Motivational Monday -- How to Write a Red Herring [Link]

By Tana French as told to Lila Shapiro

Tana French is an author of murder mysteries who is less concerned with whodunit than with the inner lives of her detectives. In her first book, In the Woods, which came out in 2007, she let what actually happened to a pair of vanished children remain a mystery because she didn’t think her detective was equipped to face the truth. French, a Dubliner who originally trained as a stage actor, has published six more books since, each one further cementing her reputation as a writer of “cultic devotion,” as The New Yorker put it.

The announcement of her latest, this spring, was met with feverish anticipation and a scramble for advance copies — the novelist Jeff VanderMeer pleaded on Twitter: “Who do I have to offer bird seed and bark butter to … to get an advance copy of the new Tana French?!” She’s famously good at a particularly eerie brand of red herring — that alluring detail that seems like the key to solving the crime, only to prove a clever bit of misdirection. In The Witch Elm, out this month, she breaks from her own convention by writing from the perspective not of a detective but of the victim of a crime. Still, the same rules apply: French’s red herrings are not just shiny lures but windows into her protagonists’ deepest fears and flaws. Here, she walks us through how she lays the tracks, starting with the red-herring masters she admires.

Read the full article: https://www.vulture.com/2018/10/tana-french-on-how-to-write-a-red-herring.html