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Ingrid Black |
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In Dublin's Fair City by Ingrid Black
As a reader, I waited years for crime writers to turn their dark eye on Dublin. Oxford had Inspector Morse. Edinburgh had Rebus. As for London and New York, they were awash with literary sleuths; they were practically falling over each other at crime scenes. Dublin, save for a few intermittent, half-hearted efforts in the genre, was an unexplored criminal playground by contrast. It always seemed to me such a waste.
In the end, there was only one thing for it. If no one else was going to write the books I wanted to read, then I’d have to follow the example of the Little Red Hen and do it myself. The result was The Dead, the first of a series featuring former FBI agent Saxon: diminutive, abrasive, tenacious, tough-talking… OK, so a pain in the ass basically, but in a good way. At least that was the intention. Oh, and she was obviously American, which gave her the status of an outsider in Ireland, always a useful perspective for any writer.
Outsiders see what natives sometimes overlook. What natives take for granted and shrug off, outsiders find infuriating. It makes for tension and conflict. Which, in a crime novel, is never a bad idea.
It wasn’t only Saxon who was an outsider, though. You might think you know a city well, but once you start to write about it, you become an outsider too. You take a step back and see things anew. The streets and squares and buildings that were once merely the familiar landmarks of your daily life become suddenly a maze of potential crime scenes.
See a hidden churchyard tucked behind shadowy walls, and where once you might have thought “that’s a nice spot for a quiet read”, now you start to think: “What a great place that would be to dump a body.” It’s not morbidity. (Well, maybe a bit.) More an opening up to the fictional possibilities of a city. It’s only as you begin the process, indeed, that you realise how little you had noticed previously. The alleyway you would always have avoided for fear of what lay beyond the reach of the streetlamps becomes irresistible.
“I wonder what’s down there?” becomes the mantra as you walk – because you have to walk. Seeing a city through the windscreen of a car is not seeing it at all. Getting lost is better still. Disorientation concentrates the mind beautifully.
Then there are the place names, the names of streets. Some so irresistible, you just know you have to put them in a story. In The Judas Heart - the third novel to feature Saxon and her partner in life as well as in crime, Detective Chief Superintendent Grace Fitzgerald - the victim lives in area of the city known as the Liberties (an area that originally went by the splendid title of the “Liberties of the Monastery of St Thomas of Canterbury” - imagine putting that on your letterheads!); and when Saxon walks to the crime scene she is captivated, as I was too, by the Dickensian quality of the names of the streets she walks through: Fumbally Lane, Ebenezer Terrace, Marrowbane Lane, Black Pitts.
How could any writer resist the lure of those words alone? They are redolent with mystery and darkness and secrets.
The obsession with geography which inevitably grips any crime writer who claims a city as their own and tries to stamp their own personality on it is not mere self-indulgence or authorly vanity, though. It’s an essential counterpart to what the killer, that invisible and unknown protagonist who haunts the pages of every crime novel - the ghost in the machine of the narrative, as it were – does too. The only person who knows the city as well as the detective is the perpetrator. They match their knowledge of the city one against another.
Killers have an intimate and profound relationship with landscape. Think of Jack the Ripper, the Moors Murderers, the Green River Killer, or Moscow’s so-called “Chessboard Killer” who lured all his 50 plus victims to Bitsevsky Park in the city after dark.
What strange synchronicity must they all have felt to those dangerous places?
Mapping the connections between an offender and the space through which he moves and in which he operates is the ultimate aim of geographical profiling, which, whilst lesser known than the psychological profiling made famous in such films as Silence Of The Lambs, is increasingly being used by police to identify possible suspects.
We all carry a personal map in our heads, after all. There are places where we feel comfortable, or which make us uneasy; places to which we feel attached for whatever personal reason; places to which we return again and again. That speak to us. Killers have their maps too. What they try to do is impose their own personalities over the established maps of any area and claim the public space for their own. A bit like writers. Only it’s generally safe to be left alone with a writer after dark...
For all its growth under the gaze of the voracious Celtic Tiger, Dublin is a still small city, as Saxon observes at the start of The Judas Heart, so there’s always the danger of stepping, metaphorically-speaking, on someone’s toes. I’ve not yet met anyone whose back yard I’ve used for dumping a fictional corpse, but there’s always that chance.
Plus people get possessive about their own towns. Sometimes they don’t like it when, for fictional effect, you make free with the way things really are.
The Irish police force is known as the Garda Siochana (literally: “guardians of the peace”). In The Judas Heart, as in the previous Saxon books, murder is investigated by the Dublin Metropolitan Police, which, technically, has not existed since 1925.
Why wipe the Garda Siochana from history and resurrect a defunct police force which has not been around for the best part of a century? To cut down on explanations, that’s all. To reduce the distance between the reader and the story which superfluous historical particulars risk opening up. Every reader will understand what is meant by the Dublin Metropolitan Police, so let’s just get on with the story. For a similar reason, I also allowed the DMP back into their old headquarters at Dublin Castle in the centre of the city, instead of out in the wilds of the Phoenix Park where the Irish Murder Squad is actually located.
A fictional detective ought to be in the centre of his or her city, the spider at the centre of the web, sensitive to every quivering of the interweaving threads.
Besides, who wants too much reality? In the alleged real world, Dublin Castle is currently being used for a series of Tribunals into various corruption scandals involving politicians, property developers, and other such rogues. The place is crawling, not with Sherlock Holmes’ descendants restoring the world to (temporary) equilibrium, but with overpaid barristers and jobbing journalists looking for a juicy morsel of scandal for tomorrow’s front page. Not that I have anything against journalists, being one myself.
But each time I walk past Dublin Castle, I can’t help thinking what a waste it is, using this fine old building for tribunals and what have you when it could be home to Saxon and Detective Chief Superintendent Grace Fitzgerald instead. That’s the joy of fiction. You can take quotidian reality and fashion into something far more mysterious and exciting.
