The bar at the Clayton Hotel in Belfast is an apt enough place to discuss author Brian McGilloway’s latest thriller given its central character works in a pub.
McGilloway drinks tea and chats about his drive from Strabane, where he lives with his wife, Tanya, and family, before discussion turns to the genesis of his new novel, The One You Least Suspect. Set in Derry, it centres on beleaguered Katie Hamill, a mother of one who is put in an impossible situation when two police officers try to force her to inform on her employers. It explores, among other things, how people justify wrongdoing ostensibly for the good of others.
“I started with the idea of this person who is put under pressure to become an informant, and wanted to play with the ideas that these two sides are both very certain of their rightness, and yet both of them are almost as bad as one another,” he says.
“It’s that idea of, through no fault of your own, getting caught in something that is just impinging on your family, and that no matter what way you look, there doesn’t seem to be any way out. Everything that you do to try to escape ends up actually making the trap that bit tighter.”
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Katie’s story unfolds in first person, chronologically, and with a tension and urgency that makes the book difficult to set down. She is in a nightmare not of her own making, with drugs and prostitution on one side and ruthless police on the other. Yet she’s more clever than she first appears, and resourceful and courageous in the midst of unbearable pressures. The sensation of a shutting trap is palpable. Katie is squeezed between the O’Reilly brothers and detectives “English” and “Black Hair”, and there are lots of parallels in both parties’ actions; something one side does, the other side echoes later on.
“And they both kind of justify it on the grounds that, ‘Oh, we’re doing this for your protection’, or ‘We’re doing this for the good of the community’,” says McGilloway.
The 51-year-old sees a reflection of this attitude in society’s polarisation. Growing up in Derry there was “very much that sense of sides” that seemed to ease after the Belfast Agreement, but has now returned.
“I think there’s probably different reasons for it. I think social media has had a big part to play in it. I think Brexit, whether we like it or not, has a big part to play in that idea of having to take sides again. And the ‘what side are you on?’ – that’s never good here.”
Certainty in itself is polarising, he says.
“I find that always quite worrying whenever people are certain that they’re right, because nobody’s 100 per cent right.”
[ Walking the tightrope: Brexit, books and the BorderOpens in new window ]
Another worrying development, for authors at any rate, is Meta’s scraping of novels and papers without permission to train its artificial intelligence model, Llama. The technology company accessed the material from pirate database LibGen. When he checked the database, via an online search engine from US magazine the Atlantic, McGilloway discovered 28 of his books, including translations, had been included.
“I think some people have got to the point of forgetting that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should,” he says. “AI obviously is going to have its values and its place, but ... literature is an expression of our humanity, it’s telling our shared story, that’s the point of it, it’s working out who we are and what our place is.”
The idea technology might mimic that is “terrible”.
“What’s it going to say about our humanity? Because the thing producing it isn’t human. Its intelligence is ultimately synthetic.”
Added to this, he says, Meta’s use of pirated books shows a lack of respect for the work of writers.
“They kind of go, ‘Not only are we going to use this to train, but we’re not even going to acknowledge or pay for it’, and it’s not even the paying for it. I think it’s indicative of an attitude that devalues our humanity ... We’re not heading in a particularly positive direction as a society.”
I wanted to write a book that was made up of the documents of a police file, where the reader would have to basically solve the crime from the evidence
The One You Least Suspect is his 13th novel since 2007 when debut Borderlands, the first in a series, was published. It featured Inspector Ben Devlin, whose voice, he says, is closest to his own. Detective sergeant Lucy Black is the central character in four novels, and he’s written two other standalones, The Last Crossing and The Empty Room. McGilloway, who studied English at Queen’s University Belfast after a brief, uninspiring taste of biological science, has had multiple best-sellers, awards and nominations. He also writes TV scripts, including for BBC drama Hope Street.
It’s unsurprising he’s expanded to screenwriting given a childhood of watching crime drama. Morse, A Touch of Frost and other ITV productions featured strongly since they had the most reliable subtitles, necessary for his father, who had lost his hearing. McGilloway credits the dramas with his love for police procedural, but says after his father died in 2019, his writing changed. He’s “a different person” since then and is “writing differently”.
“The books since he died, they probably have more emotional heft to them,” he says.
He hasn’t written procedurals since, beyond Blood Ties, another in the Devlin series, in which a father-son relationship is tenderly depicted.
“And Blood Ties was because I wanted everybody to know about my dad, who was really quiet and very honest, unassuming and just such a lovely, gentle spirit ... Not enough people knew what a good man he was.”
His procedurals were “all about control”.
“They’re all about protecting your family. These later books have been more about that awareness of loss and letting go.”
[ Only after my father’s death did I begin to know griefOpens in new window ]
McGilloway wrote a moving piece for The Irish Times after his father’s death, and an essay for Impermanence, a collection edited by Neil Hegarty and Nora Hickey M’Sichili.
“It was that kind of idea that the last lesson your parents teach you is how to let them go, and the awareness that you’ll have to do the same at some stage [for your children],” he says.
His father also encouraged him to pursue a doctorate and, after he died, McGilloway took “a couple of years out” from teaching to do that. His thesis scrutinises the history and revival of epistolary crime fiction – books written in the form of letters and documents – and looks at works including by Wilkie Collins and Dennis Wheatley.
“Where this came from was about 10 years ago, I said to my editor – my then editor with the publisher I was with – that I wanted to write a crime file ... a book that was made up of the documents of a police file, where the reader would have to basically solve the crime from the evidence.”
The response was, “No, no, nobody would want to read that. You need a central character, you need narrative.”
The editor was probably right at the time, he says. Nevertheless, as part of his PhD he has finally created his own epistolary novel.
“An awful lot of it was about generating photographs and trying to create a look of a webpage or the BBC News site or whatever else. So it was very much a construction exercise,” he says. “It’s been a privilege to do ... to have the time to work on a book, just not because you’re wanting to get it published, just because you want to do it.”
He has always written and produces work in short, intense bursts.
“It feels like a compulsion,” he says. “If you don’t write for a while, it just builds and builds until you have to.”
His wife tells him, “Go and do some writing because you’re unbearable”, he says, laughing. He doesn’t begin a book from a point of having something to say. It starts with a “kind of discomfort”. He mentions Blood Ties again and its examination of a hierarchy of victimhood.
“There was an awful lot of talk in the press here about victims and who’s a worthy victim and who’s not a worthy victim. And I kind of remember listening to it going, ‘Is there something uncomfortable about this?’ Because every one of those people was a person and every one of them is a family and their loss is no different,” he says.
He thinks for a moment.
“I write to work out how I feel,” he says.
The One You Least Suspect by Brian McGilloway, published by Constable, is out now
