"Fair Play"

Louise Hegarty’s work has appeared in Banshee, the Tangerine, the Stinging Fly, and the Dublin Review, and has been featured on BBC Radio 4’s Short Works. She was the inaugural winner of the Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story Prize. Her short story “Getting the Electric” has been optioned by Fíbín Media. She lives in Cork, Ireland.

Hegarty applied the Page 69 Test to Fair Play, her debut novel, and reported the following:

On page 69, Abigail and her aunt are meeting with a funeral director to organise her brother’s funeral. It begins: Abigail wanted to be cremated. She had told Benjamin sometime after the death of their father. She had sat through enough funerals now to know exactly what she wanted. She was certain: ‘Scatter my ashes on their graves and on the cliffs near the cove.’ She thinks he wanted the same, but the memory isn’t strong enough and so now, tasked with the decision of what to do with his remains, she isn’t quite sure.

Fair Play is split into two parts: Abigail’s contemporary life and the murder mystery that she has found herself starring in. I think page 69 very much gets across Abigail’s grief after the sudden death of her brother, but it might come as a shock to the reader to find out that a large chunk of the book is in fact a subversion of the detective genre. It is very interesting to me that page 69 is the first time we meet Abigail since the death of her brother – she has been missing from the page for a couple of chapters. I think the Page 69 Test works well in regard to that side of the narrative – we feel her sadness amidst the practicalities of death - but I think because of the structure of my novel the test only half-works on this occasion.

Learn more about Fair Play at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue