Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2010: The past haunts in
Tana French novels. That which was buried is brought to light and
wreaks hell--on no one moreso than Frank Mackey, beloved
undercover guru and burly hero first mentioned in French's second
book about the Undercover Squad, The Likeness. Faithful Place is
Frank's old neighborhood, the town he fled twenty-two years ago,
abandoning an abusive alcoholic her, harpy mother, and two
brothers and sisters who never made it out. They say going home
is never easy, but for Frank, investigating the cold case of the
just-discovered body of his teenage girlfriend, it is a tangled,
dangerous journey, fraught with mean motivations, black secrets,
and tenuous alliances. Because he is too close to the case, and
because the Place (including his family) harbors a deep-rooted
distrust of cops, Frank must undergo his investigation furtively,
using all the skills picked up from years of undercover work to
trace the killer and the events of the night that changed his
life. Faithful Place is Tana French's best book yet (readers
familiar with In the Woods and The Likeness will recognize this
as an incredible feat), a compelling and cutting mystery with the
hardscrabble, savage Mackey clan at its heart. --Daphne Durham
Sophie Hannah and Tana French: Author One-on-One Sophie Hannah
Sophie: Someone said to me recently that they found it strange
we openly say we like each other's work, when we should surely
regard each other as "the competition." I found this idea really
weird. As far as I'm concerned, the only competition any writer
ought to be interested in is the competition between good writing
and bad writing. So, while I get very cross and resentful when a
book that I think is terrible does well, I love it when books I
think are great do well--I feel that the right side, i.e. good
writing, is winning the competition, which I feel benefits me as
much as anyone else, because I want to live in a world where
brilliant books are valued. Also, if I think a book is better
than anything I could write, then I want it to do better than my
books in order to reflect that. I suppose what I'm saying is that
I want there to be a meritocracy of literature. Would you agree
or disagree?
Tana: I'd definitely love a meritocracy of literature--both for
reasons of principle (same as you, I get jumping-up-and-down
outraged if I see a good book sidelined in favor of what I
consider a crap one) and for very practical reasons. It sort of
ties in with why I've never seen you as "the competition." I love
what you write. I think it's good. If someone picks up one of
your books and reads it and likes it, I think it'll whet their
appetite for good books--and, specifically, for good
psychological crime. That makes them more likely, not less, to go
looking for more and wind up reading something of mine.
Sophie, is there anything you wouldn’t write about for ethical
reasons? I think mystery’s one of the most moral genres--it’s all
about exploring right and wrong, finding truth, achieving
justice, how these things are never black and white. We spend a
lot of our time thinking about the more dangerous far reaches of
morality and immorality. Any ethical lines you wouldn’t cross as
a writer?
Sophie: There are no subjects that I think writers shouldn't
write about--anything is a valid subject for fiction, and it's
possible to handle any subject sensitively or insensitively. I
think the ethics are in the way a writer treats a subject, not
inherent in the subject itself. Having said that, there are
things I don't think I could write about because I find them too
horrible--the main one that springs to mind is state-sanctioned
execution. If a film or book contains legal execution, I can't
watch/read it. I find it too upsetting. The other subject I find
too upsetting is al illness, especially when the terminally
ill person is the loved one of the narrator--so, I guess since I
wouldn't read about those things, I wouldn't write about them
either! How about you, is there anything you wouldn't write
about?
Tana: The one huge ethical issue, for me, is making sure that I
give murder and murder victims the weight they deserve. I don't
ever want to write something where the victim is simply a prop
that's necessary in order for the story to get under way. Murder,
taking another human being's life, is so earth-shatteringly huge:
it doesn't just take one life, it affects everyone who comes into
contact with it--families, friends, detectives working on the
case, people who knew the killer.... I feel like using something
so immense as a throwaway plot point would be unethical and
cheap. I've got a responsibility to show that immensity, as far
as possible.
