Tana French plays with Western tropes in an Irish setting in "The Hunter"

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.

Tricia Ford: Hi, listeners. I'm Tricia Ford, fiction editor here at Audible. Today, I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with Tana French, bestselling author of eight previous books, including The Searcher, The Dublin Murder Squad series, and The Witch Elm. In addition to being an Audible listener favorite, she's won numerous awards, including the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry Awards, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery Thriller, and the Irish Book Award for Crime Fiction. She's here today to talk about her latest novel, The Hunter. Welcome, Tana. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Tana French: Thank you, Tricia. It's great to be on. Thank you so much for having me.

Tricia: Now, I wanted to give people a little bit of background on The Hunter. The Hunter marks the return of Cal Hooper, the retired Chicago police detective who was first introduced in The Searcher when he arrived in Ireland as the classic outsider in a small town. Now, that it's been a couple of years, Cal seems to be settling in, maybe even making roots. He's got his girlfriend, Lena, and he's still mentoring Trey Reddy, the once out-of-control teenage girl who's now learning how to repair furniture alongside Cal. Life seems good. That's until Trey's long-absent father returns with an English millionaire and a scheme to defraud the townsfolk. Did you always know that the story of Cal and Trey would continue beyond The Searcher?

Tana: No, I absolutely didn't. I saw The Searcher definitely as a standalone, but then I kind of came out of the pandemic haze and started thinking about a new book, and it just felt like on so many levels what I'd been doing in Searcher, there was more there to explore. Like, both Searcher and Hunter are very much mystery software running on Western hardware. They came out of the fact that I'd been reading a bunch of Westerns and going, “Now, a lot of these tropes would map really well onto the west of Ireland.” The settings have a lot in common. There's that wild, beautiful terrain that demands a lot of mental and physical toughness from anyone who wants to put down roots there and make a living, and there's that sense of a place that both culturally and geographically is quite distant from the centers of power, to the point where the people feel like if they want a cohesive society that functions, they're going to have to make their own rules and enforce those rules. And I thought there's a lot of interplay between those two settings.

"Both Searcher and Hunter are very much mystery software running on Western hardware."

And in Searcher, I was playing with, obviously, the trope of the outsider who wanders into the saloon and he becomes a catalyst for change, but I kept thinking there are more Western tropes there that would be fun to play with. And the one that came to mind was "There's gold in them there hills," and the gold rush trope that's in so many Westerns. And Ireland actually has a long history of discovering huge numbers of ancient gold artifacts, and there have been little mini gold rushes here over the centuries. There are places where there is, in fact, gold in them there hills. So, I was like, “You know, that wouldn't be too implausible.”

And I was also thinking about Cal and Trey and the way their relationship at the end of Searcher is kind of at an interesting point, like it's started to flourish but it's not really firm yet, like it hasn't set firm and it's not stable quite yet. And I thought, “What if something came along to disrupt it?” And the obvious thing was Trey's absent father, and he is exactly the kind of guy who if he came home would come home with a get-rich-quick scheme. So I thought, “Well, what if he comes home with a scheme to find gold in the mountains?” And it all kind of flowed from there.

Tricia: That's fascinating. Now, do you think Cal is still an outsider at this point, or is he firmly a part of the community?

Tana: No, In the first one, in The Searcher, he was an outsider, but what's happened now is he's in a weird kind of limbo—he's not an outsider anymore, he has developed relationships with people and he's got much more awareness of what this townland requires from people who live there. But he's not an insider. I mean, this is a place full of people whose relationships go back centuries, go back generations, so he's kind of on the periphery, he's in this strange peripheral place. And so is Trey, who, while she's from the townland, she's from—you know that family in a small town who everybody kind of wishes would go away and everybody feels isn't worth the hassle? So she's on the periphery. And Lena has very deliberately put herself on the periphery because she does not want to be deeply bound up in this very sort of intrusive place.

So, they're all three sort of circling around the edge, and that's a really interesting place to be because it means that you're not bound by the rules of the townland in the same way as a real insider, you don't have quite the same amount at stake, but you still have influence, you still have power. And all three of them, in the course of this book, end up having to come to terms with what kind of power they have in this outsider-insider limbo and how they do or don't want to use it. So, I thought those three angles on that half-outsider, half-insider territory would be a lot of fun to play with.

