Event: Classic Crime Novels at Lucan Library

I’m delighted to be taking part in Lucan Library’s ‘Classic Crime Club’ series, as part of which I will be talking about the great American crime novels from the 1970s to the 1990s. Among the titles under consideration will be George V. Higgins’ THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, Sara Paretsky’s INDEMNITY ONLY, Donald Westlake’s COPS AND ROBBERS, Sue Grafton’s A IS FOR ALIBI, James Ellroy’s WHITE JAZZ and Elmore Leonard’s GET SHORTY.
  The event takes place at 6.30pm on November 19th at Lucan Library, Newcastle Road, Lucan, Co. Dublin. It’s a free event, but booking is advisable on lucan@sdublincoco.ie.

Essay: ‘Contradictions in the Irish Hardboiled: Detective Fiction’s Uneasy Portrayal of a New Ireland’

I came across a fascinating essay / paper in the New Hibernia Review last week, written by Professor Maureen T. Reddy of Rhode Island College on the contradictions in the Irish hardboiled crime novel. It runs like this:

‘Contradictions in the Irish Hardboiled: Detective Fiction’s Uneasy Portrayal of a New Ireland’ by Maureen T. Reddy

The sheer size of the recent boom in Irish crime fiction has tended to obscure its most striking feature: a striking lack of diversity, in terms of subgenres and models. Virtually all twenty-first-century Irish crime fiction is derived from the tradition of the American hardboiled, yet few reviewers or scholars have addressed the thoroughgoing similarity of literary descent, beyond noting that much Irish crime fiction is “noirish.” Current Irish crime writers tend to see themselves as connected to the American hardboiled tradition, judging from published interviews, blogs, and even titles of collections—for example, Down These Green Streets (2011) and Dublin Noir (2006). Many of the twenty-first-century Irish series feature either tough-guy private eyes or police detectives whose style of speech, loner tendencies, and cynical attitudes link them more closely with the conventions of hardboiled than with the police procedural. Other subgenres—cozy mystery, academic mystery, legal fiction, spy, and comic or “caper,” for instance—have found few new Irish practitioners, although all of these specialties remain popular with both readers and with non-Irish writers. Although not a new form per se, the Irish hardboiled represents a significant development in Irish literature through its resurrection of an established literary form not previously associated with Irish writers. That it arose when the definition of Irishness itself was newly and widely under interrogation is no coincidence.
  Most traditional definitions of Irishness were obsolete by the early 2000s. They were unsettled by many developments: successive public scandals (political, economic, and religious, beginning in the 1990s), the country’s membership in the European Union, immigration after a long history of emigration, and the economic boom and then bust, along with widespread access to global media and increasing levels of education among the populace. But the obsolete markers of Irishness were not replaced with a coherent ideology. Instead, the question of Irishness has in many ways been left up for grabs.
  Recent Irish crime writers have been deeply interested in working through the problem of redefining Irishness. This problem has been raised also in much contemporary Irish non-genre fiction, but the hardboiled form that has profoundly influenced so many contemporary crime writers works against a progressive or liberatory conception of Irishness. The intensely conservative ideology expressed in the form of much of this Irish writing is at odds with its more progressive content; sometimes, the authors find themselves writing into dead ends from which series cannot extricate themselves.

  In The Dragon Tattoo and its Long Tail (2012), a survey of contemporary European crime fiction, David Geherin describes Galway’s Ken Bruen as an exception to the general rule that “European crime writers deliberately try to distance themselves from their American counterparts.” That claim is simply false unless one excludes all Irish crime writers from consideration; Irish writers of hard-boiled fiction, and not just Bruen, are at pains to claim a connection with their American counterparts and, more important, with their American literary forebears. They do so by drawing direct attention to them in their novels and modeling plots on theirs. Declan Burke, for instance, has frequently mentioned—on his blog, in interviews, and in his introduction to the Books to Die For (2012) collection—that his main influence is Raymond Chandler. In the third episode of RTÉ’s “Irish Noir” radio series in 2013, Burke said that he was inspired to write crime fiction by Chandler; Burke “wanted to take the classic tropes of 1930s stuff” and put them in Ireland.
  Similarly, Declan Hughes’s author’s web page lists “Ten Crime Novels You Must Read Before You Die,” which has Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key as number one (with mentions also of The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest) and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye as number two (followed by mentions of The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely). Hughes describes Hammett as “The Master—the JS Bach, the Louis Armstrong of crime fiction” and Chandler as “The greatest prose stylist in the genre. Romantic, lyrical and witty.” Even the title of the first collection of Irish crime writing and writing about Irish crime writing, Down These Green Streets, is a tribute to Chandler. Andrew Kincaid rightly notes that “the most striking aspect of many of these [Irish noir] novels is the conscious reference to American noir.”
  The American hardboiled is rife with contradictions: the outsider detective who on closer examination turns out to be a social insider; complicated attitudes toward the police (they are definitely stupid, possibly corrupt, but the detective works with them anyhow); and depictions of women, who are both the major threats to the detective and those he is dedicated to protecting. The Irish version of the genre compounds the contradictions. The Irish protagonists frequently criticize the Americanization of Ireland, from attitudes to accents, and yet they do so in the context of an American literary form in which the characters hold an American position.
  Although the fictional Irish private eyes resemble Hammett’s and Chandler’s solo professional detectives in their cynical attitudes and tough style of speech, their backstories offer a major difference—indeed, that they have backstories at all is a departure from the original formula. In the American hardboiled, the detectives are loners by choice and are depicted as free, a condition all the more attractive given the novels’ portrayals of most family relationships as poisonous. In contrast, the detectives in Irish novels are not so much free as they are miserably lonely; they are decidedly unfree, because permanently damaged by their own toxic family relationships.
  This departure from the conventions of the American hardboiled reflects Irish historical circumstances, and draws attention to the fundamental changes in the Irish national story that are central to the new Irish crime fiction. The lone male—the cowboy, the explorer, the one who lights out for the territory, leaving a feminized civilization behind—is an essential, heroic figure in American nation-building mythology. American hardboiled detectives are drenched in this mythology. In Irish cultural traditions, the solitary male figure is generally both unusual and pitiable. The lone male who stays in Ireland is a sad figure in popular culture, epitomized by the lonely bachelor on a farm. The most common association in Irish history with solitary males, however, is with emigration, evoking the thousands who left family and country behind, not fully by choice. The territory for which these men lit out was not open and liberating, but colonial and stifling.
  While it is true that the figure of the exile has complicated that picture in Irish literature at least since Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, that exile is of course always in another country, not Ireland itself. The most Irish Irishman is rural, settled, and as the constitution asserts, fully embedded in a family. These claims both reflect and reinforce social norms that prevailed for decades in Ireland. The hardboiled loners, with their miserable family histories, draw attention to a part of the story usually left out of the national mythology: that the Irish family may be “the necessary basis of social order” while at the same time being the locus of abuse, oppression, and misery. Perhaps, then, that social order is of a piece with its basis—abusive, oppressive, miserable, and dangerous—and therefore disruptions in it are in fact desirable, leading to a greater social good than would its restoration.
  The American hardboiled usually suggests something along these lines regarding about the ruling classes—one of many ways that the form is distinct from the British golden age mystery, in which the detective acts to restore order and can therefore be seen as an agent of the ruling classes. However, the American hardboiled detective consistently labors to restore two elements of the existing social order—restrictive gender and race roles—which complicates his supposed independence from the ruling classes and makes him complicit in their hegemony, a fact that the novels work hard to obscure.
  Late twentieth-century American feminist writers and writers of color—for example, Sara Paretsky, Marcia Muller, and Walter Mosley—have sought to intervene in the received trope of the hardboiled detective, revising both the solitariness and the class loyalties of the hardboiled detective. Their interventions cast further light on the Irish versions. In American feminist series featuring female detectives, the authors generally provide the detective with a backstory that explains her solitariness and that shows her creating a chosen family, outside the usual confines of the patriarchal nuclear family. A number of writers of color take this revision further by creating detectives who are extensively connected with their communities and who even often have primary responsibility for children, theirs by birth or adoption. Such revisions serve to highlight hardboiled ideology’s valorization of whiteness and masculinity while also calling into question received ideas about autonomy and freedom. In the Irish case, however, the revision does not challenge hardboiled ideology so much as it disputes the veracity of official Irish ideology. The detectives’ lives strongly suggest both that the family is the basis of a social order that has gone seriously wrong, and that the family unit itself is often far more damaging and dangerous than the official Irish story could ever admit. And yet, the Irish detectives long for family stability and regret their own solitariness, which imbues the five series discussed here with a peculiar nostalgia—one that consistently subverts their critiques of the Ireland now passing into history.
  A case in point is Hugo Hamilton’s truncated Pat Coyne series, which technically does not fit the private eye model, as Coyne is a member of Garda Síochána in the first book. But his status as a garda is incidental to the novels’ plots, in which Coyne essentially functions as a private eye. Hamilton’s Headbanger (1996) was the first Irish hardboiled novels; in it, Coyne imagines himself as protecting all and stopping crime though he is not very good at either task. Coyne has a number of obsessions, but “above all else, he was concerned with extinction; the disappearance of legendary people. Last men belonging to ancient and pure civilizations which had clashed with modernity. Men and women like the Blasket Islanders.” At one point, he thinks of his father, who moved to Dublin from West Cork “to claim his part in the making of a new Ireland.” (H34) Coyne sees the country changing again, and thinks that “all the new historical landmarks would be eclipsed by new outrageous shrines of crime”, (H34) mentioning a pedophile priest at a summer camp in Glendalough: “The sacred places of Irish history defiled by new atrocities” (H 34).
  The novel focuses on Coyne’s determination to bring down Berti “Drummer” Cunningham, a gangster, murderer, pimp, and drug dealer who has opened a nightclub and “was now transforming himself into a regular statesman” (H 70). This novel’s explicit concern with the “new Ireland” and the destruction of traditional Irishness corresponds very closely to American hardboiled fiction’s concerns about the “new” United States and loss of whiteness in the 1920s and 1930s seen in, for example, Dashiell Hammett’s “The House in Turk Street” and Raymond Chandler’s “Finger Man.” Pat Coyne is treated ironically in many ways, unlike the original hardboiled detectives, but the concern about social changes is handled entirely without irony: the novel repeatedly demonstrates that Pat is right to be worried. The threats to Irishness in this novel come not from the outside, but from traditional centers of authority: the corrupt hierarchy of the gardaí that allows Berti and his ilk to flourish, the church that shelters pedophiles, the ordinary Irish people who value money above traditional culture. Headbanger suggests that Ireland is fast becoming the fifty-first American state, and even a hard man like Coyne cannot stop the process.

