Narratives of apprehension: crime fiction and the aftermath of the Northern Irish Troubles

Abstract

With over four hundred produced between 1969 and 1998, the thriller was the most popular fictional form of representing the Northern Ireland Troubles. Critics, however, were highly dismissive of the genre, claiming it offered little more than clichés and stereotypes, and that it marked the enthronement and reiteration of a problematically reductive take on the conflict. The Belfast Agreement (1998) signalled the official end of the Troubles and the beginning of what many hoped would be a new era in Northern Irish history. The decades since the Agreement era have witnessed a remarkable resurgence of interest, both critically and creatively, in crime fiction, and in the ways in which the hermeneutic codes of the genre might be brought to bear on the various legacies of the Troubles. For a new generation of Northern Irish crime writers, academic critics and literary novelists the possibilities and limitations of genre fiction have provided an arena in which key issues might be theorised and thought through; these include the challenge of dealing with the past, questions about truth recovery and transitional justice, and the need within the region to achieve some form of closure on the traumatic events of recent years. Far from continuing a process of ideological reductionism, post-Agreement crime fiction has exemplary value. Drawing inspiration from the police procedural, the comic thriller and the noir-ish Weltanschauung of hardboiled detective fiction, it contains a series of idiosyncratic and sophisticated responses to the aftermath of political conflict. Image source: ‘Loyalist banner and graffiti on a building in the Shankill area of Belfast, 1970’. By Fribbler - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7569750