Blood Will Tell

In January Magazine today, Kevin Burton Smith--creator/editor of The Thrilling Detective Web Site and an infrequent contributor to The Rap Sheet--interviews Irish playwright and theatrical director Declan Hughes, author of the new private-eye novel The Color of Blood. Their lengthy exchange ranges all over the map, from Hughes’ respect for cartoonist Charles M. Schulz and the critical reception of his fiction on both sides of the Atlantic, to the author’s wide-ranging tastes in music, the rising scale of Dublin’s criminality, and his concern for series protagonist Ed Loy’s health.

But one of my favorite parts of this interview comes when Smith asks Hughes about his debts to notable crime novelists of the past--Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. We join their discussion, already in progress:

Q: What about Macdonald?

A: I think it’s Ross Macdonald I’m most influenced by. If Hammett took murder out of the rose garden and put it back in the alley where it belongs, Macdonald told you about the kid who’d been dumped in the alley, found out that he was from a family with more than a little loot, and then took you into their house to leaf through the family album and trace the deep history that led to that kid’s death. That “family gothic” spoke to me, because Irish society is still pretty tribal, and because, despite the impression Irish people give that we’re open and friendly and candid, there’s a lot we don’t want to tell you. A lot of skeletons in our closets. As it says in [my first novel] The Wrong Kind of Blood, “Whatever you say, say nothing.”

So reading Ross Macdonald years ago, I always thought that that aspect of the P.I. story would certainly work well in Dublin.

I just had to wait a little longer for the other stuff--the gold-rush town [Dublin] with opportunities for all, especially gangs of organized criminals--to come about.

Q: But Ireland’s always had its share of crime. What’s changed?

A: The scale. More people with more money equals more drugs, equals more money to be made in supplying them, equals more turf wars, etc. And second/third generation criminals, high on their own supply. Mental bastards. The stakes weren’t that high 20 years ago.

You can read the entirety of their discussion here.