CANR
WORK TITLE: Trust Her
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WEBSITE: http://www.flynnberry.com/
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LAST VOLUME: CA 402
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PERSONAL
Born September 7, 1986.
EDUCATION:Graduate of Brown University and the Michener Center for Writers.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Yaddo residency, Sarasota Springs, NY.
AWARDS:Edgar award for best first novel, for Under the Harrow; Yaddo fellowship.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
In her debut novel, Under the Harrow, Flynn Berry presents a psychological thriller in which a woman named Nora seeks revenge on the person who murdered her sister. “I was really angry when I started the book,” Berry noted in an interview with Mystery People Web site contributor Molly Odintz, adding: “There had been a few awful crimes against women in Austin that made me furious on behalf of the victim. So the book is sort of a revenge fantasy. And I kept asking what I would do next, and that led Nora further and further into obsession.”
As narrated by Nora, the story begins with Nora taking a train from London, England, to visit her sister Rachel in the Yorkshire countryside. Initially, Nora is surprised when Rachel fails to meet her at the station, but she fully expects to find Rachel waiting for her at Rachel’s home. However, when Nora arrives at her sister’s house, she finds Rachel brutally stabbed to death with her faithful dog dead nearby. Nora is stunned by Rachel’s death and is soon trying to help the police investigation of the murder.
Nora, however, has little faith in the police, primarily because of an unsolved, brutal assault on Rachel years earlier when she was walking home from a party. For years Nora and Rachel sought out reports of attacks on other women hoping to find some clue that would lead them to Rachel’s attacker. Now Nora feels guilty for stopping the search, believing that if she and Rachel had continued and found the perpetrator, Rachel might still be alive. “Berry … never lets the reader forget the weight of Rachel’s death, the heft of which grinds down Nora’s every step,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor.
Nora suspects that perhaps Rachel’s murderer is the same person who assaulted her years earlier. Then Nora finds several packed suitcases in Rachel’s car and subsequently learns that Rachel, who already lived in relative isolation, was seeking to get further away from people by moving to a remote village on the Cornwall coast. As a result, Nora begins to suspect that Rachel was afraid of someone she knew or knew about. Nora’s suspicion that Rachel knew her murderer is bolstered by the knowledge that Rachel’s guard dog must also have known and trusted the murderer.
As Nora delves into her sister’s past, she begins to find out there were a lot of things she did not know about Rachel. Nora becomes more and more unbalanced as she delves into Rachel’s life and searches for her sister’s murderer. As a result, the police begin to suspect that there is something not right about Nora, who becomes fixated on one of Rachel’s neighbors, convinced that he is either the murderer or knows something about the murder. Nora ends up stalking the man and even accosts him in public. “Trying to delve deeply into Rachel’s life to find clues to her killer’s identity, Nora rapidly becomes something of a double for her dead sister,” wrote Washington Post Online contributor Maureen Corrigan.
As the novel continues, readers learn that the relationship between Nora and Rachel had its own problems. Although Nora loved her sister, she always felt inadequate in comparison to the beautiful Rachel. As a result, the relationship was often marked by tensions between the siblings, largely because of Nora’s resentment. “Nora’s voice bounces between grief, desperation, and rage, and this unpredictability creates a Hitchcockian tension,” wrote Christine Tran in a review for Booklist. Liz Kirchhoff, writing for Library Journal, called Under the Harrow “a dark, twisty, and deeply disturbing thriller that makes for an absorbing summer read.”
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In her 2018 murder thriller, A Double Life, Berry embellishes the real-life 20th-century Lord Lucan case, about the highest ranking British lord suspected of murder and his disappearance 40 years ago. In Berry’s version, Claire Alden is a London doctor with a secret—she’s the daughter of Colin Spenser, a lord who 26 years ago when Claire was 8 was charged with murdering the family’s nanny and leaving Claire’s mother, Faye, near death. Spenser’s car was found near the English Channel with bloodstains, and Spenser vanished and has never been found. Trying to solve the mystery all these years, Claire disguises her identity so she can befriend the daughter of one of Spenser’s best friends and gain entrance to his house to look for clues. Claire uncovers the lengths the arrogant and declining aristocracy will go to protect one of their own. Claire also learns more about her parents’ relationship, and how much Spenser’s friends hated his working-class wife.
In an interview with Denise Davidson at the San Diego Union Tribune, Berry reported that she was inspired by the real case but wanted to blend fiction and history: “My favorite books blur the line between crime and traditional literary fiction. They have a dark undertow but also a strong sense of character and setting, so that’s always my goal. With this book, I was most interested in how the effects of a crime ripple out for decades afterwards.”
Calling the book an engrossing psychological thriller, a Publishers Weekly reviewer noted:
“The action builds to a shocking but satisfying conclusion. Berry tells this shattering story with surprising grace.” In Kirkus Reviews, a critic commented on the “slow pacing, letting the characters’ tension gradually build,” and concluded that “the level of action and violence contradicts the tone of the rest of the novel.” Writing in New York Times Book Review, Karen Valby remarked on the hasty revelations and shifts in point of view, saying: “As desperate and consumed as our messy heroine may get in the process, Berry always lets her hold onto her humanity.”
Next, Berry published Northern Spy in 2021 about an IRA attack in Northern Ireland that comes too close to home. Despite the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, tensions in Northern Ireland have never settled down. BBC news producer Tessa Daly in Belfast watches a news clip that shows her sister, Marian, donning a black ski mask to join IRA members in robbing a bank. When questioned by police, Tessa says it can’t be Marian because she just spoke with her sister who’s on vacation, and if it was Marian, she must have been coerced. But the more Tessa investigates, the more she questions her sister’s motives and the more Tessa herself sympathizes with the IRA’s goals. The single mother of an infant son, Tessa believes she must protect her child at all cost.
