In honor of St. Patrick's Day, I thought it would be fun to have a little blog parade of Irish-themed entries. Leading the way is Irish author Declan Burke over at Crime Always Pays, where he directs your attention to Irish crime writers "woefully neglected," as he says, in years gone by. Since Burke's blog is often centered around Irish crime fiction, you might want to stay awhile, grab a pint of Guinness, and check out his other postings, as well as his list of links to 100+ Irish Crime Writers.
Crime Scene NI (Northern Ireland) celebrates the date by interviewing Belfast native Sam Millar, author of three best-selling novels and his latest, Bloodstorm. As you an guess from the title of this blog, there's a lot more Irish fodder there for crime fiction fans to peruse. (With thanks to Peter Rozovsky over at Detectives Beyond Borders, who often writes about Irish crime fiction.)
On the Library Journal's blog, Wilda Williams profiles the Irish Book Awards. Drawn from a list voted on by over 300 Irish booksellers and librarians, the categories include the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year, in which Ronan Bennet's historical thriller Zugwang was nominated, as well as Benjamin Black's second crime novel, The Silver Swan.
Kathy Harig, owner of the Mystery Loves Company bookstore in Baltimore (and its sister store in Oxford, Maryland), jumped the gun with a posting earlier in the month listing Irish mysteries and mystery writers.
The Euro Crime blog focuses primarily on UK crime fiction, but if you click on the "More European Countries" link under Crime in Translation, you'll find a lengthy bibliography with links for Ireland and Northern Ireland authors, including reviews by either Euro Crime or Reviewing the Evidence.
Sandy Mitchell included a select list of her favorite St. Patrick's Day Murder Mysteries on her Mystery Crime Fiction Blog. Two of them, by Lee Harris and Leslie Meier, even include the holiday in the title.
Sarah Weinman has a link from her blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, to her recent Dark Passages column in the Los Angeles Times about the state of P.I. fiction, where she mentions Declan Hughes' detective novels which, she says,
"truly embody the 'slow and steady' aspect of reinvention. His owes a literary debt less to Hammett and Chandler than to Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer books, family melodrama disguised as P.I. fiction. Hughes, a noted Irish playwright, writes about his hometown of Dublin, where corrosive secrets and generations of lies play out with melodramatic payoff. If anything, The Price of Blood, Hughes' third go-round with private eye Ed Loy -- tips its narrative hat to Sophocles and other purveyors of Greek tragedy."
Writer/editor Gerald So offers up one of his short stories with an appropriate theme for the day, as well as a review of the story "One Serving of Bad Luck" by Sean Chercover in the Killer Year anthology.
Another tribute to mystery short stories, the Criminal Brief blog, has James Lincoln Warren musing on the Blarney Stone ("to tip the Blarney," is figuratively used for telling a marvellous story, or falsity), which he weaves into an essay about the use of imagination in storytelling.
And finally, Terrie Farley Moran on Women of Mystery has a wonderful piece about the St. Patrick's Day Parade. Did you know the New York event is the oldest Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in the world, first held in 1762 when a group of Irish immigrants and Irish soldiers decided to march along lower Broadway on Saint Patrick’s Day?
She concludes with the traditional Irish toast meaning Good Health, which I'll also leave you with here -- Slàinte!
