Abstract
The idea for this book emerged from an article in The New York Times announcing that John Banville had been contracted to bring hard-boiled icon Philip Marlowe back from the literary graveyard. Banville—who introduced his Dublin criminal pathologist Quirke in Christine Falls (2006) under the pen name Benjamin Black—was already a leading author of the detective novel, so the genre was hardly groundbreaking territory for him. Nor were revived fictional characters a new concept when this announcement appeared in 2012. What caught my attention was the Times emphasizing the Booker Prize-winning Banville; it felt like a small touch of genre snobbery. The Booker Prize descriptor was right up front, before any details about the new novel were offered. It read a bit like a justification along the lines of ‘let me offer a preemptive apology for why I am bothering you, dear Times reader’. I bookmarked the article and forgot about it until Marlowe appeared in The Black-Eyed Blonde (2014), and Banville went on a promotional book tour. During that tour, he was asked about his dual literary personas and their respective generic labeling: Banville as ‘literature’ and Black as ‘detective’. He professed to ‘hate’ it, and elaborated on how ‘some of the best writing of the twentieth century was in crime novels. James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Richard Stark, Simenon of course—this is wonderful work, and shouldn’t be put off into a ghetto.’ Yet it often is, both within the academy and apart from it.
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Notes
- 1.
J. Wiener (14 March 2014) ‘I Hate Genre: An Interview with John Banville/Benjamin Black’, Los Angeles Review of Books.
- 2.
S.R. Delany (20 May 2015) Conversation with Elizabeth Mannion. Philadelphia, PA.
- 3.
These include annual conferences by the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures, the Canadian Association for Irish Studies, and the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies; national and regional conferences by the American Conference for Irish Studies.
- 4.
W. Meier and I.C. Ross (2014) ‘Irish Crime since 1921’, Éire-Ireland, 49.1–2, 10.
- 5.
Divorcing Jack is the first in Bateman’s Dan Starkey series (see Appendix for titles). Starkey is a journalist-turned-private detective, reflecting the journalist-turned-crime-writer trend that began with Bartholomew Gill (Mark McGarrity) in the 1970s, but became most common in the post Celtic Tigers years, with the emergence of such novelists as Liz Allen, Eilis O’Hanlon (one half of the Ingrid Black pseudonym), Alex Barclay, and Eugene McEldowney.
- 6.
A. McKinty (2012) ‘The Irish Crime Fiction Supergroup.’ http://adrianmckinty.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-irish-crime-fiction-supergroup.html, date accessed 9 May 2015.
- 7.
‘Interview with Declan Burke’, New Mystery Reader Magazine, http://www.newmysteryreader.com/declan_burke.htm, date accessed 11 May 2015.
- 8.
‘Interview with Declan Burke’, New Mystery Reader Magazine, http://www.newmysteryreader.com/declan_burke.htm, date accessed 11 May 2015.
- 9.
T.J. Taylor (2015) ‘A Singular Dislocation: An Interview with Junot Díaz’, Paradoxa, 26, 102.
- 10.
J.M. Cahalen (1983) Great Hatred, Little Room: The Irish Historical Novel (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press), p. xiii.
- 11.
F.S. Schwarzbach (2002) ‘Newgate Novel to Detective Fiction’ in P. Brantlinger and W.B. Thesing (eds) A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell), p. 230.
- 12.
F.S. Schwarzbach (2002), p. 236.
- 13.
D.P. Zuber (2006) ‘Swedenborg and the Disintegration of Language in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Sensation Fiction’ in K. Harrison and R. Fantina (eds) Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre (Columbus: Ohio State University Press), p. 74.
- 14.
J.S. Le Fanu (2000) Uncle Silas (New York: Penguin), p. 3.
- 15.
E.C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case (1913) marks the beginning of the modern era of detective fiction and paves the way for the Golden Age that was dominated by British and American authors. This includes, in its later years, the emergence of the hard-boiled detective novel.
- 16.
Titled ‘The Murdered Cousin’ in the 1850 Le Fanu anthology Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery.
- 17.
T. Eagleton (1995) Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (London and New York: Verso), p. 198.
- 18.
Installments were published in Once a Week from 29 November 1862 to 17 January 1863, and the full novel was published by Saunders, Otley & Co. in 1865. See Mike Ashley (2012) ‘Seeking the Evidence’ in The Notting Hill Mystery (London: British Library), pp. viii–xiv.
- 19.