Wanting to write about the IRA and the Northern Ireland/United Kingdom division, but adding family drama, Berry told Betty-Jo Tilley at Coachella Review: “I knew I wanted to write about the IRA and Northern Ireland and look at the Conflict through these two women. …It also seemed that looking at the Conflict through a family would be an interesting way of getting at how tangled and intricate and complicated it is.”
A reviewer in Publishers Weekly commented on the tension and sharp, sometimes improbable turns of the plot, but admitted: “It’s a measure of the author’s skill that she never loses sight of the humanity [of] other characters.” In Booklist, Henrietta Verma praised Berry for describing life in the IRA and British treatment of Northern Ireland locals, adding “Berry’s portrayal of Irish life is uncannily accurate; give this to all who love an emotional thriller.” “A poignant and lyrical novel that asks what is worth sacrificing for peace—and provides some answers,” noted a Kirkus Reviews contributor.
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2016, Christine Tran, review of Under the Harrow, p. 41; December 1, 2020, Henrietta Verma, review of Northern Spy, p. 28.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2016, review of Under the Harrow; May 15, 2018, review of A Double Life; February 1, 2021, review of Northern Spy.
Library Journal, May 15, 2016, Liz Kirchhoff, review of Under the Harrow, p. 64.
New York Times Book Review, July 22, 2018, Karen Valby, “Daddy’s Girl,” review of A Double Life, p. 13(L).
Publishers Weekly, April 4, 2016, review of Under the Harrow, p. 57; April 16, 2018, review of A Double Life, p. 71; January 4, 2021, review of Northern Spy, p. 32.
ONLINE
Coachella Review, http://thecoachellareview.com/ (August 11, 2021), Betty-Jo Tilley, “Interview: Finding Time with Flynn Berry.”
Flynn Berry Home Page, http://www.flynnberry.com (January 5, 2017).
Mystery People, https: //mysterypeople.wordpress.com/ (June 14, 2016), Molly Odintz, “MysteryPeople Q&A: Under the Harrow, by Flynn Berry.”
San Diego Union Tribune, https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/ (July 30, 2018), Denise Davidson, “Unsolved Murder Gets Author Flynn Berry’s Imagination Going.”
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (June 17, 2016), Maureen Corrigan, “Thriller Review: Under the Harrow by Flynn Berry.”*
Flynn Berry is the author of Under the Harrow, A Double Life, and Northern Spy. Both of her novels were New York Times Editors’ Choices, and Under the Harrow won the Edgar award for best first novel. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages. She is a graduate of Brown University and the Michener Center for Writers, and the recipient of a Yaddo fellowship.
She is represented by Emily Forland at Brandt & Hochman. The editor of A Double Life, Under the Harrow, and Northern Spy is Lindsey Schwoeri at Penguin.
Interview: Finding Time with Flynn Berry
by Betty-Jo Tilley
Flynn Berry is busy: Three novels in less than five years and two children in less than three. Also, she accomplished a whirlwind promotion for her latest thriller, Northern Spy, and a move from West to East Coast with her family during the pandemic.
Northern Spy is set amidst IRA activities in Belfast. When a single working mother discovers her sister has been a terrorist for seven years, sides must be taken, threatening both their family ideals and commitment.
Berry’s Edgar Award-winning debut Under the Harrow challenges a woman, Tessa, with her sister’s dark secrets and grisly murder. The most notorious murder mystery in English royal history inspired Berry’s second psychological thriller, A Double Life, which is focused on a woman whose father disappeared after the unsolved crime. Berry is a Michener Center for Writers graduate and a recipient of a Yaddo fellowship. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages.
Our discussion took place via speaker phone, though for Berry, a far cry from hands-free. She unpacked an ice cream stand to divert her toddler as we began, while baby cooing and small child babbling lent a musical backdrop to her thoughtful entertainment of my questions. We talked about class issues in Ireland, women as spies and terrorists, her fascination with family secrets and lies, and the role of humor in drama and crime fiction.
TCR: Northern Spy has two central conflicts: a woman unraveling her sister’s entanglement with the IRA and the intricacies of the Northern Ireland/UK division. Which first compelled you?
FB: I started off with both, actually. I knew I wanted to write about the IRA and Northern Ireland and look at the Conflict through these two women. I started with alternating chapters from different perspectives, but it slowly became only Tessa’s narration. It also seemed that looking at the Conflict through a family would be an interesting way of getting at how tangled and intricate and complicated it is.
TCR: What was your process in creating two very distinct characters in these two sisters?
FB: For me, it’s by doing lots and lots and lots of drafting and then lots of rewriting. I usually write a very long, very bad first draft by hand, and then I type it and print it out and read it. I then go back and rewrite it based on what it seems the story actually wants to be. The characters sort of emerge from that. Tessa’s job changed in different drafts, and Marian’s character changed quite a bit. I do all of this not really knowing what is accurate in the beginning but by testing out a bunch of ideas and seeing which ones feel right. I’ll read a sentence and think, No, that’s not really right, and then I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, and then I’ll get on it and think, Oh, this is their relationship, and this is how they feel about each other, and this is where she works and how she feels about her work. For me, this only comes from lots and lots of trial and error and testing out lots of different options.
TCR: I felt so reassured by Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts,” in Bird by Bird. Just how shitty was your shitty first draft?
FB: It’s funny, because I read it on the beach, actually, in California, to have a nice backdrop because I knew it would be emotionally intense to read something I’d spent so many months working on. I remember thinking this isn’t right, this isn’t the right plot, this isn’t how this should actually be structured, but there was also something about it that felt accurate or authentic and that I found really exciting. It felt like something was working, even if all the externals were kind of off. Sometimes, I’ll write a first draft and then think there’s no resonance or authenticity to it. Maybe because Tessa had a baby, or I found the conflict so interesting, it felt I could find some energy in the material even if the writing was dreadful in the first draft.
