The opening chapter of my debut Breaking was scribbled on the back of my son’s home-school copy during the pandemic as I watched my kids playing on the beach. I imagined perversely the horror of something happening to them on my watch. I wanted to write the ultimate horror story: losing your child and being blamed for it. Now the story of Mirren Fitzpatrick, whose eight-year-old daughter vanishes from a Florida beach resort while she’s drinking in a nearby bar, is due to hit Irish shelves.
But what really compels authors, particularly Irish female crime writers, to tackle such nightmarish topics?
With 12 crime novels under her belt, author Arlene Hunt puts it down to the expectation surrounding women and motherhood. “Women are routinely viewed as maternal figures and child-bearing a ‘worthy’ ‘natural’ endeavour. If a woman baulks at this or rejects the status quo, society can be harsh.”
It’s finding something really dark and ultimately being able to find some light at the end of it all
Author of bestsellers Hide and Seek and All Her Fault, Andrea Mara agrees. “I spend about 50 per cent of my time beating myself up over my parenting. I spend the other 50 per cent of time worrying about things that might happen to my kids. So rather than going too far on self-flagellation, I channel the guilt and the worry into books, and play it out there. Always with a happy ending, of course.”
Holding motherhood up to women as some sort of holy grail isn’t new, of course, but it is relatable. Author and former journalist Claire Allan says it’s natural that we swerve to that when writing. “You can examine that from a safe distance through fiction. It’s finding something really dark and ultimately being able to find some light at the end of it all.”
Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin, who writes as Sam Blake, believes it could also be down to perspectives. “I think women understand emotion and fear, and how relationships can be complex and not always rosy. We bring that to the page in many guises, but the mother-child dynamic is one many of our readers relate to.”
But is using the lens of crime to examine these types of dynamics entertaining or empowering?
Patricia Gibney, who has two million sales under her belt, believes it’s a little of both. “Crimes in real life have always been scarier than anything I could write in my books. I grew up in that dark era in Ireland where secrets and lies predominated. Most of those secrets involved abuse and persecution of the most vulnerable in our society. In writing crime fiction there is comfort in the knowledge that there should be some sort of justice by the end of the book.”
Take Sinead Crowley’s latest dual timeline thriller, The Belladonna Maze, for example, which puts a unique spin on the sins of the past. Author Fiona Gartland also deals with this type of twisty deception in her novel Orchids and Lies. Louise Phillips, winner of the Irish Crime Novel of the Year, attributes our preoccupation with the macabre to a murky past: “We don’t have to look far back to recognise the dark cloak the church placed over women in society, feeding into the ideology of women as sinners rather than victims, arguably creating a more misogynistic society.
“If crime fiction acts as a mirror on society and its cultural norms, then, I guess, there are many reasons why my writing tends to explore darker issues, and why female voices are currently being heard loud and clear.”
Year on year, the crime fiction, mystery and thriller genre has consistently topped the bestseller charts. Interestingly, per capita, Irish female crime writers punch above their weight internationally. No longer confined to names such as Jo Spain, Jane Casey and Liz Nugent, it’s a case of the rising tide lifting all ships, Andrea Mara believes. “As more and more Irish women crime writers continue to do well, this has created a subgenre, sometimes called Emerald Noir, and this in turn creates a synergy that makes it easier for everyone to succeed.”
Andrea Carter, author of the Inishowen Mysteries, thinks this unprecedented Irish success in the genre is because of our unique ability to tell a story about what’s going on around us. “We are a nation of storytellers and we place a value on literature here. But to write crime well you need to understand fear. The latest Garda review shows that the majority of murders in Ireland last year had a domestic abuse motivation. When it comes to domestic and sexual violence, victims are predominantly female and perpetrators predominantly men, so there’s a reason why women here understand fear.”
What about the so-called divide between Irish writers and Irish crime writers? Queen of the twist, Catherine Ryan Howard, whose book Run Time raced up the charts in recent weeks, admits she’s sometimes observed an ‘us and them’ narrative. “We are lucky to have about as many literary festivals in this country as we do female crime writers, but so many of them exclude commercial fiction even though we have the stats to prove that that’s what the majority of people actually like to read - and so, therefore, they also exclude those readers.
“What really annoys me, though, is the people who dismiss our work as not being as important or ‘worthy’ without ever having read any of it. Crime fiction has always held a mirror up to society and, due to the pace of publishing, it often gets to do it long before our literary counterparts finish their first drafts. But then, it’s very, very difficult to sustain a living writing literary fiction alone; I feel very lucky that I get to do this job full-time.”
It’s fair to say that, blood-splattered or not, all writers share the vulnerability that comes with self-expression. Catherine Kirwan, Cork-based author of Cruel Deeds, started writing fiction in her 40s. “It was only then that I’d gained enough courage to manage the fear of exposure that is an inevitable part of the writing process. For me, the end result is worth it. It was like the answer to a prayer I didn’t remember saying.”
It’s no coincidence that Breaking first came to me during the height of the pandemic when times were eerily uncertain. A bereavement had also left me reflecting on the impact people have on shaping our lives. But mainly I found that when I couldn’t control what was going on in the world around me, I needed to create my own. Then, like all good crime writers, I decided to set it completely on fire.
Breaking by Amanda Cassidy is published by Canelo.
