First-person narrator, Henry Smart, and his mother, Melody Nash, look up at the stars outside their ramshackle Dublin apartment. Melody says that the stars are children who died in infancy and points out her “little Henry” to her surviving Henry, who was named after his deceased brother.

Henry reflects on what he knows of his mother. She was born in the Dublin slums to an eccentric mother and met his father, Henry Smart, a brothel bouncer and hitman with a wooden leg, when she was 16. (To distinguish between Henry and his father, the father will be hereafter referred to as “Henry Smart” throughout the guide.) The pair married in 1897, when Ireland was still a colony of the British empire, and they moved into a single room.

Henry Smart murders a policeman called Costello, the man who collects their rent, as ordered by his boss: Alfie Gandon, a mysterious crime-ring leader.

Prior to the narrator Henry’s birth, Henry Smart worried that his crimes as a hitman were “to blame for the death of all his children” (20). When Henry was born “a lad and a feckin’ half” (21), both the parents and slum dwellers felt delighted by his vivacity.