Elizabeth Bowen and Crime Fiction

 Here's another writer I needed prison to find time to read: Elizabeth Bowen. At that I only found one of her novels in the Fort Dix FCI leisure library and I may be stretching the found as it was most likely a discarded book. What I knew of Bowen when I read was she was an Anglo-Irish writer who had written just before and during WWII and had then faded from notice. Which is why followed the LitHub newsletter link to How Elizabeth Bowen's Big Houses Laid The Groundwork For Irish Domestic Noir by Sarah Stewart Taylor. In particular these paragraphs stood out for me with my interest in combining genres.

Ultimately, I think this is the quality that shimmers in Bowen’s genre-bending work for me: the sense that every human creation of hers might step off the page at any moment. In the section on character in Notes on Writing a Novel, Bowen writes that “Characters must materialize—i.e., must have a palpable physical reality. They must be not only see-able (visualizable); they must be to be felt.”

And so her characters are. Reading these words, it strikes me that Bowen, still winking, ever defying categorization, was asserting a new recipe for crime fiction: tense, atmosphere-laden plots, engagement with history and the Irish gothic, and palpably authentic characters. There may be no better description of the contemporary Irish writers distinguishing themselves in the genre.