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Australian author Garry Disher is recognized as the master of rural noir. His latest Hirsch novel, Consolation, won the 2021 Ned Kelly Best Crime Novel award in the last few weeks. It’s the fourth Ned Kelly award Garry has won.
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler. In Binge Reading today Garry talks about how 40 years of writing has turned into something he might call “success” only in the last five years, and why he’s drawn to stories about good people living in an unforgiving world.
We’ve got three eBook copies of Garry’s award-winning novel, Consolation, the third book in the Hirsch series, to give away to three lucky readers. Enter the draw on our website, www.thejoysofbingereading.com or on the Binge Reading Facebook page. Entries Close October 12 so don’t delay! You will find links to Garry’s books and website there as well.
Don’t forget to check out our Patreon page for Binge Reading just launched. For the equivalent of a cup of coffee a month, you can help defray the costs of running the show – sound editing, transcribing, hosting. They all add up. I have been paying them for the last four years, and that’s not including my time spent in reading the books and contacting the authors to arrange interviews.
As a bonus for your support, you will get access to Patreon exclusive content – news of books and authors we talk to on the podcast and behind the scenes content on what’s coming up next. Join our Binge Reading on Patreon community. You will find the details you need at www.patreon.com/thejoysofbingereading.
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
- The devastating critique Garry has always remembered
- The reality of a lifetime to achieve ‘overnight success’
- The benefits of kitchen table gossip
- The appeal of crime writing
- The ambiguity of the most interesting characters
- The challenge of making a living as a writer
Where to find Garry Disher:
Website: https://garrydisher.com/
Email contact: https://garrydisher.com/contact/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/117675.Garry_Disher
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Books-Garry-Disher/
What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
But now, here’s Garry.
Jenny Wheeler: Hello there, Garry, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Garry Disher: Thanks a lot, Jenny. What really is important to me is the sense of a New Zealand readership, so I’m glad you’re talking to me today.
Introducing author Garry Disher, master of rural noir
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. We do have quite a few listeners in the States as well. Mainly it is US, New Zealand and Australia, so quite a nice spread.
We have to start with congratulations because you have collected yet another award in this last week, haven’t you?
Garry Disher: Yes. The Australian Crime Writers Association has an annual Ned Kelly award of Best First Novel, Best Nonfiction, Best International Fiction and Best Crime Novel, and my third Paul Hirschhausen or Hirsch novel, Consolation, just won the best crime novel of the year award. I was very chuffed about that. I’ve been shortlisted for years and years, so I was glad to win that.
Jenny Wheeler: I think you have won it already before, haven’t you, and you’ve got a Ned Kelly Lifetime award as well?
Garry Disher: Yes, I’ve won the award twice before for a Wyatt novel and for a Peninsula or Inspector Challis novel.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s not surprising that one of your fellow authors, Chris Hammer, describes you as “the gold standard for rural noir”. You are Australia’s premier crime author, so we’re privileged to have you here today. We are going to be focusing on the crime fiction and particularly on Consolation, especially now it’s an award winner.
The very long development of a remarkable career
With all the things that have happened, including being on the short list for the Man Booker a few years ago, does this remarkable career in any way stack up to what your expectations might have been starting out years ago as a would-be writer?
Garry Disher: It is an interesting question because I have been writing for 40 years. I will say that when I started off as a writer, I had no idea what to expect. My ambitions were very small – get a short story published in Meanjin magazine, for example, have my first novel published. They were my aims back then. I didn’t ever think I would make a living as a writer. I have made a living as a writer, a very patchy living, of course. My income goes up and down.
I would say that after writing for 40 years, it’s only in the last five years that I’ve had a sense of a readership. It’s only in the last five years that my books have been taking off overseas, only in the last five years that I’m starting to make a halfway decent living as a writer. But it’s taken 35 years to reach that point.
Jenny Wheeler: It is even harder today for a lot of writers because of the way the whole system is being truncated. Mid-level writers in particular – a lot of the writers I speak to on this show, even if they are bestselling New York Times writers, don’t necessarily have a great living out of it. It’s really surprising.
Garry Disher: A lot of readers don’t realize that if a Garry Disher book is selling for $30, he’s not getting $30. He’s only getting $3, which is 10%. The other 90% is split three ways between the publisher, the printer and the distributor, very roughly. You need to sell a lot of books at $3 each to make a decent living.
