Ian Cochrane happily ridiculed the shibboleths of Northern Ireland when that was rare

I never met Ian Cochrane. In fact, despite growing up in the same part of the world as him, and being keenly interested in writers and writing from an early age, I had never even heard of Ian Cochrane until after his death in 2004.

It was in September that year that my father happened to show me a recent clipping from The Guardian – an obituary of Cochrane by his friend and fellow Northern Irish novelist Maurice Leitch. My father explained that he and Cochrane had once been neighbours at Ard-na-Maine, a little housing estate in the village of Cullybackey, Co Antrim. Both had spent their teenage years there, the development having been completed in the mid-1950s, enabling rural folk to relocate from substandard living conditions in the rundown cottages of the surrounding countryside.

Leitch’s tribute piece, brief though it was, offered a fascinating glimpse into the life story of an author somehow emerging from the humblest of backgrounds to produce what Leitch intriguingly referred to as “a critically acclaimed stream of six unusual, darkly comic novels”.

I set about reading all I could locate of these long out-of-print books, and I was hooked from the very first line of his debut novel, A Streak of Madness: “The hens were drunk – it was Derek.” This set the tone perfectly for the fictional vision of village life Cochrane would pursue in so much of his work, homing in on the puerile mayhem triggered by small-town boredom.

And yet, as I immersed myself in his novels, it became clear that there was much more to Cochrane’s imagination than his trademark ribald humour. I was struck by how he had achieved the difficult feat of writing in his own free-flowing, vernacular voice while also tackling complex themes – strained family relationships, religious hypocrisy, mental instability, alienation within a close-knit community, and the constant striving of an adolescent to understand the world around him – elevating the storytelling to something altogether grander and more universal.

Cochrane, I quickly came to believe, was a writer unjustly neglected. His moment of critical attention had lasted little more than a decade, from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, after which he had been almost entirely forgotten, long before his death in London at the age of just 62. But as I learned more about him, I was increasingly convinced that he deserved to be acknowledged as an important and influential literary figure.

His novels belong to the vital working-class writing of the postwar period, when exciting new voices from below found their first literary outlet, while his focus on the poor, rural Protestant experience in the North lends his work valuable sociological insight.

Primarily, though, it is for his style that Cochrane deserves to be remembered. His first-person narratives, told in the demotic language of a child or adolescent, were ground-breaking at the time, and his distinctive, non-standard English is his real achievement, a deliberately crude prose form infused with poetic qualities.

As my interest grew, perhaps most extraordinary to me in all of this was quite simply the idea of a Cullybackey man finding fame – albeit relatively fleeting – on the London literary scene, and doing so, moreover, by bringing his inauspicious homeplace to life on the page.

As a young boy I had known Cullybackey and Ard-na-Maine very well – we would call with my grandmother there every Sunday, and the ambience of this remote location had been a constant of my childhood.

Visiting Cullybackey today, the village appears enviably bucolic, a victim of neither desertification nor gentrification, with its one idly curving street of churches and pubs in equal measure, its tranquil riverside walkway, and its carefree air of unthreatened continuation.

As a restless child, however, forced to spend Sunday afternoons there rather than playing football with my friends, I saw things very differently: this sleepy hamlet made my nearby hometown of Ballymoney seem a bustling metropolis by comparison. In my implacable juvenile judgment, this was a place of torpor and inertia – a centre of paralysis, James Joyce might have called it, had his granny lived in Cullybackey.

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So it was all the more appealing, decades later, to find that Cochrane’s fiction drew on this ostensibly unfavourable source material, portraying it with such urgent, vivid drama through the eyes of his immature and unreliable narrators.

I was also surprised to learn that so little had previously been written about Cochrane himself. Other than the often-glowing broadsheet reviews that greeted the publication of each of his novels, there was almost nothing to be found in the British and Irish press archives, while academia had largely ignored his work.

Above all, no biography of Cochrane existed, and yet his life story, as I began to look into it, was fascinating. Rural poverty, truancy from school, menial labour from the age of 14, severe sight loss as a teenager, moving to London at the age of 18 never to return, another series of unrewarding jobs, then finally breaking into the literary world against all the odds – this was the classic story of an artist finding his unlikely calling.

