The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel

Home , Adrian McKinty, Colin Bateman, Dan Starkey (series), Divorcing Jack (novel), Freeman Wills Crofts, Harbinger (horse)

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.

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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.

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 tourism 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 community 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, critical 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). ‘Dead Men Talking: Stagnation and Entrapment in Enda Walsh’s Penelope ’ will appear in the forthcoming The Theatre of Enda Walsh . She is the co-editor (with Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel) of Shaw and Modern Ireland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Shirley Peterson is Associate Professor of English and Dean of Arts and Sciences at Daemen College in Amherst, New York. She is the author of numerous critical articles on novels of the British suffrage movement, literature and freaks, and women and modernism; and co-editor (with Elizabeth Harrison) of Unmanning Modernism : Gendered Re - Readings (1997). Recent research and publications have focused on trauma in the works of Edna O’Brien, Tana French, and Patrick McCabe. Among other journals, her work has appeared in New Hibernia Review and Clues : A Journal of Detection . She is currently working on Irish crime fi ction published during the Celtic Tiger. Introduction A Path to Emerald Noir: The Rise of the Irish Detective Novel

Elizabeth Mannion

The idea for this book emerged from an article in The New York Times announcing that John Banville had been contracted to bring hard-boiled icon Philip Marlowe back from the literary graveyard. Banville—who introduced his Dublin criminal pathologist Quirke in Christine Falls (2006) under the pen name Benjamin Black—was already a leading author of the detective novel, so the genre was hardly groundbreaking territory for him. Nor were revived fi ctional characters a new concept when this announcement appeared in 2012. What caught my attention was the Times emphasizing the Booker Prize-winning Banville; it felt like a small touch of genre snobbery. The Booker Prize descriptor was right up front, before any details about the new novel were offered. It read a bit like a justifi cation along the lines of ‘let me offer a preemptive apology for why I am bothering you, dear Times reader’. I bookmarked the article and forgot about it until Marlowe appeared in The Black - Eyed Blonde (2014), and Banville went on a promotional book tour. During that tour, he was asked about his dual literary personas and their respec- tive generic labeling: Banville as ‘literature’ and Black as ‘detective’. He professed to ‘hate’ it, and elaborated on how ‘some of the best writing of the twentieth century was in crime novels. James M. Cain, Raymond

Chandler, Richard Stark, Simenon of course—this is wonderful work, and shouldn’t be put off into a ghetto.’1 Yet it often is, both within the academy and apart from it. The detective novel’s quasi-designation as paraliterature is certainly not unique to Irish Studies. Genre boundaries are, as Samuel R. Delany puts it, ‘power boundaries. As such, they can retard crossings in either direction. Genres are as much a way of reading as they are a system of social division and exclusion.’2 At the roughly one dozen Irish Studies conferences held in the past year,3 only a handful of panels addressed detective fi ction, and one is hard pressed to fi nd a detective title on the syllabus of an undergraduate Irish Literature course. As William Meier and Ian Campbell Ross observe, such reticence has not been shared by ‘broader audiences’.4 The fi rst Irish crime fi ction to be embraced by international audiences was Colin Bateman’s Divorcing Jack (1995). 5 It took critical knocks for plot, but earned favor for dialogue, characterization, and setting. Bateman’s Belfast journalist-turned-private-detective Dan Starkey became the fi rst Irish detective to appear on best seller lists outside of Ireland. The works of John Connolly, Tana French, Brian McGilloway and others profi led in this collection are more recent examples of international success. Like Bateman, they too are often praised for witty dialogue, atmospheric settings and rich characterization. These qualities have become popular benchmarks in Irish crime fi ction. In December 2012, Adrian McKinty blogged that ‘compared to Nordic or English crime fi ction, Irish crime writers still seem to lurk in the periphery’.6 But less than one year later, Irish authors were making strides inward, and the Irish detective series had become among the most popular titles in the crime genre. McKinty’s peripheral authors have become celebrated in part for crafting detectives who operate on edges of their own: be it on the borders of professional conduct or in communities with no moralistic boundaries on profi t or revenge, qualities shared with their Nordic antecedents and contemporaries. Contemporary Irish detective novels also share an inclination toward the police procedural, murder as the most common crime, a focus on fractured families and male aggres- sion, and a referencing to unhealed historical scars: World War II in the case of the Nordic titles, and the Troubles in the case of the Irish. Dublin and Belfast are the dominant settings, but Irish detective series are not limited by borders, as Jane Casey, Paul Charles, John Connolly, and others demonstrate. Accordingly, we considered an Irish setting as an option rather than a criterion for defi ning the contemporary Irish detective series INTRODUCTION 3 for this volume. What was essential is that each series be active (the detective has not been killed off—yet), and that it be written by an Irish author or feature an Irish detective. That so much Irish crime fi ction emerged in the late 1990s has been considered by many, including authors who were and remain contribu- tors to the genre. In addition to the fi nancial rush that came in with the Celtic Tiger in the mid-1990s, most agree with Declan Burke that 1996 was a pivotal year, with ‘the IRA’s ceasefi re, and the murder of the investigative journalist Veronica Guerin, [making] a huge impact on the Irish psyche’.7 Burke sees these events as organically impacting literary output: an ‘unprecedented economic boom … invariably fuels crime and hence crime fi ction. It’s also the case that Ireland was traditionally very serious about its literature … and that genre fi ction wasn’t very popular—it was very much looked down upon. But the rise of “chick lit” in Ireland has kind of paved the way for other genres, crime fi ction included.’8 The chick lit rise to which Burke alludes began with Watermelon (1995) by Marian Keyes, who has remained one of Ireland’s more prolifi c and bestselling authors both domestically and internationally. Keyes’s novels touch on modern social concerns—such as divorce, mental health, and domestic violence—but they also tend to end on notes of recovery and optimism. Perhaps this is one reason her books are not considered part of the trauma or legacy fi ction of such authors as Pat McCabe or Roddy Doyle, whose novels—The Butcher Boy (1992) or The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996) for example—are often examined through a national lens. Such readings are a distinction and perhaps burden of the literary fi ction designation that Banville has been known to decry and the serious- ness alluded to by Burke. But Irish crime fi ction stands to circumvent the secondary status often ascribed to chick lit, and the tendency to explore the historical moment might be one reason. The leading detective writers are producing novels that feature cultural allusion, and this is likely part of their international appeal. As Junot Díaz has argued, ‘to read genres without a decolonial lens is to rob them of much of their complexity and secret truths. This approach makes genre texts real in ways nothing else does.’9 Reality is a fraught component of modern Irish literature that crosses genres. From poetry to drama and prose fi ction, there is a longstanding tradition of historical referencing in the modern Irish canon. So much so that, as James Cahalen argues, ‘if every Irish novel with history in it were to be included, just about every Irish novel ever written would have to be examined’10 as being part of the historical fi ction genre. The majority of 4 ELIZABETH MANNION

Irish detective series touch on historical scars or legacies of nation. It is common to fi nd detectives or criminals who recollect having witnessed or participated in the Troubles, or to fi nd entire novels that center around the post-Agreement North. Examination of nation–Church complicity in the legacy of domestic violence and clerical abuse of children is also com- monplace, as are, with increasing frequency, the austerity economics of the post-Celtic Tiger years. But the history of the detective novel shows that the Irishness that is now an asset was, for many decades, relegated to subtext and often written out entirely. The path toward the modern detective novel began with the sensation novel. The roots of the sensation novel are found in Gothic literature and the Newgate novels of the Victorian period, which focused on ‘crime, criminals, and lower-class life’.11 The sensation novel was a Gothic–criminal hybrid that ‘featured sensational events (bigamy, arson, murder, insanity), sudden turns of plot (shipwrecks, murdered characters reappearing, inher- itances won and lost), sexual misadventures, and an atmosphere of heightened suspense and tension throughout’. 12 Dublin-born Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was one of the most popular authors of sensation fi ction. His Uncle Silas : A Tale of Bartram - Haugh (1864), ‘with its secret murders, sexually charged undertones of incest, and doppelganger doubles … contains the classic ingredients of what made sensation so popular’.13 Le Fanu rejected his fi fth novel being consigned such a populist label, going so far as to express his disdain for ‘the promiscuous application of the term’14 in his preface. Le Fanu would likely have been no happier with Uncle Silas becoming a benchmark for the detective genre. But this most canonical of nineteenth-century sensations is a standard for the generic conventions noted above and inclusion of a locked-room mystery, which itself would become an essential motif, particularly in the Golden Age of detective fi ction, from roughly 1920 to 1940. 15 But the importance of Uncle Silas to the evolution of the Irish detective novel transcends form. Uncle Silas is based on Le Fanu’s ‘A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess’ (1838),16 with that short story’s Irish setting transformed to the English Midlands for the novel. Uncle Silas is set in Derbyshire, but even with this Irish cultural erasure—something found through the early decades of the detective novel—‘it is impossible’, as Terry Eagleton writes, ‘not to see in this portrait a strikingly accurate cameo of the Anglo-Irish gentry, along with a prophetic glimpse of their historical destiny’.17 That ‘prophetic glimpse’ appears in the absolute paternalism of Silas toward his orphaned niece, Maud Ruthyn, and the turn from benevolence to INTRODUCTION 5 autocracy when she and her inherited cash are denied to Silas and the son he expects Maud to marry. The setting was revised to maximize sales in England, which was a practical and not uncommon practice in the day. But Le Fanu’s erasure of Irishness mirrors a near omission of Irish referencing that would continue through the early decades of the detective novel, which had its debut just one year after Uncle Silas , with Charles Felix’s The Notting Hill Mystery (1865).18 Notting Hill is recognized as the fi rst detective novel, but it was out of print until 2012. Critics therefore considered Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) as the foundational text by which to document conventions of the detective novel: none of which were or are remotely Irish.19 The conventions included a fairly upper-class group of characters, a locked room scene-of-the-crime (usually a theft), and a murder or murders adding to the mysterious elements as the plot advanced. When the British Library republished Notting Hill in 2012, it provided an opportunity for comparison. As in The Moonstone , there is a methodical process of investigation, the action is set among upper-class British victims and dubious per- formers, ‘there are no sensational chases, no battles with criminals [and] no undercover work’,20 and only the most fl eeting of Irish references. Each chapter of The Moonstone is told from the perspective of a different character, several of whom can be called amateur detectives. The only offi cial detective is Detective Sergeant Cuff, and he provides the novel’s sole link to Ireland. The well-respected sergeant happens to be an avid gardener, who travels to Ireland upon his retirement to meet with a ‘great man’s gardener … who has found something new in the growing of roses’. 21 There are two Irish references in Notting Hill , but they are no more substantial than The Moonstone ’s rose-loving pensioner. The fi rst involves an unnamed Dublin bank that the detective, insurance agent Ralph Henderson, discovers as holding a life insurance policy to benefi t the suspect; the second is a brief mention by a dancer that she once appeared in a Dublin pantomime. Neither is essential to the plot or to solving the mystery. Even the murder weapon—the chemical compound emetic tarter—lacked an Irish connection. According to The Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science , the Irish medical community declared it having ‘had its day’ (as a treatment for typhus) by the time Notting Hill began serialization in Once a Week in November 1862. The Journal goes so far as to claim that it ‘did not know of any hospital physician in Dublin who administers it’.22 So, Irishness in the fi rst two detective novels can be reduced to roses, panto, and obsolescence. 6 ELIZABETH MANNION

The fi rst Irish-authored detective series—where the same detective is in multiple volumes—appears three decades later. It was written by Matthias McDonnell Bodkin (1850–1933), and premiered in 1899 with Paul Beck , the Rule of Thumb Detective . The next year, Bodkin introduced Dora Myrl , the Lady Detective (1900) and about a decade later, The Capture of Paul Beck (1909), in which Paul Beck and Dora Myrl marry. Soon thereaf- ter, Paul Beck , a Chip off the Old Block (1911) was published, featuring their son as the detective. Three more titles rounded out the series,23 with the last appearing in 1929. McDonnell Bodkin is an intriguing fi gure. He was a judge, a journalist, one-term MP for North Roscommon, and wrote books on a range of Irish history, including a biography of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and an examination of Black and Tan atrocities. One might reasonably expect this ‘staunch nationalist’24 to have introduced an Irish setting into the exciting new detective novel form, but Bodkin chose England, mostly Cambridge and London. Although no ground was broken with regard to setting, it is noteworthy that he introduced the fi rst professional woman detective to the crime-reading public. The Lady Detective category would continue as a popular subgenre for decades, and be revolutionized in the mid- and later twentieth century with such hard-boiled fi gures as Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone. Its later evolution into police procedurals—including those written by Tana French and Jane Casey—is evident in contemporary Irish crime fi ction. While Bodkin was writing his fi nal Beck novels, the Dublin-born Freeman Wills Crofts (1879–1957) published his fi rst, The Cask , which appeared in 1920. Crofts was a respected player in the Golden Age of detective fi ction, dominated by British writers Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, but never considered their literary equal. Crofts was part of the Humdrum fi eld of novelists: a title coined by Julian Symons for Golden Age writers he considered more adept at puzzles than prose. 25 The Humdrum authors were enormously popular, particularly Crofts. One unique quality of Crofts’s work, as Ian Campbell Ross points out, is that it offers the fi rst ‘sympathetic police detective in fi ction’. 26 Inspector Joseph French of Scotland Yard fi rst appears in Inspector French ’ s Greatest Case (1925).27 W.H. Auden found French’s primary motive to be a ‘love of duty’ and desire to defend ‘the innocent members of society’.28 Two later French novels have Irish plot points, Sir John Magill ’ s Last Journey (1930) and Fatal Venture (1939). Sir John’s last journey was to Northern Ireland and the murder is solved there, and Giant’s Causeway makes an INTRODUCTION 7 appearance in Fatal Venture . French’s centrality to the plot marks a signifi - cant shift in the genre’s evolution: before him, detectives were not main characters. Previous professional detectives, including Sgt. Cuff from The Moonstone , may have been good at their jobs, but they occupied limited real estate in the novels in which they appeared. In fact, Cuff retires half- way through The Moonstone . While Crofts and his Inspector French were dignifying the police procedural, a cynical private detective was introducing his own code, and a degree of Irish subtext, to the American hard-boiled detective novel. It is tempting to point to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1929) as an early example of Irish subtext, but all such referencing is limited entirely to the name of the femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy. A more compelling case appears just one decade later, when Raymond Chandler offers one of the most interesting subtexts of Irishness in The Big Sleep (1939). Although dead before the action begins, Terrance ‘Rusty’ Regan, a ‘big curly-headed Irishman from Clonmel, with sad eyes and a smile as wide as Wilshire Boulevard’,29 remains a preoccupation for all key characters and central to the problem Marlowe has been hired to solve. The novel opens and closes with General Sternwood missing this favored son-in-law who was ‘the breath’ to him with his ‘stories of the Irish revolution’. 30 Chandler’s personal feelings about those who fought in 1922, and Irish rebelliousness in general, is less clear-cut, as seen in a letter he wrote to Blanch Knopf (wife of his publisher Alfred Knopf), and in his reading of Carson’s account of the Oscar Wilde trials. Chandler was keen to clarify references Mrs. Knopf made to his Irish ancestry in a biography she had drafted for his approval. He particularly wanted to establish that he was ‘not an Irish-American in the sense com- monly understood … the Irish family my mother belonged to had not a single Catholic relative or connection, even by marriage … I should not like to say that in Ireland Catholicism reached its all-time low of ignorance, dirt and general degradation of the priesthood, but in my boyhood it was bad enough. It does the Irish great credit,’ he concluded, ‘that out of this fl annel-mouthed mob of petty liars and drunkards there has come no real persecution of the non-Catholic elements’.31 One can fi nd a back-handed compliment in there if physical contortions are applied, but there is no mistaking the sting: he did not like being mistaken for an Irish Catholic. The Carson trial reports are relevant to the Arthur Geiger subplot in The Big Sleep . It falls outside of normative heterosexual desire, not uncommon in the hard-boiled detective novels that became popular in the 1930s and 8 ELIZABETH MANNION the closely related noir cinema of the 1940s.32 Geiger is murdered early in the novel, and his young, male lover, Carol Lundgren, murders the person he mistakenly believes killed Geiger. Marlowe hands Lundgren over to District Attorney Taggart Wilde who, Marlowe approvingly observes, ‘had the frank daring smile of an Irishman’.33 His heritage marks him as trustworthy to the cynical Marlowe, and Wilde’s name, if not deliberately chosen to reference Oscar Wilde, is one of literature’s more striking coin- cidences.34 Queer overtones and subtexts are well explored in Chandler studies, but the Wildean allusion in conjunction with the honorable qualities attributed to District Attorney Wilde indicate a unique queering of Irishness in The Big Sleep . Marlowe’s respect for Wilde and sentimental appreciation for the old General are matched by his admiration for the inept tough guy Harry Jones and his ‘worn little Irish tweed coat’.35 In protecting his partner, Jones shows an honor that Marlowe admires, and the detective eulogizes Jones several times later in the novel. For a man who spent a fair amount of his boyhood back among his mother’s relatives in Waterford and claimed to ‘have no romantic ideas about the Irish’,36 The Big Sleep proves otherwise. It is full of romantic musings: there is no cynicism in the General’s take on his son-in-law or in Marlowe’s respect for Jones, Lundgren, and Wilde. Chandler’s later years are said to have found the author becoming ‘more tolerant’37 as a result of having spent time with openly gay writers, including Christopher Isherwood. This evolution included the decision ‘to read the infamous cross-examination of Oscar Wilde by Edward Carson, from Wilde’s unsuccessful libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry’, in which Chandler ‘concluded that it read like “two people shouting across oceans of misunderstanding … they [homosexuals] threaten us because our own normal vices fi ll us at times with the same sort of revulsion”’.38 But his epiphany came in the 1950s, long after the publication of The Big Sleep . The trail of Irish detection—subtextually or otherwise—runs cold until American journalist Mark McGarrity (1943–2002) introduces the Peter McGarr series with The Death of an Irish Politician in 1977.39 Under the pen name Bartholomew Gill, McGarrity created the fi rst longstanding Irish detective series set in Dublin, and infused it with just enough elements of the hard-boiled to temper the sentimentality that occasionally surfaces. McGarr, Chief Superintendent of the Dublin Murder Squad, contains qualities that are seen in more than a few detectives that grace contemporary Irish police procedurals. He is equally at ease with a good INTRODUCTION 9 drink as a good book (ideally together), well liked by colleagues and often an annoyance to superiors, enjoys the company of an intelligent woman, is good at and enjoys his job. McGarr was a worthy forerunner to the police procedurals40 that currently dominate Irish crime fi ction. Engagement with contemporary social issues is as central to the police procedural as realistic portrayals of police investigations and elements of the psychological thriller. When the police procedural is part of a geocen- tric series—like the LAPD of Harry Bosch (by Michael Connelly) or the Lothian and Borders of John Rebus (by Ian Rankin)—it is essential that the social be local. With many (but certainly not all) Irish police procedurals being set in Dublin and Belfast, it is not surprising that a considerable amount of writers have positioned their gardai and murder squad detectives against the austerity economic plan, or their PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) inspectors among a citizenry still negotiating the post- Agreement North. But, as Carol Baraniuk explores in Chapter 5 , there is also room in this subgenre for ‘negotiating borders’, and in his Inspector Devlin series, Brian McGilloway suggests it takes a pragmatic empathy to keep the peace. Stuart Neville’s Detective Jack Lennon is a train-wreck of a human being, but, as Fiona Coffey shows in Chapter 6 , he still has something to offer to the PSNI, at least for a while. The Lennon series examines the fragility of the peace process and the measures that politicians and other heads of state go to in order to maintain it. At the center of the novels are withering critiques of a hypocrisy that seems to have infi ltrated every layer of society, and cynicism over an inability to move beyond the past. The past also haunts the detectives who comprise Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad and Jane Casey’s Detective Constable Maeve Kerrigan. In Chapter 7 , Shirley Peterson examines French’s series from the perspective of trauma theory to argue that the crime genre is fertile ground for examining the experience of individual and communal trauma, including colonialism as well as the Celtic Tiger years. She demonstrates that the Celtic Tiger generation of French’s Dublin is no safer than the post-Agreement generation of Neville’s Belfast. Traumas of the past are not limited to Irish soil, as Casey’s Maeve Kerrigan series proves. Set in London, Kerrigan, like most of French’s murder squad members, is too young to have personally witnessed the Troubles and as a Londoner she has not been subject to Ireland’s austerity economy. But, as Chapter 8 explores, the legacy of the former and stagnation of the latter emerge nonetheless, with women metaphorically feeling their pain. 10 ELIZABETH MANNION

Casey and French are among a wide fi eld of women authors in Irish crime fi ction, but not the fi rst. That honor, according to Willetta L. Heising, belongs to Ann C. Fallon, who took the Cozy crime route. Fallon’s James Fleming, a Dublin solicitor, is something of an amalgama- tion of mystery tropes from earlier eras. Fleming is ‘a comfortably well-off bachelor with an upper-middle class background and a love of railway travel whose law practice leads him to some unusual opportunities for legal sleuthing’.41 This creation of American author Fallon appeared in the fi rst half of the 1990s. Of the contemporary Cozy crime titles, Rhys Bowen’s Molly Murphy series is among the more internationally successful, perhaps because it offers something of a cultural stereotype palatable for foreign consumption. Not surprisingly, the Murphy series—where the amateur detective possesses the Feisty Colleen traits of old Hollywood cinema— is most popular in America, where most of the stories is set. Molly fi rst appeared in Murphy ’ s Law (2001), as a young woman in 1901 Ireland on the run after murdering the son of the big house. By The Family Way (2013), Molly is running her own detective agency, befriending suffrag- ettes who live across the street from her in Greenwich Village, scraping with the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and confronting nuns whom she rightly suspects of having questionable ethics. Like so many collections fi rmly within or skirting the edges of Cozy crime—including Ruth Dudley Edward’s Baroness Jack Troutbeck novels—Bowen’s confronts stereotypes in order to smash them to pieces. Historical detective series, like Cora Harrison’s Burren novels and Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma titles, are cornerstones of Irish detective fi c- tion. Set in sixteenth-century Munster, Harrison’s books are rich with landscaped history lessons featuring Mara, a Brehon detective who conveys authority without ever losing her sense of humanity. In Chapter 1 , Nancy Marck Cantwell offers a feminist reading of Peter Tremayne’s popular Sister Fidelma series, which is also set in medieval Ireland. She fi nds that Sister Fidelma’s authority as a dálaigh , or advocate of the law courts, advances the standing of the female detective. Cantwell demonstrates that Tremayne’s treatment of progressive Celtic attitudes toward gender parity, intellectual accomplishment, and societal tolerance also critique contemporary women’s issues, particularly motherhood. As a professional detective, Fidelma exemplifi es the prominence of Irish women prior to the constricting infl uences of Rome and colonization. Fidelma operates both within and on the periphery of male power, demonstrating an inde- INTRODUCTION 11 pendence streak that links her, without the cynicism, to the hard- boiled private detectives that dominate international bestseller lists. The private detective series profi led here—by John Connolly, Declan Hughes, and Ken Bruen—represent the collection’s most direct evidence of the hard-boiled legacy. The detectives created by these authors are crafted with the depth necessary to warrant our sympathy and support in equal measure. In Chapter 2 , Brian Cliff focuses on the way in which Connolly’s Charlie Parker series blurs genre distinctions, interweaving supernatural themes with the structures of mystery fi ction. This play with conventions is unique in Irish mystery fi ction, and is essential to the strengths of Connolly’s work. Chapter 3 features Charlotte J. Headrick’s reading of Declan Hughes’s Ed Loy series in the tradition of Chandler and Hammett. Headrick considers the benefi t of such a complex fi gure in digging through Ireland’s modern history and the hangover from the Tiger excesses. The ten novels in Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series span the years of Ireland’s epic cycle from boom to bust to modest recovery. In Chapter 4 , Andrew Kincaid reads the last four novels of the series in light of Ireland’s economic collapse, the bank bailout, the introduction of mass austerity, and the rise in emigration. The chapter presents these Irish crime novels as national allegories, with Kincaid examining what hope looks like for Taylor, a modern detective in an Ireland caught between shock and renewal. No detective could benefi t more from the hope explored in the Bruen series than Benjamin Black’s Quirke, a pathologist in 1950s Dublin. As Audrey McNamara writes in Chapter 9 , Quirke’s inquisitiveness spurs him to investigate the untimely and suspicious demise of the corpses that arrive on a trolley in his pathology department, where he fi nds, contrary to protection for women and children enshrined in de Valera’s 1937 Constitution, the systematic abuse and suppression of the vulnerable in society and the subsequent support and concealment of these injustices. As the Appendix shows, there are dozens of Irish detective series currently being written, and likely a dozen more will be in print by the time this volume goes to press. If room allowed, they would each have a chapter here, particularly Adrian McKinty and Declan Burke. McKinty and Burke have championed the genre through their journalism and contributed to it with their fi ction. This book would likely not exist had they not opened the door. 12 ELIZABETH MANNION

NOTES 1. J. Wiener (14 March 2014) ‘I Hate Genre: An Interview with John Banville/ Benjamin Black’, Los Angeles Review of Books . 2. S.R. Delany (20 May 2015) Conversation with Elizabeth Mannion. Philadelphia, PA. 3. These include annual conferences by the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures, the Canadian Association for Irish Studies, and the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies; national and regional conferences by the American Conference for Irish Studies. 4. W. Meier and I.C. Ross (2014) ‘Irish Crime since 1921’, Éire -Ireland , 49.1–2, 10. 5. Divorcing Jack is the fi rst in Bateman’s Dan Starkey series (see Appendix for titles). Starkey is a journalist-turned-private detective, refl ecting the journalist-turned-crime-writer trend that began with Bartholomew Gill (Mark McGarrity) in the 1970s, but became most common in the post Celtic Tigers years, with the emergence of such novelists as Liz Allen, Eilis O’Hanlon (one half of the Ingrid Black pseudonym), Alex Barclay, and Eugene McEldowney. 6. A. McKinty (2012) ‘The Irish Crime Fiction Supergroup.’ http:// adrianmckinty.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-irish-crime-fiction-supergroup.html , date accessed 9 May 2015. 7. ‘Interview with Declan Burke’, New Mystery Reader Magazine, http:// www. newmysteryreader.com/declan_burke.htm , date accessed 11 May 2015. 8. ‘Interview with Declan Burke’, New Mystery Reader Magazine, http:// www. newmysteryreader.com/declan_burke.htm , date accessed 11 May 2015. 9. T.J. Taylor (2015) ‘A Singular Dislocation: An Interview with Junot Díaz’, Paradoxa , 26, 102. 10. J.M. Cahalen (1983) Great Hatred , Little Room : The Irish Historical Novel (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press), p. xiii. 11. F.S. Schwarzbach (2002) ‘Newgate Novel to Detective Fiction’ in P. Brantlinger and W.B. Thesing (eds) A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell), p. 230. 12. F.S. Schwarzbach (2002), p. 236. 13. D.P. Zuber (2006) ‘Swedenborg and the Disintegration of Language in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Sensation Fiction’ in K. Harrison and R. Fantina (eds) Victorian Sensations : Essays on a Scandalous Genre (Columbus: Ohio State University Press), p. 74. INTRODUCTION 13

14. J.S. Le Fanu (2000) Uncle Silas (New York: Penguin), p. 3. 15. E.C. Bentley’s Trent ’ s Last Case (1913) marks the beginning of the modern era of detective fi ction and paves the way for the Golden Age that was dominated by British and American authors. This includes, in its later years, the emergence of the hard-boiled detective novel. 16. Titled ‘The Murdered Cousin’ in the 1850 Le Fanu anthology Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery . 17. T. Eagleton (1995) Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (London and New York: Verso), p. 198. 18. Installments were published in Once a Week from 29 November 1862 to 17 January 1863, and the full novel was published by Saunders, Otley & Co. in 1865. See Mike Ashley (2012) ‘Seeking the Evidence’ in The Notting Hill Mystery (London: British Library), pp. viii–xiv. 19. Collins is a tipping point between the two genres: his The Woman in White (1859) is classic sensation. 20. M. Ashley (2012), p. xiii. 21. Chapter VIII of The Moonstone . 22. The Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science 36 (August and November 1863), p. 198. 23. The Quests of Paul Beck (1908), Pigeon Blood Rubies (1915), and Paul Beck , Detective (1929). 24. I.C. Ross (2011) ‘Introduction’ in D. Burke (ed.) Down These Green Streets : Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (Dublin: Liberties Press), p. 24. 25. The Humdrums are being examined anew, however. See Curtis J. Evans (2012) Masters of the ‘ Humdrum ’ Mystery : Cecil John Charles Street , Freeman Wills Crofts , Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel , 1920 – 1961 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland) for more on Crofts and other leading Humdrum authors. There are no other Irish authors of this school; however, Crofts’s contemporary John Street, who authored dozens of books in his Dr. Priestley series, had a dubious Irish connection: he was an information offi cer at Dublin Castle during the War of Independence. 26. I.C. Ross (2011), p. 25. 27. Other titles in the series are: Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery (1926), Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy (1927), The Sea Mystery (1928), Fear Comes to Chalfont (1942), The Affair at Little Wokeham (1943), and French Strikes Oil (1951). 28. W.H. Auden (1948) ‘The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict’, Harpers Magazine , 410. 29. R. Chandler (1992) The Big Sleep (New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard), p. 10. 30. R. Chandler (1992), pp. 10–11. 14 ELIZABETH MANNION

31. ‘Raymond Chandler to Blanche Knopf, 17 Jan. 1940’ in T. Hiney and F. MacShane (eds) The Raymond Chandler Papers : Selected Letters and Nonfi ction , 1909 – 1959 (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000), p. 26. It was not unusual for Chandler to assert his Anglo- Irish roots while simultaneously insulting Irish Catholics. As he noted in a 1 January 1945 letter to Atlantic Monthly editor Charles Morton, ‘I grew up with a terrible con- tempt for Catholics, and I have trouble with it even now’ (p. 49). However, his confl icting feelings about his Irish ancestry were mostly private. As he noted to Morton: ‘I could make a book about these people, but I am too much of an Irishman myself ever to tell the truth about them’ (p. 50). 32. This trope can be found in American cinema as far back as the Big Three classic Warner Brothers gangster pictures: The Public Enemy (William Wellman, 1931), Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931), and Scarface (Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson, 1932). 33. R. Chandler (1992), p. 114. 34. See L. Gutkin (2014) ‘The Dandifi ed Dick: Hardboiled Noir and the Wildean Epigram’, ELH , 81.4, 1299–326, for dialogic analysis between Wilde and Chandler. 35. R. Chandler (1992), pp. 168–9. 36. ‘Raymond Chandler to Alex Barris, 18 Mar. 1949’, in T. Hiney and F. MacShane (eds) The Raymond Chandler Papers : Selected Letters and Nonfi ction , 1909 – 1959 (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000), p. 104. 37. T. Hiney (1997) Raymond Chandler : A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus), p. 247. 38. T. Hiney (1997), p. 247. 39. The full series is: The Death of an Irish Politician (McGarr and the Politician ’s Wife ), The Death of an Irish Consul (McGarr and the Sienese Conspiracy ), The Death of an Irish Lass ( McGarr on the Cliffs of Moher ), The Death of an Irish Tradition (McGarr at the Dublin Horse Show ), McGarr and the PM of Belgrave Square , McGarr and the Method of Descartes, McGarr and the Legacy of the Woman Scorned , The Death of a Joyce Scholar , The Death of Love , Death on a Cold , Wild River , The Death of an Ardent Bibliophile , The Death of an Irish Tinker (Death of a Busker King ), The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf , The Death of an Irish Lover , The Death of an Irish Sinner , Death in Dublin . 40. The fi rst police procedural novel is open to debate. S. Knight (2010) Crime Fiction since 1800 : Detection , Death , Diversity , 2nd edn (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan) asserts V as in Victim (Lawrence Treat, 1945) as the fi rst ‘consciously procedural novel’ and names Cop Hater (1956) by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) as the ‘start of the major American procedural series’, p. 242. INTRODUCTION 15

41. W.L. Heising (1996) Detecting Women 2 : A Reader ’ s Guide and Checklist for Mystery Series Written by Women (Dearborn, MI: Purple Moon Press), p. 65. Titles in the series are: Blood is Thicker (1990), Where Death Lies (1991), Dead Ends (1992), Potter ’ s Field (1993), Hour of Our Death (1995). CHAPTER 1

Hello Dálaigh : Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma

Nancy Marck Cantwell

Peter Tremayne’s seventh-century Irish detective, Sister Fidelma, is a dálaigh , or advocate of the law courts. Sister Fidelma has been illuminat- ing the prominence of Irish women prior to the constricting infl uences of Rome and colonization since fi rst appearing in the short story ‘Hemlock at Vespers’ (1993). The series holds a foundational position in the growth of the Irish detective novel. As John Scaggs observes, ‘far from being part of the boom, the Sister Fidelma novels were one of the contributing fac- tors that set it in motion.’1 Tremayne’s accomplishment lies in his richly detailed portrayal of Irish history, and in his self-assured female detective, whose investigations invariably bring her into confl ict with male representatives of both Church and state. In his historical background to Absolution by Murder (1994), Tremayne asserts that ‘the Irish laws gave more rights and protection to women than any other western law code at that time or since’.2 Accordingly, the Fidelma series offers an implicit critique of contemporary Irish women’s issues by juxtaposing past and present, offering a professional female detective whose modern sensibilities have been cultivated by a tolerant and progressive Ireland that has since ‘become obfuscated by centuries of colonial destruction’.3 The Sister Fidelma mysteries approach crime as a socio-political threat to an advanced Celtic culture characterized by tolerance and support for women’s rights. Sister Fidelma applies her skill as an authority on Ireland’s Brehon laws, an ‘indigenous system of law dating from Celtic times, which survived until the seventeenth century when it was fi nally supplanted by the English common law’.4 Despite her youth and gender, Sister Fidelma’s

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 17 E. Mannion (ed.), The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53940-3_2 18 NANCY MARCK CANTWELL professional qualifi cations place her in a unique position with respect to authority, as a dálaigh ‘may argue law with the highest king in the land’.5 The power invested in Fidelma as an anruth (one degree below ollamh , the highest level attainable at Ireland’s bardic universities), however, calls attention to the status of women in medieval Ireland, which compares favorably to the supposedly advanced cultures of seventh-century Britain and Rome. Confronted by the restrictions placed on Roman ladies in Shroud for the Archbishop (1998), Fidelma observes that it is ‘a sad city for women’.6 Further opportunities for cultural comparison demonstrate the progressive state of Celtic law, which protected women from sexual harassment, discrimination, and rape while providing access to higher education and both professional and political distinction.7 Cultural comparisons form a subtle critique of the contested status of feminism in the modern Ireland of Tremayne’s readers, who fi nd in Fidelma a kindred spirit, a professional woman whose authority must take shape within a largely patriarchal social context. Although Celtic women may be educated and hold any offi ce or rank in society, that Fidelma must repeatedly present her credentials to gain authority makes clear that even her progressive society retains sexist biases. Fidelma’s interpretive process combines logic, traditionally identifi ed with the male detective, with a form of feminine intuition that entertains a variety of confl icting possibilities simultaneously. This play of ideas allows Fidelma to unravel crimes, but she must control the time of this internal creative process. Julia Kristeva’s examination of the role of desire in interpretation resonates with Fidelma’s detective praxis, with a clue and its meaning for the solution of the crime paralleling the sign and signifi er. Kristeva argues that ‘the person who does the interpretation [here the detective], the subject who makes the connection between the sign and the signifi ed [displays] the extraordinary architectonics of his will and … his [or her] mastery of time’. 8 As Fidelma investigates a crime, she asserts her will to direct the course (or to construct the architecture) of the proceedings, often resisting the ranking male authority. In Shroud for the Archbishop , for instance, Fidelma confronts Roman Bishop Gelasius with the conditions necessary to her accepting the case, stipulating ‘full authority in the conduct of this inquiry. We will be able to question everyone who we need to question and go where we need to go. Even if we need ask a question of the Holy Father himself. There can be no limitation on either of us.’9 In Absolution by Murder , she secures the same permission of King Oswy of Northumbria, insisting that he must accept her own determination of the time needed to solve the crime. In each social register, the male HELLO DÁLAIGH: PETER TREMAYNE’S SISTER FIDELMA 19 authority must cede to Sister Fidelma control over both the structure and time of the investigation to advance an interpretation of mysterious events. Fidelma’s authority over the time of the investigation, conferred by her professional status as anruth , addresses the female detective’s classic problem, which Lisa M. Dresner describes as the ‘incompatibility of the cultural categories of “woman” and “investigator”’.10 While the history of detective fi ction attests to a masculinist perspective that relegates women to a secondary role. Tremayne’s series repositions the female detective as negotiating both male and female conceptions of time, using each one to further her interpretation of events.11 While linear time in the detective plot fi nds expression in the narrative trajectory of solving a mystery, monu- mental time resides in female subjectivity—for instance, the inaccessibility of Fidelma’s intuition alarms the male representatives of Church and state and instigates their efforts to impose linear time limits. Although Kathleen Klein notes that by ‘breaking social taboos by attempting to take over male position and prerogatives, women detectives emphasize their devi- ancy, their distance from the proper role of Woman’,12 Fidelma employs subjectivity to complement logical reasoning. Her unique reputation for solving diffi cult mysteries depends on her ability to think differently and to insist on her own interpretive time. Fidelma’s interpretive faculties supersede those of her male associate, Brother Eadulf. Like Holmes’s Watson, Eadulf offsets the detective’s special interpretive insight by his attention to red herrings, confi rming Kristeva’s observation that the interpretive object, or clue, either ‘may succumb to the interpretive intentions of the interpreter’, or it ‘may reveal to the interpreter the unknown of his [or her] theory’.13 Eadulf tends to attach a fi xed meaning to a clue, which often misleads him to overvalue its importance. In contrast, Fidelma’s openness to ‘the unknown of her theory’ enables her to unravel complex motives, solve crimes with both social and political aspects, and advance her authority as an investigator. In Shroud for the Archbishop , Fidelma can imagine that the theft of treasure might not, in fact, have motivated the murder, and she can also speculate that a scarf worn around the neck of a princess could conceal a mark identifying her as a former slave. Kristeva calls these ‘new, unpredictable signifying effects’ of an object ‘an imaginary ’ 14 to call attention to their importance for the desiring subject, whose search for truth is often complicated by the prestige a successful endeavor confers. In other words, Fidelma investigates crimes because she is a dálaigh , an advocate of the law dedicated to restoring social balance through her logical explana- 20 NANCY MARCK CANTWELL tion of a crime, but the authority of her exclusive position as interpreter also has the potential to complicate detection with her desire for prominence. Fidelma’s reputation is reinforced in nearly every mystery, where an awe-struck bystander refl ects on her exceptional skill; for instance, in Atonement of Blood , Brother Cú-Mara blurts out, ‘I thought everyone knew Sister Fidelma and her husband Brother Eadulf … their reputation is spread throughout the Five Kingdoms.’15 Personal investment in an explanation can obscure the investigator’s notion of truth ‘because he is a desiring subject, and the paths of desire ensnarl the paths of knowledge’.16 Fidelma explains this complexity to Brother Eadulf, who has questioned her attention to an apparently meaningless clue:

‘The wise judge gathers the evidence piece by piece,’ Fidelma smiled. ‘And when all the pieces are gathered, the wise judge will consider them and, like a craftsman making a mosaic, the judge will try to form patterns before the eyes, so that by inserting a piece here and there until it fi ts, it will gradually form an entire picture. It is the bad judge who seizes one piece of evidence and tries to conjure a picture from it. Who knows? That piece may not even be part of the picture the judge seeks.’17

Fidelma’s ability to enter into Kristeva’s ‘imaginary’ invariably leads to a solution. She entertains a fl exible interpretive position relative to the evidence, an elasticity of mind associated with both her education and her gender. In her study of the female poetics of crime, Anita McChesney notes that the typical female role involves erasure: a female character often appears as victim, and when ‘the tragic female death plunges the world into chaos, an entirely male network restores order’.18 Tremayne’s detective redefi nes this tradition by defending female victims as well as prosecuting female criminals—both situations implicate Fidelma’s identity as Other, exerting transgressive power like the criminal and representing ‘the victim whose status needs to be redressed’.19 Fidelma’s travels in politically unstable Muman (Munster) also imperil her. In The Seventh Trumpet , she is kidnapped and nearly smothered, while in The Leper ’ s Bell , she is taken hos- tage by the Uí Fidgente, a western clan that menaces Muman throughout the series. Eadulf rescues Fidelma in The Seventh Trumpet , but she just as often rescues him—notably from his capture in The Subtle Serpent as well as from his near conviction for murder in Our Lady of Darkness . Fidelma strategizes, marshals the ‘male network’ to defend Muman, and directs military and political leaders, including her brother, King Colgú. HELLO DÁLAIGH: PETER TREMAYNE’S SISTER FIDELMA 21

