Tag: Thriller

Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read

Writers Chat 46: Amy Cronin on “Blinding Lies” (Poolbeg: Dublin, 2022)

Cover of Blinding Lies by Amy Cronin showing a woman in a darkened room looking through blinds on a window

Amy, You are very welcome to my WRITERS CHAT series. Congratulations on your debut novel, Blinding Lies (Poolbeg, 2022) which is a cracking read.

Let’s start with your journey to writing. It was something you always wanted to do but life happened – as it does – and it’s now that you’ve thrown yourself into the world of words. So why now? And why this genre?

AC: This genre is the one I read the most; crime and psychological thrillers are my go-to books. The escapism on offer, and the need to solve the mystery, is very appealing. When I was younger I loved mystery stories; the Nancy Drew series was a firm favourite. This has continued into adulthood, and as this is the type of book I love to read, it’s what I was drawn to write.

Why now? I think it had a lot to do with turning 40 during lockdown and the general sense of unease the pandemic brought, the feeling that life is for living, and if I truly want to give writing a shot, then I have to dedicate myself to finishing something and put myself out there. My favourite subject in school was English, but I didn’t study it in college. I focused on business, marketing and management, but I never stopped tinkering around with words. I’ve written stories my whole life, and during the pandemic I focused like I never have before on finishing my first book. It was cathartic, a great escape from the daily coverage on TV and radio. Writing Blinding Lies was addictive, something I looked forward to everyday. It finally felt like the timing was right.

SG: It’s great to hear that you continued with your passion – and the way you describe your writing process it sounds like it really was the right book and the right time. And how fantastic that as a writer you now get to give your readers the escapism that you so much enjoy.

There are several aspects to Blinding Lies that stood out for me. The first is the protagonist, Anna Clarke. She’s the underdog, working in the administrative section of the Garda Station and yet manages – perhaps because of her mathematical background – to see patterns that lead to complex crimes being solved. Tell me about the origins of Anna.

AC: I wrote a chapter featuring Anna many, many years ago. I had read so many books where the protagonist is a seasoned man, capable and experienced, and he invariably saves the day. I really wanted to read a similar book featuring a woman who could do the same. It wasn’t until I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that I found a character who felt believable in that role. The only problem I had with Lisbeth Salander was that I couldn’t relate to her. I adore her character still, in the books and the movies, but she felt very far removed from anything I could connect with.

In creating Anna I wanted her to be really ordinary, like myself and most people I know. I wanted readers to be able to relate to her. I found a lot of resources online, writing.ie, inkwellwriters.ie, and had done some writing courses, so I knew my heroine needed to reach readers in a way that made them root for her. As I wrote, I found I was really rooting for her too!

When Anna Clarke was 16 her parents disappeared. Up until that point, she was living what could be considered a very normal life. After that, she and her older brother live with the continuing mystery, never moving closer to solving what happened. As a child Anna’s father taught them self-defence games and encouraged them into his passion, Tae-kwon Do. After his disappearance, focusing on this gave Anna a lifeline out of depression and worry, and as the book opens, she’s a black-belt, continuing her training, and teaching self-defence to young children. She’s drawn to logic, to numbers, studying mathematics and statistics in college, working for the Gardaí to compile statistical reports. Numbers offer the comfort of certainty, which appeals to her as a balm to the enduring uncertainty of what happened to her parents. Anna is a strong woman, yet vulnerable, leaning on her brother often, yet resenting his interfering ‘father-figure’ role. She’s flawed, not always making the right decisions, but her moral compass is set straight, and it’s her determination to help her friend Kate that propels the plot in Blinding Lies.

SG: And again, the idea of helping a childhood friend is something that we can all relate to. The themes of self-defence is key to both the narrative and also two of the main characters. Anna teaches and practices Taekwondo-Do and another interesting female character, Kate Crowley, is a kick-boxing champion. Was this a theme that interests you or did it come to you as you developed the characters?

