Most memorable is the setting for her fourth novel, “Broken Harbor”: a “ghost estate,” one of the half-built, barely inhabited suburban developments sold to families eager to climb the “property ladder” and then abandoned by developers when the housing market crashed. French, an American who has lived in Ireland for twenty-six years, chooses locations where her characters get pinched between the desire to cling to history and the urge to jettison it for brighter horizons: an archeological site soon to be paved over for a motorway, the ramshackle Georgian “big house” outside a fading rural village, and the tight-knit working-class Dublin enclave known as the Liberties.
The portrait is, to be sure, of extraordinary quality. So it’s not particularly remarkable that Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series presents its readers with a portrait of contemporary Ireland wobbling in the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger’s collapse. The detective, an intruder, provides the friction. This is part of the genre’s allure: the windows it opens onto the street life of Victorian London, the sordid fringes of postwar Hollywood, the doldrums of Sweden’s welfare state, and the sooty haunts of working-class Edinburgh. Fictional detectives make handy protagonists because they have license to explore milieus that are off limits to other characters. Even the detective fiction that seems most untethered from real-world concerns-those British country-house puzzles in which ladies in drop-waisted frocks and gentlemen in evening dress gather in the drawing room to hear a sleuth dissect the murderer’s devious plot-murmurs of class and history: the wealth necessary to staff such a house, the far-off lands where Colonel Mustard earned his insignia. They can’t help it without a society to define, condemn, and punish it, crime itself wouldn’t exist. Photograph by Ciarán Óg Arnold for The New YorkerĪll crime novels are social novels.
French’s Dublin Murder Squad series inspires cultic devotion in readers.
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