Brian McGilloway, Eoin McNamee, Stuart Neville, Alex Barclay and many, many others will be at Harrogate’s festival, with a special session dedicated to Irish Noir. For more information: http://harrogateinternationalfestivals.com/crime/2015-festival-events/
This is a word cloud story of Irish Noir. It is based on a corpus of 280 novels published between 1994 and 2015. The story told by the data represented here details a population of authors, ordered by the respective size of their outputs. This word cloud indicates the most productive authors; it suggests that the label “Irish Noir” designates a relatively small, but significant group of writers.
The next representation is based on these authors’ s places of birth.
In contrast to the previous one, and to where the action of Irish noir series are set (Jack Taylor’s Galway, Ben Devlin’s Strabane-Lifford Borderlands, Sean Duffy’s Carrickfergus, Ed Loy’s Dublin…), the third cloud here reflects the place of publication of their books. It shows that Irish Noir is actually made in Britain. And to a lesser extent in America. But it also indicates an emergence, of a number of publication places in Ireland : in Dublin, but as well in county Kerry, with Dingle as the headquarters of a publishing house actively engaged in the Irish noir phenomenon (Brandon).
Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville, in the introduction to the recently launched collection of short stories, Belfast Noir (N.Y., Akashic, 2014) describe Belfast, with some claims, as ” the noirest city on earth”. The feeling seems to be shared by the international publishing industry. In so far at least as original titles of noir novels set in Northern Ireland have been changed, in translation or for the U.S. Market, in order to feature the name of the city. Or have been produced originally, abroad, or domestically with a title using explicitly Belfast as a byword for violence. Here are a few examples of such “Belfastxploitation”, with some images for a view on Belfast, as reconstructed from the outside…
Sam Millar , Die Bestien von Belfast: Ein Fall für Karl Kane, Translator : Joachim Körb
Atrium Verlag, Hamburg, 2013 (original, Bloodstorm, 2008).… Continue reading
| Banville, Vincent | Death by design | Wolfhound Press | 1994 | |||
| McEldowney, Eugene | A Kind of Homecoming | Heinemann | 1994 | |||
| McNamee, Eoin | Resurrection Man | Picador | 1994 | |||
| Banville, Vincent | Death the Pale Rider | Poolbeg | 1995 | |||
| Bateman, Colin | Divorcing Jack | Harper Collins | 1995 | Betty Trask Prize |
There are countless examples of Irish Crime Fiction troughout the 20th Century. Admittedly, in some cases the links between a given Crime author and Ireland might be missed, or are by now forgotten. The prolific George A. Birmingham, for example (James Owen Hannay, 1865 – 1950) was a Belfast born Church of Ireland clergyman. Some Irish authors rank amongst the most celebrated representatives of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, like the Dublin born Freeman Wills Crofts (1879-1957). Nicholas Blake (Cecil Day-Lewis, 1904-1972) is another famous Ireland born author of Britsh Mystery novels.The “noir” genre however starts in Ireland much later. For the most part it only began 20 years ago. Continue reading
The video recording of the event with the two acclaimed Northern Irish crime fiction authors. introduced by Dr. Andrew Pepper (Queen’s University Belfast):
Part 1
International Crime Fiction Research Group 