The reality of an author’s ‘bread and butter’ lifestyle
Like many writers, for most of my career I relied on public and educational lending rights for books being borrowed, giving weekend workshops, appearing at writers festivals, very occasionally writing an article or a review for a newspaper. They were the bread-and-butter income, because my publishers only pay my royalties every six months, so weeks and months go by when I don’t have an income at all.
Jenny Wheeler: You have been remarkably successful in combining the more literary stand-alone novels with the crime series. Tell us about the way you’ve kept that balance. When did crime start to become an important part of your writing portfolio?
Garry Disher: First of all, I’ll talk about the diversity. I need to keep fresh as a writer. If I were to only write crime novels, I would get very stale, I think. Occasionally a literary novel or a children’s novel, that sort of thing, keeps me fresh. I treat them both seriously. I treat all those different fields very seriously. That was the main thing, to keep fresh as a writer.
But the diversity also helped me professionally, in the sense that if I were to spend five years on a highly wrought literary novel that only sold 2000 copies, I wouldn’t last very long as a writer. I wasn’t writing for money necessarily when I wrote the children’s books, but the world of writing for children is a very warm and encouraging one. The feedback from teachers, librarians, the kids themselves, parents, getting books set on reading groups, it all helped me as a professional writer, that sort of diversity.
Harking right back to a childhood of Enid Blyton
When I started to write crime fiction, I already had a couple of literary novels published and a couple of short story collections, but I’ve always loved reading crime fiction. Perhaps we can blame Enid Blyton with her Famous Five and Secret Seven stories about a group of kids in England, tackling bad guys like smugglers or whatever it might be. From a very early age, as a child, I had this love of adventure novels, crime novels, outwitting baddies kinds of novels. I’ve always loved reading crime fiction, so I needed to see if I could do it myself.
The first crime novel was a Wyatt novel. It took me a long while to learn how to write it though, because early in my career, I wasn’t much of a planner. There’s no right or wrong about it. I happen to be a planner. You don’t need to be, but my literary fiction – the novels and the short stories – were a voyage of discovery. I would start with a character in a certain situation and write to see what happens.
I couldn’t do that with the crime fiction, so now I spend weeks, sometimes even months planning, because I need to stay a step ahead of the reader. I’m getting better at it. My plots are more complicated now. That doesn’t mean the books are more difficult to read. There is just a lot more going on beneath the surface now, with the books. That all comes from the planning.
On the other hand, I always trust my instincts. My instincts take me away from the plan. Then I’ll listen to that little voice in my head, that little tap on the shoulder saying, this plan isn’t working.
The different working styles of successful mystery authors
Jenny Wheeler: Having had the privilege of talking to quite a range of authors over the last three years, it is surprising the number of crime or thriller authors who still rely on instincts a lot more than you would think. I’m thinking of Michael Robotham. He says that he doesn’t really know what he’s going to be writing until he sits down at his desk. He allows his instinct almost entirely to lead him, even though they are highly plotted. But it sounds like you might be at the other end of the spectrum. You know quite a lot of the detailed plotting.
Garry Disher: Yes, I have the whole book in my head almost before I start writing. But as I said before, there’s no right or wrong. It certainly works for Robotham, and my approach works for me. If a new writer is listening to this program, they shouldn’t be anxious about that. If they are a planner, good. If they are not a planner, that’s good too.
Jenny Wheeler: You’ve mentioned Wyatt, so I’m interested to talk a little bit about Wyatt, because he was a professional criminal. Your first major crime series was built around a professional criminal, and he meticulously plans his crimes. I wondered how you got inside his head, particularly as you started there.
Garry Disher: Wyatt was influenced by some hard-boiled American writers like Richard Stark, who were very popular and influential in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States.
Hard-boiled moral ambiguity makes the character interesting
That kind of moral ambiguity, the hard-boiled character who was often a bank robber or something like that, really appealed to me at the time – still does in fact. I wanted to write about a character like that. I think it taps into part of our human nature that wants to pull the perfect crime.
Now I’m never going to rob a bank or murder someone, but there has to be a side of me, that’s appealing to this darker side, that can imagine that happening. To write Wyatt, who is nothing like me, I muddle along like most people. Wyatt is a very cold, very concentrated, very meticulous character, so I just had to forget who I was and, if I were a bank robber, how would I operate?
