if i tell you... i'll have to kill you (extract)
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australias leading rime writers
reveal their serets
edited by mihael robotham
if I TElL you...I'Ll HAVE To
kILL YOU
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First published in 2013
Copyright Michael Robotham 2013
Copyright in individual articles are retained by individual authors
All rights reserved. No part o this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
any orm or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any inormation storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing rom the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum o one chapter or 10 per cent o this book,
whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution or
its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body
that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency
Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
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83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: ino@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
rom the National Library o Australia
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ISBN 978 1 74331 348 0
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Introduction: Youve Been Warned Michael Robotham 1
Keep the Bodies Coming Shane Maloney 7
The Three Cs Marele Day 19
What Else is There to Do? Peter Corris 33
I Know its Only Noir (But I Like it) Lenny Bartulin 47
Keeping it Real Liz Porter 59
Im Writing a Crime Novel Garry Disher 75
Ned Kelly Diary Malla Nunn 91
Scenes from a Life Kerry Greenwood 105Whats the Worst Thing that can Happen?
Geoffrey McGeachin 121
Writing Gives Me WingsAngela Savage 135
A Stripping Feminist Private Eye Leigh Redhead 151
First Find Some Atmosphere Barry Maitland 167
Beauty and Death Tara Moss 179
Take a Little Time for the Country to Know You
Adrian Hyland 189
Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know Leah Giarratano 205
The Secret Formula Michael Robotham 225
The Art of Suspense Katherine Howell 241Gitmo Here I Come Lindy Cameron 253
A Writing Life Gabrielle Lord 263
contents
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The Facts, Maam, Nothing but the Facts
Lindsay Simpson 285
The Ned Kelly Awards Peter Lawrance 303
Authors Must-Reads 315
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cIntrodution:
YOUVE BEEN WARNED
by Michael Robotham
So you want to know where the bodies are buried.
Dont say you werent warned. When you delve into
the minds o crime writers you are opening up a stinky
stew o psychoses, superstitions, hal-nished stories and
unplanned homicides.
People oten imagine that crime writers would be
good at getting away with murder, but I cant even steal a
kiss. Or to quote Woody Allen, Im the sort o guy who,
i I played baseball, would steal second base, eel guilty
and go back. Thats not to say I dont have murderous
thoughts. I do . . . All the time. I contemplated killing
the author oEat Pray Loveand then I wanted to kill theperson who made it into a movie.
This may seem extreme but Im not alone. In separate
studies, two American psychologists, Douglas Kenrick
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I F I T E L L Y O U . . . I ' L L H A V E T O K I L L Y O U
2
and David Buss, asked people i they had ever antasised
about killing someone. The demographic they chose
had exceptionally low rates o violence, yet between
seventy and ninety per cent o men and between ty
and eighty per cent o women admitted to having at
least one homicidal antasy in the preceding year.
So theres no point in lying. I know youve day-
dreamed about slipping rat poison into the bosss coeeor pushing your mother-in-law under a bus. And dont
get me started on the neighbour who mows his lawn
at 6.30 a.m. every Sunday. Youre dead pal! Just try it
next week!
Despite our day jobs, we crime writers are a colleg-
iate, happy-go-lucky bunch. We put our dark thoughts
on the page rather than bottling them up inside. Youll
appreciate this as you read through these essays, which are
written with enormous generosity, insight and humour.
From the opening pages when Shane Maloney admits to
having killed seventeen people, you will nd bodies at
every turn, as well as suspects, perpetrators and heroes.
This isnt a book about perect crimes. It is about
imperect ones. A perect murder, by its very denition,
is one committed by a complete stranger who has never
met the victim, has no criminal record, steals nothing
and tells no one. For a crime to be truly perect it cannever be detected, which doesnt leave a lot o room or
a writer. We need our murders to be imperect, with
grander or baser motives.
