‘Secrets and Lies’: Gothic Elements in Irish Crime Fiction

Irish crime fiction has largely been a contemporary phenomenon, but it has already shown itself to have highly various preoccupations and influences, including Irish gothic modes as well as the work of international crime writers like Patricia Highsmith and Ross Macdonald. Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels, in particular, are marked by a thematic obsession with ruined and ruinous families, with children cast adrift on seas of generational corruption. Such deep connections between gothic modes, family secrets, and crime fiction offer a cultural foundation that has served Irish crime and mystery writers well. Their narratives weave together local elements with the kinds of genre writing that have, until recent decades, often been seen as importations, as mere pieces in the flotsam and jetsam of transatlantic culture, or as actively contributing to the destabilization of life on the island. Although this essay examines the sometimes spectacular gothic elements in novels by Tana French, John Connolly, and Stuart Neville, the focus is rather on versions of Irish family gothic that surface in the writing of Liz Nugent, Andrea Carter, Declan Hughes, and others. Nugent, for example, fuses a penchant for Highsmithian sociopathic narrator-protagonists with her own sharp eye for familial bloodletting, while Hughes traces generations of corruption through his narrator’s haunting sensations of dislocation and uncanny unease in a Dublin where he has become at once an insider and an outsider. Through their use of such elements, at once intimately specific and readily adaptable, Irish crime writers have both animated their genre and further affirmed the vitality of Irish gothic’s fluid legacy.