Ex-Ryanair worker: ‘Why I set my debut novel in Blackpool’

Mallow-based Mark Gyves recently launched his debut novel, The Boy, which had been brewing in his head for years.

The 52-year-old aircraft maintenance engineer worked for Ryanair in the UK for years before returning to his birthplace with his dentist wife, Suzanne, for whom he works as an administrator.

This father of 18-year-old twins, Ruby and Lily, says that he has always been making up stories, going back to his childhood. He was in bands and used to write songs but says they “were never any good”.

In 2016, Mark was travelling with work and had a lot of downtime.

“I just started writing this story that was in my head about a boy. When I got it written in 2023, it was more like a series of short stories than a novel.

“I didn’t tell people I was writing (apart from his wife). I wouldn’t say I did it in secret but I just wasn’t talking about it. It wasn’t something I thought would ever be something.

“Then, myself and my wife were on holiday. We got talking about the book and she asked to read it. She thought it was credible.

“So I sat down and put it together properly over three or four months. By the time I got to the summer of 2023, it was in pretty good shape.”

While most debut novelists have tales of rejection slips piling up, Mark had it easy. But first of all, he had to decide the genre of the book.

“The feedback I was getting was that my novel was quite literary and it also had a heavy crime theme. People would think ‘this fellow thinks he’s something else’.

“I was afraid that some parts of it were a bit like purple prose. But that wasn’t the feedback. What I was told was quite encouraging.”

Mark was lucky enough to get an agent fairly quickly. “I found the most wonderful man. I had this fear that the chances of getting published were zero and that the publishing industry was gone into decline.

But Mark’s agent, James Gill, said he loved the book.

“He found the most wonderful publisher dealing specifically in crime fiction called No Exit Press. While some other publishers said the book sat between a couple of genres, that wasn’t the case with No Exit.”

A small advance didn’t disappoint Mark as he is not in the writing business for money. “I knew there was no such thing as a rich author apart from a few,” he says,

“I didn’t have an expectation that I was going to get rich from this thing. It was just something that was in me for so long and it needed to come out.”

Writers’ blurbs on the covers of books can be deceptively enthusiastic. Not all writers asked to supply a line or two actually have the time to read the book. But acclaimed Irish crime author, John Connolly, wrote that Mark’s book is “a very fine debut novel from a future star of Irish crime writing.”

“I went to a book signing that John Connolly was doing,” explains Mark. “I walked up to him and introduced myself. He remembered my name and said he was going to read my book.

“About a month later, he wrote to the publisher saying he loved the book.

“There’s a lot of luck involved and putting yourself out there as well.”

The Boy didn’t start out as a crime novel. “It’s about grief,” explains Mark. “A boy loses his brother and his mother in quick succession. The boy and his best friend support each other.

“It’s a lovely friendship. But when I was writing about the boy’s brother, he had been a criminal. I juxtaposed the boy’s life and his brother’s life, imagining the boy getting sucked into the world created by the brother.

“Then, all of a sudden, the book took on a life of its own. It gets tense quite quickly. I think it’s good. It became a crime novel.”

There is also a wealthy landlord who hides a ‘family’ of abducted boys and grotesque secrets.

The novel is mainly set in Cork city.

“Originally, it was set in Mallow but when the crime element came into the story, I thought it wasn’t believable there,” says Mark.

“In the story, people get shot on the back of a motorbike. I decided to set it in Blackpool.

“It’s funny because reflecting on it now, Blackpool, while on the north side, is almost like the centre of Cork with hills on either side of it. It’s kind of central to the city.”

Mark’s appetite for books was whetted by his mother’s Maeve Binchy books such as Light A Penny Candle and The Lilac Bus.

“They were the first books I read,” he says.

“ Obviously, Maeve Binchy didn’t inspire me to write about organised crime in Cork.

“I went on to read Roddy Doyle and knew I wanted to express myself like him in that raw vernacular style of writing.

“By the time I was in my twenties, I had read a lot such as people like Cormac McCarthy, Bret Easton Ellis and James McElroy.”

Is Mark reflecting reality when he writes about crime in Cork?

“I think there’s crime everywhere in Ireland,” he replies.

“My book is set in the 1990s, a period of intense change. You couldn’t get divorced, for a time in the 1990s, it was a crime to be gay. There were Magdalene Laundries. All that phased out.

“You had the dot.com bubble. There was crime with people like Gerry Hutch coming on the scene. Veronica Guerin was shot dead. There was the formation of the Criminal Assets Bureau.”

All grist to the mill for this writer who has tapped into the murkier side of Cork city for his fiction.