Craig every second Tuesday.

Kia ora and gidday everyone.

Along with the usual daily life of school runs and exercise etc, today I've had quite a crime fiction-related day, even though I haven't actually read any! (I read most days, but not all). Well, yet. I might squeeze in a few chapters before bed tonight of my current read - WHILE JUSTICE SLEEPS by Stacey Abrams, a new legal thriller from a political dynamo whose grassroots efforts in Georgia changed the landscape in the recent US election. 

Today I've been working on some author features for magazines in various countries, based on interviews with a range of crime writers from modern legends like Laura Lippman to fresh voices like Ajay Chowdhury (THE WAITER, out this month in the UK) and Richard Osman. Plus setting up some further interviews for future pieces on crime stars established and brand new. 

I also took part, remotely, in a Facebook-centred author 'Booklove Tuesday' event with Australian crime writers B. Michael Radburn and SJ Brown, organised by crime writer and Terror Australis Festival founder LJM Owen. And when I went onto Twitter later, my notifications included someone sharing this photo, of my feature article on 'forest author' Will Dean and his new standalone THE LAST THING TO BURN, published in the new (Summer) issue of Mystery Scene magazine in the United States. 

Summer 2021 issue of Mystery Scene and my feature on Will Dean

All of that has got me (in among some deadline-tension) feeling very grateful. When I take a moment to sit back and reflect, I am incredibly fortunate to get to regularly talk with storytellers and write about crime and thriller fiction for a whole host of cool publications. It's a blessing. I love having conversations with a range of creative people who create something from nothing, who entertain us, and who help this genre we all love continue to flourish and grow; it's inspiring as well as interesting. 

So today I thought I'd share an exclusive feature for you all, a magazine-style piece on one of the Kiwi crime writers whose books played a part in me becoming an accidental critic back in 2008 (see part of that story in my first Murder is Everywhere post from 6 March). Given all the fab experiences in crime writing I've had since randomly picking up two books from the recently returned shelves in Papatoetoe Library a few days before starting a new job, all I can say is kia ora rawa atu (thanks heaps). 

How lucky am I? Chairing the Antipodean Noir panel at Harrogate in 2019, with outstanding authors Vanda Symon, Jane Harper, Christian White, and Stella Duffy

Symon says

Hailing from one of the southernmost cities in the world, Dr Vanda Symon is a mystery writer whose journey to global readership has been full of twists

By Craig Sisterson

By any measure, Vanda Symon had earned the celebratory cupcakes and glass of prosecco at her first-ever London book launch in early March last year. For one thing, few if any mystery writers will ever have travelled further to attend their own book event. Symon lives in Dunedin, a student city about the size of Athens, Georgia that is perched on the coast near the bottom of the South Island of New Zealand, more than 12,500 miles by air from London. (Few major settlements in the world are closer to Antarctica.) Symon is a true southerner, in a global sense.

It wasn’t just the air travel. After arriving in London following the equivalent of five New York to Los Angeles flights back to back, Symon had then joined several British and European mystery writers who shared the same publisher on a weeklong whistle-stop tour of bookshops and libraries across England, Scotland, and Wales. Another 850 miles on trains and buses.

Looking back now, the whole experience seems even more surreal, says Symon. She’d flown to London in late February 2020, passing through temperature scans in Singapore as officials were getting worried about the troubling spread of a dangerous virus. Within weeks of her return home to Dunedin, many places globally had gone into lockdowns or quarantines of varying degrees.

Steph Broadribb and Vanda Symon celebrating at their London book launch, March 2020

But that night in London, as Symon sipped from her glass of bubbly and looked around at several dozen British booklovers gathered at Waterstone’s Victoria, a few minutes’ walk from Buckingham Palace, she had no idea that her launch party for CONTAINMENT, her third novel starring headstrong young detective Sam Shephard, would be one of the last such gatherings in the UK for many, many months. The night was a “Fearless Female Protagonists” trifecta, with stablemates Simone Buchholz (#1 bestselling German crime writer, MEXICO STREET) and Steph Broadribb (DEEP DIRTY TRUTH) also helping celebrate the start of International Women’s Month.

And as Symon signed copies of her mystery novels, took the congratulations of a Booker Prize shortlistee, and smiled as the Toffee Pops biscuits she’d brought all the way from New Zealand were devoured, she knew her journey to this evening had been a lot longer than 13,000 miles.

“It was ridiculously exciting to have a book launch in London, and I also really enjoyed having it as a shared book launch,” says Symon, as she reflects on the event from Dunedin many months later. “To feel that my books were having a second life was fantastic. To feel I was there to meet readers and people who followed my books. It was such a thrill to have cupcakes with my book covers on them and I would have to confess to eating a ridiculous amount of them.”

The ‘second life’ Symon mentions refers to the other way in which her journey was long.

After taking time away to complete a PhD, Vanda Symon is finding new readers internationally with her CWA Dagger-shortlisted Sam Shephard mysteries

For while CONTAINMENT, the book whose cover was displayed on dozens of iced cupcakes last year in London, and BOUND, Symon’s fourth Detective Sam Shephard tale (released in the UK in March and in United States this coming Fall), are brand-new murder mysteries for most British and American booklovers, Symon actually wrote both more than a decade ago. They haven’t been lying in a draw all that time. Both were snapped up and released years ago by a ‘Big 5 publisher’ and became bestsellers in Symon’s home country as well as shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Awards in 2010 and 2012. But the idiosyncrasies of international publishing led to Symon’s mysteries – like much Australian and New Zealand crime writing of the time – not being distributed internationally.

So how did Symon end up at that London book launch last March?

