Many congratulations to RJ Ellory whose A Simple Act of Violence was awarded the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award at Harrogate on Thursday night.

While he’s an established seller and previous Richard and Judy bookclub pick, this was Ellory’s first major prize win in the UK and it’s heartening to see him recognized for what is, for me, his finest work to date.

The jacket blurb makes it sound like a fairly standard police procedural in which a Washington DC Detective investigates a series of killings where the victims don’t appear to have official identities. But don’t be deceived, as from this starting point Ellory fashions a bold and provocative exploration of the CIA’s covert operations in Nicaragua in the 1980s (and it’s this side of it which seems even more timely and relevant following today’s disclosures by Wikileaks). Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay it is that it makes a great companion piece to Don Winslow’s magisterial 2005 novel, The Power of the Dog.

And it was another excellent year for the festival, a three-day celebration of crime writing at which the authors, as is tradition, socialise (and drink) freely with the festival-goers.

My other highlight of the weekend was the Saturday lunchtime event for debuts, hand-picked and generously hosted by Val McDermid, which featured Belinda Bauer (Blacklands), Stuart Neville (The Twelve), Attica Locke (Black Water Rising) and Liam McIlvanney (All the Colours of the Town), four authors whose highly impressive first novels all promise a vibrant future for contemporary crime writing.

Editor Katherine Armstrong shares her passion for Irish and Northern Irish crime fiction, and selects 25 of the best writers of Emerald Noir.

I grew up in Northern Ireland in the eighties and nineties, which was probably not Judith Chalmers’ first point of call for Wish You Were Here but still, it was home. As most people will remember, Northern Ireland during that period was an interesting place to be if you were particularly keen on scaring yourself silly. The television most evenings would have talk of car bombs, murders, knee-cappings and other assorted terrorist activities. Going to school in Belfast every day on the train you became used to having to get a replacement bus service due to bomb scares.  For anyone who wanted to skip class the various alphabetical groups bent on death and destruction could guarantee that no one would question your excuse for being late – there always seemed to be a bomb scare somewhere.

Throughout the difficult years there were books that focused on the Troubles – you know the stuff – where an English spy from British Intelligence would invariably fall in love with a Catholic girl who would betray him to the IRA and he’d be executed. But there was a huge gap in the market for really good home grown crime fiction. Over the past twenty years or so there has been an emergence of what has become known as Emerald Noir. It’s gritty, it’s realistic, and contemporary Ireland – both north and south – is a whole lot better for it.

But how has this come about? I think one of the main reasons is the change in the political state of Northern Ireland: the Republican and Loyalist ceasefires and the creation of the Stormont government. Once this happened all the terrorist groups moved into ‘ordinary’ crimes, running drugs and guns etc., which makes for more interesting and diverse fictional narratives. In the Republic of Ireland there was the rise of the Celtic Tiger that saw a huge influx of money enter the country and that inevitably led to more crime on the streets with the increase of gang culture. Traditionally Ireland has always had quite literary tastes in fiction – Joyce, Beckett, Shaw etc – but the success of ‘chick lit’ authors such as Marian Keyes and Cecilia Ahern has also meant that genre fiction has become more acceptable and that has helped open the Irish market to genres such as crime fiction.

Below is a list of twenty-five of the best Irish and Northern Irish crime writers past and present. This is by no means a definitive list as there are many other fantastic Irish/Northern Irish writers out there but I’ve narrowed the criteria specifically to writers who were born in Ireland/Northern Ireland and whose works are set there.

1. Eilís Dillon (1920–1994)

Eilís Dillon was born in Galway in 1920. Her uncle was the poet Joseph Mary Plunkett who was one of the seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. He was executed in Kilmainham Gaol at the end of the Easter Rising in 1916.

Apart from writing children’s books in both Irish and English Eilís also wrote three detective stories that were published by Faber. Two were translated into other languages and all were published in America. They have since been reissued in America by specialist crime publisher Rue Morgue Press.

