Rory Gallagher’s Hardboiled Blues

Rory Gallagher, for those whose ears have not yet been blessed, was Ireland’s Archdruid of bluesy rock, a virtuoso on the guitar, an electrifying live performer, a fine vocalist and talented songwriter with an understated literary bent. Music was not just his job but the organizing principle of his life; everything he saw, heard and read fed into his art. Naturally enough, most of his artistic influences were musical but film and literature also played a part.

Just as he was most drawn to Blues as a musical genre, he was strongly attracted to detective fiction and even saw parallels between the two art forms:

“If you look at Rhythm and Blues, whatever that means, compared to the pop scene, and then just look at a hard-boiled detective story with sort of amoral crime in it, there’s a kind of funny connection. Plus, the writing in a crime thriller is very sparse, sharp and bittersweet—usually bitter. And I can see some kind of connection in myself, you know.”
(Hot Press, 29 December 1988, interview with Ronan O’Reilly)

The books he liked most were infused with an atmosphere of menace, alleviated by flashes of wit. They are often centered on an alienated hero fighting a losing battle against the corruption, betrayal and ruin that surrounds him. Many of his song lyrics reflect this kind of world and, in a few lines, sketch a story where the stakes are high and the prospects are grim. While this is most marked in his later albums, especially Defender (1987), his lyrics have always been peopled by circus freaks, spies, loansharks, sinners and slumming angels.
Because I’m a fan both of Rory Gallagher and detective fiction, I thought I’d share some of the books he liked best. It’s also fascinating to me to see how a musician seamlessly incorporated elements of a literary form into his work and creating an original marriage between the Blues and Detective Novels, two of the great popular art forms of the Twentieth Century.

1
The Third Policeman (1967) by Flann O’Brien (pen name of Brian O’Nolan)

‘The Atomic Theory,’ I sallied, ‘is a thing that is not clear to me at all.’
‘Michael Gilhaney,’ said the Sergeant, ‘is an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the principle of the Atomic Theory. Would it astonish you to hear that he is nearly half a bicycle?’
‘It would surprise me unconditionally,’ I said.
‘Michael Gilhaney,’ said the Sergeant, ‘is nearly sixty years of age by plain computation and if he is itself, he has spent no less than thirty-five years riding his bicycle over the rocky roadsteads and up and down the hills and into the deep ditches when the road goes astray in the strain of the winter. He is always going to a particular destination or other on his bicycle at every hour of the day or coming back from there at every other hour. If it wasn’t that his bicycle was stolen every Monday he would be sure to be more than half-way now.’
‘Half-way to where?’
‘Half-way to being a bicycle himself,’ said the Sergeant.’
‘Your talk,’ I said, ‘is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.’
‘Did you never study atomics when you were a lad?’ asked the Sergeant, giving me a look of great inquiry and surprise.

Gallagher was a proud Irishman and dear to his heart was the classic Irish novel, The Third Policeman. While it’s not strictly a detective novel, it is a very dark, very funny tale that has a crime and a mystery at its heart. Although he never referenced it in his lyrics, he showed his affinity for it in an interview when the interviewer encourages him to speculate on the possibility of ever being separated from the 1961 Stratocaster he’d had since being a teenager:

‘It’s the Third Policeman syndrome—you become so attached to something that it actually becomes part of you. Trying to replace that guitar would be like trying to replace a limb.’ SOUNDS (December 10, 1988)

Gallagher’s fondness for Flann O’Brien’s writing is even clearer in a reminiscence of Alex Lifeson of Rush. In 1982, Rory’s band was opening for Rush on tour. Lifeson recalls getting to know him pretty well during that time:

‘We spent hours and hours talking about that sort of stuff. He bought me a copy of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, and I was really touched by that, that he would think to do that, and he said, “You’ve gotta read it, he’s a great satirist. His books are great and it gives you an eye for that Irish humour and where it comes from.” And I read the book and I got back to him, days later, I guess, and said I really enjoyed it. We had a bit of a break, he went back to Ireland and came back to North America. He bought me the whole series and gave me the whole series of books. He said, “If you liked that one, you’ll love them as well.”‘

2.
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) by Patricia Highsmith

“I quite understand,” Peter said. “I’m going home at the end of May, you know. If you’d like to come along and stay at my place in Ireland, you’re more than welcome. It’s deadly quiet there, I can assure you.”
Tom glanced at him. Peter had told him about his old Irish castle and had shown him pictures of it. Some quality of his relationship with Dickie flashed across his mind like the memory of a nightmare, like a pale and evil ghost. It was because the same thing could happen with Peter, he thought, Peter the upright, unsuspecting, naïve, generous good fellow—except that he didn’t look enough like Peter. But one evening, for Peter’s amusement, he had put on an English accent and had imitated Peter’s mannerisms and his way of jerking his head to one side as he talked, and Peter had thought it hilariously funny. He shouldn’t have done that, Tom thought now. It made Tom bitterly ashamed, that evening and the fact that he had thought even for an instant that the same thing that had happened with Dickie could happen with Peter.’

