{"id":369525,"date":"2026-03-28T08:53:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-28T08:53:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/369525\/"},"modified":"2026-03-28T08:53:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-28T08:53:07","slug":"in-ireland-things-are-coded-you-dont-necessarily-have-the-code-when-you-arrive-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/369525\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018In Ireland, things are coded. You don\u2019t necessarily have the code when you arrive\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tana French might be best known and lauded as a writer<\/a> of mysteries, but beyond the basic genre requirements \u2013 dead bodies, troubled detectives, institutionalised corruption \u2013 her books also operate as instruments of social critique. More lately, with the Cal Hooper trilogy, based on the premise of a Chicago detective who takes early retirement and moves to the small Irish<\/a> townland of Ardnakelty, she has relocated the western to the west of Ireland. <\/p>\n

French was born in Vermont but grew up in constant transit \u2013 her father was an economist working in developing-world resource management \u2013 before she settled in Dublin in 1990 to study theatre and film at Trinity College. The precariousness of the acting profession, plus a preoccupation with character and motivation as drivers of story, resulted in her first book, In the Woods<\/a>, a vanguard title in the millennial Irish crime boom. It went on to sell a million copies and scoop a hatful of mystery-novel awards, including the much-coveted Edgar. <\/p>\n

Further books won high-profile supporters such as Stephen King<\/a> and Gillian Flynn. The BBC and RT\u00c9 adapted her early novels into a TV series, The Dublin Murders<\/a>, in 2019. Now the Cal Hooper books \u2013 The Searcher, The Hunter and The Keeper \u2013 allow her to dissect Irish culture from an interloper\u2019s perspective. <\/p>\n

\u201cOne of those western tropes is the stranger who blows into town,\u201d she says. \u201cHe arrives in the saloon, he\u2019s probably got a past of his own; he\u2019s going to be this catalyst. So whether he\u2019s going to get rid of the evil sheriff and set a new regime in place, or whether he\u2019s going to kill the girl\u2019s lover and wreck everything, he\u2019s going to be a force of change. I like that idea of the stranger in town. It\u2019s a perspective I\u2019m interested in because I\u2019m what they call a third-culture kid, which means I\u2019m not really from anywhere. I grew up all over the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Was she the perpetual new kid in class, like an army brat?<\/p>\n

\u201cAn international brat, a UN brat. Except within the international schools everyone\u2019s either the new kid in class or else leaving. So I\u2019m not an insider anywhere. Every place you go to, you\u2019re new, and you have to come to it with an outsider\u2019s eye.\u201d<\/p>\n

So how much of Cal Hooper\u2019s culture shock did she experience when she settled in Ireland?<\/p>\n

\u201cI had a couple of advantages over Cal. One was that we\u2019d been coming back here for summers for ages, so I was a little bit tuned in. I\u2019m used to going into places and observing very sharply. You have to be on the lookout: how far apart do people stand when they talk, how loud do they talk, how do you slag, and how hard do you slag them? Is it a sign of affection? Is it a hierarchical establisher? What do all these little things mean?<\/p>\n

\u201cWhereas Cal comes from a monoculture. He\u2019s used to certain things in the default, so it\u2019s more of a shock to him to go, \u2018Wait, it doesn\u2019t work like that here.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cI was coming from Rome before Ireland, so if anyone [in Rome] is annoyed, if anyone has something to say, they say it loud, they say it with a lot of emotion, and then it\u2019s done. Arguments are thunderstorms: quick, loud, gone. Whereas here it\u2019s so very different. Things are oblique. They\u2019re coded, and you don\u2019t necessarily have the code when you come in. You have to get used to the idea that what someone\u2019s saying might actually be a signpost towards what they mean. It might not be what they mean. It\u2019s just something that\u2019s pointing you in that vague direction. So that was a big cultural switch.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also hard to be anonymous in a small Irish town. Sooner or later, in order to become part of a community, you must declare allegiances. In The Keeper, Cal Hooper is forced to take a stand against the figure of Tommy Moynihan, the big man in the parish, the jobs conjuror. In western terms he\u2019s the tyrannical sheriff or the mining magnate, Little Bill in Unforgiven or George Hearst in Deadwood.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing part of a community is going to demand sacrifices,\u201d French says, \u201cbut it offers amazing things as well. There\u2019s also a redefinition of yourself. Cal came here as an ex-detective who was not enamoured about what being a detective meant. He really didn\u2019t like what he had realised about the job; he was trying to shed it, take it off. <\/p>\n

