Susan Green

Voters saw Dutton as abrasive, harsh, uncaring, unsympathetic, and lacking empathy. And the more they saw of him – literally – during the campaign, the less they liked him.

Although it is not his fault, Dutton’s appearance is confronting. He began wearing glasses in public. That helped soften him a little. But too often his language matched his appearance. His looks might not have mattered so much if his words or his general demeanour had been less threatening. The combination was forbidding.

The Germans have some excellent words that we English speakers don’t, and schadenfreude is one of them. Wiki says it means ‘pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of the troubles, failures, pain, suffering or humiliation of another’. Earthquake was a feast, a banquet, a total monster troughing pig-out of schadenfreude. Basically, almost – but not quite –  too much of a good thing.

Labor’s election victory of May last year was a definitive trashing of the Coalition, and Niki Savva lays it out in delicious, forensic detail. Dutton and the Coalition saw the defeat of the Voice referendum – a blow; that pre-election promise dear to Labor leader Anthony Albanese – as a victory for conservatives and a wholesale rejection of the whole Labor agenda. They expected to win the 2025 election. All they had to do was churn relentless negativity (Dutton’s speciality), add a little Trump-lite and pursue the culture wars so beloved of Sky After Dark and The Australian. How wrong they were. How glad I am that they were. You could even feel sorry for Dutton if you were that kind of person, because he was surrounded by staffers who kept him in the dark about how badly the Liberal party was doing out there in the actual real world. So, interesting times. We shall see if the Liberals can pull themselves back from extinction…

This is the fourth of Niki Savva’s books I’ve read. She seems to have access to all sorts of major and minor players on either side of the fence (how pollies do like to talk about themselves!); she’s able to untangle the strands of ambition, betrayal and revenge in a way that’s part comedy, part tragedy, and wholly fascinating.

I am hopelessly addicted to the Albert Campion novels of Margery Allingham; they’re like literary crack. Actually, how would I know about crack? More like a Belinda Jeffrey’s Oat and Ginger Slice. Amazingly good to eat while reading, by the way.

I’ve just read three novels in quick succession – 1934’s Death of a Ghost, Flowers for the Judge from 1936 and then Traitor’s Purse, published in 1940. The first two are set, respectively, in London, in the art world and in an old-established publishing house; Campion, accompanied by his henchman/servant Magersfontein Lugg, is his usual urbane and clever self. The plots are slippery and satisfying, they’re peopled with hapless innocents, despicable murderers and classic English eccentrics. Justice, of course, is served which is very consoling in these evil times.

I would have been happy with more of the same, but Traitor’s Purse was quite a surprise; it is so very different to the other Campion books I’ve read. More of a thriller than a detective novel, it never lets up on the action.  It’s got a taut and shatteringly believable wartime plot, and shows Campion, for the first time, completely at a loss.

He wakes in a hospital bed. Gradually he realises that he must been involved in a fight, and a blow to the head has left him with amnesia. He overhears a conversation between a nurse and a doctor, and leaps to a horrifying conclusion; he’s killed a policeman. All he knows that there is something terrifyingly important he needs to do. Disabled, vulnerable and scared, he has to feel his way to accomplishing his unknown mission.

And that’s all I can say without giving anything away. There’s pace, there’s menace, there’s remorseless ratcheting-up of suspense. One of the best I’ve read for ages. Un-put-downable!

My library book group had a really interesting conversation about The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood. One member said it was such a disturbing and angry book, she thought it shouldn’t have been published at all. I think she meant it, too. Another said she wasn’t going to waste her valuable time reading something like that. Some people only got 50 or so pages in, and gave up (disturbing, confronting, challenging were some of the words used). A very few of us made it all the way through, and found it a worthwhile winner of the first Stella, disturbing, challenging, confronting and angry though it was.

We talked about what we read for comfort, and I admitted that I turn to a nice, happy murder story to cheer me up. Which got a laugh, as it was meant to, but in fact they knew what I meant. To quote Oscar Wilde, ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.’

