Novelist Sheila Bugler told David Hennessy about her latest novel Dark Road Home which is her tenth book but first to be set in Ireland.
Sheila Bugler is known for her DI Ellen Kelly and Dee Doran books.
Her latest book, Dark Road Home is her tenth novel and her first to be set in Ireland.
Dark Road Home is the story of Leah Ryan who returns home to the west of Ireland town of Dungarry. Although it was the place she grew up in, she has not returned for 20 years since she left it as a teenager.
When she was just a girl, Leah’s mother was seriouisly injured in a car accident and was never the same again.
The prime suspect for it, Seamus O’Malley was never found.
Now, nearly two decades later, Leah arrives back in Ireland seeking answers. Seamus O’Malley’s body has recently been discovered, leading the police to believe he was not driving the car that hit Leah’s mother that night.
However when she does return, tragedy strikes again with Leah’s first love, Eamon Lonergan, being found brutally murdered.
At first, the two murders appear to be unrelated. But in a small town like Dungarry, everything is connected.
Although born in the UK, Sheila Bugler grew up in Galway. After studying Psychology at University College Galway she left Ireland to work as an EFL teacher, travelling to Italy, Spain, Germany, Holland and Argentina.
She now lives on the South coast of England.
What inspired the story?
“A huge inspiration was the whole idea of an emigrant returning to Ireland after a long time away.
“As somebody who has been out of Ireland for many years, I’m really fascinated by the emigrant experience and people who leave Ireland- Not so much our generation, but the earlier generations who left always thinking they’d go back to live in Ireland and it never happened.
“I’m really interested given how much Ireland has changed in the last sort of 25 years.
“That idea of somebody going back to Ireland after being away for a long time and going back to a place that is at the same time exactly as they remembered it but also completely different.
“This is my 10th novel and actually, it’s the first one I’ve written set in Ireland.
“For me, being Irish is such a key part of my identity.
“I love being Irish.
“I definitely describe myself as a reluctant emigrant because even though I left Ireland to go traveling and have a great time, I always thought I’d end up living back there.
“I’m very accepting of it now but it was a real source of sadness to me for a while that that never happened.
“I think I just wanted to write a book set in Ireland but it never felt like the right time or the right story.
“This idea was knocking around in my head for a long time and I finally sat down and got stuck into it about a year and a half ago.”
Leah is the prodigal daughter, isn’t she? She ran away to live in (self- imposed) exile. Now she’s back after two decades to face all those same things she ran away from…
“That’s right.
“That was the first thing: The idea of somebody running away from their past which is a classic trope in crime fiction: The idea of a character having to face up to the events in their past.
“She comes back and it isn’t an enforced exile, she chooses to stay away so when she comes back to the small town that she grew up in, she is forced to face up to all the traumatic events of her teenage years really.
“And as somebody who grew up in a small town in Ireland, I really wanted to dig into that idea of secrets within a small town community.
“Definitely one of the ideas was what’s it like to come back to Ireland after being away for a long time but the other thing that I became really interested in was we have this myth that in a small town, everyone knows your business. And that’s kind of true but also in most small towns, everyone has secrets too.
“And I think they’re even more important in a small town because you have to keep them secret because you don’t want everyone knowing your business.
“I think because I grew up in a small town and have been away from that for a long time, I just wanted to kind of revisit that experience of what it’s like growing up in a small town.”
Leah goes from the big city back into that small town where it’s all very incestuous…
“Everyone knows everyone.
“Actually, one of the things that I think we lose when we move away from the communities we grew up in is that sense of community and everyone knowing everyone.
“Obviously there are good and bad things to that, but I remember a few years ago, a cousin of mine died in Ireland and going back for his funeral and just that sense of a community coming together, and everyone being there to support the family.
“I found that really moving actually.
“I think in small towns, it is incestuous. Someone’s husband used to be my boyfriend and all that stuff.”
Leah has removed herself from it but she probably couldn’t stay, could she? She lives with a lot of guilt..
