The Enjoyable Reading of Brian Moore

What do you do when you go on holiday? Go to the library of course, especially if you are tempted in by a notice saying, “BOOKS FOR SALE”. Two hours later you scrape yourself off the floor of that municipal building and pay up for a stretched armful of books that you can’t possibly leave to be unloved.

And so it was that I acquired my first Brian Moore. It was a very slim volume, its purple, plastic-protected jacket faded to mauve: “Catholics”.

The book begins:

The fog lifted. The island was there. The visitor walked to the end of the disused pier and saw it across three miles of ocean, riding the sea like an overturned fishing-boat. morning sunlight moved along a keel of mountain, above valleys black as tarred boatsides. He thought of Rome. Surprisingly the Order itself had little descriptive information. In the Lungoterre Vaticano he had been handed an out-of-print book: Weir’s Guide to Religious Monuments.

Though I picked the book up in the library in Padstow, Cornwall, the beginning of this short novel reminded me of the first time I had travelled to Caldey Island, off Tenby, South Wales to stay at the guesthouse of the Cistercian (Trappist) Caldey Abbey.

So if you have never read any Brian Moore, or indeed visited a monastery, then Catholics would seem a good place to begin.

Now I know that I have promised not to buy any books but after I have shepherded my Brian Moore’s together, I will make a list of those I need to look out for, and I will carry it with me, because if you see a book that you know you need then you have to buy it. don’t you.

Meanwhile, in preparation for my Moore hunt, I will share my list of books with you. Brian Moore also wrote as Michael Bryan and Bernard Mara but I’m not sure if I will start on those just yet.

BRIAN MOORE 1921-1999 “his books often have a religious motif, without religious intent” “‘every tale should tell itself’. Story is everything… the writers we remember were dedicated story-tellers.”
Wreath for a Redhead ( in US “Sailor’s Leave”)	1951	writing as Michael Bryan
The Executioners	1951	writing as Michael Bryan
French for Murder	1954	writing as Bernard Mara
A Bullet for My Lady	1955	writing as Bernard Mara
Judith Hearne	1955	read & seen film
This Gun for Gloria	1956	writing as Bernard Mara
Intent to Kill	1956	writing as Michael Bryan
The Feast of Lupercal	1957
Murder in Majorca	1957	writing as as Michael Bryan
The Luck of Ginger Coffey	1960
An Answer from Limbo	1962
Canada	1965
The Emperor of Ice Cream	1965
I Am Mary Dunne	1968
Fergus	1970
The Revolution Script	1971
Catholics	1972		read
The Great Victorian Collection	1975		read
The Doctor’s Wife	1976	have ? but not read yet
Two Stories	1978
The Mangan Inheritance	1979
The Temptation of Eileen Hughes	1981
Cold Heaven	1983
Black Robe	1985		read
The Color of Blood	1987		read
Lies of Silence	1990		read
No Other Life	1993		read
The Statement	1995		think I’ve read
The Magician’s Wife	1997		have but not read