  The second Coyne novel, Sad Bastard (1998), ratchets all these concerns up and places an immigration scam at the center of the plot. Many characters in the novel complain about immigrants—especially Eastern Europeans—but Coyne welcomes them, seeing them as returnees: “These were the Blasket Islanders coming back. The tide of emigration was turning. Here they were, the first of them—thousands who had fled poverty and were now returning at last.” But the reality is that they are not “returnees.” Coyne’s insistence on mistaking them in this way is ominous. His superficial openness to others, in fact, covers precisely the opposite: he does not welcome new people or a new Ireland, but wants a return to an old Ireland and to “authentic” Irishness. Coyne’s sentimentality regarding immigrants to Ireland stems from his fury with the “new” Ireland. In a shop on Grafton Street, he wonders, “What evolutionary platform had the Irish arrived at now. . . . Their identity was what they purchased. All around him tills were ringing, credit cards sliding, people making choices with great conviction” (SB 54). At the end of the novel, when the thugs have been sorted by Coyne, acting alone, he reflects that,

Maybe Ireland was not a real place at all but a country that existed only in the imagination. In the songs of emigrants. In the way people looked back from faraway places like Boston and Springfield, Massachusetts. Maybe it was just an aspiration. A place where stones and rocks had names and stories. Maybe this was the glorious end. The end of Ireland (SB 189–90).

  Of course Coyne is right in thinking that Ireland—like all nations—exists only in the imagination, but his ultimate resignation to the disappearance of his imaginary country, and his sentimentality, set him apart both from earlier tough-guy detectives and also from those of the hardboiled counter-traditions. Like the original hardboiled detectives, Coyne is positioned as an outsider and an independent thinker, at odds with most forms of authority. But the reality is that he is a social insider by virtue of gender, sexuality, and nationality. Also akin to those earlier detectives, Coyne is willing to engage in violence—even extreme violence—and is the only fully trustworthy character in the novels. In contrast to the hardboiled detectives of the counter-traditions, Coyne is nostalgic for a past that was, in fact, oppressive to many. It is not clear why Hamilton chose not to continue with the Pat Coyne series, but these two novels suggest a dead end: a hardboiled protagonist who is treated ironically, yet whose deeply conservative impulses we are meant to respect, with an embedded social critique that is also a plea for a return to an imaginary prelapsarian past. There is no place to go from there.
  These two novels serve as prequels, of a sort, to Irish noir—much of which, like Hamilton’s novels, only slightly adapts the conventions of the hardboiled tradition, offering a recapitulated version of the dominant discourse, as if the developments in the hardboiled in the last part of the twentieth century had never happened. Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor, Declan Hughes’s Ed Loy, and Declan Burke’s Harry Rigby are hard-drinking, and sometimes hard-drugging, tough guys who follow their own codes, determined to resist the Americanization of Ireland and to expose corruption among the powerful. Yet each one of these series reaches the kind of dead end that we see in Hamilton’s second book. Only Bruen has succeeded in writing past it, continuing his Jack Taylor series beyond Sanctuary (2010), a novel in which form and content engage in what reads like a final clash.
  The best-known of the contemporary Irish crime writers is Benjamin Black, the pen name of John Banville. His use of unrevised hardboiled conventions is persisting and unmistakable. His Quirke series—set about fifty years ago, and begun with Christine Falls, published in 2006—offers the innovation of a doctor (a pathologist named Quirke) as the central consciousness of the novels, but otherwise directly incorporates hardboiled conventions and is fully immersed in hardboiled ideology. Quirke, flawed as he undoubtedly is, the sole trustworthy character. Other of Banville’s novels, such as The Book of Evidence (1989), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Athena (1995), often focus on crime, and are both thematically and stylistically closely related to his work as Benjamin Black. However, the author insists that the Black novels differ from the Banville books; he describes the former as “cheap fiction” that he writes very quickly, in contrast to the novels he publishes under his own name—an assertion that infuriates other crime writers. Black adopts, entirely uncritically, the whole of hardboiled ideology, structure, and tropes; his embrace of a bygone tradition also explains why the novels are set in the 1950s instead of in a more contemporary period. The Quirke series is suffused with beliefs and attitudes, particularly regarding women, that would seem anachronistic in the twenty-first century. James Naremore has described the characteristic tough, cool voice of the hardboiled detective as the “Voice of Male Experience.” It might be more specifically identified as the voice of heterosexual, white, male American experience. Black’s Quirke is the voice of white, male, heterosexual, settled Irish experience in a period in which those terms equated with Irishness itself. Although those terms no longer suffice to describe Irishness, the Quirke series labors to reinstate only slightly revised versions of them.

