PicoBlog

My ambition to read at least one Irish writer per month is getting off to a grand start. A friend (Hi John!) sent me a copy of Tana French’s The Searcher and said it was one of his favorite books of 2020. Now French isn’t Irish; she was born in Vermont, but she has lived in Ireland for 30 years. She has written an immensely popular crime series about Dublin cops that I have no interest in reading. 

I don’t like cops and I’m not interested in reading about their stunted emotional lives. Cops are like priests – good on paper but they have a knack for causing more harm than good. Like priests, they are tools of oppression. I’m a firm believer that decades of cop shows and detective shows have created an idea of cops that doesn’t match the reality we’re likely to face as ordinary citizens: that most cops are illiterate chowderheads who care about their survival first, their pension second, their brothers in blue third. Everyone else is a threat to one of those three things. The bagger at your local grocery store probably cares more about your safety and well-being than the next cop that crosses your path. 

I wasn’t thrilled to discover that French’s new book, a standalone novel set in rural Ireland, features an ex-cop as a protagonist. This ex-cop, however, has at least one good thing going for him: he’s never fired his weapon. I felt reasonable sure there wasn’t some unpardonable sin lurking in his back story that he was striving to atone for. 

After his divorce Cal Hooper buys a house with a patch of land in the rural townland of Ardnakelty, which is midway between Sligo and Dublin. It’s September, and the house is cold and damp after years of neglect, and he hasn’t made much progress. The wind is blowing and the rain is lashing. It’s not even winter and he’s beginning to wonder what he’s gotten himself into when the hair on the back of his neck goes up. There’s someone lurking outside his house. 

He thinks it’s probably kids, but what if it isn’t? What if it’s someone who has some connection to the house and isn’t happy he’s in it? What if Cal has unknowingly made an enemy his first few weeks in Ardnakelty? What if it’s someone who doesn’t like strangers moving into the townland? What if it’s someone who doesn’t like Americans? What if it’s someone who doesn’t like cops?

From this moment on, I was hooked. The book arrived on Friday and I started it Saturday morning. I tore through its 450 pages and by Monday evening I was done. 

Now some of you will recall that I spent several weeks in August and September of 2019 in Northern Ireland for a writer’s residency at the Curfew Tower. That sounds pretty fancy. You’re probably picturing a castle tower perched atop a windswept promontory overlooking the mutinous waves of the Irish Sea. It wasn’t like that. 

The Curfew Tower sits in the center of the village of Cushendall, right at the intersection of its two busiest roads: Mill Street and High Street. The Curfew Tower doesn’t make any money and is owned and operated as an artist’s residency by Bill Drummond, who is a stone genius, his decision to burn a million pounds notwithstanding. Bill lives in Scotland and the tower’s curator is a guy named Skippy who works at his family’s butcher shop across the street from the Tower. I cannot say enough good things about Skippy. 

The Curfew Tower isn’t terribly big. It’s cramped and cold and being a tower built in the 1800s isn’t a luxury affair. Far from it. There’s no internet, which is great for writing. There are beds, but no sofas. No central heating. No shower. After staying at the Tower for several weeks, I no longer have any desire to live in a lighthouse. 

The Tower, of course, is haunted, but that’s neither here nor there. I want to tell you about the bit of trouble I ran into with the local kids in Cushendall that made reading the opening pages of The Searcher so eerily familiar. 

I’ve been to Cushendall at least a half-dozen times over the course of my life, but that doesn’t mean anything. A blow-in is a blow-in. My guide to Cushendall is my friend Tom from Belfast whose family has been coming to the village for decades. They love Cushendall so much that his sister bought a house next to the Tower. During the annual Fairy Festival Tom’s family gathered there with friends and essentially welcomed Annie and I to Cushendall with a big party.

After the party, Tom’s sister left me the keys to her house so I could shower and use the Internet during my residency. This would prove to be a big help for staying in touch with Nuvia. After a long day of writing, I’d grab a hot shower and call Nuvia from the front parlor where the signal was strongest. 

Tom would come up on the weekends and keep me company or go sightseeing. One weekend we went to Sligo to interview Kevin Barry. Tom and I were out for a walk one day and when we came back to the Tower there was someone in the garden. It was a kid. A very large kid, but just a kid between the age of twelve and fourteen, who’d hopped the fence to retrieve a ball. 

The Tower garden is very small and surrounded on all sides by rock walls and hedges. From the street, the walls are fairly low, maybe seven or eight feet high, but on the other side of the wall the garden is actually several feet lower, and climbing out is no easy task, as our young friend had discovered. The gate was kept padlocked at all times. I had the key in my pocket. 

