Great Irish Detective Stories Author:Peter Haining (Editor) That the Irish have a flair for storytelling is widely known. But that Ireland has produced an abundance of crime and detective fiction since the genre began over 50 years ago may come as a surprise to many. — Profiling Ireland's contribution to the literature of mystery and mayhem, Great Irish Detective Stories serves up 26 tales from many of Ir... more »eland's leading writers -- with several contributions from writers not normally associated with detective fiction, including Liam O'Flaherty, James Joyce, Sean O'Faolain, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O'Brien, Dorothea Conyers, William Trevor, and Brendan Behan.
Offerings from such acknowledged masters of suspense as Freeman Wills Croft, Nicholas Blake, Edmund Crispin, and Peter Cheyney are also present.
To highlight the pioneering efforts of the Irish in crime fiction, the collection includes a selection by Gerald Griffin, "The Hand and the Word," written fourteen years prior to Edgar Allen Poe's "The Murders of the Rue Morgue" -- it is most certainly the very first tale of detection.
Here, too, is M. McDonnell Bodkin's "The Vanishing Diamonds," featuring Ireland's first serialized detective, who was created in 1898 as the workaday answer to Sherlock Holmes - and who rivaled Holmes in popularity. Yet another "first" for Irish mystery writing occurs in Richard Dowling's "Negative Evidence," in which a photograph is cleverly employed to solve the whereabouts of a missing person.« less
Twenty-six tales with a detective theme by Irish authrors! One very short one is byJames Jouce. This was given to me as a gift but I don't really like detective stories that much.