Tana French Has Broken the Detective Novel

Two detectives walk into a hospital room. That line isn’t a joke, but they are. The detectives are called Martin and Gannon, and they’ve been sent to investigate the burglary and beating of Toby Hennessy, an up-and-coming gallerist in Dublin. But Toby’s cottoned brain can’t quite make out what they’d like from him, and they don’t inspire much confidence; he wants them and their prying questions gone. To his delight and ours, once they walk out, they’re barely heard from again, leaving Tana French’s The Witch Elm all the better for their absence.

This was French’s first novel outside the Dublin Murder series, the popular and critically acclaimed crime novels that made her name. Each book in the series featured a different member of the squad, all of whom brought a new kind of intensity to the case at hand; to open a new novel was to consider the ways that the very different human frailties of detectives would influence how they worked their cases, and who was damaged or redeemed along the way.But in published in 2018, without badge-donning, gun-brandishing, quick-witted investigators poking their noses all over her fiction, French hazied up the moral ambiguity—and narrative—even more than she already had in her first six books. “I’ve always had detectives for narrators. I liked the idea of seeing the story from the other side: from the side of someone who considers detectives to be a terrifying and tricky force,” she an interviewer at the time. cantilevered off detective fiction and created something far more modern and angular than its predecessors, a novel that used an old foundation to fashion a new, more pointed structure.