Ice cold Alex

It’s become a staple cliché of interviews with authors who dredge the murkier mires of the human psyche in the medium of crime, suspense or horror novels.
The journalist’s introductory paragraphs invariably describe trembling in anticipation of some hissing, slit-eyed troglodyte, only to be completely disarmed by the arrival of a pleasant, mild-mannered and apparently normal human being.
In the case of Alex Barclay – whose debut thriller Darkhouse sold to HarperCollins for a six figure sum, and recently topped the paperback bestseller lists – that cliché is writ in bold capitals.
A chatty, attractive 31-year-old, she seems tailor cut for a job in one of the more sociable industries – media or marketing maybe – rather than holed up in solitary poring over police procedurals and serial killer profiles.
Barclay, born and brought up in Bayside in north Dublin, has been steeped in crime literature since she was a teenager. Consequently, she takes the central tenets of thriller writing – research, plot and pacing – very seriously. Darkhouse is the tale of a New York detective who, after hitting a career trough, flees with his family to the safety of south-east Ireland, only to be tracked down by Duke, a North Texas white trash grotesque intent on avenging the death of his boyhood blood brother. As you can expect, not much hilarity ensues.
Darkhouse may not quite scale the technical heights or plumb the psychological horror depths of peers like James Ellroy or Thomas Harris, but Barclay has a firm grip on how to make the conventions of crime fiction work in her favour.
Prose stylings take a back seat to story, but this is compensated for by the barrelling narrative, which vaults from cliffhanger to cliffhanger with mercenary efficiency.
A friend of mine in the book business described it as one of those therapeutic reads whose unstoppable impetus and thrill-kill factor is a tonic after one too many funereal-paced highbrow tomes.
The author and I meet for two interview sessions, one in the Library Bar of the Central Hotel around the corner from HP towers, and one in a Monkstown pub, with an interim stopover in Murder Ink on Dawson St to pick up a copy of Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia. I note from Barclay’s Mad Hatter slot a couple of weeks back that her favourite song is Johnny Cash’s ‘Wanted Man’ and her biggest thrill Nick and The Bad Seeds set at last year’s Electric Picnic. I think we’ll get along just fine.

Peter Murphy: At what point did the writing virus infect you?
Alex Barclay: It’s a funny one, because I was that person in the class who, when you were given an English essay, was going, “Woo-hoo!” when everyone else was going, “Oh, fuck!” But in terms of writing a book, I really didn’t think I was going to do that until the first night I met my husband.
I was 24, and we were chatting away for the night and he said to me, “You could write a book,” and I thought, “That’s refreshingly original.”
I started a couple of years later, so I was 28. I was gripped by the story of Darkhouse, just the opening, the prologue. It was a very basic (feeling of), “I’ve come up with this story and I’d like to write it.” It has become a virus though, that’s for sure, once I started doing it, it just took me over, it’s very hard to switch off.
TC Boyle has a great essay called ‘This Monkey, My Back’ about writing as a substitute for drug addiction.
It is a very weird sensation. Before, I was working as a journalist and a copywriter. Totally different. With a book it was like being sucked into a vortex where you’ve got the story that you want to tell and there’s only one honest way you can tell it. It was the first time that I really felt: “Here’s how I write. This is my style, it’s quite stripped down.”
What were you like as a journalist?
I really liked what I was doing, but I guess I wasn’t as passionate as I am about what I’m doing now. But I still loved it, I did a lot of “real people” features for women’s magazines, and I wrote about fashion and beauty. I’m still interested in fashion and beauty products, can’t help myself, that’s never going to go away.
Have you read American Psycho?
Yes. I love it.
The only time I ever found facial products remotely interesting was when Patrick Bateman was making inventory of his bathroom cabinet.
It’s extraordinary. All of that knowledge was so brilliantly used.
Your career trajectory, as I understand it, is that you wrote the first three chapters of Darkhouse and sent them to Darley Anderson, a heavyweight UK agent.
He liked it and asked for more, so you quit the day job and spent another eight months finishing it. Almost immediately after you submitted the manuscript, a bidding war started.
That’s right.
That’s ridiculous.
(Laughs) It was all a bit surreal, because every bit of this process happened – apart from writing the book – very quickly. I sent the first three chapters off to Darley, he was the one I wanted. He loves Irish writers and he loves crime, so that was logical.
