Abstract
The critical discussion of Ireland and crime fiction has often focused on Troubles thrillers, primarily novels from the 1970s and 1980s, habitually derided as ‘Troubles trash,' relatively little of which was domestically produced. Those discussions allow the chapter to consider the existing critical discourse around the genre in Ireland, providing a point of reference for later chapters. Although it addresses the roles played by groundbreaking authors like Colin Bateman and Eoin McNamee, the chapter focuses on work by Stuart Neville, Claire McGowan, Brian McGilloway, and Adrian McKinty. All of these writers have opened the genre’s potential in Northern Ireland through narratives that hinge on matters as varied as human trafficking, abortion, economic despair, revenge and justice, corporate conspiracies and corruption, spies, and ghosts.
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- 1.
Michael Parker, Northern Irish Literature, 1975–2006, Volume 2: The Imprint of History (London: Palgrave, 2007), 202. In another essay, Parker and Liam Harte similarly argue that the ‘peace process … opened up new artistic as well as political perspectives on the sectarian violence and religious bigotry which had plagued the province for a quarter of a century.’ Harte and Parker, ‘Reconfiguring Identities: Recent Northern Irish Fiction,’ in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories, ed. Liam Harte and Michael Parker (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 232.
- 2.
Emilie Pine, The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). See particularly her chapter ‘Embodied Memory: Performing the 1980–1 Hunger Strikes,’ 100–126.
- 3.
Eamonn Hughes, ‘Evasion, Engagement, Exploitation,’ 30th Anniversary Special Issue, Fortnight, September 2000, 55.
- 4.
J. Bowyer Bell has been credited with originating this phrase with his article ‘The Troubles as Trash,’ Hibernia, 20 January 1978: 22. See Caroline Magennis, Sons of Ulster: Masculinities in the Contemporary Northern Irish Novel (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 59n5.
- 5.
For a further discussion of the shift from an initial wave of novels by journalists to later works by former soldiers, see Aaron Kelly, ‘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, ed. Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 509–511. In his earlier book The Thriller and Northern Ireland Since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), Kelly offers a valuably detailed bibliography of Troubles thrillers.
- 6.
Marisol Morales-Ladrón, ‘“Troubling” Thrillers: Between Politics and Popular Fiction in the novels of Benedict Kiely, Brian Moore and Colin Bateman,’ Estudios Irlandeses 1 (2006): 58. Morales-Ladrón goes on to suggest – with a long list of examples – that ‘scholars almost unanimously acknowledge the thriller as the most popular form in Northern Irish literature’ (‘“Troubling Thrillers,”’ 59). Despite this, she focuses her analysis on thrillers not by dedicated genre writers but by ‘literary’ authors, whose ‘thrillers have been concerned with the exploration of moral, psychological and social preoccupations that were ignored in the most popular and traditional mode’ (‘“Troubling Thrillers,”’ 60).
- 7.
Eve Patten, ‘Fiction in conflict: Northern Ireland’s prodigal novelists,’ in Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction, ed. Ian A. Bell (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), 132.
- 8.
Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, ‘Shadows of the Gunmen: The Troubles Novel,’ in Irish Fiction Since the 1960s: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2006), 100.
- 9.
Kennedy-Andrews, ‘Shadows of the Gunmen,’ 87. See also Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, ‘The Novel and the Northern Troubles,’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel, ed. John Wilson Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 238–258.
- 10.
Hughes, ‘Evasion,’ 54.
- 11.
Hughes, ‘Evasion,’ 55.
- 12.
Joe Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 129.
- 13.
Richard Haslam, ‘Critical Reductionism and Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal,’ in Representing the Troubles: Texts & Images, 1970–2000, ed. Brian Cliff and Éibhear Walshe (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), 39–54.
- 14.
Keith Jeffery and Eunan O’Halpin, ‘Ireland in Spy Fiction,’ Intelligence and National Security 5, no. 4 (1990): 103.
- 15.
Jeffery and O’Halpin, ‘Ireland in Spy Fiction,’ 112–113.
