Barbara Fister

Moonlight Downs, published originally as Diamond Dove in Australia and the UK, is a mystery set in the Northern Territory of Australia and is narrated by Emily Tempest, a mixed-race woman in her twenties who is returning home after years of wandering the world. Shortly after she arrives, the leader of the Moonlight mob, an Aboriginal group that Emily grew up with, is murdered. She feels compelled to find out what happened. The book offers a vivid view of Aboriginal life from the perspective of a strong-willed woman who has a foot in two cultures but doesn’t fully belong to either.

Author Adrian Hyland kindly agreed to answer questions generated by the class members of the Mysterious World First Term Seminar, who had been discussing his book. (Note: He was also recently interviewed by Stuart McBride at Shots Ezine - well worth a read.)

Was it difficult to write from a female point of view? Why did you choose a woman as your protagonist and narrator? Did you consider telling the story from a purely Aboriginal perspective - Hazel’s, for example?

I originally wrote the story from the perspective of a young whitefeller coming up from down south, discovering his roots, etc. However, whatever I did to it, it seemed too autobiographical – a roman a clef - and nothing could be more boring (especially to me) than me.

Emily was a relatively minor character, but one I liked – so when my protagonist disappeared, she kind of insinuated herself onto centre stage.

I think I chose a woman because so many Aboriginal women I’d known made a huge impression on me: I loved them for their power, their determination, their feistiness.

I might share with you a story. When I was working in the outback, I was working with a small  remote community who had set up an outstation near a mine. They wanted their children to attend the mine school – to the horror of the parents of the white children already at the school. The whites called a community meeting to discuss this unwanted intrusion, and an Aboriginal  woman I know asked me to come along with her. The atmosphere was very hostile when we entered the room, but she spoke to them in such a simple, friendly but forceful manner that by the end of the night she’d completely won them over, so much so that when an Education Department official mentioned that they planned to have a separate class for the Aboriginal kids, the parents objected, saying they wanted them all in together.

I saw hundreds of such little incidents in my time out back.

I think of the book as in some ways a tribute to those women.

Though the book is a mystery, there’s a lot of emphasis on Emily and the Moonlight community, less on who did it and how they’ll be caught. Why did you decide to tell this story in the genre of crime fiction rather than as a novel without a murder?

When I first wrote the book it wasn’t a murder mystery at all – as I mentioned above, it was more a young man’s coming of age story – a rambling, stream-of-consciousness type of thing:  bigger than Moby Dick, but with less artistry than Enid Blyton. I showed the manuscript to various people who said – er – interesting in parts, but where’s the plot? It just wasn’t working, and I thought it was destined to moulder forever in my drawer.

It was only then that I had the idea of turning it into a crime novel – I’ve always loved the genre, and regard people such as Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard and our own Peter Temple as great writers.

Basically I kept the original setting and many of the characters, and wove a plot around them.

The thing I love about the crime genre – the thing that saved me, really -  was that it forced me to hammer my flights of fancy into a coherent piece with a recognizable form – a beginning and an end, no less!

What experiences have you had with Aboriginal communities and how did those experiences influence the book?

I spent ten years living in remote Aboriginal communities. I found there such beautiful honesty, joy and sense of place that everything else tends to seem shallow by comparison.

Before reading the book, our class watched the film Rabbit Proof Fence and read the Prime Minister’s speech of apology. He laid out a program for closing the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. What was the impact of that speech? Has there been progress since that speech was given?

It has had an enormous impact – one that I hope won’t diminish with time. I’ve a friend – an Aboriginal woman in jail – a member of ‘the stolen generation’ herself. She said on the day of the speech, all of the Aboriginal prisoners were gathered together in their dark little activities room to watch it. They were pretty cynical about politicians at the best of times, but she said it was like a beam of light had shone into the room – by the end of the speech most of them had tears in their eyes.  (I’m sure many of you felt a similar feeling during Obama’s speech).

The US edition has a glossary of Australian and Aboriginal terms, but many word that are unfamiliar to American readers aren’t included. Did you have a hand in the glossary? Did your US publisher ask you to Americanize anything? Do you have any advice for readers who aren’t fluent in Strine?

The American publishers gave me a list of words that their readers could have trouble with, and I gave definitions of them. Some readers have told me (as seems to be the case with you folk) that they could have used a larger glossary (the only really bad review I’ve had in the world) was from a feller in some US magazine called – er January, I think – who was obviously puzzled by the language, and was mocking the publisher’s including a glossary. My immediate reaction was: what an idiot! I don’t mind being criticized, but to criticize a book because the language is too colloquial for you says more about the critic than the book. I read books from every corner of the globe, and  the language is one of the things that delight me – American (crime) writers I admire include James Lee Burke, Leonard, Ellroy, Pelecanos and The Kinkster – all of them rich with slang. On the other hand, I find writers such as Patricia Cornwell or Jeffrey Deaver virtually unreadable – I try, but the predictability of the language puts me too sleep.

