We Solve Murders, by Richard Osman, Viking, 464 pp, £22, ISBN: 978-0241608364 Want a cosy mystery that takes place partly in Dublin, Cork, and RTÉ’s studios? We Solve Murders fits the bill. How about a cosy mystery with a grand, idiosyncratic detective champion? That’s not We Solve Murders. Marple. Maigret. Marlowe. Holmes. Poirot. Montalbano. Gamache. Dupin. Dalgliesh. V.I. Warshawski. Kogoro Akechi. Karen Pirie. Glory Broussard. Martin Beck. Agatha Raisin. Do famous detectives solve mysteries on their own? Let’s apply the question Bertolt Brecht dares to ask in his poem ‘A Worker’s View of History’: ‘In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished / Where did the masons go?’ In the evening, when the mystery has been solved, where did all the people who helped the great detectives go? Their names don’t live on in the same way as the celebrisleuths. A parallel lesson awaits readers late on in Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone: ‘It’s all well and good for the heroes to play cops and robbers in novels and on TV, but in real life it’s the side characters who take the blows, who bear the pain, so someone else can raise their arms aloft in victory.’ The mystery genre overflows not so much with stories of a collective enterprise, but with the seemingly solitary efforts of Übermenschen, quirky brainboxes whose transgressions evaporate in an atmosphere of perpetual forgiveness. That forgiveness is based on the diegetic audience’s and the reading audience’s faith in the detective’s aim to steady a wobbly world, to undo the spreading miasma of scepticism inherent in the lead-up to the disclosure of the murderer, a period when even one’s bed partner seems a reasonable...

‘But to me our real shame lies in our silence regarding Fascism. We must be anti Fascist or all our history is a lie.’ Thus wrote poet Ewart Milne to Muriel MacSwiney on May 19th, 1942, at a stage in World War Two when it was by no means certain that the forces of fascism would be defeated. Milne had acted as a medical courier during the Spanish Civil War, the prelude, or as some regarded it, the rehearsal for World War Two. He also wrote some of his best poetry as a result of this first-hand visceral experience, driving medical supply lorries across the conflict zone. Milne and young poet Charles Donnelly were just two of the volunteers from across the globe drawn to the conflict, whether it was to the International Brigades, or as doctors or nurses, or to bear witness – as did journalists, photographers and documentary film-makers. Indeed it is now remembered, not entirely accurately, as a war, in its seeming stark struggle between fascism and communism that writers, poets, photographers and artists were galvanised by. Of course it was much more complex than that. But the fact that Irish writers – albeit only a handful – took their place in the ranks of an internationalist movement to save Spain from the threat of a Franco dictatorship, is still remarkable. Irish writers, both in physical and imaginative terms, engaged passionately with the cause of Republican Spain at a time when in conservative Catholic Ireland, vehemently in favour of Generalissimo Franco, it was deeply unpopular to do so. There were mass demonstrations in support of the church in Spain and Franco’s rebel forces. The largest of these...

Orwell – the new life, by DJ Taylor, Constable, 960 pp, £14.99, ISBN: 978-1472132987 Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell, by DJ Taylor, Yale University Press, 224 pp, £18.99, ISBN: 978-0300272987 ‘To read him and write about him is one of the greatest satisfactions I know,’ writes DJ Taylor of George Orwell. The evidence concurs. Orwell – the new life is his second take on the Orwell biography while Who is Big Brother? is his second deep dive into the writings of this ever-compelling author. In addition, several of Taylor’s other books – Bright Young People, The Prose Factory and The Lost Girls – while not directly about Orwell, concern his times, the people he knew and his interests. It all makes for a considerable output, running to several thousand pages and with no sense of short measure, of material being spread too thin, say, or recycled. This new biography, for example, is no mere makeover of its predecessor (George Orwell – the Life, published for the author’s centenary in 2003), more a systematic upgrade, drawing on, among other sources, the recent and pioneering work by Sylvia Topp (Eileen – the making of George Orwell, 2020) and Masha Karp (George Orwell and Russia, 2023) not to mention the ever-fascinating material that Darcy Moore keeps bringing to light (see www.darcymoore.net). I am pleased, however, that Taylor has retained the earlier book’s format, with the narrative periodically interrupted by a reflective mini-essay on a relevant Orwell theme. These include his lifelong thing about faces (‘At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves’), his rodent anxieties, his diaries, and his various insensitivities, notably regarding gay men and Jews. Of the former,...