Abstract
This chapter examines Irish crime fiction by women and the varied roles played by women characters. This focus introduces specific ethical and political considerations that are at the heart of persistent debates in crime fiction studies, including the representation of violence against and by women, and the genre’s relationship to its readers. The focal point here is the work of Alex Barclay, while other authors discussed include Arlene Hunt, Claire McGowan, and Jane Casey. These authors use familiar genre elements including serial killers and medical conspiracies, but also take their characters through less genre-defined narratives around mental health and domestic abuse, as well as experiences tied directly to Irish society, including maternity, abortion, and the regulation of sexuality through institutions like the Magdalen laundries.
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- 1.
Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards, http://www.irishbookawards.irish/crime-fiction-award (accessed 3 December 2017).
- 2.
Maureen T. Reddy, ‘Women Detectives,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. Martin Priestman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 200.
- 3.
Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 243. Horsley is citing Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones, Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 28–30. See also Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction Since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 164.
- 4.
Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, 246.
- 5.
Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, 287. Susan Rowland makes a similar argument in suggesting that ‘crime fiction … crucially supplements the culturally authoritative texts of the law. … all crime fiction … is offering a story that the laws cannot or will not tell. It is saying, in effect, that there is more to crime than the institutionalized stories told in courts and police stations … Crime fiction is the other of the powers of legal institutions to represent crime to the culture.’ Susan Rowland, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 17.
- 6.
Margaret Kinsman, ‘Feminist Crime Fiction,’ in The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, ed. Catherine Ross Nickerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 158, 148.
- 7.
Kinsman, ‘Feminist Crime Fiction,’ 161.
- 8.
Adrienne E. Gavin, ‘Feminist Crime Fiction and Female Sleuths,’ in A Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley (Chichester: Blackwell, 2010), 258.
- 9.
Rowland, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell, 17.
- 10.
Megan E. Abbott, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity and Urban Space in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 7–8. See also Horsley’s chapter on ‘Regendering the Genre’ in Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, 242–289, particularly her discussion of Sally Munt’s Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel (London: Routledge, 1994).
- 11.
Melanie McGrath, ‘Women’s appetite for explicit crime fiction is no mystery,’ Guardian (Manchester), 30 June 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/jun/30/women-crime-fiction-real-anxieties-metaphorical (accessed 5 May 2017).
- 12.
Carl Kulo and R.R. Bowker, The Mystery Book Consumer in the Digital Age, www.sistersincrime.org/resource/resmgr/imported/ConsumerBuyingBookReport.pdf (accessed 5 May 2017), 6–7.
- 13.
Kulo and Bowker, The Mystery Book Consumer, 33.
- 14.
Kulo and Bowker, The Mystery Book Consumer, 35. The study notes an interesting ‘generational shift in perception and blurring of the lines’ between genres and subgenres, suggesting perhaps that readers may be increasingly disinterested in subgenre divisions, such as that between the thriller and the cosy, or the noir and the comic, or the procedural and the PI (Kulo and Bowker, The Mystery Book Consumer, 43). With exceptions like John Connolly, Colin Bateman, and Declan Burke, the most conspicuous examples of blurring genres in Irish crime fiction tend to be women writers, drawing on the supernatural (French), romance (McGowan), or cosy mysteries (Catriona King and Andrea Carter), often while including pronounced elements of the procedural.
- 15.
Gavin, ‘Feminist Crime Fiction,’ 268.
- 16.
McGrath, ‘Women’s appetite for explicit crime fiction is no mystery.’
- 17.
See John Curran, ‘Happy innocence: playing games in Golden Age detective fiction, 1920–45’ (PhD thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 2014).
- 18.
Published under the name Anna Sweeney, Deadly Intent (Sutton: Severn House, 2014) is an English-language version of Anna Heussaff’s Buille Marfach (Gaillimh: Cló Iar-Connacht, 2010), one of the relatively rare examples of crime novels written in Irish. Other examples are discussed in Ian Campbell Ross, ‘Introduction,’ in Burke, Down These Green Streets, 14–35, particularly 20–21.
- 19.
