-jonathan-goldberg.jpeg)
Author Jane Casey talks to us about her latest thriller The Close and how a small detail from a minor character ended up saving a reader's life from a rare condition.
Jane Casey has written twelve crime novels for adults and three for teenagers. A former editor, she is married to a criminal barrister who ensures her writing is realistic and as accurate as possible. This authenticity has made her novels international bestsellers and critical successes. The Maeve Kerrigan series has been nominated for many awards, including the Mary Higgins Clark Award in 2015 for The Stranger You Know and Irish Crime Novel of the Year for After the Fire.
In 2019, Cruel Acts was chosen as Irish Crime Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and it was a Sunday Times bestseller. The Close is Jane's tenth Maeve Kerrigan novel. You can find The Close and Jane's other titles on our catalogue.
I’ve always been a big reader and took the classic crime-writer’s route by discovering Agatha Christie when I was about eight, primed by Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven (always more of a favourite than the Famous Five, who were less inclined to take risks). I was allowed to read anything on our shelves at home or in the library and I developed an absolute addiction to Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Mary Stewart. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History came out when I was fifteen and I read it many times. It was probably the first time I thought about writing a book myself.
I wanted to write about a police officer who is an outsider, but not because she’s a maverick or difficult. All she wants is to fit in, but she has a sense of never really belonging, in part because of her Irish upbringing in London. In the early books she’s the only woman in the team and struggles to be taken seriously. Even now she’s constantly trying to prove herself. I wanted to write about the most junior member of the murder squad instead of the boss – I also wanted to show how different the job might be if you’re a young woman as opposed to a burly hero who can fight his way out of trouble. She’s sweet-natured but nobody’s fool and she has a good sense of humour – she needs it!
I know a couple of people who are firmly convinced they were the models for Maeve Kerrigan but she is truly herself, as far as I’m concerned – I remember starting to write The Burning, the first book in the series, and hearing her voice in my head. She feels like one of my best friends at this stage; I love checking in with her when I start a new book. I miss her when I’m not writing about her!
The Close was a gift to myself after a difficult couple of years – it was so much fun to take the characters out of the usual police procedural environment. The idea occurred to me during the pandemic when I thought it was a shame Maeve couldn’t work from home. In The Close, she and DI Josh Derwent are tasked with trying to uncover what happened to a vulnerable man who has turned up dead in an empty house in London.
The only clue leads them to a small, wealthy rural community where Maeve and Josh go undercover, posing as a couple who are dog-sitting in a residential road called Jellicoe Close. Maeve notices that all is not well in the close. More than one neighbour is hiding something... and as if that’s not enough to worry about, Maeve has to deal with her relationship with Josh, which feels increasingly as if they aren’t pretending to be in love.
I have a very definite arc in mind for the characters but I sometimes let things progress more quickly or slowly, depending on what feels right. I think series fiction works best when you don’t force things. I’ve never said how I see the series developing but I tend to know what will happen in the next two or three books.
In the nicest way possible I try not to think about the readers too much because I think it’s very hard to give everyone what they want – or maybe what they think they want! I don’t want the series to feel predictable and sometimes when readers’ expectations are met it feels anticlimactic. I think Maeve and Josh are both on a journey. That’s not to say they are going to arrive at the same destination...
I’m planning to write my first novel set in Ireland, which is a very exciting prospect. There are lots of exceptional crime writers working in Ireland at the moment – a real golden age. It feels like a chance to do something a little bit different.
The Killing Kind should be premiering in September – I’ve seen it and I’m very happy with it! They have made a beautiful and utterly chilling TV series out of the book. I was lucky to be involved and approved the changes that needed to be made to the plot, so it’s a new creative work in its own right, but very true to the spirit of the book.
This is so subjective but I often return to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. The recording is on YouTube among other places. Sublime, melancholy and ultimately uplifting. My father loved music and I grew up listening to all kinds of things. He would put the radio on and guess the composer if not the piece AND the specific recording within a couple of bars.
In an early book I needed a very minor character to have strong painkillers, and asked a doctor friend what illness they might have to be prescribed something like that. He came up with something unusual, I put it in the book, and I didn’t think anything of it. A year later I got a message from a reader who had recognised his own intractable symptoms in the description I’d written, and went back to his GP to see if it might be the same rare condition. It was, and he went from suffering great pain to complete recovery – all by complete chance!
The first story I ever had published was in a collection of Christmas stories for children and it was about a clumsy reindeer called Stagger, who is a total liability when it comes to pulling Santa’s sleigh but turns out to be short-sighted. Once he gets a pair of glasses he isn’t clumsy anymore. I was an incredibly clumsy child and only found out I was short-sighted at the age of eight, after many disasters. I still have the scars!
