The recent success in the UK of The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman’s debut mystery novel, was not entirely unexpected, even if the scale of it—the fastest-selling British adult crime debut ever—was probably beyond the wildest dreams of his publisher.
The book has even done rather well in Ireland, too, Osman being as familiar a figure to Irish television viewers as British ones. Even so, his appearance on the Irish bestseller lists is a little unusual. Generally speaking, while American mystery writers tend to make the Irish lists on a regular basis, British ones do not. We can speculate on the reasons, among which may be a certain unconscious Irish resistance, based on our complicated history with our nearest geographical neighbour, to embracing British police officers—even fictional ones—as entirely trustworthy figures when it comes to issues of law and justice. Escapism may also play a part, Britain being rather too close, and too familiar, to permit it. (The exception, as in many things, is J.K. Rowling, whose mystery novels, written under her Robert Galbraith pseudonym, shift well in Ireland, if not quite on a par with her British sales.)
But what is also interesting about Osman’s success in Ireland is that he is, undeniably, a man. I may be wrong—it has happened before, and it’s possible it may do so again—but I’m not sure an Irish male writer would have enjoyed similar success in his homeland, even allowing for a profile like Osman’s. The model of Irish mystery fiction that has emerged in recent years is almost entirely female. I think I may be the only Irish male mystery writer to make the Irish bestseller lists, in part because I’ve been knocking around for a while, but also, perhaps, because I don’t write about Ireland. (In fact, it’s often incorrectly assumed that I no longer even live permanently in the country and now light my cigars with foreign currency.)
But back to those Irish female writers: just off the top of the top of my head, I can name Arlene Hunt, Jane Casey, Liz Nugent, Jo Spain, Alex Barclay, Catherine Ryan Howard, Sam Blake, and Sinead Crowley, many of whom have already published new novels this year. There’s also Tana French, of course, with whom I formerly shared an editor, and it’s worth noting that she is American by birth, although she has lived in Ireland since 1990.
By contrast, I’d struggle to name many Irish male crime writers who have achieved any similar level of commercial success in their homeland. Ken Bruen always sold better in the US than in Ireland, possibly because Jack Taylor—drink-soaked and grimly philosophical—appealed more to an American conception of Irishness than he did to Irish people themselves. The playwright, critic, and novelist Declan Hughes produced five fine mysteries featuring his Dublin-based private detective Ed Loy (as well as one standalone novel set in the US), but the books, despite critical acclaim, struggled to find a readership here. Declan Burke, with whom I co-edited the Books to Die For anthology, wrote a number of well-received mysteries, and continues to review and publish, but his latest book, The Lammisters, is not a crime novel but an ambitious piece of comic metafiction, albeit with an Irish bootlegger among its cast of eccentric characters.
John Banville, meanwhile, is again producing crime fiction, most recently Snow, his first mystery novel under his own name rather than the Benjamin Black pseudonym. Critical attention, and even a TV adaptation of Banville’s earlier Quirke novels, did not necessarily result in significant sales, hampered further by what sometimes comes across as a degree of ambivalence on Banville’s part about genre fiction as an entirely appropriate pursuit for a Booker-winning writer.
But rather in the manner of the exception that proves the rule, Snow is enjoying some success in Ireland. I think it may be because, like The Book of Evidence—still my favorite Banville novel—it seems to be have been loosely inspired by a real-life Irish crime, in this case the unsolved murder of a Catholic priest, Father Niall Molloy, in Co. Offaly in 1985. If there’s anything the Irish public enjoys more than a mysterious killing, it’s a mysterious killing involving a priest.
More recently, Shane Dunphy—who had previously written books about his experiences as a child protection expert—has begun releasing mystery novels set in Ireland featuring a criminologist, David Dunnigan, but Dunphy has chosen to publish under the semi-pseudonym of S.A. Dunphy. One reason is clearly to distinguish his fiction from his earlier work, but—intentionally or unintentionally—it also serves the useful purpose, in the Irish market, of rendering him gender-neutral.
