The North and the Republic
Although the credit crunch caused the odd hiccup, the city of Dublin maintains its frenzy of property development. Walk through such areas as James Joyce’s ‘Nighttown’ these days, and you’ll see something rather different from the locale he celebrated: the working girls may still be there, but there are fewer of them and cranes now loom above the narrow streets, preparing the way for the proliferating wine bars, coffee shops and upscale couture houses. But Dublin’s basic identity seems to remain inviolable, however much her face may change – and it is this struggle between the old and the new that is powering some of the most provocative fiction being written in Ireland today. Interestingly enough, as ALAN GLYNN’s Winterland comprehensively proves, it’s the not entirely respectable genre of crime fiction that is throwing up some of the most incisive evocations of this protean city.
The central character, the tenacious Gina Rafferty (who takes on some very powerful and dangerous people), may have wandered into Winterland from a Martina Cole novel, but the territory here couldn’t be further from the East End of London, either geographically or in terms of the author’s ambition; despite its popular pedigree, this is something of a state-of-the-nation novel. From the violent opening in a smoking section of a Dublin pub – where the dialogue has an authentic snap, maintained throughout the novel – Glynn keeps his narrative exuberant and fleet-footed. A young drug dealer, Noel Rafferty, is shot in a beer garden, and the police are happy to file it under gangland killings – one less thug to worry about. But on the same evening, Rafferty’s uncle (who shares his nephew’s name) also loses his life in a suspicious car accident. Coincidence or conspiracy? Gina Rafferty, Glynn’s heroine, isn’t buying the official explanation of either death, and undertakes some amateur detective work. But she quickly realises that she is up against some influential opponents – movers and shakers in a world of crooked property deals and corrupt political influence. She discovers that her brother (the Rafferty who died in the car crash) was involved with the construction of a massive skyscraper together with a property developer, Paddy Norton, whose ambition is to transform Dublin into something like downtown Chicago. The real crimes in Glynn’s provocative and richly textured novel are not necessarily the killings, but the unfettered exercise of greed and political self-interest.
The names of certain crime writers are uttered with due reverence, and for a long time, KEN BRUEN has been a writer spoken about by both his fellow scribes and his devoted readers with great affection. Among his many skills, perhaps his most notable is the astonishing consistency he has shown over his series of books. The Galway-born author’s Jack Taylor series has bagged both Shamus and Crime Writers’ Association awards – not to mention critical acclaim. Cross, the sixth in the award-winning private eye series, is a first-rate entry, played out against a slowly – and sometimes reluctantly – modernising Ireland and Galway City. The author’s PhD in metaphysics is reflected in the mental processes of Jack Taylor, and Jack’s frequently alienated state is one of the many unusual aspects of these very individual novels.
It’s always a gift for a crime writer when his series character enjoys a successful TV incarnation, as COLIN BATEMAN has done with his Martin Murphy books. Or is it? James Nesbitt has made the character very much his own on television, but every reader will have their own conception of Murphy when they read the cleverly written novels. In fact, it’s probably best to forget the face of the actor involved and let the author work his particular magic. There is a serious point at the heart of Murphy’s Revenge: who defines the moral imperatives if it is possible to track down and kill the person who murdered a loved one? A support group for relatives of murder victims – Confront – counsels empowerment through therapy, but someone is choosing to murder the killers involved. Martin Murphy joins the group undercover, but finds it impossible to remain aloof when his own past is wrenched into the investigation. What makes all of this even more involving than one might expect from the reliable Bateman is the insidious way in which he confronts the reader’s own prejudices. Surely the scum who have murdered loved ones deserve no more pity than they gave to their victims? The moral equivocation forced upon the unwilling Murphy strengthens Bateman’s narrative.
Slowly but surely, Bateman (who went for a time under just his surname, a strange ploy his publishers have wisely abandoned) has been building a loyal army of fans, eager for all they can get of his sardonic and idiosyncratic writing. Bagging the Betty Trask Prize with his first novel Divorcing Jack was not the passport to oblivion such early success can often be; in fact, it was an open sesame for what has been a very healthy career. This first book introduced Bateman’s feckless hero, Dan Starkey. By the time of The Horse With My Name, Starkey has not made a success of his career in journalism and is living in a run-down Belfast flat. He spends most of his time in the pub, his only activity being worrying about his collapsed relationship with his wife Patricia (who has found herself a new lover). But when his friend Mark (who moonlights as ‘The Horse Whisperer’, an online tout) asks him to look into the activities of Geordie McClean, the prime mover in Irish American racing, Dan finds himself in very deep waters – and yearning for the balmy days when no one cared what he did. Dan is a wonderfully rounded comic creation, and the ever-surprising narrative has all the bite and incident of Bateman’s best work. If you like the hard-edged wit of Irvine Welsh but find all the drugs a little hard to take, Bateman may well be the writer for you.