I realized the character felt right, but she was in the wrong position. The initial plot had a hostage scenario, and I remember thinking that wasn’t the right structure for the book. I wanted to start putting my character in different places and seeing what she would do. I think it’s just an incredibly hard thing to read your work as a reader and not a writer. I’d taken a workshop where the instructor advised us to print out the full first draft and read it through without a pen and not let yourself make any edits or take any notes, and in this way, you would get a sense of it with your editor mind turned off, which is a good way of getting the full picture of the work itself.
TCR: Your books reveal intricacies of both historical and contemporary Ireland and England. What have you learned about yourself in taking on a body of work that is inherently outside of your personal experience as an American?
FB: I read to live a life that’s not my own, and I feel for me writing is the same thing. I want to try and explore a character whose experience isn’t like mine. My worst nightmare would be doing work like autofiction, because the beauty and pleasure of reading is that I can get away. In writing, you’re spending two or three years on a novel, and having a larger landscape and the need for research and a lot to learn about other than my own experience is what, I think, keeps me interested. This feels like discovery and that anything I read about or explore in the region I am writing about can inform the novel. That is motivating because I feel I’m constantly working and moving forward even though I’m not at my desk writing. Also, the most fun for me is the research and the dreaming and daydreaming aspect.
TCR: There is so much class disparity in Northern Spy, from the sisters’ mother working as a thankless housekeeper for rich people to the portrayal of the wealthy. How was this important in creating the personal lives of your characters?
FB: That part came through the writing and research, because when you start out, particularly as an outsider, you think it’s a religious conflict, or about land. But the more time you spend talking to people and reading about it, the more you see how class is part of every aspect. During the worst of the Troubles, East and West Belfast were the most dangerous parts of the city, and South Belfast, which was the wealthy region, was almost untouched. You have this sort of strange scenario where some people were living in what actually looked like a war zone, with army tanks and burned-out buildings on their streets, and then a few miles away, you’d have these kind-of-lazy, quiet streets with big brick houses and pretty gardens.
Right now, the New IRA is recruiting mostly young men who aren’t given the benefits of peace their generation was promised. The Good Friday Agreement was made in 1998 with the idea there would be prosperity and that this new generation of cease-fire babies, as they are called, would grow up in a completely different society. But you still have segregated schools and pretty severe income inequality and it seems that class is woven through every aspect of the Conflict.
TCR: Like Northern Spy, Under the Harrow is about secrets between two sisters. And in A Double Life, a woman seeks to resolve secrets thirty years after her father’s brutal crime. Is there a fascination here with family lies and secrets?
FB: In a book group, we joked that the tag line for every book could be “A family with a secret,” because there are so many books about this. I’m not sure where this comes from, but I really love mystery and writing from a sense of friction, or dread even. Often, secrets come through in the writing. I never know what someone will be keeping from me until I’m really around them. I think we’re all fascinated with this. I’m thinking of how many people, like with 23andMe, learn this huge family secret that someone has been keeping all their life. So maybe fiction and crime fiction are just a heightened version of the kinds of secrets every family holds.
TCR: It’s frightening, and so bizarrely relatable, that Marian is a terrorist for seven years before her sister finds out. She thinks back to ordinary occasions, like making a dinner together, or going to market with her baby; all that time she was with her terrorist sister. And there’s her husband’s infidelity. Why did you have her character struggle with the lies of both her sister and her husband?
FB: I felt this was very realistic. I heard about a family that had no idea the father was in the IRA until, at his funeral, there was an IRA salute, with the armed guard firing a shot over the coffin. His wife hadn’t known, his kids hadn’t known, and he died without them knowing. I’ve heard a lot of those stories where you’d have siblings, and one would be involved in the Conflict and the others wouldn’t be and they would not ever know.
For Tessa, I always knew she was a single mother and that she was vulnerable in that way, that she was the only one protecting her son, and that there wasn’t a backup person standing alongside her. I didn’t know exactly what happened in her marriage and that was one of those awkward points where I was testing out different options for her and nothing seemed quite right. Then I wrote the scene where she discovers the lip balm in the car, and I thought, Oh, okay, this is what actually happened. It wasn’t deliberate, but it is one of those things where, if you’re writing a drama—and we talk about this in book clubs a lot too—that a lot of drama is taking someone you like and having bad things happen to them. And you’re sort of testing them and seeing how they respond, and hopefully watching their progress towards the light, or truth, or freedom in some way.
TCR: I love that Tessa’s mother knew, even before her daughter knows, that the husband is not a great guy.
FB: Right. We all have people like that, who are so annoyingly good at figuring out what’s good for you, or what’s bad for you, and you don’t always want to hear it.
TCR: Northern Spy features ordinary characters doing extraordinary things, with action scenes startling or disrupting completely ho-hum daily routines. A makeup artist puts people at ease so they inform, and schoolteachers find out which children have police officer parents to identify them for a kill. An IRA terrorist doubles as a lifesaving paramedic and drags her normal working single mother sister into it. What inspired you to approach the Conflict from such nondescript situations, and how does this serve to heighten suspense?
FB: A lot of the writing around the Troubles has been focused on men, and most of them were presented as soldiers and revolutionaries with political activation. But there were also women in the IRA, or working against it, or working with police. There was actually a schoolteacher who was asking children, “What does your mammy do?” or “What does your daddy do?” and then feeding names as targets to the IRA, and she was just a normal-looking schoolteacher. And there were other women who had double lives in the Conflict, but the ordinary life didn’t go away. It’s not like if you join one of these movements, you’re living underground; you’re still very often raising children. I was interested in that space in between, where a woman is doing extraordinary things but also has to worry about cooking dinner, or paying the gas bill, or waking up at night with the baby because that seemed realistic, too. The ordinary domestic parts of life had to coexist with the Conflict, so that people had this double burden of trying to get by on a daily level and then also trying to survive a war.
