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Across this year’s shortlists, there are countless compelling crime narratives, from our Irish Independent Crime Fiction Book of the Year category, showcasing iconic authors such as John Banville and Liz Nugent, to varied works of writing similarly centring on dark acts - take Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time, Sam Blake’s Something Terrible Happened Last Night, and Anna Heussaff’s Sa Pholl Báite, for example. And then there are those books that are inspired by or solely focus on true crime: Aoife Fitzpatrick’s The Red Bird Sings; Mark O’Connell’s A Thread of Violence and Christy Mangan’s Cracking the Case. True crime is a genre that has increasingly seen rising popularity and fascination, across Ireland and further afield; so what is it about the centring of real-life acts that seizes our attention? Is it a need to make sense of and understand such deeds of brutality? To understand what the victims and their loved ones went through? Or a fascination with the macabre and dark parts of our society? We take a look at these three works below, and the centring of true crime in their narratives.
Aoife Fitzpatrick's chilling and gothic debut finds its roots in a real-life, historic trial. She writes in writing.ie that ‘the answers have such deep roots in nineteenth-century West Virginia that it was clear the writer, and not the story, would have to shift in place and period.’ And while those roots may be buried deep, the story hauntingly chimes with the present day in its depiction of domestic violence against women and the stifling of female voices in social and legal structures. It is a crime and trial that holds up a mirror to the systems and fates women continue to labour against.
West Virginia, 1897. When young Zona Heaster Shue dies only a few months after her impromptu wedding, her mother Mary Jane becomes convinced that Zona was murdered – and by none other than her husband, Trout, the handsome blacksmith beloved in their small Southern town.
Known for casting off her corsets and following famous spiritualists, Mary Jane is disbelieved by all but the eccentric Lucy Frye: an aspiring reporter and unmarried woman who always suspected Trout’s power over her friend. As the trial raises to fever pitch and the men of Greenbrier County stand aligned against them, Mary Jane and Lucy experience first-hand how far the legitimacy of female testimony depends on perceived morality. With this knowledge weighing heavy, Mary Jane and Lucy must decide whether to reveal Zona’s greatest secret in the service of justice. But it’s Zona herself, from beyond the grave, who still has one last revelation to make – and can no longer be silenced.
Based upon the real life trial of Trout Shue; intricately researched and masterfully playing with the tropes of the Southern Gothic, Aoife Fitzpatrick delivers a searing feminist history that confronts urgent issues of the present day, including the true meaning of justice.
The Red Bird Sings is shortlisted for Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year.
Truth, reality and doubt coalesce in Mark O’Connell’s portrait of Malcolm Macarthur, the notorious, well-to-do figure who inexplicably killed two blameless individuals in 198; a scandal which almost overturned the Irish government. ‘Grotesque. Unbelievable. Bizarre. Unprecedented.’, were the famous words used by then Prime Minister Charles Haughey to convey the crime.
Released from prison in 2012, Macarthur and O’Connell found themselves wandering the same Dublin streets, their lives edging closer together. Macarthur agreed to open up to O’Connell, and O’Connell, in turn, endeavoured to understand the blurred line between the fiction and the reality of this individual, and his act of violence all those years ago. He writes, ‘to understand Macarthur, or to attempt to do so, is to understand the darkness and violence that run beneath the surface of so many lives, and which have shaped so much of human experience’. But is this really a void any of us can attempt to comprehend?
In 1982 Malcolm Macarthur, the wealthy heir to a small estate, found himself suddenly without money. The solution, he decided, was to rob a bank. To do this, he would need a gun and a car. In the process of procuring them, he killed two people, and the circumstances of his eventual arrest in the apartment of Ireland’s Attorney General nearly brought down the government. The case remains one of the most shocking in Ireland’s history.
Mark O’Connell has long been haunted by the story of this brutal double murder. But in recent years this haunting has become mutual. When O’Connell sets out to unravel the mysteries still surrounding these horrific and inexplicable crimes, he tracks down Macarthur himself, now an elderly man living out his days in Dublin and reluctant to talk. As the two men circle one another, O’Connell is pushed into a confrontation with his own narrative: what does it mean to write about a murderer?
A Thread of Violence is Shortlisted for the Dubray Non-Fiction Book of the Year.
Insightful and compassionate, Cracking the Case is the story of four decades of crime from the eyes and voice of former Chief Superintendent Christy Mangan, traversing some high-profile and truly horrific crimes, that give an insight into the minds of the perpetrators, as well as the victim’s families. Described by the Irish Independent as 'a rare insight into the darkest recess of human nature', Cracking the Case once more tugs at our desires to understand the evil capabilities of humans. But crucially, Mangan displays a profound reckoning with the shock-waves of such crimes and the tragic destruction they leave in their wake.
In his forty-year career, Mangan participated in or led over 100 murder investigations. And he set up the Garda cold case unit to examine some of the state’s most troubling unsolved killings.
In his accounts of fascinating cases, Mangan’s focus is always on giving the victim’s family answers. He also shows a deep understanding of the complex reasons people are drawn into crime or commit unthinkable acts. Cracking the Case is a remarkable insight into the mind of a gifted garda working at the highest level.
Cracking the Case is Shortlisted for the Dubray Non-Fiction Book of the Year.