Ли Чайлд - Belfast Noir

Also in this period, a series of “Troubles Trash” airport thrillers were published by British and American authors seeking to cash in on Belfast’s infamy, some becoming best sellers and Hollywood films that were largely derided in Northern Ireland for their didacticism and unsophisticated analysis of the situation.

In the 1990s a native series of Belfast police procedurals appeared, written by the witty Eugene McEldowney, and homegrown satirist Colin Bateman began his long run of novels that mined the rich vein of dark humour that has always been one of the city’s defining characteristics.

Finally in 1998 a peace deal was reached between Protestant and Catholic factions and a new legislative assembly set up at Stormont. The uneasy truce established on Good Friday 1998 has held, for the most part, for a decade and a half.

Walking through Belfast city centre today, you’ll see the same range of chain stores and restaurants that can be found in just about any part of the British Isles. Some might argue that the evidence of Northern Ireland’s economic growth—the peace dividend, as it’s known—has robbed the centre of Belfast of its character, but few citizens miss the security turnstiles, the bag searches, the nightly death of the city as it emptied out. Most feel the homogenisation of Belfast is a price worth paying for the luxuries other places take for granted. It might seem a cynical observation, but the truth is, those comforts—the restaurants, the theatres, the cinemas, the shopping malls—are the things that probably guarantee that the peace will hold. Only the most hardened individuals would feel a return to the grey desolation of the ’70s and ’80s is a sacrifice worth making for whatever political ideals they’re too embittered to let go of.

The most visible sign of Belfast’s transformation is the Victoria Square shopping centre, a glittering network of walkways, escalators, and staircases that traverse enclosed streets, a temple of much that is crass and shallow in the modern world, yet a strangely beautiful image of rebirth. Had anyone tried to build such a place in the Belfast of the ’80s or early ’90s, it would have been irresistible to the men of violence. If such an architectural bauble had ever been completed, it would have been bombed within days of opening. The people who planted the bomb would have claimed it as an economic target, a blow against capitalism, a crippling of Belfast’s business life. Or perhaps it would have just been nihilism: at the time many felt that when the bombers destroyed the Grand Opera House, the ABC Cinema, the Europa Hotel, and other landmarks, it was simply because they couldn’t bear the thought of Belfast’s citizens having anything good, anything decent, anything shiny to brighten the drudgery of their lives.

For all the shimmer and shine of the new Belfast, you can still walk a mile or two in almost any direction and find some of the worst deprivation in Western Europe. Those parts of the city have not moved on. While the middle class has enjoyed the spoils of the peace dividend, working-class areas have seen little improvement. The sectarian and paramilitary murals are still there: crude memorials to the fallen “soldiers” of the conflict, to heroes and martyrs still revered. For a small outlay, you can tour these murals in a black taxi with a knowledgeable guide at the wheel, ready to tell you who died where. You can see Belfast’s bloodstains up close and personal. This is the city that gave the world its worst ever maritime disaster, and turned it into a tourist attraction; similarly, we are perversely proud of our thousands of murders, our wounds constantly on display. You want noir? How about a painting the size of a house, a portrait of a man known to have murdered at least a dozen human beings in cold blood? Or a similar house-sized gable painting of a zombie marching across a postapocalyptic wasteland with an AK-47 over the legend UVF: Prepared for Peace—Ready for War . As Lee Child has said, Belfast is still “the most noir place on earth.”

Despite its relative newness as a city, Belfast has a rich psychogeography: on virtually every street corner and in nearly every pub and shop something terrible happened within living memory. Belfast is a place where the denizens have trained themselves not to see these scars of the past, rather like the citizens of Besźel in China Miéville’s novel The City & the City .

This volume contains fourteen brand-new stories from some of Belfast’s most accomplished crime and literary novelists and from writers further afield who have a strong connection to the city. The stories take place in all of Belfast’s four quarters and in a diverse number of styles within the rubric of “noir.”

We have divided the book into four sections—City of Ghosts, City of Walls, City of Commerce, and Brave New City—which we think capture the legacy of Belfast’s recent past, its continuing challenges, and a guess or two at where the city might go in the future.

We believe that Belfast Noir is an important snapshot of the city’s crime-writing community and indeed represents some of the finest and most important short fiction ever collected on contemporary Northern Ireland. We hope that this book will serve as a record of a Belfast transitioning to normalcy, or perhaps as a warning that underneath the fragile peace darker forces still lurk.

Adrian McKinty & Stuart Neville

July 2014

FOREWORD

BY DAVID TORRANS

So, you want to open a specialist crime-fiction bookshop in Belfast? Are you mad?!

This was the general response here in 1997.

Those who cared about my personal and financial well-being were supportive and terrified in about equal measures. At that time the vast majority of our stock originated from the other side of the Atlantic—the attraction of the “other” is always present—along with the more obscure British, European, and Asian crime fiction in print at that time. As is the way with change, the more obscure at one time can become the mainstream somewhere down the line: Mankell, Rankin, McDermid, et al. were all “new” authors at one point, bringing a fresh and exciting approach to the genre.

Searching for new authors is probably the most satisfying part of our work, and as each year passed by the arena within which to choose increased.

Yet, something was missing . . .

The local scene regarding the crime-fiction genre was somewhat lacking. I would find myself filtering onto the shelves books by fine literary novelists who combine style and narrative with a sense of dark foreboding in much of their work, all important elements in the best of crime fiction. Thankfully, from this point on, things were brewing within the genre in this part of the world, and new names started to appear on the shelves.

That is not to say that all fiction within the genre is Belfast-centric. Much of the best writing from this part of the world combines the urban with the rural; we are, after all, a place filled with contradictions—social, political, and environmental—and this provides the perfect material for the genre to flourish.

Now, almost twenty years on, I can happily say that our focus within the shop veers much more strongly toward the “local.” Procedural, satirical, thriller, and of course noir elements of the genre are all present, and whilst from a gender perspective it is slightly skewed toward the male, this too is starting to change.

That an anthology such as Belfast Noir is even possible is a sign of how far both the genre and the city have come. When authors better known for literary or even science fiction are ready to tackle crime stories set in a city once torn apart by sectarian strife, you know both Belfast and Northern Irish noir have come of age.