When she was a child, Tana French (Vermont, United States, 51 years old) lived halfway around the world. The work of her father, an economist specialized in resource management in developing countries, led her to spend time in Iran or Malawi. “I went to many international schools. My father is American with Irish ancestors, my mother is half Russian half Italian, I grew up in many places, I was not from anywhere. When I finished school in Rome I felt like there was nowhere to go back to. I had no idea where home was, but I used to spend summers as a teenager in Ireland and that’s why I ended up there,” she explains. She came to Dublin to study acting at Trinity College, she threw herself into theater and, when she was 30, she began to write. Her mystery novels, in which she mixes black, gothic and thriller, have become bestsellers, earned praise from Stephen King, and topped the charts in Washington Post either time. They all have something in common: Ireland is another character. That place is now inseparable from her work. She now publishes The hunter, The second part of a trilogy with a Western feel starring Trey, a teenager, and Cal, a retired American police officer, with which French continues to explore the terror of everyday life.
Why did you start writing?
When I was six or seven years old I wanted to be a writer, but I discovered acting and it distracted me from writing for a while… In the theater, unless you are a big star, you usually have free time between plays. I decided that I wanted to work on an archaeological dig, the place was near a forest and I thought: what would happen if three children went to play there and only one came back, with no memories? And what would happen if he became a detective and a case of murder would take him back to that forest? I realized that if I wanted to know how the story was going to end I had to write it myself, I stopped acting to finish the book.
An archaeological excavation led her to writing and she is a self-confessed follower of Mary Renault. Are you considering writing a historical novel? In The hunter there is a search for gold…
Yes, it has some historical touches, because I am fascinated by archaeology, I wanted to discover Troy… But the real reason why I don’t write historical novels is because they involve a lot of research. And I’m lazy. I like to invent things, and when you are going to write a historical novel you have to immerse yourself deeply in that world, understand it. That’s why I love Mary Renault, she doesn’t write modern characters in old clothes, but rather characters who experience the world in a different way than we do today. And that is what differentiates a good historical novel.
What other authors have marked it?
Donna Tartt, Patricia Highsmith, Josephine Tey… They are all writers who do not cling to the conventions of the mystery genre. Mystery books used to have very strict rules and limits and I like authors who do not believe that these conventions imply an end point, but rather see them as the starting point and wonder how to bend them, twist them.
Why are women such good mystery writers?
Women read a lot of crime novels and a lot true crime, and I wonder if it has to do with the fact that they are socialized to believe that they are seen as potential victims and that it is their responsibility to escape being victims, to avoid predators. But also, in general, mystery is a very good genre for exploring a society. The moment you face a murder you are facing what a specific society believes is crucial, you see what its priorities are, its fears, its dark places.
Is that why this genre is living, in novels, audiovisual fictions and podcastssuch a good time?
Mystery novels have always had the function of providing certainty. When people read an Agatha Christie novel they knew that in the end everything would be resolved, everything would have an explanation, the murderer would no longer be a danger… Order would be restored. During the first Covid confinement I devoured those novels, everyone wanted to read those books to feel that one day the crisis was going to end. But now, at the same time, I see that we need another type of mystery novel, in which not all the answers are found, not everything is resolved and we cannot trust that justice will be done in the end… Because we all live in situations in which That does not happen, where the security or justice forces do not, in fact, offer justice, but instead cause more suffering or more chaos, or perhaps the bad guy escapes and continues with his life while the good guy suffers. We all have mysteries that are not solved.
They say that some of his books are “Irish Gothic.”
I think that today people want to play with the idea of mystery on more than one level. The real mystery lies not in who killed a person, but in exploring the limits of reality, a greater and more interesting mystery. I go back to Shirley Jackson or Stuart Turton, to those wonderful gothic mysteries that begin with a fact, but expand into a mystery about human nature.
Is the fact that all your novels are set in Ireland a rebellion against your nomadic childhood?
It has to be something like this… That whole movement made me very aware of the power of places, of how growing up and living in a place shapes your experiences. There was no WhatsApp, when you left a place your entire life there disappeared suddenly. I didn’t have any roots, so I had to choose a place to create them.
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