The Maker’s Name is a suspenseful saga of family betrayal and corporate intrigue that unfolds against the backdrop of Ireland’s economic boom, where two brothers clash over their inheritance. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I’ve always taken a strong interest in the way businesses develop, particularly family businesses. I worked for a number of years in the Irish Industrial Development Authority (IDA) where I was able to gain good insight into many such scenarios. The IDA gave me an inside track.

The characters are complex and often morally ambiguous. Can you talk about your process for developing such compelling characters?

I have often clashed with strong personalities in my career, which also took in multinationals like Colgate-Palmolive Company and Shell Oil. There one would come face to face with individuals whose ambition knew no bounds, and against whom one would need strong defences; rising through the ranks in big business is often a zero-sum game. The process of developing such characters for the novel consisted of little more than remembering back to the details of the personalities and behaviour of the people concerned.

The novel features a mix of dark humor and bursts of violence. How did you balance these elements to maintain tension without overshadowing the story’s deeper themes?

I have always been an avid reader. This, I believe, has encouraged me to a deep study of human nature whenever I have found it. I have also taken inspiration from the very best: Ernest Hemingway, Ian McEwan, Graham Greene, Robert Louis Stevenson, Auberon Waugh, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Claire Keegan, Anthony Trollope, Tom Wolfe, William Makepeace Thackery, Vladimir Nabokov, and many, many more of history’s superlative novelists. Not forgetting, of course, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, for the style.

What is the next book that you are working on and when will it be available?

I am working on an outline, and have written about 30,000 words, of a novel that’s inspired by the kind of things that happened in Ireland in the 1980s, the period in which Claire Keegan’s novella, Small Things Like These, is set. According to one commentator, this book sells a thousand books a week, every week. The film version, starring Cillian Murphy, has just been released, to critical acclaim. My book will be ready in the first quarter of 2025.

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