Irish Noir

This article will look at four contemporary Irish crime writers: John Connolly, whose Charlie Parker novels are set in the United States, and who writes closely within the American tradition; Ken Bruen, whose Jack Taylor novels are set in Galway, but which also owe much to the hard-boiled and Nordic traditions; and Benjamin Black and Tana French, whose novels are largely set in and around Dublin, and are more closely related to the psychological tradition of crime writing such as that practised by Georges Simenon or Patricia Highsmith.

Although John Connolly was born and lives in Dublin his best known novels are set in the United States where he now spends part of his time. His first Charlie Parker novel, Every Dead Thing (1999), introduces us to his dark, troubled hero, an ex-policeman in search of the killer of his wife and daughter. The Parker series resonates with echoes of the genre. The prose is strikingly similar to that of James Lee Burke’s, whose Dave Robicheaux detective series began with Neon Rain in 1987. Much of Every Dead Thing is set in Louisiana, as are Burke’s Robicheaux novels, but of particular note is both writers’ fondness for a melodramatic, almost gothic style of narration of the kind employed by Cormac McCarthy. Both authors, who favour first person narratives, have a liking for declamatory phrases beginning “I came to believe…” or “I knew then that some terrible blackness had descended…”  (Every Dead Thing, 146). Connolly acknowledges Burke’s influence on his website, and also confesses to borrowing names from his favourite authors’ works, which no doubt explains the name of a minor character in Every Dead Thing – Clete – a rather unusual name, but also that of Dave Robicheaux’s best friend.

Robicheaux and Parker, the fictional detectives, share certain characteristics too. Both are ex-policemen turned private detective, although Robicheaux soon returns to the force, while Parker’s unofficial status, since he does not even have a licence, is recognised purely through his reputation on the street: he is “the Detective”. In keeping with the tradition of the genre, both are recovering alcoholics. In the early days of hard-boiled crime, a bottle of rye to accompany a stakeout was a sign of toughness and masculinity, and that both Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, still the two most celebrated writers of the genre, were chronic alcoholics did not seem to dispel this belief. Over time, the whisky has remained, but its glamour has evaporated. Robicheaux and Parker keep company with a once fast crowd: James Sallis’s Lew Griffin, Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, or George Pelecanos’s Nick Stefanos. Alcoholics to a man. They are all, also, violent, but especially Robicheaux and Parker, for whom violence is a means of resolving those difficulties the law cannot reach, and for which, therefore, there is little need for regret.

Their particular penchant for unrepentant violence may well be linked to their belief that evil walks the world; the only possible explanation for the foul crimes that the novels describe. This is controversial. Most crime novelists over recent decades: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Robert B. Parker, Ian Rankin, Deon Meyer, Henning Mankell or Dennis Lehane – to mention only a few outstanding writers in a very crowded field – use their novels to dissect and criticise society. Indeed, Dennis Lehane, in an interview published in Estudios Irlandeses argued that “[t]he movement that came out of American crime fiction at the beginning of the 1980s, and then extended well into the 1990s … took a much more social approach to the novel. It was all written by men and women who were concerned with the underclass” (Menéndez Otero 2012: 110). The rise in popularity of crime fiction over the last century can be attributed to a late nineteenth century loss of faith in which the spiritually consoling priest is replaced by the rational detective – Poe’s Dupin, and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes being the genre’s archetypes. For the rationalist and social reformer, the existence of evil as an explanation for crime is a dead end. Detectives might as well give up and the populace resort to human sacrifice in appeasement of the gods, since no rational attempt to understand crime, its motivations and causes, will be of any earthly good. To be fair to Burke and Connolly, their protagonists’ opinions are not necessarily those of their creators, and the invocation of evil can always be viewed through the lens of psychoanalysis, yet these two crime authors are relatively unusual in a genre which consciously turns its back on the supernatural, and leaves the incorporeal to the genre of horror fiction. Connolly is frequently called upon to defend his interest in the supernatural, and his website includes a large number of interviews which deal with the subject. Not surprisingly, he justifies the mixing of the horror and crime genres, but also argues, with some justice, that horror is a particularly Irish tradition:

