Murder in 1952 is one of the few ‘true crime’ mysteries in Northern Ireland that does not involve the Troubles
Iain Hay Gordon pictured when he was arrested.
As a writer, he had been thinking about the case for years but he “couldn’t find a way into it”; her photograph, and the discovery that Gordon had whistled a tune, The Blue Tango – which was in the charts at the time – in between interrogations gave him “not just the title of the book, it’s the texture of it, it’s the noir feel of it.
He went on to write two more books about murder cases overseen by Judge Curran – Orchid Blue and Blue is the Night – which deal with, respectively, the judge’s sentencing of Robert McGladdery – the last man to be hanged in Northern Ireland – for the murder of 19-year-old Pearl Gamble in 1961 and the Robert the Painter case, about a Protestant, Robert Taylor, on trial for the murder of a Catholic woman, Mary McGowan, in Belfast in 1949, who the judge ensures walks free.
Among the “fascinating” aspects of the Curran case, he says, is “this miasma of wrongdoing and transgression, she’d been going out with older men, all this sort of stuff common to sexual crime cases, it had the ‘she brought it on herself’ sort of feeling to it. During his research, he interviewed many people in the North, including some who remembered the murdered teenager and others who met Gordon after he was sent to the asylum in Antrim town.
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