
by Annika Breinig (with thanks to Portia Ellis-Woods and Dominique Jeannerod)
No Alibis : a Bookshop to die for (83, Botanic Avenue, Belfast, BTL7 1 JL) Continue reading
by Annika Breinig (with thanks to Portia Ellis-Woods and Dominique Jeannerod)
No Alibis : a Bookshop to die for (83, Botanic Avenue, Belfast, BTL7 1 JL) Continue reading
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).
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