The Lost Man

"This is Jane Harper’s best book. I think most people who’ve read her work agree The Lost Man is her best book. It’s standalone, so not part of the Aaron Falk series with The Dry and Force of Nature. Jane Harper has made ‘Outback noir’ really popular in the last few years; I mean, she started it. This book is about three brothers who grew up in the outback, a very remote part of Queensland. They are cattle farmers who own this huge piece of land. One of the brothers is found dead by a landmark called ‘the stockman’s grave’—it’s a gravestone out in the middle of nowhere, and his car is parked a long way away, so he must have had to crawl or walk for a long time to find this grave. No one knows who the stockman was, or how long it’s been there. So the mystery is: Was it suicide, or was he murdered and someone left his body out there? The main character, one of the brothers, sets out to unpack what happened in his brother’s life over the previous months. In doing so, he uncovers all these family secrets. The great thing about this book is the setting, it’s so atmospheric. You can really feel the blazing, scorching heat of the Queensland sun. It all feels very dry and dusty. And, again, this is a book where the ending really took me by surprise. It’s perfect! So cleverly done, so well thought through. It’s the kind of book where you think she must have started out knowing the ending, then worked it all out. Not like she stumbled her way there, like a lot of us do. It’s a very, very clever twist. It’s a really beautifully written, clever crime novel. I write in a very inefficient way. I tend to know the set-up—the opening, the inciting incidents, I know what the main mystery is going to be. I’ll think about who the main characters are, and I’ll always have a few key scenes in my head, which I know are going to happen at some point. But otherwise, I just write and discover it as I go along. This tends to mean I have to do a lot of drafts. For example: I just finished writing a book that I had to write almost from scratch the second time I wrote it because, apart from maybe the first 10,000 words, I threw away the whole rest of the book. I had to write those 80- or 90,000 words again. So, basically, I wrote two books. If I could get it right first time, I could write twice as many books, or have twice as much time off. But I get there. It’s a tried and tested process. I write quickly, I don’t allow myself to sit and get stuck, I just plough on, even knowing that I might have to delete it. So, yes, I never know how it’s going to end, and I often rewrite the ending several times, even when I think I’ve finished. Or I’ll think of a much better twist, which will involve going back and rewriting a whole thread that runs through the book. I have tried plotting it out, and I just can’t do it. The words have to be in the character’s heads for me to be able to figure out the story and the scenes. My main character, Aidan, is British but lives in Seattle. His younger sister came to stay with him, and a few days into the trip she disappeared. Now, two months have passed, and he gets a call from a woman who was on the Coast Starlight , a real train that runs from Seattle to L.A. and back—which I went on, to research this book, which was fantastic—and looking out the window at the break of dawn, when everyone else was asleep, she saw a young woman being chased across a forest clearing by a man. The disappearance of Aidan’s sister, Scarlett, has been a massive news story, and this woman is certain that she recognised her. So he travels down to northern California, where this sighting was made, but without much hope, and very sceptical about whether this woman really did see his sister. He goes to a small town near to where she was sighted, and starts asking questions. It’s a fish out of water story—he’s British, he’s never used a gun, he’s a mild-mannered software engineer, but he finds himself in a Lee Child novel, basically, with all these bad guys after him and scary goings-on in the forests of California. There are crazy, extremist eco-warriors who may or may not have something to do with what happened to Scarlett. You’ve got corrupt cannabis farmers, weird things going on in the Mojave Desert. Basically, there are all these action elements, which is not typical of my books—it’s less of a psychological thriller, and more of an action thriller. I wanted to write something a bit different this time. It’s more like Lee Child meets Harlan Coben , but with an everyday British character at its centre. It’s a very fast-paced book with a cast of thousands, with lots going on on every page. It was hard to write, in as much as I kept having to rewrite it. I got a third of the way in, where there’s a big confrontation between the good guys and the bad guys, which changes everything. I couldn’t work out exactly what should happen after that, the end of Act One. I kept writing and re-writing it, changing my mind. But it was particularly good fun to research; I went out to north California, took the train to Seattle, drove around and took a lot of photos. These are the places where the book takes place. That was just before the pandemic—I got there just in time before everything started shutting down. So yes, it was a lot of fun to research."

"Absolutely. It’s interesting: Harper moved to Australia from the UK, and has clearly brought that dispassionate outsider’s eye to the country, and to the landscape, that you can’t always achieve when a place has always been part of your life. Some people write very well about places they’ve lived all their lives, and open the door for us. Other people come to a place and see it afresh and give us a very different view of it. Jane Harper seems to have managed to inhabit both of these things. There’s a real sense of being on the inside with her books. From my recent trip to the Antipodes, I know that in Australia they think she’s terrific. In fact, they’re just calling her an Australian writer now. They’ve completely left out the fact that she’s from the UK. What she’s really very good at is capturing the atmosphere of landscape and climate, and the pressures that puts on the people who live there. I think The Lost Man is her best yet. It’s not just a great crime novel, I think it’s a great novel . She writes really movingly and really interestingly about the inimical landscape of Queensland. You know, I often say about Australia that it’s not designed for human beings. It’s a tough country to live in, because of the climate and because of the extremes – as you’ve probably seen recently with the terrible bushfires raging in New South Wales. At the beginning of this book, a man is being roasted to death under the sun. You’re gripped from the start by this opening, and you have to read on, you have to understand. You have to read on because you need to know who he is, why he’s there, why this is happening to him. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . If you’ve never been to Australia, you might not know that when we talk about a farm in Australia, we’re not talking about a farm like those in the Yorkshire Dales that covers maybe a few square miles. A farm in Australia is just massive, sometimes thousands of square kilometres. You do your patrolling of your land not on foot but in utility vehicles. Some farmers do their farming by helicopter. The scale is really hard to get your head around. But Jane Harper manages to give us a sense of what that’s like, and what the implications are if you are out in that landscape without the stuff you need: without fuel, without wood, without water. It’s a wonderful evocation of landscape, and also of the way that lives are shaped and distorted by the exigencies of that landscape As usual with Jane Harper, she’s very good at drawing people’s past into their present. There is a whole complex of historical events underpinning this story. It’s about the darkest of family histories. It’s a gripping read. She writes really well. She writes dialogue particularly well. You have the sense when you’re reading her dialogue that this is the way people speak to each other: it’s not overworked, it’s not affected. It has all those shorthand ways we use in speaking to each other, and I think there’s a real sense here of a writer who is growing with every book. I think it’s an addition rather than a corrective! What often happens is one novel will break out – with the Scandi noir it was Stieg Larsson that really exploded – and then every publisher has to have a Scandi noir! With Antipodean noir, if you like, Jane Harper’s had such a huge success that people are starting to realise that crime writing in Australia is really good. Actually, what you usually find is that there, behind the big breakthrough, are a couple of figures in the dim landscape. In Scandi noir, you had Sjöwall and Wahlöö , and Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow , which sent a trickle of awareness into the marketplace. Readers thought, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, I quite like that.’ And in the wake of that you get the big blockbuster. In Australia you had the remarkable, the wonderful Peter Temple , whose novels lit up the 1990s and the early 2000s – the Jack Irish novels and his other award-winning novels. He was an astonishing writer, but he never broke out into wider bestseller-dom, although he won the Gold Dagger for The Broken Shore . That made some of us aware that there was good crime fiction coming out of Australia . Temple was really a class act, and opened the door for a big blockbuster like Jane Harper’s to come powering through. And the great thing about that is then publishers and readers start to become curious about what else is going on in this particular corner of the world. It’s exciting for me as a reader, I think it’s brilliant."