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- [00:02]
Commercial Narrator
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- [00:37]
Charlie Gibson
Well, hello all you bibliophiles or book nerds. As Kate likes to say, top of the morning to you. It's the Irish greeting, and it's appropriate
- [00:45]
Kate Gibson
in this case and the rest of the day to you. I am Kate Gibson and he is Charlie Gibson.
- [00:52]
Charlie Gibson
And that comes from. I don't know if it's the correct way to do an Irish greeting, but Speaker Tip o', Neill, who was Irish to his core, and I covered when I was working for ABC News covering the House of Representatives, and he was the speaker, and he told me that when you say top of the morning to you, the response is, and the rest of the day to you. I don't know if that's correct, but I've told a number of people that, and I now repeat it on this maybe Tip was making it up, but I don't think so. He knew his way around. And I mention all of this in the Irish Connection because our writer today is Irish and so is our bookstore, which we'll explain in a moment. Patana French is with us, a wonderful mystery writer. But you know, Kate, I don't think I should. I don't mean to denigrate people who write mysteries. They're wonderful. But she's not just a mystery writer. She's a writer who writes mysteries and
- [01:49]
Kate Gibson
constantly challenges herself and changes it up and writes. And she doesn't just write a police procedural. And she doesn't, you know, and she doesn't have one series. She just keeps trying new things. And I get excited every time Tana French has something new out. And the new one is called the Keeper, the Keeper being the conclusion of the Cal Hooper series, the first one being the Searcher, the second one being the Hunter, and the third one being the Keeper. See, I had gotten the order of that. Like, I don't know why. I've gotten the order of those confused in my head many times. But I am familiar with all three titles. I've read all three. They are terrific. It is not just a good trilogy. It is a great trilogy.
- [02:32]
Charlie Gibson
And we should underline. And I think it's important because I I keep it in mind whenever I'm reading a book in a series. Do I need to have read the earlier ones? And the answer in this case is absolutely not. It is wonderful. As a standalone book, it's really interesting. And I think one of the things, and we talk about it a lot with Tanner, is the fact it is set in Western Ireland in the town, as the first two books are set in the town of Ardna Kelty in Western Ireland, which is, of course, rather rural. But. But her trope is that.
- [03:03]
Tana French
Right.
- [03:03]
Charlie Gibson
Her model is the American Western transposed to Western Ireland. And, And. And I think you see the influence in it as you read this book very much.
- [03:16]
Kate Gibson
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. There are posses, bar fights, you know, the townspeople taking the law into their own hands. Like, I think in some ways, the Western, certainly in the US has sort of become a jokey cliche. But there is some great Western literature out there, readers and listeners. If you have not read Lonesome Dove, go get it. If you have not seen High Noon, go see it. There are some really great artistic tropes of the Western that are really worth reading as great literature and great films, and they influence Hannah. And you can see it in all three of these books. Maybe the most. In this most recent one, the Keeper. And I just loved every minute of it at one point, too. I think the characters are even talking about the fact that. That they come across like, you know, gunfighters, and one of them's, you know, singing the theme song to the good and the dead. So I, you know, it's. It's a really. And why do these things. Why does the Western work so well in Western Ireland? I don't know, but Tana French makes it work brilliantly and puts a whole new spin on the genre.
- [04:21]
Charlie Gibson
Well, the difference is in. In this instance, that, you know, she wrote the Dublin Murder Squad series. Those were six books that were, I think, terrific mysteries. And now she's writing about Western Ireland where the police and the sheriff and whatever isn't the key case. This town of Ardecelty has to take care of itself. And we asked her to read a passage that would best illustrate that Cal
- [04:46]
Tana French
doesn't know how to find words for what he means. The things he's come to prize in this place are not mostly the ones he moved here in search of. The beauty is all there and more. But he was also picturing simplicity and peace, maybe even innocence, none of which showed up in any noticeable quantity. Instead, he's found the intricate webs constructed over centuries that Bind people to one another, to their land and to their past. He's under no illusion that these bindings are simple or innocent either. They've sliced people to the bone, scourge them out of town, choke them to death. But alongside all that, they've held the place together, steadfast in the face of time. Dark happenings, rifts, attacks and sieges.
- [05:31]
Charlie Gibson
But I said, you know, she's a writer who happens to write mysteries, and there's some. There's some great lines that. That I. That I think he. He's only ribbing Mart, who consider women to be interesting in the abstract, but not a field in which he has any urge to get personally involved, like space travel or raising ostriches.
