Crime writing is on the rise in Ireland and it's a story with a happy ending, writes Arminta Wallace
Crime is on the rise in Ireland - at last. But don't worry, we're talking strictly crime fiction here. One of the biggest growth areas in international publishing in recent years; but until recently, relatively few Irish writers had ventured into its somewhat murky waters. Now, it seems, there are few who don't want to take the plunge.
Even literary fiction appears to have taken a criminal turn. Claire Kilroy's latest book, Tenderwire, has been praised for "the way it skilfully interfuses the literary novel with the thriller": and Man Booker prize-winner John Banville - writing under the pseudonym Benjamin Black - is due to produce his first thriller, entitled Christine Falls this autumn. For the most part, however, the new generation of Irish crime writers is composed of just that - crime writers who know, and love, the crime genre.
Not that there hasn't been good Irish crime in the recent past. We've had John Connolly, he of the beautifully-written bloodbaths set in Maine, Philip Davison's stylish Harry Fielding spy novels, and, more recently, Alex Barclay's chilling Darkhouse and Declan Hughes's highly promising The Wrong Kind of Blood.
Why the Irish crime novel should have chosen this particular time to blossom is, however , a matter of debate.
Some critics claim that crime fiction, with its penchant for gritty realism, is uniquely placed to address such topical subjects such as "the new Ireland" of prosperity and multiculturalism. In his recent review of Gene Kerrigan's The Midnight Choir on these pages, Douglas Kennedy put forward the theory that "crime fiction always flourishes at a time of economic plenty".
The reason, he wrote, is blindingly obvious: "bad behaviour - especially that which is motivated by cupidity - is the very stuff of all crime writing". Prosperity, of course, doesn't have a monopoly on cupidity; and bad behaviour is not the exclusive preserve of the newly affluent. But it's certainly true that, in a country where a cup of coffee can set you back €5, people are happy to shell out three times that much for a paperback they're going to gobble up in a matter of days, or even hours.
And publishers are naturally keen to oblige by providing a steady stream of new titles. Kerrigan's publisher, Harvill Secker, is a top-notch publishing house which deliberately targeted the crime market following the runaway success of Peter Hoeg's quirky Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow a decade ago, and now specialises in crime writing from Sweden, Norway and Iceland.
Closer to home, Brandon Books has just released a trio of crime titles under the heading "Crime Centre Ireland". These include a volume of short stories by Irish and American writers, Dublin Noir; Sam Millar's The Darkness of Bones, based on the Kincora Boys' Home scandal in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, and Jack Barry's hi-tech, high-speed romp Miss Katie Regrets, whose opening paragraph declares it to be "the story of the blue-rinse transvestite, the Provo in the Lacoste sweater and the government minister". Barry also writes under the name John Maher.
Brandon also publishes Ken Bruen - one of the writers who, according to Michael Gallagher of the specialist Dublin bookshop Murder Ink, has been responsible for changing the way we think about crime fiction in Ireland. "I think that since he came to prominence about three years ago, Bruen has contributed a fair bit to the Irish thriller genre," he says. Gallagher's Dawson Street shop carries between 9,000 and 11,000 crime titles, many of them American editions. But up to now, he says, he has found that it's the tourists who tend to snap up the books with Irish settings.
"The Irish don't seem to want to read about the Irish," he says. Gallagher puts this down to "intellectual snobbery" towards the crime genre in Irish book circles. "In America," he says, "the detective novel is regarded as social commentary, in a tradition going back to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Here, it has been regarded as potboiler stuff - worse than chicklit, even."
Arlene Hunt, whose second novel featuring the likeable young Dublin private detectives John Quigley and Sarah Kenny, Black Sheep, has just been published by Hodder Headline Ireland, disagrees.
"I don't think crime is a second-rate genre - I don't know what that means, even," she says. "Looking at my bookshelves, I can see Joyce and I can see Don DeLillo, but beside them are all the thrillers and crime books I enjoy reading - and I'm equally proud of them. It would be very narrow-minded if you read only one kind of book, wouldn't it?"
