AWW: You’ve set yourself a real challenge with your main character, private investigator Lane Holland. He finishes the first book in prison. In book two, he solves the mystery from inside prison. Could you take me through your problem-solving process when it came to finding a way to have an investigator work cases from behind bars?
Shelley: I really wrote myself into a corner with the end of the second one. I’d finished the first one and that felt like the natural place for a story to go. I wasn’t necessarily planning it out as a series when I put him in that position. So, I ended it with him in that spot. A lot of people said, ‘You could just time-skip it, start the book on the day that he gets out of prison and go on from there.’ I thought that’s a bit of a cheat.
Then in the second one I was able to use that trope of him solving it from inside the prison because there was just one person in there that he needed to get information out of. I really enjoy that in crime fiction, particularly with the ticking clock of getting a bit of info out of the serial killer before he dies.
I end the second one with almost a post-credit scene setting up the third book, but also with a promise that he will dive into that particular mystery immediately. It’s not going to be time-skipping to him getting out so he could pursue it that way. So I did put myself into a really awkward position of trying to figure out then, okay, how does he investigate a crime in the position that he’s in?
Through research I actually found that the NSW corrective system does allow a certain amount of leeway for people who are approaching the end of their sentence to have a bit more freedom to try and re-integrate into the community. To learn new skills, to hopefully get a little work experience under their belt, to hopefully get out when they’re released and not immediately fall back into old patterns and wind back where they started.
It’s almost generous the amount of leave that hypothetically would be possible. I don’t know how realistic it is for someone in Lane’s position to be approved for that sort of leave program. He’s got the benefit that he’s got the prison governor on-side, who’s able to pull some strings for him in the background. So it was really just a process of researching through and figuring out what solutions I would have to put in place to let him take advantage of one of those programs and head back out into the world.
Crime is such a huge genre, does that present a challenge when it comes to sitting down and planning a new book, in that you have to find new ways to tell stories that contain familiar elements, or do the limits make it easier to be creative?
I’m a big planner. I like to sit down and I like to plan out my novels. I definitely don’t plan out my series. That’s been a bit more of a progressive discovery process about who the characters are and what they’re going to do next. But each book individually I sit down and I make an outline.
Working in a genre really can help in that way. Crime fiction isn’t necessarily one of the most restrictive genres in terms of what you can and can’t do. There’s going to be certain audience expectations. Key among them that they will actually get the answers to the questions that you’re asking in the book. I have read crime fiction novels that don’t solve the murder and I’m still mad about it.
But there is a certain level of flexibility with what you can do within those structures. There’s a little bit of a map that you can follow in terms of what has to be in there, and if something isn’t working I can go back to what I understand about structure and how crime fiction novels typically go to try and figure out why this points a little wobbly and how it needs to be shored-up.
We see Lane Holland employing his skills as a profiler and investigator. What research did you do to build that character, with a full tool-box of skills?
I wouldn’t say that it was that kind of structured research. There were certain things I needed to look up about what sort of licensing he has and what rules he has to operate under, which becomes a big plot point in book three.
I read quite a lot of true crime and I read quite a lot of non-fiction so it was a continuous process of just taking in things from the world. Sometimes I’ll run across something where I’ll think, ‘Oh that’s really interesting. I need to make a note of that.’ And so, I think now I really couldn’t probably trace back where the elements of Lane’s character have come from but I do know they are grounded in that research. It’s just years of reading and picking things up like a bower bird when something interests me.
That’s so interesting! Something I hear often from crime writers is they keep away from crime novels when they’re working because they don’t want to be influenced by other stories, but it sounds like you really immerse yourself in the genre?
It’s very much cyclical for me because when I’m writing a book, and then I’m reading new ones that have come out, there’s always that terror that I’m going to pick one up and find we’ve accidentally both hit on the same idea. And it can happen because we’re all pulling from real cases and stuff that’s happening in the news and old cases that have been pulled back up and maybe there’s been a new documentary and suddenly there’s a lot of interest. So, I don’t tend to read crime fiction while I’m actively drafting and I especially don’t read it while I’m editing because I can’t enjoy crime fiction when my editing brain is turned on. So I do read a lot of crime fiction but only in this stage of the cycle when I’m promoting and outlining and not really deep into the guts of the process.
We follow Lane onto a mysterious, organic farm, where people go to live and work. The character Brandon Roby is interesting, because through him, Lane learns that people who may seem to be missing, are there voluntarily. It does provide a genuine refuge. What inspired the farm and how did you bring it to life?
I was really interested in that question of where is the line between a group of people who choose to live in an unusual way, and go off to an isolated place and do that together and when do they cross the line and become a cult? And, if you do think they’re a cult, when do they cross the line again and become dangerous, either to people who are within the group or outside the group?
