Blackboard Jungle - Tana French Interview

The sun-lit lounge of Dublin’s Westbury Hotel seems an unlikely place to discuss murder most foul. But as fans of Tana French will know, the Irish crime novelist has an unerring ability to imbue the most unlikely places with menace. Luckily for patrons and Hot Press, it is not the Westbury itself — the latest heinous backdrop, as featured in new novel The Secret Place, is a private girls boarding school on Dublin’s southside. A year previously, the body of 16-year-old Christopher Harper was discovered in the grounds of St. Kilda’s. When Holly Mackey, a St. Kilda’s pupil, brings Detective Stephen Moran a postcard suggesting someone in the school knows the identity of the killer, Moran sees his chance of joining the elite Dublin murder squad.

The Secret Place alternates between the new investigation and flashbacks building towards the murder. French uses multiple narrators of different ages, genders and backgrounds to tell the story. Making such disparate characters believable comes from her previous life as an actor, she explains.
“I was never one of those actors who liked playing versions of me — the further from me, the better! This was great fun, being able to switch from a detective to a teenage girl. As an actor, that’s what I trained to do — getting up there and taking a character, and hopefully making them a three-dimensional person and drawing the audience in to their fears, desires, needs... and showing the audience the world through that character. That’s kind of what I have practice at, and I hope it carries over to the writing.”
As you would expect from a story centred around a school for teenage girls, there are plenty of rivalries and cliques — it being something of a cliché that teenage girls are experts at oneupmanship. However, French draws a parallel between the girls and the detectives in the murder squad and implicitly suggests rivalry is not dependent on age or gender.
“Yes, there’s jockeying for position. That’s what I was thinking about. I didn’t think of this so much as a book about teenage girls, or even teenagers in general, more a book about ‘Who do you allow to define you?’ Are you going to do it yourself? Is it the media, your peers or your friends?’ That sense is at its height when you’re a teenager. You’re in this maelstrom trying to work out who you are. Then, that doesn’t ever stop. It’s more subtle within the police. I’m writing about an imaginary murder squad. It’s quite a tight environment — a couple of dozen detectives, they are the elite. They are in a very hothouse, cabin feverish atmosphere. And that’s just the kind of atmosphere where this jockeying for position occurs. Who gets to decide who fulfils what role? Who gets to decide how the others will be seen? Who decides the hierarchy and the dynamic? I thought there was definitely a parallel between the teenagers’ lives and the detectives, and anyone else who lives in that kind of tight-knit environment.”
Moran gets partnered with the caustic Antoinette Conway, the only female detective in the squad. She refuses to play the “girlie” role and is punished for it.
“That’s one of the obvious ways people try to define others. There still are men that try to force women to fit into their definition of what a woman should be. Conway has no intention of going along with this or anyone else’s definition of who she should be. A murder detective should be, according to some people anyway, much more upper-middle class or rural — they shouldn’t be a working-class Dub. She has no time for that. She’s not going to change her accent, change who she is. Anyone who wants her to conform to their definition of a woman, or their definition of a detective, can fuck right off!”
“That does make her life difficult. I am in no way in favour of anyone conforming to some cheesy left-over idea of what it is to be a woman, or to be working-class or any of that, but the awareness of those definitions is out there. If you refuse to be aware that they exist, they can make your life more difficult. That’s one of the things I was thinking about — how do you strike that balance? How do you make that a feasible way to live without making your life impossible?”
The idea of who you are and how this can conform or contrast with how others see and define you is central to the novel. The murdered boy, Chris Harper, is seen in very different lights by the teenage girls in the novel. Holly describes him as selfish, whereas her friend Rebecca sees him as kind. But as French notes, a person can be both of those things.
“Chris is handsome and charismatic, and because of that people think they know who he is, and they try to make him be this popular, cool, heartthrob guy. In the flashbacks in the book, he spends a lot of time trying to work out if that is true, trying to experiment with different ways of being, within the limitations that other people force on him. Selena says at one point that he has trouble coming to terms with the fact that he is bits of both — that you can be cruel and kind, or silly and serious.”
It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that, early on, it becomes obvious to the detectives that one of eight people, teenage girls at that, have to be the killer, which makes The Secret Place read like a classic whodunnit.
“I wanted that ‘closed room’ feeling,” says French. “One of the things with a school like this, a private girls’ boarding school, is that it is very isolated — it is its own own little circle. I wanted to bring that sense of stifling isolation. At first the detectives think they’re only looking for a girl who knows something. Gradually they realise it’s not just a witnes: very, very probably the killer is within that circle of eight girls. I’m not a fan of books where it turns out to be a serial killer who just wanders in. Those are books where the plot is all-important; I like books where the characters are all-important. If you do that, the killer’s identity has to be rooted within the characters. He or she has to be there all along.”
Unlike a number of contemporary Irish crime writers, French sticks close to home and Dublin is the recurring location for all her books. Does she see the city itself as a character?
“Definitely! Especially in Faithful Place — it’s a love letter to Dublin, both the good sides and the bad. I’m not originally from Dublin, I didn’t grow up here. It is home more than anywhere else. When you come back to somewhere, you see things about it that a native might take for granted. I think that makes it easier to write about. I can’t imagine writing about anywhere else. This is the only city I know. I’ve never lived anywhere else long enough to know what bus you catch to get from A to B, what places to avoid after dark, or where to get a good pint. That kind of thing adds texture. If I tried to set a novel in Boston, I don’t know which pubs to send my characters to if I want them to go for a quiet drink. I need the exact right pubs!”

The Secret Place published by Viking Adult is out now