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Irish Hard-Boiled Crime: A 51st State of Mind

by Declan Hughes

Irish people can be especially prone to magical thinking, to put it at its kindest. We seem extremely reluctant to relinquish our belief in phenomena that nei ther experience nor reason will justify. The most notable and poignant example of this is our relentless credulity regarding the existence and quality of the Irish summer. Although year after year, a solitary sunny day is followed by unending weeks of overcast skies and squally rain, hope springs infernal. In my case, this belief, or superstition, took root when I was thirteen, during the (genuinely) long hot summer of 1976. Every morning I would assemble a lunch and spend the day on Whiterock beach in Dalkey, alone or with friends. I swam and read and looked longingly at girls in bikinis and wondered how that, and every thing else, was going to go. And thats pretty much how I spent my subsequent teenage summers, often in delusional defiance of the weather. I never got a job, because I didnt drink back then, could get all the books I needed from the library, experienced a certain amount of success in finding out more about those mysterious bikini wearing creatures, and didnt want anything else money could buy as much as I wanted to be on the beach and in the sea, even if the rain fell and an east wind tested your faith in the Irish summer to the limit.

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There was music in the air during that time, of course, and for all that punk rock had happened and post punk followed in its wake, and for all that I had developed a ferociously puritanical line in rock snobbery which permit ted me to like virtually nobody except the Clash and Bruce Springsteen (which was convenient, since I could barely afford their records, let alone anyone elses), the soundtrack I still associate with Whiterock during those years was the Eagles Hotel California. (You didnt have to buy Hotel California: in the late 70s in South Dublin, it played for free from every shop doorway and bed room window). Cowboy boots and flared Levis and plaid and cheesecloth shirts and droopy moustaches and long hair were the order of the day for the half generation ahead of me, and their musk of patchouli oil and dope smoke seemed like an intoxicating promise, a hazy benediction from alluring adepts of a laid back cult I longed to join. The cult did not just dream of America, and more specifically, California; it seemed to believe it was already living there. And as I gazed out to sea on whichever blue sky day I could find or recall, I knew I was worthy of confirmation in their faith, for that was where I believed I was living too. The Ireland that presented itself to us day to day in the 70s was still run by priests and nuns and decrepit old bogmen in tweed suits, and claimed by murderous bigots intent on shooting and bombing everyone who disagreed with them into a fantasy vision of the glorious repub lican past; nobody who dreamt of truth, beauty, youth and love could tolerate either as a reality. My play, Digging For Fire (1991) was, among other things, a dramatisation of some of these cultural contradictions. During a long drink fuelled row in the pub, Danny, the aspiring writer character who should in no way be mistaken for the author but who is evidently ventriloquising many of his opinions, says: . . . I grew up with the TV on, (and Im not unique in this), with England and America beaming into my brain; I never had a single moment of, I dont know, cultural purity. I didnt know where I was from . . .

