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Crime fiction: domestic noir at its most beguilingly chilling

Crime fiction: domestic noir at its most beguilingly chilling

Irish Times2 days ago
At the heart of domestic noir lies a profound philosophical question: how well, really, can we know another person? Set in the village of Blarney, Michelle McDonagh's
Some of This Is True
(Hachette Ireland, £15.99) opens with the death of 22-year-old
Irish-American
tourist, Jessie DeMarco, who has travelled to
Ireland
to try to find her birth father.
Did Jessie fall down the Wishing Steps at Blarney Castle early one winter morning, or was she pushed? These questions, and more, come to occupy the minds of Maria Murphy, who is married to Tadhg, and Noelle, the owner of a B&B where Jessie's estranged mother Dani DeMarco stays when she arrives in Blarney to recover her daughter's body.
Outraged when the local gardaí declare Jessie's death an accident without investigating thoroughly, Dani is shocked when she encounters Tadhg – who she knew once as 'Michael', the charming high schoolteacher who made her pregnant when he was teaching in Boston two decades previously.
Rooted in family dynamics and a tightly-knit community, Some of This Is True makes a virtue of its ostensibly prosaic characters (primary schoolteachers, GAA stalwarts, struggling small business owners) largely because McDonagh renders her characters and their concerns in a way that is wholly unforced but grippingly authentic as the women start to wonder how well they know their husbands and sons. Told in a deceptively simple style, enlivened by snippets of blackly comic Cork vernacular, Some of This Is True is domestic noir at its most beguilingly chilling.
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A 'lifetime of guilt and shame' can erode even the strongest of marital bonds, but what could be so shameful as to persuade Wendy, a poet, that her husband Thom needs to die? Might it be the fact that Thom, a tenured academic in a minor New England university, has vague plans to write a mystery novel that reads suspiciously like a veiled confession to murder?
So begins Peter Swanson's
Kill Your Darlings
(Faber, £18.99), which quickly establishes that Thom is a boozy, philandering wastrel who has largely squandered his gifts, and just as quickly has Wendy bump him off, and in a manner that suggests that this is not the first time Wendy has brought an unsatisfactory marriage to a violent conclusion.
The crucial question here is why, and Peter Swanson employs a reverse chronology to tell his story, with each chapter – alternating between Wendy and Thom's points of view – taking us further back in time to the halcyon days when the couple first met as lovestruck teens. 'I just keep coming back to this strange feeling that this is fate,' Thom says, and that reverse chronology certainly gives events the sense of creeping inevitability that characterises the best noir.
Swanson emphasises this mood with nods to The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity (as well as Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and multiple mentions of Edgar Allan Poe). The result is a powerful literary noir that picks the bones of a singular relationship, one in which, as Thom puts it, 'we were meant to kill to be together'.
[
New crime fiction: Michael Connelly revels in fresh freedom, Brian McGilloway serves up a suffocatingly claustrophobic affair
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]
A belated sequel to The Woman in Cabin
10 (2016), Ruth Ware's
The Woman in Suite 11
(Simon & Schuster, £16.99) opens with travel journalist Lo Blacklock accepting an invitation to the opening of a luxurious Swiss hotel, where she hopes to score a rare interview with Marcus Leidmann, a reclusive billionaire and one of the richest men in Europe.
Lo hardly has time to settle in, however, before she encounters an old frenemy from The Woman in Cabin 10: the manipulative Carrie Bullmer, who tells Lo that she is being held against her will by the abusive, controlling Leidmann, and desperately needs Lo's help to escape to the UK. Which is how Lo, who once more finds herself 'compelled by some impulse I didn't fully understand … a kind of saviour complex', finds herself in a nightmare scenario and suspected of murder.
A fast-paced treasure trove of conspicuous consumption, double and triple crosses, and imperilled heroines making very bad decisions, The Woman in Suite 11 is as fizzily decadent as a pre-brunch mimosa.
Fresh from delivering the George Smiley Cold War spy thriller Karla's Choice (2024), Nick Harkaway returns with
Sleeper Beach
(Corsair, £20), a blend of sci-fi and the classic private eye novels of Continental Op-era Dashiell Hammett.
Cal Sounder is a Titan, a 7ft tall, medically enhanced uber-human, who is commissioned by the wealthy matriarch Martha Erskine – herself a Titan – to investigate the apparent murder of Ailsa Lloyd in the coastal town of Shearwater, once a thriving fishing port but now the preferred destination of hordes of lost souls – the 'sleepers' of the title – who are broken by poverty and hopelessness, and who travel to Shearwater to sit on its beach and simply wait for death to come.
Complicating Sounder's investigation are two issues: one, the Erskine family pretty much own Shearwater, and two, Martha Erskine privately suspects that she may have murdered Ailsa Lloyd.
What follows, as Sounder starts to realise that Ailsa Lloyd was a labour activist quietly fomenting neo-Marxist revolution, is a brilliantly detailed novel that looks forward to the bleak prospect of policing controlled by 'the secular divine' and backward to those early Hammett novels in which Pinkerton detectives were more likely to be characterised as strikebreakers than knights errant devoted to winkling out truth and justice.
Equally effective as speculative fiction and a classic crime fiction throwback, Sleeper Beach will likely prove the first of many outings for the 'noirish Hercules' Cal Sounder.
Consistently inventive, always seeking to expand the genre's parameters, Sophie Hannah has outdone herself with
No One Would Do What the Lamberts Have Done
(Bedford Square, £18.99). The sleepy village of Swaffham Tilney in Cambridgeshire is the unlikely setting for a crime fiction yarn that begins with the hapless PC Connor Chantree trying to persuade his boss that the manuscript-of-sorts he has discovered sheds new light on the recent furore caused when Champ Lambert (allegedly) bit Tess Gavey, thus setting in train the sensational events alluded to in the title.
Champ, we discover, is the beloved Welsh terrier owned by Sally Lambert, a woman who is utterly devoted to her canine chum: 'The truth was – and if Sally could change minds in this world about one thing and one thing only, this would be it – being the parent of a dog is exactly the same as being a parent of humans.'
And so, when Champ is accused of biting the daughter of the neighbours with whom Sally is already embroiled in a feud ('on the Hatfield-McCoy level'), there's only one thing for it: Sally, Champ and the entire Lambert family go on the run, aided and abetted by their friendly local millionaire.
Quietly absurd (Champ's plight is compared to the Dreyfus affair and the hounding to death of Alan Turing), and featuring a secondary feud rooted in the crime credentials of Agatha Christie's Mary Westmacott novels (!), No One Would Do … is the proverbial shaggy dog story, a delightfully charming variation on the crime genre which proves that Sophie Hannah could probably rewrite the phone book to entertaining effect.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His latest novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press).
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Gardaí handed out more than 6,000 fines to motorists for unlawful use of bus lanes last year
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Gardaí handed out more than 6,000 fines to motorists for unlawful use of bus lanes last year

