Truth

"Yes, he introduced crime fiction to a much broader audience. Truth won the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s highest literary award. That was the first time a so-called ‘crime novel’ had even been shortlisted, I believe, which shocked a lot of people. Many who had previously thought of crime as a lower, pulpy genre read Truth and suddenly went: oh, wow, this is actually literature. It’s not something to be thrown away. It’s something that can actually say a lot about society. It’s not just entertainment—though there’s nothing wrong with entertainment—but something deeper. It was very hard for me to choose between Truth and The Broken Shore , Temple’s previous novel. I love The Broken Shore. It’s a story of a broken man in a broken society in a small town—all things I’m very drawn to. But I chose Truth because it shows a different, urban, grittier side of Australia. It follows a few days in the life of a homicide detective, Stephen Villani; the chaos, the drama, the pathos and the humanity of what the homicide detectives go through. It’s a mirror to what’s going on in society. He’s a man who is completely out of touch with his emotional side, but trying in a very ham-fisted way to understand the mistakes he’s made, and the mistakes his father has made. One of the things that I particularly like about this book is the insight into Villani’s relationship with his brothers and with his father. There’s a through line in the story about how Villani’s father, who was a truck driver, collected the seed pods of trees as he went on long-haul trips. He’d come back and they would raise the seedlings and plant a forest. I’m actually involved in a seedling-growing scheme. Each year we grow hundreds of native trees from seeds and plant them. It’s a regeneration programme for a lot of local wildlife areas here. So this really connected with me on a number of levels. I’ve been thinking about this novel a lot lately because of the recent bushfires in Australia. In Truth , there’s a constant bass note of threat. Villani’s father’s home is threatened by fire, and the story ends with the fire. We wonder, will the people survive? Will the land survive? Having grown up with the threat of bushfire, and having written a book myself featuring bushfire, this was something that really resonated with me. It’s a metaphor, but it’s real life as well. When you can get something that works on a real level, and also as a metaphor, it’s a bit of a sweet spot. Yes, that was my second novel, featuring Caleb Zelic, a profoundly deaf investigator. I think you can safely say that in And Fire Came Down he’s not coping. Everything is falling apart. He’s mentally quite unwell and in some ways self-destructive, so setting it in a small town under the threat of bushfire felt right. My latest, Darkness for Light , is third in the four-part series. By Darkness for Light , Caleb’s been through several wars and quite a few troubles, but he’s trying to get his life back on track. He’s in therapy. He’s reconnecting with the deaf community, which he hasn’t been a part of since he was a teenager. But of course his past won’t leave him alone. His ex-business partner, who has always been bad news for him, comes back into his life. He’s dragged into the murder of a federal policeman and a young girl he knows is kidnapped. Things pretty much go downhill from there. It’s embarrassing to say, but he’s more real to me than most people. The way I write is very immersive. I am in the novel when I’m writing, particularly in the later stages, the last six months or so of writing. I guess you could call it a flow state. It’s actually very similar to my first career as a classical musician: you practise, practise, practise and it’s all about technique. That’s what laying down the story is like for me as well. Then once that’s there, once the notes are there, once the words are there, I very much fall into it. So, Caleb’s in my brain, or I’m in his brain, I’m not quite sure which, but I can access his thoughts. Whereas with real people, I have to guess their thoughts. There’s a little more distance there. But he does drive me up the wall at times. He’s incredibly stubborn. There are pluses and minuses. “Writing is actually very similar to my first career as a classical musician: you practise, practise, practise” I wanted to make it a short series, because Caleb has to change as events change. There are consequences of actions. I couldn’t imagine sustaining that over a very, very long series, so I always knew there was going to be an end to it. Having said that, I can absolutely imagine going away, writing a few more books, and coming back after a jump in time and doing another tight series with him. So I think that’s helping me say, alright, at the end of this, we say goodbye. But maybe I’ll see you again. Yeah, definitely."