The Irish Crime Fiction Supergroup

Guess which one is Colin Bateman

A repost from December of last year and a useful reminder that Irish crime fiction is at least as good as that coming from Scandinavia or anywhere else for that matter...
....
For the last year or two here on my blog I've been trying to get people interested in my books in particular and in Irish crime writing in general. It's sometimes been an uphill struggle because, compared to Nordic or English crime fiction, Irish crime writers still seem to lurk in the periphery. This is strange to me because in terms of quality and diversity Irish crime fiction is booming. I wonder if Ireland has an image problem: years of insidious and dreary cliches in what I like to call Micksploitation films have conditioned the book buying public to demand fiction that conforms to their expectations. When people think of Ireland they still think of smoky pubs, flat caps and sheep; they want their Ireland to be the Ireland of the 1950's. Working in a New York Barnes and Noble I discovered that Irish Americans are not particularly avid readers and when they do buy books it's often something ghastly thing like How The Irish Saved Civilization or The Best Irish Castles. Therefore if you want to sell books with an Irish theme in America you have to reach beyond the Irish American community but there again you are often hit by the stereotypes and imagery of what it means to be Irish. When the average American punter buys an English or Nordic mystery novel they think they're getting something that not only will entertain them but will also improve them in some way because Swedes and Englishmen seem so darn intelligent. And this I feel appeals to something deep in the American psyche - the need to better oneself.   
...
Irish fiction is intellectually on a par with any other literature in the world and I'd go further and say that Irish crime writing currently leads the world in diversity and richness. That such a small island can produce such a welter of talent is truly amazing. On his blog, Crime Always Pays, Declan Burke tirelessly promotes his fellow Micks and although I am not as well read as Declan, here are few authors that I have read in the last couple of years that I think you should be aware of...who knows it might even help with some last minute Christmas shopping. 
... 
*Declan Burke: Dec's novel Absolute Zero Cool may be his masterpiece. Channeling Flann O'Brien Dec has an original and utterly brilliant take on the contemporary crime novel. His latest Slaughter's Hound was one of the best Irish crime novels of the year.

*Stuart Neville: Stuart's first novel The Twelve was a work of brilliance. Incredibly his follow up books have only gotten better. Don't let the beard fool you, he's just a kid really, and he's got a long promising career ahead of him. I finished Ratlines last week and can vouch for it as an amazing book

*Eoin McNamee: Perhaps the most intelligent and thoughtful of this generation's crop of Irish novelists. At home in literary fiction and crime fiction, Eoin's book Orchid Blue is one of my all time favourites. 

*Ken Bruen: Sir Ken of Bruen is The Man as far as I'm concerned. The Irish Elmore Leonard or possibly the Irish Michael Connolly, but, you know, funnier. He's done many wonderful books since but there's a soft spot in my heart for Her Last Call To Louis MacNeice, one of his early classics.
*Ronan Bennett: This generation's Graham Greene. As comfortable in film and television as he is in fiction. Havoc In The Third Year is one of the great novels of our time and it should have won the Booker Prize. 

*Garbhan Downey: The bard of Derry. Garv hilariously unpacks the foibles and fantasies of the denizens of Ireland's most eccentric city. My favourite? War of the Blue Noses. 
*Kevin McCarthy: Only got to one Kevin McCarthy book so far but that was the fantastic novel Peeler. Definitely one of those books that you'll read compulsively in one long sitting. 

*Colin Bateman: Cursed by a childhood in Ireland's most boring town, Bangor, Bateman rose above the tedium of tea shops and ice cream parlours to become a best selling comic novelist. His done nothing but brilliant work since but I still love Divorcing Jack from a few years back. 

*David Park: A thoughtful, intelligent, subtle novelist in the Graham Green/Brian Moore mould. More of a literary guy than a crime guy really. His masterpiece, The Truth Commissioner, is the book to read if you want to understand what happened to Northern Ireland from 1968 - 1998. 

