When the first novel by Maurice Leitch, The Liberty Lad, was published in 1965, the 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles had not yet got under way. But intimations of the coming catastrophe were apparent: in civil rights agitation, in extreme nationalist Catholic disaffection, in sporadic violence and outbreaks of sectarian ferocity in the streets. Though it is not overtly political, The Liberty Lad reflects the deteriorating social and moral climate in the fictional Protestant mill village of Kildargan, with its damp terrace houses, its industrial decline and prevailing sense of poverty and malaise, all complicated by sectarian undertones.
Aside from anticipating the Troubles, it gained its author, who has died aged 90, a place among the many distinguished writers proscribed in the Irish republic for their treatment of sexuality. In an interview with Julia Carlson, author of Banned in Ireland (1990), Leitch commented: “[Homosexuality] seemed a subject worthy of writing about, because it was another extension of repression … It was also part of the 1950s and 60s, that sort of repression was everywhere around.”
Perhaps the most engaging of Leitch’s novels, The Liberty Lad was followed in 1969 by Poor Lazarus (winner of the Guardian fiction prize), which shows considerable insight into the spectrum of misogyny, aridity and brutality in Northern Irish life. The epigraph chosen for Stamping Ground (1975) – “for as we know savage customs begat a corresponding darkness of the soul” – sets the scene; while Silver’s City (1981), which won the Whitbread prize, depicts Belfast’s bombed-out, burnt and devastated streets as “the true terrain of nightmare”. Opening with a bungled assassination attempt and ends with a stabbing, it adds a surreal element to the treatment of loyalist braggadocio, terrorism and depravity.
A further eight novels followed, of which the last, Gone to Earth, was published in 2019, and there were also two collections of stories and a novella. Leitch wrote radio plays: Flutes (1984) and A Shout in the Distance (1999) were among those set in Northern Ireland and broadcast on Radio 4. His radio dramatisation of Silver’s City (1995) starred Brian Cox and James Nesbitt, and he had a 12-year stint as editor of Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime. His TV plays included Guests of the Nation (1983), an adaptation of Frank O’Connor’s short story about two British soldiers held hostage by the Irish Free Army in 1920, starring Timothy Spall.
Born in the village of Muckamore in County Antrim (the model for Kildargan in The Liberty Lad), Maurice was the son of Jean (nee Coid) and Andrew, a foreman at Muckamore Mill. His precocious intelligence was in evidence from the start: while attending Muckamore primary school, he won a scholarship in 1946 to Methodist college in Belfast.
He became a primary school teacher in Antrim in 1954, but after six years in the job, during which time he had gained himself a certain reputation in literary circles by writing articles on country themes for the Belfast Telegraph, he joined the features department of the BBC in Belfast as a radio producer and writer. His first radio play, The Old House (1960), starred JG Devlin and James Ellis as a father and son in conflict.
The poet Michael Longley recalled travelling around the province with Leitch, recording participants in an amateur talent programme: “I was between jobs and worked briefly as Maurice’s floor manager, the cheerleader for country-and-western songsters and backwoods comedians – characters who would have fitted into one of his marvellous Ulster-based novels.”
Remembered by BBC colleagues as someone who was eager to add to the gaiety of life (in marked contrast to the bleak mood of some of his best-known works of fiction), he was regularly among the BBC personnel who tended to congregate at the Elbow Room, a hostelry opposite Broadcasting House in Belfast’s Bedford Street, for prodigious episodes of drink and conviviality with writers such as O’Connor, Louis MacNeice, Laurie Lee, Sean O’Faolain and Brendan Behan.
In 1970 Leitch left Belfast for London, continuing to work for BBC radio, but now as a drama producer at Broadcasting House in London. His first marriage, to another native of Muckamore, Isobel Scott, in 1955, had by then ended in divorce, and in 1972 he married Sandra Hill, also from Northern Ireland. They lived in north London for many years, but Leitch never uprooted himself entirely from Antrim and Belfast, and a Northern Irish element found its way into most of his novels, even if it is just an exuberant Ulster couple heading for Wiltshire in a camper van, as in Burning Bridges (1989). They are on the run from London and their accumulating troubles there, and playacting at being, respectively, a kind of cartoon cowboy and a sophisticate in a Laura Ashley pinny. This buoyant novel offers a disabused perspective on escapism.
After his stint with Book at Bedtime, in 1989 he left the BBC to write full time. Although his work was very well regarded, it is hard not to concur with the critic and academic George O’Brien’s bewilderment at the relative neglect of Leitch the novelist in his home territory. While he had admirers in many other places, and in 1998 was appointed MBE, he was far from being a household name in his birthplace. Perhaps that was due to his abrasive approach to the ills of Northern Ireland – he was never averse to throwing a spanner in the works – and his outspoken knack for tackling difficult subjects head-on.
Sandra died in 2020. He is survived by their son, Daniel, two children, Bronagh and Paul, from his first marriage, and three grandchildren, Louis, Ciaran and Kendra.
• Maurice Henry Leitch, author and playwright, born 5 July 1933; died 26 September 2023
