Abstract
Ingram and Mullins examine the ghostly nature of Tana French’s 2012 novel Broken Harbour, arguing that French deliberately engages discourses of haunting to manifest the almost mystical ways in which unseen hegemonic forces invade the most sacrosanct of domestic spaces. To represent such hauntings in crime fiction is to reveal the inextricable lines between the past and the present, between domestic home life and organizing systems of social power. French’s ghosts—which are personal, communal, and national—are set against the backdrop of the Celtic Tiger era of economic prosperity and the bust which followed, exposing the deep connections between crime, gender, family, and economics.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. Nickerson, The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women (Raleigh, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1998), Skenazy, “Behind the Territory Ahead”, in Los Angeles in Fiction, ed. David Fine, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), pp. 85–107, and Ascari, A Counter-history of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational (Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
- 2.
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 21.
- 3.
Gordon, p. 183.
- 4.
Gordon, p. 8.
- 5.
Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) p. 113.
- 6.
Peter Collier, “Ireland’s Rurban Horizon: New Identities from Home Development Markets in Rural Ireland”, Irish Journal of Sociology, 13.1 (2004), p. 96.
- 7.
Tana French, Broken Harbour (New York: Penguin, 2012), p. 259.
- 8.
“As of October 2011 there were 2876 unfinished estates in Ireland…containing 212,048 housing units (36,510 of which are vacant or under construction). Of these estates, 2066 have either unfinished units or incomplete roads, paths, lighting or sewage works, and of these 1822 are inactive (no development work is taking place). …At the end of 2011 …house prices had fallen on average between 43 and 58 percent across the country; between one third and one half of all mortgages were in negative equity, and over 8 per cent of mortgages were more than 3 months in arrears” (Rob Kitchin, Justin Gleeson, and Martin Dodge. “Unfolding mapping practices: a new epistemology for cartography”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38. 3 (2013), pp. 485–6).
- 9.
Alison Flood, “Tana French: I’m Haunted by Ireland’s Ghost Estates”, The Guardian, 27 July 2012, n.p.
- 10.
Emily Johansen, “The Neoliberal Gothic: Gone Girl, Broken Harbour, and the Terror of Everyday Life”, Contemporary Literature, 57.1 (2016), p. 30.
- 11.
French, p. 64.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 13.
- 13.
Ibid., p. 12.
- 14.
Ibid., pp. 156–7.
- 15.
Gordon, p. 183.
- 16.
French, p. 14.
- 17.
Ibid., pp. 19–20.
- 18.
Ibid., p. 102.
- 19.
Gordon, p. 8.
- 20.
Gordon, p. 179.
- 21.
French, p. 81.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 19.
- 23.
French, p. 300.
- 24.
French, pp. 304, 275.
- 25.
This ecological theme carries through several of French’s novels, in particular In the Woods, in which development of once wild land requires an accounting of old crimes.
- 26.
Through this ecological reading, the animal highlights French’s pairing of Pat and Conor. Conor uses his wildcraft, his ability to set up and maintain a wilderness style campsite, to turn the remnants of the building site into a domestic home.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 81.
- 28.
French, p. 257.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 307.
- 30.
Johansen, p. 33.
- 31.
French, p. 393.
- 32.
French, p. 51.
- 33.
Shirley Peterson, “Homicide and Home-icide: Exhuming Ireland’s Past in the Dectective Novels of Tana French”, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 30.2 (2012), p. 100.
- 34.
Moira E. Casey, “‘Built on Nothing but Bullshit and Good PR’: Crime, Class Mobility, and the Irish Economy in the Novels of Tana French”, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 32.1 (2014), p. 101.
- 35.
French, p. 392.
- 36.
French, p. 409.
- 37.
Ibid., p. 411.
- 38.
Johansen, p. 31.
- 39.
French, p. 412.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 402
- 41.
Horsley and Horsley (1999), p. 377.
- 42.
Ibid., p. 377.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 386
- 44.
Ibid., p. 383
- 45.
Gordon, p. 19.
- 46.
John Scaggs, Crime Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 98.
- 47.
Bill Philips, “Irish Noir”, Estudios Irlandeses, 9 (2014), p. 173.
- 48.
French, p. 58.
- 49.
Ibid., p. 83.
- 50.
Ibid., p. 357.
- 51.
Ibid., p. 150.
- 52.
French, p. 105.
- 53.
Ibid., p. 292.
- 54.
Ibid., p. 287.
- 55.
French, p. 288.
- 56.
Johansen, p. 49.
- 57.
French, p. 11.
- 58.
Ibid., p. 434.
- 59.
Ibid., p. 381.
- 60.
Ibid., p. 390.
- 61.
French, p. 291.
- 62.
Nickerson, p. 197.
- 63.
Johansen, p. 54.
- 64.
Cf. Denell Downum, “Learning to Live: Memory and the Celtic Tiger in Novels by Roddy Dowell, Ann Enright, and Tana French”, New Hibernia Review, 19.3 (2015), pp. 76–92.
Works Cited
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Nickerson, Catherine Ross, The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women (Raleigh, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1998).
Peterson, Shirley, ‘Homicide and Home-icide: Exhuming Ireland’s Past in the Dectective Novels of Tana French’, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 30.2 (2012), 97–108. https://doi.org/10.3172/CLU.30.2.97.
Philips, Bill, ‘Irish Noir’, Estudios Irlandeses, 9 (2014), 169–177.
Scaggs, John, Crime Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).
Skenazy, Paul, ‘Behind the Territory Ahead’, in Los Angeles in Fiction, ed. David Fine (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 85–107.
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Ingram, S., Mullins, W.G. (2018). “[T]he People that Should Have Lived Here”: Haunting, the Economy, and Home in Tana French’s Broken Harbour . In: Joyce, L., Sutton, H. (eds) Domestic Noir. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69338-5_9
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