Nobody Kills a Priest: Irish Noir and Pathogenic Vulnerability in Benjamin Black's Holy Orders

Abstract

This chapter addresses the systemic precarisation of individuals through the examination of Holy Orders (2013), the sixth title in Benjamin Black’s “Quirke series”. This crime novel describes the multi-layered precarity of Ireland’s travellers, that appear, I argue, as archives of the failing of infrastructural norms and paradigms of pathogenic vulnerability. Similarly, the story captures the corrupted network of control and influence sustained by the Catholic Church and its concomitant rule of silence, whose dysfunctionality generates a string of parallel justice. In my analysis, I first explore how the failure of Ireland’s network of infrastructural support has prevailed throughout time, decimating the lives of some of its most vulnerable individuals. Then, I trace the vigilantism that, as a convention in crime fiction, appears as a product of such deficiency and the troubling questions posed for the contemporary reader.