The heel of the hunt

Spending her days hobnobbing with ruthless killers, psychopaths and the men and women who chase them seems to suit Arlene Hunt. She’s in fine form when she speaks to Hot Press and it’s not surprising. Since 2004 Hunt has become one of Ireland’s most prolific and well-regarded crime novelists. Her QuicK Investigations series has won her many fans and her seventh book, The Chosen, is due this October.

“It’s a stand-alone thriller set in the States in the Blue Ridge area on the border between Tennessee and North Carolina. In a nutshell, a teacher, Jessie, foils a high-school shooting and in the process becomes hounded by the media. A journalist delves into her past and discovers that she’d changed her name and been married before. She’d shot her husband in self-defence. She’d recreated a new life for herself and never told her new husband.”
“Running parallel to this we have Caleb Switch. He’s a serial killer. I’d call him an apex predator. He categorises people who may be of use to him and people he thinks will fight back and give him the thrill he needs. Because Jessie is so well-known in the media she attracts his attention. The book pits him against her.”
Fans can get a sneak preview when she reads from it at Electric Picnic this September.
“I’ll be reading a section where you get to see how Caleb operates. He works on charity phone lines, where people who have suffered a trauma phone in. Using that he’s able to pick out a steady set of targets.”
Some writers, spending their working hours alone immersed in their imaginations find the shock of having to read in public traumatic, but Hunt enjoys it.

“I think I could be a bit of an actress that way – babbling to people! I like the feedback you get. It’s really good fun because you get to see other people’s interpretations. I really enjoy it!”
The Chosen is Hunt’s first novel set wholly outside Ireland and this she says was for practical narrative reasons.
“Because Caleb is a hunter, he has to operate over a certain amount of ground. When I was looking into writing the book I thought I’d have a look to find the most remote places in Ireland. I was in Donegal and down in Clare and up the Wicklow mountains but there is nothing really remote in this country. There’s a vague sense of remote but not remote enough because I always ran into somebody, somebody hiking or cycling. That’s not something Caleb would have risked. So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll go really remote!’”

“It was a bit of an eye-opener for me actually. In was in the Pisgah National Park and I was talking to the ranger and he told me that if you get lost in the wilderness that unless someone comes looking for you, they don’t even search. That was such an alien concept to me, that they wouldn’t bother looking for you – it’s just too vast. There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell or anyone finding you. It shook me up – the amount of people that go missing in the States that are never looked for, that are presumed dead and that’s it.”
The Chosen is also Hunt’s first novel published under her own imprint, Portnoy Publishing, despite being offered a new two-book deal with Hachette.
“I’ve been with Hachette from the start and they were always brilliant but I decided to go it alone and see what happened. I’m thrilled about it but I’m also a nervous wreck!”

Fans of her QuicK Investigations series will be pleased to know that Hunt will be returning to John Quigley and Sarah Kenny.
“I’m halfway through the latest one now. It’s great to do a stand-alone and then do a John and Sarah one straight after it. It’s good fun to get back to characters that you know.”
Ireland has produced an impressive array of crime novelists in recent years – John Boyne, Declan Burke, Alex Barclay, Tana French and even John Banville writing as Benjamin Black to name just a few. For Hunt, turning her hand to writing was a development that grew out of her reading habits.
“I’m a huge fan of the genre. Nothing tickles me more than cracking open the spin of a really good crime book. It was a natural evolution I suppose to go from reading to writing it.”
While some crime novelists prefer to dwell on the gruesome details of violence and death, Hunt’s books have changed from extreme descriptiveness of violence found in her earlier works. This, she says is “a confidence issue.”

“I don’t think I had the confidence in my own writing ability at the time to allow readers to work stuff out for themselves. The later books are still quite gory and I wouldn’t shy away from a brutal scene, but I allow people to work out what has happened more so than in the past. I was putting things down in a bit too much detail and it’s not really necessary – nothing is more frightening than your own imagination.”