The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Murder Rule: A Novel by Dervla McTiernan

Episode Date: April 25, 2022

The Murder Rule: A Novel by Dervla McTiernan For fans of the compulsive psychological suspense of Ruth Ware and Tana French, a mother daughter story—one running from a horrible truth, and the other fighting to reveal it—that twists and turns in shocking ways, from the internationally bestselling author of The Scholar and The Ruin. First Rule: Make them like you. Second Rule: Make them need you. Third Rule: Make them pay. They think I’m a young, idealistic law student, that I’m passionate about reforming a corrupt and brutal system. They think I’m working hard to impress them. They think I’m here to save an innocent man on death row. They're wrong. I’m going to bury him.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, this is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. I hope you have your legs, arms, and everything in your seat. Stay seated until the captain has turned off the overhead light saying,

get the hell off my plane. Thanks for tuning in, guys. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. Go to Goodreads.com. I'm Fortress, Chris Fossy, everything we're reading, everything over there. Go to all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, the big LinkedIn group and the LinkedIn newsletter. That thing is killing it over there.

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It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book where

refined books are sold as well. Today we have an author on the show. She has got an upcoming book coming out on May 10th, 2022. So you've got time to pre-order that, baby, and you can be the first one on your block or book club. Whichever club you're in, you can pre-order that book. Maybe that's like

I've invented something new. What is a book? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I'll work on this later. Anyway, one of those jokes is you got to put in a card file and come back to it. She is the author of the newest book coming out. It is called The Murder Rule. It's a novel that you'll want to check out that's going to be really interesting.

We have Dervla McTiernan on the show. She's Irish, so there by the name, but she lives in Australia, which makes her accent even more confusing. But she is an international number one bestseller. Her first two novels, Ruin and The Scholar, I think that's the story of my life, critically acclaimed around the world. Dervla has won multiple prizes, including the Ned Kelly Award, Davit Awards, and Barry Award, and International Thriller Writers Award, and has been shortlisted for numerous others. Dervla's third book, The Good Turn, went straight to number one in bestseller charts, confirming her place as one of Australia's best and most popular crime writers. Welcome to the show. How are you? I'm great, Chris. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you very much for coming all the way from down under. So give us your dot coms where people can find you on the interwebs or get to know you maybe a little better on those social media sites. Oh, I'm so easy because everything's just DervlaMcTiernan.com. So Dervla, and I'm at DervlaMcTiernan on everything. So D-E-R-V-L-A McTiernan.

There you go. And so what motivated you to write this book? Oh man, this book started with a newspaper article I read a few years ago about a young Irish law student. So I don't know how many of your listeners would be familiar, but in Ireland, this tradition goes back a very long time. Irish university students can get a visa called a J-1, which allows you to go to the US to work for the summer. And we all go, you know, we go, we work for the summer, we earn our college tuition, we come home, we have a hell of a lot of fun along. Mostly we get jobs as chambermaids and waitresses and all the rest of it. But this young law student, she went and she volunteered for the Innocence Project for her summer, which was pretty amazing.

And when she came back to Ireland, she couldn't let go of the case that she'd been working when she was in the States. So she kept working it, she kept making the phone calls. She ultimately tracked down a detective who'd retired or a policewoman who'd retired, who pointed her to some pitted evidence, evidence that had been hidden by the prosecution from the defence in this original case. And because of her work, a man had spent more than 20 years in prison was released. It's an amazing story, you know, because I'd been a young Irish law student. I spent my summer in Bar Harbor having fun, you know, I sure as hell didn't do anything as impressive as this. So it kind of stuck with me for a while, but it wasn't, it didn't feel like a story.

