OUTBACK BOOK
Australian readers of crime fiction can’t get enough of bush noir and Chris Hammer’s latest novel is a pearler
To tell you the crime on which Chris Hammer’s Scrublands unravels, it is committed by the local priest who, clad in his vestments and carrying a high-powered hunting rifle, calmly and expertly shoots five men dead as his parishioners gather in the churchyard for Sunday service. The murders occur on page two of the novel, in a brief prologue. A year later, a damaged former foreign correspondent arrives in the drought-stricken Riverina town. He stops his rental car on the bridge that leads across the dry creek bed into Riversend, and steps out into the shimmering midday heat. Martin Scarsden has been sent by his city editor to write a newspaper feature about Riversend and its traumatised inhabitants, to mark the first anniversary of the mass shooting.
From that shattering beginning, the pace never slackens as Scarsden is drawn deeper and deeper into the secrets and lives of townsfolk still reeling from the murders but also struggling with the consequences of a crippling drought. As in any good crime novel, nothing is quite as it seems and the motive for the priest’s shocking act remains as elusive as smoke. As Scarsden might say, it’s a cracking yarn, one that will keep you up late and hold you until the last page.
As a writer, Hammer is no rookie. A journalist for more than 30 years, he’s the author of two nonfiction books, including the
award-winning The River, based on his travels in the Murray-Darling Basin during the millennium drought.
Even so, Scrublands is an impressive achievement for a first novel. Before it hit the bookshelves late last month, it was already earning rave reviews from early readers. Publisher Allen & Unwin successfully bid for the manuscript, beating four or five other publishers and awarding the Canberra-based author a two-book deal. It will also be published in the US and in the UK, and has been optioned for TV by the producers of the Jack Irish series. “That was mind-boggling,” says Hammer of the auction. He was expecting the sort of reaction he had to The River and The Coast. “They were kind of like travel writing with an environmental focus,” he says. “It was a very good experience but they don’t sell that much. People say nice things and then you go back to your day job.” On the strength of the Scrublands advance, he took a redundancy package from Fairfax last year, leaving his job in the Canberra press gallery to work full-time on the novel. He knows he is privileged in being able to write fiction full-time. “There are so many authors with very good books, very well-received books, who are still doing day jobs, or bits and pieces to make ends meet,” he says. “So I feel enormously fortunate.” Hammer is the first to admit that he has fellow journalist-turned-novelist Jane Harper to thank for the fevered interest generated by Scrublands. Such has been the success of Harper’s The Dry that when he pitched his manuscript to Australia’s most venerable and respected literary agency Curtis Brown, they immediately took it on. Like The Dry, Scrublands is a crime drama set in the unforgiving landscape of the Australian bush. Harper’s novel – her first – won a slew of awards, has been sold into more than 20 international markets, is being adapted for the screen and has spawned huge interest in Australian rural crime novels that some are calling “bush noir”.
Crime novels set in extreme landscapes are nothing new. Think of the success of “Scandi noir” – all those grisly crimes committed in the frozen north. So powerful are these unforgiving settings that the landscape itself becomes almost like a character in the novel. The Outback and the bush has held a perennial fascination for novelists – from Kenneth Cook’s thriller Wake In Fright, published in 1961, to more recent releases like Adrian Hyland’s Diamond Dove, Garry Disher’s Bitter
Wash Road; even James Patterson has tapped into it, with Never Never, co-written with Australian author Candice Fox. But with the publication last year of Sarah Bailey’s The Dark Lake, Mark Brandi’s CWA Dagger winner Wimmera and Harper’s The Dry in 2016, crime novels set in regional Australia, seem to have found their moment, captivating readers at home and abroad.
Hammer was oblivious to all this until he submitted his manuscript to Curtis Brown. He hadn’t even heard of The Dry. He has unwittingly caught the zeitgeist, like a character from a novel, blithely stepping into the right place at the right time.
“People said ‘oh, The Dry is doing fantastically well, your timing might be right’,” he says. “And I was mortified because I thought ‘oh no, publishers will think it’s derivative, that it’s not original, no one will be interested’. Now, my perspective is different and I think I owe a debt of gratitude to Jane Harper and to Sarah Bailey, and a number of other Australian authors.
“There’s a lot of interest in the US and I think that’s because of the success over there of books like The Dry, and The Dark
Lake, and others like [those written by] Candice Fox. So even though it’s a very Australian story I think [publishers] are now confident they can sell stories that are solely Australian. I’m very fortunate.”
Hammer’s fictional town of Riversend and the surrounding landscape is a richly detailed setting for his drama. From the shuttered shops and the abandoned pub to the wide streets empty but for the occasional truck thundering through to bigger centres and the odd 4WD pulling up at the kerb outside the one grocery store, it’s depressingly familiar to anyone who’s ventured beyond the coastal fringe to the dry interior. Crisscrossing the Murray-Darling Basin in his Hyundai, Hammer passed through numerous such towns in his research for The River.
It wasn’t so much that he felt unspeakable crimes might be committed in such places, rather, it was the people he met along the way, and their stories, that he found so compelling, and that inspired him to set his novel there.
“What did linger with me was the kind of quiet desperation I’d find in some places,” he says.
“Banks foreclosing, people in very severe financial straits, distraught about losing their animals, dairy farmers losing their herds, farmers who may have been third or fourth generation having inherited a farm and always thinking that they would hand it on to their children and not being able to do so, and death and suicides.
“This was at the height of that millennium drought. But, on the other hand, there’s also the resilience, the community spirit, the determination that’s also there … And that really stayed with me, so when I came to writing a crime book, it was almost a natural that that was a good location and a good kind of feeling to imbue the book with.”
While his protagonist is similarly invested with Hammer’s own experience, Scarsden is not a thinly disguised version of the author. Two long stints as a roving reporter for SBS’s Dateline took him to the world’s trouble spots, including Gaza, which is the setting for the incident that has marked Scarsden, but, unlike him, he wasn’t a war correspondent.
“I went to some places that were confronting, for sure … but I was in no way damaged by that in the way he has been,” he says.
“That’s more drawing on some of the people I’ve met in those travels. And I don’t think the public really recognises how confronting [it is] reporting not just war zones but natural disasters like tsunamis or even bushfires. You know, it’s hard to unsee a dead child. You go into a refugee camp and there’s real human suffering, and I think that does linger. I’ve certainly met people, particularly photographers, camera operators, who’ve been up close and personal with a lot of trauma that’s left them with PTSD, there’s not much doubt about that. But (Scarsden) is definitely not me.”
In his new career as an author, Hammer at 57 is realising a long-held ambition to write fiction. As a young journalism student at university in Bathurst, his writing lecturer was Peter Temple, who went on to win the Miles Franklin, Australia’s most coveted literary award for his crime fiction novel Truth in 2010.
Hammer’s reading then tended to the literary, but he’d lacked the confidence, the subject and the life experience to try his hand at it. Writing so-called “genre fiction” was a way in. He likes crime novels, but wouldn’t call himself a “crime tragic”. “I like those old hard-boiled detective ones like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, people like that,” he says. “I really liked very much Peter Temple’s books … the Jack Irish books are very good but the final two, The Broken Shore and Truth, they’re amazing. They’re a real step above, they’re not just genre books.”
Having found his métier – and his characters – Hammer is hard at work on his second book, fulfilling his two-book contract with his Australian and UK publishers, and embroiling Scarsden and his love interest, the deliciously named Mandalay Blonde in fresh adventures. They’ve left Riversend to its dust, but more than that, he won’t say.