A new Tana French novel is an event, as it has been since her debut In the Woods (2007) established her astonishing command of the crime genre, specifically the police procedural. Five more novels in the Dublin Murder Squad series followed, cementing and extending French’s formidable reputation for literary-minded crime.
As good as those books are, French’s most recent efforts are of even greater interest to me, as they experiment with different genre forms. The Witch Elm (2018) was a psychological thriller with a wholly unreliable narrator, while The Searcher (2020) was, in her words, “mystery software running on Western hardware.” French isn’t one to rest on laurels when she could be challenging herself.
So it was a surprise and a delight to discover that her new novel, The Hunter, is a follow-up to The Searcher—one that takes some narrative cues from the Dublin Murder Squad books but from the inside out. Two years have passed since the events of The Searcher, and now, retired Chicago PD detective Cal Hooper has eased into small-town West Ireland life, taking comfort in his growing relationship with local widow Lena Dunne and his mentorship of Trey Reddy, now 15 and coming into her own. Then Trey’s father, Johnny Reddy, returns to summer-sweltering Ardnakelty after years away in London, bringing with him a moneyed stranger and talk of a gold rush. That stirring up the town with the prospect of unexpected riches leads to murder is inevitable but it’s the way French unspools that inevitability—languidly, until it’s almost too late—that makes The Hunter so memorable.
French and I spoke over Zoom about writing an unexpected follow-up, why The Hunter is a climate novel, surprising connections to the earlier Dublin Murder Squad books, and looking for “gold in them thar hills.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ESQUIRE: After finishing The Searcher, did you know that you would be writing a sequel? Was Cal Hooper intended to be a series character? Because I didn’t think so the first time I read The Searcher, but when I read it again in advance of our conversation, I started to think otherwise.
TANA FRENCH: You’re right, The Searcher was originally intended to be a standalone. I’d just handed [the novel] in when the pandemic hit. So there was a while in there where I wasn’t doing any writing because I had two little kids at home doing distance learning. And, like everybody else, my subconscious was basically a smoking crater while I tried to figure out what on earth was going on. And you kind of need your subconscious, if you're a writer—it does a lot of the work. So I didn't do anything for a while. And when I emerged from that and started thinking about the next book, I started realising that I wanted to do more with that place and that world I'd set up because The Searcher is a kind of mystery software running on Western hardware.
I like that phrase a lot.
It was playing with the resonances between the Western, which I had just discovered, and the West of Ireland—the things they have in common and the ways that the Western tropes map quite well onto that West of Ireland setting. In The Searcher, I was playing with things like the stranger in town who comes in, shifts things, and acts as a catalyst. I just felt like there were more Western tropes that would map really well onto that world.
A world like that, that little village of Ardnakelty—it's so packed with secrets and stories that it felt like there was more candy in the piñata, with more stories to tell. And you know the gold rush trope? It fits well with Ireland! Oddly enough, there is, in fact, a long history of very serious gold archaeological artefacts being found in Ireland. Clearly, there's been gold being dug up in Ireland for a long time. There have been little mini gold rushes over the centuries, and some fairly recent ones, too—people are still out there in the border mountains going, “I think there might be [some] gold here.” So, it doesn't actually seem too implausible for a character to suggest that there might be “gold in them thar hills.”
Another classic Western trope is revenge. Because it never turns out to be a simple thing. It's never, “You track down the building where you shoot him, you're done.” It's always morally ambiguous, morally complex, something that doesn't turn out exactly the way you plan. So I wanted to play a little bit with that. It seemed to me that Trey had every reason and every right to need some kind of revenge. It also seemed to me that Cal and Trey’s relationship had been left at kind of an interesting place where it was developing, but fragile. If somebody came in and shook it up, that balance would be disrupted. What would happen? The obvious person to shake it up was Trey’s absent dad, Johnny—he’s the kind of guy who if he came home, would bring with him a big “get rich quick” scheme.
I have so many follow-up questions about this. But the first thing I thought of was that with respect to the Gold Rush, you're also writing this in Ireland, which went through the Celtic Tiger. In a way, that was kind of a gold rush.
Yeah, it kind of was—it had the same almost hysterical fanatical passion involved in it. And also the sense of unpredictability: we were being told that this was all under control, that the housing boom was going to keep on going forever. So, you could absolutely pay top whack for something in the middle of nowhere that you were buying off plans, and it would all be fine because, in five years, you could turn ten times the price. So, it was presented as this very modern, very controlled economic phenomenon. But the mood around it wasn't like that at all. It was this frenzy, this absolute feeding frenzy. People queued for days to buy those houses off plans, with newspapers reporting on a 10 per cent increase overnight, practically. So, it had that gold rush feel. And when it all went wrong, it had that psychologically gutting feeling where people had the ground ripped out from under them. They were left with nothing because they had staked everything on their little gold rush. So, yeah, you're right. I hadn't actually thought about that.
Why set The Hunter two years after the end of The Searcher? To give Cal, Trey, and Lena some time and space to have some stable time together? You even have a line about how Cal and the town “have reached an equilibrium, amicable if not particularly trusting, maintained with care and a certain amount of caution on all sides.”
