How do you use dialogue and dialect to reveal character?

Now that we’ve looked at how Tana French pulls us into The Searcher in her first chapter, let’s step just a little further into the novel and examine how she uses dialogue. Like interiority and point of view, dialogue is a big topic and one I’ll return to in future posts (see, in particular, my posts on I Kissed Shara Wheeler and Dial A for Aunties). To start, let’s zero in on the two components of dialogue: first, the dialogue line itself, which should reveal story information and also display the voice and personality of the speaker; and, second, the dialogue tag, which identifies the speaker but can also convey tone, emotion, and even action.

Let’s look at chapter three of The Searcher to see how French uses these two components. At this point in the book, readers have a few key story questions to focus on: Why is Trey, a young local kid, sneaking around Cal’s house? And what happened in Cal’s past life in the Chicago police department to make him want to move to a remote Irish village? We are also in pursuit of the usual question at the heart of a mystery novel: Who committed the murder? As readers, we’ve now modulated that question into two others: Who is going to be murdered, and when is it going to happen? Because we still don’t have our dead body.

French puts us on alert at the beginning of chapter three when she has Cal recall a conversation he had with the bartender at the local pub about the gun license he’d applied for:

First, I want to draw your attention to how few dialogue tags French uses, even in a conversation that expands to multiple speakers. We can easily understand from context how the conversation shifts, after Mart’s initial intervention, from Barty and Cal to Barty and Mart. Note too that French takes the opportunity with Mart’s dialogue tag to stitch in a character observation—that he feels obliged to defend Cal, or at least this is Cal’s interpretation of what Mart feels.

Second, let’s talk about dialect and accent. This is a topic I’ve tackled often with authors who want to give their work a historical or regional flavor. The key is to be restrained, particularly when it comes to changing the spellings of words, and to lean instead on word choice and syntax—the order of the words in a sentence. For example, Barty’s use of “sure” as a sentence-opener, his verb construction “oughtn’t to,” and his use of the words “packet” (rather than the American “pack”) and “yokes” (an Irishism for “things”) all give his speech an Irish flavor. An Americanized version of his initial dialogue line might read, “Well, they shouldn’t give you a gun anyway.” These are all word-choice examples. As for syntax, Mart’s line is a perfect example: “It’s far from Twinkies you were reared.” All of the words in this sentence are in common usage by Americans, but they would never be arranged in this order in casual conversation.

French also uses a non-standard spelling for three words in order to suggest the sound of the Irish accent: ye’re, et, and dacent. Note how sparsely they are sprinkled through the passage and that they all involve tiny vowel substitutions: you’re > ye’re, eat > et, decent > dacent. In a set of 898 characters, French has altered precisely six, all of them vowels.

Be aware that using non-standard spellings and speech takes you into tricky territory in which you need to be alert to the power dynamics operating between your characters and between you and your characters. Enforcing standard pronunciation and spellings can be a tool of oppression and cultural erasure; noting non-standard speech for certain characters can mark them as “other” in ways you must be alert to and use deliberately. This scene is filtered through the point of view of Cal, an American, so it makes sense that he hears “dacent” when Mart’s buddy says “decent.” Mart, if he were transcribing this bit of dialogue, would use the standard spelling.

As we move further into the scene, we watch Cal try to decode what he is seeing and hearing. Returning to the substance of the scene at hand, the discussion about guns reminds readers that we haven’t yet encountered the expected dead body and makes us wonder if Cal is going to need to use the gun he’s applied for. French is, effectively, saying to us, “Don’t worry—the dead body is coming. Be patient.” The passage also strikes a note we’ve already seen in the opening chapter: Cal’s awareness of his own cultural difference and just how much he doesn’t understand. When Mart asks him why he walks to the pub rather than driving, Cal cites his gun license application, not wanting to risk a DUI while his application is pending. He’s smart enough not to say he doesn’t want to drive drunk given that’s exactly what many others in the pub that night, including Mart, will do.

After the recalled dialogue above, we get some additional detail about the pub itself and what’s going on during this particular night: “Seán Óg’s is, by its own standards, buzzing tonight. Mart and a couple of his buddies are in their corner, playing cards with two unprepossessing young guys in tracksuits whom they’ve acquired somehow.” We learn that Mart’s group plays for money, and we readers peg that table as a potential source of conflict as the evening unfolds.

A middle-aged woman, whom Cal has slowly come to understand is a sex worker, is sitting on a banquette, and a group in the corner is listening to a man playing the tin whistle. Cal plans to sit at the bar and relax, enjoying the music and his lack of responsibility. Readers might be on alert, but Cal is not: “after twenty-five years of maintaining an intricate mental database of everyone he met on the job, Cal enjoys the lackadaisical feeling of not bothering to remember whether Sonny is the one with the big laugh or the one with the cauliflower ear.”

But his attention is drawn to an argument between a group down the bar from him:

Again, we see French using word choice and syntax to give flavor to the dialogue. But what I want to draw your attention to here is the absolute mastery of French’s descriptions of these speakers. They are filtered through Cal’s knowledge—he doesn’t remember the name of the little, round guy, but he knows he’s often the butt of jokes just as he knows the “third guy” rarely speaks. French’s physical descriptions are particularly vivid and distinct: “big bald slab of a guy” and “long gloomy streak.”

Cal is drawn into the conversation, and there is an undercurrent of tension now, both because of the topic and because they are challenging Cal, testing his knowledge and thus his right to be sitting in this pub and, by extension, living in this village:

But, when pressed, Cal passes the test, relying on the hunting knowledge his grandfather passed down to him. The mystery of what happened to the animal is left behind when the table French wanted us to peg as trouble at the beginning of the chapter does finally erupt. One of the young guys, named Donie, is accused of cheating, challenges Mart to a fistfight, and is thrown out of the bar by Barty, who asks Cal to help. Cal goes back into cop mode briefly, asking questions of Barty and then insisting on accompanying Mart home to make sure Donie hasn’t turned up there to continue the fight. He hasn’t, but as readers we are on alert: Is this the clash that is finally going to kick off the murder mystery? And what about that mauled sheep? But French leaves those questions hanging in the air, using the end of the chapter instead to delve into a bit more of Cal’s backstory via a phone call between Cal and his daughter Alyssa, who lives in Seattle.

In this conversation, it’s the in-between spaces, not the words themselves, that are important:

This is a clever strategy for delivering character description or backstory information. Tucking the material in between two dialogue lines means that the pace of the scene still feels fast. If this were an actual conversation, there would be only a tiny pause between the question and the response. Because the dialogue lines themselves are less important, French keeps them short. Notice how the phrase “big relief” has been shorn of the “which was a” that would usually precede it.

At each turn of the conversation, Cal feels his insufficiency, feels the distance between them. French underlines this distance in a passage of interiority:

The subtext, the unspoken thoughts, carry more meaning than anything that has been said during the conversation. This is a form of earned telling—French shows us a snippet of conversation along with Cal’s commentary to tell us what it really means beneath the surface.

Get new craft breakdowns like these right in your inbox, plus sentence studies, craft tips, and book reviews.