Fans of Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad novels have undoubtedly been eager to discover the protagonist of her fifth book, The Secret Place. The wait is over, and this time Detective Stephen Moran takes the spotlight in this clever, fast-paced mystery set at an all-girls Irish boarding school. 

We caught up with French and chatted about her love of crime fiction, why everyone should read To Kill a Mockingbird and more in a 7 questions interview.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Detective Stephen Moran gets his longed-for shot at the Murder squad when 16-year-old Holly Mackey brings him a postcard she’s found on the secrets board at her fancy boarding school: a photograph of a murdered boy, with the caption, “I know who killed him.”

Your Dublin Murder Squad series shifts narrators with each book. Why did you choose this structure?
I love reading the traditional series that follow one detective through all the ups and downs of life—P.D. James’s Dalgliesh books, for example—but I’m not interested in writing them. I’m more interested in writing about huge crossroads—moments when the narrator finds himself in a situation where whatever he decides to do will shape the rest of his life. The thing is, though, people don’t get those life-changing moments on a regular basis. So when I started thinking about a second book, I realized that I had three options: keep dumping my poor narrator into huge life-changing situations every couple of years, which not only is pretty implausible but would probably give him a nervous breakdown by about book four; go with the traditional framework of following him through more minor ups and downs, which, again, didn’t interest me; or switch narrator. So I went with the third option: I used a supporting character from In the Woods as the narrator of my next book, The Likeness, and so on.

This also means that I get to focus on different themes in each book, without losing the intensity of the narrator’s connection to the themes. For example, The Secret Place is about friendship, secrets, identity and how it’s defined—and those matter immensely to Stephen Moran, the narrator. For most of my other narrators, those issues aren’t all-important, so the events of this book wouldn’t have anything like the impact on them that they do on Stephen. Instead, their books spin around the themes that matter most deeply to them.

What did you enjoy most about writing from Detective Moran’s perspective?
Contented characters are mostly boring. Reading about someone who’s totally contented and secure is like watching a guy sprawled on his sofa shooting Playstation baddies and eating Doritos: He’s happy, but it’s not exactly fascinating viewing. Stephen Moran is the opposite of that guy: He’s restless right to the bone—constantly searching for the mythical something that will magically transform him into what he dreams of being. I enjoyed writing someone like that, because his lack of a real sense of himself colors the way he sees everything. When he has to work with Antoinette Conway, he’s wary of her because she’s tough and rough-edged, and he doesn’t want to find himself defined by that, even by association. When the case takes him into an elite boarding school, he loves it for the beauty and elegance that he longs to be part of. When their investigation leads them deeper and deeper into the web of friendships among the girls, he’s captivated—and, ultimately, changed—by the way these friendships define and transform them. I liked writing the ways that Stephen’s search for definition drove him forward.

What do you love most about crime fiction?
I love mysteries. I always have. I think this is one of the fundamental things that make us human—our fascination with mysteries, real or fictional, solved or unsolved—and the whole crime genre has grown from that fascination. The genre isn’t just about mysteries and their solutions: it’s about the complex techniques and systems that we’ve developed in order to solve them, about the dedication and passion we pour into that process, the experts who dedicate their lives to it, the ways we succeed or fail at it, about the profound effects mysteries have on those who get caught up in them from every angle . . . This genre is a paean to the crucial part that mysteries play within our lives, and I love that.

I also love the level of insight that crime fiction can offer. Murder happens in every time and place, but the specifics are shaped by the fundamental preoccupations of that society—its deepest fears, its priorities, its most intense desires, its history, its darknesses. In the great crime novels—Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, say, or Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves—the murder becomes a window into the dark heart of the society where it happens.

How do you conquer writer’s block?
Touch wood, I don’t think I’ve ever had full-on writer’s block—the kind where a writer is paralyzed to the point where he or she can’t get anything down on paper—but I do get days or weeks when nothing works, I don’t get anywhere near enough written and what I do write is either awful or pointless (oh, look, it’s a cheesy dream sequence and four pages of irrelevant waffle about some character’s childhood). I fight it with rewrites, more rewrites, long walks and caffeine. Lots of caffeine.

Name one book that you think everyone should read.
To Kill a Mockingbird. There are other books that I love even more, in spite of their flaws, but I can’t think of any book that’s so close to perfection. To explore issues like classism and racism without ever being sanctimonious or preachy, to show the story through the eyes of a child without ever getting cutesy or patronizing, to weave together all those separate little storylines without ever letting them feel sloppy or disjointed–it’s a rare author who can manage even one of those, and Harper Lee makes them all look effortless. And that’s before I even start on the writing and the characterization and the atmosphere . . . No wonder she never wrote another book. Where do you go from there?

What’s next?
I’m working on my sixth book, and Antoinette Conway is the narrator this time. She and Stephen are partners in the Murder squad now, but she’s still not getting on well with the rest of the squad, to put it mildly. They pull a case that at first seems like a routine domestic murder, but gradually they realize that someone within their own squad is working against them—and they need to find out whether that’s because someone is desperate to get rid of Conway, or whether there’s more going on.

Author photo by Kyran O'Brien

Woe be unto the free-range American reader who casually picks up any of Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries, set in the French-Canadian village of Three Pines, expecting a “Murder, She Wrote”-style cozy. The author erupts at the mere suggestion. 

“To call them cozies is to completely misread!” she protests by phone from her home in Sutton, a French-speaking village in Québec, east of Montreal. “I get very annoyed at anyone who calls them cozies, or even traditional. I think it’s facile for people to think that anything set in a village must, per force, be superficial and simplistic.”

