The Black Widow - The Catherine Nevin story by Niamh O'Connor. O'Brien Press, pp 249. £6.99.
The People Vs Catherine Nevin by Liz Walsh, with Rita O'Reilly. Gill & Macmillan. pp263. £7.99
`Julia Roberts isn't pretty enough to play me," Catherine Nevin allegedly claimed. It is entirely appropriate that the infamous husband-killer should harbour such delusions. It fits her sense of herself as someone above the realm of ordinary life. And it also anticipates her status in a world where screenplays were already being considered before her trial ended. Were Martin Cahill alive today, he could go to the Veronica Guerin movie, When the Sky Falls and see the fourth screen version of himself in as many years. In the relentless maw of popular entertainment, high profile crime is irresistible, especially when it contains the spicy ingredients of the Nevin case - a queeny, ambitious wife, plotting to kill her husband, with possible IRA involvement, and lots of alleged sex with unexpected and possibly important people.
Oh, and there's a pub to run, and a Judge to feed . . .
Hardly has Nevin got used to the taste of Mountjoy porridge than along come these books, breathlessly - and successively - vying for the bestseller list. Author Liz Walsh has accused her rival's title of being in the demonising category, but is her own any less distorting? The People Vs Catherine Nevin is, of course, legal parlance, but the implication, with the blood-red lettering on its cover, is that Nevin was some sort of Ceaucescu despot against whom millions rose up. Likewise, the initial comparison with Lady Macbeth (curiously unsustained for the rest of this, the obviously more rushed, of the two books) is hardly applicable. Far from planning murder to boost her husband's career prospects, Nevin simply wanted to get rid of him. Nor is there any validity to the "Black Widow" tag. The spider metaphor suggests that the female of the species eats the male after lovemaking. But in this marriage there was very little lovemaking and, as Tom Nevin sadly complained, she seemed to be sleeping with everyone except himself.
These extravagant parallels - Mata Hari and the accomplice serial killer Rosemary West are also mentioned - are a predictable attempt to spice up what is already an extraordinary story, and perhaps betrays a shorthand need to "explain it all" by wider association. The reality is much more tawdry and sad. After years of troubled marriage, delineated better in Niamh O'Connor's book, Catherine tried to persuade a number of people to shoot her husband before eventually getting one to do the job. It is surely this farcical quality which makes the case so compelling. Along with, paradoxically, her cool demeanour in the aftermath of the murder, and trial. How much less of an impact it would have had if Nevin had pleaded guilty, or crumpled and cried on the witness stand. But instead she showed extraordinary self-control. Her performance, immediately following the killing, when the Gardai found her tied up and in "shock", was masterful, even if it was eventually torn apart in Prime Suspect-type analysis by the Garda.
ULTIMATELY her steely behaviour was delusional, as these books insist, but there is a sense in which everything is now seen in retrospect - the desire to "better" herself, the setting up of a grooming salon - all surely harmless in themselves, and not necessarily, as Walsh suggests, a "craving for money and status" or a "ruthlessness and a liking for scheming".
Such a demonising perspective also infects the media's notorious preoccupation with Nevin's looks and dress-sense, rightly complained about by her lawyers. Was she any more self-conscious or stylised than the besuited drugs barons or the odd "ordinary decent criminals", with their tee-totalling, good health and fake "social concerns"? Much more importantly, the use of words such as "evil" and "wicked" are a bit over the top in a society in which people are routinely dismembered or tortured to death, or fathers kill their babies. But such cases, of course, get much less attention because the killers are not women, of whom "we do not expect such things".
Both books conclude by stressing that questions remain to be answered about the case, including the bizarre love/hate relationship Catherine Nevin seemed to have with the Garda. Walsh's book is particularly good at describing the "Used Car" end of the Republican movement, with its various chancers and small criminals "stood down" for sullying the cause, but there is also a strong suggestion that the Nevins were being lined up, from on high, for a pub purchase through which money could be laundered. Finally, of course, there is the continuing mystery of the actual hitman. Or hitwoman, perhaps. If a woman could plan it, in so cold and focused a way, then why couldn't a woman have pulled the trigger? With, or without, any sense of Lady Macbeth melodrama.
Whatever one thinks, both books are selling very well. Walsh's account is directly told as befits a Magill journalist (the compelling courtroom scenes were provided by Rita O'Reilly) whereas O'Connor's book goes into the more domestic details, trying to give the bigger picture with lots of flashbacks and flamingo-pink bathrobes.
Eamon Delaney is a novelist and critic