PLACE, PACE MAKE FOR A HIT
Chris Hammer tells Bron Sibree what inspires his award-winning, bestselling thrillers
Ever since his debut crime novel Scrublands became a runaway international bestseller in 2018, Australian author Chris Hammer has been lauded not only for his intricate plots and memorable characters but for the atmospheric settings of his novels. Now, just four novels into his crime-writing career — and with a slew of awards, including a prestigious Crime Writers Association Dagger Award for Scrublands — the former journalist is being hailed as a master of the crime genre.
As he speaks about his new novel, Opal Country, you soon learn that Hammer is a stickler for authenticity, too. And if he possesses an almost preternatural ability to evoke a potent sense of both place and character, it’s because setting is not merely a geographical location for Hammer.
“Setting is the entire world of the book,” he says. “It will influence the way I write. It will influence the way the characters think, what their motivations are. It will influence what the reader is feeling.”
Opal Country is set in the fictional mining town of Finnigans Gap, not so far from the real-life mining town of Lightning Ridge. It begins in the dead of night with thieves breaking into an opal mine where, instead of rich pickings, they find the owner crucified in the depths of his mine.
Billed as a standalone, it is more of a sidestep from the viewpoint of the protagonist of Scrublands, Silver and Trust, journalist Martin Scarsden, giving centre stage instead to Sydney homicide detective Ivan Lucic, a minor character in the previous novels, and Lucic’s assistant Nell Buchanan, a young local detective. But Scarsden and an array of characters from Hammer’s previous books appear throughout its pages in richly satisfying ways. Or as Hammer puts it: “There’s nothing you need to know from the previous books, but if you have read them, you get a bit of a bonus.”
Hammer’s previous books were lauded for their superb multiple plot lines and, with Opal Country, it’s as if he has upped the ante — several complex plot lines revolve around nasty secrets, bitter resentments and lifelong rivalries that lie, festering, in this desolate town.
Another reaches back to Sydney where Lucic’s old boss, Morris Montefiore, is under internal investigation. As Lucic soon discovers, so is he. Yet another revolves around the way big corporate miners get away with things smaller miners don’t.
For Hammer, who famously never plots his novels as “they evolve as I’m writing”, Opal Country is the result of stymied plans and a fortuitous sighting or two. He’d originally wanted to set his fourth crime thriller near “a very big mine” in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia and planned on driving there to research it, he says. “But because of Covid-19 restrictions, I couldn’t cross the state borders.”
But during a routine foray to the local shops soon after his plans were foiled, he spied a woman walking past wearing an opal pendant. “It was just this lightbulb moment, oh, an opal mining town! That could be interesting!” recalls Hammer.
“I knew next to nothing about opal mining, but I did know one thing — that opal miners are typically one-man bands, smallholdings. If you stake an opal claim you can only stake a claim 50m by 50m. That’s why the big global corporations aren’t in there. It’s all these leathery old blokes with their teeth missing and tatts on their arms. God knows where they’ve been in the past; they’ve washed up in these little opal mines seeking their fortune.”
So in July of 2020, he drove to Lightning Ridge, the New South Wales town famous for its opal mines, and the only state he had access to from his home in Canberra. It was there, soon after walking into the Miners Association Office, and striking up a conversation with some miners about a huge sign that hung there, that the opening of the novel came to him. The sign portrayed a rat overlaid with a red circle with a line running through it, with the words “No Ratters” written underneath.
Hammer says: “Of course, I said, ‘What’s a ratter?’ and they said ‘Ratters are people who go down other blokes’ mines and steal their opals in the middle of the night,’ and I thought ‘I can use that’.”
Hammer relishes the task of working out what drives his characters, just as he relishes everything about his relatively newly minted life as a fiction writer. He’d been writing Scrublands in his spare time when in 2017 he became one of the thousands of journalists to be retrenched from a declining industry.
But the success of Scrublands — which paved the way to his new career and is still walking off bookshop shelves — is, he admits, “still hard to believe. It was painful in a way leaving journalism, particularly as it wasn’t my decision. But it was joyous because I absolutely love what I’m doing now. It’s just been so liberating, and I can’t believe my good fortune.”