STAR INTERVIEW
MISSING INK
©Donna Ford
Any idea of writers as wafty, arty types sitting around waiting for the Muse to show up is blown away by the powerhouse that is Claire McGowan. In the decade since her debut, The Fall, was published in 2012, the Northern Irish writer has published a seven-book crime series, seven standalones and seven works of women’s fiction (writing as Eva Woods). She set up the UK’s first crime writing MA and ran it for five years. She teaches creative writing. Last year she published two books – adomestic thriller, Are You Awake?, and her first work of non-fiction. A true crime book, The Vanishing Triangle tackles eight murders of young women in Ireland that took place in Claire’s childhood. The murders have never been solved.
‘What is most amazing was that I’d never heard about them at the time,’ says Claire. ‘These disappearing women, how easy it was to slip down the rabbit holes.’
In a similar way that Hallie Rubenhold in her celebrated book The Five uncovers the life stories of Jack the Ripper’s victims, Claire has turned the murder victims in The Vanishing Triangle into people with relatable lives and identities.
‘I think The Five is very emphatically trying to discover the women and find out who they were. And with The Vanishing Triangle it was almost equally difficult to find out about these women,’ says Claire. ‘There was no Prolific crime writer and creative writing teacher Claire McGowan talks to Tina Jackson about disappearing women, the dangers of domestic life, and how it’s vital to her process that her tightly plotted books are written on the wing
information, pre-internet. People must know something. You wonder, where could the bodies be in such a built-up country?’ People going missing have been a long-term source of fascination to Claire. ‘In TV crime, cases always get solved. But they don’t, and people never know who did it. My whole early series was about missing persons.’ The Paula McGuire detective series involves a forensic psychologist who specialises in finding missing people.