Examining gender values in the series, Christine Kinealy fi nds traditionally male and female forms of authority: ‘In search of truth (rather than simply justice), Fidelma uses her reason and logic, which are often seen as male attributes. In contrast, part of the charm of both Fidelma and Brigit is their adherence to “womanly ways.”’20 In Shroud for the Archbishop , for instance, Fidelma shows motherly compassion for a poor boy who serves as guide to the catacombs. Her powers of deduction and sympathy combine, as she locates the means for him to continue his education and raise himself from poverty. Tremayne frequently calls attention to her cíob- horlg , ‘a comb-bag which was indispensable to all women in Ireland, for in this little bag they carried not only combs but articles for their toilet’.21 In later books, once she marries Brother Eadulf and becomes a mother (celibacy not being a requirement in seventh-century religious life), Fidelma experiences postpartum depression and questions her decision to marry, as husband and child complicate selfhood and hinder her career ambitions. As the series progresses, Fidelma’s logical faculties predominate until motherhood precipitates a crisis of identity. At this point, she seeks advice from an older woman, who places logic and intuition in perspective: ‘You may see the problem through logic, lady, but you will understand truth through your emotion. It is emotion that has taught people how to reason.’22 Tremayne permits these competing claims expression in Fidelma’s investigations as they show her ‘like many of today’s professional women, torn between career and family’.23 Like Sherlock Holmes, she can penetrate motives by employing Kristeva’s imaginary , by allowing herself to entertain possibilities that confl ict with the evidence. Similarly unhampered by her faith, she also evinces a healthy ‘skepticism about the innate goodness of her fellow human beings’, refusing to defer to male authority or to assume, as many of her contemporaries do, that people in religious life share the same values.24 Fidelma’s lack of religious fervor prepares readers for her eventual decision to leave the patriarchal confi nes of religious life to pursue her legal career, where her unique blend of logic and intuition can best serve the nation. The imaginary furthers interpretation by promoting what Kristeva calls delirium , ‘a discourse which has presumably strayed from a presumed reality. The speaking subject is presumed to have known an object, a relationship, and experience that he [or she] is henceforth incapable of reconstituting accurately.’25 If Fidelma’s ability to imagine possible interpretations of clues distinguishes her from male authority fi gures, misled by their more rigid habits of mind, her ‘delirious’ state impor- 22 NANCY MARCK CANTWELL tantly opens possible, yet previously unthinkable, explanations. Kristeva points to this ‘perception-knowledge’ as ‘always already marked by a lack ; for it shelters within its very being the non-signifi able, the non-symbolized’.26 In Absolution by Murder , Fidelma must discover who killed her friend, Abbess Etain. She moves, with discomfort, into the delirious state where logic gives way to a freer play of associations, noting that ‘she was disturbed how this disorganized and jumbled series of thoughts could enter her mind when she was supposed to be analyzing the murder’.27 From this state, in which she has the fi rst intimations of her desire for Brother Eadulf, the signifi cance of the clue objects—a Celtic brooch and the poems of Sappho—manifest the submerged, ‘non-symbolized’ truth about another form of desire. The brooch is a betrothal gift that indicates Etain’s plans to marry, and the Sapphic poems unmask the sexual jealousy of the murderer, a young nun obsessed with the abbess. Like Holmes and other male detectives, Fidelma employs logic and reason as well as a broad social experience. But her investigations also invoke a specifi cally female elasticity of mind, one that Tremayne deliberately sets in contrast to those of the male authorities representing Church and state. The female detective’s delirium also immerses her in the desire for knowledge—the solution of a crime—in a way that provokes a double jouissance : that of intellectual illumination regarding the criminal and the motivation for the crime, and that of an imaginative emotional identifi cation with the Other necessary to that comprehension. In the previous example, Fidelma’s nascent sexual desire for Eadulf helps her enter imaginatively into that frame of reference and thus detect Sister Gwid’s thwarted pas- sion for Abbess Etain. In the delirious state, Fidelma senses her own sexual desire while also processing its complex cultural and religious implications (Eadulf is Saxon and a monk). This insight dramatizes the imaginary as she begins to construct outcomes that were previously unthinkable, and con- sequently she recognizes Sister Gwid’s desire and gains mastery over the crime. This imaginary identifi cation with the criminal empowers the interpreter, who ‘identifi es himself with the very place of alternity, he merges with the Other, experiencing jouissance in and through the place of otherness. Thus in delirium the subject is so to speak the Phallus.’28 Invested with the authority of the solution, Fidelma restores order to the social world ruptured by crime. Often male authority fi gures come to respect her professional accomplishment, even responding positively to the challenge to sexism presented by Irish progressive thought, as when Bishop Gelasius admits, ‘You have taught me much about the women of your land. Perhaps HELLO DÁLAIGH: PETER TREMAYNE’S SISTER FIDELMA 23 we in Rome are wrong to deny our women a place in our public affairs.’29 This endorsement of Irish women’s power to promote equality resonates with contemporary readers who admire Fidelma’s professional skill. Tremayne offers a rich context that naturalizes Fidelma’s status and infl uence in her world. In a 2004 interview, he points to gender equality as ‘the most intriguing aspect of the seventh-century Irish system which placed women in a co-equal role to men. A fact that seemed forgotten.’30 Within each mystery, resistance to Fidelma’s authority to investigate affords an opportunity to include brief lectures on the tradition of female accomplishment in Ireland, again informing the contemporary reader that woman’s loss of autonomy resulted from centuries of religious and political oppression. Sacred references to holy women like Brigid and Hilda of Whitby balance secular allusions to representatives of professions including politics, medicine, and law. For instance, when Tremayne has Fidelma recall that ‘The Uraicecht Bec was a law text said to have been written by the famous female judge Bríg Briugaid on the rights of women,’31 he places her in a tradition of female legal expertise that presents her work as a dálaigh as normal rather than an exceptional triumph over patriarchy. Other references link infl uential women like Queen Macha, ‘ruler of all the Five Kingdoms’,32 to pre-Christian Ireland, highlighting a trajectory of declining female infl uence. In Master of Souls , female physicians trace their lineage from ‘a cult of women who followed the teachings of Airmed, daughter of the old god of healing’, 33 while in The Subtle Serpent , the traditional female healer Suanech maintains ‘allegiance to the old gods and goddesses’.34 Christine and Robert Luehrs note that Fidelma’s quest for truth is ‘essentially Druidic’ and that ‘Celtic mythology is fi lled with powerful, independent females who exhibit the same strengths and foibles as their male counterparts’.35 By following crimes, Fidelma actively shapes her world alongside kings and bishops. The historical importance of women in Irish culture offers Fidelma a formidable position from which to argue for equality in the face of the encroaching sexism of Roman Catholicism, which Tremayne portrays as an imminent threat to both the Celtic Church and women’s rights. Male representatives of the Roman way, like Brother Febal in The Subtle Serpent , articulate litanies of misogynist views based on male theological authority: ‘Women should obey men in the Church … the Blessed John Chrysostom once observed that woman taught once and ruined all by her teachings … Augustine of Hippo points out that women are not made in the image of God, whereas man is fully and completely the image of God.’ 36 Fidelma 24 NANCY MARCK CANTWELL counters that ‘In this land, men and women are coequal before God,’ again distinguishing Ireland as more advanced than imperial Rome.37 When Febal quotes scripture condemning Eve, Fidelma’s greater knowledge corrects his interpretation, but the Church suspects the destabilizing potential of female power throughout the series. Like other detectives who seek by solving crimes to correct an imbalance in a society ostensibly dedicated to the pursuit of truth and justice, Fidelma declares her allegiance to the law. But the Brehon law advances a tolerance that appears radical when compared to the severity of Roman law, which looms as a patriarchal menace in the background of the novels. As she encounters and solves criminal conundrums, Fidelma becomes aware that the progressive elements in her culture are under assault, internally by the threat of Uí Fidgente rebellion and externally by the religious and gender restrictions proposed by Rome. The series begins, in Shroud for the Archbishop , with the Synod of Whitby, where the Northumbrian Church weighs Celtic against Roman teachings. As a consequence of King Oswy’s decision, Roman infl uence threatens to eclipse Celtic tolerance as well as transform cultural traditions, both of which allow women greater scope in civil as well as in private life. Fidelma confronts the potentially destructive power of Roman authority in The Chalice of Blood , in which the murderer is an Irish noblewoman converted to Novitianism, a sect urging zealous purgation and mandating severe punishments for unbelievers. The Chalice of Blood addresses the dangers that beset progressive Ireland—the infi ltration of discordant ideas that would suppress free thought and impose dogma, and the destruction of Irish culture represented here and elsewhere (notably in Master of Souls ) by the irretrievable loss of manuscript documents refl ecting the advanced state of Irish learning. Signifi cantly, the victim, Brother Donnchad, is a scholar and a reli- gieux whose reputation rests on theological treatises proudly stored in the library of the Abbey of Lios Mór. However, fanatic Novitianist Brother Lugna forcefully suppresses texts that openly question matters of Catholic doctrine like the divinity of Christ. Brother Lugna aims to impose a strict censorship that refl ects the severe Roman Penitentials,

based on physical punishment, bodily mortifi cation, and ritual maiming which even included the removal of limbs of those found guilty of breaking the rules. The discipline was completely at odds with the spirit and nature of the native Law of the Fénechus … Eadulf shivered slightly. He had come to appreciate the Fénechus laws as being more humane and progressive, HELLO DÁLAIGH: PETER TREMAYNE’S SISTER FIDELMA 25

based on compensation for the victim and rehabilitation for the perpetrator. Physical punishment was simply bloodthirsty vengeance.38

Foreign observer Brother Eadulf registers open-mindedness as a marker of national identity as he commends Ireland’s tolerant legal system, under siege by Irish zealots gaining in numbers and infl uence. Originally from Connachta (Connaught), Brother Lugna returns to Ireland after fi ve years studying in Rome, and his rapid conversion of patroness Lady Eithne reveals an internal fracture of Irish identity, a larger social crisis that the actual crime only signposts: Celtic traditions may be undermined from within by Irish agents of Rome. The murder of Brother Donnchad centers on new knowledge brought from abroad: Donnchad imports evidence from the Holy Land refuting Christ’s divinity, and his mother, Lady Eithne, kills him for this heresy. Lady Eithne commits ‘the crime of fi ngal , or kinslaying, which strikes at the very heart of our society, based as it is on kin, on clans and our relationship with one another. Our laws stress that this is the most horrendous crime of all. It is impossible to atone or compensate for such a crime.’39 As Fidelma’s adversary in this case is a woman of rank, a mother who murders her son to further her own ambition, the border separating the female detective and the criminal blurs. Both the female detective and the female criminal employ status to further private ambitions that impact national identity. As wealthy patron of the Abbey of Lios Mór, Lady Eithne dictates an extensive rebuilding project, designing a shrine to her two sons. The abbey remodeling is paral- leled by the Roman-inspired reform of Celtic monasticism within, which includes substituting Latin for Celtic terms and institutionalizing the celibacy favored in Rome. Politically, Lady Eithne pits two neighboring clans against one another, hoping to capitalize on civil unrest and gar- ner resources for her abbey. As Sandra Tomc observes that ‘the detective embarks on a search for the criminal that ends up uncovering a network of problematic social and institutional mechanisms of which the crime is only one manifestation,’40 both detective and criminal are implicated in these social problems as discontented mothers and as ambitious women with national visions. Criminal madness presents further problems for feminine autonomy and the nation—treated according to the humane Celtic laws that stress rehabilitation, Lady Eithne is sent to the ‘glen of luna- tics’.41 Her pregnant daughter Dúliath survives her, leaving the destructive potential of the powerful female uncontained; as the child’s father is royal, 26 NANCY MARCK CANTWELL the King forecasts peril ‘if ambition stirs in the child’.42 Motherhood can restore stability to family and nation, or unseat it. When the detective is a mother, her cultural position cannot help but be complicated by her relation to the state as she is central to the political activity of reproducing national ideology by replenishing the population. Accordingly, Kathryn Conrad observes that ‘there is a more than coinci- dental similarity between rhetorical constructions of the nation/state and the rhetorical construction of the fetus: both are fantasies of inviolability and autonomy, fantasies at odds with the much more complex ideological and material conditions of both entities’. 43 This complexity emerges in the Fidelma mysteries that follow her struggle with motherhood, particularly Badger ’ s Moon and The Leper ’ s Bell , in which she struggles to reconcile her diverse roles. Refl ecting on her baby’s kidnapping in The Leper ’ s Bell , Fidelma reevaluates her own identity: ‘She was a dálaigh fi rst and foremost, a princess of the Eoghanacht, and then a religieuse. She suddenly com- pressed her lips, for she had left wife and mother out of that equation.’44 Fidelma’s view of the wife/mother roles as peripheral points to the female detective’s construction of a ‘nationalized selfhood’45 dedicated to maintaining the stability of Muman, and therefore, by extension, Ireland the nation. Fidelma’s maternity, then, offers a unique opportunity to evaluate the problems attending the female detective charged with restoring national identity in a time of crisis. Ironically, at least in the context of Ireland’s contemporary debates over immigration, the preservation of Celtic identity depends on exogamy. Fidelma chooses as her mate a foreigner of the professional class with training complementary to her own, endorsing meritocracy despite her aristocratic claims. An Angle of the hereditary rank of geralfa , Eadulf of Seaxmund’s Ham is qualifi ed as a magistrate, and his further education at the Irish medical institution fi ts him to manage the necessary physiological details of criminal investigations. While Alexander Maxwell contends that endogamy is often aligned with patrio- tism, as intra-cultural marriages foster a strong sense of national identity, he also points out that the nationalization of foreign partners through inter-cultural marriage also consolidates, as ‘sexual conquests were also national conquests’.46 In the Sister Fidelma series, Brother Eadulf assimi- lates to Celtic society and purposefully navigates his surrender of male power: ‘Under the law of the country, he had been classed as a cú glas , literally a “grey fox”, which meant an exile from over the seas with no rights and no honor price.’47 This loss of status recreates Eadulf as volun- HELLO DÁLAIGH: PETER TREMAYNE’S SISTER FIDELMA 27 tary Other, an ‘honorary female’ whose professional contributions uphold and preserve his wife’s culture. Confronted by the prospect of Fidelma’s postpartum depression, Eadulf uses his professional knowledge to foster the bond she does not feel with baby Alchú:

He is barely a month old. You have already given him up to a wet nurse. I learnt enough about such matters when I studied at the great medical school of Tuam Brecain to know that allowing the baby to suckle at your breast returns the mother’s body to health and helps the love develop between the child and the mother. 48

Eadulf’s advice could be read as evidence of a patriarchal society that judges Fidelma’s lack of motherly feeling as unwomanly, just as a masculinist detective narrative might read her ambition in confl ict with traditional femininity. However, the claim that ‘the male–female partnership is a fallacy’ is disputed by Brother Eadulf taking on the traditional female role of nurturing their son, managing the discrimination he encounters as a Saxon, and devoting his professional talents to supporting his wife’s investigations. He offers an alternative role model for partners confronting ‘the dilemma of the modern male, once the breadwinner but now unsure of his place in society’.49 By prioritizing her career ambitions, Fidelma unseats traditional expectations of motherhood, but her maternity necessarily implicates the state: as Alchú is a hybrid, he also evokes the series’ interest in civic nationalism. In later novels, Fidelma and Eadulf reconcile and raise their son together, but motherhood invests her detective work with national signifi cance as Alchú is an Eóghanacht, potential heir to the throne of Muman. If modern Irish politics show ‘the female body to be subordinate to the needs of the state’, Tremayne’s detective appears infl ected by familiar female icons like Cathleen ní Houlihan or Mother Ireland, ‘whose motherhood, where applicable, is depersonalised and politicized’.50 Against the backdrop of contemporary Irish feminism, we can read Fidelma’s ‘emotionally-inspired detective work as means to overcome her “social liminality”’, as Tremayne locates in Ireland’s progressive past a historical basis for contemporary women’s rights.51 While acknowledging the persistence of repressive social forces, Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma mysteries employ their female detective as a cultural ambassador for the gender parity, intellectual accomplishment, and societal tolerance that characterize her Celtic heritage. 28 NANCY MARCK CANTWELL

NOTES 1. E.J. Rielly (2012) ‘Sister Fidelma: A Woman for All Seasons’ in E.J. Rielly and D.R. Wooten (eds) The Sister Fidelma Mysteries : Essays on the Historical Novels of Peter Tremayne (Jefferson, NC: McFarland), p. 29. 2. P. Tremayne (1997) ‘Sister Fidelma’s World’ in Absolution by Murder (New York: Signet), p. vi. 3. E.J. Rielly (2012), p. 11. 4. ‘Brehon law’, An tSiérbhis Chúrteanna (Courts Service) Ireland. Web. 21 March 2015. 5. P. Tremayne (1994) Absolution by Murder (New York: Signet), p. 79. 6. P. Tremayne (1998) Shroud for the Archbishop (New York: Signet), p. 26. 7. P. Tremayne, ‘Sister’, p. vii. 8. J. Kristeva (1986a) ‘Psychoanalysis and the Polis’ in T. Moi (ed.) The Kristeva Reader (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 307. 9. P. Tremayne (1998), p. 57. 10. L.M. Dresner (2007) The Female Investigator in Literature , Film , and Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland), p. 2. 11. J. Kristeva (1986b) ‘Women’s Time’ in T. Moi (ed.) The Kristeva Reader (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 189. 12. K. Klein (1995) ‘Habeas Corpus: Feminism and Detective Fiction’ in G. Irons (ed.) Feminism in Women ’ s Detective Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), p. 177. 13. J. Kristeva (1986a), p. 307. 14. J. Kristeva (1986a), p. 307. 15. P. Tremayne (2012a) Atonement of Blood (New York: St. Martin’s), p. 121. 16. J. Kristeva (1986a), p. 307. 17. P. Tremayne (1998), p. 122. 18. A.M. McChesney (2008) ‘The Female Poetics of Crime in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Mademoiselle Scuderi ’, Women in German Yearbook , 24, 2. 19. S. Tomc (1995) ‘Questing Women: The Feminist Mystery after Feminism’ in G. Irons (ed.) Feminism in Women ’ s Detective Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), p. 52. 20. C. Kinealy (2012) ‘Hidden from History: Fidelma of Cashel and Lost Female Values’ in E.J. Rielly and D.R. Wooten (eds) The Sister Fidelma Mysteries : Essays on the Historical Novels of Peter Tremayne (Jefferson, NC: McFarland), p. 55. 21. P. Tremayne (1999) The Subtle Serpent (New York: Signet), p. 50. 22. P. Tremayne (2004a) The Leper ’ s Bell (New York: St. Martin’s), p. 124. 23. M. Brunsdale (2012) ‘Fidelma of Cashel: The Plight of the Learned Lady’ in E.J. Rielly and D.R. Wooten (eds) The Sister Fidelma Mysteries : Essays on the Historical Novels of Peter Tremayne (Jefferson, NC: McFarland), p. 112. 24. J.C. Pennell (1985) ‘The Female Detective: Pre- and Post-Women’s Lib’, Clues , 6.2, 89–90. HELLO DÁLAIGH: PETER TREMAYNE’S SISTER FIDELMA 29

25. J. Kristeva (1986a), p. 307. 26. J. Kristeva (1986a), p. 307. 27. P. Tremayne (1994), p. 180. 28. J. Kristeva (1986a), p. 308. 29. P. Tremayne (1998a), p. 208. 30. S. Cuthbertson (2004) ‘The Fascination with Sister Fidelma’, Solander , 15, Historical Novel Society, Web, 30 May 2015. 31. P. Tremayne (2004b) Master of Souls (New York: St. Martin’s), p. 126. 32. P. Tremayne (2012b) The Seventh Trumpet (New York: St. Martin’s), p. 161. 33. P. Tremayne (2004b), p. 57. 34. P. Tremayne (1999), p. 186. 35. C.W. Luehrs and R.B. Luehrs (2000) ‘Peter Tremayne: Sister Fidelma and the Triumph of Truth’ in R.B. Browne and L. Kreiser, Jr. The Detective as Historian : History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press), p. 50. 36. P. Tremayne (1999), pp. 165–6. 37. P. Tremayne (1999), p. 166. 38. P. Tremayne (2010) The Chalice of Blood (New York: St. Martin’s), pp. 338–9. 39. P. Tremayne (2010), pp. 416–17. 40. S. Tomc (1995), pp. 46–7. 41. P. Tremayne (2010), p. 426. 42. P. Tremayne (2012b), p. 335. 43. K.A. Conrad (2004) Locked in the Family Cell : Gender , Sexuality , and Political Agency in Irish National Discourse (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), p. 71. 44. P. Tremayne (2004a), p. 98. 45. K. Walter (2013) ‘From aisling to chora : Female Allegories of the Nation in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry’, Irish Studies Review , 21.3, 316. 46. A. Maxwell (2007) ‘National Endogamy and Double-Standards: Sexuality and Nationalism in East-Central Europe During the 19th Century’, Journal of Social History , 41.2, 413. 47. P. Tremayne (2012a), p. 62. 48. P. Tremayne (2003) Badger ’ s Moon (New York: St. Martin’s), p. 142. 49. K.G. Klein (1988) The Woman Detective : Gender and Genre (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), p. 196, and M.E. Kemp (2012) ‘Who Wears the Pants? Role Reversal in the Sister Fidelma Mysteries’ in E.J. Rielly and D.R. Wooten (eds) The Sister Fidelma Mysteries : Essays on the Historical Novels of Peter Tremayne (Jefferson, NC: McFarland), p. 188. 50. K. Walter (2013), p. 316. 51. S. Jung (2007) ‘Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre , the Female Detective, and the “Crime” of Female Selfhood’, Brontë Studies , 32, 29. CHAPTER 2

A ‘honeycomb world’: John Connolly’s Charlie Parker Series

Brian Cliff

At once sprawling and almost obsessively focused, John Connolly’s Charlie Parker detective novels demonstrate a dizzying range of concerns. From them, however, a key pattern emerges: the novels’ blurring of genres and modes. This blurring revolves in part around the connections between empathy and the supernatural, but also around the tensions between supernatural writing’s suggestive uncertainty and mystery fi ction’s need for something rather more conclusive. These connections and tensions are central both to the Parker books in particular and to Connolly’s work more generally, which often stands on the borders of the various traditions in which it participates. It is in this sense that the Parker novels challenge habits of reading within both Irish fi ction and mystery fi ction. Connolly spent several years as a journalist at the Irish Times before beginning his career as a novelist. Since then, he has sold well over ten million books in 29 languages. Among them are three young adult novels in the Samuel Johnson series1 ; the two standalone novels, Bad Men (2004), in which Charlie Parker makes a brief appearance, and The Book of Lost Things (2006); two collections of short stories, Nocturnes (2004) and Night Music : Nocturnes 2 (2015); and, with his partner, Jennifer Ridyard, a science fi ction trilogy, The Chronicles of the Invaders . 2 The bulk of his published fi ction, however, has been his Charlie Parker series, of which 14 novels and one novella have been published. The protagonist-detective Parker fi rst appeared in Every Dead Thing (1999), which became the fi rst non-American winner of the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America. The most recent Parker

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 31 E. Mannion (ed.), The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53940-3_3 32 BRIAN CLIFF novel, A Song of Shadows , was published in 2015 (characteristically spending over a month on the Irish bestseller list), with A Time of Torment scheduled to follow in April 2016. The Parker series is marked by the way in which it blurs genre distinctions, drawing heavily on mystery writing but also on supernatural fi c- tion, fusing the latter’s themes with the former’s structures and rhythms. In identifying his infl uences, Connolly has often cited the California novels of Ross Macdonald and the Louisiana novels of James Lee Burke, both canonical standard-bearers in mystery fi ction. More surprisingly, however, he has also invoked the British fantasy writer M.R. James, not an infl uence widely cited in crime circles but one whose work bespeaks its own variety of abiding and mysterious unease. Indeed, Connolly has characterized his own work as from the beginning being ‘fascinated by the possibility of combining the rationalist traditions of the mystery novel with the anti-rationalist underpinnings of supernatural fi ction’.3 This fusion becomes an increasingly essential element as the series develops, such that even the seemingly ‘normal’ crimes and the underlying supernatural patterns amplify each other. This play with generic conventions is essential to the strengths of Connolly’s work, not least for the way in which it underpins the substantial ethical core of the series. It is through these elements that Connolly’s work extends the boundaries of Irish writing. This blurring has not always appealed to genre readers: not unlike a certain kind of jazz fan, some crime readers see the generic conventions as key to crime fi ction’s appeal.4 Within such ways of reading, the Parker novels represent something of a misfi t, even a kind of betrayal of the genre’s rational inclinations. In one of the few academic considerations of Connolly’s work to date, for example, Bill Phillips argues that the author ‘became increasingly obsessed with the devil and his novel The Black Angel (2005) can more fairly be described as a horror story than a crime novel’.5 A more receptive reading, which makes fewer assumptions about Connolly’s beliefs, is in Charles De Lint’s highly favorable review of the same novel that Phillips dismisses, The Black Angel , on precisely the grounds that this work ‘for the interstitial crowd’ adeptly draws on multiple genres. 6 Here, it is unsurprising that De Lint is an established author of fantasy/science fi ction, a genre often more welcoming than mystery fi ction to experimentation and to free adaptation of genre writing. Much as Connolly’s fi ction does not quite fi t crime conventions, his place in Irish writing can be hard to locate. None of the novels are set in Ireland, for example, and they contain almost no overt Irish themes A ‘HONEYCOMB WORLD’: JOHN CONNOLLY’S CHARLIE PARKER SERIES 33 or references. There are a few minor examples of Irish diction, such as ‘tutorial’ rather than the American ‘seminar’ or ‘class’,7 and ‘fairy lights’ rather than ‘Christmas lights’.8 In this context, the Irish-American characters in The Lovers (2009) stand out: Charlie’s father’s ‘closest friend, Jimmy Gallagher … bled Irish green and cop blue’, while Parker spent some of his adolescence in Pearl River, a town ‘where all the Irish cops lived’; even here, however, despite being Catholic, his father explicitly ‘was not himself Irish’.9 Some scattered textual fragments across the series—including an epigraph from Michael Collins10 and Oscar Wilde’s epigrammatic assertion that ‘sentimentality is the bank holiday of cynicism’11 —similarly stand out, as does this wry passage: ‘The tall one was named Mackey, the short one was Dunne. Anybody hoping to use them as proof that the Irish still dominated the NYPD was likely to be confused by the fact that Dunne was black and Mackey looked Asian.’12 Although the supernatural elements that run throughout the Parker series could be seen as marking a Catholic heritage, a point Connolly himself has repeatedly raised, even the most prominent Catholic priest in the series, the Cistercian Martin Reid in The Black Angel , is not Irish but Scottish. Moreover, these supernatural elements are less likely to feature priestly infl uence than rabbinical commentary and kabbalistic fi gures, including a golem, a dybbuk, and dark angels with obscure Old Testament roots, like Kittim in The White Road (2003): ‘An unusual name, a scholarly name’, one referring to ‘the tribe destined to lead the fi nal assault against the sons of light, the earthly agents of the powers of darkness’.13 As these examples might suggest, Connolly has given this absence of Irish material a purposeful air at times, noting that ‘As a young writer, I could think of few subjects with which I wanted to engage less than the nature of Irishness, or the Irish situation, and now, as a slightly older writer, that position has not changed.’14 Apart from some works that reviewers and academics have tended to class as somehow ‘transcending the genre’—like John Banville’s writing as Benjamin Black, including his recent Chandler pastiche, The Black - Eyed Blonde (2014)—Irish Studies has tended to associate crime fi ction with literature of the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath, giving such fi ction little more weight than a footnote to that traumatic period. Paula Murphy, for example, has traced the ways in which Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series (discussed in this volume by Andrew Kincaid) charts social change surrounding the Celtic Tiger, a chart that implicitly constitutes the novels’ main interest.15 This line of inquiry also shapes much of the attention paid to writers like Gene Kerrigan, Niamh O’Connor, and Alan Glynn, often deservedly so and to good effect. At the same time, however, Irish Studies seems to 34 BRIAN CLIFF remain unsure of how to study fi ction that cannot be construed—however obliquely or allegorically, whether as a between-the-lines symptom or an above-the-fold diagnosis—as about Ireland and Irishness, unsure of how to locate such fi ction within prevailing views of what Irish literature is and what Irish literature does. This shortcoming refl ects the fact that, as Conor McCarthy has argued, the nation has provided ‘the presiding Irish metanarrative since the early nineteenth century’.16 Because that metanarrative’s vocabulary has been centered on the nation as the point of gravity around which all art is presumed to orbit, texts that do not fall into that orbit can simply fail to register. This is something Connolly has commented on, not without frustration:

As a modern state, the Irish Republic has been in existence for less than a century, and a young nation is compelled to engage in a period of questioning its identity, of coming to terms with the forces that created it in an effort to determine what shape it should take for the future. Writers as much as politicians, and economists, and historians, are involved in this act of interpretation, and a very serious business it is too, so serious, in fact, that any writing that is not actively contributing to this discussion may be disregarded entirely or at best relegated to a position of irrelevance. Such an environment actively discourages experimentation with genre, unless that experimentation is perceived to be commenting upon the process in hand. 17

Indeed, while fi ction by Patrick McCabe and others plays with or adapts genre elements, Flann O’Brien’s novels At Swim - Two - Birds (1939) and The Third Policeman (1968) might be virtually the only post-Revival fi ction to give itself over fully to genre experimentation and to have a secure place in the academic canon. This habit of overlooking texts that are less readily interpretable as informing some discussion of Irish identity and Irish society may help explain the relative silence in Irish Studies on Connolly’s work, a silence that starkly contrasts with his impact on the marketplace for mystery fi ction by Irish writers, domestically and abroad. A recurring connection in the Parker novels, however, suggests how we might productively see a relationship between these novels, their various contexts, and their blurred genres. It is most powerfully through the protagonist Charlie Parker as a character—and not just through the novels’ plots—that Connolly’s books draw together their different genre elements, from the supernatural haunt- A ‘HONEYCOMB WORLD’: JOHN CONNOLLY’S CHARLIE PARKER SERIES 35 ings of M.R. James and the familial legacies in Macdonald’s Californian noir, to the more generally familiar avenging detective of crime fi ction. In particular, Parker’s empathetic relationship with the supernatural evolves over the course of the series. In the fi rst novel, Every Dead Thing , the supernatural initially emerges through the Traveling Man, a serial killer who poses his victims’ fl ayed bodies as écorchés , tableaux from medieval and Renaissance medical texts, with overtones drawn from the Book of Enoch. In subsequent novels, this supernatural element gradually builds to include ‘dark angels’ who remember the trauma of the Fall. By inhabiting a human form—as a parasitic wasp controls its host18 —these dark angels look for others of their kind as they roam the earth, ‘dark passengers on the human soul, carried unawares for years, even decades, until it came time to reveal their true natures’.19 First hinted at in Every Dead Thing , where Parker and his friends suspect the Traveling Man ‘believes he’s a demon … Or the offspring of an angel’,20 images of dark angels are explicit by the third novel, The Killing Kind (2002).21 By The Black Angel , it is clear that while their particular nature remains shrouded in mystery these are neither hallucinations nor religious delusions, a point Connolly confi rms in his introductions to the recent reprints of the Parker series.22 Gradually, these dark angels become convinced that Parker may be one of them, one they thought lost, and they rage at him for his betrayal in seeking to atone. As the monstrous Brightwell thinks upon encountering (or, as he thinks, re-encountering) Parker in The Black Angel :

Parker. Such sadness, such pain, and all as penance for an offense against Him that you cannot even recall committing. Your faith was misplaced. There is no redemption, not for you. You were damned, and there is no salvation. You were lost to us for so long, but now you are found.23

Despite the absolute conviction of Brightwell and other characters—and his own recognition that ‘Now I spanned two worlds, the worlds of the living and the dead’24 —Parker’s precise nature still remains open to some question. That nature is tied in narratively complicated ways to Parker’s own grievous losses. Every Dead Thing introduces him amidst the discovery that his wife, Susan, and daughter, Jennifer, have been brutally murdered in their Brooklyn home, and later reveals that Parker’s father took his 36 BRIAN CLIFF own life under grimly mysterious circumstances. In the seventh novel, The Lovers , Parker discovers that his father had encountered an evil presence, which led to his suicide and which the novel connects to the same dark angels Parker would later fi ght. Throughout the subsequent novels, Parker continues to see Susan’s and Jennifer’s spirits, which leave physical traces on his world and are clearly more than just manifestations of grief. This tangle of physical and metaphysical origins becomes an emotionally affecting and narratively complex mythology that is dealt with most fully in The Lovers but develops further in The Wolf in Winter (2014) and A Song of Shadows . In the latter, Parker’s second daughter, Sam, has taken on an unambiguously supernatural role, clearly connected to the mythos developed in the preceding novels, with the implication that she even has some ordering power over ghostly presences like those of Susan and Jennifer. These experiences of loss and the empathy that drive Parker in their wake are central to the series. As he moves forward, Parker perceives what he calls the honeycomb world, initially and most elaborately in the third novel, The Killing Kind :

This is a honeycomb world … The stability of what is seen and felt beneath our feet is an illusion, for this life is not as it seems. Below the surface, there are cracks and fi ssures and pockets of stale, trapped air … a labyrinth of crystal tumors and frozen columns where history becomes future, then becomes now. 25

Parker later elaborates, connecting the image to the series’ sense of empathy in describing his ‘fi rst glimpse of the honeycomb world’, which reveals ‘an interconnectedness to all things, a link between what lies buried and what lives above, a capacity for mutability that allows a good act committed in the present to rectify an imbalance in times gone by’. 26 Crucially, this is not just Parker’s perception. He repeatedly has encounters with others who also recognize that honeycomb quality, for example, beginning with Tante Marie Aguillard in Every Dead Thing and continuing with Sam in novels from The Black Angel forward. Nor is this image exclusive to Catholic or Christian characters: Rabbi Epstein, Parker’s frequent guide to such matters, refers to Kabbalah, which

‘speaks of harmony between the upper and lower worlds, between the visible and the unseen, between good and evil. World above, world below, with angels moving in between. Real angels, not nominal ones … Perhaps your A ‘HONEYCOMB WORLD’: JOHN CONNOLLY’S CHARLIE PARKER SERIES 37

friend is such an angel … An agent of the Divine: a destroyer, yet a restorer of the harmony between worlds. Perhaps, just as his true nature is hidden from us, so too it may be hidden even from himself.’27

To be sure, the honeycomb imagery at times describes a physical place quite literally, as in The White Road , which prominently features the limestone karsts of the South Carolina swamps as a landscape ‘honeycombed by underwater streams and caves’.28 At the same time, such a landscape also serves as a fi gure for empathy as well as for the broader spiritual and moral landscape of the world. Earlier in The White Road , for example, Parker makes the following, more metaphorically toned observation:

When I look out on the Scarborough marsh from the windows of my house and see the channels cutting through the grass, interlinking with one another, each subject to the same fl oods, the same cycles of the moon, yet each fi nding its own route to the sea, I understand something about the nature of this world, about the way in which seemingly disparate lives are inextricably intertwined. 29

This vision of the world’s honeycomb nature—the way in which ‘seemingly disparate lives’ are, like distinct geographical features, connected by hidden pathways—amplifi es the role of empathy in Parker’s life, a force by which he is defi ned, even haunted. Particularly from Dark Hollow (2001) on, Parker is overtly shaped by this empathy, however idiosyncratically expressed: ‘I saw and heard my dead wife and child, and I saw and heard others too … I think that it may be a kind of empathy, a capacity to experience the suffering of those who have been taken painfully, brutally, without mercy.’30 The very particular supernatural form this ‘capacity’ takes for Parker marks him out not only from other Irish detective series protagonists but also from his own friends, colleagues, and enemies. Empathy and the honeycomb world are thus explicitly interwoven across the series. As Parker says in The Killing Kind , linking empathy to the images of the honeycomb world with which the novel opens,

I’d been hurt, and in response I had acted violently, destroying a little of myself each time I did so, but that wasn’t the worst of it. It seemed to me that as soon as I became involved in such matters, they caused a fi ssure in my world. I saw things: lost things, dead things. It was as if my intervention drew them to me, those who had been wrenched painfully, violently from this life. Once I thought it was a product of my own incipient guilt, or an empathy I felt that passed beyond feeling and into hallucination. 38 BRIAN CLIFF

But now I believed that they really did know, and they really did come.31

There is a crucial distinction here: Parker is not disavowing the force of empathy in favor of accepting the reality of the supernatural ‘things’ he sees. Instead, he accepts both the empathy and the realness of his visions, disavowing neither. His bone-deep empathy signals others, the suffering and the dead, drawing them to him and impelling him forward. Indeed, throughout the series, contra Phillips, Connolly’s depiction of violence emphasizes this complex empathy, characteristically drawing attention to the experience of the victim over and above the act of violence itself, as when Parker viscerally envisions Curtis Peltier’s experience of dying in The Killing Kind . Connolly has written about the origins of Parker’s empathy. As an Irish Times reporter, Connolly covered the Christmas 1996 murder of a young woman in Dublin, which was initially viewed sympathetically, as the tragedy of a young visitor. When it became known that she had been a sex worker, however, the ‘public attitude’ shifted and ‘one tabloid newspaper began routinely to refer to her as “the Sri Lankan hooker, Belinda Pereira”’, suggesting ‘in some bleak, appalling way’ the view that ‘it should not have come as a complete surprise to her when some harm eventually befell her’.32 This experience infl uenced the development of Every Dead Thing , which Connolly was then writing and which ‘became more about the importance of empathy and the necessity of acting on behalf of the vulnerable and the abused’. 33 Under the infl uence of Ross Macdonald—who, through his ‘profoundly empathetic’ protagonist Lew Archer, conveyed in his novels an ‘intensely humane view of people and how they suffer’—Parker ‘became a being defi ned not simply by anger and the desire for revenge, but by his own sufferings. Because he has suffered, he is unwilling to allow others to suffer in turn. It is his capacity for empathy that ultimately ensures he does not destroy himself with selfi shness and grief.’34 This empathy extends throughout the novels, and their frequent sense of rootedness in a specifi c political-social moment, including the struggles of Iraq War veterans in The Whisperers (2010), homelessness in The Wolf in Winter , and the images of economic decline that open A Song of Shadows . Amidst this depiction of Parker, the series continually suggests that his empathy is not without a certain ambivalence, as he himself observes. It is entangled in his own ‘reservoir of hurt and pain and anger upon which we can draw when the need arises’, such that ‘dipping into it costs … Each A ‘HONEYCOMB WORLD’: JOHN CONNOLLY’S CHARLIE PARKER SERIES 39 time you use it you have to go a little deeper, a little further down into the blackness … The danger in diving into that pool, in drinking from that dark water, is that one day you may submerge yourself so deeply that you can never fi nd the surface again. Give into it and you’re lost for- ever.’35 Through such scrutiny, Parker largely (and ethically) avoids using his empathy or his suffering as a fl ag of convenience under which to pursue revenge. These densely layered supernatural and realistic details help develop the series’ acute sense of empathy as an emotional parallel to the supernatural image of the honeycomb world: both draw on subterranean connections that are felt more than understood. It is through this parallel that the series builds its emotional weight, by weaving together the description of the world’s hidden depths with both a supernatural frame- work and Parker’s deeply personal commitment to the connections that constitute empathy, in all its ambivalence. The honeycomb world also offers a bridge to seeing Connolly’s work in relation to other Irish writing, not just through the ‘strong streak of anti-rationalism’ that he has seen in Irish literature, 36 but also through analogues in Irish folklore. Angela Bourke, for example, has given one account of the origin of fairies as fallen angels: ‘when the rebellious angel Lucifer and his followers were expelled from Heaven ... God the Son warned God the Father that Heaven would soon be empty. Like fi gures in a fi lm that is suddenly stopped, the expelled angels falling toward Hell halted where they were: some in mid-air, others in the earth, and some in the ocean, and there they remain.’37 In The Black Angel , we are similarly told that ‘According to Enoch, two hundred angels rebelled, and they were cast down initially on a mountain … Some, of course, descended farther, and founded hell, but others remained on earth.’38 Connolly’s and Bourke’s accounts share a fundamental sense of in-between-ness, a sense that these beings have a powerful, real impact on the physical world not despite their shadowy presence so much as because of it. Given that Connolly references a wide range of research on mysticism throughout his work, however, it would be diffi cult to reliably narrow this to a particularly Irish infl uence, rather than a local version of international elements. As Bourke notes, the fairies’ origin ‘story is also found in the apocryphal Christian literature of the late Middle Ages, associated with the Harrowing of Hell’.39 In other words, it will not do to resort to alle- gorical readings that would merely cover Connolly’s work in a thin veneer of green, nor to suggest that his real materials or his real concerns, if you 40 BRIAN CLIFF just look closely enough—and past the numerous American infl uences— are Irish. At the same time, other contemporary Irish writers have also addressed the forces discussed by Bourke. The poet Paul Muldoon, for example, displayed in early works like ‘Immram’ both an abiding comfort with uncertainty and a deep familiarity with Chandler and other noir writers. Muldoon has also written about fairy lore, suggesting that the ‘idea of there being a contiguous world, a world coterminal with our own, into and out of which some may move’ could ‘be traced back to the overthrow of the Tuatha Dé Danann’, who ‘are made invisible by virtue of the féth fi áda or ceo sídhe , the magic mist or veil, a kind of world-scrim, that hangs about them … This idea of a parallel universe, a grounded groundlessness, also offers an escape clause, a kind of psychological trapdoor, to a people from under whose feet the rug is constantly being pulled, often quite literally so.’40 Muldoon’s observations here echo Connolly’s explanation that he has ‘diffi culties’ with more conventional mystery novels because of ‘the simple fact that I don’t share the beliefs on which they are based. The world is not rational and intelligible. Order is fragile, a thin crust upon the underlying chaos. Any answers we get will be partial at best and at worst will simply give rise to further, deeper doubts.’ 41 This conviction, which parallels strands of both Irish culture and supernatural writing, is everywhere apparent in the Parker novels, from the detective’s fi rst appearance in Every Dead Thing through to A Song of Shadows . Of course, Connolly does construct a sense of mystery with a detective, villains, clues, crimes, solutions, and other familiar elements of the genre. Crucially, however, he does so in a way that refl ects the idea that something fundamentally unknowable is at the heart of the series and of Parker’s life, a conviction that suggests both supernatural fi ction and Irish culture have infl uenced this very particular detective. While this series uses many of the mystery genre’s structures, then, it does not rest on the belief that the world is ultimately or essentially knowable, that its mysteries are all only apparent mysteries, that every depth can be plumbed. Instead, a fundamental uncertainty is central to—rather than at odds with—the Parker series. These novels are distinguished by that foundational uncertainty, which supports their blurring of genres and enables them to extend the boundaries of both Irish writing and mystery fi ction as substantially as they do. A ‘HONEYCOMB WORLD’: JOHN CONNOLLY’S CHARLIE PARKER SERIES 41

A NOTE ON THE TEXTS The Parker novels vary in their US and UK editions. This is largely a matter of pagination, between the initial printing and subsequent mass- market paperback printings, and between the US and UK editions. At times, there are also minor variations in phrasing between the US and UK editions. The UK editions were republished with uniform covers and new introductions beginning in early 2015, with the US equivalent editions following gradually from mid-2015 through mid-2016. In general, the UK editions have appeared before the US editions, as much as a year earlier, leading to varying publication dates.

