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With the clock ticking down to the An Post Irish Book Awards, we asked the six nominees for this year’s Irish Independent Crime Fiction Book of the Year to tell us about their favourite reads in the genre. Jane Casey I read The Secret History by Donna Tartt for the first time in 1993, shortly after it was published in Ireland with the distinctive black and grey cover it has kept for 30 years. I felt a shock of recognition: this is how you write a book! I was a keen crime reader but I’d never read anything that broke the rules so thoroughly.
The Secret History begins with a scene from the middle of the plot, when a group of college students commit murder. From the very first page we know who dies and, more importantly, who killed loud, gregarious Bunny, which would usually be disastrous errors in crime fiction. The first mystery is what could possibly have led his friends to turn on him.
The second mystery is whether they will get away with it. After his death, as the conspirators cope with what they’ve done, the tension ratchets up. Suspense, betrayal, the corrosive power of guilt, what it means to be loyal, what it means to belong: The Secret History explores these things in the lushest, most beautiful and decadent prose, spiked with sharp sarcasm and acute social observation.
It’s an icon of 1990s culture, often imitated, never equalled, and it also remains an outlier in crime fiction. To this day I can picture the characters vividly as they move through their chaotic college world of classical poetry, pilfered drugs, roses that smell like raspberries and snow falling through bare trees to land on the face of a dead man. Jane Casey is shortlisted for ‘A Stranger in the Family’ Steve Cavanagh For a fan of the genre like me, it’s impossible to choose a favourite crime novel.
It’s not exactly like choosing between children, but it’s close. When I was asked to write this piece, one novel sprang to mind and has stayed there. It’s called The Killing Kind , by John Connolly.
The Charlie Parker thrillers should be familiar to all crime fans, and there are plenty of books from that series I could have chosen, including the first, Every Dead Thing , but I feel The Killing Kind is the first book where all of John’s significant creative powers are fully on display for the first time. This book combines a historic mystery in the shape of a group of religious settlers who inexplicably disappeared, a modern missing person’s case and one of the best villains in all of crime fiction — the fabulously named Mr Pudd. Add to this Connolly’s haunted detective Charlie Parker and his posse of amiable assassins-for-hire, and you have a tantalising recipe for suspense.
Set in the foreboding and ethereal landscape of Maine, which I think John claims just as effectively as Stephen King, the stage is set for a wonderful story brilliantly told. It’s no secret that John Connolly is Ireland’s finest crime writer, and this is certainly one of his finest works. If for some inexplicable reason you weren’t afraid of spiders before you opened the pages of this book, you certainly will be by the time you’ve finished it.
Steve Cavanagh is shortlisted for ‘Witness 8’ Read more Claire Coughlan The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins will soon celebrate 10 years since it was published. I can honestly pinpoint its existence with when I decided I wanted to be a crime writer. Of course, there were plenty of brilliant crime novels that came before and made me an avid reader of the genre, but none that packed such a sucker punch in one sitting.
The premise is so relatable — who hasn’t daydreamed on a train or bus journey and idly wondered about lives of which they catch only a fleeting glimpse? For Rachel Watson, the narrator of The Girl on the Train , the couple she has decided are called ‘Jess and Jason’ are the picture-perfect ideal of young love as she passes by their back garden on her commuter train every morning. From where Rachel is sitting, they have everything she does not. Then she witnesses something shocking and begins to involve herself in finding out what happened.
Things soon get twisted and messy. Oh, and Rachel is an alcoholic, making her not the most reliable of observers. Hawkins’ sympathetic portrayal of Rachel’s addiction plays with readers’ feelings about whether characters need to be likeable to be compelling.
She also delivers an explosive but satisfyingly redemptive ending. As with the all the best crime fiction, things are resolved on the page; this seldom happens in real life. Claire Coughlan is on the shortlist for ‘Where They Lie’ Andrea Mara Having grown up on detective fiction and police procedurals, I have a very clear memory of reading what was my first ever psychological suspense novel: The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy by Barbara Vine.
I loved how it started with what appeared to be a normal, relatively (well, heavy emphasis on ‘relatively’) relatable family — two sisters whose worlds begin to unravel after the death of their father, Gerald Candless. The elder daughter, Sarah, decides to write his biography (he was a well-known and bestselling author) but in doing her research, quickly discovers her father wasn’t who he seemed to be. In fact, he wasn’t Gerald Candless at all.
The reader is taken back to the past, to discover who he really was, and to find out why he lied about his earlier years, his background, his entire identity to his wife, his children, his publisher, his readers. The novel is a masterclass in crime writing; the red herrings; the drip-feed of information, the page-turning intrigue. Written by Ruth Rendell under the pen-name Barbara Vine, it’s a book I first read in the late ’90s, and again last year.
It’s impossible to choose a favourite crime novel, there are so many greats — classic and contemporary — but The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy is up there as one of the best I’ve read. Andrea Mara is shortlisted for ‘Someone in the Attic’ Fiona McPhillips Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is a novel that has courted controversy from its very inception. It’s not a typical crime genre book although the entire narrative centres on a crime, the sexual abuse of a minor, much like my own debut novel When We Were Silent.
Lolita is not a book about a love affair between a thirtysomething man and a 12-year-old girl. It’s about the unreliable mind of Humbert Humbert, a man who convinces himself of this and then uses his charm and eloquence to try to elicit sympathy from the reader. Nabokov navigates this horrifying subject matter with prose so beautiful we are transfixed by the picturesque and drawn into the gorgeous sadness of Humbert’s youth.
The genius of it is in how gradually and imperceptibly the tone shifts from this to Humbert’s justification for his actions before a slow descent into madness and paranoia. Nabokov tries to lead the reader astray, drawing us into Humbert’s world so that we can understand if not sympathise with his motivation. In the end, we are left with the realisation that all narrators, regardless of their story, will twist and turn the truth to convince the world that their actions are in some way human.
And that is the most gruesome truth of all. Fiona McPhillips is on the shortlist for ‘When We Were Silent’ Michelle McDonagh “For the rest of her life,” The Little Friend by Donna Tartt opens, “Charlotte Cleve would blame herself for her son’s death because she had decided to have the Mother’s Day dinner at six in the evening rather than noon, after church, which is when the Cleves usually had it.” Twelve years on from the events of that terrible day when nine-year-old Robin was found hanging from a black tupelo tree in his own garden, how it had happened was still a mystery.
Sublime prose: Donna Tartt. Photo by Venturelli/WireImage Robin’s spiky, brave, funny little sister Harriet, who was only a baby when the tragedy occurred — and is obsessed with Harry Houdini and steeped in the books of Kipling, Stephenson and Conan Doyle — is determined to find her brother’s killer. With her closest and adoring friend Hely by her side, Harriet enters a dark, menacing, violent adult world.
Tartt has described this book, her follow-up to The Secret History , as a “frightening, scary book about children coming into contact with the adult world”. If you’re looking for a fast-paced page-turner, this is not it. This is a much slower, often meandering and sometimes shocking deep dive into the aftermath of a terrible tragedy in a dysfunctional family set in Deep South Mississippi over one summer in the 1970s, but Tartt’s sublime prose, the wonderfully ominous atmosphere, and her superb storytelling and character building, make the journey well worthwhile.
This is one of those books you’ll still be thinking about long after you turn the final page. Michelle McDonagh is shortlisted for ‘Somebody Knows’ The An Post Irish Book Awards 2024 winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in the Convention Centre, Dublin on Wednesday, November 27. Vote for your favourites by November 14 at irishbookawards.
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