Today we're pleased to be Blog Tour Spot and host this Q&A with Shane Dunphy, whose gripping No Ceremony for the Dead is just out this month.
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Q: Tell us about No Ceremony For The Dead.
Shane Dunphy: The book begins with me giving a talk at a child protection conference and being approached in the Green Room afterwards by a young man whom I quickly realise has special needs. He informs me he attends a unit for people with intellectual difficulties, and that he and his friends are planning on murdering one of the staff there. When I ask why, he tells me that this person was responsible for injuring a girl who attended the unit so badly she ended up in a coma. And that’s just the start of what he did.
As I begin to investigate, I run into all kinds of opposition from the management of the unit, from the government department who run disability services (files are either wiped or missing; I’m informed the girl who was allegedly beaten never existed) and as I begin to get closer to the truth, I find myself falling foul of a couple of alt-right groups and a gang of Nazi Bikers. Which all point to the fact that things are very badly wrong in St Patrick’s Residential Home.
Q:What made you want to write up your experiences investigating this case?
SD: It is a case that offers so many unusual factors. In the telling I am able to explore ideas about how Irish folklore and mythology intersect with the often terrible treatment of people with Special Needs in our recent history. I’m also fascinated by the uncomfortable history Irish society has had with fascism and extreme right-wing politics, and this story gives me a chance to unpack some of that, too. Maybe most importantly, though, is the fact that in this story, the people with real agency, the ones who end up solving the case and bringing about a kind of justice, are the residents of St Patrick’s themselves. The whole point of the Stories From the Margins series is to shine a light on parts of our communities we normally don’t pay any attention to. No Ceremony for the Dead is a perfect example of that.
Q:What do you hope listeners take away from the audiobook?
SD: To understand that truth and reality are very subjective things. There are times in the story where I have no clue what is really going on, because I’m caught between conflicting perceptions some of the other protagonists hold, or have run up against concepts history has conditioned us to believe are true, concepts I learn are really just prejudices that really need to be overturned.
I’d like the listener to understand that very little about human interaction is simple or straightforward. There can often be all kinds of motivations at play. I suppose that the path I navigate to pick through those interweaving agendas creates the narrative of the book.
Q:How do you go about writing up your past investigative experiences?
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| Shane Dunphy |
Q:What surprised you most about writing this book?
SD: I found the character of Andrew Shelley, the man who allegedly beat the girl in his care almost to death, grew and morphed before my eyes as I wrote. I thought I knew him before I started writing, but as I began to craft the story, I started to understand that he was like one of those deep-sea creatures you see on documentaries, something that has assumed a shape to make it appear safe and unthreatening and can lie in wait for the unassuming to pass by, only then revealing the monstrous being underneath. As I wrote, I realised that I had seen the veil slipping several times and had witnessed what lay under it. It was actually quite a disturbing realisation.
SD: I found the character of Andrew Shelley, the man who allegedly beat the girl in his care almost to death, grew and morphed before my eyes as I wrote. I thought I knew him before I started writing, but as I began to craft the story, I started to understand that he was like one of those deep-sea creatures you see on documentaries, something that has assumed a shape to make it appear safe and unthreatening and can lie in wait for the unassuming to pass by, only then revealing the monstrous being underneath. As I wrote, I realised that I had seen the veil slipping several times and had witnessed what lay under it. It was actually quite a disturbing realisation.
Q: What are the challenges in writing true crime, particularly relating to your own experiences?
SD: I’ve been doing it for a long time, now, and have become used to doing the small tweaks necessary to ensure I don’t get sued. There are small things you can do to mask locations and individuals’ identities: never stating where a town is located, for example, means no one can say you were writing about where they live; if you’re writing about a family that in actuality has four kids, you say they have six; if a character is male, change their gender to female. Small things like that make all the difference. I’ve also learned to follow the advice of my legal team to the letter. Their job is to make sure I don’t get dragged into court, and in a writing career that now spans fifteen years and seventeen books, I’ve not been sued once, so I think playing it safe is working.
The other challenge is keeping the story as real as you can. It can be tempting to cast yourself as a hero, but I always try to keep as true to the reality of my actions as I can. Which means I have written about my running away from danger (in the very first scene of No Ceremony for the Dead I’m fleeing physical attack), I have painted myself as often being arrogant and intransigent in my views, and as being sometimes quite judgemental and rude. If you read my work, you’ll come across me puking, getting diarrhoea, drinking myself into oblivion to avoid pain, attending a therapist to cope with trauma, becoming frozen by fear, bawling my eyes out…. I try to put it all in. I want to be as human a protagonist as I can be.
It’s not always pretty, but it’s true.
Q: How did you find narrating the audiobook?
SD: I was very nervous and unsure about doing it at first. I visited Audible studios before doing the first book in the series, Bleak Alley, and was sitting having coffee alongside actors I’d been watching on TV only the night before, who were in to narrate a Dickens novel. I felt like a total fraud alongside them. But my editors were insistent I give it a go, and they were allowing me to compose music for the series too, which was an opportunity that was too good to pass up (I’m a multi-instrumentalist and have been performing live for years). In the end, I’ve come to quite enjoy the process. Through reading the book aloud, you almost get to know it from another perspective. And I like to do the voices!
Q: What do you think are the key messages of the Stories From The Margins series?
SD: We live in a world that can seem safe and secure, a world where bad things happen on the news or to people we hear about in podcasts. But every crime we read about on our social media is actually something that happened to a real person. It is a family devastated, a wife left bereft, children orphaned. These are stories with a real human cost. And they’re happening right where you live. ‘The margins’ are the housing estates and villages and care homes and alleyways you see all around you as you go about your daily life. You walk past and never look at what’s going on over there. I want to take you by the hand and lead you over and suggest you take a closer look. You might be surprised by what you see.
Q: Who are your favourite true crime writers?
Q: Who are your favourite true crime writers?
SD: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was probably the first True Crime book I ever read, and I think it is a work of genius. I love Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me – I think anyone interested in the genre should read it. And Irish crime journalist Paul Williams is a good friend of mine. He wrote The General, about Irish gangster Martin Cahill, which has been made into a couple of movies. Paul just published a book about Gerald Hutch, another Irish gangland figure who was dubbed "The Monk" by the press here. It’s well worth a read.
Q: Why do you think true crime continues to be such a popular genre?
SD: Because it tells us truths about what is going on in those shadowy places I mentioned. True Crime has become the modern equivalent of the camp-fire ghost story. The fact that these stories are all real and might be happening just down the road from where you’re reading this right now only makes them more compelling.
No Ceremony For The Dead by Shane Dunphy is available exclusively on Audible now.
Be sure to visit the other stops on the tour for more insight.
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