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Transnational Irish Crime Fiction

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Part of the book series: Crime Files ((CF))

Abstract

Drawing on threads from earlier chapters – including supernatural narratives, corruption, and existential uncertainty – this chapter considers the scope of Irish crime fiction against the background of traditional expectations that Irish literature will represent the nation. This chapter examines Irish crime fiction’s transnational aspects through the corporate thrillers of Alan Glynn, the imperial conspiracies of Adrian McKinty, experiences of emigration and immigration, and non-Irish characters and settings. It closes by discussing one of Irish crime fiction’s best-selling authors, John Connolly, whose Charlie Parker novels are set entirely outside of Ireland. The transnational elements of Connolly’s novels, like those in the other novels here, require a reconsideration of what constitutes Irish literature, and provide a new understanding of how that literature intersects with international crime fiction.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term ‘transnational’ is used here in its most immediate sense: ‘Extending or having interests extending beyond national bounds or frontiers; multinational.’ Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘Transnational, adj.,’ http://www.oed.com.elib.tcd.ie/view/Entry/204944?rskey=qXuyG1&result=1#eid (accessed 23 March 2017).

  2. 2.

    Andrew Pepper, Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 168.

  3. 3.

    In this regard, see Joe Cleary’s comparative work on Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  4. 4.

    Declan Hughes did the main public interview in Ireland with Lehane on his 2015 book tour, for example, while Connelly was the special guest at the Irish crime fiction festival held at Trinity College Dublin in 2013.

  5. 5.

    See Maureen T. Reddy, ‘Contradictions in the Irish Hardboiled: Detective Fiction’s Uneasy Portrayal of a New Ireland,’ New Hibernia Review 19, no. 4 (2015): 126–140.

  6. 6.

    Several panellists at Trinity’s 22–23 November 2013 festival of Irish crime fiction suggested as much.

  7. 7.

    As Pepper notes in discussing Hammett’s Red Harvest, ‘Much has been written about the interpenetration of the western and hard-boiled detective fiction forms.’ Andrew Pepper, ‘“Hegemony Protected by the Armour of Coercion”: Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and the State,’ Journal of American Studies 44, no. 2 (May 2010): 336n10. On Hammett, see also Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 166–169. Another example is Elmore Leonard, who began as a Western writer before moving on to patent his particularly laconic version of crime fiction, but who returned to something more like Westerns at the end of his career, with the Raylan books and stories, the basis for the TV series Justified.

  8. 8.

    Paula Murphy, ‘“Murderous Mayhem”: Ken Bruen and the New Ireland,’ Clues 24, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 3–16. More broadly, Murphy suggests that Bruen’s Taylor books ‘employ the “foreign” characteristics of crime fiction with Irish settings and characters, realising the collision of the local and the global that is at the heart of contemporary Irish literature’ (‘“Murderous Mayhem,”’ 15). See also Andrew Kincaid, ‘Detecting Hope: Ken Bruen’s Disenchanted P.I.,’ in The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, ed. Elizabeth Mannion (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 57–71.

  9. 9.

    Conor McCarthy, Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 19691992 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), 33.

  10. 10.

    John Connolly, ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Crime Writers,’ in Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21 st Century, ed. Declan Burke (Dublin: Liberties, 2011), 41–2. Indeed, while fiction by Patrick McCabe and others plays with or adapts genre elements, Flann O’Brien’s novels At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and The Third Policeman (1968), and perhaps Beckett’s Molloy (1951, trans. 1955), are among the few post-Revival fictions to give themselves over fully to genre experimentation and still to have a secure place in the academic canon.

  11. 11.

    Jack Higgins, The Eagle Has Flown (New York: Pocket, 1991), 334.

  12. 12.

    Higgins, Eagle, 106.

  13. 13.

    Michael Russell, The City of Shadows (London: HarperCollins, 2012), 200.

  14. 14.

    The most wide-ranging recent study of Ireland’s neutrality during World War II is Clair Wills’s excellent That Neutral Island (London: Faber, 2007).

  15. 15.

    Joe Joyce, Echobeat (Dublin: Liberties, 2014), Chapter Ten, Kindle.

  16. 16.

    For a more extensive account of immigrants in Irish crime fiction, see David Clark, ‘Mean Streets, New Lives: The Representations of Non-Irish Immigrants in Recent Irish Crime Fiction,’ in Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland: The Immigrant in Contemporary Irish Literature, ed. Pilar Villar-Argáiz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 255–268.

  17. 17.

    Andrew Nugent, Second Burial (London: Headline 2007), 146. This novel was published earlier in the US than in Ireland and the UK, under the more ornate title Second Burial for a Black Prince (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2006).

  18. 18.

