More thoughts from below the equator – an interview with Dorothy Johnston (part two)

by Bill Kirton

Last time, Dorothy gave us her insights into the labyrinthine nature of suspense/mystery and the cultural/historical influences that bear on writers of the genre in Australia. In this second part, I’m asking her about the specifics of her own writing.

For no obvious reason, after reading The White Tower, I found myself wondering about your attitude to the paranormal. Perhaps it’s the way you linked real and virtual worlds in the book. What are your thoughts about ‘alternative realities’?

In a way this is a prophetic question because the book I’m working on now is about the murder of a Henry Handel Richardson scholar who believed he could make contact with her spirit. One of the suspects is a psychic medium. In my daily life, I have no time for ‘alternative realities’, but when I sit down to write, I find that I enjoy exploring them. 

I was struck by your use of apparently insignificant detail in the narrative. For me, it enhanced the reality of your fiction. I assume that’s a deliberate choice. Am I right?

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘apparently insignificant detail’. Some details are there to mislead, or to make more plausible what turns out to be a false path. There’s a lot of detail devoted to making Canberra a solid, material place, in the tradition of mystery and crime writers for whom their settings are, in themselves, important characters. 

By details, I meant things like when Sandra is staring out of a window at ‘a square of grass’ and you write ‘A magpie hopped across it, dragging a tangled piece of string’. It’s maybe part of making the setting live, like Stendhal with his ‘petits faits vrais’. Anyway, here’s a boring question – ignore it if you like. Sandra Mahoney comes across as a fairly complex character and some of the complexities arise from the fact that, as well as an investigator, she also has a well chronicled home life, especially in sequences when she reflects on nursing her baby. Has she borrowed some of your own experiences in these areas?

Despite appearances and stereotypes, motherhood is not such a bad training for criminal investigation. I gave Sandra, partly as a reaction against the cerebral pull of cyber-detection, a weight of domestic life that, as you suggest, is not without its complications. The fact that I’ve made her a mother whose parental responsibilities aren’t brushed aside, or handed over to a nanny, or simply dropped from the narrative as the plot thickens means, for some critics, that she can’t at the same time be a credible investigator. She is the antithesis of the loner stereotype beloved by the genre.

I once wrote an essay titled ‘Female Sleuths and Family Matters – can genre and literary fiction coalesce?’ in which I attempted to argue the case that one doesn’t need to forego an in-depth exploration of family life in order to write a detective story. At the time I published the essay, I believed the combination was possible; now I’m not so sure. But I don’t regret the experiment because it taught me a lot.

Sandra’s children both are and are not mine.

She’s a great, rounded character. But then, so are the others you introduce in your narrative. You make some of them share impulses and motives and yet they’re all distinct individuals. Have you got a particular approach to creating them?

No particular approach. My children were a ‘given’, whom I then proceeded to take liberties with. Ivan is based on a Polish boyfriend from my early twenties, but I doubt he’d recognize himself in the character. Characters just come to me, much as I expect they do to you.

Yes, it sounds a familiar process. There’s also the fact that much of what we know of them comes as much from the conversations they have as from Sandra’s assessments of them. You seem to like dialogues. When you write them, do you have a specific purpose (i.e. that you want someone to reveal something inadvertently – about themselves or someone else, or supply some other clue or snippet of information necessary to the plot)? Or is it the power of the characters that drives them?

I don’t think I’m very good at dialogue. I re-write it heaps of times. I’m more comfortable with descriptive narrative, and with implication – what remains unsaid. I’m well aware that convincing dialogue is necessary for good mystery novels, so I keep working at it.

Well, take it from me, your hard work gets good results. But, turning to the comfort you feel with your narrative, does it ever take turns which surprise you?

Of course. I don’t write plans, so I don’t have pre-conceived ideas about where a narrative is heading. So I’m not ‘surprised’ in the sense of expectations being overturned. But my characters frequently surprise me.

That’s definitely a feeling we share. Now, I’m hoping your answers will have piqued the curiosity of readers so, if someone unfamiliar with your works decided to try one, which one would you recommend and why?

I’d recommend One for the Master or The House at Number 10 because I think these two novels contain my best writing. Also several short stories: ‘Two Wrecks’, ‘The Boatman of Lake Burley Griffin’ and ‘An Artist’s Story’.

On the subject of what you call your ‘best writing’, it seems that a critic found one of your books ‘too literary’. I find that a truly bizarre comment but would be interested to know your own reaction to it? Did you know what parts of the text made him/her say such a thing? Was your aim to ‘be literary’? Or was he/she expressing the annoying assumption that genre fiction is and/or ought to be qualitatively inferior?

One reviewer of The Trojan Dog wrote that I came to the genre with a pedigree. He meant literary pedigree, and that it did not fit me at all well for my new incarnation. I felt like writing back and saying that he’d made me feel like a poodle being told it couldn’t join the mongrels’ club. And that I’d always thought of myself as a mongrel. Genre classifications – and ‘literary’ is now considered to be one of these, though it is a qualitative assessment, not a genre – might be useful to marketing people and I accept that they can be useful to readers too. In my view, though, they are highly problematic.

