Abstract
This chapter surveys the history and reception of Irish crime fiction, and connects that survey to existing critical discussions of other Irish genres. It considers the factors that have contributed to Irish crime fiction’s recent and rapid growth in production and popularity. In doing so, the chapter discusses some distinguishing features of Irish crime fiction, including Irish society’s relationship to the police, and the impact of the island’s small scale on the varieties of crime depicted. The chapter also establishes significant patterns in the genre, particularly the role of civic corruption (most often related to land and the property market), supernatural narratives, and the prominence of empathy as a theme.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Full details of the festival are at http://irishcrimefiction.blogspot.ie (accessed 21 November 2013). A distillation of the press coverage is in the press release ‘Golden Age of Irish Crime Fiction Celebrated at Festival,’ https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/golden-age-of-irish-crime-fiction-celebrated-at-festival/4465 (accessed 27 November 2013).
- 2.
In contrast, Irish children’s literature has attracted considerably more research and critical study, by scholars such as Pádraic Whyte, Anne Markey, Celia Keenan, and others, though that genre’s questions of readership make it not readily comparable to crime fiction. Irish science fiction is a smaller body of work, but has also begun to attract scholarly attention, including promising work by Richard Howard, whose PhD thesis I was fortunate to supervise.
- 3.
This shortage is not exclusive to academic studies of Irish crime fiction, as Meier and Ross suggest that it is equally true of research on Irish crime itself: ‘in comparison to other parts of Europe, thematic studies dedicated to crime history that relate wrongdoing to larger historical change are singularly lacking in Ireland.’ William Meier and Ian Campbell Ross, ‘Editors’ Introduction,’ in ‘Irish Crime Since 1921,’ ed. Meier and Ross, special issue, Éire-Ireland 49, no. 1–2 (Spring-Summer 2014): 10.
- 4.
See Rachel Schaffer, ed., ‘Special Issue on Tana French,’ Clues: A Journal of Detection 32, no. 1 (2014), and Meier and Ross, ‘Irish Crime Since 1921.’
- 5.
Arminta Wallace, ‘Killer instinct: a golden age of Irish crime fiction,’ Irish Times, 21 November 2013, http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/killer-instinct-a-golden-age-of-irish-crime-fiction-1.1601482 (accessed 25 March 2014).
- 6.
Meier and Ross, ‘Editors’ Introduction,’ 12–13.
- 7.
In an aside, Andrew Fox attributes the most extensive literary explorations of the boom to genre fiction, less by way of crediting such fiction than of lamenting the shortage of similar explorations in literary fiction, suggesting that as of 2010 ‘the Celtic Tiger, which had roared its last a little over a year before – and which had been documented to a degree in a host of crime and “chick-lit” titles – still remained curiously underrepresented in Irish literary fiction.’ Andrew Fox, ‘Tiger, Tiger: The Hunt for the Great Irish Novel,’ The Daily Beast, 2 February 2014, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/28/tiger-tiger-the-hunt-for-the-great-irish-novel.html (accessed 3 June 2015).
- 8.
Tana French, The Likeness (New York: Penguin, 2008; repr. 2009), 11–12.
- 9.
Andrew Kincaid, ‘“Down These Mean Streets”: The City and Critique in Contemporary Irish Noir,’ Éire-Ireland 45, no. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 45.
- 10.
Shirley Peterson, ‘Murder in the Ghost Estate: Crimes of the Celtic Tiger in Tana French’s Broken Harbor,’ in Schaffer, ‘Special Issue on Tana French’: 80n5.
- 11.
David Clark, ‘Emerald Noir? Contemporary Irish Crime Fiction,’ in East Meets West, ed. Reiko Aiura, J.U. Jacobs, and J. Derrick McClure (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2014), 149.
- 12.
In this, Irish crime fiction shares something with corruption’s long history in crime writing, a history that features in Andrew Pepper, Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
- 13.
Fintan O’Toole, Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger (London: Faber, 2009, repr. and updated 2010), 38–41, and Fintan O’Toole, Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic (London: Faber, 2010), 228.
- 14.
Elaine A. Byrne, Political Corruption in Ireland 1922–2010 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 170–172, 181.
- 15.
Niamh Hourigan, Rule-Breakers: Why ‘Being There’ Trumps ‘Being Fair’ in Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2015), 10.
- 16.
Andrew Pepper, ‘“Hegemony Protected by the Armour of Coercion”: Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and the State,’ Journal of American Studies 44, no. 2 (May 2010): 334, 346.
- 17.
Clark, ‘Emerald Noir?’, 144.
- 18.
Clark, ‘Emerald Noir?’, 146–148. Fiona Coffey draws on Clark to make a similar argument in ‘“The place you don’t belong”: Stuart Neville’s Belfast,’ in The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, ed. Elizabeth Mannion (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 95.
