Rewind book: The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien (1967)
Have there ever been coppers like the trio in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman?
by Flann O’Brien
Dalkey Archive Press
Have there ever been coppers like the trio in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman?
There's Sergeant Pluck, whose body seems red and swollen, from his enormous hands to his "violent red moustache". Pluck, like his two colleagues, is obsessed with bicycles. "Would it be true," he asks our narrator, "that you are an itinerant dentist and you came on a tricycle?"
There's MacCruiskeen, whose surname is an in-joke for O'Brien fans: he wrote a newspaper column, Cruiskeen Lawn, under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen (Flann O'Brien is itself a pseudonym for Irish author Brian O'Nolan).
Clues to all the strangeness sprout like Pluck's moustache. There is the unnamed narrator with a wooden leg and an obsession with (a fictional) physicist called De Selby, whose bizarre notions about the universe sound eerily like O'Brien's novel. The plot throws him into a darkly farcical murder story which leads eventually to the three policemen, whose help he wants in tracking down a cash box.