Before the Tiger Roared: Bartholomew Gill’s Ireland

Decades before Irish crime fiction emerged on international Best Seller lists, the North American journalist Mark McGarrity staked a claim as the first author of a contemporary Irish detective series. From the late 1970s until his death in 2002, he published sixteen volumes in the Peter McGarr series under the pen name Bartholomew Gill. This chapter explores the McGarr series as a template for the Celtic Tiger police procedurals that emerged in the noughts. It finds that the series mimics the social realism of post-war American detective fiction in a manner that draws parallels to the societal changes in Ireland that accompanied the foundation and early years of the European Union.