Currents in Crime Fiction: Trans-Atlantic Translations

Join us for a thought-provoking double-header where crime fiction translators, editors, and critics, and the best crime novelists from Ireland/Northern Ireland discuss the knotty issues of influence and translation, of national and transnational writing traditions and identities, and how far their work and the genre in general travels and the complications that accrue along the way.

For ticketing purposes, these two sessions have been planned as a single event and we would like to encourage you to attend both sessions. There will be a wine reception in between the two panels.

Panel 1. Translating the American Hardboiled Greats from English into French: Raymond Chandler, David Goodis and Horace McCoy

Tuesday 25 March, 4-5pm

Wolfson room, Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University

Professor Benoît Tadié is the translator (English to French) of Raymond Chandler’s Le Grand Sommeil / The Big Sleep and a collection of Horace McCoy’s Black Mask short stories, Les Rangers du Ciel, for Gallimard’s world renowned Série noire, where he has also worked on some of the greatest US hard-boiled novels. These include David Goodis’s Tirez sur le pianiste/ Shoot the Piano Player (Down There) and Horace McCoy’s Un linceul n’a pas de poches / No Pockets in a Shroud. Prof Tadié has also translated British and Irish authors’ from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land /La Terre dévastée and James Joyce’s Dubliners /Gens de Dublin to Bernard Mac Laverty’s Grace Notes/Symphonie pour Anna. In this captivating panel, he will be in conversation with QUB’s own Dominique Jeannerod and Andrew Pepper. They will talk about the difficulties and challenges of translating the distinctive hardboiled style, the specific issues arising from translating Chandler, McCoy and Goodis and the theories and practices of translation in general. They will also discuss why crime fiction as a genre has been such a powerful driver of translation practices globally.

Benoît Tadié is Professor of American literature at Université Paris Nanterre and current chair of the French Society of Modernist Studies (https://sem-france.org/). His research focuses on modernist periodicals, and American hardboiled/noir fiction. He is the author of L’Expérience moderniste anglo-américaine 1908-1922: formes, idéologies, combats (Didier, 1999), James Joyce/Dubliners (Didier, 2000), and of two books on American noir fiction: Le polar américain, la modernité et le mal (Presses universitaires de France, 2006) and Front criminel: une histoire du polar américain de 1919 à nos jours (Presses universitaires de France, 2018).

Tuesday 25 March, 5.30-7pm

Wolfson room, Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University

Panel 2. Writing, Reading, and Influence in Irish Crime Fiction

A panel discussion with Sharon Dempsey, Brian McGilloway and Anthony Quinn

This motley crew of Irish crime novelists surely need no introduction to a Belfast audience – between them they have written some of the very best crime fiction in and of this place though exactly what this place means is never an easy question to answer. In doing they have breathed life into what was once, at least in an Irish context, a fairly moribund genre. Among other things we will discuss the current state of Irish / Northern Irish crime fiction, about how well and far their work travels to other places and cultures, and about the nature of their own reading tastes and influences, whether these are locally / nationally situated or extend across the water to either Britain and continental Europe or to further afield, the United States or what we might euphemistically called the world. Along the way we will discuss what crime fiction means here and there and what kind of audiences, local, national and global, they are writing for. It should not pass without note that Sharon, Brian and Anthony, as well as fantastic crime writers in their own right, are all doctors of philosophy, having completed (or almost completed) their PhDs at Queen’s.

Sharon Dempsey is the author of four crime ‎novels including After The Party (Pegasus) Who Took Eden ‎Mulligan? (Harper Collins Avon), and The Midnight ‎Killing (Harper Collins Avon) and two novellas.

Brian McGilloway is the author of thirteen crime novels including the Ben Devlin and Lucy Black series, set in and around Derry/Strabane, and most recently The Last Crossing and The Empty Room.

Anthony Quinn is the author of nine crime novels including the Celcius Daly series, set in and around the Tyrone border, and Turncoat and The Listeners, as well as the nonfiction M**der Memoir M**der.

Host or Publisher Centre for the Americas, Queen's University Belfast