- 16.
Kelly, ‘The Troubles with the Thriller,’ 508.
- 17.
Kelly, The Thriller and Northern Ireland, 147, 154.
- 18.
Kelly, The Thriller and Northern Ireland, 5.
- 19.
Kelly, ‘The Troubles with the Thriller,’ 513. Kelly is quoting Peter Messent, ed., Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel (London: Pluto, 1995), 1.
- 20.
Andrew Pepper, Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 110.
- 21.
‘Crime Fiction and Contemporary Ireland,’ panel discussion with Paul Charles, Declan Hughes, Gene Kerrigan, Brian McGilloway, Niamh O’Connor, and Louise Phillips, ‘Irish Crime Fiction: A Festival,’ Trinity College Dublin, 23 November 2013.
- 22.
John Connolly, ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Crime Writers: Ireland and the Mystery Genre,’ in Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century, ed. Declan Burke (Dublin: Liberties Press, 2011), 51–52.
- 23.
Laura Pelaschiar, ‘Troubles and Freedom Fighters in Northern Irish Fiction,’ The Irish Review 40–41 (Winter 2009): 60.
- 24.
Pelaschiar, ‘Troubles and Freedom Fighters,’ 58.
- 25.
Kelly, The Thriller and Northern Ireland, 73n24.
- 26.
Peggy O’Brien, ‘Unbalanced Styles,’ review of Walking the Dog and Other Stories, by Bernard MacLaverty, Resurrection Man, by Eoin McNamee, and Nothing is Black, by Deirdre Madden, Irish Review 16 (Autumn-Winter 1994): 150, 149.
- 27.
Glenn Patterson, ‘Butchers’ Tools,’ Fortnight, September 1994, 43.
- 28.
Patterson, ‘Butchers’ Tools,’ 44.
- 29.
Kelly suggests such meaning is the case in both Resurrection Man and McNamee’s later work The Ultras (2004), novels in which ‘crime is found not only amongst aberrant individuals but at the centre of the British state and its policy in Ireland as the government and secret services orchestrate a hidden network of violence, coercion, illegality and racketeering. … This guise of the crime genre – the conspiracy thriller – therefore disrupts the conventional critical account of order disrupted by rogue criminality’ (‘The Troubles with the Thriller,’ 513). Elsewhere, Kelly articulates a persuasive sense of Resurrection Man’s potential at more length, suggesting that it ‘conveys how the city defeats the imposition of such a tribal cartography, setting it apart from the more reactionary thriller’s criminalized zones of otherness’ (The Thriller and Northern Ireland, 100).
- 30.
Gerard Brennan, ‘The Truth Commissioners,’ in Burke, Down These Green Streets, 201.
- 31.
Stuart Neville, panel discussion with Elizabeth Mannion, Declan Hughes, John Connolly, Fiona Coffey, and Brian Cliff, Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, 13 September 2016.
- 32.
See Rachel Oppenheimer, ‘“Inhuman Conditions Prevailing”: The Significance of the Dirty Protest in the Irish Republican Prison War, 1978–1981,’ in ‘Irish Crime Since 1921,’ ed. William Meier and Ian Campbell Ross, special issue, Éire-Ireland 49, no. 1–2 (Spring-Summer 2014): 142–163, particularly 146–147. In the same journal issue, Dale Montgomery considers the partly subjective nature of this distinction in ‘“Helping the Guards”: Illegal Displays and Blueshirt Criminality, 1932–1936,’ in Meier and Ross, ‘Irish Crime Since 1921’: 22–43, particularly 43.
- 33.
Eamonn Hughes, ‘Limbo,’ review of Glenn Patterson, That Which Was and Eoin McNamee, The Ultras, Irish Review 33 (2005): 139.
- 34.
Adrian McKinty, ‘Odd Men Out,’ in Burke, Down These Green Streets, 103.
- 35.