So many debut crime thrillers have been appearing over the last few years that it’s harder and harder to keep up. But LIZ ALLEN’s intelligently written Last to Know was a book that really deserved to rise above the throng. Her heroine Deborah Parker is a fresh recruit at the prestigious firm of solicitors Jennings and Associates, trying to make her mark in a challenging legal world. A plum job drops in her lap: she is to defend the scion of one of Ireland’s leading crime figures. The issue is rape – a particularly savage one – which makes her uneasy, and Deborah soon finds that her big break is actually a recipe for disaster: her whole life is turned upside down and she finds herself part of a world that is very different from the one she is used to. It’s a standard thriller ploy to drop your hero or heroine into a maelstrom of danger and suspicion, watching in horror as their life implodes around them, but Allen brings off the device with more panache than most, and the Irish criminal underworld is created with salty, threatening authenticity. A key element here, of course, is the beleaguered heroine, and Deborah Parker is sympathetically characterised – we share her fears, get annoyed at her (frequent) missteps and identify with her successes. Similarly, the various Irish heavies Deborah comes up against are vividly created, from the brutal to the more dangerous intelligent kingpins.
The Northern Ireland novelist STUART NEVILLE enjoys the heavyweight imprimatur of American crime-writing legend James Ellroy – with such encomiums as ‘This guy can write!’ The Celtic onslaught on crime fiction continues apace, with Neville making a mark as a very individual talent. Apart from a sure grasp of the mechanics of suspense, Neville’s real coup in such books as Stolen Souls is to present a markedly multifaceted protagonist – prey to ghosts from Ireland’s troubled and violent past – about whom the reader is frequently obliged to change their mind. Comparisons may be made with other writers, but Neville is very much his own man. In 2015, Those We Left Behind saw the start of a completely new set of characters, a new location and a new style of writing. Gone is the growing pile of bodies, gone the male-dominated cast of characters, replaced instead by the brilliant and complicated DCI Serena Flanagan, a detective just back to work following her treatment for breast cancer. Those We Left Behind is not just about the whodunit, but about the ripples that crime creates and the impact it has on the remaining family, on the inspectors who work on the case, and on the perpetrators themselves.
In Crazy Man Michael by JIM LUSBY, DI Carl McCadden is being tipped to head up a new unit – the Murder Squad – which the Irish Minister for Justice is planning to form. The unit will have exclusive responsibility for tackling homicide throughout the Irish state, and the first assignment will be to investigate a group of unsolved murders of women. But as McCadden readies himself for this high-powered job, he encounters an undercover policeman called Wallace who has a strange story to tell – and, what’s more, he is being pursued by Special Branch. McCadden realises that it would be far more sensible to avoid the trouble that Wallace brings with him, but, inevitably, he is soon deep in a very dark business that threatens everything he has worked for. Jim Lusby has steadily developed his McCadden character through three previous thrillers, all rich in atmosphere and crammed with the kind of assured plotting that is found too rarely these days. Making the Cut was a powerful debut that the author succeeded in building upon, but Crazy Man Michael is possibly the most complex in the series. By dividing his hero’s sympathies, Lusby presents him, and the reader, with a host of difficult moral decisions that give a keen edge to the plot. Some of the revelations (including corruption in high places) are familiar, but it is more and more difficult for authors to avoid treading these familiar waters. The point is: can Lusby ring enough changes to make his novel stand out from the crowd? And on that score, there is little room for debate – this is a richly textured tale.
The phrase ‘If you’ve got a winning formula, why change it?’ is clearly one that the writer CHRIS EWAN doesn’t agree with. He made a mark with the titles in his witty and entertaining crime series The Good Thief’s Guide, all of which enjoyed critical acclaim and respectable sales. So – one might legitimately ask – why rock the boat with an entirely different kind of book? The answer to that is simple – in their very different way, his more recent novels, set in the author’s own Manx/Irish Sea territory, are proving to be just as accomplished as the earlier series. Safe House dealt with governmental corruption and international terrorism. And impressive though it was, Dark Tides was even better, this time drawing on the Isle of Man Halloween convention of Hop-tu-naa.
