Tommy May's and the Liffey Swim

The corner shop, that endangered species... One such local institution in Dublin 7 is - or rather, was - Tommy May's. Remember May's, near the bottom of Infirmary Road, on the wild western fringe of Stoneybatter, where Pat Kenny - the Pat Kenny - was born?

The Floozie in the Jacuzzi (not)

Dublin humour can be playful, cynical, surreal and full of wicked wordplay. It's a bit like the kid at the back of the class who's asked to use the word "bewitches" in a sentence.

"Ah you go on ahead," he replies, "I'll be wid yez in a minute."

Dublin wit is also embodied in the nicknames of its statutes and monuments, particularly the more "modren" additions to our postcolonial streetscape. And one nickname stands head and shoulders above the rest: "The Floozie in the Jacuzzi".

The manhole wars of the new millennium

Time for a very long ramble about the ground behind my feet.

Picture the scene. It's mid-May 2011, the week before the Queen of England comes to town.

The Irish weather has been kinder than usual this spring, and there have been marches and demonstrations, anti-visit posters, bomb threats, hoaxes, suspect packages, a pipe bomb on a bus from Maynooth, surveillance operations and pre-emptive arrests north and south of the Border.

Bargaintown: 'only famous'

"Hurry on down to Bargaintown
Where the prices are only famous..."

What or where is Bargaintown?

Bargaintown is a brand, a logo, a notorious jingle. Bargaintown is a chain of furniture and floor stores, a part of Dublin, a state of mind.

Phil Lynott's 'Old Town'

Among countless tunes about Dublin*, it's hard to beat Phil Lynott's "Old Town". The song has become inseparable from its video, which captures a certain time and place and person.

Brendan Behan's Cowtown

You don't come across many films showing the massive old cattle market in Stoneybatter, aka "Cowtown". But you do get glimpses of it (around the 23-minute mark) in this documentary called "Brendan Behan's Dublin".

The Ha'penny Bridge: covering the cliches

Surely the Ha'penny Bridge in the centre of Dublin doesn't pop up all that often in Irish crime fiction - not within the actual text I mean?

Yet the famous footbridge does appear with an intensifying frequency on crime novel covers. Take the following handful...

An Edna O'Brien slice of Dublin

Film stills all from "Girl With Green Eyes" - apart from the above one, which is from "Smashing Time"

I'm a huge fan of Edna O'Brien. She is a giant of Irish literature, and was a very brave writer during the darker times of cultural clampdown in Ireland. In her own country her books were censored and burned, and she was denounced from the pulpit. Is it any wonder that, like Joyce and Beckett before her, she got out of the place?

As she once said in an interview, "Writing is like carrying a foetus." The quote seemed to take on an extra frisson of meaning after the Dáil debates last Tuesday.

So maximum respect, though she has been involved in a right few turkeys over the years, particularly on screen.

The Liffey Corridor

A traditional view of Dublin sees the city in terms of a north-south axis. That's the impression you might get from, say, the journeys in James Joyce's Ulysses.

But the River Liffey's natural east-west axis is even more compelling. And, as it happens, it's also Dublin's primary axis in my 'Moss Reid' series of novels. The action tends to take place along this line between the docks and the quays up to Smithfield and Heuston Station, and even further upstream to the Strawberry Beds.

The Liffey Quays by motorbike

Here's a slightly unusual motorcyclist's-eye-view of Dublin. It's a journey along the Liffey quays to Stoneybatter and Grangegorman, and concentrates on the day-to-day problem of getting through the traffic rather than leisurely sightseeing.

The Hags with the Bags, Liffey Street Lower

Visual Artists Ireland and the sculptors' union should be paying me an honorary stipend by now. You see, in each 'Moss Reid' mystery I manage to slip in a mention of at least a couple of statues at a critical point in the book.

In Black Marigolds it's a 1988 pair of brass figures by Jackie McKenna called "Meeting Place", at the corner of Ormond Quay and Lower Liffey Street near the Ha'penny Bridge.

But nobody in Dublin calls them that. Like many statues in the city these two have a more naughty nickname: "The Hags With The Bags".

Where is Stoneybatter in Dublin?

Stoneybatter is the centre of Moss Reid's universe in my series of crime novels about the foodie PI. But where exactly is Stoneybatter (aka Cowtown or Oxmantown)?

The Ha'penny Bridge and the lovelocks

Everyone calls it the Ha'penny Bridge, don't they? Even though its official name is the Liffey Bridge, and its original name was the Wellington Bridge (after the Duke).