And I knew by reputation he was amazing. And he rang and said, “I read your opening chapters, I’d love to see the rest.” And I said, “Sorry, I haven’t written them yet.” I was thinking, “Have I really blown my one opportunity, have I done something slightly against the rules?” And he was lovely, he was taken aback, but he said, “How long do you think it’ll take you?” and I said, “Six months.” I hadn’t a clue! And it was eight months later, I sent it in, and it landed on his desk at a good time.
How did you feel when the book went to auction?
Again, it was utterly surreal. Really scary and overwhelming.
I’ve read that you landed a deal for something along the lines of £330,000 to £350,000.
Basically I’m not allowed say, ‘cos it’s in my contract. But it was just so funny. I remember sitting on my coffee table just going, “What?!!” It was just bizarre. And it wasn’t all 100% positivity, it was just quite overwhelming, I just thought, “Oh good God, this is not what I expected at all. Wow.”
You wrote a lot of Darkhouse alone in remote places – at a writer’s retreat in West Cork and a house in Dunmore East in Waterford. In the words of Leonard Cohen, how lonely does it get?
I am a real people person, so it was kind of like a learning experience for me in terms of how I can live. I need people around me (but) the minute I started writing this – a completely different story.
I didn’t like the house we were living in and I wasn’t really very creative there, and I’m very much a person who needs the atmosphere to be right. It’s really irritating because I’m not a person who’ll be waiting around an airport for three hours and can crack off a chapter.
As a Wexfordian, I was fascinated to read a crime novel where a New York detective, Joe Lucchesi, finds himself transplanted to the south-east.
I think for Joe to come from New York, such a heaving city and so vibrant with so much going on, I really wanted him to be in a house that’s very isolated. I thought when I started writing that the whole book was going to be set in New York.
But although he’s an excellent detective I wanted you to meet him at a low point in his life, but to continue that idea, the fact that he’s a fish out of water, and the juxtaposition of New York and a small little fishing village that is very like Dunmore East would be huge. Of course, it’s a massive contrast, and he’s lulled into a false sense of security in a smaller place, when the reality is it’s not safe either.
I always found The Hook peninsula to be a quite eerie, southern gothicky kind of place.
It is fascinating. I think there is something about that neck of the woods that captures the imagination. I have been there so many times driving that long barren strip out to the lighthouse.
Have you been inside Loftus Hall, The Hook’s equivalent of the Overlook Hotel?
I stood outside looking at the beautiful swinging signs going, “I want to go in there!’ I love it, I always stop outside. You can see it from Dunmore East, it’s quite magnetic as a structure, you just want to go in.
Random question: ever had one of those dreams where you’ve murdered someone?
I had my first one ever about three months ago; it was the most disturbing dream I’ve ever had, a full blown nightmare. In the dream I was accused of this murder. I went from defensively going, “I didn’t do it!” to this sick feeling of realising and going, “Oh god I did, and now I’m going to have to lie and lie and lie.” And that is not my bag at all. It was a head-wreck. I can’t believe I haven’t had it before.
But there’s a scene in Darkhouse where Joe’s wife experiences sleep paralysis, and I experienced that for the first time while I was writing it, and I decided, “That’s going in.” It’s vile, so disturbing, and I was on my own in a house when it happened and I didn’t know what it was or what was happening. I found it so suffocating and paralyzing it was what I imagined holding a heavy guilt would feel like… ugh! (shudders).
At times obviously the subject matter is very dark, and I do get a kick out of writing the darker, more violent scenes. I absolutely loved writing Duke, he’s my favourite. I loved his mother as well, she’s such a screwed up bitch!
Was there ever a point where you shocked yourself with something you wrote?
Yes, the second last chapter of the book is a scene where two very evil people have a confrontation, and it’s not normally done where somebody has to face the consequences of their acts, and that scene was quite extraordinary for me, ’cos it was one of the first scenes I wrote, in one whole sitting, in fact it’s probably verbatim how it was when I wrote it. But the thing that shocked me was how easily that menace and that verbal aggression came out. That was the strange thing about Duke as a character, it really was like being channeled from hell.
And it was a completely different voice to what I’m used to. My sense of humour appears in certain characters, but he just came, that shocked me more than anything. I remember calling my husband after I wrote it and reading it out to him, he was in Dublin, I was alone, and his response was just, “You’re not well!”
