In Dark Hollow, the person responsible for the death of Rita Ferris is found, and a degree of punishment is meted out. In real life, Belinda Pereira’s killer has not been found. It has been suggested that two pimps from Monaghan, a county in the north of Ireland, were responsible, but if they were, there is not enough evidence to bring them to trial. A public appeal by the Garda Síochána in 2005 for new information led nowhere.

I wonder sometimes if part of the appeal of mystery fiction is its capacity to give us answers and solutions that we don’t always get in real life. In real life, the guilty go unpunished. In real life, a young woman can be beaten with a hammer until she is beyond identification, and her killer or killers can retreat into the shadows, never to be found. But in mystery fiction, a man of some goodness, however compromised he may be, can choose to act on behalf of the victim and achieve a measure of justice. No matter how dark such fiction may appear to be, it is never entirely without hope.

Why, then, given the nature and setting of Belinda Pereira’s murder, did I not choose to set Dark Hollow in Ireland? Why is Charlie Parker not Irish?

Like most writers, I began writing what I read, and what I read was largely American fiction, and not exclusively mystery fiction either. I had never been very attracted to the British model, and mystery fiction has never really been part of the Irish literary tradition.

That latter observation may be worth closer examination, given the surge in production of Irish crime fiction in recent years. Nobody has ever been able to come up with a single compelling reason why Irish writers chose not to investigate the possibilities of crime fiction for many years, even while English and Scottish writers pursued them with a vengeance. The dearth of Irish crime fiction is, I suspect, a consequence of a number of factors, some literary and some social.

To begin with, Ireland was a rural society, and it was G. K. Chesterton who noted that crime fiction functions better in urban rather than rural settings, that it is, on one level, tied up with the poetry of urban life. Ireland was also not a very violent society, terrorism apart. I realize, of course, that the use of the term “terrorism apart” is a little like saying that Einstein didn’t achieve much scientifically, “the Theory of Relativity apart.” Terrorism cast a shadow over modern Irish life for the best part of three decades, and its influence extended far beyond the bombings and shootings that took place in Northern Ireland and, on occasion, in the South. One might argue that it would be difficult to write about crime in Ireland and not touch upon the subject of terrorism, which may be why so many writers chose instead to neglect the genre entirely.

There are exceptions: Eugene McEldowney’s A Kind of Homecoming, for example, or Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man, which dealt with the Protestant killers known as the “Shankill Butchers,” although McNamee might well dispute the description of Resurrection Man as a crime novel. Perhaps, too, there was a sense that mystery fiction was simply not up to the task of tackling the subject of terrorism, particularly terrorism that was ongoing and so close to home. The wounds were too raw, and fresh ones were being inflicted every day. Even Irish literary fiction seemed to struggle with the enormity of what was happening on our small island.

Finally, there has long been a strong antirationalist tradition in Irish literature, which found its expression in, among others, the great Anglo-Irish gothic novels: Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray; the fantasy fiction of Mervyn Wall (the two Fursey books); and the surreal visions of Flann O’Brien (At Swim-Two-Birds; The Third Policeman, itself a kind of anticrime novel). By contrast, crime fiction, in its most conservative form, is intensely rationalist in outlook. Think of Poe’s Dupin, Christie’s Poirot, and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, each of whom places great store by the processes of ratiocination. Philosophically, this is at odds with the Irish outlook, one that for many years placed a greater emphasis on an artistic rather than a scientific response to the world.

Quite simply, I did not see an Irish literary tradition of which I wanted to be a part. It also seemed that Irish literature was concerned primarily with the nature of being Irish, itself not unreasonable given that we are a young state, but I had no interest in writing about the nature of Irishness. There were two options, then: to import elements of the American crime novel into the Irish realm, which I did not feel would work, or to bring a European perspective to the American crime novel, which was the path I chose.

Since then, Irish crime fiction has begun to flourish (a result of the changes in Irish society over the past decade, among other things), but it is interesting that Irish readers still prefer to read crime novels set elsewhere. We remain uncomfortable with crime fiction as a means of examining Irish society, and I suspect that Irish writers will continue to find a more sympathetic audience in the United States than they will at home for some time to come.

From the moment that I began writing Every Dead Thing, there were supernatural elements in the novel. The supernatural touches to my books are frequently criticized by the more conservative elements in the genre, those who would like to see mystery fiction set in aspic somewhere between the birth of Sherlock Holmes and the last appearance of Hercule Poirot. It is, I suppose, the side of the mystery community that I find most depressing, this reluctance to countenance experimentation, particularly when it comes to the intermingling of genres. Yet, in so many aspects of art and culture, it is through precisely this kind of experimentation that new and interesting forms emerge.

Anthony Cox, in a dedication to his fellow writer Milward Kennedy, stated that he himself wished to produce a novel that “breaks every rule of the austere club to which we both belong.” Cox was writing in 1930. Almost seventy years later, I had something of the same urge, but in my case there were specific rules I wished to break, if only because I did not accept their validity. One was a rule of structure, which explains the peculiar “hourglass” form of Every Dead Thing, in which a crime that is committed, and solved, in the first half of the novel feeds into the larger mystery tackled in the second half. Another was to do with the supernatural and the metaphysical.

I wanted Charlie Parker to be haunted, but not haunted in the manner most commonly found in mystery fiction, where “haunted” tends to be a euphemism for “brooding,” “drinks a bit,” or “stares into space a lot.” I wondered what might happen if a man believed himself literally to be haunted, if his guilt and grief were tormenting him to such a degree that he was unable to determine if the visions of the dead he encountered were real or merely manifestations of his troubled psyche.

There were some literary influences at work here, particularly the early-twentieth-century ghost stories of English writers like M. R. James. It’s possible, too, that something of that Irish antirationalist tradition had also crept in. Then, of course, there are my own Catholic origins, which seemed to find an echo in the themes of reparation and redemption that are so much a part of the mystery fiction I love.

For me, the supernatural serves a number of functions in my novels. To begin with, it suggests a deeper understanding of the word mystery and its religious origins-a mystery as the Greeks would have understood it, or as the writers of the medieval mystery plays, which were versions of Bible stories, would have interpreted it. The curious thing about mystery novels is that generally they are not very mysterious at all. What seems beyond understanding at the start is usually explicable in quite simple terms by the end: the butler did it. I hoped to restore something of that older sense of mystery in my work, and the supernatural touches suggested a means of doing so. They also function as indicators of a larger moral universe, and in that sense they are as much metaphysical as supernatural. (Even here, though, there are antecedents. Chesterton, in the Father Brown stories, introduced a strong metaphysical element to the genre. What gave Father Brown his insights into crime was an “understanding of sin,” of the nature of the human soul.)