- [05:53]
Kate Gibson
There is great humor in this book, and the dialogue is incredible. She doesn't neglect one part of this book, from the descriptions of the countryside to the small conversations that take place in the pub at night. It's all just brilliantly written. If you haven't read Tana French yet, go get all of them. Start with this one if you want, the Keeper, but then go read all of them because she's just a terrific writer.
- [06:18]
Charlie Gibson
One more line that I loved. Like everyone else around here, Mart is constitutionally incapable of going at anything directly. Cal puts it down vaguely to centuries of British rule. The concealment reflex that's beaten into the colonized. There's just little passages that. That really strike me as wonderful and. And I think wonderfully, I've. I've spent a good bit of time in Western Ireland, which is beautiful, and I think she captures the feel of it so well. Noreen enjoys a good fight, but she hates holding onto a grudge. It gets in the way of conversation. Anyway, nice little lines like that. So we talked to Tana French about her new book, the Keeper, and as Kate says, the. The conclusion of the Cal Hooper series, but not necessarily one where you need to have read books one and two. Tana French. Tana French. It is so nice to have you back in the bookcase. Kate and I both love this book, but we're inclined to love a Tana French book no matter what. And this one is certainly worth loving again. You've written in this Cal Hooper Series 3 Books about a small Western Ireland town, Ardna Kelty, on its surface, so simple and so inviting, and as Americans picture it, rural and tranquil. But there is so much going on under the surface.
- [07:43]
Tana French
Oh, yeah.
- [07:43]
Charlie Gibson
Is that your invention or is that, do you think, true of towns in Western Ireland?
- [07:49]
Tana French
Oh, I think it's definitely True. It's one of the things that fascinates me about tight knit places with a lot of history because I don't come from anything like that. Like I grew up moving around all over the place. My parents have like three, four cultures between them and so I don't have any experience of that kind of stability of that kind of rooted place. So to me it's fascinating the intricacy of places like that, where they look to an outsider, really straightforward, really simple. But the more you know them, the longer you're there, the more you realize that the tangles go deeper than they ever could otherwise. Because they go back centuries, because people have known each other for centuries. Your relationship with the neighbor isn't just based on, you know, the three years you've been living next door to each other. It's based on, it's based on something your granny said to her granddad in 1962 and that is still an undercurrent in your relationship.
- [08:39]
Kate Gibson
The last time that we talked to you, my dad quoted you back to me this morning that it was, it's Irish software and western hardware. And I, I read this book through that lens and it was like to me the perfect marriage of a western and Western Ireland. So is this in your mind, the most western of the Kal Hooper series? I mean, I count posses and bar fights and you know, the old woman in the rocking chair keeping nigh in town and everybody taking, you know. So I mean, in your mind, is this the most western of the calhoopers?
- [09:10]
Tana French
Yeah, you've got the bad sheriff who needs something to be done about him and his authority. I kind of feel like all of them are to an extent. But this one I think may be more deeply western toned because so many western series have a book about the death of the west in there. And that to me was something that resonated really well with the west of Ireland right now. Because there's a way of life under threat. You know, farmers are finding it harder and harder to stay afloat. You've got young people emigrating because they can't afford housing and they can't compete against mega farms, schools closing cause there aren't enough kids. And I just thought that resonated in a really depressing way with those Death of the west novels that you get.
- [09:52]
Kate Gibson
And as a matter of fact, Mart says that to cal on page 351 and I found myself wondering. He basically says, look, we're fighting as hard as we can to keep our town protected and to keep those small Town vibe. But essentially we're just stemming the tide. And I wondered when I read that conversation, was that Mart talking or Tana talking?
- [10:13]
Tana French
No, that's more Mart. Because I don't think they're as doomed as he does. I think that this is a way of life, that these are extremely adaptable people and people who have been through an awful lot over the generations. And there have been an awful lot of forces that have tried to eliminate this way of life. You know, seven centuries of British colonization and they're trying to eradicate who these people are and what they stand for. You got famine, you've got all kinds of stuff. And nothing has got rid of this very tight knit communal way of life. Nothing has managed to extinguish it.
- [10:46]
Kate Gibson
Did making that choice. Because I read a lot of your books and I don't remember if there's anyone where like this to me is like, there's mystery, but you kind of know who the bad guy is right from the beginning. Or you know who the bad guys are right from the beginning, I should say. So why make that choice here? And how did it change the writing for you, the process for you?