While I’m Catholic, there is something appealing to me about allowing the supernatural to collide with Protestantism in a story. I suppose I feel that Catholics have a pretty high tolerance for mumbo-jumbo, and for all the whistles and bells that go with their faith, but again it’s probably also the influence of that earlier, British tradition. It may also have to do with the fact that while Irish writers have always written supernatural fiction, its most famous Irish practitioners have all been Protestants: Bram Stoker and Dracula, Sheridan Le Fanu and Uncle Silas, Charles Maturin and Melmoth the Wanderer, even Oscar Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray. [http://www.johnconnollybooks.com/qa.php]

Connolly appears to have deliberately sought out models in American crime writing in order to facilitate his entry into a genre which has not, until recently, been associated with his native Ireland. Another likely influence on his work is that of the above-mentioned Robert B. Parker – indeed, Connolly’s choice of surname for his protagonist (apart from Jazz musician Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker) sounds remarkably like an act of homage to the man known as the Dean of American crime. Parker started out as a professor of English literature at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts where he wrote his doctoral thesis on the work of Raymond Chandler (Parker’s own fictional detective, Spenser is, in turn, an oblique homage to Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: Spenser and Marlowe both being sixteenth century Elizabethan poets). However, Connolly’s greatest debt to Parker (Robert B, that is), is his dialogue. Arguably the greatest of the hard-boiled quipsters, Spenser is never at a loss for words, especially when it comes to annoying the authorities or, their mirror image, the dons, pimps, mobsters and made men of organised crime, and Connolly’s Parker, especially in the earlier novels, appears to mimic the master almost to perfection.

I find that the translator of Connolly’s novels, Carlos Milla Soler, has taken quite a few liberties with the original text, but I am not convinced that this is a bad thing. Connolly’s prose is often rather overblown, melodramatic and portentous, and the translation into Spanish tends to reduce this. In chapter 45 of Every Dead Thing, for example, we are given a Gothic description of early anatomical studies: “They are the ‘flayed men,’ who stand in dramatic poses, displaying the movements of the muscles and the tendons without the white veil of the skin to hide it from the eye of the beholder” (1999: 387). This is translated as “En posturas efectistas, muestran el movimiento de los músculos y los tendones sin que los oculte el velo blanco de la piel” (2004: 355). The laudable decision to remove the unnecessary and clichéd expression “of the eye of the beholder” is a great improvement on the original. Unfortunately, Milla Soler’s freedom with the original text sometimes leads him to make strange decisions. Further in the same chapter we are told that “In eighteenth century Florence, the practice of anatomical modelling reached its peak” (388). For some reason, in the translation, it is “En la Venecia del siglo XVIII…” (355), a shift in space which a brief consultation reveals to be entirely unjustifiable given that the anatomical modelling under discussion did, apparently, take place in Florence.

Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor novels (of which there are so far ten) are, in my opinion, the most exciting and original of contemporary Irish crime fiction. In common with John Connolly, Bruen’s novels share certain characteristics with a number of American crime writers of recent years such as Walter Mosley, George Pelecanos and, especially, James Sallis. All four write against the hard-boiled tradition and are noticeably postmodern in their playful treatment of the genre. Firstly, the status of the private detective is questioned. Mosley’s detective, Easy Rawlins, is a black man in 1960s Los Angeles, and as such, a private detective licence is, simply, unobtainable. The same would probably be true of Sallis’s Lew Griffin – also a black man – and of Pelecanos’s Nick Stefanos, if it ever occurred to them to ask for a licence. They are all, also, heavy drinkers, though Rawlins cuts down as the series develops, but Stefanos and Griffin, particularly the latter, remain unreformed alcoholics. Finally, their abilities as detectives are seriously at issue. In fact Lew Griffin, whose main activity as a detective is to find missing people, can boast a zero success rate. Stefanos and Rawlins are somewhat more adept, but all too frequently the consequences of their actions are deeply harmful to themselves and others – in direct opposition to traditional crime-solvers, such as Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, whose deeds restore the world to its previously reliable, bourgeois serenity.

Ken Bruen’s novels follow the pattern of the postmodern American model but take it, if possible, to an even greater extreme. Jack Taylor is an ex-Garda, thrown out of the force for punching a TD, a member of the Dáil. He, too, disdains the conventionality of a PI licence though his reasons for doing so are, he claims, cultural: “There are no private eyes in Ireland. The Irish wouldn’t wear it. The concept brushes perilously close to the hated ‘informer’. You can get away with most anything except ‘telling’” (2010: 11). His cases are never exactly solved, certainly not in the traditional manner, but then the detection itself tends to play a rather small part in the novels, serving to provide what little plot there is, and little else. Taylor is a chronic alcoholic, downing quantities of Guinness with Jameson chasers, although he also turns to cocaine and other drugs as a desperate means of reducing his alcohol intake. He is capable of quite savage violence, though he is more likely to be the victim of a good beating.

