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TO SIMON HALLY
who first let me develop Doctor Fingal O’Reilly and with a gentle editorial hand guided the eccentric GP from early beginnings to the maturity that finally became the Irish Country Doctor novels
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Author’s Note
Introducing O’Reilly
The Lazarus Manoeuvre
Galvin’s Ducks
Kinky
Troubles at the Table
Anatomy Lesson
Sunny Disposition
Well Said, Sir
A Pregnant Silence
Working as Equals
Murphy’s Law
The Law of Holes
Men of the Cloth (1)
Men of the Cloth (2)
O’Reilly Finds His Way
Powers of Observation
Stress of the Moment
O’Reilly’s Surprise
Shock Therapy
Happy as a Pig in …
Barometer Falling
The Flying Doctor
Forty Shades of Green
A G(h)astly Mistake
Blessed Are the Meek
A Matter of Tact
The Cat’s Meow
O’Reilly at the Helm
O’Reilly Strikes Back
A Word to the Wise
Dog Days of Winter
In a Pig’s Ear
Arthur and the General
Something Happened
Hell on Wheels
What’s in a Name?
Fill ’er Up
A Curious Affair
Curiouser and Curiouser
A Matter of Time
The Last Laugh
Easy Come, Easy Go
Lateral Thinking
Flight of Fancy
Fuel for Thought
Times Are a-Changing
The Sting
Pipes of Wrath
Sam Slither
A Matchless Experience
A Humble Apology
The Patient Who Broke the Rules
Going to the Dogs
A Meeting of the Minds
It’s in the Can
A Very Pheasant Evening …
’Tis the Season to Be Jolly
Just a Wee Deoch an’ Dorris
What’s in a Name?
What’s in a Name? (Part 2)
Whiskey in a Jar
O’Reilly Puts His Foot in It
O’Reilly’s Cat
O’Reilly’s Dog
O’Reilly’s Rival
The Smoking Gun
Ring Around the Rosies
Jingle Bells
Home Is the Sailor
Afterword
Glossary
By Patrick Taylor
About the Author
Copyright
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I have written all my life, or at least since an essay of mine phrased in the style of Sir Francis Bacon was published in my school magazine when I was sixteen. It seems so long ago now that I wonder if the task came easily to me because the old seventeenth-century statesman, jurist, scientist, and author and I were practically contemporaries.
Whenever I give readings from my later works, all novels, someone invariably asks a two-part question, the first part of which is, “Where did Doctors O’Reilly and Laverty come from?” It’ll take me a page or two to answer that.
The whole process was a lengthy evolution of a writer and his characters. Much of it seemed to come by chance, a strange admixture of who you know and luck. The short stories included between these covers are the proof of that and I hope you enjoy them.
The second part of the question will have to await the fuller explanation of part one, but I promise I’ll tell you what the query was and answer it before the end of this introduction.
During most of my medical research career any literary efforts were confined to the production of scientific papers and, in collaboration with colleagues, half a dozen textbooks. Dull, I can assure you. Very, very dull.
That changed in 1989. My longtime friend and medical school classmate Doctor Tom Baskett had been appointed editor in chief of the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada (JSOGC). To lighten its otherwise dry content he invited me to contribute a regular page of tongue-in-cheek observations about the world of then modern medicine. “En Passant” began appearing monthly and lasted for nearly ten years.
To my surprise the associate editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) noticed the early efforts and commissioned a six-weekly column, “Medicine Chest,” for his publication. An idea had begun to germinate and I asked permission to devote five hundred words in each episode to the doings of a fictional Ulster GP, Doctor Reilly—please note Reilly, not yet O’Reilly—and the suggestion was accepted. Unfortunately the electronic records of these stories are lost, but I had fun with the character.
Simon Hally, who over the years has become my friend, was then editor of Punch Digest for Canadian Doctors, which subsequently became Stitches: The Journal of Medical Humour. He’d read the Reilly stories in the CMAJ and wondered if I’d consider doing a regular piece for him, to be called “Taylor’s Twist.” He also mentioned a dollar sum that would keep me in paper, ink, and the high technology of the time, floppy discs. I agreed, but asked that rather than doing short, one-paragraph observations I could devote each column to a single, I hoped humorous, anecdote. The first of these stories appeared in 1991, and until 1995 chronicled the vagaries of the life of a medical undergraduate in Belfast in the ’50s and ’60s, and yes, they were autobiographical, if exaggerated and a bit twisted.
But old Doctor Reilly, whose antics had ceased with the discontinuation of “Medicine Chest” somewhere in 1991, kept muttering to me that he felt he should be resurrected. After four years of undergraduate stories I was running out of steam, and with Simon’s permission switched to the recounting of the misadventures of a newly qualified medical graduate who innocently accepts a position of assistant to an irascible, blasphemous, hard-drinking, rural Ulster GP who by now had adopted the name Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly. I think you probably know him. Those columns ran until 2001. Like the undergraduate stories they were based on my own and my friends’ experiences in Ulster general practice. Some come from good stories heard in pubs.