  All the novels in the Quirke series revolve around the deep corruption of powerful Irish institutions. The alternative these novels offer to that corruption is a pseudo-outsider status embodied by Quirke that is presented as a more authentic version of Irishness than the Irishness that enabled such corruption in the first place. Maleness, whiteness, and heterosexuality are never interrogated in Black’s novels (nor in the American hardboiled). Quirke’s villains are those who pervert those categories—such as the child-molesting priest Fr. Honan in the sixth Quirke novel, Holy Orders (2013)—but the categories themselves are left unquestioned. The multiracial realities of contemporary Dublin are largely excluded from these novels, which are set in the past, before much immigration to Ireland. However, Holy Orders includes Traveller characters who appear in an entirely stereotypical way. The Travellers function much as the Asian characters operate in the American hardboiled: as mysterious, dangerous, unknowable, frightening Others who must be contained. Most dangerous of all is a Traveller woman whom Quirke finds deeply alluring. Holy Orders’s treatment of women parallels that of Hammett’s and Chandler; women appear as deadly threats to the detective, and by extension, to all of society.
  Unsurprisingly, then, instead of writing a seventh novel featuring Quirke, Black next produced a new work featuring Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s detective: The Black-Eyed Blonde (2014). The Black-Eyed Blonde is a logical step in Black’s dalliance with the hardboiled. From the start, Quirke has been as close to Marlowe as a character could be without actually being Marlowe. As many of the novels he has written as John Banville thoroughly critique some aspects of the past—the stranglehold of the church and of the rich on the rest of the nation, in particular, and the seemingly limitless government corruption that enables the powerful to do as they please—the lack of critique of the rigid gender roles of 1950s Ireland in his detective fiction is especially notable. Indeed, the Black novels are suffused with nostalgia for the womanly women and manly men of the 1950s.
  One question raised by the boom in Irish detective fiction is the very question of whether the investigators have any basis in reality. The hardboiled novel depends on at least a surface verisimilitude. Readers have to be willing to believe that there are private detectives at work in Ireland for the fictional detectives to gain our trust. Oddly enough, although there is certainly disposable income available to pay private detectives in Ireland, even post-bust, there is little public acknowledgment that such detectives work in the country.
  Early in his first Jack Taylor novel, The Guards (2001), Ken Bruen has his narrator protagonist explain that he is not actually a private investigator: “There are no private eyes in Ireland. The Irish wouldn’t wear it. The concept brushes perilously close to the hated ‘informer.’ You can get away with most anything except ‘telling’.” That widely shared view of the informer is sharply challenged by a character in another hardboiled novel. Declan Hughes has an Irish journalist comment bitterly on the influence of the Catholic church in pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, describing doctors as “The Church’s willing enforcers” and going on to claim that “If Ireland had been in the Eastern bloc, we would have been riddled with secret police. We’d’ve had more police than people. I love this thing that we’re supposed to hate informers, of all things, Jesus, we’d give up our own children so long as we could do it in secret.” Although Bruen’s Jack Taylor goes on to function as a professional private eye, taking payment for that work, he continues to insist to potential clients that he is not one. Of the four Irish hardboiled detectives, only one actually calls himself a detective: Declan Hughes’s Ed Loy, who became a professional private investigator during his nineteen years in the United States The others describe themselves variously as a “research consultant,” in the case of Declan Burke’s Harry Rigby, a “finder,” in the case of Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor, or define themselves primarily in terms of a different job, such as Quirke, a pathologist, or a former job, such as Pat Coyne, who has been dismissed from the gardaí. In contrast, the fictional American private eyes that serve as models for the contemporary Irish ones insist on their professional-
ism. They often mention their credentials in the course of their narratives, and they define themselves almost entirely by their jobs. Indeed, Dashiell Hammett’s character the Continental Op is so closely identified with the job that he remains nameless throughout the series.

  Hughes’s Ed Loy, the sole Irish hardboiled protagonist to think of himself as a private investigator, sounds a lot like Hammett’s Op when a client tries to fire him in The Wrong Kind of Blood (2006). He responds by defining the P.I.:

He’s too shabby and disreputable and hustle-a-buck ordinary to make the grade at your charity balls and grand-a-plate dinners, and that suits him fine, because that way, he can get on with what he’s been hired to do. That’s the only point of him really, like a dog that’s been bred to work, he can’t relax by sitting around. He’s got to be prying and poking and stirring things up until somehow, out falls the truth, or enough of it to make a difference.