Claire McGowan, The Lost (London: Headline, 2013), 282. McGowan’s series can generally be quite deft at depicting this normality and its particular stresses, including restrained details of recessionary times familiar across the entire island over the past ten years: ‘Five days to Christmas. The ragged edge of cheer in a town with no money. Everywhere Christmas clubs; how will we pay for this plastic tat, where will we find the cash? Keep smiling for the kids. Red sale signs already in the shops, and an air of thin despair, flimsy and bright as tinsel.’ Claire McGowan, The Dead Ground (London: Headline, 2014), 324.
- 36.
Though it is not crime fiction as such, the Northern writer Garth Ennis’s graphic novel Preacher (New York: Vertigo, 1995–2000, 75 issues collected in nine trade paperbacks) is almost entirely set outside Ireland, including only one Irish character, Cassidy, who was turned into a vampire when on the run from the GPO in the aftermath of the Easter Rising.
- 37.
‘McGilloway on the Run,’ Derry Journal, 14 March 2008, quoted in Carol Baraniuk, ‘Negotiating Borders: Inspector Devlin and Shadows of the Past,’ in The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, ed. Elizabeth Mannion (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), 83.
- 38.
Adrian McKinty, Rain Dogs (Amherst: Seventh Street, 2016), 24. Duffy shows himself sufficiently aware of crime fiction tropes and precedents to cite them over the course of the series, including John Dickson Carr’s Gideon Fell, mentioned as Duffy encounters a number of seeming locked room mysteries like those in which Carr’s Fell featured. Duffy is also fully aware of the RUC’s status with the public, despite being unsure why one man particularly ‘disliked me. Sure, everybody hated the peelers. We were lazy and crap at best, corrupt and sectarian at worst … but at least I was trying to solve the murder of his brother, wasn’t I?’ Adrian McKinty, I Hear the Sirens in the Street (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013), 246.
- 39.
McKinty, Rain, 251.
- 40.
Adrian McKinty, The Cold Cold Ground (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012), 178.
- 41.
Even the title invites discussion: the original – the one under which it appeared in the US – was The Ghosts of Belfast (Stuart Neville, seminar discussion with the author and students, ‘Imagining Ireland IV’ undergraduate seminar, Trinity College Dublin, 23 November 2012). The sceptical instinct might be to assume that a less-discreet title was forced on the author by American publishers looking to reach Irish-American fetishists, and a long enough history of such marketing questions can indeed be traced, as discussed by Stephanie Rains, Diane Negra, and others. Neville’s, however, is a more interesting and (within Irish Studies) less familiar case of UK publishers backing away from overt Belfast novels, in deference to their understanding of what their audience will buy, a point Brennan has also discussed (‘Truth Commissioners,’ 205).
- 42.
Laura Pelaschiar, ‘The Twelve (2009) by Stuart Neville,’ Estudios Irlandeses 5 (2009): 196.
- 43.
Fiona Coffey, ‘“The place you don’t belong”: Stuart Neville’s Belfast,’ in Mannion, The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, 104.
- 44.
Kelly, The Thriller and Northern Ireland, 159. See also Pepper, who argues ‘that the development of crime fiction as a genre is bound up with the consolidation of the modern, bureaucratic state; that is to say, with the policing, governmental, and judicial apparatuses set up to enforce law,’ a dynamic that eventually includes ‘The interchangeability of crime and business’ in ‘the flexible, networked, deregulated world of the neoliberal economy’ (Unwilling Executioner, 1, 237).
- 45.
Stuart Neville, The Twelve (London: Harvill Secker, 2009). When Fegan bribes sailors to stow him away so he can escape Belfast at the end of the novel, however, the narrative pointedly notes that ‘They had rough hands and knowing eyes; they had no fear of someone like Fegan,’ as if to suggest that the hardest man in Belfast may still be a long way off from the hardest man anywhere (Neville, Twelve, 324).
- 46.
Neville, Twelve, 7.
- 47.
Neville, Twelve, 138; see also 39, 114.
- 48.
Neville, Twelve, 297–298.
- 49.
Neville, Twelve, 323.
