‘I had a great pandemic,” says Catherine Ryan Howard with a laugh. “I got a book out of it, and that book was my most successful to date.”
She’s talking about 56 Days, a thriller about a couple who meet shortly before the pandemic, and decide to spend lockdown together. It was published last year, and won Crime Fiction Book of the Year at the 2021 Irish Book Awards.
However, the actual writing of the book was a fraught experience. “I genuinely thought I was making the biggest mistake of my career. It’s easy to look back now and go, ‘that was a really good idea’. But I started this in April 2020, and at the time lockdown... we didn’t even know what it was going to mean. A weird few weeks? The world as we knew it over? No one knew.
“At the time, my fellow, very helpful, crime writers were all over Twitter going, ‘I’m never going to write about this, I never want to read about this’ and I’m sitting at home typing away.
“I was supposed to be writing an entirely different book, that I abandoned. In June I went to my editor and said ‘surprise, I’m not writing that other book’. I felt, ‘if this is a complete disaster and no one ever wants to read it, I’ll be forgiven. It’s the book I wrote in 2020, who’s going to hold that against me?’”
It turned out to be far indeed from a disaster. “No one has benefited from the pandemic as much as I have. What’s that expression? It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.”
Now Catherine has a new book out, Run Time, published on Thursday. So, does she worry about how to follow success? “Oh that is in my head right now. The thing with me is, every book is completely different. This [Run Time] is my fun book. I just wanted to have a good time. My hope is, if I had a good time writing it, and I really did, the reader will enjoy reading it.
“56 Days dealt with some really dark things. I couldn’t spend another year like that – you absorb it and have to stay in it. I needed a break. I’m sure there’ll be people who will pick up this book and go, ‘what the actual fudge?’” she laughs.
“I feel like Run Time is a bit of a wink – it’s me winking at readers, going: ‘I know what you want, but this time I’m giving you something slightly different, because I have to have my fun too.’ The only thing I can do is write the book I want to read, at any time. I can’t be going, ‘well, will people like this because they liked the other…?’ You can’t do that. The only thing I know how to do for sure, is write the book I want to read at that time.”
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Run Time is set around a low-budget horror film shooting in the countryside around Cork, and the idea came from an actual film, in which Catherine’s brother, John Ryan Howard, an actor, was involved.
“We’re just Howards,” she clarifies first. “Catherine Howard was the fifth wife of Henry VIII so when I started out I had to put something else in. I put my mother’s maiden name and then when John started acting, he stole that. He will maintain it was his idea but it wasn’t!
“Back to the film, Beyond the Woods. John was in it, and they went to this secluded farmhouse in the countryside, in winter. They were living in one house, filming in the other.
“It was a horror movie, and the thing that stuck in my brain was, John said when they first arrived, one of the first things they had to do was go to the local garda station and say ‘if you get a call at four in the morning saying I hear screams in the woods, it’s not someone getting murdered, it’s just a film’. Immediately, I thought, ‘what if someone was getting murdered?’ That was the start of it.”
The story is pacy, readable, tense without being too terrifying. Within the book there is also a film script. “I needed readers to know what the movie was about. There is a mirroring that goes on, when stuff that happens in the movie starts to happen on the set. That wasn’t going to mean anything to anyone if I didn’t tell them what the movie is about.” This too was written by Catherine.
“I knew from the beginning I was going to have to write the script – I put it off for ages. I’m not one of these novelists who thinks because I can write a novel, I can write anything. I know it’s a completely different form. But I really loved it.”
So, does she see herself moving into script writing? “Absolutely not. I have friends who are scriptwriters, and my god, I’d rather write a novel any day. That seems like so much more work. I don’t play well with others when it comes to writing.
“So I can’t imagine a situation where you’re getting notes from all these different people and you have to incorporate them into the next draft. It’s so much work. It’s too much work for me. I’m too lazy, sorry. What I want is for people to option my work, and hire someone to do that.”
And people have optioned her work. “A couple of things are under option. When something is optioned, that’s like having a ticket for Saturday night’s Lotto draw. The odds are still against it. But – without being uncouth about it – it’s free money. You’ve already done all the work. It’s the sprinkling on top. It’s not my priority, it’s not what I think about when I sit down to write a novel, I think that’s a fool’s errand. Put it out of your mind and write the best novel you can.”
Brought up in Cork, writing is something she has wanted “ever since I figured out there were writers – that books didn’t just magically appear”.
“I think a turning point was Jurassic Park. When I read that, I just couldn’t believe someone had taken blank paper and made that. It’s just such an incredible idea. And then, that you can do that, and that can be your job? That was mind-blowing to me. That was the moment.”
Although, in her teens, she also wanted to be a virologist (“I was always going to write on weekends”). So what happened there?
“In Transition Year, we went to Cork Institute of Technology for a week, to sit in on lectures. At the end of the week you were paired up with a grad student. I got this guy who could not have been less inspiring. He told me, ‘you think you’re going to be playing with Ebola, but what you’re actually going to be doing is looking at cervical smears for the rest of your life.’ I think that started a rot on the virology.”
