, the ex-Army Captain, knows the house and the family and one of the victims - he knew them before the War, he has his connections. You might think you’ve seen all this before, but the investigation is not exactly as you might be expecting, he is no police officer, and people are taking sides in the ongoing conflict, and there are surprises for everyone.

Harkin’s enquiries are engrossing, as he tries to find out what happened, and renew some old friendships. As ever, there are questions of who you can trust and whose side people are on: there are complex layers of loyalty and betrayal. There is also a touch of the supernatural, a house full of ghosts, something Ryan writes about very well in the proper chilling melancholy way.

I thought this was a great mixture of a crime novel, a historical, and a ghost story – a real page turner.

The location – and at least one of the female characters – reminded me of Lissadell House, here, (and another blogpost here) and the sisters that WB Yeats was so fond of, Constance Markievicz and Eva Gore Booth. Down to the initials scratched onto the glass.

I had two questions about the book: did Catholics go to Trinity College Dublin at the relevant time? And how old was the housekeeper? But that’s just me being pedantic. This was a well-written delight, full of convincing detail and a giving a real – and fair – picture of a very difficult time in Ireland’s history. And one that wasn’t going to get any easier for a good few years. The time is early 1921 – in the middle of the Irish War of Independence, a process that started with the 1916 Easter Rising. This was followed by the signing of the Treaty at the end of 1921, which led to the Irish Civil War. The pictures here are very much from that era, but come from different stages. It’s not necessary to know all the details of the history, and the key moment where the enemy changed – and most English readers wouldn’t get those nuances – but it enriches the book to know them. And special kudos to Ryan (for those who read a lot about those times) for holding back on the Black and Tans, those pivotal divisive bogeymen of the time, reduced now to the name of a drink, and mentioned only twice in the book.

The top picture of the young man and the soldiers is one I have used several times before for books set in this era. It is from the National Library of Ireland, and shows ‘A prisoner under escort in July 1922’ – that’s a little later than the setting of the book.

Constance Markieviecz is one of the group in the churchyard – 3^rd from left, photo from the same source.

 The next b/w  picture  shows a woman whose cottage has been destroyed by troops in a reprisal attack.

The military in the book travel round on Crossley Tenders:

He considers his options – Sackville Street is to be avoided. There are sentries outside the GPO and O’Connell Bridge is always guarded. Capel Street is a possibility, but then he hears the distinctive rattle and wheeze of a Crossley Tender from that direction and adjusts his course to avoid it….

this  picture shows exactly that vehicle, exactly in Sackville St (which is now O’Connell St ) in Dublin..

I very much enjoyed a previous historical crime novel with a touch of the supernatural by WC Ryan, House of Ghosts.