See You at the Toxteth

by Peter Corris

  Overall, I have only had two disappointments at the hands of reviewers. One has been that their treatment of my historical novels, which I consider to be my best writing, never generated public enthusiasm or good sales. The other is the paucity of reviews of the autobiography Damned if I Do (2013) (co-written with euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke). Newspapers, magazines and their editors are evidently as terrified as politicians of dealing with this issue, which has overwhelming support in the Australian population. Its time will come, and this brave and pungent book may one day be seen in its true light.

  ON BOOZE

  21 September 2012

  Patrick White worried about his drinking. He told biographer David Marr there were times when he drank half a bottle of spirits a day and wine as well. He consulted doctors, almost hoping, Marr suggests, for a diagnosis of alcoholism, which would relieve him of responsibility. White gave up drinking for months at a time but always went back to it. This is a pattern familiar to drinkers who are not physically addicted to, but emotionally dependent on, alcohol.

  Alcoholism and heavy dependence are common features in the lives of writers. At a rough count, more than ten per cent of the writers listed in John Sutherland’s compendium Lives of the Novelists fall into this category. Some of the better-known are Samuel Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, John O’Hara, John Cheever and Kingsley Amis. For a better gender balance, one could add Dorothy Parker and Jean Rhys. There are poets like Robert Burns and playwrights like Eugene O’Neill.

  It’s easy to see why rock musicians, performing at high voltage night after night, need something to keep them going even if they are getting money for nothing and their chicks for free. But why is it that alcohol looms larger in the lives of writers than, say, architects?

  In his study of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and O’Neill, The Thirsty Muse, Tom Dardis argues that genetics is the critical factor predisposing these writers to alcoholism. The drug, he believes, may have stimulated their early work, but ultimately led to a decline into mediocrity or worse for all but O’Neill, who quit.

  The argument holds up well for these four and would certainly apply to Chandler, whose father was an alcoholic. But whether it would apply across the board is doubtful.

  While it’s easy to establish that the writers mentioned (and many others) drank, it’s harder to tell whether they drank while they were writing.

  We know that Hemingway, after his back was injured in a plane accident, wrote standing up, with his typewriter on top of a refrigerator. Did he have a bloody Mary on top of the fridge as well? We don’t know. Chandler claimed he could type accurately while he was drunk, which suggests he drank while writing.

  When writing, I usually work for about an hour in the morning, from around eleven o’clock to noon, and in the late afternoon, from around 5 to 6 p.m. During both sessions I drink a sizeable glass of wine, sometimes two.

  I believe that alcohol releases certain inhibitions and helps me project myself into my characters, to imagine actions and scenes I’ve never experienced or to transmute actual experiences into the material of fiction.

  Over the years, for various reasons, I’ve given up drinking for quite long periods. I’ve written books in these dry spells and no one has deemed them better or worse than others. So I can write without booze if I have to, but it’s not as much fun.

  ON THE ORIGIN OF HIS IDEAS

  31 March 2017

  The question ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ is often put to authors, especially crime writers. When I was busy at the trade I tended to fob questioners off with answers about my imagination and how I had picked up on things I’d overheard when I was a journalist or listened to on radio or seen on television.

  There is, of course, much more to it than that, and now that I’m in retirement I’ve thought about a more considered response because people seem to be interested.

  My first detective novel, The Dying Trade (1980), was simply an exercise in trying to write the kind of hard-boiled detective novel I admired from Chandler, Hammett and Ross Macdonald. I piled everything in—a missing person, corrupt cops, sex and violence. The next, White Meat (1981), derived from my knowledge of boxing and the research I’d done for my history of prize-fighting in Australia, Lords of the Ring (1980). I’d been to many fights and talked to boxers in gyms and pubs. I knew how it all worked. The third, The Marvellous Boy (1982), came about because I wanted to write a little about Canberra, where I’d spent years as a postgraduate student and academic.