Come Away, Death was not quite what I had in mind. I’m coming to realise that Mitchell often played with or completely disregarded the conventions of crime fiction. This one is like a fever dream, with the characters caught up in a pilgrimage from Athens to various sites – Mycenae, Ephesus, Eleusis – nearby. Under the direction of a British archaeologist, Sir Rudri Hopkinson, they are attempting to stir the dead gods to life by recreating the ancient religious rites and rituals.

Two pairs of young lovers, a handsome but cruel photographer, three little boys, a rival archaeologist, a stalwart servant, a Greek guide and Mrs Bradley journey by car, bus, foot and boat in a travelogue of beautiful descriptive writing and much discomfort involving a boxful of adders, a horribly mutilated sacrificial cow, the appearance of the goddess Artemis and a decapitated head.

Mrs Bradley is on the one hand a witchy and uncanny figure, untangling over the web of events like one of the Fates, and on the other a sympathetic friend, skilled psychiatrist and – a lovely, funny surprise –  expert wrangler of small boys.

It might help to know a little more about ancient Greece than I do, but a few trips to see Professor Google soon sorted me out.

She stood before the Stele of Aristion, contemplating, not only the greaved and kilted warrior with his curled locks and long, straight feet, but the imaginary spectacle of Sir Rudri walking with torches in the dusk of the Greek evening, chanting strange hymns and sorrowful litanies to the Eleusinian gods Iacchus and Dionysus, and to the god-king Triptolemus. She could see him, dogged idealist and romancer, proceeding ploddingly the while along the petrol-haunted, dusty Sacred Way which now led, in the age of progress, the world no longer young, from one Greek slum to another.

Well. I feel as if I have just binge-watched every single episode of Love Island while drinking Tia Maria and eating a family-sized pizza, a couple of boxes of Shapes and a value pack of Cadbury Favourites, in my PJ’s, at 3 in the afternoon while the dog licks the plates.

Reading Entitled has left me feeling deliciously soiled and tainted, with my lefty, anti-monarchist heart thoroughly uplifted and my basest voyeuristic impulses almost exhausted with overuse. What a great read!

It (almost) beggars belief. These two are such horrible people, in their different ways.

Andrew comes out of this as spoiled, lazy, boorish, greedy, dishonest, arrogant, extravagant and wasteful; a sexual user and abuser of women and girls and a man who’s prepared to cosy up with men in power – oligarchs, dictators, arms dealers, Arab royalty and the dodgy super-rich (example: Jeffrey Epstein) – because they flatter him and he can make money. He earned his nick-name of ‘Air Miles Andy’ because, in his role as a representative of British business, the public purse shelled out to fly him here, there and everywhere. On official business, of course, which often seemed to involve golf, prostitutes and making deals for his own enrichment. The story of Virginia Giuffre, with his lies and evasions and attempts to evade responsibility, is appalling and tragic.

The man is a criminal, and he’s been shielded from any kind of justice for his financial and sexual abuses by his royal status. Steam is now coming out of my ears, so I will move on to Sarah.

She seems just as greedy, extravagant and wasteful as Andrew, but with loads of energy and ambition and entrepreneurial dash. Needy, gullible, insecure, impulsive, the royal lifestyle did her no favours. Perhaps if she had not married into the royal family, she would have been a half-decent human. Who knows? No matter how much money she had, she overspent and so was always in debt – which made her not at all shy of dodgy business dealings and gifts from rich men (example: as above, Jeffrey Epstein), often in return for access to Andrew. But every time things fell apart (and they did, with monotonous regularity) she picked herself up and re-invented herself. Author, talk-circuit speaker, charity patron and fundraiser, businesswoman, Weight Watchers figurehead…she leveraged her royal status relentlessly, tastelessly and especially in the USA, very successfully.

That’s probably enough about the Yorks. I need to put out the rubbish and take a shower.

