How Murder on Lough Derg Came to Be
Murder on Lough Derg grew out of the extraordinary summer of 2018, the year in which the novel is set. Ireland experienced one of its warmest and driest summers ever recorded. We had weeks without rain and woke each morning to uninterrupted blue skies. For a few short weeks, Ireland itself felt unfamiliar.
So unusual was the weather that domestic holidays surged, as people chose to stay at home rather than travel abroad. And I was one of them.
That June, I spent a week with my parents down in Dromineer on Lough Derg for the first time since I was a teenager. I was completely taken with the setting, and at some point during that week, the idea lodged in my head that a book set there during that extraordinary summer might actually work.
Why a Murder Mystery?
I had always said that if I ever wrote a book, it would be a murder mystery. I had loved the genre since I was probably far too young to be reading it. And the more I looked around Dromineer, the more perfect it felt for that kind of cosy mystery story.
The harbour, the yacht club, the village itself — it had all the ingredients of a classic mystery setting. It was idyllic, socially layered and safe… which in murder mystery terms usually means it is absolutely primed to be disrupted by murder.
And then there were the characters.
As with any good mystery, the characters are what really drive the story. In this setting, you could definitely map the Agatha Christie template of archetypes to form the basis of the characters. You may not find many colonels or vicars around an Irish yacht club, but you could certainly find the outsider, the gossip, the patriarch, the adulterer, the lover and the crook. But more interesting than the characters themselves were the relationships between them.
A Week on Lough Derg
That week on Lough Derg, I kept meeting people — like myself — who were returning after years away. In the bars around Dromineer each evening, you could overhear old friendships being picked back up. Friendships that stretched back decades. People who all knew one another in a loose sense.
They knew who someone was, but not necessarily who they had become.
And I think that became one of the central ideas behind the novel. Not just the mystery itself, but the strange feeling of returning to a place and a community that remembers an older version of you — one you no longer entirely relate to yourself. Questions of identity, belonging, hierarchy and memory all became wrapped up in the story.
With enough imagination, it was easy to see how tensions might sit beneath the surface of a place like that. Old rivalries renewed. Hidden resentments. Secrets left buried for years. Add in a manor house, a yacht club power struggle and a black-tie midsummer ball — partly for dramatic purposes and partly because I simply wanted a black-tie midsummer ball — and the foundations of the story were there.
How I wrote the book
The idea for the novel may have arrived in 2018, but it wasn’t until five years later that I actually sat down to write it.
In the summer of 2023, I had a few months off between finishing one role and starting another. My wife and I, and our one-year-old son decided to make the most of the time by moving to Madrid for a few months. For the first time in years, I suddenly had time.
Like many people, I had always quietly wondered whether I could write a novel. Not just whether I had the ability, but whether I had the discipline to sit down and work at something creative every day for an extended period. And if I did write one, what would it be about? Inevitably, my mind drifted back to that strange Irish summer and the idea of a murder mystery set on Lough Derg.
Completing the First Draft
What began as something to do in the evenings slowly took over my routine. I found myself getting up early to write before my family woke, then squeezing it into every spare hour during the day. After four months, just as we were preparing to move back to Ireland, I had nearly completed the first draft.
Once we returned home, I thought it would be a shame not to finish the book properly. I set myself the manageable goal of writing for an hour every morning. The difficult part, I discovered, wasn’t sitting down to write. It was learning how to leave the book behind afterwards. Because anyone who has written fiction knows that even when you are not physically writing, part of your mind remains in that world.
I’d find myself sitting in work meetings, staring at presentations while mentally wrestling with grand creative questions like ‘whether the yacht club committee would realistically approve fairy lights for the midsummer ball?’, or ‘whether making a character left-handed would somehow make him more interesting?’
Submitting the Book to Publishers
After nearly nine months, several rewrites and far more time spent thinking about fictional murders than is probably healthy, I finally had a completed manuscript. Proud simply to have finished it, the next question became what to do with it. Somewhere along the way, I must have started entertaining the possibility that I might actually try to get it published.
In September 2024, I began sending the manuscript out to a list of publishers I had found online.
Then, in December 2024, Mercier Press emailed with a simple line:
“We want to publish your book.”
And after another eighteen months, several more rewrites and countless early mornings, the story that began during one strange Irish summer finally became a real book.
(c) Cormac Quinn
About Murder on Lough Derg by Cormac Quinn:
All journalist Jack Myers wants is a relaxing Irish holiday. Retreating from his demanding job as a foreign correspondent, he thinks he’s found the perfect escape – the stately St Peter’s Manor, perched on the edge of Lough Derg in County Tipperary, just in time for Ireland’s longest heatwave.
But when a mysterious drowning occurs during the annual Midsummer Ball, Jack’s instincts tell him something isn’t quite right.
Asking questions politely but persistently, he uncovers intriguing whispers: a commodore who vanished a decade earlier, a tight-knit group of childhood friends harbouring old secrets, and motives as tangled as the lakeside reeds.
As an unprecedented heatwave presses down on this tranquil corner of Ireland, tensions rise, and Jack’s summer escape has become a deadly puzzle. In a small village where everyone has something to hide, the truth may be the most dangerous discovery of all.
A bold new cosy crime mystery from debut author Cormac Quinn, perfect for fans of Richard Osman, Janice Hallett and Graham Norton.
Order your copy of Murder on Lough Derg online here.
And read more Meet the Authors of Crime Fiction on Writing.ie here.