NOTES 1. The Gates (2009), The Infernals (2011), and The Creeps (2013). 2. Conquest (2013), Empire (2015), and Dominion (2016). 3. J. Connolly (2015c) ‘I Live Here’ in Night Music : Nocturnes 2 (London: Hodder & Stoughton), p. 414. 4. This attachment to conventions is examined at length by the Agatha Christie scholar John Curran in his scrupulously detailed PhD thesis ‘Happy Innocence: Playing Games in Golden Age Detective Fiction, 1920–1945’ (Trinity College Dublin, 2014). See also Priestman, Knight, and others on this period, as well as Connolly’s essay ‘I Live Here’, fi rst published in a limited edition (Dublin: Bad Dog Books, 2013) and later expanded for inclusion in Night Music : Nocturnes 2 . 5. B. Phillips (2014) ‘Irish Noir’, Estudios Irlandeses , 9, 175. Some of Phillips’s assertions suggest that, while his praise of Ken Bruen and Benjamin Black refl ects more sustained reading, he has given relatively little attention to Connolly’s work. For example: the claim that violence is something about which Parker feels ‘little need for regret’ (‘Irish Noir’, 169), overlooks a good deal of nuance about Parker’s empathy and his ambivalence around violence. 6. C. De Lint (2006) ‘Books to Look For’, Fantasy & Science Fiction , 110.6, 28. 7. J. Connolly (2001) Dark Hollow (New York: Simon & Schuster), pp. 318, 321; J. Connolly (2002) The Killing Kind (New York: Atria), p. 54; J. Connolly (2003) The White Road (New York: Atria), p. 46; J. Connolly (2007) The Unquiet (New York: Atria), p. 196; and J. Connolly (2014) The Wolf in Winter (New York: Atria), p. 365. 8. J. Connolly (2008) The Reapers (New York: Atria), pp. 45, 46; and J. Connolly (2013) The Wrath of Angels (New York: Atria), pp. 49, 119. 42 BRIAN CLIFF

9. J. Connolly (2009) The Lovers (New York: Atria), pp. 25, 20. 10. J. Connolly (2005) The Black Angel (New York: Atria), p. 347. 11. This phrase appears twice, in The Lovers , p. 188, and The Burning Soul (New York: Atria, 2011a), p. 61. A quotation from Wilde’s ‘Requiescat’ also appears in The Wrath of Angels , p. 387: Tread lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear, The daisies grow. 12. J. Connolly (2005), p. 111. 13. J. Connolly (2003), p. 364. 14. J. Connolly (2011b) ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Crime Writers: Ireland and the Mystery Genre’ in D. Burke (ed.) Down These Green Streets : Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (Dublin: Liberties Press), p. 44. 15. P. Murphy (2006) ‘“Murderous Mayhem”: Ken Bruen and the New Ireland’, Clues : A Journal of Detection , 24.2, 3–16. More broadly, Murphy suggests that Bruen’s Taylor books ‘employ the “foreign” characteristics of crime fi ction with Irish settings and characters, realizing the collision of the local and the global that is at the heart of contemporary Irish literature’ (15). 16. C. McCarthy (2000) Modernisation , Crisis and Culture in Ireland , 1969 – 1992 (Dublin: Four Courts), p. 33. 17. J. Connolly (2011b), pp. 41–2. 18. J. Connolly (2009), pp. 272–5. 19. J. Connolly, The Wrath of Angels , pp. 174–5. As Connolly notes in his introduction to the reprint edition of The Wrath of Angels , the novel ‘is completely in thrall to the supernatural’ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2015), II. 20. J. Connolly, Every Dead Thing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 252. 21. There is also a brief mention of a sound ‘like the beating of dark, leathery wings’ in the early pages of the second Parker novel (Dark Hollow , p. 71). Though Dark Hollow does not freight this image with supernatural weight, it nonetheless is so specifi c as to anticipate the explicitly supernatural ‘leathery wings’ – central to the imagery of the dark angels as the series progresses – fi rst mentioned in The Killing Kind , p. 65. 22. See in particular his introduction to the reprint edition of The Black Angel (New York: Atria, 2015). These reprints have begun to be issued in the UK and Irish markets, and are planned to be fully up to date in the US market by the middle of 2016. 23. J. Connolly (2005), p. 216. 24. J. Connolly (2003), p. 61. 25. J. Connolly (2002), p. 3. 26. J. Connolly (2002), pp. 264–5. A ‘HONEYCOMB WORLD’: JOHN CONNOLLY’S CHARLIE PARKER SERIES 43

27. J. Connolly (2003), p. 277. 28. J. Connolly (2003), p. 323. 29. J. Connolly (2003), pp. 39–40. 30. J. Connolly (2001), p. 121. 31. J. Connolly (2002), pp. 27–8. 32. J. Connolly (2015a) ‘Author Introduction’ in Dark Hollow , reprint edition (New York: Emily Bestler/Atria), p. xiv. 33. J. Connolly (2015a), p. xiv. 34. J. Connolly (2010a) ‘Charlie Parker’ in Otto Penzler (ed.) The Lineup : The World ’ s Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives (London: Quercus), pp. 69–71. Macdonald’s fi nal Archer novel, The Blue Hammer (1976), is referenced as the name of a coffee shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the US (but not the UK) edition of The Killing Kind , p. 49. 35. J. Connolly (2002), p. 94. 36. J. Connolly (2011b), p. 54. Also of interest here is Richard Kearney’s work on various aspects of Irish culture that show ‘an intellectual ability to hold the traditional oppositions of classical reason together in creative confl u- ence’ (‘Introduction: An Irish Intellectual Tradition’ in The Irish Mind : Exploring Intellectual Traditions , ed. Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1985), p. 9). 37. A. Bourke (2000) The Burning of Bridget Cleary (New York: Penguin), p. 31. In Bourke’s discussion of the ways in which fairies fl eetingly but sug- gestively mark their presence, too, one can fi nd further analogues to Parker’s experience of the honeycomb world, as in The White Road : ‘It was neither a dream, nor a reality. It was as if, for a brief moment, something that resided in a blind spot of my vision had drifted into sight, that a slight alteration of perception had permitted me to see that which usually existed unseen’ (p. 135); a scant few pages later, Parker’s dog Walt’s ‘eyes remained fi xed on a patch of darkness in the corner, denied light by the thick drapes but darker yet than it should have been, like a hole torn between worlds’ (p. 137). This sense of converging worlds further underscores the physical- ity of the honeycomb world: such convergence is perhaps the inevitable motion of, in, and through such a world. 38. J. Connolly (2005), p. 307. Strikingly, Enoch is also mentioned as part of the Traveling Man’s cosmology in Connolly, Every Dead Thing , pp. 251– 2, 272, 276, 296. In particular, Rachel references an edition of Enoch by the Victorian scholar R.H. Charles (p. 252). In a gratifying example of coincidence, this edition was reviewed by M.R. James – described by Connolly as ‘my favourite writer of supernatural fi ction’ (Night Music , p. 417) – who concluded that ‘we can heartily thank Mr. Charles for what 44 BRIAN CLIFF

he has given us’ (M.R. James (1894) ‘Charles’s Translation of the Book of Enoch ’, The Classical Review , 8.1–2, 44). 39. A. Bourke (2000), p. 249n8. 40. P. Muldoon (2000) To Ireland , I : The Clarendon Lectures (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 7. 41. J. Connolly (2010a), p. 77. CHAPTER 3

‘Where no kindness goes unpunished’: Declan Hughes’s Dublin

Charlotte J. Headrick

My love of mysteries can be blamed on Nancy Drew. Declan Hughes’s appears partly the fault of Dashiell Hammett. Hughes has said he named his detective Ed Loy as homage to American tough guy detective Sam Spade and his creator Hammett. This came as no great surprise since I was aware of Hughes’s interest in Hammett through his fi rst play, I Can’t Get Started (1990), which charts a period in Hammett’s life when he was struggling with writer’s block. His interest in mystery writers does not begin and end with Hammett though. Back in 1986, Rough Magic produced his adaptation of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White . It seems Hughes is a longtime student of the mystery genre’s earliest roots, and his comfort in exploring the past serves him well. After all, a detective story is all about unpacking something that already happened. The word loy comes from the Irish laí , which means spade in English. Perhaps on a sub- conscious level, Hughes is using his Loy to dig into the world of Ireland, past and present. Just as a spade literally turns over the earth to uncover what is underneath, so does Ed Loy seek out the truth, turning over the pretensions, lies, secrets, and crime of modern-day Ireland. Hughes’s talents as a dramatist complement his writing of mysteries. Like a good play—and he writes good plays—the novels in the Ed Loy series have arresting openings, clear plot development, memorable and colorfully drawn characters, and satisfying endings. In both the plays and his novels, Hughes writes strong and compelling characters, chief of which is private detective Ed Loy. Holly Robinson suggests that ‘the very best mystery novels give us … living, breathing, believable characters and

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 45 E. Mannion (ed.), The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53940-3_4 46 CHARLOTTE J. HEADRICK haunting descriptions [and] they are also cultural mirrors of the best sort, revealing life’s truths in emotionally profound ways’.1 The ‘life truths’ in the Loy novels show he lives by a code, one of the key links to Loy from Hammett and Chandler hard-boileds Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. In his heart, Ed Loy is a deeply moral man with a highly developed sense of right and wrong. He may sleep with another man’s wife (shades of Spade in The Maltese Falcon ), but in his mind he is giving comfort to someone in need. By his moral code, this is operating on a higher level than the Commandments, but there is no doubt that he knows that list well and has made a conscious judgment call. Loy’s life truths center around a code of being true to himself, loyal to his friends, and not tolerating hypocrisy or lies. Like an echo from John 8:32—‘And ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free’—Loy is a seeker of honesty, but he is not without compassion. If exposing the truth will damage the person, Loy may opt to withhold it. In All the Dead Voices (2010), it is inferred that he does not tell Anne Fogarty who really killed her father because it would be too devastating. He has fallen in love with Anne, and, at the end, we are hopeful that she will be the one to heal the damaged Loy. But calling the shots on truth in no way means Loy withholds it from himself. He is self-aware and unfl inching in his self-examination. He often sees himself as ‘a failed person, with a failed life’ and wonders how Anne ‘didn’t … understand that having me fall in love with her was the last thing she needed’.2 He is more practical than self-pitying though when it comes to romantic entanglements and the business of marriage, and not above re- gifting a wise woman’s life truth that he has taken on board himself, after all, ‘some things are more important than who fucked who’. 3 Those life truths include coming to terms with a new Dublin. The fi rst novel in the series, The Wrong Kind of Blood (2007), fi nds Loy returning to Dublin for his mother’s funeral, his fi rst trip there since leaving for Los Angeles twenty years earlier. Loy tries to reacquaint himself to Dublin and to understand all the changes that have happened to his hometown:

I followed the river down Burgh Quay to Butt Bridge and looked past the gray limestone dome of the Custom House to the new cathedral of economic prosperity in Dublin: the International Financial Services Centre, a gleaming complex of blue-tinted plate glass and gray steel. It was a pow- erhouse for banks and brokers and all manner of moneymakers, and it made Dublin look like any other city. I guess that was the point: at one stage in our history, we tried to assert a unique Irish identity by isolating ourselves from ‘WHERE NO KINDNESS GOES UNPUNISHED’: DECLAN HUGHES’S DUBLIN 47

the outside world. All that did was cause half the population to emigrate. Now we preferred to avoid distinctive national characteristics of any kind. Having once been anxious to prove that Ireland was not a colonial province called West Britain, we were now sanguine about our recolonization, resigned to our fate as the fi fty-fi rst state of the USA.4

From where he stands, Loy sees both historic Dublin and the modern architecture of present-day Dublin, but the buildings represent the history of the city and the country. Underlying the fi nancial buildings is the spec- ter of the Celtic Tiger. For so much of the twentieth century, the largest export of Ireland was her young people who could not fi nd work in their own country and were forced to go elsewhere. Loy has left and returned, and the irony of his own emigration journey is not lost on him. During the Celtic Tiger years, the fl ood of emigration was staunched and then came the crash. In this passage, the history of the Ascendancy, the Anglo-Irish, Irish neutrality, the Civil War, the Irish diaspora, and American worldwide cultural domination are the subtext. Designation of Ireland as ‘the fi fty-fi rst state’ is more than a jet-lagged, newly orphaned Dubliner’s cynical assessment of his city. It anchors the novel—and the series—in part as an exploration of the returning emigrant, something Hughes has also worked through in his drama. It was fi rst seen in Digging for Fire (1991) and then in Shiver (2003), where a Dublin couple returns from America to tap into the short-lived dot com boom with their start-up named The 51st State: ‘they have made money working in America and come back to Ireland to buy a “home” and create new, better lives for themselves … yet nothing goes quite according to plan and Hughes illustrates … that the fantasy of home is a destructive illusion’. 5 The riches of the upwardly mobile couple in Shiver evaporate when their start-up goes bust, leaving them cash-poor in the midst of the Celtic Tiger boom and having to start all over. The downward spiraling Loy (he had to borrow money to get the fl ight to Dublin) lands in a city fl ush with Tiger cash and a ballooning property market. Although after the death of his daughter and end to his marriage he lost his job and apartment and wound up ‘tending bar in a dive in Venice Beach, sleeping on a friend’s fl oor, drinking every cent I made’,6 he resolves to return to Los Angeles as soon as possible. He wants to get away from this Dublin—‘where the past was always waiting around the next corner to ambush you’7 —and this contributes to the novel’s problematizing something Emilie Pine observed about Shiver : that it ‘is partly about the impossibility of breaking free from 48 CHARLOTTE J. HEADRICK the past, especially in a country in which the landscape is a reminder of the “living connection” between the past and the present’.8 He not only winds up staying in Dublin, but he moves into the very house where he was raised. A returned son to the city ‘where’, as he wryly notes his fi rst week back, ‘no kindness goes unpunished’.9 Like all nods to noir, Loy is a fi rst-person narrator, and he gives Spade and Marlowe a run for their money. Brian McGilloway named The Wrong Kind of Blood one of his favorite mysteries from the fi rst decade of the century and at the top of his reasons was its ‘corking’ 10 opening: ‘The night of my mother’s funeral, Linda Dawson cried on my shoulder, put her tongue in my mouth and asked me to fi nd her husband.’11 It brilliantly establishes multiple story lines at once: his involvement with Linda, his grief over his mother’s death, and the mystery to follow. Setting up from the start what will become about half a dozen plotlines that have their roots at Loy’s own origins—his parents—is a handy roadmap, and something we see in each of the Loy novels. The multiple plotlines do intersect in some cases, certainly most vividly in City of Lost Girls , when Loy’s private life is threatened by the major case. One of the reasons Hughes may use the multiple plotlines is to explore the multiple threads of Dublin life. It has many stories and while Loy may be solving one case, many other earlier cases echo in the following books. The Halligans, for example, are always lurking in the background and carrying over from one book to the next. It is an effective way to communicate the underbelly of the Tiger’s shiny economic prosperity. Loy is usually a man of few words. He only goes on a rant when put in a corner, but even then he is economical. This is seen when he speaks to us too. There are times it seems like a good-natured parody of Hammett or Chandler taken just a step further.12 In Chandler’s The Big Sleep , Marlowe sizes up Eddie Mars’s wife as trouble walking after only one glance: ‘she’d make a jazzy week-end, but she’d be wearing for a steady diet’.13 Loy is just as astute, but he takes things a step further and samples a meal. In All the Dead Voices , Loy is juggling two romantic interests: his client Anne Fogarty and the zaftig Donna Nugent. After a business dinner, Donna has one thing on her mind and she has booked a room. Loy follows, ending Part II of the novel with him ‘[running] after her, blind to everything but our destination, lost in the delirium of our heated blood’.14 Part III, set on Good Friday, opens with a page that consists only of: ‘WHERE NO KINDNESS GOES UNPUNISHED’: DECLAN HUGHES’S DUBLIN 49

The Shelbourne Hotel. We stayed a second night. I don’t want to talk about it.15

Loy has his ‘jazzy weekend’, but he is fully aware of how wearing a steady diet of Donna Nugent would be. Anchoring that scene on Good Friday is a joke best left for another chapter on another day. Hughes is fond of epigraphs as chapter openings, and he pulls from a wide range of sources. While these sometimes serve as umbrellas over plot points, they more often point directly to Loy’s code and Hughes’s literary infl uences. The many biblical references tie Loy and his code to a childhood raised with enough church that it stuck. In The Wrong Kind of Blood alone, the epigraphs range from a straight use of Genesis 4:10—‘thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground’—to open a novel that, among other things, questions paternity and male relationships to Bruce Springsteen’s use of that same Old Testament book in the closing third, in which these issues are confronted head-on before being put to rest. Springsteen, no stranger to commenting on how a Catholic childhood lingers, tapped into Genesis for ‘Adam Raised a Cain’ as generously as Hughes did in The Wrong Kind of Blood . The use of its closing refrain— ‘Lost but not forgotten, from the dark heart of a dream’ 16 —alludes to Loy’s relationship with Linda Dawson and to his daughter, Lily. The New Testament is called on too, most notably with a loan from the Book of Matthew to title The Price of Blood (2009), the second installment of the series, which directly confronts church clerical abuse. Hughes knows his Bible and there are multiple references to it and the Catholic Church that transcend the epigraphs and reveal a righteous side to Ed Loy. He is a good shepherd. His rescuing of the Ukrainian women in The Colour of Blood is an example of his ‘white knight’ complex but also of his compassion for those in need. Jesus’s admonition to ‘suffer the little children to come unto me’ also underlies Loy. Little Karen Tyrell in The Price of Blood is the most dominant example, but really one of many children treated compassionately throughout the series. Loy’s anger at the mistreatment of children is ever-present and takes center stage in his depiction of the abuses of the Industrial Schools in The Price of Blood and of Jack Donovan’s unforgivable rejection of his twin daughters in City of Lost Girls . Another one of Hammett’s literary descendants, Ross Macdonald, looms large over the Loy series, and Hughes is generous in making this 50 CHARLOTTE J. HEADRICK crystal clear. Like Macdonald’s Lew Archer, Loy seldom lacks or runs from female companionship. Unfortunately, one of the Loy ‘life truths’ that is borrowed from Archer (in this case, from Macdonald’s The Zebra-Striped Hearse ) usually serves him better in theory than in practice: ‘As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him, the women he likes are getting older, too. The trouble is that most of them are married.’17 This epigraph to Part II of the novel foreshadows his troubled and doomed affair with Linda Dawson, but also carries over into The Colour of Blood and his affair with Sandra Howard, and The Price of Blood , where the woman he sleeps with is no widow after all. Macdonald is called upon again in The Colour of Blood , speaking to the internal politics of family loyalties: ‘When there’s trouble in a family, it tends to show up in the weakest member. And the other members of the family know that. They make allowances for the one in trouble … because they know they’re implicated themselves.’18 This quote from Macdonald’s Sleeping Beauty , in which Archer gets tangled up in a rich family’s misadventures, would have been a useful roadmap for Loy as early as The Wrong Kind of Blood . Hughes reaches further back too. The Colour of Blood opens with Dante’s Inferno ; The Price of Blood dips into Webster’s Duchess of Malfi ; and Wagner, Tosca, and Shakespeare are never out of reach. The Colour of Blood might have the broadest meta-literary scope among the Loy novels, and it traces to Chandler. In The Colour of Blood , Loy has been hired by Shane Howard, head of the rich and powerful Howard family. Shane’s daughter is showing up in amateur pornographic fi lms, but this is only the tip of this family’s skeletons in the closet. On the way to sorting out the fi lm problem, Loy discovers incest, murder, and suicide. Its parallels to Chandler’s The Big Sleep begin with being hired by a wealthy family to deal with an errant daughter and stumbling on to an amateur pornographic fi lm ring, and ends with a series of murders. This re-visioning of a classic from the annals of detective fi ction was only a warm-up though for Hughes’s examination of the Irish historical record. In The Price of Blood (2008), 19 Loy sees fi rst-hand the price paid for following a practice to ‘tell no one. Say nothing.’ 20 This ‘secret history of Irish life’21 is shown to come at too high a price. The book begins with Father Vincent Tyrrell summoning Loy to fi nd a boy, one Patrick Hutton. Tyrrell’s estranged brother and sister are a huge part of the Dublin horseracing scene, and we discover that their breeding business extends to humans as well as horses. Like The Colour of Blood , there are incestuous relationships, but the clerical abuse of young boys at the industrial school ‘WHERE NO KINDNESS GOES UNPUNISHED’: DECLAN HUGHES’S DUBLIN 51

St. Jude’s is at the dark heart of the novel. The novel attacks the culture in Ireland that produced the abuse of young men by the Christian Brothers. Loy’s internal monologue offers a background:

Industrial schools had become part of the folklore of what might be called the secret history of Ireland, which had only in the past twenty years or so begun to be told: unruly, unmanageable children, or simply those whose parents were unable to cope, whether psychologically or fi nancially, were effectively detained in schools controlled by a variety of religious orders who subjected their charges to a catalog of abuses, ranging from the basic con- tempt and casual disregard that was the lot of the poor anywhere in Ireland in those days, to physical beatings and psychological torture, all the way up to continual and brutal sexual abuse … it is impossible to fi nd excuses even for those who claim they knew nothing of what went on: that said, it was a social and national scandal as much it was a church affair; we were happy to have someone else to look after the losers and misfi ts, the weak and the halt, happy to close our eyes and ears to the tales they told.22

Later, when Loy is particularly bothered by the unwelcome truth that Miranda was a prostitute, he takes a more tempered position: ‘everyone’s allowed a past, and if we weren’t able to forgive and forget much of what went on there, our lives would run aground on banks of grievance and resentment’.23 Forgiveness is a hard struggle with Loy; it hurts. His struggles with forgiveness become central to All the Dead Voices . The target of All the Dead Voices is the havoc wreaked by the Irish Republican Army and Ireland’s neutrality in World War II. The book’s Holy Week structure—beginning on Spy Wednesday and ending on Easter Monday—appears to be an allusion to the 1916 Easter Rising, making all that follows a legacy of that event and, therefore, calling this keystone of modern Irish history into question as well. The book is divided by the imagined voices of the Coyle family on their way back to Northern Ireland in 1980. They have the misfortune to be driving a car exactly like one owned by a judge targeted by the IRA. The memories of the Coyles are in counterpoint to the voices of their two killers, one of whom (Bobby Doyle) turns out to have reinvented himself and found fi nancial success in America. Those voices from 1980 are counterpoints to the present Doyle–Fogarty story line. Loy is hired by Anne Fogarty to fi nd the murderer of her father, which he does while at the same time having to deal with Doyle. An additional story line involves the death of footballer Paul Delaney and another person out of Loy’s past. 52 CHARLOTTE J. HEADRICK

Paul’s brother wants Loy to fi nd out who killed his brother. Throughout these multiple plotlines, which revisit the paternalistic issues so common in the series, is Loy’s recurring lament of Dublin:

Because Ireland sat out the Second World War for reasons that are not always clear even to Irish people and certainly to no one else, but that had something to do with not deeming it possible, or at least wise, to fi ght alongside the British, having fought against them less than twenty years before, even if the enemy was the greatest menace to world freedom, including Ireland’s, ever known, there were few bombs dropped on Dublin, so the architectural fabric of that great Georgian city was still intact up until the 1960s when, fl ush at last with a bit of inward investment, we decided to haul down as much of the colonial oppressor’s heritage as we could manage before anyone objected and lash up as many hideous blocks of our own as we could muster, in the name of modernity, progress and independence.24

This critique of the capital is a thread seen as far back as Loy’s walk along the quays in The Wrong Kind of Blood . He has been back in Dublin for several years by now, but he remains baffl ed by the city’s inability to value the best of its heritage. Modernization is just an excuse for erasing and forgetting. When Anne Fogarty takes Loy to a remembrance service on Holy Saturday to remember all those lost in the Troubles, those gathered read aloud selections from the book Lost Lives .25 Loy says, ‘this would not bring the dead back, or console the living [but] it would, for a short hour, give a voice to the dead’. 26 Through Loy, Hughes is doing much the same here and suggesting that paramilitary violence echoes through the years. Taking a page from Agatha Christie, Hughes structures City of Lost Girls around a series of internal monologues and memories of the killer. The narrative goes back and forth between Loy’s memories of California and his present time in Dublin. Loy’s life then and now collide with the return of his estranged friend, the fi lmmaker Jack Donovan. Donovan is a larger than life character—equal parts Brendan Behan, Dylan Thomas, and stage Irishman—who, like James Joyce, has a wonderful voice that he uses as a party piece entertaining his fi lm entourage. In California, Loy cleaned up after Donovan, breaking up for him with his various girlfriends. This is a task that Loy grows weary of and which leads to his breech with Donovan. Loy has even made an appearance in one of Donovan’s fi lms, The Dain Curse (based on the Hammett novel), as ‘the Irish bartender’. ‘WHERE NO KINDNESS GOES UNPUNISHED’: DECLAN HUGHES’S DUBLIN 53

Young women have gone missing from Donovan’s fi lm sets in California, and now young women are going missing from his Dublin fi lm Nighttown (a Joycean titled fi lm about the notorious Monto district of Dublin). The multiple story lines in the book eventually collide in an ending that involves the solving of the mystery of the missing girls, the lost girls of the title, Jack Donovan’s redemption of sorts, and with the hope that Loy has fi nally found true love with Anne Fogarty. Like each installment in the Loy series, women are plot catalysts. But Tommy Owens—Loy’s own Watson—is usually found near the vortex along with his ex-wife Paula. Tommy, like the Halligans, is someone out of Loy’s childhood who has one foot in the legitimate world of Loy and the other in the nether world of the Dublin criminal element. Tommy is a sometimes bumbling friend, but he is always loyal to Loy. And Tommy is disabled, having taken a beating by George Halligan over a teenage bike stealing. References to Tommy’s ruined foot recur throughout the series, as does mention of his devotion to his daughter, Naomi, and the terrors of Tommy’s ex-wife, Paula. There is more than one reference to how Paula stabbed a boyfriend of hers in the hand with a screwdriver for making a pass at her daughter. Loy reports that she ‘expressed regret that she had missed what she was actually aiming for, namely, his balls’.27 Never one to shy away from strong female characters, Hughes repeatedly paints a vivid portrait of Paula as a force of nature. If Tommy Owens skirts the Dublin criminal element, Loy’s other longstanding friend, Detective Inspector Dave Donnelly, keeps things in balance. A member of the Garda, Dave is ‘the law’. Like Tommy’s ex-wife, Paula, Dave’s wife, Carmel, is another one of Hughes’s forceful women. All of Loy’s women are vividly portrayed and one of the attractive aspects of Hughes’s writing is his sympathetic treatment of women. While many of the American hard-boiled writers are criticized for their misogyny, Hughes’s portraits of women are more sympathetic, even loving. It is clear that Hughes likes, respects, even admires women. Some of the women may die in the novels, but Loy’s encounters with them are sensual and sexual. Hughes’s descriptions are racy, but, for me at least, they celebrate and appreciate women, clothed and unclothed. A character in its own right is Loy’s racing-green 1965 Volvo 122S, which belonged to his father. The car is as much a Tommy pacifi er as it is paternal legacy. Tommy is a mechanic by trade, and he simply shows up to service the car: ‘At some essential level,’ Loy muses, ‘I think he feels the car belongs to him, and I’m just the nominal owner.’28 Like Tommy, the 54 CHARLOTTE J. HEADRICK car remains a welcome fi xture throughout the series and shows Loy can be as sentimental as he is loyal. Ed Loy is memorable, likeable, and interesting; we can rely on him. And in these fi ve mysteries, Declan Hughes has given us a detective with rip- ping good stories and satisfying solutions. Marilyn Stasio, reviewing City of Lost Girls , notes that ‘Hughes isn’t just another gruff voice in the bark- ing crowd of noir crime writers … [his] characters have depth, his scenes have drama, and his sentences have grace. The characters who count are substantial fi gures with considerable heart.’29 Stasio is a wise woman.

NOTES 1. H. Robinson (13 November 2012) ‘Why We Love Mystery Novels: Murder, Mayhem, and Cultural Mirrors’, The Huffi ngton Post , date accessed 5 June 2015. 2. D. Hughes (2010) All the Dead Voices (New York: Harper), p. 311. 3. D. Hughes (2009) The Price of Blood (New York: Harper), p. 232. 4. D. Hughes (2007b) The Wrong Kind of Blood (New York: Harper; orig. pub. 2006), pp. 31–2. 5. E. Pine (2008) ‘The Homeward Journey: The Returning Emigrant in Recent Irish Theatre’, Irish University Review , 38.2, 319–20. 6. D. Hughes (2007b), p. 47. 7. D. Hughes (2007b), p. 127. 8. E. Pine (2008), 320–1. 9. D. Hughes (2007b), p. 32. 10. B. McGilloway (2009a) ‘Brian McGilloway’s Top 10 Modern Irish Crime Novels’, The Guardian , 22 April 2009, date accessed 3 June 2015. 11. D. Hughes (2007b), p. 5. 12. My thanks to Beth for The Big Sleep connections. 13. R. Chandler (1976) The Big Sleep (New York: Vintage; orig. pub. 1939), p. 117. 14. D. Hughes (2010), p. 114. 15. D. Hughes (2010), p. 117. 16. D. Hughes (2007b), p. 245; Springsteen’s ‘Adam Raised a Cain’ appears on his 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town (Columbia Records). 17. D. Hughes (2007b), p. 129. 18. D. Hughes (2007a) The Colour of Blood (London: John Murray), p. 129. 19. Titled The Dying Breed in European markets, but changed to The Price of Blood in the US. 20. D. Hughes (2009), p. 287. 21. D. Hughes (2009), p. 287. ‘WHERE NO KINDNESS GOES UNPUNISHED’: DECLAN HUGHES’S DUBLIN 55

22. D. Hughes (2009), p. 130. 23. D. Hughes (2009), p. 146. 24. D. Hughes (2010), pp. 99–100. 25. Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Mainstream, 2001) by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton, and David McVea. 26. D. Hughes (2010), p. 186. 27. D. Hughes (2011) City of Lost Girls (New York: Harper), p. 88. 28. D. Hughes (2011), p. 136. 29. M. Stasio (22 April 2010) ‘Mind over Murder’, Rev. of City of Lost Girls , New York Times Sunday Book Review Online , par. 7, date accessed 30 May 2015. CHAPTER 4

Detecting Hope: Ken Bruen’s Disenchanted P.I.

Andrew Kincaid

In the perpetual cycle of violence that is a crime series, what function does the ideology of hope play? Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series keeps drawing attention to the concept of hope, then thwarting it in favor of another round of depravity, another book that hints at escape from both self and other, but consistently returns to another psychopath, another examination of the limits of community, and another interrogation of the dark motivations of the supposedly fair. In particular, of course, the detective himself. The linear perpetually appears to give way to the cyclical. Each Taylor novel charts the universal dialectic between optimism and despair, alienation and belief, courage and violence, self-loathing and companionship. Though the tensions are never resolved, neither do the characters fully succumb to despair or isolation. Taylor fi nds the motivation to help those who seek him out. Friendship and love acknowledged if not embraced. Agency remains. Hope is delineated by the possibility of action, be it personal (the psychological habits of hope), collective (Marxist and political), or deistic (Messianic). In the case of the neo-noir detective, hope remains at the personal level, as when, for example, Taylor stops drinking or when he tries to emigrate. Hope is present, too, at the social and political levels, when he exposes a corrupt politician, halts a criminal gang, or peels back the superfi cial façade of a supposedly quaint, friendly, and welcoming Irish town to reveal pollution (the Galway water is undrinkable), hypocrisy (the clergy and judges are on the take), and exclusion (travelers, the sign of indigeneity, are ignored and maligned).

Hope in the modern era is a bold political project. The private and theological aspirations of the Middle Ages get transferred from religion to the state and the project of modernization. Bruen’s novels ridicule the notion of liberal democracy. A liberal democracy, after all, can hardly rein in the excesses of greed and crime when it is in part the cause of these excesses. While never an outright argument for vigilantism, the series presents the noir detective as an independent agent of justice. Simultaneously insider and outsider, Taylor continues to act, often violently, on behalf of others. His independence and action are a rebuke to fatalism and naturalism. Echoing the existential origins of noir, Taylor navigates the above tensions between self-delusion and stagnation, between the pursuit of change and the uncertainty of outcome. Such contradictions lie at the heart of all theories of hope. Should one latch onto little dignities or look to almighty, theological transcendence? Should one be stoical in the face of adversity or affi rm one’s strength through action? The detective agency, the agency of the detective, is an exploration of hope and its associative affects that range from wisdom to courage to dreaming. The connections between noir’s sordid social realism and existentialism’s individual anxiety (should one hope, and for what?) are now well documented. Robert Porfi rio was one of the fi rst to link Camus—‘At any moment the absurd may strike a man in the face’—and Sartre—‘Hell is other people’—to noir fi ction and fi lm. 1 In the process, Porfi rio binds the disoriented detective to the changing world, a society in which old authorities, such as religion and state, are fading, while new ones fail to appear. He fi nds that ‘set down in a violent and incoherent world, the noir hero tries to deal with it the best way he can, attempting to create some order out of chaos, to make some sense of his world’.2 The roots of existentialism and noir are entwined. Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, who popularized the term noir in A Panorama of American Film Noir (1955), locate the origins of noir in the post-World War II French intellectual scene that stressed disillusionment, betrayal, and pessimism. Existentialism was a French reaction to invasion, loss, and defeat. Stephen Faison is among those who trace the beginnings of noir back, naturally enough, to the interwar writings of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Their classic noir novels (The Maltese Falcon , The Big Sleep ) depict a cynical attitude and a rough masculinity. Faison reads these tropes as a response to the growing alienation experienced by the American working class. This group is increasingly squeezed between assembly line production and the entry of women and immigrants into the workforce. Sam Spade and Philip DETECTING HOPE: KEN BRUEN’S DISENCHANTED P.I. 59

