Tana French ventures into new territory
‘Searcher’ broadens definition of the mystery
Ever since she released her debut novel, “In the Woods,” Tana French has drawn such a devoted following that it borders on cultish. In the past 13 years, she has published seven novels that won over millions of fans with their twisty, nuanced plots.
But for the past few months, French has been struggling to write. She’s too anxious about the state of the world.
“I’ve realized how much of this gig is your subconscious, and my subconscious, like everybody else’s in the world, is a smoking crater right now,” she said during a video interview from her home in Dublin, where she has been in varying degrees of lockdown with her husband and two daughters. “It’s all used up by dealing with what’s going on around us and trying to process it.”
Fortunately for her millions of fans, French finished a book at the end of February, before the world and her subconscious shut down.
“Pandemically speaking, my timing was pretty good,” said French, who has flaming-red hair, wide-set hazel eyes and a striking energy level despite the late hour in Ireland.
Her new novel, “The Searcher,” from Viking, departs from her earlier work. After writing six mysteries in her “Dublin Murder Squad” series, featuring a cohort of detectives, French has been experimenting with stand-alone novels. “The Searcher” unfolds in a rough, wild landscape where farmers and locals know every bit of each other’s business and are suspicious of outsiders. It is her first book set outside Dublin and her first to feature an American protagonist — a gruff, retired Chicago police officer named Cal Hooper, who hopes to find peace and quiet in an idyllic Irish village (spoiler: He doesn’t).
With “The Searcher,” her eighth book, French is venturing into a new genre. Although there’s a mystery at its core, “The Searcher” feels almost as much like a Western as a suspense novel. French never picked up a Western until recently, when she read Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove” on the recommendation of journalist and novelist Patrick Anderson. French devoured it and moved on to other dark Westerns, including Charles Portis’ “True Grit” and Patrick deWitt’s “The Sisters Brothers.”
She was fascinated by how morally ambiguous the characters and their actions were. “I love that about Westerns so much — that they don’t try to pretend it can ever be clear,” she said.
French started wondering what would happen if she applied some of that to an Irish village and came up with a classic hero in Cal — a lone stranger who comes to town and disrupts its social fabric, exposing secrets and tangling with vigilantes.
Veering into Western themes might seem strange for a writer who has built a fan base with gritty and psychologically acute Dublin suspense novels. French’s books have sold 7 million copies worldwide — close to 4 million copies in the U.S. alone — and are published in 37 languages.
But French has always defied easy categorization and flouted mysterygenre conventions, even seemingly inviolable ones, such as solving the actual mystery.
“With novels in this genre, there’s this desire for breakneck pace and a big twist at the end, and she never felt any pressure to do any of that,” novelist Megan Abbott said of French. “She takes the classic elements of those story structures, but she’s not buying into any of it.”
French has been called “our best living mystery writer” and “a mystery writer for people who don’t read