My Bouchercon panels: Requiems for the Departed

Sure, the messy birth of the political entity called Northern Ireland offers a rich setting for grim stories, but Irish crime writers can reach further back into their country's past for source material. Four years ago, a bunch of them did, in an anthology called Requiems for the Departed.

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Myths don't work unless they're with us, around us, even in us.

That's why the Requiems for the Departed collection is so powerful. Its stories invoke Irish myth, most of them updating settings and, often, names, but retaining what seems to this non-expert the unsettling power and bringing it to crime fiction.

The contributors are an all-star list of Irish crime writing, some of whom readers of Detectives Beyond Borders may know (Stuart Neville, Adrian McKinty, Ken Bruen, Brian McGilloway, Garbhan Downey) and others whose names may be new (Arlene Hunt, John McAllister, Sam Millar, and quite a number more).

He was around when the myths were real.
Bog body ("Gallagh Man"), National
Museum of Ireland, Dublin. Photo by
your humble blogkeeper.

Bruen's story is brash and chilling, McKinty's. Neville's, and McAllister's the stuff to keep you awake at night, and McGilloway's a little police procedural with a delightfully comic ending. (The story features his series character, Inspector Benedict Devlin and offers evidence that myth can mix easily with a contemporary setting.)

Pop on over to Crime Scene. N.I. for all kinds of good stuff about the book from co-editor Gerard Brennan.

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Gerard Brennan, Adrian McKinty, and Stuart Neville, will be part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 called Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland. The panel happens Friday, Nov. 14, at 11:30 a.m. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010, 2014

Myths and misses in Ireland

He was around when the myths were real.
Bog body ("Gallagh Man"), National
Museum of Ireland, Dublin. Photo by
your humble blogkeeper.

I brought back with me from Ireland Lady Gregory's celebrated collection of Irish mythology. Its early stories, presumably taken from The Book of Invasions, offer marvelous deeds, a flair for drama, conventional numeric denominations (lots of nines and three times fifties), a bit of humor, and some good poetry amid their telling of the peopling of Ireland.

They also include the following, and I wonder if you will notice the same feature I did that distinguishes this from other tales of ancient battles:

"And three days after the landing of the Gael, they were attacked by Eriu, wife of Mac Greine, Son of the Sun, and she having a good share of men with her. …

"It was in that battle Fais, wife of Un, was killed in a valley at the foot of the mountain, and it was called after her, the Valley of Fais. And Scota, wife of Miled, got her death in the battle, and she was buried in a valley on the north side of the mountain near the sea. … And Eriu was beaten back to Tailltin, and as many of her men as she could hold together; and when she came there she told the people how she had been worsted in the battle, and the best of her men had got their death."

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An episode or two from the myths struck me as ripe for treatment as crime stories. See the short-story collection Requiems for the Departed (Gerard Brennan and Mike Stone, eds.) for evidence that old Irish myths can inspire new Irish crime writers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Gained in translation

Here's one difference between the two translations of The Táin  that I've been reading. Where Joseph Dunn's 1914 version has

"`It was a wealth, forsooth, we never heard nor knew of,' Ailill said; `but a woman's wealth was all thou hadst, and foes from lands next thine were used to carry off the spoil and booty that they took from thee.'"

 Ciaran Carson's 2007 version offers

"`If you were, I never heard tell of it,' said Ailill, `apart from your woman's assets that your neighbour enemies kept plundering and raiding.'"

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Mystery Táin: How Ireland's epic is like a crime story

(Cuchulain heads
for military school)

So, how is The Táin like a crime story? (And yep, I know Táin doesn't rhyme with train, but I couldn't resist.)

Its protagonist is a fearsome physical specimen, but mainly he's clever. I mean, you don't want to mess with a guy who

"struck off their four heads from themselves Eirr and Indell and from Foich and Fochlam, their drivers, and he fixed a head of each man of them on each of the prongs of the pole."

but it's his cunning that makes him stand out. When just a child, he overhears from a great distance a priest's instructions to his pupils, then uses those instructions as the authority to obtain arms not normally available to one of his age. "Hey," he as much as says when caught, "the priest said so," earning him in my edition the angry epithet of "bewitched elf-man."

My edition gives the English translations of some of character names in brackets after the originals. Some of those names are epithets, and the effect is like that of colorful Mafia nicknames: "Bascell ('the Lunatic')."

And finally, after mentioning Declan Burke's allusions to Irish myth in his more than fine new novel Slaughter's Hound, I noted this passage in The Táin: "And Culann came out, and he saw his slaughter-hound in many pieces."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Irish proto-crime tale is a lot of bull

[Road sculpture, Táin Bó Cúailnge (the Cattle
Raid of Cooley), County Louth, Ireland.
From the blog "Pictures of Ireland."]
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I like to post, seriously or not so seriously, about classics of world literature that remind me of crime fiction. These range from Voltaire's Holmesian interlude in "Zadig" to speculation that Herodotus was the father of the gentleman thief and a post about the Epic of Gilgamesh that I called "Sumer time, and the living is easy."

I am pleased to add Táin Bó Cúailnge  (The Cattle Raid of Cooley or, simply, The Táin) to the list, and Cúchulain hasn't even started doing his thing yet.

The opening of this old Irish tale is a heist story, Ailill and Medb, king and queen of Connacht, planning to steal Donn Cúailnge, the great brown bull of Cooley, and assembling their crew with all the care of Richard Stark's Parker. And Ailill and Medb (Maeve) themselves have to be the most fun fictional couple I've run into since Nick and Nora Charles. The tale begins in one of its two main recensions, or versions, with pillow talk between the two, a disagreement over which is richer. (Women could hold onto their own property in old Ireland.)

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The Táin is available in several English translations, including versions by the Irish poets Ciaran Carson and Thomas Kinsella. Several older versions are available free online. For evidence that Irish myth can still excite Irish crime writers, look no further than Requiems for the Departed (Morrigan Books, 2010)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012