From Rotorua To Vegas

Ray Berard, like many in late middle age, ticked off a long-held wish. His debut novel, Inside the Black Horse, a spellbinding crime novel set in contemporary Rotorua, was self-published in 2015.

He was pleased with the result (he says he wrote it as a “kind of redemption tale”) but didn’t expect much.

“I remember saying to my editor, Stephen Stratford, ‘I’m a 50-year-old man, with no background in writing. Who’s going to want to hear from me?’ He said, ‘Ray, I do a lot of books and this is one that should be published. I think you’ll be surprised how well-received it will be.’” Still, Berard had his doubts.

It had been a childhood dream of his to be a writer — fuelled by the books he found in his father’s library — and once the book was completed he threw himself into an ad hoc promo campaign.

“I worked out if I sold 900 copies I would make back what I spent, plus $10k. So I got to it,” he tells me over the phone from Christchurch, where he writes part-time and assists his wife, who is a specialist in hospital rebuilds.

“I never really tried to get a publisher. They showed no interest and I doubt any at the time read the book.

“The book came out … I did talks, went to bookshops and made myself available for any author event that would take me, hustling the audience to buy copies, like a busker. The good thing was I never got a bad response from those who handed over their money.”

That key metric was the first sign that the novel was a lot more than a bucket-list vanity project.

Then it won best first novel at the 2016 Ngaio Marsh Awards, was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award and was dubbed one of the books of that year by The Listener.

“It was only when it made it to that list that I thought this could have an impact,” says Berard.

His redemption is complete this month, as a $5.6 million television series, Vegas, inspired by his tale of a desperate hold-up at a Rotorua bar and the ripple effect it has on the wider community, hits the small screen.

That has led to a new edition of the book and a sudden raft of media inquiries.

“I think more people have heard about me in the last week than ever before.”

The book had grown out of diaries Berard — who emigrated from Canada in 1994 — kept as a TAB area supervisor.

“When I first got the TAB job I had no understanding of how the system worked, so a cop early on said ‘Write it down.’ So, if there was a fight, a stabbing or robbery, that’s what I did. It was a way to protect myself in case something came to court later on. The thing was I enjoyed it and I started to develop characters.”

When a TAB was held up, it was Berard who sat with the police and went through the CCTV footage.

When he left the TAB in 2009, he realised those entries and that inside knowledge could provide the bones of the novel he’d never quite got around to.

It took him three years to complete — with a phrase he gleaned from one of Elmore Leonard’s interviews ringing in his head — “If it starts to look like writing then you’re doing it wrong.”

Berard soon figured out his audience wasn’t the literary set but the man and woman on the street.

One of the highlights of the whole process was when an Auckland Airport baggage handler approached him at a bookshop event and announced, “I hate you, Ray.”

He then explained how he’d just came off a 12hour shift and didn’t get any sleep because he was up finishing the book.

“It was important to me that the people I worked with in South Auckland, Rotorua and the Waikato could read it. I can get through the Tolstoys and Joseph Conrads but I wanted to ensure this could be read by anyone, so once it was finished I spent six months going over every word, every comma — it was exhausting. I said to my wife, ‘I never want to do this again!’”

Indeed he never thought of Inside the Black Horse as crime fiction but as a representation of people’s lives, sharing similarities with the books and movies he loved — The Old Man and the Sea, Conrad’s The Secret Agent, the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple.

“Stories that make you feel, that pull you into this fictional world, and yet it’s reality.”

Berard had the makings of a gritty crime story but it was the input of a Maori bar owner who he worked with in Rotorua — and to whom he dedicates the novel — that gives the novel its heart and most compelling character.

“When I started to get the book going I struggled,” he recalls.

“I didn’t want to just write about a bunch of gang members attacking each other — so I had the idea of writing it from the perspective of someone like you or me — an innocent person caught in the middle. Maxine had told me some of the stories of her own life and I asked her if I could use a fictionalised account and she was okay with it but told me, ‘Just don’t make me look bad. If you do I’ll get my brothers to kill you!’ — and she had some interesting brothers.”

I ask if he’s had any pushback around being an outsider and writing about Maori and gang culture.

“I get asked that, but no. I’ve worked hard in my own life and spent years working in and alongside these communities and they’ve never looked at me as ‘the white guy’.

“I think humans are pretty much the same wherever you go, it’s poverty and lack of opportunity that creates the issues in our society. Young men with a good brain, if society doesn’t give them opportunity, they make their own. Young boys growing up in desperation and poverty don’t make very good citizens later on.”

Some of those issues have played out in Berard’s life, too.

He grew up in rural Canada on a dairy farm but the herd became infected with brucellosis. To keep the farm and pay the mortgage, the family turned to fattening pigs for an industrial farming operation. Berard, however, was no farmer and as soon as he was old enough, enrolled in the Army and after that attended Mcgill University, where his writing professor recognised his talent and encouraged him. However, Berard couldn’t see writing paying the bills, nor did he feel he fitted in with his classmates.

“The other kids in that class were driving their parents’ BMWS. I was working full-time at a hotel parking cars.”

Instead he took a business degree and, for many years, it was “just about making a living”.

Although the writing dream was on the backburner, Berard thought himself lucky to have escaped the destiny of so many of his friends.

“The reality of where I grew up was you either farmed or you worked for the mafia, running drugs into the States across the Canadian border. I lost friends to those gangs.”

But as much as Inside the Black Horse is a story of crime and desperation, it’s also a romance.

“As a young man, the love of a couple of good women kept me from being the guy with the gun who bursts through the door,” he says.

“I like crime novels — but I wanted to make this more of a life story; and the story of a middleaged woman who has had to usurp her emotions to survive and find love again was a theme I liked and thought took the hard edge off the story.”

Although Berard had little to do with the making of Vegas, he and his wife were invited to watch the production shoot scenes in Rotorua.

“It was fan-bloody-tastic. Just an amazing moment. To see this thing come full circle was enormously gratifying.”

Berard reckons he’ll have his next book, The Diary of a Dead Man, completed by the end of the year. But this time the pressure’s off.

“Look, if I’d been a one-hit wonder at the age of 25 that would be a hard life to live — when you’re almost 60 it isn’t such a bad deal.”

Greg Fleming talks to author Ray Berard about how his Ngaio Marsh Award-winning debut novel inspired a $5.6 million TV series

Inside the Black Horse, by Ray Berard (Bateman Books, $35) is out on Monday.

TVNZ could not confirm the screening date for at the time of going to press.