 Now this is Around the Northwest 4 at Tuesday afternoon and Jane Cassidy is a singer and writer and broadcaster from Kilkeeland County Down and she's lived in Belfast, mind you, since her student days. Spends a fair bit of time here in Donegal as well as a place up in the Ruskell Peninsula and she started her music career in the late 70s playing in a folk duo with her brother Frank after she graduated from Queens. She'd said to go solo because Frank chose to take up a teaching job, but she toured solo around Europe, many countries around Europe and she released some solo albums. Her second album actually had a song that came third in the Eurovision Song for Ireland would you believe 1985 and it was 1988 that she sang the same song on New Faces which at the time would have been the X Factor of its day. In fact it's every bit as big as the X Factor in its day but she combined singing with other work first as a supply teacher then as a radio and TV presenter. She had a weekly folk music program on Downtown Radio and presented a different musical series for BBC Radio Wallster. She also recorded three collections of children's songs and along the way composed music and songs for stage and screen. Then fast forward to 95 she joined this is a long list of accomplishments she's been very busy and she maybe she can tell us even more in a second but in 95 and she actually joined the staff at BBC Northern Ireland for the next phase of her career if you like it was as an education radio producer and she would want to have a 17 year career with BBC Television moving into online production as well and leading the the Learning and Languages Department by the time that she left in 2012 and she then returned to folk singing and she still performs regularly with her husband Morris and they they released an album or she released a solo album a few years back and together they they actually did a show Belfast Trad Fest earlier this year and another one that told the story of the poet Patrick McGill that was the ballad of Patrick McGill and that was performed just a couple of weeks ago at the Seamus Heaney home place so a busy bit as if she wasn't busy enough as it is she has now written a book would you believe and it is called the desire line and the byline says take a shortcut to the object of your desire and you will leave a trail which can tell us we've had more because I'm glad it's hey that Jane Cassidy now joins me in the studio I don't think I've ever done a longer intro wow thanks John I know well I've been on the planet a few decades so you get a bit of an end but you've been around a while you've squeezed a lot in and it's a it's a varied career in many ways because I suppose it's kind of it all changed when family came along well that's true I think as a female I mean I'm sure a lot of female artists will find this I mean I was touring as a folk musician but once I wanted to have a baby that it's felt like a dilemma how do I keep on doing that so I had already diversified into the media and to radio and then I thought well actually then that would seem to be the way to go but I was also writing at that point it was writing some drama and things and then once I got into the BBC it did it's a very interesting place so I saw a lot of possibilities there and eventually did get a full-time job as a producer and made that my sort of main career that pointed my life once you get into the organization you can there's opportunities yes these rewards probably maybe not as many opportunities now with the BBC probably not I mean that they're cutting and cutting which is a petty enemy and I was let go and one of those rounds of cuts which was painful but you'd had a 17 career with them at the year career I had I had but it was partly that experience had been made redundant in my mid 50s that motivated me to write because I was get you know I was still waking up at seven in the morning and winter mornings and all the adrenaline was there that used to catapult me out of bed and into the office to do my job and had nothing to do with nowhere to go so I I started reading thrillers and you know I was devouring so many of them I loved them but they were the only thing that could distract me from my modelling thoughts so and then I thought well I and I felt guilty because you know when you're not earning you feel guilty about spending money on yourself so I thought right I haven't got right one of these at least it would mob up some of this mental energy so then I just got addicted to that what is it about thrillers that we're you know we're sucked into them crime stories and thrillers and sort of the darker other side of life well is that why I yeah I'm not sure that I know the entire answer to that I suppose for myself when I've thought about it was it's probably that feeling of needing to feel in control again you know that life does throw a lot of things at you and at that time I was floundering definitely so you know to read those absolutist kind of novels like you know with Harry Bosch or John Connelly's Lee Lee Child you know those kind of novels where it's a very absolutist black and white thing and there is an avenging angel and justice seemed to be done and I kind of had a neat felt I needed that I also needed strong storylines and color and texture and taste in a book you know that would