It's one of the things that's a crossing point between the Western genre and the Irish genre, because the outsider who blows into town and ends up as a half-insider, half-outsider, changing the power balance, he's so much of a thing in Irish drama as well. Like The Field, Playboy of the Western World, Translations, these are the great classics of Irish drama, and they all involve that character who's on the periphery and what his power does. And Westerns, of course, always have this guy. So, I think that idea of the insider-outsider is a really good intersection point between the two genres.

Tricia: That's really interesting. Do you think that role of the half-outsider, half-insider serves a purpose to the insiders of the town? Do you think having them as a reference is an important thing?

Tana: Ooh, that is really interesting, and I actually hadn't thought about it from that perspective, and I should. I think it can be quite disruptive to the insiders of the town, it can make them quite uneasy, because here's somebody who you are stuck with—and they are stuck with Cal and Lena and Trey at this point—but somebody who refuses to toe the line, refuses to really come within the fold. So, it's somebody who could be at any point a loose cannon, someone who could decide to take off on their own set of unsanctioned ideas. So, I think there is that.

But I think at the same time, that half-insider, half-outsider can be, as you say, useful. The townland does utilize all of them in the course of the book. I mean, Cal's detective past that he wanted to leave behind comes in quite useful. And Lena's status as someone who has an influence on Trey and someone who has an influence on Cal, that comes in useful. And Trey's sort of loose-cannon quality. All of it gets used, and I think that is one of the things about those small towns is they're very pragmatic, they use what comes to hand. And if it is people who are on that periphery, well, we'll find a way to use that.

Tricia: Speaking of this western Ireland setting, the opening chapter totally threw me off. I felt like I wasn't in Ireland anymore. There was the bright blue sky, the burning sun, vibrating heat. Was that intentional?

Tana: [Laughs] A very non-Irish start to the book, yeah. Well, for one thing, our idea of a heat wave is kind of different from yours, because when it gets over, I don't know what it is in Fahrenheit, around 80 degrees? We all go nuts. We're skiving off work and going to the park to burn ourselves lobster-colored and eat a load of ice cream, and the papers are publishing articles on how to survive the heat wave. But it definitely counts as a heat wave. The weather in this book would definitely count as a heat wave for us. It was deliberate because I wanted the sense of an outside pressure, of something making the atmosphere feel unnatural, almost alien, unpredictable, that something was pressing in on the townland almost. And a heat wave, like you say, in the west of Ireland, that is definitely not what anyone is expecting.

But it's also got a plot function because for farmers, who are a majority of the characters and the people who live in this village, a heat wave isn't just an opportunity to run off and get ice cream, this is something that to them is a definite, concrete threat to their livelihoods. This is going to have effect, it's going to wreck the feed crop for the winter, so they're going to have to buy in feed for their livestock over the winter. It's going to mess with the lime crop for next spring. This has long-term and very solid, scary consequences, so this is what puts them in the frame of mind where they're a lot more vulnerable to Johnny Reddy and his smart ideas than they would be normally. Normally, they would probably tell this guy, who they've always known was a waster full of big stories and no follow-through, normally they would just tell him to get lost with his idea. But because they're feeling very vulnerable, very on edge, and like their whole livelihoods are at risk, they're much easier prey, they're a much softer target for him and his scheme. So, the heat wave isn't just atmosphere, it also drives the plot.

Tricia: And it works perfectly. Totally, that makes you feel like you're not on solid ground a little, so you're feeling the vulnerability of the town people. That's fascinating. I love that.

Tana: Yeah, exactly. Things are a little bit out of whack. Things aren't the way they should be. Everything's a little bit wrong from the start.

Tricia: And it also highlights that connection where this is an Irish Western. Almost see tumbleweeds, not quite [laughs].

Tana: Yeah, it's definitely Western weather more than Irish weather.

Tricia: Right. Right. So, I want to get back to Trey a little bit. You mentioned how she's good, but she and Cal are still working things out between themselves. So as Trey is determined to enact revenge against her father, Cal and Lena have their hands full trying to protect her. What does this represent to you? I know that there's an idea of the found family. How far along in that journey are these three?

Tana: That was one of the most fun things to write about this book, because they're just very much in the process of figuring out what they've got here. None of them planned on this kind of odd pseudo-family relationship, they just found it. And you deal with what you find in this life sometimes, which is also a big theme of Westerns, where you think you're going looking for one person or one thing and it turns out that what you find along the way is what you've got, and turns out to be more important than whether you actually find the thing that you thought you were looking for. So, they're in the process of constructing this family, and there's a huge amount of love and affection there, but none of them exactly know what they're doing, so they have to figure it out as they go.