As well as Bruen’s obvious debt to American hard-boiled fiction, he also shares much in common, and may be included in, what has come to be known as Nordic Noir, which includes the currently popular Scandinavian cohort, and, closer to home, the Scottish sub-group, Tartan Noir. Among the best-known of these writers are Sweden’s Henning Mankell, and the Scottish writer, Ian Rankin. Both writers’ work has been turned into successful television series, so successful in fact that in both cases two series with different actors have been made about both fictional police detectives. Mankell’s Inspector Kurt Wallander has been played by both the Swedish actor Rolf Lassgård, and the celebrated Irish thespian, Kenneth Branagh. Rankin’s Inspector Rebus, meanwhile, has been played by the Scottish actors John Hannah and Ken Stott. Not to be outdone, the Jack Taylor novels, are slowly and rather erratically being filmed as TV movies with the Scottish actor Iain Glen playing Taylor. The specific characteristics of Nordic Noir relate mainly to the weather of northern Europe: the cold, wind, rain and, in Scandinavia, the snow, which both literally and figuratively cast gloom upon the dark northern latitudes. This is reflected in the depressed and dour character of the people, and particularly that of the damaged detectives. At the same time, given northern Europe’s relative wealth, the novels question the benefits and desirability of affluence, particularly when injustice, inequality and distress have not disappeared, but are merely swept under the carpet.

Bruen’s books are particularly relevant here because they coincide with the boom of the Celtic Tiger and its subsequent collapse. Writing in the journal of the Irish American Cultural Institute, Éire-Ireland, Andrew Kincaid argues that the Celtic Tiger in fact inspired and is best represented by noir fiction, with Ken Bruen at the forefront:

The Celtic Tiger [produced] a literary type that represented the violence, ugliness, the distrust, the moral conflicts, and tempo that are inherent in its moment. The books of this genre capture this fast pace of cultural change ─ immigration, growth of attendant cosmopolitanism and racism, housing bubble, newly wealthy and upwardly mobile young workforce (Kincaid 2010: 41).

Indeed, it seems to be the moral and psychological damage inflicted by prosperity, rather than its precipitous decline, that particularly concerns writers such as Bruen. It is as if the events of the last six years have been a sharp (and desirable) lesson in hubris rather than a painful readjustment to an economic meltdown largely the responsibility of an unscrupulous financial and political elite.

Jack’s drinking, which inevitably leads him into trouble, is also one of the means by which Bruen observes contemporary life in Galway, where the novels are set. Chief among Jack’s concerns is the search for a decent pub, all of the favourite watering holes of his youth (he is in his fifties) having been turned into theme pubs, wine bars and chains catering to tourists and foreigners. The same is true of the shops, the book stores and the hotels, indeed the very soul of Galway has dimmed. This is not merely an exercise in nostalgia, but a serious comment on the effects of the economic boom, the tearing down of the old merely for the sake of the new, the loss of neighbourhoods and community, and the growth of consumerism. Jack’s escape into drunkenness is also a communion with an Arcadian past with Guinness his Orphic sacrament.

Another means by which Bruen avoids the burden of plot and detection is to write lists. There are lists of showbands, street entertainers, clothes, poets, items for breakfast, professions and books, merely to mention some of those to be found in The Guards (2010). As a consequence, the novels are actually quite short with, as well as the lists, poems, quotations (often from American crime writers), songs and other miscellanea occupying a good proportion of the printed page. The mix, surprisingly, works well, contributes to the readability of the novels, and endows them with a character all of their own.

This unusual style is potentially problematic for the translator, but Antonio Fernández Lera (2005) has done a good job. My only queries about the Spanish edition of The Guards are, I suspect, of an editorial nature. Firstly, the translation of the title: Maderos. The original title, The Guards, is a translation into English of “Garda”, short for Garda Síochána. But “the guards” not only makes reference to the Irish police force, it also alludes to the activities of the novel’s protagonists, and particularly Jack Taylor, who has a vocation – misdirected and wayward though it may be – to care for people. Consequently, a title involving the word “guardia” would seem to me more appropriate, and less pejorative. Equally, throughout the novel, the word for “garda” or “guard” is translated as “policia”. I see no reason why the original Irish could not have been used, or the more obvious Spanish translation, “guardia”.

