Crime author Jane Casey told David Hennessy about her latest novel, Everything She Didn’t Say.
Jane Casey is an international best selling author.
Her series of books about the London- Irish Detective Maeve Kerrigan has won and been nominated for many awards.
Since the first book The Burning arrived in 2010, Maeve Kerrigan has won her author the Mary Higgins Clark Award for The Stranger You Know, and Irish Crime Novel of the Year for After the Fire.
Just in 2019 Cruel Acts would win Jane Irish Crime Novel of the Year again.
Jane’s 2021 book The Killing Kind was brought to the screen in 2023 by Paramount with a cast that included Emma Appleton, Colin Morgan and Kerr Logan.
This week Jane releases her latest novel.
A break from her Maeve series, Everything She Didn’t Say is Jane’s first book to be set in Ireland.
The story centres around Ruth.
Ruth wakes up in the cottage she was staying at covered in blood.
Unharmed herself, she doesn’t know whose blood it is, where it came from or where her travelling companion is. Or that’s the story she’s telling.
Two garda detectives come from Dublin to investigate and find they don’t know how much they can trust Ruth and her story.
Jane, originally from Castleknock in Dublin, lives in southwest London with her husband and two children.
Jane took time to chat to the Irish World.
This is your 19th novel but your first one set in Ireland. Have you always wanted to write a book in Ireland or is it more this story had to be there?
“I had the idea for the story back in lockdown.
“I was thinking about being in the west of Ireland.
“Obviously when we couldn’t travel as easily, we were kind of thinking about where we would like to be most in the world and I was thinking, ‘That’s where I would like to be’.
“So the idea definitely started with the place more than anything else but I just knew straight away, ‘That’s not a Maeve story. That’s something else and it should have a different feel to it’.”
The mystery at the heart of the book regards Ruth and whether she is a suspect or a victim and there’s just no way to know..
“No, and I think there’s two ways of reading absolutely everything in the book.
“If you read it thinking that Ruth is a good person, it reads very differently from if you’re reading the same conversation but thinking that she’s a bad person.
“There’s always two interpretations of everything that she says.
“I think what I want readers to do is just to constantly second guess themselves as they’re reading.
“All those little shifts of opinion are what I was writing for.”
It’s set in this Mayo village of Knockawl which is fictional, is it?
“It doesn’t exist.
“I always feel that the smaller the town, the less you should be putting murderers in it and people who are up to no good.”
The eeriness comes from the isolation. Yes, they are in the beautiful countryside but they are also far away from any help if something bad happens..
“For sure.
“It is absolutely that place that you turn up and you say, ‘This is so beautiful, it’s perfect’.
“And then, as the situation deteriorates, you suddenly realise it’s more like a trap.
“That’s how my summer holidays go generally,” Jane laughs.
“By day three I’m like, ‘We’re all going to die. We have to get out of here’.”
It is almost a cross between a cabin in the woods story and also a locked room mystery as no one knows what happened except, of course, for Ruth..
“Yeah, I think it’s the kind of book where you’re investigating it alongside the guards.
“As a reader you’re kind of looking over their shoulder and looking at the evidence that they’re getting and weighing it up for yourself and trying to decide who you trust.
“That’s what I wanted when I was writing it.
“You get these little insights from Ruth and then it’s up to you to kind of place them, think like, ‘Oh, is that a good thing that she said or is that a suspicious thing? How do I feel about her?’”
Yes, as a reader, you decide how much you can trust her..
“She’s telling a story and one of the first things she says is that they lied to get there so one of the first things that you know is that she’s not always honest, even though I think she really struggles with not being honest.”
Ruth and Maura’s relationship starts off really nice but becomes unhealthy very quickly…
“It does.
“I always feel like when you’re in your 20s, you’re so easily influenced by other people.
“You’re moving out of the shelter of your family and into the world and you make these friendships and they are so important to you, especially if you are lonely or a little bit lost.
“Someone comes along and they give you this amazing view of a different world and that you could be a different person.
“That can be a really positive thing but it can also be a really negative thing.
“For Ruth, I think the relationship with Maura opens up the world for her but at the same time, it is a really toxic relationship and there’s a lot going on that I think she’s almost coming to a realisation about it even as she’s speaking to the guards.”
A key point in the plot is that Maura and Ruth look alike and pass for each other and they lean into it by dressing similar.
I was reminded of Single White Female as it has a similar psychological vibe..
“It is and actually they always ask you to like sum up a book in three words- I always say for this one, ‘Single White Cailin’.
“It’s these two Irish women in a cottage dressing the same way and looking the same way and being very suspicious altogether.”
Although Ruth lacks confidence Ben and also the character of Killian see her as very desirable while Maura has that overwhelming confidence..
“Sometimes it’s about how you present yourself.
“Maura has this unshakable confidence in herself and then she can make other people do more or less whatever she wants.
“I think Ruth appeals to a certain kind of man and another type of man would be very drawn to a Maura type and I don’t think that there would be much overlap between the kind of people who are attracted to one or the other.
“I think they’re really interesting.
“I think there’s good reasons for them to be dressing the same way and looking the same way and having this kind of similarity between them but as you say, it all adds to that kind of sense of, What is actually going on here?
“Even to the point where someone says, ‘Does Maura even exist?’
“I think that should be in your head as a reader as well.
“If I’ve done my job properly you’re thinking, ‘Is this actually all a wild goose chase?’
“It nearly broke me when I was writing this plot.
“I have to say it was very difficult to try and pin down all of these different details.
“You know that kind of picture of the wall and the pictures and the string and the connections?
“That was me while I was writing this book.”