And at this point in the book, Trey is very much in transition because she's 15, and that is an odd age because you're making such a huge maturity leap. You're moving from a kid, who basically sees things in black-and-white and feels one thing at a time but very, very passionately and unstoppably, into an older teen moving towards an adult who sees things with nuance, who sees the layers, who sees that there can be contradictions within something and that there can be opposing poles. And Trey ends up having to take that leap over the course of the book. And Cal and Lena have to be there, watch her try and do it, and hopefully try and guide her through it without anybody getting hurt along the way. Because while Trey only sees opportunities—as you said, she is passionate about getting her revenge.

Now, the form of revenge she's after shifts a couple of times in the course of the book, but that's what she wants, she wants revenge for her brother's death. At the beginning of the book, that's all she wants, that's all she can see. The dangers, the risks, the long-term consequences, those don't mean anything to her because she's thinking like a kid. But Cal and Lena, who have somehow wound up in parental roles that they didn't plan on, they're seeing what parents see, which is the long-term consequences, the risks, the ways this could go terribly wrong and probably will. But they can't get that through to her because she has to be at the point where she's ready to see that. So, there is kind of that family moment of trying to get a teen from one stage into another through this transition that somehow takes place over the course of this book.

Tricia: I find it fascinating. I'm also finding we're getting to the realm of too many spoilers, so I might leave it there and let listeners find out what happens on their own. Like, how far does this revenge go? Have to listen to find out, if you haven't already. But it's definitely well worth listening to.

So now that I have you here, I have some general questions for you as a writer. One thing that, as a fiction editor, fiction lover who kind of tiptoes into mystery thriller, you're one of my favorites, and I don't think of you as a strict genre writer. In the States, we call it mystery thrillers. I know in Ireland, in the UK, it's crime fiction. As a fan, I would add “literary” in front of those two things. Does literary crime fiction ring true to you if you were to describe yourself?

Tana: I guess so. First off, thank you so much, because when somebody who's crazy about books says they like your books, that means a massive amount, so thank you. I'll be honest, when I first started writing In the Woods, I didn't realize I was writing mystery, exactly. I thought I was writing just a book that was hung on a mystery framework, because structure isn't really my strong point. I am very at home writing character, I'm very at home with writing on a sentence-to-sentence level with atmosphere, but structural stuff is what I've always found the hardest, how to shape a book rather than just going on writing about these characters forever, and now we've got a million words and our deadline was three years ago. I would just keep going with one character, so I need the structure of a genre to give the book an arc and make me finish it sometime. And mystery is great for giving a book structure because A kills B, and C finds out who done it. And then you can write the end and hand it in.

"I think that the initial mystery genre conventions have been used so beautifully by people who came before me and have been polished to such a shine that there doesn't seem to be any point to sticking within them anymore."

And that's one of the reasons I went for mystery, one of many reasons, because I love mystery anyway, but that's one of the reasons I went for a mystery framework. I didn't really think of it as a mystery book, just a book shaped by the mystery genre. And that's until my editor pointed out to me that the readership for mystery is a whole lot larger than the readership for some book somewhere, so maybe I should take advantage. I went, "Okay, you guys know what you're doing, you know what this is better than I do, so market it as whatever.”

But I still, I'm not big on the idea that genre is necessarily a limitation. And I think we're moving more and more away from that opinion. I mean, you still do get the odd person trotting out the whole myth that, "Well, literary fiction has great characterization and great writing, but not a lot of plot. And genre fiction has a good solid, gripping plot, but not a lot of character or thematic depth." But it's not true anymore, and it hasn't been for a really long time. There are more and more people I think who are taking the genre conventions not as the four corners that you have to fit into, the limitations, but are taking them more as a really interesting starting point: “What can I do with these now that they're here? How can I bend them? How can I play with them? How can I add in something new to the mix and just change it all and turn it inside out?”

So, I think more and more genre is becoming an ingredient in alchemy, something to play with rather than a limitation. So, that's how I like to look at it. I think that the initial mystery genre conventions have been used so beautifully by people who came before me and have been polished to such a shine that there doesn't seem to be any point to sticking within them anymore. That's been done, it's been done so beautifully. I cannot beat Agatha Christie within those conventions. So, you have to play with them, you have to stretch them, you have to see what else they can do from a different angle.

