A nod to a classic western
The Searcher Tana French Viking
The Searcher, by Tana French, is a slow burn of a suspense story. As in that apocryphal myth of the frog in boiling water, the novel lulls us readers to lie back and bask in French's radiant imagery and language — in particular, its descriptions of the rough beauty of the West of Ireland where the story takes place. By novel's end, anyplace — even the grimiest, meanest streets of hard-boiled crime fiction — seems preferable to the sinister and silent watchfulness of the Irish countryside.
As French has acknowledged in interviews, the title of her latest stand-alone crime novel is a nod to the John Ford masterpiece, The Searchers. Like Ford's 1956 film, French's novel is essentially a western. A lone man, an outsider, is drawn into an obsessive quest to find a young person who has disappeared. In Ford's film, Civil War veteran Ethan Edwards, played by John Wayne, searches for his niece who was abducted from her family's homestead by a Comanche raiding party.
French's “old soldier” is named Cal Hooper. He's divorced, semi-estranged from his adult daughter and recently retired from the Chicago Police Department. Cal has acted on his dream and bought a tumbledown Irish cottage advertised on the internet. It's so remote, he can blast his favourite Johnny Cash tunes as he spackles and paints, and only the sheep might complain. As the mists of autumn close in, Cal realizes that he's not as alone as he thought. The back of his neck — “trained over 25 years in the Chicago PD” — registers a watcher, someone who's been creeping around the cottage and disturbing the nesting rooks. When Cal corners the voyeur, he turns out to be a wayward adolescent named Trey Reddy, who lives on a nearby mountain with his single mother and siblings. Before long, Trey is coming around regularly to help Cal and to learn carpentry. One thing Trey doesn't need to learn is that Cal is an ex-cop. (Everyone in the nearest village has sussed out by Celtic telepathy that the American-who-bought-the-cottage is an ex-cop.) Eventually, Trey confesses the real reason he's been hanging around: He wants Cal to find out what happened to his beloved 19-year-old brother, Brendan, who vanished from the family cottage months ago. The local police have been useless, prejudiced, as they are, against the entire Reddy family as a pack of lazy troublemakers. So it is that Cal, despite his reluctance, gets drawn into the case because that's what makes these quiet men who preside over westerns and detective novels the flawed heroes they are. In the process of searching for Brendan, Cal ferrets out a bog's worth of secrets and sins festering beneath this quaint patch of the Auld Sod.
To even disclose this much of the plot of The Searcher is a minor crime, because the great power of this suspense story comes from its slow, measured pacing and the intensifying evil of its atmosphere.
Like the Ford film it pays homage to, The Searcher is its own kind of masterpiece.