Claire Cooper is just eight years old when her mother disappears without trace during Hop-tu-naa. The years do little to assuage her loss, until Claire, now a teenager, finds herself part of a group of five friends who celebrate Halloween with foolhardy dares. Claire is a participant, but she is more mature than her friends and her presence changes the nature of the group. Then one of the pranks takes a very grim turn, and the group is torn apart. Six years pass, and one of Claire’s friends dies in what appears to be an accident on the night of Hop-tu-naa. Claire has now become a police officer, and she is not convinced that the death was accidental – and what is the significance of the single footprint found near the body? After another Halloween death and another footprint, Claire begins to fear that somebody is seeking revenge – and the secret to the identity of the killer clearly lies in the past.
If the above scenario – prank goes wrong, body count begins – sounds familiar from a hundred films, well, yes, it is. But such is Chris Ewan’s skill that this is a compelling piece of work. Ewan utilises the more sinister aspects of Manx folklore, forging from them a truly atmospheric thriller, about which one is forced to use one of the oldest clichés in the reviewer’s handbook: it is impossible to put down. If Ewan chooses never to go back to his lighter Good Thief’s Guide series and continues to produce novels like Dark Tides, readers will have little cause to complain.
Authors tend to like to have their egos stroked, and ANTHONY J QUINN has been enjoying such attention more than most for his remarkable novels. In Border Angels, a charred corpse and a set of footprints in the snow direct Quinn’s protagonist Inspector Celcius Daley into the dark world of people trafficking. Daly is on the trail of a missing woman, Lena Novak, who has disappeared one winter’s night along the Irish border, leaving behind only the bodies of two men. Soon, Daley finds himself working with a prostitute and a hitman in an increasingly dangerous chase – one that leads to a refuge for people who do not want to be found. Like many writers resident in Ireland, Anthony Quinn is influenced by the great American crime writers – and Border Angels shows that he clearly belongs in their august company.
British crime fiction was once full of boring, characterless policemen (usually wearing a gabardine and trilby), shuffling in to solve crimes committed by far more colourful criminals. And how impatient readers were to get back to the malefactors! The breed, however, was comprehensively consigned to the dustbin by a new kind of copper, one who bends the rules to get the bad guy. This maverick cop soon calcified into cliché in its turn, so it’s a cause for celebration that such writers as GENE KERRIGAN (author of Little Criminals, much acclaimed by the likes of Roddy Doyle) can still produce something fresh and radical with the concept.
In The Midnight Choir, DI Harry Synnott of the Dublin Garda has under his belt several high-profile cases. He is a policeman with uninflected views on the difference between right and wrong – and he is unforgiving when he encounters corruption among his fellow officers. Harry is aware that a glitzy promotion is in the offing, but he’s also aware that he first has to close his investigation into an armed robbery – and he knows who the perpetrators are. He needs a lever to crack the case, and it comes his way in the figure of the desperate young Dixie Peyton. She is the widow of a petty criminal, and in her efforts to regain custody of her son she has taken to mugging. She accidentally stabs a tourist with a syringe that she claimed was full of HIV-infected blood, though this is a bluff. Dixie is perfect cannon fodder (after all, anything that could hurt the tourist trade in Dublin is frowned upon by Harry’s bosses), and as Harry and his fellow cops work through the usual line-up of rapists and thugs, he begins to feel that a sacrifice on the altar of his career might be justified if it can get him the breakthrough he wants… and that sacrifice is Dixie.
Little Criminals marked Kerrigan out as a truly ambitious crime writer, with a dextrous use of language married to some masterful plotting. While working in a different genre, he has something of Joyce’s ability in conjuring up a very vivid picture of Dublin – but this modern city is completely different from the one Leopold Bloom wandered through; the boarded-up shops and vicious petty thugs are artfully counterpointed with the cosmopolitan gloss of a European city on the up. But what really tells here are Kerrigan’s notions on the limits of justice. The destruction of lives wrought by self-styled ‘righteous’ men is the theme in microcosm here, but it’s possible to speculate that Kerrigan is drawing parallels with righteous men on the world stage, unconcerned by the destruction their virtue carries in its wake.
The versatile GRAHAM MASTERTON has adopted a career trajectory very similar to that of his colleague Peter James. Both men made their mark decades ago as British horror novelists of some distinction, before turning to the more lucrative genre of crime fiction, so it’s hardly surprising that it is Peter James who supplies the encomium: ‘One of the most original and frightening storytellers of our time.’ In Masterton’s fourth novel in his Katie Maguire sequence, Taken for Dead, an Irish wedding is in lively form in County Cork with a ceilidh band accompaniment. But when the cake is cut, a macabre discovery is made: the severed head of the local baker. Katie Maguire of the Irish Garda has no leads until another businessman disappears. Combining Graham Masterton’s two skills – crime and horror – this is proof that career changes can be successful.
