A nationwide crime spree: dastardly deeds the length and breadth of New Zealand

"L Recently I wrote a large feature article for New Zealand Author, the magazine of the local Society of Authors, taking a nationwide look at the state of contemporary crime fiction in New Zealand.  I understand from an author contact that the article has been published in the current (October/November 2011) issue of the magazine (cover image, see right), although I haven't yet seen the print version of the article myself.

I've written a lot about New Zealand crime fiction in the past couple of years, for magazines, newspapers and websites here and overseas, from author interviews to reviews to speaking and/or writing in general about New Zealand crime fiction (why we should read it, etc) - so I was a bit worried about getting a little jaded about the whole thing.

However, I really enjoyed writing this feature, as I decided to take a bit of a north to south tiki tour of our country, pulling together in one piece the variety of writers and writing styles we have in our burgeoning crime fiction community, all across the country. It was really pleasing to see that we did indeed have a pretty comprehensive geographic spread (in author locations and story settings), even when I just largely focused on books that had been published in the past couple of years or so (2009-2011).

As I said in the introduction to the feature (which I hope to be able to share with you here online in due course), "From Northland to Southland and everywhere in between, it’s becoming clear that more and more we have a number of local storytellers who are capable of weaving top quality tales of mystery, murder, and mayhem. Writers who have something interesting to offer readers, here and abroad, who enjoy this most thrilling (and globally popular) of genres."

One of the cool things was that I couldn't even mention all the books and authors I wanted to (although it was a very comprehensive piece) for fear of getting far too encyclopaedic or 'listy', and cutting out all room for any insight comment etc. That is a great sign of the growth of contemporary Kiwi crime fiction.

As I've discovered, there are crime, mystery, and thriller writers all across our small but diverse nation, which is great to see. Here are the authors mentioned in the article, with links to their websites or articles etc relating to their most recent books. As I said, there are also others who've published in the 2009-2011 period who I couldn't include for space reasons, as well as of course some other local crime writers from previous years:

• NORTHLAND: Dorothy Fowler, Michael Green, Roy Vaughan
• AUCKLAND: Alix Bosco, Ben Sanders
• CENTRAL NORTH ISLAND: Ken Benn
• WELLINGTON: Neil Cross, Donna Malane, Cat Connor, Joan Druett
• TOP OF THE SOUTH: Lindy Kelly, Maurice Gee
• WEST COAST: Trish McCormack
• CANTEBURY: Paul Cleave, Steve Malley, Andrew Grant
• OTAGO: Vanda Symon, Paddy Richardson, Liam McIlvanney, Andrew Porteous

As can be seen, we're fairly well served, geographically - although it would be good perhaps to see some more Central North Island set crime fiction - after all that's a fairly interesting part of the country, and a very large area between Auckland and Wellington, ranging from the agricultural regions of the Waikato, Manawatu and Taranaki to the volcanic plateaus of Rotorua, Taupo and surrounds, to the sun-drenched Coromandel, the Bay of Plenty and the East Coast, and much, much more. As I said in the article, "The regions between our biggest city and our capital city currently provide slimmer pickings when it comes to contemporary crime fiction, despite what would seem like a plethora of intriguing landscapes, geographic and demographic, and issues that could provide great fodder and colour for a well-told thriller story."

I will talk more about the geographic spread of contemporary (and historic) Kiwi crime fiction at a later stage, and some of the other authors from various regions, but for now, I'd be very interested in your comments about geography and crime fiction, whether Kiwi or overseas.

What do you think of my little Aotearoa tiki-tour? What New Zealand locations do you think would make a fantastic setting? Which Kiwi authors do you think use setting best? Which other crime authors from various Kiwi regions stand out to you, whether contemporary or historic? Comments and discussion welcome.

Licensed to thrill: my feature interview with Jeffery Deaver for the Sunday Star-Times

Licensed to thrill
Bestselling US thriller writer Jeffery Deaver talks to Craig Sisterson about the fun he had penning a new adventure for 007, the world’s favourite British spy

JAMES BOND was created by Ian Fleming for the 1950s-1960s Cold War era during which Fleming, who worked in British Naval Intelligence himself during the Second World War, wrote his 14 spy novels. But ‘007’ is also very much a secret agent for modern times, says Jeffery Deaver, the man behind the highly-anticipated new Bond novel, Carte Blanche.

“One reason I was excited to take this project on is that I don’t see people reading the original books much anymore, and I thought Bond is a character who really speaks to this era of conflict,” says Deaver.

His own twisting psychological thrillers, such as his series featuring quadriplegic sleuth Lincoln Rhyme (played by Denzel Washington in the Hollywood adaptation of The Bone Collector) have scooped awards, made bestseller lists, and been translated into 25 languages in 150 countries.

