Dublin Noir
Akashic Books: Noir
by Ken Bruen, Eoin Colfer, John Rickards, Ken Wignall, Laura Lippman, James O. Born, Sarah Weinman, Gary Phillips, Patrick J. Lambe, Duane Swierczynski, Craig McDonald, Pat Mullan, Reed Farrel Coleman, Peter Spiegelman, Jim Fusilli, Jason Starr, Charlie Stella, Ray Banks, Olen Steinhauer
Why You'll Love This
Dublin's economic boom gets the knife treatment — twenty crime writers exposing the city's shadow side beneath the prosperity.
- Great if you want: short, sharp crime fiction steeped in authentic Dublin atmosphere
- The experience: uneven but punchy — best consumed a story or two at a time
- The writing: voices range from Bruen's terse brutalism to Colfer's dark wit
- Skip if: anthology unevenness frustrates you — quality varies noticeably here
About This Book
Dublin has long worn two faces — the literary city of pints and poetry, and something older, harder, more dangerous underneath. This anthology strips away the tourist-brochure charm and drops nineteen crime writers into the streets, pubs, estates, and back alleys of a city riding the uneasy boom of Celtic Tiger prosperity. The result is a portrait of a place where new money sits uneasily beside old grievances, and where violence moves quietly through neighborhoods that outsiders rarely see.
What makes this collection worth your time is the range of voices brought to bear on a single city. Ken Bruen provides the native granite, but writers like Laura Lippman, Eoin Colfer, Olen Steinhauer, and Reed Farrel Coleman each find their own Dublin — their own register of dread, dark humor, or moral exhaustion. No story quite sounds like the one before it, yet the city itself accumulates page by page into something coherent and unsettling. For readers who love crime fiction that doubles as urban geography, this is exactly that kind of book.