- 50.
Claire McGowan, The Silent Dead (London: Headline, 2015), 365.
- 51.
McGowan, Silent, 365.
- 52.
Neville, Twelve, 4.
- 53.
Neville, Twelve, 88.
- 54.
Neville, Twelve, 322–323.
- 55.
In this sense, although Eunan O’Halpin and Keith Jeffery are right to identify among ‘the classic genre types’ in Irish thrillers that of ‘the loner who has lived by violence ultimately facing nemesis’ and right to suggest the ‘type recurs repeatedly in novels set in the … Irish troubles,’ Fegan himself cannot quite be classed with that type (‘Ireland in Spy Fiction,’ 101).
- 56.
Stuart Neville, seminar discussion with the author, Christopher Morash, and students, ‘Irish Crime Fiction’ undergraduate seminar, Trinity College Dublin, 11 February 2015.
- 57.
Pauline Rafferty, ‘Identifying Diachronic Transformations in Popular Culture Genres: A Cultural-Materialist Approach to the History of Popular Literature Publishing,’ Library History 24, no. 4 (December 2008): 266.
- 58.
Rafferty, ‘Identifying Diachronic Transformations,’ 267.
- 59.
Rafferty, ‘Identifying Diachronic Transformations,’ 268.
- 60.
This is from a blurb that appears on several of McKinty’s Duffy novels, including the US edition of Rain Dogs.
- 61.
According to the Irish Times, the real ‘Stakeknife’ was an informant for British military intelligence who was also a member of the IRA’s internal security group, responsible for finding informers and spies: see, for example, John Ware’s articles on the subject, including ‘Exposed: The Murky World of Spying During the Troubles,’ Irish Times, 11 April 2017, updated 20 April 2017, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/exposed-the-murky-world-of-spying-during-the-troubles-1.3043818 (accessed 17 May 2017).
- 62.
McKinty, Cold, 289.
- 63.
McKinty, Cold, 303.
- 64.
McKinty, Cold, 304, 305.
- 65.
McKinty, Cold, 328.
- 66.
Adrian McKinty, Gun Street Girl (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2015), 318. The clear reference is to the 1994 Chinook helicopter that crashed on the Mull of Kintyre, but McKinty’s novel is set considerably earlier, primarily in 1985, as the text notes repeatedly. In an epilogue set a year and a half after Duffy hears of the crash, he sees televised coverage of US Senate testimony on the Iran-Contra scandal by an Oliver North figure who has been part of Duffy’s case in this novel. News of the scandal first broke in late 1986, with hearings following in 1987.
- 67.
McKinty, Cold, 331.
- 68.
McKinty, Cold, 306.
- 69.
McKinty, Sirens, 266, 267.
- 70.
McKinty, Sirens, 268.
- 71.
McKinty, Sirens, 269.
- 72.
Adrian McKinty, In the Morning I’ll Be Gone (Amherst, NY: Seventh Street Books, 2014), 258.
- 73.
McKinty, Rain, 111.
- 74.
McKinty, Rain, 321.
- 75.
McKinty, Rain, 322.
- 76.
McKinty, Morning, 307.
- 77.
McKinty, Morning, 267–268.
- 78.
McKinty, Sirens, 231.
- 79.
McKinty, Sirens, 72, 20.
- 80.
McKinty, Sirens, 212, 81. As one blunt indicator of his views, Duffy memorably remarks, ‘I went to my office and pretended to work, but really spent time drawing glasses and moustaches on every wanker in the Daily Mail, and that is a lot of wankers’ (McKinty, Sirens, 179). The line is comically in keeping with Duffy’s tone, but its utter contempt functions more quietly as a remark not only on the Mail, but on the Falklands War and Duffy’s general sense of it as one of the Empire’s last gasps. McKinty is not the only Northern Irish writer to have addressed the DeLorean scandal. The poet Paul Muldoon scripted a BBC Northern Ireland television film, Monkeys (1989), directed by Danny Boyle, and most recently Glenn Patterson has published Gull (London: Head of Zeus, 2016).
