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

Not that it really matters, but I was just thinking that when I'm king of the world ...

Today I play newspaper columnist again and delight you with random observations disguised as work.

1) Based on the open chapters of Irregulars, Kevin McCarthy would have made a splendid member of my wartime and its aftermath panel at Bouchercon 2013.

2) Dashiell Hammett is popularly thought of as the antithesis of the old-style, rationalist, traditional mystery, and he made great fun of, say, S.S. Van Dyne. But an old-fashioned mystery-type solution lies at the heart of the mystery in Hammett's splendid 1924 story "Women, Politics and Murder." That solution takes up maybe a single paragraph, though. Rather than steamroll or satirize or eradicate the tradition, Hammett's early stories build around it, in the manner of a great city growing up around a settlement of rude huts.

3) Moshe Halbertal's book Maimonides: Life and Thought, discussed in this space Tuesday, suggests that Maimonides in some ways anticipated 20th-century ideas about the limits of language. I reflected on my own experience, and I thought, "Some people reach those limits earlier than Halbertal, Maimonides, and Wittgenstein thought." 

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

One city, one crime novel — but which novel?

I have in the past gently chided the Free Library of Philadelphia for the high-mindedness of its "One City, One Book" choices. Why can't Philadelphia do what other cities and institutions have done and sneak a Chandler or a Hammett in there once in a while?

Hammett has long enjoyed popular and critical esteem, and his work, I was surprised to learn recently, can appeal to younger readers. Julie M. Rivett, Hammett's granddaughter and recent editor, told me last week: "I talk to kids about Hammett. The Maltese Falcon has helped reach some reluctant readers."  Teenagers, she said, responded especially to the novel's celebrated "Flitcraft Parable," a story of sudden, cataclysmic, arbitrary change.

Alan Glynn's novels could serve as a springboard for discussion of corporate and government infiltration into our lives. Kevin McCarthy's could meet American interest in its immigrant populations and their histories. So could Paco Ignacio Taibo II's. Same with Andrea Camilleri's, which would also tally nicely with the boom of interest in cable television food shows and diversity in dining. Want a contemporary view of China? How about Qiu Xiaolong's Death of a Red Heroine?

If Philadelphia wants to stay local, why not David Goodis' Black Friday? Sympathy for the downtrodden. Survival against daunting odds. Finding one's own destiny.  Black Friday is full of big themes, the sort of thing to generate big discussion and draw in even readers who have not read the novel. Or how about Hammett's Red Harvest? That book would lend itself easily and deliciously to discussion of Philadelphia's history of rotten politics.

Or what about— But that's where you come in. What crime novel or story collection would you have your city, county, province, state, or country read? And why? It's not enough that the book be good or great. It must have the potential to appeal to readers young and old, to crime fans as well as to those who normally don't touch the stuff, and to those who might need a nudge to pick up a book in the first place. How does your choice meet these criteria? How will it grab readers the way "The Flitcraft Parable" snared Julie Rivett's teenage existentialists?
 
 © Peter Rozovsky 2013

Occasional Irregularity

I've read lots of descriptions of men who spend too much time in bars. If you read crime fiction, you have, too. Here's how Kevin McCarthy handles the motif in Chapter One of his novel Irregulars:

"...a Player's Navy Cut burning down in his fingers, a fairy mound of shredded betting slips in front of him on the bar, five or six pints in an afternoon and sometimes more of an evening. Not doing the dog on it, as the saying does, but supping enough to damp down the nightmares that still come to him, even now, in his new life as a conscript in Dublin's vast army of thrifty, jobless bachelors. It is an army marching on bacon sandwiches, tinned stew and beans heated on single-ring gas burners in damp digs and back bedrooms; an army barracking in pubs and betting shops; convalescing in the Carnegie library, weary foot-soldiers obliterating the days and hours alongside snuffling, time-killing comrades."

That's nice, isn't it, the sympathetic, though lightly mocking invocation of the military perhaps hitting especially hard given the novel's setting in Dublin in 1922, around the outbreak of the Irish Civil War.  Irregulars could be one of those crime novels, along with Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca novels or McCarthy's own Peeler, or, if you consider it crime, Ronan Bennett's Havoc in its Third Year, that tell a fine story while making you feel the history in your bones.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Win books by a couple of Irish guys — We have a winner!

During and after Crimefest 2013 in Bristol, I collected, among other books, the latest novels by Kevin McCarthy and William Ryan. Within days of returning home, I received by mail, among other books, the latest novels by Kevin McCarthy and William Ryan.

That promotional largesse can now win you the books, as I'll send the extra copies to the first readers who correctly answer these skill-testing questions:

1. McCarthy's novels are set amid the agonizing birth of the modern Irish state. The first is titled Peeler. What is a peeler? Win a copy of McCarthy's new book, Irregulars.
2. Ryan's books, set in mid-twentieth-century Soviet Russia, include a notable real-life Russian writer as a character. Who is that writer? Win Ryan's The Twelfth Department. 

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That didn't take long, did it? One reader in California knew both that peelers are police in Northern Ireland (named for Sir Robert Peel, whose first name became the colloquial name for police in England: bobbies.), and that Isaac Babel is a character in William Ryan's novels. Congratulations. Thanks to you, two Irish guys are smiling, and I save postage by sending two books to one place.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

All I could drink with the author of All You Can Eat

But first, a pint or two with Kevin McCarthy, whose novel Peeler I liked so much a few years ago. That affable, insightful author talked about Ireland, about America, about the American city where we both lived at the same times years ago (I was the quiet one on the Green Line) and, before I knew it, I had a copy of his second book, Irregulars, in my book bag.