“Bond is a real hero, there’s nothing ambiguous about Bond,” adds Deaver. “In much of spy fiction there’s an underlying theme of duplicity and moles and ‘who really is the good guy?’ Bond never had any doubt about that. The 00 classification meant he was an assassin, but he isn’t your coldblooded hitman. He was for Queen and country, he was going to make sure the innocent did not suffer at the hands of the villains, and I think that’s the kind of character we need nowadays.”

Deaver is the fifth author to write for the Bond series since Fleming’s death in 1964, and Carte Blanche will be the 23rd ‘continuation’ novel authorised by Fleming’s estate, but only the second since 2002 (after Sebastian Faulks’ period piece Devil May Care in 2008). A long-time Bond fan, Deaver got a text asking ‘Do you want to write the new James Bond book?’ 18 months ago when he was driving from Washington, DC to his North Carolina home.

He “screeched to the side of the road”, spent less than 10 minutes debating with his agent, then said “okay, that’s it, I’m on board”. The excitement of the moment is still clear in his voice now. “There were some practical things we had to talk about. I did not want to do a period piece. I had read Sebastian Faulks’ book and enjoyed it very much, but I felt that to reintroduce and reenergise Bond in the written form we needed the book set in the present day, and he needed to be a young, 30ish, secret service agent. And coincidentally the Ian Fleming estate felt exactly the same way.”

The first thing Deaver did for the research was go back and re-read the original tales. “They hold up extremely well because Fleming was a writer of great observational talent. His books were as much a character study as they were adventure novels. I found his perceptions and insights into geopolitics, and indeed into the psychology of good and evil, were really spot on.”

Deaver admits writing Carte Blanche has been challenging, if extremely fun (he’s particularly loved researching “all the tradecraft, spy stuff”), as he’s had to consider the expectations of not only his own readers, but millions of Bond fans. “I was very concerned that I create an updated Bond that fans of Ian Fleming’s creation would like. I really got into his mindset. I wanted to create a gritty, dark, and yet very intelligent spy ... I tried to write the character through the lens of Ian Fleming.” Deaver even had a picture of dark-featured American musician Hoagy Carmichael, who Fleming said was the man Bond most resembled, beside him when he wrote.

In Carte Blanche, Bond, a veteran of the Afghanistan conflict, is part of the secretive ODG which protects Britain “by any means necessary”. A snippet of electronic info about an upcoming attack that could kill thousands has Bond and his colleagues scrambling to discover who, what, and where in order to prevent calamity. Deaver packs Carte Blanche with intrigue and twists, and takes readers on a whirlwind journey from Serbia to Dubai to Cape Town.

In a way, writing Carte Blanche has brought Deaver full circle, back to his beginnings in terms of reading and writing. He loved Fleming’s books as a child growing up in the 1950s and 1960s (his parents restricted TV and movies but encouraged him to read whatever he liked), and the first narrative fiction he wrote as an 11-year-old was a Bond-influenced story about a spy who stole a top-secret aeroplane from the Russians. “I would study his books and kind of mimic them,” Deaver recalls now.

He shared this life-long admiration for Fleming during his acceptance speech when he won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association for his 2004 novel Garden of Beasts, a thriller featuring an American hitman on a secret mission in 1936 Berlin. Corinne Turner, Managing Director of Ian Fleming Publications, was in the audience, and began to consider “that James Bond could have an interesting adventure in Jeffery Deaver’s hands”.

Turns out Turner was dead right.

Carte Blanche (H&S Fiction, $39.99]) will be released on 26 May 2011.

Jeffery Deaver will be touring New Zealand in late July. Check www.hachette.co.nz for more details.

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This feature article was first published in the 22 May 2011 issue of the Sunday Star-Times, and is reprinted here online with kind permission.

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Have you read CARTE BLANCHE? Will you? Does your 007 knowledge stretch back to Fleming's original Bond novels, or are you familiar with the spy largely thanks to the Bond films? What do you think of my feature article? Comments welcome.

Riding with the Lincoln Lawyer: my large feature article on Michael Connelly in the New Zealand Listener

While I was away in Turkey and Greece, my large feature article based on a recent interview with Michael Connelly, one of the world's most consistently outstanding crime writers and a modern great of the genre, was published in the Arts & Books section of the New Zealand Listener, one of NZ's best magazines. "Riding with the Lincoln Lawyer" is my second large feature for the Listener, following my article on Henning Mankell in April. As of yesterday, you can now read the article in full online.

READ THE FULL VERSION OF MY ARTICLE BY CLICKING HERE.
In the same issue, New Zealand-based thriller writer Neil Cross also wrote a great piece on Connelly's writing ("he’s still the only writer whose novels I buy on the day of publication”).

I particular like Neil's observation that "Connelly’s not a stylist – he’s far too good a writer for that, with too much respect for the reader. But he’s a subtle and fabulously deft craftsman, happy to step back and conceal his guiding hand. This allows his prose to do what only the best prose can do: get out of your way and let you enjoy the book you’re reading by letting you forget you’re reading a book." You can read Neil's article in full here.

