'We were lucky we got home': Cork author on new book penned during pandemic

Some books are like a profiterole - one gobble and they’re gone.

But this is not the case with Cork author William Wall’s latest offering, Writers Anonymous, a multi- layered thriller more akin to a mille-feuille, a deliciously layered confection to be savoured with a coffee.

Set during the covid pandemic in an imagined West Cork location, loosely based on Schull with the Fastnet Rock in the background, this page-turning thriller brings the reader right back to those unsettling days, to a time when the sale of masks soared as lipstick sales plunged.

But this is so much more than a thriller set during the covid era.

The emotional resonance of those days, the fear, uncertainty and anxiety is also central to the plot, as well as being palpable to the reader.

The story unfolds with a lightness of touch and wonderful linguistic compression giving rise to many moments of humour as well as an urgency to know what happens next.

The tale unfolds around the character of Jim Winter, an acclaimed author, who, finding himself fighting off the boredom of lockdown, decides to share his skills by setting up an anonymous online writing group.

Each participant, hiding their true identities from behind a computer screen, sends him chapters of their work-in-progress over the weeks. Right from the start, the writing of one group member, a woman calling herself Deirdre, stands out head and shoulders above the rest.

Her book within the book is set in the summer of 1980 in a West Cork fishing village where the body of 17-year -old Mattie Lantry is found murdered in the local cemetery.

To Jim’s great horror, as more and more of Deirdre’s chapters arrive for him to read, he realises that her ‘novel’ is actually set in a time and a place which he himself knows well, and set in the actual village where he grew up.

Deirdre’s writing exactly describes his own schoolfriends, and to his astonishment, he reads about one character which describes even himself. He finds this realisation incredibly unsettling, and one which shakes him to the core.

Jim knew Mattie Lantry well, whose murder is described in Deirdre’s book. He re a friendly neuro-divergent lad who lived with his grandfather.

Among his many gifts, Mattie enjoyed reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, recalling every single detail of what he read.

Sadly, as often happens in real- life his uniqueness made him a target for the local bullies, and his fate was to be tragically murdered at the tender age of 17, but who did it?

As Deirdre’s story unfolds, Jim becomes increasingly more disturbed, wondering who this woman could really be and how she could know so much about his past and Mattie’s story.

He feels almost on the verge of paranoia, thinking that she surely knows him, while he is none the wiser as she hides behind the anonymity of the computer screen.

What is her motivation to slowly prise the lid off a huge Pandora’s box, ready to expose a secret which he had hoped would never, ever be revealed, one which he had worked all of his life to repress?

Jim finds himself needing nerves of steel to pretend that he does not suspect anything in order for her to keep feeding him her story. He is compelled to figure out who she really is, and how much she really knows about Mattie’s murder.

During a reprieve in the pandemic restrictions, Jim decides to visit his holiday home in the fishing village where he grew up and where Deirdre’s story unfolds, so he heads off with his wife Catherine on a quest to unearth the truth of who the anonymous writer can be.

“Nothing’s impossible on the internet,” remarks Catherine at one point, and indeed this observation is ever more pertinent to this day.

The masking and hiding behind screens is a feature of modern life, and a particular tool of choice for bullies, and this was seeded to a large degree during the pandemic.

“I think the far right gained traction during the pandemic, starting with the mistrust of science, and being able to hide behind a computer screen gave an added impetus to their hate-filled attitudes,” author William Wall tells me, from his base in Italy, where he was when the pandemic first started five years ago. It was such a strange time. As soon as I began to hear the reports on the news, I knew that we had to get back to Cork as soon as possible.” he recalled.

“We quickly packed up our home here, and travelling through Italy by train to catch the plane in Rome was one of the eeriest moments I have ever lived through.

“The normally crowded trains were empty and the usually crowded streets of Rome were deserted. We were lucky that we got home to Cork just a few days before lockdown.

“I started writing this novel during that time and my research took me to reading about previous plagues.

“It helped to reassure me that tracing and lockdowns actually really worked when I read about how Italy had managed to curb the spread of infection as far back as 1630 when a plague hit.”

In Florence, they thought that the plague was as a result of ‘foul air’, so they cleaned up the sewers and septic tanks, and eventually tracked the origin of the plague to a chicken seller that came to the city, so they kept up the tracing and isolating people in their homes.

They provided food for the people and thus the poor in Florence were better fed during the plague than they usually were.

“In Milan, where they didn’t use tracing or isolation, the incidence of infection was 46% compared to Florence, which was only 12%, proving that those methods actually worked.” William said.

Writers Anonymous is brimming with these juicy pieces of historical detail, making it a very stimulating read, as the character of Jim Winter goes on his own trajectory of exploration as well as trying to unmask the mysterious character of Deirdre who knows way too much about him.

Whatever else he does, Jim must not let his own mask slip.

Writers Anonymous, by William Wall, will be launched in Cork City Library, as part of Cork World Books Fest, with an introduction by Liam Ronayne, on Tuesday, April 22, at 8.30pm. Entry free.