My Bouchercon panels: Requiems for the Departed

Sure, the messy birth of the political entity called Northern Ireland offers a rich setting for grim stories, but Irish crime writers can reach further back into their country's past for source material. Four years ago, a bunch of them did, in an anthology called Requiems for the Departed.

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Myths don't work unless they're with us, around us, even in us.

That's why the Requiems for the Departed collection is so powerful. Its stories invoke Irish myth, most of them updating settings and, often, names, but retaining what seems to this non-expert the unsettling power and bringing it to crime fiction.

The contributors are an all-star list of Irish crime writing, some of whom readers of Detectives Beyond Borders may know (Stuart Neville, Adrian McKinty, Ken Bruen, Brian McGilloway, Garbhan Downey) and others whose names may be new (Arlene Hunt, John McAllister, Sam Millar, and quite a number more).

He was around when the myths were real.
Bog body ("Gallagh Man"), National
Museum of Ireland, Dublin. Photo by
your humble blogkeeper.

Bruen's story is brash and chilling, McKinty's. Neville's, and McAllister's the stuff to keep you awake at night, and McGilloway's a little police procedural with a delightfully comic ending. (The story features his series character, Inspector Benedict Devlin and offers evidence that myth can mix easily with a contemporary setting.)

Pop on over to Crime Scene. N.I. for all kinds of good stuff about the book from co-editor Gerard Brennan.

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Gerard Brennan, Adrian McKinty, and Stuart Neville, will be part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 called Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland. The panel happens Friday, Nov. 14, at 11:30 a.m. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010, 2014

Crime fiction and the power of myth

Declan Burke's forthcoming novel Slaughter's Hound is full of characters named Finn and Gráinne and Saoirse, and invocations of Queen Maeve, and a short prefatory note hints at wolf hounds' rich role in Irish mythology.

One need not recognize the allusions to enjoy and appreciate the dark, serious, and occasionally funny story (and I may well have missed more of them than I caught), but it doesn't hurt, either.

While waiting for Burke's book, why not dip into Mike Stone and Gerard Brennan's Requiems for the Departed,  a collection of short stories by seventeen contemporary Irish crime writers based on Irish myth?

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That's Ireland. What myths from other cultures have contemporary crime writers used? The Oedipus story? Cain and Abel? Which could they use? What ancient myths and tales would make good crime stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

New arrivals from Northern Ireland

• Gerard Brennan's award-winning newborn son, Oscar.


• Gerard Brennan's Requiems for the Departed, co-edited with Mike Stone and now available everywhere. The volume brings together some of Ireland's best crime writers in a collection whose stories "invoke Irish myth, most of them updating settings and, often, names, but retaining what seems to this non-expert the chilling power and bringing it to crime fiction," raved Detectives Beyond Borders.


• An advance copy of Collusion, Stuart Neville's follow-up to the chilling and much-honored Ghosts of Belfast (released as The Twelve in the United Kingdom). Early reading suggests some interesting variations on the tone of the first book's story of a haunted former IRA terrorist and his agonizing quest for redemption.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010