Though the focus here is on contemporary settings, Irish women have of course also written historical crime fiction, of which Gemma O’Connor’s and Cora Harrison’s novels are significant examples. For a detailed consideration of O’Connor’s work, see Rosemary Erickson Johnsen, Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), particularly Chapter 6, ‘Women and the Ever-Present Past,’ 127–149.
- 20.
Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, 252.
- 21.
A further plot strand concerns drug trials being run in the homes, as McGilloway explains in an ‘Author’s Note’: ‘Two hundred and eleven girls in Mother and Baby homes in Ireland were used, without parental consent, to test trial vaccines during the sixties and seventies.’ Brian McGilloway, The Nameless Dead (London: Macmillan, 2012), 381. Declan Hughes also references the Magdalen laundries when a character in City of Lost Girls (2010) links Dublin’s red-light district as depicted by Joyce to contemporary human trafficking, and then back to the Magdalen laundries, which serve in his speech as another example of trafficking, ‘where women and children were trapped and abused for decades.’ Declan Hughes, City of Lost Girls (London: John Murray, 2010; repr. 2011), 18.
- 22.
Carol Dell’Amico, ‘John Banville and Benjamin Black: The Mundo, Crime, Women,’ in ‘Irish Crime Since 1921,’ ed. William Meier and Ian Campbell Ross, special issue, Éire-Ireland 49, no. 1–2 (Spring-Summer 2014): 106–120, particularly 113–117, where Dell’Amico examines how ‘the Black novels are a refashioning of the entire panoply of recently uncovered postindependence state crime’ (114).
- 23.
Alex Barclay, Killing Ways (London: HarperCollins, 2015), 11, 49.
- 24.
Barclay, Killing, 50.
- 25.
Barclay, Killing, 116–117.
- 26.
Barclay, Killing, 151.
- 27.
Tana French, In the Woods (New York: Penguin, 2007, repr. 2008), 374.
- 28.
Declan Hughes, The Wrong Kind of Blood (London: John Murray, 2006; repr. 2007), 23.
- 29.
Hughes, Wrong, 224.
- 30.
Hughes, Wrong, 325.
- 31.
Tana French, Faithful Place (New York: Penguin, 2010; repr. 2011), 19.
- 32.
French, Faithful, 217.
- 33.
Two novels later, Frank’s daughter Holly feels a ‘pulse of wariness’ around her parents after their split and reconciliation, echoing Frank’s and his siblings’ constant vigilance around their dad, implicitly suggesting – across several books in what is more an anthology than a traditional series – how experiences of domestic violence ripple down through the generations. Tana French, The Secret Place (New York: Viking, 2014), 442.
- 34.
French, Faithful, 274.
- 35.
Along with McGilloway’s The Nameless Dead, French’s Broken Harbour is one of the Irish crime fiction novels that makes the most of the recession’s ghost estates – housing developments abandoned, unfinished by their builders – as a phenomenon and a setting.
- 36.
A surprise, even miraculous pregnancy is also revealed near the end of Mary O’Donnell’s Where They Lie (Dublin: New Island, 2014). Marketed as something of a crime novel, much of the book revolves around two brothers who were ‘disappeared’ – murdered, for the presumed crime of informing, their bodies never found (141–142).
- 37.
Stuart Neville, Those We Left Behind (London: Harvill Secker, 2015), 140, 203.
- 38.
Neville, Those, 325.
- 39.
Neville, Those, 355–356.
- 40.
For a theorised discussion of Irish family gothic, see Margot Backus, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
- 41.
Claire McGowan, The Silent Dead (London: Headline, 2015), 91.
- 42.
For an account of Ren’s trauma and Domenica’s violence, see Alex Barclay, Blood Runs Cold (London: Harper, 2008), 458.
- 43.
See, for example, Barclay, Blood Runs Cold, 255–257.
- 44.
Leroy L. Panek discusses some of these tropes of the police procedural in ‘Post-war American Police Fiction,’ in Priestman, The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, 155–171, particularly 157.
- 45.
Barclay, Blood Runs Cold, 16.
- 46.
Alex Barclay, Darkhouse (London: HarperCollins, 2005; repr. New York: Dell, 2008), 34–35, 133.
- 47.
