kevrenor
Well-Known Member
BrisbaneTimes
Crime and publishing
Keith Austin | July 5, 2008
THERE'S something evil lurking beneath the cosy veneer of the Central Coast. All those clean, huddled brick houses, all those perms, paisley scarves, clacking dentures and comfortable shoes, the eerie deja vu of Erina Fair - Target, Freedom, Hoyts, Rebel Sport, Fitness First, Max Brenner - it's surely too good to be true.
But then the cracks begin to appear. The sky turns grey and it starts to drizzle. The heavily made-up teenage girl on the bus to Terrigal has a skinny boyfriend - bandanna, hoodie, fuzzy top lip - whose many clothes are so large he looks like a laundry basket on legs. He has a permanently angry scowl and a concealed gun.
OK, maybe I imagined the gun. Maybe it's the books I've been reading. Don't you want something a little more than a happy seaside town, friendly people and neatly manicured suburbs when you're going to talk to the author of a novel about serial killers?
Maelstrom, Michael MacConnell's accomplished serial-killer thriller featuring brilliant FBI agent Sarah Reilly, sold well and garnered mostly positive reviews when it came out last year. Woman's Day called it a "stunning don't-put-it-down thriller by a local author". It's just been long-listed for the Ned Kelly best first crime novel award by the Crime Writers' Association of Australia, Hollywood has come calling and MacConnell is hard at work on a script. And if that's not enough, his second novel, Splinter, out this week, carries on just a few months after Maelstrom left off.
Sitting in a Thai restaurant on the Terrigal beachfront just minutes from his home, MacConnell says the new book begins with his female protagonist dealing with post-traumatic stress caused by the violent denouement of her first outing: "I wanted to work that into the novel because I got a bit tired of characters who can get into a stoush with criminals or terrorists or whatever, throw in a snappy line and then walk away into the sunset and everything's peachy.
"It's not like that, it's nothing like that at all. I tried to insert some of my own experience in there because I had some post-traumatic stress after some incidents at work [working security for RailCorp], some attacks, arrests, that sort of thing. I wanted to show what you go through just as a biological creature, not because you are weak or because you aren't tough or whatever, it just happens, it's unavoidable. So she's suffering a bit from that. And the story's different because it's a kidnapping, or rather a failed kidnapping."
[snipped]
"When I travel I always get a book and often there'd be this tome I had to get through, with so much back story and so much scene setting and so much detail, detail, detail that I couldn't enjoy it. So what I wanted to do was write the equivalent of sitting next to the person on the train or the plane and telling them the story to make it a sort of more informal structure and an easier, faster flow. If a highly praised literary novel is a Victorian settee I wanted Maelstrom to be the equivalent of sitting down in a comfy sofa."
It would be good to say that the sun went behind an inexplicable black cloud and a dark shadow moved across the face of Terrigal as the new author went back to his den to conjure up yet more scenarios of murder and mayhem. Instead, the sun shone, kids played in the surf, all was well with the world and MacConnell offered me a lift back to Gosford station. During which I discover he's a bit of a Central Coast Mariners fan.
So he is evil, after all.
Splinter is published by Hachett Australia, $32.99
Full review: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/books/crime-and-publishing/2008/07/04/1214951022005.html
Crime and publishing
Keith Austin | July 5, 2008
THERE'S something evil lurking beneath the cosy veneer of the Central Coast. All those clean, huddled brick houses, all those perms, paisley scarves, clacking dentures and comfortable shoes, the eerie deja vu of Erina Fair - Target, Freedom, Hoyts, Rebel Sport, Fitness First, Max Brenner - it's surely too good to be true.
But then the cracks begin to appear. The sky turns grey and it starts to drizzle. The heavily made-up teenage girl on the bus to Terrigal has a skinny boyfriend - bandanna, hoodie, fuzzy top lip - whose many clothes are so large he looks like a laundry basket on legs. He has a permanently angry scowl and a concealed gun.
OK, maybe I imagined the gun. Maybe it's the books I've been reading. Don't you want something a little more than a happy seaside town, friendly people and neatly manicured suburbs when you're going to talk to the author of a novel about serial killers?
Maelstrom, Michael MacConnell's accomplished serial-killer thriller featuring brilliant FBI agent Sarah Reilly, sold well and garnered mostly positive reviews when it came out last year. Woman's Day called it a "stunning don't-put-it-down thriller by a local author". It's just been long-listed for the Ned Kelly best first crime novel award by the Crime Writers' Association of Australia, Hollywood has come calling and MacConnell is hard at work on a script. And if that's not enough, his second novel, Splinter, out this week, carries on just a few months after Maelstrom left off.
Sitting in a Thai restaurant on the Terrigal beachfront just minutes from his home, MacConnell says the new book begins with his female protagonist dealing with post-traumatic stress caused by the violent denouement of her first outing: "I wanted to work that into the novel because I got a bit tired of characters who can get into a stoush with criminals or terrorists or whatever, throw in a snappy line and then walk away into the sunset and everything's peachy.
"It's not like that, it's nothing like that at all. I tried to insert some of my own experience in there because I had some post-traumatic stress after some incidents at work [working security for RailCorp], some attacks, arrests, that sort of thing. I wanted to show what you go through just as a biological creature, not because you are weak or because you aren't tough or whatever, it just happens, it's unavoidable. So she's suffering a bit from that. And the story's different because it's a kidnapping, or rather a failed kidnapping."
[snipped]
"When I travel I always get a book and often there'd be this tome I had to get through, with so much back story and so much scene setting and so much detail, detail, detail that I couldn't enjoy it. So what I wanted to do was write the equivalent of sitting next to the person on the train or the plane and telling them the story to make it a sort of more informal structure and an easier, faster flow. If a highly praised literary novel is a Victorian settee I wanted Maelstrom to be the equivalent of sitting down in a comfy sofa."
It would be good to say that the sun went behind an inexplicable black cloud and a dark shadow moved across the face of Terrigal as the new author went back to his den to conjure up yet more scenarios of murder and mayhem. Instead, the sun shone, kids played in the surf, all was well with the world and MacConnell offered me a lift back to Gosford station. During which I discover he's a bit of a Central Coast Mariners fan.
So he is evil, after all.
Splinter is published by Hachett Australia, $32.99
Full review: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/books/crime-and-publishing/2008/07/04/1214951022005.html
