The first time I ever interviewed an author in front of an audience was at Melbourne Writers' Festival in two thousand and four, twenty years ago.
This year twenty seven and Bella's twenty five.
Jesus four twenty four. Yeah, that's pretty amazing.
It's twenty years for you and I going, that's.
Right, Charlotte's now the age I was when we're met. The author I spoke with for that first interview was also a first timer, kind of. His name was Michael Robotham, and even though we'd written over a dozen best selling books, his career up until then had been in the shadows of anonymity. He was a professional ghostwriter, Tony Bullymore, Jerry Halliwell,
he even wrote Rolf Harris's autobiography. But this was his first book in his own name, a crime novel called The Suspect, And it was, as they say in the industry generating buzz. I was nervous. He was nervous, but between us we muddled through. And look at us now, how far we've come. Two decades on. Michael Robotham is a crime writing rock star, and I'm Michael Williams. And this is read this the show about the books we love and the twenty year stories behind me a little
bit of context for the crime writing rockstar label. In the intervening twenty years, Michael has written eighteen books published in twenty five languages around the world. Stephen Kingsafan the other day he tweetled about Michael's new novel, storm Child, the latest of his series featuring criminal psychologist Cyrus Haven. King called it brilliant and propulsive and it's already sitting high atop the best seller lists for crime officionados. A new Michael Robotham book is a key date on the
reading calendar. Stormchild is true to form and brings in refugee politics and intergenerational trauma, unfurling more of the mysteries behind his troubled heroine, Ev Cormack. It's a gripping read and its author is clearly no longer a first timer. Michael Robotham, I want to take you back to that first Melbourne Writers Festival as a baby author. You're out there for the first time, and I know at that
festival you had some very exalted sessions. You were from memory on a panel with Harlan Coben and Michael Connolly. You know you did enter the world of crime writing as a rock star in the making, but arguably the most prestigious event you did at that festival was with a young, upstart interviewer. Do you remember what it was like, that feeling of finally putting your name on a book.
I remember when I first saw my name on a book. I was actually because i'd go Stretten fifteen autobiographies for the Great and the Good and the Less Good, Thank you, Rolf. But I remember the very first time I saw my name on a book was in Amsterdam, because the Dutch had got two translators working on the Suspect and got it out before the English language version. And I was in Amsterdam when it was launched, and my first reaction was that made a dreadful mistake, because my name shouldn't
be on a book. I'm a ghost writer and I've always been the hidden hand. And then I remember being in London when the book launched, and I had the most astonishing, surreal experience of walking down onto a train platform and there was a huge poster on the opposite side of the tube station and it showed this silhouetted man beside a Canal underneath the Bridge very moody, and the caption read, He's had eleven Sunday Times best sellers and sold to me in books, but you don't know
his name. Meet the man behind the ghost and I remember being shocked by that, thinking they can't do that, they can't do that. But it's such completely surreal, and it took my long while to get used to seeing my name on the book.
It's funny because the ghost writing as a background meant that you were when you wrote your first novel, you're already a past master at crafting a story, at thinking
your way into a character's head. But I remember you talking about what that process of ghostwriting involved, and they're sitting down and talking to people and they kind of listening, and the understanding they're finding the voice and finding the way in and strikes me as a fundamentally building block for any novelist, I think absolutely.
I mean, it's the reason that pretty much in my entire sort of career as a fiction writer, as a crime writer, I've written in the first person because I did these fifteen books in the first person, and if I did my job well as a ghost writer, then you know, Jerry Halliwell, or Lulu or you know, Tony Buller more, whoever it was, it would look and sound and feel like them, and no one would recognize my fingerprints on the page. And very much I approached fiction
the same way. I remember the moment when I captured Joe Locklan's voice, you know, in that first book, The Suspect, And it's not the opening line of the book. It's a line where I wrote that Joe Locklin, because he's
got early on sat Parkinson's is brilliant psychologist. And Joe Locklin's voice he says, when I wake up in the morning and get out of bed, I know if it's going to be a good day or a bad day, if I can bend down and tie my shoes, And that slightly self deprecating sense of humor in amidst the adversity that was Joe's voice, And from that moment I thought, I have his voice now.
Then faculty with kind of dialogue and with humor, and it characterizes your work. Your most recent book, Storm Child, has a moment of high drama where things are coming to a head, the you know, good evil kind of clash of all these things, and the vaguely villainous character not even vaguely stops to say, is that a cliche or a trope like a has a moment in the same way it just wants to talk about words and an idea. And it's such a finely observed moment about character.
That doesn't break the tension, that doesn't it just kind of adds to it.