Tricia: I love that. I love that. And I do think mystery thriller here in the States, crime fiction, has a certain accessibility feel to it, and that's got to be a good thing if you want more people to experience your stories. So, I welcome it, and I love the blend. I'm crazy for characters, so the fact that they're so strong in your writing, that's what sucks me in. I think perhaps The Hunter and The Searcher before that are, they're not more playful than The Dublin Murder Squad series, but maybe a little less dark. Like, that bright sunshine beginning to The Hunter is not something you'd see in those other books, so it's fresh, it's new, it's still very Irish, just different Irish with this introduction of this detective from Chicago.

Tana: I think they are less depressing than some of the other stuff I've written [laughs]. And I think part of it is because of the characters. I mean, like you, I'm a character person. It's all about the characters and who they are and how they move around this world. And these are all characters, the main ones anyway, who they're doing their best. They're not out to damage anybody, they're not out to wreck anything, they're just doing their best. They're people who care about each other and are trying to do that even when it gets complicated and even when they don't always know what they're doing. And that tends not to lead to too much darkness. I mean, there is darkness in there obviously, but it tends to lead to a certain amount of warmth and brightness when everybody's basically on that track.

Tricia: So now as you're describing Cal and Trey, seems like the relationship, the story, the way things end, like there could very well be more to come. Is that the plan? Are you seeing a book 3 in the future?

Tana: I'm actually, much to my own surprise, I am working on a third book about these same people. It really wasn't the plan. I wrote the first one as a standalone. The Hunter isn't, like, I wouldn't consider it a sequel to The Searcher exactly, because The Searcher was a book about one guy coming to a town with the need to find some peace, both in practical terms and in moral terms. And The Hunter is a book about three people building a relationship and how that stands up under pressure. But when I came to the end of this one, it just felt like the arcs weren't complete, both the thematic arc of the outsider moving towards the outsider-insider on the periphery, it felt like there was a third step somewhere in that arc, and for the characters as well. So, it seems to be some kind of weird sort of trilogy, hopefully, touch wood, assuming I can finish this book.

Tricia: So, that's what you're working on right now. Do you work on one project at a time, or do you have multiple things in the works?

Tana: Oh, man, no, one at a time. One at a time, definitely. I'm really easily distracted as it is. If I was doing two things at once or several, I know authors who do, but I'd just be hopping back and forth and nothing would ever get done. I need to do one thing at a time, dive into it, and just have that spinning around my head for the entire time.

Tricia: I get that. I get that. Now, with your work, we did see The Dublin Murder Squad brought to screen as the TV series The Dublin Murders. What was that experience like, seeing your words put to a visual medium?

Tana: I'll be honest, I haven't actually seen it because when the whole process started, I was under the impression that they wanted to do an adaptation of the books, but it turned out that what they had in mind was something very different, was something quite loosely based on a few of the ideas and a few of the characters in the books. I was originally supposed to be quite involved, and then I went, "Do you know what? If you're doing this, the last person you want on board is me because I'm just going to be showing up going, ‘Excuse me, that's not like it is in the books,’ when you're not trying to do anything that's like what it is in the books. So what use am I going to be? All that's going to happen is everybody's going to get frustrated."

So, I took a big step back and went, "Away you guys go and do whatever it is you're doing. You have an amazing cast on board, you cannot go too far wrong with these people, it'll be fine." But again, I didn't watch it because I knew I would be that person going, "The person in the book would never do that." [Laughs] Yeah, I know. That's fine, I have to release it and let it go. So, I don't know, but I've heard, again, that the cast are amazing.

Tricia: Yes. Yes. I could say it, not as good as the books, but [laughs] it's a great inspiration for something, worth your time watching. But hopefully what it does is bring people to the books as well, because even when it's an adaptation, any well-told story in one medium is worth experiencing in another.

Tana: I'm kind of fascinated by adaptations. The only one I've ever seen that was just in this class was Greta Gerwig's Little Women. Did you see that?

Tricia: Yes. Yes. So good.

Tana: Yeah. I thought it was amazing. Like, I liked the book better after seeing that because it just brought to life sides of it that I had never noticed before. So that kind of adaptation, I think, that illuminates the book rather than just overlaying it with other stuff is just, it's an amazing thing.