How have Aboriginal readers responded to the book? Has anyone raised issues with the negative light in which some community members are portrayed (especially those living in Bluebush)?

I’ve had some fantastic reactions from Aboriginal people down here in the cities (have also had some criticism from lefty types ((of which I’m one)) who feel it’s inappropriate for a whitefeller to write from a black perspective – my answer is that if Shakespeare had thought that way we wouldn’t have Othello – I reckon the whole world should be open to an author – anything other than that is political correctness gone mad.)

Re other reactions: the really traditional people, the ones about whom I was writing  - no, I haven’t had much response there, but I never expected to. For most of those people, the written word plays a miniscule part in their lives at best. Few of the older people are literate, and even the young ones have more affinity with music, art and film.

What parts of the book do you feel happiest with? Are there parts that you would change?

My worry was that the book is almost an ‘anthology’ of some of the more interesting things that happened to me during my time in Central Oz. I suppose that may mean it lacks a strong narrative drive (although the critics seem to have said that the vignettes, asides, etc are its strongest element)

I suspect the book is a bit hard to categorize – traditional readers of crime may find it lacks pace, and more literary readers (whom I suspect would enjoy it most) may not even look at it because they consider crime infra dig.

What’s next for Emily Tempest?

Another one’s on the way! Hopefully I’ll have it finished in six months.

Many thanks to Adrian Hyland for taking the time to answer our questions. I, for one, am looking forward to hearing more from Emily Tempest. (Cross posted from the Mysterious World class blog.)

Thank God. There will be a hard road ahead, trying to fix all that has been broken over the past eight years, but what a triumph. I have been too anxious to hope for the past week. It’s time to hope again.

Grant Park, Nov. 4th 2008

photo courtesy of gingerbydesign

Apparently so. As are Americans who travel in the Middle East. As are Red Cross and other aid workers. As are soldiers who call home.

ABC news reports that their phone calls between Americans have been monitored by the NSA, contrary to law and contrary to what they’ve previously asserted - that the only phone calls being monitored are between Americans and suspected terrorists.

The practice came to light because two intercept operators grew uncomfortable listening in on hundreds of private, often intimate conversations between Americans. Operators were sharing especially salacious ones - which reminded me of the weird frat-boy flavor of some of the Abu Ghraib photos. It’s almost as if YouTube has insensitized us to the idea of privacy. But what’s more troubling is that the NSA continued to track phone calls of aid workers and journalists - this wasn’t just an “oops” mistake, it was deliberate.

Will Congress actually take action? I’m not holding my breath. They already passed a law to excuse the government for previous illegal wiretapping.

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. George Orwell, 1984.

Yesterday, Jonathan Lethem responded to Andrew Klavan’s bizarre likening of Batman to George Bush - a hero who has to bear the brunt of doing the right thing by means of torture, rendition, and violation of the law.

Lethem found the film’s main take-away message is a kind of “morbid incoherence,” one that marks our current civic discourse, “strained to helplessness by panic, overreaction and cultivated grievance.” And sadly, he sees a parallel with our current exhausted shrug in the face of the latest news, which is not so much “new” as more of the same.

No wonder we crave an entertainment like “The Dark Knight,” where every topic we’re unable to quit not-thinking about is whirled into a cognitively dissonant milkshake of rage, fear and, finally, absolving confusion.

It may be possible to see the nightly news in a similar light, where any risk of uncovering the vulnerable yearnings, all the tenderness aroused by, yes, the seemingly needless death of a promising young actor or of a brilliant colleague, all hope of conversation between the paranoid blues and the paranoid reds, all that might bind us together, is forever armored in a gleeful and cynical cartoon of spin and disinformation. Keywords — “change,” “victory” — are repeated until adapted out of meaning, into self-canceling glyphs. Meanwhile, pigs break into the lipstick store, and we go hollering down the street after them, relieving ourselves of another hour or day or week of clear thought.

Beneath the sniping, so many real things lie in ruins: a corporate paradigm displaying no shred of responsibility, but eager for rescue by taxpayers; a military leadership’s implicit promise to its recruits and their families; a public discourse commodified into channels that feed any given preacher’s resentments to a self-selecting chorus. In these déjà vu battles, the combatants forever escape one another’s final judgment, whirl off into the void, leaving us standing awed in the rubble, uncertain of what we’ve seen, only sure we’re primed for the sequel.

If everything is broken, perhaps it is because for the moment we like it better that way. Unlike some others, I have no theory who Batman is — but the Joker is us.

