Trillium Meeks interviews Conor McAnally, author of “Bullets in the Water”

Conor McAnally is a Renaissance man of the media world, having produced television shows, worked as an investigative journalist, starred in plays he wrote, and published short stories. He has won awards for many of these pieces. I was asked to review his debut novel, Bullets in the Water, and became so engrossed in it that I was late for work. So, I jumped at the chance to talk with this Irish icon.

Trillium Meeks: Why Texas? I ask because I live in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, and we talk a lot here about how Ireland and Appalachia are parts of the same mountain range, and there are a lot of cultural similarities if you look in those litter hollers and mountains. I wondered if there was a similar connection with Texas?

Conor McAnally: There’s a whole host of reasons, and I’ll run them down as quickly as I can for you. First of all, I’m married to a woman from Austin, Texas. So, I lived in Austin, or the environs of Austin – Bastrop, Lakeway areas – and Austin since 2004, and we still have a home there. So that’s kind of one. Two is the earliest photograph I’ve been able to access of myself, other than the really ugly baby photos, is one of me sitting on a tricycle, with a cowboy hat on, at the age of three, with my sturdy plastic six guns strapped to my side and a toy Winchester in my hands, ready to go out and track down the bad guys. I’ve always had, from early westerns and everything else, an affinity for Texas. Thirdly, there is actually quite a large connection between Ireland and Texas, historically.

I actually named every character in the book after the original colonists that Stephen. F. Austin had brought in. I just changed up their first and last names, a lot of the time. But all of the characters have connections with the first colonists that arrived. And the protagonist, Mike Carson – Carson is a Northern Irish name, in fact.

TM: Do you often use historical data like that in your stories?

Connor McAnally

CM: Yeah. I like to kind of have a ring of reality around the fiction, if I can. I suppose it comes from my background as a TV and newspaper journalist. I’m kind of a fact-based guy. I love to write fiction, but I like to have real things that either people can relate to.

TM: Right. That sense of reality that doesn’t make you jump out of the story and go “wait, that’s wrong!”

CM: Exactly! Especially on historical stuff, those details have to be right. And you can’t afford to get any of those little bits wrong, because people will jump out of the story and go “hang on a minute!”

TM: Right. And I will say that I’ve not been in Texas for any real length of time since I was about fifteen, but it definitely painted the picture very vividly, and I felt very much like I was sitting in the places I’d run around as a kid.

CM: I’m glad; that was the intent.

TM: That kind of flows into my next question, because I was going to ask if you could talk a little about your writing process.

CM: My process comes from something factual. There are two murders in this book that are very similar to murders that happened in real life. When we were living in Bastrop, Texas, a newspaper carrier was murdered about a mile and a half from our house on North Main Street. It was one of those weird things – police were called out, there was a car off the road, run into a tree, people thought it was a traffic accident or something, or somebody had had a heart attack. And it was only when they found this poor woman, and pulled her back from the steering wheel, they realized she’d been shot in the head. It’s a murder that was never solved. It’s believed by all of the police sources that I have, that basically she came upon a pair of drug dealers who had just ripped off another drug dealer and were waiting for retaliation and confused her with them and shot her. And I think everybody in the police force knows who did it, but they can’t seem to prove it. So, that was one that kind of sat in my brain, as those things do. You kind of go, “something as innocuous as throwing out the Statesman or the Bastrop Advertiser can get you dead.” In spite of you being, you know, a very hardworking mother with two jobs, looking after your kids as a single mom, you can get killed.

TM: I remember when that happened, because the incident actually made national news.

CM: The other one was a year earlier. There was this strip mall built outside a place called The Colony. Which was a fairly upscale development, outside of Bastrop on the way to Austin. It was completed, and it was pristine, and it sat there for ten years, and never, ever had a tenant. Which was very, very weird and odd. A woman was shot dead in her car, in the car park of it, either late one night or early one morning. It turned out, by two guys who were contract killers, who were hired by a policeman who was her boyfriend, but was married, and she was pregnant. He didn’t want to have to deal with that. And, he hired two guys to shoot her. That has been solved. The two killers and the cop went to jail as a result. But those two things – I mean, I was not used to murders growing up in Ireland, and certainly not by gun violence – those two kind of, in a sense, fairly innocuous, but dreadfully deadly occurrences sat in my head. That is combined with the whole issue around water in Texas. You know that water is the new oil, and that as Texas continues to develop, water is getting to be a scarcer and scarcer commodity. So, if you add those two things with that, and then add in a layer of good old boy corruption on top of it, I think you’ve got yourself a story; and that’s kind of where the genesis of it came.

TM: Was there anything that surprised you that was different about writing a full-length novel than writing short stories or plays?

CM: Absolutely! The biggest thing was – and I mean, it’s such dodgy, writer-y thing to say – but the biggest surprise was when Mike went in a direction I didn’t expect. You’re like “How does that happen? I’m making this up. How did he decide to do that?” But it comes out of your pen on the page, and you go, “Okay, I guess that’s what he wants to do.” That I found extraordinary. I’d never come across that before. Also, I think you can bring a bit more depth and a bit more nuance to all the characters in a novel in a way you can’t in a short story. You can get a fair amount of nuance in a stage play, but you don’t have that internal stuff. It’s all dialogue. So, those were things I found interesting, new, and exciting.

Trillium Meeks

TM: This is a very tight novel. There’s not a lot of fluff in it, there are not many extraneous scenes that you could cut, and have the story still make sense, right? Which I’m sure flows out of that background in writing short stories, because that medium also is very tight, and there’s not a lot of room for fluff. But there were two things that stood out to me as being interesting choices to include in such a tightly wound narrative. The first one was Mike’s arc with AA and his friend Sam telling him that “you’ve got to go to a meeting with me” and dragging him there. That seemed like it wasn’t necessarily vital to the story.

CM: Mike has a whole bunch of things going on. One is that he’s had a huge amount of success early on in his life. He’s having, if you like, second album syndrome. He’s not able to recreate that success, in the same way, and becomes desperate to recreate it. That pressure starts to push him down the road of drinking and cutting corners. He’s gone so far down that road that in order for him to come back to where, in a sense, he started, as the good idealistic, straight shooter type of guy – he’s got to deal with both of those issues. And if he doesn’t deal with the drink first, the drink will not allow him to deal with the rest. That struggle is kind of an internal version of the struggle he’s having with external forces.

TM: The other thing that really stuck out as kind of a loose piece floating there – and I’m wondering if this means we might get a sequel – was his runaway sister who supposedly died…but there’s no grave.

CM: Indeed! We will meet the sister.

TM: Okay, so we can expect a sequel.

CM: Yes, ma’am. Actually, there’ll be three in this series, to start anyway. The sister is really important in it and plays a major role in another story.

TM: Excellent. I will definitely look forward to reading those. I really appreciate you taking the time to sit down and talk with me about it.