- 81.
McKinty, Gun, 319.
- 82.
McKinty, Rain, 307.
- 83.
Patterson, ‘Butchers’ Tools,’ 43.
- 84.
Baraniuk, ‘Negotiating Borders,’ 77.
- 85.
Brian McGilloway, Borderlands (London: Macmillan, 2007; repr. London: Pan, 2007), 80.
- 86.
Brian McGilloway, Gallows Lane (London: Macmillan, 2008; repr. London: Pan, 2009), 101.
- 87.
McGilloway, Borderlands, 287. This is explicitly a sympathy he does not extend to every dead character, as is made clear a few pages later (McGilloway, Borderlands, 293).
- 88.
McGilloway, Borderlands, 142.
- 89.
McGilloway, Borderlands, 69–70.
- 90.
Brian McGilloway, The Nameless Dead (London: Macmillan, 2012), 376.
- 91.
McGilloway, Gallows, 149.
- 92.
McGilloway, Gallows, 199.
- 93.
McGilloway, Borderlands, 235.
- 94.
McGilloway, Gallows, 152.
- 95.
See for example McGilloway, Nameless, 43–44.
- 96.
Brian McGilloway, Bleed a River Deep (London: Macmillan, 2009; repr. London: Pan, 2010), 47.
- 97.
McGilloway, Bleed, 186.
- 98.
Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, http://www.iclvr.ie (accessed 19 December 2017).
- 99.
Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, ‘Confidentiality,’ http://www.iclvr.ie/en/ICLVR/Pages/Confidentiality (accessed 19 December 2017).
- 100.
McGilloway, Nameless, 109.
- 101.
Brian McGilloway, The Rising (London: Macmillan, 2010; repr. London: Pan, 2011), 297, 346, 352.
- 102.
McGilloway, Gallows, 321.
- 103.
McGilloway, Bleed, 115.
- 104.
McGilloway, Bleed, 120.
- 105.
McGilloway, Bleed, 110.
- 106.
McGilloway, Bleed, 271.
- 107.
McGilloway, Bleed, 295.
- 108.
For a detailed overview of intra-insular smuggling around the borderlands during World War II – an issue that appears in McGilloway’s Devlin series, as well as in Neville’s The Twelve and Collusion, and that has its parallel in McKinty’s and McGowan’s representations of abortion restrictions – see Bryce Evans, ‘“A Pleasant Little Game of Money-Making”: Ireland and the “New Smuggling”, 1939–1945,’ in Meier and Ross, ‘Irish Crime Since 1921’: 44–68.
- 109.
Kelly, ‘The Troubles with the Thriller,’ 513.
- 110.
McGowan, Dead Ground, 92.
- 111.
McGowan, Lost, 292–293. This editorial echoes Rose’s speech from Christina Reid’s 1989 play The Belle of the Belfast City. Amidst an argument with her sister about ending the partition of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the radical journalist Rose insists that Loyalism’s ‘right-wing Protestant Church is in total agreement with the right-wing Catholic Church on issues like divorce and abortion, on a woman’s right to be anything other than a mother or a daughter or a sister or a wife. Any woman outside that set of rules is the Great Whore of Babylon.’ Christina Reid, Plays 1 (London: Methuen, 1997), 221.
- 112.
McGowan, Dead Ground, 92–3.
- 113.
McGowan, Lost, 58.
- 114.
Claire McGowan, A Savage Hunger (London: Headline, 2016), Chapter Twenty-Five, Kindle.
- 115.
McGowan, Savage, Chapter Twenty-Eight, Kindle.
- 116.
McKinty, Cold, 118.
- 117.
McKinty, Cold, 193–4.
- 118.
McKinty, Rain, 315.
- 119.
McKinty, Rain, 307.
- 120.
McKinty, Rain, 312.
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———. ‘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.
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Cliff, B. (2018). Northern Irish Crime Fiction. In: Irish Crime Fiction. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56188-6_2
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