So here we are again: what does popular culture tell us about our world? In this case, nothing really. The world is broken, and so is our discourse; so are our heroes, and apparently we find some absolving relief in that. For Andrew Klavan, celebrating lawless and brutal vigilantism for the sake of fighting our enemies, burning the village to save it, is the heroic message.

But as I read Lethem’s list of real things that lie in ruins, I swear I hear an echo of Chandler.

The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of moneymaking, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practising; a world where you may witness a hold-up in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the hold-up men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge. . . . it is the world you live in.” (”The Gentle Art of Murder,” The Atlantic December 1944.)

It’s the world you live in, not a fantasy where good and evil duke it out to a draw. It’s the role of good popular culture - good crime fiction, anyway - to think about the real things that lie in ruins, and to give us a good look at them. Down these mean streets we must go; and in our exploration - even through as prosaic an art as crime fiction - there should be a quality of redemption - not just of blissfully numbing confusion, with a sequel in the works.

Such is my faith.

Declan Burke, whose latest book The Big O is being released right about now in the US (we’re so often the last kids on the block to read the best things coming out of Europe, though at least this time the US publisher didn’t decide to change the title) recently hosted the Carnival of the Criminal Minds at his blog, Crime Always Pays. Rather than provide the usual feast of links - something that’s hard to top after Brian Lindenmuth hosted the Carnival - he raised a serious question.

Do blogs have a particular role to play in fostering thoughtful critical discussion of a genre that has been typically neglected by mainstream media? Can we do better than the handful of short plot recaps that stand for book reviews in a book review market that is contracting daily? Can bloggers bring out the best in the genre? He thinks we can.

I believe heart and soul that crime / mystery fiction needs and deserves the kind of widespread, top-to-bottom critical work that would in turn inspire the writers to strive towards ever-higher standards of work.

The genre has not only been neglected by traditional channels, it’s often reviewed by people who are ignorant of the genre, who are shocked, shocked to find good writing. You know this is the case when a reviewer is gobsmacked by a book that “transcends the genre” because it’s well-constructed, has fully-developed characters, and is well-written - in other words, it’s a good work of crime fiction, like a great many books published in this genre. It’s only if you’re assuming James Patterson represents the genre that it’s being transcended. Dec goes on to say -

here’s the thing – crime / mystery fiction is the most popular genre on the planet, it is inarguably the most relevant and important fiction out there, and that’s why I believe it deserves more . . . It deserves the kind of dynamic, rigorous, extensive and constantly evolving critical work that the interweb is perfectly placed to provide, and it deserves to be critiqued, justified and praised not by the kind of commentator who will suggest that a particular novel has (koff) ‘transcended the genre’, but by those who understand that good crime / mystery fiction is simultaneously scourge and balm, panacea and drug, a fiction for the world we live in that is also its truth.

Wow.

It’s interesting that a number of traditional venues for book criticism are cutting their coverage and trying to make up for it by taking to the web. I’m not sure what that means, other than that they think they can save money on both newsprint and staff. The Monreal Gazette is the latest to shrink their coverage and call it an improvement.

It’s also interesting how defensive people get when a mainstream critic says a book is more than a mystery. Yes, it’s tiresome to hear people who haven’t read much in the genre say something has transcended it - how would you know if you haven’t read much of it? - but Janet Maslin saying Dennis Lehane’s newest book is a big step beyond his crime fiction is not to say his other books are dreck that only idiots would read. She seemed to me to be saying his 700-page epic is ambitious in ways his other books were not. Quite often any perceived critique of the genre is met by bristling anger and assertions that literary fiction is navel-gazing plotless crap that nobody wants to read, anyway. And that’s just as silly as declaring all genre fiction mediocre.

We have the means to celebrate the best in a genre, and we certainly have the motive, as Dec stated it above - it matters to us. Those of us who know the genre best need to give it our best critical shot. I’d say that the critical lens that Dec has turned on Irish crime fiction in his blog posts at The Rap Sheet this week are a fine example.

Or take a look at Material Witness. It’s one of several blogs that, when it comes to traditional book reviewing, easily . . . er, dare I say it? . . . transcend the genre.

I’ve had a dauntingly large pile of books to review - large, but choice, for the most part. Here are a few off-the-cuff impressions:

Asa Larsson’s Black Path - one of a number of gifted Swedish writers, I found her third book intriguing, well-written, and a little bit frustrating, with an over-the-top ending that didn’t work for me, even though I really wanted it to. She’s better at dramatic twists and fast pacing than many of her compatriots, but sometimes it gets a little out of hand.  To be fair, a lot of readers think it’s top-notch all the way through. See what I thought at Reviewing the Evidence.

John Harvey’s Cold in Hand - after I thought Charlie Resnick had his Last Rites, Harvey returns to his series and to Nottingham. As always, very, very good.