So many crime and thriller writers seem like polite, well-adjusted people, yet they harbour this compulsion to vomit up something horrific and then scuttle away to the corner, glaring at the screen.
That’s exactly what I did. I went, “In you go” into a folder and then I was out of there until I had to do it again. There was another scene where I put myself in the position of one of Duke’s victims. Now, I don’t walk away from these things shaking, it’s fiction, I know that, but you do feel a little… it gets under your skin. I think writers in general just pick at scabs the whole time, whether that’s in the writing or just life in general. Monster is a movie that I was blown away by, and imagine just the intensity of that performance, for Charlize Theron to go home every night after that. For me that was mesmerising.
Thomas Harris once remarked that as he was writing the Red Dragon scenes in which Hannibal Lecter appears, he felt creeped out, like there was a malevolent presence in the room.
There is a weird part of you going, “I’m writing this, but where the fuck is it coming from?” You can’t ignore the fact that it’s coming from inside you somewhere. But the dark side is much more fascinating to me than the palatable side. I dunno, I’ve never been somebody who enjoys reading a love story more than absolute pure evil. Having said that, I did want to make sure that I had a hero who loved his wife and son and couldn’t walk away from them.
Because for me I find an awful lot of heroes in novels in general, and even more so in movies, where they walk through a burning building, and their wife has just died, they won’t shed tears, they just go after revenge. And I wanted to make sure that that love was shown… but you’re always slightly reluctant to say that in a thriller.
How does your husband deal with being married to a woman who disappears for long periods of solitary confinement in order to think up ways of terrorizing people?
He’s pretty bloody amazing, because it is difficult. Sometimes I just go, “What is he getting back from what I’m doing?” ’Cos when it’s going well it’s a joy, but if it’s not, apparently the atmosphere permeates the whole house. And it’s a small house, so it gets pretty intense! He’s got a creative job, but he handles his creative temperament extremely well, whereas I’d be much more inclined to get very withdrawn or… how would I describe it? I guess edgy. I find it really hard to relax. But he’s been wonderful from day one.
In the genre you operate in, it’s expected, demanded even, that you do minute procedural research. In your case it involves ringing up someone like the state pathologist, who’s thanked in the back of the book.
It’s an interesting one with crime – you have to get the details of the criminal investigation correct, ’cos if you make one mistake, say there’s just one fact where you go, “I’ll check that at the end”, the end may be too late because you’ve just written 30,000 words taking your plot in one direction, and then you talk to somebody and they go, “You know what? That wouldn’t have happened.
That is completely unrealistic.” Of course you bend the realms of what is feasible, but really you have to stick to within the confines. That’s what gets me when people go on about the cliches and the conventions of crime writing. They’re there because we’re following the conventions of a criminal investigation. And they exist.
You twist them as much as you can, but there are certain facts that you cannot avoid. And guess what – there’s terminology that cops use that cannot be avoided, and there are techniques that they use that cannot be avoided.
But there’s a kind of poetry in that. I remember in the 80s there was a lot of talk when sci-fi and crime writers began to draw on what they call “invisible literature” – tech manuals, post mortems, police reports, advertising jargon. A badly written police report is still pretty chilling, words like “lesions” and “contusions” and so forth.
It’s so pared down – I love those words. I love the word “contusion”. But I think the problem is now, as the years go by… I started reading thrillers when I was 14, that’s 17 years ago, I’ve read a shitload of thrillers since then, so I am aware of an awful lot of the cliches and conventions, but there are things you have to include.
It breaks your heart sometimes, you’re putting in things and going, “Oh god, I’ve read this in five other books”, but it’s because it’s a truth and we’ve all done our research and there’s no avoiding it.
I remember Bret Easton Ellis talking about ploughing through FBI profiles on serial killers for American Psycho and slipping into a very morbid state of mind. Does it ever get too much?
I went through, over one week, a really intense reading of lots of real life crimes, and one of the ones that I was reading about, before it had gotten a lot of attention over here, was the Scott and Laci Peterson murder, where she was eight months pregnant when she was murdered.
It was grim in the extreme and that was one case I remember reading reports online from everywhere, for hours and hours, and by the end of it, closing the computer, I was just like, “I’ve had enough.”
Sometimes it’s way too overwhelming. I’ve seen a lot of crime scene photos as part of my research, and just the inhumanity of it all can be quite overwhelming if you do it non-stop.