TCR: Your female characters engage in brave and murderous acts in distinctly feminine ways. Fake eyelash glue becomes adhesive for an eavesdropping device. And then the shocking hair clasp murder! Should I grow my hair and always wear a barrette, just in case?
FB: [laughs] That felt really fun to write. And it felt realistic because you had girls who had joined the IRA and they would hollow out the wedges of their platform shoes to smuggle explosives through checkpoints. Women used their femininity and the fact that they were less suspicious to act in the war. They would hide bombs in strollers and push them through checkpoints because the police would assume a woman with a stroller would be completely harmless. You had really interesting ways that women were playing with motherhood or femininity to fly under the radar.
TCR: You’ve also conveyed the doldrums of motherhood with a huge respect for what ordinary mothers deal with. How do you hope your female characters will influence the thriller genre?
FB: Oh, God. I think when you’re working on something, you never think that far ahead, right? It seems impossible that anyone would even read the pages you’re working on. But I think there’s often the idea that motherhood is boring and that you shouldn’t even write about it, or it’s not interesting to people outside of it, or that babies are boring, or birth stories are boring, and I think they’re incredibly dramatic and complicated and compelling, and I am fascinated by it. I would listen to anyone’s birth story or about sleep training or getting their kids to eat vegetables. The work of motherhood is really interesting, and I’m always searching out accounts of it. I’m very nosy about other people’s experience, and I think there should be more of this.
TCR: You have elevated some afflictions of our female condition, mastitis [breast inflammation] in particular, to a noble level, and I believe any mother would agree.
FB: [laughs] Thank you. That is honestly the highest compliment I could ever hope to get! Yeah, there is something about nursing, and sleep deprivation, that is really extreme, and it feels like it fits really well with the unease of a thriller, because you are kind of vulnerable and edgy and disoriented in the first year, or even couple of years—at least I am. I do love it when I read novels and I get parenting ideas from what the characters do with their children. It’s like stealing advice inadvertently from other parents.
TCR: When Tessa is in the kitchen slicing blueberries and mopping the floor—and is there a mother who can’t appreciate that?—she glances out the window and sees two masked men scale her garden wall. She knows instantly that they have come to kill her and, even more importantly to her, possibly her child. Wow, what a moment.
FB: Oh, thank you. It really is the fear, and also you have so much more vigilance when you have a little baby. You just have to be wary all the time, about your kid choking, or crawling straight for an electrical outlet, and then, in certain scenarios, you also have to be wary about the sort of violence that women have always had to watch out for. This powered the writing a lot. I was aware of how vulnerable I was once I had children and how desperate you are to keep them safe and protect them. And it’s catharsis, too, if you’re having all these “what if” scenarios; it’s sort of fun to write about them instead of just have them live in your head.
TCR: You’ve written book reviews for The New York Times and The Guardian, and essays for those publications and others. What advice would you give to emerging fiction writers seeking to have their book reviews and nonfiction essays published?
FB: Oh, my gosh; I think it’s so hard, and that the hardest thing to do is probably to place a short story. With nonfiction, the way I got one essay published is that I love The Sunday Times Style magazine, and I adored the writers the editor was commissioning and felt it might be a good fit. I actually guessed her email address and sent it to her unsolicited, and it shouldn’t have worked, but it did. I’d say the best way is to find the name of the actual editor and not send through a general submission folder, and make sure it’s someone whose work you know and admire and reach out that way, because they do want writing, and it is something they are constantly looking for. I would love to be a food writer, or a travel writer, but I have no idea how you actually get that as a full-time job.
Oh, two other things: Poets & Writers magazine and website have a really good submissions database. And I try to read The Best American Essays every year. You can see what publications are listed and what other writers are working on. It’s also really helpful to read the publication and actual columns and tailor your submission to the word count or guidelines. And you have to expect to be rejected over and over again, and to have radio silence over and over again.
TCR: You continue to facilitate book club discussions. Do you do this to keep your literary analysis skills sharp, or to stay in tune with “lay” or “normal” readers’ views of books they read?
FB: My friend had the job, and I couldn’t believe it actually existed. It sounded so wonderful to be paid to talk about contemporary fiction. I have learned so much about craft from the discussions. Sometimes, it’s really hard for a book to capture a group. There are so many books that I think have so much going for them and they just don’t strike a chord with the group. That can be demoralizing when you’re trying to write something new, but it’s also such a real pleasure to see how much books mean to people when they do love a book. Listening to them and how deeply they read a book when they love it, and how moved they are by something, is also very affirming of the whole project. I do it for the same reason that people are in book clubs, that it exposes me to lots of material that I wouldn’t read otherwise.
TCR: I’d like to end on fun because when I asked you for an interview, you said, “That will be fun.” and as an MFA candidate and writer, this perspective is appealing. Northern Spy is really a fun, and very funny, book. Rather than diffusing the tension, your humorous moments exacerbate the mounting suspense. How does humor add dimension to your characters?
FB: I never intend to do it, but it does come naturally. I had a professor, Elizabeth McCracken, whom I loved. She’s an incredible writer, and I still think about her when I’m working. One thing she said is that a book without humor isn’t realistic, and that even in the most tragic or extreme circumstances, there is often humor in the characters’ lives somewhere. I feel this is true, and that you want to show the whole spectrum of your character’s emotional, interior landscape.
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At this fortuitous moment of her concluding comments, Berry’s child cried out, “No talk!” Later, she thanked me for tolerating the background cacophony and promised our next meeting would be in a café.