John Fetridge’s Everybody Knows This is Nowhere - actually not on the assigned reading list, but I ended up reviewing it for RTE anyway. A brilliant, funny, caustic, complicated book peopled with cops and criminals who have a lot in common. You’ll never see Toronto quite the same way again. Really excellent.

Mark Billingham’s In the Dark - quite a departure for him, a stand-alone that explores the drug trade in South London when a young dealer gets caught up in a chain-reaction of violence. It reminded me a bit of Richard Price’s Clockers, told in a very different accent without quite so definite a physical geography as the imaginary Dempsey.

Michael Walters’s Shadow Walker - quite possibly the only crime fiction series set in Mongolia. A British detective is sent to Ulan Baatar to inquire into the murder of a geologist. His counterpart, Inspector Nergui, turns out to be a very able cop facing a very active serial killer. The body count is numblingly high, but the setting is fascinating - a clapped-out post-Soviet industrial society at the edge of the world.

Cody McFadyen’s The Darker Side - sadly, this book will no doubt outsell all the others I’ve read recently. It’s fairly effective, if you enjoy the mix of horror, soap opera, and manichean struggle that is the basis of the standard tortured FBI Profiler on the trail of a torturing serial killer narrative. I don’t.

Sam Reaves’s Mean Town Blues - what a good writer Reaves is! And he makes it seem so simple. Here he takes a classic noir tale, the kind that aches with nihilistic fatalism, but his hero apparently took a look at the script and decided not to play along. Instead, Tommy McClain, born in Kentucky and tempered in Iraq, steers his course through the mess, calculating the odds, doing the honorable thing, and always - barely - staying a step ahead of the game. This book doesn’t have the emotional density of Dooley’s Back or the teaming and vivid cityscape of Homicide 69, but it’s a perfect vehicle for its laconic and resourceful hero.

There are a few more on the pile still needing to be read - including Nick Stone’s King of Swords and Robin Burcell’s Face of a Killer - before I get to Sean Chercover’s Trigger City. I keep hearing it’s better than his much-admired Big City, Bad Blood. Can’t wait.

. . . now that people are able to return to New Orleans. The storm was fortunately not as bad as was anticipated. Our relatives in Lake Charles weathered it withough any signficant damage, a relief after what they had to deal with after Rita.

This is just too, too, too horrible and scary.

I love New Orleans. There’s no place like it, and it’s worth preserving. Watching the Katrina unnatural disaster unfold was as upsetting, horrifying, and affecting as watching another favorite city, New York, cope with 9/11. The difference was we did it to ourselves. Most of the victims of Katrina were not killed by the storm, but by human failures. Our failures.

Given the shoddy rebuilding of levies, the greed that has ruined the wetlands that protected the coast, and the continuing ability for our government to screw up, this could be the end.

And the last of the unclaimed bodies from Katrina were buried just last week.

… while I do a bit of goofy-grinning navel-gazing. In the Wind got a really nice review in Crimespree written by Rebecca Tatham, who turns a nice phrase herself.  (”I don’t demand that the zippered pockets of my psyche be opened by some revelation during the experience. Sometimes a vicarious adrenaline rush, the pure fun of clever folly, or a well-chartered prowl through darkness is all I need.”) But she gives Anni’s adventures a nice thumbs-up, calling it

“a fast-paced, multi-layered investigation that smartly parallels our contemporary, post-9/11 culture of paranoia with the counterintelligence-fueled instability of the Vietnam War era. Anni is drawn into a conflict that involves members of a white supremacy group, a radical faction of the American Indian Movement, the FBI, and the Chicago PD. By forcing engaging, sympathetic characters into situations that threaten their personal or ideological securities, Fister explores the interplay between the perception of radicalism and the conception of civil liberties. This is an intriguing book that rewards on every level!

And a nice added note from Gary Schultz of Once Upon a Crime, one of the best book people I know.

This is a story that can bring tears to your eyes. A man who came to the US legally and has lived in this country for most of his life missed a meeting with immigration officials because they sent the notice to a non-existent address. When he didn’t show up to the meeting he didn’t know about, a judge ordered him deported. Years later, in the process of obtaining a green card, he went to a meeting with immigration officials - and was detained on the old deportation order.

While in detention he complained of back pain and was not only told to stop malingering, he was dragged from place to place and refused both treatment and a wheelchair. A judge finally intervened and ordered that he receive immediate medical treatment. Turned out he had a fractured spine and was so riddled with cancer that he died five days later.

Still, immigration authorities wouldn’t let his family visit until he was nearly dead. And when they finally were allowed to see him, he was under guard. Our tax dollars at work.

And it all started with a letter sent to a non-existent address. These people should be prosecuted.

This is just one of many cases of unnecessary and cruel deaths in detention reported by The New York Times. And it’s a good illustration of why we need a strong press. These stories need to be told. And we need to change things. Now.