Alex Barclay, Time of Death (London: HarperCollins, 2010), 321.
- 48.
Barclay, Blood Runs Cold, 78.
- 49.
Barclay, Blood Runs Cold, 94.
- 50.
Barclay, Blood Runs Cold, 229.
- 51.
Barclay, Blood Runs Cold, 117.
- 52.
Barclay, Blood Runs Cold, 233–234.
- 53.
Barclay, Killing, 52.
- 54.
Barclay, Blood Runs Cold, 248–249. These late-night spirals recur throughout the book, as she thinks obsessively about various details almost against her will: ‘The theories continued, nauseating and paralyzing, until she eventually fell asleep, half an hour before her alarm woke her’ (Barclay, Blood Runs Cold, 366).
- 55.
Barclay, Blood Runs Cold, 403–404.
- 56.
Barclay, Blood Runs Cold, 459.
- 57.
Barclay, Blood Runs Cold, 473.
- 58.
Barclay, Time, 113. Her brother Beau, we learn, committed suicide, something about which Ren is remarkably insightful in a passage that stands out even in a book like this, which gives more serious and sustained attention to mental illness than do most novels of whatever genre (Barclay, Time, 267).
- 59.
Barclay, Time, 115.
- 60.
Barclay, Time, 257.
- 61.
Barclay, Time, 310.
- 62.
Barclay, Time, 290–291.
- 63.
Alex Barclay, ‘How a line you hear, read or write can light a fuse,’ Irish Times, 7 April 2015, http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/how-a-line-you-hear-read-or-write-can-light-a-fuse-1.2167392 (accessed 1 May 2017).
- 64.
Alex Barclay, Blood Loss (London: HarperCollins, 2012), 1.
- 65.
Barclay, Blood Loss, 29–30.
- 66.
Barclay, Blood Loss, 133.
- 67.
Alex Barclay, Harm’s Reach (London: HarperCollins, 2014), 91.
- 68.
Barclay, Blood Loss, 135.
- 69.
Barclay, Blood Loss, 328; see also 171.
- 70.
This provides a thematic continuity with the leverage brutally manipulated by Domenica in the previous Ren Bryce book, Time of Death.
- 71.
Barclay, Blood Loss, 345–347 contains the core revelations.
- 72.
Barclay, Blood Loss, 368–372, 376.
- 73.
See Barclay, Harm’s, 276.
- 74.
No one else does so: her boss pointedly says ‘this is the first time at the end of a big case that I haven’t almost fired you’ (Barclay, Harm’s, 391).
- 75.
Barclay, Harm’s, 401.
- 76.
In the unremittingly dark following novel, Killing Ways, Ren spends much of the narrative avoiding her medication and immersed in a manic phase, replete with continual self-aware internal dialogues – ‘But I’m fine. You’re off the rails. No, I’m not’ (Barclay, Killing, 173) – and angrier moments where she is protective of the accelerating mania. Killing Ways ends with a remarkably unrelieved sense of desolation as Ren bottoms out, convinced (not without reason) that the decisions she made in that manic state led to a catastrophic end to the case. The killer’s guilt is clear and explicit, but closing with such a bleak, repeated insistence hardly refutes Ren’s feelings of culpability.
- 77.
Elizabeth Mannion, ‘“Irish by blood and English by accident”: Detective Constable Maeve Kerrigan,’ in The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, ed. Elizabeth Mannion (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), 121–134.
- 78.
Jane Casey, The Reckoning (London: Ebury, 2011), 79. In After The Fire (London: Ebury, 2015), another hacker expands on this, describing Swain’s legendary status in his world (256).
- 79.
Casey, Reckoning, 469.
- 80.
Jane Casey, The Last Girl (London: Ebury, 2012), 204, 356.
- 81.
Jane Casey, The Stranger You Know (London: Ebury, 2013), 325.
- 82.
Casey, Stranger, 31.
- 83.
Jane Casey, The Kill (London: Ebury, 2014), 455.
- 84.
Casey, Fire, 197.
- 85.
Casey, Fire, 425–433.
- 86.
Jane Casey, Let the Dead Speak (London: HarperCollins, 2017), 93.
