The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel

The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel Edited by Elizabeth Mannion General Editor: Clive Bloom Crime Files Series Editor Clive Bloom Emeritus Professor of English and American Studies Middlesex University London Since its invention in the nineteenth century, detective fi ction has never been more popular. In novels, short stories, fi lms, radio, television and now in computer games, private detectives and psychopaths, poisoners and overworked cops, tommy gun gangsters and cocaine criminals are the very stuff of modern imagination, and their creators one mainstay of popular consciousness. Crime Files is a ground-breaking series offering scholars, students and discerning readers a comprehensive set of guides to the world of crime and detective fi ction. Every aspect of crime writing, detective fi ction, gangster movie, true-crime exposé, police procedural and post-colonial investigation is explored through clear and informative texts offering comprehensive coverage and theoretical sophistication. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14927 Elizabeth Mannion Editor The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel Editor Elizabeth Mannion Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , USA Crime Files ISBN 978-1-137-53939-7 ISBN 978-1-137-53940-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53940-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016933996 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identifi ed as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or here- after developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This volume coalesced in the summer of 2014 at University College Dublin, where many of us gathered for the joint meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies and the Canadian Association for Irish Studies. Our thanks to the organizers of that conference, Jennika Baines, and Jim Rogers, for bringing us all together. Many thanks also to the 2015 ACIS Florida conference, for giving us a forum in which to test some of this material, and to those who attended our panel and shared their sug- gestions and enthusiasm for the project. To family, friends, colleagues, and students past and present, who lis- tened, read, recommended, and encouraged, particularly: Shelly Brivic, Maura Cliff, Patrick Cliff, Niall and Beckett Coffey, Gordon Crock, Chip Delany, Lauren Fox, Richard Howard, Clair Lamb, Joe Long, Conor McCarthy, Tom Mannion, Anne Vogelmann, and Sarah Zeigler. Special thank you to Ben Doyle and April James at Palgrave Macmillan who made every phase of this project a pleasure. v CONTENTS Introduction A Path to Emerald Noir: The Rise of the Irish Detective Novel 1 Elizabeth Mannion 1 Hello Dálaigh : Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma 17 Nancy Marck Cantwell 2 A ‘honeycomb world’: John Connolly’s Charlie Parker Series 31 Brian Cliff 3 ‘Where no kindness goes unpunished’: Declan Hughes’s Dublin 45 Charlotte J. Headrick 4 Detecting Hope: Ken Bruen’s Disenchanted P.I. 57 Andrew Kincaid 5 Negotiating Borders: Inspector Devlin and Shadows of the Past 73 Carol Baraniuk vii viii CONTENTS 6 ‘The place you don’t belong’: Stuart Neville’s Belfast 91 Fiona Coffey 7 Voicing the Unspeakable: Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad 107 Shirley Peterson 8 ‘Irish by blood and English by accident’: Detective Constable Maeve Kerrigan 121 Elizabeth Mannion 9 Quirke, the 1950s, and Leopold Bloom 135 Audrey McNamara Appendix: Contemporary Irish Detective Series 149 Bibliography 153 Index 165 ABOUT THE AUTHORS Carol Baraniuk completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow on the Ulster- Scots poet James Orr. She has lectured, broadcast, and published in Ireland, Europe, and the United States on Ulster poetry and has held research and teaching posts at the University of Ulster. She is a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of History, Queen’s University Belfast and an honorary Research Associate of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at Glasgow University. Carol’s book, James Orr , Poet and Irish Radical (2014), is the fi rst literary monograph on an Ulster-Scots writer. Carol is a lifelong avid reader of detective fi ction. Nancy Marck Cantwell is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at Daemen College, USA, where she teaches British literature. Nancy’s research focuses on nineteenth-century British fi ction, with particular attention to women writers, narrative theory, and the Gothic. Recent publications include