Murder, Mutiny & Mayhem: The Blackest-Hearted Villains from Irish History

By Joe O'Shea

The Blackest-Hearted Villains from Irish History

The Irish are celebrated at home and abroad as explorers, freedom fighters and great writers and artists, but for every Tom Crean, Bernardo O'Higgins or James Joyce, there is a Hugh Gough, Antoine Walsh or Luke Ryan.

This book is about the Irish slavers, grave-robbers, duellists, conmen, drug-lords and killers who wreaked havoc around the world …

Includes

• Beauchamp Bagenal from Carlow, an eighteenth-century duellist, hell-raiser, heart-breaker
• Burke & Hare grave-robbers turned murderers who supplied cadavers to the medical schools of nineteenth-century Edinburgh
• Antoine Walsh from Kilkenny who amassed huge fortunes in the French slave trade
• Luke Ryan, a pirate & buccaneer born in Rush in 1750
• Sir Hugh Gough, a Limerick man who commanded the British troops in the first Opium war against China
• James ‘Sligo’ Jameson who was rumoured to have fallen into madness and cannibalism in the Congo in 1888 … and many more!

• Language: English
• Publisher: The O'Brien Press
• Release date: Oct 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781847175311

Joe O'Shea

Joe O'Shea is a journalist and broadcaster, originally from Cork but living and working in Dublin. He has been writing for a range of national newspapers and broadcast media since he was 19-years-of age, first as a news reporter and then as a feature writer and columnist. He has also devised and presented TV programmes. Joe has had a passion for history from a very young age. However, being raised on the stories of the great saints, missionaries, freedom fighters and politicians of the Irish diaspora, he was always fascinated by the dark side of Irish history, the Irish men and women who didn't cover themselves in glory, the thieves, traitors, pirates, pimps, mercenaries, killers, slavers and madmen. In researching this book, he has discovered the forgotten stories of the inglorious Irish who laid waste to empires, transported countless thousands (including, in some cases, their own countrymen) into slavery and indulged in every vice and debased, evil impulse known to man. And he is a little envious.