2. Eoin McNamee (1961–)

Eoin McNamee was born in Kilkeel, County Down. His debut novel, Resurrection Man, was described by the Irish Times as ‘one of the most outstanding pieces of Irish Fiction to come along in years’ and by Jonathan Coe as  ‘Impressively confident . . . as lean and grimly purposeful a book as the demon-driven terrorist it sets out to explore.’ McNamee is one of the leading chroniclers of Ireland’s troubled past and his latest novel, Orchid Blue, about the murder case that led to the last hanging to occur in Northern Ireland, will be published by Faber in November.

3. Colin Bateman (1962–)

Colin Bateman was born in Newtownards, County Down, but grew up in Bangor (my home town!). Bateman is a prolific writer but the book that launched his career in 1995 was Divorcing Jack (which was also made into a film in 1998). Dan Starkey, his not yet mature Belfast journalist protagonist, gets involved in murder and mayhem on the streets of Belfast before being rescued by a stripper dressed as a nun. Hilarity ensues. Fourteen novels have been published since then including Murphy’s Law, for which Bateman wrote the television screenplay. The character was specifically written for the actor James Nesbitt. The Day of the Jack Russell won The Last Laugh Award for the best comic crime novel published in the UK in 2009 at CrimeFest.

4. Brian McGilloway (1974–)

Born in Derry, Brian McGilloway is the author of the acclaimed Inspector Benedict Devlin series, the first of which, Borderlands, was published by Macmillan New Writing and was shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger in 2007. Gallows Lane, his second novel, was shortlisted for the 2009 Irish Book Awards/Ireland AM Crime Novel of the Year and has been longlisted for Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year.

Inspector Devlin is an unusual police detective in that he has a (mostly) happy family life and works in a close community where everyone knows everyone. The setting of Donegal provides Devlin with the added problems of policing the borderlands when he can’t investigate over the borderline. It’s a good series that has been building nicely.

5. Stuart Neville (1972–)

Stuart Neville was born in Armagh and is an author who has really taken off over the past year. His short story, The Last Dance, was published by ThugLit, the online crimezine, in 2008 which prompted a literary agent to get in touch and take him on. Neville’s short story turned novel, Followers, was published as The Twelve in the UK and as The Ghosts of Belfast in the US; it was also published in Japan. It has since won the LA Times Book Prize and been optioned for a movie. The sequel, Collusion, will be published in August.

6. Adrian McKinty

Originally born and reared in Carrickfergus, Adrian McKinty studied politics at Oxford University before moving to New York City in the 1990s. He worked as a security guard, postman, construction worker, barman, rugby coach and bookstore clerk before becoming a teacher, author and moving to Australia.  He is the author of the Dead Trilogy (featuring hitman Michael Forsythe) and two standalone novels, Fifty Grand and Hidden River. Dead I Well May Be was shortlisted for the 2004 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and selected by Booklist as one of the ten best crime novels of the year. The Dead Yard was selected by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the twelve best novels of 2006 and won the Audie Award for best mystery or thriller. Fifty Grand won the 2010 Spinetingler Award.

7. Ingrid Black

Ingrid Black is the pseudonym of Irish journalist Eilis O’Hanlon and her husband Ian McConnel. Their first novel, The Dead, was published in 2003 and won a Shamus award. The Dark Eye was published in 2004, The Judas Heart in 2007 and Circle of the Dead in 2008.

Their main characters are former FBI agent turned true crime writer Saxon and Dublin Metropolitan Police Detective Grace Fitzgerald who is part of the Dublin Murder Squad.

8. Declan Burke (1969–)

Ken Bruen once said of Declan Burke, ‘I have seen the future of Irish crime fiction and it’s called Declan Burke. Here is talent writ large – mesmerizing, literate, smart and gripping . . . at last my hopes for crime fiction are renewed. Declan Burke, who was born in Sligo, is the author of Eightball Boogie (2003), The Big O (2007) and also runs the crime fiction blog Crime Always Pays. The Big O earned Burke comparisons with Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen.