The skinned bodies are lining up along the bench as Verla finishes with them, adding one more to the row. Pink, fairly gleaming in the light from the speckled window. Through the window she can see Yolanda coming up from the paddock, a single rabbit dangling from each hand.

Every now and then Verla imagines her old self coming across this scene, across her present self: her bony ribs, her hair matted, her coated teeth. The filthy greasy calico dress, something out of the nineteenth century. The bucket of rabbit heads beside her: staring eyes, stiff ears, the gory ragged hem of their necks. Her easy familiarity with all these things, as if she was born to this handling of little bodies like slippery new babies, flipping and turning the creatures as casually as the folding of pillowslips. The nimble plucking out of heart and liver and guts.

My library book group enjoyed Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend. I wonder what they will make of this? It’s a different kind of all-girl nightmare to Bad Behaviour. I have also been working my way through Virginia Hauseggers’s Unfinished Revolution: The Feminist Fightback. And oh, what’s that in the news?  A possible world war being ignited by a group of  narcissistic madmen? Perhaps it’s no surprise that I am kind of over the patriarchy.

I had actually read The Natural Way of Things before, around the time it won the inaugural Stella prize, so there were no surprises in the plot. A disparate group of women find themselves imprisoned on a remote bush property. They have all been involved in some kind of sexual scandal with members of the military, educational, religious, political, sporting and business establishments. Powerful men. Let’s use the P-word; the patriarchy. It is expedient for the women to disappear. Not only that, but to be taught a lesson. Taught their place.

Wood describes the day-to-day degradation and cruelty of their captivity in gut-wrenching detail. None of the women are immediate rebels; half-starved, disoriented, brutalised, they submit to their creepy captors. Wood excels in slowly building, detail by telling detail, a gut-wrenching picture of the daily degradation and cruelty meted out to them. I found the way the two main protagonists – political staffer Verla and footballer’s girlfriend Yolanda – evolved into rebels was complex, believable and at times startlingly poetic. That was a surprise; the arresting beauty of the writing was something I had forgotten.

She looked back across the plain. She had climbed the hill in the gloom but now the sky was lightening she could see the grass was pinwheeled with small frosted cobwebs: handspans of silver gauze suspended between grass blades. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, all across the paddock below her. She stood as the sky glowed, and more and more cobweb stars became visible. A Milky Way across the flat.

When I finished the book, I was exhausted and had to read a 1930’s crime novel for relief. (And that is another story, My God, there are some weird books in the Golden Age canon!) I’ll get back to Australian feminism when I’ve recovered.

There are no telephones at Silver Creek, or laptops or internet or television, so I’ll have to  write letters to stay in touch with Mum and Dad and my brother Archie. For the next year I’ll be living in a wooden house with  fifteen other girls. The boys live on the other side of the campus. We’ll have regular school each day, just like every other fourteen-year-old, but we’ll spend the rest of our free time outdoors, running and hiking, building huts and cultivating the vineyard, and in the winter we’ll ski and take part in community service.
I learnt all this from the information session last year… It had sounded quaint at the time, like something out of Enid Blyton, but now I’m not so sure.

Young Rebecca was right; Enid Blyton it aint. More like Lord of the Flies. Bad Behaviour is our book of the month for my ‘wine and cheese book group’. Since we are all women, I’m thinking it’s likely we will have our own horrible adolescent experiences. Rebecca Starford was a scholarship girl at an elite private school, and this book is about the year the author spent at the school’s remote bush campus, here called ‘Silver Creek’. It bears more than a passing resemblance to Geelong Grammar’s Timbertop, but what would I know? I went to state schools.

