Happy St. Patrick's Day

New Guy Ritchie movie honors Irish crime writer

Well, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, but the Doyles were an Irish Catholic family, and Doyle's mother was Mary Foley.

OK, I admit that that was just a hook. I mentioned it because several minor characters in the new Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey Jr./Jude Law movie, Sherlock Holmes, speak with what sound to me like Irish accents. I eagerly anticipate a critique from the blogosphere's leading critic of Irish accents in movies.

More notable is a scene of Holmes fighting a bare-knuckles boxing match to the accompaniment of Luke Kelly and the Dubliners singing "Rocky Road to Dublin," even though the band members did not write the song, as the movie's credits say they did.

The film also makes interesting use of the vaunted Holmes logical method, alluding to it at the very beginning, and then having Holmes do so just a time or two later on. This lets Guy Ritchie do his action/special effects thing without getting bogged down in old-fashioned mannerisms.

What other contemporary touches does Ritchie bring? In the aforementioned fight scene, he turns Holmes' famed logical method into a kind of Zen-like meditation that will be familiar to a generation raised on latter-day, glossy martial-arts-influenced movies. And the central plot strand, more thriller than detective tale, has a steam-punk overtone.

Robert Downey's Sherlock Holmes is more dissipated than the typical Holmes, falling into a depressed funk and letting his room fall into an alarming state of disorder. (The emphasis on the dark side goes only so far, though. Holmes used cocaine, but probably could not be shown doing so in today's moral environment. See Smithsonian.com for interesting speculation on a possible literary source for the darker side of Sherlock Holmes. That source, too, is Irish.)

That's how Guy Ritchie updates Sherlock Holmes. How do other directors update old stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The rocky road to modern Ireland

Books, Inq., run by my former colleague Frank Wilson, points the way to a newspaper article full of interesting insights about Irish English, even if some of these come from John Banville, not beloved of all in the Irish crime-writing community.

I especially liked the article's observation that, while ordinary Irish people may not have Seán Ó Faoláin or James Joyce at their fingertips, they speak with a fluency rare in the author's own city of Toronto:

"I'll be accused of stereotyping to say it, but everyone not only answered in full sentences, but those sentences almost inevitably turned into paragraphs, and those paragraphs had structure, plot, characters, jokes, well-constructed self-deprecations and not a single `um,' `er' or `like.'"

The man is right. I'm recently back from a trip to Ireland, where no one ever missed the chance to turn the most ordinary, quotidian interaction into a story or a joke or a little play:

Me: "Is that a Belfast train?"

Conductor: "Do you want it to be a Belfast train?"

Me: "Yes."

Conductor: "It's a Belfast train."

My other discovery was that Peter Lennon's 1967 documentary Rocky Road To Dublin is available whole and free on YouTube. I found this by accident when searching for clips of the song of the same name, and all I can say is that it's easy to see why the film was banned in the Republic of Ireland for so long:

"We were told that we were the sons and daughters of revolutionary heroes and that our role now was to be one of gratitude, well-behaved gratitude. To criticize the society our old guerrilla fighters had built up was to be a traitor. We were to keep quiet, and they, like jolly but tough old uncles, would take care of us. What they expected from us now was a new kind of heroism, heroic obedience."

This is electrifying stuff and will lurk in my mind as I read any current Irish crime fiction that takes even a glancing look at the current state of its country.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Two songs, two crime writers, one question for readers

Two of my favorite Irish crime writers fall nicely into analogies with two of my favorite Irish folk songs:

Declan Burke's humorous caper novel The Big O is like the humorous caper ballad "Whiskey in the Jar," and Adrian McKinty's harsh, sometimes grimly funny Michael Forsythe novels are like the harsh, sometimes grimly funny "Rocky Road to Dublin."

Readers: What crime novels match up with songs in a similar manner? (In a match-up of a different kind, "Rocky Road to Dublin" is something like an Irish "Living for the City," especially the more-intense album version of that Stevie Wonder song.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008