Tag: Maggie Feeley

Writers Chat, Writers Read, Writing Life

Writers Chat 67: Maggie Feeley on “Just Killings”(Alice Fox Murder Mysteries Book 2) (Poolbeg Crimson, 2022)

Congratulations on the second book in the Alice Fox Murder Mysteries. We last chatted about the first book in the series, Murder in the Academy (Alice Fox Murder Mysteries Book 1) (Poolbeg, 2021) and it’s great to be back with Alice and Caro in a slightly changed Belfast setting.

SG: Let’s go back to your writing, now that you’re deep into a series of novels – or is it a trilogy? Tell us about character development from book to book, in particular, our heroine Alice. I feel she’s grown in insight and confidence in the second book, (or maybe I know her a bit more). Does this relate at all to your experience in writing Just Killings?

MF: You’re right Shauna. The third Alice Fox mystery Wrestling with Demons was published by Poolbeg in August 2023, so I’ve got as far as a trilogy for the moment. Alice and I, and the other characters that carry forward from the first book, are all developing together, I’d say. I can’t claim to fully understand how that growth in each character comes about but I am coming to know each of them in an instinctive way and to understand how they will react and behave in each new context. I don’t feel that I am manipulating them to suit the plot rather that the context comes first and then they become more and more fully themselves against that backdrop. In this case, confronted by the distinctive signature murder of two men of the cloth, the Murder Squad with the help of Alice Fox, begin to investigate why these particular victims might have been murdered.

I’m influenced by reader feedback to some extent and think now about the amount of explanation I include. I’ve learned that readers don’t always want to know a lot of the detail I might serve up and so I’m more inclined now to withhold some of what I know about the people in the books. People like to create their own version of characters and I need to leave space for that to happen. At the same time, I’m not a pushover and when someone says they don’t want to read about social justice issues then I think, you’d better read someone else’s books because for me absolutely everything is about some form of in/equality.

In Just Killings Alice has settled into life in Belfast. She has links in Dublin and her work with young people in West Belfast fills the space left by her work in the College. As the work with the EXIT youth group deepens so do the relationships she makes there and we learn incidentally through these lives about the past and present in Belfast with the special legacy issues that the Troubles have bequeathed to people there. Individuals, families and communities have been coloured in by their particular history with the war and Alice, as the outsider, allows us to observe the detail of that in the day-to-day present. For the same reason there will always be an all-island element to the books as although some people identify almost entirely with one jurisdiction, others are constantly balancing the awkward reality of belonging in both places.

SG: I love the notion that you are growing with and as your characters grow and develop! Just Killings, unlike Murder in the Academy is framed not so much by Alice Fox’s own story but by differing government and societal responses north and south of the border to the revelations of institutional abuse by priests in the Catholic Church, and the Murphy and Ferns reports. We open with a rather gruesome description of a murder – I felt like I was in the Netflix series Criminal Minds – which firmly connects these threads. From our last Writers Chat, I know you like the story to lead you, rather than have it plotted out. Did this opening scene come at the start of the drafting process and then lead on to the second murder or did you work out the details at a later stage? 

MF: I’m always surprised when people say they are taken aback by the way that I can produce such gruesome murder scenes that don’t match their understanding of me. In the first book I found the murder hard to create but it’s becoming easier with practice! I’m not sure what that means for the future…  In the case of Just Killings I actually began with the murder that is discovered in the church in Belfast and added what becomes the initial Wicklow scene some time afterwards when I began to incorporate the Ryan report findings into the story. The structure unfolds gradually as the plot develops and I move pieces around to suit that.

You are right that I always see the structural framework behind individual and community social practice. The connection between clerical abuse in parishes and institutional abuse in Irish industrial schools has always been clear to me. The abuse by clerics of women and girls, boys and vulnerable young men was widespread for much of the last century and fictionalising those events, or their consequences absorbed me. I am familiar both personally and academically with the minutiae of how the patriarchal church and state behaved when those abuses took place and how they responded as the subsequent inquiries proceeded. I remain unconvinced by their acts of contrition and incorporating that into a murder mystery allows for the personal impact of those criminal events to become imagined and elaborated.

