It is fitting that our first interrogation victim would be a recipient of the Edgar Award for best debut novel.  Tana French’s In the Woods won praise in our review and has had critics and readers clamoring for more.  She dutifully followed with a sequel, The Likeness, which features some of the same characters, but with a new protagonist at the center.  We already have our copy and will be doing a review of it soon.

Meanwhile, Tana is hard at work on her third novel; and as you will find out in our interrogation room, she is going to be continuing a unique trend of remaining in her fictional world, but refraining from serializing a single character over and over. It is an exciting concept in a genre of familiar gumshoes that we grow to love but become stale with familiarity. I find it fascinating to watch Tana buck this trend and try something different, even though I am sure she is just doing what feels natural to her. Tana French seems to be one of those unique creatures that forges her own path without trying to be different. By doing what comes natural to her, she innovates. This makes her one of the handful of artists in her field to follow closely, which we plan on doing.

Please enjoy the confessions we were able to beat out of her and then go grab a copy of In the Woods (our review). It is an amazing debut novel and features some of the prettiest prose I have encountered in any genre.

swivel: As a fan of realistic fiction, I was very impressed with your attention to police procedural detail.  Did this require a lot of research on your part, or are you a mystery geek like the rest of us?

Tana French: Yep, total mystery geek here! That doesn’t always help as much as you’d think, though. Most of the novels I’ve read are American or British, but I set mine in Ireland, so there are a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle differences in police procedure – I can’t take it for granted that anything I’ve read applies here too. Just for example, it’d be easy to assume that the caution starts with ‘You have the right to remain silent…’ because that’s what we’ve all seen and read a bazillion times, but actually, the wording in Ireland is totally different.

Luckily for me, I know an amazing detective, now retired from the Irish police force, who’s saved me from shoving my foot in my mouth on a regular basis. Not only does he answer a wild variety of questions, but he’s taken the time to sit down with me and just tell me stories about what it’s like to put a huge part of your life into being a detective. I think that’s the only way you can really get a sense of what the job feels like, the day-to-day atmosphere, the nuances of it: by hearing the stories. Two ex-detectives have e-mailed me to say that reading the book was like being back on the job, which absolutely made my week and which makes me think I owe my amazing detective a serious bottle of wine or two.

I do ditch reality every now and then (obvious example: there’s no Murder squad in Ireland, but I felt like the story demanded that tight-knit, hothouse environment), but if I’m going to have an inaccuracy in there, I want it to be because it’s essential to the story, not because I goofed.

swivel: You break a lot of traditions with In the Woods.  The expected romance between opposite-sex partners and the tone at the end of the book breaks several rules.  Do you find it difficult to avoid cliches scenarios and characterizations as you write?

French: I don’t deliberately set out to break with convention, or anything like that – I’m nowhere near that organised. But I’m coming from an acting background, and I write like an actor: I start with the character. When I start a book, I have a very basic premise and I have the character of the narrator, and that’s it. The rest of the action develops out of the characters, the way it mostly does in real life.

And I think that, if your characters are fully developed, three-dimensional human beings – if they’re real to you – then it’s very unlikely that you’ll end up neck-deep in cliché. Real people don’t live in clichés; even if they end up in a clichéd situation, that element is overridden by their individual quirks, passions, hopes, fears. In the same way, even if you’re writing about a situation that’s been done a billion times (Cop With A Past, opposite-sex partners), as long as the characters are fully developed individuals, the situation is inevitably going to pan out in a non-clichéd way.

swivel: You put Rob and Cassie through the ringer, emotionally.  Is it hard for you to torture your own creations, or do you find that well-fleshed-out characters just start writing themselves?

French: I’m interested in writing about the crucial crossroads in life – those moments when you know that, no matter which way you choose, your life will never be the same. In the context of detective fiction, that translates as the case that breaks down the border fence between professional and personal (after all, that’s one of the things that makes detective work so intense and so risky: the constant possibility that that border fence could be breached) and transforms both.

And those huge turning points tend to be emotional tsunamis: they knock you down, bowl you over and over, rip your breath away and finally dump you miles from where you started out. The stakes are so high that there’s no way for this decision to be anything other than intense and difficult. So it’s kind of inevitable that the narrator is going to end up getting a little emotionally battered along the way!

swivel: Do you have any tips for aspiring authors that can’t make it to their last chapter?  I know every writer has a different solution to this problem, but we would love to know yours.

