Catherine Ryan Howard: ‘It seemed ridiculous that an Irish woman in her early 20s wanted to make a living as a writer’

Author Catherine Ryan Howard may joke about the “literary” label attached earlier this year to her work, but her high-concept crime thrillers are deadly serious.

We’re sitting at a long table in a high-ceilinged, white-walled conference room in Dublin, where the Irish arm of Penguin Random House is based, drinking coffees from office mugs. Howard has been chatting with her publicist about plans to promote her latest novel. Her schedule includes festivals, signings and interviews. While she works hard to perfect her writing, she also does all she can to enhance sales. She’s a talented and determined woman.

Howard (41) comes from a family of five in Cork and now lives in Dublin. When asked about her background, she pushes her glasses up her nose, clever blue eyes glinting behind them.

“I hope you’ve read very little [about it] because I enjoy being, like, a woman of mystery.” Her laughter is infectious.

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What sort of a student was she? Very lazy, she says. At her secondary school, Regina Mundi in Douglas, she would run home to write English essays, but teachers would remark she wasn’t applying herself to other subjects and could do better.

“I was very bored in school a lot of the time.”

Once I’d stopped vomiting with jealousy, I thought it can happen ... I shouldn’t have quashed my ridiculous dreams

—  On the success of Cecelia Ahern's PS I Love You

She wanted to be a virologist, inspired by Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone, and consumed lots of American made-for-TV true crime dramas and Patricia Cornwell novels when “too young”. From age 11, she was in awe of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park.

“That book blew my mind. Because I couldn’t believe – and I still can’t today – that someone took blank paper and built Jurassic Park on it.”

After school, she managed to secure a place at Lancaster University, but lasted only three weeks.

“One of which was freshers’, so technically two weeks. I was never going to be a virologist and I realised that very quickly.”

She moved home and held down various jobs. All the time, though, she wanted to be a novelist.

“Back then it seemed ridiculous that an Irish woman in her early 20s wanted to make a living as a writer. I might as well have been saying I want to be an astronaut.”

When Cecilia Ahern got her first book deal, in 2004, for PS I Love You, Howard’s attitude changed.

“Once I’d stopped vomiting with jealousy, I thought it can happen ... I shouldn’t have quashed my ridiculous dreams.”

[ Summer short story: Hitch by Catherine Ryan Howard ]

There followed “adventures” abroad, including a job at Disneyworld, then English literature at TCD, two self-published novels, a blog and her first traditionally published novel, Distress Signals, in 2016. Since then it’s been roughly a book a year and plenty of effort to promote them.

“It drives me bananas when I see authors say ‘I have no interest in sales, I’ve no interest in the commercial success of this book’. Great. You will never have another book because publishing isn’t a charity, it’s a business, and if this book doesn’t do well it harms the chances of you getting to do this again.”

Her credentials include numerous No 1 best-seller tags, an An Post Crime Fiction Book of the Year Award for 56 Days, and nominations for many other awards. She has been shortlisted for a prestigious Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for The Liar’s Girl, and longlisted for a Dublin Literary Award, for 56 Days. The well-regarded €100,000 accolade attracts nominations from libraries around the world. When the subject is raised, Howard guffaws.

“God love Cork librarians,” she says. “I really got a kick out of it because all the headlines were like three Irish writers duke it out – Colm Tóibín, Claire Keegan and Catherine Ryan Howard, and I thought, that is the only time in my life I’m going to be in a group with those two people.”

I want what’s on the page to be so polished down that it’s like a translucent membrane and there is no distance between the story and the reader

While the nomination labelled her work “literary”, she doesn’t see it that way. In literary fiction the author wants you to stop and admire the roses, and you do, says Howard.

“I’ve been stopped in my tracks by sentences and description, but I don’t want people to do that in my books. I want what’s on the page to be so polished down that it’s like a translucent membrane and there is no distance between the story and the reader.”

Commercial fiction authors don’t get enough credit for how much work goes in to polishing prose to that level of delivery, she says.

“I think we work just as hard as our literary fiction counterparts, but my primary goal is entertainment. I’m not saying that I try to produce popcorn.” Referencing The Nothing Man, she says she would prefer readers not to think “isn’t that a lovely sentence?”, and so become aware they’re reading fiction.

“I’d rather people think the Nothing Man was going to come through their door. I’m sorry but that is what I would like.”

Her ideas are mostly inspired by real-life events.

“I’m convinced, though I could never prove it, that I heard Edna O’Brien say ‘I write as a way to grieve for what I read in the headlines’, and I think I always do it as a way to solve the mysteries I see in them.”

I think there’s far too many novelists that think they can write screenplays and I’m well aware that I cannot. I don’t want to

This is what she’s done with The Trap: provided a fictional solution to women who disappear, partly inspired by The Vanishing, from Dutch author Tim Krabbe, and partly inspired by, though she insists in no way based on, women who went missing in Ireland in the 1990s, during her adolescence.

“I genuinely don’t understand how you get through an hour of not knowing, let alone all these years,” she says. “What’s crazy is, we are here 30 years later and we still don’t know, I mean I can’t even fathom it in a country the size of Ireland.”

The book is set in the present day and centres on Lucy, whose sister is missing. Howard explores how far a person might go to uncover the truth about a disappeared loved one, and what happens if that obsession overtakes the grief. There’s another darker voice, too, haunting and nightmarish, in this taut, satisfying novel.

The Trap, which along with her next book was the subject of a six-way auction in 2022, may well end up in development for TV. Three of Howard’s novels already have, though she’s only allowed name 56 Days at present, which has been optioned by Amazon Studios. She had no role in writing its script.

“I think there’s far too many novelists that think they can write screenplays and I’m well aware that I cannot. I don’t want to. I don’t play well with others when it comes to writing.” She will have a credit as co-executive producer, which chiefly means more money and “a seat at the table” if the show goes into production, though she says that’s “unbelievably unlikely”.

While writing 56 Days, and living alone in a “shoebox” apartment during lockdown, she discovered Lego as a means of diversion. Initially ignoring the expensive Jurassic Park set, she focused on modular buildings and persisted until she owned “a whole street”, which she displays on the top shelf of an Ikea bookcase at her new home.

“I call it Kallax Street,” she jokes.

It’s not that she’s obsessed with Lego. It’s just that Howard likes to world-build. And she’s very good at it.

The Trap is published by Bantam/Transworld/Penguin