Jaye Ford, Beyond Fear, 2011

I really wanted to like Beyond Fear.

I bought it at a conference – selected it from literally dozens of other choices because I was very taken with the author, Jaye Ford, and what she had to say about her novel. She’s an intelligent, well spoken, attractive person with a very good sense of humour. A former journalist who once fronted her own national sports show, she sure knows how to engage an audience. I was also taken with the idea for her novel and how she came to write it. Beyond Fear is a ‘stand-alone’ crime thriller with a  female heroine (Jodie) who is thrust suddenly into a terrifying situation while away on a girls’ weekend at an isolated cottage shehas rented. There’s also a personal history aspect of the set up. Jodie suffered a horrifying attack as a teenager. She had escaped but her best friend was gang raped in front of her and then murdered after Jodie escaped. Ford spoke about how the idea came from a real case she’d read about in the newspapers years before and which had stayed with her - a girl who had got away from an attack when her friend did not. She’d wanted to explore what life would be like for a person like that 20 years on. And after she spoke, I wanted to read what she’d come up with.

And in the first few chapters I was not disappointed. They were seriously spooky, and I do not spook that easily. A couple of women standing beside a country road in the dark waiting to be picked up. But their lift doesn’t come and they become increasing frightened. Later, they are safely (ha!) at their destination – an old barn converted to holiday accommodation - but Jodie becomes aware of people and vehicles prowling about in the night. Something is terribly wrong; they in danger. She knows it. But her friends won’t take her seriously. It was quite well done and had me a tad unnerved, jumping at the sound of possums on my roof. In the first quarter of Beyond Fear I thought Ford had very successfully created of a sense of foreboding, creeping malevolence and tension.

Sadly it wasn’t maintained. What didn’t I like? Lots of things, unfortunately. It ended up being very predictable after the baddies showed their true colours and the action began. This was in chapter 18. After that there were 22 chapters of people running about in the dark, hitting, shooting, stabbing, shouting and threatening each other. What started out as tension filled and spooky, played itself out by the numbers as biff, bam, boom action.

I don’t mind action. But this was not that well done and some parts were terribly slow moving. Just two examples: from page 263 to page 300 (37 pages!) the heroes are locked in a cupboard crying, arguing and freaking out. This is an absurdly long time! Then on page 315 Jodie and her love interest Matt make a break for it, trying to get to some bush that is just 20 metres away. Matt has a sore leg, but even so it still should not take until the end of page 317 – almost three full pages or approximately 600 words – for them to stagger there. That’s about 30 words for every step they make. This scene (and others) reminded me of Kill-Bill – with its comic book style ultra slow motion action.

The violence in Beyond Fear reminded me of a video game. Awful things are done repeatedly to human bodies, but they just keep getting up and fighting on. I’d love to have time to go back and count the number of times Jodie is stomped on, punched, slapped, kicked, thrown on the ground, tied up. She even gets stabbed. It’s just too much and becomes repetitive and unrealistic.

So too are the logistics. The action is set around, in and under a large barn that has been converted to a house. For 22 chapters the characters are all over the place, inside and outside, through various rooms multiple times, out in the yards and surrounding bush and back inside again. A large hole is ripped in the floor boards mid way through, so the characters are in and out of the large cavity under the house as well. It’s very confusing and annoying to keep track of. Jaye Ford credits her teenage son with helping her keep track of all of this. Wish he’d been there to help me.

And the dialogue, especially from the baddies, was woeful. I couldn’t shake the image of that nice lady I met at the conference dropping her voice to sound like the rough, tough, and uncultured thug she isn’t and saying things she imagines bad men say like: “We do the bitches first.”  “It’s no fun if they don’t fight.” Ford’s baddies call each other “’Bro” (yes, they are brothers) like American gangbangers. They scream, “bitch!” at the women over and again and call them “prickteaser”. They refer to  Jodie as “the tough bitch” over and over like it’s her name. This all made me cringe.

The plot is absurd in places. One of the baddies was suspected of murdering a teenage girl many years before when he lived in the barn. A search team had been involved and they’d scoured the area and found nothing. Somehow, we find out late in the text, they missed finding the four bodies buried under the barn. Sorry, but the police are not as inept as that.

The baddies have also just killed a man and need to get out of the area. So they’ve returned to the barn to dig up some guns they buried there years before and which are worth a lot of money. For some reason it can’t wait until after the weekend when the women will leave and the house will be empty, so they will have to murder them all. But, if it’s so urgent, why were the baddies drinking at the pub when the women first arrived in town and not digging up their guns and getting away? Then, when the baddies arrive back at the barn later that night and find the women there, why do they wait until the next afternoon to make their move? Instead of acting immediately, they lurk around the garden and drive their scary growling car around and around the barn in the dead of night scaring Jodie witless for no apparent reason. It was pretty creepy at the time, but then later on makes no sense at all.

