Fourteen Ways to Get Shot in Belfast

Fourteen writers, one bruised city

Here’s the setup, and it’s a good one. Akashic has been doing these city noir anthologies since Brooklyn Noir kicked things off, and by the time they got to Belfast they had the formula down: grab the best crime writers connected to a place, hand them a neighborhood each, let them go dark. McKinty and Neville split the book into four sections, City of Ghosts, City of Walls, City of Commerce, and Brave New City, which sounds like a real estate brochure until you realize the whole point is that Belfast can’t stop being haunted by what it used to be even while it’s trying to sell you apartments in what it’s becoming.

That tension is the actual subject of the book, more than any individual plot. You’ve got Lee Child doing a rare short story appearance (not a Reacher story, before anyone gets excited), Brian McGilloway and Claire McGowan bringing their procedural instincts, Sam Millar and Gerard Brennan writing the kind of grimy Belfast underworld stuff that reads like it was typed with a cigarette in the other hand, and Ian McDonald throwing in something stranger and more speculative than you’d expect from a noir collection. It’s a genuinely wide net. Nobody’s pretending Belfast is one thing.

What actually rips, and what just lies there

Look, I’ll say the thing I always say about anthologies: the ceiling is higher than a novel’s ceiling and the floor is lower. Belfast Noir proves both halves of that.

Eoin McNamee’s “Corpse Flowers” is the story people who’ve read this book bring up first, and they’re right to. It’s got that patient, almost clinical dread that McNamee does so well, following a pathologist through the residue of violence in a way that feels less like a whodunit and more like an autopsy of the city itself. I read it on a train somewhere between Belfast and Dublin, which is either the perfect setting or an embarrassingly on-the-nose one, and I remember looking up at my stop and needing a second to remember where I actually was.

Ruth Dudley Edwards goes for something almost comic, which shouldn’t work sandwiched between all this bleakness, and somehow does, mostly because it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Steve Cavanagh, who wasn’t a big name yet when this came out, writes a tight little legal-adjacent piece that in hindsight you can see the DNA of his later thrillers in. Lucy Caldwell’s contribution is the one that surprised me most, quieter and more literary than the crime-plot stories around it, which either makes it a nice palette cleanser or a tonal wrong turn depending on your mood when you hit it.

Now the criticism, because pretending every story here is essential would be a lie and I promised myself I wouldn’t do that. A few entries feel like the writer was handed an assignment (write noir, set it in this neighborhood) and turned in exactly that assignment, no more. There’s at least one story in the middle section that I could not tell you a single detail about a week after finishing it, and when I went back to check my own memory, that turned out to be accurate, not a memory problem. That’s the risk with any anthology built around geography instead of a shared plot or theme that actually forces connection. Some contributors use the constraint as a springboard. Others just fill it in.

The other thing worth saying honestly: this book leans hard on Troubles-era grief, sectarian scar tissue, the Peace Walls, all of it, and there’s a real question of how many times you can revisit that particular wound before it starts to feel like a genre convention instead of a genuine reckoning. McKinty and Neville seem aware of this, which is probably why Brave New City exists as a section, trying to gesture at a Belfast that’s moved past its ghosts. It doesn’t fully land. The ghosts are still the most interesting characters in the book.

Am I being too hard on the weaker stories because I went in expecting every single one to be a knockout? Maybe. Anthologies aren’t supposed to bat a thousand. But when McNamee’s story is sitting right there in the same table of contents, the gap becomes impossible not to notice.

Belfast Noir isn’t a novel pretending to be a story collection, it’s a city arguing with itself in fourteen different voices, and not all of them are worth listening to equally.

About Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville

McKinty is the guy who wrote the Sean Duffy novels, a Catholic detective working the RUC during the Troubles, books that are funnier and angrier than they have any right to be given the subject matter. He grew up in Carrickfergus, left for Australia and the US, and writes about Northern Ireland with the specific clarity of someone who had to leave to see it properly. Neville writes the Belfast-set Jack Lennon thrillers and has a reputation for being one of the bleaker, more morally unsettled voices in Irish crime fiction, the kind of writer who doesn’t let anyone off the hook, protagonist included. Putting these two in charge of an anthology about their hometown makes total sense. They know exactly which version of Belfast sells the lie and which version tells the truth, and mostly they picked contributors who understand the difference too.

If this hit you, read these next

• The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty, the first Sean Duffy novel, for the full-length version of everything this anthology is only sampling.
• The Twelve by Stuart Neville, brutal and unforgettable, basically the tonal blueprint for half the stories in this collection.
• Dublin Noir or any other Akashic city noir volume if the format itself is what hooked you, since the quality-control problem is baked into the series, not unique to Belfast.
• Little Criminals by Gene Kerrigan for a non-Belfast but similarly unglamorous take on Irish crime and class.

You can grab a copy here: Belfast Noir on Amazon.

For your book club

1. Which story in the collection do you think should have opened the book instead, and why?
2. Does dividing the anthology into four thematic sections actually change how you read the stories, or is it mostly cosmetic?
3. Is “Corpse Flowers” doing something the other stories aren’t, or are you just responding to McNamee’s reputation going in?
4. How much of this book’s darkness comes from genre convention versus something specifically, historically Belfast?
5. If you had to cut four stories to make this a tighter collection, which four go, and what does that tell you about what you actually want from an anthology?