Malla Nunn - interview

Book: Let the Dead Lie
Publisher: Macmillan Australia
Price: $32.99 (paperback)

The train pulls into the busy station in Sydney’s CBD. A young mother of two battles the crush of the peak hour crowds to spend her day in an office with out of work actors selling wine over the phone. It is certainly not the stuff dreams are made of but she needs a job while she is putting the finishing touches on her manuscript. She doesn’t know yet but that manuscript which has been four years in the making will soon be an award winning novel. She has faith. She is a believer. She is Australian crime writer Malla Nunn.

Nunn is a storyteller. Long before she started writing novels she was telling stories through film. Her three short films have won numerous awards and shown at international festivals from Zanzibar to New York City but crime fiction is where the buck stops for her now. “What I love about the novel is that I don’t need anyone else to make it happen,” she says. “The film script is just the beginning of the process but with a novel I get control, I get to work on it full time and at the end of it I have this product, I have my story right there. For me right now at this point in my life writing novels is definitely it.”

When Nunn was a little girl she loved The Famous Five. She, like her favourite character George, wanted to don galoshes and have adventures in a beautiful grey and rainy England a far away and magical place for a young girl living in Swaziland. Through Enid Blyton’s words Nunn was able to travel there and she wants her readers to feel that same magic when they crack the spine on one of her novels – to feel transported to another time and place. “When I am writing a crime novel I don’t want to know exactly where I am going, that is part of the joy of writing it and you are able to take the reader with you,” she says. “I used to think I had to know everything before I started. Stephen King said that a story is like a dinosaur and your job as a writer is to find the bones of the story which are all just waiting there for you to discover which I totally agree with.”

In the early 1970s, Nunn’s parents fled apartheid South Africa and came to Australia. Through her novels she wanted to explore the racial segregation laws that forced her parents out of Africa but thought in order to do this the writing would have to be wordy and political. “I was burdening myself with this idea that it had to be a stunning work of genius,” she says in an accent rich with the cultures that have moulded her. “The kind of book I love to read is engaging and fast paced and the history is woven in there in a way.” When the initial image for A Beautiful Place to Die came to her she knew it was a crime book, a genre she loves. Understanding she could achieve what she wanted to through the crime genre freed her up from the suffocating thought that every sentence had to be desperately deep.

Let the Dead Lie is Nunn’s second novel and the second book in the Detective Emmanuel Cooper series. The detective we meet is very different from A Beautiful Place to Die. Forced to resign from his position of Detective Sergeant and re-classified as ‘mixed race’ he winds up powerless and alone in the tough coastal city of Durban in South Africa. Patrolling the ship yards one night, Cooper stumbles upon the body of a young white boy and the detective in him will not walk away. When two more bodies are discovered at his boarding house he unwittingly becomes the prime suspect in a triple murder case. Nunn is currently working on the third book in the series.

Detective Cooper is an ex-soldier whose identity mirrors that of Nunn’s ancestors many of whom were soldiers. “I had to scale back the war stuff because some of the soldiers I have met that fought in the war were not well and Emmanuel needed to be an effective guy, “ she says. But Cooper is a believer, a trait she worries makes him incredibly naive, a trait he gets from her. “I have that belief that despite everything there is a path that will take you where you need to go,” she says.

Nunn confesses that she doesn’t do ‘hardcore’ research for her novels preferring instead to get the lay of the land from her 83 year old father who is ‘sharp as a tack’ and who lived in Durban as a young man. She also has connections with an ex-policeman in South Africa who sends her information and photos from the actual 1950s police files. “I am not writing a police procedure manual. I am there to tell the story and the facts should serve the story but they shouldn’t burden the story in any way,” she says. Nunn is pleased with the fact that she chose to set her stories in a time before DNA testing and the CSI obsessed time we now live in. “I am very lucky that I am writing in the 50’s so I can gloss over some things,” she laughs.

With a Davitt Award and an Edgar Award nomination under her belt it is interesting to hear that Nunn battles with the fear that she is a terrible writer. “That fear is ever-present,” she says. “The fear that the magic will leave you that you won’t be able to communicate, that you won’t be able to put it down anymore. But the fear changes into something else. When I am arguing with the writing and hating it I feel absolutely engaged in a way that I don’t feel engaged in any other work.”

But this woman, who loves mangoes and loathes rudeness, admits a certain amount of narcissism must be present to believe that a story should be told or must be told. “My job is to write the story that I have and it is definitely an organic process,” she says. “I know I will find my way eventually and tell the story because that is the most important job.”