AC: It was suggested to me by an early reader, when the book was in the first-draft stage, that Anna be a kick-boxer, to add plausibility to scenes where she’s under threat. By that point I had already decided she was studying and teaching Tae-Kwon Do, mainly because I did so myself and know how beneficial it is in general.

The kick-boxing idea grew though, and I used it as a point to confuse Anna and the reader, to input doubt over the character of Kate – I wanted her to be someone we aren’t sure is guilty or innocent. Anna is certain her childhood best friend is innocent of murder. But she learns that in the years they lost touch Kate learned kick-boxing to a high level, and with her own knowledge of self-defence, Anna then begins to doubt Kate – if she was capable of defending herself so skilfully, why shoot a man dead?

I studied Tae-Kwon Do when I was young, although not for as long as I would have liked! It has always appealed to me, and I planned it as a facet of Anna’s character to be the crutch she would lean on to recover from the disappearance of her parents. It offered an anchor, something to focus on. I know that the skills taught in self-defence go beyond the manoeuvres – I wanted Anna to have a calm mind, to have self-control when it mattered most. I know Tae-Kwon Do can cultivate this level of discipline, so it was always going to part of her story. The fact that it was her father’s passion was something I found very emotional to write. Anna trains as much to feel close to him as anything else.

SG: Yes, the link to her father came through very strongly and I thought that link between the body and mind in Tae-Kwon Do was really interesting and key to Anna’s character. At the heart of the Gallagher-Crowley dynamic is David’s abuse and coercive control of his wife, and his father’s control of his empire. Can you talk a little about this theme of control?

AC: Control, or attempting to restore it, is certainly a theme through Blinding Lies. Anna Clarke is the protagonist. In her training, in her job, in everything she does, she is measured, to counterbalance how out-of-control her life went when she was 16. In that respect, she and Tom Gallagher, the main antagonist, are very similar. Both are seeking to control the world around them to a high level.

For Tom Gallagher, we learn that everything he has built up, his criminal business, his respect and status, was borne of control. While his son David was abusive, what Tom lamented most about that was his loss of control, which ultimately led detectives to the family, and ended up with David dead. David’s loss of control is rippling into Tom’s existence and he can’t stand it. Everything he does in Blinding Lies is about regaining the control he feels slipping away from him.

It’s interesting that control is such a strong theme throughout Blinding Lies, as it was written at a time when the world felt completely out of control to me. The world around me was shutting down because of a new virus as I wrote, and as the main characters fought for control in their world, I was coming to realise I had very little in mine! I write with a vague ‘start-middle-end’ outline, and I didn’t realise until the book was finished how much the characters rely on and seek to gain control. But as I said, writing Blinding Lies was cathartic during the early stages of the pandemic!

SG: Isn’t it really interesting how what’s going on for the author becomes distilled in their writing? Parallel to this theme is the idea of people having two sides, and also of fighting for a better life. I felt this was captured well in the characterisation of Tobias.

“Tobias…had fought his way to this position in life. It had come to him the hard way. There were bodies stacked up behind him, in his past, people he’d had to move out of his way. Sometimes, at night, he dreamt of their faces, how their skin had sagged, and their muscles had twitched in the final moments between life and death. At night, he felt vulnerable, freaked out by the dead. By day he was in charge again, a man not to be crossed, nor to be defied.”

So many of the characters know what they want and will go to great lengths to get it. Can you comment on this?

AC: Such characters are great propellers of plot; decisive, driven, charismatic. For me, this book was my attempt to finally immerse myself in writing and go after what I really wanted. I guess that’s reflected in the characters too. Regardless of what they want – be it revenge, the truth, closure and peace – the characters are determined to get it. Anyone with ambition, for whatever that might be, can relate to that.

