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| Liam Devlin | |
|---|---|
| First appearance | The Eagle Has Landed |
| Created by | Jack Higgins |
| Portrayed by | Donald Sutherland Keith Carradine |
| In-universe information | |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Spy Assassin |
| Nationality | Irish |
Liam Devlin is a protagonist and recurring character in the novels of Jack Higgins. "Liam Devlin" is a pseudonym and his real name is never revealed.
Liam Devlin is described as being born in County Down, Northern Ireland, and having attended Trinity College Dublin. [1] However, during a visit to Belfast, he witnesses his elderly uncle, a Catholic priest, being assaulted by a Protestant mob. When the members of the Irish Republican Army attempt to defend the church building, Devlin picks up a gun and joins them.
Devlin later receives the assignment to hunt down and assassinate two British informers who have fled to America. He succeeds and is later described by a Scotland Yard detective as "the most cold blooded executioner the movement has seen since Collins and his murder squad". [1]
During the Spanish Civil War, Devlin volunteers for the Connolly Column and is later captured by Falangist forces. While in a detention camp, he is recruited by Germany's military intelligence service, the Abwehr . During an intelligence mission inside the neutral Irish Free State, he is captured after a gunfight with the Garda Síochána, but later escapes from hospital in Dublin. The incident has left him with bullet scar on the forehead.
In the 1975 novel The Eagle Has Landed , Devlin has recovered from his wounds and is teaching Irish language literature at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. He is then approached by Colonel Radl of the Abwehr and recruited into a secret mission to kidnap Winston Churchill. He is parachuted near the Northern Ireland border and makes his way into England, posing as an Irish veteran of the British Army. While scouting for the arrival of German paratroopers in Norfolk, Devlin poses as a stereotypical "bog Irishman." He also meets and falls in love with Molly Prior, a young girl from the village of Studley Constable. He subsequently saves her from a would-be rapist and introduces her to the poetry of Antoine Ó Raifteiri. Soon after, they make love. In later novels, Devlin thinks about Molly from time to time.
When the German soldiers commanded by Col. Kurt Steiner arrive, they pose as Free Polish troops. Molly is overjoyed, believing that Devlin is still in the British Army and not a black marketeer like she had previously thought. However, one of the paratroopers is killed while rescuing two village children in an accident and his German uniform is seen by the villagers. As a result, the villagers and their priest are taken hostage and hidden in the village's Roman Catholic church. The priest's sister is able to escape and inform a nearby unit of the United States Army. Although enraged and betrayed when she learns of Devlin's true loyalties, Molly has no desire to see him killed by the Americans. When she warns him, however, he refuses to flee and says that he is going to the church to die alongside the Germans. Before he leaves, he insists that he is not a traitor, but a man serving his country. He has also left a letter on the mantel expressing his love for her and saying goodbye.
When the Americans arrive, Col. Steiner releases the hostages so that they will not be caught in the crossfire. After a violent gunfight, Molly arrives and reveals a secret tunnel out of the church. Col. Steiner, however, slips back into the village and is officially killed while trying to gun down Churchill, who is later revealed to have been a decoy. Devlin and the last surviving member of Steiner's unit are rescued at the seaside by a German E-boat.
In the later novel The Eagle Has Flown , Steiner is revealed to have survived. Devlin, who is hiding in Lisbon and planning to escape to America, is persuaded by SS Gen. Walter Schellenberg, then chief of the Ausland-SD , to rescue Steiner from the Tower of London. After they return to Germany, Devlin and Steiner prevent Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler from seizing control of the Reich. In the aftermath, Himmler orders Schellenberg to murder them. Instead, Schellenberg arranges their escape to the neutral Irish Free State. The novel ending states that Devlin now lives in a cottage in County Mayo and that he and Steiner remain friends.
As well as appearing in The Eagle Has Landed and The Eagle Has Flown , Devlin also appears as a major character in the Higgins novels Touch the Devil and Confessional. In other novels, Devlin has made cameo appearances as a mentor to Sean Dillon (in Drink with the Devil, The President's Daughter and Day of Reckoning ) and Martin Brosnan (in Eye of the Storm).
In the film version of The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Liam Devlin was portrayed by Donald Sutherland. [2]
In the television version of Confessional (1989), Liam Devlin was portrayed by Keith Carradine. [3]
Wilhelm Franz Canaris was a German admiral and the chief of the Abwehr from 1935 to 1944. Initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, Canaris turned against Hitler and committed acts of both passive and active resistance during World War II following the German invasion of Poland in 1939.