Peeler, I wrote:

"performed one of those acts of alchemy that always leave me in awe: It conveyed not just the facts of the novel's historical setting (the founding years of the Free State of Ireland), but also the feeling: the rural and urban poverty in West Cork, the moral uncertainty, and aching nostalgia for a time very recently passed, before the shooting started, when life seemed much simpler."

So I am excited to have Irregulars, and I'll keep you posted.

Then Kevin and I hied to the Porterhouse (I took a pint of the plain to keep my heart from sinking) to meet Ed O'Loughlin, who slapped his latest book into my hands. I had not heard of O'Loughlin before, but he was nominated for the Booker Prize, and he was smart enough to quit journalism when he looked around and found that the world's corps of foreign correspondents had been been slashed and cut and decimated to the point where it could fit comfortably into a snug at any bar in Ireland and still hear its lonely voices echoing off the walls.

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Speaking of Irish authors new to me, Declan Burke has been throwing new names into the ring of late over at his Crime Always Pays, and no one knows more about Irish crime writing than Declan, even though he's sometimes too modest to show it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Meet Kevin McCarthy

The world's best crime fiction comes from Ireland, and one of the country's best new crime and historical-fiction writers has started a blog.

The author is Kevin McCarthy, his first novel was Peeler, (which no U.S. publisher has seen fit to pick up in a print edition; it is available as an e-book), and the blog is A Criminal History?  Here's a bit of what I wrote about Peeler in 2010:

“When Clive James turned into Francis Fukuyama three years ago and as much as declared the end of crime fiction (`In most of the crime novels coming out now, it’s a matter not of what happens but of where. Essentially, they are guidebooks.'), I dissented.

“For one thing, the where can constitute its own what, a setting so different from the reader's own that it offers fictional possibilities even Clive James never dreamed of.

“I've just now opened Kevin McCarthy's novel Peeler, and its plot, its dueling epigraphs, and the note of uncertainty in its second sentence offer the promise of an exciting and maybe even morally serious work. And it's all because of where the story takes place: in Ireland, during the country's war of independence, the Royal Irish Constabulary and the IRA each investigating, unknown to the other, a young woman's killing.”

The book fulfilled its promise, and it performed one of those acts of alchemy that always leave me in awe: It conveyed not just the facts of the novel's historical setting (the founding years of the Free State of Ireland), but also the feeling: the rural and urban poverty in West Cork, the moral uncertainty, and aching nostalgia for a time very recently passed, before the shooting started, when life seemed much simpler. (McCarthy talks about the history behind the novel and the Royal Irish Constabulary at Crime Always Pays.)

It's up there with Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca novels and Ronan Bennett's Havoc, in Its Third Year as the best historical (crime) I've read since this blog first saw the light of day.

Take it away, Kevin.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The considerable appeal of Peeler

Kevin McCarthy's Peeler is like Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca trilogy (The Damned Season, Carte Blanche, Via delle Oche): a vivid, sometimes stunning evocation of a historical period through one police officer's life.

Here, the officer is Sgt. Seán O'Keefe of the newly despised Royal Irish Constabulary during the Irish War of Independence in 1920. (The novel's title refers to a popular term for English and Irish police, derived from Sir Robert Peel, creator of the RIC and, later, of London's Metropolitan Police.)

As in Lucarelli's books, competing military and police forces, not always in this case divided neatly along national or religious lines, complicate the protagonist's moral, personal and professional lives. O'Keefe and colleagues are called on to investigate the murder of a young woman mutilated and left on a hill wearing a misspelled "traitor" sign.

Some on the British side are eager to blame the IRA — which has, in the meantime, launched its own, parallel investigation and is just as eager to blame Auxiliaries or "Auxies," a feared group within the RIC.

Mostly, though, at least through its first two thirds, the novel offers affecting portraits of rural and urban poverty in West Cork, moral uncertainty, and aching nostalgia for a time very recently passed, before the shooting started, when life seemed much simpler.

I don't know who will solve the mystery or how the case will be resolved (I've just guessed at the killer's identity, though I have no great confidence my guess is right), but in its evocation of its period, of what a war that no one seems quite sure is a war can do to people, Peeler is already one of the top books I've read this year.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Kevin McCarthy's "Peeler," or, sometimes the where is the what

When Clive James turned into Francis Fukuyama three years ago and as much as declared the end of crime fiction (“In most of the crime novels coming out now, it’s a matter not of what happens but of where. Essentially, they are guidebooks.”), I dissented.

For one thing, the where can constitute its own what, a setting so different from the reader's own that it offers fictional possibilities even Clive James never dreamed of.

I've just now opened Kevin McCarthy's novel Peeler, and its plot, its duelling epigraphs, and the note of uncertainty in its second sentence offer the promise of an exciting and maybe even morally serious work. And it's all because of where the story takes place: in Ireland, during the country's war of independence, the Royal Irish Constabulary and the IRA each investigating, unknown to the other, a young woman's killing.

I'll be back to tell you what's what about the where, though I'm not sure when.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010