Leaving her home and family, Rebecca lives in the spartan ‘Red House’. She sleeps in a dormitory, sharing common rooms and study areas, and performing rostered daily tasks with the other girls. The emphasis is firmly on physical, mental and emotional challenge; the activities are presumably intended to build strength, capacity, resilience and self-reliance. But the lack of supervision, the failure to provide real support and guidance means that quickly a pecking order evolves. Homesick and lonely, trying hard to fit in, she falls under the spell of powerful ‘top girl’, Portia, and Rebecca, formerly a well-behaved and studious teenager, becomes one of the naughtiest girls in the school. Which sounds Blytonesque, but the bullying meted out to the most vulnerable girls is unremitting and vicious; the power clique is amoral and toxic.

It’s not all hell. There is friendship, and growth. Rebecca finds solace in the natural world. But the Silver Creek year left marks on her future adult self, as she so painfully describes. My heart ached for this good girl irresistably drawn to the dark side. As one of the bullied, and once (to my lasting shame) a bully myself, Starford’s struggles made a difficult, even gruelling read for me. Adolescence is a rotten time, really.

Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung.

Why have I never read this book before? I’m so glad I chose it for my Library book group.
Alice Pung’s memoir managed to place me right next to her, in the middle of her Chinese-Cambodian family. Newly arrived in Australia, settling in Footscray, Alice navigates the disconnect between home and the world outside.  There’s pathos and humour as she documents her journey into Australian life. As well as gaining understanding of her immigrant experience, I could see just how weird we – white Australians, Anglo-Australians, whatever we are – can seem.

Legacy by Christ Hammer

I stayed up until 2.30 am to finish this book. Which doesn’t mean it was a great book (as in well-written, complex, believable, etc) – but it was a great page turner. Hammer knows what he’s doing. The series hero, journalist Martin Scarsden, is on the run. He gets stuck in a small town in the Channel Country of outback Queensland – and of course becomes embroiled in current and historic crimes. Water theft is the big issue in this story. I didn’t know that after a heavy fall of rain, water flows very slowly (it can take three weeks) from over 700km away to form a network of channels in this dry, flat country. Which means cattle graziers can take advantage of the transient greening to re-stock their properties, and communities can be cut off by flooding. There’s a sub-plot featuring a family feud and a missing woman; a tepid romance; the mafia…
Also…what is it with Hammer and his female characters’ names? Mandalay Blonde? And Ekaterina Boland – known as Ecco?

Police at the Funeral by Margery Allingham

I enjoyed this so much – until the very end. It’s classic Allingham, which is complicated, twisty, literate, often very funny, full of superbly eccentric characters. And I love Albert Campion to bits. But at the denouement, I came upon an example of racism that was actually shocking to my modern-day sensibilities. This issue comes up quite often in re-issues of classic crime novels. What, as a publisher, do you do? (Here’s a fascinating discussion about editing Agatha Christie from the Shedunnit podcast). Racial slurs can be excised, and most readers won’t know the difference, but what do you do when racism is the raison d’etre of the crime?

Robert and I go to fetch the prescription, we buy Eccles cakes because my father likes them and because we all deserve a treat. So we surround David, eating Eccles cakes and drinking coffee and speaking quietly: there’s lamplight, music, the scent of sweet spices; the sound of my mother’s knitting needles, of muted idle conversation and sighing dogs, and briefly my foolish mind interprets these signals as evidence of Christmas, and I am content. There’s no world beyond the bungalow door, no life but this life, no hours but these hours. Death and its duties have become largely unremarkable; though now and then we’re pierced by shock and sorrow. Once, my father – watching Robert  moisten his father’s mouth – turns suddenly away and is abruptly choked, and says privately to himself: ‘I can’t believe David is dying. I just can’t believe it.’

David is writer Sarah Perry’s father-in-law. Robert is her husband, his son. After a few weeks of tests and appointments and waiting, David was given a diagnosis of oeosophageal cancer. There was the suggestion, from his medical team, of a stent in his throat so that he could swallow more easily, but in the end David decided he didn’t want to be ‘messed around with’. He would have died in hospital, hooked up to machines and tubes; instead, he got to die, nine days later, at home.

