AWW: What writers or books made you want to become a writer?
JP: There’s two or three books I read quite early on that made me want to be a writer and then there’s one or two that made me want to be the sort of writer I became. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. I remember studying that at high school and it was the first adult book I read that really inspired me. And the Harry Potter series. I always go back to those books when I think of what made me fully understand the power of fiction and storytelling.
In terms of craft, it felt like I could do what Ken Kesey did. It turns out I can’t. But at the time it was comprehensible. The story. How the story was told. I could see the workings of it a little bit. But with Harry Potter I was in awe really of the world building and how much I inhabited those characters.
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut is another one that I remember just being blown away by. Again, that was a book that made me really fall in love with literature and a by-product of that is wanting to write more and develop my craft.
In terms of why I became the writer I am. I read a lot of Helen Garner, her – I think it’s reductive to call it true crime – but her true crime for lack of a more apt description is absolutely stellar and I guess made me realise how important the crime genre was. It wasn’t just for escapism or entertainment, and it didn’t have to be exploitative.
Some of the more problematic things with crime fiction I felt disappearing when I read her stuff. I’d say that a big inspiration was Gillian Flynn who wrote Gone Girl, I read her three books and almost studied them. Finally, in terms of narrative structure, there’s a book by Evie Wyld called All the Birds, Singing. That was a really important one for me as well.
Are you a plotter or do you make it up as you go along?
My answer has changed. When you think of “plotting” and “pantsing” you’re only thinking about how you plot the novel. A plotter plots the novel by presumably writing it out on index cards. They map it out in full before they start writing the prose. I say that in air quotes. Someone like Michael [Robotham] – and I put myself in this camp – we’re called pantsers but really our first drafts are us sort-of plotting. I know Michael’s first drafts are tighter and cleaner than mine, but I know he also makes wholesale changes between that and the second.
I’m the same. I have this draft zero theory which is stolen from someone. I’m not sure who. But I write the first draft as an exercise in finding the plot and what the story is about.
For me that first draft is, you’re writing also while acknowledging that you’re trying to find out what the story is about, so you don’t care as much about the prose. Although if you find a really clean beautiful line you might want to hold onto it. It’s a form of plotting that just takes a lot longer than the index cards.
You sound a little like an excavator, like you’re trying to chip the plot out of something.
Yeah. Crime fiction is plot-heavy and plot-first and we think in plot. So, everyone does plot, but one does it before they’re writing prose and one does it as they’re writing prose, they’re plotting.
I really enjoyed the different elements playing together in The Gambler. We have Barb and Ted becoming drawn into the world of conspiracy theory during Covid. The Enigmas. Gun control. Gambling. Particularly sports gambling. What was the starting point?
I definitely thought a lot about gambling in Australia. I think we’ve got a real issue with exposure and regulation and I think we served as a bit of a model for the US. Sports gambling was legalised recently in the States and it’s going to be a monster problem for young men there and I don’t know how they’re going to tackle it because it’s going to be really difficult to contain with crypto and dark web casinos and gambling outfits.
I’ve been long fascinated with that gambling aspect and some of the issues that manifest from that in society and some of the opportunities for criminal activity as well.
Certainly with the gun violence stuff, lots of people have already pointed out to me certain shootings, like the Charlie Kirk incident, echo things in the book – and of course I wrote this book before any of the Charlie Kirk stuff – but that’s because it’s at the forefront of the political discourse because every time there is one of these things everyone comes out with an opinion and it seems nothing ever changes.
Someone drove a car into a crowd at a rally and I just remember thinking, ‘Why?’ It could just be that this person panicked. I remember thinking how quickly we dissect this person’s life and seek out some sort of validation for our own prejudices. And I thought, ‘What if there’s nothing?’ What if you look at this person’s life and they don’t really have any political affiliation. They don’t seem to have expressed, at any point in time, belief in the First Amendment [free speech] or Second Amendment [the right to bear arms].
What if all this person had was slightly scammy, weird Facebook pages they follow. That was probably what drew me to the character Barb.
I thought about the fact that we’ve got no natural defence to AI, synthetic media and that sort of thing.
There’s a lot in The Gambler that feels very American, in fact some of it could only happen in America. Your other books have been set in Australia and New Zealand, can you tell me about the decision to set a series in the US.
The story sort of demanded it. I tried to devise it in a way where it could work in Australia and it didn’t make sense. I think I would have regretted setting it in Australia with the Bondi massacre because gun violence is so rare here and each act of gun violence is so significant. Whereas in the states something like that could disappear within 24-hours. It just wasn’t a story I could set in Australia.
Does setting something in the States increase the degree of difficulty when it comes to researching procedural matters or even just researching the lay of the land, and the towns and the culture?
A little bit. I research every setting pretty heavily, anyway, be it Australian or New Zealand. Unless I’m writing about somewhere I spend a lot of time every day, I still would want to research it a little bit. The good thing about the US is they export so much culture. You can consume it from your loungeroom the way you couldn’t with regional Australia.
I find shows really help. You can pause and look at what everyone’s wearing and eating because they get a level of exactitude that you couldn’t get without actually being there. It’s hard in that sense but only marginally harder than writing something set in Australia.
I really enjoyed the parts that engaged with the Amish community. I’d heard of Rumspringer but I didn’t really know a lot about. Did you have an opportunity to spend time in Amish communities?
No I didn’t. I have a friend in Chicago who helped with it; went and checked out some stuff for me and spoke to some people. I’d planned a trip. In fact, for the first one [The first Vince Reid Novel The Wrong Woman] I was going to go over but then Covid happened. This time it was mostly the idea of my social media being scrutinised. I have such trouble with customs and immigration in the states and was really put off by the idea.
I use Google maps a lot with my Australian and New Zealand novels as well. For logistics.
One of your earlier novels, The Clearing, was inspired by The Family. What is it about groups that live outside mainstream society that make for such rich storytelling?
I think it appeals to everyone. Curiosity I think. You can’t call the Amish a cult but they’re certainly analogous to a cult in many ways. They’re more exclusive than a cult. It’s not an easy thing to join an Amish community. They’ve got these odd traditions. They’ve got their own kind of language.
Everyone kind of wants what the Amish have. That is: almost exclusively organic or locally grown produce or food. A real connection to the land and family and values and ideals we all strive for, and they don’t use tech. They sit down and they talk and they work together and they’re not all tech-addled like we are. I loved that.
That’s a quite deliberate juxtaposition; the Amish way of life and all this crime that is fundamentally dependent on tech and our use of tech. So much of [The Gambler] is about tech and our growing cynicism around AI and our frustration with the way that we don’t have any defences to algorithmically driven content and it feels like our brains have been really hijacked by tech.
Same with The Clearing, it was more my curiosity.
I want readers to imagine themselves in these worlds and what it would be like.
The Amish plotline did sit nicely against that theme of the villainy residing in the tech.
They’re as far from me and my tech addiction as possible. I think at times about how idyllic… it’s not by the way. When you start to scratch at the surface there’s some pretty ugly things. But if you just look at the surface it looks pretty idyllic. It looks like something that would happen in Byron Bay and Mullumbimby.
Are we going to see more of Private Investigator Vince Reid?
Yeah, I think so. He’s not the next book but I think he’ll be the next one after. I’ve got a bit of a plan for him. I think there will be four books.
Read the book review here.
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