Writers on the crest of a crime wave

THERE WAS a time when Irish writers of the criminal persuasion were rarer than root canal work on a hen. Over the past decade, however, Irish crime fiction has emerged as a self-assured genre whose practitioners are not just selling well at home, but are also gaining recognition on the murderously competitive international crime scene.

Take the Edgar awards. Named after the man who is usually credited with the invention of the murder mystery, Edgar Allen Poe, the annual prizes from the Mystery Writers of America are among the most prestigious in the business. Past winners include Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke, John Le Carré and Ian Rankin: but Irish names are beginning to crop up on a regular basis. Declan Hughes's third Ed Loy novel, The Price of Blood,has been nominated for this year's Best Novel award, while Benjamin Black and Ken Bruen were nominated last year for Christine Fallsand Priestrespectively.

Our first outright Edgar -winner, however, is Tana French, whose thoughtful debut outing In the Woodswon last year's Edgar award for Best First Novel. As a newcomer to the crime-writing scene, French has her own ideas about why the genre seems to have caught on here only recently. "Crime writing is more deeply rooted in space and time than most genres – because crime itself is so specific to a context," she says. "You don't get drive-by shootings in 18th-century Siberia. And in Ireland, until recently, murder was something which just didn't happen that much. I remember hearing John Connolly saying that when he started out, he set his books in America – because if anybody committed a murder here in Ireland everybody knew, within a day, who had done it. Also, there was a culture here of 'whatever you say, say nothing' – and that permeated everything. Even writing about crime was seen as unacceptable." The implication, of course is that now we live in a society where anything goes. "Well," says French, "Ireland has changed so much over the past 15 years that nobody can really take it in. The explosion in crime fiction may be one way of trying to deal with these changes."

A CENTRALpreoccupation of many of the current crop of Irish crime novels is, she points out, the theme of how to strike a workable balance between past and present. "In Declan Hughes's The Wrong Kind of Blood, the past literally surfaces from underneath a building site to shake up the present. Patrick Dunne's investigator, Ilaun Bowe, is an archaeologist by trade. And just about everything I do is about keeping hold of our traditional identity while not getting stuck in the past.

“That’s such an issue for people in Ireland at the moment. How do we balance the new motorway with the archaeological site? How do we keep an eye on our identity while welcoming immigrants who have a load to offer? When you’re reading a good crime novel, you get a core sample of what a place is about. So crime writing becomes a way to deal with issues that people have a really hard time getting their heads around.” One of the hardest issues to get our heads around is, of course, murder. “There’s no bigger act than somebody killing somebody else. The stakes just don’t get any higher than that.”

Although she has lived in Dublin for 20 years now, French’s father was a development economist, so her childhood was divided between the US, Italy and Malawi – a semi-nomadic upbringing which, she says, is invaluable for a writer. “You have to learn to fit into cultural contexts that are utterly unfamiliar,” she explains. “Coming to Italy from Ireland, for instance, the physical distance which is normally maintained between two people in conversation is completely different. Unless you want to get yourself into a lot of trouble, you have to pick that up quite quickly. So it makes you observant. And if you’re noticing these things – these cultural indicators – all the time, it makes it easier to translate them into writing.”

Her training as a professional actor also helped. "If you write in the first person, which I do, the skill is the same skill underneath. It's the same thing that I did for 10 years as an actor, working in theatre and, occasionally, voiceover. Seeing the story through the eyes of this person – the narrator – with all their flaws and distortions. The narrator of In the Woods, Rob, is not particularly reliable. He tells lies; he omits things; he skews things." Which, clearly, makes his relationship with the reader a little more complicated – and a lot more interesting.

French has now abandoned acting to write full time, and says that winning the Edgar has played a major role in her rising career. "I think in America, it really did make a difference. When you go into a bookshop, there are so many books – how do you choose? When you see that this one won the Edgar, or that one's on the New York Timesbestseller list, you've got a little reassurance that you're not putting down your money for nothing. I hope."

In the Woodsmade healthy inroads on to that very bestseller list. Modestly, she says that it's the book's theme, rather than its style, structure or pacing, which has propelled it into the big time.

“Sometimes you just hit on something that people have been thinking about, or wondering about. Everybody’s interested in mystery, and the biggest mystery of all isn’t murder. It’s people simply disappearing. When someone is murdered, at least you know what happened – but when people vanish, that question mark is enormous. That’s why I was drawn to that subject, as a writer. Three kids go into the woods. Two of them never come out; one does. What would it do to your mind to know that somewhere inside you is the solution to this mystery?”

French made the survivor of that mystery, Rob Ryan, her narrator for In the Woods. In her second book, The Likeness, it's the turn of his partner Detective Cassie Maddox. She's now working on a third novel in which Maddox's former boss, Frank Mackey, tells the story. "He always thought that his first love had dumped him and run off to England," she says. "Right up until her suitcase shows up in the wall of a house that's being gutted. So he finds himself going back to a world from which he had cut himself off totally."

THE LOOSE linking of one novel with another represents an open-ended approach to the traditional parameters of the murder mystery: the country house, the detective unit, the forensic laboratory. And it's the psychology of mystery, rather than the nitty-gritty methodology of police procedure, which interests French above all. "I recently read The Franchise Affairby Josephine Tey," she says. "I think she's one of the greats. You know almost from the beginning who the killer is – and yet you're gripped, because the mysteries are the mysteries of human personality. It's 'howdunnit' and 'whydunnit' rather than 'whodunnit'."

From this wide angle, the boundaries between crime fiction and other kinds of writing become distinctly blurred – which may be why so many contemporary Irish literary novelists, from Gerard Stembridge through Eoin McNamee to Sebastian Barry – have been flirting with the genre to one degree or another. In the brave new world of crime writing, the solution to the crime is often not where the story ends, but where it begins.

And it seems to suit the new breed of Irish crime writer right down to the ground.

• The 2009 Edgar awards will be announced at the end of April

THE IRISH ANGLE

You could spend the rest of your life just trying to catch up with contemporary Irish crime fiction. From the edgy Quirke books Christine Fallsand The Silver Swanby Benjamin Black, aka John Banville, to Arlene Hunt's likeable duo John Quigley and Sarah Kenny, akathe Quick Investigation Agency, there's certainly plenty to plunge into.

This year looks as if it will be another fruitful one for Irish crime writers, with new novels due from Declan Hughes ( All The Dead Voices), Ken Bruen ( American Skin), Adrian McKinty ( Fifty Grand), Brian McGilloway ( Bleed A River Deep) and Gene Kerrigan ( Dark Times in the City). Paul Charles's London-based DI Christy Kennedy is on his ninth case in The Beautiful Sound of Silence, while Pauline McLynn juggles a missing urn and a devoted granny in Missing You Already. But are we sated? Are we heck. We can't wait for

Ed O'Loughlin's debut novel, Not Untrue And Not Unkind, due in April – and also in April, Stuart Neville's Belfast thriller The Twelve. Another month, another murder – happily only on paper.