- 87.
Mannion, ‘“Irish by blood and English by accident,”’ 121.
- 88.
Arlene Hunt, False Intentions (Dublin: Hodder Headline, 2005), 17.
- 89.
Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, 244.
- 90.
Hunt, False, 28.
- 91.
Hunt, False, 22.
- 92.
Hunt, False, 118.
- 93.
Hunt, False, 251.
- 94.
See Arlene Hunt, Missing Presumed Dead (Dublin: Hodder Headline, 2007), 404–405.
- 95.
Hunt, False, 530.
- 96.
Hunt, Missing, 397–398. Undertow (Dublin: Hachette, 2008; repr. 2009) calls him ‘her deranged ex-boyfriend’ (20), but Blood Money (Dublin: Hachette, 2010) calls him her ‘husband’ (157).
- 97.
Hunt, Missing, 93.
- 98.
Hunt, Missing, 281.
- 99.
Hunt, Missing, 286.
- 100.
Hunt has described John as ‘that kind of laissez-faire detective that I quite enjoy. He’s not a detective because he’s the smartest guy ever to walk the streets. He’s a detective because he doesn’t want to do a nine-to-five job … He’s a bit of a shyster, really. If he can avoid work, he will.’ ‘Irish Crime Fiction Abroad’ panel discussion, ‘Irish Crime Fiction: A Festival,’ Trinity College Dublin, 23 November 2013.
- 101.
Hunt, Missing, 369.
- 102.
Hunt, Missing, 393.
- 103.
Hunt, Undertow, 59.
- 104.
Hunt, Undertow, 56.
- 105.
Catherine Ross Nickerson, ‘Women Writers Before 1960,’ in Nickerson, Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, 39, emphasis added.
- 106.
Hunt, Missing, 318.
- 107.
James M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), xviii. While Smith is at pains to note that these institutions’ ‘punitive nature is not unique to the Irish context’ (Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, xv), he concisely describes the laundries as part of ‘Ireland’s architecture of containment,’ which also ‘encompassed an assortment of interconnected institutions, including mother and baby homes, industrial and reformatory schools, mental asylums, adoption agencies … These institutions concealed citizens already marginalized by a number of interrelated social phenomena: poverty, illegitimacy, sexual abuse, and infanticide … Those incarcerated included unmarried mothers, illegitimate and abandoned children, orphans, the sexually promiscuous, the socially transgressive, and, often, those merely guilty of “being in the way”. This bureaucratic apparatus operated as a bulwark to the state’s emerging national identity’ (Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, xiii). Smith is also careful not to conflate the Magdalen laundries with these other institutions, each of which had discrete characteristics (Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, 48, 224n12). For further astute discussion of Irish culture’s representation of these and related institutions, see Emilie Pine, The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), particularly 36–51.
- 108.
For an extended historical examination of this regulatory activity, see Diarmaid Ferriter, Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland (London: Profile, 2009). In this work, Ferriter details an ‘enduring theme in relation to perceived sexual transgression – the collusion of state, society and religious orders in seeking to remove from public circulation perceived threats to a conservative moral order’ (Occasions of Sin, 16). See also Laura Weinstein, ‘Unlawful Carnal Knowledge of Teenage Girls: Performing Femininity and the Myth of Absolute Liability,’ in Meier and Ross, ‘Irish Crime Since 1921’: 69–91, particularly 75–81.
- 109.
Claire McGowan, The Dead Ground (London: Headline, 2014), 377.
- 110.
Claire McGowan, The Lost (London: Headline, 2013), 58.
- 111.
McGowan, Lost, 314.
- 112.
Hunt, Missing, 241.
- 113.
Hunt, Missing, 276.
- 114.
Pine, Politics, 41.
- 115.
Hunt, Blood Money, 170, 141–142.
- 116.
Hunt, Blood Money, 233.
- 117.
Hunt, Blood Money, 264–265.
- 118.
Hunt, Blood Money, 292, 291.
- 119.
Tana French, The Trespasser (Dublin: Hachette, 2016), 268.
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Cliff, B. (2018). Women and Irish Crime Fiction. In: Irish Crime Fiction. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56188-6_4
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