The Venlo incident was a covert operation carried out by the German Nazi Party's Sicherheitsdienst (SD) on 9 November 1939, which resulted in the capture of two British Secret Intelligence Service agents five metres (16 ft) from the German border, on the outskirts of the Dutch city of Venlo.
Walter Friedrich Schellenberg was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era. He rose through the ranks of the SS, becoming one of the highest ranking men in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and eventually assumed the position as head of foreign intelligence for Nazi Germany following the abolition of the Abwehr in 1944.
Henry Patterson, commonly known by his pen name Jack Higgins, was a British author. He was a best-selling author of popular thrillers and espionage novels. His novel The Eagle Has Landed (1975) sold more than 50 million copies and was adapted into a successful 1976 movie of the same title.
Plan Kathleen, sometimes referred to as the Artus Plan, was a military plan for the invasion of Northern Ireland by Nazi Germany, sanctioned in 1940 by Stephen Hayes, Acting Irish Republican Army (IRA) Chief of Staff.
The Eagle Has Landed is a book by British writer Jack Higgins, set during World War II and first published in 1975. It was quickly adapted into a British film of the same name, released in 1976.
Antoine Ó Raifteirí was an Irish language poet who is often called the last of the wandering bards.
Frank Ryan was an Irish politician, journalist and soldier. He first came to prominence as an Irish republican activist at University College Dublin and fought for the Irish Republican Army during the Irish Civil War. Ryan fell under the influence of Peadar O'Donnell, an advocate of socialism within Irish republicanism, which resulted in him breaking with the IRA and becoming involved with founding a new political organisation, the Republican Congress, and editing its associated newspaper, An Phoblacht.
Flight of Eagles is a novel by Jack Higgins, set in World War II.
Sean Dillon is a fictional Irish character who is the hero of a series of Jack Higgins novels.
The Unlikely Spy is a 1996 spy novel written by Daniel Silva, set during World War II.
Breakfast on Pluto is a 2005 comedy-drama film written and directed by Neil Jordan. It is based on the 1998 novel of the same name, written by Patrick McCabe, as adapted by Jordan and McCabe. The film stars Cillian Murphy as a transgender woman foundling searching for love and for her long-lost mother, in small town Ireland and London in the 1970s.
The Eagle Has Landed is a 1976 British war film directed by John Sturges, and starring Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland and Robert Duvall.
O'Devlin is the surname of a Gaelic Irish family of the Uí Néill who were chiefs in the far northeastern of the present-day County of Tyrone, bordering on Lough Neagh and the Ballinderry River. The O'Develins claimed a common descent from Develin. Develin was a scion of that branch of the clan Owen known as the Sons of Erca because of their descent from Muirchertach Mac Erca, grandson of Owen.
The Eagle Has Flown is a book by Jack Higgins, first published in 1991. It is a sequel to The Eagle Has Landed.
The Abwehr was the German military-intelligence service for the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht from 1920 to 1944. Although the 1919 Treaty of Versailles prohibited the Weimar Republic from establishing an intelligence organization of their own, they formed an espionage group in 1920 within the Ministry of Defence, calling it the Abwehr. The initial purpose of the Abwehr was defense against foreign espionage: an organizational role that later evolved considerably. Under General Kurt von Schleicher the individual military services' intelligence units were combined and, in 1929, centralized under Schleicher's Ministeramt within the Ministry of Defence, forming the foundation for the more commonly understood manifestation of the Abwehr.
Night of the Fox is a 1990 made-for-TV film by Charles Jarrott, based on the 1986 novel of the same name written by Jack Higgins. It was broadcast in France on TF1.
Confessional is a British espionage thriller television miniseries starring Robert Lindsay, Keith Carradine, Simon Chandler, Robert Lang, Valentina Yakunina and Arthur Brauss. This series based on the 1985 spy novel of the same name by Jack Higgins and adapted for the television by James Mitchell and directed by Gordon Flemyng, it was produced by Granada Television for the ITV network and originally aired in four parts from 4 to 25 October 1989. The plot follows a rogue terrorist turned Soviet assassin, code named Cuchulain, trying to prevent a peace agreement between the parties involved in Northern Ireland.
Touch the Devil is the 42nd book by British writer Jack Higgins, first published in 1982.
Maria Kruse (1908–?), better known by her stage name Lea Niako, was a German exotic dancer and actress. Niako was renowned across Europe for her dance performances in the late interwar period, from 1926 to 1933. She often performed with little to no clothes; nude dancing, or Nackttanz, was at the time popular and was seen as an artistic expression of modernity and emancipation. For her unusual and exotic performances, she garnered great attention in the international press. She also broke through into the film industry, appearing in the Portuguese film Fátima Milagrosa (1928) and the Spanish film La Carta (1931).
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