Author Steve Cavanagh’s signature conman-turned-lawyer returns in mystery novel Witness 8

Steve Cavanagh. // photo by Emma Gornall

Irish mystery writer Steve Cavanagh’s books are thrilling adventures, wherein the twists and turns of the plot are only outdone by the writer’s ability to craft characters who hook you in with their three-dimensional motives and behaviors.

It’s best demonstrated by the Eddie Flynn series, which returned this week with the release of the latest book, Witness 8, wherein the conman-turned-lawyer must reckon with the question, “What if the witness was more twisted than the killer?” as he defends an innocent man accused of murder on Manhattan’s wealthy Upper West Side.

In addition, later this summer Atria Books will put out two more of Cavanagh’s Eddie Flynn books heretofore unreleased stateside: Fifty-Fifty and The Devil’s Advocate, in June and August, respectively.

We hopped on Zoom to speak with Steve Cavanagh from his home in Ireland about the series and his writing process.

The Pitch: With all of your Eddie Flynn books, you don’t have to go all the way back to the start of the series to get it. It’s like Law & Order, where you can just drop in and enjoy it on its own without having to know the whole series. Was that something you had planned from the start or is something that’s evolved as the series has gone on?

Steve Cavanagh: No, that’s something I’d planned from the start. As soon as I realized this was going to be a series, I thought about what kind of series it would be. There are some series of novels where you really have to start from book one and go on so you get the full flavor of the character and there’s maybe an ongoing story, you know? Some books, there’s 25 pages at the start–“Here’s all the stuff you missed out in the first loads of books that you need to know before we go any further”–and I didn’t want to do that.

Lee Child is a big inspiration for me. I love you can pick any Jack Reacher book up and read it and you’ll instantly get to know that character and you’re not feeling as if you’re missing anything out, so that’s what I wanted to do. You can pick up the books in any order and you’ll have hopefully the same reading experience, if it’s your first time reading one of my books or if you’ve read them all.

As someone who is based in Ireland, how do you get New York City so right? I’ve never lived there, but I’ve been there quite a bit and your books nail it. What’s the research like, to get that realism into your books?

Not as much research as you might think. I wrote my first three Eddie Flynn novels, all set in New York, without ever having visited the United States and people said to me, “Oh, you really got New York.” I went, “Yes, thank you, I’ve got away with it.”

I think New York allows me to cheat a little bit. If I had set the books in Denver, I would have to go through quite a bit in explaining to people what Denver’s like, this is who lives there, this is the demographic, this is the streets and the culture and the pace of the city and everything else, whereas I don’t really need to have to do a lot of that for New York, because even if you’ve never been there, you feel as if you know that city.

It’s so iconic. You’ve seen it in so many movies. You’ve seen Ghostbusters five times. You know what New York is like. All I have to do is tap into your already pre-existing idea of what that city looks like and the pace of the city suits the pace of the books. Occasionally, I’ll throw in a little detail about the city or things like that, which maybe even some New Yorkers don’t know, and that really lends good authenticity to the books.

One of my favorite facts is, if you’ve ever been through Central Park–and I find it quite disorientating going through Central Park because you don’t always know where you are because it’s so vast–you can tell exactly where you are in the city by looking at a lamppost, because there’s a four digit code on every lamppost in Central Park. I love little things like that. So yeah, I managed to get away with it. I’ve been to New York several times now and spent a lot of time in the city and in the courts, so I know it a lot better than when I started off.

In your Eddie Flynn novels, you present viewpoints from a good number of characters. Knowing what the villains of the piece are doing feels as though you get to be that much more excited watching Eddie and his team sort out how this all happened. It feels kinda Columbo. Is that accurate?

Yeah, you’ll know some information with Columbo. You knew everything, which is the genius of that series. You know exactly how the murder was done. And then the thing is, well, can Columbo catch up? In my books, you may not know exactly how everything was done, but you’ll see the villain. And again, this is most of my books. The first three books, you didn’t. The first few, it’s all in Eddie Flynn’s perspective, but I wanted to widen that out so you can get more of flavor of the villain and get into their psychology.

A lot of it’s based on Hitchcock’s bomb theory of suspense. In my books, you’ll know there’s a bad guy and he’s doing bad things and you’re thinking, “Oh, what’s going to happen here?” and then you’ll see Eddie and you’re hoping he catches up to the villain. Hitchcock’s bomb theory of suspense is two people are sitting in a room at a table, talking about baseball for two minutes, and suddenly there’s a bomb under the table. The bomb explodes and the audience is shocked for a couple of seconds because they weren’t expecting it.

