My mother, Eilís Dillon, was the author of fifty books, ranging from children's stories to historical novels. She wrote and translated poetry, and had two plays produced by the Abbey Theatre company. Her books have been translated into fifteen languages. Fifteen years after her death, several are still in print.

She enjoyed working within the discipline of genres, while taking liberties with their conventions. Although her first forays into adult fiction were cast in the detective story mould, they are more concerned with character than with the intricacies of plot. The three mysteries from the 1950s, Death at Crane's Court, Sent to His Account, Death in the Quadrangle, enjoyed a good level of success and received extremely positive reviews. All three were reprinted in America; there were translations into Dutch, French and Italian. So why, given this promising start, do we not have a dozen Eilís Dillon detective stories?

A certain creative restlessness, visible at several points in her career, prompted her to move on, abandoning crime fiction in favour of ironic literary novels appealing to a sophisticated minority readership. In the 1970s, she changed again to write well-researched historical novels, dealing with patriotic themes in a style that combined elements of literary and popular fiction. That earned her a wide international readership, international critical acclaim, and the disapproval of some local book reviewers. Some of her later books tended to undermine or at least question the world-view of her first historical novels, and she also returned to other genres. Her last writing project was a novel which began to expose some of the tensions of her own early life. She fell ill while writing this novel, and instead of finishing it she devoted her last remaining energies to assembling and editing the academic essays that her second husband, Vivian Mercier, had left unfinished at his death in 1989. The resulting book, Modern Irish Literature: Sources and Founders, appeared from the Clarendon Press, Oxford in the year of her own death, 1994.

It is a pity that her last novel remained unfinished, as her early experiences had been interesting and formative. A non-fiction work, Inside Ireland, had touched on some of these matters, but without the dark irony that enlivened her fiction.

Even before her birth in 1920, Eilís's family had been deeply involved in the traumatic events of the Irish War of Independence. Her maternal uncle Joseph Mary Plunkett, a talented poet, was one of the seven signatories of the Proclamation of Independence, and was executed by firing squad following the rebellion of Easter Week 1916. The summary execution of the leaders of that rebellion proved to be a disastrous act of stupidity on the part of the British authorities, conferring the status of martyrs on a motley crew of amateur revolutionaries, and ensuring the secession of most of Ireland from the United Kingdom some years later. That secession provoked a formal split between Northern Ireland, with its Unionist majority wishing to retain British rule, and a mostly Catholic Irish Free State which promptly fell into a brief but bitter civil war followed by decades of economic and political stagnation. Both of Eilís's parents had spent time in jail. Her father, a professor of chemistry in Galway, left control of the household to her mother, Geraldine Plunkett Dillon, a woman of immense creative drive coupled with a powerful personality. Geraldine's vivid and opinionated memoirs, All in the Blood, were edited posthumously by my cousin Honor O Brolchain and published in 2006.

Geraldine loved some of her children unconditionally, but took every opportunity to marginalize Eilís, even in very old age. Back in the 1920s, another trauma struck the family when one of the six children died in early childhood. Also, there was rivalry between Eilís and her two older sisters. One did a law degree, one studied medicine. Despite a brilliant school career, Eilís was not channelled towards further study. This always bothered her, and left her with a tendency to marry professors (not such a bad choice, really).

When she reached the age when her sisters had gone to university, Eilís had been apprenticed to the hotel trade. Or so her mother described the arrangement. In reality, her duties as a trainee involved emptying chamberpots, collecting used condoms from tangled bedsheets, and having her handbag searched at the end of the working day to ensure that she was not stealing her employer's property. Finding this unsatisfactory, she got a summer job running the catering side of an Irish-language summer school, where she was spotted by a visiting academic, almost eighteen years her senior. This was my father, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, then a lecturer in Irish at University College Cork, whose curriculum vitae included a spell in jail during the Irish Civil War. They were married in 1940, shortly after her twentieth birthday. It was a quiet wedding because her uncle Jack Plunkett—the Plunketts were still capable of stirring up political trouble—was on hunger strike and expected to die. She went to live in Cork. In the midst of having three children, fitting into the patterns of respectable provincial life (which she found uncomfortable), and taking on the running of a large student hostel, she launched her writing career.

