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Vincent McDonnell

YOU might think that when Graham Greene selects your novel as the best book in a prestigious competition you would be well on the way to literary fame.

But for Vincent McDonnell what happened next was not what he had expected and the effect of the ensuing arguments linger on.

McDonnell’s wife Joan sent the first chapter of The Broken Commandment to Greene in 1986, long before it was published.

The famous author telegrammed back to say the first chapter was “remarkable”.

McDonnell then sent it to publisher Max Reinhardt and it was published in 1988 to generally favourable reviews. In 1989, the novel was entered by the publisher for the prestigious GPA/Irish Times Award for which Greene had coincidentally been chosen as judge.

Some 127 books were submitted for the competition by publishers and a shortlist of five was submitted to Greene to choose the winner. But The Broken Commandment was not one of them. Green however invoked a clause that said he could pick from any of the 127 books submitted, and chose it as the winner, said McDonnell.

“That’s where holy war broke out,” he said. “He picked from outside the shortlist and he picked mine. But, I had never met him and I had never spoken to him.”

The matter was resolved when The Broken Commandment received a first fiction award, rather than the main prize, said McDonnell.

But the disappointed author says the publishers did not re-print the book, “So I was literally left down in Co Mayo, twiddling my thumbs as it were,” he said.

He admits that getting back to writing after that was difficult: “After the GPA in 1989 I worked on an adult novel which was dreadful, absolutely appalling rubbish. I was listening to everybody and I was writing for everybody except me. But after that I started writing for children. I think every writer has to write for themselves first,” said McDonnell.

And write he did. He published a book a year with Poolbeg in 1992, 1993, and in 1994. Brandon published an adult novel in 1995 called Imagination of the heart, and a further children’s book was published in 1996.

In passing, he won the Ireland’s Own writing award for his short stories.

“I went mad writing and wrote the bulk of my short stories for Ireland’s Own then and wrote a lot of stories for various magazines and anthologies and various other bits and pieces, about 50 stories in all and in 1996 there was nothing left. I was empty and I stopped writing for virtually three years,” he said.

Gone dry, he accepted writer residencies from 1997 until the present. Today he has a residency in Limerick University where he said he will stay until they throw him out.

Residencies can include running workshops, going into schools, setting up book clubs as part of the work, and has a broader remit than writing alone, according to the author.

In 1999, he began writing a teenage market novel, which explored the world of asylum seekers. That became Out of the Flames published by The O’Brien Press in 2002. It was shortlisted as one of eight contenders for the RAI awards in November 2003.

In 2004, he was adjudged winner of the Francis Mac Manus Short Story Award 2003, for his story, Lemon Creams. The competition saw some 700 stories entered for the annual radio competition.

McDonnell lives near Kanturk in Co Cork in a house 800 ft above sea level where wind and rain wrap around the house at times. But that’s how he likes it. Born on a farm in Co Mayo, he lived and worked in London for 14 years and was glad to get back to a quiet ordered life in Ireland.

“I was always writing while I was in London. People seem to think that somebody publishes a novel in their forties and it’s their first novel and they just started writing; but if you look back they have always been scribbling.”

McDonnell’s writing began when he was 12 years old and the stories were of his heroes from cowboy stories. “I think one starts by virtually copying what one is reading.”

He was first published in a broadcast on LBC in London in 1984 with a horror radio story in a series he recalls going out at midnight and being called A Moment of Terror.

He had a novel called Chill Factor published by O’Brien in 2004, which was an adventure mystery story in which a boy searches for his scientist father who has disappeared. The boy suspects he has been kidnapped by an American billionaire and used to carry out experiments.

Then there is another book published by Collins Press called Race against Time, which deals with motor racing, and which may develop into a character series.

“Going around schools I found that boys are reluctant readers. I thought there might be a gap in the market for a book with a motor racing setting. So I did this book and Collins liked it and I would hope that it might be a series as distinct from a one-off.”

Not bad going for a writer who understandably expected lionisation but instead found a famed literary achievement was in fact merely a moment in time on a long journey through a writing life.

But then it’s hard to keep a good writer down.

© Brendan Nolan 2005
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