… and that was where we stopped. I must confess, though, that I found Dorothy’s answers so thought-provoking that I’d liked to have asked her even more. So far, I’ve only read one of her Sandra Mahoney quartet but I’ll be reading the rest.

Thoughts from below the equator – an interview with Dorothy Johnston (part one)

by Bill Kirton

Dorothy Johnston is an award-winning Australian author. She’s written novels, short stories and a quartet of mysteries featuring Sandra Mahoney. It’s through these mysteries that I came to know her. They’re set in Canberra and, as well as being beautifully written examples of the genre, convey the subtle differences between life in the northern and southern hemispheres.  The questions she asked when she interviewed me  were so perceptive that I wanted to turn the tables and try to get some of her own inside story. Her replies were so rich and interesting that I didn’t want to lose anything of what she said so I’m posting them in two parts. Here’s part one.

From the point of view of a traditional fan of crimes/mysteries, it seems that the whole area of computer crime, identity theft, alibi establishing, the location of suspects/victims at specific times (through mobile phones or computer log-ins) has added a new dimension to the genre. Is that the way you see it? Does your own expertise in the field open up possibilities different from the conventional ones?

I’m no technical expert, but neither is my protagonist, Sandra Mahoney. Her partner, Ivan, knows a lot more about the IT world than she does, at least at the beginning. In the first book in my quartet, The Trojan Dog, Sandra falls into investigating an electronic crime, much as I fell into writing about them. She’s an everywoman, learning as she goes.

The mystery quartet – after The Trojan Dog comes The White Tower, then Eden, then The Fourth Season – is my way of writing about Canberra, where I lived for thirty years before moving back to Victoria, close to where I was born. Canberra, the most stratified and Gothic of Australian cities, had ambitions to become the IT capital of the country, an ambition which seems quaint now; but in the early 1990s, when I began my quartet, a lot of people were taking it seriously. The slipperiness, often the invisibility, of electronic crime still seems to fit well with the national capital – the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing – or pretending not to know – the government as the country's biggest spender, and therefore a most attractive target for thieves.

On another level, writing about electronic crime appealed to me imaginatively. Some years ago, I discovered a description by Umberto Eco of three types of labyrinth, and this description has stayed with me.

First, Eco says, there is the classic labyrinth of Theseus. Theseus enters the labyrinth, arrives at its centre thanks to Ariadne's thread, slays the minotaur, then leaves. He does not get lost. Terror is born of the fact that you know there is a minotaur, but you do not know what the minotaur will do. Then there is the mannerist maze. As Ariadne's thread is unravelled and followed, the Theseus figure discovers, not a centre, but a kind of tree with many dead ends, many branches leading nowhere. There is an exit, but finding it is a complicated task. Finally there is the net, which is so constructed that every path can be connected to every other one. This labyrinth has no centre and no one entry or exit.

Cyberspace, where crimes using computers are committed, is clearly this third kind of labyrinth. The computer criminal, hacker, virus king etc can be tracked, but the mode of tracking, of following the thread, soon corresponds to becoming lost in the maze, which indeed itself can become the minotaur.

I find this space enormously appealing. Yet what also appeals to me is the traditional structure of a crime investigation, a fictional one, that is, the progression from a beginning to an end where the criminal is identified and caught. I like the tension that's created by putting one inside the other.

That’s a terrific analysis of how the genre works. I’ll no doubt be stealing it in the future. Let’s be more basic now, though. I knew, of course, that the seasons in the southern and northern hemispheres are reversed but I was somehow more aware of it when I read The White Tower. Is that the sort of experience you have when reading books written by ‘northern’ authors?

The quartet was always going to be ‘four seasons’ – one novel for each. The seasons are distinct in Canberra, for someone who was born and grew up on the coast. (The White Tower is Spring.) I like turning things upside down for northern hemisphere readers. In the same way, I like looking at snowbound French villages on television when the temperature outside my window is forty degrees.

You’ll find images of Aberdeen in January have a similar effect, only without the prettiness. Does the genre differ in Australia from crimes or mysteries written here up north? If so, can you tell me a bit about the nature of those differences?

I thought you might ask about this, and I really don’t have an answer. It’s a truism to say that Australia was a convict settlement, that Europeans’ sense of themselves in this country began with ritualised crime and punishment, compared with, for example, religious conviction in North America. It’s a truism that, in my view, has far-reaching consequences, but I don’t have the space to go into them here. Bill – you said you could write an essay in answer to each of my questions, and you’ve presented me with the same dilemma! Briefly, there’s a strong – and brutal – line of inheritance from convict days, and at the same time contemporary fiction that goes in multiple directions – from cosy to hard-boiled and everything in between. One general comment made by critics from time to time is that we favour private operators rather than police procedurals. Interestingly enough, one of my favourite writers, Barry Maitland, who writes police procedurals, has chosen to set his series in London rather than anywhere in Australia.

…and that’s the point at which we’ll pause to reflect on some stimulating thoughts about both the mystery genre and the cultural influences that I, for one, had never really considered. The fact that we share a language tends to lead us to suppose that the sharing extends to values. It probably does, but the historical element Dorothy introduces adds a fascinating new dimension.