Maurice Leitch (1933–2023)

I read an article last year on Northern Ireland's must read authors and must confess I'd never heard of Maurice Leitch before. Apparently I'm far from the only one (even in Northern Ireland), yet in Irish literary circles he's considered to be one of their finest. At the ripe old age of 88 he's still tapping away at the keys, with his last book published in 2019.

The Eggman's Apprentice is set in Leitch's native county Antrim in the early 1960s. When 'wee Hugo' is left orphaned at an early age, he's forced to leave his comfortable home to live with a rabble of poorer distant relatives. When his singing voice leads him to be discovered by Eggman, the local gangster Kingpin known for being driven around in his 1950s pink Cadillac, Hugo sees a way out of his current circumstances, but as he becomes increasingly controlled by the mysterious Eggman Hugo makes an ill thought out break for freedom.

I'm very torn on this book. The writing was excellent yet it took me ages to read it, and I can't decide if that was down to me or the book. The second half was certainly more engaging than the first, so perhaps it dragged a little until Hugo got into the world of the Eggman. Nonetheless I enjoyed its inventiveness. Rather than getting bogged down in the underworld story and becoming a different type of novel, Leitch takes a humorous slant, telling the story through the humorous eyes of the naive and carefree young Hugo who doesn't take life too seriously and takes an amused view of the new circles he's running in.

This was somewhere between a 3.5 and 4 star read for me, but I'll go for the 4 due to its originality and high quality writing. It took me a while to get there but it won me over in the end.… (mere)