Then there’s the silliest bit of all. After being trapped in the cupboard with her annoying friends for 37 pages, Jodie escapes. She just needs to run for ten minutes (she’s a fitness enthusiast) to a farmhouse down the road to call the police and tell them two maniacs have three friends locked inside and intend to rape and murder them. If that’s not enough, one is bleeding from a serious bullet wound. It’s a very urgent, serious situation, but Jodie won’t go for help. She just won’t do it. As a teenager she ran away from rapist murderers and her friend got murdered. She’s vowed never to leave a friend again. So she opts not to go and call the police and ambulance. Instead sheruns back into the situation without notifying anyone, with no weapons, no real plan and little hope against two armed thugs. Some friend! She’s also a mother who at several points expresses sadness that her children will grow up without her because she’s bound to get killed, but still she must be an idiot against all odds in honour of the memory of a lost teenage friend. I’m sorry, but I’m a mother. It did not seem real to me.

And then there’s the romance. Jaye Ford’s first ambition had been to be a romance novelist. It’s pretty important in Beyond Fear as well. It’s a bit cheesy. A bit too obvious. A bit too “romance novel” for me. I also didn’t like the blend of graphic description of sexual violence and murder (told in flashback) which really was quite awful. Shockingly awful. With the fact that this ended up being a light weight romance novel. I think if you’re going to do graphic sexual violence you have to make it a supremely serious book, not a book where readers are enjoying Mills and Boon type sexy fantasies a few pages on.

Beyond Fear left me with a lot of questions. Why was it published? Jaye Ford is a brand new author and this is Random House. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get published in this climate as a first time author? And she’d landed a fabulous agent before that – Curtis Brown, one of the best known in the country. Is it just me? Do I just not get it? Am I just jealous?

Well I am jealous, of course!

But no, it isn’t just me. Beyond Fear was circulated to readers on the website Soup, which is basically an online opinion sharing, word of mouth, market testing kind of thing. Two hundred and Forty Three reviews from regular readers – people with no affiliation to agents, publishers or authors and no fear of ruffling the wrong feathers - were loaded up. The average rating was 3.7 out of 5, which is a pretty poor rating. Reading through the results, there was a lot of polarisation. Many gave 4 star and 5 star reviews, but there were an awful lot of threes and twos and even ones. Here are some quotes I pulled out from among the poor reviews:

“very obvious ...no twists and turns”

“The writing needs to allow the reader to feel the fear, not tell them to be scared and that it is scary.”

“a bit simplistic... no build up... just constant tension It would be a nice read sitting by the pool sipping coctails.”

“Probably a bit more subtlety, nothing was left to the imagination.”

“The story was not at all believable. I just found myself questioning what I was reading constantly.”

“It was a bit of a average read. It took a while to get into the plot and it was very predicatable as to where it was going. It also seemed to go around in circles.”

“I really wanted to like this book, to support a new Australian author, but I'm sorry, it just isn't happening. I was very surprised that the first chapter was published as is. The character introductions in this chapter were just awful and it was just generally sloppily written.”

“ it is really difficult to like these women - paranoid, vacant, disloyal and hysterical - and much harder to really care what happens to them. Beyond Fear is a chick lit/thriller that will appeal to readers with simple tastes. The storytelling lacks the tension and drama of great thrillers, and the characters are largely underdeveloped and uninteresting.”

“Beyond Fear started off as a compelling page-turner. However, it quickly became annoying.”

“the dialogue was repetitive.”

“The style was very green, which led the mind to ponder the processes of the author, rather than be submerged in the world of the story the author was telling.”

Recommended for ”someone who doesn't generally read much and who just wants something to kill time, like on a flight"

“There was no natural suspense all the events leading up to the main event felt a bit forced and stereotyped.”

“For a thriller it needed more suspense”

“Sometimes it felt like it was written for people who couldn't keep up”

“I thought it started off a bit too childish, reminded me of girls carrying on at high school. It was also a very predictable story line, there wasn't really any surprises which is what I look for in a thriller/crime book.”

“The dialogue was repetitive and naive”

And one last one that made me laugh, a reader who thought there should be “more violence”!

You can look for yourself, here:

http://www.thesoup.com.au/review/Beyond%20Fear/?show=5&sort=s1&pageno=18

So what is going on? I would have thought most first time authors would be sent packing if they presented a manuscript like this to a publisher or even to an agent. Perhaps Curtis Brown and Random House saw in Jaye Ford what I did – a very impressive woman who can really sell her book. She certainly sold it to me, even if I didn’t like it when I actually read it. And picking books that will sell easily is bread and butter to publishers and agents.