  Later, a police investigator named Geraghty from the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation repeatedly challenges Ed about his right to work in Ireland because he is not licensed there (as a matter of fact, Ireland has no licensing system for investigators). Geraghty mocks the very idea of a private eye by using the clichés of the hardboiled genre: “A private dick, is it? Fast cars and bourbon chasers and a forty-five, what? Is that the way it is, Ed, shoot-outs and double-crosses and dames?” (WKB 231). Geraghty is crude and unsympathetic, but his straight-from-the-pages-of-American-fiction description of Ed’s life is not far off as a summary of The Wrong Kind of Blood.
  Each of Declan Hughes’s first four Ed Loy books roots its plot in a ripped-
from-the-headlines issue of Celtic Tiger Ireland: property development illegalities in The Wrong Kind of Blood, child sexual abuse and human trafficking in The Color of Blood, abuse in the industrial schools in The Dying Breed (2008) (published in the United States as The Price of Blood), and gangland activity by former paramilitaries in All the Dead Voices (2009). The fifth—and thus far, the last—Loy novel, City of Lost Girls (2010), links Los Angeles and Dublin through a psychopathic serial killer involved in the film industry.
  Hughes seems to have deliberately chosen the American hardboiled for the style of his crime novels, with Hammett and Chandler his literary models. Even his detective’s name—a loy is a long, narrow spade used in Ireland, perhaps most famously as the putative murder instrument in Synge’s Playboy—seems a nod to Hammett’s Sam Spade of The Maltese Falcon (1930). The second Loy novel, The Color of Blood, is an extended riff on Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep: it features a wealthy, deeply troubled family in which the patriarch—now dead, in the Hughes novel—is extremely powerful; spectacularly damaged adult children; a mentally ill character who acts out violently; a plot that turns on blackmail through pornographic photographs; connections with a crime syndicate; a helpful cop who is frustrated by his (possibly crooked) superiors and also by the detective’s behavior, and so on. The most direct reference to Chandler, though, is in Ed Loy’s extended descriptions of the Howard family home, which in many particulars, such as faux-medieval stained glass, strongly resembles Sternwood’s house in The Big Sleep. Rowan House, Loy tells us, “looked like a Victorian merchant’s idea of a baronial castle” (CB 63).
  In common with earlier hardboiled writers, Hughes devises plots that repeatedly demonstrate the close connections between the wealthy and powerful and the criminal underclass. In his novels, the wealthy are willing to do anything, including kill their own children, to hold onto their money, power, and cherished respectability. The Ed Loy novels, like their American hardboiled antecedents, insist on the utter corruption of the official power structure. The detective stands alone against that corruption, and endures as well as metes out tremendous violence—and always loses in the end. Or to be more precise, he generally solves the cases on which he is working, but the criminals are not brought to justice, nor is there a sense that Ed’s intervention has made any lasting difference in straightening out the crookedness of the world. Like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Ed is a romantic, a knight errant to whom his cases are more than jobs. When a client turns out to be unworthy of Ed’s services, Loy chooses his own idea of justice over completing his work. As he says in the opening sentence of the second novel, “The last case I worked, I found a sixteen-year-old girl for her father; when she told me what he had done to her, I let her stay lost” (CB 3).
  Also like Hammett’s and Chandler’s detectives, Ed Loy is essentially a loner. Hughes, unlike his American models, sketches in his background to explain that solitariness: his father disappeared when Ed was a teen (Ed finds out in the first novel that the father was murdered) and Ed caught his mother with another man. Ed, we are told, went to the United States and did not return to Ireland until after his mother’s death. In the first novel, he is back in Dublin for his mother’s funeral but fully intends to return to California—significantly, Hammett and Chandler territory—which he thinks of as a place that lets one start over, “be whoever you wanted to be,” unlike Dublin, “where everyone was someone’s brother or cousin or ex-girlfriend and no one would give you a straight answer, where my da knew your da and yours knew mine, where the past was always waiting around the next corner to ambush you” (WKB 115). Complicating this view of California is the fact that he has left behind there an ex-wife whom he still loves, and with whom he suffered through the death of their small daughter—although Ed learned he was not her biological father when a transfusion was needed and his wife said his blood would not be a match. Loy can no longer in fact be “whoever [he] wanted to be” in either Dublin or California.
  Like Ed Loy, none of the other protagonists in these Irish hardboiled novels is entirely separate from family entanglements—although each is a loner, either by temperament or circumstances, or else distanced from his family in opposition to his own desires. Hamilton’s Pat Coyne desperately wants to be a regular family man and even sees himself as a “father figure to the city of Dublin” (H 1), but he does not understand his wife, Carmen. By the start of the second novel, Sad Bastard, they are separated, with their two daughters living with Carmen in the family house and Coyne living with his son, Jimmy—a drug-using petty criminal—in a depressing flat. Declan Burke’s Harry Rigby’s parents are dead; his brother Gonzo is a psychopathic criminal who Harry ends up shooting in Eight Ball Boogie (2003) to protect his son, who is actually that brother’s son by Harry’s wife and Gonzo’s ex-girlfriend. Bruen’s Jack Taylor frequently thinks about his dead father, who like Jack himself was the target of Jack’s deeply cruel, deeply pious mother’s endless wrath. As Bruen’s series opens Jack and his mother are estranged, with the mother appearing every once in a while to castigate Jack or sending her emissary, the local parish priest, to do so for her. She dies in one of the early novels unmourned by Jack. Jack is briefly married during the course of the series, but that marriage, and every other romantic relationship he has, is eventually destroyed by his drinking and drug use. Benjamin Black’s Quirke has an exceptionally complicated set of family relationships: an adoptive father who rescued him from a nightmarish orphanage and then evidently favored him above his biological son; an impossible, enduring love for that adoptive brother’s wife; and a biological daughter who has been raised by her uncle to think that Quirke is her uncle.
  Quirke was married but his wife—the sister of the woman he really loves—died. Unsurprisingly, his romantic relationships, too, tend to be limited and ultimately unhappy. Quirke’s work as a pathologist seems chosen to fit with his personality: he is more comfortable with the dead and with silence than he is with most relationships with living human beings. This litany of damage and loss in the lives of the Irish detectives is one of the subgenre’s most notable departures from the model of American hardboiled, in which the protagonists tend to be atomized and immune to human involvement—although the end point may be similar, with solitary detectives alienated from most ordinary human relationships.
  The detectives’ own family situations, troubled as they are, are frequently less disastrous than those they encounter during the course of their investigations. The few intact families the novels include are usually held together by lies and secrets or bound to each other by violence and criminality, or both. For instance, Ed Loy’s chief nemeses in Hughes’s series are gangster brothers, the Halligans, who are both terrifyingly violent and deeply loyal to each other. In the pantheon of disturbed and disturbing families in the Irish hardboiled, one of the most intriguing is the Hamilton family in Declan Burke’s second Harry Rigby book, Slaughter’s Hound (2012). The upper-class Hamilton family includes Harry’s friend Finn, Finn’s adoptive mother, and his now-dead adoptive father, as well as a young woman who believes herself to be Finn’s also-adopted sister but is in fact his child with his mother. As an adolescent, Finn supposedly witnessed his father’s suicide but we learn that Finn actually murdered him. Finn and his mother’s ex-lover are involved in a scam in which they copy original paintings and then sell both the copy and the original. Their criminal enterprise creates an even tighter bond than their familial relationships. That tangled family story is only slightly messier than Harry’s own; significantly, he and Finn met when they shared a cell in a hospital for the criminally insane, to which Harry was remanded after killing his brother at the end of the first Rigby book, Eight Ball Boogie.
  Burke cleaves closely to his American models in several ways. Harry’s narration of the two novels, for instance, evokes the spare, cool, ironic, self-deprecating voice of Chandler’s Marlowe novels, most directly when Harry reminds us of his injuries while downplaying them, as in this moment from Eight Ball Boogie:

I dug the Maalox out of my pocket, poured the contents down a drain, threw the empty bottle into the river. I was going to need all the pain I could get, just to keep me sane. The bottle bobbed away towards the bend and the bridge, heading for the open sea. I bade it bon voyage and told it to watch out for icebergs.

  Burke takes no chance that we might we miss Harry’s connection to his American predecessors. Harry evokes them directly several times, as when he describes a thug as looking “like Bogey spoofing on Edward G. Robinson” (EBB 246). Most jarring in twenty-first century novels are Harry’s extremely biased attitudes toward women and gay men, attitudes that the novels’ plots reinforce by positioning women and gay men as major threats to society. In the Rigby books, all women are dangerous, either directly (a property developer’s wife, Helen Conway, in Eight Ball Boogie, turns out to be the head of a criminal enterprise) or through their sexual appeal, as was the case with Harry’s wife—which leads men into trouble, as in the American hardboiled tradition of the spiderwoman. The most prominent gay character in the Rigby novels is Detective-Inspector Galway, who Harry variously describes as a “fruit” (EBB 100), a “pederast” (EBB 226), “the fag” (EBB 226, 227), and “the fairy” (EBB 270). When Harry first sees Galway—and well before he knows Galway is crooked—he describes him as “dapper” and concludes, “he was a fruit, a banana, bent for sure but so yellow about it people didn’t really notice” (EBB 100). That the “bent” guard turns out to be “a cop bent all ways up” (EBB 233) implies that Harry’s prejudice against gay men is rooted in some kind of truth, that they are major threats to social order.
  Notable, too, is Harry’s use of “yellow” to describe Galway’s gayness, as it calls to mind the “Yellow Peril” discourse that so many of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories call upon, in which the “yellow” character is the brains behind a criminal enterprise and is often also described as not heterosexual, somehow less “masculine” than the white detective. This use of sexist, racist, and heterosexist patterns from the American hardboiled in Irish novels written nearly a century later not only ties the contemporary novels to their models, but also limits their critique of twenty-first-century Irish social problems, by suggesting that the solution would be a return to a time when women and gay men stayed in their subordinate places. And yet, the logic breaks down quickly. It is precisely those old social roles and systems of power that led to the social and political mess that the Rigby novels tackle.
  In Burke’s novels, all members of the official criminal justice system are crooked, no one can be trusted, and no one is safe. The moral bankruptcy of the old authorities is abetted by the general public’s lack of interest in setting things right. The politician at the center of the property scandal Harry exposes during the course of Eight Ball Boogie will probably suffer no damage to his image or career. He may not be re-elected, but he has a bright future in corporate directorships. Even Brady, the guard in Eight Ball Boogie with whom Harry eventually collaborates to catch Galway, the crooked cop who for many years has been stealing drugs and selling them, is motivated less by a righteous commitment to justice than he is by his own aggrieved sense that he should be making more money and enjoying a higher rank. Brady is interested in exposing Galway primarily because Galway stands in the way of his own promotion. Further, Brady is willing to subvert the law in order to get what he wants; he does not participate in the drug ring, but he does falsify evidence, including planting a gun on Galway and making sure it carries Galway’s fingerprints instead of Harry’s. Brady’s bitterness about the sorry state of Irish society and the bankruptcy of traditional authority is meant to explain his disregard for the law; he feels justified in using any tactic to bring down the bad guys and evidently is untroubled by his own criminal behavior. He tells Harry a story about his saving the life of a junkie who shortly thereafter killed an old woman while robbing her, concluding,

