![]() The Dublin Murder Squad books are a mystery series in name only in multiple respects, the series transgresses the well-established conventions of the genre, the first of which is a reliable continuity in tone and dramatis personae. In most crime fiction, the central mystery is: Who is the murderer? In French’s novels, it’s: Who is the detective? In her books, the search for the killer becomes entangled with a search for self. A bit of the spell it casts can be attributed to the genre’s usual devices-the tempting conundrum, the red herrings, the slices of low and high life-but French is also hunting bigger game. Most crime fiction is diverting French’s is consuming. The recipient spent much of the weekend shuffling around in a robe with the book clutched to her chest and a distracted expression on her face. The early copy of “The Trespasser” that I presented as a hostess gift this summer was greeted with ecstasy. French’s readers like to go online and rank the books (six so far, counting “The Trespasser”) in order of preference, and while there’s no consensus, it’s taken for granted that anybody who’s read one will very shortly have read them all. ![]() Yet, however convincing and well observed French’s Ireland feels, it isn’t the kernel of her work’s appeal, the thing that makes the Dublin Murder Squad series the object of an intense, even cultic fascination. She gazes down at the victim, Aislinn Murray, whose straightened blond hair and fake tan are the series’ badges of today’s generic young Irish womanhood, and thinks to herself, “She looks like Dead Barbie.” The corpse in “The Trespasser,” the most recent book in the series, turns up in a Victorian terraced cottage on a nondescript Dublin street, a home furnished in the kind of canned, impersonal good taste that would give Detective Antoinette Conway the creeps if she permitted herself such whimsies. 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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