HAUNTED BY THE PAST
If there’s anyone out there still labouring under the (tedious) misapprehension that crime writing is formulaic, check out award-winning international bestseller Stuart Neville. In particular, see his new novel The House of Ashes. Set in his native Northern Ireland, it blends crime and the supernatural to tell a chilling dual timeline story of past and present abuse with a kind of visceral, appalled compassion.
‘It’s one of those books where it’s hard to pin down what you’re writing,’ says Stuart. ‘My biggest struggle is figuring out what I’m trying to write. Is it a short story, a novel, is it a thriller, horror, a ghost story? I’ll start writing the thing but then I figure out what I’ve actually got. The key here was finding the voice. That’s the spine of the book, that real Northern Irish voice.’
Giving Mary Jackson, the older character in the story, a distinct Northern Irish voice unlocked the writing for Stuart. The original inspiration for the book was a news story. ‘A real-life case, a murder suicide. It was a starting point, but real people were affected by it and I couldn’t write a novel based on that. So it’s moved from the actual event to something more fully imagined. There was a lot of wrestling with the idea and what really did it was Michael Hughes’s novel Country – written entirely in that dialect. Once that clicked I started to make progress on it.’
Up to recently he kept the accent in his books quite neutral. ‘The odd colloquialism would sneak in but I don’t like to include a forced accent in a book –
