Top honours for traumatic tales
Authors Fiona Sussman, Finn Bell, and Michael Bennett reveal the inspiration that drove the books that scooped last night’s Ngaio Marsh Awards. Craig Sisterson reports.
Ben Toroa doesn’t want to show nerves as he waits to see Carla Reid. It’s been several years, tough prison years, since he tore both their lives asunder. Carla was a farmer’s wife, had a son. A teenaged Toroa took all that away from her.
Restorative justice, they call it. Maybe some things can never be restored.
Meanwhile, down the road in Grey Lynn, another man hides his emotions. Teina Pora was once like Toroa, a Polynesian teen caught up in criminal life, and then imprisoned for a brutal rape and murder. Unlike Toroa, Pora was innocent. He spent 21 years in prison.
Pora withdraws to a friend’s garden as his eclectic supporters watch a live feed from the Privy Council in far away London. Waiting for our final court to finally confirm what Pora knows, but some didn’t believe: he didn’t commit the shocking crimes to which he confessed.
In Southland, another man is waiting: to die. Finn dangles in his wheelchair from a cliff above a raging sea. He’d been near-suicidal when he moved to a remote cottage outside Riverton, but after obsessively digging into a past tragedy, he’s desperate to live.
Fascinating characters, real and fictional, populate the three outstanding local books that triumphed last night at the 2017 Ngaio Marsh Awards, held in association with WORD Christchurch.
In its own way, each explores the impact of violent crime on the lives of those involved – victims, perpetrators, investigators, bystanders – once public attention moves on. ‘‘As a screenwriter, I’m used to condensing, getting to the next story beat quickly,’’ says Michael Bennett, who won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Non Fiction for In Dark Places, his powerful expose of the real-life miscarriage of justice that befell Teina Pora.
‘‘I’m not used to having time and space to go so deeply into character. That was very important to me, to cover the broad tapestry of what happened to Teina: the police mishandling of the case, involvement of Teina’s family, the story of his exoneration.’’
Fiona Sussman hung up her stethoscope to become an author, and spent seven years working on her second novel The Last Time We Spoke, which won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel. The international judging panel called the tale of home invasion victim Reid and perpetrator Toroa ‘‘a harrowing, touching story that stays with you’’.
Sussman, who grew up in apartheidera South Africa, says the acorn of her award-winner was the imprint left on her by a spate of high-profile crimes in New Zealand in the 1990s; their senseless brutality and the young age of the offenders.
‘‘I found myself pondering a particularly brutal home invasion long after the news cycles had ended and the story had disappeared from national consciousness,’’ she says. ‘‘I wondered could the victim ever go on to negotiate a meaningful life? What happened in a youngster’s life to set him on a path to murder?‘‘
Dunedin author Finn Bell, who scooped the Best First Novel prize for Dead Lemons, also based his novel on real-life stories. Trained in forensic psychology, Bell’s worked in night shelters, charities, hospitals, and prisons. ‘‘Over the years people have told me absolutely amazing things, spanning the human condition from wondrous to grotesque.’’
Dead Lemons centres on a man whose drinking cost him his love, his job, and the use of his legs. He flees to Riverton, only to become obsessed with the historic disappearance of a father and daughter.
‘‘Bell is a wonderful new voice in crime writing, delivering a tense tale centred on an original, genuine, and vulnerable character,’’ said the Ngaios judges.
All the accolades have shocked Bell, whose second novel, Pancake Money, was also a finalist for Best Crime Novel. ‘‘I write because it helps me hold on to some things and let go of others,’’ he says. After lots of editing, he decided to self-publish his tales as eBooks.
It took Sussman seven years to write The Last Time We Spoke. Even though she’s lived in New Zealand for 27 years, she had fears writing about a country and culture not her own.
‘‘I could easily conjure the world of Carla, a middle-aged farmer’s wife, but Ben’s world – that of an illiterate young gang member – was largely foreign to me. Feeling a huge onus of responsibility to present his world authentically, I embarked on two years of research, navigating the underbelly of New Zealand and immersing myself in the world he would live.’’
Sussman visited prisons, flagship Ma¯ori offender units, and spoke to exgang members, inmates, and victims. She went on police patrol, visited Victim Support, attended Treaty seminars, and sought criticism from Ma¯ori writers. ‘‘When a Ma¯ori colleague thanked me for channelling her tupuna and atua so authentically, I felt incredibly gratified.’’
After decades working in the local screen industry, In Dark Places was Bennett’s first attempt at prose. ‘‘I am incredibly humbled, and still pinching myself really,’’ he says.
Bennett is now hard at work on a film about Teina Pora’s case, but says he’d love to write another book one day. For now, he’s glad he could share more about two men he considers personal heroes: Pora and private investigator Tim McKinnel.
‘‘On the one hand you’ve got a guy wrongly in prison for two decades who comes out with forgiveness and a determination not to give in to anger,’’ says Bennett. ‘‘And then there’s Tim, a former cop who had no skin in the game, no personal reason to join a fight that everyone else had given up on years before. I admire him for seeing something that was wrong and his determination to do something about it.’’