TANA FRENCH possesses one thing many writers would kill for – impeccable word of mouth among readers and critics. There are few aficionados of crime fiction who do not speak approvingly of her work: in fact, more than approvingly – with massive enthusiasm. Her novel The Likeness started with a conversation in a pub involving the notion that everyone has a double somewhere in the world. She began to speculate: what would it feel like if you and your double made friends? Or what if you couldn’t stand each other? Would you have other things in common, beside that shared face? In a mystery novel someone has to die, so French’s concept was that her protagonist meets her double when it is too late – she is already dead. But her protagonist, Cassie, is the only person who can find out who her double was and what happened to her, and the only way to get to know her is to become her. Detective Cassie Maddox, who first appeared in In the Woods, shows up at a crime scene and finds a victim who not only looks like her but is using her old undercover identity, Lexie Madison. She ends up going back undercover as Lexie to tempt the killer out of hiding to finish the job. But Cassie’s at a very fragile moment in her own life, and Lexie’s world is a very tempting one: a tightly knit group of friends sharing a huge, beautiful, ramshackle house in the countryside outside Dublin. Gradually, she starts to fall deeper and deeper into Lexie’s life and to lose hold of her own. In many ways, this is a book about identity, and what a tricky, vulnerable thing it is. French has said that most of us have had at least one moment when we want to simply leave our own lives behind, just put them down and walk away. In The Likeness, some of the characters actually follow that impulse: they try to erase their old selves and start over from scratch. But it’s a dangerous thing to do. French’s other novels are equally ambitious and gripping.
The best crime writers, such as BRIAN McGILLOWAY, are adroit at bringing thorny issues to a general readership. And in Bleed a River Deep, the Irish-born author takes his Garda Inspector Benedict Devlin away from the locales of earlier books to a new setting: the opening of a gold mine in Donegal. Elements here include pollution in a local river and the treatment of illegal immigrants in Ireland, and McGilloway develops the relationship between Devlin and his Northern counterpart, Jim Hendry, in a highly satisfying fashion. The book is a reminder of just what an accomplished crime scribe McGilloway is – and how his skills keep on growing.
The acclaim that greeted DECLAN BURKE’s adroit Absolute Zero Cool was replicated for Slaughter’s Hound, which arrived bearing praise from no less than Lee Child (as well as a striking jacket that rather cheekily lifts motifs from the designer Saul Bass – but then everyone does that). Burke’s protagonist, the world-weary Harry Rigby, is witness to a suicide – a suicide that may be part of an Irish epidemic. And in Harry Rigby’s Sligo, life can be very cheap, as Harry is reminded in the most forceful of terms. Those familiar with Declan Burke’s work will know what to expect here: that wry and sardonic authorial voice, married to a particularly idiosyncratic command of dialogue. In some ways, perhaps, it’s the latter (as in The Lost and the Blind) that marks Burke out from what is rapidly turning into an unstoppable juggernaut of Irish crime fiction.
In The Priest by GERARD O’DONOVAN, the streets of Dublin throb with fear as a ruthless killer cuts a swathe through his victims. Before each assault, he makes the sign of the cross. A visiting politician’s daughter is attacked and left for dead, her body burned by a heated cross. It’s up to DI Mike Mulcahy to track down a ruthless murderer, the eponymous ‘Priest’. As the divine mission of the killer proceeds bloodily, Mike finds himself dealing with both a hostile media and a highly intelligent nemesis, with only journalist Siobhan Fallon to help him bring a truly monstrous figure to justice. This book showed that O’Donovan was a name to watch, which was proved subsequently by Dublin Dead. The tenacious Fallon is attempting to track down a missing girl, while Mulcahy discovers a connection between Ireland’s biggest ever drugs haul and the killing of a Dublin gangster in Spain. More people will die, as the duo begins to uncover some very nasty secrets from the past. O’Donovan’s wonderfully evocative sense of locale, breakneck pacing and strong characterisation mark out Dublin Dead as something special in the crowded field of modern crime, and he ensures that the streets of Dublin are always a scary place in his memorable novels.