Many many years ago, when I was a feature writer, before I became a ghost writer, I was a journalist and a feature writer, and I picked up a book called Stalking the Feature Story. I can't remember the name of who wrote it now, but it was probably the best book I'd ever read on on the art of feature writing. But it actually used a Hemingway example. Hemingway once described a character as having a dimple deep enough
to drop a marble into. And it was just, I mean, in that one line, it didn't matter whether you read another two hundred pages, you remembered that character. And so that's sort of what I strive to do at times, is to just think of you can't do every line like that. Every line can't be a zinger, so to speak. I mean, but you're just trying to do the one line descripture at times that will cement a character in the reader's mind, and that reader will remember that character.
That also has significance in the context of genre fiction when it comes to seeding plot points that are going to be important afterwards. You know, Agatha Christie was a great one for talking about playing fair with the reader, that you know that you have this contract with your reader where you can set stuff up, but the reveals when they happen, the twists when they happen, can't come out of the blue. They have to be carefully seated
through the book beforehand. And I'm curious about the ways in which that for you has changed in your plotting as you've gone on in your career, whether you're now like more schematic or less schematic than you were when you started.
I don't think i've changed. That was the great challenge with writing Storm Child is when I created the series with Cyrus Savan and Needy Kormack, with Good God, Bad Girl, I mean ev is this young girl was found hiding in a hidden room in a house where a man had been tortured to death. And when you reach the end of Good God, Bad Goal, everything you thought you knew about Evie gets turned on its head, But you don't know who put her in that room, and that's
still a mystery that's got to be answered. And readers would come to me after that saying, but you know who put her in the room, don't you going? No idea, no idea. So I had to write the second book when She was Good, based upon the clues that I created in the first book, and going all the way through to Storm Child, where all the details of Evie's backstory, her creation story are revealed. In Storm Child. When I began the first book, I had no idea about Evie's story.
There was no character arc. I had to create that after each book.
Is that important to you to have mystery? To you? When you write that, you're happy to set up a scenario, but you're not writing to a point of s You're writing to a point of kind of curiosity.
Totally. I mean, I understand why people like you know, Jane Harper and Jeffrey Deaver, they plot the entire book out in advance before they begin writing it. I mean to me, the idea that I would know what I was going to be writing next Tuesday at four o'clock, I would find credibly sort of boring. And the beauty is that, you know when I come in from you know, I have this writer's room which my daughters in the previous house they refer to my writing room as Dad's
pit of despair. I now work in the kabana of cruelty. But when I come in from the cabana of cruelty and say to my wife, you would not believe what just happened. I mean, if I haven't seen the twist coming, then I think I don't imagine the reader will see it coming. So it's a very organic way of writing. It's a very exciting way of writing. It's a very
scary way of writing. But it means that when my main character is hang by their fingertips from a cliff, I'm hanging there with them thinking how the hell am I going to get them off this cliff? And it makes it an exciting journey.
Do you have a sense of having to play fair with yourself or do you like pushing the limits of where that goes? All right, I'm going to blow everything up purely because it's going to give me that frissle of how do I fix this?
No, I think it's got to be believable. I appreciate how clever readers are, and I always accept the fact that there are some readers that are going to pick the villain or pick the ending. I mean, you can try your best, you know. I think one of the great problems though, is if you you know, you don't want a situation where the villain is beamed down at the last chapter and you haven't given the reader any any as you mentioned earlier, any chance of You're not
played fair with them at all. So you accept the fact that some readers are going to going to guess the ending. Some really set out to guess see any others you know are quite happy to just go along for the ride. My wife thinks that watching any crime drama is spoil for me because literally five minutes in, I'll go that person, they're the villain. She's quite happy to just let it roll over her and just enjoy the journey. But I mean, I think I do play fair.
I don't tend to blow things up. I think initially I give readers too much credit and I don't put enough clues in. And what I do you know, through the many many rewrites, I go back and I plant more clues in and I refer to the not soo much as clues as land mines. I bury land mines. And the thing is I put a flag on it and say there's a landmine here, But then I distract the reader. So at some point they step on the landmine and it blows their leg off and they go,
damn him. You know, I saw him plant that mine. And so that's what it's about.
There is a comfort, I mean, is one of the things about reading genre where you don't want it to run away from its own conventions. You know that actually part of the thrill of it is knowing the tradition into which it's being written and kind of understanding that that being done in an original way or a surprising way. That's where the play not in kind of completely undermining all those things.
Yeah, and I think, I mean, I have a I hate three word slogans for all sorts of reasons, but I have three words that I sort of write by, and that's make them care.
I thought it was stop the boats, make them care, right, that make them care?
