In a lifetime first on Monday, I served on the jury at a Dublin inquest. And great fun it was too, despite a three-way split among the jurors and some disappointment in my faction that we didn’t carry our desired verdict: “unlawful killing.”The dead man was Paddy Dignam, which for those who read James Joyce – the rest of you have my sympathy this week and next – will indicate that the inquest was not entirely serious.Dignam, late of Newbridge Avenue, Sandymount, and “as decent a little man as ever wore a hat”, is the fictional character whose funeral the main protagonists attend in Ulysses.We know he died of a Monday. But Monday is not an official cause of death, even in Ireland. So the “inquest”, held in Dún Laoghaire’s old Carnegie Library, had to choose from a range of other potentially fatal conditions mentioned in the text, including a vague “brief illness”, heart failure and apoplexy.There is also the intriguing suggestion, albeit about his ghost in the book’s phantasmagorical Nighttown sequence, that he had a “scorbutic” face, implying scurvy. But the inquest took a dark turn when “coroner” Senan Molony hinted at the possibility that Paddy might have been poisoned, either by his widow or the sinister “Uncle Barney”, or both.Motives included a policy that had been taken out with the Scottish Widows insurance company (whose representatives were said to be in court, on a watching brief).[ Aldous and Joyce too: Frank McNally on a literary pilgrimage to ZurichOpens in new window ]The coroner had clearly taken a dislike to Mrs Dignam, in part because she didn’t attend the funeral – not unusual for woman relatives back then, in fairness – but, worse, because she hadn’t turned up at the inquest either, a decision he considered “impudent”.Anyway, after we were led (in every sense) through the evidence, it was put to an audience vote, with five options on the ballot paper. Death from scurvy or heart failure both lost their deposits, while apoplexy topped the poll with 43 per cent. This was an anticlimax for those of us (25 per cent) who had opted for drama. But it’s worth noting that, if it had been decided by single transferable vote and the unlawful killing lobby had transferred solidly to “open verdict” (28 per cent), we could at least have defeated the apoplectics and their stroke politics.Fellow jurors included a man named Rob Roman, who is not in a fact a Roman but a Los Angeleno. Badly bitten by the Joyce bug some years ago, he makes the pilgrimage to Dublin every June and has even taken to composing poetry – sonnets – inspired by Ulysses.But when the inquest adjourned to McKenna’s pub afterwards, Rob also told me about his day job, which involves writing for the US TV show Wheel of Fortune. [ The small patch of Dublin where the Jameses – Joyce and Connolly – passed each other byOpens in new window ]That’s inspired by the quiz game Hangman, wherein one player thinks of a word or phrase and the other tries to guess it in fewer attempts than it takes to complete the drawing of a gallows scene.Roman’s role is to devise the puzzles. “And that’s an actual job?” I heard myself ask, in wonder. At which point another juror interjected: “Says the guy who writes An Irishman’s Diary for a living.” Which was a fair point.More usually behind the camera, Rob is in front of it currently thanks to a short film by Canadian Godfrey Jordan. “A poet’s Odyssey from LA to Dublin” follows Roman’s rambles around the Hibernian metropolis. It will screen as part of the Bloomsday Film Festival.There is no escaping Joyce these days – not even at the David Byrne concert in St Anne’s Park last Sunday. He didn’t officially feature at that, I think, but in the singer’s slide show of his Dublin visit, a pub synonymous with Ulysses, did. “My pub”, Byrne called it. And sure enough, there was a picture on screen of a “David Byrne’s”: slightly Photoshopped from Davy’s of that surname.During his Talking Heads phase, Byrne the singer recorded an album called More Songs About Buildings and Food. But he could write a late literary addition to it now via “his” Dublin pub and its next-door neighbour.[ All about the Bass – Frank McNally on a Joycean angle to a million-pound questionOpens in new window ]In Ulysses, famously, Leopold Bloom first intends to have lunch in the Burton restaurant: a real-life establishment long gone by the time the book appeared. Disgusted by the sights and smells of meat-eating men there (a Homeric parallel with the Laestrygonian cannibals), however, he turns temporarily vegetarian and has a cheese sandwich in Davy’s instead.Regular readers of this column will have followed the mysterious saga of the revived Burton Tavern, which seemed all set to open two years ago on the site of the original, before a series of planning complications. It did open briefly last Bloomsday, for free drinks, then closed again. But the saga continues, amid great suspense. Signs appeared in the windows recently seeking staff. And when I passed its still unopen doors yesterday, menus were again on the tables.