“There’s a huge guilt. And also, of course she was able to push that guilt as far away from her as she could while she was away but the minute she comes back, she has no choice but to face up to the choice she made which was to stay away and the detrimental effect that’s had on people she loves, particularly her brother, because he’s the one who suffered most by her not being around.
“Actually in an earlier draft of this book, the main character in the book was a man.
“I changed it to a woman and actually it becomes a much more interesting story when you have a woman who goes away because people don’t think about men leaving the rest of the family to look after whoever’s left behind.
“But when it’s a woman doing it, she’s judged very differently.”
Indeed no one would blink an eye if Leah stayed home to care for her mother while her brother Frank went away…
“And he’d be a great man forging his career and making great money and everyone would be really proud of him, right?”
There’s a theme in the book of lost potential and lost lives. We see that in Frank who is studying art in London and falling in love only for his life to change in an instant when his mother has the accident and he returns home to care for her.
“It is taken away like that.
“I really loved writing Frank as a character.
“I really loved writing his story.
“At the beginning, he was the more adventurous sibling.
“He was the one who wanted to leave and have this great new life in London.
“His story is very sad and but it can happen to any of us in a heartbeat.
“Our life is going in one direction, fate comes along and we’re shoved off in another direction.”
There is that one point in the book where Frank has returned home and been living a sheltered life. However his girlfriend from London is in Galway for the day and he plans to see her if Leah returns home to look after their mother. But Leah never comes home as agreed and he misses that chance to meet his girlfriend. Where was Leah?
“She was actually off being a teenager.
“In earlier drafts of the book, there was a whole chapter explaining where she’d been.
“I think it’s interesting.
“I’ve just done a read along with a book club on the book, and a lot of the readers judged Leah harshly a lot of the way through the book but I think we have to look at her in the context of a troubled, traumatic teenager.
“Teenagers, and especially teenage girls, I have one and I love her, but they’re very self-centred and I think she was just troubled and traumatized and thinking of herself really instead of thinking about her big brother who was carrying everything.”
The other thing that is important to remember about Leah leaving is that Frank, in anger, told her to leave and never come back..
“I think both of those characters are just really hurting. That’s the thing.
“They’re both hurting and they do what we all do, we lash out at the people closest to us.”
There are three mysteries in the background of this story. There is the truth of who was driving the car that hit Leah’s mother, the other car crash when Leah was behind the wheel leaving someone else hurt and whatever did happens to Seamus O’Malley. I think all three have hung over the town for all these years..
“I think one of the things that does really interest me is the long term effects of trauma and in a way, this book is about the long term effects of traumatic things on the community and the different ways people are affected by that.
“That’s something that does really interest me and how all of us are the products of the things that have happened to us in our past.”
When Leah sees her brother after so many years, she barely recognises him. Life has been hard for him and dulled the sparkle he had as a young man..
“Absolutely.
“Like I said, when she’s away she can kind of put all of that to the back of her mind but if you stay in a town like Dungarry, you can’t put any of that stuff to the back your mind because it’s living there in the community.
“All the bad stuff that happened in the past, everyone remembers it.”
The other thing is if she’d have stayed, she would have had to watch Eamon with the limp he carried since the accident that she was behind the wheel for…
“Yeah, I think she couldn’t really stay after that to be honest with you.
“Sooner or later, she would have had to run away from that.”
There’s some dark moments concerning teenage girls and older men. I am thinking of Leah’s encounter with a predatory Seamus O’Malley and Leah’s friend Coco making an advance on Leah’s brother Frank.
“That’s when the book kind of came right for me was when the central character became a woman and I started to write about that relationship between Leah and Coco, because there is something weirdly intense about the teenage friendship between girls and that tug that Leah feels towards Coco.
“She’s aware of Coco’s flaws but she’s still so dazzled by her that Coco just makes her feel more alive than anyone else she knows and she’s too young to pull back from that in the early stages when she’s a teenager and that friendship becomes quite toxic then.”
Did you enjoy writing about Ireland? Do you think having lived outside it for years give you a different perspective?