    Nugent, Second Burial, 176.

  19. 19.

    Nugent’s first novel, The Four Courts Murder (London: Headline, 2006), also contains a number of passages touching on varieties of bigotry and anti-Semitism in Ireland.

  20. 20.

    Charlotte Headrick suggests that this ‘exploration of the returning emigrant’ is ‘something Hughes has also worked through in his drama,’ from 1991’s Digging for Fire through at least to 2003’s Shiver. Charlotte Headrick, ‘“Where no kindness goes unpunished”: Declan Hughes’s Dublin,’ in Mannion, The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, 47.

  21. 21.

    Declan Hughes, The Wrong Kind of Blood (London: John Murray, 2006, repr. 2007), 11.

  22. 22.

    Hughes, Wrong, 15.

  23. 23.

    Tana French, Faithful Place (New York: Penguin, 2010, repr. 2011), 28.

  24. 24.

    Alan Glynn, Graveland (London: Faber, 2013), 275.

  25. 25.

    Alan Glynn, Bloodland (London: Faber, 2011), 128.

  26. 26.

    Glynn, Bloodland, 27.

  27. 27.

    Glynn, Bloodland, 287; 288–297 spells out the core details of this tangled conspiracy.

  28. 28.

    Glynn, Bloodland, 118.

  29. 29.

    Aaron Kelly has described ‘the conspiratorial thriller’ in terms relevant here: ‘the confrontation within earlier detective fiction of the organic community with the criminal individual … is fundamentally overhauled and historically rewritten in the conspiratorial thriller by the confrontation of the individual with the criminal collective, the mystery of the social. In such thrillers one crime often leads not to its resolution but rather its attachment to other seemingly interminable concatenations and labyrinths of crime and conspiracy. Nevertheless …this conspiratorial mode also harnesses a utopian desire to uncover and trace the social totality and its complexity in however degraded or skeletal a manner through such criminal patterns and intrigues.’ Aaron Kelly, The Thriller and Northern Ireland Since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 22.

  30. 30.

    Glynn, Graveland, 275; cf. 277.

  31. 31.

    Glynn, Bloodland, 331; see also Glynn, Graveland, 95.

  32. 32.

    Glynn, Graveland, 314.

  33. 33.

    Glynn, Graveland, 256–7.

  34. 34.

    Glynn, Bloodland, 269; Glynn, Graveland, 9.

  35. 35.

    Glynn, Graveland, 3, 230, 258.

  36. 36.

    This was republished as Limitless (New York: Picador, 2011) after the film adaptation of that name was released.

  37. 37.

    Glynn, Graveland, 329.

  38. 38.

    Alan Glynn, Winterland (London: Faber, 2009), 407.

  39. 39.

    Pepper, Unwilling Executioner, 168.

  40. 40.

    Glynn comments on precisely these films in the interview appended to the UK/Irish release of Bloodland (416).

  41. 41.

    Elizabeth Mannion, ‘“Irish by blood and English by accident”: Detective Constable Maeve Kerrigan,’ in Mannion, The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, 121.

  42. 42.

    Mannion, ‘“Irish by blood and English by accident,”’ 123, 128.

  43. 43.

    Jane Casey, The Stranger You Know (London: Ebury, 2013), 10, 9. A less centrally ambivalent approach can be seen in Zane Radcliffe’s London Irish (2002), a comic thriller that uses its protagonist-narrator Bic (who ‘was born in Bangor, lived there till I was ten, then moved to Scotland’) to anchor its narrative amidst London’s Irish expats and their descendants. Zane Radcliffe, London Irish (London: Black Swan, 2002), 129.

  44. 44.

    Glynn, Winterland, 435. Declan Hughes’s Ed Loy is just as explicit: ‘Dublin is a small place for a private detective to be a public figure, and I’m already too well known for my own good. The city is shrinking, and I wonder, not for the first time, whether I’m running out of road.’ Declan Hughes, City of Lost Girls (London: John Murray, 2010; repr. 2011), 142. Nor is this just Loy’s perspective: his girlfriend says in passing ‘God, that was a coincidence. Or rather, that was Dublin for you’ (Hughes, City, 128).

  45. 45.

    Seminar discussion with the author and students, ‘Irish Crime Fiction’ undergraduate seminar, Trinity College Dublin, 11 March 2015. This point is also on display in Jane Casey’s fiction, where London provides potential anonymity because of its sheer scale, a very different urban landscape even from Dublin, sprawling enough for one to disappear into it. In Casey’s seventh Maeve Kerrigan novel, Let the Dead Speak (London: HarperCollins, 2017), Maeve reflects on this metropolitan sprawl, in which she could hear ‘a jumble of accents around us – English, Eastern European, Irish, Jamaican, Glaswegian … London, basically’ (Let the Dead Speak, 272).