Collins is a tipping point between the two genres: his The Woman in White (1859) is classic sensation.
- 20.
M. Ashley (2012), p. xiii.
- 21.
Chapter VIII of The Moonstone.
- 22.
The Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science 36 (August and November 1863), p. 198.
- 23.
The Quests of Paul Beck (1908), Pigeon Blood Rubies (1915), and Paul Beck, Detective (1929).
- 24.
I.C. Ross (2011) ‘Introduction’ in D. Burke (ed.) Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (Dublin: Liberties Press), p. 24.
- 25.
The Humdrums are being examined anew, however. See Curtis J. Evans (2012) Masters of the ‘Humdrum’ Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920–1961 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland) for more on Crofts and other leading Humdrum authors. There are no other Irish authors of this school; however, Crofts’s contemporary John Street, who authored dozens of books in his Dr. Priestley series, had a dubious Irish connection: he was an information officer at Dublin Castle during the War of Independence.
- 26.
I.C. Ross (2011), p. 25.
- 27.
Other titles in the series are: Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery (1926), Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy (1927), The Sea Mystery (1928), Fear Comes to Chalfont (1942), The Affair at Little Wokeham (1943), and French Strikes Oil (1951).
- 28.
W.H. Auden (1948) ‘The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict’, Harpers Magazine, 410.
- 29.
R. Chandler (1992) The Big Sleep (New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard), p. 10.
- 30.
R. Chandler (1992), pp. 10–11.
- 31.
‘Raymond Chandler to Blanche Knopf, 17 Jan. 1940’ in T. Hiney and F. MacShane (eds) The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909–1959 (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000), p. 26. It was not unusual for Chandler to assert his Anglo-Irish roots while simultaneously insulting Irish Catholics. As he noted in a 1 January 1945 letter to Atlantic Monthly editor Charles Morton, ‘I grew up with a terrible contempt for Catholics, and I have trouble with it even now’ (p. 49). However, his conflicting feelings about his Irish ancestry were mostly private. As he noted to Morton: ‘I could make a book about these people, but I am too much of an Irishman myself ever to tell the truth about them’ (p. 50).
- 32.
This trope can be found in American cinema as far back as the Big Three classic Warner Brothers gangster pictures: The Public Enemy (William Wellman, 1931), Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931), and Scarface (Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson, 1932).
- 33.
R. Chandler (1992), p. 114.
- 34.
See L. Gutkin (2014) ‘The Dandified Dick: Hardboiled Noir and the Wildean Epigram’, ELH, 81.4, 1299–326, for dialogic analysis between Wilde and Chandler.
- 35.
R. Chandler (1992), pp. 168–9.
- 36.
‘Raymond Chandler to Alex Barris, 18 Mar. 1949’, in T. Hiney and F. MacShane (eds) The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909–1959 (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000), p. 104.
- 37.
T. Hiney (1997) Raymond Chandler: A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus), p. 247.
- 38.
T. Hiney (1997), p. 247.
- 39.
The full series is: The Death of an Irish Politician (McGarr and the Politician’s Wife), The Death of an Irish Consul (McGarr and the Sienese Conspiracy), The Death of an Irish Lass (McGarr on the Cliffs of Moher), The Death of an Irish Tradition (McGarr at the Dublin Horse Show), McGarr and the PM of Belgrave Square, McGarr and the Method of Descartes, McGarr and the Legacy of the Woman Scorned, The Death of a Joyce Scholar, The Death of Love, Death on a Cold, Wild River, The Death of an Ardent Bibliophile, The Death of an Irish Tinker (Death of a Busker King), The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf, The Death of an Irish Lover, The Death of an Irish Sinner, Death in Dublin.
- 40.
The first police procedural novel is open to debate. S. Knight (2010) Crime Fiction since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity, 2nd edn (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan) asserts V as in Victim (Lawrence Treat, 1945) as the first ‘consciously procedural novel’ and names Cop Hater (1956) by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) as the ‘start of the major American procedural series’, p. 242.
- 41.
W.L. Heising (1996) Detecting Women 2: A Reader’s Guide and Checklist for Mystery Series Written by Women (Dearborn, MI: Purple Moon Press), p. 65. Titles in the series are: Blood is Thicker (1990), Where Death Lies (1991), Dead Ends (1992), Potter’s Field (1993), Hour of Our Death (1995).
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Mannion, E. (2016). A Path to Emerald Noir: The Rise of the Irish Detective Novel. In: Mannion, E. (eds) The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53940-3_1
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