John Connolly
The past decade has seen a gusher of quality crime writing from a source that had previously produced almost none: the island of Ireland, both the Republic and the six counties belonging to the United Kingdom.
The most successful Irish crime novelist is probably John Connolly, whose books are set not in Ireland but in the United States and England. His Charlie Parker series, which began with 1999’s Every Dead Thing and will reach its eighth installment with The Whisperers later this year, is set primarily in Maine. His two stand-alone novels, the dark fantasy The Book of Lost Things and the young-adult romp The Gates, are set in England. “I’ve never written about Ireland and I never will, I have no desire to,” he told a London Times interviewer in 2007. In earlier interviews, Connolly said that the size and interconnectedness of Ireland made crime fiction difficult; in a country where everyone knew or was related to everyone else, it was almost impossible to keep the kind of secrets necessary to drive crime fiction.
The Irish economic boom changed that, and the revelations of abuses within the Catholic Church in Ireland provided even more material for aspiring crime writers. Now, fans of Irish fiction can choose from nearly a dozen authors writing mysteries in every subset of the genre. In honor of these amazing achievements (and St. Patrick’s Day), we’ll look at 10 in this month’s post.
Bateman
1). Bateman, the comic crime novelist formerly known as Colin Bateman, is a Northern Ireland native whose books have been adapted for film and television in the UK. His first novel, Divorcing Jack (1995), was written after 10 years as a newspaper reporter, and was pulled from the slush pile at HarperCollins. Since then, he’s written 21 additional novels; the most recent, Mystery Man (2009), launched a new series featuring the Man with No Name, who owns the Belfast bookstore No Alibis and is drawn into crime investigation when the detective agency next door goes out of business. A Book Club selection by the UK talk show hosts Richard and Judy, Mystery Man is not yet published in the United States, but is widely available from independent mystery bookstores, or through No Alibis itself.
2). Ken Bruen is the author or co-author of more than two dozen crime novels, set in Ireland, England, and the US. In the US, he is best known as the author of the Jack Taylor novels, set primarily in Galway. Jack Taylor is a former member of the Irish police force (the Garda) who battles alcoholism and personal demons while acting as a private investigator and fixer for desperate clients. The first Jack Taylor novel, The Guards (2001), was a finalist for the Shamus and Edgar Awards, and won the Macavity Award for Best Novel. The sequel, The Killing of the Tinkers (2002), won another Macavity Award, and was a finalist for the Anthony. The Dramatist (2004), Jack Taylor’s fourth outing, won the Shamus Award; the fifth Jack Taylor novel, Priest (2006), won a Barry award and was an Edgar finalist. Sanctuary, the seventh Jack Taylor novel, was published in 2008, and found Taylor on the trail of a serial killer too close to home.
Declan Burke
3). Declan Burke is a journalist and reviewer who has published two critically-acclaimed crime novels: Eightball Boogie (2004), which introduced Dublin PI Harry Rigby, and The Big O, a caper novel that drew comparisons with Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard. The Big O, in particular, has great fun with the rampant greed and suspended rules of life during the Celtic Tiger years. In addition to writing his own books, Burke maintains a blog that is the single best online source of news about Irish crime fiction.
4). Tana French, born in the United States but reared in Ireland, won an Edgar for her first novel, In the Woods (2007), a moody and gripping thriller that raises more questions than it answers. The not-quite-reliable narrator of In the Woods is a Dublin police investigator who disappeared for two days as a 12-year-old boy, with two of his friends, and returned alone with no memory of what had happened. French is fascinated with questions of identity and ambiguity, which she explored further with 2008’s The Likeness, a critically-acclaimed thriller about dopplegangers and stolen identities. Although French’s books are not a series, the narrator of The Likeness was an important secondary character in In the Woods, and the protagonist of her forthcoming book, Faithful Place (July 2010), is the supervisor of the characters who narrated her earlier books.