“No thanks,” I proffered. “I’d rather hang with you and the kids. I’ll bring the sprinkles. That will be fun.”
Flynn Berry On The True Crime That Inspired Her Book & Why She Loves Thrillers
by Sadie Trombetta
Feb. 11, 2019
Photo of Flynn Berry, courtesy of Nina Subin
Each month, the Bustle Book Club asks an author to recommend a book they think everyone should read. In February, The Girl on the Train author Paula Hawkins recommended A Double Life List by Flynn Berry. Follow along with the book club on Bustle, join the conversation on Goodreads, and enter to win free books now.
Author Flynn Berry knows firsthand just how scary of a place the world can be for women. That is why she decided to write her first book, the Edgar Award-winning Under the Harrow, and it is why she's stuck with the crime genre for her follow-up, A Double Life.
At the center of this psychological suspense novel is Claire, a hardworking doctor who, by all appearances, leads a quiet, normal life in London. But behind her carefully crafted existence is a dark secret: She is the daughter of England's most notorious murder suspect.
Nearly thirty years ago, while she and her brother slept upstairs, a horrific crime was committed in her family home. By morning, her father's car was found, covered in bloodstains, abandoned near the English Channel. The man himself vanished, and has been considered missing ever since.
Claire has been careful to keep her violent past a secret, but when the police inform her that they think they have found her father, her carefully crafted world begins to crumble. Determined to uncover the truth about her family, Claire infiltrates her father's former inner circle in search of information that can either exonerate him, or prove his guilt once and for all.
'A Double Life' by Flynn Berry
'A Double Life' by Flynn Berry
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Berry spoke to Bustle about the unsolved crime that inspired her novel, the continued popularity of the crime genre, the likability (or lack thereof) of her narrators, and so much more.
Bustle: A Double Life is loosely inspired by a notorious unsolved murder. Can you tell us a little bit about how you found the true crime case and what made you want to write a novel about it?
Flynn Berry: I had known about the case for years because it's so widely reported in the British press. There are new newspaper articles every year about sightings of Lord Lucan, and I've always been fascinated by it.
It just seemed like this huge, rich story with elements of class and privilege and revenge and how women are treated by the courts. It was a story that always fascinated me.
"It just seemed like this huge, rich story with elements of class and privilege and revenge and how women are treated by the courts."
What do you think it is about the crime genre — whether it be true crime or crime fiction — that fascinates us? Why are podcasts about serial killers and documentaries about unsolved murders so popular, particularly in this moment?
FB: I think it's, for me at least, about the desire for justice. It's kind of cathartic, because normally what happens is you read about something horrible that has happened in a newspaper, and then you just try to go about your life as though you haven't read this terrible thing. I think the podcasts and the shows and the investigations are all a way of letting people feel like they're doing something — participating in a search for not necessarily revenge, but retribution and the truth. I think it's satisfying on that kind of deep level.
The mystery and thriller genre has been criticized for its portrayal of violence, especially towards women. Some have even called the genre anti-feminist for its reliance on the Dead Girl trope, but in recent years books like Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, and your debut Under the Harrow have challenged that and actually given agency and power to women who often don’t have it. What drew you to this particular genre and telling the story differently?
FB: I think about this all the time, because you don't want to perpetuate the myth of a woman being hurt being the most interesting things. The reason why I started my first book was because I was really scared. There had been a murder in my neighborhood of a young woman, and I felt really vulnerable. My roommates, who were also women, felt really vulnerable.
"I think the podcasts and the shows and the investigations are all a way of letting people feel like they're doing something."
I just got really angry about that, and I think that the reason why books have women victims often is because women don't commit murders. Something like 98% of murders worldwide are committed by men, and so it feels like this kind of disproportionate share of fear is on women.
I think it is just something that people live with. All my friends in college would walk home with their keys between their fingers, for example, which is just something that I don't think men interact with on a daily basis.
Claire, the narrator of A Double Life, is a fascinating character. She is obsessed with this search for her father, but also this question of whether or not he could be innocent, and if he wasn't innocent, whether or not he has always been this horrible man, or if something good once existed in him. It's an extreme example of taut family relationships, but it gets to these questions we all have about who our parents are, who we are because of them. Can you talk a little bit about what interested you as far as the family relationship goes, and what that legacy of violence leaves behind?
FB: I was really curious about what it would be like growing up not knowing if you were the daughter of a monster basically. I read a lot about women who were the daughters of dictators or war criminals, like Stalin's daughter who fled to the U.S. and tried to have a normal life but was haunted by her father's legacy.
I think, like you said, it's part of a wider idea of, "What have I inherited? How will I be different or the same?" to the most extreme degree.
I also think it is partly interesting to think about someone feeling responsible for atoning for what their parents have done, and how they handle that burden.
"I think, like you said, it's part of a wider idea of, 'What have I inherited? How will I be different or the same?' to the most extreme degree."
The thriller/mystery genre is no stranger to addiction. Many of the most famous fictional crime solvers struggle with alcohol abuse or some other kind of addiction which at times feels glorified, but the struggle Claire's younger brother Robbie has with opium addiction in A Double Life feels very different. What inspired to tackle the subject of addiction in your novel, and to use it in this way?
FB: So that's based pretty closely on an experience in my own family, and it feels like something I am always kind of writing towards, whatever I am working on. That sense of survivor's guilt or of the damage of addiction. And I think it's funny because the idea that addiction can be glamorous to anyone who has seen it up close is laughable. There is absolutely nothing mysterious or sexy about it when you actually see what is happening.
At the same time, I love all the cop shows when the cop comes home and has a big glass of wine. The kind of damaged lone wolf.