That’s what’s wrong with this fucking hole of a country, no one gives a fuck, someone else’ll take care of it. Then the shit comes down and you come looking to me, expecting me to give a fuck. Well, I give a fuck, Rigby. Fuck you, that’s the fuck I give. I’m ten years in this gig, haven’t moved up since the junkie offed the granny. Galway’s job’ll pay the bills and a whole lot more besides. All you give me is a pain in the hole. (EBB 238)

  Burke’s two Harry Rigby books push the hardboiled to its limits, taking every familiar convention to its logical extreme endpoint. The violence that is so much a part of the American hardboiled manifests in Burke’s series as extreme violence, often beyond what even Mickey Spillane concocted. Harry is the target of much of that violence, but he also metes it out in ways that seem only tenuously related to hardboiled ideology. His violence is more akin to a sort of frenzied, hopeless vengeance. Burke’s detective does not prove his own superior toughness through enduring and dispensing violent assaults; instead, he demonstrates his own impotence. Indeed, Slaughter’s Hound ends with Harry evidently bleeding to death, away from any possible help. In a 2013 interview, Burke asserted that he wanted the series to employ the “classic tropes of 1930s stuff” in an Irish setting; this ending seems far away indeed from the classic hardboiled ending.

  The reality is that, as the Rigby books inadvertently illustrate, those tropes cannot simply be transplanted and then operate precisely the same way in their new Irish context as they did in their old American one. Instead, the new context alters how those tropes—corrupt authority conspiring with the wealthy to subvert the law, dangerous women, greed, violence, a romantic solitary investigator committed to his own ideal of justice and so on—may be deployed, and therefore fundamentally changes what they mean. The detectives in the American hardboiled often prevail against a specific criminal while recognizing both that damage done cannot be undone and that the particular case or cases they have resolved make little difference in the bigger scheme of things, which continues along a crooked path despite their efforts. But the American hardboiled is also imbued with a sense of something worth saving in the American national story, and as a whole, the novels of Chandler, Hammett, and similar writers suggests that the struggle against the forces of evil is not hopeless. In contrast, the two Rigby books suggest that the Irish national situation is hopeless and that anyone who tries to put things right is destined for destruction. Among the many ways that Burke pushes the boundaries of the hardboiled is by endangering the detective’s own child, Ben, who is in fact killed late in Slaughter’s Hound when Harry is driven off the road by a man he has believed to be dead. Ben’s death emphasizes that bleakness, serving as a warning about the fate of innocents in the new Ireland: there is no future for them there at all.
  These contradictions in the Irish hardboiled help to explain why most of the series stall out. The lives and attitudes of the Irish detectives become bleaker and bleaker, with everything eventually stripped away. Their loved ones, including children, die senseless deaths in most of these series—a fate the American hard-boiled avoided by not allowing the detectives any loved ones. There is no place for the detectives, or their series, to go. Benjamin Black may choose to keep the Quirke series alive, as it is lodged in the past—but it is hard to see what he might find worth saving in the Irishness the series has depicted as irredeemable. Ken Bruen has continued to write beyond the logical ending of the Jack Taylor series in Sanctuary. But Bruen project has devolved, in the later books. into an outright attack on everything Irish: gone are the earlier books’ attempts at redefinition, at scuttling the corrupt institutions, but holding out the possibility that the new Irishness might be more inclusive and less harshly judgmental than its bygone variants. Indeed, the devil himself appears in Ireland in a late Bruen novel and no one but Jack Taylor seems to notice: in Bruen’s universe, Satan is not much worse than everyone else and fits right in to Irish society. In the Irish hardboiled thus far, redefining Irishness proves to be impossible. It remains an empty category, and will continue to be in this genre until the Irish writers forswear their fealty to the American hardboiled.

  This paper was first published in the New Hibernia Review ©

Introduction: BOOKS TO DIE FOR, ed. John Connolly and Declan Burke

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that BOOKS TO DIE FOR (Hodder & Stoughton) is being reissued in paperback; last week, the Irish Times was kind enough to carry the book’s Introduction. To wit:

Why does the mystery novel enjoy such enduring appeal? There is no simple answer. It has a distinctive capacity for subtle social commentary; a concern with the disparity between law and justice; and a passion for order, however compromised. Even in the vision of the darkest of mystery writers, it provides us with a glimpse of the world as it might be, a world in which good men and women do not stand idly by and allow the worst aspects of human nature to triumph without opposition. It can touch upon all these aspects of itself while still entertaining the reader – and its provision of entertainment is not the least of its many qualities.
  But the mystery novel has always prized character over plot, which may come as some surprise to its detractors. True, this is not a universal tenet: there are degrees to which mysteries occupy themselves with the identity of the criminal as opposed to, say, the complexities of human motivation. Some, such as the classic puzzle mystery, tend towards the former; others are more concerned with the latter. But the mystery form understands that plot comes out of character, and not just that: it believes that the great mystery is character.
  If we take the view that fiction is an attempt to find the universal in the specific, to take individual human experiences and try to come to some understanding of our common nature through them, then the question at the heart of all novels can be expressed quite simply as ‘Why?’ Why do we do the things that we do? It is asked in Bleak House just as it is asked in The Maltese Falcon. It haunts The Pledge as it does The Chill. But the mystery novel, perhaps more than any other, not only asks this question; it attempts to suggest an answer to it as well.
  But where to start? There are so many from which to choose, even for the knowledgeable reader who has already taken to swimming in mystery’s dark waters, and huge numbers of new titles appear on our bookshelves each week. It is hard to keep up with authors who are alive, and those who are deceased are at risk of being forgotten entirely. There are treasures to be found, and their burial should not be permitted, even if there are some among these authors who might have been surprised to find themselves remembered at all, for they were not writing for the ages.
  And so, quite simply, we decided to give mystery writers from around the world the opportunity to enthuse about their favourite novel, and in doing so we hoped to come up a selection of books that was, if not definitive (which would be a foolish and impossible aim), then heartfelt, and flawless in its inclusions if not its omissions. What we sought from each of the contributors to this volume was passionate advocacy: we wanted them to pick one novel, just one, that they place in the canon. If you found them in a bar some evening, and the talk turned (as it almost inevitably would) to favorite writers, it would be the single book that each writer would press upon you, the book that, if there was time and the stores were still open, they would leave the bar in order to purchase for you, so they could be sure they had done all in their power to ensure it was read by you.
  While this volume is obviously ideal for dipping into when you have a quiet moment, enabling you to read an essay or two before moving on, there is also a pleasure to be had from the slow accumulation of its details. Reading through the book chronologically, as we have done during the editing process, patterns begin to emerge, some anticipated, some less so. There is, of course, the importance of the great Californian crime writers – Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and James M. Cain – to the generations of writers who have followed and, indeed, to each other: so Macdonald’s detective, Lew Archer, takes his name in part from Sam Spade’s murdered partner in The Maltese Falcon, while Chandler builds on Hammett, and then Macdonald builds on Chandler but also finds himself being disparaged by the older author behind his back, adding a further layer of complication to their relationship. But the writer who had the greatest number of advocates was not any of these men: it was the Scottish author Josephine Tey, who is a crucial figure to a high number of the female contributors to this book.
  Or one might take the year 1947: it produces both Dorothy B. Hughes’ In a Lonely Place, in which the seeds of what would later come to be called the serial killer novel begin to germinate, and Mickey Spillane’s I, The Jury. Both are examinations of male rage – although Spillane is probably more correctly considered as an expression of it – and both come out of the aftermath of the Second World War, when men who had fought in Europe and Asia returned home to find a changed world, a theme that is also touched on in Margery Allingham’s 1952 novel, The Tiger in the Smoke. The pulp formula in the US also adapted itself to these changes in post-war society, which resulted in the best work of writers such as Jim Thompson, Elliott Chaze and William McGivern, all of whom are considered in essays in this book.
  Finally, it’s interesting to see how often different writers, from Ed McBain to Mary Stewart, Newton Thornburg to Leonardo Padura, assert the view that they are, first and foremost, novelists. The mystery genre provides a structure for their work – the ideal structure – but it is extremely malleable, and constantly open to adaptation: the sheer range of titles and approaches considered here is testament to that.
  To give just one example: there had long been female characters at the heart of hard-boiled novels, most frequently as femmes fatales or adoring secretaries, but even when women were given central roles as detectives, the novels were written, either in whole or in part, by men: Erle Stanley Gardner’s Bertha Cool (created under the pseudonym A.A. Fair), who made her first appearance in 1939; Dwight W. Babcock’s Hannah Van Doren; Sam Merwin Jr.’s Amy Brewser; Will Oursler and Margaret Scott’s Gale Gallagher (all 1940s); and, perhaps most famously, Forrest and Gloria Fickling’s Honey West in the 1950s.
  But at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, a number of female novelists, among them Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, but also Amanda Cross and, in her pair of Cordelia Gray novels, PD James, found in the hard-boiled mystery novel a means of addressing issues affecting women, including violence (particularly sexual violence), victimization, power imbalances, and gender conflicts. They did so by questioning, altering, and subverting the established traditions in the genre, and, in the process, they created a new type of female writing. The mystery genre accommodated them without diminishing the seriousness of their aims, or hampering the result, and it did so with ease. It is why so many writers, even those who feel themselves to be working outside the genre, have chosen to introduce elements of it into their writing, and why this anthology can accommodate such a range of novelists, from Dickens to Dürrenmatt, and Capote to Crumley.
  But this volume also raises the question of what constitutes a mystery – or, if you prefer, a crime novel. (The terms are often taken as interchangeable, but ‘mystery’ is probably a more flexible, and accurate, description given the variety within the form. Crime may perhaps be considered the catalyst, mystery the consequence.) Genre, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder, but one useful formulation may be that, if one can take the crime out of the novel and the novel does not collapse, then it’s probably not a crime novel; but if one removes the crime element and the novel falls apart, then it is. It is interesting, though, to note that just as every great fortune is said to hide a great crime, so too many great novels, regardless of genre, have a crime at their heart. The line between genre fiction and literary fiction (itself a genre, it could be argued) is not as clear as some might like to believe.
  In the end, those who dismiss the genre and its capacity to permit and encourage great writing, and to produce great literature, are guilty not primarily of snobbery – although there may be an element of that – but of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of fiction and genre’s place in it. There is no need to splice genre into the DNA of fiction, literary or otherwise: it is already present. The mystery genre is both a form and a mechanism. It is an instrument to be used. In the hands of a bad writer, it will produce bad work, but great writers can make magic from it. ~ John Connolly and Declan Burke, Dublin, 2012