  After that the books came thick and fast—including the novels and the short stories, I calculate that Cliff Hardy must have dealt with about a hundred cases—and I forget the genesis and the plots of most of them. But a few are clear in my memory.

  The only short story I can remember the spark for is ‘The luck of Clem Carter’ in the collection Heroin Annie (1984). I’d been captivated by the opening line of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926): ‘Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.’ I thought it would be interesting to imitate it and see if anyone noticed. From memory (I don’t have a copy of the book to hand) my lines were: ‘Clem Carter was the welterweight boxing champion of the Maroubra Police Citizens Boys Club. The title didn’t mean much to most people, but it did to me because he beat me for it.’ The story, one of my best I think, was about mateship. No one ever noticed my homage.

  Wet Graves (1991) was inspired by a passage in Peter Spearritt’s book Sydney Since the Twenties (1978), which gave an account of the people killed in the construction of the Harbour Bridge. Their bodies were recovered but it occurred to me that there might still be undiscovered corpses under the bridge and I built up a story to develop the thought.

  The Greenwich Apartments (1986) had its beginning in my friend Bill Garner’s account of renting a supposedly empty flat and finding a suitcase under a bed containing, I think, photographs. I changed the photos to video cassettes and that set the story in motion.

  Torn Apart (2010) gestated for many years. When I was at university in Melbourne I got a letter from a friend in Sydney enclosing a clipping from a Sydney newspaper. It showed a student demonstration at the Melbourne University campus and the head and shoulders of one student was circled. My friend commented on my participation. But, although the photograph looked exactly like me—the height and build, the hair, the expression, even the clothes—I’d been nowhere near the demo. The idea of a doppelganger stayed with me for decades until I incorporated it into Torn Apart, providing Cliff Hardy with a look-alike.

  Apart from Sydney locations, places where I’ve lived or visited were quite often the stimuli for stories—the south coast of New South Wales, the Central Coast, the Blue Mountains, New Caledonia, Norfolk Island. If I racked my brains I could probably come up with some other triggers but this is enough to make the point that it didn’t take much to set me off.

  ON LEE CHILD

  1 March 2012

  Patrick Gallagher, the publisher at Allen & Unwin Australia, asked me some time ago if I’d ever thought of writing a novel à la Lee Child. I had to admit I hadn’t read Lee Child. I checked with Jean, who consumes eight novels a week, mostly crime. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘his character’s a sort of superhero.’ Not my kind of thing and I told Patrick so.

  A bit later Jean bought Lee Child’s fourteenth book, 61 Hours. With nothing else on hand, I read it and was very impressed. Jack Reacher, ex-military MP, now a vagabond whose only luggage is a folding toothbrush, finds himself in a frozen, troubled North Dakota town. Trouble is Jack’s business. The writing was crisp with no padding; the characters were well drawn and the plot held me. I realised I’d been missing something.

  Always in the market for a good read, over the next year or so I borrowed from libraries or bought second-hand most of the Jack Reacher novels. Reacher, six-foot-five
and 220 pounds, was puissant to the max but credible. He was an original creation, a free-as-the-air wanderer owing nothing to other literary heroes I could think of.

  The books were patchy, with some much better than others. The couple written in the first person, such as Persuader (2003), were weaker than the third-person books. Reacher, and his manifold abilities as fighter, thinker and lover, was better observed from without than portrayed from within. Several of the books harked back to Reacher’s career in the military, but most were set in the present, a present that Lee Child was able to render convincingly.

  While the character is American, the writer is English, and this enables him to avoid the sentimentality that disfigures so many American heroic characters—Robert B. Parker’s Spenser in the later books is a notable example. Child’s books are full of fresh information about places, weaponry, and the civil and military authorities. Jack is good in the city but better in the country. In Nothing to Lose (2008), in his depiction of the two isolated Texas towns Hope and Despair, Child achieves a nightmarish, almost Dantesque, atmosphere. In this book, Child’s best in my opinion, you can learn a great deal about the US military’s inexcusable use of depleted uranium.

