From the front of the Royal Marine Hotel, the harbour town of Dún Laoghaire looks glorious under a summer blue sky. It seems the perfect idyll for the perfect life, which is why Dublin author Gill Perdue chose it as the backdrop for her latest crime novel.
Sipping coffee with hot milk in the foyer of the Victorian hotel, a relaxed and chatty Perdue emphasises the impact the town had on The Night I Killed Him. It wasn’t just the setting, she says – it drove the plot.
“Dún Laoghaire is a place of such contrasts. You have the beautiful glittering marina, the boats, all the different yacht clubs, old Victorian buildings, the sunshine, but you also have a darker side, and in a way, that’s what I’m always looking for. And I wanted somebody who was living this wonderful lifestyle on the surface, but underneath, there was something darker going on.”
The “somebody” she refers to is Gemma Fitzgerald, a social media influencer around whom the story centres. She’s not the hard-sell, vacuous type beloved of some dramas, but someone with a genuine connection to her followers, along with a beautiful home, a handsome yachting husband and an adorable young son. Her life is picture perfect, but she also lives with a dark secret about the disappearance of her golden-child brother, Max, 18 years earlier. And when his body is discovered, the tension created in this nerve-racking and pacy read is palpable.
READ MORE
Perdue’s first adult work, If I Tell, was shortlisted for Crime Novel of the Year at the 2022 Irish Book Awards, and was followed by When They See Me, in 2023. Both featured Garda specialist victim interviewers Laura Shaw and Niamh Darmody. The duo continue in The Night I Killed Him, which has attracted praise from a plethora of writers including Jane Casey, Liz Nugent, Jake Arnott, Andrea Mara and Marian Keyes.
[ Helping the traumatised to speak: The role of the specialist victim interviewerOpens in new window ]
Perdue, who lives in Rathfarnham, Co Dublin, with her husband, has a particular skill for characterisation. Strong women are her forte. Shaw and Darmody are powerful and complex, as well as entertaining and relatable.
“They each have their vulnerabilities, they have their complexities, they have their strengths, and they have their blind spots and weaknesses,” she says. “They are just like me, my sisters, my friends, my daughters. They are very real.”
Their relationship is leavened with lighthearted banter, including when Shaw walks down a corridor in a green two-piece suit.
“On board this aircraft there are six emergency exits, two doors at the rear of the cabin, left and right,” Darmody says before their boss growls from his office.
Perdue credits her sense of humour to her family, and the Aer Lingus joke to her brother.
“Even in the bleakest times, humour can keep you going,” she says.
Michelle Obama was saying she had to have counselling … I was delighted to hear her say that
— Perdue on big life transitions
Four-year-old Ferdia is compassionately drawn, due in part to Perdue’s experience as a primary schoolteacher, as well as to her volunteer work for a children’s helpline. It taught her a lot about children’s struggles and how they spend so much of their time trying to please their parents.
“It’s really hard to find a single child whose main goal is not to just please their parents and make them proud. You can see grown men weeping when their dad says, ‘You know you make me proud, son’, so it is everything.”
She gave up the helpline when life took over.
“As soon as I had kids myself, I found it much more difficult ... It was like as if a layer had been taken off me.”
Perdue works hard at her writing, but also puts much effort into the visible side of her career: the festivals and interviews, the book signings and social media presence. There was a point, though, before she rediscovered writing, when she felt invisible. She recalls her younger self who had heard of “the invisibility of the middle-aged woman”, but had attributed it to low self-esteem and poor self-care. Then, when her children were small, she took a career break from teaching, taught dance part-time, and found she had become part of the “sandwich generation”, raising teenagers and caring for elderly relatives.
Her siblings were “brilliant” and played their part, she says, but because she had more time, she could do more. And although she was happy to take on the role, she recalls always being in her car on her way somewhere or on her way back.
She had written children’s books in her 30s, and “sort of wrote” during this generational caring phase, but found it difficult to carve out time. Her mother died in her 60s, then her grandmother and father died and, when her two daughters moved away, Perdue found herself “suddenly in the empty house and floating around”.
“I kind of felt invisible. I just felt like: who am I? What am I? To a certain extent, you are what you do. So what was I doing? I felt I had sort of faded and become invisible, even to myself.”
With that came a loss of confidence. It wasn’t, she says, empty nest syndrome – the term applied to a sorrowful parent, mostly a mother, after children have moved away from home – because she had never defined herself through her children and was delighted they’d gone out into the world.
“But if you are keeping up your day job, and you’re in and out of town and you’re in your office workplace, and you’re dealing with people, and they’re adults ... you’re just operating in the world fully engaged ... Your world can become very quiet when all that goes.”
She became shy and found it difficult to speak in front of people.
“I needed to put myself in touch with who I used to be. So what did I always love doing? Well, I always loved writing. And I thought, Are you going to call yourself a writer? Have you even finished one thing?”
This gave her “a kick”, and she told herself “get out there and go for it”. She began “engaging with the world rather than hiding away”. She invested in herself and took a summer school in fiction writing in London. At this point, in her 50s, she feared her classmates might think she was too old and ask why she wasn’t taking up “flower arranging or something”. But it wasn’t the case, and she wasn’t the oldest student.
Perdue mentions former US first lady Michelle Obama, who recently spoke publicly about the help she needed as a 60-year-old to “transition” into a life after her daughters left home.
“She was saying she had to have counselling ... I was delighted to hear her say that.”
Returning to the subject of her time in England, she smiles with pleasure.
“It was a nice full-circle moment, because I stayed with my daughters in London, and went from the mummy minding them ... to them going ‘Now, look, I’ll put the app on your phone’, and telling me what stop to get on, and only stopping short of making my school lunch.”
It was a special time in her life.
“And writing gave me the courage to do that,” she says.
The Night I Killed Him by Gill Perdue is published by Penguin Sandycove