9. Ken Bruen (1951–)

Ken Bruen is like the Big Daddy of Irish crime fiction. His most famous creation is Jack Taylor and he sets his Taylor novels in Galway, where he was born and still lives. The Guards, the first book in the Jack Taylor series (published in the UK in 2001; US 2003), won a Shamus Award for Best Novel in 2003. The Jack Taylor series focuses on disgraced ex-Guard Jack Taylor who turns private investigator while struggling with a drink problem. The most recent Jack Taylor novel is The Devil (2010), described by the Irish Independent as ‘Brilliant . . . Bruen’s Galway is certainly not Bord Faílte-approved, but once again he has delivered a disturbing story that casts a very cold eye on the state of our nation’.

10. Eugene McEldowney (1943–)

Eugene McEldowney was born in Belfast but lived in Dublin as a journalist for the Irish Times before writing full time. His series of crime books feature Superintendent Cecil Megarry of the Northern Ireland Special Branch. He also writes standalone novels like 1999’s The Faloorie Man and 2002’s Stella’s Story.

11. Liz Allen (1969–)

Dublin born Allen worked on several national newspapers in Dublin before leaving journalism in 2001 to work on her first novel. The lead characters in her standalone books are both independent women: solicitor Deborah Parker [Last to Know], and crime profiler Kate Waters [The Set-Up]. Allen has been compared to Minette Walters.

12. Alan Glynn

Alan Glynn’s Winterland was published by Faber in 2009 to rave reviews. Returning to his native city of Dublin Glynn looks at big business corruption as the Celtic Tiger begins to wane. The Irish Independent thought it was ‘a fast-moving, tightly-plotted, exciting read from the bright new star of Dublin noir crime fiction’, while the Irish Times described it as ‘a page-turner in the best sense of the word, a novel filled with clearly drawn, morally ambiguous characters . . . The plot never lets up for a moment and the three set-pieces of the story are as good as anything I have read in contemporary crime fiction. The great achievement of the novel, however, is the creation of Gina Rafferty herself. Believing that a property developer has destroyed her family’s life, she acts as a metaphor for an entire country that has been shattered by greed and the machinations of the filthy rich. Because of this, Winterland takes its place as the first contemporary Irish novel to explore the disastrous effects of the property boom and the damage it has done to countless Irish families. For that, and for this thrilling, brilliantly written novel, Alan Glynn deserves enormous praise.’

13. Alex Barclay (1974–)

Author of the Joe Lucchesi novels – Darkhouse and The Caller – Dublin born, Cork based Barclay has had great success since making the move from fashion and beauty journalism into crime writing. Darkhouse, her first novel, garnered a lot of critical acclaim and was sold to ten countries. Blood Runs Cold and Time of Death are a separate series featuring FBI Special Agent Ren Bryce.

14. Gene Kerrigan

Dublin journalist and author Kerrigan writes both non-fiction and fiction. His crime fiction explores the Dublin underworld and gang culture and has garnered him much praise.

15. Cormac Millar (1950–)

Cork born writer Cormac Millar [pseudonym of Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin] is the son of Eilís Dillon and brother of the poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. He is Associate Professor of Italian at Trinity College Dublin. His Dublin based crime novel An Irish Solution was the first work of fiction to be published in 2004 by the Penguin Ireland imprint. His second crime novel, The Grounds, was published in 2006.

16. Sam Millar (1955–)

Sam Millar was born in Belfast. He has been shortlisted for numerous awards including the Martin Healy Short Story Award and the Cork Literary Review Award. His short story Rain won the Brian Moore Short Story Award in 1998. His novel Bloodstorm introduces readers to Belfast private investigator Karl Kane. It was described by Publisher’s Weekly as ‘the first in a powerful new crime series from Millar. Extremely original, it is a chillingly gripping book’, and by BBC Radio Ulster as ‘a powerful, relentless page-turner of a book, leaving you gasping for more’.