This piece was first published in the Irish Times.

Review: THE POLKA DOT GIRL by Darragh McManus

Hera City, the setting for Darragh McManus’s The Polka Dot Girl, is a very unusual place. On the surface it resembles countless cities to be found in American-influenced hardboiled detective fiction, being sleazy at its heart and increasingly affluent the further you move out into the suburbs. Its lower social reaches teem with crooks and cops, prostitutes, drunks and drug addicts, all of whom are preyed upon by the corrupt politicians and wealthy business folk who gaze down on the city from their position of privilege like so many vultures anticipating their next feast. So far, so conventional – but what gives this novel a notable twist is that Hera City is entirely populated by women.
  The story is told by Hera City Police Department detective Eugenie ‘Genie’ Auf der Maur, who investigates the murder of Madeleine Greenhill, a young woman found floating in Hera City’s docks wearing a polka dot dress. Ambitious and conscientious, Genie is in her second year as a detective and keen to prove herself, not least because Madeleine Greenhill is the only daughter of Hera City’s most feared woman, the matriarch Misericordiae ‘Misery’ Greenhill.
  Struggling to compensate for her inexperience and lack of self-confidence, Genie initially finds herself grasping after shadows in Hera City’s labyrinth. Surviving an assassin’s attempted hit has the perverse effect of steadying Genie’s nerves, however, not least because it tips her off that Maddy Greenhill’s death was not a straightforward tragedy of a young woman in the wrong place at the wrong time, but a more sinister affair engineered by a powerful cabal with secrets to hide.
  It’s an intriguing set-up, and Genie makes for a very charming narrator. The book’s cover blurb suggests that we can anticipate ‘Sam Spade in lipstick and a dress’ but Genie, by her own admission an extremely petite example of a HCPD detective, is a much more vulnerable and sensitive character than Dashiell Hammett’s Spade or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, both of whom are strong influences on her hardboiled patter.
  Indeed, McManus and Genie establish their hardboiled credentials early in the story, as Genie leaves the Greenhill mansion after informing Misery of her daughter’s murder. “I drove straight home,” Genie tells us, “listening to a jazz station on the car radio. Sure, it’s a cliché – the wiped-out cop, in the middle of the night, driving through the dark streets with clarinets and cymbals in her ears, a smoke in her mouth and a fresh murder on her hands. All it was missing was the rain. But hey, I never said I was original. Besides, I’m a sucker for the classic stuff.”
  That ‘classic stuff’ extends to the way in which The Polka Dot Girl mirrors the narrative arc of much of hardboiled detective fiction, as Genie pulls on the thread of a street-level murder only to find that the unravelling runs all the way up to the highest echelons of society, laying bare its greed, corruption and immorality.
  This, despite the quirky setting of Hera City, is familiar territory for the crime fiction aficionado, and if you’re willing to buy into Genie’s knowing self-awareness of her place in crime writing mythology, then The Polka Dot Girl is an enjoyably offbeat take on the post-modern mystery novel. It’s overtly old-fashioned, and not only in the way it taps into the roots of the contemporary hardboiled crime genre. McManus litters the story with references to classical Greek tragedy and mythology: the obligatory femme fatale is called Cassandra, while geographical locations are given names such as Pasiphaë Prospect and Hecate Point. At the heart of the tale lies a religious cult which worships the moon goddess and appears to be derived from the Eleusinian Mysteries of Ancient Greece, a cult in which only women were indoctrinated.
  It all makes for very pleasant meta-fiction cross-pollination, but what Darragh McManus is trying to achieve with his plethora of classical references and his women-only city is never made explicit. Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky are probably the best known of the authors who have adapted the hardboiled private detective voice, and created feminist heroines who take on men – and more importantly, perhaps, a historically male-dominated genre – to succeed on their own terms. McManus adapts the same tone – albeit one that’s painfully self-aware of its fictional history – to a woman-only narrative, but Genie’s investigation of the prevailing culture ultimately reveals that the female of the species is no more or less deadly than the male. Meanwhile, and despite the unique setting, the patriarchal origins of the language remain the same: the detectives are still known as ‘Dicks’, a prostitute’s client remains a ‘John’. A crucial plot-point requires a prostitute to be beaten almost to death by a group of (female) clients, only to find herself somehow pregnant when she emerges from the subsequent coma.
  It’s arguable that McManus, who has a palpable affection for the tropes of the classic hardboiled novel, is simply retaining the linguistic conventions – fans of Black Mask-era pulp fiction, for example, will be delighted to find a hired killer referred to as a ‘gunsel’. It’s also true that McManus, in his career to date, has been more engaged with playing with the genre’s tropes than reinventing the wheel – his debut Cold! Steel!! Justice!!! (2010), published under the pseudonym Alexander O’Hara, was a spoof of Mickey Spillane-style masculinity, while Even Flow (2012) featured a trio of vigilantes waging war on society’s homophobes and misogynists.
  All told, there’s a nagging sense throughout that McManus has missed a trick by not recalibrating his narrator’s voice and language in order to make the most of Hera City’s unique setting. That said, The Polka Dot Girl is a very interesting addition to the growing canon of Irish crime writing which confirms Darragh McManus’s promise. - Declan Burke

