Arts
Tana French reigns over Irish crime fiction. She pushes the genre with descriptive lyrical language in novels that are character-driven and densely atmospheric. Her first six books center on the Dublin Murder Squad, an imaginary branch of the Dublin police force. But French defies convention—instead of a single narrator for the series, each book is narrated by a different member of the squad. So, a supporting player in one book might be the narrator of another. These first-person narrations by various detectives, whose own issues color their observations, give readers a deeply personal and extremely partial perspective of colleagues, suspects, and the crimes. All of which results in the understanding that truth is elusive. Then in her seventh book, the stand-alone novel The Witch Elm, French turns this model upside down. Here, the narrator is a character who is the victim of one crime and a suspect in another. Not surprisingly, the detectives and their actions look very different from this perspective—manipulative and bullying rather than cops just trying to get the job done the best way they can. In her latest book The Searcher, another stand-alone, French moves to new territory entirely: she takes the framework of the American western and shifts it to a remote rural area of Ireland where a former Chicago cop settles by himself in a ramshackle cottage ready to begin a new life. It’s a familiar trope but French molds it into a story of her own. In this episode of the podcast, she joins us to talk about that new novel and her other books, as well as her determination not to keep writing the same book over and over, how her time as an actor informs her writing, and why she blames her entire career on Stephen King. As we celebrate Women’s History Month this March, the National Endowment for the Arts will shine the light on some phenomenal women, past and present, through the agency’s blog, podcast, and social media channels. While the stats may continue to be disappointing in terms of equity, we believe that as we work to address those disparities it’s also important to celebrate the impact women have made and continue to make in the arts. From Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved woman who was also one of the best-known poets in pre-19th-century America to dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, whose work lives on not only through her dancers but through the company’s venture into mixing dance with technology, we’re celebrating women who, to borrow from Maya Angelou’s famous poem “Phenomenal Woman” have fire in their eyes and joy in their feet.