Most of the characters in Blinding Lies are driven by love for their family, which is a very powerful force; Anna, for her parents and for her friend. Kate is driven by saving her sister and nieces; Tom Gallagher by love for his wife and son John, and by avenging his son David’s death. All things are a mix of light and darkness; in even the worst of characters, there is some redemption, and in the best of characters there are elements of shadow. Striving to rise above, being ambitious, are traits readers can understand, can get on board with. And they make memorable characters that turn the pages.

In the case of Tobias, he is a minor character but his actions have a big impact on the antagonist. Tobias does terrible things, and the “bodies stacked up behind him” allow the reader to gain a glimpse of his past. But there is an element of fear in him too – the people he killed freak him out at night, and in Blinding Lies, he cannot return to his employer empty handed, with his mission incomplete. I wasn’t trying to elicit sympathy for him, rather to show that like all people, his nature is multi-faceted.

SG: Yes, I think that’s why I found his character interesting -he’s more than what he seems. I also found that the workings of the various rankings in the Gardaí were well done – I especially loved the scene when Detective Sergeant William Ryan goes to one of the major crime scenes and “closed his eyes and inhaled, breathing the scene deep into his lungs. Anna’s voice played in his head as though he had recorded her testimony and was playing it back…He cut an unusual figure, standing in the middle of the room with his eyes closed and his arms by his sides, turning this way and that…” Can you talk about your research into investigative procedures and methods?

AC: The internet helped with this, as did absorbing information from the countless crime novels I have read. I also have a garda friend who happily answered questions, but I didn’t delve too deeply into detail. I tried hard to get the garda procedures right, but ultimately, Anna is a clerical officer, not a detective, and so I didn’t dwell too much on detailing procedures.

I love the character of William Ryan, but I really don’t know any detectives like him! He’s young, a little eccentric, a little off-putting to some colleagues, but ultimately very like Anna Clarke – his moral compass is set straight.

SG: It’s great to read a book set in a place that is familiar or that you know well. I loved how Cork was so real – street names, hotel names – and also fictionalised to a large extent, to fit the story. Tell me about that process of setting the scene – it felt like you’d researched the city in terms of traffic, weather, times it takes to get from place to place.

AC: I’ve lived in Cork all my life; well, except for some time spent living and working in the UK, when I was very homesick! I grew up in the countryside, then moved to the city to live for eight years, before moving back to the countryside again. Initially I was unsure about setting Blinding Lies in my home county, but as I wrote, I realised there was nowhere else it could be. It felt right to set the novel in familiar territory.

Some place names are real and some are fictional. The Garda station in Blinding Lies, for example, is called the Lee Street station. This doesn’t exist but is named after Cork’s River Lee. It felt right not to accurately name some places. But other places are steeped in memory for me – such as the fountain on the Grand Parade where Anna meets Myles, and it was lovely to include that.

SG: Finally, I found myself thinking about a question as I read Blinding Lies – how well can we ever know anyone, including our family? There’s a lot of intrigue, passion, and greed in the novel – it’s what drives many of the characters including the Gallaghers – and there’s Anna’s burning desire to find out why people do what they do, including disappear. Can you talk about this?

AC: This is certainly true; how well do we ever really know the people close to us? Often that’s not called into question until extreme events take place.

In Blinding Lies, Anna’s brother Alex is worried about reopening the search for their parents, because he was a lot older than Anna when they disappeared, and he remembers things that lead him to believe he didn’t really know who they were. This, of course, is unsettling for him. He’s an insomniac, constantly worried about keeping his sister safe, never able to relax. The questions that consume him are not just where their parents are, but who they were.

Of course, some people do know the inner nature of those close to them, and chose to turn away from that truth, as Mae Gallagher does for her husband, and as she did for her son David.

Anna is the opposite of that – she’s a deep thinker, and for ten years the need to understand her parents’ situation has burned inside her, and it has shaped how she looks at people and situations, I think. She should have walked away from Kate’s plight, but she needs to understand it, because she cannot understand the terrible events that shaped her life when she was 16.

Ultimately, for the characters, if they cannot understand the people around them and why events have taken place, the ground feels very shaky, and control is lost.