In 1983, the Irish music magazine Hot Press asked Rory what his favourite book was. His answer was The Talented Mr. Ripley. Of Highsmith he notes:

“She writes more psychological sort of stories. She has a lot of crime stories where she has maybe only one murder and only one cop in it, and it’s not all cops and robbers.”

Sounds come crashing and I hear laughing
All those lights just blaze away
I feel a little strange inside
A little bit of Jekyll, a little Mr. Hyde

3.
Ripley’s Game (1974) by Patricia Highsmith

Tom was not really such a monster. But how to explain? Jonathan tried again. ‘Do you realize that last night—those men were killers? They had guns, they had garrotes. Tu comprends, garrotes.—They came to Tom’s house.’
‘And why were you there?’
Gone was the excuse of paintings that Tom wanted framed. One didn’t help Tom kill people, help him get rid of corpses, because one was going to frame a few pictures. And what was the favor Tom Ripley had done him to make him cooperate so? Jonathan closed his eyes, gathering strength, trying to think.

Just as Gallagher declared his favorite book was The Talented Mr. Ripley, his preferred film was a film adaptation of Ripley’s Game, Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (1977). It seems reasonable, therefore, to think that he liked the book as well.

The concept of Evil, of the dark side is something that Highsmith treated with expert hands. It was something that Rory used to good effect in his lyrics, but it was also something he had a superstitious respect for in real life. There was a legend, for example, that Robert Johnson (1911-1938) got his guitar-playing powers by meeting the Devil at a crossroads, that the Devil tuned his guitar for him in return for his soul. In an article in The Irish Times, Rory describes an experience he had while listening to a Robert Johnson record:

“[I] got a strange feeling of maybe connecting with some evil force which made me switch off the music and I haven’t played Johnson since. I get that black cat feeling and, blues or no blues, there is a strong post-Celtic pagan element within the Irish, which I don’t think we’ve ever completely shaken off. So, as a superstitious Catholic, I think it’s dangerous for us to toy with these forces….You have to step over a certain line, not necessarily to connect with evil, but to take yourself as close to the brink as you can, to give the music that essential edge. It’s a dangerous balance you have to try and maintain.” (‘Black Cat Blues’, The Irish Times, 14 August 1992)

4.
The Continental Op (1923) by Dashiell Hammett

The Continental Op, ‘the Op’ for short, is one of literature’s first hardboiled detectives. He appeared in 36 short stories that Hammett had published mainly in the pulp magazine Black Mask in the 1920s. The Op is a master of deceit and a man whose experience of the dark side has left him dangerously close to losing his humanity. In the last chapter of The Dain Curse, for example, a woman client notices his dark side:

“You came in just now, and then I saw—”
She stopped.
“What?”
“A monster. A nice one, an especially nice one to have around when you’re in trouble, but a monster just the same, without any human foolishness like love in him, and—What’s the matter? Have I said something I shouldn’t?”

Rory wrote the song “Continental Op” as a tribute to Dashiell Hammett’s detective. The song appeared on Defender (1987), one of his raunchiest albums and the one most infused with detective-fiction atmosphere. He talked about writing the song with Shiv Cariappa:

“It is his character, the Continental OP, a very vain detective, and I just wrote that one night after reading various stories of his, you know. [Hammett’s] got a book of short stories called The Big Knockover, and the ‘OP’ is in that. I’ve also got quite a few books on the life of Dashiell Hammett, which is quite an interesting story on what he’s been through and so on.”

Well..there’s a body in the bay
The cops are taking it away
They said this case was closed
It only shows that you never know

So who are they gonna get
When the trouble’s gotta stop?
Here’s my card
I’m the Continental Op

5
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) by John Le Carré

Now ain’t it strange that I feel like
Philby, there’s a stranger in my soul
I’m lost in transit in a lonesome city, I can’t come in from the cold
I’m deep in action on a secret mission, contact’s broken down
Time drags by, I’m above suspicion, there’s a voice on the telephone