  46. 46.

    Linnie Blake, The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma, and National Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 102. Blake further argues that factual and fictional murder narratives reflect ingrained American ‘binarisms that pit the transgressive individual against the common good, the lone frontiersman against the machinery of urban-industrial life under capitalism’ (The Wounds of Nations, 108). In contrast to such national imagery, modern Irish culture has for better and worse frequently carried with it a stronger, more overt strain of communitarian discourse. Despite the setting of Hunt’s The Chosen, these American binaries do not quite apply in that novel, because Jessie and her allies do not themselves neatly map on to them: instead, everyone in The Chosen, villain and protagonists alike, is some variety of outsider relative to ‘the machinery of urban-industrial life under capitalism.’

  47. 47.

    Lee Horsley is not alone in noting a ‘shared history, linking crime fiction from its inception to the gothic representation of excess, violence, and transgressions of the boundaries of reason and law’ (Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, 4). For an important and detailed discussion of some of these issues in the genre, see Maurizio Ascari, A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). See also Michael Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story: The Haunted Text (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

  48. 48.

    The Gates (2009), The Infernals (2011), and The Creeps (2013).

  49. 49.

    Conquest (2013), Empire (2015), and Dominion (2016).

  50. 50.

    John Connolly, ‘I Live Here,’ Night Music: Nocturnes 2 (New York: Atria, 2015), 420.

  51. 51.

    This is perhaps particularly true in discussions of Golden Age crime fiction, as John Curran, Martin Priestman, Stephen Knight, and others have all demonstrated. See also Connolly, ‘I Live Here.’

  52. 52.

    Bill Phillips, ‘Irish Noir,’ Estudios Irlandeses 9 (2014): 175. Some of Phillips’s assertions suggest that, while his praise of Ken Bruen and Benjamin Black reflects more sustained reading, he has given relatively little attention to Connolly’s work. For example: the claim that violence is something about which Parker feels ‘little need for regret’ (Phillips, ‘Irish Noir,’ 169), overlooks a great deal of nuance about Parker’s empathy and his clear ambivalence around violence.

  53. 53.

    Charles De Lint, ‘Books to Look For,’ Fantasy & Science Fiction 110, no. 6 (2006): 28.

  54. 54.

    For instances of ‘tutorial,’ see John Connolly, Dark Hollow (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 318, 321; John Connolly, The Killing Kind (New York: Atria, 2002), 54; John Connolly, The White Road (New York: Atria, 2003), 46; John Connolly, The Unquiet (New York: Atria, 2007), 196; and John Connolly, The Wolf in Winter (New York: Atria, 2014), 365. Except where otherwise noted, Connolly references are to the American editions of his novels, which often have different pagination and sometimes small textual differences, though the UK first editions are also listed in the bibliography for reference purposes.

  55. 55.

    John Connolly, The Reapers (New York: Atria, 2008), 45, 46; and John Connolly, The Wrath of Angels (New York: Atria, 2013), 49, 119.

  56. 56.

    John Connolly, The Lovers (New York: Atria, 2009), 25, 20.

  57. 57.

    Connolly, Lovers, 20.

  58. 58.

    John Connolly, A Game of Ghosts (London: Hodder, 2017), 91.

  59. 59.

    This phrase appears twice, in Connolly, Lovers, 188, and John Connolly, The Burning Soul (New York: Atria, 2011), 61. In the latter, it is spoken by an expatriate Irish gangster, indignant that his companion does not know who Oscar Wilde is. A quotation from Wilde’s ‘Requiescat’ also appears in Connolly, Wrath, 387:Verse

    Verse   Tread lightly, she is near    Under the snow,   Speak gently, she can hear,    The daisies grow.

  60. 60.

    John Connolly, The Black Angel (New York: Atria, 2005), 111.

  61. 61.

    Connolly, White, 364.

  62. 62.

    Connolly, ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Crime Writers: Ireland and the Mystery Genre,’ 44.

  63. 63.

    Connolly, Lovers, 272–5.

  64. 64.

    Connolly, Wrath, 174–5. As Connolly notes in his introduction to the reprint edition of The Wrath of Angels (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2015), the novel ‘is completely in thrall to the supernatural’ (II). This essay, like all of Connolly’s author introductions for the Parker books, along with other non-fiction prose of Connolly’s, has been collected in Parker: A Miscellany (Dublin: Bad Dog, 2016).

  65. 65.

    John Connolly, Every Dead Thing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 252.

  66. 66.

