This St. Patrick's Day, Fly Your Tana French Flag
A primer on my favorite Irish crime/mystery/western novelist
On a Mother’s Day some years ago, my daughter presented me with a piece of notebook paper taped to a cardboard poster tube. On the paper, she’d written, “TANA FRENCH.” My daughter was barely old enough to write at the time, but she already knew my flag.
I have lost sleep, canceled appointments, and put off Very Important Tasks in order to keep reading Tana French. When I heard about French’s new novel, The Hunter—her first in four years—a small, dutiful voice inside me said, “Do not go get that book.”
Right now is a particularly busy time. The kids are out of school for spring break and my husband’s new restaurant, Bambino, opens Thursday, so I’m doing a lot of solo parenting while working from home.
At first, I heeded that small dutiful voice.
Then the rest of me told her to shut it, in a Dublin accent that only comes from hours of listening to Tana French audiobooks.
Several days later, I’m only a few chapters into The Hunter, which I count as a sign of maturity. French’s novels unfold at a slow and steady pace; I enjoy sinking into the story, only gradually beginning to grasp the intrigue. While I limit myself to a chapter every night, I’ve been enjoying the media that the event of The Hunter’s publication date has inspired. (Brad Listi’s interview of Tana French on his Other People podcast is particularly good.) It got me thinking—are there readers out there who aren’t yet fans of all things French? Are there French-curious people who don’t know where to start? If this sounds like you, you are in the right place.
If you are already a French aficionado, like me, you will also enjoy this breakdown. I had so much fun researching one of my favorite living writers and revisiting her novels. With no further ado, let’s get to it.
Who is Tana French?
Tana French is an Irish novelist. She has worked as an actress, and when she was growing up she lived all over the world, including Rome, Washington D.C., and Malawi. Her writing shows traces of these biographical traits. She is great at character, and her novels often feature an outsider’s perspective. She is widely known for her Dublin murder squad series, but she has also written several standalone novels. Her books have been described as mysteries, crime novels, and more recently, Westerns. But she is the kind of author people have a hard time categorizing. Her books skillfully blend elements of multiple genre traditions but don’t fit neatly into any particular genre formula—a quality, I would argue, that makes her books feel “literary.”
French has said that she enjoys playing with genre. Her plots center around a crime, but they are not cozy mysteries. She does not set out to construct a “whodunit” puzzle in which the reader can follow cleverly buried clues to solve a to solve a crime.* She starts with character—usually a detective or an undercover cop—and setting—always Irish, ranging from Dublin to the rural west, from a posh boarding school to crowded Catholic estates to abandoned real estate in the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger. She often doesn’t know who committed the murder until she’s well into writing the book.
Tana French novels in order
NB, and I cannot stress this enough: you do not have to read these novels in any particular order. Feel free to jump in with whichever novel is immediately available from your local library.
The Dublin Murder Squad Series
The six books in the Dublin Murder Squad series are linked in the sense that each one focuses on a character who is a detective or undercover cop in the squad, but the main character is not consistent and the books are not exactly sequels of each other, though they do take place along a chronological timeline (a progression that also happens to follow the economic expansion and property bubble burst of the Celtic Tiger). Like the stories of J. D. Salinger or Elizabeth Strout, the narrator of one novel may be a minor character in another book. It’s fun to trace the web of connections from any starting point.
In the Woods (2007). Three children go into the woods near their housing estate and only one child returns, with no memory of what happened to his friends. Twenty-two years later, a body is found at an archeological dig site at the same location. The detective assigned to the case is the surviving child. Written in the P.O.V. of Rob, the detective whose amnesia holds the key to an unsolved double murder, In the Woods introduced French’s ability to inhabit an unreliable narrator. French once aspired to be an archeologist herself, and she got the idea for the premise of In the Woods while working on a dig. To me, this is evidence that we should all cherish our youthful obsessions. You never know how they will show up later.
The Likeness (2008). Cassie Maddox, a supporting character in French’s first novel, takes center stage in this novel involving a murder and a cult-like group of college students. Sound familiar? After reading In the Woods, I wrote in my reading notes, “She writes like Donna Tartt.” After reading The Likeness, I wrote, “How is she not Donna Tartt?!” I even went down an Internet rabbit hole, researching whether “Tana French” might be a pseudonym—a way for Tartt to publish more than one novel per decade. (Reader: Tana French is an actual person with her own identity, completely separate from Donna Tartt.) With a doppelganger and a creepy house, The Likeness blends elements of Gothic literature with mystery. The central conceit in The Likeness—Cassie’s uncanny resemblance to another woman—might be too much for some readers. I urge you to suspend your disbelief and just go with it.
