John J. Gaynard

John J. Gaynard comes from the West of Ireland. Paris has been his home for nearly forty years. Over that period of time he has worked and traveled widely; in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and West and North Africa.

"Another Life" was his first novel to be published. It tells the story of three members of an emigrant family who returned to their home place in the west of Ireland from the north of England thinking they would find a better life for themselves. But their dream is smashed into smithereens by the overbearing temperament of a mother and the conflicting worldviews of two sons. A feud between the three culminates in a murder. Sergeant Timothy O'Mahony, of the Irish police force, the Garda Síochána, leads the investigation to its amazing conclusion.

"The Imitation of Patsy Burke" is set in Paris. World-renowned sculptor and hell-raiser Patsy Burke has fought and womanized his way to success from his early beginnings as a member of the Britart movement and he now finds himself battling against himself in the most degrading depths of the city. The novel takes place over a few hours. In that time Patsy Burke's demons drag push him into taking a fateful decision that has been described as "totally predictable yet coming in from left field".

Here is the Kirkus Review for The Imitation of Patsy Burke

"THE IMITATION OF PATSY BURKE

Booze, brawls, sex and schizophrenia--such is the artist's life in Paris, according to this raucous satire.

When Patsy Burke, a world-famous Irish sculptor living in France, wakes up in his hotel with his body torn and bloody and no recollection of how it got that way, he's not particularly surprised. A raging alcoholic given to beating up pimps in Paris dives, he's used to blackouts and drunk tanks. Unfortunately, his latest bender has left a dead man in its wake, and Patsy's attempt to piece together what he's been doing for the last few days triggers a reckoning with his past and his demons. Said demons take the form of bickering voices inside his head, including Caravaggio, a Nietzchean figure who eggs on Patsy's fistfights and womanizing; Goody Two-Shoes, a prim woman who castigates his atrocious treatment of friends and lovers; a wispy romantic named Forget Me Not; and a scary demiurge called the Chopper, whose insistent promptings to behead women with a meat cleaver are barely fended off by the remnants of Patsy's sanity. These clashing personae narrate Patsy's violent picaresque and roiling internal conflicts; he's bombastic, selfish, preening and cynical, yet steeped in Irish-Catholic guilt. (His downward spiral was touched off when he learned that a statue he made of Jesus being sodomized by two monks--meant as a protest against clerical abuses--is now presiding over orgies conducted by Vatican pedophiles.) Patsy's saga is plenty lurid--"You bit off his right ear and you spat it out"--yet the author's pristine prose keeps it under control. Despite the tale's almost Dantean excesses, Gaynard makes the tone ironic and droll--during an odyssey through the Parisian demimonde, Patsy finds himself discussing Marxist development economics with a glamorous prostitute--and registers delicate shadings of his antihero's psychic travails. The result is an entertaining, over-the-top farce that still draws readers in with pathos.

A rich, darkly comic send-up of the art world and the megalomaniacal souls that populate it."

Gaynard's third novel is Green Blood for France. It features the French-speaking Irish Detective Timothy O'Mahony, who made his first appearance in Another Life, as he follows the trail of a murderer from the West of Ireland through Paris and Nice to Francophone Africa.

GREEN BLOOD IS FOR FRANCE

"Gaynard dissects France's political corruption in his novel about a police investigation into the murder of a young woman used as a sex toy by French political leaders.

Hardened Irish police detective Timothy O'Mahony investigates the murder of a young African woman after her mutilated body washes up on the Irish coast. Turns out that she disappeared from a luxury yacht chartered by a man vying to be the next French president. The purported reason for the trip was so the candidate could discuss campaign strategies with his advisors. In reality, the trip was an excuse to indulge in wild orgies, and O'Mahony must separate the culprit from the mass of suspects. In Paris, coverups and threats abound as the political rivals and competing police forces try to outdo each other; each proclaims they're acting "for the good of France."

Gaynard's novel examines the corruption and cynical exploitation of former French colonies, as well as France's role in encouraging the chaos and savagery in the Congo to keep control of raw material supplies. The author's knowledge of the political and legal systems often verges on political philosophy. Says a puzzled Congo politician, "Why is it only Africans that are charged by the International Criminal Court? Why don't American or British leaders like Bush and Blair get hauled up?"

References to Nicolas Sarkozy and Dominique Strauss-Kahn further connect the novel to contemporary French issues..."