Marlowe refl ect ambiguous attitudes toward family, work, morality, and responsibility. Others, however, including Chandler himself in ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, defi ne it by a tone and a mood, a style rather than a theme. It is a technique that blends shadow and light, mist and night, to create an atmosphere of angst, claustrophobia, and paranoia. Chandler writes that it is a ‘spare, frugal’ style and represents a not ‘very fragrant world’.3 But no specifi c sociological explanation is given. Such an atmospheric approach can take us almost anywhere, back to Greek tragedy, to the various itera- tions of the Gothic decay, to postcolonial questionings about place, identity, and belonging (including Celtic and Tartan noir). Not looking to systematize the origins of noir in any strict sense, Bruen fi nds its lonely spirit in a range of writers, many of whom are quoted in the epigraphs. In The Guards (2004), the fi rst Taylor novel, Bruen uses Oscar Wilde’s privileging of form over sincerity to illustrate that ‘violence requires a cold and deadly style’.4 Darwin’s mechanical view of biology supports noir’s loss of moral or religious guidelines in Headstone (2011): ‘I cannot persuade myself [writes Darwin] that a benefi cent and omnipotent god would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.’5 In Taylor’s relatively friendless world, literature is a constant, a balm. Taylor’s erudi- tion distances him from emotional complications, and further, highlights the contrast between him and the thuggish world he inhabits. Many of the borrowed quotes hint at the existential, the nihilistic, the mystery of expression and violence, found in the oddest, and therefore most ubiquitous, of places: ‘You are provided with no material arms, but you are armed with the far more valuable weapons of vigilance’ (Pope Pius XI)6 ; ‘Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there’ (Miles Davis)7 ; ‘Everyone thought I’d be a failure and a liability’ (Shane McGowan).8 At times, however, Bruen does draw direct links between existentialism and his own brand of noir. The Killing of the Tinkers (2005) highlights Beckett as the novel reaches its violent crescendo: ‘[A]nd you as you always were alone’ (from Beckett’s Company ); ‘[T]he dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most unshatterable association’ ( Krapp ’ s Last Tape ). Random acts of cruelty, be they Pozzo’s beating of Lucky in Waiting for Godot or Molloy’s assault on a fellow vagabond in The Trilogy , along with a heavy world-weariness and rhetoric of doubt and moral ambiguity, clearly link Beckett’s modernism with that of detective fi ction. In The Magdalen Martyrs (2006), quoting Solzhenitsen’s Ivan Denisovich 60 ANDREW KINCAID captures the feeling shared by both prisoner and detective, both of whom are caught between meaningless, daily brutalities and small, seemingly insignifi cant, acts of resistance: ‘Only a small crack … But cracks makes caves collapse.’9 It is a dark world, but Taylor’s references to Beckett and Solzhenitsen suggest his intellectual engagement with the literary refl ection of this darkness, which, in a small way, manages to rise above, and therefore implies a way out. Be it through references to nineteenth- century Victorianism, to jazz, or to the theatre of the absurd, Bruen is keen to underscore the universal philosophical tension at the heart of noir: how can the actions of one person make sense in a world that appears not to care? Bruen’s novels are mass-marketed paperbacks aimed at the global mystery market, part of the Celtic or Emerald Noir brand. As such, they are obviously not setting out to be works of high literary fi ction. We should, of course, be suspicious of the categories of high and low, elite and popular, anyhow. That said, the links are there, explicitly and implicitly, in direct allusions and epigraphs, as shown above, and in all manner of inherited affects (curt dialogue, cynical independence, jaded tone, moral ambiguity) between Jack Taylor and the highbrow modernist tradition of ‘the outsider’, from Poe’s pursued narrators to Hemingway’s withdrawn heroes. We might, indeed, go further and reverse the arrow of infl uence to show that many of modernism’s canonical writers, such as Joyce, Beckett, Camus, and Woolf, each established in his or her own way the themes of ennui, urban anonymity, menace, and stylized narration that drew directly from potboilers and detective fi ction. Camus wrote The Outsider having read Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice . Beckett gorged as a teenager on Sherlock Holmes. Molloy , the fi rst book in the Trilogy , has a detective- like structure, as the stoic, refl ective, even defeated Moran narrates his pursuit of the libidinal, frantic, violent Molloy. Joyce’s Dubliners with its cast of eerily perceptive narrators describes perverts, corrupt politicians and employers, along with honest everymen, all of whom are attempting to escape from and to survive in a dark, gritty, and claustrophobic city. From ‘The Mark on the Wall’ to Mrs. Dalloway , Woolf creates characters on the verge of paranoia as urban phenomena threaten to overwhelm the rational mind. Suicide, the abandonment of hope, is always an exit strategy. Bruen’s noir feeds from universal—or at least modern Western—angst. But the Jack Taylor series fi nds more of its energy and sense of humor in the particular world of Ireland, of Galway: in the nuances of local DETECTING HOPE: KEN BRUEN’S DISENCHANTED P.I. 61 tough-talk (‘A pint and chaser mightn’t help but, sure as rain, might bring oblivion’10 ); sentimental Irish sayings and proverbs (‘If you are going to sup with the Divil, bring a long spoon,’ 11 or ‘Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win’12 ); in deploying and explaining the Irish language (‘Another pishog, that’s Irish for a story that is not only untrue but superstitious too,’13 or, ‘Sláinte amach. The added amach is reserved for close friends’14 ); and in the absurdity of gombeen politics and austerity economics (‘A water charge. In Ireland. Where we were surrounded at every turn by it, now we were to pay for it, with meters to be installed free of charge ’15 ). If existentialism brought theatre of the absurd, Bruen’s noir revels in highlighting the hypocrisy and apparent ridiculousness of modern Irish life. In this way, the novels serve as populist political and cultural commentary: where absurdity and hypocrisy go hand in hand, nothing much will ever get done. In Sanctuary (2008), Jack, equal parts Xanax, Jameson, and rage, tracks down an ex-nun who is exacting violent justice on the streets of Galway against the agents of the liberal welfare state (judges, social workers, do- gooders) who managed to get the charges against her sister’s rapist dismissed. This is Taylor novel number seven and familiar territory: a tragic, lawless hero steeped in loss who damages himself almost as much as he hurts the evil characters lurking in the urban underbelly. Sanctuary marks the transition from a Galway mired in the excesses of the Celtic Tiger to a city gone belly-up. Taylor enters the Claddagh, ‘the old fi shing village’ that ‘[a]ge has not withered’. A statue of ‘the Virgin sits atop the arch, like a forlorn illusion of hope’. 16 Later, as Sister Maeve, a recurring character, reveals to him the heart of the case, he notices the sun refl ecting from her gold band ‘almost like a shard of hope’.17 A subplot in Sanctuary has Anthony Bradford-Hemple, the patriarch of a fading Anglo-Irish family, turn to Jack to solve a blackmailing scam involving his daughter and her horses (echoes of General Sternwood in The Big Sleep and Shergar). This particular subplot leads to a marriage of convenience between Anthony (who needs a wife) and Jack’s reluctant friend, Ridge, a lesbian ex-cop (who needs the appearance of a heterosexual life). Bradford-Temple turns to Taylor at one point and says, ‘I want to tell you how happy I am. I’d never have had the audacity to hope again.’18 But the marriage will collapse, and a statue of the Virgin will end up, in Purgatory (2013), ‘submerged amid the litter of a hen party at the Dominic Street end of the canal’.19 Jack’s dream to get to America, ‘my promised land’, will also be thwarted at the end of Sanctuary by US Immigration, who 62 ANDREW KINCAID turn him back on account of the jail time he did once for throwing a ‘child-beating bollix through a window’.20 The tragic and age-old Irish habit of exporting its young, only then to celebrate the pain of the loss, forms a regular part of the narrator’s social commentary. Taylor’s 2013 novel, Purgatory , draws, none too subtly, our attention to Ireland as an endless waiting place between suffering and success. ‘They’re advertising for police in Australia,’ says Ridge to Stewart, Taylor’s Zen-practicing, dope-dealing ally. ‘“What?” She was serious. Half the young people were lined up to leave.’21 Later, an ex-cop asks Jack for help: ‘My daughter, Oonagh, she fi nished college and, like every other young wan, looks like she’ll have to emigrate, so I was wondering.’22 And as one group emigrates, the immigrants who arrived during the Celtic Tiger era pick up the service jobs and are the target of racism from an older, more conservative generation of natives. Taylor, at times, plays this role of older observer. Given his anger, melancholy, heavy drinking, and fi erce- ness, Taylor is more anti-hero than savior. His frequent commenting on the number of non-nationals suggests both his generation’s attitudes and the rapid demographic changes in the country. Little goes without comment in this regard, be it an imported local barman who ‘poured the pint and didn’t let it settle’23 to the tinkers who ‘moved up a notch since we started to resent the non-nationals’. From emigration to taxes to austerity to drugs, Taylor is our urban guide to the polarities, contradictions, and ignorance in Irish society. The novels of Hammett and Chandler portray a frontier society, as the openness and richness of California at the start of the twentieth century got squeezed between the forces of crime and encroaching government. The cowboy turned into the gangster; the western became the hard-boiled genre. In neo-noir, the frontier is diminished, but the riches and the fi ght over them remain. It is sometimes an overreach in Irish Studies to read everything as a national allegory. But Bruen constantly draws attention to the Irish and the Galwegian context in which Taylor operates. As Bruen put it in an interview with Karen Babine, ‘The city is the fourth main character [after Taylor and his two allies, Ridge and Stewart]; it shapes, coddles, beguiles and seduces, and to do this it has to be ever present like a banshee, just slightly in the mist, keening.’24 Whatever the actual news of the day is makes a reference in most chapters of Bruen’s books, from Galway residents having to boil water for up to two years due to an outbreak of cryptosporidiosis to the pollution of local playing fi elds, the names of which only locals would know: ‘Hear about the swamps? You DETECTING HOPE: KEN BRUEN’S DISENCHANTED P.I. 63 have to be real old Galway to name them that. The swamps are a playing fi eld close to Nimmo’s pier. They found arsenic in them.’25 When not referencing intimate details of place, the narrator—nearly always Taylor himself—introduces macroeconomics, which helps contex- tualize the weariness and cynicism of the population. Sanctuary (2008) opens on the tail end of the Celtic Tiger and fi nds Taylor ‘renting a small place on Dominic Street. It was only temporary, I told myself. It was tiny, just a living room and a bedroom, and cost a fortune, like everything in our rich new country.’26 A hundred and forty pages later, the great recession has hit and the economy is ‘in meltdown. Mortgages had gone through the roof, so to speak, and fi rst-time buyers were seriously screwed.’27 The Dantesque titles of the subsequent novels—The Devil (2010), Headstone (2011), and Purgatory (2013)—chart the descent into corruption, crime, and ethical tensions. If existentialism asks questions about authenticity and responsibility (to what or whom?) in the language of abstract univer- salisms, Bruen’s novels pose the issues closer to home: just what exactly have the years of so-called prosperity brought? As Taylor ruminates in The Devil , ‘We’d come a long way and gained sweet fuck all.’28 In a genre noted for sensational plots, The Devil is perhaps Bruen’s most outrageous. Having been turned back at the airport by Aer Lingus from entering the United States, Taylor meets a man called Kurt. Kurt reveals himself to be a psychologist who studies evil. After a few drinks together, Kurt suggests that Taylor has all the ‘requirements for where evil would nest and multiply. Bitterness, disbelief, and a cynical disregard for how such things work … Evil hones in on those closest to redemption.’29 Kurt turns out to be Satan incarnate! And he’s in Galway posing as a foreign businessman and ready to battle Jack. It is revealed that characters whom Taylor had thwarted in earlier novels, such as The Killing of the Tinkers (2002), had been members of Anton LeVey’s Church of Satan, and the Devil has to intervene to stop Taylor. Against this malevolent background, the ‘whole country is losing jobs and everyone is emigrating’.30 There are round-ups of non-nationals, the Church sits next to drug dealers, and the Real IRA is assassinating British soldiers in the North. As Taylor points out, it is ‘like the eighties are back’.31 The plot of The Devil suggests a world about to succumb to irredeemable social disease and disrepair. Seamus Deane has argued that a national paradigm in Irish writing is the relentless seesawing in theme and style between boredom and apocalypse. From Burke (the French Revolution vs. slow evolutionary change) and Beckett (time standing still vs. the undertone of radical possibility) to 64 ANDREW KINCAID

Yeats (‘The Second Coming’ vs. the eternal world of myth), Joyce (sudden epiphanies vs. static ruminations), and Synge (rural rhythms vs. impulsive violence), political violence erupts out of the community’s fecklessness. Irish history and historiography, too, are replete with failed revolutions that, in turn, feed the cycle of potential redemption. Racked by crises, the country seems perpetually unable to overcome them. Following Deane’s logic, the Irish are strangely revolutionary while simultaneously deeply conservative, as evidenced by the 2015 Marriage Equality Bill and the recent acceptance of austerity. To Deane’s theory, to the boredom and apocalypse that drive the national story, I add the structure of noir, a form that manufactures the endless repetition of the same while at the same time providing a partial solution that never brings about a complete conclusion. Resolution never overcomes the tension. In book after book, violent bloodletting coexists with the temporary hope of security. In noir the blend is less that of Deane’s alternating apocalypse and boredom, as it is one of suffering and hope. In Headstone , the ‘recession is in full bite’,32 Church abuse scandals are proliferating, and priests have the ‘taint of leprosy’.33 The banks are ‘threatening the wrath of God’34 in a city where ‘pawn shops have sprung up overnight’.35 We enter a Columbine-like world of alienated, middle- class youth from families with ‘cash and clout’,36 who are intent to shoot up a school. Along the way, they try to get rid of Galway’s misfi sts: the handicapped, the vulnerable, the weak, and the pitiful in order to ‘kick up a revolution’.37 A subplot involves Jack tracking down an Opus Dei-like priest who has absconded with Church funds. In such a debauched world, nobody is redeemable. Indeed, Bruen has Taylor cross a line, a common one in noir, between criminal and vigilante. Once transgressed, it can be impossible to return to civilized society. Taylor turns for help to a known gangster with whom he ‘shared the same ideas about justice’.38 In the process he gets a close friend, Caz, a Roumanian immigrant, killed. Despite the brutality, Bruen continues to play with the word hope . Hope in Headstone mirrors the gritty realism, being mostly a tarnished and ineffectual belief. The initial chapter is told from the perspective of Malachy, a priest and Taylor’s old nemesis. He is about to be abducted and beaten by a gang of youths, but ‘as they moved away, he allowed himself a tiny amount of hope, till one hesitated, came back, and with slow and deadly aim, kicked him’. 39 When Taylor himself is abducted, before his legs buckle having received a blow to the head, he saw his cigarette ‘fl oat down into the water, like a tiny light of hope’.40 Recovering later, he says DETECTING HOPE: KEN BRUEN’S DISENCHANTED P.I. 65 that drinking the Jameson warms the stomach, ‘promising false hope’.41 The only optimism more laughable than that which is to be found at the bottom of a bottle is, in Taylor’s estimation, the ‘fucking naiveté’ of the Church ‘hoping to restore the people’s trust’.42 Flickering hope, doomed hope, false hope: noir appears to perpetuate the mythic concept of optimism introduced to the world by the gods via Pandora—that hope is an evil force, one that prolongs suffering and exists to divert man from more achievable and realistic causes. In Purgatory (2015), Taylor tries to unravel the paths and motives of a serial killer. Simultaneously, he is introduced to the fold of an enigmatic tech billion- aire who has been buying up vast amounts of property in Galway, seemingly in the hopes of offering the downtrodden city a better future. The novel opens at the Anglo-Irish Hunter house, a wealthy mansion on the edge of the city that is ‘ablaze with light, like a beacon of false hope’. 43 A rich Irish-American’s solid gold Zippo lighter makes a clunk sounding ‘like some weary hope’.44 Hope is fundamentally about opening up the present to a different future, looking ahead to what will come with interest and anticipation, and noir fi ction would appear to shut down those possibilities. A brighter future in noir may be elusive. The use of Dante’s title Purgatory for the tenth book in the Taylor series conjures up the motto on the gates of Hell, ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.’ There is much in the theory of hope that speaks to the dark side of optimism, to the noir sensibility that the darkness of the world may be lifted only temporarily, that goodness never lasts, and that alienation is inevitable. Sophocles believed that ‘Man warms himself with unsubstantial hopes’ ( Ajax ). Hope, for Sophocles, as for many in the literary canon, is a foible that merely stretches out suffering. Nietzsche posits the same sentiment: ‘Hope in reality is the worst of all evils,’ he wrote, ‘because it prolongs the torments of man’ (Human ). Ben Franklin warns that he who ‘lives upon hope will die fasting’ (Wealth ) and, in The Rape of Lucrece , Shakespeare summarizes the cynical attitude toward positive forward thinking as, ‘And so by hoping more they have but lesse’. 45 Noir pessimism is but a popular, modern restatement of a long literary and philosophical history that views the false illusions of men as lacking substance and ultimately compensatory. Indeed many classic noir fi lms, such as The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), and The Dark Mirror (Robert Siodmak, 1946), conjure up directly allusions to magic, refl ection, and dreams, the notion that all of us are seduced by false desire. Not merely a style, noir is also an aura and a mood that 66 ANDREW KINCAID gets close to the soul of tragedy: the darkness of the psyche, the absence of morality in the world, and the betrayal of those who are often the closest to us. Noir, of course, famously takes up the theories of Freud. Femme fatales, interior brooding, sexual intrigue, and familial feuds are some thematic connections. Distorted subjectivities, urban scenes, and plenty of penetrating, subtextual dialogue stylistically bridge psychoanalysis and noir detection. Both affi rm the reality principle, the ultimate acceptance of repression, and, most often, patriarchy. Freud, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Darwin mark the gloomy side of nineteenth-century industrializa- tion and so-called progress, reading the tea leaves for naturalism and competition. Against the view of a nineteenth-century Victorian city representing the ‘worst of times’, a perspective from which noir draws heavily, Marx and his heirs, along with their liberal democrat opponents, saw advance- ment and hope in modernity. Progress afforded an opportunity at escape into a better world. Marxism predicted a hopeful future. This future was rooted in an understanding of the past and a re-reading of the mutable facts of the present. For Marx, the future was open, yet to be built and full of possibilities (and what is hope if not possibility?). The imaginations and labor of men and women could reshape nature. Mankind, uniquely perhaps, possesses the ability to think about what it wants. Hoping is thinking about what we desire. To desire is to hope. Of course, recogniz- ing accurately our desires and mapping a path to attain them become the crux of the matter. When asked whether hope is a good or a bad thing, most of us would likely answer that hope, whether it be an emotion, a motivation, or a belief, is a positive trait. Certainly, the Judeo-Christian tradition places hope as one of the triumvirate of virtues along with faith and charity. Saint Paul holds ‘faith, hope, and love’ as the essence of the good life. Martin Luther King writes how ‘everything that is done in this world is done by hope’.46 Judaism is built upon the idea that tomorrow can be better than today, so many generations having rebuilt after assault. Hope theory revolves, therefore, around two poles. So, too, does noir fi ction. One attitude presents hope as a virtue, an emotional response to a situation that prompts further knowledge, understanding, self-belief, along with individual and communal agency. The detective can offer change, resolve, action, and insight. He or she restores order, stands for a form of justice. The other perspective on hope is that it represents wish- DETECTING HOPE: KEN BRUEN’S DISENCHANTED P.I. 67 ful thinking; that it ‘consorts with illusion and consigns reason to irrelevance’.47 We would be better off, according to this logic, accepting a fatalistic and naturalistic worldview. Stoicism would be the correct modern affect, but the detective—certainly Taylor—is world-weary. He has seen too much to think that human nature will ever change. Yes, instinctual drives kick in, such as self-preservation, the need to take cases in order to feed oneself, and even the odd brush with romance, but the private eye knows that nothing really changes. There is only repetition and more crime, and sameness offers no grounds for hope. There is no hope in hell. Bruen’s brand of noir puts these two views of hope, that of cynicism and that of affi rmation, in tension with each other. Often Taylor evokes hope only to knock it down, diminish it, or even ridicule it. Yet, to the chaos and crime of the world, the detective can bring a modicum of meaning, security, deliberation, trust, and protection. As Kurt, aka Satan, tells Taylor over lunch in a Galway café, ‘You manage to keep that one element alive that is contrary to so much badness in the world … Hope.’ 48 Moreover, throughout the series, hope (a goal, the agency to achieve it, and a path to accomplish it) attaches itself to certain objects, people, and phrases. His erratic friendships with his ‘conscience and accomplice’49 Stewart and his ‘partner in hostility’50 Ridge are an anchor in the speed and confusion, providing reality checks and offering recuperation when needed. More importantly, they provide support and, when placed in danger, motivation for propelling the plot. He needs them, and they need him. Indeed, in various ways, whether by helping him to stop his drinking, or by purchasing tickets to America for him, they seek to transform him. Hope need not be just about future orientation. It can be about preservation too, protecting institutions. The Irish language appears throughout the Jack Taylor series. Yes, in terms of the branding of Celtic noir, they add local color, but in terms of Taylor’s character, the old Irish sayings, the intimacy of Gaelic toasts and ‘unbidden’ phrases—‘A Dhia, ta bro norm’ (God, I am so sad)51 —are a safeguard of tradition and the past. Maintaining the language is an act against letting older social, more egali- tarian forms disappear. It is also a shortcut to a certain kind of authenticity; that is, Taylor’s deep connection to ‘essential’ Irishness; it is a sentimental move by Bruen, one that appeals to the reader’s desire for simplicity and honesty. In the same vein, it also carves out a niche in the noir market for a distinctly Celtic version of the genre. Another recurring trope is Taylor’s old Garda coat that he pulls around him and wears to hold off the Galway rain. When Taylor walked away 68 ANDREW KINCAID from his job as a cop with the local corrupt police in The Guards , he took the coat with him. Now, when he wraps himself in it, he is reminded of his loss, but also of his promise. He gave up an income, a community, and power, but gained independence, pride, and resourcefulness. Like the great coats that Beckett’s roaming characters wear, Taylor’s former Garda coat, number 1834, serves as a security blanket, a marker of identity, self- reliance, and hope for stability. Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) is one of the great philosophers of hope. Bloch, a German Jew, wrote his three volumes of The Principle of Hope as an émigré in the United States between 1938 and 1947. Writing against the nihilism of war, the supposed laws of Marxist inevitability, and developing consumerism, Bloch located human yearnings, forward-looking drives and emotions, in everyday popular and folk culture, as well as in the highest and most aspirational of fi ne art. Rejecting the given ‘order of things’, Bloch sought out the anticipatory, the projections of ‘the not-yet conscious’ that remain the seed of all human endeavor. The Principle of Hope , which runs to 1400 pages, is an eclectic archaeology of emotions, wishes, dreams, yearnings, ideologies, moments of transcendence, superstitions, longings, and provocations that can be found in just about every part of daily life, from dreams to friendships to song and to travel. The job of philosophy, for Bloch, is to unearth, to teach and to perform spaces of dissent and foreground the idea that different futures are possible. ‘Philosophy will have conscience of tomorrow, commitment to the future, knowledge of hope, or it will have no more knowledge,’ he writes.52 Yearning to be fi lled, propelled by basic drives, such as self-preservation, hunger, and love, mankind is always forward-looking. In the products of our collective past we can catch glimpses of a better life on the horizon. We can never properly imagine what lies beyond the given world, but art, religion, music, and literature all speak with varying degrees to the humane idea of fulfi lling human potential. Of course, it is also Bloch that gives us a relatively early theory of crime fi ction.53 Bloch presents three characteristics of the detective novel. First, there must be suspense, an anxious uncertainty caused by the delayed revealing of what is happening. There is not just physical tension (bodies and murder), but also intellectual tension that demands a solution. Second, there is discovery and unmasking. Clues, the smallest details, must be uncovered and converted into signs of something deeper, something beyond their mere appearance. Third, a pre-narrative event, ‘something that happened before the start of the book’, must be brought to DETECTING HOPE: KEN BRUEN’S DISENCHANTED P.I. 69 light, narrated, and understood. Beyond the scenery and intrigue, the skill of the detective can penetrate. To the chaos and crime of the world, the detective can bring a modicum of meaning, security, deliberation, trust, and protection. ‘Mr. Purveyor of Hope’, as Jack Taylor is referred to.54 Bloch goes a step further, however, than to say that detective fi ction ends with resolution. Rather, he argues that behind every crime lies something more ‘primordial’.55 Detective fi ction, noir fi ction in particular I would say, cannot answer the cause of sinfulness, the original misdeed that lies in the darkness of our origins. Bloch takes us back into existential terrain. We know that we exist, but why we exist or what we are is unknown. Bloch suggests in his refl ections on the role of the detective, ‘that we are like foundlings lost in the world, suffering from homesickness without knowing where home is’.56 The ten novels in Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series span the years of Ireland’s epic cycle from boom to bust to modest recovery. The Guards (2001) introduced Jack Taylor, Galway’s own hard-living, jaded, and fatalistic detective, who is caught, as many Irish protagonists are, between nostalgia and expectation, alienation and faith, self-loathing and companionship. Purgatory (2013), the latest installment, is set against the backdrop of ‘austerity, the new poverty, and the bankruptcies’.57 Evil turns out to be a property developer. Explicitly tailoring noir to Irish circumstances, Bruen never eases up on the cynicism, the rain, the drinking, and the curt dialogue. And yet when those characters that are most desperate need help, they turn to him. Taylor fi nds the agency to assist. There is goodness in him. But Purgatory ends on a cliffhanger. We know that we are in for another round of loss and violence. Noir provides neither resolution nor certainty. The point of the genre is to wrestle with the limitations of the world, as literary tragedy does. None of which is to say that the world is meaningless. Hope, in noir, lies neither in heroic revolution nor in passive acceptance but in those everyday expectant actions and emotions—friendship, recovery, tradition, respect—that in the midst of the dark here-and- now offer a degree of comfort, defi ance, and images of a safer, less harsh world.

NOTES 1. R. Porfi rio (1976) ‘No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir’ in Film Noir Reader (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996), pp. 77–95. 2. R. Porfi rio (1996), p. 92. 70 ANDREW KINCAID

3. R. Chandler (1988) ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ in The Simple Art of Murder (New York: Vintage). 4. K. Bruen (2004) The Guards (New York: Minotaur Books), p. 211. 5. K. Bruen (2011) Headstone (New York: The Mysterious Press), p. 215. 6. K. Bruen (2005) The Magdalen Martyrs (New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur), p. 19. 7. K. Bruen (2011), p. 207. 8. K. Bruen (2013) Purgatory (New York: The Mysterious Press), p. 146. 9. K. Bruen (2005), p. 115. 10. K. Bruen (2011), p. 232. 11. K. Bruen (2010) The Devil (Dublin: Transworld Ireland), p. 49. 12. K. Bruen (2011), p. 259. 13. K. Bruen (2011), p. 259. 14. K. Bruen (2008) Sanctuary (New York: Minotaur Books), p. 36. 15. K. Bruen (2013), p. 94. 16. K. Bruen (2008), p. 7. 17. K. Bruen (2008), p. 92. 18. K. Bruen (2008), p. 123. 19. K. Bruen (2013), p. 66. 20. K. Bruen (2010), p. 12. 21. K. Bruen (2013), p. 102. 22. K. Bruen (2013), p. 251. 23. K. Bruen (2008), p. 73. 24. K. Babine ‘State of Mind’, http://minnesotababine.blogspot. de/2012/09/interview-with-ken-bruen.html 25. K. Bruen (2008), pp. 41, 76. 26. K. Bruen (2008), p. 10. 27. K. Bruen (2008), p. 114. 28. K. Bruen (2010), p. 98. 29. K. Bruen (2010), p. 14. 30. K. Bruen (2010), p. 33. 31. K. Bruen (2010), p. 273. 32. K. Bruen (2011), p. 11. 33. K. Bruen (2011), p. 2. 34. K. Bruen (2011), p. 91. 35. K. Bruen (2011), p. 194. 36. K. Bruen (2011), p. 55. 37. K. Bruen (2011), p. 152. 38. K. Bruen (2011), p. 168. 39. K. Bruen (2011), p. 4. 40. K. Bruen (2011), p. 110. 41. K. Bruen (2011), p. 135. DETECTING HOPE: KEN BRUEN’S DISENCHANTED P.I. 71

42. K. Bruen (2011), p. 68. 43. K. Bruen (2011), p. 19. 44. K. Bruen (2011), p. 162. 45. W. Shakespeare (2005), p. 1208. 46. http://www.xavier.edu/jesuitresource/online-resources/martin-luther- king-quotes.cfm 47. A. Mittleman (2009) Hope in a Democratic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 1. 48. K. Bruen (2010), p. 168. 49. K. Bruen (2010), p. 9. 50. K. Bruen (2008), p. 12. 51. K. Bruen (2011), p. 177. 52. E. Bloch (1986) The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). 53. E. Bloch (1993) The Utopian Function of Art and Literature : Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 245–65. 54. K. Bruen (2010), p. 168. 55. E. Bloch (1986), p. 261. 56. C. Harper (1993) ‘The Philosopher as Detective’ https://philosophynow. org/issues/5/The_Philosopher_as_Detective 57. K. Bruen (2013), p. 11. CHAPTER 5

Negotiating Borders: Inspector Devlin and Shadows of the Past

Carol Baraniuk

For his series of novels featuring Inspector Benedict Devlin, Brian McGilloway chose a strong, idiosyncratic regional setting in northwest Ireland. Historically, Donegal is one of the nine counties of the Province of Ulster, but it does not form part of Northern Ireland as, following partition, it was located within the Irish Republic. Since the latter is routinely referred to as ‘the South’ by inhabitants of both jurisdictions, this most northerly and physically wild of the island’s 32 counties may appear to experience a double exclusion. While acknowledging the actuality of the border, the Devlin series appears tacitly to question both its practicality and at times aspects of its reality. Closer in geographical location and in its commercial and social life to Northern Ireland than to Dublin, Donegal has been called ‘the forgotten county’ by its representatives, frustrated at the lack of development which caused it to suffer from extensive migration throughout the twentieth century.1 It is a county which varies greatly in its character, defying easy cat- egorization. In his essay of 1908, G.A. Leckey identifi ed ‘two Donegals’: the mountainous districts of the Gaeltacht along the western seaboard, and the low-lying Laggan area in the east.2 The latter is where much of the action of McGilloway’s gripping Devlin series is set. This region has a contested history, incorporating districts settled mainly by Scots migrants during the seventeenth-century Plantation of Ulster. The Laggan borders with Northern Ireland, into which the action of the series frequently intrudes, from the City of Derry/Londonderry, upstream along the River Foyle to the town of Strabane, which is separated from Lifford, Devlin’s

Fig. 5.1 Lifford Bridge, River Foyle © Carol Baraniuk headquarters, by a short road bridge (Fig. 5.1 ) which the characters cross and re-cross multiple times in the course of investigations and of daily life. The Borderlands have the texture of a distinct region, even though they exist within two separate jurisdictions. One resident has expressed it thus: ‘We shared something, we were borderers … and that is an identity in itself.’3 This is an area of great beauty, much of it an unspoiled pastoral landscape, particularly along both banks of the Foyle. Yet away from the main centers of population, the terrain is not easy to access or explore for strangers who leave the major thoroughfares; it is a district of farmland and wide fi elds, of wooded lanes and back roads shaded by tall, fl owering hedgerows. It is beautiful in sunshine, but retains a secretive, hidden quality that can generate an unsettling ambience under overcast skies. McGilloway maximizes the effect of the landscape in frequent, brief lyrical passages that never detract from the action but which powerfully develop atmosphere. He comments, ‘that lyrical, very poetic, very literary prose for a crime novel … that’s what I aspire to’.4 This is seen in his attention to depicting details of weather, light, and seasons. Four of the fi ve novels published to date unfold against wintry or autumnal backdrops, NEGOTIATING BORDERS: INSPECTOR DEVLIN AND SHADOWS OF THE PAST 75 with Gallows Lane (2009) the exception. They deftly evoke the exposed bleakness, the cold and the wet, of the northwest region of Ireland’s (and Europe’s) uttermost edge, but McGilloway also captures its moments of fl eeting beauty and deceptive calm. Borderlands (2007) opens with the discovery of a murder victim whose bruised body straddles the border. Here the sky too appears bruised— ‘purple and yellow in the dying sun’—the wind is ‘snow-heavy’ and the trees stretch ‘arthritic limbs towards the snow clouds’.5 In The Rising (2010), penultimate in the series, he achieves a macabre, even Gothic effect during a vividly portrayed violent storm that bursts open the sar- cophagi in the ruins of Lifford Abbey, disturbing the interred bodies and exposing ‘a copper-coloured skull grinning up at me from beneath a foot of water’.6 In contrast, when Devlin’s young daughter assures him that she loves him, the exchange takes place under a brilliant red and orange sunset in which nature seems harmoniously to be celebrating the father’s joy, creating ‘a physical presence in my throat that I could not clear’.7 Devlin is a tough cop but he possesses an essential underlying sensitivity, of which only the reader and a few intimates are properly aware. McGilloway’s prose conveys his narrator’s identifi cation with the land in all its variety and supports the construction of Devlin’s persona. This subtle evocation of the landscape establishes a link between McGilloway and Irish literary tradition more generally, recalling some of the best Irish prose writers and poets of modern times, particularly Frank O’Connor, Seán O’Faoláin, Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney. It was Daniel Corkery who, in a decolonizing Ireland, asserted that there were ‘three great forces [working in] the Irish national being’, which he believed literature genuinely Irish should refl ect: ‘the Religious Consciousness of the people’, ‘Irish Nationalism’, and ‘the Land’.8 All three are certainly present in the Devlin series, though not foregrounded, or invested with Corkery’s essentialist, post-partition perspective. First and foremost, the series remains a distinguished entry in the canon of detective fi ction intended for a wide readership. A noticeable trend in recent years has been for authors to set their narratives, as McGilloway does, away from metropolitan centers. Powerfully evoked regional settings, both urban and rural—whether Henning Mankell’s Ystadt and its environs, Anne Cleeves’s Shetland, Martin Edwards’s Lake District, or Peter May’s Isle of Lewis in his Hebridean trilogy—are frequently providing a fresh perspective to the genre. One observes the northern wildness inherent in the settings of each of these, 76 CAROL BARANIUK the strength of the local communities, and the sense they all convey of a real landscape that is both beautiful and inhospitably Other. McGilloway too expertly establishes his setting. Through local references to the Laggan district’s rivers, towns, and villages (Finn, Stranorlar, Raphoe, Letterkenny, Carrigans, Ballybofey), he fashions Devlin’s ‘patch’: a substantial location made up of small communities as individual and distinctive as their appellations, and isolated by the uninhabited rural spaces between them. With this landscape and its population, across the network of narrow rural roads, or along fi eld tracks and woodland trails, the twenty-fi rst-century detective must engage. His advantage is his native local knowledge, which the liberal use of place names and topography serves to underline. By the end of the series, the reader too feels that she or he ‘knows’ east Donegal and something of its Northern Ireland hinterland, including the city of Derry and the busy town of Strabane. The sense of place that emerges is almost palpable, fostering familiarity with physical appearance, social problems, and lingering connections to Ireland’s recent, troubled past. Ultimately, the powerful atmosphere of place that emerges supports the perceived authenticity of McGilloway’s plots and characterization. Street names and historic locations within towns further enhance the effect. Gallows Lane, for example, the setting for public hangings of criminals in previous centuries, becomes, in the novel of the same name, the site of a gruesome crucifi xion murder.9 The choice of an historic place of state execution seems to symbol- ize the criminal perpetrators’ view of themselves as constituting the real authority in the district, able at will to arrest, try, and punish those who give them offense, while intimidating opponents with the barbarous cruelty of their methods. The crucifi xion of Christ and His sacrifi cial role in the redemption of mankind stand at the heart of Christian doctrine, Catholic or Protestant, as Devlin and everyone in the largely church-going community he serves would be well aware. Thus the murder of a human being in such a fashion appears not just obscenely sadistic but a deliberately blasphemous act. The perpetrators could be condemned as repro- bates in the theological sense, and deserving of judgment, but the atrocity allows McGilloway to show the deeply shaken Devlin as thoughtful and self-critical, ready to interrogate his own conduct and to interpret events in the light of his Catholic faith. His musings invest the murdered man with the pathos and the dignity of a sacrifi cial victim—a type of Christ who has been betrayed not only by his attackers, but by the police, who should have protected him. As Devlin says, ‘I can’t be the only one who NEGOTIATING BORDERS: INSPECTOR DEVLIN AND SHADOWS OF THE PAST 77 sees religious connotations in this. What if we’re all to be judged for what happened to him?’10 Recurring characters contribute to the impression of the ‘warts and all’ community that Devlin polices, and with which he is personally integrated by birth, marriage, and his affi liation to the Catholic Church. They include the morally ambivalent, fi ercely protective Sadie Cashell; Lorcan Hutton, drug pusher and spoiled son of wealthy parents; organized crime boss Vincent Morrison, whose son is friends with Devlin’s daughter, Penny; Father Brennan, the wise, compassionate Lifford priest; and Miriam Powell, a local politician with whom Devlin had an abor- tive and embarrassing teenage relationship and who once shared a student house with his wife, Debbie. These are all compelling fi gures who offer insights into Devlin’s psyche. This ‘small world’, these sometimes stifl ing ‘local attachments’, are the stuff not only of Irish fi ction but of most people’s experience of life in Ireland, where cities such as Belfast and Dublin (themselves miniature by the standards of London, New York, or Tokyo) are urban islands in an environment that is still predominantly rural- or small-town-based. Yet that is not to suggest a setting that is cozy or rustic. The global is present in the local, and thanks to modern communica- tions, inseparable from it. The series demonstrates what Fiona Stafford refers to as ‘the paradoxical power of creative work to be both local and universal’.11 Lifford-based Devlin grapples with issues criminal and social that arise from international drug running, traffi cking and exploitation of migrants, illegal adoption rackets, the Celtic Tiger economic boom, and the bust of the global banking crisis. In addition, there is a degree of graphic violence and forensic detail occasionally present that is very much in line with current trends in detective fi ction, and in on-screen representations of investigative work. McGilloway does not shrink from conveying the viciousness of a fi ght involving the Traveller community in which a man has an ear bitten off while another is kicked and stamped on with ‘enough force to shatter his teeth and his jawbone, which soon hung loose and useless as a dead man’s’.12 The discovery of the horrifi c torture-murder of a drug dealer is followed by an account of the dealer’s deliberate infection of a uniformed Garda offi cer with AIDS through a contaminated hypodermic needle. The offi cer recounting the story remarks that the murdered man was ‘a piece of shit and good riddance to him’.13 Inevitably, in a series about the investigation of murders, the texts are punctuated with discoveries of corpses. Such fi nds are described in clinical detail, as when the body of a teenage 78 CAROL BARANIUK victim of drowning is recovered with ‘his skin … swollen and wrinkled, leaving his face distorted. One of his eyes had been removed from its socket, presumably by a sea animal, and chunks of fl esh had been torn from his cheeks and neckline.’14 Several commentators on the development of detective fi ction have noted the increasing role that forensic science now plays in investigation, and therefore in police procedural fi ction. John Scaggs identifi es forensic pathologists, crime-scene investigators, and psychological profi lers as ‘embodiments of post-industrial, information age responses to crime’.15 The discoveries made at postmortem examinations in the sterile conditions of the laboratory can contribute signifi cantly to a pervasive atmosphere of gloom, whether they record banalities such as the details of a victim’s stomach contents, or clarify exactly how a murdered, malformed baby met its end: ‘The infant was newborn … The craniofacial abnormalities are consistent with Goldenhar syndrome … The child was a girl. She was throttled.’16 In addition, Devlin himself appears at times to be in the grip of a mental and emotional crisis. On one occasion he cries to his wife when he fears a suspect may have infected him with HIV, and in another he almost cracks when faced with the grisly sight of the victim of a crucifi xion murder: ‘my stomach twisted, sweat popping on my forehead, as my pulse thudded in my skull. A pain spread across my chest … everything seemed to lose its colour and I knew that, unless I could get out of that space, that room, I would die.’17 Such material raises the question of whether the Devlin novels may be classifi ed as ‘Irish Noir’. In defi ning the essential characteristics of noir fi c- tion, Philip Simpson argues that

the element of violent crime does not in itself defi ne noir; rather noir is stamped by its prevailing mood of pessimism, personal and societal failure, urban paranoia, the individual’s disconnection from society and cynicism … Noir’s universe is bleak, divested of meaning. Flawed human beings in these stories must somehow make moral decisions with no transcendent founda- tion of morality. 18

While it is undeniable that graphic violence, misanthropy, desolate land- scapes, and gruesome images can lend a noir-ish atmosphere to the novels, it is nevertheless clear that the Devlin series is by no means an unreliev- edly nihilistic tale. This in many respects is due to Devlin’s narrative NEGOTIATING BORDERS: INSPECTOR DEVLIN AND SHADOWS OF THE PAST 79

persona, his motivations, and to the role of religious faith—his ‘religious consciousness’—throughout the novels. The use of fi rst-person narrator is one nod to the hard-boiled tradition, and in some respects Devlin shows maverick tendencies in his readiness to circumvent and disobey the orders of superiors. Their equivocal morality is often on display, with a preference to ‘leave well alone’ in diffi cult cases, a tendency to manipulate the press by overstating their successes, and a high sensitivity to public opinion and scrutiny. Devlin, by contrast, frequently follows his own instincts and moral sense against their instruc- tions. Though he is often obliged to bind his tongue in their presence, he can be blunt in expressing fl at disagreement. When his boss, Harry Patterson, defends the behavior of a high-profi le businessman on the grounds that ‘he brought a fortune into this country’, Devlin replies, ‘He brought nothing; the place isn’t producing enough for a fucking ear stud.’19 Patterson later complains of Devlin being ‘out of order in so many ways’, adding in some frustration, ‘And yet you still manage to come out of it smelling like roses.’20 Devlin, however, suffers suspensions for his departures from regulation procedure and on one occasion he uses his fi sts, dispensing summary rough justice in a vicious attack on a wife- beating husband who might otherwise have gone unpunished. Standard police procedurals focus on team work, but Devlin sometimes adopts the approach of a lone crusader, to the frustration of his superiors, and sometimes his wife. Though he does work in partnership with one or two trusted colleagues, there is a degree of isolation in his position within the Lifford force. He fi nds it diffi cult to accept the pragmatic advice that he should try to be more of a ‘team player’ which his boss acknowledges is ‘not your style’.21 Both his PSNI opposite number, Jim Hendry, and his wife urge him at times to moderate his stance. In Hendry’s view, Devlin underestimates the power that ‘being a company man’ could give him, 22 while Debbie suggests he has an overblown self-image, reminding him that he is not the only ‘honest policeman’.23 It comes as little surprise to learn that Devlin was once a student activist. He appears uncomfortable when mocked by a former fellow protester for having dwindled to an establish- ment fi gure, insisting that ‘I make what difference I can in my own way’.24 He seems to mean that by working within the law on the issues that matter to him, he can make a more signifi cant impact than through short-lived, showy campaigns, and gestures. He may also be implying that he is driven by his conscience rather than by the police ‘rule book’. 80 CAROL BARANIUK

