Crime Beat

Two days ago on Crime Beat William Saunderson-Meyer talked up the Scottish krimi scene but I reckon the Irish could give them a run for their money. Of course the Scots have Ian Rankin but the Irish have Ken Bruen, perhaps, until recently, less well known but a writer no one can ignore.

I remember some years ago – when John Connolly did his first swing through South African on a promotional tour for his first two novels Every Dead Thing and Dark Hollow – he said he’d set his books in the US because, well, no one read Irish crime – as in crime set in Ireland. I guess this must have been in 2000 or 2001. And, perhaps, at the time he was right. But since then the scene has changed hugely – and possibly because of the success publishers have had in marketing Scandinavian crime novels. Suddenly publishers twigged to the ‘exotic’ in crime fiction: that readers might be as fascinated by the country in which the crime occurred as the crime itself. Think back, when did you first read Henning Mankell or Karin Fossum, or Arnaldur Indridason or Jo Nesbo? And would Stieg Larsson have made it into the realms of the mega-sellers without those names paving the way?

Over the last decade, the country ‘hosting’ the crime has become a significant factor in crime fiction.

And now the Irish are on the scene. When Connolly made it big with his US-based thrillers, Bruen had been around a while although he wasn’t easy to find in SA. His short, crisp Rilke on Black was available from Serpent’s Tail in 1995 but who’d ever heard of Bruen’s hard-drinking Jack Taylor?

In 2001 Bruen published a Jack Taylor novel The Guards (which got him some international attention) and the following year The Killing of the Tinkers but although he was on the radar in the UK and US, if you wanted to read him in SA you had to order his books through Amazon. Or you might get lucky and find a stray title in the second-hand stores which was where I picked up an Australian edition of his three short novels (A White Arrest, Taming the Alien, and The McDead) collected as A White Arrest. Unfortunately the situation hasn’t changed much and you won’t see the latest Bruen getting the Connolly treatment. Pity.

Since 2005, Bruen has taken the krimi world by storm with a clutch of novels – Priest and Sanctuary among them – and now some movies of his books are in the making. Fair to say, that he has opened up the Irish crime fiction scene to a point where today the list includes the likes of Declan Burke (impossible to find in SA bookshops but search out The Big O), Declan Hughes (available in second-hand shops), Adrian McKinty, Brian McGilloway, (can’t find either of them), Arlene Hunt, Tana French, Colin Bateman (who I haven’t yet been in search of), and Stuart Neville whose debut novel, The Twelve, (Harvell Secker) was hailed by James Ellroy as ‘the best first novel I have read in years’.

Quite simply Neville’s novel is a considerable achievement. It is a crime novel in the sense that there are a series of murders but these are committed not by a serial killer but by a hitman with a conscience. Wrapped up in The Twelve is all the hurt, disgrace, suffering, waste, futility, sheer awfulness, blind terror, maliciousness, and political expediency that attends any extended period of struggle where one group suppresses another. By changing names and places, The Twelve could as easily be about South Africa. The South Africa of the apartheid years and our contemporary country benighted as it is by greed and cronyism and violence. Northern Ireland it seems is no better. If you like socially relevant crime fiction then read this book.

Interestingly, while the Irish are on the ascendency internationally, on their home turf these writers face much the same apathy from their own market as we do from ours. In a recent blog Declan Burke wrote, ‘It’d be a huge pity if Irish readers were to ignore the likes of Gene Kerrigan, Declan Hughes, Arlene Hunt, Tana French, Brian McGilloway, Colin Bateman, Stuart Neville, Alan Glynn (who set his debut novel in New York, incidentally), Garbhan Downey, et al, simply because their very fine novels were set in Ireland, and especially if it’s because of some kind of inferiority complex. And even if it was, the very fact that Connolly, Hughes, French and Bruen are hugely popular Stateside should tip them off that Irish scribes writing about Irish crimes are just as valid as American authors on American crimes, particular as Connolly and Bruen are bending over backwards to big up their compatriots. Hopefully the Ireland AM Crime Fiction Award will alert Irish readers to the quality of indigenous crime writing.’

Amen to that. Two final thoughts: (1) watch the rise of the Irish in the coming years; and (2) maybe what we need is a prize to give our local scene some lift?