John J. Gaynard

John J. Gaynard comes from the West of Ireland. Paris has been his home for nearly forty years.

He is at present finalizing a series of crime and literary novels, each featuring an Irish central character.

"Another Life" was the first of those novels to be published. It tells the story of a family returning to Ireland to find a better life, only to see the dream broken by the feud between its two sons, a feud which 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 sees his success endangered by his increasingly weird behavior and the characters who influence him. The novel takes place over a few hours: in that time the demons that haunt Patsy Burke push him both backwards and forwards through many years of his life and push him into taking a fateful decision.

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.