From fantasy to Kiwi

Empress of paranormal romance Nalini Singh talks to about why her latest novel swaps vampires and changelings for rural crime set on the West Coast

Awoman who’d never intended to return to her tiny hometown stands atop a clifftop as waves roil against the rocky coastline and the sea stretches beyond the horizon. The air is slick with a misty rain, different to the grey drizzle of the bustling city where Anahera had made her home as an adult. A city of icons, of monuments and museums, of red double-decker buses and world-famous theatre. A city that stretched back to Roman times, yet this rugged landscape at the far end of the world, not populated until centuries later (and barely now) feels more ancient. More primal.

London was where concert pianist Anahera made a life, until it was torn asunder. A place where she buried a husband then unearthed his betrayal. Golden Cove was the place she’d fled as a young woman, an outpost on the West Coast of New Zealand, the rugged frontier of a country that was once the farthest frontier of the British Empire. A place where family was laced with pain and friendship entangled with death. Where memories were more jagged than joyful.

Turning away from the clifftop, Anahera gets back into her green jeep to take the final few miles of a journey that’s racked up 12,000 of them by air and land. She heads to her mother’s cabin.

A long journey to an unexpected destination. That’s something recidivist New York Times bestseller Nalini Singh has gone through herself, in writing Anahera’s story in A Madness of Sunshine ,an atmospheric rural crime thriller.

Usually when you see the name Nalini Singh on the cover, you’ll find top-shelf paranormal or contemporary romance or urban fantasy within the pages. It’s been that way for 40 books, as the Auckland author earned a global reputation as one of the finest in her field during the past 15 years.

But there are no archangels, vampires or changelings in A Madness of Sunshine. Instead, Anahera gets entangled in the worrying disappearance of a young woman from Golden Cove, an incident that rocks the small community and has echoes of events many years before.

“I read a lot of mysteries and thrillers. I’ve always read a lot of mysteries and thrillers and I have elements of those in some of my books,” says Singh, as we chat about her swerve from paranormal romance to rural crime.

“When I travelled through the West Coast of the South Island, I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this would make a great setting for a thriller.’

“That was a few years ago but you know, as a writer, it’s always at the back of your head.”

With an atmospheric setting knocking about in the back of her brain and a latent appreciation for crime fiction despite her global renown for paranormal romance, it was a chat with some fellow Auckland romance writers that got Singh working on A Madness of Sunshine.

“I remember this one conversation where my local writers group met — the Romance Writers of New Zealand Auckland chapter — and afterwards, we were having coffee,” says Singh. “A lot of us read Nordic Noir and British crime writers and all of that. We got talking about how New Zealand has a lot of the prerequisites for Nordic Noir: the empty landscapes, the stark and beautiful places, the lonely places, and then we sort of just jokingly said there should be more. We read New Zealand crime writers as well, but there should be more. It should be as big as Nordic Noir. Jokingly we said maybe we should write some too — to add to what was already coming out — and I think it sparked something in me that I’d been thinking about anyway.”

Heading home from that meeting and with the feeling of that wild West Coast setting still lingering from years before, Singh began making notes.

“Because I’m a full-time writer and I’ve been doing this for a while now, I like to keep challenging myself,” she says. “I never want to be in a rut, I always want to grow, so I just said to myself, ‘Let’s see if I can do it.’ So it was like a project I would do in the evenings. After I’d done the work I was contracted for and getting paid for, I would spend half an hour working on this mystery. It was something to work on to stretch my mental muscles, then I just got really, really, into it.”

Singh’s agent and publisher had no idea what she was doing; Singh kept it to herself until she’d written the entire manuscript. “I wanted to know for myself I could do it,” she says. “I’ve always been like that, when I do something new. To do it without any external expectations. So yeah, it was good. I thought, ‘Why not? If it fails, no problem.”’

With a long string of New York Times bestsellers, translated into 20 languages, shelves full of awards and sales of more than 7 million books, Singh could have stuck to writing two or three novels each year of the kind her eager fans expect and devour and let the nagging idea of a rural crime thriller set in her home country wither on the vine.

“Because it was something new to me, I didn’t know I had a book until I was quite a way through it,” says Singh. “For a long time, I was just writing it to see where it would go. I wasn’t sure, because I have written romance for most of my career, I was like, ‘Will

Nalini Singh challenged herself to write a crime thriller. my natural tendency be to make this romantic or will I go towards mystery?’ I didn’t actually know until I was quite deep into it and I realised I was still going strongly into the mystery and thriller direction.”

The rugged West Coast setting that once caught her eye played a big role in the writing of A Madness of Sunshine, she says. “Everything in the book flows from it. The tone, the melancholy of it — the beautiful, stark, lonely places — play a big role in the story.”

Singh found herself having to switch up her writing process a little for the new challenge, too. Calling herself an “organic writer”, she says she’s not a plotter and usually writes a very fast first draft to tell herself the story, then works from there.

“But for a mystery I realised I needed to know basically who did it or what the plotline was beforehand. Normally if I have some mystery in a book I can work it out while I’m doing my telling-myself-thestory draft. But I found with A Madness of Sunshine ,I really needed to sit down in advance to figure out the players and figure out the climactic elements, then I just did the draft. So that was a little bit different.”

It’s a risk that paid off, with Singh showing she switches gears better than Scott Mclaughlin, crafting an immersive sense of place and richly drawn characters that power an intriguing mystery. While some long-time fans may miss the steamy sex or vampires, archangels, and unfeeling psychics, many others will hope Singh returns to the crime scene again. She intends to.

Singh now has a few new paranormal and romance novels on the go but says she’ll definitely write another crime novel.

“I think what I probably most enjoyed was just being able to showcase New Zealand,” she says. “Even though I’m writing a crime novel and the tone is dark. I love living in New Zealand and I think it is one of the most breathtakingly beautiful places in the world. So it was really nice to paint a picture of that in the pages in my book and show my country to readers, wherever they are in the world. Because the book has already been picked up for translations in other countries. I hope that people will see New Zealand.”