Jane Casey
About Author
Jane Casey was born and brought up in Dublin and read English at Jesus College, Oxford, followed by an MPhil in Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College, Dublin.
She worked in publishing for nine years and commissioned best-selling children's books, specialising in fiction for teenagers.
She has written adult crime novels THE MISSING and the Maeve Kerrigan series: THE BURNING, THE RECKONING and THE LAST GIRL.
Her first YA novel, HOW TO FALL, was published in January 2013 and is the first in the Jess Tennant series. She lives in London with her barrister husband, their two young children and a cat called Fred.
Interview
HOW TO FALL
CORGI CHILDREN'S BOOKS
JANUARY 2013
Jane Casey is well known for her adult crime writing but she has turned to teen readers with a new novel, How to Fall (Corgi Children's), and a feisty teen detective, Jess Tennant.
When 15-year-old Freya drowns, everyone assumes she's killed herself but no-one knows why. Her cousin, Jess Tennant, thinks she was murdered and is determined to uncover the truth. During a visit to Port Sentinel, Jess starts to investigate but her questions provoke strong reactions from the community.
Jane Casey spoke to us about writing the new series and about what makes a great crime thriller.
Q: Have you always been a fan of crime thrillers? Did you read a lot in this genre before you started writing them?
A: I've always loved crime novels the first 'grown-up' book I read was an Agatha Christie and I can still remember the cover (though not whodunit, oddly). At university I would sometimes order a crime novel from the library stacks as a break from ploughing through Beowulf or Chaucer. I enjoyed the crime novels a lot more than the early English verse, which should have told me something about what I was destined to do with my life!
Q: What draws you to writing crime thrillers?
A: Pretty much every story that occurs to me has some sort of criminal edge. There's so much drama in crime - the victim's story, the motive for it, the aftermath for friends and family, and the thrill of tracking down the perpetrator. As a reader, I love crime novels because they generally have a very satisfying ending. I hate books that trail off into silence without ever really coming to a point.
Q: What is the hardest thing about writing this kind of book?
A: Coming up with a good ending! The hardest thing is not giving the game away but making sure there are enough clues scattered throughout to keep the readers guessing.
Sometimes crime novels are about why, not who, but mostly you dont want everyone to know who is responsible on page 33. You need to have lots of suspicious characters, but you run the risk of making your heroine look paranoid.
It's difficult to create a villain who is a believable perpetrator without being too obvious. I really hate books that end with someone totally random and unlikely being the killer, just because no one reading it would think it could be them. You have to believe the ending is possible. It's even better if there's a dramatic way to reveal the identity of the criminal.
Q: What comes first for you - the psychology of the characters or the plot?
A: Usually I get an idea for a plot and let it sit in the back of my mind for a while. I think about it when I'm doing the washing up or walking to the shops, and write scenes in my head. If the characters start to come alive and develop their own voices, and the scenes start leading to other scenes, it's a possible book. If they dont, the idea falls off my list pretty quickly.
Q: Did you know how How to Fall was going to end?
A: I did and I didn't! I always leave myself some room to be surprised. I knew what Jess was going to do and how dangerous it was going to be, but I wasn't completely sure how the situation would be resolved, and I had a choice of villains right up to the end - though I ended up sticking to my first thoughts. Some of my best plot twists have occurred to me at the last minute.
Q: Are there any characters in the book you are particularly drawn to?
A: I'm very fond of Jess herself, who is feisty and funny and outwardly confident but not all that self-assured when you get down to it. I also loved writing about the family of cousins that Jess meets for the first time: three very different siblings who bicker but adore one another. Jess's mother is a little bit vague and Jess has to look out for her a lot. I am not the most competent person in the world. Dates, times, appointments, admin - all of these things are a mystery to me. I feel quite like Jess's mother in that way. And one of the characters is very, very like my husband, so that one is obviously a favourite.
Q: Did Jess arrive 'fully fledged' or did you write her into being?
A: I had two goes at writing the first three chapters of How to Fall before I wrote the rest of the book. A lot changed, structurally, between the first version and the second. Jess, however, is just the same in both versions - she definitely arrived fully formed. Having said that, I know that she is going to develop as a character in the next book. She'll show less bravado, less brusqueness and more of the real her. But that has more to do with what's going to happen to her than with me getting to grips with her character.
Q: Do you do a lot of editing as you write the novel or do the edits for the end?
A: My technique is to start writing by reading what I wrote in the days before, editing as I read. Then I start writing new material that I'll revise the next time. By the time I finish a chapter, I will have read through it three or four times and polished it, so my first draft isn't really a rough version. I used to edit books so I hate misspellings and inaccuracies. I have to correct them when I see them.
