Often at FLOG we’ll cover emerging and lesser known entrepreneurs and influential people, not influencers, as everyone knows that’s something to do with guns. Today I have a legend of mystery crime fiction. Cahal Doherty wrote his first book as a high school student in Galway, Ireland, about an alcoholic detective from his neighbourhood called Roddy O’Hagan, a detective with a sharp mind, a gruff persona, and a fascinating status as a functional alcoholic. That first book, Roddy’s War, launched a career that would take him to twenty further novels detailing Roddy’s cases and adventures through the underbelly of Galway. This rogue careered about the city, a champion for solving murders of the downtrodden, while himself spiralling out of control. The adventures of O’Hagan garnered Doherty critical praise and popular devotion not just because O’Hagan captured a gruff laconic masculinity that was equal parts swasivious and reprehensible, but because he seemed to sum up an archetypal antihero not just emblematic of Galway but Ireland in its entirety, and his win of the Booker Prize in 2004 for Murder is a Cruel Meatmaiden was considered not just a highlight for him but for crime fiction. In the past two years though, Doherty and O’Hagan have been met by a new readership that don’t have the same reverence and adoration that made him one of the highest selling authors in Ireland. How he adapted to his challenge may be the greatest mystery yet. Through his greatest personal and career challenge, a movement and company was born which redefines masculinity in the age of feminism.