This chapter surveys the history of Irish crime fiction, a genre whose contemporary popularity tends to obscure its origins in the works of nineteenth-century writers including Gerald Griffin, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Oscar Wilde, and L. T. Meade. The discussion highlights some of the most significant works that lie along the broad spectrum of writing that ‘crime fiction’ occupies and, in so doing, reveals the plurality of ‘Irish’ crime fiction over the course of 180 years. Among the topics covered are the features that distinguish nineteenth-century Irish crime writing from its British counterpart; the emergence of Irish-language crime fiction in the early part of the twentieth century, and the defining features of contemporary Irish crime fiction, which has flourished domestically and internationally since the 1990s.