Devlin’s religious consciousness, his unostentatious piety, is a recurring but subtly employed trope of the series. It serves to reinforce the impression of a man driven by sincerely held convictions, who is nevertheless compassionate and genuinely tolerant. Devlin is a regular attendee at Mass; he acknowledges his need of confession and absolution; he refl ects ruefully, after suffering a savage beating, that ‘the catholic in me needed to be punished’; when his daughter is dangerously ill, he prays through the rosary; on several occasions he says the Act of Contrition for a murder victim, whether colleague or criminal. If this appears to identify him with a traditional Ireland—which clearly lives on in the Lifford community as depicted here, despite the intrusions of modernity with its social problems and moral ambiguities—then it is also clear that he exercises his critical faculties to question orthodoxies. He approves a softening in the Church’s teaching with regard to the spiritual condition of the souls of dead, unbaptized children and he endorses his teenage daughter’s rejection of a teacher’s narrow views on the subject though he does not approve the terms she employs in telling the teacher ‘she was talking shit’. He assures Penny that ‘anyone who suggests the existence of limbo displays a very fl awed understanding of God’. Nevertheless he upholds the school’s penalty for the insolence, which requires Penny to write a letter of apology. Devlin explains that she should say sorry for ‘being personally rude to the woman’, though he adds that ‘You don’t have to apologize for what you believe in, just how you expressed it.’ His determination, on the discovery of a cache of malformed ‘limbo babies’ buried in the 1970s, one of whom has clearly been murdered, is to pursue the perpetrators in the name of justice: ‘Those children deserve their story to be heard’ and ‘I can’t think someone got away with killing a child.’ 25 This resolve to act and to speak up for the weak, vulnerable, and marginalized is at the heart of Devlin’s character as a man, father, and policeman. A further distinction between Devlin’s persona and that of the classic maverick cop is seen in the warmth of Devlin’s family life. Devlin’s wife is supportive but strong, well equipped to censure or advise him. He is frequently portrayed discussing professional and family matters with her, and he takes her opinions very seriously. When she warns him that he is losing his family because of the time he is spending on police work and in supporting a colleague, he modifi es his schedule to avoid ‘missing the kids’ bedtime yet again’.26 The Devlin family interactions are written as realistically as the crime scenes. Devlin’s confession that he was tempted to infi delity infuriates his wife; the siblings, sweetly affectionate as small NEGOTIATING BORDERS: INSPECTOR DEVLIN AND SHADOWS OF THE PAST 81 children, bicker unpleasantly as the years go on; and on more than one occasion, Devlin’s policing duties bring the threat of violence perilously close to the cherished circle. In general, however, it is clear that protecting and providing for his family, alongside his religious faith, are major motivations that make Devlin’s life meaningful as an offi cer of the law. Humorous touches maintain Devlin’s sympathetic persona. From his covert running battle with a neighbor who suspects the family basset hound of sheep worrying to his capacity for delivering a smart wisecrack that is on a par with the verbal style of any hard-boiled PI, it is clear that he is a man with a sense of irony, and likely to be good company when relaxing in a social environment, or with those he loves and trusts. The bantering by which the Catholic Devlin and Protestant PSNI Inspector Jim Hendry negotiate their relationship often strays into territory that simultaneously humanizes both men and addresses the shadows of history that permeate each novel. When Hendry teasingly remarks on the ‘papist idolatry’ surrounding them at a Catholic funeral, Devlin is ‘surprised you didn’t get burned by the holy water when you came in’.27 Hendry is his match in repartee, however. As he prepares to pass Devlin some highly classifi ed information, Devlin jokingly calls him ‘Deep Throat’, drawing Hendry’s quick-fi re response: ‘I pray to God you’re thinking of the same fi lm I am when you make that reference.’ 28 The badinage is perhaps necessary to keep awkwardness at bay and to create a bridge of trust. These two Ulstermen must be very aware of each other’s community histories and heritages, and in an earlier era might even have felt enmity toward one another. The Devlin/Hendry relationship evolves into a true, if occasionally wary, friendship throughout the course of the novels and is one of the many ‘border crossings’ of the series. The fi rst victim in Borderlands is dumped on the border, echoing events in the Troubles era when ‘the Border itself became the site of particular kinds of terror practised by the IRA, including the dumping of executed victims on Border roads’.29 More recently, the body of a man stripped naked and bound was found near the Derry–Donegal border, an act which local politicians compared to a paramilitary killing from the ‘darkest days of the troubles’.30 As Devlin and his fellow offi cers face their northern counterparts in weak December light, vision blurred by the eye-watering effect of chill winds, the present seems momentarily to dissolve; the atmosphere is reminiscent of a standoff between the forces of two opposing states. In fact, as McGilloway makes clear, we are observing here the border not as a dividing line, but as a 82 CAROL BARANIUK meeting place between neighbors: ‘When a crime occurs in an area not clearly in one jurisdiction or another, both the Irish Republic’s An Garda and the Police Service of Northern Ireland work together, each offering all the practical help and advice they can.’ 31 The concord is underlined by the clear compassion both Hendry and Devlin feel for the victim, with Hendry noticeably ‘under stress’, calling her ‘Poor girl’, and Devlin having to stifl e the urge to remove his jacket and cover her nakedness.32 Their relationship is tested in the course of the series, particularly when Devlin does not permit the border to be a hindrance in his quest for justice. He pursues one major investigation into Northern Ireland in an attempt to trace a people traffi cker who is exploiting Chechnyan migrants, illegally settled across the border. Patterson has already warned him not to get involved as it is a matter for the PSNI, and Devlin also fails to inform Hendry, whom he knows would be obliged to arrest the migrants, making their deportation virtually inevitable. Devlin’s quest goes disas- trously off-track, however, seriously endangering both himself and the vulnerable migrant group. Eventually, he is obliged to confess the truth, leaving Hendry to pick up the pieces. Understandably furious, Hendry tells Devlin to ‘piss off back to Lifford’.33 However, such disharmony is uncharacteristic and camaraderie is soon re-established. Hendry provides cross-border leads for Devlin, permits him to sit in on the questioning of suspects, and legitimizes his intrusions into the Strabane and Derry areas by accompanying him on several occasions. Their interaction demonstrates personal and professional ‘border crossing’ that yields results. Hendry is also shown to be deeply affected when Devlin’s daughter suffers serious injury in a riding accident. Ironically, in one of Devlin’s incursions into Northern Ireland, it is Hendry who crosses an unoffi cial ‘border’ into Republican territory when Devlin takes him to a pub on the outskirts of Strabane. It is an establish- ment where in times past ‘they’d have skinned a copper alive’,34 and where still the arrival of a PSNI offi cer ‘did not go unnoticed’, although according to the barman this is due to the presence of drug dealers rather than paramilitaries.35 In this setting it appears to be Devlin’s companionship that (briefl y) ‘legitimizes’ Hendry’s presence in premises that sit within his own jurisdiction. The border itself takes on an unstable character throughout the course of the novels. McGilloway adroitly sidesteps direct politicized discussion of its existence, just as he makes Devlin a member of An Garda Síochána to avoid the potentially toxic issue of how the presentation of the PSNI NEGOTIATING BORDERS: INSPECTOR DEVLIN AND SHADOWS OF THE PAST 83 might be perceived. As McGilloway has said, if the Devlin series was set in Derry, ‘Devlin would have been a PSNI offi cer. And the diffi culty with that was that people would be looking to see how I was presenting the PSNI. There seemed to be too much opportunity for people who would look for the political.’ 36 McGilloway is clearly conscious of the border, however, as a potent fact and symbol of life in Ireland. On shopping trips to Strabane, or when Devlin takes his daughter to visit Santa’s Grotto in Derry, it is crossed virtually unnoticed, the checkpoints of the Troubles era long gone. Its existence, however, facilitated a getaway environment for paramilitary groups such as the gang in The Rising who carried out a robbery in Castlederg, Northern Ireland during the Troubles, then crossed into Donegal where the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) could not pursue them. In Devlin’s experience, it adds a further level of complication to investigations when crimes are committed in one state by a person resident in the other, and his bosses can attempt to conserve limited resources by persuading diffi cult individuals who have crossed into Donegal back across the border for the PSNI to deal with. Ironically, then, the border may be perceived as an obstacle that stands in the way of the law. In the landscape, the border can be diffi cult to locate. The Lifford Bridge is concrete and shows it as a hard fact, but much of the border follows the course of the tidal River Foyle with its unstable, mudfl at shores that imbue the border line with a fl uid, shifting quality. One telling image in Gallows Lane seems to dissolve it entirely as Devlin, in Donegal, drives to a high point which allows him a panoramic view over the land ‘across the three rivers into Strabane,37 where the fi ve giant metal sculptures of danc- ers and musicians seemed to spin and twirl under the June sunlight’.38 The sculptures, which represent the harmony of music and dance, were erected as part of a cross-border initiative to emphasize the unity of Strabane and Lifford.39 Ultimately, however, viewed from the height where Devlin’s car sits, the land itself discloses no visible border, so that it seems a fi ction created by the civil servants who drew it in 1920: people ‘who knew little more about the area than that which they’d learnt from a map’.40 McGilloway has stated that he did not want to write ‘another Troubles book’,41 but references to the pre-Agreement years weave an essential backdrop. The Devlin series is set well after the Good Friday Agreement,42 and, on several occasions, Devlin comments that these are ‘new times’ with the IRA offi cially stood down and PSNI/Garda co-operation established: ‘The bad old days, when collusion and suspicion had prohibited any contact, were passing.’43 The reference is to suspicions in the RUC 84 CAROL BARANIUK that some members of An Garda Síochána were complicit with the IRA in the murders of offi cers, the subject of a 2013 court case in the Republic.44 The Troubles do, however, echo throughout the series, in the memories and experiences of characters, and in the evolution of the criminality with which Devlin has to grapple. The land itself still hides the secret, decommissioned arms stashes of the Provisional IRA. These are occasionally uncovered, as in Gallows Lane , when an arms bunker has more recently been used as cover for a consign- ment of cannabis, one of many examples of the new wave of drugs-related crime that is a signifi cant feature of several of the plots in the series. Still more sinister is McGilloway’s narrative of how ex-paramilitaries, ‘fed up with being told to stand down, the war was over’,45 have attempted to retain control of the streets by garnering community support for anti- drug- dealing activity. They employ vigilante style strategies that include aggressive public demonstrations, punishment beatings, knee-capping, and the humiliation of tarring and feathering, a form of chastisement used in the 1970s against young women suspected by the IRA of having relationships with British soldiers. McGilloway is accurate in portraying such methods employed by ex-terrorists who have reinvented themselves as ‘community activists’.46 Jim Hendry is clear about their purpose: ‘get people behind them on the anti-drugs thing, get their feet under the table in a few areas, then introduce some of their more extreme political ideologies bit by bit’.47 A more unusual legacy of the Troubles with which the Devlin series engages is that of the ex-paramilitary who has been ‘born again’ as a committed Christian believer, and who fi nds a spiritual home within the evan- gelical Protestant tradition. James Kerr in Gallows Lane is such a character and it is evidence of the breadth and sophistication of McGilloway’s writing that he fi nds space within his often fast-paced thriller series to address thoughtfully this inherently Northern Irish phenomenon. Kerr is a serial trouble-maker who has returned to Lifford after serving time for armed robbery. He arouses the suspicions of Devlin’s boss, who expresses skepticism that Kerr has ‘found Jesus’ and wishes to atone for his past sins. McGilloway permits Devlin, a man to whom religion matters personally, to profess greater sympathy, suggesting that the conversion may be genuine. He offers a prayer for Kerr, sleeping rough, and visits Coleraine to meet Kerr’s mentor, Reverend Charles Bardwell, another born-again Christian. Bardwell once committed a sectarian murder but now devotes his time to reconciliation projects, including cross-community football matches. NEGOTIATING BORDERS: INSPECTOR DEVLIN AND SHADOWS OF THE PAST 85

While Devlin appears not fully convinced either about Kerr’s conversion or the likely effi cacy of Bardwell’s project, his response is respectful, showing him refl ective about the nature of evil and how it may be dealt with: ‘I … wondered at the thoughts or evils which pushed men to do the things they did to each other, and the possibility that such darkness could be dispelled in a place as unremarkable as a football fi eld.’48 Though Devlin asserts his optimism about the new era, McGilloway at times undercuts his sanguinity, demonstrating Ireland’s obsessive tendency to commemorate and tenaciously hold on to the past. Nowhere is this more evident than in The Nameless Dead (2012), the most ambitious and mature of the Devlin novels. This tale of informers, old murders, betrayals, and ‘disappeared’ victims is rooted in an array of buried secrets, wrongs, and hurts from the 1970s that linger on, troubling the present like restless ghosts. In this novel, which begins and climaxes on Islandmore—a type of no man’s land on the River Foyle, dissected by the border—sym- bolism collapses into reality and vice versa. Islandmore features as a burial place for one of the Disappeared, victims of the IRA whose remains are secreted in isolated spots around the country.49 When the story begins, the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims Remains is searching the island, but under its terms of reference none of its fi ndings may be used for the investigation of murders.50 The island is interpreted as standing for Ireland itself by the father of a victim, himself a former active IRA man who, when apprehended by Devlin as he attempts to bury alive on Islandmore the man he holds responsible for his son’s death, yells, ‘You’re standing on top of a huge fucking graveyard … this whole fucking country!’51 For anyone who has lived through the Troubles and remembers, or has personal experience of the dreadful register of loss and bereavement of that period, the words seem to articulate an appalling truth. Devlin is frustrated by the political embargo on the use of evidence uncovered by the Commission in its location of the bodies of the Disappeared. His concern to see justice done receives further stimulation with the discovery of a cillin on Islandmore. A cillin was a burial place for children to whom the Catholic Church, in an era of more rigid dogma, had denied burial in consecrated ground. Because they had died before they could be baptized, their souls were deemed to be in limbo. Several of the infants are discovered to have deformed features and at least one has clearly been murdered. But in the course of Devlin’s investigation— against orders—of this cold case, McGilloway incorporates into his narrative the moving account of a couple whose stillborn son could not be 86 CAROL BARANIUK baptized and was buried on Islandmore. This account—the couple’s tale of the local ‘ferryman’ being paid a few silver coins to row them to the island to inter their baby—encodes a sad allusion to Charon and the River Styx of Greek mythology, emblems of pagan belief. The narrative implies that the parents of the stillborn infants have been cruelly marginalized by church practices so that they fi nd themselves beyond the borders of Christian comfort. Signifi cantly, in line with a contemporary loosening of the Church’s rules concerning limbo, the Lifford priest conducts a service of blessing at the cillin and asserts his belief in the ‘communion with God of such infants and the special place they held by His throne’.52 The plot strand concerning the malformed infants broadens to include the past disempowerment and exploitation of teenage single mothers in state- and Church-run Mother and Baby homes as recently as the 1970s. McGilloway has chosen an issue here that has had less publicity than other historical child-abuse scandals: the trialing of drugs without parental con- sent on girls committed to Mother and Baby homes. The story exposes the abuses that can be perpetrated under cover within a society that is deeply conservative and judgmental. Commentators on the police novel’s evolution have pointed out that it is ‘a form that, at its best, has mutated into an ongoing (serial) enquiry into the state of the nation, its power structures and its social concerns’.53 This was certainly the intention of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, authors of the distinguished Martin Beck series as long ago as the 1960s. As Sjöwall explained, ‘We wanted to show the reader that under the offi cial image of welfare-state Sweden there was another layer where poverty, criminality and brutality existed beneath the glossy surface.’54 Throughout the Devlin series, readers are confronted with social evils, identifying the poor and the dispossessed whom society bypasses while criminal fraternities exploit them. This is also evident in the portrayal of the plight of illegally transported migrant workers within Northern Ireland in Bleed a River Deep (2010). McGilloway explicitly references here the real experience of a Ukrainian woman, forced to sleep rough for several nights during the Christmas period, who had to have both legs amputated due to the hypo- thermia she suffered. As Devlin rightly remarks, ‘It seemed vile that such things could happen in a country that had been enjoying an unparalleled period of prosperity.’55 A Dark Ages bog body discovered in Bleed a River Deep is identifi ed as a sacrifi cial victim, offered to the goddess Aine for the fertility (and therefore the material prosperity) of the land. The ignorant sacrifi ce of NEGOTIATING BORDERS: INSPECTOR DEVLIN AND SHADOWS OF THE PAST 87 the defenseless, deep in Europe and Ireland’s pagan past, was an issue with which Seamus Heaney engaged in his bog poem series, relating it to contemporary events during the Troubles. McGilloway, a teacher at St. Columb’s (the school Heaney himself attended long before McGilloway’s birth), is implicitly aware of this.56 He allows Devlin to describe in a fairly distanced, clinical manner the ‘type of twine tied around her throat and looped at the back around a piece of wood’ which marks the woman as a victim of ritual killing. In Heaney’s version, the speaker identifi es with the punished adulteress, bringing the reader vividly into the physical discomfort of her experience. He ‘can feel the tug/of the halter at the nape/ of her neck, the wind/on her naked front’.57 However, the novel’s pre- served bog body is also revered as a thing of beauty and wonder, a relic of Ireland’s and indeed Europe’s heritage, which many in the community fail to appreciate, preferring instead to participate in the Donegal ‘gold rush’. McGilloway foregrounds the fears of environmentalists concerning the damage to the landscape infl icted by industrial-scale gold mining.58 The quest for riches undertaken by the stream of prospectors who encamp around the River Carrowcreel, panning for ore, seems an unseemly chase after ‘fool’s gold’. This barren quest reads as a metaphor for the unprecedented affl uence which the Ireland of the new Europe pursued enthusi- astically in brief boom years, only to fi nd itself bankrupt when the boom burst and the duplicity of bankers and politicians was exposed.59 Nowhere is the disintegration of material prosperity more evident than in depictions of the ‘ghost estates’: under-occupied streets of new homes now rendered into dens for drug runners and racketeers. These housing developments, which may also be home to legitimate occupants who pur- chased them in good faith, were hurriedly constructed during the boom period and now are hardly fi t for human habitation with their unfi nished lighting and sewerage systems. Around this setting, McGilloway weaves a narrative that bristles with anger against the exploitation of the vulnerable through an illegal adoption network involving traffi cked infants. But even when absorbed with social issues and the consequences of business corruption, McGilloway does not permit his plot to lose pace. The Nameless Dead incorporates one of the most thrilling chase sequences in the series. It culminates in the waterlogged mudfl ats of the Foyle and within sight of Islandmore, with its excavated burial ground, that stands at the heart of the borderlands, and where the action of the novel ultimately concludes. From its deceptively peripheral location, the Devlin series offers an intriguing portrayal of a twenty-fi rst-century Ireland where the Troubles 88 CAROL BARANIUK still cast long shadows. McGilloway’s hero may be fl awed, but he is essentially decent. If in constructing him McGilloway has employed traditional Irish tropes such as family and religion, he has done so without inducing the cringe factor, or making Devlin appear in the least out of kilter with the contemporary world. Devlin pursues perpetrators of injustice across a vividly painted landscape comprising back lanes, bog land, rolling hills, and the mean streets of small towns, confronting, often in the worst Irish weather, an array of villains from low-life thugs to sophisticated criminal bosses. The borderlands of the Donegal/Derry/Tyrone district are surely the island of Ireland in microcosm where, as everywhere in this world, justice can never be suffi ciently exact or complete.

NOTES 1. See, for example, ‘Donegal Wiped Off Crisis HQ Maps’, 21 April 2010, http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/donegal-wiped-off-crisis-hq- maps-26651587.html , date accessed 7 July 2015. 2. Qtd. in J. McLaughlin (1995) ‘The Politics of Nation-building in Post- Famine Donegal’ in W. Nolan et al. (eds) Donegal History and Society : Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County (Dublin: Geography Publications), p. 587. 3. D. McDonald, Omagh, quoted http://www.irishborderlands.com/living/index.html , date accessed 5 July 2015. 4. ‘McGilloway on the Run’, Derry Journal , 14 March 2008, http://www. derryjournal.com /news/mcgilloway-on-the-run-1-2122496, date accessed 1 July 2015. 5. B. McGilloway (2007) Borderlands (London: Macmillan), pp. 3–4. 6. B. McGilloway (2011) The Rising (London: Pan Books), p. 142. 7. B. McGilloway (2009b) Gallows Lane (London: Pan Books), p. 65. 8. D. Corkery (1931) ‘from Synge and Irish Literature ’ in S. Deane (ed.) The Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature , Vol. 2 (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991–2002), p. 1010. 9. B. McGilloway (2009b), p. 11 and pp. 153–4. 10. B. McGilloway (2009b), p. 160. 11. F. Stafford (2010) Local Attachments : The Province of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 2. 12. B. McGilloway (2007), p. 22. 13. B. McGilloway (2007), p. 137. 14. B. McGilloway (2011), p. 77. 15. J. Scaggs (2005) Crime Fiction (London: Routledge), p. 100. 16. B. McGilloway (2012) The Nameless Dead (London: Macmillan), pp. 41–2. NEGOTIATING BORDERS: INSPECTOR DEVLIN AND SHADOWS OF THE PAST 89

17. B. McGilloway (2009b), p. 156. 18. P. Simpson (2010) ‘Noir and the Psycho Thriller’ in C.J. Rzepka and L. Horsley (eds) A Companion to Crime Fiction (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell), p. 189. 19. B. McGilloway (2010) Bleed a River Deep (London: Pan Books), p. 276. 20. B. McGilloway (2010), p. 287. 21. B. McGilloway (2009b), p. 37. 22. B. McGilloway (2009b), p. 116. 23. B. McGilloway (2009b), p. 150. 24. B. McGilloway (2010), p. 116. 25. B. McGilloway (2012), p. 244 and p. 251. 26. B. McGilloway (2011), p. 206. 27. B. McGilloway (2011), p. 237. 28. B. McGilloway (2009b), p. 132. 29. G. Dawson (2006) ‘The “Ulster”–Irish Border, Protestant Imaginative Geography and Cultural Memory in the Irish Troubles’ in M. Ascari and A. Corrado (eds) Sites of Exchange : European Crossroads and Faultlines (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi), p. 242. 30. Belfast Telegraph , 25 February 2010. 31. B. McGilloway (2007), p. 3. 32. B. McGilloway (2007), p. 4. 33. B. McGilloway (2010), p. 74. 34. B. McGilloway (2011), p. 128. 35. B. McGilloway (2011), p. 131. 36. ‘McGilloway on the Run’, Derry Journal , 14 March 2008. 37. The River Foyle fl ows from the confl uence of the River Mourne and the River Finn, a short distance west of Lifford Bridge. 38. B. McGilloway (2009b), p. 61. 39. http://www.strabanedc.com/leisure-and-tourism/attractions/item. php?q=22 , date accessed 5 July 2015. 40. B. McGilloway (2007), p. 3. 41. ‘Crime Pays for Derry Writer and his Different Type of Detective’, http:// www.culturenorthernireland.org/features/literature/brian-mcgilloway , date accessed 6 July 2015. 42. Also known as the Belfast Agreement, signed 10 April 1998. 43. B. McGilloway (2007), p. 62. 44. ‘Garda Collusion Found in IRA Murders of RUC Offi cers’, The Irish Times , 4 December 2013, http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/ irish-news/garda-collusion-found-in-ira-murders-of-ruc- offi cers-1.1616146 , date accessed 6 July 2015. 45. B. McGilloway (2011), p. 33. 46. ‘Public Humiliation that was all too Familiar during Troubles’, The Belfast Telegraph , 28 August 2007, http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/ 90 CAROL BARANIUK

public-humiliation-that-was-all- too-familiar-during-troubles-28397271. html , date accessed 6 July 2015. 47. B. McGilloway (2011), p. 34. 48. B. McGilloway (2009b), p. 114. 49. T. Whitehead, ‘The Disappeared was One of the Worst Chapters of the Troubles’, The Telegraph , 1 May 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/uknews/northernireland/ 10801280/The-Disappeared-was-one- of-the-worst-chapters-of-the-Troubles.html, date accessed 6 July 2015. 50. http://www.iclvr.ie/ , date accessed 7 July 2015. 51. B. McGilloway (2012), p. 367. 52. B. McGilloway (2012), p. 206. 53. P. Messent (2010) ‘The Police Novel’ in C.J. Rzepka and L. Horsley (eds) The Oxford Companion to Crime Fiction (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell), p. 178. 54. M. Sjöwall and P. Wahlöö (2006) Roseanna (London: Harper Perennial), p. 10. 55. B. McGilloway (2010), p. 266. 56. See especially ‘Punishment’ in S. Heaney (1975) North (London: Faber and Faber). 57. ‘Punishment’, ll. 1–4. 58. ‘Donegal Greens Object to Gold Mining’ http://www.indymedia.ie/artic le/60955?userlanguage=ga , date accessed 6 July 2015. 59. An interesting analysis of the Irish real-estate and construction boom, of the effect of prosperity on Irish households, and a discussion of the causes of the sudden downturn may be found in S. Pearlstein, ‘Can Ireland’s Celtic Tiger Roar Again?’, The Washington Post , 16 August 2013, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/business/can-irelands-celtic-tiger-roar- again/2013/08/16/1462304c-0460-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story. html , date accessed 6 July 2015. CHAPTER 6

‘The place you don’t belong’: Stuart Neville’s Belfast

Fiona Coffey

Born in Armagh, Northern Ireland, Stuart Neville is one of the top fi ction writers of the Troubles1 and one of the best selling Irish crime writers of his generation. Neville began writing thrillers a decade after the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, which offi cially signaled the start of the Northern Irish peace process. Five of his six novels are set in the post-Agreement years during which social tension, political corruption, and lingering violence characterize the Northern landscape. In each of these thrillers, present-day crime is inevitably linked to past Troubles violence, emphasizing the pessimistic view that a generational cycle of crime may never fully end in the North. At the heart of the series is Detective Inspector Jack Lennon, a disgraced, hard-drinking loner who is single- minded in his pursuit of truth and justice despite the deep corruption endemic to the government and law-enforcement agencies of Neville’s Northern Ireland. The novels ultimately examine the fragility of the peace process and the extreme and dubious measures that politicians will go to in order to maintain it. At the center of the series are withering critiques of the hypocrisy that seems to have infi ltrated every layer of society, cynicism over the North’s ability to move beyond its past, and questions on how to defi ne and execute justice in the post-Agreement North. The Detective Lennon series’ structure promotes a view of the sectarian confl ict as self-perpetuating and constantly evolving. A vigilante killing spree in The Twelve (2009)2 that leaves the son of a paramilitary leader dead results in his father orchestrating a bloody revenge plot in Collusion (2010). Stolen Souls (2011) delves deeper into the new criminal oppor-

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 91 E. Mannion (ed.), The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53940-3_7 92 FIONA COFFEY tunities that these same paramilitaries have exploited during the peace process, while The Final Silence (2014) examines the corruption of politicians who are complicit in allowing paramilitary activity and criminality to proliferate. In addition to the violence that bleeds from one book into the next, the series charts an evolution of crime from a localized phenomenon generated from specifi c historical and political circumstances to global criminal activity refl ecting crime unlinked to any ideological motivation besides greed and power. The Twelve examines the fallout from paramilitary violence during the Troubles; Collusion expands its reach by showing how past Troubles violence morphs into complex criminal activity in present-day Belfast; and Stolen Souls widens its purview further by examining globalized crime syndicates that have infi ltrated Belfast and become interwoven with the local paramilitary groups. Throughout the series, Neville argues that the infrastructure of the Troubles has created criminal gangs and a culture of lawlessness that has normalized violence in the present day. With the advent of peace, paramilitary groups have turned to new ways to make money and maintain power, welcoming in international drug and prostitution rings. By showing this progression from the local to the global and by showing how the Troubles created a landscape conducive to the proliferation of crime, the series connects complex histories showing a direct link between Troubles and post-Agreement violence in the North. In each novel, Lennon must rein in the chaos of an individual’s desire for vengeance within the social order of law and justice. However, the detective’s efforts are continually undermined by corrupt police and politicians who are more concerned with maintaining public confi dence in the peace process than actually rooting out endemic crime. Desire for truth and justice versus the failed realities of the peace process are at the heart of these novels. Belfast is depicted as a location where distrust in law enforcement and government means that justice can only be achieved by those who are willing to work outside the boundaries of the law. Unable to hold down a healthy relationship, estranged from his family, a heavy drinker and womanizer, the detective is driven by a relentless belief in the pursuit of truth at any cost. Lennon originally joined the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) during the Troubles years when it was viewed as a Protestant-led organization charged with reinforcing and protecting a Unionist-controlled North. When his brother was killed by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) for being an informer, Lennon joined the RUC in an arguably misguided attempt to root out truth and justice within a ‘THE PLACE YOU DON’T BELONG’: STUART NEVILLE’S BELFAST 93 highly corrupt and ineffectual police force. His anger at the RUC’s indif- ference to his brother’s death and its unwillingness to pursue justice at the expense of Unionist political power compels him to join the force in an attempt to effect real change. He tells his astonished family, ‘But it’ll never change … How can we complain about the RUC being a Protestant force when we refuse to join? How can we condemn them for not protecting this community when we won’t allow them to?’3 His Catholic family and neighborhood view joining the RUC as a betrayal of the nationalist cause and shun him. The series is set later, during the peace process when the RUC has been reborn into the neutrally named Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). Lennon is one of the minority Catholic offi cers on the force and fi nds himself alienated from his primarily Protestant colleagues. As a Catholic who dated the niece of a prominent Republican paramilitary leader, his colleagues are deeply suspicious of him. This combined with his almost pathological drive for seeking out truth at any cost threatens the protected, closed-rank system of the police offi cers who are used to operating with impunity. The beginning of each novel fi nds Lennon continually demoted, punished, and recovering from some professional infraction that has placed him on probation. Lennon’s personal life is equally dour. His family disowned him after he joined the RUC, he abandoned his girlfriend (Marie McKenna) when she was pregnant, and he initially has no relationship with his young daughter Ellen. Lennon fi lls the lack of human connection in his life by frequenting prostitutes and living a lavish lifestyle funded entirely on debt. In addition to his womanizing, abuse of alcohol, and misanthropic nature, Lennon has an ambiguous moral code and a propensity for violence, which blurs the righteous line between himself and the depraved killers he hunts for a living. Moreover, the detective constantly teeters on the edge of hypocrisy, occasionally undermining his attempts to seek truth and justice. Although he condemns the deep corruption of the police force, in Collusion , Lennon blackmails the chief police command into endorsing a false version of events before a police inquiry. In Stolen Souls , Lennon simultaneously pursues an organized prostitution ring while frequenting prostitutes himself, failing to see the hypocrisy. Before he meets the young Russian prostitute whom he saves from the Lithuanian mob- sters, it has never occurred to Lennon that the women he frequents might be traffi cked or forced into prostitution: 94 FIONA COFFEY

[Lennon] had always felt shame during and afterward but it had never stopped him. They were willing to take his money, he told himself, they had not been coerced. They got paid while he scratched the itch. Nobody got hurt. Nobody suffered … Some of them were foreign … But in his mind, they were free women. He would never go with a girl who’d been forced into it. But how could he be sure? 4

Lennon’s dubious ethics are again questioned at the end of the last novel, The Final Silence , when he gains custody of his young, traumatized daughter by forcing her away at gunpoint from her deceased mother’s family. Expelled from the police force for aiding a fugitive, without a home or money, Lennon has regained custody of his daughter but has no stable life to offer her. Far from riding off into the sunset, the fi nal exchange between Ellen and Lennon expresses how tenuous and uncertain the future is. When Ellen asks her father where they are going, ‘For want of a lie, Lennon said, “I don’t know.”’5 Throughout the series, Lennon is suspended in a self-made purgatory, trying to atone for interwoven personal and professional sins. In The Twelve , a former IRA hit man, Gerry Fegan, is haunted by the ghosts of his victims. In a paradox that only makes sense within a Northern context, Fegan ‘atones’ for his sins by going on another killing spree and hunting down those who ordered the original murders during the Troubles. Whereas Fegan is able to attain peace and absolution from the ghosts of his victims, Neville refuses to afford Lennon such satisfaction.6 The detective’s sins are complex, layered, and far-reaching and cannot be so easily resolved. By presenting a deeply fl awed antihero as the lone truth seeker, Neville refuses to provide any certainty that Lennon is up to the task of making a signifi cant difference in the future of the Northern Irish state. Instead, Lennon exists between fl uctuating states of integrity and hypocrisy, success and failure, and each novel ends with the corrupt government leaders and crime bosses still strong and powerful. Neville’s writing thus remains stubbornly unsentimental and realistic in its depiction of what impact a fl awed individual can have while fi ghting his own demons as well as those of Northern Ireland. At the end of The Final Silence , a fellow offi cer tells Lennon, ‘I heard you were a good police offi cer, at one time.’ Lennon dolefully replies, ‘Not any more.’7 By The Final Silence , it appears that Lennon has been consumed by the violence and trauma of the North to such a degree that he can no longer purport to be a symbol of a higher ethical code meant to enforce the laws ‘THE PLACE YOU DON’T BELONG’: STUART NEVILLE’S BELFAST 95 of the land. Indeed, in each novel, it is often hard to distinguish Lennon from the dark underbelly of Belfast that he is charged with policing. The crazed serial murderer, the Sparkle, reminds Lennon of PSNI complicity in perpetuating a criminal climate: ‘remember this. Everything that happens now is on your head. I’ve spent so many years keeping this inside me, the wicked, the lightning, and now it’s free. Because you set it free. When you see the bodies, you’ll know they’re yours as much as mine.’8 Lennon has become indistinguishable from the ecosystem of crime and policing, which Neville depicts as having a symbiotic and perpetuating relationship. The contradictions inherent within Lennon—driven to pursue truth and justice but constantly undermined by his personal failings—refl ect the tenuous, liminal state of Neville’s post-Agreement North, which wavers between truth and lies, justice and corruption on a daily basis. Without discussing what constitutes justice and how individuals are allowed to seek it, Neville suggests that the future may be untenable. Indeed, the very premise of The Twelve is that the victims of Troubles violence have not received justice since the Agreement. They are now forced to pursue individual retribution in order to achieve a sense of peace. This inherent contradiction—that justice can only be achieved outside of the law—along with the confl ation of justice with retribution refl ects how unstable Neville views the current peace process. Neville’s work is best characterized as a Troubles thriller. This genre emerged during the early 1970s and remains one of the most popular and bestselling literary models in Northern Ireland. David Clark argues that the Troubles aided the development of Irish crime fi ction when the confl ict spilled over the border into the Republic, bringing in weaponry, drugs, and gang violence. This criminality, which grew increasingly more complex and widespread during the 1980s and 1990s, drew signifi cant media coverage and produced many true crime books written by the reporters who covered crime for the local newspapers. The public appetite for these stories translated into the burgeoning genre of Irish crime fi ction in the 1990s.9 The Troubles thriller is often divided into two categories: ‘Troubles-trash’ and Troubles literary thrillers. ‘Troubles-trash’ emphasizes sensationalistic stories and often trades in reductive tropes of the confl ict. British journalists, in particular, popularized the genre by perpetuating colonial representations of the Irish as ‘exotic, uncontrollable, intractable, violent, mysterious’ and the Troubles as ‘the mere product of the ongoing recidivist irrationality of the Irish’.10 Journalists such as Peter Dickson, Kevin Dowling, William Paul, and Tom Bradby used the 96 FIONA COFFEY deteriorating state of the Northern Irish confl ict as a backdrop for these commercial thrillers and represented the Troubles as a result of an inex- plicable violent proclivity within the Irish race itself. The British soldier Private Nelson in Dowling’s Interface : Ireland is ‘frightened of the dark, unpredictable Irish who nursed their hatred as a mother will nurse a child. He thought the only cure for them was death.’11 The Troubles thriller genre thus quickly became synonymous with reductionist and stereotypi- cal images of the North as violent, unstable, and entrenched. However, a second, more nuanced thriller, ‘which draws on serious political matters to refl ect upon social and religious disputes that cut across national and cultural identities’,12 also developed during this period. Often written by local authors, these novels show more complex representations of the confl ict while still operating within the conventions of the thriller category, which comprise:

the inclusion of actual or realistic political facts; the portrayal of characters who feel, one way or another, responsible for the social, political or historical contradictions of society, the resolution of which would turn them into heroes; the depiction of the confl ict in terms of pressure of the community on the individual; and the exploration of questions of identity. As within these novels the nature of the criminal actions is not analysed, these appear as the inevitable result of a chain of historical events and merely serve to perpetuate violence.13

Neville’s work refl ects many of these important qualities. His novels are fi rmly grounded within the real economic and political changes of the peace process with an emphasis on how the physical space of Belfast has changed since the advent of peace. As Fegan walks down the streets of Belfast in The Twelve , he marvels at how much the city has transformed: ‘Designer boutiques, restaurants and wine bars passed on either side. Students and young professionals crossed at the lights. They think the city belongs to them now , Fegan thought. If the peace process meant they could buy overpriced coffee without fear, then perhaps they were right.’14 Furthermore, Lennon feels a deep personal responsibility to bring justice to Belfast. Wracked with guilt for being unable to protect his murdered brother, for humiliating his Catholic family by joining the RUC, and for abandoning his girlfriend when she was pregnant, Lennon feels almost pathologically compelled to hunt down criminals in order to atone for these unforgivable sins. Finally, the very structure of the detective series ‘THE PLACE YOU DON’T BELONG’: STUART NEVILLE’S BELFAST 97 shows violence spilling from one novel into the next in an inevitable fashion that appears de-historicized and unstoppable. Clark further distinguishes the Troubles thriller as featuring ‘heroes [who] do not triumph over evil in any unequivocal way, and even where … they succeed to some extent, they still leave the reader with some sense of unease’.15 While classic detective fi ction tends to end with evil punished, mysteries revealed, and order restored, the endings of the Lennon novels bring little sense of resolution or confi dence that things have changed for the better. The Twelve ends with a bloody trail of dead paramilitary leaders and politicians, and the fallout from this carnage threatens the very stability of the Northern Irish state: ‘The politicians and the media would con- vulse, accusations would be hurled, recriminations threatened. Stormont might collapse again.’ 16 Collusion ends with Marie dead, Ellen without a mother, and a psycho-killer inexplicably still alive. The culmination of Stolen Souls fi nds Lennon in trouble for helping a fugitive escape while his corrupt boss remains in power. The Final Silence ends with Lennon driving away from Belfast with no job, money, or future to offer himself or his daughter, leaving the reader with a deep sense of unease. Hypocrisy is another important theme within the Troubles thriller genre, and Neville leaves no entities or persons untouched, including the Northern government, security forces, the peace process, the paramilitaries, religious fi gures, and Lennon himself. In each novel, government offi cials are so concerned with maintaining confi dence in the peace process and padding their own wallets that they willingly cover up any crime that might cause embarrassment or disgrace. Lennon repeatedly uncovers vast conspiracies involving high-ranking police offi cials who are in the pockets of the paramilitaries, government offi cials who preach peace while supporting criminal organizations, and even Loyalist and Republican groups who collude with each other in order to maintain wealth and power. Religious fi gures are shown to be as corrupt as politicians. In The Twelve , a Catholic priest preaches non-violence to his congregation while simultaneously taking bribes from the IRA. In Stolen Souls , a crazed killer pretends to be a Baptist preacher in order to lure vulnerable traffi cked women to his home before torturing and killing them. Neville shows that people in positions of authority and power are often those most susceptible to corruption, making the regular citizens of the North vulnerable and without confi - dence in those charged with leading and protecting them. Neville is particularly withering in his attacks on the paramilitary groups. He discredits the Republican and Loyalist causes, suggesting that 98 FIONA COFFEY paramilitary violence and crime have never been politically or ideologically motivated but instead are based on greed and desire for power. In The Twelve , repulsed by the violence of the North and made complacent by the wealth of the Celtic Tiger, former IRA gunman Gerry Fegan argues that the Republic of Ireland no longer wants reunifi cation with the North, rendering any ideological argument from the paramilitaries pointless:

South of the border, in the Republic of Ireland, the old parochial ways vanished, washed away by money and the country’s new vision of itself. The North had become the poor relation, the bastard child no one had the heart to send away. The struggle for the North’s reunifi cation with the rest of Ireland was rendered pointless. The rest of Ireland didn’t want them any more. So the longing for freedom, whatever that was, had given way to the lust for money and power. The paramilitaries, Republican and Loyalist alike, maintained the façade of their political ideals, but Fegan knew the truth. 17

Neville condemns the paramilitaries’ use of outdated and hollow political ideology to justify post-Agreement crime. He also suggests that with the advent of peace and without a clear enemy against which to struggle, many of the remaining paramilitaries lack purpose or a clear direction. The peace process essentially disenfranchised a portion of the population who got their money, power, and sense of purpose from the confl ict. As one Loyalist in The Twelve says, ‘If there’s peace, if it’s really over, then what use are we?’18 In Collusion , Lennon is continually astounded by the frequent co-operation between Loyalists and Republicans, arguing, ‘You, the big Loyalist, you sold a child to the Republicans … the collusion, it goes all ways, all directions. All the likes of you ever cared about was lin- ing your own pockets. You didn’t give a shit about any cause, did you? Just so long as you were making money.’19 It appears as though the peace process, which was predicated on the idea of unity, resulted in the mutual co-operation of the Republicans and Loyalists for deviant acts. Another central theme within the detective series (and shared across much Northern Irish writing) is the power of the past to arrest Northern society. In Neville’s work, the past takes form through dreams, memories, visions, ghosts, and premonitions. In The Twelve , Fegan is literally haunted by 12 vengeful ghosts who refuse to allow the hit man to move on from his past crimes. The ghosts are not represented as the symptoms of a psychotic mind, but as the real tortured souls of Troubles victims demanding justice from beyond the grave. In Collusion , Fegan has premonitions, which ‘THE PLACE YOU DON’T BELONG’: STUART NEVILLE’S BELFAST 99 haunt him, including a recurring nightmare in which he saves a young child from a fi re. This omen comes true at the end of the novel when Fegan saves Ellen from a burning house. Ellen also has premonitions, which are always of a violent nature. In Collusion , she predicts that the itinerant contract killer, the Traveler, will create bloody chaos while drawing Fegan out from hiding, and she also foresees most of the gory violence that ends the novel (including the gruesome death of her mother). In Stolen Souls , Ellen is haunted by the nightmare of her mother’s death. This young girl is trapped between past and future violence, with her dreams/premonitions repeatedly turning into a nightmare reality. After Ellen wakes up from a particularly bad nightmare, Lennon tells her, ‘You were only dreaming … You’re safe.’20 However, this generalized missive contradicts the recurring message that no one is safe from the past. Despite being born in peacetime, Ellen is kidnapped multiple times, gets trapped in a burning building, and witnesses her mother’s murder. Nightmares of past violence and premonitions of future violence haunt her dreams, undermining any suggestion that the peacetime generation is free from the troubled past. Ellen and Fegan, more than any other characters, embody some of the most signifi cant constructs in contemporary Northern Irish literature: that Troubles trauma and violence continue to defi ne and shape the peace process; that past violence perpetuates and generates new cycles of violence in the present; and that the history of the North will never be fully escaped. In Neville’s series, Belfast has learned to cover up evidence of its violent past with chains of Costa Coffee shops, expensive boutiques in the glass-domed Victoria Square Shopping Centre, and museums and luxury apartments in the multi-million dollar Titanic quarter; however, underlying wounds of the confl ict exist just beneath this shiny surface and within the fi ssures of the peace process. In The Twelve , David Campbell, a double agent charged with infi ltrating the IRA for the British government, refl ects on this phenomenon: ‘The city’s invisible borders remained the same as when Campbell fi rst walked its streets holding a rifl e eighteen years ago. The same lowlifes still fed off the misery they created, deepening the divisions wherever they could. The same hatreds still bubbled under the surface. But the city had grown fat, learning to mask its scars when necessary and show them when advantageous.’21 Tension between the middle-class commercialism and the still impoverished and segregated working-class neighborhoods is evident throughout the series, paralleling the illusory peace and providing yet another example of post-Agreement 100 FIONA COFFEY fracture. While hunting his next victim down the dark side-streets of Belfast, Fegan walks past the newly built Titanic quarter, which houses luxury apartment buildings, movie theatres, fi lm studios, and the Titanic museum: ‘The lights of the Odyssey complex shimmered across the water. The nightclubs inside it would be thronging with the young and affl uent; young enough to have no memory of men like Fegan, affl uent enough not to care.’ 22 This image of Fegan stalking his next victim down the hidden alleyways of Belfast while oblivious youth dance in fancy clubs across the water refl ects the splintered identity of a city caught between deepening class and generational divisions. This sentiment is echoed in the preface to Belfast Noir , an anthology of short stories edited by Neville and fellow Belfast crime writer Adrian McKinty:

