FICTION: DECLAN HUGHESreviews Orchid BlueBy Eoin McNamee Faber, 304pp. £12.99

WRITING IN the Guardianabout GB84, David Peace's novel of the miners' strike, Eoin McNamee said: "There is something out there in the world of fiction . . . It is writers looking to engage with real people and real events, and stitch them into their fiction . . . There are dangers . . . Playing with people's lives, that kind of thing. The taking of real lives and setting them down in a landscape of invention. But a writer isn't there to create morality tales or to give a good example. All that matters is that the work is good. And the conviction that morality will follow the well-made thing."

McNamee had just published The Ultras, his novel about the undercover British army captain Robert Nairac, but his remarks amount to a manifesto that could be applied to all of the fiction he has written since the Booker-longlisted The Blue Tango, to which Orchid Blueis a kind of sequel. (The two books are complementary but independent, and it is not necessary to have read The Blue Tangofirst, although, as each is the work of a master of Irish prose writing at the height of his considerable powers, I would urge you to read them both – indeed, to read everything McNamee has written.)

Orchid Blueexamines the case of Robert McGladdery, who was tried, convicted and executed for the murder of 19-year-old Pearl Gamble in Newry in 1961. The case was presided over by Justice Lance Curran, whose own 19-year-old daughter, Patricia, had been murdered nine years previously (the terrain of The Blue Tango): "In any other jurisdiction Curran would have been disbarred, or would have disbarred himself, from presiding over a capital case involving the murder of another 19-year-old girl."

But this is not any other jurisdiction, and Brian Faulkner, minister for home affairs (“An air of feudal rancours about him. Disdain in the gene code”) makes clear to Det Eddie McCrink, returned to the North after 15 years with the Met, that “a guilty verdict is assured . . . There will be a conviction. You do your job and I’ll do mine”. The open wound of the Patricia Curran case, where an innocent man, Iain Hay Gordon, was fitted up with a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict and quietly released after five years, is to be healed not by reinvestigating what actually happened at the Curran house that night, as McCrink attempts to do, but by appointing a guilty man to preside over the trial of an innocent man and sway the jury towards a verdict of guilt.

Later in that Guardianpiece McNamee made the case that fiction that is close to real events puts the truth on display in a way journalism simply cannot: "The facts can be done, but not the whispering around the edges, Don DeLillo's sinister buzz of implication."

And for all the controlled anger at the outrage of a ruthlessly contrived miscarriage of justice, it is at the whispering around the edges that McNamee excels, the casting of moods and atmospheres, the making of patterns and connections. Take the encounter between McCrink and Faulkner, which takes place in a hotel where the minister is attending a dinner dance: “There was a middle-European look to the dance crowd . . . an atmosphere of low-key intrigue running through the evening . . . McCrink felt that he had found himself among some lost bourgeoisie.” A bar frequented by the police is a “place where people drank to keep at bay the damage they had caused through drinking”.

A game of French billiards becomes a reminder “that things are mapped out, that matters were underlain with strange cartographies”. The billiard balls in turn are transformed into the planets in the planetarium: “The announcer described the movements of the planets as a dance and Curran turned to look at him as if to say is this in fact a dance, this cold gavotte, the steaming nebulae, the stars of ash.” The act, or fact, or object, is made general, is made myth; the particular attains a poetic, a metaphysical weight; the story resonates at a universal frequency.

The telephone plays as significant a part in the novel as it would in a West End play of the period, a totem of networks, hierarchies, interventions granted and with-held: “ . . . the heavy bakelite receiver in his hand. An instrument to give weight to your words, a moral heft”. Having been warned off the Curran case, McCrink hangs up the phone and feels “like a functionary in some far-flung corner of empire. Orders coming through from the capital. You imagined hundreds of miles of telephone lines. Crossing the forests, the still-frozen tundra”. And, of course, the Curran case revolves around a telephone call, and a telephone no one except Lance Curran was permitted to answer.

Alongside Peace and DeLillo, the noir influence of James Ellroy is also discernible in this haunting novel's elegant, fateful, inexorable progress, not only in the comparison between Pearl Gamble and Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, but also in the mesmerising, almost hallucinatory beauty McNamee conjures from such dark material: "The bride and groom . . . looking into the flash as though dazzled by the promise of the life to come. Robert and Pearl the sombre reverse of that promise. Fixed in the ghoul-light of murder." Eoin McNamee is a magnificent writer, and Orchid Bluemay be his finest novel yet.

Declan Hughes is a novelist and playwright. His latest novel, City of Lost Girls, is published by John Murray