  • SG: I can’t leave our chat without mentioning the last line of the novel, “it was time to discover the truth”. Ae looking at a trilogy or a series?

AC: I’m very happy to say that Blinding Lies is the first book of a trilogy. I didn’t realise Anna’s story would span three books until I started to write. But it’s not just her story, it’s her parents’ and Tom Gallagher’s as well. I’ve always enjoyed reading a set of novels about the same character, and I hope readers will take Anna to their hearts and follow her journey.

SG: I have no doubt they will, Amy! And now for some fun questions:

  • Cork county or city? Cork county, because it’s home.
  • Mountains or sea? The sea, definitely.
  • Tea or Coffee? Coffee.
  • What are you reading now? Right now I’m reading The Widow by K.L. Slater.
  • What are you writing now? I’m currently finishing the third book in the trilogy.
Amy Cronin holding a copy of her debut novel Blinding Lies

Connect with Amy on Twitter: @AmyCroninAuthor

With thanks to Poolbeg and Peter O’Connell Media for the advance copy of Blinding Lies

Writers Chat

Writers Chat 16: Tanya Farrelly on “When Your Eyes Close” (Killer Reads/Harper Collins: London, 2018)

Tanya, You are very welcome to my WRITERS CHAT series. Congratulations on your second novel, When Your Eyes Close, which follows on from your short story collection When Black Dogs Sing (which won the Kate O’Brien Award in 2017) and The Girl Behind The Lens, another literary thriller published by Killer Reads. 

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Sam Blake, author of The Cathy Connolly Series has said that When Your Eyes Close is ‘A superbly twisty tale’ and that describes so well my reading experience of it. The first question has two parts:

It’s a fast-paced page-turner and I loved how you used multiple narrators. Can you talk a little about that, please? Did the story come to you through the characters – Nick, Michelle and Caitlin – or did you have the plot worked out and then decided to tell the story through the viewpoints of three characters?

Tell us about the title. It’s such a perfect title for the story and captures all the complex themes. Did it come before you finished the book or after?

Hi Shauna and thanks for inviting me to participate.

I knew from the beginning that the story would be told from three perspectives, the primary story being Nick’s. I was driving down the motorway one night on my way home when the concept came to me: a man is diagnosed with liver failure, he undergoes hypnosis in order to try to stop drinking, but while he is under hypnosis he is accidentally regressed to a previous life where he sees himself commit a terrible crime. I guess I had plenty to work with once I had that concept. I figured it would be interesting if Nick had died before he’d even reached middle age in his previous life, that way his daughter Caitlin would be just a little older than him in the present.

I’m not someone who plans and plots, I prefer the characters to take me on their journey, and the plot unfolds as a result of their decisions and actions. Caitlin’s story was more difficult to execute – I knew that her husband was missing, but for a long time I had no idea where he’d gone – then I came up with two options, hopefully I chose the right one! With regard to Michelle, I wanted her to play a very active role in the story, there would have been no point in giving her a voice if she’d simply been Nick’s girlfriend.

You’ve asked me about the title – titles are something I struggle with, I can write full stories with little difficulty and then I labour over titles, which sounds absurd! It was the marketing team who came up with “When Your Eyes Close”. My original title was “Out of Time” which I felt brought together the two aspects of the story – Nick’s regression and the fact that he was running out of time for his transplant. The publisher didn’t like that – so they sent me an alternative title, which I really hated – then they send on some more, and I have to admit, I love this one!

SG: Titles are hard, alright, so it’s great to have a team behind you who can help with that. Interesting about the different options you had for Caitlin’s husband – well, the one you picked definitely works! 

You explore some very topical themes in When Your Eyes Close – especially homelessness and what it means to belong (to a family, a home, or even an identity). A fitness instructor by day, at night Michelle volunteers on soup runs with the Simon Community in Dublin city centre. In one of the early chapters, Nick knows of a homeless man who literally crosses his path that “only if he were lucky would he find a shelter for the night.” It’s a very human story – as Michelle muses thinking about one of the men she helps, that he only liked tuna and cheese sandwiches: “That was the thing about volunteering, you got to know the people, their likes and dislikes.”