5). Cora Harrison launched her Burren series of historical mysteries with 2007’s My Lady Judge: A Mystery of Medieval Ireland. The series, whose fifth entry, Eye of the Law, comes out this month, revolves around Mara, a Brehon woman appointed to serve as judge and lawgiver by King Turlough Don O’Brien in 1509. Harrison herself lives in County Clare, near the Burren, where the books are set. The Burren series is recommended for fans of Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma mysteries, set in ancient Ireland.
Arlene Hunt
6). Arlene Hunt is an up-and-coming Irish novelist whose books are just beginning to draw notice in the United States. Her first novel, Vicious Circle, was published in the UK and Ireland in 2004, when Hunt was only 27. Her second, False Intentions (2005), marked the first appearance of private detectives John and Sarah of QuicK Investigations, who would become the central characters in a series that continued with Black Sheep (2006), Missing Presumed Dead (2007), and Undertow (2008). The fifth book in the QuicK Investigations series, Blood Money, will be published in the UK and Ireland this month, and it seems only a matter of time before the books find an American publisher.
7). Declan Hughes was an award-winning playwright and director before he published his first detective novel, The Wrong Kind of Blood, in 2006. That book won the Shamus Award for best first novel, and Hughes’ subsequent novels featuring Dublin PI Ed Loy — The Color of Blood (2007), The Price of Blood (2008, published in the UK as The Dying Breed), and All the Dead Voices (2009) — have been nominated variously for the Edgar, CWA New Blood Dagger, Shamus and Macavity awards. The audio recording of The Dying Breed, featuring actor Stanley Townshend, was recently nominated for an Audie Award by the Audio Publishers’ Association. The fifth Ed Loy novel, City of Lost Girls, comes out from William Morrow in April.
8). Gene Kerrigan is an award-winning, veteran journalist whose first eight books were nonfiction, including 2005’s Hard Cases: True Stories of Irish Crime. He puts this background to good use in gritty, realistic urban crime novels reminiscent of George Pelecanos and Richard Price. The Midnight Choir, Kerrigan’s first novel to be published in the US (although it was written after Little Criminals, which got US publication in 2008), is a panoramic view of crimes large and small in modern Ireland, moving between apparently unrelated incidents and police detectives in Dublin and Galway. Little Criminals is the story of a kidnapping plot gone very wrong, with a sense of humor that echoes of Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake. His third novel, Dark Times in the City, was published to critical acclaim in the UK and Ireland last April, and should be available in the United States sometime this summer.
Brian McGilloway
9). Brian McGilloway launched his Inspector Devlin mystery series with Borderlands, published in the US in 2008. Drawing comparisons to Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus, Inspector Benedict Devlin is a small-town Garda detective called to his first murder case in an area still rife with North-South tensions. The second Inspector Devlin novel, Gallows Lane, followed shortly thereafter, and the third, Bleed a River Deep, was published in April 2009. McGilloway heads the English department of a boys’ grammar school in Derry, Northern Ireland.
10). Stuart Neville’s first novel, The Ghosts of Belfast, was published as The Twelve in the UK and has been nominated for the Dilys Award, given by independent mystery booksellers, and the L.A. Times Mystery/Thriller Book Award. A dark, violent thriller with supernatural overtones, The Ghosts of Belfast is the story of former IRA assassin Gerry Fegan, whose desperate quest for redemption means that more people have to die. Neville himself is a native of Northern Ireland who has a day job as a partner in a multimedia design business, and previously worked as a musician, a composer, a teacher, a salesman, a film extra, a baker and — according to his online biography — “a hand double for a well-known Irish comedian.”
– Written by Clair Lamb, writer for BookReporter.com
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It’s terrific to see this rise in Irish crime novels. I think readers are become more and more fascinated in crime novels set in foreign countries – Stieg Larsson’s ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ being a prime example. And it’s about time we moved beyond the U.S. with our crime novels!
Suzi
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