WHEN it comes to writing, Dr Maggie Feeley is no stranger to pointing out the inequalities faced by many communities, with a background in equality studies. Now, the academic has turned her eyes to creative fiction with the launch of a new murder mystery series set in West Belfast.
Having attended St Mary’s University College before going on to teach at St Louise’s on the Falls Road, Maggie certainly knows the area and it’s people like the back of her hand and this is something that she draws on throughout her book ‘Murder in the Academy’.
“From St Louise’s I went to Rupert Stanley College which is Belfast Met now and I was the adult literacy organiser for West Belfast and was based in St Thomas’ as it was then. Eventually I moved to Dublin but I know West Belfast well and I draw on that in terms of the main character who is working in a fictitious restorative justice project off the Glen Road.
“I suppose it is surprising that you draw upon the territory that is inside you. I never really meant for the book to be based in Belfast but that just happened as it is a place I know.
“I had a piece of advice from a Canadian who writes Irish murder mysteries and he told me not to forget that the place you are writing about is almost like another character. Belfast has such a rich history and the fictitious college in this story is based in the Titanic Quarter and the characters move from one area that has been regenerated to areas of West Belfast that have not benefited from that regeneration at all as yet. So the book points out that kind of inequality too.
“Belfast is a great place to set a story because the people are so friendly even though we were killing each other.”
As a mature student, Maggie studied a masters and PhD in equality studies which she says has very much informed some of the characters in the book.
“One of the reasons for writing the murder mysteries was to introduce those ideas in a light-hearted way,” she continued.
“There is quite a lot of threads of equality and social justice throughout the book, for example the kids in the restorative justice project ask how come they have to talk to the people they transgressed against and apologise yet nobody has to apologise to them for the fact that they are poor or didn’t get a good education.”
Maggie says that she has drawn on her own experiences of the world of academia and believes that it has given her an opportunity to criticise and poke fun at aspects of it.
“I suppose you draw on your experience but that is coloured by your imagination. People have described the murder as quite gruesome but it took me months to write as I wouldn’t be violent by nature, but it was hard to kill them,” she said.
“For relaxation I would have read a lot of murder mysteries and the books kind of started as a joke. Many of the places I have worked have people that can be quite annoying and I remember saying that murder doesn’t happen very easily otherwise it would have happened here before now.
“Afterwards I felt that it would be quite an interesting setting because within academia there is a lot to criticise as people can be full of their own importance and there is a lot to criticise and poke fun at particularly how divorced a lot of academics are from real life.”
Murder In The Academy is published by Poolbeg Press and is available from Amazon.
