Tana French Has Broken the Detective Novel

Two detectives walk into a hospital room. That line isn’t a joke, but they are. The detectives are called Martin and Gannon, and they’ve been sent to investigate the burglary and beating of Toby Hennessy, an up-and-coming gallerist in Dublin. But Toby’s cottoned brain can’t quite make out what they’d like from him, and they don’t inspire much confidence; he wants them and their prying questions gone. To his delight and ours, once they walk out, they’re barely heard from again, leaving Tana French’s The Witch Elm all the better for their absence.

This was French’s first novel outside the Dublin Murder Squad series, the popular and critically acclaimed crime novels that made her name. Each book in the series featured a different member of the squad, all of whom brought a new kind of intensity to the case at hand; to open a new Dublin Murder Squad novel was to consider the ways that the very different human frailties of detectives would influence how they worked their cases, and who was damaged or redeemed along the way. But in The Witch Elm, published in 2018, without badge-donning, gun-brandishing, quick-witted investigators poking their noses all over her fiction, French hazied up the moral ambiguity—and narrative—even more than she already had in her first six books. “I’ve always had detectives for narrators. I liked the idea of seeing the story from the other side: from the side of someone who considers detectives to be a terrifying and tricky force,” she told an interviewer at the time. The Witch Elm cantilevered off detective fiction and created something far more modern and angular than its predecessors, a novel that used an old foundation to fashion a new, more pointed structure.

Since that book, French has made it clear that she’ll keep coming at violent crime from different angles, leaving behind the idea of the detective as the arbiter of truth. But without a protagonist who is invested in bare-knuckling it through the unscrupulous world of policing, her stories’ brilliantly rough edges have been shaved right down. Her detectives were our Charons, guiding us through hell; her new plots are set in an annoyingly amoral limbo.

In 2020, she published The Searcher, a sedate, anti-procedural mystery set in a sheep-and-“eejit”-populated village called Ardnakelty, which sits beneath the heathery but merciless mountains of western Ireland. Only one police officer pops up there, a smiley nincompoop who sucks down children’s birthday cake from behind a desk and shrugs his way through conversation. The Guards, as the Irish call their cops, are generally thought useless in the village, an attitude French reinforces. Despite a string of drug-related burglaries, some animal mutilation, obvious child abuse, and one notable disappearance, the police are called only once. Instead, the restless old men of Ardnakelty enforce their own system of justice. The Searcher hobbles along like they do, placid and toothless.

Instead of a typical detective, The Searcher has Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago cop who has moved to Ardnakelty to, as we hear time and again, find some peace and quiet away from the mental tumult of cop-brain. Like so many old-timers who came before him in the genre, Cal has the bad luck to meet a desperate soul in laconic Trey Reddy, a 13-year-old girl (whom he mistakes at first for a boy—so much for a detective’s eagle eyes) with a missing older brother whose case Cal says he’ll investigate lest the child keep hurling eggs at his house. From its slow, meandering beginning, The Searcher doesn’t just avoid the framework of French’s earlier fiction—it seems to forget it’s a mystery at all, waiting more than 150 pages to even inform us that Brendan Reddy is missing, and another 200 to pony up a body. It ends just as it’s really beginning.

In French’s newest novel, The Hunter, Cal Hooper is back and again drawn, against his instincts and mine, into a scheme put on by Ardnakelty’s lads. This time, French pushes her plot into an even lumpier shape: Cal spends most of the novel sniffing around a harebrained  plan dreamed up by one of the village’s biggest wasters (French’s Irish slang is contagious), Trey’s father, Johnny. Despite Cal’s vow to never again involve himself in Ardnakelty’s machinations, he has too much affection for Trey to let things spin out of control and potentially hurt her. This time, a body doesn’t appear until almost 300 pages deep (in a 450-ish-page novel). The detective put on the case, a man called Nealon, ducks in and out, leaving only the barest of impressions. And somehow, though I once publicly called French “our best living mystery writer,” her signature sense of restlessness and agitation, her characters’ sharp attention to the intricacies of human behavior, and the rigorousness of her plotting are nowhere to be found. I wanted to shout, Bring up the bodies!

French wants to assign corpses and detectives less prominent roles in her fiction. She wants to infiltrate the classic crime plot and twist it into a shape that considers how death and violence aren’t phenomena that can be tamed by authority, as she brilliantly displayed in The Witch Elm. But now she’s shaken off far too many of the vital elements that make her novels boil and steam. This sort of fiction needs characters with passion, curiosity, and doggedness—she’s dispensed with all three.

