Belfast Noir Read online

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Introduction by Adrian McKinty & Stuart Neville

  Foreword by David Torrans

  PART I: CITY OF GHOSTS

  The Undertaking

  BRYAN MCGILLOWAY

  Roselawn

  Poison

  LUCY CALDWELL

  Dundonald

  Wet with Rain

  LEE CHILD

  Great Victoria Street

  Taking It Serious

  RUTH DUDLEY EDWARDS

  Falls Road

  PART II: CITY OF WALLS

  Ligature

  GERARD BRENNAN

  Hydebank

  Belfast Punk REP

  GLENN PATTERSON

  Ann Street

  The Reservoir

  IAN MCDONALD

  Holywood

  PART III: CITY OF COMMERCE

  The Grey

  STEVE CAVANAGH

  Laganside, Queens Island

  Rosie Grant's Finger

  CLAIRE MCGOWAN

  Titanic Quarter

  Out of Time

  SAM MILLAR

  Hill Street

  Die Like a Rat

  GARBHAN DOWNEY

  Malone Road

  PART IV: BRAVE NEW CITY

  Corpse Flowers

  EOIN MCNAMEE

  Ormeau Embankment

  Pure Game

  ARLENE HUNT

  Sydenham

  The Reveller

  ALEX BARCLAY

  Shore Road

  About the Contributors

  Sneak Peek: USA NOIR

  Also in Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  About Akashic Books

  Copyrights & Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  THE NOIREST CITY ON EARTH

  Few European cities have had as disturbed and violent a history as Belfast over the last half-century. For much of that time the Troubles (1968–1998) dominated life in Ireland’s second-biggest population centre, and during the darkest days of the conflict—in the 1970s and 1980s—riots, bombings, and indiscriminate shootings were tragically commonplace. The British army patrolled the streets in armoured vehicles and civilians were searched for guns and explosives before they were allowed entry into the shopping district of the city centre.

  A peace process that began in 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement has brought a measure of calm to Belfast, but during the summer “Marching Season” rioting between Catholic and Protestant working-class districts often flares up to this day.

  Belfast is still a city divided. East Belfast is a largely Protestant working-class district. South Belfast is a prosperous middle-class enclave centred around Queens University. West and North Belfast, where Catholic and Protestant working-class districts jut up against one another is the area of greatest conflict and where the fracture lines are at their most raw. So-called “peace walls” have been built to separate adjacent streets of Protestant and Catholic families, with more having been added since the peace agreement of ’98.

  The north of Ireland has always been a slightly different place than the south. For centuries Ulstermen and -women have been blessed with a unique accent, a mordant sense of humour, and a taciturnity unshared by most of their countrymen in the rest of the island. Attempts have been made to explain the province of Ulster’s singularity by laying the blame at the door of thousands of dour Scottish planters who began arriving in the northeast of Ireland in the early 1600s. Of course the Ulster plantation changed the religious complexion of the north, but well before then “the land beyond the Mournes” revelled in its exceptionalism. Ulster was the most Gaelic and least English province of Ireland in the early seventeenth century, and further back into the mists of prehistory the story of the Táin Bó Cúailnge was that of Cuchulain, champion of Ulster, battling the forces of Erin.

  Belfast was little more than a village for much of this time. The name probably derives from the Irish, béal feirste, which means river-mouth, and for centuries it was an uninteresting settlement on the mudflats where the River Lagan joined Belfast Lough.

  In the nineteenth century shipbuilding, heavy engineering, and linen manufacture led to Belfast’s exponential growth, and by 1914 a tenth of all the ships and a third of all the linen clothes made in the British Empire were coming from the city. Belfast was Ireland’s boom town and Dublin the mere administrative capital.

  But World War I, the 1916 Easter Rising, and the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) led to the creation of a border that separated the six counties of Northern Ireland from the twenty-six counties of the Irish Free State. Post-partition Northern Ireland suffered from an inferiority complex. Cut off from cultural developments in Dublin and London, Belfast became something of a provincial backwater. Belfast was heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe in World War II and postwar reconstruction was piecemeal at best.

  International literary trends tended to pass Ulster by, and Northern Irish fiction itself went through a lean period until well after the end of World War II. A rare cultural highlight was F.L. Green’s Odd Man Out, which led to Carol Reed’s extraordinary film noir adaptation starring James Mason.

  But the decline of engineering, shipbuilding, and linen manufacture had a devastating impact on Belfast and it was a gloomy, depressed, unfashionable Victorian city that encountered the years of conflict and low-level civil war known euphemistically as the Troubles.