It didn't feel like there was a story there for me to write. You know, it felt like the story had kind of been told. And then a few years later later i came across the article again i did a little bit more digging it turned out after she found this evidence which proved his innocence it took another five years for the case to be heard wow by the time he was released he'd been 22 years in prison there were three years left to run his original sentence you know i started thinking like why was it the case that all the original articles i read presented this in such a kind of a an inspirational light you know this really clean story when the actual story was much darker more complicated and it made me

think well you know maybe the editors preferred the cleaner view or maybe what if the innocence project had like a pr team and they kind of pushed the more inspirational story? And I had no reason to think that, except that I was trying to think of reasons. And that made me think, OK, what if you're a really good person in the world? You're trying to do really important, really good work, but the world just doesn't care. We're living in a very noisy world now. It's hard to do things that matter. What happens if you take a tiny ethical step off the black and white line? And then what happens if you take the next little step off and then the next

little step off? Where could that lead you? And that's where I thought there might be a story to write. Ah. So what made you title it The Murder Rule? I'm thinking of a few ideas, like don't tell them where you hide the bodies, always use a shovel and lie without uh and pay cash so that you don't have a receipt at home depot what what is the murder rule i feel

like you can you tell us we're still working on the details coming out the murder rule refers to the felony murder rule which is a weird piece of law which says that if you commit a felony and a death occurs when the felony is happening you can be found guilty of murder which kind of flies in the face of everything i was taught about criminal law when i was a student which was that you know to be criminally to be legally responsible for an act you have to have two things actus rea and mens rea actus rea meaning you have to actually carry out the act yourself and mens rea meaning you have to have intended to do so and that intention thing is important that's why we have murder and manslaughter they're two different things you know

accidents are different to intent but felony murder has resulted in some really weird prosecutions like for example there was a situation where a guy carried out an armed robbery right he was caught he was arrested he was placed in the back of the police car by the policeman, and he was in handcuffs when the policeman shot his accomplice dead. And the guy in handcuffs in the back of the police car was convicted of felony murder and sent to prison. Not for the armed robbery, but for the felony murder. There was another very weird situation where a young man was asked by his

friend if he could lend him his car. The guy who wanted to borrow the car did say something about he was going to drive to this woman's house and he wanted to get his stuff back. Some stuff that she had. So the guy said, yeah, yeah. Okay.

You can have my car. He went home, went to bed, fell asleep and he was arrested and charged with felony murder because the friend who borrowed the car drove to the woman's house, broke in, gotten to a fight with somebody and killed them as a result of that. Because they said, well, you know, you knew he was going to break into this woman's house and therefore you were guilty

of committing a felony by facilitating that and therefore you're now guilty of felony murder. But it was also these really weird outcomes where people who actually pull the trigger end up sometimes with lesser sentences than those who did not. It's a weird branch of law, and it worked for the book for a lot of reasons, but the main one being one of the things I wanted to look at was, you know, where does the responsibility lie? Like how foreseeable do the outcomes of your acts have to be before you're considered responsible for them? Wow.

That sounds a bit boring, but it's a buried theme, put it that way. So how would you categorize the book? How is it categorized? I think it's a buried theme, put it that way. So how would you categorize the book? How is it categorized? I think it's a thriller, really. You know, it's a story that moves pretty quickly. And I wrote it, you know, my primary aim always is to entertain people. Like I go to fiction for a good story. I want to disappear from the world for a while.

And so that's what I want my readers to have first and foremost. But, of course, everything you care about in the world ends up in your books when you're a writer, doesn't it? So there are layers, I think. So definitely a thriller. Let's see, what are some other aspects of the story that you want to tease out to readers that they'll find interesting about it? Well, I think the basic story is, it follows the story of Hannah Rokeby. Hannah is this young, idealistic law student, and she joins the Innocence Project on the eve of their biggest case. You know, they're trying to save an innocent man from death row. And on the surface, Hannah is she looks like exactly what you'd expect her to be, you know, really bright eyed, bushy tail, kind of keen to make a difference in the world.

But if you scrape beneath the surface, she's a lot darker and she's a lot more complicated. She has her own agenda. And that was really what drew me into writing the story because I love the idea of writing this young woman who is kind of unafraid, you know? I mean, she's a bit messed up, to be honest, at the beginning of the story, but she's sort of unafraid. And that's very different to the person I was. I used to be a lawyer a long time ago for quite a number of years. And I was very much a kind of a box ticking kind of person. You know, I was the eager to please person at that stage in my life and kind of trying to do everything according to the rules. And it took me a long time to grow out of that and realize it's not a very satisfying way to

