How Irish storytelling sensation Jo Spain became a writer

Bestselling writer Jo Spain. Photo / Supplied

Bestselling Irish author Jo Spain launched her career by taking a chance on herself. She talks to Craig Sisterson about blue collar beginnings and visual storytelling.

After it had appeared out of nowhere, the visual lingered and niggled in Jo Spain's mind. A seemingly happy couple. The woman, post-coital, opens their door to surprise visitors. With badges. She doesn't understand what's going on. Behind her, her husband leaps off the balcony to his death. A single visual that sparked so many questions for the bestselling Irish author.

Why would he do that? What happened to cause it, what happens next?

As Spain spun that visual in her head, over and over in between caring for her four children and working relentlessly on various television projects, things "slowly but surely began to fill in". The husband was a policeman too, just like the men at the door. "Then the next chapter I immediately went to 'okay, so now she's in jail for her husband's murder', and that was in my head, nothing else," says Spain, as we discuss what sparked her tenth novel, The Perfect Lie.

"I couldn't resolve it, it was the most stupid, ridiculous conundrum that I could ever come up with," she says, with an easy laugh in her Irish lilt. "Which is how a lot of my books start, with the germ of an idea and that's it. I'm waiting for the kind of muse gods to come down and give me something else. It took months and months for that to kind of come together."

While Spain may mull on her ideas for months, before plotting out her novels with a few pages of bullet-points then cracking into the manuscript itself, that doesn't slow down her productivity.

The Dublin storyteller has been astonishingly prolific since breaking through with her debut crime novel With Our Blessing, a murder mystery set in the snowy Limerick countryside that introduced Detective Inspector Tom Reynolds and was partially set against the real-life horrors of the Magdalene Laundries; places where "fallen women" were effectively turned into slaves.

Spain was working at Leinster House – the Irish equivalent of the Beehive – as an economic advisor to Sinn Féin when life elbowed her to act on a dream she'd had (but thought out-of-reach) since growing up among poverty and alcoholism in the working-class suburbs of Dublin.

"I was working on economic policy when the IMF came to Ireland in 2010, so it was a real intense period," she recalls. "I liked it, but politics really consumes you, you know. Then my husband lost his job in the recession, we had three kids and were about to have a fourth, and I just thought 'what can I do to like not work 15-to-16-hour days in Parliament, maybe work from home and make some money?' So, I wrote this book. It sounds completely bonkers. I'd say to people now if you want to make money, there are easier ways. Sell a kidney."

Spain laughs. It's something she does easily and often.

But there's a steely focus and work ethic beneath her warm, engaging personality. A drive that's powered her rapid rise since she swapped politics for storytelling. The Perfect Lie is her tenth novel published in six years, and she's garnered awards nominations and #1 bestsellers while also breaking into and establishing herself as a television screenwriter during the same period.

"I am a fast writer, and I do get that – I mean I'm working on so much TV now – but there's a lot to be said for having to pay the bills," says Spain. Another laugh. "It's no longer something you do on the side where it's an artistic hobby, where you can put it down and come back to it. You've got to do it when you've got to pay the bills. I have no choice, like I've got kids to feed."

When Spain was working on the manuscript for With Our Blessing, she had no contacts in publishing. "I thought 'okay I'm going to write this and send it off to agents and get rejection slips and maybe I'll write something else', and I sent it to the Richard and Judy Search for a Bestseller competition." Out of thousands of entries, Spain's novel was one of seven shortlisted.

An editor at Quercus rang, offering a two-book deal.

"That was it, no agents, no submissions. I was amazed, I couldn't believe that it had happened for me. Then soon after the realisation came that I still had to stay in my job."

Spain says she wrote all the time as a child. But growing up in an impoverished Dublin suburb ala the setting of Roddy Doyle's The Commitments, saying "I want to be an author would be like saying 'I want to be an astronaut' it just didn't happen for people like me". Fortunately, Spain had teachers who told her she had talent with the written word, and stoked her love of books.

Spain earned a place studying politics and philosophy at Trinity College, "which was huge for where I came from, and I like worked two jobs to put myself through there", after which she worked as a journalist, unsuccessfully took on the sitting Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) in an election, then shifted into a role writing speeches and legislation at Leinster House.

In 2016, the year after With Our Blessing came out, Spain left her parliamentary job. She'd written her second book while on maternity leave, but after returning was working around the clock, with four kids, and trying to write as well. "I was like, I'm just going to quit my job for a year, we'll live off limited savings, and see what happens. I wrote two books that year."

One of those was The Confession, a Rubik's cube of a psychological thriller that like The Perfect Lie was also sparked by a strong visual: a man walks into the luxurious home of a banker and beats him with a golf club in front of his wife, before turning himself in to police. The Confession became a #1 bestseller and vaulted Spain into a new publishing stratosphere.

During that time Spain was also contacted by the Irish broadcaster, who loved her DI Tom Reynolds series and asked if she'd ever considered writing for television. "It sounds like a fairy tale now, but at the time I leapt off the cliff without a parachute," she says. "It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I just had to see if I could make it work."

Nowadays Spain is a full-time screenwriter who also manages to publish a novel or two each year. Her first crime drama, Taken Down, revolved around the death of an African migrant near a

Dublin centre for refugees awaiting asylum, and was hailed as "a major step forward for Irish television drama". Spain is now juggling various projects with a variety of European production companies, including an upcoming drama set in Lapland – a setting that's inspired her next novel, The Drowning – and an adaptation of her own Tom Reynolds books.

She says that one day she'd love to work on a Aotearoa-set crime drama.

"I think New Zealanders are very like Irish people, there's something in the dry wit, and a smaller nation beside a larger nation. I've been fascinated by New Zealand for years. It's always amazed me how you can be in one part of your country and have snowy mountains and in another hot beaches. Your writers have so much at their disposal – you could literally drop a body in ice on a beach and have people trying to figure out where it had come from."

The Perfect Lie by Jo Spain (Quercus, $34.99) is out now.