At one level these books are pure fairy stories, because no one in their right mind wants to rob a bank if you can be robbing drug dealers, because that’s where the big money is, in drug dealing and so on. But I couldn’t hope to make an appealing character out of a guy who dealt drugs, so he’s an old-style bank robber, and I thought my way into his skin. I had to forget who I was.
I do break one rule of writing with these books. A rule of thumb is that you get to know your characters very well before you start writing. We don’t know Wyatt at all, really. We don’t know very much about his background. In the early series, I had him as a Vietnam War veteran, which would make him in his 70s now, so in the later books I’ve managed to steer clear of that. That explained some of his practical skills.
Minor characters an important part of the story
But we don’t know whether he had a bullying father or that he had a twin sister who died of leukemia, or he’s got a little niece who’s in hospital and needs an operation for leukemia. There’s none of that in the books. We don’t know what makes him tick. The only thing that matters to Wyatt is robbing a bank or robbing a jeweler. Unfortunately, he has to rely on others and they are not always trustworthy. But that’s as far as I go into his mind.
A lot of the appeal of the books for me as a reader and writer, is the minor characters. I have a great deal of fun with them. But I think if I were to go into Wyatt’s mind, if I explored his childhood in a few chapters or that sort of thing, suddenly Wyatt is not Wyatt anymore. He’s a ? book character. He would no longer be Wyatt, if that’s the case.
I get letters from readers saying, I don’t approve of Wyatt, but I want him to win. That’s fine by me. It’s exactly what I want.
Jenny Wheeler: There is a fantastic critic’s comment about that, which I must read out because it’s so funny. They said Disher writes with all the compassion of a well-placed bullet in the back of the head. That sums up Wyatt, doesn’t it?
Garry Disher: Yes. There’s quite a different stylistic approach with the Wyatt novels if you compare them with my Hirsch novels, for example. Hirsch is a very well-rounded, very warm sort of character who muddles along. We’ve got a lot of sympathy for him.
Language reflects the type of character he or she is
We know what his hopes and fears and desires are. The style, the sentences on the page, the tone of them, the personality of the voice, reflects that.
With Wyatt, the language is stripped down. Short sentences. There are no flourishes to speak of because that matches the tone of the stories and it matches the tone of the character, Wyatt. I couldn’t hope to write a Wyatt novel with long rolling delicious sentences. I’m stepping into the skin of the book and I’m stepping into the skin of the character when I write anything..
Jenny Wheeler: Hirsch is very sympathetic. He’s not a campaigner. He didn’t particularly want to be a whistleblower, but he didn’t want to be drawn into deliberate corruption, and so he gets caught up in a foul system. He finds himself having to go against his workmates, he gets labeled a nark because of that and gets exiled to a no man’s land. He’s a good guy who’s on the right side, and he gets badly treated by the system.
You’ve said that Hirsch is an outsider in search of a true home, and that would apply to a lot of your characters. I wondered if you could elaborate a bit. How much do you personally identify with that sense of searching for a true home?
Garry Disher: I identify with it quite a bit. When I look at all my books, the main characters are outsiders at one level. Partly, that can be appealing to a reader because the outsider character is very perceptive, has a good eye for what’s going on around them. We want them to win, we want them to feel comfortable, but there’s always that edginess which can make a book or a character appealing.
The appeal of ‘outsiders’ in building the story
If I wrote Hirsch as a guy who went home to his wife and kids at the end of the day, whose parents lived in the next street, who belonged to a tennis club, who went drinking with his mates, who was thoroughly an insider, I would find him boring, and I don’t think he could operate. He has to be on the edges, on the margins.
That’s true of most of my characters, even the kids in the kids’ novels, and the teenage novels and the literary novels. They have always been outsiders. They can cast an eye on what’s really happening, whereas an insider can’t, I don’t think.
I relate to that because I feel like that too. I grew up on a farm. I didn’t see other kids after school or on weekends very often. I was older than my brother and sister. I spent a lot of time by myself daydreaming, and daydreaming is a kind of storytelling. The Hirsch novels are set in the wheat and wool country halfway between Adelaide and the Flinders Rangers in South Australia, and that’s where I grew up.
I left there when I was about 19 to go to university in Adelaide, and haven’t been back since, except to see family or family Christmases or whatever. I’ve still got family there. After that I lived in Adelaide, then I traveled overseas and I came to live in Melbourne. Now I live down on the Mornington Peninsula, about an hour and a half southeast of Melbourne, and I’ve never quite felt at home since I left home, if you know what I mean. I think it’s perhaps influenced the books I write, this sense of an outsider, watching the center from the margins.