    The early pages of the second Parker novel also contain a brief mention of a sound ‘like the beating of dark, leathery wings’ (Connolly, Dark, 71). Though Dark Hollow does not freight this image with supernatural weight, it nonetheless is so specific as to anticipate the explicitly supernatural ‘leathery wings’ – central to the imagery of the dark angels as the series progresses – first mentioned in Connolly, Killing, 65.

  67. 67.

    See in particular his introduction to the reprint edition of The Black Angel (New York: Atria, 2015), collected in Connolly, Parker: A Miscellany.

  68. 68.

    Connolly, Black, 216.

  69. 69.

    Connolly, White, 61.

  70. 70.

    Connolly is not the only Irish mystery writer for whom empathy is not just about present suffering but also about absence, as examples like the death of a young man in Gene Kerrigan’s The Rage (2011) make clear.

  71. 71.

    Connolly, Killing, 3.

  72. 72.

    Connolly, Killing, 264–5.

  73. 73.

    Connolly, White, 277.

  74. 74.

    Connolly, White, 323.

  75. 75.

    Connolly, White, 39–40.

  76. 76.

    Connolly, Dark, 121.

  77. 77.

    Connolly, Killing, 27–8.

  78. 78.

    John Connolly, ‘Author Introduction,’ Dark Hollow, reprint edition (New York: Emily Bestler/Atria, 2015), xiv, reprinted in Connolly, Parker: A Miscellany, 10.

  79. 79.

    Connolly, Parker: A Miscellany, 10.

  80. 80.

    John Connolly, ‘Charlie Parker,’ in The Lineup: The World’s Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives, ed. Otto Penzler (London: Quercus, 2010), 69–71. Macdonald’s final Archer novel, The Blue Hammer, is referenced as the name of a coffee shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the US (but not the UK) edition of Connolly, Killing, 49.

  81. 81.

    Connolly, Killing, 94.

  82. 82.

    Connolly, ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Crime Writers,’ 54. Also of interest here is Richard Kearney’s work on various aspects of Irish culture that show ‘an intellectual ability to hold the traditional oppositions of classical reason together in creative confluence.’ Richard Kearney, ‘Introduction: An Irish Intellectual Tradition,’ in The Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions, ed. Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1985), 9. Compare Kearney’s sense of an Irish independence from reason’s dominance to the following passage in Declan Hughes’s fifth Ed Loy novel: ‘At a certain stage, evil becomes a mystery, transcending all considerations of biography and motivation. … That doesn’t stop people trying; books and newspaper articles appear, some content to detail the mere facts of the case, others attempting to provide some insight into the psychology of the killer’s mind. The result: we know almost all the facts; we remain terrifyingly low on insight’ (City, 301). Here, Loy’s sense that some evil is not susceptible to rational explanation fits interestingly with Connolly and Glynn, and with Irish crime fiction’s sense of the counter-rational, articulated above by Connolly. Glynn’s work is not counter-rational in the way Connolly’s is, and yet Glynn is clearly invested in a sense of how things exceed explanation and understanding.

  83. 83.

    Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary (New York: Penguin, 2000), 31. Bourke’s discussion of the ways in which fairies fleetingly but suggestively mark their presence offers further analogues to Parker’s experience of the honeycomb world, as in The White Road: ‘It was neither a dream, nor a reality. It was as if, for a brief moment, something that resided in a blind spot of my vision had drifted into sight, that a slight alteration of perception had permitted me to see that which usually existed unseen’ (Connolly, White, 135). This is amplified a scant few pages later, when Parker’s dog’s ‘eyes remained fixed on a patch of darkness in the corner, denied light by the thick drapes but darker yet than it should have been, like a hole torn between worlds’ (Connolly, White, 137).

  84. 84.

    Connolly, Black, 307. Strikingly, Enoch is also mentioned as part of the Traveling Man’s cosmology in Connolly, Every Dead Thing, 251–2, 272, 276, 296. In particular, the character Rachel references an edition of Enoch by the Victorian scholar R.H. Charles (Connolly, Every Dead Thing, 252). In a gratifying example of coincidence, this edition was reviewed by M.R. James – described by Connolly as ‘my favorite writer of supernatural fiction’ (Night Music, 426) – who concluded that ‘we can heartily thank Mr. Charles for what he has given us.’ M.R. James, ‘Charles’s Translation of the Book of Enoch,’ The Classical Review 8, no. 1–2 (1894): 44.

  85. 85.

    Bourke, Burning, 249n8.

  86. 86.

    Paul Muldoon, To Ireland, I: The Clarendon Lectures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7.

  87. 87.

    Connolly, ‘Charlie Parker,’ 77.

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Cliff, B. (2018). Transnational Irish Crime Fiction. In: Irish Crime Fiction. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56188-6_5

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