Introduction
At the turn of this century, one of my mystery novels was nominated for a literary prize at a festival in the south of Ireland. The nominees were requested to attend, awards ceremonies tending to be damp squibs if those involved aren’t immediately available to look pleased or disappointed, depending on the outcome, so I traveled from Dublin to be present. Prior to the formal announcement of the winner, I found myself seated at a dinner table next to one of the judges, a well-known Irish author and critic. He leaned toward me in a confidential manner, as one with matters of considerable import to share.
“You know,” he said kindly, “You write very well. Have you ever considered applying yourself to something more appropriate to your talents?”
Which was when I realized that I probably need not have rushed down.
Exactly one hundred years earlier, in 1901, the popular Irish author L.T. Meade (1844-1914), one of the pioneers of young women’s fiction, as well as a noted writer of detective stories, was interviewed in her home in West Dulwich, England by the author Laura Stubbs for the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine. In the course of the conversation, Stubbs inquired of Meade:
“I want to know why, with all your splendid gifts and abilities, you do not give yourself up to writing one good book instead of (forgive me for saying it) frittering away your energy in sensational stories for magazines – interesting, of course, well written, else they would never have secured so large a hearing, but I feel you might give the world a book that would remain, like George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a literary monument of your genius.”
We’ll come Meade’s reply shortly, but another later Irish writer, Eilís Dillon, might well have felt a twinge of empathy. In June 1954, the reviewer “J.W.” in The Irish Times, commenting on Dillon’s crime novel Sent to His Account, remarked: “I cannot help feeling that, if Miss Dillon is so good a writer, perhaps she should be encouraged to launch in the wider seas of the real novelist.”
So, if my own experience was anything to go by, it appeared that the critical consensus on the merits of genre fiction – whether detective fiction, romantic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, or otherwise – had not advanced very far by the turn of the twenty-first century, even at fifty-year intervals, or at least not in Ireland. In fact, I’d argue that the clock was effectively reset on genre writing in Ireland in the 1920s. From that point on, Irish genre writers began to be seen as an aberration, their work marginalized and underrated, with a deleterious effect on critical thinking about genre in Ireland that has only started to be undone during the last two decades. The nation that gave the world its first great fantasy novel in English, albeit satirical, in the form of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and helped keep the Gothic novel alive between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – before contributing four of its finest examples in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) – had, during the twentieth century, largely ceased to produce any fantasy or supernatural literature of note, or not on any level comparable to the 1800s. The country whose writers had, in the nineteenth century, composed innovative work in the field of crime fiction – medical mysteries, female criminal masterminds, first-person police narratives – could probably have numbered its home-based crime writers on one hand by the middle of the twentieth.
