Declan Hughes has become a leading writer of Ireland’s crime-writing boom – although he argues that we should move away from lazy categorisation
IRISH CRIME fiction has been a long time in the cooking. But like a good casserole whose lid has finally been lifted, it contains all kinds of mouth-watering goodies. We have Brian McGilloway’s Wild West Border adventures; we have Arlene Hunt’s darkly comic John Quigley and Sarah Kenny series; we have Gene Kerrigan’s urban neo-noir. And we have Declan Hughes, whose Ed Loy books have gone from strength to strength since he made his debut with
The Wrong Kind of Blood
in 2006.
Loy is the kind of fast-talking, hard-drinking private investigator who spends his time getting on the wrong side of the bad guys and the right side of the gals. It's a miracle, indeed, that he survived the first four books, so many beatings and bashings and late-night love-ins did he – and his catastrophe-prone sidekick Tommy Owens – undergo. In City of Lost Girls, however, we see a softer side of Loy. Is he in danger of mellowing?
Declan Hughes takes a sip of the excellent coffee served by the barman of Fitzgerald’s of Sandymount. “I came out of my last book feeling I’d been in a very low-ceilinged room with a lot of very scary blokes,” he says. “You tend to answer a book with another book, even though you’re not aware that you’re doing it at the time.”
Hence the high humour quotient in the fifth Loy outing, whose plot revolves around a charismatic film director and a series of disappearing extras. Much of the humour, however, comes from the feisty mother-of-two Anne Fogarty.
"In All The Dead VoicesLoy met a woman who didn't die 50 pages later. So there she is. His girlfriend," says Hughes. "Now, there's a dreadful trap that you can fall into in crime fiction, where the detective has a girlfriend – and then in the next book all she does is ring him from the dinner-party saying, 'Where are you?' It's such an unrewarding role for her. Thinking back to my theatre days, I figured no actress would thank me for writing a part like that for her. I've been trying to introduce other narrative voices in the books anyhow. Because obviously there are technical difficulties with the first-person PI novel, in terms of how's he gonna find things out, and how are we gonna find things out. So I thought, I'll give Anne her own narrative and see how it goes."
Pretty well, is the answer, if rave reviews in the New York Times, LA Timesand Boston Globestill count for anything at all. Here, however, an idea persists that if it's crime, it can't be literary. Mention of his theatrical past is a reminder that Hughes spent two decades working as playwright and director with the highly-regarded theatre company Rough Magic. Does the patronising attitude to crime writing in certain Irish circles irritate him?
He takes another sip of coffee. Behind us, the sunlight streams through a series of windows which commemorate the various episodes of Joyce's Ulysses.
“In crime, there are some very bad books indeed that can make a lot of money,” he says. “The writers are not interested in sentences, or in anything other than doing what they do. But there are people who feel they’re doing a little bit more, maybe – and I suppose I have the temerity to feel I’m one of them. So it’s occasionally a bit irksome if people go, ‘Oh, there you are over there with your thrillers’. Through the crime novel you can deal with so much, whether it’s political or social or cultural. You can really reflect society. And I like that kind of book – the kind that reflects, in Trollope’s words, the way we live now.”
Part of the problem, he suggests, is the contemporary world's mania for easy categorisation. "Think of the time when you had Dickens and Wilkie Collins and nobody had a name for what it was. I mean, what was Robert Louis Stevenson writing? What would we call it now? What is Bleak House– a legal thriller, a mystery, or just a very, very good book in which these elements are mixed up? Anyone who reads a page of Chandler and doesn't realise that it's better prose than 95 per cent of writers of any kind . . . it's weird, I think. It's ignorance, too."
The latter is certainly not a charge which can be aimed at Hughes, whose knowledge of the classic novels of American PI fiction – Chandler, Hammett and his favourite, Ross McDonald – is encyclopaedic. His background in the performing arts also runs through his Loy books in the shape of Loy’s ongoing connections to the movie world on both sides of the Atlantic. At the recent Cúirt literary festival in Galway, Hughes and his long-time friend John Connolly stood in for the absent Ian Rankin, who was stuck somewhere in the ash cloud, and delighted the capacity audience with their sharp, smart double act of reading and conversation.