I am going to switch gears a little bit: let's talk about book clubs. t's an old tradition, but it feels like book clubs are having a moment. Why do you think people are drawn to them, right now in particular?
FB: First of all, when you love a book, there is nothing better than talking about it with other people. At least, I always want to cook the food that the characters are eating, or watch the movies that they've seen, or go to the places that they've visited. It seems like a book club is an extension of that, where you can live in the world a little longer.
"First of all, when you love a book, there is nothing better than talking about it with other people."
I think also at this time, it is especially appealing because of how much we want community and to gather together. It allows you to talk about ideas and engage in the world in a way that is different than online.
What do you think makes a good book club book?
FB: I think it has to be absorbing, and I think people have to come in wanting to talk about it, which could be because they hated it or had a really hard time with one of the characters, or because they enjoyed it. So something that has a rich web of ideas that people can really get into and untangle with each other.
What do you think makes A Double Life a good book club pick? What are you interested in seeing people talk about?
FB: Well, I was delighted to be chosen! I did a small dance around my house.
But I think the thing that has been interesting when I do readings is the question of likability, which is something I never really think about when I am working. It kind of took me by surprise that a lot of people found the narrator, in my first book especially but also this one, kind of unlikeable or difficult or prickly. I love that. I am just really curious about the ways that women are judged, especially when they are victims of crimes or witnesses of crimes, and how we have a very curious idea of what constitutes good behavior for a women and normal behavior.
Unsolved murder gets author Flynn Berry’s imagination going
By Denise Davidson
July 30, 2018 9:45 AM PT
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American author Flynn Berry will take you back in time to fictionally resolve a real-life mystery in her second book, “A Double Life.” The plot revolves around the 1974 murder of Sandra Rivett and disappearance of a British peer, John Bingham, Seventh Earl of Lucan. Did Lord Lucan commit this heinous crime?
Berry’s debut novel, “Under the Harrow,” was a 2017 Edgar Award winner for Best First Novel and was translated into 17 languages. She will be at Mysterious Galaxy on Aug. 10 for a discussion and signing.
Q: Why did you want to write a fictional account about an unsolved case that happened 44 years ago?
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A: I remember reading, years ago, about a woman running into a pub on a quiet road in Belgravia, covered in blood, and asking for help. That image has always haunted me, and the more I learned about the rest of the case, the more complicated and thorny it seemed. Lucan has, of course, been missing for 44 years, and I wanted to work out a fictional account of what had happened and where he had gone.
Q: Were there challenges writing Claire’s voice?
A: Claire’s voice came pretty easily; in an odd, slanted way, this book is much more autobiographical than my first. The tricky part was figuring out how to tell the parts of the story that she hadn’t been present for, like her parents’ early marriage, and the massive police search of the South Downs.
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Q: Is this a story of mistaken identity?
A: My favorite books blur the line between crime and traditional literary fiction. They have a dark undertow but also a strong sense of character and setting, so that’s always my goal. With this book, I was most interested in how the effects of a crime ripple out for decades afterwards.
Q: Were there true-life plot ideas that got edited out of the book?
A: Yes, so many. It’s the funny thing about writing something inspired by a true case. You end up having to edit out some of the most fascinating pieces because they’d stretch belief in fiction. One example is that Lord Lucan was invited to screen test to play James Bond, even though he wasn’t an actor. Another is that one of his friends skipped part of the coroner’s inquest because he had tickets to the Royal Ascot horse race. And the strangest, most macabre is that during the search for Lucan in the South Downs, the police found the remains of another body, a judge who had been missing for decades.
Q: How did you decide to fictionalize characters?
A: I based the book on the circumstances of the crime but not the real-life individuals themselves. One exception is Colin, who shares some broad traits with Lucan, like being charismatic and handsome. Claire and her brother are absolutely fictional. And Colin’s friends aren’t based on specific people but they do play the role that Lucan’s friends did in real life, in that they seem to be obstructing the police inquiry and aiding him in escaping.
Q: Is the social context important?
A: Yes, hugely. Lucan became a sort of legend in Britain very quickly, which has everything to do with his class. Up until the 1940s, someone like Lucan, who was an earl, would have been tried for murder in the House of Lords, not in a criminal court. I’m so interested in how that sort of privilege can warp justice, how people in the establishment can play by different rules than everyone else. One common theory is that someone among Lucan’s powerful, wealthy friends helped him flee the country after the murder.
Q: What are your favorite questions from readers?
A: I always like being asked about my favorite books and authors, since so many come to mind. Some absolute favorites are Kate Atkinson, Kamila Shamsie, Ian McEwan and Claire Messud.
I write longhand, and I like to commiserate with others about that terrible phase of having to type up all the pages.
Q: Is a second book harder to write than your first one?
A: The research on this one was really satisfying. Writing’s always hard for me; I usually end up doing about 20 drafts.
Q: Can you talk about what you are working on next?
A: I’m working on a new novel and keeping it close to the vest at this stage. Though I can say that the narrator is pregnant, which has been fun to write, since I am too at the moment.
“A Double Life” by Flynn Berry, Viking, 272 pages.
A Double Life
Flynn Berry. Viking, $26 (272p) ISBN 978-07352-2496-4
London doctor Claire Alden, the 34-yearold narrator of this engrossing psychological thriller from Edgar-winner Berry (Under the Harrow), remains obsessed with finding answers decades after the horrific night when her nanny was slaughtered in her family's Belgravia townhouse and her mother, Faye, was left near death. The crime's prime suspect, Claire's titled father, Colin Spenser, vanished without a trace. Claire, who leads an almost hermitlike existence, can't stop her sleuthing. She tails some of her father's posh friends in a desperate hunt for clues to his whereabouts as well as why they hated her working-class mother so much that they would shield a murderer. Claire combs through her own memories and Faye's extensive diary entries and other research to vividly imagine her parents' relationship, then subsequently manages to befriend, unrecognized, the daughter of one of Colin's closest chums in the hope of discovering further leads. The action builds to a shocking but satisfying conclusion. Berry tells this shattering story with surprising grace. Agent: Emily Forland, Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents. (July)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
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"A Double Life." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 16, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 71. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A536532702/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f17e0eba. Accessed 27 May 2024.
