A Difficulty of Definitions

For my final post of the week in The Rap Sheet, I’d like to take this opportunity to shoot myself in the foot.

The most common phrase I’ve used all week has been “Irish crime fiction,” and that phrase is the raison d’etre of my blog, Crime Always Pays (CAP). Yet lately I’ve been starting to wonder if there’s any such thing as “Irish crime fiction.”

We don’t really talk about “American crime fiction” or “Swedish crime fiction” or “English crime fiction”--do we?

There does seem to be a number of writers being pulled together under the “Tartan noir” banner, but even that’s not really the same as “Scottish crime fiction.”

I do think it’s absolutely pertinent to mention the setting of a crime novel when discussing it, as one of the pleasures of crime fiction is that it works as a kind of barometer of society. Yesterday, for example, I was given Bait, the first of a series Nick Brownlee has set in Kenya, and it’ll be interesting to see what lies beyond the newspaper headlines.

Bait is an example of how settings for works of crime fiction have turned increasingly exotic, and to a certain extent have become something of a “platform”--Michael Walters’ series set in Mongolia being a good example.

But not all of the work I describe on CAP as “Irish crime fiction” is set in Ireland. In fact, the best-selling Irish crime writer, John Connolly, has never set a novel there. Adrian McKinty has set only one of his novels in Ireland.

More importantly, if I was asked what single aspect of Irish crime writing appeals to me most, I would answer that it’s the sheer diversity of the storytelling.

Gene Kerrigan writes hard-boiled social realism. Ruth Dudley Edwards writes satirical comedy. Brian McGilloway’s novels are police procedurals. Tana French writes police procedurals too, but in a more self-consciously literary style. John Creed, aka Eoin McNamee, writes thrillers. Ingrid Black’s amateur sleuth is an ex-FBI agent who just so happens to be a lesbian. Cora Harrison’s heroine is a 15th-century Brehon judge. Arlene Hunt’s QuicK Investigations is manned by a Moonlighting-style pair of male and female private eyes. Ken Bruen goes all po-mo on Jack Taylor’s private-eye ass in Galway, and also writes London-based police procedurals and pulp-trash-comedy collaborations with Jason Starr. Declan Hughes takes the classic Raymond Chandler/Ross Macdonald private-eye tale and gives it a distinctly Dublin twist. Benjamin Black, aka John Banville, sets his mysteries in 1950s Dublin, and makes his sleuth a pre-forensics pathologist. Colin Bateman writes a number of comedy series. Eoin Colfer’s hero is a time-traveling teenage evil mastermind. Derek Landy’s is an undead skeleton modeled on Philip Marlowe. On and on it goes, with no two Irish writers mining the same seam.

Does it make sense to force all of those square pegs into a round hole marked “Irish crime fiction”?

I honestly don’t think it does.

That’s not to say I’ll be closing down Crime Always Pays anytime soon, or that I’ll stop posting about “Irish crime fiction.” I’ll keep doing it for the same reasons I started doing it: (a) I can’t afford to promote my own novels conventionally, and (b) there are ever-increasing numbers of Irish authors writing crime narratives that I think the world at large should know about. But I’ll be continuing to do so with the same attitude that I’ve recently adopted on the blog--that “Irish crime fiction” isn’t so much an Irish stew as it is a smörgåsbord.

Finally, editor Jeff Kingston Pierce has kindly suggested that, to finish my week of guest blogging here in The Rap Sheet, I offer “a list of recommended Irish detective/crime novels for those of us who are woefully behind in our exploration of that subgenre.” I’m delighted to do so, albeit with the double caveat that (a) I’m one of those readers “woefully behind” in my own exploration of the subgenre, and (b) it’s very much a list that reflects my personal taste ...

1. Dead I Well May Be, by Adrian McKinty. The first of McKinty’s trilogy of Michael Forsythe novels, which reads like Cormac McCarthy taking a stab at the Robert Ludlum franchise.