SG: Thanks again for the great insight into your writing self, Maggie, how a certain type of writing might be difficult at first, but with practice becomes more manageable, or familiar. A key theme in this book, for me, was family and society’s definition and denial of it. I really enjoyed how various characters’ experiences of this were shown in parallel narratives. We see-sawed from Jed’s search for answers to his family’s hidden history to Alice and Caro’s open making of their own history. This threading of the individual/ communal as much as Alice Fox links all your books. Can you talk about these links?

MF: In the 1980s, feminist Barbara Demming published We Are All Part Of One Another and cemented for me the belief in our irrevocable interconnectedness. I see feminism as the antithesis of all things patriarchal and families in their diversity are another site of that struggle. The Irish church made use of the family structure and women’s role in it to support its own power and influence at the same time as it was covertly causing havoc in individual lives. Those individual hurts and harms that were perpetrated by members of the clergy against vulnerable people placed in their care were inexcusable. As were the behaviours against those who trusted the holy personna they projected and then betrayed. The survivors of these abuses became communities of the wronged whose damage extends across generations and who, with their allies, have struggled to get some kind of recognition of how the patriarchal church has offended against them. In Just Killings I take the liberty of hitting out against the hypocrisy of the church and imagining what would happen if the victim claimed some measure of personal justice. I do believe strongly that it is solidarity that can take down oppression and Alice and Hugo as well as the survivor communities north and south are the expression of this in Just Killings.

SG: Yes, this sense of solidarity is what Alice hones and fosters in both herself and those she works with. Just Killings not only takes place in Belfast but spans the island – from the second murder site, to discussions of institutions in the West of Ireland. While this is a work of fiction, it feels that many of the fictitious institutions are based on real places. Are you at liberty to discuss your research and reading, besides the influence of your other publications such as Learning Care Lessons, on the societal structure, class and disadvantage.  

MF: Just Killings is a form of historical fiction in that it is based on the reality shared with me by survivors of abuse. From 2002-2007 I carried out an ethnographic study in the community of survivors of abuses in Irish industrial schools. I was particularly interested in their memories of the learning of literacy in those institutions and how the absence of care impacted on the capacity to learn. It is not by accident that there is a literacy thread in all my books. I have been involved in adult literacy learning for most of my working life and am clear that literacy is a real barometer of in/equality in society. From my immersion in the survivor community I gathered stories and details of experiences that allowed me to write Learning Care Lessons: Literacy, love, care and solidarity. Having unmet literacy needs is directly linked to all forms of inequality and disadvantage. In my research, care was uncovered as a vital element in learning and it is ironic then that those taken from their families into the care of the state were deprived of the most minimal level of literacy learning.  Those who preserved even some small element of familial affection were much more likely to learn than those who didn’t. These small loves emerged as hugely significant and always strike me as an undervalued source of social sustenance.

Far beyond the impoverished educational elements of life in these institutions, people shared deeply personal memories of family circumstances, of the isolation a child experienced when deprived of the company of siblings, of physical neglects in terms of hunger and emotional trauma brought about by the constant fear of corporal punishment, humiliation, sexual grooming and repeated assault. Much of what is written in Just Killings is rooted in those and other recollections of adults who survived their time in the care of the state and have bravely shared their truth about what happened behind those closed doors.

What is totally shocking is that the fictional revenge sought in Just Killings is the only detail that isn’t informed by my first hand experience and research. For the most part, survivors were avid adult learners, solidary supporters of their fellow survivors and focussed on making the best life for themselves and their families. Causing hurt to others was not on their agenda.

SG: That is most shocking indeed, Maggie. Thank you for sharing these insights into your research and most caring work. This leads us to our final focus which is the title – Just Killings. Alice reflects on this

It was a very different role to be facilitating the detection and capture of someone, maybe himself a victim, who had decided to punish acts that had incurred little or no punishment inside the legal system. Did that reluctance within the system to bring these abusers to book make it okay for someone to take the law into their own hands? Should those who are wronged be expected to behave more morally than their leaders?

I like how you, and the story, leave the reader to also reflect, without providing answers. Can you talk a little about this, for example, were you tempted to expand on these questions or even answer them for the reader?

MF: Justice is a slippery concept and I’m struck by the way the people that tend to fall foul of the law are often those that the social structures have treated most unequally. Literacy levels are lower in prison than in outside society and the two-tier Irish education system is allowed to persist and perpetuate these inequalities. It often seems as if state systems are constructed to protect the powerful, even when they behave in a negligent and harmful manner and at the same time to find the least influential at fault for even minor misdemeanours. Childhood institutional abuse, state sanctioned mother and baby homes, Direct Provision for those seeking assylum and protection from torture and ill-treatment in their country of origin are examples of systems exposed as critically flawed yet where the damage experienced is slow to be acknowledged and reform comes far too late for many users. Those who are harmed in these structures past and present are not known for fighting back.