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M I c H A E L R O B O T H A M
Our protagonists are a mixed bunch, ranging rom
whisky-soaked private eyes to ex-strippers, political xers,
wealthy aristocrats, ormer models, trembling psychol-
ogists, paramedics, pathologists, Aboriginal community
police ocers, detective inspectors, bikies and amateur
sleuths. This is testament to the broad scope o crime
writing in Australia, as the gender, jurisdictions and loca-
tions constantly change, but the undamental elementsremain: the crime, the investigation, the resolution and
the ticking o the clock. It may not be tidy, it may
not be nice, it may be bloody miserable, but justice is
normally done.
Whether youre a an o crime ction or true crime,
or a would-be crime writer yoursel, youll nd laughter,
understanding, insight, ideas, advice and hopeully some
inspiration in this collection o essays. I was ascinated
to read how other writers approach their crat. Some
are plotters and some are pantsers (writing by the seat
o their pants). Some are pioneers and some are settlers.
Some write what they know and others go to extra-
ordinary lengths or the sake o their research, including
being strangled to the point o unconsciousness.
Ater reading these essays I knew these writers better
because I learned about the highs and lows, as well as the
nuts and bolts o their working lives. Some stumbled intocrime writing by accident, while others were raised on
the genre being suckled on Chandler, Conan Doyle and
Christie. For most o us it began as a passionate hobby
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I F I T E L L Y O U . . . I ' L L H A V E T O K I L L Y O U
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and grew into something more. Peter Corris has been
writing virtually every day or over thirty years and
regards it as something akin to breathingstop it
and Id die.
Those o us who read crime ction and true crime
stories appreciate these eorts because we take pleasure
in the details and we love seeing the patterns behind
the details. Fierce mental energy is needed to exposethe lies and resolve the contradictions, to pull o the
alse beards, to interrogate witnesses and interpret
the evidence. We also know that most modern crime
stories are more than just mysteries. They are laden with
insights about people, environments, politics, the law
and much more. One week we can be on the mean
streets o Chicago with Sara Paretsky or in Marthas
Vineyard with Philip Craig or in Venice with Donna
Leon and Sweden with Henning Mankell.
Crime stories allow us to escape romour daily lives
and provide us with the reassurance that we can cope
withour daily lives. They show us the best and worst o
human nature and allow us to question how we would
react in similar circumstances. Author Sue Graton
summed it up when she said: A crime story is more
than a novel, more than a compelling account o people
whose ate engages us. The mystery is a means by whichwe can explore, vicariously, the perplexing questions o
crime, guilt and innocence, violence and justice.
So consider yoursel warned beore you begin digging
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M I c H A E L R O B O T H A M
up the bodies. Our secrets are now yours. And remember
what Stephen King said when asked why he wrote about
such gruesome subjects. Why do you assume that I have
a choice?
Michael Robotham
All royalties rom this book go towards the Australian
Crime Writers Association, which runs the annualNed Kelly Awards and was established to promote crime
writing and reading in Australia. I youd like to learn more
about the ACWA and see the benefts o membership
go to our website: www.auscrimewriters.com
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cKEEP THE BODIES
cOMING
by Shane Maloney
So ar Ive killed around seventeen people. Its hardto be completely sure without digging them up and
counting them all, but Ive been at it or a while now
and it has to be somewhere in the high teens, minimum.
Among others, Ive dispatched a leading-hand storeman,
a promising young athlete, a talented painter, a shity
property developer, an abalone poacher, the owner oa trattoria in Moonee Ponds, a senior union ocial, a
rerigeration mechanic, a public policy analyst, a gym
jockey and both sons o a trucking magnate. Ive rozen,
drowned, bludgeoned, shot, speared, squashed, run
down and incinerated them. And I still havent nished.
Lead a lie like mine and youre under constant pressureto keep the bodies coming.
Some o those who died were innocent victims.
Some were only getting what they deserved. Mostly
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I F I T E L L Y O U . . . I ' L L H A V E T O K I L L Y O U
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I kill men. The one time I killed a woman, it cost me a lot
o grie. I dressed it up to make it look like an accident,
but it was entirely deliberateher loss was indispensable
to the advancement o the story, so she had to die.