- [11:09]
Tana French
See, for me, the core question in mystery is almost never who done it? That's not the interesting part. It's why done it? It's how did we get to this point? And in a book like this, it's how did this entire community get to this point? Whodunit, you know, that's. That's a one moment revelation. Oh, look, you know, there you go. Bad guy's name is now underlined in a nice thick black marker. But what's interesting to me is almost nobody starts out deciding, right, I'm gonna kill somebody or I'm gonna hound somebody to death. They get there. Or if they're an interesting character, they get there. From not planning that at all, from having an objective in mind, a goal that's probably a relatively normal one. And gradually, little by little, they find themselves due to a combination of interactions with the other characters, interactions, the setting, the pressures of their community, they find themselves in a point where it feels like a rational or worthwhile choice to kill somebody. And that's really wild when you think about it. That's a really wild decision to make. And it's even more wild if it's somebody who isn't naturally that callous, who wouldn't normally go around just blowing people away for the fun of it, because it's a boring Tuesday. And that's the part I'm interested in. So I don't think it really matters knowing who the bad guys are. It matters how they got there. And it also matters what the narrator, whether he's a good guy or not, what he's going to do with this, what he's going to do with the conflicts and tensions that a death like this throws in his way. Like Cal is trying to figure out, who am I within this context when this community comes to me going, we need you to be a little bit detective, but not too detective, not too official or anything like that. We need you to be our man. And yet the detective you were, how do you cope with that? How do you cope with that conflict and the demands of what is now your community? So I don't think whodunit, who's the bad guy is ever the really interesting question. I mean, maybe not ever. There are books where it totally is, but I don't think in a lot of books, that's the big question.
- [13:25]
Kate Gibson
Well, and I think you're probably especially right here when in some ways there are. There are bad guys, but in some ways there are. So much of the town is implicated in what happened and the tsunami that causes the crime.
- [13:37]
Tana French
That's what I like about Westerns, actually, is they have quite a different approach to morality and justice from mysteries. And that's why I like this sort of mystery Western intersection that I've been writing about. Because in mysteries, good and bad tend to be relatively clearly delineated. And justice tends to be like black and white, the official form of justice, the law has it neatly written down for you, what counts as justice. But in Westerns, it's. They tend to be much more shades of gray and very matter of fact about the fact that good and bad aren't always neatly separable. And sometimes nobody is really purely a good guy. And maybe nobody's purely a bad guy. And maybe there is no good thing to be done, and you just have to figure out something that's as close to good as you can. And that justice probably is going to be something that the community has to cobble together itself as best it can from whatever materials it's got ready to hand. And I thought that was interesting, having Cal be somebody who came from the classic mystery environment where he was a detective, and now he's been assimilated into this Western framework where justice is whatever you can put together. And good and bad are much more pragmatic. So I like that, that crossover.
- [14:54]
Charlie Gibson
The conundrums for a mystery writer, for a great mystery writer, are things like that, as Kate pointed out, you know, right away who did it. This is really a battle about land, about ownership of land. And the other part of it that struck me is you have with the Dublin murder squad so carefully plotted books where police or people to whom you go to to solve a crime, in this instance, not in this instance, Arden Kelty has to take care of the situation by itself. And I wonder just about the difference in writing those two extremes.
- [15:27]
Tana French
Yeah, after when, when I came to the end of the Trespasser, which is the sixth of the kind of police detective based books, I was just. I got uncomfortable with the idea that the detective is a default narrative position for mystery fiction because it seemed to me that, okay, that is an interesting character to be watching, but there's. It limits you to a position where this narrator character is controlling the narrative. They drive the investigation. For them, it's a force of order. It's a way to restore order to chaos. But there are so many other people involved in any murder investigation. There are suspects, there are witnesses, there's a perpetrator, there's victims. And for them, this investigation is not a force of restoring order. And it's not a thing that they control. It's this thing that just barrels into their lives, causes huge upheaval, possibly huge damage, and where they have no control at all. And I just thought all of those perspectives were really interesting and deserved a voice. So in the Witch Elm, I've got, you know, the narrator who's kind of all of those things at some point during the book. And in these books, what I was interested in is the idea of a detective who's trying not to be a detective, who has himself become uncomfortable with where that positions him. And Cal has a line in surtr, something like he realized that one or the other of them, him or the job or both, can't be trusted. He's realized that this position of being a detective is not the force for good justice and truth that he hoped it would be. So in these books, he has tried to strip all of that away. He's a retired detective. He left early. He's come an entire ocean away, and he's trying to not be a detective, except that this community he's become part of requires a detective sometimes. But he has none of the trappings. He doesn't have a gun, a badge. He has no authority. He can't question people. He can't, you know, call in texts to check somebody's phone for phone calls. So it's what is left of him as a detective. With all those trappings gone, can he use it in ways that he considers good? And how does it fit into this new, weird, bizarre structure of homemade law and justice that he's entered into? It's like somebody dismantled a detective and is putting him back in pieces from what they've got around the house.
