Irish crime author Jane Casey: ‘I spent quite a long time not writing because I was looking in the wrong direction’

Jane Casey might be a regular fixture on the bestseller lists, but the Dublin-born author doesn’t get to spend all her time focused on fiction. Like most writers today, she must manage against a backdrop of constant emails and writing-related requests that make ever more demands on her time.

“There are many ways to be a full-time writer and never sit down at your desk and write”, Casey says, speaking over video link from her home in London, which she shares with her husband and two boys. “I find I have to be protective of my time. You get lots of emails and lots of requests and there are phone calls.”

She smiles as she speaks. It is, as she knows, a good complaint to be busy. Since publishing her debut novel in 2010, Casey (46), has won numerous accolades, including netting the Mary Higgins Clark Award, presented by the Mystery Writers of America, for the fourth in her popular Maeve Kerrigan series.

While she creates some monstrous characters in her work, they’re never two-dimensional, and their turpitude is softened by her empathy for them. “I can always tell when a writer doesn’t like their characters,” Casey says. “They are judging them in the way they write them and I try not to do that. I try to have empathy for them.”

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Her new novel, A Stranger in the Family, is the 11th in the Maeve Kerrigan series, and readers familiar with it will recognise the team working around the detective sergeant, especially Detective Inspector Josh Derwent. The chemistry between the two has been playing out through the books and adds a pleasing sizzle to their pages.

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In the latest instalment, the pair try to figure out whether a double murder is linked to the disappearance of nine-year-old Rosalie Marshall, who vanished from her home 16 years earlier. Rosalie comes to life on the page; she’s smart, tough and vulnerable, surviving on the scraps of attention she can glean, and she’s still hopeful.

“This book is very personal to me,” Casey says. “A lot of the storyline, the non-Maeve and Josh storyline, draws on things from my own life. Rosalie’s feeling of being strange, of being different from other people and not quite fitting in, and trying to make the best of it: she’s a heartbreaking character at times. Rosalie is, in some ways, very like I was as a child.”

The character’s outsider quality also echoes that of Kerrigan, a complex and likable protagonist of London-Irish heritage. “When I started writing Maeve, the fundamental thing was she didn’t fit in, and she’s always been trying to find her place and she’s made a virtue of it,” Casey says.

When you get to chat to people and they talk to you about how they feel about your characters and everything else, that is very nourishing

The trait of feeling like an outsider is one common to many writers. “All writers have an ability to step back and detach themselves, and that can be a little bit lonely,” Casey says. “Graham Greene used to talk about the chip of glass in the heart. You can’t switch off the writer part of you that is stepping back and looking at what’s happening, rather than being in that moment. That’s something I feel myself.”

Raised in Dublin, Casey moved to Britain to study English at Jesus College in Oxford in the 1990s. She later returned home to continue her education at Trinity College, but found that everything felt different.

“One of the professors said to me: ‘What took you to Oxford?’ He was kind of angry, and a little defensive about the fact that Trinity is great, and it is great, but I hadn’t followed the traditional route. I’d stepped off it and come back and the path wasn’t there any more, and so that was a huge shift in my life.”

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She also met her husband at Oxford, when she was 19, and knew “we’d be together forever, and that was that. And so that was obviously a factor as well, there was this pull to leave again. You go through things in your life and they change you.”

Did she know, in those early years, she’d write fiction?

“I did, but I had to shed the desire to write the great Irish novel, which I think everybody who studies English to any level has, thinking ‘Maybe I could write something that could say something important’. But I just found there was nothing there. I spent quite a long time not writing because I was looking in the wrong direction really.”

As a student at the Bodleian library, along with stacks of publications on literary theory and other “very dense things”, she’d order crime novels as a reward. “That was what I should have been trying to write, but it took me a long time to actually think, ‘This story I have in my head, I could actually write that down’.”

She worked as an editor in young adult fiction initially, and cites John Connolly and Tana French as influential in making her see the possibilities of crime writing.

“The way women have started writing more and more crime is fascinating to me. It’s hard to pinpoint what is an Irish crime novel at this point because they are so varied and there are so many different voices. I think that’s great. It’s people exploring and really pushing at the boundaries of what’s possible.”

This summer, Casey is one of the headline speakers at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, held in the Old Swan hotel, where Agatha Christie lay low once, back in 1926. The festival, sometimes dubbed the crime writers’ agm due to the many writers who attend, attracts thousands of readers each year, and headlining is a “career highlight” for Casey.

“It’s really nice, it’s lovely. I’m in conversation with Erin Kelly, who I know very well, so I think it will just be a lovely chat.”

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But she’s naturally shy, rarely holding launches for her books, for example, and so such events make her worry. “Authors are expected to do such a range of things now, including public speaking, and it’s almost like the best authors are stand-up comedians. They just get people laughing and engaged, and that is such a skill. At the same time, we’re the people who want to hide away and write books. How you do both of those things and balance them is difficult.”

How does she manage it? “I don’t know. Adrenaline and experience, I suppose. On the other hand, there’s nothing better than meeting readers, so like, the event is one thing, but then afterwards, when you get to chat to people and they talk to you about how they feel about your characters and everything else, that is very nourishing.”

And listening to other writers is always fascinating, too. “You feel part of something bigger in a very nice way,” she says. For similar reasons, Casey also enjoys spending time on social media, frequently posting missives about her cocker spaniel Rory to X and Instagram, and communicating with her readers.

If I’m not having a good time with a book, I can waste a lot of time online and tell myself it’s research or engaging with the culture, or lots of other excuses

“You get this engagement with people that is very different and new compared to getting a piece of fan mail. Back in the day, it would come to you through your publisher or agent and they would vet it and say ‘Yes we’ll pass this on’, or if it was mad maybe you’d never see it. Now you are face to face with people in a different way.”

There are also insights gained by online browsing, she says. “My husband would laugh [at that], but I feel part of being a crime writer is, you’re reflecting society. You are giving a picture of the world as it is at this moment if you’re writing contemporary crime, and part of that is seeing what’s going on.”

People are very open online in a way they’re not in real life, she says, “particularly on Twitter”. “You can get a lot of insight from people and how they think just from looking at it. If I’m not having a good time with a book, I can waste a lot of time online and tell myself it’s research or engaging with the culture, or lots of other excuses.”

If Casey could time travel, would she prefer to be a writer from an earlier age like Mary Higgins Clark or Agatha Christie, when modern distractions didn’t exist?

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She doesn’t think so. She’s read lots of authors’ biographies and “the ups and downs” of them. “Dealing with the US tax system practically broke Agatha Christie,” she says. “Georgette Heyer was obsessed with being more successful – she really felt she should be earning a lot more money and she was really bitter about it.”

There’s always something for writers to struggle with, Casey says.

“I think now is all I know, so I would probably still stick with now.” She smiles a little ruefully. “Though it would be nice to not have to worry about mobile phones and CCTV when you’re plotting.”

A Stranger in the Family, by Jane Casey, from Hemlock Press/HarperCollins, is out now