Can you tell us about research you did to bring this into the novel?

TF: I’d like to say that I got out on the street to research this aspect of the novel, but I didn’t. The most important skill for any writer is to be able to imagine yourself into any situation. It wasn’t difficult to think about what life must be like on the streets. This is a social problem which has been allowed to escalate unchecked until it has grown to epic proportions. The government should have seen the need for more social housing long before it resulted in families living hotels, which ironically costs the government more money. The other social issue which I’ve talked about is the shortcomings in the heath system: this is something that I have experienced first-hand. In 2010 my mother was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, a Cancer of the blood inside the bone marrow. The Cancer had damaged her kidneys, so she began a very intensive period of having chemotherapy and kidney dialysis, which meant having to take her to the hospital four days per week. During that time we suffered the frustrations of late prescriptions, an unavailability of doctors to see her – being batted back and forth between two hospital departments, and worst of all the consultant’s failure to either recognise or act upon the fact that the cancer had returned after she had been in remission for two years. After being fobbed off with my concerns that my mother was seriously ill, I finally had to go on the Internet to find her consultant’s email address and contact her directly. My mother died two weeks after admittance, in 2015, from septicemia. I didn’t expect my story to become Michelle’s, but it did. Traumatic and life-changing events will generally find a way into our writing, often it is unplanned.

SG: Yes, the shortcomings of the health system is very clearly explored, and I am so sorry to hear that it is based on what sounds like a traumatic experience for your mother and for you. My deepest sympathies. 

On another note, I was fascinated about what happens to Nick when he undergoes hypnosis. It raises a lot of questions about identity and ways of being in the world. How can we really – if ever – get away from our past, and past generations? How much do we carry with us? Or does it mean, as Nick says “that death was not the end.”? This is at the heart of the novel, really, isn’t it? How did you come to write about confabulation?

TF: A number of years ago I read a fascinating book entitled “Many Lives, Many Masters.” It is the true story of an American psychiatrist, Dr Brian Weiss and of how he went from being a sceptic to believing in reincarnation. Weiss was working with a patient who had been referred to him because she had a number of phobias – she was afraid of water, she had difficulty in swallowing pills etc. Weiss had been working with her for some time, they’d discussed and identified several possible reasons for her phobias and he felt that she should have been better at this stage. Thinking that perhaps there was another reason, some childhood memory that she had blocked, he decided to try hypnosis. Whilst under hypnosis, Weiss’s patient described herself in another time and place, not believing in past lives, Weiss felt there had to be some logical explanation, that perhaps his patient had interest in history, but every time he hypnotised her the same thing happened. Spookily, the patient began speaking to him in different voices- voices of the “masters” – she told Weiss things about his own life, which were confidential, things that his colleagues in the hospital were unaware of, for example the fact that he’d had a baby that died at only a few weeks old due a hole in its heart. He began to wonder if there was some truth to what the woman was describing in her sessions. Whether or not you believe in such things as reincarnation, and I’m not saying I do, but it’s a truly compelling idea. The “masters” tell Weiss through his patient that we are sent here to learn a lesson and if that lesson is not learned, we are sent back again, we have many things to learn before we reach the final stages of evolution. The book also talks about how people are reborn into the same circle, that your teacher in one life may have been your father in another and so on. I had really wanted to explore this idea in relation to Michelle and her relationship with Nick, but my editor felt that it was a step too far – she wanted the story to be based 90% in reality and only 10% about regression, so I had to pull right on the regression theme in order not to alienate readers.

SG: Oh that is so fascinating! I’d have loved more about regression as it struck me as such an unusual element in a thriller. I must look up Many Lives, Many Masters. 