  So I looked forward eagerly to the next Reacher novel. Worth Dying For (2010) was pretty well up to standard, with Jack setting things right in backwoods Nebraska. The next book, The Affair (2011), was a shocking disappointment.

  The Affair was set in the past and focused in part on the circumstances surrounding Reacher leaving the army, something that had been alluded to in earlier books. But it had a tired feel and the matter apparently at issue—a murder in a Mississippi town close to a mysterious army base—lacked bite. Uncharacteristically, the plot relies on red herrings and the shadowy figures pulling the strings remain shadowy. Reacher’s love interest is the local sheriff, a character virtually recycled from an earlier book, and the scene where they achieve simultaneous orgasms as the room rocks to the vibrations set off by an express train is simply ludicrous.

  Every writer is allowed a flop, but the lack of energy in The Affair is worrying. Even the title suggests a lack of effort. Child’s seventeenth Reacher novel, A Wanted Man, is due out this year. I’ll approach it with caution—probably via a library rather than a bookshop.

  ON HIS EDITORS

  29 April 2016

  In a writing career of more than forty years I’ve had dealings with dozens, perhaps scores, of publishers’ editors. Some have been excellent, some good, some just all right and a few terrible.

  I can’t remember much about the editors of the handful of academic books I produced. My impression is that they were mainly concerned with the accuracy of footnotes and indexes rather than the quality of the writing.

  I first encountered serious and helpful editing from Carl Harrison-Ford, who edited my history of boxing, published as Lords of the Ring in 1980. This was my first attempt at nonacademic history and I struggled with the material. At one point I had the idea of changing to a fictional approach. I had only the slightest of credentials as a fiction writer at the time and Carl, wisely, talked me out of this. He also encouraged me to adopt a thematic rather than a chronological approach and this resolved many problems. I remain proud of the book, which continues to be cited, and grateful to Carl.

  When it came to fiction I was lucky in having Jean as a first reader and copyeditor to civilise the raw product. The editor at McGraw-Hill for the first Cliff Hardy novel, The Dying Trade (1980), smoothed away a Melburnian’s ignorance of Sydney and I feel sure contributed to the book’s success in that way. To my shame I’ve forgotten her name and did not credit her, an omission I’ve tried to rectify in subsequent books with other editors.

  I struck trouble with an editor in one of my early historical novels. She clearly disliked the story, the characters and the style, and her editorial work was dismissive. We battled. The book didn’t sell, so perhaps she was right, but she became a successful writer herself later and our meetings subsequently on panels and at gatherings were amicable.

  Not so with another editor. I’ve forgotten the book involved but again, she was unsympathetic. I remember that she wrote in the margin beside a passage in which I described the abilities of a character, ‘What an all-rounder!’ I took exception to this and her whole editorial manner and insisted that another editor be assigned, the only time I’ve done this. I later heard her described as ‘the rudest person I’ve ever known’, a judgement I endorsed.

  The Journal of Fletcher Christian (2005) was a tricky book to compose. It was a fictional account purporting to be Christian’s work and was preceded by a narrative explaining how the supposed manuscript had come into my hands. Meredith Curnow and Roberta Ivers at Random House showed great, almost embarrassing, faith in the book and worked long and hard to conquer its difficulties. I made sure to acknowledge them for helping me to produce what I think was one of my best books.

  No editor has done more to ensure that my Cliff Hardy books appear in as finished a form as possible than Jo Jarrah, working for Allen & Unwin. Jo has edited more of the series and caused me more annoyance and gratitude than anyone else. She has received the manuscript after I’ve dealt with Jean’s copyedit and the publisher’s reader’s report and has never failed to find flaws—inconsistencies, mistakes of time and place, stylistic awkwardness. More importantly, she has sometimes seemed to understand Hardy’s character better than I have myself. She once pulled me up short with the comment that ‘Cliff has lost his mojo’. That required a serious reappraisal and I’ve kept it firmly in mind ever since.