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As Galway's arts festival opens, the city's long-expected cultural space inches slowly towards planning this year
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‘Significant and necessary': Advocacy groups welcome proposal to change ‘honest belief' rape defence
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Irish Times

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‘Significant and necessary': Advocacy groups welcome proposal to change ‘honest belief' rape defence

Sexual violence support groups have welcomed proposed changes to consent law that could see 'honest' belief of consent no longer being considered a legal defence in rape cases. Rape Crisis Ireland (RCI) executive director Dr Clíona Saidléar said the change would raise the current 'low bar' of consent law in Ireland. 'This reform will be a modest change where defendants can no longer simply rely on their own understanding of an honest belief they had consent,' Dr Saidléar said. 'The change, which has been under discussion since 2016, will raise this low bar and require that that belief not only be honestly held, but also reasonable.' READ MORE The planned reform is at an advanced stage, with backing from the Law Reform Commission and as a key part of the Government's plan to take action on consent laws. Welcoming the reform, RCI said the 'paramount concern' for survivors of sexual violence is that laws and policies effectively uphold and deliver justice. The organisation added that it would closely examine the legislation's wording when it is published, 'but expect there to be broad agreement given the amount of scrutiny the proposal has already had in recent years'. The National Women's Council (NWC) said the proposal to remove the honest belief in consent as a legal defence in rape cases would be 'a crucial step towards a justice system in Ireland that centres survivors'. Speaking of the potential impact of this reform, NWC's violence against women co-ordinator Ivanna Youtchak said it would help shift the balance toward a justice process 'that recognises consent must be freely given, voluntary, ongoing, and affirms survivors' right to be heard and believed'. [ Shocking domestic violence data adds further urgency to new strategy Opens in new window ] Women's Aid chief executive Sarah Benson said the change was 'long overdue' and 'an important step to help improve victims-survivors' confidence' in the Irish justice system. 'The removal of the present scenario where an 'unreasonable' belief in consent can be grounds for an alleged perpetrator to be found innocent of rape is an important step to help improve victims-survivors' confidence that there can be justice in these deeply traumatic legal processes,' said Ms Benson. 'Women's Aid will monitor the progress of this action in the hope that it will be taken quickly, as it is already long overdue.' Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) also welcomed the proposed legislative change. In a statement shared to social media on Monday, the charity described the reform as 'significant and necessary' and said it reflected a 'victim-centred focus'. The organisation said it had expressed concern in November 2023 when it was revealed that the provision was being removed from draft legislation. 'This reform will ensure that any belief in consent must be objectively reasonable, rather than based on subjective beliefs. It is a crucial step in strengthening protections for survivors and ensuring that perpetrators are held accountable for their actions,' DRCC chief executive Rachel Morrogh said. [ 'Scale of our sexual violence epidemic' shown by record calls and texts to national rape crisis helpline Opens in new window ] 'The passage of this legislation cannot come soon enough and we remain committed to working with all stakeholders to create a justice system that truly supports and protects survivors of sexual violence.' According to figures from DRCC's annual report, published in May, the national Rape Crisis Helpline received more than 20,000 contacts for the first time last year. This marked a 22 per cent increase on 2023; 37 per cent of the 22,700 contacts made in 2024 related to rape as an adult.

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