Crime Beat

Here’s a special for Crime Beat thanks to Joanne Hichens who put the interrogation lights on Michael Robotham when he jetted into Cape Town recently on a promo tour for his latest, Bombproof. He came clean so this is the first of a two-part transcription of the grilling:

Michael Robotham’s Bombproof starts:
Some days are diamonds, some days are stones.

Sami Macbeth’s first days out of chookie – he’s been wrongly imprisoned in the first place – are nothing but stones. Sami manages, through an unfortunate chain of events, to get himself right back in deep trouble. He’s chased by a gang of villains in need of his reputed ‘safe-cracking ability’ which is nothing more than urban legend! Then he becomes a suspect in a train bombing – an ‘accidental terrorist’ if you will – and ends up with cops and gangsters in hot pursuit in a mad chase through the East End of London.

Crime Beat: Bombproof is hard-hitting, fast, less of a psychological thriller if one compares it your debut novel Suspect, and more of an undiluted thriller…

Michael Robotham: All my books are quite different. This one is much more of a romp – very fast, violent and very sexy, and I suppose a bit satirical.

Crime Beat: Is the faster, tougher thriller a reflection of what the market wants?

Michael Robotham: Bombproof was initially written as part of a reading literacy campaign which wants to encourage reading in men, especially to reach lapsed male readers. I was the ambassador at the time, and I wanted to write something that was sort of a Quentin Tarantino romp, something that’d really appeal to young guys under thirty. Hopefully my other, and older readers won’t dislike Bombproof and fall by the wayside…

Crime Beat: If anything, you’ll strengthen you readership with Bombproof! I loved the pace of the book, and of course, I loved Sami Macbeth! I’m sure he’ll capture the imagination of millions of readers out there…

Michael Robotham: You know, I have this philosophy about reading: if you don’t like reading, it’s like saying you don’t like sex. You’re just not doing it right is all … everyone is one book away from being brought back into the reading fold!

Crime Beat: Readers can be brought back into the fold by a great character, too! Sami Macbeth is young, strong, intuitive, he wants to play guitar and be a rock star – an altogether different kind of character to seasoned Prof Joe O’Loughlin, the brilliant psychologist who featured in your debut novel Suspect. But from Suspect to Bombproof – the characters are authentic, believable, rounded, they all have those essential flaws that make them accessible. You have an ability as well to imbibe even minor characters with incredible history, without detracting from your major characters. Would you regard your novels as character driven?

Michael Robotham: People always talk about crime novels as being plot driven, but I like to think mine are as much character driven as plot driven. Again, that comes from having ghostwritten. When I look at the people I’ve written for, I’ve spent twelve months of my life with each one as I’ve captured their voice, looking for the events that shaped their lives … they are all so complex, it’s really helped me to imagine my own characters.

Crime Beat: That’s right, you worked as a ghostwriter for ten years or so before writing Suspect…

Michael Robotham: I’ve written everything from the point of view of a 26-year-old Spice Girl, to ageing actors, 70-year-old politicians, soldiers. It’s a bit like looking at the world through someone else’s eyes, and you get that privilege as a writer. I imagine it as having a huge jar of eyes in front of me and reaching in and grabbing a pair of eyes that I’m going to wear and look through for the next 12 months. We all see it so differently… I don’t preplan my books. I certainly want to experiment as a writer…to inhabit the world of different characters.

Crime Beat: So back to Sami Macbeth. Apart from being caring, and sexy (he has a great love interest in devoted Kate Tierney!) he’s and tough and enterprising, and importantly – has brains…

Michael Robotham: The whole point is Sami is an intelligent character. He’s hapless, sure, every time he tries to dig himself out of trouble he digs himself deeper. It starts with his arrest as a safe-cracker, a crime he never committed, but he can’t shake the reputation. I had a great deal of fun writing Sami. I loved that idea, of someone just stumbling into more and more trouble, but in order to get out of that he has to be intelligent. He can’t be entirely clueless, or readers will feel he’s an idiot and that he deserves to be where he is.

Crime Beat: He’s really a typically British ‘son’, with an Algerian mother and a Scottish father – certainly not an Islamic extremist, yet his looks fit the stereotype. Is part of Sami’s role, so to speak, to show up people’s prejudice?

Michael Robotham: What intrigued me was that I was in New York after the 2005 London bombings and I remember feeling quite uncomfortable on the train platform. I carry a rucksack with water and other stuff in it and I thought what if someone was carrying a bag containing maybe not a bomb but something incriminating … and so the story idea came from that. I thought it had to be a sort of siege situation … and thinking about who I could bring in to it, I thought Joe O’Loughlin could deal with a siege.

Crime Beat: Yet Joe O’Loughlin, brilliant psychologist that he is, only features on the last page of Bombproof?

Michael Robotham: I was needing a bit of space from Joe as he’s featured in three novels. He wasn’t high up on my agenda!

Crime Beat: He really faded into the background on this one! In fact, the only character that appears in all of your novels, including Bombproof, is tough cop Vincent Ruiz. In Bombproof, Ruiz remains haunted by a case that went wrong. The image of Jane Lanfranchi – Ray Garza’s first victim – sits squarely in his mind. As Sami enters the fray, and becomes mixed up with Ray Garza and his henchmen, the opportunity opens for Ruiz to settle the score, and put Garza behind bars. Tell us more about Vincent Ruiz.

Michael Robotham: In Suspect Ruiz doesn’t come across as particularly nice – such an arsehole in that book, always trying to arrest Joe – the beauty of Bombproof is you get the little extra layer. I love the idea of Ruiz sleeping around with his ex-wives. In a sense if someone were to give you a pen portrait of him, he’d come across as a cliché – the hard-drinking, damaged cop. But there’s a reason there’s this archetype – if you created a tee-totaling, God-fearing, church-going character it might not sell too well! What makes the best ghost book, and what makes the most interesting life, is drama, and to have drama you must have conflict. If someone has a conflict-free, happy marriage, great-job sort of life, it’s very hard to create drama unless you throw something in to the mix that upsets that existence.

Crime Beat: Which is the secret to good fiction, isn’t it?

Joanne Hichens continues her interrogation of Michael Robotham on Crime Beat tomorrow.