“On the edge of foreign”: race and (non-)belonging in contemporary Irish crime fiction

ABSTRACT Using Andrew Nugent’s Second Burial (2007) to exemplify the Celtic Tiger era crime fiction, this article compares Second Burial to two recent Celtic Phoenix era crime novels: Tana French’s The Trespasser (2016) and Brian O’Connor’s Bloodline (2017). In doing so, I show how Irish crime authors forge a complicated path from the isolated token immigrant figure to a more nuanced portrayal of belonging and non-belonging. I argue that, in case of recent Irish crime fiction, spaces of belonging are established and defined through visible but also through audible markers of difference. My essay demonstrates the stubborn persistence of a residual desire for delineating the aural and visual boundaries that separate the national “I” from strangers, citizens from non-belonging aliens.