Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, is the Republic’s sixth largest city, popular with tourists and backpackers and set to be Europe’s official Capital of Culture for 2020. It’s also emerged as a center of Emerald Noir—Irish crime writing that’s gritty, realistic, and concerned with contemporary Ireland. Of course some great examples of Emerald Noir can be found in Dublin, Cork and Limerick, as well as in Northern Ireland (see Crime and the City Belfast), but Galway’s giving them all a run for their money at the moment.
Galway’s crime writing reputation is, in large part, thanks to Galway-born Ken Bruen. Bruen began writing crime novels back in the early 1990s but has garnered much praise and a legion of fans for his Jack Taylor series which began with The Guards in 2001 and won a Shamus award. There have since been another thirteen Jack Taylor novels up to the most recent, In The Galway Silence (2018). In The Guards Jack Taylor is unceremoniously ousted from his post with Dublin’s Garda Siochana (that’s Irish for the police force, colloquially known as the “Guards”) and returns to his native Galway to drink too much and lick his wounds. But he can’t stay out of trouble and ends up working as a private investigator (a “finder,” as Bruen has it), looking into a series of teenage girls’s suicides in Galway, an investigation that brings him into direct confrontation with the local Guards who have dismissed the deaths.
Bruen’s Jack Taylor series is one that relishes the clichés of crime writing—the heavy drinking, the ex-cop defined by his taste in paperbacks and records, the sort of man who takes a beating and then checks himself out of ER too early. Hopeless at relationships; unable to just let things pass; a magnet to confrontation with authority. But the Jack Taylor novels are more homage than pastiche and readers have eagerly awaited each new installment. The Irish Times awarded Bruen the accolade, “the Godfather of the modern Irish crime novel.”
The series continues with Taylor never quite quitting the drugs or the booze, and never quite getting his life together. The Killing of the Tinkers (2002, and a Macavity award winner) deals with Ireland’s gypsy community; Priest (2006, and a Barry award winner) with the murder of a Catholic priest at the height of the booming “Celtic Tiger” years, while the two latest Taylor novels both feature Galway in the title. The Ghosts of Galway (2017) sees Taylor reduced to being a minimum wage night guard before being hired to find a book stolen from the Vatican. For a lost book there’s an awful lot of violence associated with both stealing and recovering it! In In the Galway Silence (2018) Jack’s still on the Jameson’s while investigating the murder of French twins in Ireland. There’s no sign that Jack’s going to quit the coke or the whisky anytime soon, or that Ken Bruen has tired of writing him. More Taylor and more Galway to come.
Bruen has some competition these days in the Galway crime stakes. Dervla McTiernan, for one, has attracted a lot of attention. Her first novel The Ruin (2018) features Detective Cormac Reilly, formerly a “golden boy” with the special detective unit in Dublin but now working cold cases in Galway. Reilly, like Taylor before him, finds himself running afoul of seemingly uncaring local Guards who might well have something to hide in a case where, twenty years before, five-year-old Jack and his fifteen-year-old sister Maude were found keeping vigil over the corpse of their mother, Hilaria, in a Galway flat. McTiernan’s novel is uber-contemporary, laced with police corruption, child abuse and matricide. The Ruin received great reviews for a first novel and it seems Cormac Reilly will return in The Scholar, set to be published in spring 2019.
And a few more Galway Emerald Noirs:
- Declan Varley’s Nightmusic (2000) features a Galway fisherman with a penchant for Mozart sonatas and Sherlock Holmes locked room mysteries teaming up with a rule breaking under-appreciated Guard to find out why bodies keep washing up on the shore.
- Rory McCormac is the pseudonym of genuine Galway vet Muiris O’Scannell, who also happens to be the author of three equine-related mysteries featuring fictional vet-turned-detective Frank Samson. Playing Dead (1996) introduces the idea that there could be priceless, but potentially fake, stallions out there; Outbreak (1998) sees someone spreading anthrax to thoroughbreds and; Malpractice (2006) sees Samson investigating his own cousin’s apparent drug overdose.
- And something a little different, but with its own not insignificant fan base—the super prolific Father Andrew M. Greeley‘s bestselling tales of Nuala Anne McGrail, an Irish-speaking woman from Galway with a hapless husband, a tendency to get involved in murders, but who is, fortunately, blessed with the gift of second sight. There are twelve books in the series from Irish Lace (1997) to Irish Tweed (2010). Greeley was an American Roman Catholic priest who died in 2013. He also wrote the seven novel series featuring Bishop Blackie Ryan, who solves crimes for the Archbishop of Chicago.
Galway has also produced several excellent true crime books. Tony Muggivan’s A Tragedy Waiting to Happen (2004) is the harrowing story of Brendan O’Donnell, a young man who absconded from a detention centre in Dublin. People took pity on Brendan, who had a history of psychiatric problems. However, a Galway hospital refused to admit him and, slipping into mental illness and desperation, he embarked on the life of an armed robber. Eventually, in 1994, O’Donnell murdered a Catholic priest, a mother, and her young son. A Tragedy Waiting to Happen is a story of how the Irish justice and healthcare system failed O’Donnell and turned a disturbed boy into a fugitive killer.
Dean Ruxton’s When the Hangman Came to Galway: A Gruesome True Story of Murder in Victorian Ireland (2018) goes back to the winter of 1885 and James Berry—a hangman who worked in Britain and Ireland arriving in Galway to conclude a couple of sensational cases by hanging two convicted murderers. However, their cases may not have been quite as clear-cut as the Galway justices thought.
Finally, there’s poet and teacher Nessa O’Mahony’s The Branchman (2018), a political thriller set in Galway in 1925 and featuring Detective Officer Michael Mackey of the newly-created Special Branch. Mackey has been sent to the Garda Barracks in Ballinasloe (a town near Galway) to root out subversives. The book is rich in detail thanks to the fact that O’Mahony, who is a Dubliner rather than a Galwegian, has previously meticulously researched the life of her own grandfather Michael McCann, who was an early member of the young Irish Free State’s Garda Síochána and posted to Galway.
Galway’s a friendly city of under a hundred thousand folk, but it is the far west of Ireland on the Atlantic: next stop America. The city is often, in crime fiction at least, a place people reach when running from their lives somewhere else, like Bruen’s Jack Taylor or McTiernan’s Cormac Reilly. But when they get as far west as they can go they’re confronted with the same gritty reality as anywhere else in Ireland, and that’s Emerald Noir.
