Donal O’donoghue talks to the celebrated author abut her own gripping story
Jo Spain is writing TV for Jane Seymour while she continues to deliver best-selling crime fiction. Yet her own story is just as gripping. Donal O’donoghue talks to her
“ When you bury your dad at 16, it gives you a very strong life lesson,” says author Jo Spain of her father Ray, who died in 1995 at the age of 44. “I now realise, at 41, how young that was but it gave me a sense of mortality. When you lose someone at a young age, you realise that you can’t be hanging around for something to happen; you’ve got to get out there and live your life. Dad had a tragic life but he did have me. Now I like to think that there is an a erlife and that he’s up there proud of what I’ve achieved, that in his own way, he has le a nice legacy.”
Jo Spain, best-selling crime novelist and screenwriter, is someone who bloomed against the odds. When she was ve, her parents split up. Later, she would learn that her father was born in a mother and baby home. Coming from a tough working-class background, she worked her socks o to study politics in Trinity College, holding down two jobs to make ends meet. She wrote her rst novel, With Our Blessing, to change her life and it did. Now red by a rigorous work ethic (married to Martin, they have four children aged 15 to 6) she is determined to serve not just her talents but also the ghosts she carries.
“My dad was born in a mother and baby home (St Patrick’s, Dublin) and wasn’t adopted until he was four or ve,” she says. “It shadowed his whole life and he struggled with alcoholism. He died in a house re caused by cigarettes and alcohol. I’m always happy to talk about my dad because there’s no shame to what happened to him, or any of the other children who su ered like him in mother and baby homes or industrial schools. ey should be allowed to tell their stories and not feel the shame. And then there’s the legacy. I obviously lost my dad but my children also never got to meet their grandad.”
When we speak, Jo Spain is, as ever, up to her oxters: working on a handful of TV projects including the mystery drama Harry White, which is currently being lmed in Dublin and stars Jane Seymour as a retired academic who dabbles as a detective. “is is the stu I like least,” she says with a laugh of the PR part of the job. Her latest stand-alone novel, A Perfect Lie, is a typically twisty tale about an Irish emigrant in New York whose policeman husband jumps to his death in front of her. “ey’re just ideas that pop into my head, but the real world too seeps into your consciousness,” she says. Unsurprisingly for someone with her academic background (she also wrote for An Phoblacht and worked as a political advisor to Sinn Féin), politics is woven into Jo Spain’s ction. “I grew up in a working-class area of Dublin (Belcamp) and I’m very socially conscious,” she says. “I wasn’t the toughest person growing up, although I did learn to toughen up a bit.
When I’m writing books, the politics is always with a small ‘p’. I don’t want to batter people over the head with my personal politics. But when people say to me that they have no interest in politics, I’m aghast, because politics is every aspect of your life. And if you’re not engaged, get engaged. Don’t just abdicate responsibility.”
From the beginning, reading was her escape. She devoured Enid Blyton, discovered her gran’s suitcase of books about lovers in Blitzed London under a bed, was given an adults ticket in the local library because she had worked her way through all the kids’ books. She rst read Lord of the Rings at 13 (she has re-read it nearly every year since) and even their use as school text books could not dampen her passion for Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights. “While other kids were out playing from morning ’til night, I had to be thrown out of the house because I would read books all the time,” she says. It was escapism, she sees that now, but something that would ultimately shape her life.
The day Jo Spain was told that her rst novel had been shortlisted for the Richard and Judy ‘Search for a Bestseller’ competition, is still vivid (she subsequently secured a three-book deal with Quercus). “I was on my way home from work on the bus. My husband had lost his job a few years earlier and so we were relying on my wage. Writing the book was for me a hope that maybe I might just be able to change my life. When that email came through, I had my headphones on and was listening to Kings of Leon. It was lashing rain and when I got home, my husband was waiting for me with an umbrella, saying ‘We can’t have the talent getting wet!’”
Since then, the proli c Spain has published nine more novels ( ve Inspector Tom Reynolds, four stand-alone titles), co-written (with Stuart Carolan) the RTÉ crime drama, Taken Down and (with David Logan) a number of episodes of Harry Wild, with Jane Seymour in the title role as Harriet Wild, a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, recently retired English professor who gets involved in her son’s police detective work. “I met Jane recently, which was overwhelming,” says Spain. “She was talking about all these Hollywood stars and I was thinking ‘Is this really happening to me?’”
It is and it’s no accident: Jo Spain, who writes up to 12 hours a day, is collaborating with David Logan on ve other TV projects and the novels just keep coming. “It’s crazy at the moment as I have multiple TV projects on the go,” she says. “Plus my new book is just out, my next book for 2022 is nished and a few weeks back, I pitched my book for 2023 to my editor. It’s never-ending.” Yet there’s nothing else that Jo Spain would rather do, nothing else that makes sense. “I can’t not write,” she says, someone for whom the clock has always been ticking, driven by that desire to not let time pass her by.