live your life. If you're spending most of your time thinking about what other people think and want, it's hard to figure out what you want yourself. And it's very hard to be brave. And so Hannah, for me, is sort of a bit of wish fulfillment, which if you've read the book is going to sound a bit weird because she is a bit messed up, but I like the fact that she knows what she wants, that she's not afraid to go after it. That's pretty interesting. So why did you choose to set the book in the United States as opposed to maybe doing it in Australia? Yeah, that's a really good question because my first three books were set in the West

of Ireland where I'm from, you know, and it probably would have seemed like the natural next step would be to write one in Australia because I've been living here now 11 years. But I think first of all, it had to be an American story because it was based around the Innocence Project, which does exist in other countries, but in its purest form is probably in the US. And some certain elements of US law are more relevant, you know, it's more relevant to the story to set it there. And then I spent a summer working in Bar Harbor, as I mentioned earlier, on my J1. And I just had really strong memories of that place that i always wanted to bring to a story and then as well as i have a good friend who always writes her books

in cities she wants to visit and then she can go on research trips to new york we have a few authors that do that on the show they're like yeah i secretly put it in england so i guess i don't why am i setting everything in galway i I go to Galway anyway. I'm going to write it in Virginia. I've never been to Virginia. I want to go check that place out. Oh, yeah. Honestly, yeah. That's the thing to do and I had a very successful practice until I didn't when the economic crash hit in 2007 and it hit Ireland really really hard I don't know if people realize how bad it was there I mean house prices dropped 30 40 percent which which seems like okay that seems bad but when you look at little isolated pockets, you can see it was even more dramatic than that in places.

Like I'll give you an example. My husband's from a small town in Sligo. And before the crash, there was a little housing development, developed there, 22 houses. And I think the first one sold for 230,000 euros. And after the crash, all of the rest of the houses, the remaining 24, 25 sold for 240,000 euros, like all of them together of the houses the remaining 24 25 sold for 240 000 euros like

all of them together oh wow one go so people i mean you couldn't sell your home people lost jobs every every family at least one person lost their jobs if you kept your job you took a massive pay cut taxes went up it just became very very. And I had my clients, a lot of my clients lost everything down to and including family homes, you know, and so I worked for a few years through that. People couldn't pay their bills, which meant it was hard for me to pay mine, but you had to kind of try and keep getting through it. But after a few years, we were so worn down by it. You know, you can imagine people losing everything. There were a number of suicides and it was just a really, really rough time. And by the end of it, you know, I just said, I never, ever want to practice law again.

I just can't do this work. And my husband had been working, he was a civil engineer. And we just said, look, let's make a big change. Let's just go somewhere completely different, do something totally different. So at the time, you could get visas for Canada or Australia.. Canada was only offering really short visas, like a year or something. And we had a two-year-old and a baby on the way. And I just said, we need a slightly more permanent option. So we got permanent residency in Australia and we were trying to decide where to go. My husband had spent a year backpacking here, but I'd never been to Australia. So it was between Brisbane

and Western Australia. And Kenny said, well, you can decide, Derv, never been to Australia. So it was between Brisbane and Western Australia. And Kenny said, well, you can decide, Darv. It's your call. The only thing I will tell you is that in Brisbane, the cockroaches can fly. So I said, fine, part that is. It's scary. So we went to the West. Yeah, that's the other thing I tease all my friends about Australia.

It's like I'll see pictures of the spiders there and then all the koalas have chlamydia or something. It's like, I'll see pictures of the spiders there and then all the koalas have chlamydia or something. It's like, what's going on down there? And like everything down there can like kill you. Or give you chlamydia, I guess. When you're Irish and the worst

you have to worry about is getting soggy all the time. And every second creature is poisonous. It's a bit of an adjustment, though, right? Yeah, I mean, the spiders can leap or something. I'm surprised anybody can even inhabit that place.

Yeah, it's messed up. The first time when we moved house, we were moving stuff into the garage, and I moved a box. And the spider, big spider with a big bulbous back came running out. And I went, whoa! And I moved a box and the spider, big spider with a big bulbous back came running out and I went, and I dropped the box on the spider. And it was,

what was on the back was all its babies. Oh man. Mother spider got squashed. Babies did not. And the next thing is like a hundred tiny spiders running everywhere. And I was like, that's it. We're back in the plane.