Berry, Flynn A DOUBLE LIFE Viking (Adult Fiction) $26.00 7, 31 ISBN: 978-0-7352-2496-4
Berry's (Under the Harrow, 2016) second thriller explores the effects of a brutal crime on the family of the alleged perpetrator nearly 30 years later.
Claire's father, Lord Spenser, notorious for being one of the highest-ranking members of British society to be accused of murder, disappeared 26 years ago, after Claire's mother and nanny were both attacked. The police contact her when there is a sighting or a lead, but so far, these have all turned out to be false. Driven by her need for closure and her concern for her opium-addicted brother, Claire befriends the daughter of her father's best friend under false pretenses so she can be invited to the family estate and conduct her own investigation. Claire's first-person narrative alternates with a third-person account of her parents' early courtship and marriage and Claire's own childhood memories leading up to the murder. Berry is an expert at slow pacing, letting the characters' tension gradually build to a boiling point, but that's also a drawback. The mystery, and the characters, seems to lack true passion. By the time the climax comes around, the level of action and violence contradicts the tone of the rest of the novel. She does have a talent for setting, and the emphasis on the insulation of the arrogant, if declining, aristocracy resonates as a larger commentary on British society. The most fascinating side of the novel, implied but not openly developed, is that Claire's obsession with her father leads her to make some pretty shady choices of her own, and she strongly believes that the end justifies the means. She's not quite an unreliable narrator, but those patches of darkness in her character do add an extra layer that could have been explored more deeply.
A competent psychological mystery that lacks greater human resonance.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Berry, Flynn: A DOUBLE LIFE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A538294086/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=de1ab50b. Accessed 27 May 2024.
A DOUBLE LIFE By Flynn Berry 261 pp. Viking. $26.
Why must so many revenge fantasies fixate in such detail on the physical mutilation of women's bodies? (As if the answer weren't depressingly obvious.) Take Stieg Larsson's best seller ''The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,'' which lingers unbearably, for pages and pages, over the description of Lisbeth's rape. Why does the author feel the need to humiliate his heroine so completely? What a relief then for weary fans of the genre to discover Flynn Berry, who writes thrillingly about women raging against a world that protects cruel and careless men. She's less preoccupied by scenes of abuse than the psychological toll of its threat. Her protagonists seethe over their knowledge of violence and are fueled by a howling grief for its victims.
Berry's rich 2016 debut, ''Under the Harrow,'' about a woman hellbent on finding her sister's murderer, won the Edgar Award for best first novel. Her latest, ''A Double Life,'' again takes us deep into an obsessed woman's head. On the surface, Claire lives a tidy life in London. She's a doctor, with friends to meet at the pub, and a dog to walk, and more than the average number of bolts on her apartment door. But Claire's world is a construct. She was born under a different name, the daughter of a charismatic Eton-bred man of power who's wanted for a decades-old murder.
Claire's father, based on the real-life dastard Lord Lucan, loved her mother, until he grew tired of her. Before their divorce was final her dispensed-of mother stumbled half-dead into a bar, drenched in blood, and accused the future earl of trying to kill her with a steel pipe. The last time Claire ever saw her father was the weekend before the attack, when he'd given her the peppermint from his ice cream. ''It's difficult for me to think of that visit. Not because I could've stopped him, exactly. I was 8 years old. But the scene seems grotesque. The little girl, accepting a stick of red-and-white candy from him. It's like he made me complicit.''
She's been on her father's trail her whole adult life, anonymously skulking around the case studies and true-crime message boards and the high society borders of her father's friends, who helped him escape while cruelly trashing her mother. But a constant anxiety courses alongside her searching. Is there a chance her dad is somehow innocent? And if not, was any of his love for her true?
Berry proved in ''Under the Harrow'' that her prose can be as blistering as it is lush. Here, too, the writing is rich and moody, without any unnecessary fuss. Every scene between Claire and her younger brother, quaking under a noose of Tramadol addiction, is breathtaking. ''Robbie looks like our father. Sometimes I wonder if that's why he mistreats himself. It's the only act of revenge he can take.'' I would read Berry's view of sibling relationships in any genre.
But there's the occasional sound of gears grinding in Berry's sophomore effort. Claire secures an unlikely accomplice too easily. She finds the final hasty pieces to her great life's puzzle in one stolen browser history. And Berry's decision to shift perspectives throughout the first two-thirds of the book, from Claire's slightly unhinged present-day head to a third-person recounting of the past, messes with her momentum.
But you do so want Claire to get her man, and the ending is as shocking as it is satisfying. As desperate and consumed as our messy heroine may get in the process, Berry always lets her hold onto her humanity.
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PHOTO: Flynn Berry (PHOTOGRAPH BY NINA SUBIN)
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Valby, Karen. "Daddy's Girl." The New York Times Book Review, 22 July 2018, p. 13(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A547175467/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=30a7fec4. Accessed 27 May 2024.
Northern Spy. By Flynn Berry. Mar. 2021. 288p. Viking, $26 (9780735224995).