Some might argue that the evidence of Northern Ireland's economic growth – the peace dividend, as it's known – has robbed the centre of Belfast of its character, but few citizens miss the security turnstiles, the bag searches, the nightly death of the city as it emptied out. Most feel the homogeniza- tion of Belfast is a price worth paying for the luxuries other places take for granted. It might seem a cynical observation, but the truth is, those com- forts – the restaurants, the theatres, the cinemas, the shopping malls – are the things that probably guarantee that the peace will hold.23

The commercialization of Belfast is thus a sign of progress, peace, and stability while also being an uneasy representation of how the city’s history and continuing divisions are being disguised rather than resolved. Furthermore, while the middle class has benefi ted economically and socially from the peace process, the working classes are again being left behind, creating fracture. This divide is further emphasized by a Belfast that appears to be split into two groups: those who are still drowning under the weight of the Troubles and a new generation who appear to be unaffected by the dark past. While Neville hints at a younger generation unaware and unaffected by the legacy of the Troubles, Ellen contradicts this optimism. Despite being born in peacetime, she is kidnapped, terrorized, and witnesses her mother’s murder. Nightmares of past violence and premonitions of future violence haunt her dreams, undermining any suggestion that the next generation is free from the troubled past. It is diffi cult not to read the pessimism inherent in Neville’s landscape given his and McKinty’s observation that in Belfast ‘on virtually every street corner and in nearly every pub ‘THE PLACE YOU DON’T BELONG’: STUART NEVILLE’S BELFAST 101 and shop something terrible happened within living memory’.24 Many of Neville’s characters, including Marie, Fegan, and Lennon himself, feel a deep sense of alienation from the shiny new Belfast that appears indifferent to its past. Marie tells Fegan, ‘You can’t choose where you belong, and where you don’t. But what if the place you don’t belong is the only place you have left?’25 In addition to deepening socio-economic and generational divides, societal fracture is further alienating those who have been unable to adapt to the ever-shifting peace process. Despite the complex, far-reaching, and nuanced considerations of post- Agreement life outlined above, Neville’s work has been criticized for perpetuating stereotypes of the Troubles and presenting Northern Ireland as a state arrested by its violent history, unable to progress or modernize. Bill Robton and Eamonn Hughes have identifi ed the Troubles thriller as preventing more nuanced and refl ective representations of the North within the development of the Northern Irish novel: ‘The thriller, with its stereotyped generic mechanisms (“goodies” against “baddies”) does not allow for any open interplay between characters and circumstances and leaves very little space for an articulated contextualization of the Northern Irish reality.’26 There are certainly problematic representations within Neville’s work. One such issue is Neville’s refusal to imbue the sectarian confl ict or its violence with any political or ideological meaning, purpose, or agency. Northerners have spent decades trying to combat persistent stereotypes that the confl ict is a barbaric, refl exive fi ght born of illogical hatred and an innate propensity for violence. Arguing against such limiting ideas, Northerners have long sought to educate people at home and abroad that the confl ict is the result of specifi c material and historical conditions that have created a larger ideological struggle regarding civil rights, ethnic identity, territory, and freedom. However, the Lennon series depicts Troubles violence as a crazed pathology enacted by mentally deranged individuals. The central killer is often depicted as a psychopath with a debased animalistic desire for killing. In Collusion , the Traveler is a nomadic, erratic contract killer with no roots or moral code. He derives great pleasure in the trail of blood he leaves throughout Belfast and has no compunction in killing women and children if they get in his way. His boss asks him, ‘I’m told you’ve no problems doing women and children. Is that right?’ The Traveler shrugs and replies, ‘Depends on the money.’27 In Stolen Souls , the mentally ill Billy Crawford tortures and kills fi ve traffi cked women and keeps another one locked in an abandoned house, chained to 102 FIONA COFFEY a bed. In The Final Silence , the Sparkle is a deranged serial killer who sees himself locked in an epic battle with Lennon. The Sparkle refl ects,

If he was truthful with himself, he had been unwell for some time. In his mind. The illness came and went. For weeks at a time, he could feel almost like a real human being. Reasonable. Calm. And then his hold on himself would slip, the wiser part of his mind unable to assert itself. And he became dangerous, more to himself than to anyone else.28

After gunning down shoppers at the Victoria Square Shopping Centre and declaring that he ‘should’ve killed more … Now it’s over, and it’s not enough. I wanted more,’29 the Sparkle attacks Lennon by pinning him to the fl oor and biting his face like a wild animal:

Lennon tried to lift his head. He felt a warm trickle on his scalp. He saw the Sparkle’s teeth, felt the fi sts grabbing bunches of his hair. His neck jerked through no will of his own, up, then down, an explosion in his skull … Blood consumed Lennon’s sight in that eye. Through the other he saw the Sparkle’s teeth once more, this time snapping at his fl esh. He felt pressure then pain in his other cheek, something pulling and tearing.30

This representation of violence as stemming from mental defect or an animalistic desire for death negates the arguments of Republicans and Loyalists who view their radicalization as being born of specifi c material circumstances rather than an atavistic tendency toward violence. In addition to representing violence as mental defect, Neville discredits the Republican and Loyalist causes, suggesting that paramilitary violence and crime have never been ideologically motivated but instead are based on greed and desire for power. One of Collusion ’s central arguments is that Republicans and Loyalists have been conspiring with each other for years in order to maintain power: ‘Loyalists supplying Republicans with fake DVDs and Ecstasy tablets. Republicans wholesaling laundered diesel and bootleg vodka to Loyalists. Feeding off the hate, letting on they’re fi ghting for their fucking causes when all the time they’re making each other rich.’ 31 By painting violence as pathological and paramilitary activity as motivated by greed rather than political ideology, Neville negates a lot of the work that has been done to transform understanding of the confl ict from this stereotype of an entrenched, barbaric fi ght to a more ‘THE PLACE YOU DON’T BELONG’: STUART NEVILLE’S BELFAST 103 complex ideological struggle to correct very specifi c historical, economic, and social conditions. However, violence as depoliticized and as stemming from mental defect are also standard conventions of the thriller genre and simultaneously can be viewed as a comment on an atmosphere that has allowed criminality and violence to continue in the North. By de-historicizing the violence of the Troubles, Neville emphasizes how ineffectual and destructive violence has been in obtaining any political resolution, and by linking violence to mental defect, he discredits the use of violence as a means of political activism. Laura Pelaschiar, a strong critic of Neville’s work who has argued that his ‘fi rst novel parades without shame all the most practiced clichés and stereotypes of the [Troubles thriller] genre’,32 even concedes that some of the reductive tropes that Troubles thrillers are criticized for can also be viewed as legitimate refl ections of the deep and understandable distrust that ordinary citizens have in the political process:

In Northern Irish narrative, the world of political commitment – with its adjacent terrain of terrorism – is populated by a singularly unattractive group of fi gures, who seem to fall mainly into two categories: the failed or corrupt leader and the violent killer … [This] cannot be dismissed simply as a sign of the immaturity of Northern Irish narrative in general (Hughes) or as a lack of imagination or of ‘willing knowledge’ on the part of its writers (McMinn). This fi ctional negativity is not so much a failure in itself, but rather it is an expression of a deep and persistent sense of disenchantment with and of distrust for the world of politics in general and of political activism and terrorism in particular.33

Thus the common clichés that the genre is often criticized for—such as the representation of Belfast as grimy and crime-ridden, the police force as corrupt and unreliable, and the British government as destructive—are rooted in the real lived experiences of Northern Irish citizens. The often- repeated criticism of the genre as ‘stagnant and reductive’ can also be viewed as a form of genre snobbery that tends to ignore the complexi- ties of highly popular, commercial forms. Morales-Ladrón also supports a more nuanced understanding of the tropes used within the Troubles thriller category. Because most thrillers are locked into certain conventions such as ‘closed patterns, formulaic structure, and predictability’,34 she argues that Troubles thrillers often appear, as many critics have argued, ‘to contribute to the consolidation of essentialist positions with regard to 104 FIONA COFFEY nationality, religion, politics, or culture, in other words, to identity’.35 But when readers delve deeper, many contemporary thrillers demonstrate ‘the destabilization of binary notions, problematizing and blurring categories with regard to all kind of boundaries—national, geographical, sexual, racial or cultural—stressing ultimately difference and hybridization’.36 Although Neville operates within many of the typical conventions of the Troubles thriller, he also undermines normative representations of the post-Agreement North and blurs distinctions between traditional binaries. While the Northern government and media promote progressive and peaceful images of a new Northern Ireland, Neville takes care to remind readers that beyond the shiny new buildings and Titanic tourism sites are insidious remnants of the Troubled past and an increasing socio-economic divide. While Northern citizens are trying to forge a positive and stable future, the government, paramilitaries, and police force are still entrenched in old patterns and refl exive behaviors that perpetuate crime and division. Far from showing an essentialist viewpoint locked into Troubles stereotypes, there is no clear distinction between the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’ in Neville’s work. The hollow goals and rhetoric of police, religious leaders, politicians, and paramilitaries often make them indistinguishable from each other, creating a symbiotic ecosystem of crime and policing where the two collapse into each other. Truth and lies, integrity and corruption, justice and vengeance are blurry in Neville’s work, and the endings of the Lennon novels are ambiguous, unresolved, and lacking in clear judgment or resolution, refl ecting destabilization and obfuscation. Far from a ‘stagnant’ representation of Northern Ireland, Neville shows the ever-shifting positioning of the North and the tenuous state of its peace process status. Neville’s Detective Lennon series is, therefore, not a Troubles-trash thriller, operating in an anachronistic world of absolutisms and binaries. Instead, this work falls into what could be described as a ‘peace process’ thriller, working within blurred and increasingly obscured systems to question how truth, justice, and peace will be defi ned and achieved in the North today. Neville’s series ultimately critiques naïve assumptions of the peace process that the past can be erased by middle-class commercialism and the appearance of a more equitable police force and government. His novels expose the deep societal fractions and contradictions that instead characterize the North today: deepening class divisions, a generational split marked by youth with no living memory of the Troubles, and lingering remnants of violence, corruption, and refl exive confl ict. He ultimately ‘THE PLACE YOU DON’T BELONG’: STUART NEVILLE’S BELFAST 105 shows that the peace process is defi ned by a marked haunting of the past that must be fully recognized.

NOTES 1. The Troubles refers to a period of extremely violent sectarian confl ict between Catholic nationalists and Protestant Unionists from roughly 1968/69 to 1998. 2. The Twelve was renamed The Ghosts of Belfast for publication in the United States. 3. S. Neville (2010) Collusion (New York: Soho Press), p. 153. 4. S. Neville (2011) Stolen Souls (New York: Soho Press), pp. 290–1. 5. S. Neville (2014) The Final Silence (New York: Soho Press), p. 340. 6. J. Foster (2011) ‘The Cost of Violence PW Talks with Stuart Neville’, Publisher ’ s Weekly , http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/ authors/interviews/article/48390-the-cost-of-violence-pw-talks-with- stuart-neville.html , date accessed 8 June 2015. 7. S. Neville (2014), p. 314. 8. S. Neville (2014), p. 271. 9. D. Clark (2014) ‘Emerald Noir ?: Contemporary Irish Crime Fiction’ in R. Aiura and J.D. McClure (eds) East Meets West (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), p. 148. 10. A. Kelly (2012) ‘The Troubles with the Thriller: Northern Ireland, Political Violence and the Peace Process’ in A. Piette and M. Rawlinson (eds) The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth -century British and American War Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), p. 508. 11. K. Dowling (1979) Interface : Ireland (London: Barrie and Jenkins), p. 41 as qtd. in A. Kelly (2012), p. 508. 12. M. Morales-Ladrón (2006) ‘“Troubling” Thrillers: Between Politics and Popular Fiction in the novels of Benedict Kiely, Brian Moore and Colin Bateman’, Estudios Irlandeses , 1, 58. 13. M. Morales-Ladrón (2006), 60. 14. S. Neville (2009) The Ghosts of Belfast /The Twelve (New York: Soho Press), p. 27. 15. M. Morales-Ladrón (2006), 62. 16. S. Neville (2009), p. 325. 17. S. Neville (2009), p. 84. 18. S. Neville (2009), p. 137. 19. S. Neville (2010), p. 303. 20. S. Neville (2011), p. 7. 21. S. Neville (2009), p. 91. 22. S. Neville (2009), p. 14. 106 FIONA COFFEY

23. A. McKinty and S. Neville (2014) Belfast Noir (Brooklyn: Akashic Books), p. 17. 24. A. McKinty and S. Neville (2014), p. 18. 25. S. Neville (2009), p. 52. 26. L. Pelaschiar (1998) Writing the North : The Contemporary Novel in Northern Ireland (Trieste: Edizioni Parnaso) as excerpted in Confl ict Archive on the Internet (CAIN ), http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/literature/novels/pelaschiar.htm , date accessed 9 June 2015. 27. S. Neville (2010), p. 20. 28. S. Neville (2014), p. 315. 29. S. Neville (2014), p. 326. 30. S. Neville (2014), p. 328. 31. S. Neville (2010), p. 170. 32. L. Pelaschiar (2010) ‘Rev. of The Twelve ’, Estudios Irlandeses , 5, 195. 33. L. Pelaschiar (1998), http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/literature/novels/pelaschiar. htm , date accessed 9 June 2015. 34. M. Morales-Ladrón (2006), 60. 35. M. Morales-Ladrón (2006), 60. 36. M. Morales-Ladrón (2006), 60. CHAPTER 7

Voicing the Unspeakable: Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad

Shirley Peterson

The disorienting formal characteristics of modernist and postmodernist texts have typically served to illustrate such traumatic symptoms as the fragmentation of the self, alienation, identity disorder, and dissociation. But popular genres in the naturalistic or realistic tradition have been deemed less illustrative of the traumatic experience. However, critics have recently argued for the expansion of trauma texts to include non-Western and popular genres.1 This essay extends that argument to detective fi c- tion, which becomes a valuable artifact of historical signifi cance when read as a trauma narrative, refl ecting Judith Herman’s assertion that ‘denial, repression, and dissociation operate on a social as well as an individual level’.2 Of particular interest is the period of Irish economic prosperity spanning the 1990s to 2008 known as the Celtic Tiger. The disorienting effect of the Tiger years has been noted by many critics, including Declan Kiberd, who described the rapid change as akin to looking through ‘an expansive rear-view mirror attached to a fast car’.3 In 2008, on the brink of the Tiger’s collapse, R.F. Foster echoed the same idea, arguing that the Irish now inhabited a future in which they were ‘experiencing history in fast-forward mode’.4 These metaphors of wild acceleration suggest a traumatic ‘fast break’ from twentieth-century social and cultural traditions which, despite underpinning a nostalgia-infused Irish identity, kept Ireland in a state of either political isolation and economic stagnation or fi tful development. The image of a speeding car further illustrates how the Tiger’s unsustainable economic expansion left behind a steady stream of victims before crashing head-on into the hard reality of economic collapse.

Amid the frenzy of upward mobility, opportunities for crime proliferated as did interest in the crime novel, including the bestselling Dublin Murder Squad series of Tana French. These police procedurals illustrate how the detective genre can express, through both subject and narrative method, the destabilizing infl uence of trauma on both individual and communal levels.5 One of the most commercially and critically successful Irish crime writers,6 French had a peripatetic upbringing in Ireland, Italy, Malawi, and the United States, which situates her well as both a subjective and an objective observer of the Celtic Tiger years. From this dual perspective, her novels engage with what Joe Cleary terms ‘Irish history as trauma … in which an overwhelming event could not be fully assimilated at the time of its occurrence, and which must therefore belatedly be compulsively re- possessed’.7 Along similar lines, David Lloyd asserts that the ‘after-effects of colonization for a culture … [are] identical with those for the traumatized individual, one of which is the “unspeakableness” of the trauma itself’.8 This ‘unspeakableness’ may have found expression through the crime genre, which Fintan O’Toole declares ‘the nearest thing we have to a realist literature adequate to capturing the nature of contemporary society’.9 Accordingly, Andrew Kincaid notes how post-Tiger crime fi ction ‘refl ects the pace of change while also giving nervous expression to the disillusionment and self-doubt that lay just below the glittering prosperity’.10 Thus, Emerald Noir—aka Celtic Noir and Hibernian Homicide—has its roots in Ireland’s traumatic past, including the blip now known as the late Celtic Tiger. The Dublin Murder Squad series launched in 2007, within the waning days of the Celtic Tiger, but it also resonates with events preceding the boom years. As I have argued elsewhere, the scene of the crime in French’s novels is generally a hastily modernizing or downsizing Dublin in which the buried past surfaces in homicide cases doubling as ‘home-icide’.11 The traumatic backdrop to all these crimes includes colonialism’s eclipse of the Irish language and cultural traditions; the nineteenth-century famine and land wars; the Troubles; decades of postcolonial social and economic dor- mancy; and, fi nally, the economic rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger accompa- nied by revelations about social and clerical scandals. As French explains, the effects of rapid modernization and globalization have been violent and disorienting for a nation like Ireland, until recently often regarded as VOICING THE UNSPEAKABLE: TANA FRENCH’S DUBLIN MURDER SQUAD 109 a third world country. She contemplates ‘what happens when a past, that a newly wealthy country has tried to forget ever existed, collides head-on with the twisted, materialist mores of the present … crime fi ction becomes a point of exploration of a society’s deepest fears, of things that it hasn’t assimilated’.12 These intrusive and unassimilated fears, which Herman calls ‘unspeakable’, align with Cathy Caruth’s description of trauma as unclaimed experience : ‘the unwitting reenactment of an event that one cannot simply leave behind’ but ‘which is not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor’. At the nexus ‘between knowing and not knowing’, literature both ‘speak[s] about and speak[s] through the profound story of traumatic experience’.13 In a very literal sense, detective fi ction takes extremely traumatic experience—usually murder—as its subject matter, but it can function in at least two ways. Writing about trauma in novels about the Troubles, Robert Garratt makes a distinction between novels about trauma and trauma novels. The former, he argues, ‘tend to objectify traumatic experience as an external force … that determines character’ or plot, while the latter ‘employs a narrative strategy in which a reconstruction of events through memories, fl ashbacks, dreams, and haunting is as important as the events themselves’.14 In this regard trauma novels combine ‘subject and method’ to ‘[balance] narration and narrative’ in order to ‘[describe] an external violent action and [portray] the mind’s attempts to remember it’. 15 Standard detective stories, such as those by Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Conan Doyle, might be classifi ed as being about trauma: the investigative process involving a detective (Dupin or Holmes) who assembles disparate clues into an objective and rational ‘truth’ about an event. French’s narratives, however, move into the category of trauma novels, balancing subject and method through (often unreliable) fi rst-person narrators, confronting temporal discontinuities and fragmented identity while struggling to assimilate the ‘unspeakable’ into a coherent causal analysis. These novels also extend beyond the hard-boiled school of American detective fi ction (although certainly drawing from some of its features) in the preva- lence of symptoms specifi cally related to trauma. Through such tropes as archaeology, amnesia, the idyllic pastoral, matricide, and elements of the supernatural, French’s series demonstrates the challenge to apprehend- ing the truth behind a traumatizing event. As Dori Laub notes regarding 110 SHIRLEY PETERSON

Holocaust narratives, ‘One has to know one’s buried truth in order to be able to live one’s life.’ The ability to ‘[capture the story] in thought , memory , and speech’ is elusive and can lead to distortions of memory and psychic alienation’16 (italics in original). In French’s novels, the elusive or inaccessible ‘buried truth’ often erupts within the tectonic shifts from the Old to the New Ireland. To borrow from Caruth, we could say they ‘speak about’ this experience through the conventions of the police procedural and ‘speak through’ the experience in tropes associated with trauma. In the Woods (2007) initiates the series’ many traumatic features in an archetypal setting containing the ‘buried truth’ of two crimes. The prin- cipal tropes of archaeology and amnesia convey what Herman calls ‘the central dialectic of psychological trauma’, which she locates in ‘the confl ict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud’.17 The narrator/protagonist, Detective Rob Ryan, is French’s most traumatized detective. As 12-year-old Adam Ryan, he survived a mysterious attack on himself and two friends while playing in the woods outside his Knocknaree suburban home in 1984. Discovered afterwards with bloodstained shoes, a torn shirt, and minor scratches, Ryan retained no memory of the event and was subsequently removed from his home to England for his own protection and recovery. His friends were never found. His return to the scene of the crime two decades later as Detective Rob Ryan involves another crime, the murder of 12-year-old Katie Devlin, whose body is found on a Bronze Age ceremonial stone at an archaeological dig. Although Ryan has no memory of his childhood trauma, he senses that he ‘never left that wood’.18 In fact, his career path into the Dublin Murder Squad seems designed to return him to the site where that part of his memory lies buried. At fi rst it appears that he might solve the earlier crime in the familiar detective fashion, through clues (ultimately red herrings) left at the scene of Katie’s murder. The further Ryan digs into the case, however, the more psychologically dissociated he becomes,19 and the novel gradually forecloses expectations for complete resolution. Even his romantic relationship with his partner, Detective Cassie Maddox, breaks down as he circles the truth about his own trauma, and, as Rosemary Erickson Johnsen points out, he repeatedly lies, subverting expectations for closure.20 Ryan’s inability to confront the ‘buried truth’ of his own past steadily erodes his judgment until he actually destroys the Devlin case. The crime scene in an archaeology site metaphorically merges with the amnesia theme to indirectly critique the Celtic Tiger years, particularly as a failure to protect Irish heritage and to address past injustice. VOICING THE UNSPEAKABLE: TANA FRENCH’S DUBLIN MURDER SQUAD 111

Rachel Schaffer argues that French’s detectives serve as ‘archaeologists of crime’,21 and as Ryan digs for clues to Katie’s murder at the excavation site where the body is discovered, this crime gradually links to the national crime narrative of ‘progress’. Knocknaree lies at the crossroads of Old and New Ireland, the latter promoted in the ‘Booster’ rhetoric in vogue during the rise of the Tiger that celebrated Irish initiative and discouraged ‘Begrudger’ rhetoric that criticized the growing socio-economic dispari- ties.22 This setting actually marks the intersection of three crime scenes: one involving Ryan in 1984, one involving Katie’s murder, and the third involving the destruction of a heritage site by developers. The third crime takes the form of a civic plan for a new motorway to handle increased traffi c between the suburbs and Dublin. That plan necessitates shutting down the excavation site, losing access not only to ancient artifacts but also to possible clues. Here, French purposely draws ‘parallels with recent events in Irish history, where [Irish] cultural and national identity has held up “progress”, such as the construction of the M3 motorway in the Tara Valley … an important sacral site associated with Indo-European kingship rituals’.23 The obliteration of the Knocknaree dig also resonates with the traumatic cultural erasure effected by colonialism. That the archaeological dig is halted in the end to make way for the motorway reinforces the demand to keep the inconvenient past buried. The commercial encroachment on this ancient site of Irish identity also ties Ryan’s amnesia to the collective amnesia attending Celtic Tiger Ireland during rapid modernization and economic prosperity. Ryan’s inability to access and integrate his traumatic experience refl ects Pierre Janet’s early observations on ‘traumatic memory’ as resistant to narrative24 ; his amnesia also signals a lacuna in the collective memory, what Andreas Huyssen termed the fi n de siècle ‘culture of amnesia’ in 1995: ‘The past is not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to become memory. The fi ssure that opens up between experiencing an event and remembering it in representation is unavoidable.’25 While Ryan’s inability to access, articulate, or integrate his trauma experience with his current reality leaves him with a permanent gap in his memory, the fi ssure created by Celtic Tiger Ireland’s ‘culture of amnesia’ threatens to replace the historical memory of national struggle for subjectivity and justice with the myth of unadulter- ated capitalistic success. As French has commented, the country’s uncriti- cal embrace of Celtic Tiger exuberance unfairly implied that ‘we should be embarrassed about the fact that Ireland existed before the year 1996 or so’.26 The Booster narrative, however, is undercut by the novel’s refer- 112 SHIRLEY PETERSON ences to lost cultural landmarks, like the Knocknaree archaeological site where the body of Katie Devlin, whose name symbolically links her to Mother Ireland, lies in a posture of ritualistic matricide. This traumatic fi ssure between pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland and its hey- day takes on gruesome dimensions in French’s third novel, Faithful Place (2010), in which another archaeological trope involves exhuming the remains of Rosie Daly in the basement of a building in the Liberties, a section of early Dublin named ‘hundreds of years ago, because they went their own way and made their own rules’.27 The crime victim is literally buried within Ireland’s originating site of occupation and colonialism. In 1985, Rosie had been poised to elope with her young lover, Frank Mackey, and start a new life in England when she mysteriously disappeared, leaving the impression she had jilted him for a better life in the UK. Twenty-two years later, Detective Mackey fi nds himself drawn back into that traumatic moment, believing erroneously over the years that Rosie rejected him for being a waster and ‘petty criminal’.28 The reformed Mackey does not suffer the amnesia that marks Ryan’s psyche, but he has intentionally reinvented himself and repressed some unsettling details of his traumatic family history, including a plot with his brother, Shay, to murder their father, a brutal alcoholic patriarch. Their plan was scuttled by Rosie’s offer to elope with Frank to England. The case opens with the discovery of Rosie’s suitcase stuffed up the chimney of an abandoned row house, once slated for new development with Tiger money but now, in the property crisis, being gutted for scraps.29 Further excavation of the basement reveals Mackey’s worst fears about his troubled past when Rosie’s remains surface, ‘curled up like a kid asleep, face tucked down in its arms’,30 the very image of lost innocence. Once again, a detective’s personal trauma is linked to the culture’s refusal to address its traumatic past. While Jean Gregorek argues that ‘French’s work converts all problems into family problems’,31 Maureen Reddy notes how the family in Faithful Place serves as an index of ‘dangerous and corrupt’ public institutions, particularly those linked to child abuse. The Mackey family’s craziness, she argues, is simply a ‘difference of degree, not of kind’. 32 Rosie’s corpse lies at the juncture of private and public trauma, her name evoking the iconic Dark Rosaleen, who drives the sons of Ireland to martyrdom. In this case, though, the pattern is upended as she becomes their matricidal victim. When they fi rst reunite early in Frank’s investigation, Frank tells Shay in words recalling their father’s nationalist rhetoric that he ‘would’ve died for Rosie Daly’. 33 But VOICING THE UNSPEAKABLE: TANA FRENCH’S DUBLIN MURDER SQUAD 113 the romantic/nationalist narrative in which Frank has cast himself as victim of Rosie/Ireland is undercut by Shay’s accusation that by effectively abandoning his siblings in the 1980s, Frank is complicit in the erasure of Ireland’s victims of poverty during prosperity. Frank’s failure to acknowledge Shay’s sacrifi ces mirrors the amnesia of New Ireland’s rising middle class toward those who suffered past injustices and, like Shay, now demand reparations. When Frank’s investigation threatens Shay’s hopes for his own future, Shay voices the suffering of those left behind in the wake of Ireland’s domestic upheaval: ‘[I] gave up [my] education so you could get yours. We had a fucking right to you. Her, Rosie Daly, she had no right getting in the way of that’ 34 (italics in original). The excavation of the Mackey family’s traumatic history provides a grim counterpoint to the nostalgic pastoral view of the 1980s imagined by Detective Ryan. Unlike Ryan’s view, Shay’s depiction of a traumatized generation that sought escape through alcoholism, exile—or even ‘kill[ing one’s] own da’—is at least understandable.35 The necessity of confronting that past fi nds powerful expression in the very concrete image of Dublin at the end of the novel. In the fi nal scene, Mackey surveys his city like an archaeologist/detective searching beneath the façade of progress for what is authentic: ‘it’s the old stuff, the stuff that’s endured, that might just keep enduring’.36 While reassuring on one level, the same might be said of family and communal trauma that, when left unaddressed, is recycled through generations. While the communal need to ‘fi nd our way back home’ 37 reverber- ates throughout In the Woods and Faithful Place , the association of homicide with home-icide is most pervasive in The Likeness (2008) and Broken Harbor (2011), which directly link domestic trauma to the national housing crisis. In The Likeness , Detective Cassie Maddox is seduced by the familial bonds she witnesses among a commune of young Trinity College students sharing a dilapidated Big House called Whitethorn. Noting similarities to the Gothic novel, Gregorek argues that French’s novels are ‘haunted … by nostalgia for a time when it was possible to imagine the home as a space of safety and resistance to market forces’. Thus, the Whitethorn group members exist in a state of ‘existential homelessness’,38 clinging to the values of pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland against the dissociative effects of globalization that threaten the traditional Irish home. In the novel, Lexie Madison, a member of the Whitethorn commune, turns up dead in a famine cottage not far from the Big House, a crime linking two of colonial Ireland’s iconic domestic images. The investigation is over- 114 SHIRLEY PETERSON seen by Frank Mackey, who assigns Maddox to the case because she is a ‘dead ringer’ for the victim. While this doubling may stretch the limits of plausibility, it also signals Maddox’s dissociative state as Lexie’s alter ego. For a while, Maddox poses successfully as Lexie to infi ltrate the commune and expose the killer. As she unravels the network of ties that bind this solipsistic group, however, she increasingly identifi es with her double and is drawn into the group’s familial circle. Maddox is grieving the loss of her relationship with Rob Ryan, and she has been the victim herself of traumas involving the tragic loss of her parents, an attempted sexual assault, and a stabbing. The Likeness also focuses on Maddox’s alienation and disori- entation in a prosperous but unrecognizable city where familiar signs of home have evaporated in an overheated economy. One side effect of prosperity has been a rise in crime, against which the Whitethorn commune seems a refuge as well as a connection to an Ireland once recognized as an authentic, if impoverished, home. By contrast, modern Dublin reels from the effects of what J. Douglas Porteous and Sandra E. Smith have termed ‘domicide’, or ‘the murder of home’: the literal and psychological global destruction of home by powerful corporate and political interests.39 Like Detectives Rob Ryan and Frank Mackey, the commune’s nostalgic view of the past depends upon a degree of amnesia. While the Whitethorn members celebrate their Irish authenticity as a bulwark against a consumer- driven Dublin forsaking its heritage, they overlook Whitethorn’s link to the colonial past as the site of an earlier crime perpetrated by its Anglo- Irish landlord against a local village woman. They also fail to see how their preservation of Whitethorn has a negative economic impact on a community with high unemployment eager to tap the real estate for economic development.40 Ironically, as Moira Casey has noted, the commune members act much like the Big House landlords that preceded them: ‘remote and formidable’.41 Their pact never to discuss the past constitutes a denial of history that makes them vulnerable to Lexie’s betrayal and ultimately leads to the destruction of Whitethorn. A similar sense of communal trauma associated with home-icide and historical denial occupies Detective Mick ‘Scorcher’ Kennedy in Broken Harbor , who returns to the site of a childhood trauma involving his mother’s suicide to investigate the murders of family members in a half- built ghost estate named Brianstown, a seemingly crass commercialized allusion to Brian Boru. The historical erasure of the former name, ‘Broken Harbor’, not to mention its Irish etymology— breacadh : daybreak— resonates with Kennedy’s sense of cultural displacement and abandon- VOICING THE UNSPEAKABLE: TANA FRENCH’S DUBLIN MURDER SQUAD 115 ment.42 Left to languish in the post-housing bubble, Brianstown is less the luxury enclave promoted in advertisements than ‘the village of the damned’.43 Kennedy, though, is eager to forget his traumatic associations with the place, so he subscribes to the same Booster philosophy that has driven the Patrick Spain family into deep debt during the prosperous Tiger years. The Spains’ belief in the Utopian myth of unfettered capitalism has led them, along with many others, to economic bankruptcy. French has noted how such blind optimism runs counter to a more typical Irish cynicism, which might have offered a corrective; instead it ‘dissolved just at the moment when it was needed most’, leaving people like the Spains vulnerable to unscrupulous speculators.44 The traumatic impact of the Celtic Tiger on the millennial generation informs French’s most recent novel, The Secret Place (2014), in which Detectives Stephen Moran and Antoinette Conway investigate the murder of a young man on the grounds of St. Kilda’s, ‘a hermetically sealed world of teenagers at a tony girls’ prep school … [with] the toxic stew of hor- mones and homicidal rivalries roiling within’.45 Here, the victim of a brutal murder—a boy from a neighboring school—is discovered in a ‘secret place’, a pastoral student hideaway. A counterpoint to the sexual marketplace of the mall,46 as well as to the prelapsarian garden of Rob Ryan’s 1980s Ireland, this glade provides an escape for millennials. Nurtured in the Celtic Tiger years, this generation seems unhinged from its heritage, foundering in a globalized new century, and clinging desperately to remnants of community in the form of ‘mean girl’ cliques.47 Like the Whitethorn group, their remoteness from the economic crisis of the outside world fosters their solipsistic narcissism and homesickness.48 The class divide between the privileged students and the working-class detectives, Moran and Conway, contributes to their detachment as do technology and social networks that replace traditional communal bonds, both sustaining and destroying their ‘private claustrophobic, world-within-a-world’.49 Ironically, a somewhat antiquated version of the social network—a bulletin board—provides another ‘secret place’ where an anonymous post reveals the fi rst clue: ‘I know who killed him ’50 (italics in original). The girls’ reluctance to openly reveal their secrets illustrates the moral complexity of this clique-ish world in which ‘the will to deny [competes with] the will to proclaim … an unspeakable secret’.51 As Moran tells Conway, ‘this generation know all the facts, they’ve seen the porn sites, probably they know more positions than you and me put together; but when it comes to the real thing, they’re miles out of their depth’.52 Thus, one of them, Frank Mackey’s daughter, Holly, longs for a 116 SHIRLEY PETERSON time ‘fi fty years ago [when] no one shagged anyone till they got married’, a statement immediately undercut by a reminder of Magdalene Laundries.53 However, this yearning for certitude, sought through an Amazonian sisterhood founded on rejection of men, ultimately leads to group hysteria that results in ritualistic murder. Such altered psychological states are manifest through supernatural elements in many of the novels, particularly as ghostly hauntings. John Teel notes the pervasiveness of this trope in French’s novels, in which victims are haunted by ‘the ghosts that may never be dispelled’.54 For instance, during Rob Ryan’s investigation of Katie Devlin’s murder, he returns to the woods where his friends disappeared only to encounter a spirit akin to the pooka fairy of Irish folklore that lives in the woods and terrorizes children.55 Terrifi ed of what it might reveal, he fl ees but remains haunted by the experience. Likewise, the ghostly presence of Lexie Madison, a dop- pelgänger for Maddox, haunts Whitethorn while the commune members fi xate on a past which they have romanticized and essentially whitewashed in their self-imposed isolation. More realistically, a mysterious creature appears to have invaded the Spain family’s home, ‘a genre-shifting Gothic element haunting the ruins of modern suburbia, a vestige of the Irish past’.56 Patrick Spain’s conviction that there is a predatory animal in his attic is at least metaphorically accurate—the Celtic Tiger has invaded his home—even if he is mentally deranged. Finally, St. Kilda’s lore includes a ghost nun who haunts the school grounds, and group hysteria spreads when the ghost of Chris Harper appears to one girl. Another displays paranormal powers, and the Amazonian sisterhood participates in ‘witch games’ that lead one to perform a ‘purify[ing]’ sacrifi cial murder.57 While some of these supernatural elements have plausible explanations, French leaves others unexplained, which might suggest a fl aw in these detective narratives. However, as trauma novels these narrative lacunae dramatize well the diffi culty of integrating traumatic experience into the realm of narrative memory. While Teel rightly asserts that the hauntings blur the genre distinctions between Gothic and police procedural, producing a ‘mode that always hovers on the edge of the irrational and unexplainable’,58 this mode also serves the genre of trauma narrative. Overall, the supernatural elements suggest that though the detectives might be capable of cracking the case, the trauma they encounter either subjectively or objectively is never fully containable within the simple crime genre. Reading crime fi ction as trauma narratives can deepen our understanding and appreciation of the former while expanding our sources of study VOICING THE UNSPEAKABLE: TANA FRENCH’S DUBLIN MURDER SQUAD 117 for the latter. Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series is just one valuable source for such an undertaking. By linking personal to communal trauma, the novels demonstrate how ‘an understanding of psychological trauma begins with rediscovering history’.59 If the country is truly ready to move away from its dark past morally and psychologically—as its recent groundbreaking endorsement of marriage equality indicates it might be— there needs to be a full accounting of how Ireland’s traumatic history has found its way into, and to a certain extent fi xated, the national psyche. A reckoning must precede recovery. In the meantime, the wealth of rich crime stories proliferating over the past twenty-fi ve years provides ample terrain for further digging.