2. Julius Winsome, by Gerard Donovan. A man takes up his grandfather’s gun to avenge his dog, shot to death by callous hunters. One of the best novels I’ve ever read.

3. Quinn, by Seamus Smyth. First-person psychotic narrative in which Mr. Fixit, Quinn, wreaks mayhem in a darkly hilarious and lyrical voice. Too far ahead of its time for Irish tastes when first published in 1999, unfortunately.

4. Divorcing Jack, by Colin Bateman. A comedy crime caper set on the war-torn streets of Belfast, it was a breathtakingly brave novel when first published in 1995. Bateman appears to have fallen out of favor with American audiences, but he’s seriously overdue a reappraisal.

5. Borderlands, by Brian McGilloway. On the surface a conventional police procedural, McGilloway’s debut is set on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, and subtly investigates the 40 shades of gray of Irish morality.

6. Little Criminals, by Gene Kerrigan. An award-winning journalist with decades of experience in court reporting, Kerrigan’s fiction debut is so steeped in the reality of crime and criminality that you come away grimy.

7. The Dark Fields, by Alan Glynn. Set in New York, Glynn’s dystopic vision of drug-addled paranoia owes a significant debt to Philip K. Dick and Aldous Huxley.

8. The Book of Lost Things, by John Connolly. It’s not a crime-fiction narrative, but this standalone about a young boy who slips sidewards into a dimension of myth and fairytale is in my opinion Connolly’s finest novel to date.

9. The Guards, by Ken Bruen. The first in the Jack Taylor series, it genuinely broke new ground for crime fiction everywhere.

10. The Butcher Boy, by Patrick McCabe. In its first-person evocation of a poignant, childish need to belong that sours into murderous obsession, The Butcher Boy is literary Ireland’s equivalent of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me.

Laugh? I Almost Emigrated

I’ve gone into print in the past saying that I believe Raymond Chandler is Ernest Hemingway with a sense of humor.

It’s not that I think every book should be a giggle-fest, but there’s no dichotomy between writing a serious novel and making people laugh. Kurt Vonnegut is probably the classic example, but I like Carl Hiassen and Barry Gifford for the same reason. Elmore Leonard always makes me smile, not so much on a line-by-line basis, but for the overweening aspirations of his characters juxtaposed with their inevitably sordid milieu. John McFetridge mines a similar seam. Charles Bukowski’s crime novel parody, Pulp, is hilarious.

For some reason, a goodly chunk of Irish crime fiction is shot through with humor. It’s not a staple of Irish writing, because lots of Irish crime writers aren’t funny at all, and don’t try to be. And that’s fine by me. By the same token, though, I knew I was going to love Colin Bateman’s Divorcing Jack from reading the very first lines:

I was upstairs with a girl I shouldn’t have been upstairs with when my wife whispered in my ear. ‘You have twenty-four hours to move out.’

The same applies to playwright-novelist Declan Hughes’ debut, the first line of which runs like this:

The night of my mother’s funeral, Linda Dawson cried on my shoulder, put her tongue in my mouth and asked me to find her husband.

Actually, that’s not the very first line of The Wrong Kind of Blood (2006), because there’s a prologue. But I never read prologues, so it qualifies for me.

I’ve already mentioned this week that I’m partial to Flann O’Brien, and particularly The Third Policeman, on the basis that O’Brien was a comic genius and that novel was probably the finest and funniest deconstruction of the crime novel ever. I won’t labor the point, except to point out that Eoin Colfer’s brilliant Artemis Fowl, the evil teenage genius who may or may not take over the world one of these days, has twin baby brothers called Beckett and Myles, Myles na Gopaleen being one of Flann O’Brien’s pseudonyms.

