He moved on to short stories for Northern Ireland Children's Hour,[9] before following the career path that had been established by the poet Louis MacNeice (1907–1963), and poets and writers of MacNeice's generation including W. R. Rodgers and Sam Hanna Bell who had paved the way for Ulster writers to join the BBC.
The Liberty Lad was published in 1965, adding to his growing reputation with its portrait of a schoolmaster, a threatened mill closure and a corrupt unionist politician.
This time the protagonist is Albert Yarr, an isolated – 'tormented' as described by Tom Paulin[12] – Protestant in a predominantly Catholic area who is offered a temporary resurrection when he is recruited by a documentary film maker.
It covered the spectrum from soap opera to Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, interspersed with literary readings and features across three of the BBC's four radio networks.
The legendary figures he followed into Broadcasting House and the BBC Club were to receive a kind of tribute in Tell Me About It (2007), Leitch's novel about a young Irish features producer in the 1960s, trawling the streets of London with a tape recorder and a thirst.
Among the dramas he produced were plays by James Follett[14] and a dramatisation of Seán O'Casey's great autobiography, I Knock at the Door.
'[16] Despite this he went on to produce over 30 readings of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, abridged for Corgi Audio with Tony Robinson as the reader.
A review of his 1994 novel, Gilchrist, by the Roman Catholic Northern Ireland novelist Robert McLiam Wilson in the monthly Northern Ireland cultural and political magazine Fortnight,[19] is cited by Caroline Magennis[20] and also by Sarah Ferris and in the Ricorso website, A Knowledge of Irish Literature 1992–2012.
Magennis comments: 'In this review, provocatively entitled, 'Rhythm Method', Wilson claimed that Protestant novelists lacked the 'cultural credit card' that he possessed, being 'born Catholic and working-class...
Wilson exempts Leitch from the generalisation, and finds a compelling, harsh metre in Gilchrist, a novel about a 'smudged' Ulster preacher on the run to Spain with the church funds.
Robert McLiam Wilson's words, on the cover of the Secker & Warburg edition, continue his argument from his review of Gilchrist: 'With The Smoke King, Maurice Leitch does what he's been doing for three decades, he raises his glorious, inconvenient voice ... a unique, troubling fiction, unpredictable and moving, shows Leitch's customary unremitting integrity and profound knowledge of what the novel is for.'
The story he tells in The Smoke King is set in the prejudice-filled Northern Ireland countryside during the Second World War, with the American forces stationed in Ulster preparing for the conflict in Europe.
In the small market town near the edge of the lough, an American soldier, Willie Washington, is one of the gum-chewing black boys dispensing largesse in return for favours.
[24] The book was perhaps most succinctly placed in its cultural and stylistic context by the Belfast critic Ian Hill when he cited the novel while reviewing the acclaimed stage play Pumpgirl by Abbie Spallen in 2008:[25] ' ... in truth, the characters in this four-letter word splattered tale have more similarities with Sam Shepard's tarnished trailer-trash losers and Maurice Leitch's masterly Ulster-set novel The Eggman's Apprentice which set out the mores of a rural northern Ireland where the lives of its poverty stricken dreamers - confined by soulless jobs and poor wages - are doomed by their addiction to a second hand proxy America of sugary beers, souped-up rusting cars, and Country 'n' Western music, where what sex they have is at the beck and call of any portly and sweaty local villain with a facility for fine quotations.'
A rumbustious, picaresque tale, Tell Me About It takes its inspiration from the fabled BBC Broadcasting House of the 1960s, in the years just before Leitch moved to London when the corridors and pubs were roamed by legendary producers, writers and actors such as Reggie Smith, Julian Maclaren-Ross and George Baker.
An extract from the novel was published in the Dublin literary magazine The Stinging Fly in the Summer 2015, devoted to Irish writers in London.
What is really clever is the way in which the characterisation and incidental details make Gerry Noonan and Declan Downey believable and, while hardly sympathetic figures, human'.
While Leitch's voice in the stories, as in his novels, is distinctly Irish, Hardy's interview draws out Leitch to acknowledged his influences, identifying the American authors Raymond Carver, John Cheever and William Faulkner, while also a writer nearer to home: 'You always go back to Joyce and The Dubliners — it's about storytelling.'
At night, when his new partner and her mixed race son are asleep, their warm relationship is replaced by searing images on a blank television screen of a small village on the northern Irish coast, and, in the publisher's words, of images of a 'terrible act to protect his friends from local paramilitary heavies'.
Walker has forged a hard-won normality, but his hopes of anonymity are undone by his necessary closeness to the illegal, to the underworld of casual work as a painter and decorator.
However, near the hanging place, in Edinburgh's Grassmarket and Lawnmarket area, and near where the crimes were committed, an oddly fleshy pub bearing the name of Burke & Hare became, in the years leading up to the pandemic, a lap dancing bar.
In January 2020 the Edinburgh Evening News reported an extension of the pub's ambitions to include life drawing classes.
This novel takes another tack in its unnerving success in bringing Hare down to earth, allowing him his voice, his amorality, his superior survival instincts.
O'Brien's review shows how Leitch has provided Ireland with something it may not want: the return of a notorious native son to his homeland where he reveals the roots of his character.
'We might like to pretend that Hare the murdering monster is not one of us', he writes, 'but there's no denying that he is, and this realisation has a further resonance as the bulk of the action takes place in his native northern Ireland.
The novel's sharp sequences of adventures, a rushing series of vivid vignettes of the 1830s, are not entirely among the imagined characters Leitch provides.
The author Thomas De Quincey, who also pursued Hare in his celebrated essay On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, also joins the cast and the novel's ambitions are clear, and accomplished, as Leitch brings the seamier side of the enduring conflicts of the English and Irish following Hare's escape from Scotland.
Drama Now Sunday Playhouse Afternoon Play Classic Serial Silver finds that his ideals have made him a dangerous anachronism in a changing Northern Ireland.