*Tana French: I was in a bookshop in Tokyo looking for something to read on the train and in among the Japanese novels was a shelf full of Ms French. I bought, I read, I loved. Now I've read them all and they're all great. 

*Ruth Dudley Edwards: A true prose master. Her crime novels are fantastic but for me her book about the Omagh bombing takes us to another level. A must read for anyone who is interested in contemporary Ireland. 

*Brian McGilloway: You all know Brian don't you? One of the brightest lights in all of Irish literature. Intelligent and tough with a poet's heart, he's a best seller in the UK and Ireland and he's increasingly huge in America. If you don't have a BMCG book go get one, now!

*John Connolly: How do you crack America? Well, if Alex Barclay and Stuart Neville are the Kinks and the Stones JC is the Beatles. You crack America by writing taut, original, stylish crime fiction with a supernatural bent.  

*Gene Kerrigan: I just finished Kerrigan's The Rage and I thought it was amazing. I'll definitely be reading more in the future.  

*Dec Hughes: The Wrong Kind of Blood is the first in the great Ed Loy mystery series. Hughes is street wise, smart, witty and just a little bit cocky. 

*Gerard Brennan: One of the new generation of N Irish novelists and playwrights. This year I read Brennan's hilarious, tight, brilliant novella The Point. I was lucky enough to get The Wee Rockets in manuscript and I knew it was going to be a hit. It was. 

*Alan Glynn: Winterland is one of my favourite books of the last five years. I haven't read Glynn's latest but I surely will. 
*Cormac Millar: Only read one CM book, The Grounds, but fortunately it was a fantastic read. Definitely adding more to my TBR pile. 
*Arlene Hunt: Also only read one Arlene Hunt novel but luckily that was also pretty damn fine. It was called The Chosen and it was one of my books of the year.
*Alex Barclay: I really enjoyed Barclay's Darkhouse, one of my favourite books of 2010.
*John McFetridge: John is from Montreal but his ancestors are from Larne (God help them!) His novel Tumblin Dice was recently picked by Amazon.ca as one of the best Canadian crime novels of the year. (THE best if you ask me).
...
Like I say, this list is not exhaustive. I'm not as well read as many people in this field, but if I've piqued your curiosity at all investigate the authors above and please check out Crime Always Pays and Detectives Beyond Borders for a more comprehensive look at Irish crime fiction.

The Irish Tourist Board Damns Belfast With Faint Praise

Heaney, Longley and two men with beards

In an ad that's been running in The New Yorker the Irish tourist board urges New Yorker readers to come to Ireland to explore its literary heritage. The ad is called A Touch of the Poet and is an expensive double page spread with photographs of the Liffey, Ben Bulben and the James Joyce statue on O'Connell Street. Of course they talk about the Dublin of James Joyce and Wilde and Beckett which is fair enough. This, however, is what they come up with when they mention Belfast: "Belfast welcomes visitors with tours that encompass the favourite haunts of EM Forster, John Keats and Anthony Trollope." Who wrote that bullshit copy? It really is some tenuous nonsense when there's no need for tenuous nonsense as Belfast's literary heritage is very rich. John Keats? Really? John Keats spent one day walking from Donaghadee to Belfast and had nothing nice or very interesting to say about the place when he got there. He left immediately for the packet back to Scotland, so what pray was his favourite haunt in the twenty minutes he spent in the city? Forster spent a couple of days in Belfast in the 1950's unveiling a plaque. Trollope did actually live in Belfast and wrote The Warden there so thats ok but my God Keats and Forster? That's incredibly lame. What would I mention if I was going to do a literary heritage tourism spread about Belfast (especially a spread called A Touch of the Poet)? Well how about:
...
1. CS Lewis: born and grew up in Belfast. Wrote a little thing you might have heard of called the Narnia series. There's a statue of Lewis and his wardrobe and a blue plaque outside his house. Millions of copies of the Narnia books have been sold. Tourists might like that. 
2. Philip Larkin: the greatest twentieth century poet lived in Belfast in the 1950's and wrote some of his best work there. 
3. The Queens University Poetry circle in the 1970's produced Ireland's most important poets since the Gaelic revival. Who exactly you might ask? Well just half a dozen Pulitzer Prize winners and Noble laureates and winners of every other major poetry award. People like: Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, etc. etc. 
4. Belfast's current poetry scene is one of the richest in Europe with exciting young poets like Sinead Morrissey et. al. many of whom read at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at QUB, the place for poetry in Ireland. Tourists might like that too.
5. And if we're talking about Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett how about mentioning that they spent their formative years in Northern Ireland at Portora School? Or that Jonathan Swift wrote A Tale of a Tub and began Gullivers Travels in a spot just outside Belfast called Carrickfergus. Or why not mention my favourite, the great Flann O'Brien who grew up in Omagh?
...
My point in all this is that the Discover Ireland people don't need to embarrass themselves by mentioning some half assed John Keats or EM Forster reference when the literary heritage in Belfast is already impressive. I haven't even talked about Louis MacNeice or Brian Moore or Ian McDonald or Ronan Bennett or Eoin McNamee or Colin Bateman etc. bloody etc. 