It is so hard to get published as a first time author. Women writers in particular get a raw deal as writers of crime. So when something like Beyond Fear gets published by a major publisher, there is this pressure to fall in behind it publically and celebrate it. And then whisper quietly to our friends not to bother... Or post genuine 'ordinary punter' reviews like those that appear on the Soup site... 

My review might well be the only bad review of this book you find on the net. The people who will read this book - women who enjoy crime and want to read the work of women - will want it to be a cracking read. But what is the effect of supporting a dreadful book? For one, the myth that this is what women want to read (and think is good crime writing) is perpetuated. Men wouldn’t touch this book with a barge pole and must think women are fools if they take it seriously. Yet the conspiracy of silence says we do...  Meanwhile intellegent, gritty women’s crime writing struggles to find a publisher and cowers further into the margins. And women wonder why female crime writing is so overlooked by the blokes in awards such as the Ned Kellies.

Sorry folks, this one was not for me.

Shamini Flint, Inspector Singh Investigates: A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul, 2009.

I’m a bit of a Bali fan, so a murder mystery set in Bali was always going to be something I went for.

Plus Shamini Flint in person, is one very, very funny woman. An ex lawyer who lives in Singapore, I was as interested in her as I was in her writing. Not only does she write crime with Asian settings and an environmental, humanitarian angle, but she’s also written books for kids. The Sasha series of a few years back was hers – I’d read them to my kids and liked them.

I didn’t know all that at first, of course. Flint was just one of the talking heads at a recent conference. And she got me in because she was so hilariously funny. Honestly I cannot remember having laughed like that, not even at comedy festivals. I had high hopes for the book; someone with that much wit could surely write something intelligent that passed the cringe test.

And phew! This book made it. Intelligent and worth reading, if not perhaps the cracking read I’d been hoping for.

It had been line-ball for quite a while. The first half of this book annoyed me quite a lot. I didn’t care about any of the characters, including Inspector Singh, a Sikh policeman from Singapore, or his Australian colleague Bronwyn Taylor of the Federal Police. The set up had promise. The Singapore police have seconded Singh to Bali after the Bali bombings because they don’t like him and want him out of the picture. But, very embarrassingly, he knows nothing about terrorism and is being baby-sat by an Australian Federal Policewoman, Bronwyn Taylor who has similarly got herself in hot water with her superiors and been shunted sideways and out of the action. Then an ordinary murder is discovered and they are put on the case.

It didn’t take long before I found myself a little bored with that investigation. It all seemed to revolve around some fairly tedious and stereotypical ex pat couples. I didn’t like them or really care about the fellow who was murdered. I kept getting stuck on Facebook making inane comments on friends’ wall posts instead of racing off to bed to read the book that hadn’t really got me in.

There was more to it than that. I was attracted to the book because it was set in Bali, but before long that was putting me off. There was too much of the travelogue about it. Too many unnecessary cultural details put there to emphasise the Bali location. Too many italicised local words – it reminded me of Lonely Planet and the way it likes to chuck in a bit of the local lingo to show how with-it it is. And you know what? I’ve been to Bali too. It’s not so distantly exotic to me. I felt I was being taken on a bit of a tour, complete with tour guide commentary. And I hate tours. I’m more your independent traveller type. Take me somewhere interesting, for sure, but Iet me imagine I’m doing my own exploring, not being lead by the nose.

And I also started to worry that it was all sailing a bit too close to cultural stereotypes in places. The Balinese are obsequious, we are told. Naturally so, it seems, because they come from a hierarchical society. They are also way too chatty and very nosy. And they are terrible drivers. All of this made me uncomfortable and I found it difficult to relax into the story.

But it got much better as it went on and I did finally really enjoy this book. By the end I was thoroughly involved with the situation of several characters and the terrible circumstances in which they are caught up. The ending of the story actually moved me. I choked back tears, in fact, to my great surprise.

A few things happened to swing me around. The initial  cast of boring ex-pat couples, who I hadn’t liked, fell away as the story progressed and it reorientated around a group of Indonesian characters. They were much more interesting and as the story progressed, I came to care about several of them. The plot also evolved into something much stronger and more intriguing than the original set-up which had seemed to me a bit of a boring old Agatha Christie whodunnit at first.