Berry juxtaposes the pleasures, wonder, and frustrations of life with a baby against a journalist's life in contemporary Northern Ireland. Terrorism first encroaches on Tessa Daly's life as a single mother when she sees her sister, Marian, on TV donning a ski mask to rob a bank with IRA members. Baby care and work fade to insignificance as Tessa scrambles to determine where her sister is, whether she was kidnapped by the terrorists and forced to take part in the robbery, and how to get her home. That's just the start of this twisting thriller, though, as Tessa becomes far more involved with the terrorists' cause than she ever planned, risking her life to save all she loves. Edgar-winning Berry (Under the Harrow, 2016) unobtrusively uses Tessa's agonizing journey to portray life in the IRA and the nonchalance of the British forces toward Northern Ireland's locals, in the process dropping readers headfirst into the emotions of living in conflict. Berrys portrayal of Irish life is uncannily accurate; give this to all who love an emotional thriller, but also to Irish and Irish American patrons seeking a no-shamrocks look at Ireland in the not-so-distant past.--Henrietta Verma
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association
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Verma, Henrietta. "Northern Spy." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 7, 1 Dec. 2020, p. 28. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A647835807/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=805cc725. Accessed 27 May 2024.
Northern Spy
Flynn Berry. Viking, $26 (272p) ISBN 978-0-7352-2499-5
Belfast BBC political news producer Tessa Daly, the protagonist of this moving contemporary thriller from Edgar winner Berry (A Double Life), is struggling to juggle her job with caring for her six-month-old son, whose custody she shares with her ex-husband, when she sees a TV clip showing a gas station being robbed by a gun-wielding IRA trio. One of them is her younger sister, Marian, whom Tessa believed to be vacationing on the north coast. Detective Inspector Fenton and his team, who subsequently interrogate Tessa, seem convinced that she must also be IRA or, at the very least, privy to her sister's activities. It turns out that the local authorities don't know an awful lot about the now-fugitive Marian, whose efforts to press Tessa to assist her in her current clandestine mission puts both mother and baby at risk. The tension becomes at times almost unbearable as the plot takes increasingly sharp, sometimes improbable twists. It's a measure of the author's skill that she never loses sight of the humanity other characters. Berry remains a writer to watch. Agent: Emily Forland. Brandt & Hochman Literary. (Mar.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 PWxyz, LLC
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"Northern Spy." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 1, 4 Jan. 2021, p. 32. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A649683484/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a8864c00. Accessed 27 May 2024.
Berry, Flynn NORTHERN SPY Viking (Fiction None) $26.00 4, 6 ISBN: 978-0-73-522499-5
Berry delivers a taut and compassionate thriller as young mother Tessa is drawn into working as a double agent in the Irish Republican Army to protect her sister.
It's been years since the Good Friday Agreement was signed, but tensions in Northern Ireland remain at a constant simmer. Tessa moves through the simple motions of her life: taking care of her infant son, working at the BBC News Belfast bureau, spending time with her mother and sister. The physical isolation and beauty of her home village hint at the possibility of a world in which one doesn’t always have to be alert for terrorists; Tessa is old enough, however, to remember the Troubles, and she fears that the IRA will never truly surrender. Still, it comes as a shock at work one day when she sees a video of her sister participating in an IRA robbery. But even more shocking is the revelation that comes from Marian herself once she is able to reach out to Tessa: She's been a member of the IRA for seven years, drawn in by their talk about economic inequality, and has recently begun feeding information to MI5 in order to create space for peace talks. After a bomb she created for the IRA failed to blow up, though, she's under constant surveillance and can no longer meet with her British handler. And so Tessa joins her sister as a double agent: She's accepted by Marian’s crew and asked to do increasingly dangerous tasks for the IRA, which she then reports to her handler. Days of espionage are balanced by quiet moments with her son as Tessa comes to realize that putting herself in danger is justified, even necessary, if she wants him to grow up in a safer Ireland. Berry's use of short chapters, often divided into several smaller episodes, is particularly effective in reflecting Tessa's fragmented sense of loyalty and safety. This is not a book of action, though there is plenty, but instead a greater reflection on personal choice and consequence.
A poignant and lyrical novel that asks what is worth sacrificing for peace—and provides some answers.
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"Berry, Flynn: NORTHERN SPY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A650107662/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=85e845db. Accessed 27 May 2024.
Berry, Flynn TRUST HER Viking (Fiction None) $30.00 6, 25 ISBN: 9780593490327
Three years after the events of Northern Spy (2021), former MI5 informants Tessa and Marian Daly learn that you can never really walk away from the IRA.
In the years since she and sister Marian barely escaped Northern Ireland with their lives, Tessa has settled into the exhausting, beautiful routine of motherhood. Finn, at 4, is capricious and loving and curious, and while she misses him when he's with his father, Tessa values the mundane stability of their lives. Of course, if she double locks her doors at night, who can blame her? Even with a new identity and a new home in Dublin, Tessa knows the IRA never forgets a betrayal. When her car is rear-ended and she's confronted by an acquaintance from her childhood, it feels like an inevitable nightmare. Eoin Royce, recently released from prison, wants Tessa to help him turn her former MI5 handler. Soon, Tessa is back to walking the tightrope with new mom Marian's help as she feeds choice bits of information to Royce and other bits to her MI5 handler, Eamonn. She will learn about deeply buried family secrets as she fights an intense attraction to Eamonn--even as she lies to him to keep herself, and her child, safe. Berry once again provides an engaging character in Tessa, who is fierce, desperate, and clever. In a lot of ways, though, this is Marian's fight, and Tessa, while willing to do whatever she can to protect her sister, ends up being more reactive than in control. The author continues to interrogate the lasting, and live, impact of centuries of colonialism and violence on contemporary lives. For readers who don't live with this constant fear, it's a reminder that old wounds in a country bleed long and deep.
A meditation on generational trauma--along with well-scripted action and suspense.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Berry, Flynn: TRUST HER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A793537065/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=edea82c0. Accessed 27 May 2024.