Perhaps at this point I should say that I am not an
inherently violent person. My childhood was not spent
torturing caterpillars. My mother was not killed in
a bizarre sex slaying on a vacant lot in Pasadena. Myinner demons keep mainly to themselves. I would never
dream o stabbing someone over and over again in the
eye with a shard o broken glass then kicking him until
his spleen came out o his ears, no matter how much he
might happen to deserve it. I didnt deliberately set out
to become a serial killer. My homicidal rampage began
entirely innocently, but it is a well-known act that these
things have a tendency to get out o hand. One thing
leads to another and God knows where it will all end.
Death has a lie o its own.
It all began when I decided to write a novel. At the
time, I didnt know much about the literature game, so
I thought Id start somewhere on the ringe and work
my way towards the centre, picking things up as I went
along. Eventually, I elt Id gured out enough to write
the Great Australian Novel and win the Peter Carey
Prize or Best New Tim Winton. Crime ction seemeda good place to start. It is a second-rate literary orm, a
hot bed o low expectations, so its appeal was obvious.
For a brie moment I considered trying my hand at
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S H A N E M A L O N E Y
antasybut theres only so low a man can be expected
to stoop.
Precisely because it makes no great literary claims
or itsel, crime ction takes a lot o perormance
pressure o the would-be novelist. Free rom the need
to produce lapidary sentences and proound rumina-
tions, the writer can get on with the job o taking the
reader or a ride. But contemporary crime takes in a loto territory and I wasnt quite sure where to begin. So
I started in the usual placeby killing somebody.
My victim was a Turkish oreman in a meat-packing
works in Broadmeadows. I locked him in a reezer
until he expired, then stued his snap-rozen carcass
between the pallets o spring lamb. His job was simply
to get the ball rolling, to precipitate the ensuing action.
He had a name but little in the way o a lie history.
That would come later, uncovered in the course o the
story. All that mattered or the moment was the act
that he had met an untimely death and there was clearly
more to the situation than met the eye o the relevant
authorities.
I got the idea rom my own experience. Once as a
teenager, when I was working a school-holiday job, my
workmates locked me in a reezer until I turned blue and
began to shake uncontrollably. It was all jolly good un,a bit o a lark, but it sort o stuck in my mind.
With a corpse suitably urnished and puzzle success-
ully posited, it was time or the protagonist to arrive.
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I F I T E L L Y O U . . . I ' L L H A V E T O K I L L Y O U
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In accordance with the inexorable logic o crime ction,
a suspicious death summons orth the sleuth. In most
crime ction, the killer-catcher is acting in a proessional
capacity. They are a representative o those institu-
tions o society charged with the task o investigating
crimesa police ocer, a coroner, a orensic pathologist
or whatever. Their mission is sanctioned and supported
by the apparatus and resources o the state. The investi-gator acts on behal o the rest o us to seek the truth and
ensure that justice is enacted.
Alternatively, the sleuth might be a private detective,
a hired specialist, a gumshoe. He might be a twenty-
dollar-a-day proessional, a Philip Marlowe hanging his
shingle or the passing trade. Operating on the ringes
o the law, the gumshoe doesnt so much solve crimes as
turn over rocks, setting in motion a train o events which
might, or might not, reveal the truth. This process is
acilitated by asking unwelcome questions and being
struck over the head rom behind, knocked unconscious
and waking up in a puddle o piss.
The protagonist might also be an inspired amateur,
a Miss Marple who treats murder as an intellectual puzzle,
a mystery to be solved, a brainteaser. Such a character
proves her mental and moral mettle by penetrating the
signicance o the act that the pistol shot was concealedby the striking o the dinner gong by the butler, whose
ootprints outside the conservatory window can only be
explained by young Reggie Fernacker-Clakkes sudden
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S H A N E M A L O N E Y
interest in Eunice Crabapples collection o rare Lepi-
doptera.
Take your pick: orensic procedural, gumshoe, cosy,
gangsterin crime ction par excellence, one writers
meat is another writers ast-acting, almost-undetectable
poison derived rom a rare plant ound only in a lost
valley in the Hindu Kush. Whatever shape they might
happen to take, detectives are usually driven by easilydeciphered intentions. In police procedurals, the invest-
igators are government unctionaries, with all the
organisational complications that entails. Murder is
antisocial and its victims have rights, including ull
access to the latest in electron microscopy and DNA
matching. Detection is a team eort and the individ-
ual investigators are there to provide the psychological
dimensions and the personal quirks.
