Murder in Dublin

THE PURITAN--Liam 0'Flaherty--Harcourt, Brace ($2).

Dublin Journalist Francis Ferriter feels that because he is good he must be God. But when his hunger and thirst after righteousness begin to include a craving for Prostitute Teresa Burke, he hates himself so much that he decides to murder her. To lend the act godly significance, he pretends to himself that by making an example of Teresa he will scare the rest of Dublin out of their dearest deadly sin.

Craftily he commits the murder so as to incriminate Teresa's lover, Dr. O'Leary, son of a prominent Dubliner, whom Ferriter hates. But he had not reckoned on the psychological aftermath, finds the next day that he has a feeling of horror rather than of a holy sacrifice well performed. To get his self-righteousness corroborated by others he tries to persuade the editors of two Dublin newspapers to feature the murder-story as a testimony of Divine Wrath against evildoers. They think he is mad; by this time he obviously is. The man who murdered Teresa for divine reasons, and the man who now realizes that he murdered her only because of jealous love, make up a split personality that splits wider every minute.

Meanwhile Detective Lavan has discovered incriminating evidence against Ferriter, gives him a grilling. Ferriter promises to produce the real murderer before midnight. He tries to confess to a priest; to his horror finds that he, the jealous lover-murderer, no longer believes in God. He rushes to the slums to drink, confess to harlots. In a scene reminiscent of Dante's Inferno, Joyce's Ulysses, he confesses himself to one of three diseased harpies who play with his disintegrating personality the way vultures play with bones.

At midnight he is arrested, confesses to the police. Completely mad, he is thrown into a cell where over and over he cries out his maniacal conclusion: "There is no God, but man has a divine destiny."

The Author. Born in J. M. Synge's Arran Islands in 1896, Liam O'Flaherty has infused something of the Playboy into his career. Educated in a Jesuit College, as a youth he was intensely religious, scandalized his family by joining the Irish Guards to save Catholic Belgium. He was shell-shocked in the War; returned to Ireland for the Irish Revolution. Since then he has roamed over half the world chopping logs, working in restaurants, printshops. He was employed in a Hartford tire factory when he began to write his first short stories, invariably waste-paper-basketed when they were finished. Widely-acclaimed books followed: The Informer, Mr. Gilhooley, The Assassin, The Mountain Tavern, The House of Gold, The Return of the Brute, Two Years.

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