More Irish history and why you should read it

Here's some more of what I've learned about Ireland's history, this time mostly from Ronan Fanning's Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922:

1) German arms shipments to Ireland date back at least to April 1914—to the Ulster Volunteer Force; unionists, not nationalists.

2) A much smaller German arms purchase by Irish nationalists, co-led by Erskine Childers a month later for maximum publicity, resulted in a bloody a crackdown by a British regiment.

3)Yes, that Erskine Childers, author of the early spy novel The Riddle of the Sands.

4) The Irish tradition of secret societies and volunteer groups long predates the alphabet soup of organizations that became familiar during the sectarian Troubles that began in 1969.

5) That "The IRA’s initial focus in what is known either as the ‘War of Independence’ or the ‘Anglo-Irish War’ of 1919–21 was the ostracisation of the police."

What does this have to do with contemporary crime fiction set in the present, or a lot closer to it than 1910 to 1922? Not much, unless one is reading Stuart Neville or Adrian McKinty or Eoin McNamee or Garbhan Downey, or Kevin McCarthy, or Anthony Quinn, or Andrew Pepper, or ...

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Some Irish crime writers on St. Patrick's Day

I've been in touch with some of my Irish crime writing friends. It transpires that this St. Patrick's Day carry-on has something to do with Ireland, and that a few of them have some thoughts on the matter. First up is Anthony Quinn, author of Disappeared, with sobering, wistful thoughts on America's crapulous celebration of Ireland's patron saint. His essay is called "Green WIth Envy," and here's a sample:

"On March 17, every US city seemed to want to subject the saint’s day to a proper patriotic blowout, an annual invitation to a feast of green, white and gold, that, as a child growing up during the Troubles, I yearned to accept. However, in the 1970s and 80s, Northern Ireland was a world away from Boston, Chicago or New York. In the border towns of my youth, wearing green made you a target for loyalist death squads, while waving a tricolour was an act of rebellion that could lead to internment without trial. 

"For the children of my generation, March 17 was a religious festival blighted by bad weather, a solemn event from which all sense of pleasure or celebration was firmly excluded."

Read the rest on the Mysterious Press Web site. Quinn's essay devotes space to Denis Donaldson, the activist, informer, and haunted figure who was an inspiration for a haunted central character in Disappeared.

Next up is Carrickfergus' own Adrian McKinty, who writes: "If you want to call yourself Irish then be my guest ... and if that Irishness manifests itself in drinking German beer that has been dyed green, well that's fine with me too." Just don't wear a four-leaf clover and call it a shamrock.

Finally, Declan Burke marks the day with a list of fine Irish crime novels of the last five years, a list to which you should add Burke's own Absolute Zero Cool and Slaughter's Hound.

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Irish fact of the day: Barry Fitzgerald was Protestant! Now, I'm off to read from The Oxford History of Ireland. Happy St. Patrick's Day!

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Anthony Quinn on his Troubled upbringing

With a hat tip to Crime Always Pays come a link to this essay by novelist Anthony Quinn about his childhood in Northern Ireland. (I wrote about Quinn's novel Disappeared here and here.)  The interview will explain much about why Northern Ireland remains fertile territory for some of today's best crime writing.

By coincidence, I read the interview a day after the obituary of a former reporter for my newspaper included this excerpt from his 1981 article about the funeral of Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands:

“In a grimy gray drizzle, under ragged black flags that lifted and waved balefully in the fitful air; to the wail of a single piper, on streets winding through charred and blasted brick spray-painted with slogans of hate; by silent tens of thousands, past fathers holding sons face-forward that they might remember the day, past mothers rocking and shielding prams that held tomorrow’s fighters, past old men who blew their rheumy noses and remembered their own days of rage …  Bobby Sands was carried yesterday to a grave of raw Ulster mud.”

And that, in turn, leads to the even more felicitous coincidence that this week marks the UK release of Adrian McKinty's I Hear the Sirens in the Streets, which would be the best book I've read in 2013 if I hadn't read it in 2012.  Sirens follows on the excellent Cold Cold Ground. Read both, and find out what McKinty fans like Daniel Woodrell and Ian Rankin are talking about.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

More from Disappeared

My voyages in Side Project City continue. In the meantime, here are a few more selections from Anthony Quinn's Disappeared:

"Since the ceasefire, many paramilitaries had gone to ground along the lough shore — entire families of them, in fact. Some of them forged new careers in politics, others took to alcohol, and a few found God."

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"So our prime suspects are a group of paramilitaries with macabre imaginations and an interest in duck hunting."

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"It was wariness and silence that distinguished Republican estates after the cease-fire. Not petrol bombs or riots, but silence."

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"His mind was like a house that had been repeatedly burgled by a memory thief."

And that's not to mention some incendiary speeches at the wake of a man who had been a good Republican to some people and something quite different to others.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Meet Zorba the crime writer

There's no such thing as the supernatural, just phenomena and states of being outside the usual whose resistance, temporary or otherwise, to explanation induces feelings of uncanniness in characters and readers.

Stuart Neville understood this well in The Ghosts of Belfast (The Twelve in the UK). And another Northern Ireland crime writer, Anthony Quinn, understands it as well in his debut novel, Disappeared.

A retired Special Branch agent's Alzheimer's disease induces a hyper-sensitivity and heightened self-awareness that are just as creepy as and far more convincingly real than twaddle about ghosts.

A mysterious buzzing as two police officers search a hastily abandoned cottage offers further evidence that Quinn understands — and this is crucial for successful creepy scenes — that the feeling of uncanniness is wholly interior to the character. It's nothing "out there."

The book, through its first quarter, is also full of mordant wit:

"Irwin, who was at least ten years younger, represented the youth Daly fervently hoped he had left behind."

and

"Who do you think it was? The real IRA, the continuity IRA, the INLA, or the truly, madly, deeply IRA?"

Ken Bruen is an indefatigable blurbster, but I see no reason so far to suspect him of  overstatement when he says: "Line up the Edgar for best first novel. Disappeared is a major piece of work." 

© Peter Rozovsky 2012