“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian

Saturday, August 9, 2008

Irish Crime Fiction: Ghetto Chic?

Two not entirely unrelated mails popped into ye olde inboxe yesterday, the first from Norm ‘Salman of Knowledge’ Price - yes, that's 'Salman' of Knowledge - to let me know that Barbara Fister (right) has established a new interweb yokeybus dedicated to Scandinavian Crime Fiction in English; the second was from Damien Seaman, to ask this: “You ever worry this kind of approach (i.e., a crime fiction blog with an Irish focus) can serve to ghettoise Irish crime fiction, or create false expectations as though ‘Irish crime’ were a genre in its own right?”
  The first thing here is to wish Barbara the best of luck with her latest endeavour, and here’s hoping it’s as successful as the Crime Carnival.
  The second thing to say is that I can only wish that Crime Always Pays was popular enough to influence opinion to the extent that it could ‘ghettoise’ Irish crime fiction. Sadly, it falls a long way short of that particular mark. Besides, one joy of Irish crime writing is its diversity.
  The main reason I set up Crime Always Pays a year and a half ago was to promote my new novel THE BIG O, on the basis that I hadn’t a red cent to promote it in the traditional way. I’d also been writing for some other Irish blogs, now sadly defunct, and I loved blogging. On top of that, I believed there were a number of authors coming through who were saying interesting things about contemporary Ireland, and that no other blog or website was covering these writers in a cohesive way. And so CAP was born.
  As it happens, and as the months went by, I was gobsmacked at the number of writers out there who were writing quality crime fiction that could very loosely be described as ‘Irish’. Every week seemed to turn up a new gem, but each new find only confirmed what was almost immediately apparent: that there was nothing homogenous about ‘Irish crime fiction’.
  For example, the three most high-profile authors at the time – John Connolly, Ken Bruen and Colin Bateman – could hardly write more different kinds of stories if they tried, with settings that included Maine, Galway / London and Belfast, respectively. Adrian McKinty’s novels were also set in the U.S., albeit with a more Northern Irish flavour. Eoin Colfer’s crime capers are about a pre-teen evil genius. Tana French, who was actually born in the U.S., arrived with a police procedural set very firmly in Dublin. Declan Hughes goes the private eye route and uses the Chandler / Macdonald model to get under the skin of modern Ireland. Brian McGilloway appeared with a police procedural set in rural Donegal. Gene Kerrigan’s gritty noirs are set in urban Dublin. Ruth Dudley Edwards writes comedy crime that are set wherever the mood takes her. Arlene Hunt riffs on the male / female private eye duo. Ingrid Black takes an ex-FBI agent and plonks her down in Dublin. KT McCaffrey has his amateur sleuth Emma Boylan work as an investigate reporter. Benjamin Black’s amateur sleuth is a pathologist in 1950’s Dublin. Cora Harrison’s Mara is a Brehon judge of the 16th century based in the wild Burren of Ireland’s west. Sam Millar writes darker-than-dark noir set in Northern Ireland. Derek Landy’s Skulduggery Pleasant is about a private eye skeleton. Stephen Leather writes balls-out thrillers. Aifric Campbell, Julie Parsons, Paul Charles, Garbhan Downey, DB Shan … the list goes on and on, and the only thing the writers have in common is how different their novels are. And that’s without factoring in the diaspora. Michael Haskins, for example, calls his protagonist ‘Mad’ Mick Murphy, a man who is as Irish as red hair despite his Florida Keys setting. By the same token, John McFetridge is Canadian-Irish, although you’d never know about the Irish element from reading his Toronto-based novels. And then there are the more literary offerings that utilise crime narratives. Gerard Donovan’s JULIUS WINSOME, David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER and Eoin McNamee’s 12:23, set in Maine, Belfast and Paris respectively, are only three of the most recent novels that engage with the tropes of crime fiction.
  If someone can draw a straight line between all of those novels, then he / she is a better man / woman than I. The only thing the writers have in common is that they are to one degree or another Irish. There is no ‘Tartan noir’ movement, and neither can Irish crime fiction be characterised by a particular tone, say, as you could argue Scandinavian crime can.
  It’s possible that I have done certain writers a disservice by calling them Irish crime writers, and if that’s the case I can only apologise. The intention was always to draw attention to their books, not to cram them into some pigeonhole to suit a theory of mine. And hey, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, right? Peace, out.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Where does that leave my theory that Irish crime is funny? (I don't mean odd, I mean humorous.)

