Review: THE LAST GIRL by Jane Casey

THE LAST GIRL (Ebury Press) is Jane Casey’s fourth novel, and the third in the DC Maeve Kerrigan series of novels. The first two books in the series, THE BURNING and THE RECKONING, were shortlisted for the Irish Crime Novel of the Year award at the Irish Book Awards.
  THE LAST GIRL opens with DC Maeve Kerrigan responding to the scene of a murder in the upmarket neighbourhood of Wimbledon in London.
  The family of barrister Philip Kennford has been attacked. His wife and one of his daughters have been brutally slain, stabbed and slashed to death. A second daughter, Lydia, has escaped the killer’s frenzy. Kennford himself is discovered unconscious in his bedroom, bruised but otherwise unhurt.
  Naturally, the suspicions of Kerrigan and her immediate superior, Derwent, are raised, and they believe that Kennford has murdered his wife and daughter. Very quickly, however, they discover that Kennford has what amounts to a small army of enemies who might have been inclined to vent their rage on his family …
  A relatively young woman in a male-dominated world, Maeve Kerrigan has to work very hard to be taken seriously by her male colleagues. She is helped in this by the fact that her ultimate superior, Superintendent Godley, respects Kerrigan’s abilities and intelligence, and has the capacity to see beyond her gender. On a day-to-day basis, however, Kerrigan is often the butt of sexist jokes. Happily, she’s more than a match for her male colleagues in his regard, and holds her own - in public, at least. The sexist ‘banter’ is augmented by the occasional jibe about Kerrigan’s parents, and Kerrigan’s Irishness.
  While Kerrigan copes very well in public with the ‘banter’ and jibes, she is a much more sensitive soul in her internal monologues. She doubts her own abilities, even as she proves herself to those around her. She worries that her skills aren’t up to the task, and that she might fail the victims of murder as a result. These are very human frailties, and make Maeve Kerrigan a very empathic character indeed.
  Kerrigan also finds her personal and professional life in a constant state of collision. In THE LAST GIRL, she is in a long-term relationship with Rob, who was formerly a Detective Inspector. He had to leave the Met’s Murder Squad once their relationship became known.
  Much of the personal aspect of THE LAST GIRL is driven by Maeve’s fear that her relationship with Rob, if it works out, and if marriage and children follow, will mean the end of her own career. Certainly she fears losing her ‘edge’. Thus Maeve Kerrigan is a pleasingly complex and at times counter-intuitive character, and not a woman who conforms to many of the genre’s stereotypes.
  It’s something of a trope in the crime novel that a female protagonist will be better at noticing the small details that escape a man, and that the overlooked details are often crucial to the solving of a case. This can be an interesting development, if handled well, as it contrasts the priorities of the male and female gaze. That said, you run the risk of too-broad generalisations if you begin suggesting that men and women write different kinds of novels.
  In the case of Maeve Kerrigan, Jane Casey is perfectly happy for Maeve to notice the small details that go unnoticed by her male colleague, Derwent. By the same token, Maeve herself doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed in a largely male-dominated arena. Thus Maeve goes out of her way to poke fun at the notion of women’s female intuition, as she does on pages 64 / 65:

  “ … Godley didn’t think it was a good idea to let Derwent loose on someone who’s bound to be feeling a bit vulnerable.”
  “Whereas I’m notoriously sensitive, being a woman.” [said Maeve]

In a sense, Jane Casey is having her cake and eating it here, given that Maeve Kerrigan is particularly sensitive to detail and other people’s emotional states. By the same token, it’s refreshing that Casey is happier rejecting the stereotypes than she is confirming them.
  Meanwhile, Casey allows Maeve certain feelings of insecurity, or even inferiority, that may well chime with those of her readers. In particular, Maeve is deeply uncomfortable - as in, way out of her depth - when it comes to wealth and class. The initial investigation takes place in a Wimbledon described by Maeve like this:

“Up the hill. Up into the rarefied air of Wimbledon Village, the pretty, exclusive little enclave where expensive boutiques, delis, galleries and cafes catered to the tastes of the locals and their apparent desire to spend my annual salary on fripperies and cappuccinos … It was leafy and lavish and a different world from where I lived, even though that was only a few miles away as the crow flew.” (pg 4)

