Amanda Cassidy: What life as a journalist has taught me about writing crime

Her debut novel Breaking was shortlisted for a prestigious CWA Dagger award, and this month Amanda Cassidy’s second novel, The Returned hits shelves. But how much did her life as a TV and radio journalist influence her crime writing?

Irish author Amanda Cassidy

My path to journalism began with a sliding door moment in the guise of our postman Johnny.

He delivered two fateful letters through the front door of my Dublin home in the same week. One was the offer of a job with the European Commission [I was a recent graduate of European Studies in Trinity College Dublin].

The second letter informed me I had a place as an intern in Sky News Ireland. After a stint in Brussels earlier that year, I already knew my heart lay in media communications.

After four years of academia, I desperately wanted the buzz and urgency of a newsroom to be the backdrop to my days. So, I chose Sky.

A month later, I was transcribing other reporter’s interviews, booking politicians into the studio, and heading out with the camera crew to get reactions to current affairs stories.

Two months later [still arriving every day in my suit just in case any of the journalists got sick and I had to cover] I was asked to hold the mic. A few weeks later, I even asked a few questions.

The three-month stint stretched into eight months, then nine months. One day someone from Sky Sports desk got sick so I volunteered to chase Nick Faldo across two fields in Leitrim to get a live interview. Ten months passed, eleven months… a year.

I reported live from the scene of a heartbreaking fatal bus crash in Navan, from the Pope’s visit, from Budget Day on the Leinster House plinth.

Over the following years, I tried to make myself invaluable, teaching myself to edit, to shoot, to produce, to hone my interview skills. 

I arrived early, stayed late and took a second job reading the news at Newstalk to fill in my knowledge gaps. I ended up staying there for over a decade.

I spent my days as a journalist reporting facts. In that world, there is no room for embellishment or hyperbole. Nor is there any need.

These heinous crimes, political scandals, or heart-breaking tragedies are other people’s stories to tell. But I couldn’t help carrying them around with me even after I left work. 

I’d wonder what life was really like for the people I interviewed after I’d closed my laptop and had driven home.

The human aspect of such harrowing news stories intrigued me. I was drawn in by how the whispers of a moment reported in the news bulletin can linger for generations. 

But it felt wrong to dwell on real crimes happening to real people. It felt indulgent somehow to imagine I was even capable of understanding those feelings.

So it made sense to channel it into fiction instead. It’s no coincidence that there are so many journalists writing novels.

Not only do we have a fantastic ability to meet deadlines, but we understand the importance of being concise and to the point.

Having a month for book edits when we had three or four minutes to scramble to get a breaking story on-air is a glorious luxury. 

Having a background in news also teaches editing discipline, an understanding of story structure and the habit of observation. 

Spending so much time uncomfortably close to some extremely difficult situations, means we don’t shy away from dark themes. Because not only do we know they exist, but we’ve seen first-hand how they shatter lives.

But being the master of my own pretend world feels so much safer now because I get to control it. I’ve been telling stories my whole life. First other people’s, now my own.

The opening scene of my second novel, The Returned begins with a mother frantically searching for her child inside the family home as it burns to the ground. 

Through the smoke, Nancy Wills fans the child’s bed, searching through the sheets for her son, but it’s empty.

For years afterwards, Nancy maintains that her child wasn’t in the house at the time of the fire at all. But nobody in the small community where she lives believes her. And then she sees her son in a playground.

Writing the opening chapter of The Returned was both extremely difficult and overwhelmingly cathartic. 

It brought back memories of my own personal experience – a house fire that destroyed our home when my daughter was just a newborn.

Nine years ago, we’d gone out for the day to visit relatives – to show off the new baby.

We had a two-year old and a four-year-old at the time too. I remember arriving back to see eight-foot flames coming from the roof of our house. Luckily, nobody was in at the time. 

But the memory of standing clutching the baby in my arms, trying to shield the other children from what was happening still gives me goosebumps.

For a long time, I dreamt about running into the burning house trying to find the children. For months I wouldn’t put the baby out of my arms. 

Luckily, we rebuilt, we moved on with our lives, but there were elements of trauma that I must have needed to get out of my system.

Writing has always been a way of processing the world. For me it started as sprawling diaries and evolved into bad poetry as a teenager. I’d write quirky comic books to friends who’d moved abroad. 

I kept meticulous travel journals when I spent time exploring Asia and Australia in my 20s. In my life as a TV journalist, I enjoyed telling stories through pictures. 

An old boss of mine once told me that radio is like theatre for the mind, so I always tried to write my radio news scripts descriptively; bringing in the weather, the setting, the dog’s name… anything to try and humanise the people behind the headlines. 

After my children were born, I channelled my writing into human interest features and parenting articles.

Then during the time of covid lockdowns, we faced our own heart-breaking family bereavement.

I found solace focusing all my energy on writing my debut novel Breaking.

Recently, after reading The Returned, the ten-million-copy bestselling author Lisa Jewell described me as “an unflinching storyteller”. 

And while I have never shied away from difficult themes, in this book I wanted to play around with other aspects too. I wanted to bring some new dimensions into the typically dark nature of the psychological thriller. 

The character of Ally Fields, the detective tasked with finding out what happened to Nancy’s child, offers these moments of introspection. 

Ally is 42 and heavily pregnant. She is prickly and closed off, but is assigned new detective Clarke Casey who is as delightfully optimistic as he is green. 

I loved creating their contrasting personalities and their relationship dynamic.

The end result isn’t a straightforward police procedural. It’s hopefully so much more. My overarching goal in journalism and in fiction-writing is to make the reader or listener to feel things. 

In the case of crime-writing, I want them to feel suspense and mystery. But I also want to bring the reader further into the lives of the characters I’ve created. 

I want them be invested in their emotional journey. In Ally’s case, as she gets closer to finding out what happened to Nancy’s child, some of the themes run pretty deep. 

When my husband got emotional reading the first draft of The Returned, I knew I might be onto something special.

I love words. I love rearranging them into stories that make readers’ heart race or break or swell with emotion. I love building worlds that draw the reader in and make them want to turn the pages.

I want the final words to have impact, so even after you put the book down, it lingers. I want to haunt you, to delight you, to frighten you. 

I want to make you cry and shiver and laugh… and care. I want you to enjoy a good story well told. I see it as a wonderful connection. Between the person telling the story and the reader. Between you and me.

So next time you watch something sinister unfold, and whisper in horror to the person next to you ‘can you even imagine?’ My answer is yes. And it goes something like this…

• The Returned (Canelo) is in bookshops now.