17. Declan Hughes

Declan Hughes’ Dublin based PI Ed Loy books have seen him nominated for an Edgar, the CWA New Blood Dagger, a Shamus and a Macavity Award. His first Ed Loy novel, The Wrong Kind of Blood, won the Shamus for Best First PI Novel. Hughes is also co-founder of Dublin’s Rough Magic Theatre Company, Ireland’s leading independent theatre company, as well as an award-winning playwright and screenwriter.

18. Tana French

Former professional actress French grew up in Ireland, Italy, the US and Malawi before settling in Dublin. Her first novel In the Woods won an Edgar for Best First Novel, Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and was sold to 22 countries.  Her latest book, Faithful Place, will be published on 1 July.

19. Vincent Banville (1940–)

Vincent Banville was born in Wexford. Faber published An End to Flight under the pen name Vincent Lawrence in 1973. His crime series features Dublin PI John Blaine and he also writes a children’s series featuring Hennessey.

20. Arlene Hunt

Since beginning her writing career at the young age of 27 Arlene Hunt has since published 6 novels. Her books follow John and Sarah of QuicK Investigations, who were first introduced to readers in Hunt’s second novel False Intentions. Her fifth novel, Undertow, the fourth in the QuicK Investigations series was nominated for Best Crime Novel at the 2009 Irish Book Awards. Her latest novel, Blood Money, was published in March 2010.

21. John Banville (1945–)

Born in Wexford John Banville is one of Ireland’s best known and celebrated authors. His novel The Sea won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. Christine Falls was first published in 2006 under his pseudonym Benjamin Black. It was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a finalist for the 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and introduced ex-hard-drinking Dublin pathologist Quirke.

22. Jim Lusby (1951–)

Waterford born Lusby now lives in Dublin. As well as writing short stories, for stage and radio, Lusby also writes as James Kennedy. His protagonist is Inspector Carl McCadden of Waterford police.

23. K. T. McCaffrey

Graphic designer McCaffrey’s first novel Revenge introduced feisty Dublin journalist Emma Boylan. The Observer has called McCaffrey, ‘A welcome addition to the ranks of superior crime writers’.

24. Andrew Nugent

Former lawyer turned Benedictine monk, Andrew Nugent’s novels set in Dublin follow Inspector Quilligan and Molly Power of the Irish Police Force Murder Squad.

25. John Galvin

A member of the Gardaí, John Galvin wrote Bog Warriors, a comic thriller set in Co Kerry, in his spare time. Published in 2000 it was followed by The Mercury Men in 2002. Galvin, originally from Co Cork, comes from a family of Guards.

This April sees the publication of my latest crime novel. By a singular coincidence, it also sees the production of an excerpt of an opera I’ve written the libretto for (at the Linbury Theatre in the Royal Opera House, April 14 and 16). I never consciously set out to be either a crime writer or a librettist, so it’s strange, all of a sudden, to find myself both.

It’s easy enough to retrace the steps that led me to becoming a crime writer. I had a crate full of unpublished manuscripts under my bed – so many in fact that the bed was starting to rise off the floor. My agent told me, more or less, that we were reaching the end of the road. I decided to risk one more throw of the dice on possibly the most ambitious idea for a novel I had yet had (and I have had some ambitious ideas). I proposed to write a detective novel set in nineteenth century St Petersburg featuring Porfiry Petrovich, the investigating magistrate from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It needed to work as a mystery story, as a historical novel, but also as a literary homage to one of the greatest books ever written. It was an insane idea, particularly for someone who knew no Russian and had never been to Russia. But I went ahead and wrote it. We found a publisher (Faber) and they asked for a series. And here I am, three books and one CWA Dagger short-listing later, a crime writer.

So how did I become a librettist? Contrary to what most people seem to think, it wasn’t by dint of being an opera buff. It’s true I’ve seen a few operas in my time, some of them I even went to see before I knew I was going to be invited to work on one. (Who knew?) I find the ones that are sung in languages I don’t understand difficult. I am a words person, after all. I like to know what’s going on. I like to know what people are saying, even when they’re singing it. So there have been barriers to my enjoyment of opera.

