Irish Women’s Crime Fiction

[With apologies to those who received the early draft, when I managed to spill coffee and hit “publish” prematurely, in a flurry of damp papers and tissues.]

St. Patrick’s Day: Revisiting 2024 and Anticipating 2025.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day weekend!

On Friday, during a late afternoon lull, I enjoyed a Welsh rarebit refashioned as Irish through the judicious addition of Guinness, alongside an ounce of generously discounted Redbreast on ice with lots of water. A ratio of about seven to one, in fact. The pub across the street happily provides English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh holiday celebrations, but no green beer.

Last year was my first St. Patrick’s Day weekend spent downtown, and it was predictably boisterous.

I watched, from an amused distance, four evenings of shenanigans (which may but does not definitively derive from the Gaelic sionnachuighim).

The best was a family-friendly event on Government Street, which will repeat tomorrow, complete with bouncy castles, Irish dancers, and the B.C. Fiddle Orchestra.

The local pubs seem to be doing booming business with themed drinks, and the generous number of Celtic music bands likely amass most of their earnings for the winter season.

And that season is a relatively long and bleak one in Ireland, I’m told by a friend who grew up in a small west coastal town that faced howling winds. Lots of cozy evenings indoors with books, and hence a substantial number of excellent writers.

Perhaps the most famous of Ireland’s women crime author is Tana French. A confession: I’ve tried a few of her novels, starting with In the Woods and The Secret Place, and find them too disturbing for me. But she has legions of fans and is a brilliant and innovative writer. As this LA Review of Books piece by Lisa Levy (also a favourite of mine) notes, “The specificity of French’s work is irrevocably tied to the recent history of Ireland, the economic rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger and the havoc that wave wreaked in a small country where poverty was a given but crime a rarity.”

Dervla McTiernan’s The Scholar is the second book in her Cormac Reilly series, but it was the first of her novels that I read and it remains my favourite. The Ruin is also terrific. The novels’ settings are completely different: contemporary university campus vs decaying gothic pile. But she writes them equally well, and McTiernan’s characters are vivid and believable. I’m a bit sorry that her recent work has been going in a different direction, although What Happened to Nina? is doing very well and is accomplished: McTiernan moves her setting to the U.S. for a frantic search by a missing young woman’s parents, who are convinced that her wealthy boyfriend’s parents know more than they are revealing.

Jo Spain’s books are also atmospheric, and my favourite is The Darkest Place, set on an island off the Irish coast where a psychiatric hospital was abandoned decades earlier. Shades of Lehane’s Shutter Island, with rampant paranoia and a missing doctor.

Spain takes on the incarceration of vulnerable people who didn’t meet social norms and religious requirements, and who were punished for their transgressions with decades behind the walls of an institution. I’s one in a series of novels that have probed the painful chapter of Irish history that includes the Magdalene laundries and other modes of social control via state-sanctioned imprisonment. (And lest Canadians feel smug: we had our own publicly-funded and church-sponsored hells here, including the residential schools and training schools across the country; in Quebec, the enfants de Duplessis fought a long battle for recognition that they had been imprisoned and abused as the illegitimate or disabled children of parents who lost their kids to a horrific provincial system of quasi-orphanages.)

Irish-born Jane Casey writes the acclaimed Maeve Kerrigan series: she’s a London-based police officer with Irish roots. The books are excellent, although the violence can be intense. The Burning, the first novel, features a serial killer who beats women to death and then sets their bodies alight; if the whole series had continued in this vein, I would have given up. But Casey goes in some unexpected directions in both character development and theme, and she provides a sensitive and astute depiction of intimate partner violence and coercive control in the more recent novels.

I’ll close with Emma Donoghue, and then I’m going to give Tana French another try.

Donoghue is important to me, and I’ve been working on her novel and her adaptation of Room as a stage play for an article where I discuss it in tandem with Newfoundland playwright Meghan Greeley’s early work, Kingdom, also about a young woman’s experience of prolonged abusive confinement. While in Room the perspective is that of the young child born and raised in this captive setting, in Kingdom the protagonist has imagined company for herself, and it’s a brilliant work. But working on Room and Kingdom has been difficult for both intellectual and emotional reasons: I need to get back to this and find some more meaningful ways to tease out the meaning of imagination in the works.

Several of Donoghue’s other works could arguably be classified as crime fiction. Slammerkin has crime elements and Frog Music is based on a historical crime. Donoghue has lived in Canada for decades now, so we claim her as one of our own, but it’s only fair to allow Ireland some of the honour.

My two writing tasks for the next couple of weeks will take me away from crime fiction but I’ll be back in April.

Sláinte.