- Contradictions in the Irish Hardboiled:Detective Fiction’s Uneasy Portrayal of a New Ireland
The sheer size of the recent boom in Irish crime fiction has tended to obscure its most striking feature: a striking lack of diversity, in terms of subgenres and models. Virtually all twenty-first-century Irish crime fiction is derived from the tradition of the American hardboiled, yet few reviewers or scholars have addressed the thoroughgoing similarity of literary descent, beyond noting that much Irish crime fiction is “noirish.” Current Irish crime writers tend to see themselves as connected to the American hardboiled tradition, judging from published interviews, blogs, and even titles of collections—for example, Down These Green Streets (2011) and Dublin Noir (2006). Many of the twenty-first-century Irish series feature either tough-guy private eyes or police detectives whose style of speech, loner tendencies, and cynical attitudes link them more closely with the conventions of hardboiled than with the police procedural. Other subgenres— cozy mystery, academic mystery, legal fiction, spy, and comic or “caper,” for instance—have found few new Irish practitioners, although all of these specialties remain popular with both readers and with non-Irish writers. Although not a new form per se, the Irish hardboiled represents a significant development in Irish literature through its resurrection of an established literary form not previously associated with Irish writers. That it arose when the definition of Irishness itself was newly and widely under interrogation is no coincidence.
Most traditional definitions of Irishness were obsolete by the early 2000s. They were unsettled by many developments: successive public scandals (political, economic, and religious, beginning in the 1990s), the country’s membership in the European Union, immigration after a long history of emigration, and the economic boom and then bust, along with widespread access to global media and increasing levels of education among the populace.1 But the obsolete markers [End Page 126] of Irishness were not replaced with a coherent ideology. Instead, the question of Irishness has in many ways been left up for grabs.
Recent Irish crime writers have been deeply interested in working through the problem of redefining Irishness. This problem has been raised also in much contemporary Irish non-genre fiction, but the hardboiled form that has profoundly influenced so many contemporary crime writers works against a progressive or liberatory conception of Irishness. The intensely conservative ideology expressed in the form of much of this Irish writing is at odds with its more progressive content; sometimes, the authors find themselves writing into dead ends from which series cannot extricate themselves.
In The Dragon Tattoo and its Long Tail (2012), a survey of contemporary European crime fiction, David Geherin describes Galway’s Ken Bruen as an exception to the general rule that “European crime writers deliberately try to distance themselves from their American counterparts.”2 That claim is simply false unless one excludes all Irish crime writers from consideration; Irish writers of hard-boiled fiction, and not just Bruen, are at pains to claim a connection with their American counterparts and, more important, with their American literary forebears. They do so by drawing direct attention to them in their novels and modeling plots on theirs. Declan Burke, for instance, has frequently mentioned—on his blog, in interviews, and in his introduction to the Books to Die For (2012) collection—that his main influence is Raymond Chandler.3 In the third episode of RTÉ’s “Irish Noir” radio series in 2013, Burke said that he was inspired to write crime fiction by Chandler; Burke “wanted to take the classic tropes of 1930s stuff” and put them in Ireland.4
Similarly, Declan Hughes’s author’s web page lists “Ten Crime Novels You Must Read Before You Die,” which has Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key as number one (with mentions also of The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest) and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye as number two (followed by mentions of The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely). Hughes describes Hammett as “The Master—the JS Bach, the Louis Armstrong of crime fiction” and Chandler as “The greatest prose stylist in the genre. Romantic, lyrical and witty.”5 Even the...