Fiction set during the Troubles and Northern Ireland’s post-conflict years has delivered some of the most memorable Irish crime fiction over the past decade. Anthony J Quinn and his impressive series of Tyrone-set novels featuring the PSNI detective Celsius Daly have been to the fore in investigating the recent past, but in Murder Memoir Murder (Dalzell Press, £11.99) Quinn takes his investigations onto a whole other plane.
The story is rooted in two unsolved murders that affected Quinn’s own family, one of which occurred during the War of Independence, the other in 1982, when the Quinn family home was invaded by IRA men who hijacked the family car and subsequently used it during an operation in which they shot dead an off-duty RUC policeman. Handed a bullet as the IRA men left, as a warning against alerting the authorities, the young Anthony Quinn was left traumatised, with the shock still reverberating 40 years later.
Now a critically acclaimed writer of crime fiction, Quinn is frustrated by the limitations of fiction, and his own limitations too: “Every crime novel poses its own technical problems, which have to be resolved by the plot and the deductions of the detective figure, but my detective didn’t seem to have much talent for investigating, or was it the writer who lacked the talent?” And so Quinn sets out — in defiance of the received wisdom of not rocking the boat in rural Tyrone parishes where “the Troubles had yet to end” — to discover the identity of the IRA man who handed him the bullet. The result is a breathtakingly brutal piece of true crime writing that is ruthless in exposing the truth, regardless of who it might implicate or whether it might confirm Quinn’s own suspicions about his own failure as a writer.
Peter Papathanasiou’s debut crime novel The Stoning, featuring DS George Manolis, was set in the Australian Outback. In The Invisible (MacLehose, £16.99), a burnt-out Manolis travels home to Northern Greece and specifically the region of Prespa, which is ‘an untamed frontier’ situated between Greece, Albania and North Macedonia. There he discovers that his childhood friend Lefty has gone missing, to no one’s great surprise – Lefty, according to Manolis himself, is ‘a shape-shifter, a chameleon with no moral compass. If anyone was going to light the wick of anarchy, it would be Lefty.’ And so the weary Manolis, disguising himself as a manual labourer, embarks on a covert investigation as to Lefty’s whereabouts, a tricky proposition amongst the permanently wary population of Prespa, who are ‘Greece’s misfits, the descendants of war and exile.’ What follows is an offbeat missing-person investigation, during the course of which Manolis is reminded that ‘Lefty’ is a nickname for Lefteris, or Freedom; which is to say, people who go missing in Prespa don’t always want to be found. What gives The Invisible added heft is Papathanaisou’s superb descriptions of the landscape and character of Prespa, a place where bears and wolves still roam the hills. The supposedly suspicious and cloistered folk of Prespa seem surprisingly willing to answer our hero’s questions – and he asks a lot of questions – but otherwise The Invisible is a classic gumshoe yarn in a fascinating setting.
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“I had always wanted to become a writer,” DCI Terry Balance tells us at the beginning of Tariq Godard’s High John the Conqueror (Repeater, £12.99), “but I became a policeman instead”. Set in Wessex in 2016, Godard’s novel opens with the disappearance of Iggy Lockheart, “the sixth youth to have disappeared this year from Hanging Hill”.
Hanging Hill, alas, is a poverty-stricken estate where children tend to go missing on a regular basis without exciting any great interest from the police. But when a grieving mother tells Terry that “posh people are taking our children”, the working-class Terry and his partner DCI Tamla Sioux — “the new kind [of cop] that had watched the movies you hadn’t and probably had degrees in psychology and scriptwriting” — sit up and take notice.
What follows is a blackly hilarious romp through contemporary Britain that employs the detective novel to skewer all manner of pretension and hypocrisy (Iggy Lockheart’s disappearance gets short shrift due to the forthcoming royal visit by the queen). A dark, irreverent and impressionistic take on the police procedural that calls to mind Mick Herron’s Slough House novels and Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn and Child, High John the Conqueror stakes a late claim for the most original crime novel of the year.
Set in Argentina, Paula Rodriguez’s debut novel Urgent Matters, translated by Sarah Moses (Pushkin Vertigo, £12.99) opens with a train wreck that proves a blessing in disguise to Hugo Victor Lamadrid, a petty criminal who views his miraculous survival as an opportunity to escape a life spent running around at the behest of his mother-in-law, Olga. Unfortunately, Hugo has reckoned without the police detective Dominguez, a phenomenally successful and dogged investigator even if — or perhaps because — “human relations are a mystery that eludes him”.
Written in the taut, clean style of the classic pulp noir, and proceeding by way of brief chapters that offer a variety of points of view — those of Hugo, his partner Marta and their daughter Evelyn, along with those of Dominguez, Olga and Marta’s religious sister Monica — the story barrels along at a ferocious rate as Hugo ricochets from hope to despair via dreams of an improbable redemption that he would likely have relinquished at the start had he taken the time to listen to his sister-in-law, Monica: “Salvation doesn’t come free. Someone has to suffer the wounds. God doesn’t save you just like that, because salvation isn’t social planning.”
Irish Crime Correspondent of the Year in 2021, Michael O’Toole’s Black Light (Maverick House, €16.99) is the most hardboiled debut Irish crime novel in years. Operating out of Broadstone Garda station, John Lazarus is an Italian-Irish detective who specialises in the investigation of sex crimes, in part as a self-imposed penance for failing to prevent the rape and murder of his beloved sister Gabriella some years ago.
When student Anne Delaney is raped and left for dead after a brutal assault, Lazarus takes the call, and quickly finds himself going head-to-head with Ireland’s most charismatic crime journalist, Conor Sullivan, who seems to have an uncanny knowledge of details of the attack. Lazarus is on occasion an irritatingly self-aggrandising character — he describes himself, unironically, as “dark and brooding”, and “an Irish Al Pacino” — but overall Black Light is an impressively gritty debut, largely due to O’Toole’s insider knowledge of the grim realities of Irish policing and crime journalism.
- Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)
