Tell us about your new novel, Blood Like Mine
Rebecca Carter and her daughter, Moonflower, are on the run from a grisly secret across the American southwest. Meanwhile, FBI agent Marc Donner hunts a vicious serial killer targeting online predators and draining victims of blood before severing their spinal cords. When Donner’s investigation leads him to Rebecca and Moonflower, he discovers a mother who’ll do anything to protect her daughter – even if she’s a monster.
The Shining by Stephen King inspired you to write. Does Blood Like Mine, which straddles horror and thriller, come closest to the source?
I read The Shining when I was 12, and I read King, James Herbert and others throughout my teens. Although Blood Like Mine is structured like a thriller, it reflects that early horror influence more than anything else I’ve written.
‘Every book is a reaction to the last.’ The House of Ashes (2021) was your most Northern Irish, complete with Ulster-Scots dialect. Why so?
I’d just written two America-set thrillers. The House of Ashes was very much a swing in the opposite direction, not just in setting, but in style.
You made your name with your debut The Twelve (2009), about a guilt-ridden IRA killer turning on his former comrades. What inspired it?
I don’t know where the idea came from, but it arrived pretty much fully formed one Sunday morning, when I woke with the opening image in my mind – a man drinking in a bar, surrounded by the ghosts of all the people he had killed.
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The US publisher kept the original title, The Ghosts of Belfast, but your UK publisher ran a mile. Are the Troubles still bad news in London?
Northern Ireland as a setting used to be verboten, but the success of TV shows like The Fall, Derry Girls, Blue Lights and books like Milkman by Anna Burns show the breadth of stories that can be told here, and audiences are more open than they used to be.
How dirty was the conflict in the North? Is truth more sordid than fiction?
The truth is always more sordid, and more bizarre. We’re barely more than a generation beyond the Good Friday Agreement, and already the Troubles are being romanticised and sterilised. I wish I could say fiction will set the record straight but history suggests otherwise.
In Ratlines (2013), minister for justice Charles Haughey orders an intelligence officer to protect Nazi fugitive Otto Skorzeny. Was Haughey that bad?
Haughey told the Dáil that Skorzeny was not resident in Ireland, even though he knew full well that he was. As I say in the foreword to the book, the rest is just a story.
Why the pseudonym of Haylen Beck for Here and Gone (2017) and Lost You (2019)?
It was a change of style – high-concept thriller – as well as a change of setting to the US. At the time it felt like the right approach to try a pen name. With hindsight I should have used my own name, but you know what they say about hindsight.
You co-edited Belfast Noir with Adrian McKinty. Is there a distinct Northern voice?
To me, it feels closer to the Scottish school of crime fiction, and to American voices, than writers from the Republic or England. Belfast Noir also illustrated the range of stories we can tell here.
And is there a distinct Armagh voice?
The accent is certainly different than Belfast! My friend Michael Hughes, from Keady, wrote a terrific book called Country that used a strong local dialect. That heavily influenced my book The House of Ashes.
I hear you’re a bit of a rock star. Tell us about the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers
Our tagline, “murdering songs for fun”, sums us up pretty well. It started out as a bit of a laugh, a bunch of crime writers performing songs about murder, but we’ve played Glastonbury twice now!
Which projects are you working on?
I’ve almost finished the sequel to Blood Like Mine, which will hopefully be the second in a trilogy.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
No, but I’m going to Pasadena in a few weeks, and I hope to go and see the house where the Van Halen brothers grew up.
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
John Connolly once advised me to always have a good pen to hand in case someone wants a book signed.
Who do you admire the most?
I’ll stick with John Connolly, because he’s the kindest writer I know.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
I’d ban reclining seats for any flight lasting less than 2½ hours.
Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend?
The Cracked Mirror by Chris Brookmyre is a brilliantly meta take on a crime novel; Civil War is my film of the year; the Scriptnotes podcast is great for any aspiring writer.
Which public event affected you most?
The ceasefires followed by the Good Friday Agreement seems like an easy answer, but it’s true.
The most remarkable place you have visited?
The Stanley Hotel, in the foothills of the Rockies, which was the inspiration for The Shining’s Overlook Hotel.
Your most treasured possession?
A guitar: a Charvel Model 2 that my mum bought second hand for me when I turned 18. To this day, I’ve no idea how she paid for it.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
My tattered paperback of William Goldman’s Marathon Man. It’s barely hanging together because it’s been read so many times, but that’s what makes it beautiful.
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
James Ellroy and Shirley Jackson. I imagine they’d hate each other, but it wouldn’t be boring.
The best and worst things about where you live?
You can drive across the entire width of Northern Ireland in less than two hours. That is both the best and worst thing about it.
What is your favourite quotation?
“Anguish is the salt of my life. Without it, how would I know anything?” – John McLaughlin
Who is your favourite fictional character?
Pete Bondurant, a mafia button man who appears in several James Ellroy novels.
A book to make me laugh?
Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.
A book that might move me to tears?
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness.
Blood Like Mine is published by Simon & Schuster UK
