In terms of a book’s location the crime writer is, according to Declan Hughes, the author of the Ed Loy series, in a different position to the literary novelist. There is a kind of obligation, but it’s demanded by the genre itself. “The kind of crime fiction I write - hardboiled crime fiction - centres around the detective and the city,” Hughes says. “If you look back to Dashiel Hammett with San Francisco, or Raymond Chandler with Los Angeles, the city is a character in the novel. I have been quite conscious about trying to use Dublin in that way.”

He has also, he says, tried to show the way in which Dublin, like Los Angeles, has sprawled outwards over the past 10 years. “People used to say, ‘Oh, Dublin’s like a village - everyone knows each other.’ Well, I think that’s only true now in the sense that Washington’s like a village and everyone knows each other. The 500 journalists and lawyers and politicians and rich people know each other. But after that ... you don’t know everyone who’s driving on the M50 at 6.30 in the morning, do you?”

Much of the action in Hughes’s books takes place along the sweep of Dublin Bay, from Howth through Killiney and Dalkey to the Wicklow mountains. Hardly the mean streets.

“You don’t get the full picture if you’re only in the mean streets,” he says. “The big gates to the mansion as are resonant as the alleyway where the body is dropped, and those connections are where the crime novel really begins to accumulate a kind of energy.” From this point of view the crime novel’s relationship to the city is primarily one of space rather than time; the city is the three-dimensional space within which the story happens, so its sense of “right here, right now” is not so much a conscious stylistic decision as a by-product of that literary architecture.

Hughes suggests women’s fiction has had an even bigger role to play in changing ideas about what the purpose of fiction should be. Often denigrated as escapist fluff - “chick lit” - this kind of writing may, he says, have helped create “an expectation that there will be realistic fiction about contemporary life”.

[...; quotes Gerard Smyth on post-boom Dublin: “[...] it will take time for someone to emerge to navigate through it, and mediate it, and write it into literature in some way or other." ]

Hughes agrees, to the extent that he has taken a break from his Ed Loy series and is writing a stand-alone novel set in the US. “Having set five books in a row in Dublin I actually did want to step back, because the whole political and economic situation was so volatile and huge that you couldn’t quite take it in,” he says. Like Bolger, however, he questions the extent to which writers are obliged to take a moral position one way or the other.

“That’s not your job as a writer,” Hughes says. “It may be your job as a citizen, or as a father, or as a drinker late at night to go, ‘Maybe it was better when we had nothing.’ But as a writer you’re going, ‘What is all this? How do we capture all this? How do we describe what is going on?’”

Engaging with a constantly changing cityscape has its perils, says Hughes. His most recent novel, City of Lost Girls,  refers to a gents’ toilet at the Forty Foot as “the urinal with the greatest view in the known world”. “Between the book getting locked down after galley proofs and the book being published, the urinal with the greatest view in the known world was closed,” Hughes says, ruefully. “So you’re writing historical fiction whether you like it or not.”