Faithful Place (2010). In this novel, French again takes a supporting character from a prior novel and elevates him to the main stage. Detective Frank Mackie, Cassie’s handler in The Likeness, grew up dreaming of escaping his dysfunctional family’s crowded flat on Faithful Place. But on the night when he was supposed to sail to London with his girlfriend, Rosie, she no-showed, leaving Frank to assume he’d been dumped. Twenty-two years later (a special number for French?), Rosie’s suitcase is found, and Frank has to return home to solve the mystery. Faithful Place was the first Tana French novel that I gave to my Irish Catholic dad, because it reminded me of stories about his upbringing on the South Side of Chicago. He liked it, though not as much as I did. This could be a matter of taste, or maybe it’s easier for me to enjoy novels about poverty and alcoholism because I didn’t grow up with those hardships in my life.
Broken Harbor (2012). A man and his two children have been killed in their “luxury” home in a half-abandoned development. The wife and mother is in intensive care. Investigating the crime is Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy, who will have to reckon with his past and his relationship with a chaotic sister in order to solve the mystery. I found this domestic thriller to be the creepiest of French’s novels; at times, the plot borders on horror. French nails the details of an eerie, liminal time in the lives of her characters and of Dublin in the wake of economic recession. There are layoffs, obsessive Internet rabbit holes, addiction, gentrification. Even the name “Broken Harbor” is resonant—an aspirational neighborhood rebrand reminiscent of Arrested Development’s Sudden Valley. Again, I saw echoes of Donna Tartt—specifically the ghost-town Las Vegas housing development in The Goldfinch. Scorcher is terser than French’s other male narrators; if you were to rate them on a rainbow spectrum of Irish blarney, Scorcher and Mackey would fall on opposite ends. As the investigator in Faithful Place, Scorcher felt straight out of hardboiled fiction. Now we get to see the world through his eyes. It’s remarkable how French complicates a character that, in a lesser novelist’s hands, might be a one-dimensional tough guy.
The Secret Place (2014). Are there teenage girls in your life? Have you ever been a teenage girl? Are you a fan of pre-smartphone mean girl tactics, and do you perk up when things get witchy? This might be the French for you. Featuring Holly Mackey, the 16-year-old daughter of Frank, this novel dives into the inner sanctum of a clique at an all-girls’ boarding school after a boy from a neighboring school is bludgeoned to death with gardening equipment. Investigating the crime is new detective Stephen Moran, who has history with Mackey from the events depicted in Faithful Place. The Secret Place is a bit of a departure for French in that it is told in dual timelines and alternating points of view (Moran’s narration, interjected with flashbacks from Holly and the other girls). I highly recommend the audiobook, in which male and female narrators read the different points of view. I loved this book so much, I listened to it and read it simultaneously.
The Trespasser (2016). The last in the Dublin murder squad series (so far), The Trespasser is narrated by Antoinette Conway, the partner of new detective Stephen Moran in The Secret Place. Conway is Black and French is not. If there was controversy over cultural appropriation, I can’t find any evidence on the Internet. Perhaps this has something to do with French’s track record of creating fully realized narrators of another gender. In The Secret Place, Antoinette was a reliable source of eye rolling at the privileged boarding school girls’ speech and mannerisms. She is brusque in comparison to Stephen, who is white. In The Trespasser, the reader comes to understand that Antoinette needs that tough attitude to endure relentless hazing from others on the squad. The murdered victim in this case is a stereotypical blonde—cue Antoinette’s reflexive eye roll. But as all her initial assumptions are proved wrong, Antoinette begins to suspect that someone is sabotaging her investigation from the inside.
I hear the Dublin murder squad series has been adapted into a TV show on Amazon Prime. I would love to watch this someday, but in my family I find it’s rarely worthwhile to argue over the remote. From the looks of it, this show combines the plots of In the Woods and The Likeness and stars Sarah Greene, who was very good in Amazon’s Bad Sisters. Maybe you should watch it and tell me if it’s worth a fight!
NB, and I cannot stress this enough: you do not have to read these novels in any particular order. Feel free to jump in with whichever novel is available from your local library.
After the Dublin murder squad series, French published The Witch Elm (2018), a standalone novel:
Tobey Hennessey has the good luck to be white, male, educated, able-bodied, and from an upper class family. He’s got a nice apartment, a loving girlfriend, and a hip job at a Dublin art gallery. Everything changes when he is the victim of a home invasion and violent assault, leaving him with PTSD, memory loss, and visible scarring. He and his girlfriend move into his ancestral estate, which is inhabited by a reclusive uncle. When a skull is found in a tree on the family’s property, Tobey becomes a murder suspect and is led down a path that will lead to uncovering long-buried family secrets.
