Stories that stay with you, like a scar

Nirica Srinivasan

When I think of the writer Tana French, a quote by film director David Fincher comes to mind: “I don’t know how much movies should entertain. To me, I’m always interested in movies that scar.” This is how I think of my favourite crime novels, the ones that have gotten under my skin and stayed there, almost as a thought I can’t get out of my head. For that feeling, to me, Tana French is the best there is.

Tana French is an Irish writer of crime novels, whose books loosely fall into three sets. The Dublin Murder Squad series, which starts with In the Woods, is six books that each follow a different detective (the novels can be read in any order). Then, a standalone novel, The Wych Elm, is notable for being not from the perspective of a detective at all, but from someone who might be a suspect in a crime. Her latest novels are a trilogy comprising The Searcher, The Hunter, and The Keeper. They follow Cal Hooper, an American ex-cop who settles in Ireland, as he works to integrate himself into a strange new world in which the intricacies of unspoken rules, land ownership, small town gossip, local politics and, yes, murder, all contribute to a completely new sense of morality and justice.

To me, a good mystery novel is made up of several elements — a satisfying mystery is foremost, of course, but there’s also strong atmosphere, compelling characters, and a sense of stakes. Some crime novels might meet one or two of these, but I find French’s novels usually meet all. Her books are deeply atmospheric, whether they take place in the dark woods of childhood memory (In the Woods, where the silence is “a pointillist conspiracy of a million tiny noises”) or an all-girls boarding school (The Secret Place with its “worn checkerboard tiles” and frenetic, alive energy). They’re primarily character-led, and those characters feel real and vivid and fully-drawn as people. These are not procedurals where detectives will solve crime after crime: instead, in each of French’s novels, you get the sense that you’re meeting a character at a turning point in their life. Something that happens within these pages will change them forever. Those are the stakes — not just the crime itself, but something larger and more fundamental for the people we’re reading about. 

There’s a crime at the heart of each of these books, of course, but in French’s work, there is often a second, more abstract mystery or conspiracy at play. In In The Woods and The Wych Elm, that’s the mystery of memory. Both protagonists are impacted by something that they can’t remember all, or that they can’t forget — sometimes both at the same time — all contributing to a feeling of murkiness, of instability.

In Broken Harbour, which takes place in a half-abandoned luxury development, questions about land, home, and ownership are foregrounded, setting the novel against a country’s economy, ideas of progress, politics, and class. In The Wych Elm, we interact with power and privilege, and how they blind us to reality. And in the Cal Hooper trilogy, we question morality itself, local politics and local violence, and the complexities of walking the line between what is right and what is necessary.

One thing you might not find in a Tana French novel is a tidy resolution. Much like real life, her books lean into ambiguity, uncertainty, and imperfection. We might know the murderer, but a larger question still haunts us. Or maybe the crime is all tied up, but the detective’s life is changed forever. If you like your crime novels to exist in the space of character exploration, of slow, psychological, and deeply thoughtful engagement with characters and motivations — something perhaps like the first season of True Detective, or like David Fincher’s films — I firmly believe that there is no better person for that than Tana French. As I reread her novels now, I’m struck by how what I remember is very rarely who committed the crime, but rather the feeling I was left with long after I closed the book, the feeling of what these characters experienced and the atmosphere it all conjures — it stays with me, like a scar.

The reviewer is a writer and illustrator. Piqued is a monthly column in which the staff of Champaca Bookstore bring us unheard voices and stories from their shelves.