\u201cBut he came from a system where law and justice were very clearly defined, as they are in detective novels and the mystery genre: what constitutes law and what constitutes justice are clearly set out in black and white. Whereas in westerns, law and justice are very home-made and raggedy around the edges; they\u2019re sort of winging it. Justice is whatever we can cobble together from who we\u2019ve got at the moment, as the situation demands. And Cal is having to redefine himself as someone who\u2019s much more willing to go with the rough-and-ready, in-the-moment idea of what\u2019s right and wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even the antagonist Tommy Moynihan is a complicated figure. He\u2019s brought life to a marginalised rural community that exists beyond the purview of media and power centres. But he\u2019s also vindictive and manipulative, a microcosm of the global imperialist bully, keeping dissenting locals in line with threats of planning-authority machinations or tip-offs to the taxman.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve got to keep your power established, because if you let people away with stuff, then your authority crumbles. The power of the big man in the small town is based on consensus, because you\u2019re not elected, you don\u2019t have an official post. It\u2019s based purely on the community\u2019s opinions that you are the big guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hence French\u2019s books operating as works of social realism as much as suspense novels. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Author Tana French: \u2018I like the feeling that I\u2019m just getting started\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always thought of the crime genre as a nice starting point to do stuff. I know we still have people going, \u2018Mystery is very limited and it doesn\u2019t have room for good writing or characterisation or a theme,\u2019 but I think it\u2019s been a long time since most people thought that way. Because you\u2019ve got this framework, right? It\u2019s neatly delineated. A kills B, C finds out whodunnit. And you\u2019ve also got an instant window into whatever society you\u2019re writing about, because murder happens everywhere. <\/p>\n

\u201cPeople get killed in every time and place, but not for the same reasons. So if you have somebody murdered over a piece of land, or if you have somebody murdered over jealousy in a relationship, that tells you something about that society: it\u2019s not happening in some nomadic tribe; it\u2019s happening in a society that considers land to be so vital, so highly charged, emotionally and practically, that it is a top priority; it\u2019s worth killing for.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Chinatown<\/a> and The Field<\/a> are essentially about the same subjects, albeit worlds apart: competition over resources, water rights, land.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know The Field is sometimes seen as not being in the great canon of Irish literature, but I think it really is, because it digs deep into what murder tells us about the dark places, the tangles of the society, the priorities, the values.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0From the archive: John B Keane, gifted writer who was not afraid to highlight the raw side of rural lifeOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

French spoke in an interview some years ago about a sort of national schizophrenia that prevailed during the boom years. Refusal to buy into the property bubble was regarded by the political elites as a kind of treason. Are we a nation of magical realists?<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s the Irish specifically. I think it\u2019s possible that we may be slightly more vulnerable because of being a small country, so during the boom I think it was easier for it to become, \u2018Rising house prices are a good thing. They will keep on rising forever. Of course you can spend 10 times your income on a drawing on a piece of paper in an estate that doesn\u2019t exist yet. As long as everybody keeps believing, it\u2019ll be great forever, and we\u2019ll just keep going.\u2019 <\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know anybody else who gets you quite as intimately inside the character\u2019s mind. With Donna Tartt, you come away feeling like you know these people better than your best friend.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I think in a small country it\u2019s easier to unify narrative to an extent where any competing voice can just be squashed down.\u201d <\/p>\n

She cites the former taoiseach Bertie Ahern wondering how anyone engaged in moaning about the economy wouldn\u2019t just kill themselves. \u201cIt\u2019s easier to do that in a country where everyone knows the same figures and listens to the same stations. But I think in general people are quite susceptible to that idea of magical thinking. If we all agree on the thing, it becomes real.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so to a different kind of suspension-of-disbelief: what were French\u2019s reading habits as a child?<\/p>\n

