Outsiders: A Guest Post by Tana French

Tana French crafts a masterful conclusion to the Cal Hooper series. This time, Hooper uncovers a dangerous scheme that threatens his entire community. Read on for an exclusive essay from Tana on writing The Keeper.

I wasn’t planning to write a third book about Cal Hooper, the Chicago detective who takes early retirement and moves to a remote Irish village looking for peace (and of course not finding it). After The Searcher and The Keeper, I thought I was done. But here Cal is, trying to figure out why a young woman drowned in the river on a cold November night, and risking his relationship with his fiancée when he gets more involved than she wants him to.

One reason why I ended up with a third book was the characters’ relationship with the townland of Ardnakelty. These are books about outsiderhood and insiderhood, and that theme has always fascinated me – probably because I’m a mix of several different cultures and grew up moving around the world, so I’m an outsider everywhere. In The Searcher, Cal is an outsider, navigating generations-old codes and relationships that he can’t begin to understand. The Hunter is about characters who live in the liminal space between outsider and insider, and the complex forms of both danger and power that come with that position. It felt like I needed to complete that arc with a book about what it means to be an insider. In The Keeper, Cal, Lena, and Trey are all coming to terms with the fact that they’re part of Ardnakelty now – with the demands that makes, and what it offers in exchange.

The other reason had to do with these books being, sort of, Westerns. They came out of the realisation that Western settings and tropes have a lot in common with the West of Ireland, and with Irish writing: the harsh land that demands physical and mental toughness, the small towns with their private power structures, the stranger who becomes a catalyst for change, the complicated relationship with authority and law… So these three books are mystery software running on Western hardware. And so many Western series have a book about the death of the West.

That’s a theme that resonates deeply with rural Ireland nowadays. Farmers are finding it harder and harder to make a living. Young people are emigrating to countries where a home of their own isn’t a crazy fantasy. Big corporations buying up land are pricing individual farmers out of the market. School after school is closing because there aren’t enough children. A way of life is under threat, and I felt like it would be dishonest to write about that way of life for two books and then head off somewhere else without ever engaging with that threat. So what Cal uncovers, while he’s trying to find out how a young woman died, is something big enough to endanger the whole of Ardnakelty.

And if I’m honest, there’s a third reason: I wasn’t ready to leave the characters and the place. I wanted to see Cal and Trey and Lena get their relationships with each other and Ardnakelty on a more stable footing, before I left them behind. By the end of The Keeper they’ve found, if not peace, at least some kind of equilibrium in the place that’s become their home.