Life
1907-1991 [Patrick Rearden Connor; also pseud Peter Main]; b. Cork, childhood
in West of Ireland; ed. CBS, Cork; m. one Farrell; emig. London, 1941;
Red Cross during Blitz; worked as landscape garden in London; novelist,
critic and broadcaster; books about travellers; reviewed for many
British, Irish and American papers; broadcaster for BBC, RTE, and South
African Broadcasting; novels incl. Shake Hands with the Devil (1933),
filmed with James Cagney as a pathologically violent, woman-hating IRA-man
in 1959; also Rude Earth (1934); Men must Live (1937); The
Devil Among the Tailors (1947); My Love to the Gallows (1948);
The Singing Stone (1951); River, Sing me a Song (1939);
and The House of Cain (1952); A Plain Tale from
the Bogs (1937) is an autobiography; also many short stories;
Epitaph (1994), concerning rising against penal laws in Kenmar
during 1701. IF DIW OCIL
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Works
Shake Hands with the Devil (London: Dent 1933), and Do.
(NY: Morrow 1934), Literary Guild Choice; Rude Earth (London: Dent
1934), and Do, as Salute to Aphrodite (NY 1935); I Am Death
(London: Chapman & Hall 1936); Time to Kill (1936); Men
Must Live (London: Cassell 1937); A Plain Tale from the Bogs
(London: John Miles 1937) [autobiog.]; The Sword of Love (London:
Cassell 1938); The Devil Among the Tailors (London: MacDonald 1947);
My Love to the Gallows (London: MacDonald 1948); Hunger of the
Heart (London: MacDonald 1950); The Singing Stone (London:
MacDonald 1951); To Kill is My Vocation (London: Cassell 1939);
River, Sing Me a Song (London: Cassell 1939); Kobo the Brave
(London: Warne 1950); The House of Cain (London: MacDonald 1952);
Epitaph (London: Janus 1994), 252pp.
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Criticism
A. N. Jeffares, Anglo-Irish Literature (1982).
Desmond Clarke, Ireland in Fiction [Pt. II] (Cork: Royal Carbery 1985); regards his novels as a melange of violence, melodrama, and sentiment, occasionally derogatory towards Irish Catholics and clergy, full of unbelievably wicked persons, male and female, and fuelled by gelignite explosions; Clarke regards his novels as a melange of violence, melodrama, and sentiment, occasionally derogatory towards Irish Catholics and clergy, full of unbelievably wicked persons, male and female, and fuelled by gelignite explosions. The Telegraph thought Shake Hands a notable picture of Ireland, and the Tablet though the it showed how demoralised the Irish were after the Troubles; The Telegraph thought Shake Hands a notable picture of Ireland, and the Tablet though the it showed how demoralised the Irish were after the Troubles.
Kevin Rockett, et al., eds, Cinema & Ireland (1988).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)