Sex, bullshit, and good stuff from Ireland

`Can any good come from Ireland?"

I don't know what I'd have answered when Gerald of Wales asked that question 825 years ago, but today I'd reply that some of Ireland's crime fiction is all right.

At the moment Conor Brady's 2012 novel A June of Ordinary Murders continues my Irish education. The novel has a dogged police detective sergeant tracking three murders in Dublin in 1887. That was a big year, the jubilee of Queen Victoria's reign and a time of heightened activity by the Land League and the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

But the novel wears its history lightly. Here's an example: Anyone who has read a British or Irish crime or espionage novel will likely have encountered the term Special Branch, that secretive national-security force whose very name makes perps, regular police, and readers alike tremble with fear and excitement. All it takes is a few mentions of Scotland Yard's Special Irish Branch here to remind the reader that the first Special Branch, of London's Metropolitan Police, was, indeed, formed (in 1883) to combat the IRB.

A June of Ordinary Murders (as distinguished from the political murders much on Irish and English minds at the time) is also good on period detail, with the protagonist, Joe Swallow, doing a lot more walking than fictional police of stories set in later periods. My only historical quibbles amount to little more than bullshit. Characters in this 1887-set novel use that expletive several times, though it did not come into popular use until around 1914, according to several sources.

I'm also not sure gender was as widely used for sex in 1887 as it is in A June of Ordinary Murders. The question is less one of strict chronological accuracy than of striking the right tone. Gender, though I am convinced that its spread in America is due to puritanical reluctance to say and write sex, is attested in that sense well before 1887. But it sounds a bit too twentieth- and twenty-first-century to me.

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And now, for a lighter-hearted invocation of a Special Branch man, let's give it up for Ronnie Drew and the Dubliners.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013