Book review: Brendan Marsh, The Logic of Violence: An Ethnography of Dublin’s Illegal Drug Trade
| DOI | 10.1177/13624806211012239 |
| Published date | 01 November 2021 |
| Date | 01 November 2021 |
| Author | Alistair Fraser |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Brendan Marsh, The Logic of Violence: An Ethnography of Dublin’s Illegal Drug Trade, Routledge:
Abingdon, 2020; 156 pp.: 9781138388864, £96.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Alistair Fraser, University of Glasgow, UK
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 help-
less 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 under-
world 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 abil-
ities required to access, intuit and articulate such lifeworlds, and Marsh has done the crim-
inological 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, suc-
cessively, the ‘logic of violence’among committed sellers, successful dealers, chronic-
ally 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 differen-
tiated, 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’rele-
vant 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
692 Theoretical Criminology 25(4)
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