  And later:

“I very much disliked being made to feel inferior because of my accent or my job or the fact that I was clearly impressed by my surroundings. Class was still an issue and only those who never needed to worry about it in the first place thought it wasn’t. I had to make a special effort to keep myself from sounding nettled.” (pg 76)

  On the evidence of THE BURNING and THE LAST GIRL, Maeve Kerrigan seems to me to be an unusually realistic and pragmatic character in the world of genre fiction: competent and skilled, yet riddled with self-doubt and a lack of confidence, she seems to fully inhabit the page.
  This was a pacy and yet thoughtful read, psychologically acute and fascinating in terms of Maeve’s personal development, particularly in terms of her empathy with the victims of crime. I’ll be looking forward with interest to Jane Casey’s next book. - Declan Burke

  For an interview with Jane Casey published last month in the Sunday Business Post, clickety-click here.

Jane Says

I had an interview with Jane Casey (right) published in the Sunday Business Post a couple of weeks ago - there’s no link, I’m afraid, so I’ve republished the piece in its entirety here. To wit:

It is one of literature’s great tragedies that not every writer can manage to look like a wig-wearing bag.
  “I always get comments about not looking or sounding like a crime writer when I do events,” says Jane Casey. “I haven’t yet managed to find out how I should look and sound. Agatha Christie looked like a bag with a wig on it, after all.
  “It’s not a comment that I mind, much,” she continues. “But I did an event last year where I was reading with three other authors, all male, and I thought that in comparison to them I sounded like I was reading a school project. So maybe I still need to work on the gravitas.”
  THE LAST GIRL is Jane Casey’s fourth novel, and the third to feature her series heroine Maeve Kerrigan. London-born to Irish parents, Maeve is a Detective Constable with the London Metropolitan Murder Squad.
  Born and raised in Ireland, now living in London, Jane got the highest mark in English in her Leaving Certificate year, and received a medal to mark the achievement from Seamus Heaney. She read English at Oxford (where she would read crime novels whilst supposedly writing her thesis on Beowulf in the Bodleian Library) before completing a MPhil in Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College, Dublin.
  Given her classical education, what was it about the crime novel that drew her to write in the genre?
  “I can’t think of anything more telling about society than what we hold to be criminal acts,” she says. “Crimes occur because of how people live and how they relate to one another, essentially, which is the basis of literature. Go back to the start of literature itself and you find one of the first dramas, Oedipus, is based on the crime of patricide and its aftermath. Within the parameters of the genre you can write about more or less anything because crimes occur at every level of society.
  “Some of the sharpest social commentary can be found in crime novels. I’m not totally sure why it’s seen as being ‘light’ or ‘entertaining’ in comparison with more challenging fiction, because you don’t get much darker than murder.
  “It’s a generous type of literature for a writer,” she says, “because it can include pure tragedy alongside broad humour, or lyrical description followed by brutal dialogue. There are conventions to be observed but there’s no single style of writing that defines the genre. So there’s a freedom there to do what you want.”
  According to those very genre conventions, Maeve Kerrigan, as a young woman in an Old Boys’ world, should be utilising her feminine wiles to stay one step ahead. Time and again, however, Maeve herself is to be found mocking her supposed ‘female intuition’.
  “A large part of Maeve’s survival strategy is her ability to see a put-down coming and dodge it,” says Jane. “She wouldn’t like to think that she’s good at her job because of her female intuition, but then she likes to see herself as one of the boys. She’s young. She hasn’t yet realized that she doesn’t have to fit in with them.”
  Perhaps Maeve Kerrigan aspires to a similar quality of gravitas as Jane Casey when dealing with her male colleagues, but it can be argued that such a character development would hugely diminish Kerrigan’s appeal. Maeve Kerrigan is an ambitious and dedicated policewoman, but she is possessed of an endearingly charming irreverent streak and a wilful refusal to accept arbitrary limitations that is as destructive in her professional life as it is in her personal affairs.
  She is also, and unusually, exercised by the long-term impact of crime on its victims. Married to a criminal barrister, Jane Casey is privy to the harsh realities of the legal system.
