Book review: Dirty Linen is a harrowing read about the toll of the Troubles on one small town
Martin Doyle’s book is mainly a series of anguished conversations with Tullylish residents left to pick up the pieces after their loved ones’ killings
“Who shot her?” That was eight-year-old Martin Doyle’s instinctive response when his mother told him that an elderly neighbour had passed on. Growing up in what was dubbed Northern Ireland’s Murder Triangle, “the idea that an old woman might have died of natural causes did not even occur to me”.
Doyle’s sensitively written but emotionally gruelling book is clearly inspired by a quote attributed to Joseph Stalin: “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Part memoir, part history, Dirty Linen sets out to explore the Troubles’ psychological legacy through the microcosm of its author’s home parish.
