“In a way, a similar thing happened,” she explains, “because my very early memories of Ireland – I was one of those children who travels back and visits – were very vivid.”Īn imaginary village in County Mayo also seemed like the perfect place to experiment with blending crime fiction with other elements.

She cites Ted Hughes, who said that something was “sealed off” when he moved from Mytholmroyd to Mexborough at the age of seven, leaving him a store of impressions he could keep returning to in his work. It wasn’t until 2009, when Kidd landed a bursary for an MA in creative writing back at St Mary’s, that her fiction could emerge from the nooks and crannies of her crowded life.įor me the magic realism is very much linked with an oral tradition and folklore that’s how I like to see it in my work Jess KiddĪs a child of the Irish diaspora, Kidd says it seemed obvious the novel should head into the west. Looking after her daughter while working in a series of office jobs and in social care meant that completing her degree via the Open University was a slow process. An access course set her on the route to a degree in English at St Mary’s University in Twickenham, but she dropped out again when she found herself pregnant. Born in west London in 1973, she fell out of education while she was studying for her A-levels, a swerve she puts down to a combination of “boys and working”. But often it’s not the case, actually you can’t”. One of the limitations of the crime genre that Kidd’s novel explores is the implicit suggestion that “you can solve things, you can package everything up, you can put this whole thing back together and you can confront death. In a way, a lot of the dead and the supernatural happenings are a way of addressing the impossibility of processing what happens with death.” There is a strong tradition of gallows humour in Irish writing, she points out, that is “actually a way of absorbing these things that are very difficult to face. “It is a heavy load and I think that’s why it needed the comedy, otherwise it would have been relentless horror and misery, ”says Kidd. The novel cuts between the mayhem unleashed in 1976 and the awful events of 1950, breaking down the barriers between mystery story and comedy of manners, mixing magical realism and crime fiction. Taking the starring role in an amateur production of JM Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, he puts the womenfolk in a flutter and confronts the pillars of traditional male authority head on. Twenty-six years after the murder of his mother Orla, long-haired, dark-eyed Mahony comes back to Mulderrig to investigate. The mystery buried in the woods surrounding the little speck of a place Kidd has imagined on the west coast of Ireland features incest, prostitution and a vanished child, but stitched alongside the story of a life cut short is a rollicking tale of a hero’s return.

Himself by jess kidd