Adult Fiction

The Blackmail Blend: “Sassy Crime”

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Tea, mystery and romance novels; a heady combination. The Blackmail Blend* from Livia Day is a delightful offering, small and artful like the high tea her heroine serves.

Tabitha Darling runs a café frequented Tea2by hipsters, while her Scottish friend Stewart works in the building upstairs as a journalist when he’s not writing romance novels. He’s not impressed when he discovers she’s taken a booking from a rival, the revered author of Regency romances Beatrice Wilde, for a book launch and high tea.

The reputation of Tabitha’s business is on the line when Beatrice collapses from a reaction to a food allergen. Tabitha knows she kept all traces of Beatrice’s allergies from the food she served, so someone must have poisoned her deliberately. Stewart drags her into investigating, and it doesn’t take long to discover there’s no shortage of suspects.

But how will she cope with Stewart’s new girlfriend? Just because she’s with her long time crush now, a policeman, does that mean she won’t be jealous? Can either of them look at the evidence about Beatrice or her workshop participants impartially? Will they discover the culprit before another attempt is made on the life of the odious Beatrice?

The Blackmail Blend is under 100 pages, and is a lovely read. It’s light and tight, with well-drawn characters and a decent mystery for its size. Tabitha is smart and witty with a hint of commitment phobia to keep her interesting. Her flat mate and best friend, Xanthippe, is satisfyingly outrageous, and Xanthippe’s brother is Tabitha’s policeman boyfriend who hovers in the background to let her bounce ideas around and distract her from other things – particularly the journalist/writer. Stewart is Scottish, which is a ninety percent approval guarantee in my opinion, so when you add smart, charming and being a romance writer, my only question is, Why is Tabitha with the policeman?

TrifleDead-Cover2Regardless of Tabitha’s reasons, it delivers excellent sexual tension and entertaining dialogue.

Though I haven’t read the the preceding story in the Café La Femme series, A Trifle Dead, there was still a sense of shared history between the characters, and necessary backstory was explained without noticeable exposition. The crime – attempted murder – comes into Tabitha’s life naturally without her seeking it. A major scare in her previous case put her off amateur detective work, so she’s not keen to go down that road again.

The copy I read included the text of a speech presented by Livia Day at CrimeSceneWA in November 2014, titled Obsessive Amateur Detectives (and the Authors Who Love Them). It’s an interesting piece giving some insight into the creation of Tabitha and her sleuthing tendencies, as well as Day’s own comments on other famous crime novel protagonists. It’s probably particularly enlightening for readers like me who only read an occasional crime novel.

DrownedVanillaThe Blackmail Blend is set between A Trifle Dead and Drowned Vanilla. It has encouraged me to read the longer novels. After I’d written most of this review, I went looking for them and discovered that Livia Day is the crime-novelist alter ego of fantasy writer Tansy Rayner Roberts. No surprise, then, that the writing is so good.

It was also then I came upon the term “Sassy Crime”, coined by Angela Slatter.** It’s a perfect way to describe this series, not in terms of brashness, but more of an outspoken, confident woman who’s smart and isn’t about to sit in a corner and let other people get away with anything.

I intend to enjoy the further exploits of Tabitha Darling.

*I was provided with an e-copy of this book for review by the publishers.

Links: Livia Day’s website

A Trifle Dead Twelfth Planet Press

**A.K.A Livia Day Angela Slatter interviews Tansy Rayner Roberts

Lost and Found

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23350837A few months ago I snuck into a packed-out, quiet room where Brooke Davis and Favel Parrett spoke with Courtney Collins. These soft-spoken young women held the audience at the Newcastle Writers Festival spellbound as they talked about writing and life, and telling a story “through the eyes of a child”. I’ve reviewed Favel Parrett’s Past the Shallows and Courtney Collins’ The Burial, and it’s high time I completed the trio with Brooke Davis’ debut novel, Lost and Found.

Davis gives us the story of seven-year-old Millie, who discovers her dog dead on the road, then witnesses the death of a old man hit by a car. She receives rather confusing explanations from her parents about these events, and as she  notices other things dying around her, begins to record them.