NOTES 1. G. Buelens, S. Durrant, and R. Eaglestone, eds (2014) The Future of Trauma Theory : Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism (New York: Routledge), p. 7. 2. J. Herman (1992) Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books), p. 2. 3. D. Kiberd (2005) The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 276. 4. R.F. Foster (2008) Luck and the Irish : A Brief History of Change from 1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 1. 5. Earlier parts of this chapter were published in Clues : A Journal of Detection 30.2 (2012) and 32.1 (2014). 6. See the special issue on Tana French in Clues : A Journal of Detection , ed. Rachel Schaffer, 32.1 (2014). 7. J. Cleary (2000) ‘Modernization and Aesthetic Ideology in Contemporary Irish Culture’ in R. Ryan (ed.) Writing in the Irish Republic : Literature , Culture , Politics 1949 – 1999 (London: Macmillan), pp. 107–8. Writing from a 1990s perspective, Cleary argues that current aesthetics ‘tend to stymie strong critique’ of modernity (pp. 109–10), but more recently Rosemary Erickson Johnsen offers a persuasive counterpoint to Cleary’s assertion, arguing that Dermot Bolger’s crime novel The Journey Home (1990) does critique modernity and also provides a precursor to later popular crime novels by Gene Kerrigan and Tana French. 8. D. Lloyd (2000) ‘Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?’, Interventions : International Journal of Postcolonial Studies , 2.2, 214. 9. F. O’Toole (2011) ‘From Chandler and the “Playboy” to the Contemporary Crime Wave’ in D. Burke (ed.) Down These Green Streets : Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (Dublin: Liberties Press), p. 360. 118 SHIRLEY PETERSON

10. A. Kincaid (2010) ‘“Down These Mean Streets”: The City and Critique in Contemporary Irish Noir’, Éire - Ireland , 45.1–2, 41. 11. S. Peterson (2012), 98. 12. T. French (2011b) Interview by Claire Coughlan in D. Burke (ed.) Down These Green Streets : Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (Dublin: Liberties Press), pp. 335–6. 13. C. Caruth (1996) Unclaimed Experience : Trauma , Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), pp. 2–4. Caruth draws from ideas regarding trauma and memory initiated by Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud in the nineteenth century. 14. R. Garratt (2011) Trauma and History in the Irish Novel : The Return of the Dead (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 5. 15. R. Garratt (2011), p. 5. 16. D. Laub (1992) ‘An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival’ in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony : Crises of Witnessing in Literature , Psychoanalysis , and History (New York: Routledge), pp. 78–9. 17. J. Herman (1992), p. 1. 18. T. French (2007) In the Woods (New York: Penguin), p. 31. 19. See B. van der Kolk, O. van der Hart, and C.R. Marmar (1996) ‘Dissociation and Information Processing in Posttraumautic Stress Disorder’ in B. van der Kolk, A. McFarlane, and L. Weisaeth (eds) Traumatic Stress : The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind , Body , and Society (New York: Guilford Press), p. 306: ‘“Dissociation” refers to a compartmentalization of experience: Elements of a trauma are not integrated into a unitary whole or an integrated sense of self.’ 20. R. Erickson Johnsen (2014) ‘Crime Fiction’s Dublin: Reconstructing Reality in Novels by Dermot Bolger, Gene Kerrigan, and Tana French’, Eire - Ireland , 49.1–2, 133–5. ‘What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this – two things: I crave truth. And I lie’ (T. French (2007), p. 4). 21. R. Schaffer (2014) ‘Tana French: Archaeologist of Crime’, Clues : A Journal of Detection , 32.1, 32. 22. See R.F. Foster (2008), p. 8. 23. T. French (2011b), 337. 24. P. Janet (1925) Psychological Healing , Vol. 1, trans. E. Paul and C. Paul (New York: Macmillan), p. 663. 25. A. Huyssen (1995) Twilight Memories : Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge), p. 3. 26. T. French (2011b), p. 337. 27. T. French (2010) Faithful Place (New York: Penguin), p. 17. 28. T. French (2010), p. 31. 29. T. French (2010), p. 11. VOICING THE UNSPEAKABLE: TANA FRENCH’S DUBLIN MURDER SQUAD 119

30. T. French (2010), p. 81. 31. J. Gregorek (2014) ‘Fables of Foreclosure: Tana French’s Police Procedurals of Recessionary Ireland’ in J.H. Kim (ed.) Class and Culture in Crime Fiction : Essays on Works in English since the 1970s (Jefferson, NC: McFarland), p. 152. 32. M. Reddy (2014) ‘Authority and Irish Cultural Memory in Faithful Place and Broken Harbor ’, Clues : A Journal of Detection , 30.2, 84. 33. T. French (2010), p. 118. 34. T. French (2010), p. 350. 35. T. French (2010), p. 358. The reference here to J.M. Synge’s Christy Mahon ( The Playboy of the Western World ) recalls another national narrative in which an abusive patriarch is challenged by a traumatized son. 36. T. French (2010), p. 400. 37. T. French (2010), p. 400. 38. J. Gregorek (2014), p. 155. 39. J. Douglas Porteous and Sandra E. Smith (2001) Domicide : The Global Destruction of Home (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press), p. 3. 40. Gregorek argues that the novel nostalgically presents the Whitethorn members as a ‘group of brave iconoclasts standing against the wave of entrepreneurialism infecting Irish life’ (p. 157). I fi nd their depiction somewhat less fl attering and tainted by blindness and amnesia toward the more troubling elements of the past. 41. M. Casey (2014) ‘“Built on Nothing but Bullshit and Good PR”: Crime, Class Mobility, and the Irish Economy in the Novels of Tana French’, Clues : A Journal of Detection 30.2, 97. 42. T. French (2011a) Broken Harbor (New York: Penguin Group), p. 156. 43. T. French (2011a), p. 13. 44. T. French (28 July 2013) ‘The Psychology of an Irish Meltdown’, New York Times Sunday Review , 5. 45. M. Corrigan (14 September 2014) ‘Tana French’s “The Secret Place”: The Dublin Murder Squad Takes on the Mean Girls’, The Washington Post . http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/tana-frenchs- the-secret-place-the-dublin-murder-squad-takes-on-the-mean- girls/2014/09/14/42d668c8-2d1b-11e4-994d-202962a9150c_story. html , date accessed 15 January 2015. 46. T. French (2014) The Secret Place (New York: Penguin), p. 48. 47. M. Corrigan (2014). 48. See T. Oler (7 October 2014) ‘Safe as Houses’, The Slate Book Review . http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/10/tana_french_s_ the_secret_place_new_novel_in_the_dublin_murder_squad_series.html 120 SHIRLEY PETERSON

49. See L. Wilson (6 September 2014) ‘ The Secret Place Review – Tana French Brings Murder to Private School’ The Guardian . http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/06/the-secret-place-tana-french-review . 50. T. French (2014), p. 10. 51. J. Herman (1992), 1. 52. T. French (2014), p. 43. 53. T. French (2014), p. 75. 54. J. Teel (2014) ‘Blurring the Genre Borderlines: Tana French’s Haunted Detectives’, Clues : A Journal of Detection , 32.1, 21. 55. T. French (2007), 217. For a discussion of such motifs in French, see Sarah Fogle (2014) ‘Unhappily Ever After: Fairy-Tale Motifs in Tana French’s In the Woods ’, Clues : A Journal of Detection , 32.1, 23. Fogle notes other references to the Black Dog (224) and biblical demons, Legion (246). 56. J. Gregorek (2014), p. 165. 57. T. French (2014), pp. 175–6, 183, 431. 58. J. Teel (2014), 21. 59. J. Herman (1992), p. 2. CHAPTER 8

‘Irish by blood and English by accident’: Detective Constable Maeve Kerrigan

Elizabeth Mannion

Detective Constable Maeve Kerrigan of the Metropolitan Police murder squad was introduced in The Burning (2010), the fi rst of Jane Casey’s London-set police procedurals. Like many police procedurals, the Kerrigan series skirts conventions of the psychological thriller. Ironically, the playing fi eld for mind games in this London—where ‘no one knows anyone’1 —is distinguished by the false familiarity of media and a willing- ness to be watched, perhaps as a trade-off for our own time spent watching the lives of others unfold on Twitter and reality television. Surveillance, offi cial and otherwise, is ever present. Like many of the victims in Casey’s London, Kerrigan is young, female, and surrounded by every conceivable threat that urban living has on offer, but, unlike them, she is Irish, and her ethnicity is commented on by others as often as it is contemplated by Maeve herself. Attention to cultural otherness is not limited to Maeve or her Irishness, however. Distinctions of race, class, and gender are central to each volume in the series, along with a running commentary on social inequities along these boundaries. This commentary, provided largely by Maeve, reveals her own susceptibility to harm, unifying her with women citywide, including victims of the crimes she investigates. In addition to emphasizing the vulnerability of young women, this calls into question the distinction between revenge and justice, vigilantism and the rule of law. These issues prove central to The Burning and are further problematized in The Reckoning (2011), The Last Girl (2012), The Stranger You Know (2013), The Kill (2014), and After the Fire (2015). Each of these novels, and the e-novella prequel Left for Dead (2014), stop short of being polemi-

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 121 E. Mannion (ed.), The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53940-3_9 122 ELIZABETH MANNION cal, but the series as a whole, in its focus on observation, vulnerability, and empathy, is a cautionary tale of the price paid for living in a surveilled society. The series shows the highest price for city living is often paid by women, and the cops who investigate their plight wade through serial killers, traffi ckers, and rapists on their way to seeking justice. Kerrigan’s murder squad unit is led by Superintendent Godley, a media-friendly cop, respected by his superiors and subordinates alike, who has earned the undying loyalty of his squad, particularly Detective Inspector Josh Derwent. Even after they have worked together for a few years and ‘his behavior had lost its capacity to shock’,2 Josh remains ‘the embodiment of aggressive misogyny’3 as far as Maeve is concerned. But cliché is deftly avoided; his misogyny is never excused, and it appears to grow into opportunistic button pushing over time (which perhaps is what it was from the start). When an inspector makes a sexist remark to Maeve, Josh is quick to send him a death stare. She realizes that while ‘it was fi ne for the inspector to be a misogynist prick towards me … he took offence on my behalf at the slightest provocation’.4 Maeve earned a university degree in sociology and criminology before being accepted at Hendon, where she excelled and joined the Met at the age of 22. But she was a beat cop only briefl y, promoted to the murder squad after being on the force for less than a year. She is ‘someone who is in every way Irish except for the fact that she lives in England’, 5 a circum- stance of which she is often reminded:

From the fi rst day I walked through the door at Hendon, I’d been called Spud, or had to listen to jokes about how stupid the Irish were, or even fucking Riverdance , for God’s sake. It was all too petty to make a formal complaint, but it bothered me. I’d grown up in England – I had an English accent – but I still didn’t fi t in and they made sure I knew it.6

Maeve does not really need others to tell her she does not fi t in though; it is her preoccupation as well: ‘I was Irish by blood and English by accident and I didn’t belong to either tradition, or anywhere else. I’d grown up feeling as if I’d lost something.’7 While her cultural space might be liminal, her professional standing is unambiguous. She is a valuable member of the murder squad, both for her insights into reading people and for her attention to detail: she is an astute observer. London’s other professional observing class, the ever-present media, is more likely to be a hindrance to solving crimes than to offer any assis- ‘IRISH BY BLOOD AND ENGLISH BY ACCIDENT’ 123 tance in solving them. They intrude on crime scenes; turn criminals into celebrities; and, having ‘learned all about murder investigation from re- runs of Prime Suspect ’,8 speculate with their own sense of authority on the effectiveness of police investigations. The ‘endless moralizing editorials’ accusing the Met of ‘institutional arrogance’9 show newspapers to be no safe harbor for the police: they face attacks on all fronts. The ubiquitous commentary by talking heads is sometimes treated with biting humor, as in The Burning , when 24/7 coverage of a serial killer creates a climate whereby one very drunk young woman stabs her socially awkward, but entirely innocent, taxi driver and is subsequently sentenced to two years in jail. But media coverage most provides insight into Kerrigan’s empathy and the series’ position on urban inequities. As the detective observes in The Stranger You Know , ‘there was no media interest in a young black woman being beaten to death by her partner, even if she had been pregnant’,10 not when a killer of attractive, white women is on the loose. The media paradox of selective reportage is one method by which the series exposes the false sense of security that city women willingly embrace. Social media is equally complicit, with dating sites and blogs making it oh-so-easy for criminals to select new targets from women who willingly let their guards down, falling into some sort of cyber-fugue state where their safety is concerned. Kerrigan holds no such illusions, but her hyper- vigilance contributes to a physical and mental wariness that make her cynicism—one hallmark of the hard-boiled tradition the series occasionally evokes—a deeply entrenched part of her personality. Kerrigan is more than an updated noir fi gure. She is ‘positioned at the center of the narrative, in the familiar fi rst-person voice of the hard- boiled tradition embodied by Chandler’s Philip Marlowe [and like Kerrigan’s literary antecedents] Sharon McCone, Kinsey Millhone, and V.I. Warshawski [is] allowed agency, intelligence and action’.11 She also occupies something of the alienated space so common to the hard-boileds. But, as Margaret Kinsman notes, the early (male) hard-boiled detective’s alienation was largely due to the nature of his profession, while a more contemporary (female) hard-boiled like Warshawski ‘is isolated and distanced … from what society dictates is a woman’s place’. 12 Kinsman’s position is borne out in the minor character of Una Burt, a woman long on the job who ‘[wore] her concentration like armor’13 in her rise through the ranks and is distanced from superiors and subordinates alike as a result. Kerrigan, on the other hand, is more often responding to voices echoing in her head than she is to institutional or societal isms. Her internal unease is a post- 124 ELIZABETH MANNION feminist legacy only too familiar to those who came of age after the second wave, who took Women’s Studies courses at university, and hesitate to identify any lagging institutional sexism from a sense of guilt at having benefi ted from a feminist activism in which we had not necessarily been active participants. An internal radar goes off when it is perceived, but that radar is quickly shut down by second guessing. The end result is a dull hum like an electric line on a summer night. Her police status, of course, marks a professional shift from the traditionally self-employed hard-boiled, but so does her background. Hardly the loner or orphan, Maeve comes from a close-knit family. The nagging mother is more humorous than stifl ing and, while her chosen profession is a point of contention, Maeve’s family is reliable support when times get tough. Her rationale for staying a cop is based entirely on skill and the satisfaction of knowing she ‘was good at it’. 14 This self-realization, after closing her fi rst big case, speaks to a hard-boiled legacy and a post- feminist sensibility: Kerrigan’s career commitment is based as much on an innate suitability as on training. This combination will allow her to rise quickly through the ranks, but that practicality of her rookie year is often forgotten as she gives in to the voices in her head that tell her to be ever mindful of how her femaleness is viewed by others. She never cuts herself any slack on this score. After stepping out of a particularly gruesome autopsy, she is mindful of how not remaining in the room will be viewed and, worse, talked about: ‘Men didn’t question themselves so much. Men didn’t worry all the time about how they were perceived. Men did their job and went home, untroubled by what they’d seen—or if they were troubled, they didn’t show it. And I had practically fainted. There were plenty of senior offi cers who were female, but I was the only one fl y- ing the fl ag for feminism in Godley’s team, and a pretty small, ragged fl ag it was too.’15 That fl ag is ‘ragged’ because, as she will later admit during a particularly high-profi le investigation, she would ‘rather be right than sensible. Good for my integrity. Bad for my career.’16 When a few jealous colleagues imply she must be getting placed on high-profi le cases because she and Godley are an item, they are speaking to her ‘deepest fears—that I was only included in the team as a makeweight, that whatever interest anyone senior showed in my career was motivated by something baser than the desire to encourage a promising young offi cer’.17 Her concern of how she is viewed by others accentuates her vulnerability, and it nuances the series’ preoccupation with surveillance. ‘IRISH BY BLOOD AND ENGLISH BY ACCIDENT’ 125

Kerrigan’s alienation is largely self-prescribed, but her outsider status, interrogated by race as well as gender, is not entirely unprovoked. Casey contends that

Maeve is a misfi t in various ways and one of those is her own sense of estrange- ment. She doesn’t fi t into the very British world of the Metropolitan Police, but she isn’t like someone who’s grown up in Ireland either … Maeve’s background is also important to how she’s perceived by her colleagues. It’s still common for Irish people to be seen as charming but untrustworthy, fundamentally unreliable. So she has all of that prejudice to deal with too.18

She does deal with it, but she keeps score. Maeve is within hearing range of one Irish put-down or another in every volume, and she is just as likely to let ‘the same old rubbish’19 slide as she is to respond. That ‘rubbish’ usually takes the form of someone equating Irishness with drink or con- geniality, ‘Paddies always get on’20 after all. Cultural alienation is also addressed humorously, however, with Casey spotlighting the absurdity of the Irish stereotyping by having Maeve show herself to be just as ridicu- lous with regard to the English: maintaining over several novels, and with absolute certainty, that English people ‘don’t actually like tea. They just like the taste of milk in hot water.’21 She is less dismissive when situations touch upon the political, and most contemplative when regarding the Troubles. When pressed to disclose details of his past because of its possible relevance to a new case, Josh reveals the unsolved murder of Angela, his teenage love. The horror of that event leads to his subsequently leaving home to join the army. In telling Maeve about Angela, he mentions that she came from an Irish background ‘like yours’.22 It is the only time an explanation (of sorts) for his fondness for Maeve is offered: the possibility that she reminds him of his life before that tragedy, his falling out with his family, and joining the army while still a teenager. His unit was based in Northern Ireland in the 1990s, as he recalls, ‘right at the end of the fi ghting, and it fucked me up, the things I saw. I left after that—couldn’t deal with the stress.’23 The experience shaped the cop he became just as much as that teenage tragedy. Learning of a suspect’s service on a tribunal that investigated army complicity with paramilitary organizations, and the possibility of it being linked to death threats he received, Derwent is quick to say that ‘the Irish are capable of anything’.24 Maeve reveals a lot when she notes that he says this ‘without looking in my direction. He had been 126 ELIZABETH MANNION in the army and had done tours in the Six Counties, I knew, but he never talked to me about it.’25 His body language suggests that Derwent is not making his claim to antagonize her, and—in referring to Northern Ireland as the Six Counties—that she shares the language, if not the political position, of her family. She ‘had a slew of cousins back in Ireland who had very little time for the British authorities’ and her mother had kept Maeve’s choice to join the Met ‘quiet for as long as she could, [but] she still tended to avoid talking about it within the extended family’.26 Josh and Maeve’s experiences of the legacy of the Troubles transcends the personal, informing investigations and the communities they serve and, at times, appearing to be a metaphor for life in modern London. The Troubles become analogous to socio-economic imbalances. The most compelling example is in The Kill , which introduces Geoff Armstrong, MP, who becomes synonymous with everything Maeve fi nds wrong with politicians. He fi nds a way to infuse any situation with his key talking points that oppose immigration and public assistance. As he sees it, ‘the privileged poor … are costing hard-working taxpayers billions every year’.27 The Kill concerns solving the murder of fi ve policemen, who were shot at a housing estate where an innocent teenager had been shot by a cop some weeks earlier. Although neither an advocate of public housing nor supportive of the residents when they seek justice for the murder of the young man, Armstrong is quick to appear on the scene, exploiting the tragedy to promote his view that the people who live in the estate behave ‘like animals in a zoo’.28 Parallels are drawn between the British Army patrolling West Belfast in the pre-Agreement years and a Met-escorted politician making their presence known at an estate otherwise neglected by both. Derwent sizes things up immediately, after asking a surviving sergeant for an overview of the ambushed cops patrol:

So what you’re saying, if I’m right, is that your men were made to come in here to show the community the police were watching them. You were discouraging protests before they even began … you provoked them. Lots of patrols. Lots of heavy-handed attention. You wanted to get a reaction. You bothered the residents and came down like a ton of bricks on any sign of dissent … it’s obvious.29

The issue of police tactics is later raised by a television interviewer to Armstrong, who claims that British authorities have never before used water cannon against civilians. The interviewer corrects the MP, reminding ‘IRISH BY BLOOD AND ENGLISH BY ACCIDENT’ 127 him that it had been used in Northern Ireland, but this is dismissed as ‘special circumstances’30 by Armstrong. Maeve does not miss a beat: ‘And who cares about the Paddies anyway? I fi lled in silently. As usual, what was per- fectly acceptable in Belfast or Derry would be an outrage in Southwark.’31 Irish subtext is also seen on a formal level. Casey is part of a group of Irish crime writers—including Ken Bruen and Declan Hughes—who use epigraphs from and allusions to a range of popular and classical sources to inform plot, tone, and characterization. Epigraphs in a detective story can operate on a meta-literary level, offering readers another puzzle to solve along with the mystery at the center of the plot. In the Kerrigan series, they are used sparingly and generally limited to Irish authors and to British works that are specifi c to London.32 Some, such as an excerpt about the 1666 London Fire from Pepys’s diary that opens After the Fire , are specifi c to one particular novel. Others are emblematic of the series as a whole, including this opening to The Reckoning from Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz , which addresses urban alienation and suggests that the sorrows of the Londoners Maeve encounters are nothing new:

It is strange with how little notice, good, bad or indifferent, a man may live and die in London … There is a numerous class of people in this metropolis who seem not to possess a single friend, and whom nobody appears to care for.33

Others pose more of a challenge and contain an intertextual engagement that raises the bar, to say the least. During the course of the series, it becomes clear to Maeve that the sainted Godley is actually in collusion with local gangster John Skinner. She keeps this to herself, but tells Godley she believes him to be selling Skinner inside information. In the end, she is both right and wrong. Godley does warn Skinner about pend- ing Met investigations, but he does so out of a very real threat against his family, not for any fi nancial gain. The pressure of it all fi nally leads to Godley breaking down in The Kill , and it is here that Casey once again calls on Dickens. No longer able to withstand the pressure of being under Skinner’s thumb and having forced his wife and daughter away in an effort to keep them safe, Godley is falling apart. He passes Maeve’s desk, looking at her briefl y as he moves through the squad room. He reminds her of ‘an old black-and-white fi lm on Channel 4 on a dull Saturday afternoon, with the rain streaking the windows … Dirk Bogarde looking noble in 128 ELIZABETH MANNION heavy make-up. It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done .’ 34 The allusion to Sydney Carton facing the gallows in A Tale of Two Cities cuts through what could easily have been a great deal of narrative clutter (Casey is a refreshingly economical writer). The one reference conveys Maeve’s understanding that she had read him wrong (even if she does not yet know the particulars); exemplifi es her ability to assess situations (the skill that earned her a place on the murder squad); and demonstrates the depth of her empathy. It also communicates the extent to which Godley is willing to sacrifi ce to end Skinner’s infi ltration of the Met and to keep his family safe: he is on his way to the Met basement with his service revolver and a bullet. Although passing, light allusions to Samuel Beckett appear in later novels and are made by or associated with minor characters, 35 they are pronounced in The Burning , which introduces Godley (sometimes nicknamed God by Maeve and her colleagues) and centers on Operation Mandrake, a case that concerns a serial killer whose victims are brutally beaten with a hammer then set afi re. There are neither hangings nor any positive indi- cations of renewal, begging a curiosity as to the code name.36 Mandrake appears in ‘Echo’s Bones’, Molloy , and, perhaps most memorably, Waiting for Godot : three works that give voice to a negation of reproduction while the texts themselves copy, reproduce, and allude to other works. This is most pronounced in Molloy , and subtle shades of that short novel—be they deliberate or accidental—can be seen in The Burning . Within Operation Mandrake is a murder that occurs at the hands of Louise, a London law- yer and copycat killer, who reinvented herself after a brutal childhood. She had gone to university against all odds, and killed a student there to avenge his rape of her roommate, Rebecca, a young woman whose loving, privileged background embodies everything to which Louise then aspired. These many years later, Louise kills Rebecca because she fears Rebecca will disclose her college crime. The fi rst crime Louise had committed though was in her youth, when she murdered her grandmother and sold the old woman’s prescription drugs to fund her reinvention at university. Along the way, Louise has been dying (Molloy in Part I of Molloy ), replicating a life she watches closely (Moran in Part II), and, fi nally, been under surveillance herself before ultimately having her crimes detected by Maeve (Molloy plays on the detective genre). In the suicide note she left behind, Louise made it clear she saw herself as an avenger of misogyny, and Maeve’s sympathetic reaction satisfi es what had been an increasingly blurring line between justice and revenge, ‘IRISH BY BLOOD AND ENGLISH BY ACCIDENT’ 129 with vigilantism being the easiest—but not necessarily the only—term for what fi lls a space in between. The fl uidity of characterization and blend- ing of plotlines show a deft hand at work, and this comes into focus in The Reckoning , where the consequences and limitations of an increasingly surveilled city backlight the terms on which justice and revenge are negotiated. The Reckoning is among the most surveillant books in the series and the one where markers to determine lines dividing legal and vigilante justice are in constant motion. Two brothers are simultaneously making a living off the internet (as pop-up party entrepreneurs), and using it to abduct victims (via dating websites and other social media), while crime boss John Skinner is threatening a low-level government offi ce worker to obtain access to the Met’s sex offender database in his effort to fi nd out who abducted his teenage daughter, Cheyenne. It is also the novel that introduces Chris Swain, a hacker who will become Maeve’s stalker as the series moves forward. Everybody is watching and being watched, and online access is a tool for criminality and revenge. Skinner turns out to be responsible for the initial murders the team is investigating. His hench- men have systematically gone through the offenders list and imposed ‘eye-for-an-eye’ torture on the offenders before killing them. The man charged with accessing child pornography online has his hands broken and eyes gouged out; the man who was accused of touching a neighborhood girl has that hand severed, an accused rapist is castrated, and so on. None of these men, all of whom have already served time, turn out to be in any way responsible for Cheyenne’s disappearance though, and there is evidence to suggest that none of them were ever guilty of the crimes for which they were sentenced. This is entirely irrelevant to the vigilante Skinner, however. When Godley confronts Skinner about the tortures and murders he orchestrated, Skinner is quick to argue that his has been ‘real justice’ and promises Godley that when the abductor of Cheyenne is found ‘they’ll be a proper reckoning. None of your law, your human rights bullshit.’37 Combined with Godley being a conduit of insider information for Skinner, the men become two sides of one coin, emblematic of justice being a less than black-and-white proposition. Both men are also fathers, and they commit crimes in defense of that position: Skinner in search of his daughter and Godley in protection of his. Godley is the fl awed, but good, father in a series that does not shy away from identifying the ramifi cations of paternal neglect or regress. Most of the criminals are found to have had absent, ineffectual, or abusive fathers 130 ELIZABETH MANNION and, notably, one victim—Philip Kennford in The Last Girl— is targeted specifi cally for not living up to the responsibilities of fatherhood. The Last Girl , for all of its subplots, is essentially a study in familial disloyalty. In investigating the family in question, Kerrigan discovers wealth, infi delity, incest, and layers of deceit: all of which makes this perhaps the most hard-boiled in the series. The murderer is Zoe, a daughter resulting from one of Kennford’s many affairs and whom he never acknowledged. Like Louise in The Burning , Zoe is determined to right the wrong of a paternal vacuum. She systematically murders each of Kennford’s ‘real’ daughters, becoming lovers with one of them along the way. Investigation of this case, which is set against a world of privilege, also offers insight into Maeve’s self-consciousness and offers insight into why Maeve was almost overly sympathetic to Louise—she who devoted her life to replicating the life of privilege she was exposed to at university—in that fi rst novel. It becomes clear in The Last Girl that Maeve registers a distinction between wealth and social standing. In the company of a woman who comes from a line of inheritance, she blushes at having been talked down to: ‘I very much dislike[d] being made to feel inferior because of my accent or my job or the fact that I was clearly impressed by my surrounding. Class was still an issue and only those who never needed to worry about it in the fi rst place thought it wasn’t.’38 At the start of the series, she lived with a boyfriend whose preoccupation with status was a point of ridicule. The expensive watch and the professionally decorated fl at were easily read as insights into his character; but in retrospect, that was a red herring. Maeve’s attention and reaction to these things were more the point. Her class concerns become more central as the series moves forward, until she is forced to confront them during a major confl ict with Rob, a later boyfriend who appears to be the love of her life. The situation is entwined with her class anxieties. When Maeve tells her mother that she is more upset at learning Rob comes from family money than that he cheated on her, Mrs. Kerrigan points out to Maeve that she has always been ‘funny about money … you like to be equal with people. You don’t like feeling as if you’re worth less than anyone else.’39 Rob understood this about her, and Maeve now realizes ‘why he hadn’t wanted to tell me he was loaded’.40 This realization is a small step toward working out her class standing issues, but only a step. In After the Fire , the most recent installment of the series, she is still quick to note ‘the casual dropped consonants of the public schoolboy who’s learned to tone down their accent’.41 For all of her self-consciousness, Maeve is relatively void of self-awareness. Ironically, it is at Josh’s urging that she ‘IRISH BY BLOOD AND ENGLISH BY ACCIDENT’ 131 begins to take stock of herself. He calls her on her evasiveness—complaining when he tries to get her to open up that he would ‘get straighter answers from a Jesuit’42 —and offers to arrange private counseling for her to deal with a traumatic experience on the job. Confronting her baggage allows her to begin unpacking it, and her starting point is sorting out the problem of Chris Swain. Swain personifi es the consequences of living in a surveilled society. He earns a living off the underground hacker-sphere and stalks Maeve relent- lessly with the aid of technology. His efforts fi rst become known to her when a video of her in bed with a lover appears on a website, and they escalate from there. She never sees him, but videos and photographs— complemented by notes left on a windshield—haunt her. The rules she set for herself at the end of her rookie year—to never again get romanti- cally involved with a colleague, to fi nd a way to work with Godley, and to remain a cop no matter how diffi cult it proved to be43 —appear utterly naïve once she has been his target for a few years, and have been replaced by the guiding principle to ‘never relax. Never forget there’s someone watching you.’44 She comes to understand that living in a constant state of hyperawareness is costing her part of her humanity though: these new rules ‘had kept me alive, so far, but they made me feel as if I was dying a little more every day’.45 This recognition places her, once again, on a par with the London women whose deaths she has investigated over the years, none of whom were the victims of a random act of violence. Like Maeve, they were targeted by somebody they knew (husband, partner, friend) or somebody who lured them out with the aid of technology by which victims willingly took part. As one tech expert points out when advising Maeve on how Swain may be tracking her:

‘People are idiots. They give away information about themselves every time they touch a device that connects to the internet and they don’t have a clue. They use social media to tell the world what they want to buy, where they are, where they’ve been … I can tell you where you get your morning coffee. I can tell you how you travel to work. I can get your email address. I can probably get a picture of you too if you’re on Facebook or Instagram. And you have no idea. I just have to be close enough to be able to read your phone and pick out your information from everyone else’s.’ 46

So Maeve becomes a better idiot than she had previously been, and one with means. She enlists hackers and the social media she has always dis- 132 ELIZABETH MANNION dained to draw Swain out. She has now come full circle. In putting herself in danger so she can end his stalking, the social media that contributed to the harm of other women whose deaths she investigated is now her weapon, fi guratively placing her on the side of the criminal element and crossing a line of justice. Although Josh is aware of her actions, Maeve’s conduct here is not part of any offi cial investigation, and she is walking a line between revenge and justice no different from that walked by Skinner when he sought to fi nd his daughter or Godley when he tried to protect his family. She gets her man in the end, with Josh backing her up. Swain will be brought in on his hacking charges, with no mention made of the years of harassment and terror he has caused Maeve. Her privacy, at least professionally, will be protected. But Josh (and Swain at Josh’s coercion) keeping Maeve’s secret is really only an extension of the illusion of privacy that dominates the series. The secret exists, and like the digital fi ngerprints left behind by every login, search, and registration, it is only safe until an opportunity is created to reveal it. The arrest of Swain offers Maeve a chance to fi nally rest and culminates the self-examination that began when Rob left and she had to start examining her issues with money, trust, and being a woman in a city she sees everyday on the job is a breeding ground for men who hate women. The only issue she appears to have put to rest is the struggle with her cultural belonging. When Josh goads her into yet one more conversation about her Irishness, she is unambivalent for the fi rst time, telling Josh she is ‘one hundred per cent Irish’ and thoroughly ‘tired’47 of the question.

NOTES 1. J. Casey (2013) The Reckoning (New York: Minotaur Books; orig. pub. 2012), p. 44. 2. J. Casey (2015) After the Fire (London: Ebury Press), p. 372. 3. J. Casey (2014a) The Kill (London: Ebury Press), p. 203. 4. J. Casey (2014a), p. 56. 5. V. O’Loughlin Fox (March 2014) ‘Jane Casey Interview: Waterford Writer’s Weekend’. 6. J. Casey (2012) The Burning (New York: Minotaur Books; orig. pub. 2010), p. 40. 7. J. Casey (2014d) The Stranger You Know (New York: Minotaur Books; orig. pub. 2013), p. 10. 8. J. Casey (2012), p. 200. 9. J. Casey (2014a), p. 129. ‘IRISH BY BLOOD AND ENGLISH BY ACCIDENT’ 133

10. J. Casey (2014d), p. 95. 11. M. Kinsman (2010) ‘Feminist Crime Fiction’ in C.R. Nickerson (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 148. 12. M. Kinsman (2010), p. 152. 13. J. Casey (2014d), p. 40. 14. J. Casey (2014c) Left for Dead: A Maeve Kerrigan Novella (New York: Minotaur e-book), loc. 1356. 15. J. Casey (2012), p. 76. 16. J. Casey (2014a), p. 277. 17. J. Casey (2013), p. 180. 18. ‘Jane Says’, an interview with Jane Casey, originally published in the Sunday Business Post , 24 June 2012. From Declan Burke’s Crime Always Pays . 0 19. J. Casey (2012), p. 18. 20. J. Casey (2012), p. 40. 21. J. Casey (2014a), p. 312. 22. J. Casey (2014d), p. 121. 23. J. Casey (2013), p. 353. 24. J. Casey (2014b) The Last Girl (New York: Minotaur Books; orig. pub. 2012), p. 103. 25. J. Casey (2014b), p. 103. 26. J. Casey (2012), p. 97. 27. J. Casey (2014a), p. 279. 28. J. Casey (2014a), p. 211. 29. J. Casey (2014a), p. 225. 30. J. Casey (2014a), p. 278. 31. J. Casey (2014a), p. 278. 32. Although Irish and London references dominate, Shakespeare (Othello and Cymbeline ), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , and Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned also make appearances. 33. Qtd. in J. Casey (2013), p. 3. 34. J. Casey (2014a), pp. 352–3. 35. For example, Maeve’s actor neighbor in The Reckoning casts various residents of their apartment building as Vladimir, Estragon, and Godot over drinks; and Savannah’s dog in The Last Girl is named Beckett. 36. ‘Mandrake’ (OED ): ‘formerly credited with magical and medicinal proper- ties esp. because of the supposedly human shape of its forked fl eshy root, being used to promote conception, and was reputed to shriek when pulled from the ground and to cause the death of whoever uprooted it’, OED online , date accessed 17 July 2015. 37. J. Casey (2013), p. 188. 134 ELIZABETH MANNION

38. J. Casey (2014b), p. 79. 39. J. Casey (2014a), p. 440. 40. J. Casey (2014a), p. 440. 41. J. Casey (2015), p. 252. 42. J. Casey (2014a), p. 340. 43. J. Casey (2014c), loc. 1352. 44. J. Casey (2015), p. 29. 45. J. Casey (2015), p. 29. 46. J. Casey (2015), p. 258. 47. J. Casey (2015), p. 339. CHAPTER 9

Quirke, the 1950s, and Leopold Bloom

Audrey McNamara

Declan Kiberd stated that ‘James Joyce’s Ulysses can be read as a slow- motion alternative to the daily newspaper of Dublin for June 16th 1904.’1 This essay will argue that the Benjamin Black (John Banville) Quirke series is also a literary alternative, but for a longer stretch of Dublin time. While Joyce’s Ulysses is confi ned to a single day, the Quirke series explores how Irish urban society refl ects the mind-set of an entire population which is governed by a state that is encased in the stagnant grip of a right-wing Catholic Church throughout the dark decade of the 1950s. In creating the character of Quirke, a pathologist with a penchant for crossing into the seedy underworld of Dublin society, Black tracks the urban landscape of Dublin while exploring the somber inertia of post-Emergency Ireland incorporating the dominating effect of de Valera’s 1937 Constitution that envisioned the now accepted phrase of ‘maidens dancing at the crossroads’. Creating the character of Quirke as the product of an institution produces a device through which a mirror is put up to a very fl awed 1950s Irish society. Quirke’s natural inquisitiveness spurs him to investigate the untimely and suspicious demise of some of the corpses that arrive on a trolley to his pathology department and fi nds, contrary to protection for women and children enshrined in the 1937 Constitution, the systematic abuse and suppression of the vulnerable in society and the subsequent support and concealment of these injustices. The opening line of the fi rst chapter in Christine Falls (2006)—‘It was not the dead that seemed to Quirke uncanny but the living’2 —acts as a harbinger for a narrative that exposes immorality and corruption in both the Irish government and the

Irish Catholic Church, belying what the Irish Proclamation of 1916 and the leaders of the Easter Rising envisaged for a free and independent Irish nation. Concentrating on the fi rst three Quirke novels—Christine Falls, The Silver Swan (2006), and Elegy for April (2010)—this chapter will explore how Quirke’s role as amateur detective excavates and exposes the dark and duplicitous underbelly of the so-called Irish Free State. Diarmaid Ferriter argues that ‘historians have invariably used such words as “doom”, “drift”, “stagnation”, “crisis”, and “malaise” to describe Ireland … in the 1950s’. 3 Indeed, the recently designed articles of the 1937 Irish Constitution which were in full enactment in this post-Emergency period did little to repel this idea. The preamble to the Constitution—‘In the name of the Holy Trinity and to Whom, as our fi nal end, all actions of both men and States be referred’4 —exposes a patriarchal hierarchy involving both the state and the Catholic Church. Although idealistic language was used to promote ‘woman’ and ‘mother’, assuring her protection in that role, the reality was contra to the actuality of female existence in Irish society, as the exposure of the Magdalene Laundries has shown. Article 40 of the Constitution, though promising to hold all its citizens equal before the law, comes with the proviso that ‘this shall not be held to mean that the State shall not in its enactments have due regard to differences of capacity, physical and moral, and of social function’. 5 Despite this anomaly, the woman bore the burden of responsibility for producing future generations and playing the nurturing role for the future of the nation. Conversely, the protection for the reproduction of children did not extend outside the married state; punishment and judgment were swift for women who found themselves pregnant outside wedlock. By association, the constitutional protection for the nation’s children did not extend to the children of unmarried women. They were not afforded the same parental rights as children of married couples. Shame of these unplanned pregnancies forced women to either use backstreet abortionists or to place their babies for adoption. The warped thinking behind this treatment is laid bare in a 6 September 1947 letter written privately by the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, to the then Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera. It expresses the Catholic hierarchy’s disapproval of the 1947 Health Act that sought to amend these inequalities:

for the State, under the Act, to empower the public authority to provide for the health of all children, and to treat their ailments, and to educate women QUIRKE, THE 1950s, AND LEOPOLD BLOOM 137

in regard to health, and to provide them with gynaecological services, was directly and entirely contrary to Catholic social teaching, the rights of the family, the rights of the Church in education, and the rights of the medical profession, and of voluntary institutions.6

McQuaid’s position formed the basis of rejection for an extension of the Act that was instigated by the Minister for Health, Noel Browne, in 1952. The extension was to include the Mother and Child Scheme, which aimed to provide free health care for mothers and all children up to 16 years of age. Objection to the scheme by the state and Archbishop McQuaid was so vehement that Browne felt he had no choice but to resign. Such state and Church control frame the backdrop for the Black series, which is rife with characters who are the result of that institutional collusion. Like Leopold Bloom, Quirke’s outsider status is marked by the religion in which he was raised. Although he had adopted Catholicism through his marriage to Molly, Bloom was raised Jewish and this informs his treatment by others as well as how he views himself. He defends his Irishness in ‘Cyclops’, pointing out to the citizen that ‘I was born here. Ireland.’7 But Irishness on this afternoon in Barney Kiernan’s pub is being measured by a heightened nationalism that comes with a checklist, and there is no box to tick for Jewish. Quirke’s outsider status within the confi nes of the Catholic religion is the result of church policies. His early childhood was spent in a church-run industrial school, institutions that have been described by one former inmate as ‘a dumping ground for children who found themselves on the fringes of society’. 8 The Industrial Schools Act of 1868 established such schools to care for ‘neglected, orphaned and abandoned children’,9 but, like the Magdalene Laundries, they have been shown to be state-sanctioned institutions of abuse. According to Micky Finn, former inmate of Saint Joseph’s Letterfrack, ‘they were a dumping ground for children who found themselves on the fringes of society. In 1954 there were three classes of boys placed … the homeless and those guilty of criminal offences. The destitute sent by local authorities in accordance with the Public Assistance Act. Those voluntarily admitted by parents and guardians.’10 These schools were completely Church governed and free from state interference. As a result, this total autonomy by the Church served to create a climate of secrecy through power. Revelations in recent times have exposed the extent of that power and the catastrophic long-lasting effects on the survivors of these institutions.11 138 AUDREY MC NAMARA

Christine Falls , The Silver Swan , and Elegy for April chart the darkness that prevails in the stagnant atmosphere of 1950s Dublin, and the characters represent a gaping social class divide. All three novels focus on the suspicious deaths of young women. These women are products of an unjust and unequal society that fl outs the very constitution that was designed to protect them. Quirke, through his investigations, uncovers the insidious layers constructed by those in power to conceal the death of these women and the circumstances surrounding their demise. In doing so, he is an unintentional enemy of the state. The complicated lives of Quirke and his family unravel simultaneously with the revelations of a murky underbelly of Dublin society. Because Quirke spent his childhood in an industrial school, his family story is never revealed, although Quirke assures Phoebe that ‘there are worse things than being an orphan’.12 He was ‘rescued’ by Judge Garett Griffi n, a prominent member of Dublin’s legal profession and of the Catholic society of the Knights of Saint Patrick. Quirke is reared alongside the judge’s son, Malachy, and an underlying tension develops between them, with Malachy always feeling the lesser in the eyes of his father. Both completed medical degrees, with Malachy becoming a gynaecologist and Quirke a pathologist. Both went to work in a Boston hospital for a year, and it was there they met and married two sisters, though both men were in love with Sarah, who married Malachy. Delia, the other sister and Quirke’s wife, died in childbirth. Quirke rejected their daughter, Phoebe, who went to live with Malachy and Sarah. Unaware of her real parentage, Phoebe thinks Quirke is her ‘nuncle’,13 as she fondly addresses him. Quirke’s problematic relationship with alcohol and his constant battle with the demons associated with it enhance the dark undertones that underpin the narrative throughout the novels. These complex intertwined lives expose the sordid story of 1950s Ireland. The prologue to Christine Falls begins a tale that is at once puzzling and sinister. A shadowy ‘they’ is introduced, and a baby is being handed to a woman, Brenda Ruttledge, who is taking a nursing job in Boston, to bring the baby to a designated convent of the Catholic Church. ‘May God go with you’14 were the matron’s parting words when she persuaded Brenda to take the baby to the Boston convent. Brenda feels ‘frightened’ and ‘sick’ over the task she has been asked to undertake, a task she felt she could not refuse. The secrecy surrounding the baby and its journey to another country further encourage the ominous tone established in the prologue. QUIRKE, THE 1950s, AND LEOPOLD BLOOM 139

