Crime Beat

Yesterday on Crime Beat, Joanne Hichens put the thumb screws on Michael Robotham and made him squeal. So if you were wondering what dire conspiracies lie behind his novel Bombproof check out what he had to say. And now for more as Joanne tightens the screws a notch or three.
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Crime Beat: Strictly speaking, you don’t consider yourself a series writer, do you?

Michael Robotham: If you write a book for 12 months it’s like living in a small tent with your best friend for 12 months and no matter how friendly you are, you get sick of the sight of him and you just want him to go away for a while. Publishers often push crime writers towards series. But I like to take a lesser character from a past novel, then he or she becomes the main character in the new book . It’s a way of keeping it fresh in my mind. Characters will drift in and out. It’s the case of look for the story and who would be best to tell the story. Readers like being reintroduced to a character they know, but for the same reasons readers love series, they’re prone to say that book was pretty much like the last book.

Crime Beat: Of your clutch of novels – Suspect, Lost, Shatter, The Night Ferry, Drowning Man and Bombproof - is there one in particular that stands out for you?

Michael Robotham: Writers are supposed to say their favourite book is the one that they’re promoting now … but Suspect changed my life. I was in between ghostwriting a book for Rolf Harris, and Lulu, wife of Barry Gibb, when I started to write Suspect. A British publisher offered a very substantial amount for it, and when word leaked out at the London Book Fair, it got to the point where people were offering money just to read it … literally in the space of a few hours my life changed! Then it was bought in so many territories, sold a million copies, and did all that so there’s always going to be a soft spot for Suspect. But the book that’s been the most challenging was The Night Ferry, told from the point of view of Alicia who happens to be a 28-year-old Asian woman.

Crime Beat: And what was that challenge?

Michael Robotham: Knowing that the vast majority of readers are likely to be women, I didn’t want to cock it up! I knew I hadn’t when my wife said, after reading the first draft, ‘My girlfriends are going to think you are the most sensitive new age man, but I want you to know, buster, I know the truth!’ I’d ghostwritten books for women, but to capture the female point of view from the imagination is hugely risky. From a gender or cultural viewpoint, you stuff something up like that, people will really jump all over you!

Crime Beat: Do you have a favourite character? Or is that unfair to ask?

Michael Robotham: The problem is I love all my characters; I really get deeply involved with them. Alicia, though, who featured in The Night Ferry, is one of my favourites. It’s really interesting that my wife had to come to terms with the fact that I pretty much had an affair with Alicia. My wife would kick my shins when we’d go out to dinner and say, ‘You’re with her, aren’t you?’ I’d drive my kids to school and miss the turnoff and they’d say, ‘Dad, the schools back there!’ I must say, I’m really missing Alicia ‘cause it’s been a couple of years.

Crime Beat: To go back to Sami, you wrote him from the third person point of view – which is different for you. Do you prefer writing from one perspective more than the other?

Michael Robotham: Having ghostwritten 15 autobiographies it’s a very natural thing for me to write in the first person. There’s a great sense of immediacy, a great pace, but it becomes a plotting nightmare - you have to be inventive about the way a person can get a piece of information, there’s only so many times someone can get a phone call. I was quite nervous about writing third person. Bombproof was the first time I’ve ever written in third person, and I really enjoyed it.

Crime Beat: I also wondered, how, as an Australian, you create such a ‘British’ take? Bombproof in particular is peppered with lots of contemporary detail, including allusions to current affairs and movie stars, from Gordon Brown to Osama Bin Laden to Sienna Miller – even Bob Mugabe is mentioned. I really liked this about the book – it felt very relevant and rooted in contemporary living.

Michael Robotham: I was 25 when I left Oz to try my luck on Fleet Street as a journalist. It’s a hard thing to describe this, but when you go away your memory of a place creates enormously vivid pictures of it. When I was living in London and I was homesick for Oz, I could literally feel the salt on my skin, and smell the eucalypt. Once I left Britain, after 11 years, part of my soul was still there, so it made it easier to set books there. And of course I had to consider the commercial aspect of it. All my publishing contacts were there, I’d written a lot of books there. I was making a good living as a ghostwriter so when I started writing fiction I had to know I’d be able to pay my mortgage, so I set Suspect in Britain.

Crime Beat: I’m sure that your background as an investigative journalist must come in handy when it comes to research?

Michael Robotham: The journalist in me means I have to do research. I aim to write books that are believable and if you make a mistake the spell is broken.

Crime Beat: Indeed, as a one-time therapist myself, what impressed me about Suspect, was the way you handled the psychology aspect. I thought to myself, either you’ve done a lot of research, or you’ve spent years in therapy! Which is it?

Michael Robotham: I had the privilege of working closely with the forensic psychologist Paul Britten who has the most astonishing mind of anyone that I’ve ever met. He helped me to understand the layers of the personality, how people are created through their past. Too many crime novels are black and white, about good and evil. For every one of my villains there are always mitigating circumstances for their deeds. I’ve worked with another Jungian psychotherapist who was most helpful, too, and I learned that you can sometimes empathize with the villain when you understand his childhood.

Crime Beat: Is there any psychological significance for you about the colour red? It struck me that at the start of Suspect a red dress features; in Shatter, the victim on the bridge has on red shoes…

Michael Robotham: Something I learned too, is that it can be can one detail that imprints that character on a person’s mind. Someone has a dimple deep enough to drop a marble into … that’s what the reader will remember.

Crime Beat: You’ve just handed over your new manuscript ‘Bleed for Me’ to your editor, and you voice the fear that you will now be exposed as a fraud, a charlatan – hard to believe that still goes on after all your success. Is this true?

Michael Robotham: Oh yes. Working on ‘Bleed for Me’, I wrote three thirty-thousand word starts to the novel, which I threw away. That’s ninety thousand words dumped! So yes, it’s hard. On a good day writing fiction I’ll write a thousand words. On one occasion, I came up with one line – the line in Suspect about ‘cancer being a cruel hairdresser’, and I felt good because at least I had that one line!

Crime Beat: And lastly give us the low down on your basement office - your ‘pit of despair’.

Michael Robotham: It’s a beautiful office. Because I’m surrounded by women, my wife and my teenage daughters, my office is my retreat, it’s got a sofa in there, so I can kick back and close my eyes…

Crime Beat: And dream, I would imagine, about Alicia!

Joanne Hichens is the editor of the SA krimi anthology, Bad Company.