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IRISH NOIR

John Kelly 1 Image Name: John Kelly 1

Presented by John Kelly, Irish Noir is the story of Irish Crime fiction. From its gothic origins, through the fast paced storylines provided by Celtic Tiger excess – and right up to the bleak fictional landscape inspired by Austerity Ireland

In the last 15 years, Irish crime writing has experienced a renaissance in popularity comparable to the Scandinavian and Scottish crime writing scenes. But before that, Irish crime was a niche style written by few. Irish Noir is a major new four-part which will explore why it took so long for this popular genre to get a comfortable footing in this country. To what extent did politics and history play a part? And did the enormous success of Irish literary giants like Joyce and Beckett cloud the ambitions of writers who might have naturally had more hard-boiled aspirations…? In other words, did we turn our literary noses up at crime fiction?

PART 2: In this second instalment of Irish Noir, we look at the way politics and nation building impacted on the kind of fiction Irish writers produced at the foundation of the state and decades after. While Agatha Christie was honing the Golden Age style, and Dasheill Hammett and Raymond Chandler were finding their hard boiled noir voices, writers in this part of the world were more interested in writing about being Irish than in writing about crime… And speaking of Raymond Chandler, we’ll have a special report about his considerable Irish connections.

John is joined in studio by playwright and author, Declan Hughes; Golden Age and Agatha Christie expert, John Curran; and cultural historian, Elaine Sisson.

Also, we’ll delve into Northern Irish crime writing, with Stuart Neville and Brian McGilloway.

 

RTE Radio 1, 7pm, Saturday 21 September