She wasn’t to know that after she had recorded twenty-seven assorted creatures in her Book of Dead Things – Spider, The Bird, Grandma, next door’s cat Gertrude, among others – her dad would be a Dead Thing, too. That she’d write it next to the number twenty-eight in letters so big they took up two pages: MY DAD.

Through Millie’s eyes we see her mother falling apart, though she doesn’t fully understand what’s happening, culminating in Millie’s abandonment at a department store. Her mother tells her to stand right near the Ginormous Women’s Undies and says, I’ll be right back. It’s the last we or Millie see of her.

20823038Millie hides out in the department store and befriends eighty-seven year old Karl the Touch Typist in the store cafe, who is adrift since losing the love of his life. When store employees discover Millie’s predicament and call authorities, Karl helps her escape. Completing the main cast is Agatha Pantha, who lives across the street from Millie’s house. She’s an angry eighty-two year old who hasn’t left her house since her husband died, but is reluctantly drawn into looking after Millie. The three embark on a journey to find Millie’s mum, but discover there’s more to life than they expected.

The language of Lost and Found is beguiling. Millie’s voice is fresh with lack of self-consciousness, and an internal logic that comes from observation and limited information. Karl is more at home pretending to type words than saying them; his internal monologues reveal his longing to be more than he is. Agatha’s outbursts at everyone and everything hide a deep anxiety and pain that she keeps at bay only with her anger.

It’s a story about death and loss, how we hide from it, how we deal with it or refuse to deal with it. It’s also a story about the extremes of age, the young and the old, and how those in between can fail to treat our children and elders like real people with loves, fears, hopes and dreams as important as our own.

Though Lost and Found is written in the viewpoint of all three characters, I have to confess to a preference for the Millie sections. Perhaps that’s because, in spite of her losses and sadness, she maintains her hope. Ultimately it is her hope and naive longing to be reunited with her mother, in contrast with Karl’s almost despairing determination and Agatha’s reluctant intervention, that drives their journey, allowing them to see past their own pain and ultimately find comfort.

Lost and Found has won the General Fiction Book Of The Year, Australian Book Industry Awards 2015, and the Matt Richell New Writer Of The Year 2015. It has also been shortlisted for Debut Fiction, Indie Book Awards 2015, and the Australian Booksellers Association Neilsen BookData Booksellers Choice Award 2015

Links: Brooke Davis page at Hachette

Past the Shallows by Favel Parrett, Review

The Burial by Courtney Collins, Review

Newcastle Writers Festival

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Do you know The Lady Bushranger?

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What do you know about women bushrangers?

If your answer would be, ‘Not much,’ you wouldn’t be alone. Before I picked up The Burial by Courtney Collins, my response would have been, ‘What women bushrangers?’

The Burial’s central character is inspired by the life of Jessie Hickman, Australia’s ‘Lady Bushranger’ who ran with her gang in the 1920s in the area now known as the Wollemi National Park, part of the Blue Mountains range between Lithgow and Muswellbrook. While other women were consorts of male bushrangers and some carried out daring exploits, Jessie Hickman is the only one who stands out as a mover and shaker on the bushranger scene in her own right.

It’s easy to see why Collins was captivated by her story. Sold off while still a child to a bush circus, she became a skilled rider and performer, developing the skills and confidence in her own abilities which allowed her to take off into the bush, and to escape captivity multiple times. Stories of her include riding off a cliff into a river to evade police, and escaping after being locked in a toilet on a train.

While she’s reputed to have married three times and had a cattle and horse rustling career over many years, The Burial concentrates on a short period of her life at the end of her third marriage. It’s a beautifully written novel, but perhaps it’s a testament to the skill of its author that for the most part I didn’t notice that as I read it. The prose is evocative, but doesn’t get in the way of the story or characters.

BurialCollins doesn’t claim historical accuracy. A statement before the ‘Prelude’ reads, “This is a work of fiction – inspired by art, music, literature and the landscape, as much as the life and times of Jessie Hickman herself.” The narrative begins in the voice of a dead child and the burial of the novel’s title, but the story is primarily told from Jessie’s viewpoint as she heads into the mountain bushland, and that of Jack Brown, a half-Aboriginal drover/rustler and tracker. He and police sergeant Andrew Barlow are ‘inspired-by-life but mainly fictional characters’ (according to Collins), who provide the narrative of the search for Jessie and the hunter-versus-hunted tension.