Black Ops

It took me a couple of books before I began warming to the Benjamin Black novels, but at this point it feels like John Banville has grown into the persona of his crime-writing alter-ego Benny Blanco and – whisper it – may even be enjoying the process. I reviewed the latest Benjamin Black novel, HOLY ORDERS (Mantle), as part of the latest crime fiction column in the Irish Times, which also includes Sara Paretsky’s BREAKDOWN, Benjamin Tammuz’s MINOTAUR and Marco Vichi’s DEATH IN FLORENCE. For more, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, if you’re in Dublin city next Wednesday evening, June 12th, John Banville / Benjamin Black will be taking part in a Q&A with Olivia O’Leary at the Smock Alley Theatre. To wit:

Writers at Smock Alley – John Banville as Benjamin Black in conversation with Olivia O’Leary
Venue: The Smock Alley Theatre
Date: Wednesday 12th June – 6pm until 7pm

The Gutter Bookshop are delighted to announce the second event in a new series of author events with their neighbours, the Smock Alley Theatre 1662. Join them in this beautiful and unique theatre to meet bestselling Irish novelist John Banville who will be discussing his new Benjamin Black crime novel Holy Orders with journalist and broadcaster Olivia O’Leary, as well as the new Quirke television series, and the film version of his Booker Prize winning book The Sea. A book signing will take place after the event.

Tickets cost €5 and available from Smock Alley Theatre (01 6770014) or the Gutter Bookshop (01 6799206).

World Book Night: And Miles To Read Before I Sleep …

You may or may not know that tonight is World Book Night, in which tons of books are given away free to stimulate reading. A good idea, I think, no matter how you look at it.
  Naturally, being something of a contrarian, I decided that it’d be nice notion to look into the possibility of an Alternative World Book Night - i.e., to ask a number of writers, poets et al to nominate a recently published book that they consider to be unjustly overlooked by the critics and public alike. The result was published in the Irish Times on Saturday, with the most fascinating / totally bonkers answer coming from poet David Lordan. To wit:

CYCLONOPEDIA: COMPLICITY WITH ANONYMOUS MATERIALS
By Reza Negarestani (re.press, 2008)
“I’d like to plump for the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani’s genre-bending ‘Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials’. It’s one for active readers and fans of “difficult work”. A continuously inventive and artistically ambitious work that, like many great literary refoundations, is simultaneously a reimagining of reality and a reorientating of literature against currently dominant trends. Negarestani draws on a polyglot engagement with contemporary theory and on a schizophrenic, inhumanist literary heritage including Lovecraft, Stein, Burroughs and Pynchon, to give us an astounding depiction of history as a minor subplot within a struggle of much older, more vast forces. Cyclonopedia refreshed my paranoia and left me more doubtful and contemptuous of things-as-they-are than ever before, something the most sustaining works of art have always done for me.” - David Lordan

  For the rest, which includes nominations from George Pelecanos, Aifric Campbell, Nuala Ní Chonchúir, China Miéville, Sara Paretsky, Mark Billingham and more, clickety-click here …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: McGilloway, Paretsky, Nadelson, Hiaasen and Fitzgerald

The latest of my monthly crime fiction columns for the Irish Times appeared yesterday, featuring Brian McGilloway, Sara Paretsky, Reggie Nadelson, Carl Hiaasen and Conor Fitzgerald. It ran a lot like this:

Brian McGilloway has established a strong reputation with his Donegal-set series of Inspector Devlin novels, but LITTLE GIRL LOST (Macmillan, £12.99) is a standalone set in Derry, featuring DS Lucy Black of the PSNI. While investigating a case of a missing teenager, Black discovers a younger girl wandering through a snowstorm in her pyjamas. Her reward is an unwanted transfer to the Public Protection Unit, although Black has more pressing, personal concerns: she is the prime carer for her father, a former RUC officer who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, while her ultimate superior is her mother, who walked out on Lucy’s family some decades previously. Effortlessly blending Black’s personal woes into her professional life, McGilloway weaves a taut police procedural in an unadorned style that belies the story’s complexity. With a backdrop provided by the PSNI’s ongoing evolution as a police force, and the tension inherent in the force’s attempts to police a vibrant Derry that is in the process of shaking off the shackles of its recent history, McGilloway has tapped into a fascinating and febrile setting. Black, meanwhile, is reminiscent of Jane Casey’s DC Maeve Kerrigan, a painfully self-conscious but thoroughly competent young woman whose ability to do her job has very little do with her gender. All told, it’s an impressive statement of intent from an author whose reputation grows with each successive release.
  BLOOD COUNT (Atlantic Books, £12.99) is the ninth in Reggie Nadelson’s series of Artie Cohen novels, in which the hardboiled cop investigates a series of unusual deaths in an upmarket Harlem apartment building. The fact that Artie’s on-off love interest Lily appears to be implicated in the deaths complicates matters, and renders Artie something of an ambiguous narrator, which in turn gives the reader a delicious frisson of being party to the subversion of both law and morality Nadelson unveils. It’s an issue-driven novel, as Nadelson invokes the recent history of the Soviet Union’s collapse, sleeper agents, and the complicated relationship between Communist Russia and the historically dispossessed African-Americans. The story takes place in the wake of Barack Obama’s election, which has the benefit of investing the historical elements with a contemporary immediacy, but there are times when Nadelson forsakes Artie Cohen’s hardnosed realism in order to hammer home a political message. The net result is a potentially enthralling snapshot of melting-pot New York that is at times undermined by the author’s digressions into the realms of polemic.
  Sara Paretsky is no less issue-driven in BODY WORK (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99), the 14th novel to feature her iconic private eye, VI ‘Vic’ Warshawski. An artist’s right to portray herself onstage as she sees fit leads to the murder of a young woman, and Warshawski’s investigations subsequently uncover a conspiracy of silence generated by corporate giant Tintrey, a firm which offers security consultancy in Iraq. The consequences of sending unprepared and poorly outfitted men and women to war becomes a major theme, but Paretsky is too canny to allow her political concerns to dominate the narrative at the expense of pace, story and character. Warshawski, nearing 50, is a self-described feminist and street-fighter, a very modern woman who nonetheless harks back to the classic knight errants of private detective lore, as originally created by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. The mix is a potent one, and BODY WORK confirms, yet again, Paretsky’s status as one of the great crime authors of her generation.
  STAR ISLAND (Sphere, £14.99) is Carl Hiaasen’s 12th adult crime novel, a blackly comic caper that features his recurring anti-hero Skink, the former Florida governor who now lives half-wild in the Everglades. A multi-character tale, it centres on wild-child pop star Cherry Pye and her ‘undercover stunt double’, Ann DeLuisa, who impersonates Cherry when the star is too befuddled with drugs and booze to function. Blackmail, kidnap and violence enter the picture when a sleazy paparazzo gets Cherry in his sights, and soon Hiaasen is merrily plumbing the sludgy depths of modern America as he pops off deadpan zingers at a host of targets, most notably the puddle-shallow cult of celebrity. Despite the many and (deliberately) implausible twists and turns, STAR ISLAND sticks to Hiaasen’s tried and trusted formula, delivering a polished comedy that will delight newcomers and satisfy established fans.
  Set in Rome, featuring an American-born Italian police detective, and written by an Irishman, THE FATAL TOUCH (Bloomsbury, £11.99) is Conor Fitzgerald’s sequel to last year’s debut, THE DOGS OF ROME. Commissioner Alec Blume investigates the murky world of art forgery, aided and abetted by his colleague Caterina Mattiola, former policeman Beppe Paolini, the mysterious Colonel Farenelli, and the memoirs left behind by a dead forger, the Irish artist-in-exile Henry Treacy. Beautifully written, the story proceeds at a stately pace which disguises an exquisitely complex plot, as Blume delicately negotiates the labyrinth that is Roman policing. Blume himself is a loner, an outsider and a potential alcoholic, but Fitzgerald cleverly reworks the police procedural’s conventions, much as the forger Treacy pays homage to the Old Masters, and makes a distinctive hero of Blume, particularly in terms of his ability to not only adjust to the corruption that is integral to Italian policing, but to employ it on his own terms. Chief among Blume’s virtues is his laconic sense of humour, which gives rise to deliciously dry and deadpan observations on virtually every page, most of them at Blume’s expense. Meanwhile, Treacy’s memoirs provide a secondary narrative strand that is equally compelling, and which neatly feed into the main story despite Treacy’s penchant for baroque and self-serving prose. The blend results in a scintillating novel that confirms and enhances Fitzgerald’s burgeoning reputation. - Declan Burke