\u201cI loved time-travel books, anything where somebody had a hidden door or hidden staircases. I like settings and stories where there are about five layers going on underneath the one you see. They\u2019re all fully fleshed-out worlds, but you have to find the access points, the idea that there\u2019s a world under whatever world you\u2019re seeing, through some liminal space, if you can just get there. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt goes well with the mystery genre, I suppose, the whole premise that at least one character here has been experiencing this world in a very different way from everybody else, to lead them to the point where they kill somebody.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first book that I fell in love with that\u2019s still on my top-10 list was Watership Down, by Richard Adams. I was six or seven. I\u2019ve read it maybe a dozen times since, and there\u2019s always some new strand that I didn\u2019t recognise before. And [Donna Tartt\u2019s] The Secret History is up there as a genre redefiner. <\/p>\n

\u201cTalk about breaking the rules: she tells you on the first page who killed him, and yet it is this gripping mystery, and it\u2019s also a literary novel, and nobody can deny that it\u2019s all of those things. She\u2019s refusing to be confined by what she\u2019s been told. I don\u2019t know anybody else who gets you quite as intimately inside the character\u2019s mind. With Donna Tartt, you come away feeling like you know these people better than your best friend.\u201d<\/p>\n

The plot of The Keeper hinges on the murder of a local girl, Rachel Holohan. The device of the beautiful dead girl and the obsessive detective recurs through generations of noir stories, from Otto Preminger\u2019s Laura to Ellroy\u2019s The Black Dahlia, from Twin Peaks to True Detective: the impact of the murder of an innocent on an entire community.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was thinking more in terms of human sacrifice. We\u2019ve found bog bodies that point to that happening for thousands of years. And the tradition is not gone. If you look at the Catholic Church, the number of girls who were sacrificed to the gods and sentenced to life, the laundries or punished in various horrifying ways\u2026 <\/p>\n

\u201cAnd now we make human sacrifices to whatever billionaire or corporation comes along. There\u2019s so much going on here with data centres; we have to put up with the electricity demands, the water demands. We\u2019re the ones paying the fines for increased emissions. We as individuals are the ones who need to suck it up for the corporate gods. The whole Grok scandal, pumping out illegal AI images.<\/p>\n

\u201cGrok is the one creating and distributing illegal images, but there\u2019s been no hint at any point that anything will be done\u201d about that. <\/p>\n

French is unimpressed by the way the Government is handling the issue.<\/p>\n

\u201cAgain, it\u2019s the individual, it\u2019s the people who are being victimised that were sacrificed to the big corporation to save us.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0\u2018Concerns remain\u2019 around Grok despite X\u2019s assurances, says MinisterOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Which is as about as chilling as any murder ballad. I conclude our meeting by asking French how she maintains creative health over a 20-year career, playing the publishing game but avoiding burnout.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m in one of the luckiest positions in the world. I get to do something I love and get paid for it. I think it\u2019s much easier to stay sane that way than it would be if you were fighting a day job that you hated and then trying to cram in the creative writing after the kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet there\u2019s no guarantee that a novel will show up in the next two years and behave itself sufficiently to the point where you can execute it to your standards of pride and professionalism, on a deadline.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the leap of faith, isn\u2019t it? The courage it takes to go, \u2018I\u2019m just going to dive in.\u2019 I know some writers do it the other way around. They\u2019ve got it all plotted out, they\u2019ve got a structure, they\u2019ve got the full outline before they ever put it down. And I envy them, because they do have the luxury of knowing that there is in fact a book in there. But I can\u2019t work that way. I\u2019m not going to know the characters well enough to know who would do what until I\u2019ve been writing them for a while. So I just have to jump in there figure and out who these people are.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Keeper is published by Viking on Thursday, April 2nd<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tana French might be best known and lauded as a writer of mysteries, but beyond the basic genre…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369526,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[615,93,61,60,21637,15342,115],"class_list":{"0":"post-369525","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-dublin","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-stephen-king","13":"tag-trinity-college-dublin-tcd","14":"tag-united-states"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369525\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}