The Shankill Butchers

Martin Dillon is a native of Belfast although educated in England. He lived in France for a time and returned to Northern Ireland to work as a journalist with the Irish News before joining the Belfast Telegraph. He also worked as a freelance journalist for several national newspapers and American periodicals. In 1973 he wrote Political Murder in Northern Ireland which is regarded as the definitive study of political assassination in Northern Ireland. His second book, Rogue Warrior of the SAS, is a biography of the Second World War hero, Lt. Col. Robert Blair Mayne, and is published by Arrow. The Shankill Butchers which was a bestseller in both Ireland and Britain was the first in his trilogy of books about Northern and Southern Ireland.
Martin Dillon has written plays for BBC radio and television and has been Editor in Northern Ireland of many of the BBC's programmes in the area of current affairs. He now works for the BBC History Unit in London.

Martin Dillon

"Gruesome yet compelling and superbly researched" Tribune "Gruesome territory...the great value of Martin Dillon's carefully researched and readable work is that it enters a world that few journalists have been inclined or able to penetrate" Listener "Mr. Dillon recounts in chilling detail the evolution of Murphy's gang and the efforts to catch them. It makes for gripping but altogether terrifying reading" Washington Times "A chilling book, chilling but fascinating ... People on both sides - or some of them - are likely to read Martin Dillon, and to learn from him" -- Conor Cruise O'Brien "Dillon's books are a working lifetime's brave and persistent effort to get information of a kind which, as he frankly says, can be perilous to possess, let alone to reveal" -- Times Literary Supplement