an article on Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in Nineteenth - Century Gender Studies . Her current research includes narrative technique in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent and subversive tour- ism in Sydney Owenson and Susan Ferrier. Nancy is presently preparing a book-length study on women and nationalism. Brian Cliff is Assistant Professor in the School of English at Trinity College, Dublin, where he has served as Director of the Irish Studies degree. His recent publications include Synge and Edwardian Ireland (2012), co- edited with Nicholas Grene, and a reprint of Emma Donoghue’s novel Hood (2011), co-edited with Emilie Pine. He co-organized ‘Irish Crime ix x ABOUT THE AUTHORS Fiction: A Festival’, held at Trinity in November 2013 with 18 leading Irish and Irish-American crime novelists. He is currently working on a book-length survey of Irish crime fi ction, and a monograph about com- munity and contemporary Irish writing. Fiona Coffey holds an MPhil from Trinity College, Dublin and a PhD from Tufts University. Her research examines the literature, fi lm, and theatre of Northern Ireland with a special focus on women artists/writers. She has been published in Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices by Women in Ireland (2014) and The Theatre of Marie Jones (2014). Fiona’s fi rst book, Sectarian Warfare , Gender , and Performance : Women in Northern Irish Theatre , 1921 – 2010 (forthcoming from Syracuse University Press) charts the historical development and contributions of women to Northern Irish drama. She discovered her love of the Troubles thriller while trolling Hodges Figgis as a graduate student in Dublin. Charlotte J. Headrick is a professor of Theatre Arts at Oregon State University and widely published in the fi eld of Irish drama. She is past president of ACIS West, a former Moore Visiting Fellow at NUI Galway, and the recipient of the Kennedy Center/American College Theater Festival Medallion for service. Charlotte has directed numerous premieres and productions of Irish plays all over the United States, including Declan Hughes’s adaptation of Farquhar’s Love and a Bottle at OSU, and the American premiere of Teresa Deevy’s The King of Spain ’ s Daughter . She is the co-editor (with Eileen Kearney) of Irish Women Dramatists 1908 – 2001 (2014). Andrew Kincaid is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, where he teaches British and Irish literature, criti- cal theory, and urbanism and modernism. He is the author of Postcolonial Dublin : Imperial Legacies and the Built Environment (2006) and articles in College Literature , the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies , Éire / Ireland , and Samuel Beckett Today / Aujhourd ’ hui . ‘Subverting the Wave of Capital: Piracy and Fiction in the Wake of Union’ is in Wherever Motley is Worn (2015); ‘They Stand for all the Things I Hate’, an essay on the politics of Georgian preservation, appears in Urban Communication: Production , Text , Context (2007); and ‘What They Left Behind: The Irish Landscape after Emigration’ appears in Aftermaths : Exile , Migration , and Diaspora Reconsidered (2009). ABOUT THE AUTHORS xi Elizabeth Mannion earned her PhD at Trinity College, Dublin. Her research interests cover an interdisciplinary range of Irish Studies: from modern drama to contemporary crime fi ction, with a tendency to gravi- tate toward urban settings. Her fi rst book, The Urban Plays of the Early Abbey Theatre : Beyond O ’ Casey (2014), was a repertoire study of the fi rst decades of Ireland’s national theatre. Current projects include a chapter on clerical fi gures in the plays of Bernard Shaw for Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland (forthcoming from Palgrave); and a chapter on early twentieth-century literature set in Dublin and Belfast for the forthcoming A Cambridge History of Irish Working - Class Writing . Her lifelong interest in detective fi ction is entirely the fault of her mother. Audrey McNamara was awarded her PhD from University College Dublin and lectures there. Her monograph Bernard Shaw : From Womanhood to Nationhood — the Irish Shaw is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan. Publications include an essay on John Bull ’ s Other Island in the ‘Shaw and the City’ edition of SHAW : The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies (2012), and ‘Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer : “Male Pattern Blindness”’ in The Theatre of Conor McPherson : Right Beside the Beyond (2012).

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