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I've been reading Flann O'Brien's novels. His first, At Swim Two-Birds, 1939, had no quotation clues at all, but I got used to it. The next one I read The Dalkey Archive (1964) used the dash, or rather em dash, at the beginning of dialogue, and for some reason I found this very confusing. His last novel, The Third Policeman, although written around 1940, was published posthumously in 1968 and used conventional quotes, quite likely an editorial decision.
They are all very Irish novels.
Brian O'Nolan, Flann O'Brien's real name, was a native Gaelic speaker, learned English as a second language in childhood. He was best known under the name Myles na gCopaleen, writing the "Cruiskeen Lawn" column in the Irish Times for 30-odd years.
I prefer quotation marks. If you are writing with a lot of dialogue, it seems to me, you really do have to make an effort to let the reader in on the secret of what's dialogue and what's not.
I think it's a traditional thing, too. I have in front of me a Hercule Poirot novel, Italian translation, which starts off a chapter like this: (I am using two hyphens to represent the em-dash):
--Non avete cavato molto da quella signora Ramsay --si lamento il colonnello Beck.
--Non c'era molto da cavare, in vertia.
--Ne siete sicuro?
I don't know how to insert the diacriticals. At any rate, the dash is still conventional in Italian, or was in 1984 when the translation was published in Italy ("Sfida a Poirot", aka "The Clocks")
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