Sophie Gee

and how it's impossible to tell what anyone's motives are or what they're really like, because they're so habitually able to kind of cover over their kind of true character.

So it's a very close study of what it's like to live in the theatre and be kind of brought up in the world of the theatre.

Yeah, it's unbelievably interesting.

I actually want to talk more, and we'll do it later in the episode, about the way she gives us Te Pukeha, because he's actually quite a complicated piece of characterisation, including the way he describes the Maori arrival and Maori settlement of New Zealand.

There's a really amazing passage towards the end of the book.

But for now, Jonty, I want to drop my insight, which I've just been sitting on since we started talking.

So I think that Vintage Murder, Naio Marsh's novel, is the Picnic of Hanging Rock of New Zealand fiction.

And it's so interesting the way that, you know, in exactly the same way that Joan Lindsay does in Picnic of Hanging Rock, which of course is written in the 1960s.

So Naio Marsh is writing earlier.

She's got this kind of

very acerbic, satirical eye on white colonial behaviour in the appropriated country.

She's got this very sympathetic, very curious sort of anthropological interest in the First Nations culture.

And she's kind of toggling between the two and using that to kind of construct this mystery story.

It's so clever.

Unlike Joan Lindsay, she doesn't ultimately make the heart of the mystery be connected to the New Zealand landscape or the kind of New Zealand First Nations people.

But

I think she's doing many of the same things in this book.

And, you know, both of these writers are people who we think of as kind of embedded in their period.

We think of them as kind of mouthpieces or spokespeople for a kind of colonial sensibility, a settler sensibility.

And in some ways they are.