McCormack - Forensic Songs

Praise for Mike McCormack

Gives Ian McEwan and Edgar Allan Poe a run for their money Decay and ruin seep through this book, drive by some of the finest prose to have emerged in over a decade. The Irish short story is thriving, and in the hands of writers like McCormack it can only continue to.

London Independent

In the sixteen short stories that make up his first book, McCormack displays the satiric sense, religious knowledge, dark humour, cutting insights and incredible imagination that made Swift famous. Then McCormack adds an overcast of modern doom and gloom with the skill of Edgar Allan Poe. The result is stunning and irresistible.

USA Today

I am a huge admirer of Mike McCormacks work. From sentence to story the writing is by times intriguing, funny, surprising, disturbing and profound.

Lynn Freed, author of The Servants Quarters

McCormacks language is lovely, lyrical his humor is dark, macabre; the words glimmer like a spell.

Time Out

A cross between 1984 and The X-FilesNotes from a Coma establishes McCormack as one of the most original and important voices in contemporary Irish fiction.

Irish Times

A major talent in Irish fiction McCormack slyly and brilliantly satirizes, among many other things, our fixations with celebrity and high-priced medical technology.

Booklist

McCormack is the most exciting new writer to emerge since Pat McCabe.

Irish Book Review

McCormacks debut crackles with wit, is laced with black insight and places him right up there with McCabe as a master of the new Irish Gothic.

Sunday Tribune

Irish writer McCormacks debut collection (he is winner of the Rooney Prize) is a dark meditation on life and death and the states of existence that fall somewhere in between The pages are populated with ax murderers, self-mutilating artists, stalkers, and pre-teens who give us step-by-step instructions in building pipe bombs but also fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, and troubled young men torn between love and hate. And underlying the macabre plots is a sense of humanity and subtle humor.

Library Journal

Comparisons to Poe are apt theres no denying McCormacks knack for throwing a harsh light on some of lifes grimmer corners. Disturbing, audacious work.

Kirkus

Also by Mike McCormack

Notes from a Coma

Crowes Requiem

Getting It in the Head

First published 2012 by The Lilliput Press, Dublin 7, Ireland
Copyright 2012, 2014 by Mike McCormack

Published in 2014 by
Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
All rights reserved.

Some of these stories have previously been published in the following: Transcript, Irish Independent, Ropes, Irish Book Review, The McGahern Yearbook, Short Fiction and Irish Pages. Take These Chains from my Heart, Fred Rose and Hy Heath 1952 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Some Days are Diamonds (some days are stone), Dick Feller 1975 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

The author would like to thank The Arts Council of Ireland, An Chomhairle Ealaon, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation for their support.

Published by
Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCormack, Mike, 1965
Forensic songs / Mike McCormack.
p. cm
ISBN 978-1-61695-414-7
eISBN 978-1-61695-415-4
1. Interpersonal relationsFiction. 2. Self-perceptionFiction.
3. IrelandFiction. I. Title.
PR6063.C363F67 2014
823.914dc23 2014006293

v3.1

Using the edge of his hand, the sergeant swept to one side the little bits and pieces that littered the top of his deska spool of thread, a little coil of silver wire, a neat little pliers and what looked at first glance like a small mound of hair and feathers. With a large space cleared in the centre of the desk, he laid down a sheet of blotting paper and placed an unusually hairy-looking insect in its centre. Only then, stark against the white background, was the hook concealed within the coloured hair and feathers visible.

The Olive Gold Invicta, the sergeant announced happily. What think ye of it?

The question fell to the young guard who stood on the other side of the desk. He looked nervous, giving the giddy impression that he might bolt from the room at any moment. After a long pause and with the cautious tone of a man taking a considerable gamble he said, Its lovely.

The sergeant smiled indulgently. Its more than lovely, young fella, its downright irresistible. He turned the fly over so that now it presented an iridescent green belly to the light. Youre not looking at it properly. If you were a brown trout, about two and a half to three pounds, say, and this lad lit on the surface over your head, youd be beside yourself with happiness. One lep out of you and youd have him. He looked up brightly. Of course then Id have you and thats when wed have some sport.

And for a few moments the sergeant was lost in such a happy, heedless reverie that the young guard thought it best to remain silent. When he came back to the present the sergeants tone was fond. I started tying flies shortly after I came herelearned it from a man by the name of Billy Phelan. You wouldnt know himhes dead now this good while. Billy would come into town every Tuesday to draw his pension. Hed buy two plugs of tobacco and that would do him till after second Mass on Sunday. But hed break your heart, the same Billy. Trying to get him into a hackney at night to take him out home manys the night he slept in one of the cells. But for all his faults there was no one to tie flies like him. And with that the sergeant sat back and looked up at the young guard. So tell me, what do you have?

Startled by the sudden change of subject, the young guards head jerked from side to side. Nothing, he blurted, not a thing.

The sergeant squinted at him. There cant be nothing, there has to be something.

The young guard looked down at the fly on the desk and repeated, Theres nothing, weve looked everywhere.

There must be something, some few pages, a document of some sort or other.

The young guard swallowed thickly.

There must be some sort of a sketchy outline or a synopsis of some sort.

The young guard remained silent. The sergeant leaned forward onto the desk.

What about all the obvious stuffa short account of his inability to get on with a silent and sullen father?

None whatsoever.

No tender account of loving regard for his sainted mother?

No.

A disturbing account of clerical abuse?

The young guard shook his head, his misery now deepening as the note of incredulity thickened in the sergeants voice.

We hadnt much but what we had was cleansomething along those lines?

No.

Any description of him wearing a sleeveless geansa or of his head hopping with lice?

No.

Short trousers?

No.

No account of him going shoeless through the fields and developing a thick, protective callus on the soles of his feet?