The real plot twist that changed Dervla McTiernan’s life

I’ve never met crime author Dervla McTiernan before our lunch, but when she arrives, she immediately embraces me like we’re old mates.

“I’m a hugger,” she says.

McTiernan, who lives in Perth, is in Melbourne to promote her latest book, Three Reasons for Revenge, and for an appearance at this week’s Melbourne Writers Festival, before heading to Sydney for the Sydney Writers’ Festival; she’s a busy woman. So we’ve met for a late brunch/early lunch in West Melbourne, where much of her new novel takes place.

Roslyn Thai Cafe specialises in Thai breakfasts and despite its location on gritty King Street, is bright and cosy. Owner Po talks us through the menu, and I’m easily swayed into the kaya set, four house-made doughnuts with Thai tea and pandan kaya dipping sauces. (It’s only days later when I look at the receipt that I see Po, who tried to give us the entire meal for free, hasn’t charged me for those.)

Are doughnuts a breakfast thing? “I have no idea,” McTiernan says. “I’m an ignoramus. I don’t want to admit it, but it’s true.” She does, though, like Thai food. “And I like trying new things … she says, ordering the green curry.”

I add to my doughnuts with an order of pork belly with scrambled eggs and rice.

McTiernan is as lovely as she seems on social media, where she has an active presence, happily interacting with her many fans. She’s so warm, in fact, it’s difficult to believe she makes a living writing about kidnapping, ritualistic mutilation, hit-and-runs and child abuse.

Best known for her crime series featuring Irish detective Cormac Reilly, which began with her first book, The Ruin, in 2018, McTiernan is a poster woman for both mid-life career changes and middle-aged debut writers. Originally from Galway, Ireland, she had been working as a corporate lawyer for 12 years when the global financial crisis hit and she and her husband, Kenny, an engineer, began plotting a life change.

McTiernan had never set foot in Australia, but Kenny had backpacked here as a younger man. Their deciding factor was that there was work in the engineering field here, but the jobs were mostly in Queensland or Western Australia.

“I said to Kenny, you make the decision,” McTiernan says. “Then he said, ‘I will tell you that in Brisbane, the cockroaches can fly.’” WA it was then. Although, apparently WA also has flying roaches. “But further north! Perth was also, just looking at purely logistics, a bit closer to Ireland. The time difference was a bit shorter.”

These were, she says now, perhaps “terrible reasons” to make such a huge decision.

She and Kenny arrived with their then two-year-old daughter, Freya, and six weeks later, their son Oisin was born. She worked part-time while their kids were young, and in 2014 she decided to give writing fiction a serious go, working on a novel for a couple of hours every night. By 2016, she had completed The Ruin. She sent her manuscript to an agent, who was shopping it around; things were looking up.

Then, what McTiernan thought was a routine GP appointment turned into a nightmare when she was diagnosed with a brain tumour. In a fiction-worthy plot twist, she was in her car outside the GP clinic with a list of neurosurgeons, coming to terms with what the doctor had told her. Then her phone notified her of an incoming email. It was from a New York literary agent who had read the first 10 pages of McTiernan’s novel, loved it, and wanted her to send the full manuscript.

So the worst days of her life were entangled with the best; it was, she says, a strange time. Shortly after major surgery to remove the tumour, McTiernan was offered representation from a slew of agents, and had her pick of six different offers. The Ruin went to auction while she was still recuperating, and as she wrote in 2018, she “began to feel that possibly I was still lying on a hospital bed, high on painkillers and enjoying a very detailed fantasy”.

But it was no fantasy: the book became a global hit, winning the 2019 Ned Kelly Award, and making McTiernan a bona fide, bestselling crime author.

To date, she has written four Cormac Reilly books, and two standalone novels – and has global sales of more than a million copies – but Three Reasons for Revenge is the first time she has set one of her stories in Australia.

The book opens at the Melbourne West police station – not far from where we’re lunching – when a woman walks in to report an assault. She meets Detective Sergeant Judith Lee, a feisty senior cop who, like all the best fictional detectives, doesn’t always play by the rules.

