Free The Line Up by Otto Penzler Page B

and what I read was largely American fiction, and not exclusively mystery fiction either. I had never been very attracted to the British model, and mystery fiction has never really been part of the Irish literary tradition.
     
    That latter observation may be worth closer examination, given the surge in production of Irish crime fiction in recent years. Nobody has ever been able to come up with a single compelling reason why Irish writers chose not to investigate the possibilities of crime fiction for many years, even while English and Scottish writers pursued them with a vengeance. The dearth of Irish crime fiction is, I suspect, a consequence of a number of factors, some literary and some social.
     
    To begin with, Ireland was a rural society, and it was G. K. Chesterton who noted that crime fiction functions better in urban rather than rural settings, that it is, on one level, tied up with the poetry of urban life. Ireland was also not a very violent society, terrorism apart. I realize, of course, that the use of the term “terrorism apart” is a little like saying that Einstein didn’t achieve much scientifically, “the Theory of Relativity apart.” Terrorism cast a shadow over modern Irish life for the best part of three decades, and its influence extended far beyond the bombings and shootings that took place in Northern Ireland and, on occasion, in the South. One might argue that it would be difficult to write about crime in Ireland and not touch upon the subject of terrorism, which may be why so many writers chose instead to neglect the genre entirely.
     
    There are exceptions: Eugene McEldowney’s A Kind of Homecoming, for example, or Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man, which dealt with the Protestant killers known as the “Shankill Butchers,” although McNamee might well dispute the description of Resurrection Man as a crime novel. Perhaps, too, there was a sense that mystery fiction was simply not up to the task of tackling the subject of terrorism, particularly terrorism that was ongoing and so close to home. The wounds were too raw, and fresh ones were being inflicted every day. Even Irish literary fiction seemed to struggle with the enormity of what was happening on our small island.
     
    Finally, there has long been a strong antirationalist tradition in Irish literature, which found its expression in, among others, the great Anglo-Irish gothic novels: Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray; the fantasy fiction of Mervyn Wall (the two Fursey books); and the surreal visions of Flann O’Brien (At Swim-Two-Birds; The Third Policeman, itself a kind of anticrime novel). By contrast, crime fiction, in its most conservative form, is intensely rationalist in outlook. Think of Poe’s Dupin, Christie’s Poirot, and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, each of whom places great store by the processes of ratiocination. Philosophically, this is at odds with the Irish outlook, one that for many years placed a greater emphasis on an artistic rather than a scientific response to the world.
     
    Quite simply, I did not see an Irish literary tradition of which I wanted to be a part. It also seemed that Irish literature was concerned primarily with the nature of being Irish, itself not unreasonable given that we are a young state, but I had no interest in writing about the nature of Irishness. There were two options, then: to import elements of the American crime novel into the Irish realm, which I did not feel would work, or to bring a European perspective to the American crime novel, which was the path I chose.
     
    Since then, Irish crime fiction has begun to flourish (a result of the changes in Irish society over the past decade, among other things), but it is interesting that Irish readers still prefer to read crime novels set elsewhere. We remain uncomfortable with crime fiction as a means of examining Irish