Colfer has also strayed into the realms of the private-eye novel, although, Colfer being Colfer, the private eye is a 12-year-old boy called Fletcher Moon. Half Moon Investigations opens thusly:

My name is Moon. Fletcher Moon. And I’m a private detective. In my twelve years on this spinning ball we call Earth, I’ve seen a lot of things normal people never see. I’ve seen lunch boxes stripped of everything except fruit. I’ve seen counterfeit homework networks that operated in five counties, and I’ve seen truckloads of candy taken from babies.

Derek Landy also writes for young adults, creating for the Skulduggery Pleasant series a wisecracking Bogey-a-like undead skeleton. A sample line from the first novel:

The moon was out and the stars were twinkling and it really was a beautiful night for pain.

Some writers’ sense of humor is darker than others. From Adrian McKinty’s As Dead I Well May Be:

It was 1982 and the year after the hunger strikes and tension was as high as I ever remembered it. In Belfast, riots were as general as Joyce’s snow.

Darker still is the work of Ken Bruen, in particular his private eye Jack Taylor series. While the bleak and blasted tone may appear harrowing to an international audience, Taylor can be darkly funny for an Irish reader, celebrating as he does the Irish penchant for only being truly happy when utterly miserable.

Ruth Dudley Edwards, meanwhile, revels in puncturing the myths of the politically correct in her crime/comedy romps.

For me, though, the funniest writer working crime narratives today is Roger Gregg, who writes, directs, and produces radio plays with his production company, Crazy Dog Audio. My favorite is Tread Softly Bill Lizard, in which the eponymous private eye, named for Bill the Lizard from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is “thrown off his own train of thought only to land in the strangest of all possible realities. Trapped there, he becomes an unwilling Yankee tourist fumbling his way across the fertile landscape of the Celtic imagination.”

Bill Lizard investigates time, space, and all points in between, and the results have to be heard to be believed. If you can imagine Stephen Hawking, Lewis Carroll, Ray Chandler, and W.B Yeats collaborating on a radio play, this is what it would sound like.

Why so much humor in Irish crime writing? I honestly don’t know, and it’s very likely that every writer has his or her own reasons. For myself, I always find it difficult to write without that crutch of humor to lean on. In one sense it’s self-deprecating, so that if no one takes me seriously, I can always say I wasn’t taking myself seriously either. In another sense it’s a consequence of having grown up in the Ireland of the 1970s and ’80s, when the country was so economically crippled that emigration was at levels last seen during the Great Famine, the 40 shades of green were 40 shades of gray, black, and gloom, and if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.

And then there’s the great Irish tradition of the pub raconteur, a venerable breed of invariably hilarious tellers of hilarious stories, of which I’m not one and never have been. I can’t tell a joke to save my life. So I try to be funny on the page instead.

It doesn’t always work, but that’s OK too.

Even one joke is better than none.

With Dark Joy, the Madness: Liam O’Flaherty’s Assassins and Informers

On Monday I wrote about the current explosion in Irish crime fiction, and why I believe it has come about now. The names will have been familiar to you--Connolly, Bruen, French, Hughes, McKinty, et al.

But where did it all start? What can be considered the very first Irish work of crime fiction?

The Irish Free State, which later became the Republic of Ireland, was established in 1922. Broadly speaking, the Irish Republican Army had been at war since the Easter Rising of 1916 with the occupying British forces, a war eventually settled by treaty in 1922, after which the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Fein, split into pro- and anti-treaty forces and engaged in vicious year-long civil war. The dust had hardly settled when Liam O’Flaherty published The Informer in 1925, and followed it with The Assassin in 1928.

The Informer would become widely known after director John Ford adapted it for the big screen in 1935, with Victor McLaglen playing the eponymous anti-hero Gypo Nolan. Set in Dublin’s seamy underbelly, the novel explores the consequences of Gypo’s informing on his erstwhile friend and comrade in “the Organisation,” Francis Joseph McPhillip. O’Flaherty’s “the Organisation” is a radical communist faction determined to achieve equality for the disenfranchised by any means necessary, but while the Irish labor movement was strong in the early decades of the 20th century, communism had little impact on Irish politics. To any Irish person of that time, “the Organisation” meant only one thing--the IRA.