“Oh I’m sure it gives me a rose tinted perspective completely, but I just love going back to Ireland. I love Ireland.
“I’m in Eastbourne here, I’m part of a WhatsApp group of random Irish people who’ve all ended up here on the south coast and we meet up occasionally and go and drink pints together.
“And they’re all different ages, all different backgrounds. It’s really lovely, really lovely.”
Is it true that you started writing while you were on maternity leave and that’s how you really got going as a novelist?
“That’s right. I think I always wanted to write but I think it was confidence to be honest with you: Lack of confidence and lack of maturity for a long time.
“I kind of had it in the back of my head that I would do it one day and then I was on maternity leave with my second child. She’s going to be 18 next month so that’ll give you an idea.
“I was on maternity leave with her and I just had this moment where I thought, ‘If I don’t start doing this thing I’ve always wanted to do, one day I’ll be lying on my deathbed and I’ll be thinking, ‘Why didn’t I try that?’’
“And honestly that was it.
“I went home that evening and I started writing.
“It took me a long time to work out what I was doing.
“I didn’t know anything about writing, took me a long time to work out how to write fiction, what type of fiction I wanted to write but that was the starting point and I didn’t look back from then.
“The other bit of that story is that I did think, ‘I’m going to bang out a best selling novel while I’m on maternity leave and I never have to go back to the day job’.
“I still have the day job.”
If they were to make a film or TV series about one of your other protagonists, who would play them?
“I haven’t thought that much about Ellen Kelly but I have thought about Dee Doran.
“I have wildly tweeted a few times to Amanda Redman.
“I’d love her to be my Dee Doran, I think she’d be perfect.
“She hasn’t replied to any of my tweets about it but we’ll see.”
It seems like a really exciting time for Irish crime fiction. Is that something you’ve been aware of yourself?
“Yeah, it’s a hugely exciting time for Irish crime fiction.
“I think it has been for a few years though.
“We’ve got some amazing Irish crime writers.
“We’ve got Ken Bruen.
“There’s Tana French who is astonishing. She’s just absolutely astonishing.
“And Declan Burke, you know, Louise Phillips, Patricia Gidney. On and on and on. There’s so many and they’re all so lovely.”
You mention Ken Bruen there. One comment on Dark Road Home likened the writing to his, you must have been stoked with that..
“He actually did a really lovely quote for my very first book which was my first Ellen Kelly book called Hunting Shadows.
“He gave an amazing endorsement for that and I was proper stoked because I’m a huge Ken Bruen fan.
“I think his Jack Taylor books are just wonderful because as somebody from Galway, how he captures the feel of that city is just amazing.”
You were born over here and then grew up in Ireland..
“I was born in Leicester and then my parents moved back to Ballinasloe when I was six so I grew up in Ballinasloe, went to university in Galway.
“I was 20 when I finished university, I studied psychology at Galway and the only thing I knew was that I wasn’t anywhere mature enough to be a psychologist to anyone, so I did a TEFL course and spent most of my 20s teaching English and traveling around to different countries around the world and having a great time.
“It was amazing.
“I honestly think you can’t go anywhere in the world without meeting Irish people.
“Everywhere I went, you’d find an Irish person there.
“I still married an Irish man after all that.”
Leah has been living in Sydney which we know is packed with Irish these days..
“Absolutely which is so interesting because I left Ireland in the 80s and then it wasn’t that cool to be an Irish person then.
“In England it certainly wasn’t.
“It’s changed a lot since then, you know?
“I remember going into work and people saying things to me after a bombing saying to me, ‘Your lot are at it again’.
“I really remember coming back to England after traveling and it just feeling so different.
“I remember being really surprised that it was kind of okay to be Irish here now.
“And more than okay, kind of cool so that’s changed a lot and it’s nice for my kids.
“They’re really proud of being Irish even though they’re also very proud of being English.
“They’re very comfortable with that kind of dual nationality.”
Dark Road Home is out now on Canelo.
For more information about Sheila, click here.