This book has its origins in a festival of Irish crime fiction, which I organised with Professor John Waters of New York University’s Glucksman Ireland House, and which the School of English at Trinity College Dublin hosted in November 2013. The intent of the festival was to explore the remarkable and still-recent growth in Irish crime fiction, a growth that has only accelerated over the intervening years. Eighteen Irish crime writers (and one Irish-American) appeared on four panel discussions, and the festival closed with a public interview between John Connolly and the Irish-American author Michael Connelly.1 The events had to move to a series of larger venues, and drew on the order of 500 discrete attendees, as well as significant print, radio, and television coverage. The success of this weekend helped confirm the impression that Irish crime fiction had reached a critical mass, for authors and readers alike.
At the time, despite increasing coverage in the book review pages and increasing sales, very little critical discussion of Irish crime fiction had yet been published. The two main exceptions were both the work of Declan Burke: his long-running website of reviews, news, and interviews, Crime Always Pays, and his edited anthology of short fiction and essays by Irish crime writers, Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (2011). These remain among the most valuable resources on the subject, providing a focal point that has been essential in establishing a sense of the genre in Ireland.
Burke aside, a number of factors contribute to the continuing paucity of scholarship. One is that Irish Studies does not yet have an enviable track record on serious and sustained consideration of any popular fiction for adults.2 Some of this reflects the problematic legacy of earlier Troubles thrillers, which established several patterns that Chapter 2 examines. It also, however, reflects a cultural field in which for some time poetry and drama – as a legacy of the Irish Literary Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – were valorised as the prevailing genres for representing and considering Irishness. That Revival’s influence on the critical discourses around Irish literature – indeed, on the very question of what constituted Irish literature – left little room for genre fiction, not when the Revival so assiduously tasked Irish literature with articulating a national identity.3
Just over four years and change on from the festival, more studies have begun to appear. Scattered essays have been published on individual authors, and several essays – notably those by Andrew Kincaid, David Clark, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, Maureen T. Reddy, and particularly Ian Campbell Ross – have provided valuable if brief overviews of Irish crime fiction, with more specialised survey essays by Keith Jeffery and Eunan O’Halpin, and by Aaron Kelly. Kelly’s 2005 book about Troubles thrillers is groundbreaking in this regard, as Chapter 2 suggests, and remains to a large degree exceptional. At least two notable journal issues have also been devoted to the subject, both in 2014: a special issue of Clues on Tana French, and an interdisciplinary special issue of Éire-Ireland on Irish crime.4 Elizabeth Mannion’s edited collection of essays, The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel (2016), is the only critical book to appear so far on the subject, though more are in progress.
Little exists, however, in the way of sustained, synthesizing overviews of Irish crime fiction. While Irish Studies has not yet done much with the genre, crime fiction studies has until recently not done much more to look at Irish crime fiction as Irish crime fiction, rather than addressing a limited range of texts in essays about individual authors. This book seeks to remedy these shortcomings with a survey of Irish crime fiction. The intent is to provide a foundation for further study, one that begins to connect some of the dots; this book, to borrow an obvious image, is the chalk outline.
The Growth of Irish Crime Fiction
This book focuses for the most part on contemporary Irish crime fiction, reflecting the genre’s comparatively recent coalescence on the island over the last several decades. This expansive and rapid growth has been remarked on, by the novelists themselves, by the press – ‘Once upon a time, crime writers in Ireland were few and far between. These days it’s not so much a case of “whodunnit”, or even “who’s doing it”, as “they’re all at it”’5 – and by several of the overview articles that have been published, one of which fixes the genre’s prominence as dating ‘back only … to the publication of Every Dead Thing (1999), the first novel by John Connolly, Ireland’s most successful and critically admired crime writer.’6 Although one can identify various contributing factors and timelines, certainty about the precise starting point and its reasons is harder to obtain.
Even the varied attempts to provide reasons have tended to remain slightly tentative, although a number of threads recur. In particular, the genre’s growth has been reductively though not untruthfully seen as reflecting the Celtic Tiger, for example, an unfortunate name for an era in which Ireland experienced a dizzying growth in prosperity from the mid-1990s followed by an even more vertiginous crash from 2008 on, with widespread corruption and newly urgent social pressures both exacerbated by and reflected in the boom and crash.