But what has always appealed to me about opera has been the bigness of it, the spectacle, the overt and unashamed theatricality, the emotional intensity, as well as the extremity. What you might call the lushness. Also, if I’m honest, the sheer barking madness of the project. I mean, these people are, like, singing! How crazy, and wonderful, is that. (Yes, it’s true to say I am not one who necessarily looks for realism in the theatre. Strikes me it’s the wrong place to go for realism.)

My favourite opera is Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, which actually I have never seen live on stage. I saw a film version on TV years ago and it made a tremendous impression on me. I can still see images from the film, even though I have never been able to track down a DVD of that particular production. What I like about Bluebeard’s Castle, as a writer, is the power of the story, the combination of inevitability and surprise that seems to be contained in the telling of the myth. And, of course, the profound psychological truths that are revealed along the way. That’s the ideal of opera storytelling that I aspire to.

The truth is I became a librettist more through good luck than good management. I had the good luck to meet, and become friends with, a composer. No one could have been more surprised than me when he asked me to collaborate with him on an opera.

Our own opera is called Cocteau in the Underworld. As you might have guessed from the title, it is about the French filmmaker, artist, poet, novelist and opium addict Jean Cocteau. Ed Hughes, the composer in question, very much wanted to do an opera about Cocteau, because, to be frank, he is a bit of a Cocteau-nut. Music is very important in Cocteau’s films, and film is very important to Ed – he has written new scores for a number of classic silent films including Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. At the time he approached me with the idea of doing an opera about Cocteau, I was probably less of a Cocteau-nut than Ed, although by a bizarre coincidence I had written a novel in which Cocteau was a character. It was a rather mischievous and satirical portrayal, and I felt sufficiently guilty about it to jump at the chance to redress the balance somewhat by writing a piece which showed Cocteau in a truer light. Which (apart from the singing) is what I hope we do.

Cocteau made a number of films in which he explores the idea of the underworld, and in particular the myth of Orpheus. It seemed natural to shape our story around similar themes. There was an obvious operatic connection, as Gluck and Offenbach had written operas about Orpheus’s visit to the underworld, and indeed music from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice features in Cocteau’s film Orphée. We felt as though we would be working in a tradition. However, for me, growing up in Manchester in the sixties and seventies, TV was the formative influence, not opera. (My parents had once taken me and my brother to see the D’Oyly Carte perform Gilbert and Sullivan, but that was about it.) So although Ed Hughes and I consciously looked back to previous operas about Orpheus, looming far larger in my mind as I wrote the libretto was Rod Serling’s legendary TV series The Twilight Zone.

We were also interested in Cocteau’s opium addiction. An early storyline revolved around a stint of rehab in a Priory-style clinic of the day, paid for by Cocteau’s friend Coco Chanel. We moved away from this story but held onto the opium strand, though in a less literal way, exploring how the drug might operate as a key both to unlocking Cocteau’s creativity and to accessing the realm of the dead. Coco Chanel somehow mutated into Princess Death.

Our ideas formed around the death of Cocteau’s lover Raymond Radiguet. We decided to set our story at some time after that, when Cocteau is grieving for Raymond and unable to work. He is visited by a mysterious ‘Princess’ who seems to know the secrets of his past (such as his father’s suicide) and to hold the key to his future.

As our thinking progressed, we were fortunate to receive development backing from OperaGenesis, the programme funded by the Genesis Foundation at the Royal Opera House (ROH 2). Working with John Lloyd Davies, head of opera development at ROH 2, we honed the ‘spine of the story’. The dramatic impetus is provided by a fateful character-defining choice that Cocteau is forced to make between love and creativity.

So I suppose the question is, how does all this fit into my crime-writing? How much of the crime-writer has informed the librettist?

