ABSTRACT
Almost four hundred thrillers have been produced over the last 35 years in response to the current phase of political upheaval in Northern Ireland. This vast popular cultural sedimentation has ensured the enthronement of the genre as the dominant fictional mode of representing the North, supposedly granting appropriate literary form to national and historical experience. This book interrogates the complicity of the enduring confrontations, conspiracies and mysteries of the thriller form with the hegemonic view of Northern Irish society as itself suspended in a recurrent and befuddling stasis. Brian Moore's Lies of Silence typifies such a correlation by utilizing the regurgitatory element of the crime genre to depict the conflict as 'that endless mindless chain of killings' (64).l In a way, then, there is a moment of ideological conflation in the application of the thriller form to Northern Ireland. Therein the conspiracies of the genre are collapsed into what Joep Leerssen has termed 'the traumatic 'paradigm' (1998, 37) of Irish History, in which a nightmarish model refuses dialectical transformation and reverberates ceaselessly in irresoluble crisis.2 I want to suggest later that there is also a Utopian formal politics to conspiracy in the thriller form, which actually proffers a speculative grasp of the social totality but which is conventionally masked by this traumatic paradigm. For ultimately this book seeks to redeem not only the thriller as a form but also the historical dynamics present in the North of Ireland, to affirm a potentiality that disrupts what in many of these books appears most fated, contemptuously dismissed, statically stereotyped and without hope.
