Stuart Franklin

Ellroy Confidential

“If I could eradicate any word in the English language,” Ellroy declared in 2001, “it would be the word ‘closure.’” The discipline of writing, from age thirty, became a lifejacket that kept Ellroy afloat above the tide of decrepitude that shaped his early years.

Louis MacNeice’s Carrickfergus Revisited

“In the beginning was the Irish rain,” wrote Carrickfergus’s unsung poet-hero, Louis MacNeice. Like many of the poorer regions of Northern Ireland, the town today is in social and economic decline. “The tragic irony of life in Northern Ireland today,” the murdered journalist Lyra McKee wrote in 2016, “is that peace seems to have claimed more lives than war ever did.”