© 2006

ONLYC ONNECT

Brooklyn Noir was a huge success, set a bunch of authors to write about one place, simple and highly effective.

Now in Akashic Books’ “noir” pipeline are Manhattan, Baltimore, Miami, Los Angeles, Havana, London… and that’s just the beginning. Here is Dublin Noir.

At first, it was straightforward-Dublin authors to write on their city… Then we turned the concept on its head, as you do in noir. The Irish are fascinated by how we appear to the world, so let’s have a look, we thought, at how this city appears from the outside. In addition to a couple of us locals, let’s take a cross section of the very best of today’s crime writers from America, as well as Britain, Europe, and Canada-the successful ones, the new blood, and those between. We knew we’d get a lot of Yeats and Ulysses, but what else…?

The challenge we posed to the authors we invited to join this collection was simple: Show us yourDublin, and show it noir.

Tourists booking holidays in Ireland inevitably do Dublin first and seem to always end up in Temple Bar, our very own Times Square-replete with the squalor, the drugs, the homeless, and the wandering psychos. Two years ago, Pat Boran, the legendary director of the Dublin Arts Festival, invited me to do a reading in Temple Bar. During my gig, a woman up and died. It added to my already noir rep and has certainly given me pause about returning there. Temple Bar, naturally, features in many of the stories, and the authors certainly capture the noir element. The Tourist Board, not fond of me in the best of times, has responded with a bounty on my head. I take that, I think, as flattery.