Crime in the City: The 5th Annual Dublin UNESCO City of Literature Lecture by Prof Chris Morash

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There are cities whose imagination has been shaped by crime fiction. Whether it is the London of Sherlock Holmes or the Los Angeles of Michael Connolly’s Harry Bosch, the city’s best crime fiction has woven itself into the streets and sidewalks. When it comes to crime fiction, Dublin has been something of a late-comer, and until about twenty years or so ago, Dublin’s fictional detectives were thin on the ground. That situation, however, has changed dramatically, and over the past few decades an entire imagined history has fallen into place, from Conor Brady’s historical crime novels set in the 1880s, through Joe Joyce’s thrillers set in the 1940s, to Benjamin Black’s Quirke novels set in the 1950s, right up to writers such as Tana French and Declan Hughes, whose characters inhabit the Dublin of today.

This talk ranges widely through the dark alleys and wet laneways of Dublin crime writing, asking what it means for us to imagine our city as the home of its fictional criminals and detectives.