Diamond Dogs

Yet another intriguing Irish crime title emerges in 2012, with the publication of Joe Murphy’s DEAD DOGS (Liberties Press) - although, Liberties Press being my own publisher, I’m reliably informed that DEAD DOGS is not a straightforward crime novel, and may not even be a crime novel at all, but a literary offering with crime fiction elements.
  Quoth the blurb elves:

In rural Wexford, a young teenager is worried about his friend Sean. Sean, you see, has just accidentally killed a pregnant dog and her puppies. Sean isn’t stupid but he sometimes gets a bit confused. When the unnamed narrator brings him to Dr. Thorpe’s house to see about some new medication, they end up watching through the letterbox as Dr Thorpe beats a woman to death. This sharp witted and psychological narrative explores the troubles these teenagers face as they move towards a climax that will tear their worlds asunder.

  I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a crime narrative to me. Then again, I haven’t had the chance to read the book yet, so I’ll hold fire until such time as I do.
  The same issue raised its head a couple of weeks back with Keith Ridgway’s very fine HAWTHORN & CHILD, which features a pair of London-based police detectives but is more a novel about characters involved in crime - victims, investigators, criminals - than it is about the crimes themselves, or their detection and/or consequences.
  These are strange but exciting times for the Irish crime novel. One of the best crime titles of the year to date, Tana French’s BROKEN HARBOUR, probably functions best as a novel detailing the personal cost of the Irish economic collapse, and less well as a dedicated police procedural. Only this week, it was announced that John Banville’s alter ego, Benjamin Black, will publish a new Philip Marlowe novel next year in the style of Raymond Chandler.
  Meanwhile, authors such as Keith Ridgway and Joe Murphy are offering stories that are bound up in criminal activity, yet shy away from explicitly describing themselves as crime novels. This may be in part a reluctance to be consigned to the crime fiction ghetto, as many people consider it. It may also be a literary reaction to the impossibility of coming to terms with the legal heisting of an entire country by a small number of gamblers and thieves. There’s a kind of schizophrenia abroad than can be loosely summed up as, ‘Yes, a crime took place; yes, it was immoral and unethical; yes, it was fully legal.’
  Yet again, I’ll put forward my definition of a crime novel: if you can take out the crime and the novel still works, it’s not a crime novel; if you take out the crime and the story collapses, then it’s a crime novel.
  Not that any definition matters, of course. What truly and only matters is whether the book is well written and has something interesting to say. By that mark, and having read the first few pages, DEAD DOGS is a very intriguing prospect. Stay tuned for more …

Reviewing The Evidence

There were a couple of very interesting reviews of Keith Ridgway’s HAWTHORN & CHILD (Granta Books) in the Irish Independent and Irish Times yesterday. What piqued my interest was that the phrase ‘crime fiction’ was conspicuous by its absence in both cases, even though our eponymous heroes are police detectives. Quoth the blurb elves:

Hawthorn and Child are mid-ranking detectives tasked with finding significance in the scattered facts. They appear and disappear in the fragments of this book along with a ghost car, a crime boss, a pick-pocket, a dead racing driver and a pack of wolves. The mysteries are everywhere, but the biggest of all is our mysterious compulsion to solve them. In HAWTHORN & CHILD, the only certainty is that we’ve all misunderstood everything.

  It’s not true, of course, that every novel to feature a police detective (or two) is a crime or mystery novel. Neither is it true that a book becomes a crime novel simply because crimes are committed or investigated during the course of the story. So I’m not entirely sure that HAWTHORN & CHILD qualifies as an Irish crime novel, or that Keith Ridgway would want it to be considered as such. Keith Ridgway is Irish, the novel is set in London, and Ridgway writes in the literary genre (I’ve already seen a call for it to be longlisted for the Booker Prize on Wednesday). That said, an earlier novel, THE PARTS, also dabbled in crime fiction tropes; and anyway, who the hell really knows what’s bubbling away at the back of a writer’s mind?
  Here’s a flavour of both reviews:

“Ridgway’s new book, HAWTHORN & CHILD, is strange, unsettling, fragmented, confusing, at times dreamlike (these are all good things, by the way). You won’t find sentimental stories of Irish emigrants here, nor self-flagellating clichés about dysfunctional families. […]
  “The story, or rather stories, concern two London policemen, the titular detectives Hawthorn and Child. It opens with them being called to a shooting, but this is just the beginning for a series of incidents both violent and tender, strange occurrences, stranger characters, shifts in time, shifts in perspective, shifts in tone and tempo.
  “The different threads are connected, but tenuously so, though of course this is deliberately done: it’s not as if Ridgway has lost control of his own stories.
  “The book makes the reader work hard, much like its two heroes: sifting through the facts, piecing together clues, trying to shape a cohesive narrative out of seemingly random bits of information. And it’s all the more satisfying for that.” - Darragh McManus, Irish Independent

“HAWTHORN & CHILD is a working partnership of two very different policemen. Together they patrol a seething present-day, utterly tangible London by car [...]
  “It is a novel of contrasts: darkness and light. The daily and mundane balanced against the sheer hell of evil. One man, who is good with accounts, has secured an easy life – admittedly working for a gangster – but then he finds himself pinned under a car that could fall on him. Elsewhere a baby who is about to be rescued is thrown down a stairs. A woman who lives in a neat, spacious flat hangs herself over a cooker while the gas rings burn her from beneath.” - Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

  I haven’t read the novel yet - I’ll be trotting along to my local independent bookseller tomorrow, as fast as my little legs will allow - but it sounds like a fascinating prospect, similar in theme and tone to two of my favourite novels from last year, Sara Gran’s CITY OF THE DEAD and James Sallis’ THE KILLER IS DYING. Both were vaguely surreal in their approach and existential in tone, but - and here we can draw parallels in an Irish context with Flann O’Brien’s THE THIRD POLICEMAN, or the work of Ken Bruen, Eoin McNamee and Colin Bateman’s ‘Mystery Man’ series - tapped into an uncompromising realism in acknowledging that, despite our culture’s plaintive protestations to the contrary, justice is a fiction, evidence is arbitrary, and any conclusions drawn can only be subjective and thus fictions in their own right. All of which, of course, is the true subject matter and governing philosophy of every great crime novel.
  If HAWTHORN & CHILD is in the same ballpark, I’m in for a treat.