7 The narrator of Tana French’s second novel,
The Likeness (2008), for example, sees a darker range of changes in which the stresses of the boom are intensifying rather than just white-collar-ing crime in Ireland:
Irish homicides are still, mostly, simple things … We’ve never had the orgies of nightmare that other countries get … But it’s only a matter of time, now. For ten years Dublin’s been changing faster than our minds can handle. The economic boom has given us too many people with helicopters and too many crushed into cockroachy flats from hell … and we’re fracturing under the weight of it.8
Few passages in Irish crime fiction more bleakly assess the boom’s effects. The other contributing factor most regularly cited in the genre’s rise is the relative peace in Northern Ireland. As discussed more fully in Chapter
2, the end of the Troubles cleared space for wider varieties of Northern Irish crime fiction. Some of this has been explained in terms of the economic boom that followed the ceasefires, when Northern Ireland saw its own increase in prosperity, often referred to as the ‘peace dividend.’ North and south of the border, contributing factors in the booms included inward investment, from the EU and from transnational corporations, the latter featuring prominently in fiction by Alan Glynn, Adrian McKinty, and others. On both sides of this experience, going up and coming down, prosperity and privation left their mark on crime and consequently on crime fiction, as the central chapters here demonstrate.
Whatever the final causes of the genre’s growth, these changes clearly contributed, perhaps most directly through specific economic themes that often seem tailor-made for the genre. Indeed, as Andrew Kincaid has argued, ‘Noir proves a perfect genre to capitalize on’ the Celtic Tiger’s ‘under-currents of melancholy, alienation, grievance, and even injustice,’9 a capacity Shirley Peterson suggests has become all the more ‘concentrated’ amidst the crash.10 These related contexts on the island – the ‘Celtic Tiger,’ the ‘peace dividend,’ the real estate boom, the economic crash – continue to inspire crime fiction about corruption and other varieties of serial human frailty. The frequency with which Dublin discussions circle back to real estate investment, home prices, and property development, for example, bewilders Declan Hughes’s Ed Loy on his return to Ireland after a long absence. The boom and crash also brought other material changes to Irish society, which have in turn left their marks on crime fiction. These wider changes include an increase in immigration, a radically new experience for a country that has yet to grow back to its pre-Famine population levels nearly two full centuries later. As discussed most fully in Chapter 5, immigrants play prominent roles in contemporary Irish crime fiction by Andrew Nugent, Brian McGilloway, Arlene Hunt, Jane Casey, Michael Russell, and others. In these novels, immigrants are victims and villains and protagonists alike, roles through which they sharpen crime fiction’s long-standing use of outsiders in a context where the foreign is no longer nearly as rare. As these and other examples will show, the boom may not have directly led to Irish crime fiction’s growth, but its circumstances clearly nurtured certain recurring strands of interest within the genre.
Corruption and Crime
Although the boom and the crash have both been transformative in their ways, we should also acknowledge that their role in Irish crime fiction’s development can be overstated. Too narrow a focus in this regard could easily overshadow slower, longer processes (or recast them in the boom’s terms), resulting in a historical foreshortening that would effectively erase pre-boom Irish crime fiction. David Clark, for example, has tied Irish crime fiction’s development to certain structural changes in Irish society, including those that culminated in the 1996 creation of the Criminal Assets Bureau, which he argues helped shift ‘The focus of crime in the late nineties and in the first decade of the twenty-first century … away from the old gang-based robbery and kidnappings towards the more lucrative and initially less perilous area of white-collar crime,’ in particular to the ‘quick profits that could be gained from’ the exploding ‘property market.’11 In this view, the CAB helped fight conventional crime in Ireland, in the process reducing the gap between such crime and varieties of entrepreneurial activity that looked much more mainstream, all the more so as the boom accelerated.
One by-product of the CAB legislation, then, may have been to foster both crime and crime fiction that were less ‘exotic’ to some readers, and more familiar from the property, business, and society pages of the newspapers. Indeed, much crime fiction set in Ireland touches on varieties of clientelism and corruption: if an archetypal crime exists in Irish versions of the genre it may be not murder, rape, kidnapping, robbery, or drug dealing, but corruption.12 Fintan O’Toole has described the aborted attempts to establish a Corruption Assets Bureau modelled on the Criminal Assets Bureau, attempts that reflected in part the increased prominence of corruption.13 This corruption agency regrettably if unsurprisingly never came into existence (although Elaine Byrne argues that the Criminal Assets Bureau was nonetheless used to seize funds determined to aris...