Every country has its version of Quisling and Benedict Arnold, but in Ireland the accusation of “informer” was particularly potent, given that the country had been ruled by England and/or Britain for hundreds of years. O’Flaherty nonetheless created a sympathetic character in Gypo Nolan, a simple-minded bear of a man who blunders from one disaster to another as he tries to escape the closing net. In a sense, Gypo is O’Flaherty’s “straw man,” a caricature of the hard-drinking, stupid Irishman etched in grotesquely exaggerated strokes in order to skewer his real target--the country that spawned him.

In Transatlantic Irish Noir: John Ford, Jules Dassin, and Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer (2007), Casey Jarrin, an assistant English professor at Minnesota’s Macalester College, has this to say:

The formal structure of [The Informer]--its dense descriptive prose, police-blotter narrative, clipped yet deliberate dialogue--performs a stylized fusion of the conventions of detective fiction, silent film melodrama, and emergent noir cinema. Contemporaneous with the serial successes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, yet without any of the satire or self-effacing humor of a Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, The Informer stages a morality play in earnest and a noir landscape without irony, in which human agents struggle through shadows to challenge fate, speak their sins, and move ever-so-closer to redemption.

It’s certainly true that O’Flaherty was “contemporaneous with the serial successes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler,” but Red Harvest was still five years distant, and The Big Sleep 14 years away, when The Informer’s brutally direct prose and staccato rhythms marked O’Flaherty out as a proto-hard-boiled writer. Both The Assassin and The Informer were set amidst Dublin’s criminal fraternity, both were written in the brusque, spare style that Hammett and later James M. Cain would be championed for, and both followed the classic crime-fiction narrative arc as their respective protagonists went in search of cathartic redemption.

But O’Flaherty didn’t just prefigure Hammett and Cain; his complex and self-tortured protagonists will be immediately familiar to anyone who has read the work of Jim Thompson, for example. In The Assassin, the anti-hero McDara visits a bookies:

So now, leaning against the wall, he contemplated with dark joy the madness and debauchery of man. Gambling, leching and carousing, while the civilisation wrought by centuries of his labour crumbled about his ears. As if sin were necessary to the birth of Christ. He rejoiced darkly, seeing the tumult of passion about him, the degraded souls gambling, while the country was being laid waste by the tyrant. So ... the blow would come like a thunderbolt among them. It would come striding out of the heavens in a flash, sudden, awe-inspiring.

McDara, a former IRA man, has returned from exile to assassinate “the tyrant,” who remains unnamed throughout the book. Fueled by extremist politics and religion, self-loathing and vaingloriously pompous by turns, McDara is a repellently charismatic killer. What gives The Assassin an extra twist, however, is that Kevin O’Higgins, a former IRA soldier, Sinn Fein MP, and later a TD (a member of the lower house of Irish Parliament), was assassinated in 1927 by anti-treaty IRA men while serving as Minister for Justice in the first Irish government in reprisal for his ordering the execution of 77 anti-treaty prisoners of war, among them Rory O’Connor, who had served as best man at O’Higgins’ wedding.

Given the climate that prevailed in the wake of O’Higgins’ killing, The Assassin, published barely a year later, is arguably the bravest Irish novel ever written.

Prose by Any Other Name

I’ve run a number of posts over at Crime Always Pays aimed at developing a working definition of crime fiction. It’s just a bit of fun, mainly to exercise the gray matter, although the process can be useful when it comes to separating novels that are dedicated crime fiction from those that employ crime and/or criminality as a narrative device.

Responses as to what constitutes crime fiction have varied wildly, from those who say that if a crime is central to the tale (Crime and Punishment, for example) then it’s crime fiction, to those who reckon that a book must be deliberately conceived and executed as a crime novel to qualify.