Forgive me if I now digress into some technical aspects of writing fiction, but I needs must if I am going to explain why in these columns I cast myself, Patrick Taylor, as the straight man and narrator in this Hippocratic Laurel and Hardy double act.
The best modern stories are written in “point of view.” The author must slip into the background and let the reader experience the action through the eyes of the “point of view character.” This means that, for example, a subsidiary character in a scene cannot comment as an aside on what the main character is thinking or doing. Such asides, while properly called “authorial intrusion” in literary fiction, can be the guts of good comedy. And there is a way to use them so they are not intrusive.
If the poin
t of view character is the narrator, they can make as many asides as they like, and this is even easier if the story-telling character is the first-person “I,” as in, “I saw O’Reilly lift Donal Donnelly by gripping the little man’s shoulder in one vast paw and as God is my witness I swear I heard the victim’s bones creak. O’Reilly never seemed to know his own strength.”
To tell the Stitches stories my own character became the narrator, the butt of many of the jokes, and I had a useful technique to work with. I am frequently asked, “In the novels are you Doctor Barry Laverty?” O’Reilly’s fictional junior. For structural reasons I did indeed use myself in these columns, but I do not translate into Barry in the Irish Country series.
So those were the first stumbling steps. I’m afraid they don’t quite answer the question of how did the Country Series evolve. That is also the story of my journey to become a novelist.
Shortly after graduation from medical school in my twenties I tried my hand as a short-story writer. W. Somerset Maugham had been my teenage hero. The Belfast Troubles had broken out and I tried to set human drama against that background. I am the proud possessor of rejection slips from several magazines of the period, including one from The New Yorker.
By the mid-’90s I had been appointed editor of the JSOGC. The various humour columns were doing well, and as a sideline I was also selling sailing humour. (I think it’s genetic. When an Ulsterman goes to sea, strange things can happen. We, after all, built the RMS Titanic.) In a fit of chutzpah I dug out some of the short stories I’d written back in the ’60s and a few more I’d started to experiment with, and sought an opinion from the publisher of the JSOGC and his wife, Adrian and Olga Stein, two people whose interest in the written word is vast. They in turn persuaded Anna Porter, then of Key Porter Books, to take a look, and to my delight she agreed that with editorial help from Carolyn Bateman, who is now my friend and highly valued editor to this day, a short story collection, Only Wounded: Ulster Stories, should be produced. It will be re-released by Forge in 2015.
Another remarkable man, Jack Whyte, author of the Dream of Eagles series and more novels, suggested I try writing a novel. Emboldened by having had my short stories accepted, I took his advice. Thank you, Jack. To cut a long story short, after numerous rejections a psycho-thriller, Pray for Us Sinners, was published in 2000 in Canada. Flushed with pride I suggested to my house editor, Adrienne Weiss, “Why don’t we take all my Doctor O’Reilly columns, clap on covers, and make a buck or two?”
She said, “If your name was Garrison Keillor I’d say, ‘Let’s call it Lake Wobegon Days and go for it, but…’”
Her implication that no one had heard of Patrick Taylor was not lost. She was, however, kind enough to suggest that she liked the character of Doctor O’Reilly. “Perhaps with the confidence gained from one published novel under my belt I might consider…?”
The Apprenticeship of Doctor Laverty, the first novel about O’Reilly, appeared in Canada in 2004 and, thanks to the efforts of Jack Whyte, as well as Natalia Aponte, then acquiring editor for Forge Books, it was republished in the United States in 2007 as An Irish Country Doctor. It was the beginning of the Irish Country series.
And so with the support of you, the readers, the continuing story of Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly has continued to grow.
I started this introduction by quoting the first part of a two-part question: “Where did Doctors O’Reilly and Laverty come from?” and I promised after a long-winded answer to tell you what the second part was. “You’ve told us that they came from your humour columns,” I can hear you say. “So, when are we going to get to see those old columns?” And that of course is the second part of the question.
The answer is that while I have released a few on my Web page as blogs, now through the generosity of Tom Doherty and Forge Books you can have the lot, warts and all, between these covers. The cover illustration was conceived and brought to life by Irene Gallo and beautifully painted by Gregory Manchess. They have been responsible for all the Irish Country dust-jacket art.
In addition, last March we published a short O’Reilly story, “Home Is the Sailor,” in e-format only. You can see how in part it was derived from a column entitled “The Lazarus Manoeuvre” first created in late 1995. I now know that many readers who did not have access to the e-reader technology were disappointed. For them, that story, written much later than the columns, is appended in hard copy in this work.
I have had a lot of fun revisiting these long-ago-written friends. I sincerely hope you enjoy them. If you compare them with the Irish Country novels you will see how characters changed and grew, and simple story lines were twisted and embellished.