- 19.
Elizabeth Mannion, ‘A Path to Emerald Noir: The Rise of the Irish Detective Novel,’ in Mannion, The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, 4–8.
- 20.
Ian Campbell Ross, ‘Introduction,’ in Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century, ed. Declan Burke (Dublin: Liberties, 2011), 19, 20. Ross’s essay is even more valuable when coupled with ‘Irish Crime Writing 1829–2011: Further Reading,’ the bibliography he and Shane Mawe compiled for the same volume (362–368), a work for which scholars of Irish crime fiction will long be indebted.
- 21.
Ross, ‘Introduction,’ 21.
- 22.
On Childers, see Keith Jeffery and Eunan O’Halpin, ‘Ireland in Spy Fiction,’ Intelligence and National Security 5, no. 4 (1990): 93. Like Jeffery and O’Halpin (‘Ireland in Spy Fiction,’ 100), Aaron Kelly discusses F. L. Green’s Odd Man Out (1945) as another model in The Thriller and Northern Ireland Since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 15. On Brendan Behan’s work in The Scarperer, see John Brannigan, ‘“For the Readies”: Brendan Behan, Crime Fiction, and the Dublin Underworld,’ in Meier and Ross, ‘Irish Crime Since 1921’: 92–105.
- 23.
John Gray, review of Inspector French’s Greatest Case, by Freeman Wills Crofts, The Linen Hall Review 2, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 26. Conversely, Declan Burke has argued that Ireland’s colonial past means that ‘Irish crime writers get to have their cake and eat it too, presenting the police as agents of oppression and terror when it suits, but also culturally attuned to tapping into the classic British perception of PC Plod as the flat-footed but utterly dependable avatar for law, order and justice.’ Declan Burke, ‘Raising hell in Arizona with a gripping thriller,’ review of Here and Gone, by Stuart Neville (pseud. Haylen Beck), Irish Times, 29 July 2017, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/here-and-gone-review-raising-hell-in-arizona-with-a-gripping-thriller-1.3164145 (accessed 29 July 2017).
- 24.
For a focused consideration of historical crime fiction, including a discussion of the Irish author Gemma O’Connor, see Rosemary Erickson Johnsen, Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Numerous articles have also been published on Benjamin Black’s novels, including Carol Dell’Amico, ‘John Banville and Benjamin Black: The Mundo, Crime, Women,’ in Meier and Ross, ‘Irish Crime Since 1921’: 106–120. See also Nancy Marck Cantwell, ‘Hello Dálaigh: Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma,’ in Mannion, The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, 17–29. Tremayne’s work has attracted the devoted fans of The International Sister Fidelma Society, and a recent essay collection, Edward J. Rielly and David Robert Wooten’s The Sister Fidelma Mysteries: Essays on the Historical Novels of Peter Tremayne (Jefferson: McFarland, 2012). Though she is not writing about crime fiction as such, Eve Patten perceptively identifies a pattern of relations between contemporary Irish fiction in general and ‘the recent past,’ noting the ways in which ‘novelists have put particularly intense pressure on … the period from the 1950s to the 1970s, in which … Ireland experienced most acutely the effects of the country’s failure to keep pace with modernisation and secularisation.’ Eve Patten, ‘Contemporary Irish Fiction,’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel, ed. John Wilson Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 263–264.
- 25.
Linnie Blake, The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma, and National Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 102; Mark Seltzer, from ‘The Serial Killer as a Type of Person,’ in The Horror Reader, ed. Ken Gelder (London: Routledge, 2000), 104.
- 26.
John Curran, ‘Happy innocence: playing games in Golden Age detective fiction, 1920–45’ (PhD thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 2014). See also the novelist Elizabeth George’s introductory essay to her edition of The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2016), xiii-xv, in which she distinguishes between ‘mystery’ and ‘crime,’ drawing in part on the ‘rules of the game’ as articulated by the Golden Age authors Curran discusses.
- 27.
Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction Since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), xiii. See also Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3; Maurizio Ascari, A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 7.
- 28.
Another example of an Irish text that draws on crime genres but cannot be described as crime fiction is the Northern Irish writer Garth Ennis’s graphic novel series Preacher (New York: Vertigo, 1995–2000), which contains remarkable levels of graphic violence beyond almost anything in Irish crime fiction. It explicitly adapts elements of crime genres in ways both direct and less so, like it does with many other genres, including cinema and Biblical narratives. As a graphic novel first and foremost, however, Preacher is centred in a genre with quite particular demands, which would require a fuller and more sustained discussion.
- 29.
