She’s always the searcher for a good mystery

couldn’t imagine putting him at the fore of a case that felt less significant. “I thought, OK, I can keep throwing the same poor character into huge lifechanging situations for book after book, but for one thing, that’s not realistic. For another, he’s going to be in a straitjacket by book four.” She wondered aloud why some fictional detectives — facing life and death, case after case — “don’t just go, ‘I quit, I’m going to drive a bus during the day.’ ”

So Cassie Maddox, a secondary detective in “In the Woods,” came to the forefront to narrate French’s second book, “The Likeness.” Subsequent books featured a revolving door of narrators, all of them from that same room at the Dublin police department: Frank Mackey (“Faithful Place”), Scorcher Kennedy (“Broken Harbor”), Stephen Moran (“The Secret Place”), Antoinette Conway (“The Trespasser”).

And then it seemed like a good time to mix things up. “I had written six books from the point of view of a detective,” French said. “And while I thought that was fascinating and I’m blown away by what detectives do, I thought, there are so many other viewpoints in the investigation of a murder.” In “The

Witch Elm,” her main character is “a victim, a witness and a suspect,” letting French explore a crime story from other angles.

And if the title of her latest book, “The Searcher,” makes you think of a famous John Ford Western, that’s no mistake. This novel, another stand-alone, emerged at a time when French was intrigued by the genre. “I started thinking that the settings of Westerns have a lot of resonance with the west country of Ireland,” she said. “That Western sense of a place that’s so distant, both culturally and geographically, from the center of power. For the people living there, the power brokers have no real sense of what their lives are like — they have to make their own rules.”

She reimagined that classic Western trope of a stranger arriving in town: Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago cop who has bought a crumbling house in an Irish village. (In order for him to be “a proper stranger,” she said, he couldn’t be Irish; an Irishman would have some sort of remote connection to the village, which the townspeople would find out. “Ireland’s like that.”) He arrives in town, “rolls into the saloon, he’s got a few secrets, he doesn’t answer questions, he’s an agent of change.”

French said she’s not very far along with her next novel yet. “I have an idea that I’m bouncing around, but like everyone else, everything’s been scuppered by COVID,” she said, noting that she has two children attending remote school and is therefore a bit distracted.

But she’s excited to jump in, “when things lessen up a little bit,” and spend some time with the characters, whoever they may be. French said she doesn’t plan out her plots in advance, and says she’s “in awe” of writers who are able to do so. Like acting, she said, her writing is character-based. “The plot comes out of the characters, so I can’t really know what character will be what until I’ve gotten to know them by writing them for a little while.”

PAULO NUNES DOS SANTOS/THE NEW YORK TIMES Tana French, pictured in Dublin in September, has written a Western-inflected mystery with her first American protagonist and a backstory that touches on police violence and systemic racism.