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Chapter 1: What is the focus of this week's episode on crime writing?
This is an ABC podcast.
Hi, welcome to The Bookshelf, your weekly fiction collection on RN. I'm Kate Evans.
And I'm Cassie McCullough, and we're going bite-sized fiction this week with a kind of assorted creams selection of novellas, Kate.
We're also getting our teeth into crime with two leaders in the field.
Australian writer Gary Disher, for one, with his new rural noir.
And the dark shadows of Los Angeles with Michael Connolly revealing his own reading and influences.
I think I'm a student of Los Angeles. I became a writer largely because of the works of Raymond Chandler. Before I start writing a book every year, I always reread Chapter 13 of The Little Sister because it has nothing to do with the plot of the...
book you don't have to reread the whole book to read chapter 13 it's just his character Marlo taking a drive around Los Angeles and I think that was printed in 1939 and it still captures the essence of Los Angeles so he achieved to me a rare level of art in his book in his description of Los Angeles there that still inspires me every time I try to do my own take on Los Angeles
Oh, well, he had met Raymond Chandler, Kate. More from Michael Connolly in about 20 minutes. Before we get to LA, though, some Australian crime with Gary Dish's piece.
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Chapter 2: Who is Garry Disher and what is his contribution to Australian crime fiction?
The lights flared across Windsor Road From the tourmaline
Gary Disher has written over 40 novels, collections of short stories and works of non-fiction. He's won many awards for his crime fiction, including his Wyatt series and Peninsular Crime series.
He also writes for both children and young adults. The Bamboo Flute is a standout, I think. And he writes what you could call straight literary fiction too, with books like The Sunken Road and Her.
That's her H-E-R. And you were telling me about that just the other day.
It's an extraordinary novel, Cassie. It's set in Australia in 1909. So it's in the lead up to World War I. An extraordinarily poor family sells their three-year-old daughter to a passing swagman. So it's quite grim, but beautifully written. And it says a lot about his work, I think. He pays attention to history, to landscape. spare and poetic, but it has a good pace in terms of the plot.
And so that's the reason that I mentioned that one, even though he's written so many books. I think it says something about the way that he writes.
So is this a kind of homage to Darcy Nyland's Shirley, or is it a bit darker?
It's darker and earlier, I think. But he's good at revisiting those tropes in Australia, like in that one, The Swagman. And in this latest novel, Peace, he's looking at rural towns, at the cop, at a river that runs through, you know, nearby a town. So he's quite good at taking the things that we think are familiar in an Australian landscape and remaking them in very interesting ways.
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Chapter 3: How does Michael Connelly view the influence of Raymond Chandler?
All right. Well, let's talk about peace. Firstly, what about the title? What's it about?
Oh, you're starting the hardest question first. I mean, what does peace in a small town mean and even peace in the life of his central character, Hirsch? I mean, that is such a contested thing on both levels. So give me an easier question, Cassie.
Yeah, yeah. I know, it's just such an odd name for a crime novel. Normally there's like, you know, The Fisherman's Secret or, you know, some kind of little hook that's going to get you in. It just doesn't strike me straight up as a crime novel title. But anyway, all right, so we're in Tiverton, which is a town, although it's fictional, but it's regional South Australia.
It's a small town, big enough to have a cop shop and a general store and also a Christmas lights competition. Very important. Yeah. but there's also some problems in that town. What kind of ones?
Well, the usual problems of poverty, which is something that I think Gary Disher is very interested in. There aren't many teenagers in the town. There's not a lot for them to do. There are drug issues. Ice. Well, ice is one of them. I mean, people are smoking dope, but ice is probably the scariest drug issue in the town, given the behaviour that it can lead to.
Okay, and so Hirsch, although that's not his full name, is the main guy. Tell us about him.
Well, Hirsch has a backstory. Well, he actually has more than one backstory. So we know that he had been in the police force in Adelaide and he'd left because there was corruption in the police force and he exposed it, which means, of course, other cops are very, very wary of him.
Well, he's what's called generally a dead man walking, isn't he? Isn't that what they say?
or they call him a maggot or a dog, and he gets the full force of that kind of reaction. And so we get a lot of references to that backstory in this novel, Peace. But we also know that closer to time, he had moved to this small town and something had happened there as well. And there'd been a whole changing of the guard.
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Chapter 4: What themes does Gary Disher explore in his novel 'Peace'?
Understandable, though. It might put you off if you think, oh, this is the second in a series when, in fact, it's just a recurring character.
That's true. It is a crime novel though. So there are a number of crimes that we have to get our head around.
Well, look, I read the early part of this book. I didn't complete it. But what you see is this knockabout guy who's actually quite friendly, very dedicated to his job. He wants to go around and check in on old age pensioners and see that their meals on wheels have arrived and check in on people who have had some difficulty because of a crime in the past.
And he has this schedule of people that he likes to tap into to see what's going on. He seems like a pretty standard good cop.
And that feeds into one of the crimes, which is all about what happens in a small community and the anxieties and tensions and stresses in that community. So that's one layer of crime that we see, which is that something awful is done to some animals in the town.
Mm-hmm.
So that's one crime. Another crime is that a young woman is found dead at the side of a road. It may or may not have been a hit and run. And that ties into a whole other layer of knowledge and characters and Bad guys. And then there's a third level that does actually reach out into the whole country.
And that, well, that's a bit hard to explain without giving the plot away, but it involves a phone call from a cop in Sydney to one of his superiors saying... check up on this person, this family, this household. And there's a whole lot more going on there. And so as the book progresses, we have these three layers of crimes intertwined.
We've met quite a lot of characters who are drawn very quickly and clearly. We have Hirsch himself, who's in a relationship with a local school teacher, who has this fantastic 12-year-old daughter, who's also drawn in a very vivid way.