Hunt, who was born in Co Wicklow but has lived in Barcelona with her family for the past five years, is a big fan of American thrillers. "And I thought, why shouldn't those kind of stories be set in Ireland? This is the kind of book I like to read myself, so that's the kind I wanted to write," she says. Among her favourite authors, she cites George Pelecanos, Robert Crais, Dennis Lehane, Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy. "A thriller or a crime novel can be about anything," says Hunt. "But inevitably it will be about loss - somebody will die somewhere in it. And there are so many ways that death can affect people. A mother might lose a child, or a husband lose his wife. So that's one major issue you constantly find yourself addressing. And then you're looking at the dark side of people as well."
Another Irish writer who explores the dark side of human nature is Belfast-based Sam Millar, whose most recent book, The Darkness of Bones, recreates the details of a child abuse scandal with shivery vividness. Millar's own memoir, On the Brinks, which relates how he served time in a US jail for his involvement in one of the biggest robberies in American history and was eventually given a pardon by Bill Clinton, was a best-seller and he has enjoyed considerable critical acclaim, winning the Brian Moore short story award in 1998.
"I've always loved the thriller because at the end of the day it's great escapism," he says. "It has been monopolised by American writers, which is a great shame - but there are some great books coming out of Dublin at the moment, and Ken Bruen has done tremendous work down in Galway. I'm hoping to do the same for Belfast. I don't want to mention the war and the Troubles and paramilitaries as such - I just want to get into small-town characters and dark stories. I'm hoping that in my small way it will push us all on and help us forget about what happened here."
Perhaps every country gets the crime fiction it deserves - in which case, it comes as no surprise that some of the best of the genre currently being written in Ireland has a clerical flavour. "I've written short stories, a memoir, poetry and a handbook on bereavement," says Christy Kenneally, who was a priest for seven years before turning his hand to writing and presenting TV programmes, including RTÉ's travel show No Frontiers. "When I brought my first book to Breda Purdue in Hodder," he adds, "the first thing she said to me was 'Christy, is this the great Irish literary novel?' I said 'No', and she said, 'Thank God'. I had no ambition at all to write the great Irish literary novel. That would wear me out to a thread."
With his most recent outing Kenneally has produced what might be called an Irish Da Vinci Code - except that The Remnant is a hugely entertaining tale of intrigue and murder in the Vatican featuring fast-talking cardinals and a liberal sprinkling of wry humour, neither of which are to be found in Brown's po-faced bestseller. "Well, you know what, I must be the only person on the face of the earth who hasn't read The Da Vinci Code," says Kenneally. "I was so in dread of being in any way influenced by it, even sub-consciously, that I wouldn't touch it with a 40-foot pole - so I wrote in lovely virginal purity, away from it all."
Within the walls of Glenstal Benedictine Abbey, Co Limerick, meanwhile, the monastery's prior Andrew Nugent has also - as he puts it - turned to crime. He wrote his first book, The Four Courts Murder, to cheer himself up when, aged 60, he found himself in a remote part of Nigeria with no television and little to cheer about. "I wanted the sort of escape that you'd go to the cinema for," he says. "I had this mental image of somebody walking down Winetavern Street in Dublin, crossing the bridge, entering the Four Courts, crossing the Round Hall, walking along a corridor and killing a judge. I started from there."
The Four Courts Murder has been highly praised in the US and will be published by Hodder Headline next month. It will be followed by Second Burial for a Black Prince, in which Nugent paints an extraordinarily lively picture of one of Ireland's newest and least known environments when Insp Jim Quilligan, a Garda detective from a settled Traveller background, is faced with the murder of a young African man who runs a restaurant on Dublin's Parnell Street. "I'm not a campaigner," he says. "I'm just interested in people - their struggles, and their enthusiasm for life, even when life is difficult. Perhaps especially then. That's what I believe is interesting."
With still more Irish crime writers due to produce books over the next few months - including Glenn Meade's The Devil's Disciple, which will appear at the end of August - there will doubtless be many twists and turns still to come in the saga that has been the story of the Irish crime genre so far. For the moment, however, it seems to be a story with an uncommonly happy ending.