Did it dismay Hughes to discover that crime writers are required to produce from their creative hats – as well as a book a year – something approaching stand-up comedy? He shakes his head. “I suppose there’s a bit of the frustrated performer in me anyhow,” he says. “I met Lynne Parker and Darragh Kelly and Pauline McLynn and Stan Townsend and other actors at Trinity, and I had a notion then that maybe I could be an actor too. It was good to find out early that it’s a tough profession – even for people who are good at it. What was it gonna be like for someone who couldn’t do it? But the notion must have lingered. So when I began to write the books and got a chance to perform them, I just kind of plunged in.”
As it happens, Stanley Townsend – in sparkling comic form – is the reader on Isis Audio’s superb CD versions of the first four Loy novels. Meanwhile the evening at the Town Hall Theatre in Galway confirmed, if confirmation were needed, that Irish crime fiction is all grown up and ready to take centre stage. So consummate was the performance by Hughes and Connolly that Rankin – whose Detective Inspector John Rebus has, at this stage, assumed legendary proportions in the genre – wasn’t even missed. Irish crime writers are also beginning to rub shoulders with the great and the good at the big international awards ceremonies.
"The CWA Gold Dagger is the biggest English prize, and the Edgar is the American one – which I was fortunate enough to be nominated for," says Hughes. "That was exciting, to go to the Edgars. Because everybody is there, you know? There's Michael Connelly presenting an award. And there's Harlen Coben at the bar. And Lee Child. I met Sue Grafton. And James Lee Burke was in the room. I suppose I could have beaten my way across to him and touched the hem of his garment – but to be honest, breathing the same air was enough." Crime writers don't spend all their time schmoozing and quaffing champagne; the downside of the job is the requirement to get inside the head of some very nasty individuals. In City of Lost Girls, for example, Hughes gives a voice to a serial killer. Is that something he finds difficult? "Alarmingly not," he admits. "I seem to have access to a certain amount of rage and darkness. I'm not entirely sure where it comes from – but it's available. Afterwards, you get a bit disturbed by it. In The Colour of Bloodthere was a lot of familial sex abuse and dark, dark secrets; and at a certain point, near the end of that book, I just felt very bleak and kind of depressed.
"On the other hand, we're writers. We make stuff up. There was an article recently scolding writers for writing about sexual abuse without having been abused themselves. Which goes back to the old joke, 'How many children did Shakespeare have to kill to write Macbeth?' I mean, it's ridiculous. So you do occasionally have to have a meeting with yourself and say, 'This is all made up'. And it's entertainment – as all art should be. High or low, it's entertainment before it's anything else. Or else it isn't worth anything."
City of Lost Girlsis published by John Murray
The Lives of Loy
Who is Ed Loy? The clue's in the name. A loy is a kind of spade, and loy digging was a highly-skilled form of manual ploughing in Ireland a couple of centuries back. Sam Spade, the protagonist of Dashiel Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, is of course the daddy of all fictional PIs.
How many books? Five: The Wrong Kind of Blood, The Colour of Blood, The Dying Breed(published in the US as The Price of Blood), All The Dead Voicesand City of Lost Girls.
What’s his gimmick? His trademark outfit of black suit, white shirt and highly polished shoes – which places him somewhere between gangster, funeral director and orchestral musician in the sartorial stakes.
Any shady past? He played the role of Irish Man in Bar in a film adaptation of the novel The Dain Curse(there's that man Hammett again) in 1997. He also has a broken marriage, and a personal tragedy in the death of his baby daughter, Lily.
Most likely to say? “Maurice stares at me blankly for a while. He looks as if his brain has been removed for servicing.” Or “Finnegan stood up surprisingly quickly, and waved his hands at me. They were pudgy hands, and they matched his socks . . .”.
