The Red Branch
It’s 1883 and the Fenians are at it again, bombing high profile targets in London (Scotland Yard, the House of Commons etc). Some of the dynamite is coming from 6000 miles away in San Francisco. Because he’s Irish, expendable, and an annoying pain in the ass, a young London Metropolitan policeman, Robert Emmet Orpen, is despatched on a secret mission to the city by the Bay. His job is to infiltrate the Fenian front organisation in San Francisco, the Knights of the Red Branch.
His cover is blown before he sees his first cable car.
He finds himself on the San Francisco police force, competing for the attention of the flamboyant southerner, Sergeant Wellington Campbell, and the feisty Californian medic, Ophelia Williams. He ends up investigating a bloody revenge killing while going ten rounds with the seamier side of California’s murderous politics, and San Francisco’s Irish-American turf wars.
The Red Branch is part-detective, part-espionage, part-thriller, where the Rogues Gallery of malevolent characters and the sequence of deadly events are often observed with a wry sense of humour, and where you will be trying (and hopefully failing) to get your bearings until the final page.
Myles Dungan is an Irish TV and Radio broadcaster, presenter of the weekly History Show on RTÉ (Irish National Radio) and the author of almost twenty books on Irish and American history. He holds a PhD from Trinity College Dublin and received a Fulbright Award in 2006. The Red Branch is his first novel and he hopes it won't be his last.
‘The combination of a dynamic narrator with a vivid recreation of 1880s San Francisco makes The Red Branch compulsively readable.’
John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.
The Red Branch is a wonderfully inventive, vigorous and exciting fiction woven out of the facts of the Irish republican movement on the west coast of America in the nineteenth century. The narrative is positively symphonic, and teems with memorable characters and colourful action. The character of our hero, Robert Emmet Orpen, is as intricately fashioned as his highly resonant name. A splendid read.
John Banville, winner of the Booker Prize for The Sea
Myles Dungan’s magnificent The Red Branch introduces us to Robert Emmet Orpen, an Irish man from Kells Co Meath who started out in the Dublin Metropolitan Police and then to the London Met before landing in the Wild West of 1880s San Francisco where he is charged with infiltrating the infamous Knights of the Red Branch, a supposedly benevolent organisation. Here, he comes across knaves and rogues as villainous as himself though perhaps not quite so eloquent.
Dungan’s use of language and wordplay although light in tone, displays an extraordinary talent; plotting is watertight and characterisation is rich and vivid. A totally absorbing and highly amusing caper.
Liz Nugent, author of Strange Sally Diamond
