by
Sheila Connolly
I
fell in love with Ireland the second day I was there.
Not the first day. When my husband and I took
our daughter to England and Wales, we tacked on Ireland. After
all, my father’s parents both came from there, and it
was so close, how could we not?
We stepped off a plane and headed for the
place my grandmother was born—and of course we got lost.
Like most Americans we didn’t realize that driving in
Ireland consisted mainly of following winding two-lane roads
(on the wrong side) and avoiding the occasional sheep in the
road. Signs are few and far between, and if you ask for instructions
you’re usually told something like “turn left
at the sixth lane, and if you go past the creamery you’ve
gone too far.” While we did finally find the tiny townland
we were looking for, it was not a promising start.
Then we set off again for the village of Leap,
a tiny place in West Cork overlooking Glandore Harbor on the
south coast, a few miles from where my father’s father
was born. By the time we arrived it was getting dark, and
it had started raining—hard. We stopped at the hotel
(the only one in town) and all eight of its rooms were booked
by fishermen, but they sent us around the corner to a family
who had a couple of rooms available. Then we went back to
the hotel for dinner, which was everything we’d ever
heard about Irish food: grey meat, mashed potatoes and carrots,
all swimming in murky liquid. It kept raining.
Tired and damp and discouraged, after dinner
we retreated to our room and went to bed. The next morning
I was the first to wake up, and I slid out of bed and pulled
back the curtains to find a view of sunshine and sparkling
water with gliding swans, and cows grazing on the hill, and
I almost cried. That’s when I fell in love with Ireland.
And if
that wasn’t enough, I discovered that the pub across
the street was called Connolly’s. That’s the place
that became Sullivan’s pub, the heart of Buried
in a Bog.
But it
took ten years to get that book published. I hadn’t
even started writing when first saw the pub, but the village
made a lasting impression on me, and I used the setting for
the second book I ever wrote a couple of years later, with
the pub at its center (the less said about that first book,
the better). That book never sold, but I refused to give up
on it: I rewrote it and changed the major characters not once
but twice, but never the setting. Third time’s the charm,
it seems: Buried in a Bog was published in 2013 and
became a best seller.
Why do
I write about Ireland? I write cozy mysteries, which is what
I’ve always loved to read. Most cozies are set in small
towns, but American cozy writers hadn’t really ventured
abroad with their stories. But since most of Ireland (with
the exception of the biggest cities) is one small town, where
everybody knows everyone else, and their entire family history,
I thought it was perfect for cozies.
I once
told someone that visiting Ireland was putting on an old shoe:
it’s like slipping into something that just fits right,
like it’s been yours forever and knows your foot. Ireland
felt like home, even though I’d never seen it before.
And I keep going back.
My main character, Maura Donovan, was born
in Boston and raised by her widowed Irish-born grandmother.
She has no interest in Ireland, having seen her share of down-and-out
immigrants in Boston. But her grandmother insists that Maura
visit Ireland, as her last wish, so Maura goes reluctantly,
and there she finds a home and relatives she never knew she
had and friends—in short, more than she ever expected.
In fact, there’s one point in Buried in a Bog when Maura
is overwhelmed by events and is reduced to rare tears, and
she demands, “why is everybody being so nice to me?”
She’s angry and confused, and unable to handle simple
kindness and others looking out for her, a near-stranger.
But that’s the way it is in Ireland, particularly if
you have any Irish in you.
By the
second book, Scandal in Skibbereen, Maura has begun
to settle in. The book opens with the arrival of pushy New
Yorker Althea Melville, who’s searching for a lost painting,
and she can’t understand why everybody isn’t jumping
to help her, and she thinks she has to deceive them to get
what she wants. It falls to Maura to explain that things don’t
work like that in Ireland; people are more than willing to
help you, but you have to ask, not demand. By the end of the
book even Althea has come around to that point of view.
There’s only one problem with writing
murder mysteries set in Ireland: few murders take place there
(except in Dublin). I met with a sergeant at the local police
(garda) station, who told me that they’d had all of
three murders in their district in the past decade, and in
each of those cases they’d known who did it. I apologized
to him for inflating their crime rate, at least on paper.
What I enjoy most about writing this series
is exploring the contrast between insider and outsider, the
past and the present, the old and the new. You find all of
these side by side in Ireland, and sometimes I have to shake
myself and wonder, what decade am I in? The townland where
my grandmother was born is still using the mail box installed
during Queen Victoria’s reign, and the church holiday
bazaar is still raffling off a truckload of firewood. Time
seems slower there. The nights are darker and quieter. It’s
beautiful and peaceful, and, yes, there are plenty of rainbows.
I’m
still in love with the place. I hope I can let readers see
what I see there.
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