There are other small issues, such as the placing on the page of the numerous, above-mentioned lists. In the original they are on the right of the page, in the translation, on the left. I do not know why. I rather prefer them on the right.

John Banville, writing under the name Benjamin Black, has produced a number of crime novels about Quirke, a pathologist in 1950s Dublin. The first of the series is Christine Falls (2006), in which Quirke investigates the death of a young woman after her body mysteriously disappears from the pathology department. Quirke, it turns out, has all the characteristics of the contemporary detective. Firstly, of course, he is not a detective at all, but a doctor. He drinks too much, and his life has been blighted by the loss of his beloved wife twenty years earlier. During his investigation he is duly beaten up (a fate common to the fictional detective of the twenty-first century – his hard-boiled twentieth century predecessor could usually count on at least giving as good as he gets), but persists in his enquiries until the truth is fully exposed. This includes the discovery that his niece is really his daughter, his wife’s father something of a bad lot and the Catholic Church is engaged in the practice of taking new-born babies from those mothers it considers to be immoral and unsuitable, and passing them on to parents and institutions which will bring them up properly. The plan, apparently, is that such children, once grown up, will choose the church, either as priests or nuns. Black’s crime novels are of the quiet, atmospheric sort, in which the objective is to reveal, rather slowly it should be said, the mind of the imperfect protagonist. Quirke is less than heroic, yet he is stubborn, and in the meantime 1950s Dublin is described in loving detail. Black seems to have created a hero who in some ways represents a stereotype of Ireland itself. He is cultured and literate, yet a drunkard. He is troubled, yet irresponsible; caring, yet ineffectual; sociable yet dysfunctional; larger than life, yet diminished. He is maimed by the loutish representatives of the Church and the state, and is powerless to retaliate. He crosses the Atlantic, to Boston, in a recreation of the Irish diaspora, only to find the same institutional powers at work.

For those who like slow, gentle, psychological dramas, then Benjamin Black is the man. Strangely enough, John Banville’s 1989 novel, The Book of Evidence, was also about a murder, though it is not considered a crime novel. Perhaps because the protagonist and narrator is the murderer rather than a detective. The traditional model of detective fiction has been exploded so thoroughly that it is no longer at all clear whether it even still exists. It is strange, then, that Banville chose to write his crime fiction under a different name, on the assumption that he was writing a different kind of novel. Banville himself claims, rather provocatively, that he finds it faster to write as Benjamin Black because Black novels are a different form of art:

Banville books take two to five years to make. It takes three or five months to make a Black book. Real crime writers are furious when I say this. Because they think I am saying it’s easy. That’s not what I am saying at all. Banville books are high literature – it’s a different way of working (Birnbaun 2011).

Tana French also writes psychological crime fiction, and like Black’s, her novels are rather slow – she does not specialise in high-speed action, tough-guy cops, or tortuous plotting – and there are many readers who prefer this kind of gentler, more ruminative pace. Her first novel, In the Woods (2007), is about a Dublin detective with a tragic past whose investigations place an increasing strain on his mental equilibrium. This seems to be French’s method. In her recent novel Broken Harbour (2012), a multiple murder takes place on a remote housing estate some distance from Dublin which has been left unfinished and abandoned by the now bankrupt construction company, victim of Ireland’s economic collapse. The detective assigned the case has – surprise – a troubled past. Indeed, his professional life, despite his own insistence on his unusually high success rate, is marked by an unexplained black cloud – a botched investigation. The novel’s plot is almost non-existent: murder, crime scene investigation, suspect caught, not very unexpected or sharp twist at the end, and the truth revealed. Most of the novel, like Black’s Christine Falls, seems to be an exploration of the detective’s mind. “Scorcher” Kennedy, the first-person narrator and protagonist, has a great deal to say about police work and how he believes it should be done. He is a strong believer in detachment and putting across the right image; he claims to be an excellent detective, with an unusually high solve rate, yet he is only a detective sergeant (most fictional police detectives are inspectors) and at first the novel appears to be the exploration of one man’s self-delusion. Yet this is only partly true. Kennedy does not turn out to be especially incompetent, instead, he is let down by the two people – his disturbed sister and his inexperienced partner – who owe him most for his generosity and tolerance. This, of course, is rather ironic, given that Kennedy’s professional philosophy is to remain detached, but that, presumably, is the point.