This was one of those novels when I was looking out through the character’s eyes and couldn’t help contrasting my life with hers. To be sold off at a young age, essentially at the mercy of the men around you, be they kind and fair or lecherous and abusive, is it any wonder she chose to take her chances in the bush? A hundred years ago in Australia, when this novel is set, how many women suffered what she did but didn’t have the ability to survive in the bush or evade those who would come after them? I wonder how many tried – and died?

Of course, this type of scenario still happens, on large scales in countries where women are legally and socially oppressed and, closer to home, on smaller scales in secret. It’s a moot point to ask if Jessie Hickman would still have ended up on the wrong side of the law if she hadn’t been exposed to such abuse and injustice. We’ll never know. What we do know is that abuse and injustice distorts and destroys lives.

A book like The Burial helps remind us of that.

Links: Courtney Collins website
The Burial will be released in the US at the end of May under the title The Untold.
Her upcoming novel is entitled The Walkman Mix.

More about Jessie Hickman

by Di Moore

mistsA newspaper article on Di Moore and her non-fiction book
about Jessie Hickman, Out of the Mists

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I saw Courtney Collins interviewing Favel Parrett (Past the Shallows) and Brooke Davis (Lost and Found) as Newcastle Writers Festival 2015

Trying Something New: “Challenge”

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I had a dilemma. In a room about ten metres away two authors of speculative fiction were about to discuss their work. I’d planned to attend for weeks. The problem? My replacement volunteer hadn’t shown up. The next session for my current room was about to start.

I didn’t really have a choice. I stayed – and the magic that happens at writers festivals was present in abundance.

It was 2013 and I was at the inaugural Newcastle Writers Festival. The session I stayed for was Chris Uhlmann  and Steve Lewis discussing their book, The Marmalade Files, with 1233 ABC’s Paul Bevan. It helped that I was interested in hearing them, but I wasn’t a fan of political novels. I could count on one hand the number of novels in that genre I’d read in the last twenty years.

The anecdote15775297s ran thick and fast. It was obvious these two knew the political landscape like the back of their hands. The session ended with Chris Uhlmann describing what it was like to break the story on ABC news of the change of prime minister when Kevin Rudd was rolled from leadership. I was converted. I bought their book.

Although different to most other things I read, I enjoyed the difference. Lewis and Uhlmann said they knew a lot of anecdotes they could never publish, so they made up characters and attributed real deeds to fictional people. A scary thought, but it makes for good reading and more than a few laughs. The story revolves around a journalist who receives leaked information, anonymously, about the Defense Minister. But that’s only the start …

It’s well paced, with enough intrigue to drive the story forward. With obvious parallels to some real political figures, I just hope not all of the stories are true.

Lewis and Uhlmann returned to the Newcastle Writers Festival this year, its third year, with the release of their second book, The Mandarin Code. This time I made sure I attended their session, which they shared with Paul Daley and Jessica Rudd, discussing the revived popularity of political novels. Of course, I bought their new book, but what I didn’t expect to do is buy the books of the other two. This is not my genre, but they were just too interesting.

23050077I’ve saved The Mandarin Code for the moment, but have finished Paul Daley’s Challenge. It’s about Danny Slattery, the leader of the Opposition, who is facing a leadership challenge in the run up to an election in the coming twelve months against a government and prime minister whose best days are behind them. He’s toed the party line, but now has had enough. Beset by attacks on multiple fronts, he resolves to stick to his principles and refuses to cave in to the pressure. But the question is, who he can trust?

While Daley’s protagonist is the leader of a Labor Opposition, the author is equally scathing in his portrayal of the Left and Right sides of politics. Danny has his political principles, but is coming back to awareness of them after too long letting them languish in the name of pragmatism. He sees many of his own faults, excusing some as inevitable consequences of the job, but also unable in many ways to see how far he’d diverged from what he hoped to be.

Challenge is written in the first person, so we see everything through Danny’s filter. It’s not a pretty one. I found his character compelling but not likable, though readers will differ in how they respond. I wouldn’t want to be on his staff, or his friend, but his viewpoint is undeniably a window into a life I’ll never have. Perhaps Daley’s journalistic experience produced a more honest picture than any memoir of an actual member of parliament, because there is no real Danny Slattery to worry about what we’ll think of him. We get Danny, warts and every other bump, bruise, ulcer, and all.