French: Long walks usually unstick my brain when it gets stuck on something. But my main tip, the big Eureka that got me to the end of In the Woods, is this: it’s OK to get stuff wrong, and it’s OK if writing’s not always fun. I think it’s easy to get hooked on the illusion of The Muse and fall into believing that, if the deathless prose isn’t flowing like water, there must be something wrong. Actually, sometimes writing is hard, frustrating work, and there are days when everything you come up with is full-on, five-star awful. That doesn’t mean you should ditch the book; it’s completely normal. The only way to deal with it is to keep going and trust that sooner or later you’ll get your second wind, the inspiration will come back, and things will take off again.

Also, coffee.

swivel: At least two of your characters admit to reading the classics voraciously.  For Cassie it was quite an addiction.  How much of this was autobiographical?  Your writing style, vocabulary, and frequent allusions to other works hints at quite a reading list on your part.

I’ll read just about anything; I always have. I spent a big chunk of my childhood in Malawi, where there was no TV, not many toys and almost no after-school activities, so I spent lots of time running wild with my friends and lots of time reading. I took reading for granted as a part of daily life, the way I would have taken TV for granted if I’d had it around. When I ran out of kids’ books, I read adults’ books.

swivel: There is a very big mystery that you leave untouched in this book.  I imagine this was as difficult for you to leave as it was for the reader to miss.  How much did you wrestle with this decision, or was it always your plan to leave it dangling?

French: I thought about it a lot, but I kept coming back to the fact that that was the only possible honest ending for the book. Rob is the kind of person who, whenever he comes close to taking some irrevocable leap, runs as fast as he can in the other direction. He’s so badly damaged that he can’t risk taking that leap, in case it smashes him into a million pieces. So when I started thinking about the end of In the Woods, I had three choices: turn my narrator into a totally different person in the last chapter, in order to force in a solution (cheap, artificial and cheesy); do a deus ex machina and have someone else pop up with the solution (cheap, artificial and cheesy); or stay true to the character and just write the best book I could, even if it didn’t exactly fit the genre conventions. The third possibility was the only one with any integrity or coherence.

I knew some people would probably be pretty outraged by an ending that didn’t stick to the conventions – but, on the other hand, other people would have been at least as outraged by an ending that forced in cheap artificial closure. There was just plain no way I could write an ending that would suit both of those tastes. I figured the only thing I could do was make the book as good as I possibly could…and then duck!

swivel: Do you have any plans to continue your acting career, either in voice-overs, on stage, or on film?

French: I really miss acting, and I definitely plan to do more as soon as I can. The problem is that I’ve always been mainly a theatre actor, and theatre takes an awful lot of time. If you’re a film or TV actor, you can do a small support role in, say, a week – but in theatre, it doesn’t matter how small the part is, it still takes two months or so, minimum. If I tell my editors that I’m planning to take two months out of writing to do a show, they will hit me with sticks. Maybe I need more film work!

swivel: There were many scenes in In the Woods that would play out great on the silver screen.  Do you have any plans to adapt your works for film?

French: I’d love to see the books end up on the screen, but I don’t think I’d want to be the one doing the adapting. Screenplays are such a different genre, and I know absolutely nothing about writing them… I’m pretty sure the result would be a total car crash. I’d rather see it done by someone who actually knows how to do it!

Plum: Combining the last two questions: Would you play a good Cassie?  How cool would that be?

French: That would be DEEPLY cool, but I bet I’d be the worst possible person for the job. I have this theory that actors should never play parts they’ve written, because – and I know this sounds weird – that’s a really good way to miss things. I’m always getting e-mails from readers who’ve spotted things in the books that I didn’t even realize were in there: a pattern, a character trait, a nuance to a relationship. If I came to the role of Cassie as an actor, I’d only be able to see the things that I deliberately put in there. Another actor would come to the part with no preconceptions, and she’d spot the things that somehow slid in through my subconscious.

swivel: Can you give us any hints about your future works? Switching to Cassie’s point of view for your second book is a neat twist, but I wonder if we will hear more about Rob in the future…?

French:I’m working on the third book at the moment, and this time the narrator is Frank Mackey, Cassie’s old undercover boss, who shows up in The Likeness. He’s a lot of fun to write, because his moral sense isn’t like most people’s: for him, the end justifies the means, and he’s willing to inflict absolutely anything on himself or anyone else in order to get his man.

I’d like to keep writing about the same general bunch of main characters for a while – I’ve got interested in them. And I think that, sooner or later, from one angle or another, that’s bound to bring me back to Rob Ryan.

We would like to thank Tana French for her time and willingness to bear our abuse.  Go check out her official website, grab one of her books below, discuss In the Woods in our forums, and read our review one more time.