  This column first appeared in the Irish Times.

The Other Clones Cyclone

There’s about five hundred reasons for getting along to the Clones Flat Lake Festival this coming weekend, given that it’s chock-a-block with events musical, literary and film-related – although I have to say that my favourite will very probably be the 30-second disco. Hard on the heels of that will be the crime writing panel, which will feature Brian McGilloway (right), Declan Hughes and Some Chancer, Esq., aka Your Humble Host, all under the watchful eye of Eoin McNamee, who will be asking some very easy questions that – given the panel takes place on Sunday, after the frolics and of The Night Before – we can only hope will require no answering at all.
  Those all important details: The Flat Lake Festival is co-hosted by Patrick McCabe and Kevin Allen, and will take place in Clones, Co. Monaghan, from Friday 14th to Sunday 16th of August. For more, clickety-click here …
  And while we’re on the topic of book-related jamborees, the Books 2009 Festival takes place from September 10th to 13th in Dublin’s fair city. The crime fic element alone is worth the price of admission: the line-up includes John Connolly, Sara Paretsky, The Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman, Declan Hughes, Arlene Hunt, Gene Kerrigan, Paul Williams, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Brian McGilloway, Tom Rob Smith, Mandasue Heller, Stuart Neville, Alan Glynn, Ava McCarthy, Alex Barclay, Some Chancer, Esq., and – save the best ’til last – JOHN MCFETRIDGE! Who will, no doubt, be sporting a Montreal Bluestars basketball cap. Or something.
  Incidentally, John Banville will also be appearing at the festival, but as John Banville, to promote his new novel, THE INFINITIES. So there’s probably not much chance that he’ll bump into Ruth Dudley Edwards. Boo.
  For the running schedule, clickety-click here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 1,004: Sara Paretsky

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
THE POISON ORACLE. Such a sophisticated weaving together of layers of story; Peter Dickinson shows a mastery of linguistics, the Arab world, primate behaviour, and the painful life of his loner protagonist that the book is a tour de force in any genre.
What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Georgia Strangeways (I’m assuming this is in crime fiction).
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Delano Ames.
Most satisfying writing moment?
When I got the author copies of my first novel.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
I have to pass on this one because I’m woefully ignorant about Irish crime fiction. I like John Connolly and Ken Bruen very much, but I need to explore some of the other people on Declan’s blog.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
John Connolly’s THE BLACK ANGEL is crying for a film!
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worse thing about being a writer: constant anxiety. The best thing: getting to go to work in your underwear (my last job I had to wear pantyhose -- and a skirt).
The pitch for your next book is …?
The search for a missing man leads V.I. Warshawski back to the turbulent days of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago and forces her to question her beloved father’s role in some of the most despicable acts of the Chicago Police force.
Who are you reading right now?
VANITY FAIR and DEATH OF A FELLOW TRAVELER by Delano Ames.
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I quit.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Insightful. Witty. Literate.

Sara Paretsky’s BLEEDING KANSAS is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

A hat-tip to the Book Witch for putting us in touch with Sara …

“You Charm Us To Sorrow.” Irish Crime Fiction: A CrimeSpree Appraisal

Last week we wrote a feature article for the Evening Herald to a pretty tight deadline, which was why Reed Farrel Coleman’s reply to our query, in the wake of the Edgar nominations, about why Irish writers are becoming so popular in the US of A arrived a little late. Ditto the answer from Ruth and Jon Jordan of the indispensable CrimeSpree Magazine (right, clutching the prestigious Anthony Award for ‘Cutest Couple in Crime Fiction’), both of whom have been cheerleading for Irish crime writing since God was a boy. Herewith follows their rather generous two cents on why Irish writing is becoming so popular:

“The economic and political status of Ireland today is much in line with that of the time in which American crime classics were written. A poor-to-affluent generation living in a post-violent but pre-pacific time, remembering the religious ironies and icons with equal resonance and enwrapping them in a story like a taco bell quesadilla. The Irish story is updated with generations more of ennui and religious acceptance behind it, the precarious situation that is refracted by words of today flirted with, exposed and uniquely discovered by a group of writers who embrace the crime novel as the way to tell their story for all the world.
  “The talent for words is remarkable and embraced by a United States at once ahead and behind a continent we’ve pretended to understand for three generations. Our story, told with more history and depth. Yet Ireland is unique, as are the people writing of it in crime form. Different voices tell the story and make it stronger, more complete. You charm us to sorrow and make us examine where we are today.
  “The background of many of today’s Irish crime fiction writers includes not only a reading of ‘literary fiction’ but also almost all have found the literary brilliance within American crime fiction, be it recent greats like Lehane, Pelecanos, Connelly, Lippman, Rozan, Paretsky and James Lee Burke (to name a few), or the classics (Chandler, Hammett, Cain). They elevate their novels’ structure from the debut and almost always add a fresh voice to the genre. They don’t want to emulate as much as pay tribute to this often overlooked genre of fiction. Pay it forward and make it better, to use an American phrase. They see the possibilities of one flawed man/woman trying to solve a unique and usually violent problem. The writing jumps off the page and connects with the American reader because Irish authors use the entire environment of the crime and make it resonate.
  “The first author I fell in love with from Ireland is John Connolly, an Irishman who set his fiction in a relatively remote American locale. John has said he loved the work of James Lee Burke and many others. He grabbed a location he knew and made it his own. Last year’s work is remarkable in any time: THE UNQUIET is a true literary novel and I cannot think of many recent reads who express the joy of reading and the possibility it has to soothe, but THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS is a must-read for anyone who has ever loved a book and lost a loved one.
  “From Connolly I went to L. Welch, who strips bare any pretences in her prose to expose the baldness of story, and Declan Burke, whose approach to EIGHTBALL BOOGIE was as refreshing as THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE in its time. Ken Bruen’s arrival on our shores made everyone take notice. From THE GUARDS forward, Ken has infused admiration and anticipation for a writing style so unique it cannot be compared to anyone else writing today. Full of bon mots and cultural references that put you into the being of his characters, only someone so sharp of pen could get away with it.
  “America came full circle with the words of one Declan Hughes, whose third novel [THE PRICE OF BLOOD] is about to launch in the States. Instead of taking an Irish sensibility and applying it to the American detective, he brought an Irishman home who has been an American P.I.
  “The possibilities are just beginning and yet we’ve already come full circle.”