In Just Killings I was imagining what revenge might look like in the context of institutional and clerical abuses. I am not a believer in violence as a means of tackling injustice. War is an extreme example of how physical fighting does not resolve disputes and where justice is easily dropped from the agenda. Nevertheless in fiction and especially in crime fiction I think there is room to raise the hypothesis of a ‘just killing’ in order to bring the underlying contextual factors into question. I leave the questions unanswered because the important issue is always social inequality of some kind and reconfiguring that is the only action that can lead to just and lasting solutions.

SG: Well, I would love to see, instead of just killings, a just society! Lastly, Maggie, some fun questions:

  1. Coffee or Tea? I have always preferred coffee to tea but now a chronic bladder condition prevents me from having either unless all caffeine is removed which seems a bit pointless. My current favourite herbal tea is liquorice.
  2. Dogs or Cats? I admire the self-centreredness of cats however my wife Ann is allergic to both so my admiration has to be from afar.
  3. Most surprising reader reaction to your Alice Fox Murder Mysteries? After reading Murder in the Academy someone went on a weekend mission to Belfast and did an Alice Fox tour retracing all Alice’s movements. That surprised me quite a lot!
  4. I love that! What writer would you most like to have afternoon tea with? I’d like Claire Keegan to let me into her secret of writing short, rich and absorbing stories.
  5. What are you writing now? I’m having a break while moving house, incubating Alice Fox 4 and dabbling in some short story writing.
Photograph courtesy of Maggie Feeley, showing Maggie, seated in a garden with daisies behind her. She smiles with a blue-eyed gaze to the camera wearing a blue shirt.

Thank you to Maggie for her insightful answers, particularly about her writing processes, research and passion for social justice that lie behind many of her novels. I wish her much continued success and many more eager readers!

Writer Interview, Writers Chat

Writers Chat 47: Maggie Feeley on “Murder in the Academy” (Poolbeg: Dublin, 2021)

Photograph of the book Murder in the Academy (Alice Fox Murder Mysteries Book 1) by Maggie Feeley

Maggie, You’re very welcome to my WRITERS CHAT series. Congratulations on your debut novel, Murder in the Academy (Alice Fox Murder Mysteries Book 1) which was published last year by Poolbeg.

SG: Firstly, let’s start with your journey to writing. You worked in academia for years and, according to your acknowledgements, had been talking about writing a murder mystery with the themes of social justice for some time. How did you find the transition from academic to writer and how did you experience bringing your academic knowledge into fiction – which you do very well?

MF: Well, firstly thank you Shauna for giving me the chance to have this discussion. It’s interesting to think about the writing process and you’re right that I talked about writing Murder in the Academy, or MITA as it’s known in our house, for years before doing anything much about it. I had a title and a victim from the beginning and colleagues frequently asked me about my progress long before I started to write. The catalyst was the incongruous and often egocentric attitudes and behaviours I witnessed in some of the many educational institutions where I’ve worked. Much of it was too implausible to be believed even in a work of fiction. I joked to someone once that it was a testament to human restraint that murder didn’t happen more frequently in such circumstances and the idea of creating some therapeutic homicidal fiction was conceived.

I worked for severeal decades in the area of adult and community education and I came late to academia. As well as my own ethnographic research and teaching about educational inequalities, I had spent a lot of time ghost writing for other academics who had gathered data and hadn’t time or the impetus to write it up. It was sometimes a cash cow but also always about some aspect of social justice which is my passion. I liked all of that writing even when it was not my area of specialism and I gathered a lot of evidence about real social practice that I can draw on now in works of fiction. My writing head thinks about structure and argument almost automatically and so that imports usefully into crime writing. I have the discipline in terms of getting to the desk but once there, the experience is totally different now to my prior life. Where academic writing is tethered to data and the conventions of a particular discipline, I’ve found the freedom of fiction very liberating. A voice is emerging from the long shadows that makes me feel more alive and that is challenging and pleasureable at the same moment. I’m like a happy seagull that has found her thermal and is enjoying the destination-less trip.

