Irish writer Louise Hegarty’s debut novel Fair Play follows a group of friends who gather at an Airbnb for a jazz-age themed New Year’s Eve murder mystery party, only to wake up and find the birthday boy, Benjamin, dead. As his sister Abigail reels from the loss, a detective arrives to investigate, transforming the house into a classic whodunit setting where everyone is a suspect and no one is quite who they seem. Both gripping and tender, the novel explores love, grief, and identity while cleverly subverting the conventions of the mystery genre.
The release of the debut mystery builds off of a shining career where she was the inaugural winner of the Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story Prize and her short story “Getting the Electric” has been optioned by Fíbín Media.
We asked the writer to answer our recurring My Reading Life questionnaire so readers could get to know her better and discover the books that shaped her life.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
A writer that had a huge impact on me as a child and who I still read and think about as an adult is Diana Wynne Jones. She had an incredible talent of enmeshing the supernatural with the everyday. Her books are well-plotted, creative, imaginative and more than anything else immensely enjoyable. I could name any number of her books – Fire and Hemlock, the Chrestomanci series, Black Maria – but the book that I have re-read more than any other is Archer’s Goon. Even though I don’t write children’s books, I think about the plotting and the writing and the ideas in this novel and use them as inspiration in my own writing today.
What book helped you through puberty?
I am not sure if any book really helped. I think that age can be difficult in that you are caught between the two worlds of childhood and adulthood: too old for children’s books but still too young for a lot of books aimed at adults. I read very widely during that period – probably more than I do now – and I remember in particular reading The Clockwork Orange and a ton of non-fiction books.
What book do you think all teenagers should be assigned in school?
I find the idea of ‘assigned reading’ a little suspicious. I think it important as a teenager to read widely and to challenge oneself: there will be the books and the authors that you naturally gravitate to, but you should not limit yourself in any way. Read books by and about people who are not like you (and indeed who you may, on the face of things, not even like).
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
- The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- The Ginger Man by JP Donleavy
- Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
- The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis
- Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard
- The Listening Wall by Margaret Millar
- My Beautiful Friend by Elena Ferrante
- The Fight by Norman Mailer
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
My novel Fair Play uses the structure of a Golden Age detective novel to explore the emotions around grief and the impact of a sudden death and so I, of course, turned to classic examples like The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie for inspiration. I also looked to books like The Hog’s Back Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts where its detective displays a playful awareness of the detective genre and his own role in it and
The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr – in particular for Chapter 15 and its famous ‘Looked Room Lecture’. I also re-read Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames: a wonderful homage to PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves books that plays with familiar characters.
What books are on your nightstand now?
I have just finished reading the English translation of Oromay by Baalu Girmu: an Ethiopian classic that cost the writer his life. I have also recently loved Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte: a collection of linked stories around the theme of rejection. I am currently reading The Boyhood of Cain by Michael Amherst which is so beautifully written.