Yours truly had a piece in the Sunday Independent yesterday about the current explosion in Irish crime fiction, the idea being to promote next weekend’s Books 2008 Irish crime writing series. Here’s one reason: Perversely, the influence of chick lit can’t be discounted as a factor in the emergence of crime fiction. The shop-and-fuck novels might be criticised for skating along the surface of the Celtic Tiger, and charting the new Irish obsession with vacant consumerism, but their best-selling status gave a huge boost to genre fiction in a country that has traditionally been more concerned with literary issues. Where chick lit celebrated the gaudy delights of the Celtic Tiger, crime fiction proposes to penetrate to its dark heart, which is likely to get a lot darker now that the recession has kicked in and that big fat pie starts to shrink.In the interests of openness, transparency and plagiarism accusations, I should say that I ripped that off from a quote John Connolly gave me for another article I’ve written on the same subject for the Evening Herald, which will appear later this week. Turning a buck writing about Irish crime fiction – who’d a thunk it, eh?
And we all thought That Ahern One was just cashing in, when she was, in fact, blazing a trail…
ReplyDeleteIt'll be interesting if she turns to writing Irish political crime fiction, revealing the dark underbelly of the Celtic Tiger years. Talk about connected!
Ceclia Ahern. Political crime fiction. The. Mind. Boggles.
ReplyDeleteCheers, Dec