"[Roger Clark] understood the entire breadth of the humor and the darkness and the emotion from both perspectives at once, and he's got a beautiful voice. He's so great to listen to."

Tricia: Yes. And when a story is so kind of well-known, it's kind of okay to play with it, in a way. And like you said, it makes something that you think you know inside-out new again. And I love that.

That does bring me to something else. I don't know how much of a listener you are, whether it's podcasts, audiobooks, but in my preparation for this interview, I did discover that you're a big Richard Adams fan, a Watership Down fan, and that that's a book that you've read over and over again. Have you listened to it? Because if not, I have some great recommendations for your next visitation on Watership Down. Maybe try the audio version to hear something different.

Tana: That had never even occurred to me. I am not much of a listener because usually when I do my listening is when I'm going for long walks trying to get my head in gear to write the next bit of book. So if I'm listening to something that's text, then that's going to be in my head. So, usually I have music playing and I'm just going for long walks and lots of things. So, that's my only listening time. But Watership Down, you're absolutely right, is one of my over and over and over books. And it had never occurred to me, how would you even do that as an audiobook? That would be amazing. Please do give me recommendations.

Tricia: No, yeah, it's great. It's Peter Capaldi narrating.

Tana: Peter Capaldi, I love him. Oh, wow, I'm getting a pen. Peter Capaldi is Watership Down. Yeah, okay, that's very, very hard to resist.

Tricia: Yeah, so you should try it out. And I know one of your childhood favorites, it's also one of my childhood favorites, The Wind in the Willows. And there's two audio versions to check out for that one. There's one that's a single narrator performed by Michael Hordern, and there's another multicast audio adaptation, so it's a little different, by Dina Gregory, that our Audible UK team produced, and you should check that out too.

Tana: The multivoice one sounds amazing. The idea of something like The Wind in the Willows, where it's this whole little world with all the animals moving around it, the idea of that being brought to life by full cast sounds amazing.

Tricia: Definitely worth checking out. So, I already know what you're working on now. Do you have a working title for the next part of the story?

Tana: Still in sort of the initial phases where I'm poking around the edges and doing a lot of wandering around looking spacey, thinking about how all the characters would interact. I'm not one of those writers who has, like, a full plan before I get stuck into a book. I just tend to dive in and figure it out as I go. But I'm very much in those stages of figuring it out as I go and getting it all wrong and having to rewrite a whole scene without this character. That kind of stage. The messy bit.

Tricia: The messy bit. Now, just sticking to the audio for a second, for Roger Clark, what is it about his voice that you think works so well? Because he goes between an American and Irish and male and female. How do you think that worked for him, and what about his voice in particular stood out to you?

Tana: Well, Roger happened partly because I was first discussing the audio with the guys at Viking, who are just magic at this, experts at this, and they said, because they know I was an actor, I still do bits, and they said, "Do you know anybody in the acting world who you think would be a good idea?" And I texted a guy I know who actually did the audio for The Witch Elm a few years back. I knew he and his wife had lived in the US, knew a lot of US actors. I said, "Who comes to mind for you for this?" And he mentioned Roger Clark, and when I heard his audition sample, it was like, "No, no, this is the guy. This is the voice for Cal."

It's a difficult part to do because you're somebody who has to understand both the American POV character and the Irish world that he's in. And Roger, having been back and forth between those two worlds, having lived in both, he has a really deep-rooted understanding of both, and you could tell. When he starts reading the scenes in the pub where you've got all these Irish guys giving each other hassle and turning everything into a joke with an edge on it and using this pub banter for like every purpose, from showing affection to giving warnings to establishing hierarchy, there's a very specific tone to that. There's a very specific layering of meaning within an Irish pub. And he got it, he knew it, he understood it instinctively.

But he also, as far as I could tell, not knowing much about American culture, he also really deeply was rooted in the American perspective. He understood what it was like for Cal as an American to see this Irish world unfold. So that, I thought, was what made him wonderful, that he understood the entire breadth of the humor and the darkness and the emotion from both perspectives at once, and he's got a beautiful voice. He's so great to listen to.

Tricia: That's amazing. That's amazing. So, hopefully next book, we'll meet him again. Tana, it's been such a pleasure talking to you today.

Tana: Tricia, thank you so much for having me on. This was great.

Tricia: And listeners, The Hunter is available now on Audible.