Tana French, 41, is a former actor whose award-winning crime novels based around Dublin's fictional murder squad have become international bestsellers. Her fifth book, The Secret Place, is set in an exclusive girls' boarding school. French lives in Dublin with her husband and two children.
What made you move from acting to writing?
When I was a kid I always wanted to do both, but the acting took over for a while. If you write in the first person as I do it's very much the same thing, in that you're playing a character, telling a story through that person and hopefully drawing the audience into their world. I found I couldn't really do both at once, so when I started acting, the writing went out of the window. I stumbled back into it by accident. In an alternate world where there were 30 hours in the day, I'd still love to do both. Maybe someday there'll be room to balance the two.
Why crime fiction?
The thing that attracts me isn't the murder, it's the element of mystery. I've always loved mysteries, real or fictional. I remember reading about the Marie Celeste when I was a kid and becoming obsessed with what happened. That idea of what could be mysterious and start people asking questions – that's how I wound up with crime fiction.
Why did you choose this unconventional structure for a series, focusing on a different narrator each time?
I like writing about those big turning points in a character's life, those crossroads where you know that whatever you choose, life is going to be defined by it. Most of us only get a few of those in any lifetime, so I could either keep dumping this poor character into huge life-defining crises every couple of years, in which case he's going to end up in a hospital, or I could switch narrator. I'm also interested in the way people look different to themselves. It gives me new angles to explore with a character and you can question how much of the previous narrator's reality was actually true.
The Secret Place is about a close-knit group of friends, as was your second book, The Likeness. What appeals to you about that set-up?
I'm fascinated by friendship; it comes into all of the books. I think it's possible to be a healthy, fulfilled human being without a partner or children, but I'm not sure it's possible to be a whole, healthy human being without good friends, so I've always been interested in the intensity of friendship and the dangers that can come with that. Great friendships are incredibly powerful, passionate things and I think it's explored less in fiction than the danger that might come in romantic or family relationships. Donna Tartt's The Secret History was certainly an influence on The Likeness. She was the first person I saw opening up that landscape of friendship as something worthy of exploration and something that could be powerful enough to trigger a murder.
Which other authors have influenced you? Who do you return to?
I reread a lot. I must have read The Once and Future King, Watership Down and Mary Renault's Theseus books at least a dozen times each. I find something new in there every time, and in all of them the writing is so beautiful that after a while I start to miss it and I have to go back for another read. In terms of pure volume, I probably read more psychological mystery and historical true crime than anything else. I like books like The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, where the investigation of a crime becomes a way into an exploration of the society where the crime took place.
Which writer(s) do you think should be more widely appreciated?
Josephine Tey. She's one of the classic mystery writers, but somehow – maybe because she only wrote a handful of books – she's nowhere near as widely known as Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers, and she should be. She plays with the genre conventions, spins them and twists them, in wonderful ways.
Do you have any guilty pleasures?
Not when it comes to reading! I'm not into the idea of any book being a guilty pleasure, because it tends to feed into the tired old idea that some genres are innately inferior to others (chick lit or science fiction count as guilty pleasures, literary fiction never does), and I don't buy into that.