- [17:54]
Kate Gibson
One of the things I love most about this series, especially this book, is it, does this series particularly lend itself to humor? Or did you think that humor was important to Kal Hooper's story for some reason, or to the story of Western Ireland for some reason?
- [18:09]
Tana French
Irish people are funny, man. It's one of the currencies. It's one of the main currencies. And we're funny at the darkest moments as well. You know, the instant Irish reflex, if anything really dark happens, is you've got to make a joke about it. It's the way people cope and it's the way people bond as well. Like people slag each other. You get down the pub and the closer you are, the more you slag each other. I have a cousin, right, who's Italian, my mom's half Italian, and he came over to visit me here and we went down the pub, me and my now husband and my cousin and my husband's mate. My cousin's listening to this conversation. He turns around to me at one point and says in Italian, do these people hate each other? And I'm like, no. They've been best friends since they were teenagers. This is how they show love, is by slagging the absolute hell out of each other. Because that's the Irish reflex to anything is to be funny, be sharp, banter, throw stuff back and forth. And I felt like I wouldn't be doing justice to an Irish book, and in particular to a rural Irish book, if it wasn't funny on a semi regular basis at least. And the darker it gets, the funnier it needs to get.
- [19:20]
Charlie Gibson
I come back to Niall Williams, who he and his wife moved from the United States to this small town in Western Ireland, and he said one of the things that surprised him was if you simply drop in on your neighbors and you don't bring a gift, you don't bring a house present. The currency is conversation. Yes, you bring conversation, you bring stories. And that, that's what the evening will come down to, is an exchange of, of stories. And of course that lends itself into the, I guess, meme of Irishmen being great talkers and the gift of blarney, if that's a real occasion. So you have to have it Seems to me, as an Irish writer, a really keen sense of conversation and dialogue.
- [20:04]
Tana French
Oh, yeah. Oh, God, yeah. You can't write a book set in Ireland unless you are willing to really put in the work to make sure that that dialogue is as fluent and as snappy and as charged with subtext as real Irish dialogue. Because the Irish are very good at talking a lot but not saying anything straight out. And especially down the country, that's the case. I don't know whether to blame it on those centuries of being colonized where, you know, you've got to be a little bit careful what you say because you never know who could be listening. But people seldom say anything straight out. They talk in circles around it. And if you don't get the meaning straight away, they'll get a little bit closer. They'll get a little bit closer. But it's very seldom that you get sat down and told anything straight out. Look, hey, here's a problem. Or, hey, listen, you need to know this. People will just come at it obliquely, and there'll be little tangents, and you need to put it together. And, you know, so there's a huge amount of talk and very creative talk. Like, nobody makes up creative swear words like the Irish, but a lot of the time it's not saying. The talk is used to conceal meaning rather than to clarify it. So I had to get that right. Among other things. I had to get right not just the way a sentence sounds, but also the way language is used, which is different.
- [21:26]
Charlie Gibson
I go back and sometimes I read a sentence and I think, did that flow out of her pen spontaneously, or does she go back and edit each sentence for precision?
- [21:36]
Kate Gibson
Which do you do and do you read aloud?
- [21:38]
Tana French
I don't read aloud. I don't know why. I just. I feel like I care more about the rhythm of it to the eye than to the ear. But I edit. Yeah, every sentence gets edited like, a million times. And I go back as I write. So I'll, like, edit what I did yesterday and then write, add on a bit more and then edit that. And I write first longhand in a notebook. So I'm editing and scribbling and crossing out while I do that, and then editing again when I transfer it onto screen, and then I go back and edit it again the next day. So I don't have a finished first draft until a few weeks before my deadline or, you know, sometimes a few weeks after, occasionally a few weeks after. But I every bit in it. When I have that first draft, every passage in it has been edited at least six or seven times because I've just gone over and over as I go.
- [22:26]
Kate Gibson
Are you gonna miss these characters or were you glad to finish up?
- [22:29]
Tana French
Oh, no, I'm gonna miss them. I'm gonna miss them. I would have kept writing about these people for a long, long time, except kind of, you can't because it's a really small town and if I kill off anyone else, we're going into full, like, Murder She Wrote territory where. What the hell is going on in this place?
- [22:44]
Kate Gibson
If.
- [22:44]
Charlie Gibson
If you got hit by a bus tomorrow. Oh, good praise be that it doesn't have.