Over the course o crime ctions 150-odd-year
history, the protagonist has evolved and multiplied
into myriad orms. The shambolic homicide dick with
whisky on his breath and soup stains on his tie has
transmogried into the emale orensic pathologist in a
Chanel suit. Sherlock Holmes has become a traditionally
sized Arican lady rom Botswana and the hard-boiled
Philip Marlowe is now a eisty goil rom Noo Joisey or
a hal-Danish, hal-Inuit Marxist glaciologist. The jobdescriptions, jurisdictions, gender and methodologies are
continuously changing, but the undamental structure
persistsdiscover the crime, untangle the acts, winnow
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I F I T E L L Y O U . . . I ' L L H A V E T O K I L L Y O U
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the suspects, plumb the motives, test the alibis, appre-
hend the perpetrator, avenge the wrong and beat the
clock. Whether amateur or proessional, the habitual
crime-solver is inured, i not hardened, by amiliarity
with the grisly details. Inspector Rex, or example, takes
homicide in his stride. Ritual disembowelment one
minute, a ham roll the next.
It all seems pretty straightorward, but at my rstoray into the genre, I began by making a serious category
error. It was a mistake which has dogged me ever since.
Instead o employing a member o the killer-catching
community as my protagonist, I gave the job to a rank
novice called Murray Whelan, a minder, political xer,
hopeless romantic and inadvertent detective.
Wondering what an ordinary bloke might do i he
began to suspect that a murder had gone undetected,
that a death which had been quickly dismissed as an
industrial accident was actually the result o oul play,
and that somebody was getting away with it, I came
up with a sel-starter protagonistan everyman equipped
with no brie to investigate, no orensic expertise and
no real evidence. And by way o motivation, I gave
him not a coppers world-weary determination or a
gumshoes tarnished code o honour, but a mish-mash
o nosiness, scepticism, loyalty, sense o justice and,when the baddie eventually comes at him with a sharp-
ened screwdriver, pants-shitting terror.
Despite these undamental design faws, my accidental
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S H A N E M A L O N E Y
hero stumbled onward, uncovering clues and upsetting
the urniture. By the end o the book, the body count
was a modest two. The victims, to a greater or lesser
extent, deserved what they got. No innocents were
harmed. No evil greater than greed was unmasked.
Murray Whelan, having come ace to ace with murder,
was physically shaken but not existentially stirred.
Actually, it all worked out rather well. By that, I meanthe book got published.
But a taste or murder, once acquired, is not easily
shaken o. Hercules Poirot didnt stop at just one victim,
nor Philip Marlowe, nor Cli Hardy or John Rebus.
No sooner had my bloke settled back into a semblance
o normal lie than another body popped up. Thats the
other thing about crime ction. Once word gets around
that youve got blood on your hands, youre expected
to live up to your reputation. I was now duty bound to
start ong people at regular intervals. I must become
a serial killer.
Things soon began to get seriously out o hand. The
death rate took a steep upward turn. From two bodies
in my rst book, I went to ve in the second. I took a
young painter with a complicated past, got him drunk
and drowned him in the ornamental moat o an art
gallery. I then pushed a harmless old queen down a steepriverbank. And soon ater I got a gun. Its not hard to do.
There are a lot more o them around than most people
realise. And once I had a gun, people started to get shot.
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For a while there, it looked like my bumbler would be
lucky to escape with his lie. Eventually, o course, the
villain got his comeuppance, but only ater a long trail
o corpses had been delivered to the morgue.
By novel number three, I was acing a new pressure.
Pace wasnt matching productivity. I wasnt killing ast
enough. My American publisher complained that it took
almost 100 pages to get to the rst atality. Why the longlead-up? In Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett had killed
28 people by Chapter 5. Id barely managed threeor
was it our? Id been concentrating on neither numbers
nor speed but method. I started with bare hands and
worked my way up to a javelin.
By the end o book our, the bodies were really
starting to pile up. I ran over the rst victim with
a semi-trailer during a torrential pre-dawn rainstorm.