John Connolly, ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Crime Writers: Ireland and the Mystery Genre,’ in Burke, Down These Green Streets, 53.
- 30.
Alan Glynn, ‘Murder in Mind: The Irish Literary Crime Novel,’ in Burke, Down These Green Streets, 118–119.
- 31.
Ross, ‘Introduction,’ 21–22.
- 32.
Meier and Ross, ‘Editors’ Introduction,’ 15. Elsewhere in their essay, they argue that ‘The diagnosis of “Irish crime” as premodern outrage prescribed the cure: coercive legislation to curtail civil liberties and enhance police powers. In its commission, perception, and punishment Irish crime was thoroughly colonized’ (Meier and Ross, ‘Editors’ Introduction,’ 7).
- 33.
Moira E. Casey, ‘“Built on Nothing but Bullshit and Good PR”: Crime, Class Mobility, and the Irish Economy in the Novels of Tana French,’ in Schaffer, ‘Special Issue on Tana French’: 92.
- 34.
See Margot Backus, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
- 35.
John Connolly, ‘The Chill by Ross Macdonald,’ in Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels, ed. John Connolly, Declan Burke, and Ellen Clair Lamb (London: Hodder, 2012), 298.
- 36.
Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (New York: Picador, 2000), 575–576.
References
Ascari, Maurizio. A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Backus, Margot. The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
Blake, Linnie. The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma, and National Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008.
Brannigan, John. ‘“For the Readies”: Brendan Behan, Crime Fiction, and the Dublin Underworld.’ In Meier and Ross, ‘Irish Crime Since 1921’: 92–105.
Burke, Declan. Eightball Boogie. Dublin: Lilliput, 2003. Reprint, Kindle Original, 2011.
———. ed. Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century. Dublin: Liberties, 2011.
———. Slaughter’s Hound. Dublin: Liberties, 2012.
———. ‘Raising hell in Arizona with a gripping thriller.’ Review of Here and Gone, by Stuart Neville (pseud. Haylen Beck). Irish Times, 29 July 2017. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/here-and-gone-review-raising-hell-in-arizona-with-a-gripping-thriller-1.3164145 (accessed 29 July 2017).
Byrne, Elaine A. Political Corruption in Ireland, 1922–2010. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012.
Cantwell, Nancy Marck. ‘Hello Dálaigh: Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma.’ In Mannion, The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, 17–29.
Casey, Moira E. ‘“Built on Nothing but Bullshit and Good PR”: Crime, Class Mobility, and the Irish Economy in the Novels of Tana French.’ In Schaffer, ‘Special Issue on Tana French’: 92–102.
Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. New York: Picador, 2000.
Childers, Erskine. The Riddle of the Sands. London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1903. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1999.
Clark, David. ‘Emerald Noir? Contemporary Irish Crime Fiction.’ In East Meets West, edited by Reiko Aiura, J.U. Jacobs, and J. Derrick McClure, 144–156. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2014.
Coffey, Fiona. ‘“The place you don’t belong”: Stuart Neville’s Belfast.’ In Mannion, The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, 91–106.
Connolly, John. Every Dead Thing. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999. Reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.
———. ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Crime Writers: Ireland and the Mystery Genre.’ In Burke, Down These Green Streets, 39–57.
———. ‘The Chill by Ross Macdonald.’ In Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels, edited by John Connolly, Declan Burke, and Ellen Clair Lamb, 297–304. London: Hodder, 2012.
Curran, John. ‘Happy innocence: playing games in Golden Age detective fiction, 1920–45.’ PhD thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 2014.
Dell’Amico, Carol. ‘John Banville and Benjamin Black: The Mundo, Crime, Women.’ In Meier and Ross, ‘Irish Crime Since 1921’: 106–120.
Donoghue, Emma. Room. London: Picador, 2010.
———. Frog Music. London: Picador, 2014.
Ennis, Garth, and Steve Dillon. Preacher. 9 volumes. New York: Vertigo, 1996–2001.
Fox, Andrew. ‘Tiger, Tiger: The Hunt for the Great Irish Novel.’ The Daily Beast, 2 February 2014. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/28/tiger-tiger-the-hunt-for-the-great-irish-novel.html (accessed 3 June 2014).
French, Tana. The Likeness. New York: Penguin, 2008. Reprint, 2009.
Glynn, Alan. ‘Murder in Mind: The Irish Literary Crime Novel.’ In Burke, Down These Green Streets, 117–129.
‘Golden Age of Irish Crime Fiction Celebrated at Festival.’ https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/golden-age-of-irish-crime-fiction-celebrated-at-festival/4465 (accessed 27 November 2013).
Green, F.L. Odd Man Out. London: Michael Joseph, 1945. Reprinted with introduction by Adrian McKinty. Richmond: Valancourt, 2015.
Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Hourigan, Niamh. Rule-Breakers: Why ‘Being There’ Trumps ‘Being Fair’ in Ireland. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2015.
‘Irish Crime Fiction: A Festival.’ Trinity College Dublin, 22–23 November 2013. http://irishcrimefiction.blogspot.ie (accessed 21 November 2013).
Jeffery, Keith, and Eunan O’Halpin. ‘Ireland in Spy Fiction.’ Intelligence and National Security 5, no. 4 (1990): 92–116.
Johnsen, Rosemary Erickson. Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Kelly, Aaron. The Thriller and Northern Ireland Since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.
———. ‘The Troubles with the Thriller: Northern Ireland, Political Violence and the Peace Process.’ In The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature, edited by Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson, 508–515. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
Kilroy, Claire. The Devil I Know. London: Faber, 2012.
Kincaid, Andrew. ‘“Down These Mean Streets”: The City and Critique in Contemporary Irish Noir.’ Éire-Ireland 45, no. 1–2 (2010): 39–55.
Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction Since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Lynch, Paul. Red Sky in Morning. London: Quercus, 2013.
Madden, Deirdre. One By One in the Darkness. London: Faber, 1996.
Mannion, Elizabeth, ed. The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel. London: Palgrave, 2016.
———. ‘A Path to Emerald Noir: The Rise of the Irish Detective Novel.’ In Mannion, The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, 1–15.
McCabe, Patrick. The Butcher Boy. London: Picador, 1992.
McInerney, Lisa. The Glorious Heresies. London: John Murray, 2015.
Meier, William, and Ian Campbell Ross, eds. ‘Irish Crime Since 1921.’ Special issue, Éire-Ireland 49, no. 1–2 (2014).
———. ‘Editors’ Introduction: Irish Crime Since 1921.’ In Meier and Ross, ‘Irish Crime Since 1921’: 7–21.
Murray, Paul. Skippy Dies. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2010.
O’Brien, Flann. The Third Policeman. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1967. Reprint, McLean: Dalkey Archive, 1999.
Ó Cuilleanáin, Cormac. ‘Crimes and Contradictions: The Fictional City of Dublin.’ In Crime Fiction in the City: Capital Crimes, edited by Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps, 47–64. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013.
O’Flaherty, Liam. The Informer. London: Jonathan Cape, 1925. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1937.
O’Neill, Louise. Asking For It. London: Quercus, 2015.
O’Toole, Fintan. Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger. London: Faber, 2009. Reprinted and updated 2010.
———. Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic. London: Faber, 2010.
Patten, Eve. ‘Contemporary Irish Fiction.’ In The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel, edited by John Wilson Foster, 259–275. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Patterson, Glenn. The International. London: Anchor, 1999. Reprint, Belfast: Blackstaff, 2008.
Pepper, Andrew. ‘“Hegemony Protected by the Armour of Coercion”: Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and the State.’ Journal of American Studies 44, no. 2 (May 2010): 333–349.
———. Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Peterson, Shirley. ‘Murder in the Ghost Estate: Crimes of the Celtic Tiger in Tana French’s Broken Harbor.’ In Schaffer, ‘Special Issue on Tana French’: 71–80.
Power, Kevin. Bad Day in Blackrock. Dublin: Lilliput, 2008. Reprint, London: Pocket, 2010.
Reddy, Maureen T. ‘Contradictions in the Irish Hardboiled: Detective Fiction’s Uneasy Portrayal of a New Ireland.’ New Hibernia Review 19, no. 4 (2015): 126–140.
Rielly, Edward J., and David Robert Wooten. The Sister Fidelma Mysteries: Essays on the Historical Novels of Peter Tremayne. Jefferson: McFarland, 2012.
Ross, Ian Campbell. ‘Introduction.’ In Burke, Down These Green Streets, 14–35.
Ross, Ian Campbell, and Shane Mawe. ‘Irish Crime Writing 1829–2011: Further Reading.’ In Burke, Down These Green Streets, 362–368.
Schaffer, Rachel, ed. ‘Special Issue on Tana French.’ Clues: A Journal of Detection 32, no. 1 (2014).
Seltzer, Mark. From ‘The Serial Killer as a Type of Person.’ In The Horror Reader, edited by Ken Gelder, 97–107. London: Routledge, 2000.
Wallace, Arminta. ‘Killer instinct: a golden age of Irish crime fiction.’ Irish Times, 21 November 2013. http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/killer-instinct-a-golden-age-of-irish-crime-fiction-1.1601482 (accessed 25 March 2014).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cliff, B. (2018). Introduction. In: Irish Crime Fiction. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56188-6_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56188-6_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-56187-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-56188-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)