Crime novelists have a history of growing weary of their detectives. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, with his never-changing bank balance of 444 pounds, 4 shillings, and 4 pence, was, in the eyes of his creator, a “detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep,” whom she kept around only to prop up the franchise. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously sent Sherlock Holmes hurtling to his death over the Reichenbach Falls: His tiresome infallibility must have grated on Doyle, who saw himself as destined for a more highbrow literary fame than 19th-century detective fiction allowed.

French solved this problem for herself early on by condemning her detectives to a one-and-done system. In her first novel, In the Woods, Detective Rob Ryan investigates a teenage girl’s murder that just so happens to have been committed in the same woods where he was the childhood victim of an unsolved violent crime. By book two, The Likeness, he’s been assigned a desk job for breach of duty; instead, his partner, Cassie Maddox, is sent undercover to learn who killed a young girl who bears an uncanny resemblance to her. The case leaves Cassie in shambles, and she’s demoted back to the domestic-violence unit. In French’s third novel, Faithful Place, Detective Frank Mackey tries to solve the mystery of his long-ago love’s murder and ends up spectacularly self-destructing. And so on and so forth, with each Murder Squad novel supplying a new case and a whole new tragic character arc. The job, it seems, is itself a killer, wearing down each obsessive detective until they close one last big one and can limp off toward some pallid future.

Solving murders regularly wears out our culture’s best gumshoes: Think of bedraggled Sergeant Catherine Cawood of Happy Valley, or Henning Mankell’s series about the Swedish inspector Kurt Wallander, who even brews coffee with an air of quiet desperation. The difference with French is that the Dublin Murder Squad novels bend and train themselves around each detective’s quirks—Cassie’s hungry confusion, Rob’s baggy vulnerability, Mackey’s slick bravado—like a pear tree espaliered against a sturdy garden wall. With the security of a classic narrative backbone—dead body turns up; detectives sort it out—French’s Murder Squad assembles new coalitions of novel parts: shifting points of view, patterned switches in time, narration that zooms closer in and further out. This isn’t assembly-line crime fiction. It’s too humane for that.  

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A detective’s authority can tip a story’s scales. They have license to enter nearly any domain, badger any witness, run fingerprints, sequence DNA, prod confessions out of dimwits using unfettered lies. The digital surveillance state and ubiquity of web-based communications mean that on shows such as Slow Horses, an MI5 hacker can pilot any security camera or decrypt any confidential file. Measly Irish cops don’t necessarily hold the power to surveil suspects by moving satellites with a keystroke, but when they’re given a narrator’s perch, they draw the entire story into their grip and exercise a kind of moral sway over the reader. “The detective is a symbol of authority and restoration of order,” French once noted. In the Murder Squad novels, French used that authority as her main storytelling pillar—her detectives were flailing and imperfect, but they were also honest, tough, and determined.

Introspection is French’s specialty. Her detectives weigh each questioning of a suspect or interaction with a colleague as if they can, and should, see all possible outcomes branching out ahead of them. For example, most of her fifth novel, The Secret Place, consists of Detectives Stephen Moran and Antoinette Conway devising and executing plans to question teenage girls in the case of a murder at their posh boarding school, using flattery or bombast or the fear of God to push each girl toward revelation. They’re not just detectives; they’re close readers of the human psyche. French’s detectives are necessarily savvier than us, but we have access to every bit of their thinking, creating a natural alliance between reader and detective.

In The Searcher (and The Hunter), we have the tepid and mild-mannered retiree Cal Hooper, a man with all the know-how of a detective and not an ounce of the can-do. He’s a loner in tight-knit Ardnakelty, where everyone grew up together and second cousins abound. Cal is American (check against him), a former cop and therefore a snoop (another check against), and self-righteous enough to believe himself the moral authority the village needs (obviously, big check against). He doesn’t have a crime lab or a criminal database, facts he regularly bemoans. Brute force isn’t much good in a place where you’re an outsider and your opponent’s buddies are just around the mountain pass. He spends much of The Searcher waiting, law-abiding citizen that he is, for a gun permit to come through.

Cal is a cop-out, if I can make such a grotesque pun: In him, French gets all the intuition her plot requires and all the moral distance she wants from the point of view of the police. When Cal is asked why he retired (he’s only 48), he offers that “things got shittier,” and then expands: “Black people got mad about being treated like crap. Bad cops got mad ’cause they were getting called on their shit all of a sudden. Good cops got mad ’cause they were the bad guys when they hadn’t done anything.” It’s a tidy, and not inaccurate, review of the state of American policing. But it’s also an indicator of Cal’s limp moral reasoning and of French’s refusal to set high stakes: Cal doesn’t want to think through big questions about policing—hell, he doesn’t really want to think at all, a real drag on a protagonist and a knife to French’s surest skill.