As with the relative absence of British mystery writers in the Irish bestseller lists, we can argue about the reasons for the dominance of domestic female mystery authors in Ireland. Our readership for fiction is heavily female, although this tends to be the case for fiction across the board, women generally being greater consumers of fiction than men. The impact of the publication of Maeve Binchy’s Light A Penny Candle in 1982 also should not be underestimated. That book was a massive bestseller both at home and abroad, and marked the appearance of a form of Irish writing that was both critically and commercially successful, the work of many earlier Irish writers having been more admired than actually purchased. At least two generations of Irish female novelists—Marian Keyes and Sheila O’Flanagan among them—have come through since then, producing women’s contemporary fiction that has proven durable and profitable while also helping to cultivate a strong domestic female readership.
Perhaps it was likely, then, that some of this readership would naturally cross over into other genres as they emerged in Ireland—especially crime, for which women have long had an affection both as consumers and producers. (I say “emerged” because for much of the 20th century we Irish produced relatively little homegrown mystery fiction, and certainly none that was very widely read. For more on this, it’s worth taking a look at Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century, edited by the aforementioned Declan Burke.)
One might also argue that some Irish male crime writers, in attempting to explore what form Irish mystery writing might take early in the new century, embraced a model based on American hard-boiled fiction, including the private detective tale, or elected to write about gangland (a perennial source of fascination for Irish tabloid newspaper readers), the demise of the Celtic Tiger, and political corruption, subjects which, although topical, appealed more to novelists than readers, or were more interesting to the general public as non-fiction and journalism.
Domestic private eye fiction in particular is, I would argue, largely a dead-end for Irish mystery writing, just as it is in the UK. The private eye comes out of the American Western tradition, and the archetype is one with which Irish and British readers have no cultural or historical connection of their own. We like American private eyes, just as we like American Westerns. To produce a domestic form of the PI requires a certain element of pastiche and, by implication, an acute awareness of the American tradition. Hughes’s Ed Loy is very much a private detective in that mode, and Hughes even has him return to Ireland after twenty years as a P.I. in Los Angeles—but Irish readers still struggled, I think, with the concept of an Irish private detective as protagonist.
An addendum to this, in Northern Ireland, as opposed to the Republic, the balance between male and female practitioners is different, even leaning more toward male writers such as Stuart Neville, Adrian McKinty, Brian McGilloway, Paul Charles, Eoin McNamee, Colin Bateman, Gerard Brennan, Steve Cavanagh, and Cormac Millar, with Clare McGowan, Annemarie Neary, Ruth Dudley Edwards, and Kelly Creighton, among others, signing on for the female contingent. I have no idea why this is. I’d speculate—I’m good at speculating—that a history of terrorist violence may play some part. More than 3,500 people were killed in the Troubles, as we Irish quaintly elected to describe three decades of savagery, most of them innocent people murdered by Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries in a conflict that was as much about class and religion as anything else. That level of slaughter, which casts a cultural shadow as well as a historical one, may have contributed to a harder edge in Northern Ireland’s crime fiction, which could in turn have drawn a larger male component of mystery writers. I’m probably entirely mistaken, though. What is undeniable is that the Troubles, and the profound link between criminality (prostitution, protection rackets, smuggling, bank raids) and terrorism (as the terrorists used all of those means, and more, to fund their campaigns) made it difficult for writers north and south of the Border to produce mystery fiction while the violence was ongoing. In addition, it’s hard to write common or garden mysteries when your neighbors are killing each other for worshipping in the wrong church.
So what is this female model that has emerged in Irish mystery writing? Well, it appears to be comfortable with the police procedural as a form (Sinead Crowley, Jo Spain, Tana French, Olivia Kiernan, Jane Casey), and Jane Casey has even managed to make a London-based detective appealing to Irish readers by giving Maeve Kerrigan an Irish heritage. It does, I think, lean towards the psychological (Liz Nugent, Karen Perry). It’s not averse to having lawyers—not typically the most beloved of species—as protagonists (Andrea Carter, Catherine Kirwan). Oh, and it has a healthy tolerance for violence.
But I stress that what I’m doing here is thinking aloud, and little more than that. Regardless of gender balance, themes, characters, and traditions, what can be said with certainty is that Irish domestic mystery fiction is in a healthier state than it has ever been, and has been gifted this century with some of its most accomplished practitioners. I’ve barely scraped the surface of them in this piece, and apologies to all those I failed to mention. I bet I’m off so many Christmas card lists now, but if I’ve inspired you to delve even a little deeper into Irish mystery writing, it will be worth it.
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