Tana French: Cal is an American detective who’s taken early retirement. Tana talked to me about this change of territory from her home in Dublin beginning with a short summary of The Searcher. It’s a familiar trope but Tana French molds it into a story of her own. In her latest book another stand-alone The Searcher, Tana moves to new territory entirely: she takes the framework of the American western and shifts it to a remote rural area of Ireland….where an ex Chicago cop Cal Hooper settles by himself in a ramshackle cottage ready to begin a new life. Not surprisingly-the detectives and their actions look different from this perspective.manipulative and bullying rather than truth-seekers. Here, the narrator is a character who is the victim of one crime and a suspect in another. Then in her seventh book-a stand-alone The Witch Elm, Tana French turned this model upside down. These first-person narrations by detectives whose issues color their observations give readers a deeply personal and extremely partial perspective of colleagues, suspects and the crimes. Her first six books center on the Dublin Murder Squad-but defying convention-each book is narrated by a different member of the squad-so a supporting player in Book 1 might be the narrator of book 4. She’s reigns over Irish crime fiction-but she pushes the genre with descriptive language in novels that are character-driven and densely atmospheric.
Jo Reed: People who think the term ‘Genre Writer” is reductive often use Tana French as an example. A great play or symphony or painting or book gives us a glimpse into what it’s like to experience the world through someone else’s eyes and that’s a huge transformative vitally important thing that feeds into empathy and all the things that make us human and I think that cuts to the heart of what we do, both as writers and as readers It has different realities, equally valid from different points of view and to me, this kind of cuts to the heart of what the arts are for. Tana French: There isn’t one objective truth about what the murder squad is like or what the friendship between Rob and Cassie is like.