Peter Rozovsky said...

And you didn't even mention Peter Tremayne. Yep, you're calling people's attention to a lot of good crime writing that happens to be Irish, for which you deserve recognition by the Dáil, the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Maybe some of this stuff is typically Irish. Maybe some it will expand non-Irish readers' idea of what is and isn't Irish.

And, as far as ghettoizing, stereotypes and the bookwitch's a comment, I have written an article about how humorous Nordic crime is.
===================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

Declan Burke said...

Ms Witch - You're right, a lot of Irish crime writers are very funny - in fact, it's almost expected, which is why I didn't mention it. Peter - Nordic crime fic humorous? Now I'm guilty of perpetuating stereotypes ... but really? Cheers, Dec

Peter Rozovsky said...

Yep, humorous -- well, containing more humor than one would expect. Before its issue on Irish mysteries, Mystery Readers Journal published a number on Scandinavian mysteries, for which I write an article on humor in Nordic crime fiction.

It was precisesly the reputation for dourness that made the such humor as did occur stick out. You'll find the article here.

A number of Australian crime writers are funny as well, perhaps, in part, because people expect it. Or maybe because of the Irish streak in the country's makeup.
==============
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

Declan Burke said...

Except now those Aussies have Adrian McKinty to contend with. That'll unfizz their gin. Cheers, Dec

Anonymous said...

I know exactly how funny Scandinavians can be. Not quite as funny as Declan, Derek and Eoin. (My personal favourites, you understand.)

But in my youth, which was a while ago, we had a crime writer calling himself Bo Balderson, who had a sleuth who accidentally became a government minister because his galoshes were too large (don't ask), and who wrote some very funny crime novels about the government, from the inside. He was a millionaire and had sixteen children and was a complete idiot. But he solved murders.

We never knew his real identity.

Peter Rozovsky said...

Declan, McKinty lives in a neighborhood and a city that look large in Australian crime fiction.

Bookwitch, that sleuth sounds a bit like Shane Maloney's Murray Whelan, except for the part about the sixteen children and the millions. And Murray Whelan is more surrounded by idiots than idiot himself. But his novels give very funny views of government from the inside.
===================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

Strindberg.Ibsen.Kierkegaard.Andersen.Swedish Death Metal,with bands named Abhorrence,Autopsy Torment or Vomitory.You'd be forgiven to think that,rare bits of humor aside,Scandinavia is all about the doom and gloom.
The Finns,though,are different.
Just compare the Edda (everybody dies at the end) with Kalevala,which is basically a collection of trickster stories.
Or take this wonderful little novel, The Bear's best friend.
http://www.iperborea.com/web/libri/0162.htm
It starts with Lutheran pastor Oskari Huuskonen delivering a colourful,somewhat fire-and-brimstone but unintentionally comic sermon to his hapless congregation,then shifts to momma bear ,who wanders with her newborn cubs into the village from a nearby wood,discovers beer and proceeds to wreak havoc until she's electrocuted by a live wire.
Then the pastor,to the dismay of his wife,which soon asks for separation,adopts one of the orphaned cubs.
Over time the bear,christened (?) Satanas (??) helps him with church matters,learns to iron his clothes and more or less becomes his valet,until Huuskonen has a mid-life crisis and the two embark on a rollicking,picaresque journey through Russia and most of Europe.

As I said elsewhere,modern fiction definitely needs more bears.

Marco