{"id":42852,"date":"2025-07-06T07:57:12","date_gmt":"2025-07-06T07:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/42852\/"},"modified":"2025-07-06T07:57:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-06T07:57:12","slug":"dun-laoghaire-is-a-place-of-such-contrasts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/42852\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018D\u00fan Laoghaire is a place of such contrasts"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the front of the Royal Marine Hotel, the harbour town of D\u00fan Laoghaire <\/a>looks glorious under a summer blue sky. It seems the perfect idyll for the perfect life, which is why Dublin author Gill Perdue chose it as the backdrop for her latest crime novel. <\/p>\n

Sipping coffee with hot milk in the foyer of the Victorian hotel, a relaxed and chatty Perdue emphasises the impact the town had on The Night I Killed Him. It wasn\u2019t just the setting, she says \u2013 it drove the plot.<\/p>\n

\u201cD\u00fan Laoghaire is a place of such contrasts. You have the beautiful glittering marina, the boats, all the different yacht clubs, old Victorian buildings, the sunshine, but you also have a darker side, and in a way, that\u2019s what I\u2019m always looking for. And I wanted somebody who was living this wonderful lifestyle on the surface, but underneath, there was something darker going on.\u201d <\/p>\n

The \u201csomebody\u201d she refers to is Gemma Fitzgerald, a social media influencer around whom the story centres. She\u2019s not the hard-sell, vacuous type beloved of some dramas, but someone with a genuine connection to her followers, along with a beautiful home, a handsome yachting husband and an adorable young son. Her life is picture perfect, but she also lives with a dark secret about the disappearance of her golden-child brother, Max, 18 years earlier. And when his body is discovered, the tension created in this nerve-racking and pacy read is palpable. <\/p>\n

\"GillGill Perdue in D\u00fan Laoghaire. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw <\/p>\n

Perdue\u2019s first adult work, If I Tell, was shortlisted for Crime Novel of the Year at the 2022 Irish Book Awards, and was followed by When They See Me, in 2023. Both featured Garda specialist victim interviewers Laura Shaw and Niamh Darmody. The duo continue in The Night I Killed Him, which has attracted praise from a plethora of writers including Jane Casey, Liz Nugent, Jake Arnott, Andrea Mara and Marian Keyes. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Helping the traumatised to speak: The role of the specialist victim interviewerOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Perdue, who lives in Rathfarnham, Co Dublin, with her husband, has a particular skill for characterisation. Strong women are her forte. Shaw and Darmody are powerful and complex, as well as entertaining and relatable.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey each have their vulnerabilities, they have their complexities, they have their strengths, and they have their blind spots and weaknesses,\u201d she says. \u201cThey are just like me, my sisters, my friends, my daughters. They are very real.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their relationship is leavened with lighthearted banter, including when Shaw walks down a corridor in a green two-piece suit.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn board this aircraft there are six emergency exits, two doors at the rear of the cabin, left and right,\u201d Darmody says before their boss growls from his office.<\/p>\n

Perdue credits her sense of humour to her family, and the Aer Lingus joke to her brother.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven in the bleakest times, humour can keep you going,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\n

Michelle Obama was saying she had to have counselling \u2026 I was delighted to hear her say that<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Perdue on big life transitions<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Four-year-old Ferdia is compassionately drawn, due in part to Perdue\u2019s experience as a primary schoolteacher, as well as to her volunteer work for a children\u2019s helpline. It taught her a lot about children\u2019s struggles and how they spend so much of their time trying to please their parents. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really hard to find a single child whose main goal is not to just please their parents and make them proud. You can see grown men weeping when their dad says, \u2018You know you make me proud, son\u2019, so it is everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

She gave up the helpline when life took over. <\/p>\n

\u201cAs soon as I had kids myself, I found it much more difficult … It was like as if a layer had been taken off me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perdue works hard at her writing, but also puts much effort into the visible side of her career: the festivals and interviews, the book signings and social media presence. There was a point, though, before she rediscovered writing, when she felt invisible. She recalls her younger self who had heard of \u201cthe invisibility of the middle-aged woman\u201d, but had attributed it to low self-esteem and poor self-care. Then, when her children were small, she took a career break from teaching, taught dance part-time, and found she had become part of the \u201csandwich generation\u201d, raising teenagers and caring for elderly relatives.<\/p>\n

Her siblings were \u201cbrilliant\u201d and played their part, she says, but because she had more time, she could do more. And although she was happy to take on the role, she recalls always being in her car on her way somewhere or on her way back. <\/p>\n

She had written children\u2019s books in her 30s, and \u201csort of wrote\u201d during this generational caring phase, but found it difficult to carve out time. Her mother died in her 60s, then her grandmother and father died and, when her two daughters moved away, Perdue found herself \u201csuddenly in the empty house and floating around\u201d. <\/p>\n

\u201cI kind of felt invisible. I just felt like: who am I? What am I? To a certain extent, you are what you do. So what was I doing? I felt I had sort of faded and become invisible, even to myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

With that came a loss of confidence. It wasn\u2019t, she says, empty nest syndrome \u2013 the term applied to a sorrowful parent, mostly a mother, after children have moved away from home \u2013 because she had never defined herself through her children and was delighted they\u2019d gone out into the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut if you are keeping up your day job, and you\u2019re in and out of town and you\u2019re in your office workplace, and you\u2019re dealing with people, and they\u2019re adults … you\u2019re just operating in the world fully engaged … Your world can become very quiet when all that goes.\u201d<\/p>\n

She became shy and found it difficult to speak in front of people.<\/p>\n

\u201cI needed to put myself in touch with who I used to be. So what did I always love doing? Well, I always loved writing. And I thought, Are you going to call yourself a writer? Have you even finished one thing?\u201d<\/p>\n

This gave her \u201ca kick\u201d, and she told herself \u201cget out there and go for it\u201d. She began \u201cengaging with the world rather than hiding away\u201d. She invested in herself and took a summer school in fiction writing in London. At this point, in her 50s, she feared her classmates might think she was too old and ask why she wasn\u2019t taking up \u201cflower arranging or something\u201d. But it wasn\u2019t the case, and she wasn\u2019t the oldest student. <\/p>\n

Perdue mentions former US first lady Michelle Obama, who recently spoke publicly about the help she needed as a 60-year-old to \u201ctransition\u201d into a life after her daughters left home.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was saying she had to have counselling … I was delighted to hear her say that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Returning to the subject of her time in England, she smiles with pleasure.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a nice full-circle moment, because I stayed with my daughters in London, and went from the mummy minding them … to them going \u2018Now, look, I\u2019ll put the app on your phone\u2019, and telling me what stop to get on, and only stopping short of making my school lunch.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a special time in her life.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd writing gave me the courage to do that,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The Night I Killed Him by Gill Perdue is published by Penguin Sandycove<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From the front of the Royal Marine Hotel, the harbour town of D\u00fan Laoghaire looks glorious under a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":42853,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,33619,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-42852","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-gill-perdue","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114805227640594181","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}