So he did her a favour? “I’m not sure he did. I am where I’m supposed to be, but when my goal turned to writing, I had a lot of conversations with men like that. When men meet a woman who has this amazing dream – she doesn’t just want to work in an office – they feel like they can’t get there, they don’t know how to get there, so they assume no one is able get there, and they tell you that.”
Are women different? “Women lift each other up. Any time I’ve met someone more successful than me in my career, all I’ve got is encouragement.” Although, she adds: “In Ireland we love the misery, we love the glamorisation of failure. We love to say we don’t make any money out of writing and all that.”
Is that because we’re superstitious? Or we’re worried people will hate us if we say we’re doing well? “The second one. We’re afraid that we will suffer the worst thing that can happen to an Irish person, that we’ll be accused of having notions.
“A lot of our most successful writers, their success is confined to Ireland. Therefore their idea of success is very different to mine. I publish internationally. They will say things like ‘you can be a number one best-selling author who wins awards, and you still have to have a job.’ Because their publishing life is on this island, one of the smallest book markets in the world.”
Did she find that kind of talk discouraging? “I never listen to anyone. I was told so many times ‘you can get published but you can’t make a living’. I never listened to any of that, because I knew that there’s a very simple truth at the heart of publishing: If someone buys your book, you get paid. So the more people that buy your book… So that can’t be true, mathematically. I never listened to any of that ‘you’ll have to get a real job’ rubbish.”
Irish Independent Crime Fiction Book of the Year winner Catherine Ryan Howard
It is, she then points out: “The only thing in my life I’ve felt that way about. Just this. This one fire burning – all my energy went into it.”
But it didn’t happen straight away. From school, Catherine went to university in Lancaster, “for three weeks”.
“I went to study combined sciences. After three weeks I went, ‘this isn’t for me’. Everyone said, ‘stay there, stick it out’, but I knew it wasn’t for me. It wasn’t like going to UCC. It was costing money. So, I said, ‘I’m going to come home, and figure things out’. So I came home, and didn’t really figure anything out.
“I had my lost years. Three or four years where I worked in a card shop, an auctioneers, whatever I could get. I was trying to write all the time, but probably talking about writing far more than actually writing. Nothing was happening.”
She got a job in the Netherlands for two years, training campsite couriers, then spent a year-and-a-half working in Disney World in Florida. “There, I started writing non-fiction about my experiences – a book called Mouse Trapped. I came home, tidied it up, and tried to get an agent for it. The response was, ‘this is so niche’. At the time, self-publishing was really taking off. I self-published Mouse Trapped. That went well enough that I could afford the ink cartridges I needed to write my novel.
“But I was still living with my parents. Then I wrote a book about back-packing and self-published that. And then I wrote a book about self-publishing.” That got her work with a traditional publisher, helping to promote their authors on social media. It was, Catherine says, “one foot in the door, but I was still working in a B&B”.
“Finally, I realised, I need to do something other than waiting for a yes. I applied to Trinity to study English as a mature student. Just before I started, I realised I would no longer have much free time, and that was the impetus that finally made me finish the novel I had been tinkering with, Distress Signals. When I started in Trinity, the book was out with agents, and six weeks into my four-year degree, I get an agent. Six months in, I got a two-book deal.”
It was everything she had hoped for. And yet: “The year my debut came out was the worst year of my life. It was kind of devastating. I had dreamed of this since I was eight years old, I was published when I was 33, and it was nothing like I wanted or hoped. In terms of sales, it just died a death. That was the first point where I was wavering, thinking, ‘I did my part, but now the universe hasn’t responded.’”
There are, she says: “So many writers who publish two books. Because they got a two-book deal, and they did them, and then it was just too much emotionally. I say to my friends, being a writer is like being professionally disappointed.
"Right now I’m in this amazing high of momentum, but most of the time you’re just being disappointed – disappointed you didn’t get that promotion opportunity, disappointed you didn’t win that award, that person got interviewed and you didn’t.
“The highs are so high, but because of the schedule of publishing, where nothing happens for 11 months and then the last month goes crazy, your publishers don’t even think of you for half a year. You’re left thinking, ‘have they forgotten about me? Do they hate me? Is it all over?’”
How does she cope? “Wine, mostly,” she laughs. “Actually, the best thing for me is to have friends who are also writers. It’s such an odd job, other people won’t get it. You need other writers in your life.”
You also need, as the psychotherapists tell us, to ‘feel your feelings’.
“I cried,” Catherine says. “I had my total toddler tantrums at times. There were times when I was like ‘this doesn’t feel good.’ But I pushed through. Probably because I don’t think there’s anything else I could do. But I kept going. No matter what happens, you have to start that next book.
“There’s only one thing you can control in this whole process: What you write. Writing the best book you possibly can. If you let all the noise and emotion get in the way of that, that’s not going to end well.
“That’s why you have to take joy in the process. I’m not of those people who says ‘oh I love writing’, I’m more like, ‘how much of this do I have to do today, so I can go watch Netflix?’ But, there’s no better feeling than having written. Having created something from nothing.
“Everything has changed for me in the last 18 months or so, and I’m so glad it’s happened now. If it had happened on that first book, I would not have appreciated it. I’m in such a position of gratitude right now.”
‘Run Time’, by Catherine Ryan Howard, is published by Corvus on Thursday
