Genres have rules, and these rules emerge organically, almost naturally.Ian Fleming didn't consciously lay down a series of conventions for James Bond, but they emerged over time,writes Kevin Myers.
Indeed, many of them have been the creation of the film-makers rather than Fleming himself. The Bond of the novels was not a whimsically punning charmer, but a sadist and a snob, a deadly killer who used and discarded women without scruple.
The genre nonetheless permits these departures from the original character, for the central ingredients that make James Bond James Bond are retained: he remains thoroughly British, speaks no foreign languages, but is urbane, suave, imperturbable, and of course ruthless. To the chagrin of the Americans, they have never managed to create a character remotely close to the Bond figure; and they cannot. Why? Because the genre doesn't permit it.
The failure to understand genre is one reason why there have been so many unsuccessful attempts to set a crime-thriller in Dublin. As my former colleague John Connolly - the King of Saudi Arabia is now his butler - has triumphantly shown, the bastard, the genre is essentially American.
And though there are rules to the genre which can be bent, just as the Bond rules have been, the central one, the wise-cracking hero-figure, has to be American, talking American, thinking American, and with a distinctly American world-weariness.
That's the genre, and the rules for it have been laid down by Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, Mickie Spillane and all those unknown screen-writers of film-noir. The prime location for the US-thriller, with a maverick investigator at its focus, is Los Angeles. But the genre is elastic enough to allow certain departures. The trick is to find out what those departures can be.
If you are going to set your thriller in Dublin, the first thing to know is that your hero cannot be an embittered, weary ex-Garda detective inspector.
It's a great shame, but he simply won't bear the weight of story-telling expectation. He simply lacks the glamour. His cousins with the New York or Los Angeles police departments, they can certainly be the hero of a police-thriller. But an Irish police officer in Dublin simply cannot live up to the mythic requirements of the narrative, any more than could a wooden pig at Troy.
That's one reason why Ingrid Black's recently published The Dead works so extraordinarily well. It's set in Dublin, to be sure, but its hero isn't Irish; but nor is he a hero; and nor is he a he; and anyway Ingrid Black is not Ingrid Black. She is in reality Eilis O'Hanlon, columnist for the Sunday Independent, and her central character in her first thriller is an ex-FBI officer who is a she. And not merely is she a she, but a lesbian who is having an affair with a senior Irish police officer. A she-officer, naturally. This is a brilliant reversal of the mythic private eye figure, because we are at ease with a wise-cracking ex-FBI lesbian American: in a wholly unexpected fashion, she conforms with the requirements of the genre.
In The Dead, Dublin does noir well; surprisingly well.
In fact, it's a natural setting for the B-movie genre, with the American heroine Saxon - writer, ex-FBI agent, cynic - prowling through it, puffing her cigar, quipping in the way only Americans are allowed to quip.
Eilis O'Hanlon - predictably - has been criticised for not making Dublin "Irish" enough, and for creating the Dublin Metropolitan Police force, rather than using An Garda Síochána for her tale. But one of the primary requirements of the PI-thriller genre is that the narrative has to be mythic in scale and still believable: and the everyday conversations of real Dublin and of real gardaí are simply incompatible with that requirement.
But the LA of Raymond Chandler or of Robert Towne's magnificent Chinatown are probably largely unlike the real city. So what? Do you believe that Tombstone or Sherwood Forest ever bore the remotest resemblance to what you've seen in westerns or Robin Hood movies? Moreover, there might also be a more practical consideration. Gardaí are the most litigious single group in the country: if she'd used the Garda as a setting, how many libel suits would right now be pending before the High Court? The territory which Eilis O'Hanlon steers her narrative through is in one sense familiar: a serial killer is loose on the streets of Dublin. But that's merely the context for the narrative, just as the saloon is for the western and the madman who wants world domination is for James Bond.
And let me tell you, I've been led on wild goose chases and gone gambolling after red herrings enough times in many who-dunnit genres, but never so many as in The Dead.
For it's set dead centre in the Raymond Chandler tradition of making a plot of such sly and fiendish complexity, with so many misleading clues. Had they been included in the story, Sherlock Poirot or Hercule Marlowe would simply have stepped out of the pages in a blind rage and shot the author.
It might well be the first thriller ever written in which not a single reader guesses the identity of the murderer.
The Dead is being translated into half a dozen languages, and I suspect, is the beginning of a series of thriller whodunnits starring Saxon, the sapphic sleuth.
I'm unaware of anyone taking the maverick PI genre and relocating it successfully outside the USA, though God knows, so many have tried. Eilis O'Hanlon, however, has managed it quite brilliantly.