But times have changed, and now we can boast a generation of writers finally comfortable with creating crime novels which look and sound like the real deal.

Apart from the glaringly obvious reason that we have a lot more crime, murder, gang rivalries and abuse of women and children than ever before, the question arises as to why we have such a sudden blossoming of a genre not normally considered a staple of Irish literature? A genre whose current practitioners are showing a far greater degree of skill and accomplishment than we ever expected back in the bad old days of mac-wearing, middle aged chain smokers, who were more Newport Co Mayo than New York.

It seems we now have writers who have successfully absorbed the lessons of the past masters, and deployed them with an almost clinical skill in response to a society which is rapidly transforming. If anything, the detective novel or thriller is becoming a more accurate measure of what Irish society is now like than any other genre.

Tana French's book In the Woods examines the effects of a double child disappearance 12 years after the event. For her, writing crime fiction is "a way of trying to understand the society in which we live, through one tiny facet, which is the crimes which happen in that society." She believes the current crop of crime writers are writing about a society dealing with huge change, in an Ireland that is becoming "more anonymous and more fragmented." She also points to a fracturing of community, and a sense that in terms of what can happen to someone, all bets are off, in a country where we seem to be dealing with what she calls an almost constant "undercurrent of uncertainty and danger."

Declan Hughes's novels also deal with this sense of rapid transformation through the character of returned immigrant, Detective Ed Loy.

Loy investigates the dark secrets of a respected Dublin family in The Colour of Blood, a book laced with an atmosphere of innate corruption. He is a man whom Hughes says has his "eyeballs peeled" by the shock of seeing how drastically his hometown of Dublin has changed. Hughes is inspired by what he calls that sense of "look out the window, look at what's happening, someone has to chronicle this".

And he proposes that the rise of the crime novel in Ireland may be because we are "ready to be mythologized and gentrified now". He believes that Dublin is now stranger and "harder to encapsulate", and he revels in the fictional possibilities. Hughes also shows a refined ability to apply lessons learned from the masters like Hammet and Ross MacDonald. He is particularly influenced by MacDonald's "Californian Gothic", which saw MacDonald also examining a boomtown at a time of unprecedented change. "I don't look at Dublin as the city between the canals. I look at the sprawl and the way it has become like a mini Los Angeles as opposed to a metropolitan city."

In that sense Hughes marries a razor sharp social nous to an ability to absorb, and make new the literary influences which inspired him. It's that blend which exemplifies the best of the new crop of crime novelists.

Music promoter and detective novelist Paul Charles believes that "the Irish have an ability to stare at and examine their own darkness", and this theme of responding to society and ourselves seems to be the common factor that binds most of this new crime fiction. But of course the market itself could not survive on this sociological urge alone. Fortunately we also seem to have sufficient diversity to suggest that Irish crime writers can now handle the restrictive parameters of the form. Rather than a predictable uniformity we have everything ranging from the pacy, adrenalin fuelled work of Arlene Hunt, to the gritty realism of Gene Kerrigan. The current crop of writers resemble a bunch of literary magpies stealing what's bright and shiny, yet still managing to make it their own.

Arlene Hunt talks with enthusiasm about her work, and the influence of people like James Elroy and George Pelecanos. Her latest novel, Missing Presumed Dead, is particularly timely, and taps into current fears with a story centred on a child abduction. She enjoys making her fiction unashamedly entertaining, and she also acknowledges the effect of society on her work and that of others. "It's a reflection on our current culture, we're a fast track nation. We've got everything we want, and we have things like a growing drug problem. I suppose that translates into what people will be writing about now. You can't help but be influenced by what's going on around you."

In his latest novel, Second Burial, Andrew Nugent investigates the murder of the owner of a Nigerian restaurant in inner city Dublin, and the effect this has on the victim's younger brother. Yet uniquely among the current group of crime fiction writers Nugent is not directly influenced by past masters. Like Tana French he cites Donna Tartt's The Secret History as a seminal text, but that's where the similarity ends. Instead Nugent claims his work as a theologian has had greater impact.

Regarding his most recent spiritual book he claims that "it comes from the same place within myself as the murder mysteries. They're just two sides of the same coin, being as they are about the growth and development of people." He is representative of a refreshing distinctiveness in a group of stylistically diverse writers.

But of course all of these authors share that core impulse, the urge to examine murder and its consequences. As Tana French puts it these novels seem to serve one function, which is that strange by-product of comforting people in regard to the crime of murder: "I think people are trying to find a way to deal with the fact that this can actually happen, by writing and reading about it." In that sense these novels are possibly more timely in a society that has seen a huge increase in murder in recent years.

We now have a successful genre responding not just to a particular society but to a literary heritage that is punchy and almost symbiotically linked with the society it's written in.

It's a trick previous Irish crime novelists couldn't master.

Thankfully, that doesn't appear to be a problem anymore.