Yes, definitely, not the other one. And so you know, I'm in awe of people like Gillian Flynn and gone girl who could create two completely odious characters in Nick and Amy and pull that off with the Unreliable and Radar. I mean, that's astonishing piece of writing. And you know Trisia high Smith did it with the Ripley novels, or
you know Paula Hawkins Girl on a Train. I mean, every so often people break the rules and get away with it, and I'm in awe of that because, you know, because I tend to stick to the premise that I want to give the reader a chance. I want to make the reader fall in love with my characters, and then I will do terrible things for those characters.
One of the ways you do that and one of the tricks that you've played right through your twenty years of crime writing. It's certainly writing series and series characters, but it's the sideways step. It's the kind of moving the focus to other characters in the same world that you've done kind of several times through your career. And what it means is you afford yourself a kind of different lens through which to look at characters you've previously created.
You mentioned Joel Lochlan before he was kind of your key protagonist early in your career. Joe still looms in the background of these books, but as seen by others rather than in his own head.
When I set out to write, I didn't intend to write a series. So when I wrote The Suspect and created the Joe Lochlan character, I mean, if I thought I was going to write a series, what sort of idiot would have given their main character early on set Parkinson's I mean, I mean, I thought I was creating this man with a brilliant mind whose body was abandoning him bit by bit. Loved the tragic irony of that, but I didn't imagine I'd write more Joe Lachlan books,
and so I fought against it doing the series. So I did take another character, like Vincent Luis became the main character of Lost, and then Alicia Barbara Young Policemen became the main character in The Night Very. And the one thing I've always wanted to avoid is writing the same book twice and we all see it and without naming names, you know, we pick up and we read a writer who always admired and we might still enjoy
the book. But there's a sameness to it, you know, and there's a comfort in that there's also a they're not surprising you to be.
A coward, Michael, names.
You want to I'm not going to name names. No, I know too many of these people.
I know fair enough, and you know, to be fair to Lee Child, they've got his brother to start writing him at some points.
So you said that, not me, Michael, I mean I want someone to tap me on the shoulder when I'm sort of if they feel as though I'm posting it in or on I'm not trying new things and new voices or and I get bored. So I want to try always to create something fresh in year.
When we return, Michael reveals ways never set a book in Australia and why that might be about to change. We'll be back in a minute. A phrase that comes up in this book and that is relevant to Evie and her story is truth wizards. And I want to ask you if truth wizards are a real thing.
Yeah, they are, because ev Cormac is a has got this ability to tell when someone is lying. And you know, present company excluded, of course, Michael, the majority of people lie between ten and two hundred times a day. And when I said earlier that you're looking good.
That's so hurtful. Michael.
So that's so interesting, interesting you should ask that, Michael, what a great question, whether it be you know I'm five minutes away, I bought it on special, or I've read the terms and conditions. We lie all the time to people we love, So for Evie it's not a gift.
It's a curse because three little words like I love you or I miss you become incredibly damaging if you know they're not genuine, and so Evie is what's known as a truth wizard that The term was coined by Professor Paul Eckman, who is the world's leading expert on lying. About one in five hundred people have the ability to
tell when someone is lying. They invariably have come from law enforcement or child services, or many of them are school teachers, because I mean, if you're lied to for a living, you tend to be able to pick it up a bit better. Evie is a bit of an anomaly.
But when they do find young people to have the ability, they often come from very violent or dysfunctional backgrounds where they've had to work out within a split second whether they're going to be hugged or hit, and they then pick up on the signals, and so truth wizards do exist.
I hate the term. It sounds very JK. Rowling, Harry Potter, but they do exist in society, and they have the best one to have about an eighty percent ability to pick the verbal lie or the emotional lie or the physical lie.
With Cyrus Haven, you've gone back to the psychologist. Well, and I mean, I'm interested in what it is about psychologists in particular, rather than conventional law enforcement characters that you do seem drawn to. You seem drawn to the person who's on the periphery. At one point, someone in Stormchild, one of the cops, points out that Cyrus is a kind of second rate Hercule Poirot, and there is something about someone who's outside the system that must be appealing.
But why psychology that kind of slightly dates back to one of your ghosts written books for you, doesn't it?
Yeah? It does. I mean, I think police procedurals there, I mean, there are so many of them out there, and there are so many rules and regulations that the police have to follow and detectives have to follow. I yearned for the days of the Sweeney, where you could kick indoors and you know, and slap suspects around the head, all of which is impossible now, I mean everything's by the.
Book, sent crime book.
