Since then, she has demonstrated remarkable range. French’s opening salvo was leaving one of the chief mysteries in her first novel, In the Woods, unsolved. She has been celebrated as a stylish genre defier, in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith and Richard Price – and her books sell. Tana French has gained a following over the past decade for her riveting series of police procedurals, the Dublin Murder Squad series. ‘The thing I couldn’t bear,’ he realises later, ‘was myself, whatever that had become.’ He spends his days pacing his flat, ‘restless as a tweaker’, and although he loves getting visits from Melissa, he knows he should let her leave him. He’s not fit to return to work, or even to go to Tesco. Months later, he still has a limp, a droopy eyelid, a chipped tooth, a ‘thick village-idiot slur’, and difficulty following a conversation or finding the right words – he says ‘went’ when he means ‘emigrated’, ‘dazzling’ when he means ‘scintillating’. When he confronts them, they assault him. He falls asleep drunk and wakes to find two burglars in his flat. His story begins with the night he goes out to celebrate getting out of a scrape at the gallery that should probably have got him fired. Now 28, he lives in a flat paid for by his parents, works in PR for an art gallery and has an attractive, devoted girlfriend, Melissa.īut his ‘luck’ – a word that suggests an accidental quality not just to one’s birth but to all the circumstances of one’s upbringing – has run out. He describes himself as ‘basically, a lucky person’: he grew up in a prosperous, supportive family in Dublin, went to good schools and has always been well liked, not least because he’s ‘good-looking, in an easy, straightforward way’. Y ou’re not supposed to feel sorry for Toby Hennessy, the narrator of The Wych Elm.
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