Q: Do you plan to write in other genres?
A: Most of my ideas tend to be crime-related. I am writing two crime series at the moment - one for adults, the Maeve Kerrigan books, and the Jess Tennant ones for YA readers. The stories for them are very much driven by the characters of Maeve and Jess, so crime is my first thought.
However, I love writing romantic scenes and I have two ideas for not-crime YA that I hope I'll get to write some day. One has the potential to be a two-boxes-of-tissues-snot-fest kind of weepy read and one is ultra-romantic. I didn't go looking for the ideas but they found me. If they stick around for long enough I'll write them!
Q: Is the setting in How to Fall, Port Sentinel, based on a real place?
A: Port Sentinel is a lot of places mixed together. I've been lucky to spend quite a lot of time in Devon in the last few years with family. It's such a beautiful area. Port Sentinel is a combination of a small historical river port just beside Exeter called Topsham, pretty little Dartmouth with its sailing boats and winding streets, the very glamorous second-home enclave of Salcombe, hippy hide-out Totnes and a dash of sandy Exmouth, shaken and stirred with a lot of imagination.
Q: What were your favourite holiday destinations as a teenager?
I did a lot of travelling with my family, but the holidays that made the strongest impression on me were trips I made by myself to the west of Ireland to learn Irish. It's a compulsory subject in school in Ireland but it's only commonly spoken in small areas called the Gaeltacht, mainly along the western seaboard.
During school holidays a lot of teenagers go to Irish college so they can improve their Irish - a bit like going to camp in the US. You stay with local families for three weeks and have formal lessons in the local school and speak Irish the whole time - you get sent home if you speak a full sentence in English!
It sounds grim but it was so much fun. There were dances every evening, and college songs, and inter-college rivalries, and a lot of gossip. Also, I was educated at a convent school and at Irish college there were boys. Those trips were just full of memorable experiences.
Q: Jess gets drawn into some dangerous situations - what's the most dangerous thing you've ever done?
A: I'm very risk-averse but I have come close to death a few times, always by accident. I've almost died three times in Paris alone - it's just not a lucky city for me! Then there was the time I almost walked into a hornets' nest in South Africa .... or the terrifying landing at Dublin Airport in very windy weather.
It was a small plane and the wind kept tipping it sideways. I was sure we were going to crash. The lady behind me was literally sick with fear. I was sitting beside my three-year-old who thought it was all hilarious. I've never felt less like laughing, but I did!
Q: Why did you decide to write for young adult readers and what have you enjoyed about doing so?
A: I love YA fiction and read a lot of it myself. I used to commission it when I was a book editor. Eventually I decided to write my own including all of the things I particularly love about YA, like a wisecracking heroine and a complicated love interest.
Writing How to Fall was a total joy from start to finish. YA readers are so much fun you can put in so much humour and emotion, and tell exciting stories that have a heart. Everything is life or death for teenagers anyway, but in my books I really mean it.
Q: What are your plans for Jess going forward?
She's got to settle in to Port Sentinel and work out what's going on with her love life. The next book begins a few months after the end of How to Fall and everything has not gone smoothly in the interim - in fact, her world has sort of fallen apart.
Then she gets dragged into investigating another mysterious crime, more or less against her will. It's important to me that Jess grows up as the series continues, so her personal life will have an effect on her. I've got some cracking crimes for her to investigate too, though.
Q: What are you writing at the moment?
I'm finishing off my fifth crime novel for adults - doing some rewriting and reworking after my editor has had a go at it! But I am also up to my ears in the next Jess book. After that, I have a couple of months of freedom, though I'll probably find something to write. I'm always happier when I'm writing.
Q: How does your writing day go?
A: My writing day is more of a writing night! I often end up under a blanket on the sofa, typing away while everyone else is asleep. It's so glamorous, the writer's life... When I'm really busy and concentrating hard, I can find myself getting to bed after two or three in the morning.
Mainly, though, I write between nine and midnight. I do a lot of thinking during the day, so at night I just try to write it all down. Before I had children I got up very early to write. I'd fit in a couple of hours before getting ready for work. I spent years wishing I had time to write, but eventually discovered you can make time for it even with lots of other commitments.
You have to do it every day, though. If you start giving yourself a few mornings off or just collapse in the evening now and then, pretty soon youll abandon the attempt to write altogether. Make it your routine and even if it's just a half-hour at a time, the word count will mount up and one day you'll have written a book.
