Culture That Made Me: Catherine Ryan Howard, Cork author
Catherine Ryan Howard recently published her fifth novel. Picture: Bríd O'Donovan
Born in 1982, Catherine Ryan Howard grew up in Grange, a suburb of Cork.
Her debut thriller Distress Signals was published in 2016.
Her fifth novel, 56 Days, won the crime fiction category in the 2021 An Post Irish Book Awards and was named by the New York Times in its best thriller of the year round-ups.
Amazon Studios/Atomic Monster are developing it as a TV series. Her latest novel, The Trap, is published by Blackstone Publishing
I persuaded my mother to buy me the movie tie-in paperback of Jurassic Park in Douglas Court on the way down to Garryvoe in the summer of 1993, a couple of weeks before the movie came out. I was barely 11 and so had to skip all the bits about genetics and chaos theory, but I’ve more than made up for it since by re-reading it at least once a year.
I’ve read it so many times now I know when a sentence runs onto the next page what it’ll say before I turn. I couldn’t believe – still can’t – that someone took blank pages and turned it into this incredible adventure, and better yet, that was his job. From that moment on I wanted it to be my job too.
I’ll never forget Oasis and the Prodigy at Páirc Uí Chaoimh in August 1996, which I attended as a 14-year-old without adult supervision thanks to an elaborate system of lies. My overriding memory is heading down Centre Park Road in my baby blue Oasis T-shirt, all excited, and encountering a man – probably only 17 or 18 himself, looking back on it now – who looked me up and down and said in the most condescending tone he could manage, “Wouldn’t Boyzone be more in your line?”
The exquisite Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt is a book that demonstrates that true crime isn’t the blood-splattered, sensationalised tabloid titles that people who don’t read true crime books think they are. I bought a beautiful hardcover edition of it in Bantry Bookshop during this year’s West Cork Literary Festival, as a gift from me to me.
I discovered Michael Connelly’s Void Moon in a bargain bin in Porters in Paul Street Shopping Centre in 1999. For the next two decades, I obsessively bought his new Harry Bosch detective book on the day of release and took it straight home to read.
For a long time I had a framed print of The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch from the Prado within sight of my desk – that’s where Harry gets his name and the painting features in my favourite Bosch novel, A Darkness More Than Night. Bosch felt like a real person I got to check in with once a year and the print reminded me to aim for that kind of character development in my own work. I passed Connelly on the street at Harrogate, a crime writing festival, last year and it took everything I had not to make a complete show of myself.
Reality TV has become such an enormous part of our culture that we can’t appreciate now how incredibly ahead of its time the movie The Truman Show was. It came out in 1998; the first series of Big Brother UK aired in 2000. It’s a perfect film as far as I’m concerned. Last year, for my 40th birthday, I did something I’ve wanted to do ever since I first saw it in the North Gate cinema: visit Seaside, Florida, the New Urbanist town where it was filmed. I stayed one street over from Truman’s house, which still looks exactly the same. It’s a fascinating place, I loved it.
I’m always trying to get people to watch The TV Set. It’s a little movie I discovered back when I was living in Florida in 2007. David Duchovny plays a screenwriter struggling to hold on to his artistic integrity and creative vision as his TV show gets closer and closer to getting made – but progress only comes in exchange for increasingly depressing compromises. Sigourney Weaver plays a network executive and it's honestly my favourite performance of hers ever.
I saw Hamilton on Broadway in New York a few years back and it was an incredible experience. A lot of people were confused as to what all the hype was about when they watched the recording released on Disney, but it was never meant to be seen that way. In the theatre, it was out of this world.
I’m not sure anything will ever beat The West Wing. I watched it as it was broadcast. I don’t know how we survived months and months between seasons. I still remember the feeling of watching certain episodes – Zoe getting kidnapped, Josh getting shot, the night Mrs Landingham got her new car. The reason it was so good was because it stood alone; now we are spoiled for choice with that kind of prestige TV.
Unbelievable on Netflix is a dramatization of a real case – the article it’s based on won a Pulitzer – and as far as I’m concerned it is the gold standard of how these things should be made. It’s so sensitively done; it’s about a serial rapist but there isn’t a single shot from his point of view.
The cast is predominately women, of all ages and sizes, with no Botox or veneers in sight. The first episode is very upsetting but it’s supposed to be. There’s a purpose to it. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
OJ: Made in America is the best documentary I’ve ever seen. Worth the seven-hour investment. Never has the question “Why did this crime happen?” been so comprehensively and thoughtfully answered.
I’m obsessed with Off Menu. It’s a comedy podcast hosted by British comedians Ed Gamble and James Acaster where they invite a guest to share their dream menu – but that doesn’t even begin to hint at the joy that awaits. There’s over a 100 episodes now so if you want some pointers on where to start, the episode with Alison Spittle made me cry with laughter in a public place. They’re coming to Dublin to do it live in November and I have tickets for both nights.
While living in Orlando – I was working in Walt Disney World – I got to do some amazing things, and one of them was seeing Bruce Willis perform live with his blues band in the Rocket Garden of Kennedy Space Centre. It was a Netflix-sponsored event; the evening began with an outdoor screening of Armageddon, which had been filmed on location.