Ronan Bennett

I just watched Michael Mann's Public Enemies starring Johnny Depp and scripted by Ronan Bennett. I liked the movie, I don't think its Mann on top form but it isn't terrible. Anyway it gives me a chance to republish this review of Bennett's Havoc In Its Third Year from a couple of years ago:
...
Ronan Bennett’s HAVOC, IN ITS THIRD YEAR is set in the north of England in the 1630s. It is the story of John Brigge, a respectable county civil servant who is also a covert follower of the “old religion”. Brigge is the parish coroner, and the book begins with his investigation into a local woman who appears to have murdered her baby. There may be more to the story than meets the eye or it could be that Brigge’s compassion towards the desperate wretches that appear before him day-in and day-out has clouded his judgement. In either case, Brigge raises suspicions among some of the local townsfolk and his life, complicated already by his own wife’s pregnancy, takes a dramatic turn for the worse.
...
Bennett skilfully portrays a man on the edge and a country at the cusp of a disastrous civil war; among many remarkable passages he gives us Brigge’s dreams that mix murderers, wives, victims, secret priests and unborn children in a swirling whirlpool of guilt and fear. Brigge is ultimately betrayed as a Catholic by a jealous clerk and he and his family go on the run through a nightmare landscape no less vivid than the dreamscape.
...
Ronan Bennett and I were born only a few miles and a few years apart but we’re from different cultural and political universes. Bennett was radicalised in the early seventies and apparently he has lost none of his righteous indignation. He has got himself into passionate debates with Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens and he has said unfortunate things about the Omagh bombing - things which he has since recanted. But surely no one can fault Bennett’s fury at our contemporary scene, and his prose tells us something about the writer behind the disputes: clinical, dispassionate, ironic, intelligent, careful and ultimately incendiary. His plots move, his writing pulses, and his characters live and breathe and disagree with each other and often him. He takes his time with his protagonists, allowing them psychological and spiritual depth and yet he understands that characters alone aren’t enough; for a book to succeed it must have a strong, well planned narrative. Bennett’s novels are structurally sound and that hardest of combinations: unpredictable, yet completely convincing.
...
Bennett is a profound writer in the tradition of early Le Carré or middle period Greene. He takes his job seriously and never underestimates the intelligence of his readers. And, speaking of Greene occasionally the British press will play the perennially popular game of wondering who “the new Graham Greene” could possibly be. A few – almost always English – authors are often tossed out and then summarily critiqued and dismissed as mere pretenders. No dauphin has yet been found, but if Ronan Bennett keeps on going the way he’s been going, I’d say the contest is over, the new Graham Greene isn’t an Englishman at all – he’s a fearless, gifted, Irishman from Newtownabbey