The History-Mystery Man
Irish America magazine
The author Peter Quinn, whose third and final installment of the Detective Fintan Dunne trilogy was released in October, talks to Tom Deignan.
It's been nearly 20 years since Peter Quinn's epic Banished Children of Eveem>, arguably the greatest novel of the New York Irish, was published. Over the course of 600 pages, Quinn depicts the city in all its gore and glory, as the Irish and others struggle to find a place in America, which had absorbed wave after wave of Famine immigrants, only to then be plunged into a bloody Civil War. With extraordinary attention to detail and a diverse cast of characters, Quinn presents the causes and consequences of these seismic events, including the Draft Riots of 1863, and raises important questions about the Irish, immigration, assimilation and the myth of the melting pot.