That’s the question that really intrigued me right from the beginning.
I watched a fair amount of documentaries on cults, and the psychology of it and how they manipulate and control people.
It’s really super easy to create an obviously evil cult who are out there hurting people. I kind of wanted to walk the line a little bit more of a cult that almost believes the things that I do. They take it to extremes but I’m very interested in sustainable agriculture and I would prefer it if people wore cotton instead of polyester because of the microplastics.
I didn’t want to create a group that believe really horrible things that I disagreed with and it was really easy to point at them and say, look at these awful people. I wanted to keep it closer to home and explore that the ways I believe can be twisted and turned into something dangerous.
I heard that the physical farm is heavily inspired by your own property, and that during the writing process, it really got under your skin. Can you tell me about how to manage that as a writer?
One of the most difficult things when writing a book is trying to keep the space real in my head, of understanding how far apart things are, and if in chapter one they turned left and arrived at this building there can’t be a different building there in chapter three. It all has to make sense for the reader in terms of how it’s laid out.
So I thought, alright, I live on a rural property. Lets use this geographical space as the basis. I could even go out and take a break and walk the roads in my farm to try and figure out where things should be or how things should work, how long things might take, walking from place to place. It also meant that I didn’t have that separation any more of stepping out of the world of the book and into the world of real life because I’d blurred the lines a little bit. So I did find if I was spending hours every day writing in this headspace of Lane not trusting the people around him, needing to sneak around but also being worried that people were watching him, I’d stop what I was doing and I’d go and check to goat sheds or check the chicken sheds, and out of the corner of my eye, anything vaguely human shape became a person that was watching me.
Terrifying! Did that help the creative process? You were trying to create a sinister, atmospheric environment and you were feeling that in your day-to-day life. Could you draw from it?
It definitely could be helpful and, this is a thing I’ve experienced as well, getting into that headspace. When I was first writing Wake (Shelley’s award-winning debut) I had to set really firm rules with myself. All research had to stop around lunch time so I had a couple of daytime hours to process what I’d learnt before I had to go to sleep.
I was quite often writing Wake late at night and because of its themes, often I would have to stop what I was doing and go and double-check that the windows were locked in my daughter’s bedroom. So I probably should have predicted what would happen if I tried to use my own property as the basis.
Sam Karpathy is the classic charismatic leader. Who or what inspired that character?
Here’s the interesting thing, things often stray very far from the original inspiration. The original pitch for Vanish was just one sentence which was: “Lane meets the evil version of himself.” Sam is almost a mirror image of Lane. I call him evil, Lane thinks he’s the evil version of himself.
The idea was to use them as foils, in a way. They both have very complicated relationships with their fathers. They’ve got an emotional intelligence that they can use in quite manipulative ways. It was really interesting then to almost force Lane to look at himself in somebody else.
The sparring between the two of them is quite interesting because you can see Lane analysing what Sam is doing.
Yeah, it’s almost like a Sherlock and Moriarty fight.
How do you go about constructing a mystery? Do you start with the ending and work backwards, or do you plunge in and see where your idea takes you?
Everyone is different. With Vanish it very much was one that started from the end point. I had a very, very clear idea of what the final couple of scenes would be. The final scene in particular I’ve known where that was going for years at this point. But also the climactic scenes, the revelations. I knew really early that that was what the ending of the book was going to be and in particular one of the revelations is really important for Lane’s character and his arc. It was something I knew needed to happen for him to have the closure of his story so far.
So it really was the starting point for Vanish, knowing I had to get to that point.
The others I got more of a spark. Something would come up and it would spark an idea and I needed to build from that original point. With Vanish it was more like I know where I need to get to and I know what I promised the reader in Ripper, so how do I fill in what’s in between those two points?
Is it challenging, when writing a story that features a returning character, not to include “reverse spoilers” that give away key details of earlier books? How do you find the balance between providing enough backstory, without giving a complete blow-by-blow of Wake and Ripper?
It’s a skill and I got a lot of support from my editors in developing that skill to get that balance of making this a complete stand-alone that you could pick up as the first Lane Holland you’ve ever read and get a complete story.
I had the benefit of having been a crime fiction reader. I don’t think I’ve ever started a detective series from book one. It’s always book number seven left on the book swap shelf in a hotel somewhere. You just pick it up and if you like it you can go back and maybe get a bit of a richer understanding of the characters and how they got to book seven without ruining the earlier books.
It was a constant process of figuring out how much to put into Vanish so that it made sense to those totally new readers without making them feel like they didn’t have to read the earlier ones.
Are you working on anything new?
I am working on book four. If everything goes according to plan it will be out late 2026. It is crime fiction but it’s not a Lane Holland book. He’s going to have a little rest which he’s totally earned. This one is going to be stand-alone with new characters.
Read the book review here.
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