Like a mystery novel, life can be full of twists. Several years ago, Symon had five acclaimed books under her belt (four starring young cop Sam Shephard, and a standalone thriller, THE FACELESS, about people living on the margins of New Zealand’s biggest city, Auckland), published in Australasia and some in Germany. While she still had plenty of “Sam stories to tell”, fate intervened, and her writing swerved from fiction to academia for a few years.

“The PhD came about because I did a University of Otago summer school paper in forensic biology as research for my novel writing,” she says. “I loved the course so much I decided to do more study, but I wanted to do something relevant to what I loved.”

Vanda Symon combined her science background and mystery writing for her PhD

A pharmacist by trade, Symon combined her interest in science with her passion for mystery writing. Her doctoral thesis was “The Communication of Science Through Crime Fiction” and involved research into the use of science and scientific methods in the mysteries of Golden Age Queen of Crime Ngaio Marsh, as well as contemporary mystery writers and keen readers.

“I surveyed readers of crime fiction to see if, amongst other things, they believed the science they encountered in crime fiction, and if they cared if it was accurate or not,” says Dr Symon. “I also surveyed crime writers to assess their approach to science.”

Symon’s research confirmed that readers care a lot about accuracy, with many saying that if they found a scientific error it broke their trust in the author across all elements: “plot, character, everything”. Most mystery writers took care to ensure any science they included was accurate, feeling both an ethical obligation and a desire to avoid being challenged by readers!

Not the only lessons for Symon from her studies: she says she also discovered that writing a thesis is dreadful for a novelist!

“In academic writing you have to give away the point in the first sentence, then provide the evidence to justify it,” she explains. “For a writer who normally doesn’t reveal everything until the end, that was really hard. I even asked my supervisors whether I could please write a thesis with a great surprise for them at the end – I told them they’d love reading it. Alas, they said no.”

After completing her PhD, Symon looked forward to returning to her old pal Sam Shephard – especially as the series had been picked up for northern hemisphere publication while she was studying. It was an interesting process, Symon says, of revisiting her debut Overkill almost fifteen years after she first started writing it. When I mention to Symon that I can still recall the gut-punch opening to her series, more than a decade after I first read it, she laughs, before saying, “You know, I wrote that first chapter, and I still cry at the end every time I read it.”

Vanda Symon onstage at Newcastle Noir in 2019, with Nathan Blackwell, Rachel Amphlett, Helen Fitzgerald and Craig Sisterson.

That story begins in a small farming town in New Zealand, where a nondescript man comes to a young mother’s door with a terrible ultimatum. After its release in the UK, OVERKILL was shortlisted for the 2019 CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger. The book’s genesis many years ago, says Symon, was “the result of several paths colliding and making one hell of a noise”. While she’d wanted to be a writer since childhood, she’d pursued her interest in sciences through college then into working in community and hospice pharmacy. “I was mentally shattered at the end of my working day, so wasn’t capable of writing. But when I had children and was at home with them I finally had the time and headspace. I should perhaps qualify that the time was snatches of 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there if I was lucky, and the headspace was tired, happy, grumpy, determined, and off in a day dream half the time, ie all over the place!”

That gut-punch opening came from Symon’s own addled emotions.

“OVERKILL’s prologue was born out of the mind of a young Mom who was sleep deprived to the point of being paranoid and vaguely hallucinating, up in the middle of the night feeding a baby, and imagining all of the worst things that could happen to her and her child.”

While the prologue was bruising, it is headstrong country cop Sam Shephard who really makes OVERKILL such a knockout mystery debut, and the ongoing series so engaging to a growing readership around the globe. “It is Symon’s copper Sam, self-deprecating and very human, who represents the writer's real achievement,” said The Guardian newspaper in London.

With the fourth and final novel of her original Sam Shephard quartet, BOUND, now out in the UK and soon the United States, Symon is excited about seeing where her headstrong heroine will go next. After completing her PhD, she’s returned to fiction writing alongside her university teaching.

BOUND, the latest Sam Shephard mystery, sees the young detective investigating a brutal home invasion and clashing with her own colleagues over the likely culprits

In BOUND, Detective Shephard is faced with a case that her colleagues think they’ve quickly solved. A shady businessman is shot-gunned and his wife left hospitalized after being tied to a chair, gagged, and left to watch his blood pool on the floor. When evidence begins pointing to a couple of high-profile local lowlifes who are the prime suspects in an unsolved cop killing, Shephard’s detective colleagues are ecstatic. But our heroine is uneasy, and decides to investigate further – angering her peers – while juggling plenty of personal and professional conundrums: a dying father, ongoing family issues, and the stresses of a workplace romance.

Like the rest of the series, BOUND is mystery writing with real verve and personality, centered on an intriguing and engaging heroine. And now, for the first time in several years, Symon has been working on a new Sam Shephard adventure, continuing her heroine’s evolution from small-town rural cop to a city detective who must battle ‘old boys club’ misogyny and personal travails.

“What I love about Sam is her optimism and her imperfections,” says Symon, as she reflects on the winding partnership she’s had with her main character. “She’s occasionally over-emotional, and that’s okay. She’s impulsive and gets into trouble, but she does it with the very best motives at heart, and she’ll stand up for what she thinks is right even where others may not share the same opinion. She is also a character who is developing. She’s a bit immature and inexperienced in OVERKILL, but like the rest of us she grows and matures with each experience, and hopefully learns from it.”

Thanks for reading. Until next time. Ka kite anō.

Whakataukī of the fortnight: 

Inspired by Zoe and her 'word of the week', I'll be ending my fortnightly posts by sharing a whakataukī (Māori proverb), a pithy and poetic thought to mull on as we go through life.

Kāore te kumara e kōrero mō tōna ake reka

(The kumara (sweet potato) does not say how sweet he is.)

Placing meat, veges, and kumara in a hangi pit to be cooked over heated rocks