French stretches herself again in The Witch Elm, writing from the perspective of a crime victim rather than a detective. She talks in this Vulture interview about the origins of the book:
I had been thinking a lot about the connections between luck and empathy. Everybody has ways in which they’ve been lucky in life, and everybody also has ways in which they’ve definitely rolled snake eyes. But lately I’ve been thinking about, “Okay, what about somebody who’s been lucky in every way, all along, who’s always come out on top of the coin flip?” Someone who is white, straight, male, from a well-off, happy family, loved, mentally healthy, physically healthy, good-looking, intelligent, who’s just been on the right side of all the coin flips? What would that do to his ability to empathize with other people’s experience of life? And what would that do to his ability to take on board the fact that other people’s very different experiences are, in fact, real? And then, what would happen if something happened to him that meant he was no longer on the right side of all the coin flips? How would that affect not only his experience of reality, but his perception of himself within reality?
Some people called The Witch Elm a reaction to #metoo, but anyone following French’s career can see that her interest in gender, privilege, and empathy did not spring into existence in 2017.
The Irish Westerns
In recent years, French has become interested in grafting Western tropes onto Irish settings for a genre combination she calls “mystery software running on Western hardware.” She has said that she got interested in Westerns after reading Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, which was thrilling news to me because I love McMurtry.
In The Searcher (2020), Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago detective and French’s first American protagonist, moves to Ardnakelty, a small village in rural western Ireland, determined to build a new life free of intrigue. Of course, he fails miserably, because a sullen teenager shows up on his door with a host of problems Cal can’t help but try and fix. The Searcher has a well-executed twist—the kind that makes you want to go back and read the whole thing from the beginning once you’re in on the reveal. Also, kudos to Tana French for her canine characters. I read this novel in the winter of 2020, right after my daughter got a puppy for Hanukkah, so I was especially alive to the centrality of dogs in her fiction.
The Hunter (2024) returns to the western region of Ireland for the further adventures of Cal Hooper, his attractive neighbor, Lena, and his teenage protégé Trey Reddy. As in the Dublin murder squad series, readers don’t have to read The Searcher in order to follow the plot in The Hunter; everything you need to know will be explained in one or two graceful sentences, and you will not feel left out. In The Searcher, the Western trope was: a stranger arrives in a small town. In The Hunter, the Western trope is: small town boy returns to his hometown and tries to convince some local farmers that there is gold in them thar hills. I’m still reading, but so far this novel makes the most of both its Irish setting and the Western/mystery genre. Is there a leprechaun and a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow? Read and find out!
By the way, I did some research and was assured that NO DOG WILL DIE IN THIS BOOK. (If this is an issue in your family’s media consumption, you might want to know about this website.)
In this interview, French says she is still writing about the characters in the small town of Ardnakelty: “All the characters have been moving on an arc in their relationships with each other and with the place, and that arc is not complete—one more should do it.” I look forward to that third book—I will be flying my Tana French flag high!
Other interesting things
Count on Marlon James to see through the silliness of elevating or denigrating books according to genre: “Here’s the funny thing about so-called genre books: Nobody has ever had to teach a crime writer about cultural appropriation or representation of other people. That’s an affliction that affects only literary novelists. And scoff at chick lit all you want, but it is the only genre where women work.”
After my daughter scolded my husband for listening to a book by a male author in which a young woman’s rape is the principal plot device, he looked up crime novels by women and found My Sweet Girl by Amanda Jayatissa and Counterfeit by Kristen Chen. Both dad and daughter are enjoying listening to Counterfeit on their commute to and from school, and My Sweet Girl is on my to-read list because I’m intrigued by unreliable narrators and the ethical quandary of international adoptions.
It is springtime in Austin, the bluebonnets are beautifying Texas roadways, and if you are visiting for SXSW (or really any reason), you cannot do better than Austin Kleon’s recommendations.
If you care about educating children, please read this essay by Adam Gidwitz. “They’re listening to us. Or they want to. Not to us shouting, but to us calmly trying to explain what’s happening, showing empathy for all innocent people, and most importantly empathy for the kids — the kids over there and the kids who are here, listening. Resiliently. Waiting for us grown ups to stop shouting and telling each other to shut up.”
*If puzzle mysteries are your cup of tea, may I recommend The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett? I just finished this ingenious book, and it was a ball.
Ooo, thank you for the tip about Tana French's mystery/western hybrids. I teach a class called Literature of the American West, and it's nice to have examples of western themes and patterns traveling globally. The Searcher and The Hunter look like great summer reads.
Thanks for the reviews. I am ALWAYS looking for my new favorite book. I also appreciate the Guardian link on abolishing genre. I kind of get it. I call myself genre fluid because I don't want to be pinned down. Look at Beyonce. Look at Taylor. Going all genre might be where the fun is.