Claire McGowan: Writing THE VANISHING TRIANGLE
Having been a novelist for all of my writing life – more than ten years now – it never occurred to me I would write anything non-fiction. That seemed like a world for other people, academics and journalists. Like most novelists, I’ve written the odd article to promote my work, but always felt much more comfortable in the world of the made-up. However, all that changed when I was given a chance to write a non-fiction, true-crime book. And I had the exact case I wanted to work on – the disappearances of eight women from an area round Dublin, in the mid-nineties.
I knew immediately this story would not have the neat endings and satisfying twists of a crime novel. With no bodies ever found and no evidence, the cases have remained unsolved, and I didn’t think there was a vital clue to be turned up. Instead, I had to write a different sort of story, one that was about Ireland’s dark past, about violence against women, police failures, and a culture of silence and shame.
I believe all these factors helped contribute to the disapperances and the fact they were never solved. I did end up identifying several main suspects and coming up with a theory of what might have happened, but the fact the cases may never be solved, let alone by me, was frustrating and very different to writing fiction.
I also found the writing process much more difficult. Whereas I can complete a novel in about six months, this book took me nearly three years and was constantly being added to as real-world events overtook it. Even now when it’s published, there are several developments I would add in if I could. The research also took a very long time, as I felt a great responsibility to try and get the details right. As I don’t have an investigative background, I made some approaches to the families of the missing women, but didn’t feel comfortable tracking them down or door-stepping them. Even though I do research my novels and try to make the crime bits realistic, I also feel comfortable changing things to suit the needs of my story, and the whole process is much smoother.
Most of all, I found writing a non-fiction book a much more emotional process. Some writers say they cry over their imaginary characters, but this has only happened to me once or twice. This was real-life suffering however, real families grieving and left in the dark for decades, real women who had likely been brutally killed. I found I had imposter syndrome – not being a journalist or expert, who was I to write about this? What if the families were hurt or offended by my work?
I even started to worry about my personal safety, after spending years researching the murders and assaults of women, often very close to where I’d grown up. Several high-profile murders of women in London and Ireland reinforced this feeling, and made me wonder if anything had changed at all since the nineties. Sadly, while cases may be more easily solved now thanks to technology, the violence still goes on.
On the whole I found writing a true-crime book very rewarding, and I feel I was able to bring these cases to light more, especially outside Ireland where they are generally not known about at all. I hope I was able to accurately sum up the cases and the women’s lives, and put them in the context of Ireland in the nineties, with its turbulent mix of religion and politics, and its dark history of misogyny. What I wasn’t able to do was solve the cases. But perhaps by keeping them on the agenda and jogging people’s memories, this can still happen in the future.
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Claire McGowan was born in 1981 in a small Northern Irish village. She is the author of The Fall, What You Did, The Other Wife, The Push and the acclaimed Paula Maguire crime series. She also writes women’s fiction under the name Eva Woods.
Find out more about her on her website https://clairemcgowan.net/
THE VANISHING TRIANGLE
From the bestselling author of What You Did comes a true-crime investigation that cast a dark shadow over the Ireland of her childhood.
Ireland in the 1990s seemed a safe place for women. With the news dominated by the Troubles, it was easy to ignore non-political murders and sexual violence, to trust that you weren’t going to be dragged into the shadows and killed. But beneath the surface, a far darker reality had taken hold.
Through questioning the society and circumstances that allowed eight young women to vanish without a trace―no conclusion or conviction, no resolution for their loved ones―bestselling crime novelist Claire McGowan delivers a candid investigation into the culture of secrecy, victim-blaming and shame that left these women’s bodies unfound, their fates unknown, their assailants unpunished.
McGowan reveals an Ireland not of leprechauns and craic but of outdated social and sexual mores, where women and their bodies were of secondary importance to perceived propriety and misguided politics—a place of well-buttoned lips and stony silence, inadequate police and paramilitary threat.
Was an unknown serial killer at large or was there something even more insidious at work? In this insightful, sensitively drawn account, McGowan exposes a system that failed these eight women—and continues to fail women to this day.
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