You paint a very moving and at times upsetting picture of Dublin as a city, almost a character, and the novel also explores how it does – or does not – care for those who live there. Yet there is solace to be found – in the bars where live music is played (where Caitlin plays with her band), in the restaurants, and in the quietness of the night.

TF: When we create characters we have to think of them as real people – real people have likes, dislikes, hobbies, idiosyncrasies etc. I tend to enjoy writing artistic characters; after writing my second love is music, I sing, play guitar and am part of a ukulele session that meet in the Harbour Bar in Bray on a Tuesday night. One of my closest friends used to run a music night in the Ormond Wine Bar on Ormond Quay – now sadly gone – and I used to enjoy the music there on a Wednesday night. I always like to include different things that friends will recognise and be amused by, as well using these things to enrich characters and make them all the more believable.

Regarding landscape, I think it’s also an important part of a novel. Dublin is my native city and so both of my novels are set here. I wouldn’t feel comfortable setting a novel in a city or country where I hadn’t lived – there are too many potential pitfalls. Here I know the geography, I know how people speak. Interestingly, I had to change a couple of Dublin expressions I’d used in dialogue as my London editor had no idea what I meant – “you know yourself….”! 😊

SG: Oh yes, I have had experience of that myself. Hiberno English is always like another language to those outside of Ireland.

I always find that despite myself in novels with multiple narrators, I always end up favouring one narrator. In this case it was Michelle, probably because of her earnestness and wonderful curious and questioning mind. She’s great at reading people and I liked how she used all types of information in trying to figure out what happened to Nick in his past and David before he disappeared. She takes all her information, from psychics to research and uses it, believing what she sees and trusting her instinct. Was Michelle one of the first or last character to come to you? Dare I ask if you have a favourite in the cast of When Your Eyes Close?

TF: Michelle has a lot in common with me – far more so than the other two characters. Like I said before, I wanted to ensure that she was an active character – not simply Nick’s girlfriend. I experienced a painful breakup in the early stages of writing When Your Eyes Close and I used that experience in both Michelle’s bafflement at Nick’s disappearing act in the beginning of the novel, and also in Caitlin’s confoundment at David’s disappearance. Being dumped without any explanation is a horrible thing, you could drive yourself mad trying to figure out why it happened and silence is the worst kind of punishment – I’m a communicator, if something’s wrong, I like to talk it through, evasion is simply a cowardly non-action. But experiences never go to waste, not when you’re a writer!! I don’t know if I have a favourite character among the cast, they are all different -they all have their strengths and their flaws. I often enjoy writing characters that are completely dissimilar to me – in The Girl Behind the Lens, Oliver Molloy is a total cad, I had great fun writing him – I even felt sorry for him at times. Like I say, being able to inhabit another person’s mind is one of the most important things about being a writer. If you couldn’t do that, everything would be autobiographical and we would soon run out of material!

SG: Yes, I agree. It is one of the fun things of writing – inhabiting others’ lives as it were and enjoying what that feels like.

Lastly, Tanya, some fun questions:

  1. Tea or Coffee? Tea – I love coffee but have problems with an over-acidic stomach!
  2. Mountains or sea? Sea – I’d hate not to live by the coast.
  3. What’s your favourite drink when you’re writing? Hmm – Tea, I guess!
  4. Where can we find you reading from When Your Eyes Close? I’ll be reading brand new material in Books Upstairs along with my other half David Butler, and poet and writer Edward O’ Dwyer on Sunday, 17th February and I’m also at Ballycastle literary festival the weekend of 21-22nd Sept. I’m taking part in Ennis Book Festival on Sunday 3rd March along with US writer Michelle Richmond and I’m reading at “Listeners” Rathfarnham on Monday 25th March.
  5. Wow that’s a great tour around the country! So, what’s your next writing project? I’m currently working on a second short story collection – they are historical stories set in the first half of the twentieth century. These stories are very different from what I’ve done before, more in the vein of magic realism.

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Thanks again, Tanya for participating in my Writers Chat series. It’s been lovely to talk with you.