A caution here for some. The plot of this book surprised me. It is set in the aftermath of the first Bali bombings. The crime that is investigated is linked to the Bali bombings and the author fictionalises some events that follow the bombings, including a second fictional planned terrorist attack that forms the climax to the novel. Here in Australia the Bali bombings still touch a lot of people personally. If you’re one of them and think this would upset you, you might not want to read this book.

But don’t let that put you off reading a different Inspector Singh book, because in the end it was the Inspector himself that really captured my attention. Much to my surprise, I ended up finding him fascinating. I think I was expecting another cardboard cut-out, a fat, turbaned curry eating Hercule Poirot. He is so much more than that. Flint has really got inside the head of Inspector Singh; his quirky, off-beat thoughts pepper the story.

I thoroughly enjoyed everything about him and would happily read more.

The author's website:

http://www.shaminiflint.com/

The Dragon Man - Garry Disher

The Dragon Man is a cracking read. It’s hard to believe I wasn’t aware of this series, given I’m an Aussie who reads crime almost exclusively and the series is set on the Mornington Peninsula where I live. What does this say about how poorly Australian crime fiction is promoted? And Garry Disher is a writer I knew of. I’d even studied some of his short stories at university a zillion years ago. But it wasn’t until I saw him speak on his crime fiction at my local library that I thought, hhhmmm, must check that out....

The talk was so interesting I went up and bought the first in the series, then got him to sign it for me. The Dragon Man, was first published way back in centuries past - 1999. It isn’t dated, though. There are computers and mobile phones but not everyone has one. Aside from that this book might have been published last year. Or the year before that, when summers were still blisteringly hot down here and the land and people were parched. Disher captures this perfectly; his main character – copper Hal Challis, is introduced showering with a bucket at his feet to catch the run-off. We did that for about a decade of summers. I loved it. The bit in the book, that is... not the awkward showering.

The Dragon Man is a police procedural set on the Mornington Peninsula, at a mythical town called Waterloo, which is really based on Hastings. The main characters are Hal Challis and his offsider a female detective called Ellen Destry. Four other coppers are very well developed as characters – there’s a youngish female constable Pam Murphy, policeman Scobie Sutton whose mind is never far from his young daughter, a couple of bend-the-rules coppers whose names I don’t recall, but who pull central roles and really flesh out this rich, complex, multi-layered cast.

This Garry Disher bloke can really write. I mean really. The Dragon Man is understated. Stark in places. He’s mastered completely the “show don’t tell” of writing. The character clues are there and the reader’s intelligence and imagination fills in the rest. There is mood and atmosphere galore. And the people – his creations - feel so real they could be my neighbours.

It's a literary read, from an accomplished writer. But it's also genuine crime writing at its best. The Dragon Man has tremendous pace. And I need pace in my literary reads, I really do. Or I get bored. Not a problem here. Events occur in rapid succession, over just a few days. There are multiple stems to this story: a serial killer raping and murdering young women, a pair of petty criminals with one graduating to violence arson and murder; seemingly unrelated crimes happening in parallel that somehow do have a connection. All interconnected with the police themselves and the dodgy stuff they get up to when they think no one is watching. Disher pulls it all together perfectly.

I lost sleep because of the The Dragon Man. It was very difficult for me to stop reading each night. The chapters are unusually long for a crime novel, but each time I got to the bloody end of one, it left me with such questions that I had to just taste the next... and so it went on, into the wee hours...

So I loved it. It made me think. I’m still thinking about it. One thing that occurred to me the day after I’d finished it was that although the victims of a serial killer were women, in other respects this book explores ways in which women can be proactively callous, ruthless or even dangerous. The women in this book do some not nice stuff.

A female detective is planning on cheating on her husband. One character’s wife is in prison for trying to murder him. Another female character is a respected professional but is also a criminal planning home invasions. A likeable 30 year old police constable dreams of seducing her 17 year old surfing instructor. A “gypsy” woman is going around town ripping off the elderly and gullible. A cocaine addict entraps a policeman into supplying her with drugs in exchange for sex. A woman being tailed by a road rage maniac parks in her neighbour‘s driveway to throw her pursuer off her tail – and get the neighbour murdered... This is quite a list  of sneaky female villains in a little book about police chasing a serial killer.

Did any of this bother me? Not especially.  I wondered if maybe Disher didn't like women, but it was just something that occurred to me. In some ways it’s pleasing that women get such a run in this book. They’re not just the bodies on the slab and they’re not cool superwomen fighting crime. There are no cardboard cut-outs, here. There is complexity and fallibility. It made me cheer all the more when breakthroughs came.