The galvanic Black Cat Black Dog by JOHN CREED (a pseudonym of Eoin McNamee, mentioned below) is as stylishly written as it is filled with kinetic action. Creed’s The Sirius Crossing introduced his resourceful ex-spook Jack Valentine, and provided an exhilarating experience – but not at the expense of carefully honed prose, and that, thankfully, remains the case with this outing, even if Creed takes slightly longer than before to exert a real grip.
On a beach in County Antrim, a set of dog tags is discovered, appearing to belong to a sailor who vanished in the 1950s. Jack Valentine may have renounced his previous life as a spook, but he is drawn once again into a dangerous mystery. The mix here involves a WWII arms dump in the North Sea and an American mission to Iraq that went disastrously wrong in the early 1990s. As Jack gets deeper and deeper into his old familiar universe of violence and betrayal, he finds that Northern Ireland is still prey to some of the sinister individuals he knew in the past. But there is a frightening global agenda at work here and perhaps it would be best for Jack simply to walk away – not something he’s very good at.
Those who have read Creed’s earlier books will know what to expect, and will be more than prepared to put up with the extra time the author takes to lay out his stall. In fact, this is some very canny work on Creed’s part that more than pays dividends as his convoluted plot unfolds.
Under his real name, EOIN McNAMEE produces disturbing journeys into the benighted soul of his native country. The Blue trilogy of books is based on real-life murders – but, as they took place before the Troubles, they are not within the remit of this study – while his extraordinary debut novel, Resurrection Man, detailed the bloodletting of the UVF gang the Shankill Butchers in the Belfast of the 1970s.
With such books as The Cold Cold Ground, comparisons have been drawn with David Peace’s blistering Red Riding Quartet, specifically suggesting that the talented ADRIAN McKINTY is doing for Northern Ireland what Peace did for Yorkshire. And these comparisons are not far-fetched: it would seem that the effortless grasp of genre that the author demonstrated in earlier books, such as the powerful Dead I Well May Be, is matched by a prodigious literary reach which is every inch the equal of its ambition. In The Cold Cold Ground, the first in the series featuring DS Sean Duffy, the detective is promoted and posted to Carrickfergus CID, where he finds himself with a challenge involving two very different cases: what appears to be the county’s first serial killer and a young woman’s suicide (which may well be murder). Things are complicated by the involvement of one of the victims in the IRA. This is powerful and pungent writing that takes on social issues along with its storytelling impetus.
JOHN GORDON SINCLAIR has successfully made the transition from actor to novelist – from the gangling youth of Gregory’s Girl to a hard-boiled middle-aged crime writer. Seventy Times Seven is set in 1992. Professional hitman Danny McGuire has a job: to kill the ‘Thevshi’, the Ghost, who has been acting as a mole within the Republican movement of Northern Ireland. But the Thevshi knows who murdered Danny’s brother, and Danny will need to speak to his victim before he kills him. And there is a third figure in the equation, as ruthless as either of the people he is up against. The American locations are a clue to an element in the stew that Sinclair has concocted: US maestro Elmore Leonard, whose peppy dialogue and delirious plotting are echoed here. But Sinclair is the real thing – a full-throttle writer of energy and inventiveness. Sinclair’s second book, Blood Whispers, was set in his native Scotland.
Given the rude health of Irish crime fiction, it becomes harder and harder to point out who are most striking of the current writers – there are a hell of a lot of candidates. But in any such criminal beauty contest, DECLAN HUGHES would quickly assume pole position. Hughes is a writer of real authority and power, as demonstrated in his skilfully written novels featuring tough private eye Ed Loy. The surname of his Dublin-based Irish-American sleuth is a nod to Dashiell Hammett’s imperishable gumshoe Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon: a ‘loy’ is a traditional Irish spade. Signature books include City of Lost Girls and All the Dead Voices; a good starting point is the lively The Colour of Blood. The writer is also a playwright and screenwriter, and has served as writer-in-association with Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.
IAN SANSOM writes two series with very different locales, but the tongue-in-cheek Mobile Library novels are set on the north coast of Northern Ireland – hence his inclusion here. The most representative book is probably the first in the series, The Case of the Missing Books, which introduces the librarian (and unlikely detective) Israel Armstrong and his eponymous mobile library. However, the period-set County Guides sequence is set – or will be set – in every corner of England. Sansom’s plan is to write a book about every historic county, and once he has covered England he is planning to turn his attention to Scotland, Ireland and Wales.
Other writers and key books
GERARD BRENNAN: Wee Rockets
SINÉAD CROWLEY: Are You Watching Me?
MATT McGUIRE: Dark Dawn
SAM MILLAR: Dead of Winter, Bloodstorm