Colin Bateman, in his first novel, Divorcing Jack (1994), begins his narration with an introduction written in italics that very much appears to be connected with the narrative style of the 1940´s film noir movies, where it is taken as a fact that the main character always introduces the viewer with the storyline of what had happened so far and the narration continues to run in the retrospective (such as Billy Wilder’s famous Sunset Boulevard, or Double Indemnity). Here, the very similar narrative device helps Bateman to make the reader enter quickly and directly into the plot. Hence, from the very first lines we know the main hero is going to be caught by his wife when a party at his place leads somewhat incoherently to kissing a newfound young friend in his study. And this fact is going to change their lives. The character soon appears to be Dan Starkey, a witty columnist of Belfast Evening News, who, after a rather unsuccessful initial meeting with his supposed-to-be future employer, gets drunk, falls in lust with a young student of geology, and finds himself helplessly mired in trouble with his wife and soon after, with the law. Shortly after Patricia (Starkey’s wife) catches him in the arms of another woman and gives him a twenty-four-hour ultimatum to move out, Margaret McBride (the student) is murdered and Starkey, being the last one to have seen her dying, not surprisingly becomes the prime suspect. Cut loose in Belfast – “the cosy gold cost of Northern Ireland where paramilitary organizations hold coffee mornings, with an Armalite in one hand and a packet of Jaffa Cakes in the other” (p.78), Starkey decides he must track down the killer in order to clear his own name. In his job as a newspaper columnist he finds even more trouble. His employer pairs him with an American reporter of Boston Globe, Charles Parker, to interview a political candidate, Mark Brinn, and during the following investigation Starkey uncovers a scandal that could potentially affect and even seriously alter the result of the incoming national election (not forgetting to mention the fact that the reader’s favourite characters start to get killed off). What makes this book different from other literature written by the Irish authors is the fact that the main character, Dan Starkey, is British, defining himself as a Unionist Protestant - “I was brought up with Protestant taste.