The tough environment reflects the character’s lives
Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting because all of your books have such a very strong sense of location, and it’s a fairly unforgiving location. Even if you’re not right out in the Outback, it’s a tough environment, and it seems to be reflecting what the characters themselves are going through – tough environment and a tough life. Do you think that’s true too? As they say in the cliché – is the setting another character?
Garry Disher: Yes, to me setting is just as important as character and plot. Everyone talks about character and plot or storyline, when they’re talking about a novel or a film, but forget about the setting. I used to teach creative writing and most of my students didn’t pay attention to the setting either.
Let’s say they had a husband and wife arguing in the sitting room. They think, the curtains are drawn, there’s a TV on in the corner, that’s enough. But it’s not enough. I think you can tease that out, explore elements of the setting that are going to add to the tension between the two characters. Setting to me is a very, very vital element in fiction.
I learned that in an interesting way, when I went on a creative writing fellowship to Stanford University in California. I thought I’d jump in the deep end and gave them a short story to workshop at the start of the academic year. They pulled the story apart. They hated it. It’s a simple story about a young woman who goes into a pub, sees her ex-boyfriend across the other side of the pub and is trying to decide whether or not to go over and speak to him.
Garry Disher’s tough lesson, well-learnt, at his career outset
It’s only 10 pages long, there are no car chases, nothing like that, a very internal story. At the end of the story, she realizes, no, she’s moved on. She’s doesn’t have to go and talk to him, he’s part of her past now. That’s all the short story needs to do. The class pulled it apart and someone whose opinion I trusted, who had had a few stories published in the New Yorker said, your writing suffers from sensory deprivation.
I was quite demolished by that. I asked her, what did she mean? She said that good writing makes pictures in the head. She said, I don’t know if your main character is fat or thin or tall or blonde. Sense of sight. She said, I can’t hear the jukebox in the corner of the pub. Sense of hearing. She said, I can’t smell cigarette smoke. Sense of smell. She said, I can’t feel the beer dampness of the carpet under my feet. Sense of touch. I can’t taste the pretzels on the bar. Sense of taste. She said that good writing makes pictures in the head by appealing through our senses.
It’s the best, cleanest, bit of writing advice I’ve ever received. Now when I’m describing a person or a place, I try to appeal to the reader’s senses because it’s going to bring them into the action. It’s going to put them face to face with the main character or it’s going to put them in a car rattling over a corrugated dirt road, for example, by appealing to little things like sense of hearing, sense of smell. I don’t beat the reader over the head with a lot of sensory information. Just what’s appropriate at that time.
Writing Anna Tolley – the female perspective
Jenny Wheeler: That is so right. Having been fairly much immersed in your work for the last few months, I can very much attest to that. The book that was shortlisted for the Man Booker, The Sunken Road, is quite different from all of these, because one of the key characters, one of the main viewpoints, is female. It’s Anna Tolley – leggy, wilful, auburn-haired, always answering back”. How challenging was it to write from a woman’s point of view, when all this intimate detail is so important?
Garry Disher: I should go back and make a small correction. The book was long listed or nominated for the prize. It didn’t reach the short list. But it was a great enough honor for me, at the time, to have reached that far. When I first started writing The Sunken Road, I made attempts over a 15-year period to write the book, until I found my voice, until I found my way into the story.
I thought I was going to write about a farmer. I had been reading the short stories of the Canadian writer, Alice Munro, who writes about small towns, small farm life in Southern Ontario mainly. I loved her stories, and I wanted to do the same about this small town, small farm life that I’d grown up in, in South Australia. I thought my main character would be a farmer, but he was just a cardboard cutout. He didn’t come alive in my head.
I realized that when I went home for Easter or Christmas, I enjoyed going out to the paddock with my father and we’d fix a leaky trough for the sheep, or we’d fix a broken fence, and we would yarn about practical matters of the farm. I enjoyed that.
Gossip around the kitchen table great fuel for an author
But what I really enjoyed was sitting at the kitchen table with my mother and my sister and sometimes my aunt, listening to the district gossip – the stories of marriages that had broken up, of who’s going out with whom. That kind of thing. That is what really got to me, and I realized then that I wanted to write about a woman who has grown up in a farming area.
