"I Still Consider Myself a Lucky Person": Unreliability, Intersectional Privilege, and Irish Society in The Wych Elm and Bad Day in Blackrock

Abstract: Tana French's 2018 novel The Wych Elm and Kevin Power's lesser-known 2008 work, Bad Day in Blackrock , offer a strikingly similar window into a specific kind of Celtic/post-Celtic Tiger social critique. Through the use of unreliable narration—a familiar device in Irish crime fiction—and the portrayal of entitlement and its unquestioning acceptance, French and Power warn against the dangerous intersections of gendered, racial, sexual, and class privilege. Both novels suggest that such privilege causes real harm to others, blinding the entitled to their own advantages within an injurious system.