The Booktopia Book Guru asks

Michael Robotham

author of The Wrekage, The Suspect, Lost and many more

Ten Terrifying Questions

———————-

1. To begin with why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?

I was born in the town of Casino in the Northern Rivers of NSW, the son of country school teacher whose peripatetic existence took me all round the state. My primary school years were spent in Gundagai, where the dog sits on the tuckerbox, and I’m still remembered as the little boy who played with matches and almost burned down the town. The first house the blaze threatened belonged to the boss of the town’s volunteer fire brigade. By then I had crawled under our house among the redback spiders, determined never to emerge.

2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?

When I was seven I wanted to be a prison warder because I heard on the radio they were striking for a pay rise to $50 a week. I only earned 20 cents a week. I could do the maths.

When I was twelve I wanted to play cricket for Australia. At eighteen I wanted to be a writer, but had nothing worth writing. I became a journalist to gather material. At thirty I was working on Fleet Street and my dreams of writing novels had been pushed aside by the sheer excitement of seeing history being made – the Berlin Wall tumbling and the Soviet Union crumbling.

3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you do not have now?

At eighteen I believed I was bulletproof and blessed with enormous talent just waiting to be discovered or nurtured. Now I realise that what little talent I have has been uncovered only hard work and perseverance.

Special Price $8.95

4. What were three works of art – book or painting or piece of music, etc – you can now say, had a great effect on you and influenced your own development as a writer?

Paintings and music have never managed to move me as much as a great novel can, so I’m going to choose three books: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald; and A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.

5. Considering the innumerable artistic avenues open to you, why did you choose to write a novel?

What makes you think I had a choice?

(BBGuru: I refer you to Rodney Hall’s answer to this question – here)

6. Please tell us about your latest novel…

THE WRECKAGE. It’s a little different from my previous novels. Painted on a bigger canvas, it is an international conspiracy thriller set in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis and the War in Iraq. It introduces a new character, LUCA TERRACINI – a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist who is living outside the wire in Baghdad. Luca is investigating a series of bank robberies that have netted tens of millions of dollars.

Meanwhile in London, former detective, Vincent Ruiz, rescues a girl from a violent argument with her boyfriend. He tries to help her but wakes next morning to discover that he’s been robbed. It was all an elaborate scam. Setting out to find the girl, Ruiz discovers her boyfriend’s tortured body and realizes that powerful men are looking for the same couple. What did they steal that was so important?

THE WRECKAGE is about the money, politics and power. Who has it, who wants it and who’s ultimately going to pay… Order your copy The Wreckage here.

7. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?

I want them to remember the characters and to imagine them as real people whose lives have carried on even though I, as the author, have chosen to end the story at a random point. Just as Graham Greene said:

‘A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.’

8. Whom do you most admire in the realm of writing and why?

There are too many people to name here – but I will mention two particular crime writers who I think have broken the barriers of the genre: James Lee Burke and Peter Temple.

Forget the labels or the debate about literary fiction and genre fiction. There are just great writers and great books.

9. Many artists set themselves very ambitious goals. What are yours?

My goal is never to write the same book twice and to retire one book shy of overstaying my welcome.

10. What advice do you give aspiring writers?

Write, write and when you’re sick of writing, write some more. It’s the only way to get better.

Michael, thank you for playing.

Filed under: Australian Author, Author Interview, Crime/Thriller, Fiction, Writing Style, Writing tips Tagged: | Lost, Michael Robotham, Ten Terrifying Questions, The Suspect, The Wrekage