A couple of things to note about style. If bad language bothers you, skip this book. Daley was obviously going for gritty realism, including the internal dialogue. The other thing is my personal taste. There’s a trend in a lot of writing to omit quotation marks for speech, and this novel follows that trend. I find it distracting, because I often find myself having to re-read lines as I’ve assumed they either were or weren’t direct speech, and the following lines then don’t make sense. I know some authors like it, but I find it reduces clarity, and can’t see it adds anything to the writing.

A good find, once again from a writers festival.

Links:
Steve Lewis and Chris Uhlmann The Marmalade Files
Paul Daley Challenge
Newcastle Writers Festival

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Only Paul Daley’s Challenge counts in my Aussie Author Challenge, as I read The Marmalade Files ages ago.

Going ‘Past the Shallows’, Favel Parrett

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I pushed the door open a crack and peeked in. The room was full, only scattered seats around the room, and I didn’t want to make a disturbance.

21458054I pushed a bit harder and the usher on the end of a row jumped up and opened the door for me, pointing to a lone empty seat a couple of rows ahead of her. I ducked down, trying not to attract any attention or distract the three young women on the podium.

I needn’t have worried. The audience was captivated by the considered, melodious voices of Favel Parrett and Brooke Davis discussing writing ‘Through the Eyes of a Child’ – creating a child protagonist in an adult novel – with Courtney Collins. In the Sunday morning session at Newcastle Writers Festival there was an atmosphere of calm, of depth, and of respect for all three women. Each had an air of being acquainted with the grim side of life without succumbing to cynicism, and a maturity I’d expect from women many years older.

I read Favel Parrett’s Past the Shallows before the books by Collins or Davis for aesthetic reasons unconnected to literary quality. Its format was smaller, the type large and easy on eyes that were overtired at the time, and I loved the feel of the book. The edition I have (pictured) has that lovely matt velvet finish that publishers are using to lure in those of us who are swayed by tactile as well as visual qualities. Heaven help my credit card bill if they find a way to add aromas like ‘salt-beach’ or ‘fresh-baked bread’ to the normal new-book smell.

Having begun Past the Shallows,  I didn’t take long to finish it. Even considering my compulsive concurrent reading, I couldn’t leave the fate of its two young protagonists hanging in the air.

The novel is about two young brothers, Miles and Harry, who live in a small community on Tasmania’s coast with their abusive, often drunk father. Scraping a living collecting abalone, often in illegal waters, their father makes the young teenage Miles work on his boat, while Harry escapes only because of intractable sea-sickness. The only relative they truly like and trust, their older brother, Joe, is about to leave for fairer climes in a boat he’s built himself. Harry’s wide-eyed innocence and fear, along with Miles’ protective instincts towards his little brother and attempts at placating his father, create a tension that sweeps the novel forward.

A vague mystery surrounds their mother’s death in a car accident a few years earlier and their father’s animosity towards Harry. An aunt takes only a distant interest. A loved grandfather has died, leaving them stranded. What will they do without Joe around? Who can they run to, once he’s gone?

The prose of this novel is deceptively simple, written alternately from Harry’s and Miles’ point of view. Perhaps in this case Castiglione‘s definition of sprezzatura is apt:

… to practice … so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.

The writing does indeed appear effortless, but I’m sure it was anything but a long, emotionally exhausting process. But as we follow Harry through the bush to make friends with a secluded neighbour’s dog, or Miles as he climbs shivering aboard his father’s boat in the pre-dawn hours, we never doubt the authenticity of their voices. We see through their eyes, fear as they fear, and wonder along with them how they can best survive their father’s whims and tempers.

This novel has stayed with me. I think it will stay with me for a long time. Favel Parrett’s second book, When The Night Comes, has just been announced in the long list of the Miles Franklin Award. Having read Past the Shallows, I don’t doubt it’s deserved. I’ll read her second one, eventually. When this one stops haunting me.

Links: Favel Parrett’s website

I’ll be reviewing Lost and Found by Brooke Davis and The Burial by Courtney Collins in coming weeks.

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