“If you don’t have your code,” the main character of Tana French’s new novel, The Searcher, tells a little girl with a missing brother midway through the story, “you’ve got nothing to hold you down. You just drift any way things blow you.”
tells a little girl with a missing brother midway through the story, “you’ve got nothing to hold you down. You just drift any way things blow you.”The line seems straight out of a western, and for good reason. French’s novel follows Cal Hooper, a disillusioned former Chicago cop—who happens to talk and think like a John Ford cowboy—who has taken early retirement and moved to Ireland following a shooting incident involving a Black teenager.
At the outset, Cal Hooper doesn’t understand how the police shooting, his failed marriage, or his estrangement from his daughter have intersected to find him retired in his forties and single in a strange country. This is a common starting place for many Tana French novels—a law enforcement officer finding him or herself in unfamiliar new circumstances, sifting through the past.
French, who is American, has lived in Ireland since 1990, and by most critics’ measures is considered an Irish mystery writer, despite also being aBook Prize. Her books have also drawn from American sources in the past. For example, French’s second novel in the Dublin Murder Squad series,as inspiration.
The answer seems to be simply to make Cal more uniquely American and give him an impetus for coming to Ireland, which is not a good enough reason to involve serious and fraught subject matter in a story where it has absolutely no place beyond a gimmicky, halfhearted attempt at characterization.
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