There is a certain perception that life in Cork is like a musical. It has the reputation of being an antic town but this is easy hyperbole that doesn't fully colour the canvas; Passion Play, the debut novel from Cork writer Conal Creedon, acknowledges that there is a sense of darkness too, that everyday Cork isn't all jaunty, singsong frolics. "There probably is a feeling of Cork being a happy-go-lucky kind of place, but I don't think that's something that's contrived by Cork people," says Creedon. "My intention from the start was to write a sad story because in some way I feel that sadness is more the natural state of people, although we might all go around acting as if we're ecstatic."

Passion Play is the story of Pluto, grimly surveying the debris of his existence in a dreary Northside bed-sit as middle-age looms. Under a malodorous duvet, he sucks on his rollies and decides to bolt towards a suicidal escape route. Gurgling back a bottle of gut-rot and gobbling psychedelics, he thinks back over his life. Reminiscences of boyhood intermingle with memories of thwarted romance and blackly comedic episodes dip and soar in sympathy with the streetscape.

"I never set out to write the book as a comedy and I don't see that it is, really," says Creedon. "I mean, the main character is suicidal, someone else ends up on heroin, someone dies of cancer, someone dies of Aids. When people say that they found it funny, I kind of worry and think, `My God, what's wrong with me?' "

But there is comedy here, a comedy of dysfunction and domestic despair. It is carried by Creedon's happy knack for dialogue, but the fact that this dialogue is sprung from the cadence of Cork life is, he claims, almost incidental.

"The reality is that it isn't really a book about Cork at all; it's as much about Cork as the Passion of Jesus Christ is about Jerusalem. I was doing a little story about life and I wanted to make sure that it was as true as possible. To do this, I felt I had to give it a definite location, I had to make it site-specific and Cork is the place I know best."

Cork is a useful location and its topography has long provided a dizzy backdrop for fiction. Frank O'Connor described the city's inherent dramatic quality with his customary wit: "There is the up and down of it on the hills," he wrote, "as though it was built in a Cork accent."

In truth the Cork backdrop in Passion Play is nicely etched but the emphasis is firmly on the central comic melancholia of Pluto's somewhat fatalistic take on life. He is a victim of injurious happenstance, a man for whom things go wrong, and as his many-tentacled narrative splices its way into the fabric of the city, the tale gathers pace and darkens.

"I consciously wanted the tone of it to be sad and colourful, rather than sad and funny," says Conal. "The characters in there are Joe Soaps with biased and uninformed opinions, they're wrong about stuff, and I wanted to keep that intact."

Creedon's first book, a collection of stories called Pancho And Lefty Ride Out, was published in 1994 but it was his daily soap opera for RTE Radio Cork, Under The Goldie Fish, that sparked public interest. With its strange and swirling undertow of magic realism, it attracted a cult following but, after 400-plus episodes, has now been laid to rest.

"With Goldie Fish, I found that the script was forever flying off to Tokyo, or the foothills of Afghanistan, and eventually I felt that the wackier it got, the more that it seemed like I was running out of ideas.

"It was a hugely enjoyable experience but four years was enough. I did an awful lot of it - 70 pages of text a week - and if you do that, you're going to wear it out at some stage."

Currently writer-in-residence at the Everyman Palace theatre, Conal is working on what he has tentatively dubbed The Second City Trilogy, three plays set in or inspired by Cork. He is also involved in a "top secret Millennium project" with Pat Kiernan of Corcadorca theatre company.

Writing is his pleasure, he says, rather than his profession: "I do it for my own enjoyment. If people like it, that's great, if they don't, I won't be too upset." There will be further novels but not just yet. "I'd be pauperised if I did another straight away. Writing novels is no way to pay the bills."

Passion Play is published by Poolbeg.