On the day David Marcus published my first short story in The Irish Press in 1976, when I was still a schoolboy in Finglas, I remember dreaming that one day I might publish a collection of stories. I had no idea what my future held, but I never imagined that it would take me another forty-four years to get around to fulfilling my ambition. In fairness to myself, there were interruptions to the process that got in the way, in the form of fourteen novels, two collaborative novels, seventeen plays, ten collections of poetry and three decades of wasting my Friday evenings making runs into the box, on a succession of muddy pitches, waiting for the perfect ball to arrive for a diving header, that was only delivered courtesy of my grown son just after my fiftieth birthday when I could finally retire.
However now, forty-four years later, this debut book of stories which I dreamt about as a schoolboy will finally be published by New Island under the title, Secrets Never Told, with this handsome cover. It doesn’t contain the story that David Marcus published back in 1976 but it does contain a story about Roger Casement which David published in what was probably the last anthology he ever edited. “The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories, 2006-07”. I have a precious memory of having the privilege of going to meet him in Wynn’s Hotel to discuss some edits to that story, and finding this elegantly dressed elderly gentleman patiently waiting on the front steps, umbrella and leather gloves in hand, smiling shyly in greeting. Following a stroke David was starting to have problems with his memory even then, but I remember his ability to still utterly focus on the story and make small suggestions with the same insight he had shown in his first letter to me in 1976.
Like their author, and like many another Irish XI before them, the eleven stories in Secrets Never Told have all undergone varied journeys. Many were commissioned by BBC Radio 4 with every strict word counts and it has been fascinating to use these last months of lockdown to rewrite them and watch them find their natural length, with the characters finally having space to breathe. Hopefully the blurb below written by New Island gives a sense of what I have been waiting forty-four years to say, if anyone wants to check out the book when it appears in September:
“A daughter searches a foreign city for her missing father, hoping to uncover the secret behind his disappearance. A widow tries to hunt down an unknown woman who secretly leaves flowers on her husband’s grave, tormented by doubts they cause about her past. A former lover of Roger Casement standing among crowds at his state funeral, paying silent homage to the secret world they were forced to inhabit. A novelist at a book launch is confronted by the only other person aware of the secret behind his success. Another writer is summoned to visit a dying stranger who seems convinced they have spent their lives locked in bitter rivalry. A child is randomly knocked down outside the home of a woman who seems powerless to prevent her garden wall being transformed into a permanent shrine.
These intricate and subtle short fictions by a master storyteller peer under the veneer of our lives, delve into the secrets that bind relationships together or tears them apart, and create worlds where people discover how nothing about their past is truly certain. There are always truths just beyond reach that would make sense of their lives if they only knew how to unlock them.”
Advance orders of the book can be made at https://www.newisland.ie/fiction/secrets-never-told