Two years felt about right. Partly for the relationships to have started to build solid foundations but they haven’t really had time to become concrete. So, it's still very disruptive. But it’s also about Cal's relationship with the town because this isn't like The Searcher, which was Cal’s story. This is a story about the relationship between three people: Cal, Trey and Lena. I wanted their relationships to have time to blossom and spread out and develop the intricacies that make them interesting. But I also wanted the relationship between Carl and the town to shift, too.
In The Searcher, he’s a newcomer. He's just wandered in here from America. Nobody knows him, which in a small town in Ireland is a huge thing. And he knows nobody. So he is the outsider coming into this closed community. But in The Hunter, Cal is in a kind of strange borderland where he's an accepted outsider; he knows the place and they have an established relationship. That gives a different kind of power. He has the power of knowing the town and knowing its dynamics, but he’s not bound by its rules in the same way as an insider.
There are so many evocative descriptions in The Hunter of the blistering summer heat and how it almost bends everyone (particularly everyone in Ardnakelty) to its will. As Cal says, “Whenever it stays hot too long, I’m just waiting for things to get messy.” Would you call The Hunter a climate novel?
Oh, god, yeah. Especially in a location like this, because I wanted a sense of some kind of unsettling, almost unnatural pressure on the characters. And around here, especially in the West [of Ireland], a heat wave does that. We're not used to them. The natural range for Ireland is from on the cold side to a bit warm. Once the temperature hit 25 degrees in 2016, people went nuts.
To the characters in this book—not the three main ones but to most of the rest of them—it's more than that. These are farmers. So this isn't just psychologically unsettling; this has a concrete effect on their livelihoods. This is something that's going to affect the whole lambing season. It's affecting their crops; it's affecting the feed they've got for their cattle over the winter. So that's one of the reasons why they're so susceptible to Johnny Reddy’s wonderful “get rich quick” scheme when he comes in with it because they're in a very vulnerable place. They're on the defensive and feeling under threat—not just psychologically but financially. So it does end up being a crucial factor in the way the plot unfolds, as well as the atmosphere.
Once there’s a murder, it’s almost as if The Hunter gets into a familiar Murder Squad-like gear, particularly in the interrogation scenes. Did it feel like slipping on an old pair of gloves to write these particular scenes or did they feel new because of different characters being involved?
The main thing that was interesting was that I was doing it from the reverse perspective from the Dublin Murder Squad. Here, it’s from the perspective of the people being interrogated, who go in there with their own agendas, each one of them different at different times and in different interrogations. So, it's not about the detectives trying to bring everything together, find the truth and make everything fit neatly into place. It's about the characters trying to manage the situation so that it goes in a direction that works for them—which, for all of them, oddly, has very little to do with the murder. And who did it? None of the three main characters actually care that much. They care much more about their relationships, their world and Trey ending up basically okay, as unscathed as possible by this whole situation. So the detective is not some crusader for truth and justice but just this obstacle that they have to get past and manoeuvre and navigate in a way that will let things come out okay.
The detective is not some crusader for truth and justice, but just this obstacle.
I mean, on the one hand, the cop is working the case but it's much more interesting that they are working the cop. They're also working on each other and themselves, to try to keep that equilibrium that they fought so hard to maintain for the last two years so that it doesn't literally and metaphorically blow up in their face.
They are just trying to deal more with what this means to everyone around the murder, rather than who’s done it. Murder has a huge impact. There are ripple effects on everyone who's touched by it, from the detective to the community, to the people who knew the victim and people who knew the murderer. Here they're trying to deal with that ripple effect, rather than with the murder itself.
A couple more questions before we sign off. First, are you still going to inhabit this world for your next book? Or are you going to give Cal, Trey and Lena a break?
It's early days because I'm just getting stuck into something new. But at the moment, what I'm getting stuck into is the third in what's turning out to be a trilogy, which I did not expect.
The Hunter definitely has the “second book in a trilogy” feel to it.
Yeah, I just feel like that arc needs completing somehow. All the characters have been moving on an arc in their relationships with each other and with the place, and that arc is not complete—one more should do it.
I’m obligated to ask: do you feel like, at some point, the Dublin Murder Squad is going to return in some capacity? Or is it just that these were the books of your earlier years, and now you have so many other stories to tell? I'm curious what your current relationship is with those earlier books.
I don't know—I don't rule it out, because I don't rule anything out. But I've come to realise that as a writer, I'm only happy when I'm a little bit outside my comfort zone. I like feeling that I've bitten off just a little more than I may be able to chew and that I'm not in any danger of falling into the trap of writing the same book over and over. Faithful Place has elements of noir and The Likeness has elements of the Gothic. But overall, the [Dublin Murder Squad] books were all from the same perspective of the detective undergoing an investigation and trying to reimpose order on the chaos that is murder. It was starting to feel, I mean, not easy. It's never easy but it was starting to feel like something I knew how to do.
It sounds like you prefer, as a writer, to live in the discomfort than to take on something that you're familiar with, even if you can push against those constraints.
Yeah. I need to feel like I'm learning a new skill as I do this every time. And unless I'm doing that, I'm worried that I'm somehow shortchanging people who aren't giving them what I gave them before.
But what about what you're giving yourself?
Oh, I just love doing this! [laughs]