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Moments later, this exchange occurs: Danny: And what about the people who dont want to live in a village? The people who left before their village suffocated them? Is village life supposed to be the most authentic, the most Irish? Breda: Its also about having a sense of place Danny: And what happens when you dont have a sense of place? When I arrived in New York for the first time, and as the cab swung past that grave yard and around the corner, and I got my first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline, I felt like I was coming home. The landscape was alive in my dreams, the streets were memories from a thousand movies, the city was mine. Rory: Well, you have a sense of place, Danny. It just happens to be some body elses place. Danny: No it doesnt, its as much Ireland as Dublin is; millions of Irish went out and invented it, invented it as much, probably more than any ever invented this poxy post colonial backwater. Breda: So whats the problem? You dont like it here, fine, you dont live here; you feel at home there, great, you live there. Whats the big deal? Danny: The big deal, the big deal is, that there is as much here as here is . . . and I dont believe the here youre describing exists here. To me, here is more like . . . there. Pause. Emily: Danny, are you on drugs? In the introduction to the published text of the play, I put it like this: The experience of growing up in Dublin in the 60s and 70s was not unlike the experience of growing up in Manchester or Glasgow, or in Seattle for that matter. The cultural influences were the same: British and American TV, films and music. You read Irish literature, but mostly for the past; to discover the present, you looked to America. Irish writers flicked through the family album; American writers looked out the window. You knew you would go to America one day, to work, or for a holiday, or just
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to get the hell away from home, or maybe you lived in California or New York already, in your mind . . . and if you felt your cultural identity dwin dling into a nebulous blur, well, you believed that what you had in com mon with others was more important than what set you apart, and you knew there were millions like you all over the world, similarly anxious to be relieved of the burdens of nationality and of history. You were tired of hearing about those who didnt learn from history being condemned to repeat it; you sometimes felt the opposite was true, that it was those who were obsessed by the past that were doomed never to escape it, to replicate it endlessly, safe and numb within its deadly familiarity. So when, at the age of sixteen or seventeen, I started to read Ross Macdonald, for all the talk of white stucco and bougainvillea, of canyons and freeways, I felt I was reading, if not quite an Irish writer, certainly someone capable of speaking more directly to me than any Irish writer of that time. Indeed, there is one aspect of Macdonalds work that connects very easily with traditional Irish experience. All the Lew Archer novels follow a similar pattern: hired to find, invariably, a missing girl, Archer finds that the truth lies ten, twenty, thirty years in the past, buried deep in the secret history of a dysfunc tional family. Maybe I was not as consciously aware of this aspect of Macdonalds novels what you might call southern Californian family Gothic as I subsequently became, but I think it accounts to some extent for why they made such a deep impression on me. Because of course, we are no strangers in Ireland to the troubled family plot: the feuds and fallings out, the secrets and lies, the who didnt say what to whom and now never will. There have always been plenty of skeletons in the Irish closet, and for a long time, we didnt even hear them rattle. Or at least, we said we didnt. Whatever you say, say nothing, has ever been the national motto. We lie to each other because we lie to ourselves. By the time I was coming of age, there was a sense that all that lying was taking its toll: Irish literary culture seemed an endless, exhausted riffing on the identity variations: Who are we? No, who are we really? What were we like when we were kids? What are we like now? Is anyone looking at us? Why isnt anyone looking at us? Were still very popular
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(among ourselves). Arent we? The questions had grown weary through repeti tion; the answers could no longer be provided by looking inwards. Irish writing felt as if it was eating itself. Macdonald, whose volume of autobiographical fragments was called, after Fitzgerald, Ceaselessly Into The Past, held an equally tragic sense of the difficulty escape from the past entailed, but at least the possibility, the (American) dream of Gatsby esque self reinvention was in sight. The future was at hand, and all was not futility. As a writer setting out on a circuitous route that would eventually lead to my writing hard boiled crime novels, Macdonald was one of my guiding spir its; the others, inevitably, were Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the first and second persons in the blessed trinity of American hard boiled crime fiction. But it wasnt Macdonalds family plots in the first instance, any more than it was Hammetts terse, Hobbesian fatalism, or Chandlers quixotic romanticism, that spoke so clearly to me; as much as what they said, it was the way they said it; it was above all else a question of style. In The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler calls Hammetts style the American language, and says . . . at its worst was almost as formalised as a page of Marius the Epicurean; at its best it could say almost anything . . . Chandler felt there was more to be said than Hammett felt the need to say, and added wit and lyri cism to the mix; Macdonald refined the strengths of both with subtle intelli gence and psychological acuity, and brought the hard boiled crime story to a peak that remains unsurpassed. Not that any of this occurred to me back then: I just felt the way I felt when I heard Jumpin Jack Flash and Gimme Shelter and Honky Tonk Woman for the first time: this is the stuff, I thought, this is hence forth the control in the experiment. I found the spare, insistent rhythm and pulse of the language every bit as intoxicating as the guns and the girls, the murk and the mayhem, the haunted carnival of death and delirium that noir descried behind the gossamer thin veil of reality. I was the man Geoffrey OBrien wrote about in Hardboiled America, who read this fiction as another might read a lyric poem because its images sustain the life in him. It was reality to me more real than the everyday speech I heard around me. The