The idea of writing such a biography myself soon seemed compelling, if daunting. Few others, I supposed, could be in a position to understand Cochrane’s world so intimately, to visualise so precisely the characters and localities he described. I was also well placed to appreciate the dark humour of the wider north Antrim area in which we had both grown up, and the singular atmosphere of piety and irreverence, of affability and aggression, that he so skilfully captures.

When I eventually took the plunge many years later, my first port of call was with Leitch, whose Guardian piece had initially inspired me. Leitch invited me to his home in London one afternoon in March 2019, where he told me of Cochrane’s remarkable personality and literary achievements, and about their many years of close friendship. By the end of our chat, it was clear that Cochrane was a thoroughly worthy subject for any biography, and many more interviews soon followed with his family, acquaintances and admirers.

His brother Drew, now in his eighties and almost completely blind as a result of Leber hereditary optic neuropathy – the same illness suffered by Ian – was exceptionally welcoming, supportive and encouraging from the outset, delighted at the prospect of any restoration of Ian’s literary reputation. Drew and other members of the Cochrane clan gave me access to an extensive collection of unpublished works and correspondence, greatly enhancing my research, and I passed several fruitful months, supported by an Irish Arts Council award, studying these papers.

Ian’s ex-wife, Maggie Manicom, was equally enthusiastic, showing me around her native village of Goodnestone in Kent, where Ian had spent many happy times, particularly at the local pub, the FitzWalter Arms. Close friends of his in London, such as Shay and Imelda Kelly, were also able to fill me in on Ian’s many decades in his adopted city.

One contact led to another, and in the end I was able to piece together Cochrane’s biography from the insights of 50 or so interviewees – not just friends and family, but also the select band of academics, literary commentators and fellow writers who continue to appreciate his fiction.

Happily, my biography builds on a renewed interest in Ian Cochrane. In his obituary in 2004, Maurice Leitch had regretted the extent to which his friend’s work had already fallen from view, and it was not until 2016 that a mini-revival began, when James Greer of Queen’s University Belfast published a comprehensive article on Cochrane. This was followed in 2018 by a reissue of Cochrane’s novel F for Ferg, launched with a panel discussion celebrating his life and legacy, at the Seamus Heaney HomePlace in Bellaghy, Co Derry.

This was all the more fitting a venue in that Heaney had been a champion of Cochrane’s work. Reviewing A Streak of Madness in 1973, Heaney praised the book’s “highly developed sense of the irreverent and the bawdy” and astutely observed that “the great delight of the thing is the way in which the living speech of the Ulster countryside is married to a highly inventive comic imagination, and an extraordinarily lyric evocation of the natural world sits side by side with a tough-minded debunking intelligence”.

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Perhaps above all, Cochrane’s legacy may be found in his influence on another towering figure of Irish literature, Patrick McCabe. The Monaghan man, I was intrigued to discover, had once jokingly remarked that he “stole Ian Cochrane’s voice for The Butcher Boy”. This was a generous comment – in truth, their styles are somewhat different, and McCabe unquestionably brought his own unique brand of manic energy and unbridled humour to his seminal novel, yet the parallels in their anarchic, heightened visions of Irish village life are evident.

Clearly, to have been an inspiration for McCabe, himself so influential on contemporary writing, does much to confirm Cochrane’s importance as a kind of literary missing link.

In 2023 I edited a volume of Cochrane’s previously uncollected short stories, uncovered in the course of my research from long-forgotten literary magazines and anthologies. Providing a cover quotation for this new collection, McCabe described Cochrane as “a one-off genius ... for his reckless laughter and faith in human beings”. The phrase “reckless laughter”, I felt, described perfectly both Cochrane’s undaunted approach to life and his unfiltered fictional voice.

As an author, Ian Cochrane was unafraid to bring humour even to the direst of circumstances and the worst of human behaviour, and he happily set about ridiculing the religious and cultural shibboleths of Northern Ireland at a time when few others seemed willing to do so. Regrettably, whether in the North or in the wider world, it would seem that such reckless laughter is still needed today, perhaps more than ever.

Reckless Laughter by Philip Taylor is published by Turnpike Books