Recently on The John Murray Show, on RTÉ Radio 1, a man named Louis La Roc told the story of a well-known but anonymised war correspondent, “Alan Buckby”, who had lived a double life as a rapist and killer.

La Roc, it was explained, is a solicitor and pseudonymous ghostwriter for the stars who has sold more than two million books; Buckby’s diaries were given to him by Buckby’s wife after his sudden death by falling tree in October. At Kay Buckby’s request La Roc had used these to write Buckby’s memoir, Numb: Diary of a War Correspondent, published by Liberties Press, and he was now recounting its tales of rape, torture and mutilation on national radio.

“Here was a man who lived a double life all his life,” said La Roc. “He got away with it . . . He got away with killing, murdering and being a psychopath all his life.” After the interview several people texted Murray’s show to complain about such content being aired not long after breakfast.

Several copies of Numb had been sent to the Irish Times office, but to us it didn’t read like a genuine work of nonfiction.

Numb is a dark book. On his website La Roc warns prospective readers: “Fasten your seatbelt. The double life of respectable people is under the spotlight in Ireland as the Graham Dwyer and Elaine O’Hara murder trial concludes. Guilty or not?”

Among other crimes, Buckby describes participating in the loyalist torture and murder of an IRA man in 1981, arranging and participating in the gang rape of an Iraqi woman in 2014, and capturing and repeatedly sexually abusing a Bosnian teenager in Sarajevo in 1994, to the point where she took her own life.

Red flags

It begins with Buckby, last year in Iraq, trying to buy the decapitated head of an American and ends with early diary entries about his misspent childhood. It reads like a lesser Bret Easton Ellis novel.

We couldn’t find any trace of a 55-year-old British war correspondent who died last October, or indeed last year. There were other red flags. Buckby/La Roc graphically describes the mutilation and castration of an IRA man on May 5th, 1981 – the day of Bobby Sands’s death, as Buckby notes in the text. No murder matching that description appears in the Sutton Index of Deaths during the Troubles at any point from April to June that year.

Buckby also claims his interest in coming to Northern Ireland in 1981 was triggered by a fascination with how Gerry Adams was overdubbed by actors in television interviews. The broadcast ban didn’t come into effect until 1988.

We asked La Roc, via Liberties Press, to be a guest on the Irish Times Off Topic podcast, to discuss the book. We sent Liberties Press some questions about how it had verified the material in the book. It had not, it said. “We trusted Louis.”

La Roc, who seemed nervous about doing the programme, agreed to talk to us as long as we didn’t ask about his own identity. We did ask him how he had verified the material in the 30 years of documentation and diaries he received from Kay Buckby last October. He said that a lot of people were named. “I could sit down, do a Google and see what happened to those people,” he said. Had he contacted any of the people mentioned to verify the material? “I didn’t feel the need to,” he said. “So, no, I didn’t.”

No trace of murder

He explained that he “employed a cinematic jump-cut technique. In other words I would piece together two murders into one, or something like that.”

We pointed out that the practice of overdubbing Sinn Féin politicians, which apparently motivated Buckby to go to Northern Ireland in 1981, didn’t start happening until 1988. “So shoot me,” he said. “So I throw in a sentence about a voice box that happened in 1988 into a scenario in 1981.”

When we said we thought Numb was a novel and not a memoir, he said: “It certainly has the content [of a novel], I’ll agree with you there.”

During the interview La Roc seemed to be both emotionally affected by the dark material in Numb – “For Christmas this year you had Christmas turkey,” he said. “For Christmas this year I had tears” – and keen to disassociate himself from it.

He agreed that Numb reads like a work of “torture porn”. Why should this story be told? “I don’t particularly feel it needs to be told. I’m a ghostwriter. I get paid for a job.”He insisted that “all this information happened. This is true.”

After the interview it didn’t take long for internet detectives to uncover that Louis La Roc is actually Colin Carroll, a former solicitor based in Fermoy, Co Cork. In a phone call with The Irish Times Liberties Press also confirmed that Carroll is La Roc.

La Roc stopped taking our calls this week, but he occasionally took to Twitter to retweet articles about Numb (including those that questioned its veracity), lament the “groupthink” of Irish journalists, and cryptically reference a page number from his book. When we emailed an address controlled by Colin Carroll he responded: “Hi Patrick, I have no idea why you are contacting me and can only imagine it’s to read my screenplay inspired by Europe’s largest drug bust in west Cork. Great!” This was followed by details of Carroll’s screenplay, Just Ryan.

Later we received another email from Carroll’s account, which read: “My old law firm . . . want you to know that I have not practised as a solicitor since late 2010 and, naturally, I have not worked there since then. These are facts.”

Besides his legal work Carroll has had a varied career. He has cohosted a BBC and RTÉ TV show, called Colin and Graham’s Big Adventure, launched a merchandising brand aimed at the diaspora called Irish Empire and, in 2011, organised the Paddy Games in Cork. He has also attempted a career as Ireland’s only sumo wrestler. “You always have to be open,” he told Cork News in 2012. “I don’t believe luck comes your way: you have to make your luck. If my life looks scattered, you can see that the common factor is creativity and innovation.”

Numb: Diary of a War Correspondent seems to be just the latest in a long line of colourful projects originated by Carroll. So does it matter if it’s a work of fiction passed off as fact?

There have been plenty of fictional works, from The Blair Witch Project to Fargo, that have claimed to be based on true stories. But in cases where memoirs have turned out to contain chunks of fiction, like the Oprah-feted One Million Little Pieces, by James Frey, readers have felt betrayed, and refunds and retractions have followed.

In this instance there’s also a danger that a dead journalist might be erroneously identified as the rapist and killer Alan Buckby. Last week Roy Greenslade, in the Guardian, also questioned the veracity of Numb. Beneath his article commenters began trying to establish Buckby’s true identity, and a deceased journalist was mentioned more than once. (The man in question didn’t pass away in 2014, and he died in different circumstances from Alan Buckby.) These comments have since been removed.

“We stand over it”

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O’Keeffe is adamant that Liberties Press hasn’t been misled. Numb is “a work of nonfiction”, he says. “It’s a memoir and we stand over it, and we’re happy to publish it – and beyond that there’s not a lot more to say. I think people should read it for themselves and make their own judgment on it.”

O’Keeffe adds that ghostwritten memoirs often contain sections that “bear little relation to things that have actually happened . . . We publish fiction and nonfiction, but nonfiction is not necessarily, you know, gospel truth, and two people can have very different recollections of the same event,” he says. “Certainly there are parts in this that maybe have been embellished, and perhaps are not accurate, but, as I say, we stand over having published it as a memoir.”

Was this material “too good to check”? As a publisher rather than a newspaper Liberties Press doesn’t have “a responsibility to report the news in an accurate way”, O’Keeffe says, “and what we’re doing is essentially entertaining people, or providing them with something interesting to read”.

So could Numb be a literary hoax, fiction pretending to be fact? “I don’t know. I wouldn’t think so, no.”

O’Keeffe hasn’t been in much contact with Colin Carroll, but he says that Carroll did get in touch to say he stood by the book. And, according to O’Keeffe, Carroll doesn’t suggest it’s fictionalised. “But it’s all getting quite complicated, certainly. Once it’s out there I suppose you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

Additional reporting by Hugh Linehan