Australia

“…last night’s dreams had slipped into waking hours again, plucking at his thoughts with their blood-stained fingers.”

With her first novel, Resurrection Bay, Emma Viskic not only announced herself as a novelist to watch she also created a lead character in Caleb Zelic who you hoped could be sustained through a series of novels. That hope does however place a weight of expectation on subsequent novels and when I sat down to read And Fire Came Down, the second Caleb Zelic novel, I wondered if it would carry that expectation? I certainly think it does, and then some.

Firstly, Caleb Zelic is not only an excellent character, he is for many reasons not a particularly likeable one. He is prone to causing ‘train wrecks’ and it is often those closest to him who are injured, either physically or emotionally. He is also not a patient person and although some of this is due to his deafness, he has reckless determination to find answers whatever the cost doesn’t always endear him a character. He is not however a boring character and the same can be said for many of the supporting characters. Novels can sometimes have so much invested in the main character that the other characters are dull and lifeless, this is definitely not the case with And Fire Came Down. The story line is also very good and there are times when it moves at a cracking pace and, I think more importantly, there are also times when the story is slowed down allowing it and the reader time to breathe. 

In conclusion And Fire Came Down is an excellent follow-up to Resurrection Bay and I’m looking forward to the next Emma Viskic novel with an eager anticipation.

Marketed under the banner "incredible new literary thriller", CALL ME EVIE is the debut novel of New Zealand born, Melbourne based writer J.P. Pomare.

Opening in a manner guaranteed to make readers feel maximum discomfort, a young woman is in a bathroom, hacking at her long hair with a pair of small scissors when she's interrupted by an angry man, shouting and finishing the job roughly with a pair of hair clippers. She screams, he hits, neither of them clearly identified, the relationship and the power dynamic not explained. Gradually snippets of detail emerge, the pair are hiding out in a small town in New Zealand, avoiding something in the past, some never fully articulated threat, just "they" might find "them".

Putting aside the never-ending discussions of why "literary" and what it's telegraphing about the position of crime fiction in the literary world (let's just leave sales figures and reader engagement to speak for themselves), there is much about CALL ME EVIE that's classic psychological thriller, and much that's slightly different and cleverly constructed. Construction is possibly the key point here, the book is divided into parts, with the chapters within the parts headed "before <" and "> after". Told in the voice of central character "Kate / Evie" the action moves between these timelines. "before <" is all about her life as a teenager in Melbourne, daughter of a former sports star father, and a mother who died when she was a very young child. In this viewpoint she's a stereotypical teenager, struggling with one of those all too common bitchy all-encompassing friendships that are toxic and unbreakable when you're that age, as well as her growing attraction to "the" boy in their social circle. It's littered with the sorts of issues you'd expect of teenagers nowadays - access to phones, complicated engagements with parents, fraught social pressures, emerging independence and conflicts around love and developing sexual identity. The "> after" viewpoint is all set within the escape hole of New Zealand, and Kate/Evie's voice is more hesitant, more damaged, scared, vulnerable and obviously haunted by something that's happened in the recent past. Her relationship with the controlling and sometimes quite compassionate man isn't explained, her status of victim / captive / co-conspirator hard to define.

And from there we really must leave discussions of plot elements as the power of CALL ME EVIE is in how the reader isn't supposed to be sure what, exactly, is going on with Kate / Evie. There are definitely points in the narrative that you would be well within their rights to make some educated guesses, but you may also find yourself swept into the storyline so comprehensively that there's more page-turning happening than thoughtful contemplation. For this reader there was also the odd point at which the narrative dragged a bit, and a feeling of being overtly manipulated snuck into play. 

CALL ME EVIE is however a powerful psychological thriller, exploring the complications of memory (as hinted at in the opening quotations). But it's memory in all it's false, guilty, happy, searching, fragmented, convenient and confrontational guises. 

"In the beginning she was a thought so unformed that he was aware only of something which once was not."

Edward McGinnity is a successful novelist who wants to write a novel about a crime writer. His character’s name is Madeleine d’Leon, a writer of the popular period crime novels. Madeleine wants to write a modern crime novel. Her novel’s character is also a writer.

"She called him Edward McGinnity. His friends would call him Ned."

Sounds simple so far, it’s not. Crossing The Lines is a work of Meta Fiction and the characters of Edward McGinnity and Madeleine d’Leon are both real and imagined. Not only are they writing crime novels, they are also characters in each other’s crime novels. As Crossing The Lines progresses the barriers between each writer and their character become blurred, they cross into each other’s lives, they question, advise and finally become attached to each other, if I was to say any more it would spoil the fun.

In her acceptance speech after Crossing The Lines won the 2018 Ned Kelly Award for Best Australian Crime novel Sulari Gentill said “Crossing the Lines is in many ways my love letter to writing, to a writer's life with all its highs and lows, its absurdities and privileges. This is very definitely a high and a privilege. To everybody who took a chance on this strange little book, thank you with all of my heart”. 

Crossing The Lines is more than a ‘strange little book’, it’s a wonderful journey into the mind and life of a writer with Sulari Gentill as an excellent guide to take you there.

"Mile after mile of bush. Gum trees standing straight and silent along the side of the road like ghosts sitting in judgement on the living: on him. It was amazing you could drive so far and see so few people. With each passing minute, the sun sunk lower, as if embarrassed by the outcome of the day. Light that had been pale, almost white when he set out, turned the colour of urine. My life is like this, Blake thought. I keep driving on in my car, removed. I don't get out and touch what's around me. Little by little, things get darker and you don't really know where you are any more, you just follow white posts and try not to crash."

Blake Saunders has had a lot of unusual white posts to follow in his life, from life in Philadelphia as a hitman for the Mafia, to bar owner and guitar player in a NSW coastal town. Both lives have involved a lot of forethought and planning and a cautiousness that's inbred, instinctual and habitual. He's also able to accept that which cannot be changed - regular payments to the local cop to ensure the lack of business competition, or the need for personal intervention when that cop refuses to extend their arrangement to more active protection. He's loyal to his friends and employees though, so it's not just a killer he's after, he's also keen to track down the standover men who took their bid for protection money way too far.

RIVER OF SALT is an interesting undertaking from Dave Warner. The idea came to him at an Atlantics' gig, so the musical components of this novel are strong, the love that Saunders has for the surf-styled guitar band he plays with obvious. The rest of the novel though is different from more recent outings by Warner, it's more slowly paced, Saunders is restrained (I think that's the best word to describe him), and there are side-threads involving other characters that create a sort of Hydra of a story with the central neck obscured by heads until they are all accounted for.

The slower pace, and the controlled, cautious Saunders may take a little adjusting to for anybody who has only read the recent books. There are some echoes of Andrew (Lizard) Zirk in Saunders though (see Warner's earlier works MURDER IN THE FRAME / MURDER IN THE GROOVE / MURDER IN THE OFF-SEASON), and there's hints of the sort of controlled mayhem that showed up in EXXXPRESSO). Mostly there's a feel of a potential new series character, and a slight change in direction from the more police procedural / Western Australia based works of recent years.

The strength of RIVER OF SALT is definitely in the idea of a stranger in a strange land, back in the days when communications weren't instant, and people could reinvent themselves to some extent. It's exploring just how far you can go with that idea, and how much of the old you will never go away.