I’m currently working on the theory that a novel fits into the crime fiction category if its story collapses when you remove the crime elements; if it doesn’t, then it isn’t.

It may sound like gratuitous nitpicking, but it’s a contentious point in Ireland at least, where some authors would be surprised and perhaps even horrified to be described as crime writers. Recent examples of crime-infused fiction include David Park’s The Truth Commissioner, in which a truth commission is set up in Northern Ireland to deal with the consequences of the abduction and murder of a teenage boy some 20 years previously; Aifric Campbell’s The Semantics of Murder, in which Campbell’s fictional author investigates an apparent murder; and Gerard Donovan’s Julius Winsome, wherein a man takes up his father’s gun to avenge his murdered dog.

Should I include these novels on Crime Always Pays, which concerns itself with Irish crime fiction? Or are these authors entitled to baulk at the idea of being considered genre writers, and demand that their work be considered literary offerings?

It’s not just a recent development either. Eoin McNamee, who writes thrillers under the pseudonym John Creed, has penned a number of novels with crime narratives set during Northern Ireland’s “Troubles,” among them Resurrection Man, The Blue Tango, The Ultras and, most recently, 12:23: Paris. 31st August 1997, his fictional imagining of the events surrounding the purported assassination of Princess Diana. Another Northern Ireland writer, Brian Moore, wrote crime novels under the pseudonym of Bernard Mara, and published literary crime narratives such as Lies of Silence and The Colour of Blood under his own name.

Patrick McCabe’s breakthrough novel The Butcher Boy, a tour-de-force in spellbinding first-person narration, has every right not to be considered a dedicated crime fiction offering, even if it concludes with a shocking murder. And yet if its internal monologue detailing charismatic, psychotic insanity could be compared with one other novel, it’s the classic 1952 crime narrative, Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me.

Even more troublesome is John Banville, who has recently started publishing dedicated crime titles under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. Banville’s The Book of Evidence is a fictionalized first-person account of a real-life murder. The protagonist, Freddie Montgomery, kills a young woman and goes on the run in 1970s Ireland, but Banville takes pains to disassociate himself from the crime genre. With 40 pages to go, just as a traditional crime narrative should be quickening towards its climax, he has Freddie chafing at his boredom: “But all the time, behind all these agitations, there was that abiding, dull, flat sensation. I felt disappointed. I felt let down. The least I had expected from the enormities of which I was guilty was that they would change my life, that they would make things happen, however awful, that there would be a constant succession of heart-stopping events, of alarms and sudden frights and hairsbreadth escapes.” None such occurs; as in the real-life events, the novel culminates in anti-climactic absurdity.

In The Untouchable, Banville created the character of Victor Maskell, who was based on the real-life Soviet spy Anthony Blunt. Slow of pace, rich in detail, the novel nonetheless can be read as a Le Carré-like tale of intrigue, betrayal, and reversal in the hothouse atmosphere of the Cold War. “Like so many of my generation,” wrote Banville in The Guardian in 2006, “I had been, and indeed still am, fascinated by the Cambridge spies. Their commitment, their daring, their sangfroid--and Blunt was the sang-froidest of them all--brought me back to the days of boys’ comics, of Bulldog Drummond and Maugham’s Ashenden. Philby and Burgess and Maclean--these chaps were the flower of English manhood, cultured, handsome, dashing, the very spirit of heroism, and yet they had so despised the establishment and its values that they had systematically gone about setting a secret charge of dynamite underneath it.”

But is it crime fiction? Or even a thriller?

Most awkward of all, however, is the great Flann O’Brien. A master of satire, a genius of post-modernism, O’Brien is a writer to equal James Joyce, and he’s hilariously funny to boot. In The Dalkey Archives, for example, his hero Michael Shaughnessy not only sets himself the task of tracking down James Joyce, who is allegedly still alive and well and working as a barman in the Dublin seaside resort of Skerries, but he must also foil the mad scientist De Selby’s plot to destroy the planet by removing all the oxygen from the atmosphere. First published in 1964, it is a parody of the crime genre of the first order.