That's the only way to go. But no one of the people I go strot for. And I guess my knowledge of criminal psychology comes from having worked with a man called Paul Britton, who was a pioneer of offender profiling in the UK, who had spent twenty thirty years working in broad Moor and ramped and with the deciding whether people could ever be treated or released. So he's knowledge of human behavior came from that background. And I
did two books with Paul. I go strough to book called a Jigsaw Man, and he'd worked on over one hundred murder cases, Friend Rosemary West, the House of Horrors, you know, Jamie Bulger, the Little Boy in Liverpool. I mean, just endless numbers of incredible cases. And then we did a second book called Picking Up the Pieces about his clinical work, and a lot of the novels have been
seated in those cases that Paul did. I mean, even The Secret She Keeps, which was turned into the TV series you know that was based upon the kidnapping of Abbi Humphrey's little baby, that was kidnapped from the Queen's Medical Center in Nottingham by a woman who faked a pregnancy and dresses and earths and stole and the baby was missing for seventeen days. And so I created an
entire sort of fictionalized that sort of event. And so many of the novels have been seated in poor Britain cases or stories that we maybe couldn't mention in the books, but I thought still would make great novel material.
Does that been At some point there's going to be a You're going to write a crime novel from the perspective of a Jerry Halliwell style character, and you just like mind those stories.
Now I do mind. It's funny, I still mind those stories of all my ghost written books. One of the people I did who you know, I go straight for was Ricky Tomlinson, a British comedy actor who was most famous for comedy series called The Royal Family written by
Carolyn O'Hearn. And Ricky had spent time in prison when he was a builder's laborer and he was rested on a picket line and there were a couple of stories that he told me from his time in prison that have turned up in books like Life or Death or so I do mind all of those All of those things finish up being fodder.
Really your career, your meteoric career. Obviously most of it you owe to me interviewing you early in it. But you know that picture of ads in the tube station, bidding wars in multiple territories. All of that stuff is a kind of rare story of success. And I'm curious for you about the relationship between being an international author and being an Australian author, what that success feels like at home, and what it feels like when you're out in the world on the circuit.
Yeah. No, I did have an incredibly fortunate start. Most of my publishing contacts were in the UK because that's where i'd goes stritten for for many years, even though I'm born and bred Australian. I mean, I was sold internationally from UK, and I'm always regarded myself as more international sort of writer anyway, But more and more it's the question I get asked most often is you know, a y, I don't set my books in Australia. And secondly, when are you going to set a book in Australia.
And it's I've got this right. It's because you hate Australia and Australians. I'm pretty sure you've said that to me off Mike, But are you happy to say that on the record.
Nothing, No, none of the above. That's such a slanderous.
We're going to edit out. You're applied. Now.
What happened was I have I have in my bottom drawer at home the greatest ever unpublished Australian novel, and it was almost published by Penguin in the UK in about nineteen ninety five, and I missed out by a single vote in a publishing meeting was set in a small fishing fishing town on the coast, and I missed
up by a single vote. And I was told afterwards, if I'd set that book in England, Island, Scotland or Wales, they would have published it in a heartbeat, But because I've set it in Australia, it was just too hard for them to sell. This is well before, which was pre Jane Harper having blown the doors off and opened
the world up for Australian crime writers. And so when I sat down to write another book, which became The Suspect, I thought all sat it in the UK, and of course it triggered the Bidding War and the rest is history. And since then, for twenty odd years, I've had publishers asking me about this novel in the bottom drawer. And the thing is, while it remains of my bottom drawer, Michael, it will always be Australia's greatest ever unpublished novel.
Schrodingen's novel.
You can't open that draw out. But saying that I've it's this is something I've only I've just been to the UK on a pre pre publicity sort of tour and it's amazing. How you know, fifteen years ago I had a British publisher told me they would be happy if I set a book anywhere in the world except Australia, and this time around it was odd. I was in the UK and I said, listen, I think I'm going to set a book set write a book set in Australia,
and they went, what a brilliant idea. So hearing it now that my twentieth novel, So not next year, but the year after my twentieth novel, I'm coming home.
That's pretty exciting and standalone or do you see yourself kind of launching into a whole new this one.
Would you believe I'm taking the book out of the bottom drawer and I'm rewriting it. So it's a book that really is going to be something like thirty odd years in the making.
So I'd like that a good gestation period on a book is a nice thing. I think a robotm thank you for your.
Time, Michael Williams, it's an enormous pleasure. Let's not wait twenty more years.
We'll do it again. Michael Robotham's latest novel, Storm Child, is available wherever you buy your books. Before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've been reading this week and given Michael and I met on stage at a writer's first of all, it feels like nice timing to be able to praise a book by someone else I first met at writers' firstivals. Elsa Piper is an absolutely fabulous moderator of literary events and a wonderful and astute reader, so it's hardly surprising that she turns out
to be an accomplished writer herself. Her book is called for Life, and it's an account of the death of her husband and the role that the natural world and the written word can play in how we grieve and how we heal. It's beautiful. You can find it and all the other books we mentioned today at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe and tell your friends
and rate and review. It helps a lot read This is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you next week.