Without a detective, a crime novel needs someone who is interested in justice (even if it’s extralegal), someone with an allegiance—whether it’s professional, financial, personal, or moral—to arbitrating (or scrambling) truth for the reader. That person can be faulty and uneven, immoral and unhinged. A chorus or narrator can fill the role. Pipes and capes are not required. But the story needs devotion.

French has admitted that in Cal, “there’s very little introspection.” The Searcher, with its John Ford title homage, is a play on the Western, a genre not exactly known for its deep thinkers. But Cal, unlike French’s other investigators, is a burly cutout where a person should be. He has no aims, besides peace and quiet. No face, besides a brown beard. No thoughts, besides appreciation for the rooks who taunt him from his field. He is simultaneously too much an avatar of a detective and not enough. His most apparent attribute is reluctance.

In The Searcher, after questioning a few witnesses and ignoring his craggy old neighbor Mart’s warnings to mind his business, the truth about what happened to Trey’s brother comes out in a sudden rush of confession, the least satisfying of all mystery reveals. Cal listens, only slightly moved, and accepts on its face that Brendan’s fate was unavoidable and that it’s all for the greater good. The premise is entirely out of character for Cal, a man who declaims loudly about his internal “code.” Plus, it’s thin and soupy—at least in a Western, we’d get a shoot-out.

One of French’s major projects is to excavate what’s gone wrong in Ireland since the implosion of the Celtic Tiger, the early-aughts financial renaissance that sent up high-rises in Dublin and brought unprecedented wealth to the island before the 2008 recession. In The Likeness, for instance, French was pitting moneyed college students living in a colossal Georgian house against a crumbling village. Her fourth novel, Broken Harbor, is set—like that other thriller published in 2012, Gone Girl—in an abandoned luxury-home development. In Faithful Place, Mackey returns to his childhood neighborhood and finds it sunk even lower than he recalls.

Setting The Searcher and The Hunter far from Dublin, out among the boggy wilds and muddy farms of Ireland’s west coast, pulls at a different aspect of the country’s economic decline. Young men, French’s characters repeatedly note, don’t have a future there unless they’ve inherited land. The intrepid flee to Dublin; those who stay are liable to dredge up an income selling meth. “When I was a young lad,” Cal’s neighbor Mart explains, “we knew what we could want and how to get it, and we knew we’d have something to show for it at the end of the day … Now there’s too many things you’re told to want, there’s no way to get them all, and once you’re done trying, what have you got to show for it at the end?”

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In The Hunter, French plays up that desperation among the village’s men.  Johnny Reddy returns after years away in London and lets his old friends in on a little secret: He’ll be hosting an English millionaire called Cillian Rushborough, a man whose family history allegedly links back to Ardnakelty, and who wants to pursue his granny’s old story about gold found in the earth of local farms. The plan, says Johnny, a charismatic twerp with dollar signs for irises, is to lace the river with a little gold, lead Rushborough to find it, and then encourage him to finance a dig in the area: Once he finds the gold underneath their land, they’ll all be rich.

Johnny sees the Ardnakelty men for the suckers they are: Class mobility is a pipe dream, so this scheme, one that encourages them to finally revel in the land that has brought them nothing but gripes in recent years, has broad appeal. One farmer imagines himself lounging in the Caribbean; another can dream only of better sheep. Cal, of course, with his cop’s nose for sordid plots, invites himself along to watch it play out. The first half of the novel consists of a bunch of men gathering in houses and pubs, and discussing whether or not to invest in a fraud. French is promising future action but holds off for far too long. If the subject of the ruse—Is it fraud if the oppressed are working against an unjust force? Who can own land-based heritage?—were her concern, and she veered further away from her detective-story roots, she’d have a topic ripe for speculation. Instead, she has a clutch of undeveloped geezers dabbling in petty crime.

French’s first seven novels ask what violence does to the people whose job it is to quell it. When a detective is confronted with a particularly unsettling form of violence—whether it’s physical or emotional—how do they reevaluate their own capabilities? The answers create a moral haze around the very idea of a detective: Is the search for justice an end that justifies any means? It’s no surprise that she eventually wanted to know how that haze obscures and reveals witnesses and victims and perpetrators. The detective has run the show in crime fiction for far too long. But French’s latest twist unnecessarily swerves in the opposite direction. Cal will neither arbitrate the truth nor cede the reins to anyone else. He isn’t a main character; he’s a sideshow who’s been hustled into the limelight. I want French to keep breaking detective fiction into pieces, but she also needs to put it back together again.