His bomb theory of suspense is you do the exact same scene, but before the two people walk into the room, you see someone walk in and put a bomb under the table and set a timer and then walk away, so for the whole two minutes they’re talking about baseball, the audience is getting more tense and more tense and say, “Look, there’s a bomb on the table. Can you not see that? Are you not going to look at the table?” and then it builds and builds and builds and then the explosion. That’s what I try to do. As much as my books are kind of courtroom thrillers, to me it’s all suspense, and that’s what I try to bring into the books, and that’s one of the techniques I use.

The book we’re talking about, Witness 8, the craziest part about it is, you know from the start that someone has murdered someone and Ruby saw it happen, but you don’t know who the murderer is. And, in addition to the whole murder mystery, there is this really great analysis of falling from financial and societal grace. What made you want to at that aspect of New York for this book?

I wanted Ruby to be a sort of a spider in a cupboard somewhere. I wanted someone who had access to that society, but who was not seen as part of it. Kind of not seen at all. I thought, “Well, who are those people?” and for those high society people, it’s what they call their help. The nannies and the maids and the cleaners who go in to clean their houses and do their laundry and paint their walls or whatever. They don’t really notice those people.

But with Ruby, they all trust her because she used to be one of them, so that it gives her an incredible position of power in some ways because they’re not looking at what Ruby’s doing and Ruby can know exactly what they’re doing. She has access to their diaries or calendars. She can read their mail. She knows everything about them. And when you have someone like that, who is so twisted and devious, that gave me a lot of opportunities for suspense. But the trick was, how was I going to play Ruby? Is she going to be a pure villain?

I think there are very few pure villains. I’ve written one or two of them, but I like a lot of my characters to have nuance, so parts of the book, I want you to feel sorry for Ruby when she is excluded and downgraded. I think that that’s more interesting because it’s not just a character for you to hate or loathe. You feel sorry for them even though she does horrendous things. I like having you feel a little sympathy for the villains sometimes. Makes them more rounded characters in some ways, making them more real.

When you’re world-building versus your standalone novels, what makes a story or a plot idea something that you want to be part of the world of Eddie Flynn, and what makes it something that might stand on its own?

It depends. I have lots of ideas and sometimes those can be Eddie Flynn books. Quite often, I’ll look at a story that everyone knows. I might think the ending, the climax of that story, there’s a lot more story there. What if you use the ending as a jumping-off point for something else? I think that can be interesting to me because a lot of novels or detective books, you’re looking at the crime and the investigation right up until we catch the person responsible and quite often that’s where my book starts, where they’ve caught someone and now I’m looking at the other end of it.

I’m looking down a different lens. Sometimes it’s a crime, which I think there could be a good trial there. There’s good stuff for Eddie Flynn. Other times, I have ideas that wouldn’t fit into a courtroom and for me, they’re standalones. I enjoy writing the series. Sometimes I just get compelled by another idea, and again, I’m influenced by writers I admire.

Michael Connolly started off writing the Harry Bosch books and then he had an idea which wasn’t a Bosch book. That was The Poet, and that broke out a lot more than the Harry Bosch books. He learned a lot as a writer from stepping outside the series. I think every time I just stand alone, I learn more. It’s perhaps a muscle that I haven’t used before. And that’s maybe something I’ve learned, which I can bring back to the series, so it depends on the idea for the book and that they’ll dictate what it is.

A character such as Eddie Flynn, who is a former con man and one might say still kind of one–does it does it help to have a character who operates in a morally gray area in in terms of what he considers to be appropriate or is that also just what a lawyer is a lot of the time?

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. In many ways, he’s a strange lawyer because he’ll only represent people that he believes are innocent which is not a good business decision for most lawyers, especially in New York. A lot of lawyers would have no clients if that’s the way they operated.

I look at it in a way like a David and Goliath type scenario. You have a broken justice system, which is heavily weighted in favor of the prosecution and the state. How do you balance that? I think you have to have a character who’s on the side of right, and they will use any means necessary to balance those scales, including cheating, lying, and conning their way to justice. I think that’s an interesting way to do it. You need someone who doesn’t play by the rules. It makes him a more interesting character.

He has a very strong moral code, so he will always do the wrong thing for the right reasons. With Eddie, there’s no grey area, really. You know he’s not going to do anything that’s going to hurt anyone innocent. He’s not going to do anything against someone who is a good person. He will battle who he believes are enemies for what he thinks is right. It’s a question of centering that moral code with the reader so they know he’s on the right side, and then they’re happy for him to lie and cheat and con his way to justice. Trying to fit a scenario into that framework is always interesting.

Steve Cavanagh’s Witness 8 is out now from Atria Books.