We're done. Yeah. You don't want to, you just burn the house to the ground and start over. That's what you do there. I had that happen one time. I moved into a new house and it sat for a while and there was like a spider. It looked like, I mean, it looked like one of those bad ones, the brown recluse, whatever. And I kind of half squashed it and I was squashing it with some tissue paper. So it wasn't quite squishing, you know, tissue papers was giving. So it wasn't quite squishing. You know how tissue paper was giving?

So it was giving on the squish. And as I'm trying to squish it, like you say, like a hundred of the little baby spiders. And I was freaking out going, if those guys make it to the cracks in the wall, they're going to be hunting me like those old stories of like, you killed my father. I am prepared to die. I'm prepared to die. Yeah. So you've done really well selling books. You've sold 400,000 copies of your books in Australia and New Zealand alone.

Bribery. Bribe the booksellers to put your book up front. I have no idea. Is that legal? I don't know. I don't know. I guess I have a really supportive publisher I mean Harper Collins were really supportive of the books from the very beginning and that makes a huge difference because

like we said earlier like it's a noisy world and there's a lot going on and you know brilliant books are written every day they go out into the market and they just don't get their chance because they think you know there's just too much going on so you need it you need a publisher is really behind you and they were really behind me and I don't know their chance because they think, you know, there's just too much going on. So you need a publisher who's really behind you. And they were really behind me. And I don't know, something about my first book, The Ruin, just seemed to capture people's imagination. And it got into the top 10, which was, you know, beyond my wildest dreams. And then The Scholar got into the top five. And then The Good Turn went to number one. And I'll never forget that moment. You know, I was in a bookshop in melbourne we were doing the tour at the time and got the phone call from my editor and my me and and alice we were around the corner in alleyway like jumping up down like little girls

it was just it was amazing it's been a really crazy and exciting ride yeah and you have an interesting story about getting your first book deal and what was going on in your life at that time yeah it was a crazy time chris because i was we came to australia our little boy was born five weeks after we landed you know it was we had a rough few years trying to get back on up on our feet again and um around 2014 like i i didn't want to practice as a lawyer anymore you know i kind of tried to move on from that but i still found i was doing a lot of contract type stuff. So I was thinking, I really need to do something different. I seriously considered doing an MBA at night for five years.

And I said, what am I doing? I couldn't think of anything worse than doing an MBA at night for five years. Why am I even thinking about this? So I decided, right, I'm going to try and write. I'm going to be serious about this. I've always wanted to write. So I started writing at night, 7.30 to 9.30 every night, two hours, except Thursday, which is wine night. You don't mess with that.

It's going too far. And then around 2016, I entered a Twitter pitch competition, which I don't know if your listeners would be familiar, but when you're trying to start it as a writer, sometimes they have these Twitter pitch competitions where you pitch your book in 140 characters is all you have at the time. If an agent likes it, it means they're sort of saying, yeah, this sounds interesting. Send me your first 50 pages. We'll see how you go. So I did that

and life went on and I was having a lot of headaches at the time. My husband was saying that this is not normal. You need to go see the doctor. And I was saying, yeah, it's perfectly normal. We've got two young children. I'm not sleeping, inevitable. So I didn't think much of it, but it was one Friday morning, really early, 8 a.m. We were supposed to go see the doctor and I was saying yeah it's perfectly normal we've got two young children I'm not sleeping inevitable so I didn't think much of it but it was one Friday morning really early 8am we were supposed to go down south with friends and I went in to see my GP well it wasn't my GP it was just a GP I could get an appointment with to pick up test results

and I could kind of tell she was nervous as soon as I went into the room and she just said Darla you have a brain tumor and it's really bad and you need surgery. And have you not noticed that you've, have you lost any peripheral vision yet? And this is just going to keep growing and ultimately it will be fatal. So you have to have surgery. And I was like, okay. And she just kind of turned to her bookshelf and she took down her physician's desk reference and she paged through it until she found neurosurgeons. And she wrote the names of three neurosurgeons on a yellow post-it note and gave it to me and said now whichever one of those will see you first is the surgeon that you need to see and I would think less than five minutes I think after I went into

the to the surgery I was back out in my car in the car park with my little post-it note my phone and all I was thinking is I can't go home make these calls because you know what small children are like as soon as you make a phone call, they suddenly want your attention. They come running. So it was like, I better do this here. I started Googling their names to find their telephone numbers. And as I was doing that, my phone buzzed with an email from that literary agent in the US saying, I've read your first 50 pages and I love them, but you send me the full manuscript. Wow.

