Irish Republican Army

The Irish Republican Army is a historical organization invoked in the novel chiefly through accounts of Rusty Regan’s earlier life. Although the book does not depict the organization directly, the recollections of General Sternwood and Bernie Ohls place Regan’s Irish military experience behind the mystery of his disappearance and shape the investigators’ assessment of his vulnerability.

Regan’s reported service

General Sternwood remembers that Regan had been an officer in the Irish Republican Army and was not legally in the United States. He describes Regan’s marriage to his daughter Vivian as brief and unlikely to have lasted a month in practice, even if it was legally a marriage. For the old man, Regan’s presence had nonetheless been a source of vitality: he spent hours with Sternwood, drinking brandy and telling stories of the Irish revolution. Regan then left abruptly, a month before Sternwood’s account, without saying goodbye. His departure begins as a personal loss in this recollection, but it also sits beside the renewed blackmail that prompts Sternwood to hire Philip Marlowe.

Military reputation in the disappearance inquiry

Later, Ohls considers what might have happened to Regan, who was said to have carried fifteen thousand dollars on him. A robbery followed by murder is one possibility, but Ohls questions whether an ordinary thief could have taken Regan easily: Regan carried a gun, had experience using it, and, according to Ohls, had commanded a whole brigade during the Irish troubles. That background makes Regan seem an unlikely victim of a routine holdup, without resolving what actually happened to him. The military history therefore functions as a constraint on one investigative hypothesis, not as proof of a particular fate.

Narrative significance

The organization remains offstage, known through secondhand recollection rather than direct scenes or an account of its structure and aims. Its presence supplies a fragment of Regan’s history that contrasts with his later life among the wealthy Sternwoods and gives the missing man a reputation for experience and command. The novel uses that reputation cautiously: it informs Ohls’s reasoning, while the disappearance itself remains unexplained in these accounts.