MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
One of my favorite things to do when I am packing for a vacation is to read fiction set in the place where I'm going. I start hearing the voices in my head, the accent, the dialect. I start tracking where the characters go, and then I pull up a city map and start learning the geography of my destination. And then it is so fun when I finally arrive in real life, and I get to wander around and think, oh, that's the square where they had the chase scene or, oh, that's the cafe where she finally confronted him.
Well, in a few weeks, I am headed with high school friends to Dublin. And so I have been tearing through Tana French novels. Tana French is queen of Irish crime fiction, including the Dublin Murder Squad series. She's on the line from Dublin. Hi there.
TANA FRENCH: Hello, Mary Louise. Thank you so much for having me.
KELLY: So I thought I had gobbled up your entire Dublin Murder Squad series. And then I checked and realized that I never picked up the second. The second is titled "The Likeness." It came out in 2008. I'm delighted to report I have rectified this mission. It totally holds up. I tore through it last week.
FRENCH: I'm delighted. Thank you so much.
KELLY: And I mention it because of the way that you play with the setting. Just a little bit of backdrop - several of the characters in "The Likeness" are students, Ph.D. students at Trinity College, which, as you know well, is Ireland's oldest university, the alma mater of Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett and this whole long list. It prompts me to ask, how much detail is the right amount of detail to bring a place to life for your readers?
FRENCH: Oh, that's hard because when I love a place, as, you know, my readers have probably noticed, I can talk about it for a really long time. I love places, especially places with atmosphere, places with history. And they do have that feeling for me that they have somewhere, if you could just catch it, all that recorded memory of all the people who have walked through and had experiences there and built their lives in these places.
KELLY: A lot of the action in "The Likeness" takes place at Whitethorn House, this gorgeous, stately manor house in the suburbs of Dublin which has been in the hands of the same family for generations. You tie that to Ireland's history. You wrote, this country's passion for property is built into the blood. Centuries are being turned out on the roadside at a landlord's whim, helpless. Teach your bones that everything in life hangs on owning your home. That's a theme that runs through quite a few of these books. Say more.
FRENCH: Oh, yeah. I think - well, part of that is just personal background because I grew up with my family moving continent every few years 'cause of my dad's job. So I craved a home that was my own and nobody could take it away. And that resonated really well when I landed in Ireland because there is the history of centuries of British colonization where one of the ways that they imposed their will so strongly on Ireland was by taking property away, taking homes away from the native Irish. And once you're a renter, you're temporary. Once you're a tenant, you can be turned off the land. And so that idea of owning your own land, owning your own home is so huge. It looms so huge in the Irish psyche. You never feel safe unless your home is yours.
KELLY: What other things do you think about when you're trying to root your fiction in a particular place, which I want to note, people may be detecting from your accent, which is a little transatlantic, that you were born in the U.S., right? When did you move to Ireland?
FRENCH: Oh, man. I'm a mix, right? My dad is American with a lot of Irish thrown in there and some Scottish. My mom is half Russian, half Italian, but grew up - was born and grew up in Ethiopia. And we moved continent, again, regularly when I was a kid. So we left the U.S. when I was 2 and then came back, and then I lived there till I was 7. And I wound up in Ireland at 17, and I've been there since.
KELLY: This is fascinating because the way you write dialogue, like, trying to capture the slang and the particular cadence of speech of a place, that you weren't born and raised in. How do you do it?
FRENCH: Well, I think, in some ways, that helps because if you are kind of used to moving country a lot, you have to be very aware of every little nuance of cultural interaction because otherwise you're going to mess up, and you're going to, like, not be able to make connections in this new place. So being constantly a little bit of an outsider makes you pick up on the nuances of dialect and of interaction, and of, you know, how long do you pause before you talk to somebody? How fast do you talk? How close do you stand? How sharp-edged is the humor? You have to be really, really tuned into that stuff because otherwise, you're going to run yourself into trouble.
KELLY: One thing that has not changed across the many years you've now been writing novels is that many of your most memorable scenes take place in a pub.
FRENCH: (Laughter) Yeah, OK, see, I have been assimilated. (Inaudible).
KELLY: Is that 'cause people have a few drinks and their tongues are loosened? Secrets slip out, which is useful if you're writing a who-done-it mystery?
FRENCH: Not so much. It's more that it's so much the heart of Irish socializing, partly because we don't tend to have really big houses, right? And so inviting over dozens of friends to hang out, it isn't really a thing. The pub is the heart of a lot of communities. And so that's where dynamics within friend groups and within the larger community become clear. Not always explicitly. But where you start to be able to observe, hang on, this person never sits in the same table as this person, and this person gets louder whenever this one tries to talk, and this one is, you know, eyeing this one across the pub, it's where dynamics really spring to life. And so it's a really fun place to set scenes because you can show so much.
KELLY: Any recommendations from you, for those of us looking for great summer Irish fiction?
FRENCH: Oh, OK. So if you're going to Dublin, you need "The Commitments" by Roddy Doyle.
KELLY: Yes.
FRENCH: Because the rhythms of Dublin speech, nobody catches them quite like Roddy Doyle. So you need "The Commitments," just to get your ear ringing in Dublin rhythms. And if you're going around Ireland a bit, I would always recommend Donal Ryan, "The Spinning Heart," which is a beautiful, beautiful book. It's set during the crash, the fall of the Celtic Tiger. And it's down the country, and it's a bunch of different voices of people living in a small community that's been kind of smashed. And Liz Nugent, as well, "Unraveling Oliver." I like books with a lot of different voices, and this is - it's a mystery, but not in the classic sense in that you kind of find out right at the beginning what happened. But then, as you go through, through all these different angles, you start to realize that the story is not ever as simple or as straightforward as it initially looks on the surface. And again, it's set in Dublin, so you get a lot of Dublin voices, Dublin places, Dublin atmosphere. So that's another good one.
KELLY: Tana French, speaking with us from Dublin about the joys of writing and reading fiction set in Ireland. Her latest is "The Keeper." Tana French, thank you, and happy summer.
FRENCH: Thank you so much, and I really hope you enjoyed Dublin.
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