The words “boarding school novel” usually conjure up memories of the vintage sensibilities of series such as Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers. But in Sam Blake’s second novel for young adults, Something’s About to Blow Up, a fictional Irish boarding school becomes a fertile place to explore intrigue, crime and the pressures on today’s teens.
Sam Blake is the pen name of Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin, who is also a bestselling crime author. (The androgynous name was chosen because Fox O’Loughlin “is such a mouthful”, as well as concerns about research showing some male readers are less likely to buy crime novels written by women, she says.) Over coffee Blake — glamorous, gregarious and clad in her trademark all black — says both this book and its linked predecessor, Something Terrible Happened Last Night, are “harking back to stuff that I really loved as a child — but trying to update it massively”.
Blake grew up in St Albans in Hertfordshire, England, and moved to Ireland in the 1990s with her — now retired — garda husband (she says he doesn’t give advice for her crime novels, though she has other garda contacts). Her great-grandparents on both sides left Ireland during the famine, and she is now long settled in the east of the country.
She didn’t attend a boarding school, though she was “completely fascinated” with them as a student and reader. So when she was approached about writing young adult fiction by Gill Books, she decided to bring something fresh to the genre. “I think it’s really important that Irish teenagers get to see themselves in books,” she says.
She created Raven’s Hill School, a private all-girl day and boarding school in the fictional town of Kilmurray Point. A school story meant a big cast, and Blake wanted to make the students as diverse as possible — among the characters in the two novels are a transgender student, gay students, and youths from different countries and family dynamics.
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“What I’m trying to do is reflect what’s happening in every class. And when I go and speak to kids in schools, there’s usually a trans kid in every class. Gender fluidity is a huge thing, like social media [is], that’s not taboo to this age group,” Blake says. “It’s normal, it’s completely accepted … So what I’m trying to do is reflect their normality. So that their class in Raven’s Hill is like anybody else’s class.”
The school still differs in big ways from your typical Irish boarding school. In the first book there’s the small matter of a young person’s body being found at a party thrown by Raven’s Hill students. In Something’s About to Blow Up something does indeed blow up in the school’s chemistry lab. Did she have qualms about bringing crime into a teenage world? “The body bit in Something Terrible I did have some qualms about,” she says. “I’ve a 19-year-old and when I started writing I thought, goodness me, this is quite close to the bone.” That said, “crime is my territory, and I’m interested in what goes on behind closed doors and what people are thinking and not telling us”.
Teens are a lot sharper than we realise, Blake says, so they make good mystery solvers. “I think they are much more aware of what’s going on around them — whether they are able to cope with that at that age is a different thing.” Meanwhile social media is a “second language” to teenagers, so a private message group called “Rave-fess” becomes an important way for the characters to communicate.
When it came to depicting teenage life, Blake turned to her own memories but also to her two teenage children. “When I wrote Something Terrible I did go and talk to lots of teens as well. One of my main questions was ‘What worries you now?’ — and the 14-year-olds were very worried about peer pressure and bullying and things that were happening within their world. The 18-year-olds were worried about climate change. That was a really stark difference.”
So aside from the main mystery, the book also tackles topics such as the darker side of teenage relationships, racism and school bullying. “There’s a few things that happen to the girls in the book where I felt that this is something that could really easily happen to anybody,” Blake says. “And I wanted to say: if it happens to you don’t panic, there’s support out there. And to make people aware of how you can get trapped in these situations.”
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Her plot ideas come to her as “lightbulb moments”. The plot for Something’s About to Blow Up appeared when she was watching a TV show about a trial over an explosion. “I was thinking about the cause of an explosion, and how there can be multiple reasons for one happening. I’m really interested in playing with people’s assumptions, and in all the books I try and take your assumptions as a reader and play on those,” she says. “So I started thinking about it, and the logical place for an explosion was the chemistry lab.” She then sat down for a chat with a chemistry teacher while trying to concoct a believable plot around this idea.
The origin story of Blake’s writing career has its roots in a long trip her husband took in 1999, when she was alone (pre-children) at home in the wintertime. She was learning to type and use a computer, and was working in event management. It seemed an ideal time to learn how to write a novel. “I remember sitting down one Sunday afternoon and looking at the clock and it was 12pm. And looking up again at the clock, and it was 4pm … and I had no idea where that time went. I would have said it was five minutes. And that, for me, is magic.”
This magic led to her properly pursuing writing, and in 2016 her first novel, Little Bones, was published. Something’s About to Blow Up is her 11th book, so Blake wasted no time once she got into the publishing game. She’s an entrepreneurial person, and as a nascent writer set up fiction-writing workshops led by published authors to help others in her position. That was via her company Inkwell, and she went on to set up the resource Writing.ie in 2010.
The day we meet she’s just sent her 12th novel (this one for adults) to the copy editor. “I remember walking down the pier when I was in the events job with one of the girls from the office downstairs. She’d be asking me about the book and I was going, ‘Oh yeah, it’s gonna be this huge bestseller,’” she recalls with a laugh. “And if I’d known then it was going to take so long between that point and actually the first book coming out … I think I probably would have still done it, because I’ve learnt a lot along the way. But it took a good while.”
This quote alone gives an insight into Blake’s optimistic view of life. “I don’t see obstacles — I see obstacles as opportunities,” she says. No wonder she finds crime a joy to write for adults and young people, with all its potentials for turning difficult situations into narrative openings.
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I tell her she strikes me as a person well able to back herself. “I always think that if I need to do something I’ll do it,” she replies. “I don’t know how I’ll do it, or how long it’s going to take, or what I need to learn in order to make it happen. I’m a big thinker outside the box — if I can’t get in the front door I’ll be looking for the back door. Always, in everything.”
Something’s About to Blow Up by Sam Blake (Gill Books €12.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk
