Ireland's literary heritage whispers through the cobblestone streets from espionage writer Erskine Childers to Tana French's crime novels, Kevin Brophy’s thrillers, and Andrew Hughes’ unsettling portraits of betrayal.

While Ireland may not have the equivalent of Ian Fleming dashing about in a dark blue lightweight single-breasted suit, nor a manic-depressive Graham Greene scribbling apologies for Soviet traitor Kim Philby, the cast of characters on the Emerald Isle are satisfyingly shady.
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Erskine Childers: The Riddle of the Sands

Childers - a yachtsman, Cambridge graduate, Boer War soldier, and later gun smuggling renegade - elevated the spy novel by adding fictitious letters, maps, and charts that allowed his readers to navigate the choppy waters alongside his main characters Davies and Carruthers.

The Riddle of the Sands also offered a unique blueprint for writers who’d been introduced to the espionage genre through American author James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy (1821) and British writer Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901). Riddle offered a fresh approach that captured the imagination of European audiences at a time when the first world war with Germany loomed.
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Was Childers also a spy? Some thought so. Born in London in 1870 and raised in Wicklow, Ireland, Childers moved seamlessly between London and Dublin society - at times he was a patriotic British loyalist, at others an ardent supporter of Irish self-government. In 1922, Childers was executed by a Dublin firing squad for raising arms against the Irish state. He took his fate like a gentleman, shaking hands with his executors and advising, “Take a step forward, lads. It will be easier that way.”

Childers’ impact on the espionage genre was enormous. Without him, John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, Ian Fleming's 007, and John le Carré's George Smiley may not have been conceived. Ireland’s spy writers and their quirky characters have also emerged from the shadows since The Riddle of the Sands - reluctantly at first, and with more gusto of late.
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Tana French

Crime writer Tana French may have been born in Vermont but she was raised on the Emerald Isle, so it seemed natural to use the capital's gritty charm as the backdrop for her internationally-acclaimed Dublin Murder Squad series. Her novels are often intimate portraits of friendships and the danger inherent in relationships.

The former actress studied at Trinity College Dublin but ditched acting to write crime novels, attracted by the mystery of the genre. As a child, French was obsessed with the disappearance of the Mary Celeste ship's crew and some of her favorite crime books are historical, including mysteries by Josephine Tey. If you haven't read Tana French yet, there's plenty to choose from. She is the New York Times bestselling author of In the Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place, Broken Harbor, The Secret Place, The Trespasser, and The Hunted.

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John Banville

The Untouchable (1997) author John Banville grew up in south-east Ireland and reportedly stole a collection of Dylan Thomas's poetry from the library while a teenager. He didn’t look back. Banville has described one of his great regrets as skipping university, which he describes as “not taking that four years of getting drunk and falling in love”. He has always been a great student of humanity, however. The Untouchable is a wonderful spy novel lightly based on Anthony Blunt, the Queen’s art historian and Cambridge spy. Publisher’s Weekly calls it “a beautiful exercise in character and historical detail” and “a razor-sharp dissection of the British class system by an Irish outsider.”
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Joe Joyce

Journalist Joe Joyce has authored many gripping thrillers including the Echoland series of spy novels set in neutral Dublin during WWII. The series feature Paul Duggan, a newcomer to military intelligence, as Ireland struggles to balance Nazi Germany and the Allies. The Irish Independent describes Echoland, Book I as 'a great read' that 'brilliantly portrays the divided atmosphere at the time". Joyce has also written a play and dabbles in historical fiction. In The Trigger Man, he immerses readers in the Irish 'Troubles' of the late 1980s.

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The Informer (1925) by Liam O'Flaherty

Author Liam O’Flaherty was born in Inishmore, west Ireland in 1896. He abandoned his training for the priesthood to become a WWI soldier on the Western Front for the British Army's Irish Guards and was badly injured in 1917. He helped found the Communist Party of Ireland afterward and traveled widely, working as a deckhand, miner, and lumberjack. O’Flaherty’s first successful novel, The Black Soul (1924), is the story of a tormented former soldier who seeks peace on a remote western island.

His follow-up novel, The Informer (1925) involves protagonist Gypo Nolan - an ex-policeman turned revolutionary who illustrates the complex political affiliations in post-revolutionary Ireland. Nolan is a member of the communist wing of the IRA who is paid £20 ($25) to inform on a friend. The fallout and his hopes of redemption form the remainder of the novel. The Informer is the basis of the 1935 Academy Award-winning film directed by John Ford.

The Berlin Crossing (2012) by Kevin Brophy‍

Galway’s Kevin Brophy also has an intriguing background as a writer of spy fiction. He grew up in a military barracks on Ireland's west coast and taught in Germany - with career diversions as a postal worker, barman, and businessman - and is now back in Galway, Ireland. Along the way, he has called various counties home including Ireland, England, Poland, and Germany.

Kevin Brophy's first novel, The Berlin Crossing (2012), opens in East Germany in the early 1990s and ends in Galway a year later, but it is rooted in Cold War Berlin, a city still divided by the Berlin Wall. The protagonist is teacher Michael Ritter, newly fired and separated from his wife, who embarks on a quest for truth in a city of secrets and spies.