Have you read THE FIFTH WITNESS, THE LINCOLN LAWYER, or any of Connelly's other crime novels? What do you think of his writing? Will you be going to one of his upcoming New Zealand, Australian or US events? Comments welcome - on Connelly, my article, or anything else...

Writing from experience: My Weekend Herald feature interview with Gregg Hurwitz

Writing from experience
Thriller writer Gregg Hurwitz talks to Craig Sisterson about shifting from Shakespeare to crime and comics.

Changes in his personal life, as he married and started a family, "played a big part" in Gregg Hurwitz's evolution from writing "super cop" thrillers to focusing more on emotion-packed tales of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances.

"The things that concern me and the vulnerabilities I feel have shifted," says the Los Angeles-based author, screenwriter and graphic novelist. "I've got a lot more interested in real people, with real families."

READ THE FULL ARTICLE ONLINE HERE

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The above extract is from my feature article published in the 14 May 2011 issue of the Weekend Herald, and is reprinted here with permission.

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Have you read any of Gregg Hurwitz's thrillers? Do you like 'domestic suspense' of the kind that Hurwitz and Linwood Barclay write so well? What do you think of my feature article? Comments welcome.

In search of answers: my feature interview with Henning Mankel in this week's New Zealand Listener

My first-ever large feature article for the New Zealand Listener has been published in this week's issue (dated April 9-15 2011). It's a three page article, "In search of answers", based on my recent interview with Henning Mankell.

I was lucky enough to be granted the only New Zealand interview with Mankell in the lead-up to the release of THE TROUBLED MAN, the final Wallander novel (note - a NZ newspaper also published an interview with Mankell recently, but this was a republication of a Guardian article). So for all of you in New Zealand, go out and grab a copy of this week's issue of the New Zealand Listener. The feature is on pages 34-36.

I've been fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to write for many great publications here in New Zealand and overseas, and I'm very pleased to now be contributing (occasionally) to the New Zealand Listener as well. It's a great magazine.

Traditionally the New Zealand Listener places the first paragraph of its articles online, and then about three weeks after an issue is published in print places the entire article online for anyone to read. However, just this week the magazine's website has had a major overhaul (it looks terrific), and it doesn't seem the entire contents of the current issue are listed. I'm not sure if or when my feature will now be placed online - I will let you know as soon as I do. [EDIT: I have this afternoon been told by the NZ Listener Books Editor that articles will continue to be freely available online two weeks after the issue is no longer current - so for all of you overseas I will link to the online version of my feature when it's available].

You can search for and read previous Books articles from the Listener, here. For example, you can read Guy Somerset's terrific feature on New Zealand crime fiction and the Ngaio Marsh Award here, and Jane Bowron's feature on Paul Cleave here.

The New Zealand Listener has long been considered one of our premier magazines. It is a weekly current affairs and entertainment magazine, renowned (amongst other things) for having one of the best books sections around. Near the end of each year the Listener also publishes a “100 Best Books of the Year” issue, where its reviewers compile their list of best novels, short stories, poetry, biography, memoir, and other non-fiction books of the year. You can see the crime fiction content from last year's Top 100 list here.

Have you picked up this week's Listener, and perhaps read my article? If so, what do you think? Have you read THE TROUBLED MAN, or do you intend to? Are you a Wallander fan (in books or on TV)? What do you think of the Listener's new website? Thoughts and comments welcome.

Kiwis love crime fiction, but what about our own?

A few months ago I wrote an article for the 'Soapbox' section of the New Zealand Book Council's excellent quarterly publication Book Notes, about New Zealand crime fiction. In the article I noted that local readers do have a large appetite for crime fiction, but traditionally we have been pretty poor at reading local authors in the genre. "When will New Zealanders embrace locally penned tales of murder, mystery, and mayhem?," I asked.

Since I wrote the Book Notes article some of the things I addressed have been further evidenced by specific statistics and other comments and observations in excellent articles by Mark Broatch in the Sunday Star-Times (read here) and Philip Matthews in Your Weekend (read here). In particular, I found it very interesting that my comment about the popularity and dominance of crime fiction on New Zealand's international bestseller lists as compared to how much we buy and read our own authors was borne out in Broatch's article by Neilsen Bookscan statistics showing that crime was probably the most popular type of fiction reading for New Zealanders last year (taking more than 30% of the market), but less than 1% of the crime novels sold here were written by locals.

This is an appalling statistic, especially given the quality of some of the crime fiction being produced by local writers. But what might be some of the reasons for this shockingly low level of support from the buying public? Is it the way our writers are publicised? Cultural cringe from the readers? Or something else. In my Soabox article in the Winter issue of Book Notes, I took a look at some possible reasons, and the reality behind the perceptions.

The article can now be read online. Click here to view the article.

Why do you think New Zealand readers haven't yet truly embraced our great New Zealand crime writers? Are things improving? Is there a realtive lack of support for crime writers from the books industry, or at least some parts of it? What more could be done? Is this even an issue/should we care? I'd love to read what you think about all of this. Please share your comments.