O’Brien’s masterpiece, however, is The Third Policeman, published posthumously in 1967. “Even with Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake behind him,” claimed The Observer, “James Joyce might have been envious.” According to its blurb, the tale encompasses the following: “A murder thriller, a hilarious comic satire about an archetypal village police force, a surrealistic vision of eternity, the story of a tender, brief, unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle, and a chilling fable of unending guilt, The Third Policeman is comparable only to Alice in Wonderland as an allegory of the absurd. Distinguished by endless comic invention and its delicate balancing of logic and fantasy, The Third Policeman is unique in the English language.”

Flann O’Brien, along with all the other serious literary authors who dabble in crime narratives, would not have considered himself a writer of straightforward crime fiction, although it’s likely he would have been more amused than horrified by the suggestion. But O’Brien wholeheartedly embraced the crime genre, celebrating it even as he mangled its tropes, and made it the beating heart of his finest creation.

Sadly, O’Brien would never see The Third Policeman published. Longman’s, the house that had published At-Swim-Two-Birds, turned it down, declaring: “We realize the author’s ability but think that he should become less fantastic and in this new novel he is more so.”

The Third Policeman is fantastic, in all senses of the word. If there is one novel that makes a mockery of any attempt to define the parameters of crime fiction--or, indeed, fiction itself--then O’Brien’s final offering is it.

1996: Year Zero

If there is one name that sums up the current explosion in Irish crime writing, it’s that of Tana French.

John Connolly and Ken Bruen are undoubtedly better known, particularly in the United States, and both have been well represented in the various crime-fiction awards nominations this year. But of course both men have been publishing novels for the best part of a decade and have gradually built up dedicated audiences.

By contrast, Tana French’s debut novel, In the Woods, has been nominated for practically every award going, bar the Nobel Prize, hit the New York Times bestseller list, and achieved a crossover reach that most crime-fiction writers can only dream about.

For a police procedural set in Ireland, that’s unheard of.

But even though most Irish crime writers are not as well known in the States as Tana French, she is merely the tip of the spear. Behind her is a veritable slew of writers who have decided to set their crime narratives in modern Ireland, most of whom have arrived on the scene in the last five years.

Adrian McKinty. Declan Hughes. Arlene Hunt. Gene Kerrigan. Brian McGilloway. Aifric Campbell. Alex Barclay. Cora Harrison. Christy Kenneally. Garbhan Downey. Benjamin Black. Alan Glynn. Ingrid Black. Cormac Millar. Andrew Nugent. David Park. D.B. Shan. Sam Millar.

Go back another five years and you can include Neville Thompson, K.T. McCaffrey, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Eoin McNamee, Philip Davison, Paul Charles, Keith Baker, T.S. O’Rourke, Hugo Hamilton, Julie Parsons, John Brady, Patrick McGinley, John Kelly, Rory McCormac …

Apologies for the list, but it goes on and on.

And yet, if you go back as far as 1990, there was very little crime writing coming out of Ireland. Patrick McGinley’s Bogmail, published in 1978, was very much the exception to the rule. Bartholomew Gill’s McGarr and the Method of Descartes appeared in 1986. Vincent McDonnell published The Broken Commandment in 1988, in the same year S.J. Michaels published her debut, Summary Justice. John Banville’s The Book of Evidence appeared in 1989, although, despite being a fictionalized account of a real-life Irish murder, the novel was considered a more literary offering than a genuine crime-fiction story (the same, as it happens, could be said about a number of John Banville’s pre-Benjamin Black novels, most notably The Untouchable).