  What began as a series of peaceful marches for civil rights for Northern Ireland’s Catholic minority in the late ’60s quickly morphed into street violence and random sectarian attacks. As the crisis in the north intensified, the British government deployed the army and suspended Northern Ireland’s parliament. Direct rule from London did not allay the fears of the Catholic minority and the Provisional Irish Republican Army began to recruit volunteers for their campaign to violently overthrow the British. In reaction to the IRA bombings and shootings, successive British governments panicked: interring IRA suspects without trial, flooding Northern Ireland with yet more soldiers, and strengthening the local police—the Royal Ulster Constabulary. And of course violence spiralled into more violence. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) reformed to counter the Provisional IRA, and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) became an umbrella group for various Protestant factions. Of course the majority of those killed were innocent civilians on both sides.

  A depressing three decade–long cycle of atrocities and massacres had begun.

  By this time much of Northern Ireland’s writing talent—intellectuals such as Brian Moore, C.S. Lewis, and Louis MacNeice—had left the province to ply their trade under brighter lights, and Belfast languished culturally until the early 1970s when in the midst of the Troubles the city became the focus of an extraordinary group of poets who went on to attain world renown: Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, Ciaran Carson, Michael Longley, Tom Paulin, among others. Based loosely around Queens University, these young poets produced the greatest body of Irish literary work since the Gaelic revival. As the violence worsened, ironically, Belfast grew in cultural confidence, kick-started by this incendiary poetry, which in turn provided the kerosene for the other arts. By the late-1970s Northern Ireland saw a boom in playwriting, screenwriting, songwriting, and finally in novel writing.

  Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal (1983) was one of the first and best crime novels to address the complexities of life during the Troubles, and the Belfast-set Lies of Silence (1990) by Brian Moore established the city as a labyrinth of twisting allegiances and blind alleys. Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man (1994) is a portrait of Belfast as a city of the abyss in which sociopathic Protestant serial killers stalk the streets looking for random Catholic victim
s. Resurrection Man was based on the true story of the Shankill Butchers.

  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.

  David Torrans has been a figurehead in the Belfast, Northern Irish, and wider Irish crime-fiction scenes for two decades. His bookstore, No Alibis, has been featured in media around the globe.

  PART I

  CITY OF GHOSTS

  THE UNDERTAKING

  BY BRYAN MCGILLOWAY

  Roselawn

  It’s the one thing they’ll never stop,” Brogan said. “A hearse. Think about it. Not only will they not stop you, they’ll probably halt the traffic to let you past.”

  Healy nodded, unconvinced. The room was sharp with chemicals
; the new embalmer, Mark Kearney, was learning the ropes and was still too heavy-handed with the fluid. Not that Healy had had any choice with that particular apprenticeship.

  To their left, two women whispered in a hushed sibilance next to the coffin, one with her hand laid proprietarily on the satin-covered edge of the wood. Occasionally, Healy noticed, one finger would extend slightly, just touching the ends of the dead man’s hair. It wasn’t his wife; she’d been in twice to straighten the flag that was draped over the lower half, drooping in the middle under the weight of sympathy cards being laid there.

  “You’d have nothing to do,” Brogan said. “Pick it up from an address in Dundalk, bring it to the pub. We’ve the back room hired for the day for the ‘wake.’ Bring it in, leave it a few hours, then take the coffin back to your own place. You get to keep the box, and you’ll make a few pounds.”

  “I don’t know, Brogan. What’s in it anyway?”

  Brogan stared at him, his mouth a tight white line. “You know better than to ask.”

  “I’ll be the one driving it,” Healy said. “It’s my business we’re talking about.”

  He felt Brogan grip his arm, just at the crook of his elbow. “Your business? How much has your fucking business earned from all the burials we’ve brought you? Like fucking state funerals, some of them.”

  Not to mention all the other burials they’d caused, Healy thought, but said nothing, nodding lightly. “I know,” he managed finally. “And I appreciate the trade.”

  “Your fucking business could burn to the ground some night, if you’re not careful.”

  “I know,” Healy said, raising a placatory hand.

  “Or, God forbid, that cute blondie you’re shifting could fall down the stairs and damage her skull. Not that there’d be much to damage in there, judging by what Mark tells me.”

  “Leave Laura out of it!”

  “I hope to,” Brogan said. “That’ll be your choice.”

  Just then, a heavy man lumbered through the doorway, chest wheezing from the exertion of climbing the stairs. When he saw the two men standing, he raised his chin briefly in greeting, then limped his way across to the coffin. He offered a perfunctory blessing, laid his hand, not on the dead man’s, but on the flag beneath him, then raised the fingers that had caressed the material to his mouth, kissing them lightly.