Book description
'This was the ultimate way to kill a man'
During the 1970s a group of Protestant paramilitaries embarked on a
spree of indiscriminate murder which left thirty Northern Irish
Catholics dead. Their leader was Lenny Murphy, a fanatical Unionist
whose Catholic-sounding surname led to his persecution as a child for
which he took revenge on all Catholics.
Not for the squeamish, The Shankill Butchers is a horrifying
detailed account of one of the most brutal series of murders in
British legal history - a phenomenon whose real nature has been
obscured by the troubled and violent context from which it sprang.
Martin Dillon is a native of Belfast although educated in England.
He lived in France for a time and returned to Northern Ireland to work
as a journalist with the Irish News before joining the
Belfast Telegraph. He also worked as a freelance journalist
for several national newspapers and American periodicals. In 1973 he
wrote Political Murder in Northern Ireland which is regarded as
the definitive study of political assassination in Northern Ireland.
His second book, Rogue Warrior of the SAS, is a biography of
the Second World War hero, Lt. Col. Robert Blair Mayne, and is
published by Arrow. The Shankill Butchers which was a
bestseller in both Ireland and Britain was the first in his trilogy of
books about Northern and Southern Ireland.
Martin Dillon has written plays for BBC radio and television and has
been Editor in Northern Ireland of many of the BBC's programmes in the
area of current affairs. He now works for the BBC History Unit in London.
