Irish Crime Novels
Some time ago I ran off a short note regarding the superlative Color of Blood by Declan Hughes and flippantly suggested “potato noir” as a term for Irish crime fiction. This was noticed and commented on by Declan Burke over at Crime Always Pays, and following the links I discovered not only his blog, the intriguing sound of his novel still unavailable in North America, and a heady discussion of mostly Irish mysteries and thrillers with some forays afield as well. And it is Declan I must thank for alerting me to Philip Davison’s Crooked Man and Gene Kerrigan’s The Midnight Choir.
I must say that after reading these two, and on contemplating the fierce wealth of stories from that quarter, that thank christ I am not an Irish mystery writer. The talents there are enough to strike terror into the heart of any budding scribe of even modest ambitions. I suppose I should not be surprised that the country so known for writing in general should also be successful in this genre too. After all I already find Flann O’Brian at the top of my list, as well as liking Joyce (not the two great last works so much but the earlier stuff), Samuel Beckett’s novels, John Banville’s Shroud (but I do not like his Benjamin Blacks at all), and Colum McCann’s short stories and Ken Bruen. And now these.
Philip Davison’s Harry Fielding is an uncommonly pragmatic sort, an MI5 freelancer, who for the most part has little difficulty looking the other way. His minder is a right bastard, and the sweepings under the carpet are forming unsightly mountains the size of which even our suffering but stalwart operative finds near impossible to ignore.
Fielding is not quite as nasty as let’s say Michael Caine’s Carter but give him a couple of years and if he’s still breathing he’ll get there. He’s the sort of man who witnesses a woman beating a man insensible, stuffing him in a trunk, driving him into a clearing in the woods, dragging him out of the trunk, driving back and forth over him a few times, then burying him, and then shows up at her door a few hours later with a bottle of whiskey and the assumption of a woman in need of company.
And though he is a tough, he’s not quite as tough as those who lean on him, and he does have friends of a sort who get hurt by association.
I’ll be looking for more from this man. He’s not what you’d call a fancy writer; he’s plain and straight and its what best suits this narrative.
Midnight Choir (named for the Leonard Cohen song) is a police procedural. Detective Inspector Harry Synott is a good cop, too good, good in the way that other cops hate him. He doesn’t like graft and he’s informed on his fellows. Though this begins as the beleagured but gifted detective making his way through cases, it all comes apart in the worst way possible.
This one’s a bit more of an extended novel than the Davison, dense in comparison, dense in characters and crimes and plot.
The question foremost on my mind now is, are there bad Irish crime novels? Perhaps the ocean is a fairly effective filter to a literature no better than any other but somehow I doubt it. Most national literatures I have dipped into have eventually given forth more than a few frogs but so far Ireland seems mostly princes.