The opening chapter enhances this tone of darkness with the scene being set in the Holy Child hospital morgue, Quirke’s workplace. The language again intimates a feeling of menace when Quirke ‘felt a shiver along his spine that was to prove prophetic, a tremor of troubles to come’. 15 Quirke’s natural inquisitiveness is piqued at the sight of his adopted brother, Malachy, seated at Quirke’s desk in the morgue; Malachy had ‘a fi le open on the desk before him and was writing in it with a peculiar awkwardness’.16 Malachy’s secretiveness is tied into the cover-up of the death of Christine. The corpse of Christine is introduced lying on one of the morgue trolleys ‘slim and yellow-haired; she had been pretty, but death had robbed her of her features and now she might be a carving in soapstone, primitive and bland’.17 The disappearance of her corpse the next day, before Quirke had a chance to do an autopsy, highlighted the oddities of the night before and his encounter with his brother, and sets the scene for Quirke’s inauguration as an amateur detective. The story of Christine Falls and her untimely death from a botched backstreet childbirth delivery unravels the fabric of a carefully woven tapestry of lies. None of the characters are exempt from the exposure of wrongdoing, not even Quirke. His abandonment of his daughter shortly after her birth mirrors societal hypocrisy surrounding mothers and their children and what should be done when the so-called norm is subverted. It is the tale of the shame of unwanted babies and the women who bear them. Quirke establishes that Christine’s death resulted from extensive postpartum bleeding, which then raises the question of what has happened to her child. Involved in the delivery of the child and the subsequent secret surrounding the father’s identity is the character of Dolly Moran, who herself ends up on Quirke’s pathology table. Dolly’s death brings Inspector Hackett into Quirke’s life and the relationship they form becomes a consistent link throughout the series. The relationship between Quirke and Hackett is based on a shared desire for excavating the truth and the need for justice. What happens in reality, because of the oppression of powerful fi gures within the stories, is that the truth is uncovered but justice is never realized. This serves to highlight collusion between state and Church in order to protect their own interests and maintain control of the people they are supposed to protect. Focusing on the search for the child, Quirke unearths Church complicity in dubious fostering and child traffi cking, an all too familiar story of twentieth-century Ireland. The mystery of Christine’s baby, also named Christine, is solved when the baby that had been brought to Boston turns 140 AUDREY MC NAMARA out to be little Christine. The Catholic Irish–Boston link is explored, shedding light on the fate of Irish babies born to unwed mothers. Quirke fi nds that babies born in Catholic Mother and Baby homes are farmed out to compliant foster parents to be raised in accordance with Church policy and then returned to the Church at a suitable age to be introduced to the vocational life of the priesthood and sisterhood. Through the characters of Claire and Andy Stafford, the desperation of infertile couples is preyed upon. Claire, in particular, becomes another pawn in the Church’s game of manipulation. The Staffords’ personal back story demonstrates a fragile relationship built on lies and secrecy. It is with this background of deceit that they are interviewed by the nuns in the Boston convent, in order to have a child, though as Sister Stephanus tells them, ‘This is not an adoption, not in the offi cial sense. Saint Mary’s … has its own … arrangements. The Lord, I always say, is our legislator.’18 This telling statement set in a fi ctional situation fi nds resonance in the internal workings of the power of the Irish Catholic Church. The legal inquiries19 into the workings of the Catholic Church in the late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst centuries expose how the Church orchestrated the violations and cover-ups that were endemic in its dealings with vulnerable women and children. That the powers that be are more interested in dealing with people whom they can manipulate than in establishing their trustworthiness as prospective parents becomes apparent through the interview between Sister Stephanus and the Staffords. The Church is also seen to be in collusion with the rich and powerful in order to further its agenda of propagating vocations. The story line reveals the shipping of babies through the Catholic institutions in order to maintain control over its fl ock. The character of Josh Crawford, Quirke’s father- in-law, symbolizes the Church’s interaction and dependence on a secular wing and that the ties of both cover both sides of the ocean. Black really drives the point home on the collection and farming out of children when Sister Stephanus takes the Staffords to the nursery to collect the child they are being ‘loaned’:

‘The nursery’ she announced. ‘The heart of St. Mary’s, and our pride and joy.’ Andy stared, impressed, and barely stopped himself producing a whis- tle. It was like something out of a science fi ction movie, all the little aliens in their pods. Sister Stephanus was looking at him expectantly, her head thrown back. ‘Lots of babies’ was all he could say, in a faint voice. QUIRKE, THE 1950s, AND LEOPOLD BLOOM 141

Sister Stephanus gave a ringing laugh that was supposed to be rueful but sounded a little crazed instead. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘this is only a fraction of the poor mites in the world in need of our care and protection!’ 20

While this statement is made by a fi ctional character, it has roots in a reality that has come to shame not only state and Church but all those who colluded with teachings that caused them to not only turn a blind eye to what was happening on their doorsteps, but to actively collude by participating in the cover-up of the shame of a pregnant unwed daughter or sister. The Mother and Baby homes, set up by the state and run by the Church, served a dual purpose: fi rstly, to hide the shame of an unwed mother-to-be; and, secondly, to facilitate the growing adoption market, especially the interest of those prospective parents from the United States.21 Recent research by Catherine Coreless revealed that 794 children and babies were buried in a mass grave at the Tuam Mother and Baby home,22 highlighting the vast number of unplanned pregnancies and the manner in which these women were treated. Andy’s perception of the babies as scientifi c ‘pods’ emphasizes the experimental and calculated behavior of a self-serving institution that was, in essence, supposed to give spiritual guidance to its fl ock. The relationship between Quirke and his daughter, Phoebe, syn- chronizes with the Christine narrative, and runs parallel to Bloom and his daughter, Milly. Both Quirke and Bloom internalize their fondness and concern for their daughters. Bloom, in the ‘Calypso’ episode, muses fondly on ‘Silly Milly’s birthday gift’ 23 to him when she was a child: an old cup reserved, in a place of honor, for his morning tea. He is nervous about her living away from home, and pleased to fi nd a letter from her in the post. Although growing up, she remains his ‘looking glass from night to morning’.24 While Bloom does seem to be more effervescent in his portrayal of his affections for his daughter, this affection is measured and internalized more than explicated. Carol Dell’Amico argues that the ‘depiction of the Quirke–Phoebe story line is of a cautiously developing relationship devoid of any fi reworks’.25 While she is completely correct in that statement, this is arguably a tactical device to epitomize the auto- mated 1950s atmosphere, playing on the Depression that preceded the Second World War, an atmosphere that was not confi ned, indeed, to the Irish psyche. Quirke’s abandonment of his daughter is refl ective of a patriarchal sympathy that deemed the duty for rearing a child belonged to the so-called 142 AUDREY MC NAMARA nuclear family, a married couple. Quirke’s conscience, however, is pricked by Malachy’s wife, Sarah, who is also his sister-in-law and adoptive mother to his child. There is no remonstration on the part of the male characters, rather there is a conspiratorial, albeit silent, agreement on letting the status quo remain. This conspiracy extends on the part of the three male protagonists—the judge, Malachy, and Quirke—pretending to Sarah that Quirke had no memory of handing his daughter over to Malachy and Sarah. Sarah’s take on her sister’s death compounds the patriarchal cover- up as she reveals to Quirke what she believes to be the truth:

‘She’s not mine, Quirke. She’s not Mal’s, either … She’s yours,’ she said. ‘Yours and Delia’s. You didn’t know she lived, but she did. Delia died and Phoebe lived. The Judge, Garret, he phoned us in Boston that night, to tell us Delia was dead. I couldn’t believe it. He asked if Mal and I would look after the baby – for a while, he said, until you were over your shock. There was a nun coming out from Dublin. She brought Phoebe with her.’ 26

These links tie together the patriarchal infl uence that is connected to the demands of a Catholic Church which, in turn, controlled and manipulated the needs of the vulnerable women, children, and those married couples who were unable to have children of their own. The devastating repercussions of this ecumenical control and lack of due diligence resulted in the death of baby Christine and the rape of Phoebe at the hands of Andy Stafford. The outcome of these heinous acts reveals the paternity of the baby, Judge Garret Griffi n, and further strengthen the ties between a secular, rich upper class and an international Catholic conspiracy. Through the character of Quirke, Black has opened a door to an embarrassing decade in the newly formed Irish Free State. The exploration of the state of the nation continues in The Silver Swan. Once again, through an ostensible story line that could be situated in any society, which Dell’Amico argues ‘reconstructs the history of a young woman exploited by various men, one pornographer’.27 The back story serves to create a thoroughly Irish narrative designed to retain an exclusive Irish authenticity. Quirke’s background is revealed through the continuing development of the, at times, diffi cult relationship between Phoebe and Quirke. The saga of his life at the industrial school, Carricklea, is prominent in this second novel and takes the reader again out of Dublin, this time to the west coast of Ireland. The trajectory of this journey from Dublin to Connemara places the narrative nearer to the American coast QUIRKE, THE 1950s, AND LEOPOLD BLOOM 143 that was the action of so much of Christine Falls . It is said colloquially of the west of Ireland that ‘the next parish is New York’, demonstrating the close ties that Ireland perceives of its connections with America. This perception is not without validation as statistics produced in 2011 confi rm that the Irish-American connection of 36 million who acknowledge some form of Irish descent.28 The Silver Swan begins with another one of those great Catholic sins— suicide—and it is yet another female that presents on Quirke’s pathology table. The body of Deirdre Hunt (who is also known as Laura Swan) opens up an unlikely door to Quirke’s past, as her husband, Billy Hunt, had been at college the same time as Quirke. The fi rst chapter opens with the same sense of unease as Christine Falls . On reading the name ‘Billy Hunt’, Quirke muses, ‘was it a lost memory or, more worryingly, a pre- monition?’29 The scene is yet again set with a tone of foreboding: one that will not simply deal with a societal capital crime but deal with the deeper unwanted undertones that smolder in Quirke’s consciousness. Teaming up once more with Detective Inspector Hackett, Quirke again reveals the unjustness and inequality of the treatment of women in society, facilitated by his continuing to operate outside of Church and state infl uence. The trope of an outsider as foil to highlight Quirke’s otherness is presented in the character of Dr. Kreutz, a charming spiritualist with whom Deirdre Hunt becomes involved. Deirdre’s experience with Kreutz mirrors the hallucinatory condition of the ‘Circe’ episode, in which the cha- otic atmosphere of nighttown exposes Bloom’s guilty conscience and his desire to be dominated. He morphs into the ‘dirty married man’ 30 he imagines Gerty accusing him of being, and as Kreutz might fantasize, ‘she paws his sleeve slobbering’ and lasciviously adds, ‘I love you for doing that to me.’ 31 His guilt over the mundane (a second trip to a butcher in one day), the tacitly illicit (the letters he has been exchanging with Martha Clifford), and emasculation (his inability to intercede on Molly’s relationship with Boylan) is all-encompassing. This fi nds relevance in Black’s story line through the character of Kreutz, who arguably replaces the female version of Bella Cohen and in fact becomes a more insidious character. The exploitation of women is more covert in that the women, through what can be described as a Freudian need for guidance, become unknown victims of the doctor. Deirdre Hunt remarked that Kreutz’s patients ‘were all women, so far as she could see. That did not surprise her—what man would consult a spiritual healer?’32 Kreutz, in appealing to women like Deirdre, presents as a trickster who wishes to satisfy his own 144 AUDREY MC NAMARA needs. He sedated these women in order that he could manipulate them sexually. Deirdre, on seeing the photographs which had been sent to her lover to blackmail him, is stunned into shame when she realizes that he had drugged her for his own pleasure:

The whole thing was disgusting, and yet somewhere inside her, deep, deep down inside her, a small fl ame fl ared at the thought of herself sprawled unconscious there on that sofa, on the red blanket, and Kreutz, with the camera round his neck, leaning over her and pulling up her dress and taking off her knickers and parting her knees … she felt dirty and ashamed.33

This reinforces the notion that women in that particular era were presented as emotional and needy, requiring reassurance and guidance from patriarchal mentors. However, the truth, as the character of Quirke exposes it, demonstrates the vulnerability of women whose voices are suppressed in a society that does not consider them equal. Deirdre’s story plays out when it is revealed that she has in fact become the victim of all the men in her life, including her husband Billy, who reveals through third-person narration that he has murdered her. Quirke’s meeting with Billy Hunt and his subsequent investigations into the death of Deirdre open an internal monologue through which Quirke visits his past life in Carricklea. His early childhood years in the industrial school have defi ned him to such an extent that he felt that ‘there was another version of him, a personality within a personality, malcontent, vindictive, ever ready to provoke, to which he gave the name “Carricklea”. Often he found himself standing back, seemingly helpless to intervene, as this other inside him set about fomenting new enormity.’34 In his personal life, Quirke felt that ‘Carricklea did not go on dates , or not willingly, and now, when it had been forced to, it was making sure to have its revenge.’35 What Black is exploring through Quirke’s thought process is the permeat- ing effect the industrial school experience has had on his character and how that effect infl uences how he deals with issues in his life. Quirke’s memories reverberate with the realities experienced by, what are now termed as, inmates of the institutional regime in place in Ireland through from the 1930s, 1940s, and beyond. Diarmaid Ferriter argues that these people ‘bore their physical and mental scars for the rest of their lives’.36 Quirke’s thoughts mirror this analysis when he muses that ‘Carricklea had to poke a stick into the eye of this fi ne, innocent, blue-and-gold summer evening that [he] was spending by the sea in the company of a handsome and QUIRKE, THE 1950s, AND LEOPOLD BLOOM 145 probably available woman.’37 This underpins Quirke’s insecurities both as a man and as a father. The damage of his institutionalized years manifests itself in all his relationships and there is a sense within The Silver Swan that Quirke is in crisis. His troubling relationship with alcohol surfaces in the fi nal pages when he falls back to the habit he struggled so hard to give up. He had described alcohol as an ‘anesthetic’38 and it is to this anesthetic he turns when the Hunt case is fi nished. The sense of crisis peaks as through an alcohol-induced haze he struggles to make sense of his life. There is the realization that ‘he had to do something about Phoebe. He did not know what it was but he knew he must do it. Save her. She was his daughter. He must fi nd a way to bring her back to life.’ 39 Even though the mystery of Deirdre Hunt’s death is solved, Quirke’s personal mystery continues and the closing lines of the narrative speak to a Joycean paralysis: Quirke ‘did not know where to go. He did not know what to do.’40 Phoebe, in some ways, becomes a metaphor for a societal struggle toward modernity. Dell’Amico argues quite correctly that the relationship between Quirke and Phoebe is ‘the single most pertinent element stretching across the entirety of the books’,41 and the interaction between them demonstrates how protracted movement forward can be. In Elegy for April , Phoebe’s role becomes more prominent, through both her relationship with her father and her emergence as amateur detective in her own right. There is a defi nite shift within the Quirke story line to the younger in society, whereas previously the characters, apart from Phoebe, were Quirke’s contemporaries. As a literary device, the introduction of ‘youthfulness’ works to further highlight the diffi culty of a society breaking the shackles of a state and Catholic Church domination. April Latimer’s disappearance, and Quirke and Phoebe’s subsequent investigation of it, unravel another damning story of the seedy underbelly of a Church-dominated state: collusion in the concealment of incest, suicide, abortion, and murder. April was considered somewhat unconven- tional by society. She appeared independent-minded and was thought to have unusual taste in men. The trope of outsider is presented in the character of Patrick Ojukwu, a Nigerian medical student, who was allegedly April’s lover. Ojukwu becomes the mirror that defl ects the wrongdoing of the citizens of that society back on itself. April’s story becomes one of the worst cases of crime against children when it is revealed that she has been abused by her father, as has her brother before her. Her father kills himself when he fears his secret will be revealed. Irreparable damage has been done and April and her brother 146 AUDREY MC NAMARA begin a sexual relationship that will ruin their lives. Falling pregnant by her brother, April aborted the child herself, causing her to bleed to death. Abortion was and still is illegal in Ireland, but Ferriter argues of the 1950s ‘that there was little doubt that abortions were being performed despite the legal prohibition’.42 He cites the case of a nurse who stood trial for performing abortions in a private house in Merrion Square. According to Ferriter, only one newspaper reported the story ‘as if it was a subject too reprehensible to merit coverage’.43 He quotes Hubert Butler’s questioning of whether the ‘vehement opposition to abortion was in fact genuine’. 44 This laissez-faire attitude existed as long as the status quo was maintained. There is no doubt that when morality reared its ugly head, Church and state moved to supress any information that would refl ect negatively on them in such a way as to shift the balance of power back to the people. There is a direct reference to John Charles McQuaid when Jimmy Minor refers to ‘ that whited sepulchre in his palace out in Drumcondra ’.45 Black has placed the blame for the ills of society directly on the doorstep of the Catholic Church and on McQuaid in particular. History has played out the catastrophic abuses of Church and state. In harking back to that period, Black has ensured, like Joyce, that these travesties remain in living memory. Campbell Ross argues that ‘the detective who investigates a crime only to discover that the culprit is, literally or metaphorically, himself is one of the most frequently used tropes in the history of crime writing’.46 In creating the character of Quirke, an integral product of a fl awed society, Black has taken the corpse of 1950s Ireland and removed the secrecy that surrounded it.

NOTES 1. D. Kiberd, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Hack’, Christina Murphy Memorial Lecture (shortened version), Irish Times 14 July 1998. http:// www.irishtimes.com/culture/portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young- hack-1.173107 , date accessed 10 July 2015. 2. B. Black (2006) Christine Falls (New York: Henry Hold/Picador), p. 1. 3. D. Ferriter (2004) The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000 (London: Profi le Books), p. 462. 4. The 1937 Irish Constitution ( www.irishstatuebook.ie ). 5. The 1937 Irish Constitution ( www.irishstatuebook.ie ). 6. Noel Browne (2012) Against the Tide (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan), n.p. 7. J. Joyce (1998) Ulysses (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 317. QUIRKE, THE 1950s, AND LEOPOLD BLOOM 147

8. M. Finn (2011) In My Own Words (UK: AuthorHouse), n.p. 9. See Chapter 2 (2.07) of the report from the Child Abuse Commission www.childabusecommission.ie/rpt/pdfs 10. M. Finn (2011), n.p. 11. A nine-year investigation by High Court Judge Sean Ryan culminated in a 2600-page report of Ireland’s Commission into child abuse. The report found that rape and physical and mental abuse were endemic in the Catholic-run industrial school system. See www.childabusecommission.ie/ rpt/pdfs 12. B. Black (2006), p. 46. 13. B. Black (2006), p. 25. 14. B. Black (2006), p. 2. 15. B. Black (2006), p. 7. 16. B. Black (2006), p. 7. 17. B. Black (2006), pp. 9–10. 18. B. Black (2006), p. 92. 19. See note 11. 20. B. Black (2006), pp. 94–5. 21. See ‘The Baby Black Market’, Irish Times 28 June 2014, which looks at foreign adoption from Ireland in the 1950s. The article’s byline maintains that ‘many children were also sold into a thriving network that stretched from Ireland to the US’. 22. J. Ward (12 April 2015) ‘Tuam Babies Scandal’, Irish Daily Mirror . See also Irish Independent (8 June 2014) ‘Baby Deaths: Now Gardai Probe the Tuam “mass grave”’. 23. J. Joyce (1998), p. 60. 24. J. Joyce (1998), p. 60. 25. C. Dell’Amico (2014) ‘John Banville and Benjamin Black: The Mundo, Crime, Women’, Éire-Ireland , 49.1–2, 114. 26. B. Black (2006), p. 226. 27. C. Dell’Amico (2014), 113. 28. United States Census Bureau www.census.gov Irish-American Heritage Month 2011. 29. B. Black (2008) The Silver Swan (New York: Henry Holt), p. 3. 30. J. Joyce (1998), p. 420. 31. J. Joyce (1998), p. 420. 32. B. Black (2008), p. 104. 33. B. Black (2008), p. 218. 34. B. Black (2008), pp. 171–2. 35. B. Black (2008), p. 172. 36. D. Ferriter (2004), p. 463. 37. B. Black (2008), p. 172. 148 AUDREY MC NAMARA

38. B. Black (2008), p. 27. 39. B. Black (2008), p. 290. 40. B. Black (2008), p. 290. 41. C. Dell’Amico (2014), 114. 42. D. Ferriter (2004), p. 507. 43. D. Ferriter (2004), p. 507. 44. D. Ferriter (2004), p. 507. 45. B. Black (2010) Elegy for April (New York: Henry Holt), p. 56. 46. W. Meier and I.C. Ross (2014) ‘Irish Crime since 1921’, Éire-Ireland , 49.1–2, 15. APPENDIX: CONTEMPORARY IRISH DETECTIVE SERIES

Vincent Banville. Private detective John Blaine series, set in Dublin (series premieres 1993): Death by Design , Death the Pale Rider , Sad Song , Cannon Law , An Accident Waiting to Happen . Alex Barclay. Joe Lucchesi series (2005): Darkhouse , The Caller . FBI Ren Bryce series (2008): Blood Runs Cold , Time of Death , Blood Loss , Harm ’ s Reach , Killing Ways . Colin Bateman. Private detective Dan Starkey series (1995): Divorcing Jack , Of Wee Sweetie Mice and Men , Turbulent Priests , Shooting Sean , The Horse with My Name , Driving Big Davie , Belfast Confi dential , Nine Inches , Fire and Brimstone , The Dead Pass . Police detective Jimmie Murphy series, set in London (2002): Murphy ’ s Law , Murphy ’ s Revenge . Mystery Man series, set in Belfast (2009): Mystery Man , The Day of the Jack Russell , Dr. Yes , The Prisoner of Brenda . Benjamin Black (John Banville). Pathologist Quirke series, set in 1950s Dublin (2006): Christine Falls , The Silver Swan , The Lemur , Elegy for April , A Death in Summer , Vengeance , Holy Orders . Philip Marlowe reboot for the Raymond Chandler estate. Ingrid Black (Eilis O’Hanlon and Ian McConnel). Saxon and Fitzgerald (2003): The Dead , The Dark Eye , The Judas Heart , Circle of the Dead . Rhys Bowen (Janet Quin-Harkin). Molly Murphy series set in fi n - de - siècle New York City (2001): Murphy ’ s Law , Death of Riley , For the Love of Mike , In Like Flynn , Oh Danny Boy , In Dublin ’ s Fair City , Tell Me ,

Pretty Maiden , In a Gilded Cage , The Last Illusion , Bless the Bride , Hush Now , Don ’ t You Cry , The Family Way , City of Darkness and Light , The Edge of Dreams , Time of Fog and Fire . Conor Brady. Detective Sgt. Joe Swallow series, set in 1880s Dublin (2012): A June of Ordinary Murders , The Eloquence of the Dead . John Brady. Inspector Sgt. Matt Minogue series, set in Dublin (2002): A Stone of the Heart , Unholy Ground , Kaddish in Dublin , All Souls , The Good Life , A Carra King , Wonderland , Islandbridge , Going Rate , The Coast Road . Ken Bruen. Private investigator Jack Taylor series, set in Galway (2001): The Guards , The Killing of the Tinkers , The Magdalen Martyrs , The Dramatist , Priest , Cross , Sanctuary , The Devil , Headstone , Purgatory , Green Hell . The Brant-Roberts series (1998): A White Arrest , Taming the Alien , The McDead , Blitz , Vixen , Calibre , Ammunition . The Fisher- Petrakos series (2006): Bust , Slide , The Max . Declan Burke. Harry Rigby series, set in Sligo (2003): Eightball Boogie , Slaughter ’ s Hound . Jane Casey. Det. Constable Maeve Kerrigan series, set in London (2010): The Burning , The Reckoning , The Last Girl , The Stranger You Know , Left for Dead (e-novella), The Kill , After the Fire . Paul Charles. Det. Inspector Christy Kennedy series, set in London (1997): Last Boat to Camden Town , I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass , Fountain of Sorrow , The Ballad of Sean and Wilko , The Hissing of the Silent Lonely Room , I ’ ve Heard the Banshee Sing , The Justice Factory , Sweetwater , The Beautiful Sound of Silence , A Pleasure to Do Death with You . Inspector Starrett series, set in Donegal (2007): The Dust of Death , Family Life . John Connolly. Private detective Charlie Parker series, set in the United States (1999): Every Dead Thing , Dark Hollow , The Killing Kind , The White Road , The Refl ecting Eye (novella), The Black Angel , The Unquiet , The Reapers , The Lovers , The Whisperers , The Burning Soul , The Wrath of Angels , The Wolf in Winter , A Song of Shadows . John Creed (Eoin McNamee). Intelligence Offi cer Jack Valentine series, set in Northern Ireland and elsewhere (2002): The Sirius Crossing , The Day of the Dead , Black Cat Black Dog . Ruth Dudley Edwards. The Robert Amiss Mysteries, set in London and elsewhere (1981): Corridors of Death , The St. Valentine ’ s Day Murders , The English School of Murder , Clubbed to Death , Matricide at St. Martha ’ s . The Robert Amiss/Baroness Jack Troutbeck Mysteries: Ten Lords A - Leaping , Murder in a Cathedral , Publish and Be Murdered , The APPENDIX: CONTEMPORARY IRISH DETECTIVE SERIES 151

Anglo - Irish Murders , Carnage on the Committee , Murdering Americans , Killing the Emperors . Tana French. Dublin Murder Squad (2007): In the Woods , The Likeness , Faithful Place , Broken Harbour , The Secret Place . Cora Harrison. The Burren mysteries, featuring Brehon detective Mara, set in medieval Ireland (2007). My Lady Judge , Michaelmas Tribute , Sting of Justice , Writ in Stone , Eye of the Law , Scales of Retribution , Deed of Murder , Laws in Confl ict , Chain of Evidence , Cross of Vengence , Verdict of the Court , Condemned to Death . Erin Hart. Nora Gavin–Cormac Maguire series, set in Galway (2005): Haunted Ground , Lake of Sorrows , False Mermaid , The Book of Killowen . Declan Hughes. Private investigator Ed Loy series, set in Dublin and Los Angeles (2006): The Wrong Kind of Blood , The Colour of Blood , The Price of Blood , All the Dead Voices , City of Lost Girls . Arlene Hunt. QuicK Investigations series, set in Dublin (2005): False Intentions , Black Sheep , Missing Presumed Dead , Undertow , Blood Money . Jim Lusby. DI Carl McCadden series, set in Waterford (1995): Making the Cut , Flashback , Kneeling at the Altar . Kevin McCarthy. Sgt. Sean O’Keefe series, set in 1920s Dublin (2010): Peeler , Irregulars . Eugene McEldowney. The Superintendent Cecil Megarry series, set in Belfast (1994): A Kind of Homecoming , A Stone of the Heart , The Sad Case of Harpo Higgins . Brian McGilloway. Inspector Benedict Devlin series, set in the borderlands (2007): Borderlands , Gallows Lane , Bleed a River Deep , The Rising , The Nameless Dead . Detective Sgt. Lucy Black series, set in the borderlands (2011): Little Girl Lost , Hurt /Someone You Know , Preserve the Dead . Claire McGowan. Forensic psychologist Paula Maguire series, set in the borderlands (2013): The Lost , The Dead Ground . Adrian McKinty. Michael Forsythe trilogy (2003): Dead I Well May Be , The Dead Yard , The Bloomsday Dead . Det. Sean Duffy trilogy, set in Northern Ireland (2012): The Cold , Cold Ground , I Hear the Sirens in the Street , In the Morning I’ ll Be Gone , Gun Street Girl . Cormac Millar. Seamus Joyce series, set in Dublin (2004): An Irish Solution , The Grounds . Sam Millar. Private investigator Karl Kane series, set in Dublin (2008): Bloodstorm , The Dark Place , Dead of Winter . Stuart Neville. Jack Lennon series, set in Belfast (2009): The Twelve /Ghosts of Belfast , Collusion , Stolen Souls , The Final Silence . 152 APPENDIX: CONTEMPORARY IRISH DETECTIVE SERIES

Eilís Ní Dhuibhne. Saoirse Ní Ghallchóir and Garda Máirtín Ó Flaithearta series, set in Kerry (2000): Dúnmharú sa Daingean (Murder in Dingle ), Dún an Airgid ( Close Money ). Niamh O’Connor. Police detective Jo Birmingham series, set in Dublin (2010): If I Never See You Again , Taken , Too Close for Comfort , Blink . Julie Parsons. Inspector Michael McLoughlin series, set in Dublin (1998): Mary , Mary , I Saw You . Louise Phillips. Criminal psychologist Dr. Kate Pearson series, set in Dublin (2012): Red Ribbons , The Doll ’ s House , Last Kiss . Michael Russell. Det. Inspector Stefan Gillespie series, set in 1930s–1940s Dublin environs and other war-torn cities (2012): The City of Shadows , The City of Strangers , The City in Darkness . Peter Tremayne (Peter Berresford Ellis). Sister Fidelma series, set in seventh-century Ireland (1994): Absolution by Murder , Shroud for the Archbishop , Suffer Little Children , The Subtle Serpent , The Spider ’ s Web , Valley of the Shadow , The Monk Who Vanished , Act of Mercy , Our Lady of Darkness , Hemlock at Vespers (short stories), Smoke in the Wind, The Haunted Abbot , Badger ’ s Moon , Whispers of the Dead (short stories), The Leper ’ s Bell , Master of Souls , A Prayer for the Damned , Dancing with Demons , The Council of the Cursed , The Dove of Death , The Chalice of Blood , Behold A Pale Horse , The Seventh Trumpet , Atonement of Blood , The Devil ’ s Seal , The Second Death , The Second Death . BIBLIOGRAPHY

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FURTHER READING Brownson, Charles. The Figure of the Detective: A Literary History and Analysis . Jefferson: McFarland, 2014. Burke, Declan. Crimealwayspays.blogspot.com. Clark, David. ‘Mean Streets, New Lives: The Representations of Non-Irish Immigrants in Recent Irish Crime Fiction.’ Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland: The Immigrant in Contemporary Irish Literature . Ed. Pilar Villar- Argáiz. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. 255–67. Evans, Curtis J. Masters of the ‘Humdrum’ Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920–1961 . Jefferson: McFarland, 2012. Flanders, Judith. The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime . New York: St. Martin’s, 2013. Garratt, Robert F. Trauma and History in the Irish Novel: The Return of the Dead . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Gutkin, Len. ‘The Dandifi ed Dick: Hardboiled Noir and the Wildean Epigram.’ ELH 81.4 (Winter 2014): 1299–326. International Crime Fiction Research Group. http://internationalcrimefi ction. org/. McCormack, W.J. Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland , 2nd edn. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1991. Murphy, Neil. ‘Crimes of Elegance: Benjamin Black’s Impersonation of John Banville.’ Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 13.1 (2013): 19–32. Murphy, Paula. ‘Ken Bruen’s American Skin and Postmodern Media Culture.’ Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900–Present) 7.1 (Spring 2008): n.p. BIBLIOGRAPHY 163

—— ‘“Murderous Mayhem”: Ken Bruen and the New Ireland.’ Clues: A Journal of Detection 24.2 (Winter 2006): 3–16. Nolan, Tom. ‘Stuart Neville.’ Mystery Scene 117 (2010): 38–9. Parrinder, Patrick and Andrzej Gąsiorek, eds. The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 1880–1940 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Rudman, Thomas. ‘“The Place You Don’t Belong”: Border-Crossings and Ambivalence in the Northern Irish Noir-Thriller.’ Border Crossings: Narration, Nation and Imagination in Scots and Irish Literature and Culture . Ed. Colin Younger. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013. 249–69. Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel , rev. edn. New York: Viking, 1985. INDEX

A Black, Benjamin (John Banville), 1, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) 11, 33, 41n5, 135 (O’Brien), 34 The Black-Eyed Blonde , 1, 33 austerity economics, 4, 9, 11, 61–62, Christine Falls , 1, 135–136, 64, 69 138–9, 143 Elegy for April , 136, 138, 145 The Silver Swan , 136, 138, B 142–5 Banville, John . See Black, Benjamin Bloch, Ernst, 68–9 Bateman, Colin, 2, 12n5, 149 Bodkin, Matthias McDonnell, 6 Beckett, Samuel, 59–60, 63, 68, 128, Bourke, Angela, 39–40, 43n37 133n35 Bowen, Rhys (Janet Quin-Harkin), Company , 59 10, 149 ‘Echo’s Bones’, 128 Bruen, Ken, 11, 33, 41n5, 42n15, Krapp’s Last Tape , 59 57–71, 127, 150 Molloy , 60, 128 The Devil , 63 The Trilogy , 59–60 The Guards , 59, 68–69 Waiting for Godot , 59, 128 Headstone , 59, 63–4 Belfast, 2, 9, 77, 92, 95–6, 99–101, The Killing of the Tinkers , 103, 126–127 59, 63 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement . (See The Magdalen Martyrs , 59 also Post-Agreement North), 83, Purgatory , 61–63, 65, 69 91, 95, 126 Sanctuary , 61–3

Note: Page number followed by “n” refers to footnotes.

Burke, Declan, 3, 11, 150 Nocturnes , 31 Burke, James Lee, 32 The Whisperers , 38 The White Road , 33, 37, 43n37 The Wolf in Winter , 36, 38 C Conrad, Kathryn, 26 Casey, Jane, 2, 6, 9, 121–34, 150 Cozy crime, 10 After the Fire , 121, 127, 130 Crofts, Freeman Wills, 6–7, 13n25 The Burning , 121, 123, 128, 130 The Kill , 121, 126–7 The Last Girl , 121, 130 D Left for Dead , 121 Deane, Seamus, 63–4 The Reckoning , 121, 127, 129 Delany, Samuel R., 2 The Stranger You Know , 121, 123 Díaz, Junot, 3 Catholic Church/Catholicism, 7, domicide , 114–5 14n13, 23–4, 33, 36, 49, 76–7, Doyle, Arthur Conan, 109 81, 85, 93, 96–7, 135–8, 140, Doyle, Roddy, 3 142, 145–6 Dresner, Lisa M., 19 Celtic culture, 17 Dublin, 2, 4–6, 8–11, 38, 45–55, 73, Celtic monasticism, 25 77, 108, 110–14, 135, 138, 142 Celtic Tiger, 3–4, 9, 12n5, 33, 47, Dudley Edwards, Ruth, 10, 150 61–3, 77, 98, 107–8, 110–16 Chandler, Raymond, 1–2, 7–8, 11, 33, 40, 46, 48, 50, 58–9, 62, 123, 149 E The Big Sleep , 7–8, 48, 50, 58, 61, 65 Eagleton, Terry, 4 ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, 59 Ellis, Peter Berresford. See Tremayne, Charles, Paul, 2, 150 Peter Christie, Agatha, 6, 41n4, 52 epigraph usage, 33, 49–50, 59–60, Cleary, Joe, 108, 117n7 64–5, 127–8 Collins, Wilkie, 5 existentialism, 58–63, 69 The Moonstone, 5, 7 exogamy , 26 The Woman in White, 13n19, 45 Connelly, Michael , 9 Connolly, John, 2, 11, 31–44, 41n5 , 150 F A Song of Shadows , 32, 36–38, 40 Faison, Stephen, 58 A Time of Torment , 32 Fallon, Ann C., 10 Bad Men , 31 Ferriter, Diarmaid, 136, 144–146 The Black Angel , 32–3, 35–36, 39 Foster, R. F., 107 The Book of Lost Things , 31 French, Tana, 2, 6, 9, 107–20, The Chronicles of the Invaders (with 117n7, 151 Jennifer Ridyard) , 31 Broken Harbor , 113, 114 Dark Hollow , 37, 42n21 Faithful Place , 112–3 Every Dead Thing , 31, 35–6, 38, 40 In the Woods , 110, 113 The Killing Kind , 35–8, 42n21 The Likeness , 113–4 The Lovers , 33, 36 The Secret Place , 115 Night Music: Nocturnes 2 , 31 INDEX 167

G Irish Studies, 2, 33–4, 62 Galway, 57, 60–5, 67, 69 Garratt, Robert, 109 Gill, Bartholomew (Mark McGarrity), J 8, 12n5 journalism/journalists, 2, 3, 6, 8, 11, Glynn, Alan, 33 12n5 , 31, 95–6, 121–3 Golden Age of detective fi ction , 4, 6, Joyce, James, 52, 60, 64, 145–6 13n15, 41n4 Dubliners , 60 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement . Ulysses , 135, 141–3, 146 (See also Post-Agreement North), 83, 91, 95, 126 Gothic literature, 4, 59, 75, 113, 116 K Grafton, Sue, 6, 123 Kerrigan, Gene, 33, 117n7, 118n20 Gregorek, Jean, 112–3, 119n40 Keyes, Marian, 3 Kiberd, Declan, 107, 135 Kincaid, Andrew, 108 H Kinealy, Christine, 21 Hammett, Dashiell, 7, 11, 45–6, 48–9, Kinsman, Margaret, 123 52, 58, 62 Klein, Kathleen, 19 The Maltese Falcon , 7, 46, 58 Kristeva, Julia, 18–21 hard-boiled, 1, 6–8, 11, 13n15, 46, 53, 62, 79, 81, 109, 123–4, 130 L Harrison, Cora, 10, 151 Laub, Dori, 109–10 Health Act (1947), 136–7 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 4–5 Heaney, Seamus, 75, 87, 90n56 Lloyd, David, 108 Herman, Judith, 107, 109–10 Holmes, Sherlock, 19, 21–2, 60, 109 Hughes, Declan, 11, 45–55, 127, 151 M All the Dead Voices , 46, 48, 51 Macdonald, Ross, 32, 35, 38, 43n34, City of Lost Girls , 48, 49, 52, 54 49–50 The Colour of Blood , 49–50 Marriage Equality Bill (2015), 64 Digging for Fire , 47 Maxwell, Alexander, 26 The Price of Blood , 49–50 McCabe, Patrick, 3, 34 Shiver , 47 McCarthy, Conor, 34 The Wrong Kind of Blood , 46, McGilloway, Brian, 2, 9, 48, 73–90, 151 48–50, 52 Bleed a River Deep , 86–7 Hughes, Eamonn, 101 Borderlands , 75, 81 Huyssen, Andreas, 111 Gallows Lane , 75, 83–4 link between Irish literary tradition, 75 I The Nameless Dead , 85, 87 Industrial Schools Act (1868), 137 plots and characterization, 76 Irish Constitution (1937), 136 The Rising , 75, 83 168 INDEX

McKinty, Adrian, 2, 11, 100, 151 S Meier, William, 2 Sayers, Dorothy, 6 Muldoon, Paul, 40 Scaggs, John, 17, 78 Schaffer, Rachel, 111 sensation novel, 4, 13n19 N Sjöwall, Maj, 86 Neville, Stuart, 9, 91–106, 151 social media, 123, 129, 131–2 Collusion , 91–3, 97–9, 101–2 Stafford, Fiona, 77 The Final Silence , 92, 94, 97, 102 stoicism, 67 infrastructure of Troubles, 92 surveillance, 121–22, 124, 128, 131 Stolen Souls , 91–3, 97, 99, 101 The Twelve/The Ghosts of Belfast , 94–5, 96–9 T Newgate novels, 4 Teel, John , 116 Nordic noir, 2 The Third Policeman (1968) The Notting Hill Mystery (1865) (O’Brien), 34 (Felix), 5 Tremayne, Peter (Peter Berresford Ellis), 10, 17–29, 152 Absolution by Murder , 17, 18, 22 O Atonement of Blood , 20 O’Connor, Niamh, 33, 152 Badger’s Moon , 26 O’Toole, Fintan, 108 The Chalice of Blood , 24 ‘Hemlock at Vespers’, 17 The Leper’s Bell , 20, 26 P Master of Souls , 23, 24 Paretsky, Sara, 6, 123 Our Lady of Darkness , 20 Phillips, Bill, 32 The Seventh Trumpet , 20 Poe, Edgar Allan, 60, 109 Shroud for the Archbishop , 18–19, Porfi rio, Robert, 58 21, 24 Post-Agreement North, 4, 9, 91–2, The Subtle Serpent , 20, 23–4 95, 98–9, 101, 104 Troubles, The, 2, 4, 9, 52, 81–5, 87–8, 91–6, 98–101, 103–4, 108, 125–6 Troubles literature/thriller, 95–7, R 101–4 Rankin, Ian, 9 Ridyard, Jennifer, 31 Robton, Bill , 101 W Ross, Ian Campbell, 2, 6, 146 Wahlöö, Per, 86 Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), Wilde, Oscar, 7–8, 33, 59 83, 92, 96 Woolf, Virginia, 60