A darkly comic Irish crime thriller.To read Caimh on ‘The problem of comedic crime’, clickety-click here …
The first time somebody tried to kill him was an accident.
The second time was deliberate.
Now Paul Mulchrone finds himself on the run with nobody to turn to except a nurse who has read one too many crime novels and a renegade copper with a penchant for violence. Together they must solve one of the most notorious crimes in Irish history … or else they’ll be history.
Irish detective fiction has enjoyed an international readership for over a decade, appearing on best-seller lists across the globe. But its breadth of hard-boiled and amateur detectives, historical fiction, and police procedurals has remained somewhat marginalized in academic scholarship.For more, clickety-click here …
Exploring the work of some of its leading writers, The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, edited by Elizabeth Mannion, opens new ground in Irish literary criticism and genre studies. It considers the detective genre’s position in Irish Studies and the standing of Irish authors within the detective novel tradition.
Writers John Connolly, Declan Hughes, and Stuart Neville will participate and will be signing books, as will Professors Elizabeth Mannion, Fiona Coffey, and Brian Cliff.
Tuesday, September 13, 7:00 p.m.
at Glucksman Ireland House NYU
‘Out of the secret world I once knew, I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I’m sitting now.’THE PIGEON TUNNEL is published on September 8th. For all the details, clickety-click here …
From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion, to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, John le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive - reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he’s writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire, or visiting Rwanda’s museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide, or celebrating New Year’s Eve with Yasser Arafat, or interviewing a German terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev, or watching Alec Guinness preparing for his role as George Smiley, or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in his The Constant Gardener, le Carré endows each happening with vividness and humour, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood. Best of all, le Carré gives us a glimpse of a writer’s journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters.
Nasir ‘Naz’ Khan (Riz Ahmed) is a naive Pakistani-American college student living in Queens, New York. While using his father’s cab one night with intentions to attend a popular party, Naz picks up a young woman, Andrea Cornish (Sofia Black D’Elia). After a night of sex and drugs with the woman, Naz wakes and finds her stabbed to death; he has no recollection of what happened. Naz leaves the scene but is arrested for a minor traffic violation shortly after. At the station, he declines to answer calls to his mobile phone from his parents, who are worried about him and trying to reach him. When searching Naz, the police find a knife matching the suspected murder weapon in his pocket and witnesses identify him. Naz is interrogated by detective Dennis Box (Bill Camp) and eventually asks for a lawyer, but one is not provided, until world-weary defense attorney John Stone (John Turturro) hears of the case and steps in to represent Naz.I watched the first three episodes of The Night Of to preview the show for RTE’s Arena programme, and once I was past the time-worn trope of ‘Naz wakes and finds her stabbed to death’, I found myself enthralled. Bracingly cynical, superbly characterised (if I’m ever arrested for a crime I’m not sure I’ve committed, Bill Camp’s ‘subtle beast’ Detective Box is the man I want investigating the case) and brilliantly acted, it’s a multi-faceted exploration of how getting caught up in the impersonal machinery of the justice system is a crushing experience for everyone involved. If you liked the Serial podcast or Making of a Murderer, or you’re a fan of the Scandi-Noir TV series, I’m pretty sure you’ll like this.
