Catherine Ryan Howard on her new book and her dreams of living in East Cork

Catherine Ryan Howard has a string of bestselling crime novels to her name, and the pandemic-inspired ‘56 Days’ is about to get a streaming adaption. She talks to Aoife Barry about her latest thriller – and her dreams of owning a home in East Cork

Catherine Ryan Howard at The Fitzwilliam Hotel, Dublin. Picture: Bríd O’Donovan

“I think especially over the last couple of years, I’ve really reasserted my stance: that the only thing I can do, the only thing I’ve control over, is what I write,” says Cork crime and thriller writer Catherine Ryan Howard, as we chat over a cappuccino in a Dublin hotel bar. 

“I need to keep writing the kind of books that I want to read. And so even if everything goes to pot, at least you can say ‘I wrote the book I wanted’. But it’s difficult sometimes to maintain that ideal.”

Warm and chatty, with a steely determination beneath her gregariousness, Ryan Howard is both an ideal champion for her own books and a champion of other writers. She’s a straight talker who makes it her business to understand how the publishing industry works, and is clear-minded about her career. She knows what she wants to do, but she’s also aware that not everything will go her way.

We’re in the glitzy Fitzwilliam Hotel bar to talk about Ryan Howard’s latest thriller, Burn After Reading. Those who have read any of her eight previous books, such as 2023’s The Trap and 2021’s 56 Days, know that she excels in twisty-turny thrillers that you’re willing to relinquish sleep for. 

In Burn After Reading, a young writer named Emily is tasked with jetting to the US to ghostwrite the memoir of a man named Jack Smyth, who has been accused of the murder of his wife. Smyth protests his innocence, but is he really innocent? And what is it about her own writing career that has Emily so anxious?

The spark for the book in part lies in the story of OJ Simpson, the late American athlete who was charged with the murder of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman in 1992. His legal trial took place under the glare of the media, and OJ — to the surprise of many — was found not guilty. 

The seed for Burn After Reading was planted when Ryan Howard watched the documentary OJ: Made In America, and in particular a scene featuring Pablo Fenjves, who was Simpson’s ghostwriter for a notorious book called If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer.

“What I love about this story is, when you’re a crime writer you’re constantly being told by your editor, ‘you can’t have coincidence… that’s too far’. Pablo Fenjves was a witness for the prosecution in the trial,” says Ryan Howard. 

“He’s telling a story in this documentary about how OJ was all hypotheticals: ‘Well, I would have gone here, and I might have done that’. And then when they get to the night of the murder, he slips into ‘and then I went…’. [Fenjves] talks about this moment where they both fall silent and they’re looking at each other, and they both know the truth of the situation.” 

Ryan Howard didn’t want to write about OJ, or indeed about real people. 

“But there was something about the idea of the ghostwriter in a room with a guy who everyone thinks murdered his wife, and he says he didn’t, and this is his way of getting his side of the story out there. And then I started thinking, what if it was an inexperienced ghostwriter? What if it was a woman?” 

She also set the bulk of the book in the fictional town of Sanctuary, inspired by her fascination with Seaside, Florida. It’s an eerily perfect, master-planned community that was the setting for The Truman Show, and which she visited three years ago for her 40th birthday.

Catherine Ryan Howard: I need to keep writing the kind of books that I want to read. Picture: Bríd O'Donovan.

A lot of Burn After Reading is about who people really are, versus how they want the world to see them. 

“We all are the hero of our own lives, and we all do what we think is right,” says Ryan Howard. 

“There’s no serial killer walking around going, ‘I’m a serial killer, I’m a terrible person’... They don’t feel that way, they have a justification for their actions. As a crime writer, one of your first tasks when you start a new novel is: what story is this person telling themselves? And I think when people are in the public eye, it’s even more fascinating.” 

She also thought about this from her own perspective, as a person in the public eye. People might think they know her from her Instagram account (“I’m on Instagram way too much,” she laughs), but in reality, they don’t. She finds this funny, but also unnerving. “I’ve actually pulled back a lot on putting anything up. I want to be an international woman of mystery,” she says with an implied wink.

Knowing herself so well means Ryan Howard is able to be honest about challenges she has faced. It transpires the writing process for Burn After Reading wasn’t an easy one. “This was a very difficult book to write, because I was having a sort of crisis of confidence,” she says. “The ending of The Trap was exactly what I wanted to write, but it proved to be quite challenging for some readers.” (Some even sent her emails about their unhappiness.) 

While she asked readers to “meet me on the page”, some would have preferred things a bit more straightforward. She wrote Burn After Reading during this time, as she wrestled with whether to “sand down the sharp edges” of her work.

“The book I’m writing now, my confidence is back and I don’t care if anyone likes it,” she says (she adds that her team have given it the green light). 

