When the New York Times says of your second novel that it "constructs a sturdy web of silken prose", you might reasonably conclude that, as a novelist, you have arrived. When, into the bargain, that novel is on the shelf marked Crime/Thriller, you might be entitled to punch the air in triumph. Frankly, it's hard to imagine Julie Parsons doing either. In the very public world of book publishing, she is being hailed as the Next Big Thing to come out of Ireland; privately, she still admits to being gripped by the terrifying conviction that her books are Simply No Good.
"When I see a friend walking down the street towards me, I wonder are they going to come up and say, `I read your book - it was great'. Or, `I read your book - isn't it a lovely day today?' Or just shoot off into the supermarket across the road."
The latter, presumably, are the sort of friends who don't approve of Ruth Rendell and Patricia Highsmith, the writers to whom Parsons has most often been compared. We're talking taut, tense, classy crime fiction, then? "I wanted to write the kind of book I'd like to read," says Parsons, in the quiet voice that is still flavoured with a sprinkling of antipodean vowels, the legacy of a childhood spent in New Zealand. "And publishers want books they can sell. Crime fiction, or psychological thrillers, or whatever you want to call them, that are not just whodunnits but that actually want to be something - to treat emotions in a serious way."
Her debut novel, Mary, Mary, does just that. Like many a crime novel before it, the story opens with the vicious murder of a teenage girl, complete with gruesome details. The plot proceeds as whodunnit plots do, a page-turner in which a series of more or less sympathetic characters nudge the pieces of the jigsaw into place. But in many ways Mary, Mary begins where other crime novels leave off; it is a book permeated, not by the blood and body fluids so beloved of crime fiction writers, but by the grief and loss suffered by the mother of the murdered girl, an emotional force so powerful it almost takes on the role of a character in itself.
Her follow-up book, The Courtship Gift, is similarly informed by the grief of its central character, Anna, an entomologist whose husband dies from an allergic reaction after being stung by a swarm of bees sent to him through the post. As she tries to piece her life together again, she discovers that he had been lying to her from the beginning of their relationship, compounding her sense of loss and devastation. Is loss, then, going to be Parsons' thing? She smiles ruefully.
"It is, I think - in the book that I'm writing at the moment, which should be out in the autumn, it has emerged again. I didn't intend Mary, Mary as an autobiographical novel, but I was amazed, when I sat down and read it through, how many aspects of my own life turned up in the story." Chief among these, not surprisingly, is the idea of the absent father.
Her own father, who had emigrated to New Zealand with her mother in 1947, worked as a government doctor in a hospital on the island of Samoa. When his baby daughter was four, he was called out to the Tokelau Islands to visit a man with a gangrenous arm. With 24 companions he set out on the three-day journey across the South Pacific, but they never arrived; a month later the boat was found, abandoned, its life rafts missing. No survivors were ever found and, seven years later, Parsons' father was legally presumed dead.
"The idea of a lost father is in The Courtship Gift as well - and in a way, that has explained to me why I like writing stories that have a mystery in them, because there's this mystery that's still there in my own life," she says. Having returned to Ireland at the age of 12 with her mother, two brothers and sister, she now considers herself thoroughly Irish - and has a 12-year career as a producer in RTE radio and television to prove it, much of it spent behind the scenes at that icon of Irishness, the Gay Byrne Radio Show. "I loved it. You'd pick up the phone and find yourself plunged into somebody's life. And they'd write in - the most amazing, extraordinary letters."
It was, in retrospect, an ideal environment for a future crime writer; not only were there domestic dramas by the dozen, but she found herself touched by the bigger international picture as well. In retrospect, she has always been interested in outsiders, people who don't quite belong, people who push the accepted norms of social behaviour to the limit - and then way beyond.
At college, she took a master's in the sociology of music. "I picked as my subject Schoenberg's atonal music and John Coltrane's jazz. I had this theory that these were both composers who challenged the orthodoxy of the musical language in which they played - and that both their musics were linked into the social and artistic change of the time. Schoenberg's was the expressionism that was happening between the two wars, Coltrane's was the civil rights movement in the US - black consciousness and the impact that that had on jazz."
When she came to write her second novel, The Courtship Gift, Parsons took the behaviour patterns of the insect world as a metaphor for human behaviour. The title refers to the mating ritual of the male dance fly, who presents his partner with the corpse of an insect wrapped in silk. While she is distracted by this gift, he can have his wicked way with her - and wicked is undoubtedly the word for the human equivalent of the dance fly in the book, the evil Matthew Makepeace, aka Michael Mullen.
But how on earth did she find out about the mating patterns of obscure insects? "Well," she says, "you can probably divide the world into people who like insects and people who don't. I like them, but it's funny the way things happen - I was watching TV one night in a demented sort of way, flicking from station to station, and I came across this wonderful BBC programme, Alien Empire, which was all about insects.
"I bought the book which went with the series, and sat down and read it. I became very interested in parasitism, the idea of one being living off the body of another - and as soon as I read about the courtship gift itself, I knew I had the perfect element for my story." She got a lot of help from the curator of the Natural History Museum in Kildare Street, too, where she was shown not just the collections but the kind of work an entomologist such as her heroine, Anna, might do.
"It's absolutely amazing - it has a million insects, and it has insects collected by Charles Darwin." But she insists that research in general is a matter of common sense: "I wasn't down at the Garda station taking notes on procedure or anything like that. There's always this incredible desire to find out more - and finding out, of course, means that you don't have to write anything; you can postpone the business of beginning the book for that bit longer. But in the end what's really important about research is how you creatively transform it in the book itself."
Creative transformation might be the way to describe the Dublin in which Parsons' novels are set - familiar yet subtly skewed, a shadowy, slightly surreal place without the slightest hint of the hail-fellow-well-met Oirishness which has become almost obligatory in fictional portrayals of the capital's contemporary underworld. It is, without doubt, the observation of somebody who has lived somewhere else - who is herself, at one level, an outsider.
Her involvement with what she now calls the "magical" landscape of New Zealand may have effectively ended when she was 12, but it still creates a vivid thread of otherness in Parsons' writing, a thread which may partly be responsible for her remarkably swift conquest of the European market; both Mary, Mary and The Courtship Gift have been warmly received in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and France, as well as English-speaking countries such as the US and Australia.
But it takes Ireland, she notes with another wry smile, to bring the aspiring writer down to earth with a bang. "I used to love bookshops, but now when I walk into one, I go - where's the book, where's the book? Because if there are loads of them, you assume they're not selling any, whereas if there are none, you assume nobody wants it.
"I did go up to the manager of a Dublin suburban bookshop and asked if they had my book in stock. He said they had - and then he said: `You know, you handled this very well. Some writers come in and change around the displays, and give out, and demand to know why their book isn't in the window and everything.' And I said, `Really? And what do you do then?' And he said, `We stop selling their book'." A sting in the tale, if ever there was one.
The Courtship Gift is published in paperback by Town House on April 18th at £6.99