My most troublesome ghost is a kind of academic compulsion. I’ve always been attentive to detail in academic work and shedding that is something I’m gradually learning. My academic duty to the voices of the researched and the entirity of their experience doesn’t transfer seamlessly to fiction which is more nuanced and leaves space for the reader to co-create. I cut 25,000 words from the first draft of MITA and I hope I am getting much better at letting go of surplus stuff.

SG: Hearing about the switching of writing registers, academic compulsion, and being true to life/the story is really interesting, Maggie, thank you for your honesty. The narrative, we could say, is framed by Alice Fox’s own story – she’s American, an ex-cop and current post-doc and, “If anything defined her, it was her low-key openness and composure, which she had worked very hard to develop.” Tell me about developing Alice’s character and the pivotal role she plays in the story (without plot spoilers!)

MF: A propos of nothing, Alice Fox is the name of my wife’s maternal grandmother so she has history. Using real names helps me get a hold of a character even though it is just a name and they get a totally fresh start from me. In MITA, Alice Fox brings the outsider’s eyes to the College, the staff, to Belfast and its community and culture. She is able to comment objectively and help create an awareness of individual and local idiosyncrasies. Because of her own life tragedy she has had to rethink her social standpoint. She has done a lot of work on herself  and has the quietness of someone used to thinking things through before she speaks. She has strong views on social justice that go beyond mere words and her community work with socially disadvantaged young people is where she puts her belief in equality and social change into action.

I like who Alice has become and I find that along the way I have had to defend her (to myself and others) and explain her way of being in the world. My first writing of her was fluent and without much conscious analysis. Then I had to go back and clarify her chosen reserved and seemingly peripheral social position. People expect a hero to take up more space than Alice does. She doesn’t seek the limelight or monopolise the foreground of the action. Rather she is a thoughtful and often unnoticed observer of those around her. She struggles between the work of detection and the academic and community practice she has chosen after leaving Lowell Police Department. By the second book she has found a compromise position between the two and can see that much academic research is its own form of detection. In MITA, she is a newcomer to Belfast and although she has great inner and physical strength she is not showy or brash. She is a critical thinker, gently and unobtrusively finding her way at her own unhurried pace. Like us all, she is still becoming.

SG: Oh I love that idea of borrowing a real name as a way of creating a new character. I enjoyed being with Alice, as you say, the critical thinking and gentle way of being. Yet, as the title suggests, there is a murder in the academy! Academic Helen Breen is murdered in the Department of Peace and Reconciliation in a fictionalised Belfast university, and a murder investigation begins. I found the pace and plot to be cleverly constructed. Can you talk about your writing process – do you plot and plan or did your characters and themes come first?

MF: My intention has always been to use crime fiction to air issues of social harm and their consequences for the victims and perpetrators of my fictional killings. Most of us don’t use murder as a way of sorting out wrongs that we experience so in a way the kind of murders I am describing are symbolic in that regard. At the same time, having lived in the north throughout the ‘Troubles’ I also know something about killing and how injustices of many kinds can spill over into lives being harmed and prematurely ended for reckless and dubious motives. Initially I found the MITA murder hard to commit to paper … I wrote a lot of explanatory pieces that built towards the actual killing and in the end I let go of all that and just let the characters speak for themselves. I got out of their way and assumed my secretarial role of recording their thoughts and actions.

I once heard a crime writer respond to a question about the extent to which she planned what she wrote by saying: ‘I write like a reader. I have no idea what is going to happen next.’ That gave me a great sense of relief and therafter I realised that my characters do a lot of the work amongst themselves and sort out the plot when it hits a bumpy place.

Apparently PD James planned meticulously and could have told you what chapter she would be writing months in advance. I’m more loosey goosey! I do settle the structure in my head at the outset and consciously think about keeping the pace interesting for the reader but I think I am primarily led by the themes and characters.

SG: I love the idea of the writer-as-secretary, recording thoughts and actions rather than directing them. MITA captures the dynamics of academia exceptionally well from the administrative staff to the power play between academics – with great humour. I especially loved Mairéad Walsh – Department Operations Manager  – the placement of her office as the hub of the Department and her eagle eyes and ears. Did you have fun with her part in the story?

MF: Mairéad Walsh is perhaps the character that is most true to someone I worked with a long time ago when I worked in a college in Belfast. She had many of those dramatic qualities that Mairéad displays and the wonderful knack of making fun of those who took themselves and their own importance far too seriously. In my experience of working in a whole range of educational establishments, it is invariably the administrator who keeps things running smoothly. She holds the pivotal role in terms of relationships with staff and students and is the primary custodian of information both professional and personal about the whole department. I had great fun with writing Mairéad … and now well over forty years since we worked together I am still friends with the woman she is based on! When she read MITA she remarked that Mairéad was a much more powerful character than she ever was, but that’s just her own modesty. She always was and still is sharp, entertaining and inspirational.

SG: Your answer is a real homage to write from what you know into what you don’t know! MITA immerses us in Belfast – geographically, socially, and, politically – creating an atmosphere of intrigue and mystery. We’re told that

“There was a time when spying and gathering anti-terrorism information was placed ahead of solving a crime, in terms of priority. Placed ahead of safeguarding life itself.”

Can you speak a little about your research and how Belfast serves as another character?  

MF: I lived in the north for nearly fifty years and while I live in Dublin now, Belfast is clearly the place etched most deeply into my psyche and it provided the best fit for MITA. I did think of Belfast as an ever-present background character as I was writing. It’s a complex, misunderstood and often demonised place that is struggling to reconcile its very traumatic history without any supportive process for dealing with those legacy issues. The word ‘Troubles’ doesn’t really do justice to the particular type of war that took place there for decades. It began with partition and in many ways, despite the ‘peace process’, as current news broadcasts continue to illustrate, is still unresolved. There is ample recorded evidence of state collusion, corruption and cover-ups in terms of intelligence gathering and killings alongside the armed struggle of all those groups that felt that democratic structures offered no place for their cause to be peacefully resolved. These elements did not sit easily beside each other and in my background reading I found many catalogues of daily atrocities over decades, long lists of those killed and reports of state sanctioned undercover activity in communities and sanctioned by those in high office. I didn’t want to write a political history but it’s not possible to situate a story in the north without this chequered past being a part of it in some way.

SG: I think that having Alice “introduce” us to Belfast really served to bring all those elements into the story without preaching or over-explanation. Finally, it strikes me that MITA portrays the many inequalities in our society, whether it is due to gender, nationality, religion, or sexuality. I thought you weaved these themes deftly into the story. Alice

“was constantly patrolling the borders between what was seen as breaking the law and the idea of social harm, much of which was totally accepted as the just desserts of those from poor and minority communities.”

These themes put me in mind of American writer Attica Locke’s novels. How important were these themes to you, and how important were they to the various narrative strands?   

MF: I firmly believe that much of the harm in society is caused by choices and policies made by the state that favour some social groups more than others. For example, the property and wealth of the privileged are safeguarded by the same state that neglects the education, health and housing of those who need that state’s support. The concept of the ‘brute luck’ into which we are born is very influential for me. Inevitably this ideological position creeps into everything that I do… including finding expression in the characters in the book. In a way I think that fiction is a better way of communicating these ideas than writing polemics or lecturing which only reaches a limited group of people. The important thing would be to have a light touch and not be overbearing and I hope I get that right.

 I haven’t read any Attica Locke but like the sound of them. I’ll order some right now. Thank you for the new reference and for this digital chat.

SG: You’re right about the power of literature – and perhaps the role of literature, and the arts in general, in our society. It can serve to mirror that which we do not want to see. I think you’ll enjoy starting Locke’s work with Black Water Rising.

Lastly, Maggie, some fun questions:

  • Who is your favourite character to write? I like the wit and wholesomeness in the person of Mairead Walsh and the opportunities for spilling venom in writing about Helen Breen. Both offer their own catharsis.
  • Music or silence when writing?  Mostly silence although noise doesn’t really disturb me. I can have music if there are no words.
  • Mountains or beach? I like both.
  • What are you reading now? On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. SG: I loved that book. Made me cry – several times.
  • What are you writing now? I’m just finished a first draft of Book 2 of the Alice Fox series – Just Killings – so I’m waiting to get the edits back. In the meantime Book 3 is simmering… mostly during the night while I’m asleep.

Well, Maggie, I wish you the best of luck with the edits and the simmering. I look forward to following Alice Fox’s challenges and learning more about her fight for justice and equality. Thank you again for your generous open answers!

Photograph of author Maggie Feeley. (Courtesy of Maggie Feeley)