Tana French I can't see myself ever writing about child abuse,
but that's partly because it became so common in mystery books
for a while there--either child abuse was the big secret that was
revealed at the end, or else it was the killer's reason/excuse
for murder. It got cheap. Apart from that, though, I'm not sure I
can see myself avoiding a subject (not permanently, anyway)
simply because it wrecks my head too badly. One of the reasons I
write crime is in a attempt to understand things that I simply
can't get my head around--how one human being can kill another,
or deliberately damage another (like the sociopath in one of the
books). So I tend to come back to the things that horrify me
most, trying to understand them by writing about them.
People ask me a lot where I get the ideas for my plots, but
someone recently asked me for the first time where I get the
ideas for my characters. I thought that was a very cool question,
so I’m passing it on. Where do yours come from?
Sophie: I agree with you absolutely about giving the crime the
weight it deserves. Which is why I write books that some readers
find upsetting. People should be upset about crime! The good
thing about crime fiction (usually!) is that it attempts to deal
with the worst things that can happen in a way that is
uplifting--either because justice is done in the end, or because
the light of understanding is shed upon the darkest corners of
the human psyche. Even if all you do is understand why a monster
behaves monstrously, it helps. I almost think understanding
something does more good than fighting against it.
To answer your question, my characters come from the plot idea,
always. I always start with an intriguing or mysterious
situation, and then I work out how that plot starting point could
develop. Usually, in order for it to develop as well as it can,
it requires a certain kind of character. For example, in my novel
The Dead Lie Down (published as The Other Half Lives in the UK),
the opening mystery is that a man appears to be confessing to the
murder of a woman who isn't dead. His girlfriend, to whom he
confesses, knows that this woman isn't dead--and she's the one
who keeps pursuing this until she finds out the truth. I needed
her, therefore, to be the sort of person who wouldn't say, "Hang
on a minute, you're a nutter, I'm off to find a sane boyfriend."
So I thought, "What sort of woman would stay with a man she
believed to be deluded?" And that was how the character of Ruth,
the heroine, came into being--I gave her a past trauma that
explained why she would cling to this man that loves her, even
though he's driving her crazy and talking apparent nonsense. So I
suppose what I'm saying is, plot comes first for me, and
character follows shortly afterwards. Which comes first for you?
Tana: I'm with you on understanding it--I don't think it's
possible to fight against evil unless you understand it or at
least work to understand it. Otherwise, you're shooting in the
dark. There's also the fact that I think the root of all real
evil is lack of empathy--the inability to believe at any deep
level that other people, people who are different from you, are
still real. If I don't accept that people who do evil are real,
if I see them as two-dimensional and don't at least accept the
possibility of empathizing (not sympathizing, obviously) with
their motivations and drives, then I take a step towards evil
myself.
Plot and character--I work the other way around: I start with
the character of the narrator and with a very basic premise, and
then I dive in and hope to God there's a plot in there somewhere.
With Faithful Place (my third book) I started out with the image
of a battered old suitcase I'd seen thrown away outside a
Georgian house that was being gutted--it made me start wondering
where it had been found, and what if someone had hidden it there
and meant to come back for it and never got the chance.... I had
that, and the character of Frank Mackey--he showed up in The
Likeness, as Cassie's undercover boss, the guy who'll do
absolutely anything, to himself or anyone else, to get his man. I
started thinking about the two things together--what if it was
Frank's first love who had hidden that suitcase, what if they had
been about to run away together, what if he always thought she
had dumped him, and what if the suitcase resurfaced...
Sophie: I read a really interesting book recently about human
evil. It's called People of the Lie, and it's by M. Scott Peck.
