Murder-mystery novel set on Lough Derg
The quaint countryside, the idyllic lake waters, the historic scenery - Lough Derg might be breathtakingly beautiful, but to Cormac Quinn’s creative imagination, everything about the location just screams murder-mystery. And the more you listen to him, the more he makes sense.
“It just seems like the perfect place,” the Kildare man remarks, reflecting on the childhood summers he spent next to the lake in Dromineer. “A close-knit community of characters, where everybody knows each other. There’s also a lot of history in the area - people don’t forget.”
Amiable and well-spoken, the former journalist has just published his debut novel, 'Murder on Lough Derg', a twisting, multi-layered tale which tracks the adventures of another journalist, Jack Myers, as he seeks to uncover the truth behind a mysterious drowning incident on the lake during a particularly acute summer heatwave. It sounds like there’s a hint of Hercule Poirot to Myers’ character, perhaps blended with a hint of Cormac himself, but make no mistake, the inquisitive protagonist is entirely original. Cormac conceived both him and the storyline back in 2023, while living in Madrid with his wife. He had a bit of time on his hands so he said he’d start trying to write a book. “One page quickly turned into ten,” he explains, and after a couple of months he had composed a first draft.
Looking back, Cormac was probably always destined to write this kind of a novel. He describes himself as “a lifelong devotee of detective fiction,” who developed an interest in the genre “much earlier than he should have.” He wasn’t just attracted to Agatha Christie either. He read extensively, and loved the mental process of figuring out complex plot-lines.
“It was probably the puzzle element of it - you have someone commit a crime and then you’ve a set of clues and a set of characters and a range of motives. Then you’re trying to work it out as you go,” he says.
Journalist and foreign editor
Listening to him speak, it’s clear that Cormac always had a literary streak. A psychology graduate with a post-grad in law, he could have chosen any number of different career paths. Curiosity brought him travelling to China, and it was there, far away in the Middle Kingdom (as China is sometimes called), that he evolved into a journalist.
“When I arrived in Beijing I had never really met a journalist before, but there are actually a lot of journalists in Beijing and I noticed they were all living really interesting lives, cool lives - going off around Asia and that. So I got interested and started writing freelance, kind of chancing my arm really,” he recalls.
Eventually he ended up getting a job as a correspondent with the Global Times - one of the two main English-language newspapers in China, alongside the Daily Times. He subsequently progressed into a role as a foreign editor with the paper. All of this happened early in the reign of Xi Jinping, who came to power in 2012. China was undergoing the first of Mr. Xi’s infamous corruption purges at the time (he launched another one recently) and Cormac remembers witnessing first-hand how social life changed in the city, how the elite class suddenly stopped dining out in lavish restaurants and the culture of systematic corruption began to ebb.
At another point, in 2014, he found himself amid the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, covering the series of protests that spawned the “umbrella movement” - a political movement so-called because protestors used umbrellas to shield themselves against the tear gas being deployed by police. After that, he was dispatched to Myanmar where he reported on the election of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese Nobel laureate who effectively led the country from 2016 to 2021. It was during that visit, however, that he witnessed the plight of the Rohingya people, a stateless Muslim ethnic group who were persecuted in a violent military crackdown in western Rakhine state. For Cormac, that was enough.
“I think it was at that point that I kind of realised that this wasn’t as much fun as I thought it would be,” he says.
Scorching summer of 2018
His novel partially takes inspiration from the scorching summer of 2018, when Ireland was undergoing one of its periodical summer heatwaves. The location took care of itself. He has a genuine attachment to Lough Derg and to Dromineer in particular, forged during childhood, and he says he’s very conscious that he’s writing about a real place. All the characters are, of course, fictional, so if you’re reading this and you’re from Dromineer, you can rest easy.
He is a gorgeously expressive writer, and that is evident from the few extracts of the novel that are available online. He is currently working on a second book, also featuring Mr. Myers. Asked whether he thinks “Murder on Lough Derg” might be listed for the Booker Prize (one of the leading international literary awards), he laughs. It wouldn’t be the first novel set around these parts to gain global recognition. There’s just something about the place that lends itself to storytelling and fiction.