![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/5253469_3_articleinline_The_20Boy_20Cover_20Art.jpg\" "\\"The")
The Boy, by Mark Gyves<\/p>\nMallow-based Mark Gyves recently launched his debut novel, The Boy, which had been brewing in his head for years.<\/p>\n
The 52-year-old aircraft maintenance engineer worked for Ryanair in the UK for years before returning to his birthplace with his dentist wife, Suzanne, for whom he works as an administrator.<\/p>\n
This father of 18-year-old twins, Ruby and Lily, says that he has always been making up stories, going back to his childhood. He was in bands and used to write songs but says they \u201cwere never any good\u201d.<\/p>\n
In 2016, Mark was travelling with work and had a lot of downtime.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just started writing this story that was in my head about a boy. When I got it written in 2023, it was more like a series of short stories than a novel.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t tell people I was writing (apart from his wife). I wouldn\u2019t say I did it in secret but I just wasn\u2019t talking about it. It wasn\u2019t something I thought would ever be something.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen, myself and my wife were on holiday. We got talking about the book and she asked to read it. She thought it was credible.<\/p>\n
\n \u201cSo I sat down and put it together properly over three or four months. By the time I got to the summer of 2023, it was in pretty good shape.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
While most debut novelists have tales of rejection slips piling up, Mark had it easy. But first of all, he had to decide the genre of the book.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe feedback I was getting was that my novel was quite literary and it also had a heavy crime theme. People would think \u2018this fellow thinks he\u2019s something else\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was afraid that some parts of it were a bit like purple prose. But that wasn\u2019t the feedback. What I was told was quite encouraging.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mark was lucky enough to get an agent fairly quickly. \u201cI found the most wonderful man. I had this fear that the chances of getting published were zero and that the publishing industry was gone into decline.<\/p>\n
The Boy, by Mark Gyves<\/p>\n
But Mark\u2019s agent, James Gill, said he loved the book.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe found the most wonderful publisher dealing specifically in crime fiction called No Exit Press. While some other publishers said the book sat between a couple of genres, that wasn\u2019t the case with No Exit.\u201d<\/p>\n
A small advance didn\u2019t disappoint Mark as he is not in the writing business for money. \u201cI knew there was no such thing as a rich author apart from a few,\u201d he says,<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t have an expectation that I was going to get rich from this thing. It was just something that was in me for so long and it needed to come out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Writers\u2019 blurbs on the covers of books can be deceptively enthusiastic. Not all writers asked to supply a line or two actually have the time to read the book. But acclaimed Irish crime author, John Connolly, wrote that Mark\u2019s book is \u201ca very fine debut novel from a future star of Irish crime writing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI went to a book signing that John Connolly was doing,\u201d explains Mark. \u201cI walked up to him and introduced myself. He remembered my name and said he was going to read my book.<\/p>\n
\u201cAbout a month later, he wrote to the publisher saying he loved the book.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of luck involved and putting yourself out there as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n The Boy didn\u2019t start out as a crime novel. \u201cIt\u2019s about grief,\u201d explains Mark. \u201cA boy loses his brother and his mother in quick succession. The boy and his best friend support each other.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a lovely friendship. But when I was writing about the boy\u2019s brother, he had been a criminal. I juxtaposed the boy\u2019s life and his brother\u2019s life, imagining the boy getting sucked into the world created by the brother.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen, all of a sudden, the book took on a life of its own. It gets tense quite quickly. I think it\u2019s good. It became a crime novel.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is also a wealthy landlord who hides a \u2018family\u2019 of abducted boys and grotesque secrets.<\/p>\n
The novel is mainly set in Cork city.<\/p>\n
\u201cOriginally, it was set in Mallow but when the crime element came into the story, I thought it wasn\u2019t believable there,\u201d says Mark.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the story, people get shot on the back of a motorbike. I decided to set it in Blackpool.<\/p>\n
\n \u201cIt\u2019s funny because reflecting on it now, Blackpool, while on the north side, is almost like the centre of Cork with hills on either side of it. It\u2019s kind of central to the city.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
Mark\u2019s appetite for books was whetted by his mother\u2019s Maeve Binchy books such as Light A Penny Candle and The Lilac Bus.\n <\/p>\n
\u201cThey were the first books I read,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201c Obviously, Maeve Binchy didn\u2019t inspire me to write about organised crime in Cork.<\/p>\n
\u201cI went on to read Roddy Doyle and knew I wanted to express myself like him in that raw vernacular style of writing.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy the time I was in my twenties, I had read a lot such as people like Cormac McCarthy, Bret Easton Ellis and James McElroy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Is Mark reflecting reality when he writes about crime in Cork?<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there\u2019s crime everywhere in Ireland,\u201d he replies.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy book is set in the 1990s, a period of intense change. You couldn\u2019t get divorced, for a time in the 1990s, it was a crime to be gay. There were Magdalene Laundries. All that phased out.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou had the dot.com bubble. There was crime with people like Gerry Hutch coming on the scene. Veronica Guerin was shot dead. There was the formation of the Criminal Assets Bureau.\u201d<\/p>\n
All grist to the mill for this writer who has tapped into the murkier side of Cork city for his fiction. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mallow-based Mark Gyves recently launched his debut novel, The Boy, which had been brewing in his head for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":650441,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[288,14641,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-650440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-books","tag-cork-city","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650440","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=650440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/650441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=650440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=650440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}