I did this in order to eliminate crime-scene orensics as
a plot element and leave the coppers bafed. Forensics
are a bitch and the more bafed the gendarmes, the more
room or manoeuvre. I then shot a truckie on the side
o a country road and let a ake suicide note beside his
body. This was a direct consequence o the protagonist
sticking his big bib in the wrong place and exacerbating
an already hairy situation. This urther compounded my
hapless heros expanding repertoire o motives. As wellas a natural tendency to want to right wrongs, he must
also clear his name and get revenge on the bastards who
oed his truckie mate.
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S H A N E M A L O N E Y
In general we humans like to think that the motives
or murder are airly straightorward. Psychopaths do it
because theyre batshit crazy. Sociopaths do it because
they dont give a shit. Other motives are equally easy to
understand. They are derived rom our most common
human emotionsear, pride, envy, anger, greed, lust
and all the other deadly sins except sloth (ew people are
ever killed in a renzy o unbridled sloth). Personally,Im somewhat inclined to the view that as a motivat-
ing actor, motive is overrated. In a lot o premeditated
murders, it seems to me, there is very little meditation,
pre or post. At one point, I killed a amily riend in
a blind rage uelled by anabolic steroids. Not only was
there no real motive behind it, there was no subsequent
memory. I got the idea rom a real case. This idea o a
motive being unnecessary doesnt just apply to murder.
As Mailer or Roth or Hemingway or one o those guys
once amously said, the motive or writing a novel is to
write a novel.
In the contemporary crime novel an element o
unresolved sexual tension is more or less obligatory. The
protagonist must not only collar the killer, he must also
nail the girl . . . or boy . . . or cat. Its a multi-gendered
world out there, olks, and the electricity must be taken
into account. And when you murder the love interest, youreally ramp up the stakes. Which brings me back to the
woman I mentioned earlier, the one whose convenient
demise caused me grie. She was an innocent victim,
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I F I T E L L Y O U . . . I ' L L H A V E T O K I L L Y O U
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collateral damage in a shootout between police and two
prison escapees. She was one o my better creations, at
least as ar as my hero was concerned. He loved her.
Which is precisely why I killed her.
In that particular book, the bullets are whistling by
page three. I saw o a mans ear and eed it to a dog.
Theres a ght to the death in a dinghy. The cops arrive
in a blaze o gunre. Its all very cathartic. Every newbook demands resh blood, but suitable victims are not
always easy to nd. In the case o my most recent novel
(I use the word recent in the ironic sense), the suspi-
cious death is decades old. The detection is hal-arsed.
The sexual tension is peripheral to the case. The only
potentially violent character is overcome in a furry o
activity a ew pages rom the end. The issue at stake
is a dead mans posthumous reputation. It wasnt really
a murder anyway.
Still, they called it crime ction, so thats what it
must be. Which tends to take the pressure o a bit, Im
pleased to say. Murder can be exhausting and its nice to
ease back rom time to time. But then, inevitably, you
begin to eel a certain hankering.
Now where did I leave that axe?
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S H A N E M A L O N E Y
MY RULES
There are no fucking rules There are only fucking examples Read
some fucking books Broaden your vocabulary Fuck can function
as most parts of speech, but that doesnt mean you should limit
yourself Have a concept Do your research Dont procrastinate Find
inspiration Believe in yourself Steal Use spellcheck Think about all
the possibilities Persist Get a proper thesaurus If it doesnt work,
start again Learn from your mistakes Get over yourself Start asclose to the end as possible Make me care
FIVE MUST-READS
1. The Big Sleepby Raymond Chandler
2. Miami Bluesby Charles Willeford
3. The Friends of Eddie Coyleby George V Higgins
4. Skintightby Carl Hiaasen
5. Miss Smillas Feeling for Snowby Peter Heg
kShane Maloney is the creator o the bestselling Australian
crime series, the Murray Whelan novels: Sti, The Brush-
O, Nice Try, The Big Ask, Something Fishy and
Sucked In. He is a winner o the Ned Kelly Award or
Best Crime Fiction and recipient o the Australian CrimeWriters Association Lietime Achievement Award.
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