Let’s talk about the two guards Ben and Liam. They are very different obviously but similar to Maeve and Josh in your other series in that they are so different as personalities..
“That’s it and I think they’re both kind of carrying a lot of baggage when they come into the novel.
“Liam is not very confident in himself in some ways and Ben has had this big career setback that he’s trying to cope with.
“They’re both just slight outliers in terms of your standard ordinary garda detective, if such a thing exists.
“They’re very different.
“They come at it from a completely different directions but actually they are brilliant at doing their jobs and I think they bring out the best in one another.
“It was just really nice to write a male friendship growing.
“I think men are quite bad at friendships sometimes.
“My husband goes off and has drinks with friends and he comes back and you go, ‘Well, what’s going on with them?’
“And he goes, ‘Oh yeah, they’re fine’.
“And I’m like, ‘What did you hear? What did they tell you about this? Did you ask about that?’
“He says no, we just like talked.
“Like, ‘You’ve just been there for four hours. What did you talk about?’
“And it’s always something like barbecuing.
“But I think that sometimes is where the affection is hidden in male relationships, you’re talking about barbecuing but it’s really like you just want to be together and having that moment of closeness.
“I really wanted to write about that and also I really loved writing about Maeve and Josh but I really didn’t want another male/ female duo because I knew that people would just compare them so I thought, ‘What happens if it’s two men? How does that play out?’”
A similarity between Ben and Maeve is that Ben has had to rebel against his upper class upbringing to become a guard just like Maeve is a bit of an anomaly as a London- Irish woman to join the Met..
“Absolutely, yeah.
“I think one of the things that I’m always fascinated by is how vocational it is to go and be a police officer wherever you’re doing it.
“There’s a lot of people who do it because there’s literally nothing else that they want to do in life.
“No matter where they started off, that is the thing that they were made to do and I find that fascinating.
“It’s not me but I see it in other people and I can see they are just born to do this thing.
“But I think struggle is always interesting.
“Somebody who has been through some stuff is is always interesting.
“It’s not just like any other job where you just kind of, ‘That’ll be grand thing to do. I’ll put in my application for it’.
“It is a big life changing thing and obviously controversial for both of them in different ways but absolutely the same, they’ve had to really try to get there.
“I do find that very interesting because I think that normal people don’t understand is that if you’re a guard or a police officer, you’re never really off duty.
“You are required by your oath to intervene if you see a crime or to put yourself in harm’s way if there’s something so you always get off-duty police officers or off-duty guards doing things but that’s because they’re never really off-duty.
“It is a complete life much more than if you’re an accountant, I think.
“There aren’t that many 24 hour rapid response accountants out there and if there are, I respect them.
“I couldn’t do it but for the police and for guards, it is a life changing thing to do.”
I feel like the two young women put themselves in a dangerous situation by going to this house when they know little about the area or the owner. But I feel influencers and others could make similar bad decisions in this climate and there are nefarious people who will lure them with such things..
“Absolutely, I’m always fascinated by how people present something online but then very often a couple of months later an influencer will say, ‘While all this was going on, my marriage was ending’.
“Or, ‘I was filming this beautiful holiday and I was crying every day behind the scenes’.
“I’m so fascinated by that, how something can be presented as perfect but actually there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that you’re not aware of and this perfect life or this perfect opportunity suddenly kind of becomes something much scarier once you are there and living it.
“I just think the fact that they’re so set on getting this kind of overrides any doubts that they might have about, ‘Is it safe to go off to this place they don’t even know on their own and just do the thing for this guy who they’ve had one Zoom meeting with?’
“If I was their mothers I would be going, ‘No, you need to ask more questions’.
“I think a lot of the time with a crime novel, you’re trying to override people’s instinct for their own safety.
“You need people to do things that, in retrospect, are a tiny bit reckless or unwise and so a lot of the time, my job as a writer is to make you believe that somebody would do this.
“Ruth’s desperate enough that she would take these chances and go and do these things and find herself in a really bad situation and have to try and talk her way out of it the best way that she can.”
The book read very cinematic to me. Of course The Killing Kind was adapted by Paramount, have you envisaged a film of Everything She Didn’t Say?
“I’d love it.
“I’m sure part of wanting to write about the West of Ireland, which I love and have been there many times, was how beautiful Normal People was with the Sligo setting and how beautifully filmed it was and how you had this sense of the West.
“I think that was probably in my head a bit when I was writing it.
“There’s people that I’ve worked with in TV before who are kind of trying to take it forward at the moment and it would be great if something happened but at the moment there’s no official news.
“But it is definitely something I would love to see with this.
“I would love to see Ben and Liam on screen.
“I would just love to see what actors would make of them.
“That would be fun.”
There has long been talk of your Maeve series coming to the screen, any update there?
“Nothing at the moment except I’m writing the next one as we speak.
“I think a lot of people were scared that I was going to stop writing the series or that this new type of writing would distract me.
“I think I’m going to write another book set in Ireland.
“That will be the next one after this Maeve.
“There’ll be another one that goes back to this world and has some of the characters from this book in it.
“That’s the book for 2028 but next year’s book is a Maeve and it’s really nice to write about her and to go back to writing a very familiar type of police procedural.
“I was trying to do something a bit different with Everything She Didn’t Say but it’s nice to go back to Maeve and Josh and their world and see where they are.
“That’s what I’ve been doing.”
You say you will follow this, could it be another series?
“I think so.
“I think it would be maybe slightly more loosely connected, maybe sometimes some of the characters would come into it, but I don’t feel like I’m finished with them.
“I’m really bad at writing standalones, I always want to go back and see the people again and hang out with them a bit longer so I think I probably will go back and write more about them.”
Everything She Didn’t Say is out now on HarperCollins.