- [22:49]
Tana French
Fingers crossed. Let's be honest. Are you.
- [22:51]
Charlie Gibson
Are you very comfortable with the body of work as it now exists?
- [22:55]
Tana French
No, I'm a third of the way through a book. I can't get hit by any buses till I've finished that. I like this one. You know what? It's hard to say because hopefully I've learned an awful lot since I started writing in the woods. I certainly hope so. And so I think if I went back and read it with an eye to what I'd do differently, I would be chewing my fingernails off going, no, wait, I want to go back and restructure that. I want to fix that. I want to use that character development note is not right. So I think that while I'm happy that I have always done the best I was capable of, I'm never going to be happy with it because I'm still getting better at this. I hope to keep on getting better at this for ages. So I'm always going to be going, wait, wait, wait, that's not the best I can do. Hang on, I need to do. I need to do another one and hopefully do it better.
- [23:46]
Kate Gibson
Thank you so much for sitting with us, Donna French. I love this book, the Keeper by Tana French. A great way of ending the Cow Cooper series. And, you know, hurry up and finish the next one.
- [23:55]
Tana French
It is always a joy to see you guys and it's just lovely to be here. And thank you for the support of this book because I had a lot of fun writing it. I really hope people enjoy reading it.
- [24:14]
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- [24:44]
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- [24:50]
Charlie Gibson
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- [24:51]
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- [24:56]
Charlie Gibson
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- [24:57]
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- [24:58]
Tana French
You're hired and you're hired.
- [25:00]
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- [25:16]
Juju Chang
It's the middle of the night in a small town on the Jersey shore. Someone reports an abandoned car on a bridge. A search gets underway for the missing driver, 19 year old Sarah Stern.
- [25:28]
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Is it a missing person?
- [25:29]
Kate Gibson
Is it a suicide? At this point, nobody knows.
- [25:33]
Juju Chang
Old friendships, buried cash, and a sinister plot that was once pitched as a movie plays out in real life. I'm juju Chang from 2020 and ABC. Listen now to Bridge of Lies, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [25:58]
Kate Gibson
Before we get to Rapid Fire, I just want to say that the Keeper is a great conclusion to this series. Again, you don't have to have read the series to read the Keeper. It's a terrific standalone. But having read all three when I got to that last question, I'm going to miss these characters. I've really enjoyed getting to know them and the town and the darkness that's inside the town and the humor that's in the town. I'm gonna miss them.
- [26:21]
Charlie Gibson
Yep. And as we talk to her, these little towns seem so tranquil, so rural, so peaceful, so innocent. And they're not. But underneath there lies layers and layers and layers of which she writes so well. We take a break. When we come back, as Kate mentioned, some rapid fire questions for Tana French and the bookstore. The bookstore in this case. We thought since Tana French was such a wonderful Irish writer that we would call Liam Donnelly at Hodges and Figgis. What a great name for a bookstore. Hodges and Figgis. It's on the main street of Dublin. It's been around for longer than the United States has been around. It goes back over 250 years. What does that mean in terms of a bookstore maintaining a traditional. We'll talk to Liam Bonnelly about that. As I say, some rapid fires for Tana French. Rapid fire questions for Tana French. What do you Use as a bookmark.
- [27:25]
Tana French
I just. I'm one of these terrible people who leave the book face down, open. Sorry.
- [27:29]
Charlie Gibson
That kind of heresy leads to notes in the margin. Later life.
- [27:34]
Tana French
No, no, no, no. God, no. No, never.
- [27:39]
Charlie Gibson
How about turning down the corner of pages occasionally?
- [27:42]
Tana French
Yes. Yeah, I've got to admit to that one. Oh, my God. This is all my dirty secrets out in the open.
- [27:51]
Kate Gibson
Well, on that note, do you have, like, a guilty pleasure in terms of reading? Like, is there something that you read that you would consider a guilty pleasure?
- [27:59]
Tana French
I don't like. See, I just think reading's great, so I don't feel guilty about anything I read. But probably the one that people would be surprised that I read is occasionally when just life's a little bit much, I go for a Georgette Heyer. And I know, like, chirpy Regency romance where everybody's beautifully dressed and it's all gonna wind up perfectly, neatly tied up in the end. Probably isn't what people associate with dark psychological mystery, but. No, every now and then, man, I love me a nice, fluffy Georgette Heyer.
- [28:26]
Charlie Gibson
In what genre do you read most widely? Do you read a lot of mysteries or do you venture outside that area?
