This Mortal Boy

"Yes. I want to say a little bit about Fiona Kidman first though, because she’s a remarkable woman. This book is her debut crime novel – she’s 79 – and it won the big Ockham New Zealand Book Award, the New Zealand Booklovers Award, the New Zealand Heritage Book and the Ngaio Marsh Award for the best crime novel. Kidman is not a newcomer to fiction, though. She caused a scandal in the fifties and sixties, because she wrote novels where women had agency and women enjoyed sex, which was heretical at the time. She’s a very smart woman, and I’m privileged to have spent some time with her when I was in New Zealand recently, because I met her at the Ngaios. It’s an amazing novel, this. It’s compelling. It’s a novelization of a real event: the second last hanging in New Zealand. It’s a case that Fiona remains convinced was a miscarriage of justice, and that gives her an opportunity to debate the validity of the death penalty. What’s the point of the death penalty? It’s one of these perennial discussions: whether or not we should restore the death penalty. This Mortal Boy is the real story of a very ordinary young man, Albert Black, who emigrated from Ireland to New Zealand in the 1950s, and was convicted of murdering another young man in a fight at a milk bar in Auckland, when he was only 20 years old. It’s a book about New Zealand’s reaction to outsiders. But it’s a book that tells that story in very human terms. “At the most, he should have been charged with manslaughter – if anything at all” At the most, he should have been charged with manslaughter – if anything at all. But Kidman argues very clearly, through her storytelling, that the whole thing should have been declared a mistrial, because of the judge’s instructions to the jury. She writes clearly and lyrically about Black’s collision with New Zealand. There’s a very powerful sense of Albert Black’s being an outsider. He’s come from Protestant Belfast, he’s lost, he’s homesick. He falls in with the wrong crowd. The fight itself – where he killed somebody, allegedly – was pretty much a drunken brawl that got out of hand, and started because they were taunting him for his Irish-ness, his outsider-ness. He didn’t really stand up for himself either in the fight or in the court. He was pretty hapless. Kidman nevertheless creates a sympathetic picture, without being sentimental, about this young man who sets off to start his new life, where everything that could go wrong went wrong. And she paints a great picture of the conservative 1950s: the Teddy boys and milk bars, the social repression, and the emotional constipation. At that time in New Zealand, there was a real fear of juvenile delinquency, that immorality was going to sweep the country into the gutter. Kidman uses this one case to shine a light on that unpleasant era in New Zealand’s history. Modern New Zealand is very much about openness and equality, and trying to make everybody welcome, but it certainly wasn’t like that in the fifties. It’s very moving. Kidman lets the story speak for itself. She doesn’t take an authorial viewpoint telling us what to think. She lays it out very clearly and very coolly for us to make our own judgments. I’m not surprised it’s won so many prizes because it’s really powerfully written, and because of that it’s a powerful advocate for the issue that it’s looking at. For a very long time there was a separation between readers of true crime and readers of crime fiction. But, increasingly, there seems to be a crossover audience. Some fiction writers have taken to this approach of writing about historic cases in a fictional way – sometimes in quite an emotionally heated way. But Fiona Kidman has stuck to the facts as we know them. And what she has filled in is, I think, valid based on the evidence that was available to her. As a result of writing this, she’s made contact with Albert Black’s relatives, who are very, very moved by the fact that even at this remove, somebody cares enough about the fate of Albert to address these issues. So it can be a very powerful tool, but it leaves me a bit queasy sometimes – putting words in the mouths of real people, when we can’t possibly know what actually happened. Sometimes it can, I think, have a very unsettling effect on people who are still around and who were touched by the case, however tangentially. It doesn’t always sit well with me. But I think this particular book does it beautifully. As it should be done. It’s not full of high flown imaginary scenes. There’s nothing in here that wouldn’t have taken place."