These four novelists share certain features. One of them is alcohol. The bottle, as mentioned above, is a fixture of detective fiction, and this is its role in John Connolly’s fiction, which is firmly embedded within the American hard-boiled tradition. Benjamin Black’s Christine Falls, on the other hand, seems to use Quirke’s drinking as a means of contributing to the evocation of 1950s Dublin. Pubs and bars are lovingly described, and we meet drunken poets and other eccentrics in a rather cliched portrayal of boozy Ireland. Rosa González, in a soon to be published chapter on Irish culture argues that Ireland’s reputation for excessive drinking is factually inaccurate, pointing out that “Ireland was only 14^th out of 50 European countries in terms of alcohol consumption”.  Significantly, however, it is the portrayal of Ireland as a drinking nation, particularly on the screen, that maintains the myth – a myth that Benjamin Black also contributes to. Ken Bruen’s depiction of alcohol is slightly different. Firstly, Jack Taylor’s addiction is not glamourised, but presented as sordid, debilitating and ugly. Similarly, most of the pubs he frequents are deeply unattractive, while alcoholic vagrants make frequent appearances, either as a backdrop to Galway’s disintegrating city centre, or as victims of the economic crisis. Even more than his American contemporaries, James Sallis and George Pelecanos, Bruen probes mercilessly into every last shameful detail of an alcoholic’s life, the hurt he does to himself, and even more so to others.

Another common feature, again also common in Irish culture, is the Catholic Church. For Benjamin Black, in Christine Falls the Church is the great villain, tearing new-born babies from their mothers’ arms, controlling and perverting the lives of the faithful and stooping, whenever necessary, to threats, violence and murder. Given the frequent scandals, particularly to do with child abuse and that of vulnerable, young, pregnant women, Black’s depiction of the Church’s crimes is never anything but authentic. Bruen, also, makes frequent and angry reference to the Church. Indeed, his third Jack Taylor novel, The Magdalen Martyrs (2003), takes as its background the same horrific events as Christine Falls. From the late eighteenth century until the 1990s, thousands of unmarried, pregnant, Irish women were imprisoned in convents, forced to work in the so-called ‘Magdalene Laundries’, their babies taken from them, and then condemned to a life of drudgery. The Irish government has, in recent years, apologised for the fate of these women.

In all of Bruen’s novels, not only The Magdalen Martyrs, the Church is criticised, particularly through the unpleasant figure of Father Malachy, a chain-smoking, foul-mouthed, unChristian priest. He was “my old arch enemy, my nemesis,” says Jack at the beginning of Cross (2007: 7). But it is important to note that Father Malachy is the living representative of the Church as institution, not as faith. The fact is, despite everything, Jack remains a believer. Brought up a Catholic, he still automatically crosses himself at the start of a journey, frequents churches, and occasionally prays. Bruen’s portrayal of faith, then, is probably that of many people brought up within a strongly religious culture – Jack is not blind to the institution’s failings – indeed, they make him furious, but he embraces his somewhat nostalgic personal belief as an inherent part of himself, his origins, his culture, his past, and his identity.

Increasingly, as the Jack Taylor series progresses, the devil in person makes an appearance. So much so that the eighth of the novels is called, simply, The Devil (2010). Bruen’s novels, though dealing with deeply serious issues, like to give the impression that they are not serious, but playful. Perhaps this is the reason for the devil’s growing protagonism. Nevertheless, it seems to be a characteristic of Catholic authors, or of authors working from within a Catholic culture. As mentioned above, both John Connolly and the American writer James Lee Burke frequently cite evil, or the devil, as the cause of tragedy and disaster. Burke’s novel In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead (1993) is the most given over to supernatural affairs, but in recent years he has turned increasingly to concern for humanity and government incompetence as reflected in his 2007 novel about hurricane Catrina, The Tin Roof Blowdown. Connolly, however, became increasingly obsessed with the devil and his novel Black Angel (2005) can more fairly be described as a horror story than a crime novel. He seems to have come back down to earth more recently though – The Reapers (2008) is a relatively standard romp within the contemporary American crime tradition.