- [28:32]
Tana French
I go through phases. There was a phase where I was reading all the mysteries. It's sort of towards the beginning when I started writing. I was reading every mystery I could get my hands on, trying to kind of get a sense of all the sort of little corners of the genre and the ways the conventions could be played with. Just. It was the way I got a sense of the space before I started into it.
- [28:55]
Kate Gibson
Do you have two or three favorite mystery writers?
- [28:57]
Liam Donnelly
Oh.
- [28:59]
Tana French
Oh, God. That's really hard to narrow down.
- [29:02]
Kate Gibson
Fair enough. I get it.
- [29:04]
Tana French
I love To See who Dear Bring. I love Dennis Lehan. I love Patricia Highsmith, Gillian Flynn. There's too many, if we can count. Donna Tartt. I love the Secret History, which I think. Yeah, I don't. I mean, I think that is one of the great mystery novels and a great literary novel at the same time, and I don't see why it shouldn't be both. So, yeah, she's definitely on that list.
- [29:28]
Charlie Gibson
Is there a great book that you feel guilty for not having read?
- [29:32]
Tana French
Oh, there. There. There are a lot. There are several. I kind of feel like I should have read War and Peace, but I haven't because it's really long and, you know, I. I just have never sat down and felt like I had the amount of time and dedication to put into that, and I somehow feel like I Should have. And no, it hasn't happened.
- [29:54]
Charlie Gibson
What's the most important element of a mystery? Is it plot? Is it character? Is it place? What is it?
- [30:00]
Tana French
Look, again, I'm coming from an acting background. I'm always gonna say character, because everything else, the plot comes out of the characters plot doesn't, like, happen itself out of nowhere, unless, of course, you're doing something that starts with a natural disaster or whatever. But even then, the plot from there, everything comes from the characters. And everything that makes it interesting stems from who the characters are, what we find out about them, how they interact, their tensions and intimacies. It's all from character and the place. Okay, I love place. It's probably obvious from my books that I love place. I'm passionate about places and what they mean. But again, we're down to what they mean to the characters and how the characters interact with them. So I'm always gonna go for character.
- [30:48]
Kate Gibson
As my dad mentioned earlier, it's our first international in bookshop. We were really excited to reach out to them and that they wanted to talk to us again. I know that most people don't believe that there's a bookshop in Ireland that's older than the U.S. what? Surely not. No one was alive back then, but it's still maintaining its great tradition. And in fact, Tana, we didn't include this, but Tana said that her kids go there and read for hours still to this day. So it still has the magic that it once did. So here is Liam Donnelly talking about being the caretaker of the great tradition.
- [31:24]
Charlie Gibson
Liam Donnelly. If your store dates back to 1758, you don't look that old.
- [31:29]
Liam Donnelly
So the store was founded in 1768, and it was in a place called Skinner's Row and which was a small street where the slaughtering of horses and cattle used to happen, just beside a very famous cathedral in Dublin called Christchurch Cathedral. And for a long time, it was there. Then over time, through various different owners, it sort of amalgamated and became Hodges and Brown. And then finally in about the 1830s, it became Hodges Figgis. And the Figgis family joined. Then after that, a storied career wandering around the city, mainly within a mile or two of this shop where we are now ending up on Grafton street. For a long time hopping up and down various different streets in the 1800s. And by the 1970s, it settled on Dawson street, across the road from where we are now, which was. Is now a record store. Then it hopped up onto Stephen's Green and then back into this place in 1989, where we've resided since.
- [32:41]
Charlie Gibson
So you're something of an itinerant bookstore?
- [32:45]
Liam Donnelly
Yeah, steady, but itinerant indeed, yes.
- [32:49]
Kate Gibson
Were you with Hodges and Figures when they went to their 1989 location?
- [32:53]
Liam Donnelly
I joined in 1992. I owned another bookstore in Dublin at the time, but I went bust in 1992. My small little bookstore died and I needed a job, so I joined Hodges Figgis.
- [33:09]
Charlie Gibson
But Hodges and Figgis must be by far the largest bookstore in Ireland. And with the 250 plus years tradition to uphold, how does that affect the bookstore?
- [33:24]
Liam Donnelly
So it's one of the largest. There are some. We're 16,000 square feet. It's not all that big in terms, but we have a long storied history. The family and the various owners subsequently made sure that it was always been part of the fabric of the city.
- [33:41]
Charlie Gibson
With that long a history, do you feel that sort of in your bones that you have to maintain some kind of a tradition that goes back so far?
