AUTHOR INTERVIEW

Dundee writer Frank Gilfeather has a new novel set in Lochee. Rebecca Baird finds out more

What do you do when you have a stupendous ending to a story, but no beginning? Well, if you’re former boxing champion, playwright and now novelist Frank Gilfeather, you make it up.

If the Dundonian’s new release, The Harp and the Violet, sounds familiar, it’s because it was adapted from the play of the same name, which filled the house at the city’s Rep theatre throughout 1991.

But the story of wayward Pioneer Corps soldier Frank Mcgarrity – who comes home to Lochee on the eve of a football match between rival junior teams Lochee Harp, and Dundee Violet and sets in motion a chain of events which culminates in a dramatic showdown between three men on the banks of the Tay – is one Frank first heard as a young man.

“I first heard about it from my brother Dennis (Gilfeather, also of Dundee boxing fame) in the late 1960s,” Frank, 76, explains.

“But the only thing that was really known was that ‘Frank Mcgarrity’, whose real name was John Fitzgerald, came home on leave, and ended up...”

Well, those who know, know. For those who don’t, suffice to say the scenes at Tay Rail Bridge station that night in 1941 were explosive enough to live on in Lochee lore for generations.

“It was such a good ending, I really needed to find a beginning and a middle. And I thought, ‘well there’s nothing left for me to do but make it up’.”

So The Harp and the Violet was born, and in its new life as a novel, Frank has been able to conjure up an even more vivid portrait of the post-war Lochee he grew up in – including the long-gone Nine Bells pub, and of course the famous Cox’s jute mill.

But the real intrigue of the tale is Mcgarrity himself, what kind of man he is, and why he appeared back in Lochee so suddenly after marching off to war.

Frank, who lives in Aberdeen now but still feels firmly Dundonian, says it’s a story he’s always felt belongs to his home city.

“When I told (acclaimed poet and playwright) Liz Lochhead the story one night in the late 80s, she said: ‘That’s a movie, you’ve got to make it a movie’.”

Buoyed by her enthusiasm, he approached writerproducer and actor Tom Conti (Heavenly Pursuits) who offered to “take it off my hands”.

“But I said no!” Frank chuckles. “I had a vision, that I wanted it put on in Dundee for Dundee people.

“At that time there were very few plays about Dundee – and very few books about Dundee, it seems to be the forgotten city half the time.”

Already, Frank’s working on another Dundee-based novel – but after going viral on Tiktok this year for his online boxing tutorials (one of which has a whopping three million views) I wonder, will he ever write his own story of growing up in the founding family of Camperdown Boxing Club?

“Who would be interested in that?” he laughs with typical Dundonian modesty, as I point out his 75,000 followers.

“Maybe I’ll give it a go.”

The Harp and the Violet by Frank Gilfeather is available now in ebook and paperback from Amazon.

Dundee-born writer Frank Gilfeather.