When crime does pay

THE great crime novelist Raymond Chandler advised, “When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand”.

When it comes to crime fiction, the man is often Irish.

Sometimes, the shooter is even an Irish woman, as is the case with Karen, the armed robber in Declan Burke’s The Big O. For these are fertile days for Irish crime fiction writing.

“If by Irish crime writers you mean Irish-born, I’d say it’s coming up on 45-50,” says Burke about the number of compatriots publishing in the genre today. Burke’s website, Crime Always Pays, lists 102 Irish crime writers, including part of the Irish diaspora like Dennis Lehane, the South Boston author of Mystic River. You can add to that number again if you go back in time, says Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, whose crime fiction nom de plume is Cormac Millar. So many of them, he says, “fade from view”.

Patrick Rearden Conner, for example, was born just after the turn of the last century. One of his novels, Shake Hands with the Devil, was turned into a movie starring James Cagney while the premise of Time to Kill, published in 1936 and set in an Irish tenement, sounds eerily modern: prompted by “poverty, idleness and sexual repression”, a sensitive young man turns into a serial killer.

Today, Irish crime fiction writers are at the top of the pile: John Connolly, for instance, has sold more than 10m copies of his Charlie Parker detective books; Stuart Neville won an LA Times Literary Award for The Twelve; Eoin Colfer, better known to some for his Artemis Fowl fantasy series, has been on the shortlist this year for his first crime fiction novel, Plugged. A decade ago, however, you could count the number of Irish writers in the trade on one hand.

““When I was starting to write an Irish crime novel, I think there were John Connolly and Colin Bateman up north and myself and that was about it,” says Ken Bruen, whose first Jack Taylor novel, The Guards, was published in 2001.

“People said you can’t write a crime novel set in Ireland, especially in Galway. Who’s going to read about an ex-Irish cop in Galway of all places? But it just happened to be the right time because Galway had become such a rich city; we had drugs, suicides and all the stuff you’d expect.

“I never expected the books would do so well in America and abroad. When a book is being translated, I’ll get emails asking me, ‘What does ‘wifey’ mean? What does ‘Jaysus’ mean?’ The one thing they can’t translate is ‘fierce’. When I say fierce it might mean it’s terrific or terrible.”

Mick Clifford, who will be reading from his debut crime novel at next week’s West Cork Literary Festival, says the recent boom helped bring more organised crime, murders, etc, to Ireland. “Also if you look at the American model in particular, the crime novel has always been a great way of looking at society.”

Clifford, an Irish Examiner columnist, has written several non-fiction books, including Love You To Death: Ireland’s Wife Killers Revealed. He got his schooling on the underbelly of Irish society while working as a reporter, covering criminal courts and recent tribunals. The world of journalism is a familiar path into crime writing for many of his peers, like Liz Allen and Gene Kerrigan, while others have doubled up as doctors (Paul Carson), English teachers (Brian McGilloway) and literary fiction writers (John Banville). And, of course, screenwriting is a lucrative add-on for the lucky ones.

“There’s also the fact that people promote their own crime fiction,” says Ó Cuilleanáin. “I’ve been in a city in Italy recently where they had a display in the tourist office about all the terrible things that could happen you if you put your nose outside your door. The city was Bologna, which is not Naples — it’s not dangerous. People are proud of it. It is part of what we are.

“Another reason to write about Ireland is that a lot of stuff has come out over the last 20 years. We’ve been ruled by people who are not that far removed from criminal goings on, from corruption and bribery.

“Our likely next government is going to include people who were into extortion and murder on a massive scale for 30 years so, in a sense, there’s good reason why we should be interested in crime as a metaphor for society.”

* The West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry, Co Cork, is on July 8-14. More details atwestcorkliteraryfestival.ie