distract me you know that's what I need it and that's what I have tried now to produce in this book it's just a stone at the end of your book oh yes okay absolutely tell us a bit about it um it's it's appropriate that it's set in the week leading up to Halloween it is because it all happens within a week because what I really wanted was to create a sleuth like Harry Bosch where you're in that his mind all the time and I always assumed I might have a female sleuth if I create one but in fact my character Jeremy Cibb sort of walked out of my imagination fully formed he's a he's a tv producer who lives in Belfast and he's flawed hero but he has this thirst to to solve mysteries and feces injustice or someone who needs help he can't resist stepping in so basically he goes to to pick up his very troubled wife Nora from a psychiatric clinic just outside Belfast and she asks him to give her new friend Helena a left home and he thinks oh fine you know she lives in Belfast that's no problem very quickly discovers Helena lives in Island McGee which is about half an hour north of Belfast so he thinks oh I'm not going to get into the office today you know but brings her to the place she directs him to only to find um the place that Helena says her house should be is an empty hillside and of course he thinks well this is a very disturbed woman you know she's maybe on medication she or maybe having us on she's deluded but that that is the the shocking moment that opens the whole book and that drives the story forward him trying to discover whether or not Helena is actually telling the truth or is she manipulating him and his very vulnerable wife Nora and you know if the house has indeed been wiped off the face of the earth why that has happened okay so have you taken a um Harry Bosch type character and um transplanted him to Belfast or is it just Harry Bosch is sort of in the back of your mind but this is an entirely different sort of a central character I think that the main thing when I make the comparison with Harry Bosch is that I wanted a character that you to be with this Ruth the main character all the time so a chair walks out of the room you walk out of the room with him you're with him all the time and I liked that about those books you know that I felt and there were times when I finished one of those books where I thought I had to start another because I miss Harry and I need to be in his head because there's a more comfortable place to be than in my own you know that that's what I wanted and was looking for in that kind of book so I thought I would love to be able to write a book that someone couldn't put down that had to read you have to read one more chapter before you go to sleep you know I kind of fell in love with Harry I really got into him in the early books and you know and as you say you put one down and you wanted to go back to him and be with him in the next one and find out what he was doing but then I don't know I read one of the later ones and it just it's just another same appeal but um can you see that your central character then because it's a three book deal you have it's a three book deal and it will be a series that Jair McCabe will be at the center of the three you know so uh yes I really want to develop him and I'm finding it excuse me more and more interesting developing him and his relationships with his family and close friends so you're hoping that people get invested in Jair well I find that when I get feedback from people that they are interested in Jair and want more good yeah good good uh writing as well writing novels and you departure for you but you have written in the past just not books yes in the past well I suppose all of my career involved writing in different ways we're writing songs up to a point I thought I was singing a lot of traditional music but I always wrote some songs myself but excuse me but when I was working for radio and television and online writing scripts obviously was a major part of what I did I also wrote a lot of radio drama at one point for BBC Radio 4 and that had a bearing on me getting this uh book deal because at one there I mean there are so many publishing companies and I I was taught you know sending my book out to Irish publishing companies but many of them don't even receive on solicited manuscripts but I noticed that Pulbeg did and when I read about Pulbeg it said that they were the first publisher to publish May of Binshey and I had actually dramatized a May of Binshey novel way back in the 1980s it had a little bit of contact with me during that so I just suddenly thought well this little nugget of information might just get me out of the slush pile and get get get them to read my book so I think it helped yeah yeah and how long for every writer's different and some might zip through how long did the process take for you people often ask that you know it's very very difficult to quantify that because I when I started writing and I'd say I was made redundant and you know at a listen so I wrote one a draft of a book and I was afraid I would lose my nerve because even then I knew I wanted to write a series I just went straight on to a second book because I thought if I look down I'll falter and I won't do it you know so then once you actually have a manuscript or two then it was really a matter of going back