Another thing I really loved about The Dragon Man is the way the author deliberately chose not to try to get into the head of the killer who wrecks the lives of young women and their families. There was no relishing of him. This is no dark hero, no mesmorising, fascinating, ultra intelligent Hannibal Lecter. It’s a creep who ruins lives and Disher’s not going to give him the time of day. His main character says exactly that at the end – the guy’s a loser and he won’t waste his energy giving him much thought. The title is significant here. You might think "The Dragon Man" refers to some new exciting psychopath Disher's conjured up to scare the pants of us (note the similarity to Thomas Harris's The Red Dragon). You'd be wrong. It refers, instead, to the central character - Hal Challis - and his hobbies. Hal Challis is a good man. He is someone I do want to know more about. Good on you Garry! Courageous choice. Awesome book.

And a bit of a post script to this. I turned up to my new book group the other night. It was time for the selection of reads for next year. I’d found Disher’s third novel in the series – Kittyhawk Down – in the catalogue and had selected it. When I mentioned this to the group, the reaction surprised me. They’d read it the year before and were unanimous in their complete  hatred of it. It had been read as a stand-alone and I wondered – does the series deteriorate? Or should these books be definitely read as a series and in order? Is there simply too much in the earlier books to make Kittyhawk Down work on its own... alternatively I might find this new book club isn’t really for me...

Overkill - Vanda Symon

I read the first few pages of Overkill while waiting to hear the author speak at a recent conference; talk about gripping. I wanted to keep going right there and then, but shut the thing up long enough to listen politely and get myself home. It is a cracking opening... and I won’t spoil it.

And the rest of the book? Cracking?

Not exactly, but a good read, for sure.

Overkill is the first novel of New Zealander Vanda Symon, who used to be a pharmacist and decided to write a crime novel after the birth of her first child. This is years ago now, of course. I’m a bit behind the times and hadn’t heard of her. Now Overkill is the first in a popular series all featuring a young female detective Sam Sheppard. It’s set in small town south island New Zealand. And I really liked that. For me reading is like travelling and it’s great to go somewhere new. And Symon has done a good job of painting the lives of the  characters who live in this small community, without peppering it with cliches.

Sam is a good character. You’d need her to be because Overkill is told from Sam’s point of view alone. She’s young and enthusiastic. Not too many scars, skeletons and neurotic personality flaws – not that I mind those. But Sam’s young and somewhat naive, an early career copper who still thinks she can make everything right in the world. She should be like that. I was like that once myself without the job.

She’s also very likable. Admirable. Kind of tough, but also vulnerable without being a sook. I love the embarrassing dumb stuff she’s done breaking up with her ex and I like the problem she has still fancying him even while she’s investigating the murder of his wife. I would certainly be keen to follow Sam into other books. This is especially because she’s young and there are so many different directions for a character like her to go in the years to come. Plus the very understated sex in this book (she gets it on, but retreats behind closed doors for the deed) was pretty sexy. Reminded me of when things like that sometimes used to happen to me.

What didn’t crack for me? Actually the plot ended up being a let-down. The underlying premise that explains the murder – which I won’t give away – was really interesting and kept me up late trying to get to the solution. But when I got there it ended up being a tad over-done and a bit far-fetched.

Don’t want to spoil it, but hiring a hit man (revealled in first chapter, so not much of a spoiler) when you’re in the position/condition of the murderer (revealled at the end, so I wont elaborate) would be unbelievably difficult to do from a small town in New Zealand. It’s never explained. And we find out that a lot of people know what the murderer has done (after the event), but for their own self interest, say nothing. It didn’t ring true to me. The murder of a young mother in front of her child and townspeople are colluding to hush it up? I don’t think so.

Aside from that, the writing wasn’t quite strong enough for me to totally forget myself in this book. The prose is competent but isn’t really a feature – and I’m a sucker for fantastic writing be it in crime or anything else. It was also a bit by-the-numbers for me, which is often the case with police procedurals. I like big surprises and twists and there weren't many of them. For me, Overkill also lacked a sense of danger and suspense – a spooky mood - which was captured in the first few pages and never really recovered. I enjoy that in a book and missed it here. For these reasons  Overkill isn't really what I'd call a cracking read.

But there was enough good stuff for me to want to read more from Vanda Symon. There’s some really nice humour and a cool character. The story moves along and builds mystery. I was certainly interested enough to want to know what happened. And I will eventually read the next in the series and that’s big tick from me. I’m not generally one who gets hooked into characters in series these days. Too often writers lose the edge they originally had that made them stand out from the pack and get published and noticed in the first place – but by then they are so popular no one will say anything. I’m scarred for life by the Kay Scarpetta novels which I started out loving and ended up hating. Let’s hope Sam Sheppard doesn’t go the same way.

And there we have it. It doesn’t have to be cracking to be recommended!