Moving forward into the ’90s, the pace picked up. Snuff, a collaboration between Jim Lusby and Myles Dungan, was published in 1992, and Lusby also had Serial published in 1992. Vincent Banville’s Death by Design arrived in 1993. Jack Holland’s Walking Corpses appeared in 1994, the same year as Peter Cunningham’s Who Trespass Against Us, both novels concerned with “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland. Eugene McEldowney’s A Kind of Homecoming was published in 1994. Colin Bateman’s debut, Divorcing Jack, which somehow managed to be a hilarious comedy set in war-torn Belfast, came out in 1995.

I have undoubtedly missed out on some writers, but the point is valid--given the disproportionate number of Irish writers blackening pages, very few of them were writing crime narratives.

So why the explosion in Irish crime writing over the last decade?

As always, there are a number of reasons. Ireland--although now experiencing something of a downturn--enjoyed an unprecedented economic boom over the last 15 years or so, going back to 1992, ’93. Ireland has always had its criminal fraternity, and its activities also blossomed in the warming glow of prosperity. Gangland murders became more common, which was something of a shock to Ireland’s system, a country where, only 20 years ago, a murder would represent front-page news for a week at a time. “I didn’t want to write about the mean streets until we had them,” Ken Bruen said recently, explaining his reasons for unleashing his private eye Jack Taylor on the unsuspecting Galway public. “We sure got ’em now.”

But the watershed year for Irish crime fiction was 1996, the year of the first Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire of the burgeoning Peace Process. It didn’t happen overnight--the first ceasefire broke down; a second took hold in 1998--but gradually the IRA, arguably Europe’s most effective private army, began to disarm. Shorn of its political motivation, it began to diversify into activities that were baldly criminal in nature. The Northern Bank robbery in 2005, during which a record-breaking £26 million was stolen, is widely, if not officially, regarded in Ireland as the IRA’s “pension fund,” a hefty but acceptable price to pay to see the boys in the balaclavas finally hand up their guns.

1996 was also the year in which investigative journalist Veronica Guerin (left) was murdered by a criminal gang. Guerin, who wrote for the Sunday Independent, had been shot previously, as a warning, but even then the Irish public refused to believe that the gangs were made up of anything but the “ordinary decent criminals” that Martin Cahill, the most notorious Dublin gangster, had portrayed himself as before he was murdered in 1994. There was a tacit agreement between the general public and gangland--so long as the criminals only killed one another, Ireland would turn a blind eye to their deeds.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Veronica Guerin’s murder, on June 26, 1996, sent a seismic shudder through Irish society. It was, and remains, Ireland’s “John F. Kennedy moment.” Politicians, finally galvanized by the sense of outrage and shock, leapt to enact emergency legislation. One consequence was the establishment of the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB), designed to pursue the profits of criminal activity. Another consequence, equally far-reaching, was that Ireland began to take crime more seriously, and nowhere is that more evident than in the explosion of Irish crime writing, both fiction and true crime.

It’s said that journalism is the first draft of history. It’s certainly true that journalists report from the front line, sending dispatches back to society at large about the world they live in. And it may well be a coincidence, but there is a disproportionate number of current or former Irish journalists who write or have written crime fiction in the last decade or so, among them Gene Kerrigan, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Ingrid Black, Garbhan Downey, Colin Bateman, Sean Moncrieff, John Connolly, Benjamin Black, and Liz Allen.

I’m not suggesting that every Irish crime-fiction author has a picture of Veronica Guerin over their desk as they write. Nor should they. Irish crime writers are as diverse a bunch as any other group of writers--they write private-eye novels, police procedurals, historical fiction, hard-boiled noir, cozy mysteries, comedy capers, serial-killer tales ... in short, they cover the full gamut of crime writing.

But there’s no denying that while all crime fiction follows the basic narrative arc of order-chaos-order, the best crime narratives offer us a journey very similar to the classic response to death: shock, disbelief, anger, acceptance.