One of the greatest scandals of the Cold War era was the (still partly suppressed) story of the ‘Cambridge Five’, a handful of anti-capitalists who joined the British Foreign Office and fed thousands of pages of classified information to the Soviet Union. These men included Guy Burgess, Donald MacClean, Anthony Blunt, Harold ‘Kim’ Philby and (probably) John Cairncross.
Of all these spies, Philby has probably most captured the public imagination. At the end of the Second World War, he was head of anti-Soviet operations for the SIS (now the MI6) and shortly afterwards he served as the chief British Intelligence officer in the United States. He was in this last position when the CIA uncovered Soviet messages that pointed directly to Donald MacClean. When Philby realized this, he urged Guy Burgess to warn their colleague. Both MacClean and Burgess disappeared, seeking refuge in the USSR. This left Philby looking like the most likely ‘Third Man’. Though he repeatedly denied it, he resigned in 1951 as his firing looked inevitable. In 1955, Foreign Secretary Harold MacMillan even declared, “I have no reason to conclude that Mr. Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of his country, or to identify him with the so-called ‘Third Man’, if indeed there was one.” But in 1963 Philby defected to Moscow and in 1967 he granted an interview to Murry Sayle of The Times in Moscow in which he admitted that “his purpose in life was to destroy imperialism.”

In 1963, the same year Philby defected to the Soviet Union, John Le Carré published the novel that would make him famous, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It’s a psychological thriller that follows the adventures of a burnt-out British spy sent to East Germany to pose as a defector in order to sow disinformation. It was controversial at the time because of its implied criticism of western intelligence methods, especially because Le Carré (the nom de plume of David Cornwell) had worked for the SIS in the fifties and early sixties. In 1974, Le Carré published Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which referenced the Philby affair more directly as it follows George Smiley’s efforts to uncover a Soviet mole in the British intelligence service.

Rory Gallagher was certainly aware of Le Carré’s writing as his song “Philby” includes the line “I’m lost in transit in a lonesome city, I can’t come in from the cold,” a glancing allusion to The Spy Who Camei from the Cold. The song was composed for the album Top Priority (1979), which was coincidentally released just a few weeks before Margaret Thatcher publicly outed Anthony Blunt as the fourth known member of the Cambridge Five. Rory: admitted to being somewhat obsessed with Philby in a 1991 interview with Christian Science Monitor:

“I was fascinated by his story. I read every book I could get on him, and of course he is not a great hero in England. I don’t agree with spying and so on, but he was so audacious. I never heard a song before that—on a spy, on a specific spy. I often wonder if he ever heard it.”

In a 1987 interview (with Spenser Leigh at a soundcheck in Liverpool on 9 October 1987, BBC Radio Merseyside) Gallagher reveals that he was particularly interested in Philby as a psychological study, though from a slightly different perspective than that of Le Carré. Whereas the novelist writes from the point of view of those trying to unearth the mole, the songwriter becomes the mole himself:

“One day I felt harassed as there were a lot of things going on and I thought that I felt like Philby, just before he went over the Albanian border. I had read a book about him and though I’m not over-sympathetic to his plight, he is a fascinating character. The song is not strictly about him, but I tried to bring in some of that twilight zone that was in his life into the song. When you’re on the road for a long time, living in hotels, it’s a bit like the life of a spy.”

6 Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

“All she did was take her hand out of her bag, with a gun in it. All she did was point it at me and smile. All I did was nothing.”

In 1988, Rory explained the nature of his interest in detective fiction to Bill Graham:

“I’m not interested in the violence, it’s the characters, the remarks they make and the loyalties: particularly the code of honour between police and thieves in the French gangster movies.” (Hot Press [Volume 12, Issue 4], 18 March 1988)

Among the cases full of such books that Rory took with him on tour, there were not a few by Raymond Chandler. Chandler had an Irish mother and it is perhaps for this that he is one of the most lyrical of the hard-boiled novelists. His famous anti-hero, Philip Marlowe, is a complex and sentimental man, a loner who refuses to take a fee for work he considers crooked. In all these qualities, he was similar to Rory himself.
And there are similarities between Chandler and Gallagher as artists. Both were constantly experimenting and trying to push the boundaries of the genre they worked in. In Chandler’s introduction to Trouble is My Business he said, “To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it is the dream of every magazine writer who is not a hopeless hack.” By the same token, Gallagher always resisted being put in a box. While his music was firmly rooted in the Blues, he was open to influences as distant as Irish trad, Zydeco, Rock n’ Roll, boogie and flamenco.

She’s the driver of the getaway car
Public enemy No.1
She’s fact and she’s fiction
All wrapped up into one.

Postscript
Several years after Rory’s untimely death in 1995, his brother and former manager Donal Gallagher conceived a project to honor his brother’s love for detective stories. The result was Kickback City, a concept album including Rory’s best noir-inspired songs, four postcards designed by Timothy Truman and a 44-page novella by Rankin narrated by the actor Aidan Quinn. In this video, Truman talks about his connection with Gallagher’s music and his work on the project, which is as fitting a tribute as I can think of to the musician’s passion for hardboiled Blues.