Duffy

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Created by Dan Kavanagh
Pseudonym of Julian Barnes

And now, we proudly present the cheeky bi-eye…

DUFFY is an ex-cop who runs a one-man detective agency. Oh yeah, and he’s a swinging bi-sexual too. In the self-titled series opener from 1980 he’s hired to find out who is blackmailing a man whose wife was recently murdered. The twist is that his client didn’t actually kill her, he just left out a few things when talking to the police. Trying to unwrap the tangled snarl of lies takes Duffy through the seedier strip joints and massage parlors of Soho.

Duffy gets other cases investigating injured soccer (sorry football) players and poking around Heathrow, before finding his way into the last book of the series (so far), Going To The Dogs (1987). Kavanaugh has some fun in these hard-boiled adventures by peppering them with a sometimes wicked sense of humor. He pokes some fun at traditional English cozies by setting the last of Duffy’s adventures in an English country mansion. He fills it with some high-class guests, some low-class characters and throws a body through the library window with Duffy on the scene.

Julian Barnes wrote this biography for his alter ego for the dust jacket of Duffy: “Dan Kavanagh was born in County Sligo in 1946. Having devoted his adolescence to truancy, venery and petty theft, he left home at seventeen and signed on as a deckhand on a Liberian tanker. After jumping ship at Montevideo, he roamed across the Americas taking a variety of jobs: he was a steer-wrestler, a waiter-on-roller-skates at a drive-in eatery in Tucson, and a bouncer in a gay bar in San Francisco. He is currently working in London at jobs he declines to specify, and lives in North Islington.”

UNDER OATH

  • “Well-told and very, very grubby”
    — The Listener on Duffy
  • “Duffy is a wonderfully appealing character who could never be anything but the creation of a top-flight imagination.”
    –– Daily Mail on Duffy

STRAIGHT FROM THE AUTHOR’S MOUTH

  • “I find it hard to talk about Dan Kavanagh because most of the time I’m me and he only pops up every couple of years for a few months. He comes from a separate part of the brain… some nasty road accident in north London may be necessary to get rid of Kavanagh. Traditionally the author kills off his characters, but I don’t see why an author shouldn’t get killed off as well. Crushed by a beer barrel falling off a truck as he leaves a pub, or something. Poor old Dan.”
    — Julian Barnes (October 17, 1989, The Toronto Star)

NOVELS

COLLECTIONS

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Report respectfully perpetrated by Dale Stoyer.

Published

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