To begin writing successful novels when you are in your 50s, is remarkable, but to choose the crime and suspense genre perhaps even more so. Dublin-born Gemma O'Connor has just published her fourth novel, Time to Remember. Dressed in a black trouser suit, she sits in the Shelbourne with her back to the wall so she can keep an eye on everything. You get the impression she doesn't miss much.
As a child, O'Connor lived in Dublin, Limerick, and Cork. Her father was a gambler. "He went bankrupt when I was four and we went from being relatively comfortable to not comfortable at all." In Limerick, the O'Connors lived two streets away from where the McCourt family had lodged.
"We were living there much later than them, but yes, we were living in very reduced circumstances." She admits with quiet dignity that she found Angela's Ashes "almost too painful to read. Beyond that, I wouldn't want to expand any further". And she stares hard at her coffee cup, temporarily uninterested in the comings and goings of the wider room.
When her future husband walked into the Dublin office of Aer Lingus when she was 19, it effectively marked the end of her time in Ireland. They married soon after and went to live in the US. When they moved again, it was to Oxford, in England, where they have lived for 30 years now.
"Someone asked me once why it has taken me so long to write novels, but I felt I had to wait until I had something to say," O'Connor explains simply. In the intervening years, she had had several jobs: reading scripts for a film company; running a book-binding business; working as a publicist in the 1980s for various Irish publishing companies, including Dolmen, Mercier, and O'Brien.
She also worked as a freelance literary scout, reading stacks of manuscripts sent to her by unknown writers. Among those who turned up in the post was Patricia Scanlan. The manuscript was a draft of City Girl, Scanlan's first best-seller. "I wasn't her agent, but I was there at the beginning of the chain. I advised her to make the setting more Dublin rather than less, as it was then. I think that helped her. We've been friends ever since."
Working as a scout, O'Connor says, "focused my ambition. When you read a lot of bad manuscripts, you learn, not how it's done, but how it's not done". What drew her to the crime and suspense genre as a debut novelist in her 50s? "I have difficulty describing exactly what sort of books mine are," she says.
"Crime writing is a very loose term these days. Look at writers like P.D. James and Barbara Vine, both heroes of mine. They have expanded the whole crime novel - made it more embracing and more interesting. They don't stick to formulas. They can write a straight novel with a crime element in it. It's not a genre that limits you any more."
`It's not violence or crime itself which interests me," she explains, "but the aftermath of violence, and describing the situation that exists after the death. I like the idea of redemption, so there is usually some type of love interest in my books - because love is the redemptive thing, isn't it?"
Sins of Omission, her second novel, is a thriller set in Dublin and Edinburgh. Farewell to the Flesh is set in Oxford and Dublin. Time to Remember, the latest novel, is located in Oxford and Belfast.
"It would be odd to be an Irish writer today and not to include it in some way," she says, of her novels' locations. "I don't live a life of regret - but I'm always happy to come back to Ireland." The university town of Oxford, "is a good place to be in exile in, because it is such a melting pot of a place. People are always coming and going," she says, explaining how Oxford doubles neatly as an actual location for her home, and as a fictional location in her novels.
Time to Remember, which was published this week, has already been reprinted. The novel commutes across decades, between France and Oxford. There are also flashbacks to bombings in Belfast.
"It's a book about people to whom tragedy has happened, and examining the consequences of that tragedy. If you don't let go, tragedy can ruin you," O'Connor says. "Time to Remember looks at what happens when violence is visited on children. I have always thought there are certain things that drive people to murder: for me, I think I would feel murderous towards someone who abused one of my children.
"I wonder about the boundaries that exist in our lives. At what point do people get to the point of breakdown in their relationships, for instance? And what makes someone step over the line from being a normal citizen to one who commits murder?"
Time to Remember, by Gemma O'Connor, is published by Bantam Books at £5.99 in UK