Still in her twenties, she started with books for small children, in the Irish language and published by a Government-owned company. On switching to English, she found London publishers more than willing to take her work. Midsummer Magic, a children's book, was published by Macmillan in 1950. Two years later Faber & Faber produced The Lost Island, first in a long series of beautifully written adventure stories for older children or adolescents; along with The Island of Horses (1956), The Lost Island remained in print more than half a century later, in the New York Review collection of children's classics. Faber were also the publishers of her three detective stories, and of her first three literary novels. By the time the last of these appeared she was living in Rome, returning to Dublin only when my father's rapidly declining health made life in Italy untenable. He died in 1970. With remarkable strength and courage she kept on working, publishing her biggest-selling book (the historical novel Across the Bitter Sea) in 1973. In 1975 she married the scholar and critic Vivian Mercier, Professor of English in Boulder, Colorado. When he moved to Santa Barbara she spent her winters there, returning in summertime to remark, irritatingly, that the Irish climate, as far as she could see, is not at all cold and rainy—is in fact far more pleasant than people say. She was very much involved in Irish cultural life, serving on the Arts Council and working within various writers' organizations. An increasingly free spirit and dispenser of wisdom both in public and in private, she remained an affectionate critic but also a sharp defender of Irish life. When she died, John Banville said: "Her books will be a lasting testament to her, as will her work for writers and writing in this country."

Apart from the occasional murder, there is little sense of personal, family or national trauma in the three early detective stories, which present an urbane, lightly comic view of life, sometimes poking gentle fun at the foibles and aspirations of Irish people from a seemingly external viewpoint. These amusing qualities were mentioned by several reviewers, who sprinkled their praise with words like attractive, agreeable, civilized, lively, colourful, snug, beguiling, refreshing, delightful, entertaining, amiably relaxed. "Miss Dillon writes with a charmingly light touch", said the Irish Independent reviewer of Death in the Quadrangle, while the Montreal Star commented, "They'll hate this in Dublin, but this is a fine example of the English detective novel." Strange praise for an Irish nationalist, and yet there is a long-established irony in writers' appropriation of a foreign viewpoint to "see ourselves as others see us." Besides, Eilís loved the English literary tradition and was extremely well read in it, back to Shakespeare. Our house was always full of contemporary international fiction—not particularly mystery books, although I remember G.K. Chesterton, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers. Not Agatha Christie because despite her genius for puzzling, the quality of her writing ruled her out of consideration. Among English writers (by birth or adoption), Eilís particularly admired Evelyn Waugh and T.S. Eliot. From these names one might hazard a guess that a combination of high style, dry wit and Christian culture was the way to win her literary affections. British children's books were also our daily fare, from classic writers like John Buchan and Robert Louis Stevenson (her own children's books have been compared to RLS) to newer authors like William Mayne. She was also hugely though selectively fond of certain Irish writing: the poetry of Yeats, the fiction of James Stephens, the plays of Samuel Beckett and the astonishing flights of fancy of Flann O'Brien. There were Penguin classics, including racy dead foreigners like Maupassant and Apuleius, bought quickly before the Irish censorship board got to them and had them banned. She had whole collections of books by John Masefield, Baron Corvo, Willa Cather. She was well versed in folklore and fairy tales; she believed strongly that the bloodiness of traditional stories should not be airbrushed out of children's books. As time went by she read little crime fiction, possibly under the apprehension that it was not real literature. I completely failed to persuade her to read Ross Macdonald (whom she had actually met when she was living in Santa Barbara, California). With great difficulty I got her to try John le Carré's A Perfect Spy, and she was surprised to discover that it was a splendid novel. But she never felt the need to read another word of le Carré. Her sights were set on other things, and I suspect that her reading was largely a function of what she wanted to write.

In 1987, recovering from her first cancer operation, she did make one last foray into crime writing. The novel she drafted, Journey to No End, is set in an international conference centre, and introduces an intriguing cast of distinguished characters, one of whom gets murdered. Eilís herself had enjoyed a residency at Villa Serbelloni, the Rockefeller Center, beside Lake Como in northern Italy. By all accounts, staying there is like dying and going to heaven. But Journey to No End, most unusually for her, remains unpublished. Perhaps it was out of its time. Perhaps it needs a little revision. I might try doing that some day.

Her three detective stories from the 1950s, on the other hand, are very much of their time, not only in their subject matter but also in the sardonic style, the light touch, the slightly satirical stance adopted by the author. "Miss Dillon's eye is beautifully sharp, her skill impeccable, and her detachment absolute," wrote a reviewer in the Belfast Newsletter. Despite the arm's-length pose, however, some elements of the books are painfully close to her own experience. In Death at Crane's Court, her immersion in the lower reaches of the hotel trade may have provided models for the sleazy hotel proprietor ("a particularly revolting spivvish sadist," said the Observer), for the mad hotel guests, for the anxious intrigues of the hotel staff. Her husband's exalted position as Warden of the Honan Hostel at University College Cork had landed Eilís, as a young married woman, with responsibility for feeding forty people; she was well capable of taking charge, but the personnel management of her domestic staff was not the most agreeable part of the job. Yet the book also betrays a certain affection for the old-fashioned Irish country hotel. Crane's Court is partly based on a establishment called The Hydro near Blarney in County Cork, where they did wonderful afternoon tea, with potato cakes. Like Crane's Court, it was full of old people. Eilís's beloved brother, Eoin Dillon, was a distinguished hotelier who managed iconic Irish hotels such as Renvyle House in Connemara, the Imperial in Cork, and the Shelbourne and Gresham Hotels in Dublin. Eoin always claimed that hotels are a subdivision of the theatre business.

Sent to His Account, the second novel, is perhaps the best plotted of the three, with some nice turns and puzzles. Atmospheric and poetic, it conveys a fine sense of life in a country house. Writing in The Lady, an august London weekly magazine whose readership is hinted at in its title, Edith Shackleton noted that "Miss Dillon presents modern Ireland realistically. She does not turn all the tenantry into Abbey Theatre characters and allows a Big House, for once in fiction, to be properly run." But behind the ample prose and comforting imagery lie some painful episodes from the author's life. The first remembered home of her childhood was Dangan, a beautiful country house outside Galway. As she writes in Inside Ireland, "A stream with kingfishers ran just beyond the gravel sweep before the door. On windy days the song of the pines made heavenly music. Distant dogs barked and were answered by ours." But her parents had taken on a debt to acquire this property. When they ran into financial difficulties the bank foreclosed, and the idyll was lost. This first home lends its name to the country house in Sent to His Account, which at the start of the book is suddenly inherited by what Maurice Richardson, writing in the Observer, called a "nice little rat-poor middle-aged person." And questions of inheritance were a live issue in Eilís's family. Her mother Geraldine Plunkett, whose grandfather had been a hugely successful builder in Victorian Dublin, eventually came to control valuable house property which she distributed to her favourite children, but not to Eilís. This did not cause particular economic hardship; Eilís's husbands earned good money, and over the years she built up a steady income from her literary work. It was not even that she lacked inherited property. Her grandmother Countess Plunkett (whom her mother passionately hated) gave Eilís a house on Dublin's Haddington Road when she got married, and an uncle left her another Georgian house in his will. So she was not, in the event, economically damaged by her mother's discrimination. What hurt was the emotional exclusion.

Death in the Quadrangle also deals with an environment that she knew well from family lore, and from her own experience: life and death in a small university. At the time she wrote it, she was living on the campus of University College Cork, under the hyperactive presidency of Alfred O'Rahilly. In the novel, the overbearing egotism of academics is used to fine comic effect. Some of her husband's colleagues in Cork suspected that episodes in the book referred to them, but she was reassured to learn that professors from foreign universities also wondered how she had come to know of the eccentric goings-on in their institutions. Clearly, she had tapped into an international pattern of bad behaviour. Her invention of King's College Dublin, situated in the splendour of the Phoenix Park, was echoed fifty years later by my own crime novel, The Grounds (2006), set in the same institution. This later novel echoes a sadder time when Irish academic life has been distorted by pea-brained bureaucratic interference and grand managerial fantasies; Death in the Quandrangle had presented a less constricted, more amusing world.

These three books are best read in sequence. They may be, as Anthony Boucher remarked of Death at Crane's Court, "long on charm and short on detection," but they are written with real literary skill and create a composite picture of the stagnant but beautiful Ireland of more than fifty years ago. An Irish reviewer praised the same book for its "County Galway background of such seductive peace as to make one wish to pack one's bags and take the next train to the West."

Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin
Dublin, 2009

Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin is Associate Professor of Italian at Trinity College Dublin. As Cormac Millar he is the author of two crime novels published by Penguin Ireland. For more information on Eilís Dillon and her works, see www.eilisdillon.com.