  “Victims and their families are really invisible in the legal system,” she says. “The prosecution acts on behalf of the state, not the wronged individual, and the rights of the defendant are considered at all points. It’s a bruising world to encounter. A lot of the characters in THE LAST GIRL have been through the criminal justice system and haven’t seen anything remotely resembling justice.”
  THE LAST GIRL opens with the discovery of the bodies of a mother and daughter in their plush Wimbledon home, both of whom have been stabbed to death. Upstairs lies the unconscious and bloodied form of Philip Kennford, husband and father, and a successful criminal barrister with a reputation for arrogance and sexual predation.
  “There are certain professions that attract charming sociopaths, and the Bar could be one of them,” says Casey. “Barristers are generally delightful to talk to and full of good stories, but they do like to be right all the time and their work involves winning or losing – you don’t get many draws. It’s a challenging, responsible job that demands a certain toughness, which is interesting in itself. I’ve heard tales of barristers behaving extremely badly in their personal and professional lives, but the only sociopath I’ve ever met myself is not a barrister.
  “Obviously,” she adds with a mischievous grin, “Philip Kennford is not based on my husband.”
  Twice nominated in the crime fiction category for the Irish Book Awards, for THE BURNING (2010) and THE RECKONING (2011), Jane Casey is one of the brightest stars in the Irish crime writing firmament. But where some publishers are suggesting that Ireland is not ‘sexy’ enough a setting to market to an international crime reading audience, Casey’s publishers have made a virtue of Maeve Kerrigan’s Irishness, going so far as to include a Personnel File on the inside cover of THE LAST GIRL with her Irish parentage highlighted.
  “My publishers would love me to write a Maeve story set in Ireland,” says Casey. “I wouldn’t do it for the sake of having an Ireland-set book, though. It would have to be the right story.”
  In part, Maeve Kerrigan’s distinctiveness depends on the novels’ London setting.
  “Maeve is a misfit in various ways and one of those is her own sense of estrangement. She doesn’t fit into the very British world of the Metropolitan Police, but she isn’t like someone who’s grown up in Ireland either. I think she does have uniquely Irish qualities, in that she has empathy in bucket-loads and a strong desire to understand the people she encounters through her job, whereas her colleagues tend to take people at face value. She’s also tied to her family very much, whereas - and this is a sweeping generalization - the British don’t seem to have such a sense of obligation to their parents. You have the feeling that Maeve’s parents have made sacrifices for their children, among them leaving Ireland and settling in London, and they expect to be paid back by their children achieving in life. Maeve has chosen a path they don’t understand, probably deliberately, just to get out from under that weight of expectation.
  “Maeve’s background is also important to how she’s perceived by her colleagues. It’s still common for Irish people to be seen as charming but untrustworthy, fundamentally unreliable. So she has all of that prejudice to deal with too.”
  Crime writers too face a certain amount of prejudice: charming books, perhaps, but fundamentally unreliable as literature.
  “There are plenty of very good writers out there who are happy to define themselves as crime writers,” says Casey, “I’m proud of the title myself and I’d be sorry to lose it. But the definition of a crime novel is changing all the time. That boundary between literary writing and crime writing is thin, and the crime-writing community tends to be welcoming to ‘real’ writers who want to try crime. I’m not sure if the same is true going in the other direction …
  “As a genre, it’s probably not valued as highly as it might be, at least in terms of the way it is criticised and discussed in the media. But readers of crime fiction are a sophisticated and discerning lot – pleasing them is enough of a challenge for me. I write the books I want to write.”
  As a former children’s books editor, that includes writing a new Young Adult novel. It also means that a woman who has become a mother since her first novel was published feels fully entitled to adapt her thematic concerns to her new circumstances.
  “The narrator in my first book, THE MISSING (2009), is a young woman who doesn’t understand her mother’s inability to move on after the disappearance of her young son. The character of the mother is one of the most damaged I have created, and yet now I realise I didn’t even get close to conveying the agony you might feel if your child disappeared.
  “I couldn’t write the book now as I did then,” she says, “but that’s probably true of every book by every writer. They’re all the product of your experience. At the moment I don’t think I could write about a child suffering.” Another mischievous grin, a flash of irreverence. “Maybe that means I should tackle it.”