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American language was my language, a language I felt more truly at home in than my own. Moreover, day by day, it was modifying the way my own lan guage was spoken. Roy Foster has talked about Daniel Corkery issuing literary visas to the Irish writers of which he approved, namely those who wrote exclusively about the (Catholic, nationalist, rural, Gaelic) Irish identity he believed defined the essence of the nation. Everything Id ever written had been at odds with the idea that you had to fulfill a certain set of criteria in order to qualify as Irish. In the theatre, that had by and large meant rejecting the native tradition and looking to England and America for models of the kinds of plays urban and suburban, classless, deracinated, indifferent to the national question that I wanted to write. In crime fiction, the situation was more complicated. There simply was no native tradition to draw on. I turned to America, not just for reasons of style, or because of the evident parallels between Californian and Irish family Gothic, or because novels based on the premise that the society they dealt with was deeply corrupt resonated more than somewhat to an Irishman; ultimately I turned to America because that was where, creatively, imaginatively, essen tially, I had been living all along. (I suppose its possible to read the forgoing as a form of solipsistic delusion, a post modern fantasy essayed by someone a writer who doesnt have to live in the real world. But there is a case to be made that since the emigrants who fled to America after the famine attained a degree of power, and what we call Irish America became a force to be reckoned with politically, culturally, emo tionally, Ireland has effectively been the Fifty first State of the Union. Without America to embrace (and contain) its huddled masses, not to men tion its restless, disaffected malcontents; without America to be its friend at (international) court; without America to serve as a reminder throughout the disastrous first forty years of independence that Irish people could be compe tent, successful, could even rise to the highest office in the land; without America to provide money, in the form of commercial investment and, prior to that, in the form of cash wired to the old country from Uncle Paddy and
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Aunt Mary in Boston and Philadelphia and New York; without America, not just imaginatively, but in the all too real word, Ireland would have found the struggle to exist at all very difficult indeed, perhaps impossible.) For a while, I felt like someone with a guitar in the 1950s, waiting for rock and roll to break out. I knew it must be possible to write hard boiled crime fic tion set in Ireland. I just wasnt sure Ireland knew about it yet. I wrote a play about Dashiell Hammett, and a violent comedy about Dublin gangsters, all the time waiting for the time to be right waiting, if you will, for reality to permit the kind of fiction I wanted to write. And then a couple of things happened at the same time: money, and peace. Money, in the shape of the economic boom of the 90s, raised the stakes. Not alone was there full employment and reverse emigration, there was also an explosion in illegal drug use, and a consequent rise in organised crime, as drug gangs enjoyed their own kind of boom. The peace agreement that followed the IRA ceasefire lowered the stakes in another way. Prior to that, the Troubles seemed to undermine the degree to which crime fiction could work effectively: how could the deaths of one or two people be compelling when the IRA were slaughtering ten or twelve at a time? Removing political violence from the national scene enabled common or garden crime to be seen for what it was and enabled those of us who wanted to write crime fiction that was political with a small p to do so. The American template suited the Irish times. The task was to employ the American model but to imbue it with a distinctive Irish feel. Perhaps a good analogy would be with jazz a distinctively American music that, of course, was created using European instruments. When a European musician plays jazz, he negotiates a tradition that is at once alien but his own; he pays homage to Louis and Dizzy and Miles, but he must transcend mere pastiche; no matter whose shoulders he first stands on, he must eventually walk on his own two feet. I created a detective Ed Loy and a first novel The Wrong Kind of Blood in which Loy returns to Dublin from twenty years in LA, where he has been working as a private investigator, to bury his mother; by the end of the book,
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he has discovered the secret behind his fathers disappearance he has, literally, dug them up. A loy is a spade, as The Playboy of the Western World tells us, and that Oedipal drama formed part of the deep Irish background to the novel. And if there was a sly wave at the shade of Sam Spade in there also, well, how ever presumptuous, that was the homage. Loy having an American past was no mere contrivance, of course. I grad uated from university in 1984 and helped form a theatre company called Rough Magic; everyone in Ireland who graduated the same year and didnt form a theatre company had to leave the country, because they didnt have a semi glamorous way of being unemployed. Emigration was my shadow life, waiting for expression. I felt I lived somewhere in between the two countries, and Loy, who moves to Dublin but is drawn back to LA, at first emotionally, and, later in the series, physically, seems to do the same. He is an insider, because he was born and brought up in Dublin, and an outsider, because he has been away so long that the streets seem alien to him when he returns. He is an Irishman and an iconic American figure. Like Danny in Digging For Fire, he feels there is here and here is there; his fate is to roam between the two, and to find, inevitably, that the American Dream no more guarantees personal reinvention or flight from the burden of history than the Irish tradition ensures a firm sense of community, solidarity or identity. He knows what he does, but has only a fleeting sense of who he is, or where he lives. As Henry Vaughan put it, in lines that could form an epigraph to any of the Loy novels: He knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where; He says it is so far, That he hath quite forgot how to go there.

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Declan Hughes was a co founder of, and award winning writer with, the the atre company Rough Magic. He is the author of five Ed Loy novels, which have been nominated for the Edgar, CWA New Blood Dagger, Shamus and Macavity awards. The Wrong Kind of Blood won the Shamus for Best First PI Novel. His most recent novel is City of Lost Girls (2010).
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