ANTHOLOGY: Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century, Edited by Declan Burke, Liberties Press, 368pp. €19.99
HEINOUS CRIMES have been committed the length and breadth of Ireland, and even farther afield. Crimes that would make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. Crimes committed by smiling serial killers, dead-eyed psychopaths, low-life gangsters and those who thought themselves soldiers or even avenging angels. Too many crimes to count. Now what looks indisputably like a body has emerged. Some literary pathologists suggest it stems from the mid-1990s; others say it bears a much older history. Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century, under the skilled editorship of Declan Burke, reveals the full story of this body and offers thought-provoking theories about its origins, identity and future.
The body in question is no decaying corpse but a flourishing school of work that generically gets labelled as crime fiction. A new generation of writers has emerged in the past 10 years, with Gene Kerrigan, Arlene Hunt, Alan Glynn, Declan Hughes, Brian McGilloway, Adrian McKinty, Ken Bruen, Jane Casey and a seemingly endless host of other authors joining the likes of John Connolly and Colin Bateman. Declan Burke, author of Eightball Boogie, The Big O and Absolute Zero Cooland creator of a lively blog called Crime Always Pays,has assembled a thoroughly entertaining miscellany of essays, interviews, short stories, memoir and first-hand perspectives that offers intriguing insights into the genre, including excellent pieces on film and theatre.
Although labouring under a shared label, it is soon obvious that crime fiction encompasses an amazing diversity of styles and subject matter, what Burke, in his editor’s note, admits can be “a bewildering brew”. Burke’s achievement is that, whether through gentle persuasion or horses’ heads in beds, he has coaxed submissions from more than 30 contributors and that they sustain a consistently high level of interest. The approach ranges from the academic introduction of Prof Ian Campbell Ross, in which he plucks earlier Irish writers from the obscurity of history, to sparky, endearingly unpretentious accounts by several of the writers about how they first embraced the genre.
But even in such a diverse collection shared preoccupations emerge. The writers have a clear grasp of the genre's history and where they stand in relation to it. Inevitably the prevailing influence is American, and it seems appropriate that the book's title is inspired by Raymond Chandler's essay The Simple Art of Murder.In exploring the catalyst for the genre's more recent Irish blossoming, contributors identify the importance of the ending of the Troubles in the North; the growth of organised crime during the Tiger years; the collapse of traditional centres of authority; and what Fintan O'Toole describes as "the dislocation of rapid social and technological change, experienced in boom-time Ireland", a dislocation that produced a sense of "fragmentation".
John Banville highlights Roddy Doyle’s contribution to redefining what writing might be about, suggesting that “even though he didn’t write crime books, he loosened things up. He freed things, so people could say, ‘Hey, let’s do something that the old guys haven’t done’.” John Connolly suggests that the international commercial success of female writers such as Maeve Binchy and Marian Keyes opened markets for other types of writing.
Right from the book's foreword, in which Michael Connelly writes that "the examination of a crime is an examination of society", there is a reiterated conviction that Irish crime writing, in the words, again, of O'Toole, "has not merely begun to blossom but has become arguably the nearest thing we have to a realist literature adequate to capturing the nature of contemporary society". In his hard-hitting essay Brutal, Harrowing and Devastating,Gene Kerrigan also emphasises this deep societal relevance when he argues that "to write fiction about Irish crime is to write about Irish society – in its brutality, its irrationality and its injustice".
As is perhaps predictable when crime writers get together, below the surface there just occasionally simmers resentment about the supposed snobbishness of the literary establishment, its apparent reluctance to acknowledge even the genre’s best work. In a fascinating interview with John Banville, Burke teases out some of his contrasting attitudes to his two chosen types of writing. Banville, in his references to Georges Simenon, clearly acknowledges the potential of crime writing to achieve the quality of art but, in describing his work as Benjamin Black, admits to getting “a craftsman’s pleasure” but not “artistic pleasure”. He also suggests that the Banville and Black books originate in different parts of his creative self.
For others, the debate about high and low art has become irrelevant, and Alan Glynn argues that crime fiction increasingly incorporates “significant elements of literary fiction – depth of characterisation, subtle and poetic use of language, and a keen willingness to explore the darker corners of human nature”. He sees the once rigid lines of demarcation as blurring and has no regrets; John Connolly believes the future challenge for Irish crime writing is how to find a place on the international stage and “how to create a uniquely Irish form of the genre without losing sight of the universal”.
The energetic, passionate voices evident in this wonderful collection suggest that this is a challenge Irish crime writers, the trawlers and scribes of our mean streets, might well have the talent to meet.
David Park is a novelist. In 2008 he received the American Ireland Fund Literary Award