Its subtitle is "Towards an Understanding of Human Evil." It's a
superb book, and Peck's theory is that evil people are not
necessarily those who do great harm, but those who cannot face
the reality of their own faults, who have to lie to themselves
and pretend they are always good, always in the right--thus
making everyone wrong and worse. Peck believes that it's those
who constantly lie to themselves about their own undiluted
goodness, and sweep all the evidence of their moral flaws under
the carpet of their own consciousness, who are truly evil. He
sees the lying as a crucial part of the evil. So he would see
someone who says, "Yeah, so I killed her? So what?" as less evil
than the person who says, "I killed her because she's bad and I'm
good, and so it was right to kill her." A lot of "baddies" do
harm and don't care--which is obviously terrible, but Peck would
say the people who do harm and believe it's good are worse--so
people like Hitler, Saddam Hussein. Gordon Brown...just kidding!
Tana: Ooh. Interesting. The idea that evil isn't only in the
action itself, but in the distortion of the surrounding reality,
the destruction not just of people but of truth. ("We just sexed
up the dossier...") That definitely ties in with mystery writing,
where everything spins around the deep human impulse towards
truth--the whole arc of the books is the movement towards truth,
through various obstacles.
Sophie: Do you have a favorite of your books, and, if so, is
that the same one as the one you think is the best? I can never
decide which of mine I like best--I like them all in different
ways, and I think they're all best and worst in different ways!
Tana: I'll probably always have a soft spot for In the Woods,
simply because that was the first one and that was the one where,
in some ways, I was taking the biggest risk--I put so much time
and work and heart into it, I actually turned down acting work to
finish it (if you know any actors, you know that turning down
work is a HUGE deal, actors are the only people who always want
to be working more)--and it was all just on hope, without any
reason to think that this book would ever go anywhere except
under my bed. I can't be objective enough to have any clue which
one's the best, though. I don't think it helps that (maybe
because of the different narrators) they're all very different in
stuff like pace and tone. Apples and oranges. With the first two,
by the time I'd finished all the copy-edits and proof-reads etc,
I never wanted to see the bloody book again. That lasted till I
saw the advance copies and was so stunned by the fact that this
was a real book that I stopped hating the of it very fast!
With Faithful Place, though, I've finished the proof-reads,
haven't seen advance copies yet, and I still don't hate it. I'm
hoping this is a good sign. Are there stages in the process when
you like/hate yours?
Sophie: My favorite of yours would have to be In the Woods, but
I think the best one is Faithful Place. Which means I should like
it best, right? But there was one particular thing in In the
Woods that I loved--Rob and Cassie's relationship and the way he
ended up behaving. I've never come across such a good analysis in
any other book of the way commitment-phobic men behave! I love my
books when I have the idea, when I write the first hundred pages,
and then again when they're in book form with their nice covers
on! I hate them between page 100 and when they're
finished--because that's when I'm laboring over them, and
wondering whether I can make them fulfill the promise of the
initial idea--and the end isn't in yet, so I feel weary.
How important are titles to you? I can't start writing until I've
got the title--it's a central part of the inspiration. My
American titles are generally different, but I love them--I love
all my titles. I hate thriller titles that just sound generic,
like Dead Kill or something like that!
Tana: My favorite of yours is probably Hurting Distance because
I love the fact that it doesn't focus on a murder. When rape
comes up in mystery books, it's usually as an adjunct to the
"real" crime of murder, rather than being the crime itself. I
also think, without giving away too much, the angle on evil in
that one is different from anything I've ever seen explored
anywhere else. My favorite of your titles is A Room Swept White,
though. I'm truly awful at titles--Faithful Place is the only one
I came up with myself, I'm not even going to tell you what the
first two books were called when they were living on my computer.
I hate the generic wordplay-type titles too, but what I come up
with if I'm left to my own devices isn't much better.
Tana French is the bestselling author of In the Woods, which won
the Edgar, Barry, Macavity, and Anthony awards, and of The
Likeness. She grew up in Ireland, Italy, Malawi, and the United
States, and trained as an actor at Trinity College, Dublin. She
lives in Dublin with her husband and daughter.
Sophie Hannah is an award-winning poet and crime fiction writer
whose novels are international bestsellers.