And perhaps having had a glimpse into the origins you will see how a writer and his characters can grow from small beginnings.
With my best wishes,
PATRICK TAYLOR
Salt Spring Island,
British Columbia,
Canada
OCTOBER 1995
Introducing O’Reilly
In which we make the acquaintance of a rather remarkable GP
“Taylor’s Twist” first appeared in Stitches: The Journal of Medical Humour in September 1991, as a chronicle of the experiences of a medical student in Belfast in the ’50s and ’60s. By 1995 I’d written about the life of a medical undergraduate for almost as long as I was one. The editor, Simon Hally, was a generous man and allowed me to switch my attention, and I trust yours, to events of postgraduate life in the North of Ireland in the late ’60s. To anyone with the intestinal fortitude actually to want more undergraduate stories, I can only apologize. To the rest, who have followed me thus far, let us boldly go where no sentient entity has gone before—and I don’t mean the Canadian House of Commons or the Congress of the United States. Come back with me to Ulster and meet my old tutor, Doctor O’Reilly, ex-navy boxing champion, classical scholar, unregenerate poacher, hard drinker, cryptophilanthropist, foul-mouthed widower, and country GP.
He was a big man, about six foot fourteen in his socks and weighing twenty stone or, if you prefer, 280 pounds. His complexion might be charitably called florid, the delicate roseate hue of his cheeks having all the softness of an overheated blast furnace. His nose, once perhaps a thing of beauty and a joy forever, had acquired a distinct personality of its own. The tip was squashed and sat at a rakish forty-five degrees to port of the bridge. Boxing, or as it was once known, the manly art of self-defence, carried its own costs. The tip of O’Reilly’s nose had one other important characteristic: when he became enraged it turned white.
I stumbled, all unsuspecting, into his clutches after I’d finished my houseman’s (intern’s) year and was eking out a meagre existence demonstrating anatomy. Weekend and evening locums for GPs helped me make ends if not exactly meet, then at least come within calling distance of each other. I simply answered a newspaper advertisement.
In the years that I knew O’Reilly, years that encompassed a series of horribly underpaid registrar’s (resident’s) jobs, he never ceased to astound me. Sometimes my surprise was a result of his absolutely cavalier treatment of a malingerer; on other occasions his encyclopaedic knowledge of his patients astounded me. He had an uncanny sense of clinical smell, and I would still bet O’Reilly’s diagnostic acumen against a battery of CT scans, MRI pictures, and the entire arsenal of the biochemistry laboratory.
He detested bureaucracy with the vitriolic hatred of Torquemada for unrepentant heretics, was kind to widows and small children, and ate public health officers for breakfast. He was stubborn to the point of mulishness when his mind was made up, had a tongue that when aroused would have made Adolf Hitler on a bad day at a Nuremberg rally sound like a cooing dove, yet he’d sit for hours in the dark of the night with a dying patient and still be ready for work as soon as morning surgery, the term for office over there, opened.
I learned more about the art of medicine from that man, and some of the humour of it too, than from a faculty of professors. I wish
I could have him with me today when I’m faced with some of the array of meaningful, interactive, holistic, client-centred healthcare providers who want to invade my turf as a physician. You know the kind: the ones who believe that medicine is too important to be left to the doctors (a brilliantly original paraphrasing of old Georges Clemenceau’s crack about war and generals, although others would attribute it to Talleyrand) and who, bless their trusting little souls, are convinced that if enough wellness clinics are opened, nasty old diseases will vanish and we’ll all live forever.
To be fair to O’Reilly, in some matters he was well ahead of his time. I thought of him the other day while watching a demonstration in which a healthcare provider held her hands over the sufferer and by concentrating, focused vital healing energies. I saw O’Reilly using a similar approach thirty years ago.
He’d asked me to join him for morning surgery, which he conducted in the converted front room of his home, sitting in a swivel chair in front of a great rolltop desk. Beside him was a hard-backed chair for the sufferer. One of O’Reilly’s ploys was to have sawn off the last inch of the front legs of this seat so the customer would keep sliding forward, be uncomfortable, and thus not be tempted to stay too long.
I occupied the other piece of furniture in the room, a battered examination couch, swinging my legs and wishing that the incessant flow of coughs, colds, and sniffles would dry up, both figuratively and literally.
The last patient came in. I’d seen her before, twice actually, with vague but time-consuming symptoms. She took one look at me and sniffed. “The young lad’s not helping me, Doctor.”
O’Reilly rose, and waited until she was seated. He sat and took one of her hands in his, peered over a set of half-moon spectacles, which he affected when he wanted to look particularly wise, and asked, “What seems to be the trouble, Maggie?”
She fired one aggrieved glance in my direction and said in a voice that would have softened Pharaoh’s heart if, like Moses, she’d been discussing the holiday plans of the Children of Israel with Ramses, “It’s the headaches, Doctor.”