1. There Came A-Tapping features a protagonist, Allie, who is struggling with grief and uncertainty. What inspired you to explore themes of loss and trust in this way?
We often write to expunge fear (it’s probably the reason why so many women write crime), and losing a life partner is an existential dread for most people. My husband Geoff is a documentary producer. The idea for There Came A-Tapping presented itself when he was away filming for a few days, and I was waiting for him in our apartment in Dublin with our dog. He was late and I was worried, so I began to write to take my mind off things, describing the scene while it was actually happening. He eventually arrived back, but I found myself wondering, what if he hadn’t? What if he simply didn’t come home?
Allie is a particularly vulnerable protagonist, having had a hugely traumatic event in her teenage years cast a shadow over the rest of her life. We know that what happens to us when we are young leaves an imprint, but I’ve always been interested in how something you might have done in those early years can affect you, how heavily it can weigh, maybe even disturbing the balance of the mind. I wanted to explore issues of conscience, of personal guilt, and the notion of a life being poisoned by something one did as a child or a teenager. How sometimes the major junctions of our lives take place when we are too young to navigate them.
Because Allie is damaged, she struggles with change. She lacks the confidence to navigate her life alone. Rory is her rock, her compass, and when he is taken away, she is left reeling, unsure where to turn or who to trust. Until Raven Cottage enters her life. Bricks and mortar anchor her, but peace of mind still eludes her.
2. What do you think is the key to building suspense in a thriller, without giving too much away too soon?
I’ve heard writing a thriller compared to conducting an orchestra: the introduction of different instruments at different times; bringing each new development to the reader’s attention; building to a crescendo; then easing off to move on to the next sequence. I agree that an important part of suspense is pace (or rhythm!) and ensuring that it varies throughout the book. A danger point, where a writer is at risk of losing a reader, is at the end of a chapter. It’s a natural break, when the reader is tempted to put the book down to go to sleep, or tend to whatever they should have been doing before they picked it up. As a writer you want your reader to be desperate to turn the page, so chapter endings are crucial.
Suspense is about making the reader wait, withholding certain information, answering some questions while posing others. But it shouldn’t feel artificial, and it doesn’t need to because real life is suspenseful. We only know for certain what we actually see, the rest is supposition and guesswork. You can never be absolutely sure of anything unless you’ve witnessed it yourself (that’s the lawyer in me speaking!).
In my case, extra suspense comes from my not knowing what will happen either. I don’t plot in advance so the book unfolds for me as it does for the reader; I compare it to driving a car at night, only seeing as far as the headlights allow. It means that I’m excited to get to my desk and begin writing each morning, armed with a huge pot of coffee!
But true suspense comes from an investment in character. If your reader is emotionally invested, caring deeply about what happens to your characters, then you have your suspense in spades.
3. Were you inspired by any particular mystery or thriller writers when crafting this book?
We have a tradition of the gothic in Ireland with writers such as Bram Stoker, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Oscar Wilde. Repressed anxiety is integral to gothic fiction and it plays an important role in There Came A-Tapping. We also love a good ghost story. I’m particularly thinking of writers such as Dorothy McCardle and Elizabeth Bowen. While There Came A-Tapping is neither a ghost story nor a gothic novel you’ll see definite influences!
When it comes to writing a present-day thriller with a touch of the unexplained (which is probably how I would describe There Came A-Tapping) John Connolly is the master. I’m also a big fan of Stuart Neville. For location and setting, I’m inspired by PD James. A sense of place has always been integral to my fiction; the Inishowen Mysteries could not be set anywhere else, and that is also the case with this book.
4. The haunted Raven Cottage is a central setting. Was there any real-life inspiration behind this setting?
We’ve just bought a 200-year-old schoolhouse in the Irish midlands (not far from where Raven Cottage is set) which we are about to restore. Before that we came close to buying two cottages in different rural locations. The idea for the physical layout of Raven Cottage came from them.
But the psychological or emotional inspiration for Raven Cottage, that sense of the past co-existing alongside the present, was inspired by my childhood, which coincidentally was spent in another Victorian schoolhouse. I remember being acutely aware of all of the families who had lived there before ours. As children we were convinced it was haunted. My brother used to see a little boy at the end of his bed, and I had visits from a girl dressed in white who would appear in the eaves. Both seem to have been entirely benign presences!
I really like the word palimpsest: a document or manuscript which has been reused, with new writing superimposed but bearing visible traces of the earlier script. And I love the idea of a house as a palimpsest, the layering of lives, ghostly shadows of the past. In There Came A-Tapping Allie speaks about herself and Eliza living side by side, ‘she in the past and me in the present like some kind of weird housemates’.
5. With so much praise from fellow authors and readers alike, what do you hope readers take away from There Came A-Tapping once they’ve reached the end?
As my first standalone after a series of six, I’m so pleased by the reception this book is getting. While authors and readers have said it’s given them chills (‘in parts just plain terrifying!’), they’ve also said that it has a satisfying, surprising conclusion.
Human nature doesn’t change. Allie’s concerns are similar to those of Eliza’s over two hundred years earlier. There Came A-Tapping is undoubtedly a darker novel than my previous books but I hope that it ends on a note of resilience, that readers will leave the book with just that: hope.
6. Do you have any personal crime/thriller recommendations?
You’ll never regret a dip into the classics; I still return to Agatha Christie and PD James every year. But we have an amazing crop of Irish crime writers at the moment. You can’t beat a touch of emerald noir! I’d recommend Jane Casey’s Maeve Kerrigan series (The Secret Room is published in April) and Brian McGilloway’s brilliant new book The One You Least Suspect is coming in May.
