IRISH CRIME WRITERS - TRUE CRIME SECTION
Information & web links compiled by Cormac MillarThis is the first sub-page of my general list of IRISH CRIME WRITERS. Once that page grew beyond 70 authors it became unwieldly; it is gradually being re-organized by categories.
This section on "Irish true crime" (TC) does not list academic studies of crime written by criminologists, sociologists and social historians. It does not include the numerous books on institutional abuse (often inflicted by pious folk on allegedly delinquent children) which have appeared in recent years, nor accounts of police malpractice, nor family killings by mentally ill or delusional people. It sets out to cover books on general crime, written for a general readership. A number of these come from the true-crime lists of publishers like O'Brien Press, Merlin Publishing or Maverick House. Several titles cover the same high-profile crimes.
There are some older or one-off books on true crime in Ireland which have left little presence on the Web. As further information becomes available about these, it will be added. Meanwhile, here is a preliminary listing:
Angela Bourke TC (Historical)
Celtic scholar and biographer. Her prizewinning history book, The Burning Of Bridget Cleary reconstructs the 1895 murder of a Tipperary woman who was burned as a witch by her husband.Barry Cummins TC
Journalist and author of Irish true-crime surveys Missing (2003), Lifers (2004), and Unsolved: Nine Irish Murder Files - still open (2007), all published by Gill and Miacmillan.Breandán Delap TC
Journalist, translator and news editor working in Irish and English. His biography, Mad Dog Coll: an Irish gangster (Dublin, Mercier Press, 1999, ISBN 1856352919) is a dramatic account of the short criminal existence of Vincent Coll, who was born in the Donegal Gaeltacht and fought in the New York gangs of the 1930s.Gerard Doherty TC
Author of Will You Murder My Husband?: Catherine Nevin and the IRA - The Inside Story (2000), about a much-discussed murder trial. Claims to lift the lid on the IRA's involvement in the Nevin case.Terence Dooley TC (Historical)
Academic historian. The Murders at Wildgoose Lodge: Agrarian crime and punishment in pre-Famine Ireland (2007) deals with the murder of eight people in County Louth in 1816, followed by the trial and execution of 18 men, half of them innocent. The same massacre inspired works by William Carleton (1794-1869) in a short story from 1830, and Fr Raymond Murray, whose The Burning of Wildgoose Lodge appeared in 2005.Wolfgang Eulitz TC
Author of The General and I, a first-person account of his clash with the criminal overlord Martin Cahill, who muscled in on his hot-dog business in Dublin's Leeson Street. Colm Tóibín called this book "vivid and fascinating ... a very compelling story".Jenny Friel TC
Journalist with the Irish Mail on Sunday, and author of The Suspect (2007), the story of Joe O'Reilly, convicted for the murder of his wife Rachel.Paul Howard TC
Sports writer. As Ross O'Carroll Kelly, Howard has authored a phenomenally successful series of satirical memoirs. Among his non-fiction works is The Joy, an account of Dublin prison life.Mick McCaffrey TC
Dublin-based journalist, author of The Irish Scissor Sisters (2007), an account of the ‘torso in the canal’ murder committed by the Mulhall sisters in March 2005.John Mooney TC
Journalist and author of four true crime books, including The Torso in the Canal, about a particularly lurid recent Dublin murder committed by two sisters, already mentioned.Edna O'Brien TC
Famous novelist, author of The Country Girls (1960 -- not a crime novel) and many other titles; her 2003 novel In the Forest re-imagines, in fictional guise, a triple murder case widely covered in the Irish media.Niamh O'Connor TC
True-crime author published by O'Brien Press; her books include The Black Widow: The Catherine Nevin Story (2000), about a murder case widely covered in the Irish media.Emily O'Reilly TC
A former journalist and editor, now Ombudsman of the Republic of Ireland, O'Reilly is also the author of a true-crime book about the 1996 murder of campaigning journalist Veronica Guerin.Michael Sheridan TC
Journalist, editor, screenwriter, theatre director, author of a series of true crime books documenting a number of major Irish cases.Liz Walsh TC
Investigative journalist and reporter. Author of The People v Catherine Nevin, about a murder case widely covered in the Irish media.Paul Williams TC
Leading crime reporter specializing in gangland figures; author of a number of thoroughly researched and well written true crime titles. The General, a biography of Martin Cahill, became a film directed by John Boorman.Frank Wynne TC
Sligo-born literary translator and author, Wynne wrote about the Dutch fake-artist Han van Megeeren in I Was Vermeer: The Legend of the Forger Who Swindled the Nazis. The Observer called his book"gripping and psychologically fascinating".Books without separate web links:
W. MacLysaght & Sigerson Clifford, Death Sails the Shannon: The Tragic Story of the Colleen Bawn: The Facts and the Fiction, THE KERRYMAN LTD (1953),
reprinted 1975, 1993, Anvil Books, 192pp, ISBN 0900068604Return to the main IRISH CRIME WRITERS page....
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