Retreating into murder
Greg Fleming talks to Aussie crime writer Jane Harper on the eve of her Auckland visit
Few crime writers can claim a road to success as swift as Jane Harper’s. Most have a drawer of unpublished manuscripts and rejection letters, and realise that — even if published — it will take them another three or four books before they start to enjoy any kind of wide readership or financial reward.
Yet, the stratospheric rise of English-born, Melbourne-based Jane Harper is the wonderful and deserved, exception. The Dry, her debut murder mystery set in small-town Victoria during a drought, scored a six-figure international publishing deal and was named book of the year at the 2017 Australian Book Industry Awards.
Then came the rave reviews from the New York Times, GQ and crime fiction heavyweights such as David Baldacci, who described the book as “one of the most stunning debuts I’ve ever read”. The dream run continued when Reese Witherspoon’s production company (responsible for thriller hits Gone Girl and Big Little Lies)
optioned the film rights (production starts this year).
And this was a book the long-time journalist wrote in her spare time, after taking an online writing course.
Harper visits Auckland this month as a guest of the Auckland Writers Festival with a new book in hand, Force of Nature.
It’s another compelling and completely addictive thriller; one critic called it “Deliverance
with oestrogen”.
If anything, it’s even better than The Dry — full of vivid and relatable characters, who are again prey to a malevolent Australian landscape, this time the rugged Giralang ranges, once home to an Ivan Milat-like serial killer.
And as with Harper’s debut, you’re hooked from the first sentence (she writes these early, setting them as a kind of thematic foundation): “Later, the four remaining women could fully agree on only two things. One: No one saw the bushland swallow up Alice Russell. And two: Alice had a mean streak so sharp it could cut you.”
This meteoric rise is something Harper has come to terms with: “The success of The Dry was beyond anything I could imagine . . . I was blown away, but I feel like I’d had quite a long build up to it, thanks to my journalism background.
“Having that discipline of getting words on a page really helped when I decided to write a novel.”
She was been a big reader and, like many, always wanted to write a book citing Val McDermid, Lee Child and another out-of-thegate thrill star A.J Finn as favourites.
But her journalism career — she was a business reporter at Melbourne’s Herald Sun until the success of The Dry in 2017 enabled her to quit and write fulltime — and lack of commitment kept the pages blank.
“I’m not sure exactly what changed but I realised that if I was going to do this, I was going to have to fit the book in around my life. So in late 2014, I committed to just finishing a manuscript — just to prove to myself that I could do it and had few expectations further than that.” That’s when she enrolled in a 12-week online writing course.
“It wasn’t so much the course itself or what we discussed, it was just having that external expectation that I would be working on it, even if it was an artificial deadline; that’s what I needed to do to focus.”
To apply she had to send off a synopsis and an opening chapter of what became The Dry.
“The thing that helped was not worrying about whether what I was writing was going to be published or if anyone was going to like it. I just focused on getting it done — one chapter after the other, whenever I had a spare moment. Because without a manuscript nothing else can happen — you have to get it down on paper.”
The Dry’s Aaron Falk, a federal agent with a troubled past, is back in Force of Nature but though both books have police procedural and thriller elements, Harper’s strong suit is her characters. Force of Nature takes a group of office colleagues out of their air-conditioned Melbourne corporate HQ and dumps them in the bush in the name of team building. Five go out, but only four return and it’s the corporate bully Alice — a woman who “could start a fight in an empty room” — who’s missing.
Harper hasn’t been on a corporate retreat — “the papers I worked on didn’t have that sort of budget!” — but she heard horror stories from
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