Tom, feeling protective of me, the Tower, and his sister’s house next door, told the kid he wasn’t supposed to be in there. The kid, probably trying to save face in front of his friends, was surly and unapologetic. Tom, who works with children with special needs, was patient. The kid, who’d decided to dig in his heels, was rude. Tom, who’d worked for many years as a bouncer and whose job was to remove people from places they didn’t want to be removed from, was having none of it. That’s when the conversation got somewhat heated in the way that all “Get off my lawn!” conversations tend to do. The kid took his ball and left, and that was the end of that. Or so we thought.

Later that night, after Tom went back to the caravan site where he’d been staying, I went over to his sister’s house to take a shower. It was raining and the streets were slick. The skies were thick with clouds. After my shower, I settled into the front parlor with a book I was reading when a loud thump on the window startled me. Although my heart was hammering away in my chest I looked up just in time to see the remains of an egg shell splatter to the ground while the ruptured yolk oozed down the window. 

It was pretty obvious what had happened: the local kid was seeking retribution for being scolded in front of his mates by egging the house. Knowing that was helpful, but not much, because isn’t this the classic horror movie set up? The guy hears a noise and puts down his paper and goes out on the porch to tell the kids to knock it off for crying out loud and gets axed in the head by a maniac? Was that what I was dealing with? What if it wasn’t a kid but a whole pack of them, like a gang? A gang of gluesniffing good and as soon as I left the house and went back to the Tower they’d come after me with hurling sticks? 

At that moment, something crashed into the glass in the next room with such force it seemed to shake the whole house. What the hell was that? It sure as hell wasn’t an egg. I was in a strange house and had no idea where the noise had come from. I left the parlor and checked the lock on the front door and did the same for the back door in the kitchen, all the while expecting someone to lunge at me from out of the shadows or for another missile to come crashing through a window.

I sent a message to Tom via WhatsApp and told him what happened. When he responded, he said he’d be right down but then a few minutes later he messaged again and said his car was stuck in the mud and he wouldn’t be down until morning. 

I gathered my belongings, set the alarm, and locked up the house. The rain had blown off. The sky was clear. There were no kids about. The moon shone down on the patio in front of the house where a pint carton of milk sat under the window. That’s what had made all that racket. A tiny carton of milk. 

I hurried to the Tower, unlocked the padlock, and went into the garden. I shined the flashlight on my phone about. Save for the silent hedges and dripping shadows it was empty. I locked the front gate and made my way to the Tower’s entrance. All clear. No broken windows, no signs of vandalism. I opened the door and locked myself inside. There’s no small amount of irony here. The tourist was built to lock people up for being out after curfew (hence the name) and here I was a foreign tourist locking myself in.

I went up several flights of steps to the first of two bedrooms where I spent the night, not at the very top of the Tower, but the level below it because it was closer to the bathroom. 

The wind had picked up, rattling the windows in their casements and making the old Tower creak in ways that sounded alien and forbidding, like a ghost ship shivering up the coast. 

I wasn’t afraid of the ghosts that inhabited the cell at the bottom of the Tower, nor was I afraid of the traps that other artists had left behind to spook future visitors (the bloody handprints on the ceiling, redrum scratched on the back of the bathroom wall where one might see it in the mirror, the skull painted above the bed in glow-in-the-dark paint so it was invisible during the day but glowed an unearthly green when the light was switched off). Mostly I was afraid of not knowing who or what I was up against and settled in for a long and restless night. 

The Searcher conjured up all these feelings in a matter of a few pages and while the book took on a life of its own I felt somewhat unsettled all weekend. French is a tremendous writer and her novel is a mystery full of lugubrious moods and sudden weather. She deftly captures what it’s like to be a stranger in a place where everyone knows everyone, and no matter who you are or what your intentions might be, you will always be an outsider. 

It’s not a perfect book. It’s a slow burn of novel that creaks along with loads of atmosphere and local color, but doesn’t go overboard with it. I thought the dialog went on for much too long. Not even the Irish talk this much, especially to a stranger. But the last chapter has a scene of such terrifying beauty its seared into my brain forever. 

Back in Cushendall, Tom called around to the shops to figure out the identity of the egg thrower and had the matter solved in the matter of a few hours. Tom ended up meeting with the kid and the dispute was resolved. They may have even hit it off, though that’s not my story to tell. 

Tom did confess to me that it was a good thing his car got stuck in the mud that cold September night, because he was ready to come roaring into town with a carton of eggs and who knows what trouble we would have found. 

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