Memories mould dark work
Before our first crime writing fest, Greg Fleming meets New Zealand’s next thriller star, J.P. Pomare
Seventeen-year-old Kate enjoys a privileged life in the leafy suburbs of Melbourne, living with her widowed, ex-rugby star dad, but all is not what it seems. She’s an introvert and is navigating the minefield of teenage life — boys, men, peer pressure, social media — while her dad’s niceguy exterior masks a trigger temper and controlling nature. Then something terrible happens and unpacking exactly what and who is the meat of this whip-smart, psychological thriller.
J.P. Pomare’s (Why the initials? “My friends always called me J.P. not Josh, but really it’s a marketing consideration; it’s gender-neutral”) powerful debut raised eyebrows months before the official release. It’s been compared to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, was subject to a fierce bidding war (won by Hachette) and is to be published in the US and UK this year.
It opens with a man shaving a girl’s head; the girl makes a failed dash for freedom before the man drags her back by her remaining hair, which he resumes shearing.
We soon find out that Evie and Jim are in Maketu, on the Bay of Plenty coast, but it’s not clear whether Evie is a captive or being protected by the man she calls Jim. The book then moves between present-day Maketu to pre-incident life in Melbourne.
It’s a stunning debut — the sort of book you don’t begin late at night if you want any sleep — and was started in 2014 as a move away from Pomare’s more literary short stories.
“I was quite realistic about the prospect of publishing literary fiction and being able to make a career out of it; it’s bloody hard,” he says. “And I do read a lot of crime and suspense for pleasure so it seemed a natural fit. I wanted to write something that would get published and read, something my mother-in-law and wife would read. They pretended to like my short stories but I just don’t know that they were really that into them — you kind of sense these things.
“Genre fiction was the smart choice but in saying that, I had to be proud of it and worked on Evie for four years.”
Can a genre writer truly write for the market? “No, because it’s always changing and because, if you do, the writing doesn’t ring true. You’ve got to be excited by your work. Really, it’s in the editing process where, with a genre book, you can make changes to your work, tweak it to make it more commercially viable and, most of the time, make it stronger artistically too.”
At 30, Pomare is now proudly a full-time writer — “well for the next couple of years, I don’t want to jinx it.” As we talk, he’s navigating Melbourne Airport on his way to an interview in Sydney. His second novel, another psychological thriller about a cult and set just outside Melbourne, is finished and being edited.
The rewards are beginning to flow.
He’s recently achieved frequent flyer silver status on Qantas — “and I never thought I’d be in a job where I’d get that”— and clocks up more points when he returns for Rotorua Noir, New Zealand’s first crime fiction festival.
He’ll chair a panel on new New Zealand crime writers and interview Aussie crime legend Michael Robotham.
Pomare grew up about 20 minutes outside Rotorua, leaving for Melbourne in 2007 and, after a bit of travel, settled into working at his brother’s Melbourne marketing company. He
It just happens that my favourite characters are villains.
drew on memories of teenage misadventures in Maketu for Evie. “We did have a couple of confronting moments there — nothing too bad — but there’s an atmosphere of underlying violence and tension that I remember and wanted to capture,” he says.
“You have certain obligations when you’re writing about a real place. When it came to the Ma¯ ori element, I was very aware of what I was writing about. I was afraid of tropes. I think we have moved beyond the domestic violence, dopesmoking tropes — although there is an element of that in Evie, I didn’t want to dwell on it.”
He cites a range of NZ media as influential on the Kiwi section of Evie — Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors, Jane Campion’s Top of The Lake, Taiki Waititi’s Boy and short film Two Cars, One Night — as well as some of his contemporaneous crime fiction colleagues in Melbourne: Jane Harper, Sarah Bailey and Jock Serong, many of whom he’s interviewed on his popular On Books podcast.
He was also aware of the dangers of being a male writer writing from a teenage girl’s perspective.
“I knew people associated with some private girls’ schools here; that was helpful. I think the female dynamic is a lot different from the male one — unlike boys, girls’ friendships can end suddenly, without a conversation happening. If I was a young girl right now there are so many more traps to fall into. As a writer, I wanted to explore that. It’s a dangerous time to be a young person with social media and once something’s on the internet it’s there forever.”
Much of Evie delves inwards, exploring how trauma and grief impact on our memory and perception of events, but is Kate an innocent victim or a calculating femme fatale? Is her father a sociopath or a hero?
“I’ve always read a lot of psychology so I was familiar with the notion of gaslighting [a form of emotional abuse where the abuser manipulates situations to trick the victim into distrusting their memory].
“I particularly liked the idea of subverting it so the gaslighting actually works for the person’s benefit. I really liked [Dennis Lehane’s] Shutter Island where that kind of thing happens.”
I put it to him that Call Me Evie is a very dark work; with few exceptions, the characters are damaged and damaging.
“Good characters for me will always surprise the reader and also challenge the other characters, make them question their integrity so the reader can see what they’re about. It just happens that my favourite characters are villains. It’s strange — you think you know your characters but the good ones always surprise you.”