Tana French

Tana French (born May 10, 1973, Burlington, Vermont, U.S.) is a popular American-born Irish crime and mystery writer. Her first novel, In the Woods (2007), established her as a skilled storyteller who blends the elements of police procedurals and psychological thrillers with an engaging literary style. The book was the first title in her best-selling Dublin Murder Squad series. French’s success has led to her being dubbed the “First Lady of Irish Crime.”

A nomadic childhood

From an early age, French was drawn to crime and mystery novels, particularly those of Agatha Christie and Patricia Highsmith. Her mother, Elena Hvostoff-Lombardi, worked as a translator. Her father, David French, was an economist whose work required the family to move often, giving French a nomadic childhood. Born in Vermont, she lived in several countries while growing up, including the United States, Italy, and Malawi. She has Italian, Russian, American, and Irish heritage.

Instead of seeking a stable career with financial security, French chose the fields of acting, writing, and archaeology. As she explained to The Guardian in an interview in 2019, “It’s not coincidence that a lot of writers—a lot of actors too—are third-culture kids” (a term for children who grow up in a culture different from the one in which their parents were born or raised). “Part of it is that we’re comfortable with the instability that goes with the arts life. We’re at home with the idea that you don’t have one solid job that lasts you forever.”

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List of Day Jobs of Famous Writers: • Tana French: Archaeologist

In the Woods and the Dublin Murder Squad

In 1990 French moved to Ireland to study drama and English literature at Trinity College Dublin. While performing in a play she met fellow actor Anthony Breatnach, whom she married. French loved the theater and supplemented her stage gigs with voice-over work. She did not begin writing seriously until she was in her 30s and working on an archaeological dig in between acting gigs. The dig site, which was located near a stand of woods, changed her life. During the dig, French found herself asking: What if three children entered those woods but only one came out, with no memory of what happened to the others? She began shaping the idea into a story. The resulting debut, In the Woods, won the 2008 Edgar Award for best first novel, among other honors.

Since 2007 French has continued to write crime and mystery novels, all set in Ireland. Her first six mysteries became known as the Dublin Murder Squad series. Unlike many other mystery series, each novel features a different main character, allowing French to explore a variety of points of view. The titles in the series are:

• In the Woods (2007)
• The Likeness (2008)
• Faithful Place (2010)
• Broken Harbor (2012)
• The Secret Place (2014)
• The Trespasser (2016)

Two of the novels, In the Woods and The Likeness, were adapted for a BBC television series called Dublin Murders (2019).

The Witch Elm and the Cal Hooper series

After writing The Witch Elm (2018)—a stand-alone novel that features a protagonist who takes on the roles of victim, witness, suspect, and even detective—French continued to experiment with her stories. In 2020 she published The Searcher, her first novel with a non-Irish main character: a retired detective from Chicago named Cal Hooper who settles into an old house in a small Irish village. The story launched a new series, which includes The Hunter (2024) and The Keeper (2026). As a departure from the Dublin Murder Squad series, the Cal Hooper mysteries focus on the complexity of rural Irish life through the perspective of an outsider and his often conflicted encounters with the locals and their traditions.

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Literary style and themes

Critics have praised French’s novels for their vivid settings, psychologically nuanced characters, and skillful dialogue. Her stories often feature lost or traumatized children, with plots that highlight the strange tricks that memory can play on victims and investigators alike. Much of French’s knowledge of police procedures comes from talking with a retired detective. She told The Guardian, “He answers questions I didn’t even know I needed to ask—about the atmosphere and about the way the dynamics work, and the power plays.”

In her novels, French not only explores what her characters do but also closely examines why they do it, with plot twists that abruptly change the mood, tone, and trajectory of a story. She is also adept at introducing a Gothic sense of dread in her stories, ranging from dark Irish myths to sinister animal mutilations, as in The Searcher.

French’s novels also often use the issues of class disparities and economic inequity in Ireland as a backdrop. Such themes arose from her having witnessed the rise and fall of Ireland’s “Celtic Tiger” economy in the late 1990s and early 2000s and the impact of Brexit, the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union (2020).

Personal life

In her personal life French prefers to keep her social media presence to a minimum. She has two children with Breatnach, an actor and film director who also serves as her first reader and editor. Admitting that her husband has the better eye for location and structure in a story, she told The Times in 2019, “I’m at home with writing character and with style, making a sentence I’m happy with, but structurally that’s what I’ve had to work hard at.” Although she still loves acting and the theater, she has said that she has no plans to write a play but prefers to keep working on novels.