Like opera, crime fiction is interested in the extremes of human behaviour. There is no more extreme act than murder. Even the most realistic procedural novels, by their focus on violent death, embrace an aspect of melodrama that would not be out of place in an opera scenario. And to be honest, my own crime novels, of which A Razor Wrapped in Silk is the latest, are not realistic procedural novels. I freely admit that I am drawn to the more melodramatic and even surrealistic possibilities of detective fiction, which, curiously, may qualify me to write for opera too.

Opera, like crime fiction, needs a good plot. In fact, the action needs to be boiled down to the essentials. The story has to be constantly moving forward, propelled by the working out of a compelling human drama. Death is never far away. Opera’s form inescapably embraces the notion of mortality. It’s both a distraction from the inevitability of death and an acknowledgement of it, often celebrating the life force of the heroine as it moves towards her tragic death.

Crime novels are highly artificial constructions. In the best, we don’t notice the artifice, but it’s there. Crime is a genre that puts story at a premium. And all stories have to be shaped. Opera is even further along the line towards pure artifice. An opera can be pretty much anything it wants to be. It is refreshingly free from the tyranny of realism. It’s hard to achieve realism when you have people singing, so why bother trying?

Cocteau in the Underworld is not a crime story. But it does have elements of suspense and intrigue. The audience, I hope, is kept guessing. There’s an atmosphere of mystery and even danger, as well as glamour. All the elements I like in a story are there: blood, ghosts, magic, death, or should that be Death? We even have a gun, though there isn’t a divorced cop with no friends and a drink problem. Instead there’s Cocteau, a creative artist with a dead lover and an opium problem. His only friends are supernatural beings and characters from myth, and strange friends they turn out to be. It could be argued that the archetypal fictional detective is a metaphor for the writer, trying to construct a narrative that makes sense out of incomprehensible events. So perhaps Cocteau in the Underworld is not so far from a crime story after all.

Where it is very different from any of my crime novels is in the language and writing. Some of it rhymes, for example. This was a big surprise to me, and others. There is a system at work, which is to do with the way the dead speak to the living. Orpheus in particular, I felt, ought to have an excessive rhyming facility, almost to suffer from a form of rhyming Tourette’s. In my mind, I had him coming on almost like a boasting, duelling rapper: the Eminem of 8 Mile descending to Hades. (I should say Ed Hughes sensibly resisted the temptation to write the music that way.) At the same time, I also turned to Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus for inspiration and, well, substance.

Ultimately, what interests me, what drives me as a writer, is the telling of stories. The challenge of telling a story through opera was one I simply couldn’t resist. For me, the thrills came from discovering what I needed to do to make it work.

R. N. Morris

An extract from Cocteau in the Underworld was performed as part of the Royal Opera House’s Exposure at the Linbury Theatre, Weds 14 & Fri 16 April. Further development will take place throughout 2010, including a semi-staged production by the MettaTheatre Company planned for the Grimeborn Festival at the Arcola Theatre in August. A Razor Wrapped in Silk by R. N. Morris is published by Faber and Faber.

Tobias Jones’s first book for Faber was The Dark Heart of Italy (2006), his critically acclaimed exposé of the darker side of Italian life, the flip side of la dolce vita, a nation riddled with corruption and political skullduggery – an anti-tourist guide. For his second book Tobias went in search of the good life – Utopian Dreams (2007) investigated alternatives, both religious and secular, to a 21st-century way of life obsessed by materialism and selfish gain. Again, a travel book with a difference.

In his third book Tobias has returned to Italy, pursuing its dark heart, but this time through crime fiction. The Salati Case is the first in a series of crime novels set in the northern Italian city of Parma, featuring a new detective on the block, Castagnetti.

In a 20-minute interview for our December Faber Podcast, a Crime double-hander with Nicola Upson, Tobias Jones introduces his new detective and explains his fondness for bees; he reveals which writers and characters left their mark on him as a writer, in particular the influence of American crime writer Ross Macdonald; he outlines just what the Salati Case is; and he lets us in on what’s lined up for the second outing for Castagnetti, White Death.

You can download our interview with Tobias Jones here. Our interviewer, George Miller, also filmed this short piece.

The Salati Case is available now in paperback.