- [33:53]
Liam Donnelly
We do try to follow that because the bookstore has been mentioned in fiction from Ulysses to Sally Rooney and poetry by Paul Muldoon and many others. It is part of the fabric of the city, whether or not we like it or not, if you know what I mean. It lives within the city. Everybody knows it. There's a big green shop on Dawson street, you can't miss it. And it's one of those icons, I suppose, of the city. There are many other bookshops that are old, 100, 150 years old, like Easton's, but they don't seem to have the storied tradition that we do where, you know, not many places can say that they're mentioned in Ulysses. Not many, indeed, not many places can say that they're mentioned in contemporary novels by Sally Rooney.
- [34:46]
Kate Gibson
Do you look at yourself as the manager of this store or do you look at yourself as the caretaker?
- [34:50]
Liam Donnelly
I am a bookseller first and foremost. Selling books is something I've done for a long, long, long time. 45 years now. I started when I was 17, just when I went into college. I took a part time job in the bookshop. I eventually bought.
- [35:07]
Kate Gibson
So you say you're a bookseller first and you started when you were 17?
- [35:11]
Tana French
Yes.
- [35:12]
Kate Gibson
So what addicted you?
- [35:14]
Liam Donnelly
I started book selling because I actually loved reading. I needed a job as well to help pay through college, but I was in college. I was also working in a library, shelving books. But at weekends you need, you know, money, so I started to do that. My first love is science fiction. I started as A science fiction reader. I still read science fiction now after all this time. It is a thing that I don't know, but it inspired me or kept me going most. My bookshop, first bookshop was a science fiction bookshop. It was a thing I love. Still a thing I love.
- [35:52]
Charlie Gibson
Does Hodges and Figures have a section in Gaelic?
- [35:55]
Liam Donnelly
Yes, it does. We sell books in Irish and books about learning Irish. Yes indeed.
- [36:01]
Charlie Gibson
So do many people read Gaelic anymore and do those books sell?
- [36:08]
Liam Donnelly
They sell quite well. I have to say that in recent years there's been a. How do I put it? The Irish language is undergoing one of its renaissances. Let's put it like this.
- [36:22]
Charlie Gibson
Can I buy books by Niall Williams, by Banfil, by Tana French in Gaelic?
- [36:29]
Liam Donnelly
Not yet. There are some things being translated. For example, the Hobbit was translated into Irish about 10 years ago. There are certainly companies that are translating fiction, not always from English, but from French. For example, you can buy. If you're familiar with asterisks, almost every asterisk book is available in Irish.
- [36:53]
Kate Gibson
Really?
- [36:54]
Liam Donnelly
Yes, indeed, yeah.
- [36:55]
Charlie Gibson
How about Harry Potter? How about Harry Potter?
- [36:57]
Liam Donnelly
Harry Potter, the first Harry Potters in Irish as well as in Latin and all the other languages under the sun. But yeah, Latin, yes indeed, yes, there's the Harry Potter Latin, but yeah, Harry Potter was translated into Irish.
- [37:11]
Kate Gibson
So you say you're a bookseller through and through and this one and you're. And science fiction is your first love. This one is a science fiction skeptic. Now I have my own favorites in science fiction. I'm a huge NK Jemisin fan. But I was wondering if you wouldn't maybe throw a couple of books his way that a non science fiction reader would thereby fall in love with science fiction.
- [37:31]
Liam Donnelly
So you're quite right about NK Jemisin and even her two volume series on New York.
- [37:38]
Tana French
Ah, the best.
- [37:39]
Liam Donnelly
Oh, fantastically beautiful written and it's not hard and it's very contemporary and it's quite beautiful. She's an extraordinary writer. I think more people should read her. I don't think she's as loved as she should be. Most great science fiction is written in the States. I have to say there are a good few English and others. But if I was to pick a couple, there's A book called we by Gevni Zamyatin published way back in the 1930s. It's fantastic. He's a Russian writer. It's absolutely stunningly good. But of the contemporary ones, Martha Wells for murderbot novels, they're very slim, quite beautiful books to Read, they tell a great story. There's an extraordinary writer called Becky Chambers whose novels are essentially all books are about people, regardless whether it's science fiction or literary fiction or whatever. It's about people. People write books. You can't imagine any. I mean, you're writing about people, you're writing about relationships. Becca Chambers writes the most extraordinary books about relationship.
- [38:45]
Kate Gibson
Do you like Bradbury? Were you a Bradbury fan?
- [38:47]
Charlie Gibson
Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
- [38:48]
Liam Donnelly
That's great.
