Mr Nold states: ‘I was attracted to Irish writers at an early age. Pethaps from seeing the notorious TV interview with a scronulated Brendam Behan, which was satirised on a track of Peter Sellers’ first 10-inch LP recording, called, I think, The Critics. We could recite it by heart. Then Borstal Boy and the plays were swiftly consumed, engendering an interest in the writers and painters of Ireland, Jack Yeats foremost among the latter..
‘James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man and Dubliners led me to his entire output. While I could not claim to fully understand Ulysses in its entirety, its brilliance and musicality appealed greatly. Then came O’Casey, the playwrights, and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and so on.
‘When I found a paperback of At Swim-Two Birds in Sydney in the early 1960s, it entertained and impressed me so much that Flann O’Brien instantly became my favourite writer anywhere, any time. It was a while before his other books appeared, but when The Third Policeman was published posthumously it became and remains my all-time favourite book. Then The Poor Mouth lured me to the Blasket Islands, Tomås O’Crohan and those who followed him. Flann O’Brien, along with Joyce and Beckett, is now rightly considered a corner boy of the Irish Literary Triumvirate.
‘This graphic version, as stated within, is a tribute.’
It’s said that The Third Policeman may be, in today’s Newspeak, somewhat ‘challenging’ for some readers, so to point the way to actually reading and enjoying it, Mr Nold has created About a Bicycle, an illustrated key to the themes and intricacies of the book — and you can now download it free of charge.
You can find out more about Flann O’Brien and The Third Policeman on this Wikipedia page.