Which was like a dream come true because I knew what it was like for authors. And when I sent out the book I was really hoping for a personalized rejection because that meant that the agent thought there was some potential in your writing you know I sure didn't think she'd be excited about it so I drove home and found my husband and his parents were visiting from Ireland at the time so I kind of took him upstairs and closed the door into our dressing room closed the door and I said okay look there's good news and there's bad news. And he said, all right, give me the bad news.

And I said, well, it's a brain tumor, but there's a literary agent. And, you know, it's just stupid. I think I was just in denial about it, you know, and then he was very upset. And I just kept saying, you know what, Kenny, like if you'd been in the room with the doctor, you'd know this is just a bit mad. Like this isn't right. There's something about this that isn't right. I don't think she's got it right. But I got her to send me the radiology report

and I've emailed it to my sister in Ireland as a doctor. But of course it was like 3 a.m. there. So I was like, look, let's go down south anyway. And when my sister Aidan wakes up, she'll tell us what's really going on here. So we piled the dog in the car and the kids in the car and we drove our three hours south. and never forget, I was at a restaurant called Clancy's Fish Bar, walking around the golden retriever outside when my sister woke up and called me and she was like,

yeah, it's not good. It's not good. And that's when reality sort of started to hit. Wow. That's crazy. And so this, you had the surgery and you're here with us today here with us today so i had three weeks in the end between that diagnosis and the surgery and the first surgeon said he couldn't do the surgery because he'd have to move my brain in a way that would be too damaging and then the next surgeon said of course not a problem he's a very funny guy he'd just come back from quite a long time in the US where he'd been involved in some really cutting edge surgery. And he'd just come back to person. His brother, it's not a very elegant story, but instead of having to do a craniotomy and move my

brain, they went up through my nose. So his brother was the ear, nose and throat surgeon, and he was the brain surgeon. And they were hilarious, both of them. So they kind of gave you a lot of confidence. And then I was in hospital for about 11 days and I was at home getting better for about 10 weeks before I could go back to work and by about week six I so I spent those three weeks when I was prepping for surgery sending my book out to loads of literary agents because I was still sort of in denial and I was also distracting myself and thinking well I don't know what's going to come of this I don't know if I'm going to survive this and I'd like to to have sent my stuff out in the world and see what could have happened so luckily for me I came through and

then by about week five I think I was at home and the first I got the first email saying I'd love to set up from an agent saying I'd love to set up a Zoom call. And I said, Kenny, I can't, I can't have my first conversation. I just had brain surgery and my next book is going to be amazing. So I didn't want to admit that this had happened. So we did the Zoom call. I wore outrageous amounts of makeup and I was very perky. And then I slept for about 26 hours afterwards. I did confess later, but I just, just couldn't have that as our first conversation, you know, because agents are looking for people who want to write more than one book, and I didn't think it would instill confidence.

Oh, yeah. But, I mean, that's crazy. But what a great ride, and I'm so glad that you made it here to where we're at today because, you know, we've got these wonderful books now you're putting out, so that's always awesome. So a great story all is well that ends well in the end and uh now we've got your great books to go over give me your plugs

your dot com so we can find you on the interwebs so i'm on twitter and instagram and facebook and it's all at jarvla mctiernan so d-e-r-v-l-a mctiernan is m-c-t-i-e-r-n-L-A. McTiernan is M-C-T-I-E-R-N-A-N. And my website is jervlamc tiernan.com. There you go. Guys, go order the book. You can check it out. The Murder Rule, a novel coming out May 10th, 2022. Thank you very much for being on the show. It's really appreciate you coming by. Thank you so much for having me, Chris. It's really fun to talk to you. Thank you. And we'll look forward to your next book too, as well. Also with my audience, go to youtube.com, Forge S. Chris Foss, hit the bell notification button.

Go to goodreads.com, Forge S. Chris Foss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there. All of our groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all those different places. Thank you for tuning in. Be sure to stay safe. Be good to each other. We'll see you guys next time.