Abstract
The first thing you notice about this arresting new ethnography is a striking image of Dublin’s glistening Custom House, at street level, with a dark, graffiti-strewn river below. The image calls to mind the Quirke novels by the Irish writer John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, which pull back a veil on Dublin’s high society to expose a dark violent underbelly. As the protagonist Quirke reflects: ‘However tranquil the scene before us, beneath our feet another world is thrashing in helpless agony. How can we live up here, knowing what goes on down there?’ (Black, 2015: 216).
Like Quirke, Marsh is unblinking in his forensic analysis of a world ‘thrashing in helpless agony’. The book is not for the faint of heart: in its pages are detailed accounts of torture, murder and extreme brutality. It is based on interviews with 35 participants in Dublin’s criminal subculture: not blowhards or part-timers but dedicated practitioners in the dark arts of the drugs trade. The conversations tread carefully, focusing not on ‘who did what to whom’ but ‘what happened and why’, and are shot through with honesty. At the time of interview, many were disentangling their lives from the underworld and engaging in drug treatment, and it feels like this moment allowed for a unique insight; no doubt aided by Marsh’s long acquaintance with many. Participants are unafraid to expose their frailties, mis-steps and greed as life events are reinterpreted and reworked.
In analysing the interviews, Marsh has a steely eyed determination to unearth the drivers of seemingly senseless violence. Constructing ‘order from chaos’, as one of the chapter titles has it, is no small task. This is a scorched landscape of ultraviolence and paranoia, suspicion and fear, rumour and bravado, ego and secrecy—where the wolf is seldom far from the door. Very few have the combination of personal and academic abilities required to access, intuit and articulate such lifeworlds, and Marsh has done the criminological community a major service in applying his unique abilities to the task. Conversations are analysed with implacable care and clarity, and arranged into an order that is highly readable and insightful.
It is a slender volume at 156 pages, but packs a powerful punch. Chapters cover, successively, the ‘logic of violence’ among committed sellers, successful dealers, chronically addicted users and ‘dominant criminals’. This sweep between the trade’s lower and upper reaches is a real strength. Though the settings may differ, common themes emerge, particularly the combustible blend of fragile ego, debt and substance use. The result is a genuinely original analysis of the microdynamics of violence at different levels of the market, building brick-by-brick a panoptic view of a trade that is often hidden. A picture emerges of a dog-eat-dog market that is chaotic yet internally differentiated, ruthless yet regulated. The formal instruments of state power feature rarely, with order imposed through fear and brute force.
It is also a book full of characters, and life. Each chapter ends with a ‘case study’ relevant to its focus, and it is these very human stories that will leave an imprint long after the book has been returned to the shelf. From these vignettes we learn of the temporality of addiction, with violent reputations diminished as bodies weaken; of the need for weaker users to be ‘decent’ customers, building social relationships to mitigate risk; and of the toxic power of indebtedness, as family members and friends become drawn into a vortex of fear and intimidation. In one striking scene, a participant recalls a moment when a police officer took him to one side and told him he was not cut out for being a gangster. There are also some revealing insights on the challenges of ‘going straight’ for participants. As one states, ‘When you have driven at 100mph it’s difficult to then drive at 50mph’ (p. 115).
Though theory is worn relatively lightly there is a discerning application of existing knowledge, often in the form of extended quotation. For Marsh, the violence of the drugs trade emerges from a blend of economic and individual forces: a ferocious rejection of poverty stirred up with an emotional hinterland of shame, fear and humiliation. In this sense, the theoretical scaffolding involves a bridge between the structural background and psychological foreground of violence. Participants may be brittle individuals for whom the world is full of slights, or grandiose narcissists for whom fear is experienced as respect, but all are drawn ‘from the impoverished, deprived and neglected areas of modern urban centers’ (p. 35). The text provides a sophisticated empirical case for the interweaving of collective economic disadvantage with individual psychology.
There were a few points of frustration. Though there are hints of a more synthetic account of individual psychology and structural inequality—through terms like ‘gangster habitus’, or ‘criminal habitus’—the text stops short of a more developed account. Further, readers interested in the role of women within the serious drug trade may also be disappointed. Though participants included four women, the ‘upper echelons’ of the trade, like that of many others, is male-dominated—and there are moments where the whiff of masculine bravado is strong. Nonetheless, the text does an impressive job of puncturing myths and looking beyond braggadocio. The toll of paranoia, suspicion and violence, and the emotional and physical toll of living up to a masculine image, are writ large throughout the text. Towards the end, the health consequences of constant vigilance among even the ‘dominant criminals’ becomes abundantly clear.
The book should, rightly, become a classic work of criminological ethnography. It is clear-eyed, empathetic and honest, combining deep cultural knowledge with a flinty analytical edge to produce what is an authoritative account of the causes and consequences of violence in drug markets. In its final pages I found myself thinking once more of the Benjamin Black novels. In Christine Falls, Quirke sees a side of Dublin that he had previously been unaware, feeling: ‘a kind of dawning alarm, as if the smooth, empty little island on which he had been happily perched had given a preliminary heave, and would presently reveal itself to be not dry land at all but the humped back of a whale’ (Black, 2006: 168).
After reading this stone-cold dissection of the animus of the violence of the underworld, I’m sure readers of Marsh will feel the same.