As for getting into her head, I didn’t find it difficult. I didn’t switch gears necessarily. Most of my friends are women. I’m not a very blokey bloke. I don’t like sport or beer or anything like that. I don’t go to the pub. I’m awkward around men. I like talking to and listening to women, so that perhaps helped me with this book.
With the Peninsula novels, for example, the police procedurals – there are about seven or eight of them now, the Inspector Challis novels in other words – as the series has progressed two of the minor characters, women characters, became much more interesting to me than Inspector Challis. Now they have quite major roles in the book. I’m talking about Ellen Destry, who was his sergeant, his offsider, in the early a couple of books, but by the last book she is head of the Sex Crimes Unit, and she’s got 50% of the story.
Character development over the course of a series
Another minor character that appealed to me was the young uniform constable, Pam Murphy. As the series progressed, she became much more interesting to me, and she retrains as a detective, and she has a much stronger role in the last Challis novel as well. So, I like writing about female characters.
My most recent literary novel is called Her. It grew out of a turn of the century newspaper clipping from a country newspaper about a three-year-old child who been sold by her parents to a travelling scrap man and his wife. That’s all the newspaper said, but I was fascinated by what might have happened to that little girl, so I’ve told her story in this novel, Her.
Jenny Wheeler: Sounds fascinating, because in the last Inspector Challis there is a child who gets sold as well. It must’ve been in your mind at the time.
Garry Disher: Probably, yes.
Jenny Wheeler: Are there going to be any more Wyatt or Challis novels?
Garry Disher: I’d like there to be. I’ve just finished a standalone novel called The Way It Is Now, which will come out in November. It’s set on the Mornington Peninsula where I live. It’s about a disgraced cop who’s been suspended for pushing his inspector over a desk. It all had to do with a rape case. He has got a lot of time on his hands now, so he starts looking into the disappearance of his mother 20 years earlier.
The Way It Is Now – latest Garry Disher stand-alone novel
His father had been blamed for the crime. The body was never found. His father was the main suspect, but he thinks she was probably murdered and he’s determined to clear his father’s name. Now he’s got time on his hands, he starts looking into that case. But of course, he’s not a cop anymore, or he’s on suspension. He can’t use police databases or anything like that, so in a sense, he’s an accidental hero. He has to draw on his own wits now, rather than the might the police force to solve this crime.
Next year I’m writing the fourth Hirsch novel set in the mid north of South Australia. I’m contracted to, but I’d like then to return to those earlier series, so Wyatt, I’d like to write another Wyatt and another Inspector Challis novel. I get a lot of feedback from readers, well not many, I’m talking about a couple of emails a week, wanting to know, where’s Wyatt, where’s Inspector Challis, are you writing another one. I think there’s a demand there for them, and I don’t want to keep writing Hirsch novels all my life. I’d like to keep fresh by shifting from character to character.
Jenny Wheeler: It seems a theme is developing here, because another one of your recent standalones, Under the Cold Bright Lights, was a crime novel about a retired cop who many consider is washed up, who works on cold cases. It seems to me this is a theme as well about good men in an unforgiving world. They do their best to do the right thing and they still manage to fall foul of the system. Is that something you feel is true about the world?
The complexities – and inadequacies – of the criminal justice system
Garry Disher: It is, in the sense that sometimes I can barely manage to read The Age, the morning newspaper here in Victoria, because I have a sense of the bastards getting away with it. By the bastards, I mean highly placed businessmen, politicians, sportsmen, whatever it might be. They can commit the most terrible crimes. They can ruin pensioners by stealing all their savings or whatever it might be, and they get away with it, whereas a drug addict who shoplifts in Coles might very well find himself in jail.
Why aren’t these guys in jail? That sense of outrage is in me all the time. I think it’s one reason why I write about these guys. They muddle along but they’ve got a sense of decency, and at one level they do outwit the bad guys.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, it’s interesting because another perceptive critic said about the Wyatt books – but it certainly applies to the most recent Challis, Signal Loss – the brilliance of these stories is that as the plot unfolds, it becomes increasingly obvious that the real villains are the lawyers, the financiers, and the bankers with the million-dollar yachts, expensive cars, et cetera. That underlines what you’re saying, doesn’t it?
Garry Disher: Yes. In that latest Wyatt novel, there is a guy who set up a Ponzi scheme. I have had a lot of newspaper clippings about these Ponzi schemes. There was a story of a man and his friend in Geelong, a major regional city of Victoria, who stole something like $80 million from retirees and so on.
