Cork's Catherine Ryan Howard: 'I had wanted this since I was about eight'

Cork crime writer Catherine Ryan Howard can recall with complete clarity the phone call that changed everything.

It was from her agent just before 1pm on March 23, 2015, who had the news that the Cork writer was being offered a two-book deal for a six figure sum for her debut crime thriller, Distress Signals.

At the time, as a mature student of English at Trinity College Dublin, she had the princely sum of €16 in her pocket.

Catherine, who grew up in Grange, was 32 when she got the book deal. “I had wanted this since I was about eight or nine,” she says.

“I remember walking through Stephen’s Green to meet my friends. There was five minutes of excitement and then there was just relief. I was getting to a place where I didn’t know what I was going to do if this hadn’t happened. 

"As soon as it did happen, I was delighted but I immediately said that I never want to want anything as much as I wanted this ever again.”

Now, the 42-year-old novelist has eight novels under her belt including the bestsellers 56 Days, which is being made into a film, and The Trap.

Her latest novel, Burn After Reading, is about a ghost-writer who is locked in an interview room with a man who might be a murderer.

It’s an intriguing premise, sparked by the “crazy book deal” OJ Simpson signed whereby he would give his hypothetical confession to a ghost-writer. Simpson slipped at one point from using the conditional tense to the past tense, making it sound like he had committed murder.

“That just stuck in my mind, the idea of a ghost-writer helping to tell the story of a man who says he is innocent,” says Catherine.

“Then I thought, what if a ghost-writer is a woman and she hasn’t been doing that job before and she’s hiding her own secret.

“My book has nothing to do with OJ; it was just that scenario of a ghost-writer and the maybe murderer in a room together.”

Catherine’s new thriller is about the night when Jack Smyth ran into flames in a desperate attempt to save his wife from their burning home. Tragically, he was too late but was hailed a hero. That was until it emerged that Kate was dead long before the fire began. Suspicion stalks Jack.

A year on, he has signed a book deal to tell his side of the story and prove his innocence in print. He needs someone to write it. Emily has never ghost-written anything before, but knows what it’s like to live with a guilty secret. And she learns that there are some stories that should never be told.

Set in a fictional town in Florida, Catherine was inspired by a real town there called Seaside, where The Truman Show was filmed. She had first gone there on a holiday.

“I loved it so much that I wanted to return there, but it’s so expensive that I thought if I set a book there and come back to do research, it could be a business expense.”

Catherine loves her writing career. Growing up, she had “three big dreams. I wanted to be a novelist, I wanted to live and work in the U.S, and I wanted to see a space shuttle launch from Cape Canaveral up close.”

She has achieved all three, having gone to the Kennedy Space Centre to see the launch of Discovery in 2007. She also worked in Disney World as a front desk agent in a resort called The Swan And Dolphin.

When Catherine left Disney World, she went travelling in Central America. “Then I came home and moved into my parents’ box room in my late twenties. It was an enormous privilege to work on a novel there. I did some office work as well.”

Always “trying to write”, Catherine self-published a factual book about Disney World. But she yearned to write fiction. “The problem was that I did very little actual writing of novels because I never had an idea that lasted more than two or three chapters.”

However, Catherine’s mother came to the rescue. “My mom had a habit of bringing home newspapers and magazines that people had left behind them in whatever café or pub she was in. If she saw something she thought I’d be interested in, she’d bring it home to me.

“In November, 2011, she brought back a copy of the Guardian weekend magazine. The cover story was called ‘Lost at Sea’. It was about the disappearance of a woman (crew member) from a Disney cruise ship.”

And so, Catherine had the bones of the novel that launched her career.

Asked why there are so many female crime writers in Ireland, Catherine says: “I can only answer for myself. I came of age at the turn of the millennium. Before that, there had been a decade of women disappearing off the face of the earth. That dominated the headlines.

“You’re growing up and experiencing fear that maybe male writers were not. You’re living in a country where women can be snatched out of their lives and never found. We don’t know what happened to any of them.”

Catherine says Irish women “have an internalised fear because of what has gone on in this country. They are reading (and writing) crime novels.

“It’s amazing. There’s a crime writers’ festival in Harrogate every July. The first time I went to it with Vanessa O’Loughlin (who writes crime under the name of Sam Blake) and Niamh O’Connor (a crime writer), we didn’t know anyone. Now we go there and there’s a gang of maybe 15 of us from Ireland. Every year, we take a picture on the steps of the Swan Hotel, and every year there are more people in that picture. It’s fantastic to have such a community.”

Catherine Ryan Howard will be signing her latest thriller, Burn After Reading, at Waterstones tomorrow, Saturday, April 19, at 3pm.