Country noir in County Galway
TANA FRENCH’S substantial reputation among crime fiction aficionados is well deserved. Her novels, most notably the sixnovel Dublin Murder series, are usually knotty, characterdriven mysteries suffused with rich writing that is as far from the hard-boiled tradition of crime writing as Sydney is from Stockholm.
The Searcher, French’s second standalone affair after 2018’s strangely formal Wych Elm, is another departure from the pacy Dublin Murder series.
Cal Hooper has bought a rundown house in the west of Ireland. He’s divorced, retired from the Chicago police and disconnected from his daughter. He needs a fresh direction and rural Galway ticks all the boxes. His neighbours are friendly, if a little bemused, at the arrival of this burly American ex-cop and he’s settled into the renovation process when 13-year-old Trey shows up asking for help in finding his missing brother.
French’s reference to John Ford’s classic western The Searcher is not coincidental, with Cal as the John Wayne character searching not for his niece but for Trey’s brother. But there’s a much stronger undertone of Daniel Woodrell, the Arkansan who was writing about the fractured families and broken communities of the Ozarks two decades before the TV series. French (left) writes well about the problems facing rural Ireland but although her previously lush, soupy prose has been tautened and spiced, and is now as pungent as damp wood smoke, she still doesn’t quite nail Woodrell’s stark brand of country noir. And unlike the snappy Woodrell, French is not stingy with the set-up. The Searcher is more than 200 pages in before we have a savage whip-crack of violence and the narrative starts to trundle properly down the tracks. But once The Searcher is rolling, you’ll not want to look away.