and writing and rewriting and rewriting and if and I don't know if I had known how much rewriting was involved I might have yeah that's the hard part is it not getting the the basics I think yeah well I realized it was a learning process because every time you write a draft you think hey that's not too bad you know but then you go back to it and you get feedback from family friends or even you send it out and it gets you know rejected and you realize well actually no it's not good enough yet so it's that constant the way you have to actually you know go back to it and admit to yourself no this isn't good enough it's not tight enough it's you know it doesn't flow enough you have to be able to to you know go back to it with fresh eyes and a bit of humility I guess to and learn as you go along that you have to and imagine that there's work hard on it quite a bit of that involved because if I mean this probably differs greatly to the first draft yeah I imagine so yeah so I don't even want to think of the first draft now I blushed the idea of some of those early drafts I sent out to agents or publishers that you know when I look back on it now yeah and I'm just looking at some of the accommodations here on the front and the and within and it's been well received it has and yeah one of the people who endorsed it for me was Paul Brady who was so so kind of him to do that because Paul had just published his memoir a lovely memoir and I was trying to because I live in the north and this I'm with a southern publisher I was trying to think of someone who's from the north who's also well known in the public of Ireland so I thought well Paul Brady is the man you know and I was saying no Paul from my music involvement so but I thought gosh I don't know if he's going to want to endorse this you know but he did and he read it he's been absolutely so generous yeah yeah it was his time with it I've described it well in one word on the front cover exciting so there you are that's what you want from a thriller um just come back to the music chain where where because and we did a couple of gigs maybe more well yeah well just last week as it you were mentioned the Patrick McGill show that is a lovely show because we tell the whole story of the Patrick McGill from Glenties and sure people know the story well but he was became known as the Navi poet and after having only three years of schooling you know he went off and was hired out in farms and then went over tattie hooking in Scotland yeah and amazingly educated himself in those Navi huts he mean he he used to buy books and they've joined the joined the Carnegie Library so by the age of 19 he had never been home in the meantime he'd just been earning money sending money home working as a Navi working at anything he could he could find at the age of 19 or 20 he he'd been sending poems and articles to London newspapers and they offered him a job and he went to London and worked as a journalist astonishing that he I mean he's he must have been a bit of a genius because he I mean he wanted to read Montaigne the the French author and he he learned French taught himself French so he could read Montaigne which is something that reminds you of Seamusini in the sense that Seamusini wanted to read the Greek the Greek so he he learned Greek so he could read it in the vernacular so that's the the level of intellectual prowess that Patrick McGill had but he was a guy living in these Navi huts up in the Wales of Scotland you know or Sleeping Rough a lot of the time and he managed to do that published 20 novels in the end and lots of poetry and a couple of plays and his most famous novel was called Children of the Dead End which is I think his masterpiece and is autobiographical which most of his work is you know it's worth reading and you and your husband tell the story in in what form yes there are three of us we we narrate the story and we we have a Scottish singer with us called Derek Williamson who lives in Green Column Kill actually because so much of the story happens in Scotland we wanted the Scottish voice in there too so yes we tell the story and we interspersed with songs that are some traditional songs from Donnie Gall some from Scotland and many of his poems set to music and his poems very often they blend beautifully with the traditional songs because he kind of wrote in that that same cadence that the old ballads have so it's a joy to do we call it the ballad of Patrick McGill because his whole life kind of reads like a ballad you know poor boy made goods you know he's he was quite a phenomenon sounds like the sort of show we would like to see in Donnie Gall we would love to do it here if someone would have us please we would love to do it in green in there dahi or anybody's listening anyhow we shall see so we've we've we've set the maybe we've set the thank you brilliant the book is out now by the way at Jane Cassidy's The Desire Line and published by Pulbeck Press yeah okay and all good bookstores speaking of bookstores yeah i'm gonna be doing an event in the wonderful bookshop um little acorns bookshop run by Jenny Doherty in Derry uh this thursday evening at seven o'clock i'll be reading from the book singing a couple of songs too so i'd love to see anyone who's around yeah okay this has been a pleasure Jen thank you John's thanks so much