South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
She’s always the searcher for a good mystery
Tana French talks about writing and her latest novel
“I’m always looking for the potentialmystery in things,” said author Tana French, on the phone from her Dublin home. “I think that’s what makes amystery writer.”
Being amystery writer hasworked out prettywell for French, who has written eight acclaimed crimefiction novels, seven of themNew York Times bestsellers, and the eighth, “The Searcher,” released Oct. 6.
French didn’t start out as awriter, despite always being drawn to it. Shewas born in Vermont, to an “Irish and American and Russian and Italian” family, and grew up “all over the world.” Settling in Dublin in her late teens, she studied theater at Trinity College and became a professional actor.
Mysteries, though, kept ticking away in her head. While in her 30s, working on an archaeological dig between roles (she has long had an interest in archaeology), a thought occurred to her.
“Therewas awood, and Iwas thinking, what a great place for kids to play. Instead of stopping there, like a normal person, I thought, what if three kidswent in there and only one came out, and had no memory of the other two? Whatwould that do to his mind? What if he became a detective someday, and a case brought him back to the woods?”
Longtime French readers will recognize, instantly, the plot of French’s 2007 debut novel, “In the Woods.” But French, at the time, scribbled the idea on a bit of paper andwent off to her next acting gig. “I found the paper, a year later
— coffee stains on a phone bill— and I thought, Iwant to knowwhat happens. I realized nobody elsewas going to write it for me. The onlyway I could find out what happenedwas to write itmyself.”
“In theWoods” won a trifecta of awards for debut mysteries that year— the Edgar, the Anthony and the Macavity— and a new career for Frenchwas launched. Something else was launched, too: the DublinMurder Squad, the police department setting for French’s first six novels. Unlikemany crime novelists, she doesn’t use the same detective/narrator fromone book to the next; instead, a secondary character in one book may step up to narrate the next.
French said she didn’t exactly plan it thatway, but it made sense to her. “I love reading the standard series when you followthe one narrator through the ups and downs,” she said, “but I realized thatwasn’t what I wanted to write.” Her narrator for “In theWoods,” Rob Ryan, was at a crucial turning point in his life, and “I liked writing about something where the stakes are so high, not just on a professional level but a personal level.”
Though French loved writing in Rob’s voice, she
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.” Shewondered 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 CassieMaddox, a secondary detective in “In theWoods,” came to the forefront to narrate French’s second book, “The Likeness.” Subsequent books featured a revolving door of narrators, all of them fromthat same room at the Dublin police department: FrankMackey (“Faithful Place”), Scorcher Kennedy (“BrokenHar
bor”), StephenMoran (“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 amurder.” In “The Witch Elm,” her main character is “a victim, a witness and a suspect,” letting French explore a crime story fromother angles.
And if the title of her latest book, “The Searcher,” makes you think of a famous John FordWestern, that’s no mistake. This novel, another stand-alone, emerged at a time when Frenchwas intrigued by the genre. “I started think
ing that the settings of Westerns have a lot of resonance with thewest country of Ireland,” she said. “ThatWestern sense of a place that’s so distant, both culturally and geographically, fromthe 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 classicWestern trope of a stranger arriving in town: CalHooper, 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 Irishmanwould 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 byCOVID,” 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 theymay 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 knowthem by writing them for a little while.”