Bestselling author Tana French’s THE HUNTER is “an absorbing crime yarn”
1.Tell us about your upcoming novel, The Hunter.
It’s a heat-wave summer in the little West of Ireland village of Ardnakelty. Cal
Hooper, who took early retirement from the Chicago police force and moved there
looking for peace, has found it: he’s built a relationship with a local woman, Lena,
and the two of them are gradually turning half-feral teenager Trey Reddy into a good
kid going good places. But then Trey’s absent father comes home, bringing along an
English millionaire and a scheme to find gold in the townland. His arrival threatens
the delicate balance the three of them have built. Cal and Lena would do whatever it
takes to protect Trey, but Trey doesn’t want protecting; she wants revenge.
2. When you wrote The Searcher, did you have any inkling that a sequel could be
in the works?
No, I took for granted I’d be moving on from Ardnakelty, even after Searcher was
published! But then I came out of the pandemic haze and started thinking about a
new book – and I realised I wanted to go back to the world I’d set up in Searcher. A
small town like Ardnakelty is packed full of stories and secrets and intertwined
histories, and I felt like I hadn’t tapped into that. In Searcher, I’d only looked at that
world from the perspective of an outsider trying to get a handle on it; I hadn’t
explored what it would be like not to be an outsider in this place, to be bound up in
its rules and its demands. So The Hunter isn’t really a sequel. Searcher is about being
an outsider in this small town. Hunter is about three people who are on the
borderline between insider and outsider, in different ways, and how they deal with
that precarious status.
3. The Hunter’s main character, Cal Hooper, is an American expat in Ireland. As
an American-Irish person yourself, how much of his worldview reflects your
own experiences?
None of it! Culturally, I don’t think I have the right to call myself American at all. My
father is American, but I only lived there for a few years, as a little kid. I’m a Third
Culture Kid, from a handful of different places, grew up in a bunch of others – so my
worldview, and my experience of Ireland, is very different from Cal’s. Writing an
American protagonist was a big challenge, in terms of everything from his vocabulary
to his attitude towards guns to his response to Irish patterns of communication.
There’s a reason Cal is from North Carolina: I’ve got a good friend from North
Carolina, so I could ask her, ‘Would he use this phrase? In what contexts would he
call someone “Miss So-and-So” rather than just using a first name? How much does
the Southern sense of humour overlap with the Irish one? What was hardest to get
used to, when you first moved here?’ I hope I’ve got most of it right.
4. The Searcher explored several heavy topics – social order, gender roles, and –
of course – murder. What themes can we expect to see in The Hunter?
It’s a book about families – both the ones we’re born with and the ones we make for
ourselves – and what we’ll do for those families when they need us. It’s also a book
about revenge, the different things that point us towards revenge and the different
ways we go after it. And it’s about what happens when those two things – family and
revenge – collide, and one of them has to be sacrificed for the other.
5. Talk about your writing process. How do you take inspiration from everyday
life?
I don’t borrow characters or situations from real life, but I absolutely borrow
phrases. Irish people are masters of sharp insults and creative profanity. I have a
notebook page full of phrases that I’ve heard people throw out in passing and that are
way too good to go to waste. I recently heard someone say, ‘He’s got a head on him
like a melted welly.’ I have GOT to use that.
6. You’ve said previously that you tend to ignore the boundaries of genre.
Your books thus far have dabbled in mystery, Western, horror, and more.
What’s next for you? What boundaries have you been pushing lately?
The Searcher is basically mystery software running on Western hardware, and I’ve
stuck with that mix of genres for The Hunter. I felt like it had more potential, more
Western tropes I could play with: the ‘there’s gold in them thar hills’ trope, the theme of
revenge that underpins so many Westerns, the theme of the adventurer coming home
and bringing trouble along with him. All of those map really well onto Ireland. There
really have been huge numbers of ancient gold artefacts found here, and there have
been regular mini-gold rushes for centuries, so the idea of gold at the foot of the
mountains isn’t actually unlikely. And the adventurer’s difficult homecoming fits
right into Irish culture: Ireland has a long history of emigration, and plenty of stories
of returning emigrants caught between the expectation of success and the harsher
reality.
7. Are you working on anything now? Something for us to look forward to?
To my total surprise, it looks like this might be a trilogy. The character and theme
arcs don’t feel like they’re complete yet.
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tana French is the New York Times bestselling author of eight previous books, including In the Woods, The Likeness, and The Searcher. Her novels have sold over three million copies and won numerous awards, including the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller, and the Irish Book Award for Crime Fiction. She lives in Dublin with her family. |
PRAISE FOR THE HUNTER
”The book abounds in local color and lively dialogue…An absorbing crime yarn.” —Kirkus
PRAISE FOR THE SEARCHER
“The west of Ireland looked good to Cal Hooper on the internet. But now that he’s living there, the rugged beauty of the region overwhelms him, as it will anyone reading Tana French’s The Searcher, an audacious departure for this immensely talented author… Not to be missed.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“Taut, chiseled and propulsive.” —Vogue
“French’s writing here is on fire. Eerie and nuanced and spellbinding.” —Fresh Air
“French avoids the fireworks of conventional crime fiction, instead taking a classic setup—the lone outsider revealing the dark side of a small town—and imbuing it with simmering menace. There’s also an unexpectedly moving friendship and storytelling so atmospheric you can practically smell the peat bogs.” —People
“The perfect cold-weather escape…French’s writing style is so unhurried and pleasurable…and every page smells and sounds like Ireland. At a time when travel is impossible and we’re spending more time at home, staying safe, it’s thrilling to be transported to another place entirely, gripped by suspense and a sense of danger as I turn the pages in my cozy lair.” —Glamour
“Nuanced and compelling.” —The New Yorker
“Thriller mastermind Tana French’s . . . work is as consistently thoughtful and thought-provoking as it is entertaining…[In The Searcher] French finds interesting angles and dynamics, and her cast is, as always, wonderfully drawn.” —The Los Angeles Times
“Vivid and poetic.” —Associated Press
