Liam O'Flaherty's novel The Informer (1925) is what the author of this study calls a 'mythogenic text', i.e. one that lends itself easily to adaptations, recreations and renditions. To date
there have been four film versions (Arthur Robison 1929, John Ford 1935, Jules Dassin 1968, Michael Byrne 1992) and at least as many stage versions. One of the reasons the novel has proved so
attractive to filmmakers is that it was itself written with an eye on the silent expressionist cinema of the day.
All too often O'Flaherty has been regarded as a hard realist who drew the great vigour of his art from the native Gaelic culture of oral storytelling. In fact, he was much more at home in the
linked gestural and visual language of melodrama and the silent cinema. As this study amply demonstrates, the central antagonism between O'Flaherty's Hardman (Gypo Nolan) and the Gunman
(Commandant Dan Gallagher) has provided dramatists and filmmakers with a compelling way of staging political conflict - not only in Ireland but in Weimar Germany and in the inner city ghettoes
of Afro America as well. In this, his last critical work before his death, Pat Sheeran displays the particular blend of scholarship, wit and panache which characterized his life and career.
