Modern Ireland and modern Irish crime writers: A St. Patrick's Day post

For St. Patrick's Day, here's a post from a couple of years ago about Irish history and what you can learn about it from Irish crime writers.

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 A passage in Adrian McKinty's novel The Bloomsday Dead alerted me to a certain tendency in Belfast to romanticize the present and the past (though McKinty states the case more pungently), and I may first have heard the term irregulars, for the anti-treaty military forces in the Irish Civil War, through Kevin McCarthy.

The dicey subject of Irish-German relations in the middle of the twentieth century? Stuart Neville deals with one strand of its aftermath in his novel Ratlines. (And it appears that Declan Burke may do so as well, in his latest.)  And Eoin McNamee wrote about the chilling sectarian hatred at the heart of one of Belfast's most notorious murder gangs in his novel Resurrection Man.

The strange, orphaned position of Northern Ireland, unloved by both the United Kingdom and Eire (or is that Ireland? Or the South? Or the Republic?) cannot have been portrayed more directly and more touchingly than in the passage of Garbhan Downey's (I forget in which book) where a politician from the North tells a counterpart from the South something like: "I know you regard us as the unwanted child you'd rather tie up in a sack and toss into the river." And my first inkling that Irish history was more complicated than the Manichean pieties we get in America came when Gerard Brennan took me to the Irish Republican History Museum off the Falls Road in Belfast.

I've just finished reading Part IV of R.F. "Roy" Foster's Modern Ireland 1600-1972, and I was periodically surprised and delighted when his entertaining, opinionated, analytical, non-ax-grinding history would touch upon subjects dealt with in some depth by each of the above-mentioned Irish crime writers. Foster's declaration, for example, that

"For all the rhetoric of anti-Partitionism, opinion in the Republic was covertly realistic about this point, too: the predominant note of modern Ireland in 1972 was that of looking after its own."

says in historical terms what Downey does in fictional ones, and induces a similar twinge of sympathy for Northern Ireland's people, if not its leaders.

So thanks, Irish crime writers, for writing entertaining popular fiction while casting an intelligent eye on the problematic present and past of your problematic country.

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Foster's bibliographic essay at the end of Modern Ireland mentions one Irish crime writer by name, though not for her crime fiction:

"There are few first-rate biographies for the period, one glowing exception being R. Dudley Edwards' Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure, which illuminates far more than its subject."

Looking for more? Edwards, Downey, McNamee, and Brennan contributed stories to Akashic Books' Belfast Noir collection, edited by McKinty and Neville.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

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

Resurrection Man

Eoin McNamee’s 1994 novel Resurrection Man took me across the ocean, past the checkpoints, and straight into the cerebral cortices of the killers, comrades, lovers, friends, family, and pursuers of the murderous Belfast sectarian killers called the Resurrection Men in the book, the Shankhill Butchers in real life

But this is no middlebrow sociological novel, seeking the roots of criminality in childhood or other trauma. Nor, despite its basis in real events and real deeds, is it a cheap straight-from-the-headlines-style exposé. (Indeed, the novel muses upon the power of media to rub the sharp edges off tragedy, smoothing everything into well-practiced phrases.) McNamee’s excursions into his characters’ heads serve only to show how isolated each is from everyone else.

Despite the intimate familiarity the novel gives us with the mind of gang leader Victor Kelly (apparently modeled closely on the real-life Lenny Murphy), McNamee never resorts to the easy out of making him sympathetic. Kelly's psychological disintegration and his delusions of grandeur are stark and terrible, but not redeeming in the least. That would be too easy.

Like Adrian McKinty's The Dead Yard, this book makes its killers terrifying and pathetic at the same time, a bunch of losers hanging around pubs talking about "units" and "operations" before going out to slaughter lone, defenseless civilians. Like McKinty's The Cold Cold Ground, this book is likely to make you feel like you were there. Like that book as well, it would not be out of place in a course on recent and contemporary Northern Irish history, a scary, traumatic history but one well worth knowing.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Paranoia strikes deep

Eoin McNamee does not quite embrace paranoia as a subject the way Alan Glynn does,  but everything in his 2004 novel The Ultras is, as the narrator remarks of a photograph, "rife with ambiguity."

Glynn handles the issue a bit more deftly than McNamee does, if only because he shows where McNamee often tells. The tells are a few key phrases, most obviously "You have a sense that ... " No one knows in this novel, they only sense.

Both authors recognize the chilling, alienating, mind-deadening effect of buzz words, regime change, brand, take it to the next level, change the conversation for Glynn; high-tech military jargon in McNamee's tale of a disgraced cop's obsession with a mysterious intelligence operative in 1970s Northern Ireland.

What are you favorite novels of paranoia? Come on; tell us. You know we'll find out anyway.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Eoin McNamee and Theodor Mommsen

I can't tell you how good it is to be back in Philadelphia. But I can tell you that the arrival of a package of four novels by Eoin McNamee that I'd ordered helped mitigate the despondence.

The four books are Resurrection Man, The Blue Tango, The Ultras, and Orchid Blue, and the only trouble I had was deciding which to read first. Each looks to be beautifully written, putting me right into the heads of characters living through tense circumstances. At least one blurber called McNamee's writing dreamlike, and the adjective makes sense. His descriptions are somehow immediate and detached at the same time.

I'm just a few pages into The Ultras, my first McNamee novel, and I have a feeling he may be about the best of the highly talented group that has made Northern Ireland home of some of the world's best crime writing.

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On the non-crime side, having just returned from Portugal and long having been awed by impressive Roman remains from Israel to Iberia and from Tunisia to Fishbourne, I dug out The Provinces of the Roman Empire from Caesar to Diocletian (1885) by Theodor Mommsen (right) and read the chapter on Spain and Portugal.

Mommsen's outlook is surprisingly fresh for a nineteenth-century author, giving due credit to the outskirts of the Roman Empire for cultural, political, and social achievements without, however, slipping into cultural relativism or sentimental boosting of the periphery over the center.

Here's a bit from the book's introduction:

"It is in the agricultural towns of Africa, in the homes of the vine-dressers of the Moselle, in the flourishing townships of the Lycian mountains and on the margin of the Syrian desert that the work of the imperial period is to be found."

In the meat of the book, Mommsen forswears rhetorical sweep and gets down to the impressive work of explaining the whats and, in detail, the hows of one of history's most awesome achievements.
© Peter Rozovsky 2011