An Accidental Villain: A Soldier's Tale of War, Deceit and Exile
Linden MacIntyre
Aug 2025 · Penguin Random House Audio
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About this audiobook
From the bestselling, prize-winning author Linden MacIntyre comes an engrossing, page-turning exploration of the little-known life of Sir Hugh Tudor. Appointed by his friend Winston Churchill to lead the police in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence, Tudor met civil strife and domestic terrorism with indiscriminate state-sanctioned murder—changing the course of Irish history.
After distinguishing himself on the battlefields of the First World War, Major-General Sir Hugh Tudor could have sought a respectable retirement in England, his duty done. But in 1920, his old friend Winston Churchill, minister of war in Lloyd George’s cabinet, called on Tudor to serve in a very different kind of conflict—one fought in the Irish streets and countryside against an enemy determined to resist British colonial authority to the death. And soon Tudor, newly responsible for policing Ireland, was directing a brutal campaign of terror against rebel "terrorists" in the Irish War of Independence. It was a conflict he didn’t entirely understand but one he was determined to win at all costs—including utilizing police death squads and inflicting brutal reprisals against IRA members and supporters and Sinn Fein politicians.
Tudor left few traces of his time in Ireland. No diary or letters that might explain his record as commander of the notorious Black and Tans. Nothing to justify his role in Bloody Sunday, November 21, 1920, when his men infamously slaughtered Irish football fans. Was it retaliation for the IRA's earlier murder of British military officers? Also, why did a man knighted for his efforts in Ireland leave his family and homeland in 1925, moving across the sea to Newfoundland where he remained in quiet obscurity until he died forty years later?
Linden MacIntyre—a storyteller and journalist long fascinated with the toll of violence and war—has spent four years tracking Tudor through archives, contemporaries' diaries and letters, and the body count of that Irish war, in search of answers. In An Accidental Villain, he delivers a consequential and fascinating account of how events can bring a man to the point where he acts against his own training, principles and inclination in the service of a cause—and ends up on a long journey toward personal oblivion.
After distinguishing himself on the battlefields of the First World War, Major-General Sir Hugh Tudor could have sought a respectable retirement in England, his duty done. But in 1920, his old friend Winston Churchill, minister of war in Lloyd George’s cabinet, called on Tudor to serve in a very different kind of conflict—one fought in the Irish streets and countryside against an enemy determined to resist British colonial authority to the death. And soon Tudor, newly responsible for policing Ireland, was directing a brutal campaign of terror against rebel "terrorists" in the Irish War of Independence. It was a conflict he didn’t entirely understand but one he was determined to win at all costs—including utilizing police death squads and inflicting brutal reprisals against IRA members and supporters and Sinn Fein politicians.
Tudor left few traces of his time in Ireland. No diary or letters that might explain his record as commander of the notorious Black and Tans. Nothing to justify his role in Bloody Sunday, November 21, 1920, when his men infamously slaughtered Irish football fans. Was it retaliation for the IRA's earlier murder of British military officers? Also, why did a man knighted for his efforts in Ireland leave his family and homeland in 1925, moving across the sea to Newfoundland where he remained in quiet obscurity until he died forty years later?
Linden MacIntyre—a storyteller and journalist long fascinated with the toll of violence and war—has spent four years tracking Tudor through archives, contemporaries' diaries and letters, and the body count of that Irish war, in search of answers. In An Accidental Villain, he delivers a consequential and fascinating account of how events can bring a man to the point where he acts against his own training, principles and inclination in the service of a cause—and ends up on a long journey toward personal oblivion.
About the author
LINDEN MacINTYRE is the bestselling author of many award-winning books, including The Long Stretch, Causeway, The Bishop's Man, Why Men Lie, Punishment, The Only Café and The Wake. A distinguished broadcast journalist, MacIntyre was born in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, and grew up in Port Hastings, Cape Breton. He spent twenty-four years as the co-host of The Fifth Estate and has won ten Gemini awards for his broadcast work. MacIntyre lives in Toronto with his wife, journalist and author Carol Off. They spend their summers in a Cape Breton village by the sea.
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