  ON EL DORADO

  27 January 2017

  I got a phone call from my agent. This was unusual. Usually she emails me along these lines:

  ‘Dear Peter (we like to observe the formalities), I’ve just processed a royalty from a set of your ebooks. I’m sorry it’s so little but …’

  I’ll reply thanking her and telling her that it’ll pay a bill or two. But a phone call …

  ‘Peter,’ she said, sounding excited. ‘Your ship has come in.’

  I didn’t know I had a vessel at sea. ‘What’s her name, the Marie Celeste?’

  ‘Very funny. I mean that I’ve had a contact from a film producer …’

  ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘is this one of those producers who wants an option for peanuts but swears he can get Mel Gibson on board if we can kick in for his expenses …?’

  ‘Mel’s too old for Cliff,’ she said. ‘No, this is Randy Frost, who produced three films in the Blackout franchise and Blood in the Water.’

  ‘Never heard of them or him.’

  ‘Where have you been? He called from Hollywood. He’s got HBO and Google money. He’s offering five million for the rights to Hardy and he’s interested in a couple of the Browning books and one of the historical novels, and his nephew Clint, who’s a documentary maker, wants to do a true crime thing for the History Channel about your book on Mad Dog Moxley and …’

  This is a daydream of course, but it indicates a certain disappointment I sometimes feel about my writing career. Wouldn’t it have been nice to get Cliff Hardy up on screen a few times? With Cate Blanchett in a cameo (all that could be afforded) as a femme fatale. To have made a rip-snorting Australian Western out of my novel Wimmera Gold (1994) with Anthony Mundine as a bare-knuckle prize-fighter and Hugo Weaving as a villain. To have captured the darkness of William Cyril Moxley and Depression-era Sydney on grainy black and white film?

  It wasn’t to be: the local market is too small, there is too little money around, foreign competition is too great and my books have failed to achieve international penetration.

  I hasten to say that I’m not really complaining: to have made a living from writing for forty years, to have never, as I not entirely playfully put it, had to go out to work for all that time and to have enjoyed writing, has been a boon and a privilege. But still …

  ON LITERARY VS POPULAR FICTION

  4 August 2017

  From time to ti
me discussion still arises about the difference between literary and popular fiction, and their respective merits. Those of us interested in the topic are often divided.

  Michael Wilding made his position clear when he wrote somewhere that, ‘Crime fiction [and by extension other forms of genre fiction] is not literature; it’s entertainment.’ As a practitioner I am inclined to agree. While hoping to provide well-written stories with at least some serious matter to engage serious minds, my primary purpose has always been to entertain.

  But the matter can’t rest there. I recently heard Ian Rankin, surely one of the best crime writers, make a case for the genre. I don’t have the actual quote, but he said something like this: if you plan to go to another country and wish to inform yourself beforehand of the society’s hopes and fears, divisions and successes, read the local crime writers. They will give you a better understanding than voices from the commentariat.

  That seems to lift the genre up a few notches and it’s remarkable how very many countries have a flourishing output of crime fiction. Rankin’s pronouncement could easily be put to the test.

  A while ago I watched Jennifer Byrne’s program, The Book Club, on ABC television. Two of the panellists were Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher novels, many of which I’ve read, and Matthew Riley, the author of techno-thrillers, none of which I’ve read, and one historical novel, which I gave up on, thinking it very bad. They both claimed that they could write literary fiction if they wanted to but had chosen not to for various reasons.

  I find this a dubious claim. I feel there is a difference between the two kinds of writing and that one deserves more critical appraisal than the other. This feeling was reinforced when I listened recently to the audio version of Ian McEwan’s Nutshell (2016). The conceit of this book is that an unborn foetus can hear everything through the uterine wall—voices, music, footsteps, the rustling of clothes, radio, television and podcasts. What’s more, he (the foetus) has fumblingly discovered his gender and can interpret this information to construct a world he has yet to see. He can intuit or guess at appearances, motives, terrors.