Far, far from either, Penny’s addictive series may be the quintessential anti-cozy, centered as it is on a village that bears more resemblance to Twin Peaks than Cabot Cove and an erudite chief inspector of the Sûreté du Québec whose demons are never far behind him.

Publisher Minotaur Books says more than three million copies of the Inspector Gamache books have been sold worldwide since the series debuted in 2006, with growing sales and buzz for each new release. Penny’s 11th Gamache mystery, The Nature of the Beast, marks her largest first printing ever.

As series devotees know, the brooding, wounded Armand Gamache left the Sûreté and retired to Three Pines after tearing the lid off of internal corruption in 2013’s How the Light Gets In, only to resurface last year, shaken but not deterred, in The Long Way Home. Penny focuses as much on whether Gamache will overcome his demons as on whether his next demon will be his last. 

In The Nature of the Beast, 9-year-old Laurent Lepage goes missing after annoying the townspeople yet again with another of his signature far-fetched stories, this one about a monster and an enormous gun hidden deep in the surrounding woods. When the boy’s body is found, the search for his killer leads authorities to the unthinkable: an enormous rocket launcher, expertly concealed, provenance unknown. 

Who built it? How? And most importantly, why? It’s just the knotty puzzler to lure Gamache and his ever-inquisitive wife, Reine-Marie, out of early retirement.

A similar unfathomable horror—the terrorist attacks of 9/11—proved to be a game-changer for Penny as well. Back in 1996, after jettisoning an 18-year on-air career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and winning a 14-year battle with alcoholism, she’d retreated with her physician husband Michael to the Eastern Townships to try her hand at historical fiction. But five years in, she was getting nowhere.

“I realized I was writing for the wrong reason; I was trying to impress my family, my former colleagues—trying to write the best book ever written. The judgment of others has played a terrible role in my life for much of my life, and I became frozen,” she recalls.

Shortly after 9/11, a desultory glance at her bedside table helped dispel her ennui.

“Like most people, I read catholically; I read just about anything. But among my pile of books were crime novels. I remember sitting on my bed looking at them and thinking, that’s it! I will simply write a book I would want to read,” she says.

Those tenuous, post-traumatic days even inspired where she would set her mysteries.

“I was feeling, like the rest of the world, fairly vulnerable and thinking that the world might be a dangerous place, and I wanted to create a place where there was a sense of belonging and community,” she recalls. “The books aren’t about murder; they’re about life and the choices that we make, and what happens to good people when such a harrowing event comes into their lives. It’s an exploration of human nature, I hope.”

Re-inspired by her new direction, Penny tripped out of the gate by shooting for a perfect first draft.

“The danger, at least for the first couple of books, was that I had to get it right the first time. As a result, it paralyzed me because it didn’t allow for creativity, for flights of fancy, for inspiration,” she says.

That’s when her years of journalism with the CBC crashed the party, lending offbeat spontaneity and quirky humor to the otherwise serious task at hand.

“My first drafts are piles of something very soft and smelly. They’re huge, almost double the size of the final book,” she chuckles. “I throw everything in—I have to—and then I edit, because I know I’m good at editing. That’s part of the beauty of having a big, messy first draft, because then I feel like I’m in a warehouse full of ideas and words and thoughts and stories. Then I can just pick and choose.”

Her unique creative process produces that rarest of wonders in fiction: verisimilitude. In Three Pines, clues to the mystery are often dropped casually over café au lait at the bistro, and so subtly that we talk ourselves to sleep wondering whether to trust them, and if they’ll ultimately form a whole. Only a writer with Penny’s instincts could wait until an author’s note at the end of The Nature of the Beast to reveal a walloping fact that’s as shocking as the book’s climax (don’t peek; it’s worth the wait!).

While it’s not a spoiler to note that a serial killer haunts this latest installment, Penny admits she’s not about the body count, and never will be.

“I’ve been on a number of writer panels where people say, ‘Well, when it gets slow or boring, I just throw in another body!’ And I think, that can’t be right,” she says. “I’m not interested in body counts or serial killers; I’m really interested in the why. What would make a real-life human being do something like that? The murder is just a conceit to allow me to look at all sorts of other issues.”

Which explains why the village setting not only appeals to Penny, but may well have been inevitable.

“What always amazes me is, there is a tendency to dismiss crime novels set in a village or rural setting rather than in a city. As someone who lived in cities all my life, murders in Montreal are in the briefs column of the newspaper. It’s always tragic but it’s not horrific; it’s not a shock, it doesn’t set the whole community on edge,” she says. “But a murder in a tight-knit community? How big of a violation is that? Not only has a person’s life been taken, but your whole sense of security has been taken. And knowing that someone you know was murdered and someone you know did it? How horrific is that?”

Although Penny had a brief brush with cinema, serving as a consultant and executive producer on the 2013 film version of her first Gamache novel, Still Life, she’s an admittedly poor candidate to go Hollywood anytime soon.

“I don’t know about films. I was involved, but I’m not anymore, by my own choice. While they did consult me, they did not take a great deal of what I said; there was no onus on them to take anything to heart, and I found that very difficult,” she recalls.

Nor should readers expect any non-Gamache standalones. Penny readily admits she has found the perfect cast and setting to accomplish her primary goal as a mystery writer.

“I want the reader to care, and if you don’t care, why bother? I want the books and characters to follow the reader for days or weeks after,” she says. 

“I want to try to bring down the fourth wall, to where they feel they’re actually sitting in the bistro listening to the conversation; they can smell the wood smoke and taste the café au lait and feel what the characters are feeling. I think if someone just reads my book with their head, they’re missing probably two-thirds of the book. You have to absorb it through your heart.”

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.