Novelist Jane Casey shared a few secrets of the crime writer's craft on Tuesday’s Ryan Tubridy Show. Jane's latest thriller, The Cutting Place, covers murder, decadence and domestic violence among a ruthless London elite. Jane says writers have to create scenarios that they haven't experienced themselves, but the fiction is always cultivated from a seed of truth:

"All authors do it. You take something that happened to you or some emotion that you felt and you kind of escalate it… I've been in relationships that weren't going very well. I've been led down paths that I maybe wouldn't have chosen to go down, in a very mild and minor way. And then you take that into fiction and you turn it into something much bigger."

The discussion pivots from fictitious relationships to domestic abuse during the current lockdown. Jane thinks that perception is everything when it comes to certain crimes:

"Crime is something that, our attitude to it dictates how we see it in society. Something like domestic violence, a long time ago it was perceived as something that was nobody else's business. It was something that happened behind closed doors and no-one else was supposed to intervene."

Jane says she welcomes a renewed focus on violence in the home, at a time when people's options to escape are so limited:

"I think it's good that we are all thinking about people in that situation. It's good that we are listening and hearing those stories maybe more than we would. But it's a very, very difficult thing to be afraid all the time."

For all the grim aspects of her storylines, Jane says she enjoyed writing The Cutting Place. The Dublin-born writer has been living with her family in London for a number of years, apart from a brief period testing the waters to see if they would move back to Dublin permanently. Jane says she likes playing with cultural differences between the Irish and the English, especially because, as she says, people in the UK aren't as aware of the differences as the Irish are:

"Irish people are very conscious of what that means, like how different we are in how we approach the world. English people tend not to be aware of it unless they live in Ireland. It's almost like we're behind mirror glass and they can't quite see us."

One strand in the novel deals with a privileged group of men who think they have a permanent 'get out of jail free' card.  Jane says she came across them in real life as a student at Oxford. They were a tiny minority, she says. As a fiction writer, Jane pares back the layers of entitlement, forcing some of her more unpleasant characters to feel the burn for once:

"Writing about people who have no moral code is great fun."

Jane chats to Ryan about being a member of Killer Women, a group of London-based crime writers, and the background to her heroine, Detective Sgt Maeve Kerrigan, in the full interview here.

The Cutting Place by Jane Casey is published by HarperCollins.

If you've been affected by domestic violence you can contact Women’s Aid 24-7 National Freephone Helpline on 1800 341 900.

Ruth Kennedy