On one fateful day in early 2009, Jane Casey discovered she was pregnant with her first child, and only a few hours later, that she’d landed a publishing deal for her first book, The Missing.
“It becomes a huge day,” she says, over tea in a hectic,, relevant London cafe. “Be careful what you want for, right? It became everything I desired, and it was an absolute nightmare. All of a sudden, I turned into readying myself to have an infant and write an e-book.”
After this, she gave start to a 2d child and another 12 books: the standalone debut, the younger grownup fiction collection with Jess Tennant, and the award-winning collection of crime books focused on the detective Sgt Maeve Kerrigan, the contemporary trio of which had been picked up by way of Harper Collins in a six-figure deal.
Casey arrives at the venue early and appears impeccable with no hair out of place and jacket and trousers that appear newly tailor-made to her. But there’s a doe-eyed gentleness that tempers this excessive achiever; with the faintest Dublin accent, she’s so softly spoken that I want to inch my chair towards hearing her over the whirrs of the frappe blenders.
Married to a crook barrister, whose expertise of London’s underbelly inspired her fictional worlds, Casey lives within the riverside borough of Wandsworth after shifting from Ireland to Britain to observe English at Oxford. She’s been moving among the 2 ever due to the fact: lower back to work on her Masters in Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College, returning to London to work, and most currently, in 2017, upping sticks together with her circle of relatives – her boys are actually nine and 7 – to live toward her circle of relatives in Dublin for a quick however no longer very sweet time.
“I don’t want to use the phrase’ catastrophe. However, I will,” she says. “We sold our place in London and bought an area [in Dublin] that we lived in for 10 months, but it did not paint for us. There was just one factor after some other; it became 12 months wherein my agent instructed me to bin a book I’d been operating on. Matters fell through with a publishing element that changed into all going ahead until it wasn’t. It became the primary time I had felt remote operating from home because we didn’t realize people were inside the location. And my husband likes Ireland and signed up for it, but he changed into nevertheless commuting to London for the duration of the week.
“Leaving became like getting a divorce. It becomes so painful. However, it became the proper thing for us. And Dublin’s now not going everywhere. We just flew over the weekend. Hopefully, we’ll move back in the future, but not now.”
So, at the same time as London faces an exodus of its international population as Brexit materializes, Casey swam in opposition to the tide and returned to London.
“Thankfully, where I stay was a Remain area. However, we understand people around us who don’t want to be a part of Europe,” she says. “There’s one couple I understand; she is from Poland, he’s from previous Yugoslavia, they met in London, the most effective language they’ve in common is English, and their children were born here. I don’t forget the day the referendum consequences got here. She had tears pouring down her face, announcing, ‘In which do we go? This is our home. We made our home here.”
Ireland has been singled out within the Brexit negotiations, which has fostered bad sentiment within the UK, she believes.
“The tales about Ireland are not flattering,” she says. “The way Leo Varadkar is written approximately is adverse. I was analyzing over here in 1996 whilst the Canary Wharf bombing came about, whilst the IRA were on ceasefire. Things have been distinctive hereafter that; it turned into more divided between them and us. If Ireland is the purpose of Brexit not happening, I’m now not sure what will happen.”
Personally and more positively, her predominant concern, for the time being, is Maeve Kerrigan, the principal character of her newly launched novel Cruel Acts, the eighth within the series. She’s a “goodie footwear detective” in step with Casey, keeping her own in a very male line of work. Living in London, the character is 2nd-generation Irish.
“She has this thing of no longer clearly belonging to both lifestyles, and I sense that Irish audiences remember the fact that gulf,” says Casey. “It’s a big deal for her to be a police officer working inside a British system – not something her circle of relatives back in Ireland would always assume is a good thing. English audiences don’t constantly remember that there’s a conflict of identities.”
