Claire Kilroy: An Apology

Literary snobbery is an issue that has exercised the Crime Always Pays elves on occasion, particularly when lit types sneer at crime fiction. Mind you, there’s as much bad crime writing as there is bad literary writing, so there’s no doubting they have a point now and then. And of course reverse snobbery, in which crime fiction fans claim the likes of Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Conrad and whoever you’re having yourself as crime writers, or at the very least writers who use crime tropes to propel their narratives, is every bit as pretentious as literary snobbery. The ever-lovely Claire Kilroy (right) got dragged into the debate here on Crime Always Pays, mainly on the basis of reviews that acclaimed her second novel, TENDERWIRE, as a tense psychological thriller reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith’s work. Kilroy, however, is adamant that she’s not a thriller / crime writer, and having read TENDERWIRE, the elves tend to agree. Which places us in something of a dilemma, given that Claire Kilroy is ever-lovely and we’re planning to stalk her just as soon as Ruth Dudley Edwards gets around to finalising that barring order against us. So we don’t want to simply erase all trace of Claire Kilroy from Crime Always Pays, but neither do we want to suggest that she’s a thriller / crime writer. As a compromise, we hereby reprint in full Claire Coughlan’s fine review of TENDERWIRE from way back in June, and suggest that if the ever-lovely Claire Kilroy wants to get in touch and do a non-genre specific Q&A, we’d be delighted to hoist it onto the blog. And then, hopefully with all the unpleasantness out of the way, we can get back to plotting how best to stalk her. Over to you, Ms Kilroy, ma’am …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: TENDERWIRE by Claire Kilroy
Dublin writer Claire Kilroy has been drawing favourable comparisons with Patricia Highsmith for this, her second novel – a recommendation that isn’t undeserved in the slightest. The parallels between both authors’ styles are obvious: TENDERWIRE boasts an unreliable, emotionally unstable narrator – professional violinist Eva Tyne – a whirling dervish of irrational jealousy, grief and obsession whose composites all vie for prominence. Eva’s compulsive acquisition of what might be a stolen Stradivarius violin, bought from a bunch of vaguely menacing Chechens whose speciality is racketeering in priceless antique violins smuggled out of Europe, takes her on a frenetic, often addled journey through Manhattan, to Germany and eventually to Dublin. As with a Highsmith novel, expectations are overturned by the denouement and tensions are finely wrought between characters – and there are plenty of memorable ones, like Alexander, an illegal Chechen, who’s “a giant of a man and as blond as a child,” and Claude Martel, a seemingly disingenuous, overbearing luthier (violin maker and repair expert). Loss, ambition and the descent into warfare brought on by soured female friendships are recurring themes that Kilroy weaves into the novel with depth, precision and lyricism. – Claire Coughlan