Crime and Justice Festival (2)

I participated in the second annual Crime & Justice Festival at Abbotsford Convent yesterday, as a member of two panels. The first, expertly chaired by Angela Savage (whose take on the festival is here), consisted of Garry Disher, Fiona MacIntosh and me talking about the idea of place in our fiction. The panel was divided between those who set their novels in remote places which require them to travel there for research (Angela –  Thailand/Cambodia, and Fiona – London/Paris) and Garry and me, whose work is set close to home. Garry’s Wyatt novels are set in South Australia, where he grew up (a new Wyatt is to be published soon, the first for ten years) and his Challis & Destry novels are set on the Mornington Peninsula.  My novel is set in Yarraville, where I live.

Years ago, when I was making my first attempts to write a novel, I wanted to set them in more exotic locales. I was fascinated by Paris in the 1920s and did heaps of research with the aim of setting a novel there. I read everything from A Moveable Feast to the memoirs of Hemingway’s barman. This was great fun, but unfortunately I was unable to transform my research into fiction. I ended up with a collection of cliches of bohemian Paris that resembled a cheap movie set. I found it was essential to base my work in something which I knew intimately – starting with the station where I catch the train to work every morning. When you live in a place, you don’t need to do research – or rather, everything is research. You just know the smells, the sounds, the buildings – and when you need something specific, it’s easy to grab the detail you want. I’d be worried, if I went off to a place and took copious notes, that when I came home I’d be cramming those details into the book for the sake of it.

The question came up: When you were writing your novel, did you know it was a crime novel? In my case, the answer was no – I wanted to write a novel about the art world with a mystery at its heart, but as the work developed, crimes started to occur. In the end I was happy to call Ghostlines a crime novel. But as Garry said, there’s something liberating about crime fiction. It gives you a strong plot driving the action forward, which many literary novels  lack.  It enables you to address many themes within that – sociological, psychological, political. And nearly all fiction, when you come down to it, involves a crime of some sort – there’s always a betrayal, or a secret, or people doing bad things to each other. It doesn’t have to be a brutal murder. So in that sense (to quote Garry again) all fiction is crime fiction. I just read Siri Hustvedt’s wonderful novel What I Loved, which is, among other things, a portrait of a sociopath - but it would never be found on the crime shelves.

The second panel was Robert Sims, Angela Savage and I, talking about the experience of getting our first novels published. It was great to have the good folk from Australian Crime Fiction - from many far-flung parts of Australia – in the audience. Robert confided that he had first submitted a ms to a publisher in 1981, and had finally been accepted in 2006, which demonstrates to anyone the value of perseverance.

On another matter, the audience at the festival was 90 per cent women, 10 per cent men. Everyone seems to think this is the norm – but why is it so? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen men in bookshops and libraries, so why not at festivals? Or book clubs?