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Chapter 5: What role does Los Angeles play in Michael Connelly's writing?
Now on the bookshelf, let's catch up with Ashley Hay. Now, she is a novelist as well as a science writer and a dedicated reader, but she's also the editor of the Griffith Review. Ashley Hay, great to have you back.
Thanks for having me.
Now, Ash, before we get to the latest Griffith Review and its novella selection, do you have time for much reading outside your job?
No, not as much as I would like. I've got a fantasy about a purely reading sabbatical. But, you know, you always manage to squeeze bits and pieces in, I think, and you can justify any reading for the job as well, which is pretty great.
So what have you read recently?
I recently have been reading a fantastic book called Earth Emotions by Glenn Albrecht, who is the man who coined among a number of phrases the word solastalgia for the sort of complicated space of nostalgia for lost landscapes that many of us find ourselves navigating at the moment. That's been wonderful.
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Chapter 6: What are some key influences on Michael Connelly's writing style?
Yes, I spoke to him about that book not so long ago. It's really quite an immense amount of work for someone who's technically retired to a farm. He's still going, putting this work out and loved around the world.
Yes. And I think part of what's wonderful about the book is if you know Glenn Albrecht, you know him in association with that one word, and it's a powerful and useful word in a lot of contexts and spheres.
But what was wonderful about the book was understanding the process of naming or renaming that he's been going through for a lot of years and around a lot of different emotions and sort of things that we have to try to navigate and experience about how we see things and how we've feel things. So I found that really wonderful. That was my sort of nonfiction recently.
Well, can we just talk briefly about crime? Because that's what we're bookending this whole show with. So we were just talking about Gary Disher and later in the show. So we're heading towards Michael Connolly. Now, Ashley, are you a crime reader?
I'm not a huge crime reader. I have spent a chunk of this year reading nothing but crime. Essays, memoir, fiction, poetry, reportage. We had a great photo essay in there as well. And that really immersed me in a landscape of crime and justice and punishment and retribution and all these sorts of things in a very different way. I don't have a good reason for not being a huge crime reader.
I devoured Agatha Christie's when I was a kid. But I think what was fascinating in pulling together the Crimes and Punishments edition of Griffith Review was
was seeing the ways all the different genres could speak about crime and sort of unpack some of the kind of complexities and difficulties of trying to reduce things to an idea of justice or an idea of punishment or one kind of sort of definition of something.
And that's what I think good crime fiction does, actually. But why don't we move on to this latest edition of Griffith Review?
Because this is all about novellas. What actually is the technical definition of a novella?
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of the title 'Peace' in Disher's new book?
It's a competition that we run annually and we're supported by Copyright Australia's Cultural Fund to do this. We call in a number of judges. This year we had Holden Shepard, who was one of our winners from last year, Maxine Boniba-Clark and Aviva Tuffield to go through and help us choose a number of winners. This year we had four, Julianne Van Loon, Keren Heenan, Alanna Hunt and Miranda Rewo.
Well, let's talk about some of those novellas. I really loved Miranda Rewo's Anna the Javanese. Now, Miranda wrote The Fish Girl, which was on the shortlist, I think, for the Stella Prize a few years ago. And that one took a Somerset Maugham short story and took a minor character in that and made her the centre of the story.
In this one, she's done something sort of similar, but it's around a real historical figure. So who is the Anna that she's imagining her way into?
So Anna is one of the women who modelled for the Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin. And I think Miranda is doing this really wonderful work in, as you say, through The Fish Girl and now through Anna the Javanese, exploring and in a sense reclaiming these figures who are, you know, just tucked in the edge of a different world. of a different piece of history.
This is a really beautiful piece of writing that looks at this particular time in Paris and then on the French coast as Anna sort of comes into Gauguin's care, in a way, or that's maybe not quite the right word, and has to navigate this odd relationship of being a muse, in a sense, and, you know, working out why she is this muse to this man, you know, not knowing...
his story, his background, but also, you know, being a servant as well, being someone who needs to, you know, run his errands and try and feed him on the no money that he has and this sort of thing. And sleep with him. Indeed. There's a beautiful, you know,
I had to stop halfway through and actually look up the paintings that he did of Anna, the real paintings that Gauguin did. And there are photographs of her as well. And it was just a wonderful thing to immerse myself into.
I'm interested that you say that because I purposefully didn't do that because I had, I think I had Miranda's image, you know, so much in front of my mind. But there's something, part of what's wonderful, and I think you can see the same things in The Fish Girl, is the way she brings this very attentive sort of research and fact, in a way, into a beautifully imagined piece of fiction.
I think that's maybe part of part of what is making her writing work really wonderfully at the moment.
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Chapter 8: Who is the main character in 'Peace' and what is his backstory?
Ashley Hay, thank you so much for giving us a glimpse into these stories and future books that we might read through the Griffith Review, The Light Ascending Novella Project.
Thanks for having me.
Ashley Hay is a novelist whose books include A Hundred Small Lessons and A Body in Clouds. She's an essayist who also writes a lot about science and, as we're hearing, is the editor of the journal The Griffith Review.
Welcome to my dark side Welcome to my dark side welcome to my darkness i've been here a while
On the bookshelf on RN, we're talking about books. And Kate, this week you sat down with the American crime writer, legend, Michael Connolly.
And he even suggested the music that we just heard.
Control freak.
No, he likes to write characters who listen to music or have other obsessions. But here's a writer who started out as a crime reporter and even though he's been writing fiction for decades. He's based in LA, but he's also the executive producer now of the Bosch TV series, which is based on his character, Harry Bosch.
Yeah. Well, I think you could have put that the other way around, Kate. You know, like the series, the books came first. The series is just, you know, a bit of icing on the cake.
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