“A Company of Rogues”: Richard Head and the Irish Picaresque

Redefinitions of the origins of crime fiction have led to a renewed interest in earlier texts which do not follow the objective and empirical methods favoured by the standard Poe/Holmes canon of crime writing. As well as pre-modern enigma tales, early modern rogue narratives also provide an interesting field with which to reappraise the origins of the genre. Irish writing has a rich history of “rogue” narratives which, borrowing heavily from the Iberian picaresque tradition but adapting this to the particular circumstances of Ireland, provides a fascinating glimpse into the origins of Irish crime writing. Richard Head’s The English Rogue (1665) is of enormous importance as the first concerted application of Iberian picaresque models to an English-language context. The later use of the picaresque by William Chaigneau and Charles Lever would reveal how this Spanish model was uniquely adaptable to Irish circumstances and would influence both mainstream and crime narratives by Irish authors.