Perry’s account of David’s illness and death, Death of an Ordinary Man, was published a couple of years afterwards. It’s a very moving book – sometimes, almost unbearably so – and beautifully written. I could have chosen other key moments in the text. For instance, her description of the changes in David’s face and body as his body starts to fail are miracles of loving observation. But the process of dying takes in all sorts of ordinary moments, including family eating Eccles cakes and sitting with cups of coffee by the bedside, and that’s part of what I loved about this book.

David was supported and comforted by the love of family, friends and his faith community; most of the carers were sensitive and caring;  but there were some tough situations, too. An insensitive doctor, increasing pain, delays with David’s morphine prescription and supply, the NHS bureaucracy, the anxious waiting for carers and nurses to arrive. Often, Perry just did not know what to do. I could see myself in some of her initial fears, but like her I soon realised that the unfamiliar intimacy of caring for a dying person’s body soon seems quite natural.

The title is, I think, a clever one, because all through we are shown the things that make this one man (and by extension, all of us) a unique and irreplaceable self. Death of an Ordinary Man is a small but powerful book, a reminder that death and dying are part of being alive, of being bound in time, and that accompanying someone you love on that journey is both difficult and a privilege.

I’ve been doing some research into London in the mid-1950’s; this is where my stash of old books, maps, catalogues, guides and magazines comes in handy. The more down-market women’s mags – Woman’s Own, Woman’s Realm, Woman’s Mirror, Woman’s Day and the rest – are probably the most useful in gauging the real lives of real people, but my favourite is English Vogue. If I ever need a quick, emergency cheer-up, they are the very thing.

My heroine, Helen Harris, is an Australian librarian working in London and though I dreamily turn the pages on her behalf, unfortunately she doesn’t have the money to buy anything, since she was probably earning between 8 and 10 pounds a week for full-time work. Take this suit, for instance. It was 11 guineas (the guinea was a unit worth 21 shillings, and used for ‘posh’ or luxury goods, like professional fees, high fashion, antiques and art) and it would be over AU $700 now.

But, she would also have had to buy a corset or girdle and perhaps a long-line brassiere so that the skirt and jacket would fit. There are pages and pages of ads for corsetry in amongst the fashion, and I keep thinking how uncomfortable ordinary life must have been if you had to achieve a teeny-tiny waist on a daily basis. A few years ago, I bought a pair of Spanx – so-called ‘shapewear’ – to wear underneath a tight dress for a special occasion. It was hell, and not worth it.

Just look at the waist on this suit!

I have come to think of the crime novel as the perfect form of the novel: a distillation of decades, of centuries of literary entertainment and enlightenment. That distillation, that dynamism continues naturally and vitally. It’s for you as a crime writer to run with, to make your own. 

Every now and then I decide to get serious about learning to write, and so I buy a book to help me. I’m a sucker for a good detective; my three middle-grade Verity Sparks books featured a young sleuth and a variety of crimes; now I’m attempting a crime novel for adults. Thus, Crafting Crime Fiction by Henry Sutton.

He’s a Professor of Creative Writing and Crime Fiction at the University of East Anglia (UAE apparently pioneered university creative writing degrees in the UK) and has written fifteen novels himself. Which is a good sign, I think.

Sutton divides this guide into structured sections that build a comprehensive picture of the crime novel. Lots of opinions, lots of advice and many examples from current crime luminaries like Lee Child and Val McDiarmid, as well as from past masters such as Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith. Sutton uses a really expansive range of crime authors and sub-genres in this guide, but also includes writers you wouldn’t normally think of, like Eleanor Catton and Martin Amis. And, most helpfully, he uses his own personal experience in writing crime.

Unusually for me, I was underlining like crazy as I read,  and even writing notes in the back few pages…but all that activity stopped at the half-way mark, which is when my brain ran out of juice. But I will return! Crafting Crime Fiction is a seriously useful discussion of the genre, and I am paying real attention to Suttons ‘mantras’, which are pace and purpose and menace and motivation. I’ve written them on index cards; they’re now pinned on the board above my desk.