Though Burn After Reading is associated with a stressful time, Ryan Howard says: “I’m proud of it, but to me it’s more straightforward and I think I pulled back on some of my ‘having fun with structure’. But there’s also a lot in this novel that I love — particularly the whole Seaside, Florida setting. I had fun writing this novel. I would put it with Distress Signals and The Liar’s Girl, which are my first two books and which are more straightforward. I sort of go mad every three books — and that structure is holding.” 

The reader wouldn’t realise Burn After Reading contained such challenges, and it’s rare to hear an author be honest about difficulties writing a book. But it is very much in keeping with Ryan Howard’s approach. She’s in the industry for the long haul, so understands that every book presents its own challenges. 

After self-publishing two non-fiction books, she published her first work of fiction Distress Signals in 2016, and soon became part of a large and growing community of female crime and thriller authors. This support undoubtedly helps her through the tougher times. 

“It’s vital to have people you can complain to, or moan to, and celebrate with. Because when something good happens, there’s so few people who have seen everything that it took to get to that moment. So it’s great to have them,” she says.

Many of her writing peers are female, and Ryan Howard is very attuned to gendered differences within the publishing industry around how authors are treated: “It’s the age-old thing of when a woman writes about family it’s ‘domestic’, and when a man writes about family, it’s ‘universal’, and he’s telling us something new about life,” she says, rolling her eyes. 

She tells me she has stopped smiling in photographs, as her male equivalents are not asked to smile. “I’m delighted today we have the wonderful [photographer] Brid [O’Donovan], who I know is not going to make me smile,” she says with relief.

Among her other bugbears is literary snobbery, and people thinking genre writing (like a thriller) is lesser than literary fiction. “If I had sleeves, I’d roll them up,” jokes Ryan Howard as she prepares to outline her thoughts on this. 

Catherine Ryan Howard: I sort of go mad every three books — and that structure is holding. Picture: Bríd O'Donovan.

“I think it’s foolish to say all books should be treated the same, because there is absolutely a difference between literary fiction and what we call commercial or popular fiction. It’s undeniable. What I write, I am trying to entertain people. But [Never Let Me Go author Kazuo] Ishiguro is trying to tell me how to live. It’s different. What bothers me in this country is it’s like there’s a sorting hat. And sometimes you get to the top of the queue and you’re going to be put into ‘literary darling, worthy, serious’ [section], or you’re going to be put over here into ‘pile up high in [a bookshop]’. And sometimes I’m confused about the sort, and the result of it. Sometimes there is a novel that the Irish sorting hat literati decides is literary fiction, and it is a crime novel.”

Ryan Howard is proud of what she writes, and says the issue isn’t crime novels like hers needing to be taken more seriously. 

“The issue is that sometimes in this country, a crime novel — just because of who’s written it and published — it’s lauded as literary fiction, and treated totally differently. And the crime novelists are sitting there going, ‘Jesus, if you like that, we’ve got this whole thing over here, but you’ve ignored it’.” 

Perhaps this is in part why she says that resilience is much needed when you’re a full-time author. “There’s rejection in this job every day of the week in various forms. So you just have to be incredibly resilient. And I think I’ve learned that I want this so badly, I have that resilience. There’s certainly been times where I have started to second-guess myself.”

Staying true to herself is a core part of her life. For example, Ryan Howard has never wanted children, and it was her desire to be a writer that showed her the desire to be a parent just wasn’t in her.

“I knew from the age of eight what I wanted, which was to do this job. And in some ways, that’s been uncompromising to the point of I might have been better off if I wasn’t so singularly focused on it. But I’m lucky to have known what it feels like to want something,” she says.

Staying focused has had clear results. Her bestselling book 56 Days captured readers during the pandemic, and is now being made into a TV series by Amazon Studios, starring Dove Cameron and Avan Jogia. Ryan Howard is not writing the script. 

“I am delirious to relinquish control,” she says. The series deviates in some ways from the book, and was filmed in Montreal, standing in for Boston. Ryan Howard visited the set and is sworn to secrecy on what she saw, but will divulge it was “surreal” seeing the filming take place.

Ryan Howard has been based in Dublin for many years, but her heart remains in Cork. “My dream is to buy in East Cork but to keep renting in Dublin so long as I can afford it,” she says, as we finish up after an hour of chatting.

“I do love being in Dublin, and I love that you can go to all the book events. Cork has a great literary scene too. But I do love being in Dublin, and I love the anonymity of it… I cannot leave the house in Cork without someone who knows my mother seeing me.” 

There’s another laugh before she heads off to have her photographs taken. No smiling allowed once the lens is on her, even though Catherine Ryan Howard has plenty to smile about.

• Burn After Reading by Catherine Ryan Howard, published by Bantam, is out now