With THREE REASONS FOR REVENGE, Dervla McTiernan pulls readers into a story that is at once both terrifying and completely immersive.
Those of us who have been fans of your books since the jump are used to your stories set in Ireland (and those two spectacular forays to the US). Now, though, you’ve set your story in Melbourne, where you live. Why was the time right to set a story in your proverbial back yard?
I’d been thinking about writing a novel set in Australia for a long time. Australia has been my home for fifteen years now. I’ve raised my children here, and slowly, over time, I’ve fallen in love with the place, and I wanted to write a book that really lived here. But you can’t force these things. You have to wait for the right story, for that gut-punch of an idea that tells you you’re onto something real, because that personal response is what gives a book its point of view, and I don’t think you can fake it.
For a long time I didn’t have the right idea for an Australia book and the idea, when it finally did arrive, was a surprise. I think I was looking for the right outback idea, but my novel is set in Melbourne and is very much an urban novel. For me the book arrived as an image — a motorbike courier moving through Melbourne in the very early morning, before the city has properly woken up, delivering three gift-wrapped parcels to three very different homes. I knew immediately that inside each parcel was something designed to destroy the person who received it. Tailored, targeted destruction. Once I accepted that I was nowhere near the outback, the pressure to write an ‘Australian’ book went away, and I could just focus on Melbourne, which is a beautiful contemporary city of such texture. A really great place to set a book.
THREE REASONS FOR REVENGE is perhaps your deepest “character study” yet, and some of these characters are painfully damaged. Was writing them difficult? Fascinating? A combination?
A combination. Though if I’m honest, the damaged characters are often the most fascinating ones to write. Characters usually begin for me as a smudge of an idea, and the detail fills in slowly as I write. With this book, I had to understand what could bring a person to the point of wanting to methodically destroy other human beings and you can’t write that from a distance. You have to find your way inside it, to understand the wound underneath the behaviour. That can be uncomfortable.
But when I’m writing a novel, that book becomes completely all-consuming. The characters feel real to me in a very immediate way, and I never find myself thinking, this is difficult. I’m thinking, who are you? What happened to you? That slow coming-into-focus of a character is my favourite part of writing, and that’s just as true — maybe more true — when the character is darker.
No small part of this story revolves around the failure of the justice system. Having been a lawyer, do you see the justice system as inherently flawed, or rather just a function of the humans on which it relies?
Both, I think. The justice system is inherently human. It’s designed by people, run by people, resourced (or not) by people and so it fails in human ways. Most (though not all) of those working within it are doing their best, usually with too little time and too little money. But when the system does fail, the person it fails doesn’t experience that as an unfortunate statistic. They experience it as a betrayal.
That’s really where Three Reasons for Revenge begins — with what happens when the system lets you down and you decide to take a very personal revenge. Having practised as a lawyer, I have enormous respect for the ideals of the system, and no illusions about the gap between those ideals and what happens in practice.
Your writing feels completely comfortable in multiple timelines. When you’re writing, do you switch back and forth as you go, or write all of one timeline and then the other?
I switch back and forth. I mostly write in the order the reader will read, because I want to experience the story the way the reader will.
It helps that my process is messy by design. Everything starts with a hardback notebook and my pen, long before I go near a computer. Days or weeks of stream-of-consciousness writing about who the characters are and how the pieces fit together. Then I write around thirty thousand words, at which point I’ve found the characters and understood what the book wants to be. And then I typically scrap most of it, draw up a much more detailed outline, and start again properly. By that second pass I know the story well enough that moving between timelines mostly happens fairly naturally. But really, it’s an iterative process. Every draft makes it a little bit better.
As THREE REASONS FOR REVENGE makes its way into the world, what are you working on next?
A brand new series! It’s about two sisters, one is a young cop, one a young defence barrister. They live together in a terrible flat in Dublin at the top of an old Georgian building. The flat is freezing in winter and roasting in summer but they are utterly broke so it’s what they can afford. The sisters love each other but they have a complicated past and their jobs put them in conflict. And then one sister gets caught up in a murder trial and the other discovers a hidden cellar on land near their family home. A hidden cellar with an iron bed and a blood-stained mattress.
Oof. I’ve just handed in my structural edit on the book and have loved writing it. I love these characters from the tops of their heads to the bottoms of their feet.
