They can’t help it without a society to define, condemn, and punish it, crime itself wouldn’t exist.” In the case of The Witch Elm, French offers an analysis of how privilege (and the lack of it) defines a person’s experience of life.Īs Toby tries to unravel the story of the skull, his memories of the past come into conflict with those of other people, including Susanna and his other cousin Leon. In a 2016 New Yorker piece about French, Laura Miller explained the connection between crime stories and the communities they’re set in: “All crime novels are social novels. Whose skull is it? Why is it in the tree? Who has had access to the garden, and why can’t Toby remember what he needs to remember? He and his cousins used to have parties in the garden in their teenage years, but the details-which could be clues-are maddeningly fuzzy in his memory. While Susanna’s kids are out playing in Hugo’s garden they stumble on a human skull, hidden for who knows how long inside the hollow of an elm tree. Unable to sustain his independent life, Toby moves in with the sweet, bumbling Hugo and begins to assist him with his work as a genealogist.Īs he adjusts to his new status as a disabled dependent, he is confronted by an old crime. Things get worse: He finds out that his uncle Hugo is suffering from a brain tumor that will shortly kill him. Deeply disturbed by the attack, Toby can’t bear to be touched, or go back to work. He wakes in the hospital with a skull fracture and a traumatic brain injury. One night robbers break in to his home and beat Toby unconscious.
The new book is a standalone work that, in a departure for French, uses a creepy historical exemplar to conduct a very modern investigation into the social politics of memory.īut then Toby’s life is transformed. Her six previous novels, like In The Woods (2007) and Broken Harbor (2012), focused on ordinary Dubliners and the gruesome crimes that lead them to the attention of the fictional Dublin Murder Squad.
This incident is the inspiration for The Witch Elm, the new novel by Tana French, who is American but has lived for decades in Ireland. Some graffiti appeared the next year on a Birmingham monument, reading, “ Who Put Bella Down the Wych Elm - Hagley Wood.” The murder has never been solved, and the charismatic graffiti has inspired conspiracy theories ranging from witchcraft to spycraft, as discussed in a 2016 BBC Radio 4 investigation. Authorities later found a whole skeleton, along with a wedding ring and a piece of taffeta inside the corpse’s mouth. They climbed a wych elm and found a skull inside it.
In 1943, four boys were poaching in the woods in Hagley, in the English county of Worcestershire.
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