I would imagine you suffer a similar – if smaller – dose of the moral fatigue that afflicts homicide detectives.
I think if you submerge yourself for weeks on end in that area, you realise there are just no limits to the depths people will go to for the most depraved motivations, never mind the most depraved methods. You do it, but you have to be aware if it’s having an impact on you, ’cos it can, definitely, and you need someone to point it out.
You can definitely slip into this overly reflective weariness about the world where you’re not seeing a lot of hope out there because of all the crimes you’re reading about.
Sometimes you can end up submerging yourself so much in the misery of it all that you don’t want to write a scene and you go off and watch Shrek II and come back later. I have a real problem with the Fred and Rosemary West thing. Of any crimes I’ve come across. I stayed away from that for as long as was humanly possible, I never read any of the news reports on it, I could not go there, I dunno why.
My thoughts about that – and this surfaced recently in reports about Abu Ghraib and Guantanemo Bay, is that interrogators and torturers have learned that the threat of death is almost too abstract to inspire terror. In some cases it might even seem like a relief. Prisoners are more disturbed by the prospect of being disfigured or denatured and kept hostage indefinitely.
I can absolutely see that. I watched a documentary on the Wests and it was just absolutely chilling to the bone, of any of the crimes I’ve read about or watched documentaries on. I found it deeply disturbing on so many levels. Did you read the book Perfect Victim (by Christine McGuire and Carla Norton)? Oh my God, I read it really early on, I was in my teens, it was about a couple in the states who were driving along in a car, they looked very safe, they had a baby seat in the back of the car, and they picked up a hitchhiker and basically held this woman captive in a box the size of a coffin for years. I mean, it’s just so hard to bend your brain around things like that happening. It was a really powerful book.
What was the soundtrack to writing Darkhouse?
The funny thing was, considering I’ve never really done a nine to five job – and I definitely wasn’t doing one when I was writing the book – one of my main songs was Dolly Parton’s ‘9 To 5’. The White Stripes were in there, a Mozart Adagios CD which I had for about five years and couldn’t live without. Johnny Cash of course, and Eminem. Tom Waits’ Closing Time I got again because I had it years ago. That was just beautiful.
You’re currently writing your second novel The Caller. There’s a lot more expectation involved this time out. Has it altered your approach to the work?
For me, the main difference between writing the second one and the first one is much more about the time that you have at your disposal and the fact that it is literally… I didn’t have e-mails coming in every day when I was writing Darkhouse. I had removed myself from Dublin, from a lot of distraction, I was in a total communication blackout, it was fantastic.
Now, ever since Darkhouse has started coming out in different territories, there are different events to go to, different things you have to do, things I’m not naturally attuned to being comfortable with, like standing up in a room at a crime festival and talking to loads of people. It can be quite intimidating. Some people are naturals at being able to stand up there and do their thing.
As a genre fiction writer, how do you handle criticism or condescension from “high-lit” snobs.
I have to say, I’m not a person who’s brimming with self-confidence about anything I do, but it amazes me when people are vitriolic about other people’s books. Invariably somebody broke their balls to do this, and I think it’s pretty crushing. I don’t understand how people out there writing a book are not rooting for every single person who gets published. We’re all rooting for that. I think it should be a go-for-it mentality. I think it’s outrageous that people can get quite wound up and irate at how well other people are doing.
Listen, all of us love reading, people have different tastes, it’s always going to be that way… but the thought of attacking somebody because of something they produced creatively is just bizarre to me.
Maybe some people do it and it’s not very well thought out or they’re very young and they don’t appreciate the whole thing, but the older you get in life the more people you meet who’ve produced various different types of work, a piece of music or a poem or a piece of art, and it may not always be to your taste, but they’ve done it, they’ve put their ass out in the wind.
I remember when Cecilia Ahern was getting a lot of stick for basically being young and successful, I was thinking, “When I was her age I couldn’t write a fucking postcard, much less a novel.”
That’s exactly what I felt about it. I was infuriated with how she was treated, I thought it was appalling. People really needed to grow up around that time, the kind of grief she was getting. She started off in her late teens doing this book. Who the hell has that discipline? Especially with how busy she was doing other things, that she had the discipline to follow her dream at that age, and do it, and be successful. And she sells hundreds of thousands… I’m thrilled for her. I’m thrilled for anyone who does well.