When Judith tries to follow up the woman’s allegations, though, something doesn’t seem right. And then three seemingly disparate people across Melbourne receive identical packages – one is delivered to the home of a respected psychologist, another to a struggling single dad, and a third arrives at the house of a wealthy socialite on the other side of the city.

Each beautifully wrapped package, tailored to their respective recipients, is intended to wreak havoc on their victims. Like all McTiernan’s novels, it’s a page-turner, as Judith races to connect the victims, and is herself led into a dangerous game with the perpetrator.

From West Melbourne to Footscray and Brighton, Melbourne plays something of a starring role in the novel.

What made McTiernan choose Melbourne? “Because it rains here!” Of course.

“It just feels like it’s got the atmosphere for a crime novel,” she says, adding, almost in a whisper, “Perth is just too sunny.”

(There is, she says, crime fiction set in Western Australia; at a recent event she made a joke about Perth being unsuitable for the genre, and someone admonished her, telling her he was writing a PhD on WA-set crime fiction.)

“When Kenny and I visited Melbourne for the first time together, I thought it’s such a beautiful city, and there’s so much happening, and it just feels kind of textured and layered,” McTiernan says. “I think I’m just more comfortable writing crime fiction where you have mood and shadow and … weather.”

I’m very much here for McTiernan panning Perth’s “consistently nice” temperature. “Maybe it’s because most of my books have been Irish set, and weather has always been part of it … in Perth it’s just a bright blue sky. And sun.”

When she first moved there, she says, she felt that intensely. “I felt almost like I was almost being pushed,” she says.

It was the polar (not meteorologically speaking, of course) opposite of Galway, in the west of Ireland, known for its cloudy skies and high rainfall. The sky there, she says, feels “low-hanging, and it’s very much mood and darkness a lot of the time. But Galway has the best pubs in the world, so there are some compensations.”

McTiernan hadn’t always wanted to write crime, and wasn’t even sure that’s where she was heading when she started The Ruin. She wasn’t a crime obsessive, although after she stopped reading fantasy in her teens and early twenties – “it’s much sexier now than it was then!” – she started bringing home crime novels.

“But when I started writing, I wasn’t thinking about categories,” she says. “I wrote the story because I wanted to tell the story of Maude, the character in The Ruin, and I was writing it with no detective. But at a certain point, I realised it would be helpful to have a detective because then you have a structure and somebody to help it move forward along with the investigation. Which is the only reason it became crime – it wasn’t that well thought out.”

McTiernan’s stories are routinely praised as “deeply human”, her protagonists as fully realised; she balances some pretty hardcore crimes with relatable characters and topical themes.

In Three Reasons for Revenge, someone has been using AI to create deepfake videos. “Those things used to cost a fortune to make because you had to be an expert – not any more,” McTiernan says. It opens up interesting legal questions around video and audio evidence, which is what happens in the novel.

This takes us into a tangent about the rise of AI, one of many detours throughout our lunch. We discuss elderly dads and their text messaging methods, pre-Google maps lives, our teenaged kids, McTiernan’s siblings – six of them – back in Ireland, and the upcoming adaptations of her books.

The Ruin was optioned by Colin Farrell’s production company, The Murder Rule is being developed into a TV series and What Happened to Nina has also been optioned. She can’t say much about any of these, but she has had some creative input. “It’s exciting, and it’s very different for me, sitting in a writers’ room,” she says.

Is it hard to watch the inevitable changes required for TV? “I’m quoting somebody else here, but I think they’re absolutely right: nobody’s taking anything from me – it’s there, it’s finished, it exists in the world. This is a new thing,” she says. “I think that’s the best way to think about it.”

Right now, McTiernan needs to get back to talking about her new book, which was released last week.

We’ve been sitting on the back deck of the cafe, and the sun has long departed, the autumn chill and the surrounding skyscrapers evoking the mood of McTiernan’s novel. As we part, we make very Melburnian chat about the change in the weather.

McTiernan pulls on a trench coat, while I complain about the chill.

“I can’t believe,” she says, “that you came without a jacket.”

Three Reasons for Revenge (HarperCollins) is out now.

Dervla McTiernan is in conversation with Louise Milligan at the Melbourne Writers Festival on May 9. The Age is a festival partner. McTiernan will be at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on May 21 and 23.