Raymond Chandler said that Dashiell Hammett took murder out of the drawing room and dropped it into the alleyway, where it belonged. Veronica Guerin shone a light into the dark alleyways of Irish life, and paid the ultimate price. The current explosion of Irish crime writing is representative of a country still feeling its way through its shock, disbelief, and anger towards an acceptance of what it has become.

Burke’s Law and Order

Later today, we will welcome to The Rap Sheet the eighth and latest in our series of occasional guest bloggers, Irish writer Declan Burke.

Most readers of this page probably already know Burke from his own excellent Weblog, Crime Always Pays, which for almost a year and a half now has been chattering about and championing Irish crime fiction in all of its colorful manifestations. In addition, Burke is the author of Eight-ball Boogie, a more-or-less private eye novel from 2003, and The Big O, a humorous crime caper that was released in Ireland last year and numbered among January Magazine’s favorite crime novels of 2007. The Big O is finally being made available in the States as of next Monday, September 22. Of that second book, Kirkus Reviews opined: “Imagine Donald Westlake and his alter ego Richard Stark moving to Ireland and collaborating on a screwball noir, and you have some idea of Burke’s accomplishment.” A fine clip, indeed.

Readers looking for more Burke should know that he spent part of this last summer posting original installments on the Web of a novel called A Gonzo Noir, which he says he “wrote about five years ago” and a few months ago “started messing around with” again. “Why am I posting it on a blog?” he asked rhetorically on his blog in May. “Well, because I can. And because I’m interested to see what kind of reaction this kind of post might generate, as well as the more specific kind of feedback that may or may not come via the comment box or e-mail. Any and all bouquets, brickbats, thoughts, and impressions welcome.” Mostly he received plaudits for the story’s text--and cautions around the idea of publishing anything free of charge on the Internet.

According to a brief biographical sketch at Books ’n’ Bytes, Burke was “born in Sligo [Ireland] in 1969. During the 1980s he worked as a labourer, barman, and factory hand.” Since graduating in English Literature and Media from the University of Ulster at Coleraine in 1994 he has worked as a freelance writer, reviewer, and editor, and is currently contributing to the Sunday [Irish] Times, the Evening Herald, the Sunday Business Post, and The Last Word on Today FM. Nowadays, Burke resides in Wicklow with his wife, Aileen, and their new, much-written-about little girl, Lily.

If fatherhood and promotional touring don’t keep him busy enough (he’s even scheduled to appear next month at Bouchercon in Baltimore), Burke has also been developing a non-fiction book of late that he described in a recent e-mail note as “a narrative of Irish crime writing.”

Basically, the notion is this--given the recent explosion in Irish crime fiction, I wondered if there might be any interest in putting together a book offering perspectives on the whys and wherefores of contemporary Irish crime writing. It would consist of a series of essays written by the Irish crime writers themselves, with each author taking a chapter according to his or her specialty and/or interest. Aimed at a general reading audience, it would decidedly not be an academic tome, but an entertaining and informative read.

The writers who have to date confirmed they will be taking part are: John Connolly, Colin Bateman, Declan Hughes, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Gene Kerrigan, Gerard Donovan, Brian McGilloway, Neville Thompson, Adrian McKinty, Gerard Brennan, and yours truly, with the latter trio taking on the job of compiling/editing.

Last week the project went forward to be assessed for funding by the Irish Arts Council, and an Irish publisher has already expressed a strong interest in publishing it.

Since he’s been thinking a lot in recent days about the evolution of Irish crime fiction, Declan Burke has decided to spend his weeklong guest spot here at The Rap Sheet commenting on the post-1990 burgeoning of crime and mystery stories in his native land, the uses of humor in Irish crime fiction, the ambiguous separation between literary and genre fiction, and other related subjects. We hope that you will enjoy his contributions, and will share with him your comments on his posts and his novels.

READ MORE: ““Ya Wanna Do It Here or Down the Station, Punk?” #2,012: Declan Burke” (The Rap Sheet); “An Interview--Declan Burke,” by Gerard Brennan (Crime Scene NI).