- [38:49]
Charlie Gibson
He transcends science fiction as far as I'm concerned. But I say that when you say he transcends science fiction that some, in some way puts down science fiction. And I don't mean to at all. I think it's amazing the way science fiction writers can create worlds that are counterintuitive to some of the readers. And they get you into that world and you accept it. Do you sell more Irish writers than you do anything else?
- [39:20]
Liam Donnelly
So when you come into our shop, we have everything Irish separate. A lot of bookstores will have A to Z fiction and within that will be everything. We keep Ireland out. It has its own Irish room. So you walk in, there's an Irish room, Irish history one side, Irish fiction the other, nonfiction of the top, art, whatever, all those things. And Irish writers form a great proportion of the sales of the books we sell. To be fair, fiction is probably 20 odd percent, maybe 25% of what we sell and all that half of that is Irish book.
- [39:56]
Charlie Gibson
Well, the Irish are great writers and they are great readers. I know they are indeed. And what a privilege it is, I think, to serve the Irish public. Hodges and Figgis, you can't miss it. Downtown Dublin. It is, as you said, the big green front. Thank you, Liam. It's great talking to you.
- [40:15]
Kate Gibson
Yes, thank you so much.
- [40:21]
Charlie Gibson
Liam Donnelly, the manager of Hodges and Figgis. F I G G I S. What a great name for a. For an Irish bookstore. Kate gave me a great book for my birthday called Bookstores of the World. And that's where we found Hodges and Figgis and a lot of other terrific bookstores, as I say, everywhere around the world. And people have found such imaginative ways to sell books in the most unlikely of settings.
- [40:46]
Kate Gibson
Yeah. And thank God for all of them because it's a worldwide need. So we loved talking to him. I also love that Liam could probably quote Ulysses by heart, but really his first love is science fiction. I think that's terrific. And I love talking to Liam and I love that that was our first international bookstore, so.
- [41:03]
Charlie Gibson
And I love the fact that Harry Potter has been translated into Gaelic. Speaking of which, if you have a young adult in your life who reads Gaelic, you're most unusual. But we have, this is a transition. We have spent a lot of time talking about how you get kids to read. And in a recent piece that we do for Good Morning America, we talked a lot about the female male gap that boys are significantly behind young girls in terms of reading. So what do you do to excite young boys?
- [41:34]
Kate Gibson
And how are we teaching boys to love literature and how are we teaching them to read? All of those, I think, are really important discussions. You know, we, every once in a while we, you know, maybe once or every couple of months we pause and we really talk about the important activity of reading and how you can encourage your kids to do it and how you can do it better. So next week got a nice response for Good Morning America. So we're going to expand those interviews that we did on GMA and we're going to talk a little more to our experts and the person who wrote the study at Stanford talking about the fact that boys are behind girls not just in America, but internationally. Why is that and what can we do about it? So tune in next week.
- [42:12]
Charlie Gibson
And the interesting part is, you know, girls were found to be lacking in terms of stem, in terms of science, technology, engineering, et cetera. And there was a concerted effort to get girls better reading about those subjects. And indeed, that gap has been closed largely, as you'll learn. But the gap in terms of just reading is still great between boys and girls. But there are ways that it could be narrowed. And we will talk about all that we really recommend next week. But here's the folks who make the podcast possible. And then a then a coda from Donna French.
- [42:49]
Kate Gibson
The book Case with Kate and Charlie Gibson is a production of ABC Audio and Good Morning America. It is edited by Tom Butler of TKO Productions. Our executive producer is Simone Swink. We want to make mention of Amanda McMaster, Sabrina Kohlberg, Arielle Chester at Good Morning America, and Josh Cohan from ABC Audio. Follow the bookcase wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to listen, rate and review. If you'd like to find any of the books mentioned in this episode, we have them linked in the episode description.
- [43:18]
Tana French
I guess. You know what? What I'd really like people to take away from this book is that having putting down roots in a place, having a home there is complicated. It has sacrifices, but it's worth it. And that Ireland is, honest to God, not as dangerous and as dark as I have made it sound. But it is every bit as beautiful as I have made it sound. And more from 30 for 30 podcasts.
- [43:52]
Charlie Gibson
Brian Pata, senior defensive lineman from Miami,
- [43:55]
Liam Donnelly
gunned down the key to this case. It's Brian.
- [44:01]
Charlie Gibson
An hour before he died, he was on the phone arguing with somebody.
- [44:04]
Tana French
This might be a hit.
- [44:05]
Charlie Gibson
You want the truth. They just want a conviction. Being placed under arrest. We had a killer amongst us.
- [44:11]
Tana French
Murder at the U.
- [44:12]
Charlie Gibson
Listen now.