Finally, as Bruen’s novels particularly exemplify, the economic crisis plays an important part in recent Irish crime fiction. Tana French’s Broken Harbour, apart from its psychological exploration of a garda’s mind, is also strongly centred on the human consequences of the economic downturn. The murdered family – father, son and daughter – were killed as a direct result of the anguish brought on by Ireland’s financial meltdown and in particular, the bursting of the construction bubble.

English Editions and Spanish and Catalan Translations

Benjamin Black published by Henry Holt and Company
Christine Falls 2006
The Silver Swan 2007
The Lemur 2008
Elegy for April 2010
A Death in Summer 2011
Vengeance 2012
Holy Orders 2013

Editions in Spanish published by Alfaguara
Christine Falls — El secreto de Christine, Trad. Miguel Martínez-Lage, 2007.
The Silver Swan — El otro nombre de Laura, Trad. Miguel Martínez-Lage, 2008.
The Lemur — El Lémur, Trad. Miguel Martínez-Lage, 2009.
Elegy for April — En busca de April, trad. Miguel Martínez-Lage, 2011.
A Death in Summer — Muerte en verano, trad. Nuria Barrios, 2012.
Vengeance — Venganza, trad. Nuria Barrios, 2012.

Editions in Catalan published by Edicions Bromera
Christine Falls — El secret de Christine Falls, trad. Eduard Castanyo, 2007.
The Silver Swan — L’altre nom de Laura, trad. Eduard Castanyo, 2008.
The Lemur — El Lèmur, trad. Eduard Castanyo, 2009.
Elegy for April — A la recerca de l’April, trad. Eduard Castanyo, 2011.
A Death in Summer — Mort a l’estiu, trad. Eduard Castanyo, 2012.
Vengeance — Venjança, trad. Maria Iniesta, 2013.

Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor novels published by Brandon
The Guards 2001
The Killing of the Tinkers 2002
The Magdalen Martyrs 2003
The Dramatist 2004
Priest 2006
Cross 2007
Sanctuary 2008
The Devil 2010
Headstone 2011
Purgatory 2013

Editions in Spanish
The Guards — Maderos, trad. Antonio Fernández Lera, Tropismos, 2005.
The Killing of the Tinkers — La matanza de los gitanos, Trad. Antonio Fernández Lera, Tropismos, 2006.
The Dramatist — El dramaturgo, trad. Daniel Meléndez Delgado, Editorial Via Magna, 2009.

John Connolly’s Charlie “Bird” Parker novels originally published by Hodder & Stoughton
Every Dead Thing 1999
Dark Hollow 2000
The Killing Kind 2001
The White Road 2002
The Black Angel 2005
The Unquiet 2007
The Reapers 2008
The Lovers 2009
The Whisperers 2010
The Burning Soul 2011
The Wrath of Angels 2012
The Wolf in Winter (2014)

Editions in Spanish, published by Tusquests Editores and translated by Carlos Milla Soler.
Every Dead Thing — Todo lo que muere, 2004.
Dark Hollow — El poder de las tinieblas, 2004.
The Killing Kind — Perfil asesino, 2005.
The White Road — El camino blanco, 2006.
The Black Angel — El angel negro, 2007.
The Unquiet —  Los atormentados, 2008.
The Reapers  — Los hombres de la guadaña, 2009.
The Lovers — Los amantes, 2010.
The Whisperers — Voces que susurran, 2011.
The Wrath of Angels — Cuervos, 2012.

Editions in Catalan, published by Edicions Bromera
The Unquiet  — Els turmentats, trad. Carles Miró, 2008.
The Reapers  — Els homes de la dalla, trad. Maria Iniesta, 2009.
The Lovers  — Els amants, trad. Eduard Castanyo, 2010.
The Whisperers  — Les veus, trad. Maria Iniesta, 2011.
The Burning Soul  — Corbs, trad. Maria Iniesta, 2012.

Tana French published by Penguin/Viking
In the Woods 2007
The Likeness 2008
Faithful Place 2010
Broken Harbour 2012
The Secret Place 2014

Editions in Spanish published by Ediciones RBA Libros: Serie Negra
In the Woods — El silencio del Bosque, trad. Isabel Margelí Bailo, 2010.
The Likeness — En piel ajena, trad. Isabel Margelí Bailo, 2013.
Faithful Place — Faithful Place, trad. Eduardo Iriarte Goñi, 2013.
Broken Harbour — No hay lugar seguro, trad. Gemma Deza, 2012.