  Jane Casey’s THE LAST GIRL is published by Ebury Press

  This interview was first published in the Sunday Business Post

And The Last Shall Be The First, And The First Shall Be The Last

The more eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that the post yesterday, which mentioned various authors vis-à-vis the crime writing gong at the Irish Book Awards later this year, omitted to mention Jane Casey, despite the fact that (a) she has a very strong contender for 2012 in the third Maeve Kerrigan offering, THE LAST GIRL, and (b) she has been shortlisted two years running now.
  As it happens, I met with the London-based Jane Casey in Dublin last week to interview her about THE LAST GIRL, and asked - a little presumptuously, yes, but I’m pretty sure she’ll be shortlisted again - if she was looking forward to coming over for the IBA bunfight again. Quoth Jane:

“It’s the best night out so I’d love to, even if I wasn’t nominated. There are just so many good writers out there in the crime category. I think some of them would be justified in picketing the awards dinner if I was nominated for a third year running.”

  Heh. I love the idea that any group of Irish writers would be so organised as to coordinate anything as complex as a picket.
  Actually, now that I mention it … I’ve been mulling over the notion of putting together a website (i.e., a properly funded operation, as opposed to this half-assed blog) that would coordinate a proactive ‘branding’ of Irish crime writing to the world, much in the same way as (unfortunate analogy alert) Bord Bia coordinates and promotes the efforts of a wide range of diverse food producers.
  As all Three Regular Readers will be aware, I’m rather fond of the Irish crime novel, and believe that there are a number of world-class Irish crime writers. I also believe that one of the reasons that Irish crime writing hasn’t made the international impact that Scandinavian writing has, for example, is because the Irish crime novel is a far less homogenous beast than that of its Nordic counterpart. There’s no Scandinavian equivalent of the comic capers of Colin Bateman, Ruth Dudley Edwards or Eoin Colfer, for example, or the historical novels of Cora Harrison, Conor Brady, Benjamin Black and Kevin McCarthy; or the foreign-set novels written by William Ryan, Laurence O’Bryan and Conor Fitzgerald; the post-modern shenanigans of Ken Bruen; or the genre-blending of John Connolly.
  I could go on, but the point is made: on the face of it, attempting to ‘brand’ even those few writers would be akin to minding mice at crossroads.
  The flip side of that, of course, is that ‘diversity’ and ‘choice’ should be positive things, particularly for readers who are always on the look-out for something new.
  Could it be done? Would it be a commercially viable project? Do writers have any interest in being ‘branded’ or tarred with the same brush? Should it be every man and woman for him and herself? It would need to be funded, of course, but I don’t know if the Arts Council even has a fund for such a project; and whether, in these straitened times, it would find itself in a position to do so, even if the spirit were willing.
  If anyone has any thoughts, the comment box is open …

The At Last Girl

Jane Casey (right) is quietly becoming one of the stars of the Irish crime writing scene, penning London-set psychological thrillers - THE MISSING, THE BURNING, THE RECKONING - which feature the very likeable heroine DC Maeve Kerrigan. Her latest offering is another Maeve Kerrigan novel, THE LAST GIRL (Ebury Press / May 24th), and the blurb elves have been wittering thusly:

High summer. Wimbledon. 14-year-old Lydia Kennford returns home to discover the bodies of her mother and twin sister in the family living room, while her father, Philip, lies unconscious and bleeding in an upstairs bedroom. DC Maeve Kerrigan and DI Josh Derwent begin to investigate, discounting a burglary quickly and focusing instead on Philip Kennford QC himself. There is no easy explanation for why he survived when the others were shown no mercy, and they suspect he might have staged the attack on himself after killing his wife and daughter. But Kennford is a self-possessed, intelligent man who knows criminal law inside out; proving that he’s guilty will be difficult.

  Jane Casey has twice been shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards in the last couple of years, and gone home empty-handed each time. Will THE LAST GIRL become THE AT LAST GIRL, ands see her finally taking home the gong? Only time, that notoriously doity rat, will tell …