Author interview: Popular crime fiction writer Jo Spain

Her latest novel 'The Trial' is a big-pharma medical thriller with a different kind of trial

Fri, 14 Jun, 2024 - 15:00

Marjorie Brennan

The Trial
Jo Spain
Quercus, €18.99

Jo Spain is an industrious writer of popular crime fiction and television scripts, most recently of the popular detective series Harry Wild. This interview is an opportunity to take a breather, she says.

“I’m just drinking my tea. This is a break, chatting on the phone with you. Although I’ve just finished the first draft of another script, so the pressure’s off.”

She may be prolific, but the writing doesn’t always comes easily. She says her latest book, The Trial, was particularly difficult; the fact that it was her 13th hadn’t escaped her attention.

“I was literally doing it and thinking, ‘I’m not the sort of person who believes in luck, am I?’. And Dave [Logan, her scriptwriting partner] said, ‘You do realise you bless yourself every time you see a single magpie?’, and I was like, ‘Oh, yeah’.

“It was the hardest one to write, I will say that. I think because of that, I have the least expectations going into it and I’ve been really taken aback by the early reviews.”

I felt a bit of pain when I was writing it and I don’t know if that slipped in, even unconsciously, because people are saying they’re getting very emotional reading it.

The protagonist of The Trial is Dani, who returns to her alma mater, St Edmund’s, a decade after her boyfriend, medical student, Theo, vanished when they were both students there.

Dani’s mother has Alzheimer’s and central to the story is the development of a drug to treat the disease.

It is a subject with which Spain is well-acquainted — the book is dedicated to her grandmothers Maureen and Julie, both of whom had Alzheimer’s.

She says that many readers have approached her to tell her about their own experiences of the disease. Spain was conscious of writing about a subject that has touched so many people.

“You’re still taking something that’s very sensitive for people and you don’t want to be sensationalist or using it cynically.

“I have been through it — and it was distressing in a different form each time it happened.”

Underscoring The Trial is the theme of corruption and Big Pharma.

It was a subject that Spain thoroughly researched, which she admits to sometimes enjoying a bit too much.

I remember, for my first book, my editor saying the trick with research for fiction is to do it, to know it, and then not to batter your reader over the head with it.

“I remember reading the first draft and thinking it was like a medical thesis on Alzheimer’s; it was a deep dive. Everything was fictional — I’d made up the wonder cure from what I could figure out from the science.

“A friend who works in pharmaceuticals, who shall remain nameless, proof-read it for me and said, ‘you’re very close to what is actually happening’. Then, they gave me a lecture on how pharmaceuticals can be quite good.”

She also took inspiration from the show Dopesick, the television series that tackled the subject of the opiate crisis in the US and the role played by the pharmaceutical industry.

“I did a lot of research into what these kinds of drug companies are up to.

“It was just as we were coming out of covid, and I was one of the first people to line up for my covid vaccine — but I was thinking if you spent enough time in this world you would start to become very sceptical … but I’m over that now.”

Now that The Trial is out in the world, Spain is focusing on scriptwriting, which she enjoys for the variety it brings to her work.

“With the books, I try to carve out time where it is just me. I’d be percolating on something for a while and then I’ll say to everyone around me, ‘I’m just going to get this draft down, I need a month’. Then I can sit with it for the year and edit away.

The TV work is so much more collaborative; you spend most of your days in production meetings.

“It gives me a nice balance, I get to do the work where you have wrap parties and a bit of a social life, which is glamorous, but I also get to do the writing, and it’s just my words on the page and my name at the front of the book.

“Not everyone has that, so I’m appreciative of it, even though I don’t know how long I can keep it going.”

Spain and Logan have adapted The Boy That Never Was, a thriller by Irish author Karen Perry, which will be shown on RTÉ in the autumn.

She says that while the perception may be otherwise, it is a great time to be a screenwriter here, with a growing appetite for Irish content.

“Our actors are punching above their weight and that’s brought an attention to Ireland. Now the world is coming to Ireland and asking, ‘What else do you have?’.

“RTÉ isn’t a massive budget broadcaster, but they are really conscious that if they have homegrown talent, they can sell it abroad.

“There’s an ambition and an energy there, and hopefully we’re going to see lots more of that in the years to come.”

Spain is also working on an Irish and Australian co-production of a drama called Mix Tape.

“It will film here, doubling for Sheffield, because the teams here are so brilliant to work with. As Ed Guiney of Element Pictures has said, Ireland is having a real moment, so there’s no shortage of work.”

The third series of Harry Wild, which is set in Ireland and stars Jane Seymour as the titular lecturer turned detective, will be on screens soon, and Spain is currently working on season four. She says working on the show has been one of her career highlights.

“Jane Seymour brings a kind of magic to set, but she doesn’t bring an ego and that filters down.

“We have a ball — myself and Dave were over in LA for two weeks in October; she put us up in her mansion in Malibu.

“When you meet a woman in her early seventies who is still so successful — there’s always something there. She has fought for that career.

“She would tell you stories that would make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. People think I have a good work ethic — she’d run rings around me.”

Growing up in difficult circumstances

Spain has previously spoken about growing up in difficult circumstances in Belcamp, near Coolock in Dublin.

She says that sometimes she does have to remind herself to stop and reflect on how far she has come.

“For every show that’s made, there are potential ones we’ve been working on that haven’t been green-lit yet or have just died.

“You can spend your days caught up in the misery or treadmill of rejection when you should really be celebrating what has gone right. Every now and again, you have to stop and say, ‘Look at this’.

“And me, particularly, because I grew up in Belcamp, I’m thinking, ‘how did I get here?’. I know I worked for it and I won’t ever stop working, but it is one of those moments when you think, ‘this is a leap, this is an intergenerational leap for me’.”