‘I was fooling myself with my idealised version of Dublin’

There’s a large advertising hoarding somewhere in the depths of Dublin Port, where the passenger ferries depart for Holyhead. “When I Die, Dublin Will Be Written In My Heart” it proclaims, beside a picture of a dyspeptic looking James Joyce, the Poolbeg chimneys looming in the background. Underneath, in smaller writing, you can read that James and his wife Nora left Ireland in 1904. Tasked with turning this into a positive, the advertising copy purrs: “They used a ferry from Dublin to make good their getaway. Why not you?”

Well, why not? It didn’t do Joyce any harm. Or Samuel Beckett, who fled the country and the English language at the same time. Or Oscar Wilde, or George Bernard Shaw. Getting out of Ireland freed the writer in them, or so it seems. And yet, read Joyce’s words again. It’s the emigrant’s lament, the awareness that you’ve left something behind that can never be replaced.

I left Ireland for London and a new job in 2003, pretending to myself that it was a temporary measure and I would be back sooner rather than later. I didn’t settle in well. Homesickness was immediate and physical and multi-faceted, like grief. My first office was near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London’s largest garden square. Despite superficial similarities it felt as unlike Stephen’s Green as it’s possible to be.

The very trees seemed different: the park is dominated by plane trees that shed leaves and bark and whiskery detritus on the grass that was brown and paper-dry from the heat of a London summer. I would pause there under the trees on my way to work and try to imagine I was back in Dublin, just for a moment. The Leaving Cert English syllabus supplied the words to fit the moment: Gerard Manly Hopkins imploring, “Send my roots rain.” But no rain came. I was earning a tiny salary, enough to buy a plane ticket home every couple of months for the weekend, if I was careful. I crafted a vision of Dublin in my imagination that skimmed as lightly over the less desirable aspects of the city as any Fáilte Ireland ad, and I cherished it. The two dreams that obsessed me – and seemed equally unlikely – were the desire to become a writer and the draw of home.

And yet, somehow, I knew I was fooling myself with my idealised version of Dublin. Dublin is a living city, and like any living entity it contains both good things and bad. I could look at London and see past the grandeur, the opulence, the history and the unflappable focus that defines Londoners. As an outsider, I was aware of the things people took for granted: the unique rhythm of London life, the strangeness of the place and the way people insulate themselves from the eight million others who share their oxygen, the smells and sounds of a big city where anything could happen.

When I started to write crime novels, it was London in all its variety and darkness that formed the backdrop for my stories. I felt comfortable with imagining terrible things happening in London; the Evening Standard proved they happened, every day, all over the city. And I couldn’t bring the same clear-eyed, dispassionate, outsider’s perspective to bear on Dublin when I couldn’t stand to think of it as anything other than home. I invented a main character, Maeve Kerrigan, who is the London-born daughter of Irish parents and gave her some of my sense of being dispossessed, of loss, of not belonging, of yearning for something that was forever out of reach.

You know what you are getting with a Scandinavian crime novel, largely: a morose but likeable hero, wide landscapes, social issues, violence, coffee, snow . . . Irish crime writing has taken a very different path, one that defies easy branding. There are more of us now writing crime novels than ever before, but one of the distinguishing characteristics of Irish crime is that many of us don’t write about Ireland at all. John Connolly, Alex Barclay, Alan Glynn, William Ryan – and me – all find inspiration outside of Ireland. I am not alone in thinking these books could only be written by Irish writers, though – the Irishness is in how the stories are told, and what they say about life, death, and who we are.

Why don’t we write about Ireland? I can only speak for myself. I’ve never pretended to follow in Joyce’s footsteps, as a writer, but in one respect I am his absolute opposite. I promised myself that I wouldn’t write about Dublin until I was living there again, until I had absorbed the truth of the place again, until I could see it without the sentimentality of the emigrant clouding my view. I want to go back to Dublin and write about it with the perspective I’ve gained from the time I’ve spent away from it. I’m not as I was before I left.

I’ve absorbed some aspects of English life: I turn up on time for things. I tend to obey rules, even if they are arbitrary and pompous. I’m nervous about crossing the road – the casual freewheeling of the Dublin pedestrian through traffic puts the heart across me (a phrase I type tentatively. These are words I stopped using because English people don’t understand them.). I stand on the right on escalators, automatically. I mind the gap. I walk with the speed and purpose of a London commuter.

It will take time to learn the rhythm of the city again, to take the wit and colour of Dublin conversation for granted, to take the measure of the place and the people. But increasingly I have the sense that although I can thank London for one husband, one cat, two children and 11 books, it's time to make my own getaway – this time from exile to home – and start a new chapter.
Let The Dead Speak by Jane Casey was published on March 9th by HarperCollins