There was a time when thesps rested. They signed-on, caught up with housework and took to the drink. Now though, if you're a comedian, an actor or even a hack, you too can write a novel. All you need is a sprinkling of column inches or a moment of glory on the small screen and some publisher will be screaming to turn your two-page plot outline into a garishly-covered, jolly, cheerful, read.
Some of the above applies to Pauline McLynn and her burgeoning career as a writer. She's famous for playing the part of Mrs Doyle in Father Ted. But that's beside the point with the publication of McLynn's second comic novel Better than a Rest (is this advice to other thesps?), which sees the return of her female PI, Leo Street, to the mean badlands of Howth, Clontarf and Blackrock.
We find Street already on the job at the opening of the book and by page four McLynn has laid out the rudiments of the investigation in hand. Miranda, the icecold, haughty wife of fertility consultant Michael O'Donoghue, has hired Leo to find out if her husband is having an affair. But, as it progresses, the investigation soon shifts emphasis from O'Donoghue's supposed philandering to his ethics as a medical consultant involved in the sensitive areas of genetics and fertility treatment; a prescient choice of theme in light of recent news regarding genetically altered babies Stateside. Two other subplots involve investigations into a case of arson and a series of spooky phone calls to Street's friend Maeve.
But the sleuthing seems to be something that either doesn't interest McLynn very much or that she's not very good at. Either way, detective fiction purists would not find Street's modest assignments either intriguing or baffling. It seems much more likely though that McLynn made Leo Street a private investigator to create a character with a job that is full of comic possibility. That done and dusted, McLynn gets on with what she's good at, making Street live and talk and think.
In a novel that's at best patchily written (for instance why waste space with weak and nonsensical sentences like "Death is a big word, and a bigger event"?) and poorly plotted, Leo Street herself emerges to save the day. As first-person narrator she compares well with Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone. There's that same easy and direct self-deprecating conversation with the reader, although this gumshoe's Dublin is a good deal less fertile in criminal possibilities than Millhone's Santa Teresa.
Leo is something of an "ordinary" woman, short, physically imperfect and sexually deprived. Her live-in actor boyfriend of three years is a ne'er-do-well who prefers six-packs to nights of lust. Love interest comes in the form of an old flame from her teenage years who has Leo "creaming" herself and masturbating in the bath. Inflamed (literally) by a night of passion, Street then succumbs to one of the most mucilaginous colds in writing history. As Leo wisecracks her way through the novel, one can't help feeling how much better this would work if dramatised. It would be interesting therefore to see the well drawn Leo follow her author's example and pursue a career on the screen, small or large.
Yvonne Nolan is a journalist and critic