Brophy follows up with Another Kind of Country (2013), still focused on the Berlin Wall but also on the Stasi Secret police, Chile, and the breakup of the Soviet Union. 

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The Convictions of John Delahunt (2017) by Andrew Hughes 

Born in County Wexford, Andrew Hughes graduated from Trinity College Dublin and has worked as an archivist, historian and novelist. His debut novel The Convictions of John Delahunt was short-listed for Crime Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards.

It is based on the true story of a child’s murder in Dublin in 1841. A small boy is enticed away from his mother and found with his throat cut. The city is outraged and it appears the guilty man, John Delahunt, is an informant working for an intelligence agency based in Dublin Castle. 

Is that why the man shows no fear? The city hangs on his every word as Delahunt tells his deeply unsettling story of betrayal.

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The Reluctant Contact (2018) by Stephen Burke

Dublin-born Stephen Burke is one of the later breed of contemporary writers coming out of Ireland - a novelist, screenwriter, and director who divides his time between Ireland and Italy. His first feature film was Happy Ever Afters, starring Sally Hawkins as an Irish single mother. He has also published two books - the first a romantic novel, and the second a spy thriller.

There’s a Cold War chill running through Burke’s The Reluctant Contact (2018). Set in the Svalbard Archipelago - about halfway between northern Norway and the North Pole - in the 1970s and the main character Yuri, a Russian engineer. He plays by the old rules: Yuri keeps his head down and trusts no one. When a co-worker dies in the mine, Yuri can’t help himself, however. He must investigate and finds himself in a dangerous world of secrets and conflicts.

The Valley of the Squinting Windows (1918) by John Weldon

Irish playwright and novelist John Weldon (using the pen name Brinsley McNamara) was the registrar of Dublin’s National Gallery of Ireland. His first novel The Valley of the Squinting Windows (1918) is considered a ‘spy’ novel by some although not in the traditional sense. Squinting Windows involves neighbors spying on each other in the fictitious town of Garradrimna, ferreting out secrets to gain leverage.

The satirical novel was met with a firestorm on its publication. Weldon’s neighbors in Devlin were offended - assuming the fictitious town was their own - and burned his books. He and his family reportedly moved to Dublin where he continued writing until his death in 1963.

Counterspy aka Vote X for Treason (1964) & the Sean Ryan series by Brian Cleeve‍

Brian Cleeve was a man of the world. Born in Essex, England in 1921 to an Irish father and English mother, he reportedly ran away to serve on ships and work as a private soldier, ending up in Africa and jail. According to The Times of London, Cleeve was paroled on the condition he work for British Intelligence serving as a WWI spy in neutral Lisbon and Dublin. As a cover, he had a job as an ordinary seaman in the Merchant Navy.

In the 1960s, Cleeve became an author with a series based on counterintelligence operative Sean Ryan, a former IRA operative now working for British intelligence. After his first novel, Vote X for Treason (1964), he followed up with three more including Vice Isn’t Private, loosely based on the Profumo scandal.

The Private Sector (1971) & the Peter Marlow spy series by Joseph Hone 

Another English-Irish writer of repute, Joseph Hone, was born in London in 1937 but he was adopted by an Irish couple at the age of two. In his autobiography, Joseph happily recalled his idyllic, artistic upbringing in rural County Kilkenny in the ‘40s and working as an assistant to Hollywood director John Ford during the filming of the classic movie The Quiet Man (1952) starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara.

Hone spent nearly 20 years in Ireland before making a name internationally with his debut spy novel, The Private Sector (1971), introducing British Secret Service agent Peter Marlow. Marlow is recruited while teaching in Egypt, largely because of his knowledge of the Middle East. Now a globe-trotting spy, Marlow is unknowingly working for a devious double agent. Marlow's story continues in a series including The Valley of the Fox (1982). At the top of his game in the ‘70s, Hone was compared favorably to Len Deighton and John le Carré. 
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More Irish authors for your reading pleasure‍

Intrigued? It would be impossible for us to list all of the sensational Irish spy writers so the rest is up to you. But if you are surveilling the stacks, you may want to also check out Philip Davison's Harry Fielding quartet and Declan Burke’s The Lost and the Blind.

If crime books are more your style, considerDublin-born John Connolly’s popular Charlie Parker series (although it is set in Maine), Sinéad Crowley's thriller Can Anybody Help Me, and Gene Kerrigan who specializes in criminal masterminds and petty thieves in his Celtic Tiger sagas.

Last but never least, lovers of espionage fiction may recall that John le Carré embraced his grandmother’s ties to Cork and became an Irish citizen in 2020 - ‘playing the ‘Irish card’ as he describes it in his autobiography The Pigeon Tunnel.‍

His certificate of Irish citizenship arrived two months before David Cornwell’s death at the age of 89 in December 2020. He wrote to thank the registrar: “I intend to fly from Newquay to Cork and seek out my ancestors.” Sadly, his return trip was never made.