Transculturality and Ken Bruen's Crime Fiction

Abstract

[Abstract] The works of Ken Bruen reflect the new impetus which has been found in Irish crime writing since the last decade of the twentieth century and which has seen an amazing rise in the popularity of crime narratives from both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. Bruen is, despite – or perhaps because of – his commitment to genre fiction, one of the greatest chroniclers of the predicaments of the Irish in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. From the early works which show the Irish as migrants in a hostile, multicultural London, through the Jack Taylor novels which focus on the years of change of the last twenty-five years and the American works which trace the cultural interaction between American and Irish culture, Bruen’s fictional output provides a fine example of a new literature made possible by the conditions which have created the transcultural condition of modern-day Ireland.