Sustaining Cities: Urban Policies, Practices, and Perceptions

8. From "The Dead" to the Dead: The Disposable Bodies and Disposable Culture of Celtic Tiger Noir

122 Detective Carl McCadden is a lonely man. His wife has just left him. “‘I felt like a case you’d solved,’” she explains. “‘I was interesting once. Years ago.’” McCadden’s mood is black. He’s “calmly, almost contentedly, waiting to hit the bottom.”1 It is in the midst of this crisis of alienation and confusion that he’s called to investigate a series of brutal murders. Young blond women are turning up dead, beaten beyond recognition. McCadden’s investigation draws him into a sordid underworld of prostitution and pornography, drugs and political corruption—the geography of a bleak and segregated city, replete with blind alleys and dark cellar hideouts. McCadden, a sharp-talking tough cop, uncovers a ring of prostitution whose leaders are respectable, powerful citizens; he breaks the case, prevents more innocent young girls from falling into lives of degradation, and, in the process, manages to bring himself halfway back from despair. Much of this sounds familiar, of course. The language of the hard-boiled detective novel, the imagery of film noir, has been more the disposable bodies and disposable culture of celtic tiger noir Andrew Kincaid From “The Dead” to the Dead i from “the dead” to the dead 123 or less the exclusive domain of one or two American cities—especially Los Angeles, both pre- and post-war, which, with its slippery economy and its new, glossy, superficial culture, was the perfect urban environment for expressing the violence, insecurity, and transformational morality of the time. But McCadden’s milieu is Waterford, and Ireland, not America, is now the landscape that is changing. The Celtic Tiger, R.I.P., presented its citizens with equal measures of prosperity, confusion, violence, and hope. Now that the boom economy has officially tanked, the popular, mass-marketed crime paperbacks that became a staple of the Irish literary diet in the 1990s and the early years of the new century have proven to have offered not only a critique of the Tiger years, but also a prescient image of the post-collapse darkness. A few years ago, Declan Kiberd, writing on the state of contemporary Irish literature, wondered why there seemed no fiction on the newly thriving Irish economy; Kiberd looked at novels about the greed and superficiality of 1980s America, such as Bonfire of the Vanities and Bright Lights, Big City, and asked why no such literature existed reflecting the similar moment in Ireland. In his essay, Kiberd suggested that the medium best expressing the then-present moment was film.2 But in fact the Celtic Tiger did produce a literary type that represented the violence, the wealth, the ugliness, the nostalgia, the speed, and the movement inherent in its moment. And the books of this genre are a snapshot of this movement, of the fast pace of cultural change—immigration, growth of attendant cosmopolitanism and racism, massive housing bubble, a newly wealthy, upwardly mobile young workforce—and it is, perhaps , this speed that causes Kiberd to suggest that film would have been an obvious medium to showcase it. But over the last decade, an interesting new format, perhaps a hybrid of various genres (hard-boiled detective, forensic thriller, crime mystery) has arisen.3 An interesting feature of this burgeoning genre is that many of these crime novels are written by minor Irish celebrities, a fact that reflects the connection between B-list superficiality and the economic boom that creates it. Liz Allen, the prominent journalist who replaced Veronica Guerin at The Independent, has written two novels that focus on strong-minded, beautiful female detectives hired to solve violent crimes against beautiful young women in Dublin.4 Sean Moncrieff and Gareth O’Callaghan are both political radio talk show hosts. Moncrieff’s Dublin (2001) is marketed as an Irish version of Pulp Fiction, and the plot involves a Russian drug ring whose violence gets unleashed on Bloomsday.5 Following in the footsteps of classic noir writers, some of these other novelists adopt the serial format, tracking the exploits and personal lives of one detective. Ken Bruen is the standout among these writers , and his protagonist, the Anglo-monikered Jack Taylor, has, for close to a dozen novels, investigated the killing of tinkers and the so-called suicides of teenage girls in Galway. Within the last two years, Bruen has produced several potboilers, including Priest (January 2008), Once Were Cops (May...