Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Irish Noir: Val McDermid on Popularity of Irish Crime Fiction

Val McDermid has a great article in The Telegraph today on Why Irish Crime Fiction is all the Rage.

I love that John Connolly quote about how you couldn’t set a crime novel in Ireland,’ Val McDermid chuckles down the phone. It is the day of the general election in the Irish Republic, and I’m interviewing McDermid, one of the UK’s top crime writers, about the documentary she’s made for Radio 4 exploring the profusion of crime fiction that’s erupted from Ireland, north and south, recently.
The quote she’s talking about is attributed in the programme to the bestselling Irish author John Connolly who, asked why he’d set his long-running Charlie Parker series in the US, supposedly joked: ‘Because in Ireland everybody would’ve known who done it within days.’ It might be apocryphal, but it is a perceptive comment on why crime novels weren’t a big feature of the pre-Celtic Tiger literary landscape in Ireland.
‘It’s not like that any more,’ McDermid says. 

 Read the Entire Article HERE.

Want to listen to Val talk about Emerald Noir: The Rise of Irish Crime Fiction? You have 7 days to listen to this BBC Radio 4 Broadcast

Val McDermid looks at the way real life violence has been dealt with in the work of authors including Tana French, Eoin McNamee, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Stuart Neville and Declan Hughes. We meet David Torrans - whose bookstore in Belfast has been fictionalised in Colin Bateman's series of crime novels. Declan Burke - author of the blog Crime Always Pays - takes us on a tour of Dublin locations featured in crime novels from the modern Docklands offices which inspired Alan Glynn's novel Winterland to the hotels and shops of 1950s Dublin featured in the crime fiction of Booker winner John Banville - who writes under the name Benjamin Black.

Want to read more about Irish Crime Writers? Mystery Readers Journal has an issue devoted to Irish Mysteries. Author! Author! essays by John Banville, Colin Bateman, Declan Burke, Tana French & many more. This issue is available as hardcopy or .pdf

Hat Tip on Val's articles & broadcast: Sarah Weinman

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