The hidden damage and loss from crime in small communities
There was a story of a retired schoolteacher who had $800,000 in his superannuation and lost the lot and committed suicide. That’s the fallout of this sort of crime, ruined lives, so the urge was there to stick the boot into someone like that.
Jenny Wheeler: In Signal Loss, the people in the town who are supposedly the respectable businesspeople were all secretly running ice networks and things like that too.
Garry Disher: Yes. As I said, I’m a planner, but I also draw on all the newspaper clippings I’ve gathered over the years. I had quite a lot on the drug ice and its effect in regional areas.
We know its terrible effect in cities, but it has an even worse effect in rural areas, I think, where often there are no jobs for the kids and ice being very cheap to make, they get addicted to it. It can affect their behavior in the sense that they become very violent, very unpredictable, and it can make ordinary crimes that much more vicious. It is a real scourge of a drug in rural areas, and I wanted to write about it.
Jenny Wheeler: We are starting to come to the end of our time together and this is The Joys of Binge Reading, so I would like to ask you a little bit about your reading habits. You probably aren’t a big binge reader, but tell us what you’re reading at the moment and is there anything you’d recommend to listeners?
Garry Disher: I am a binge reader in the sense that I go back and reread favorite authors. At the moment I’m rereading Ian Rankin. I forget the name of the novel I’m reading at the moment, but it’s one that came out four or five years ago. I’ll read a whole series of Ian Rankin’s.
The other authors Garry Disher likes to read
Earlier in the year, I read a whole series of Michael Connelly’s. I do that from time to time. But I read new authors all the time as well. Tana French – she is an Irish writer. I hadn’t read her before until I read one of her books a while back. So, if you like, I’m a binge reader in that sense. Most of my reading, I must admit, is crime but there are certain other writers I like. Colm Tóibín, the Irish writer, I read one of his books recently, for example, and I’m always going back to Alice Munro’s short stories.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. Looking back over the years now – as you’ve mentioned, you have been writing for 40 years, you’ve come to a lot of peaks in your career. Have you personally got any mountains you’re still wanting to climb?
Garry Disher: I’d love it if one of my books was turned into a film or a TV series. I’m not talking about the money involved, but it would give me a real thrill to see one of my books translated as a film or a TV series.
Jenny Wheeler: Has there ever been any sniffing around in that regard?
Garry Disher: Ever since the Wyatt novels back in the 1990s, people have been sniffing around, but it never gets past the option. An option is where they pay you $1,000-2,000 for the rights to the book for a certain period, like a year or 18 months, and then the production company tries to get funding for it and the script Bruce and all the rest of it. I’ve had a few books options over the years, but it’s never gone past that.
What Garry Disher is working on in the next 12 months
Jenny Wheeler: I think there’s a very high likelihood in the next decade because they’re getting so hungry for content now with so many streaming services. You might be lucky.
Garry Disher: Yes, and I would insist on a role in the book, even if it’s the old geezer in the background.
Jenny Wheeler: You’ve mentioned a little bit about what you’re doing over the next 12 months. Recap that for us. What have you got on your desk for the next 12 months? What can your readers look forward to having from you?
Garry Disher: Next year there will be a fourth Hirsch novel. Early November is the stand-alone crime novel called The Way It Is Now, and I’ve just finished a Hirsch short story for an anthology. I haven’t written any crime short stories for a very long time now, but a small Australian publisher called Lindy Cameron whose press is called Clan Destine Press, and a New Zealand critic called Craig Sisterson – you might know of him.
Jenny Wheeler: Oh, yes. Very well known here.
Garry Disher: They have got the idea to put an anthology of Australia/New Zealand crime short stories together, so I’ve just finished a Hirsch short story for that anthology. I don’t know who else is involved and I don’t know when the book’s coming out. In the meantime, for the rest of this year, I will start scratching my head over the new Hirsch novel.
Jenny Wheeler: Has that got a title yet?
Garry Disher: No, it hasn’t.
Where readers can make contact with author Garry Disher
Jenny Wheeler: Where do readers find you? Can they get you online? How do you normally interact with your readers?
Garry Disher: There’s a web page www.garrydisher.com and there’s a link there that will enable people to email me.
Jenny Wheeler: You’re happy to correspond with them.
Garry Disher: Yes I am. Although it depends. I get lots, well not lots, about one or two emails a week. They are usually really lovely ones, and I treasure that. But every now and again, I’ll get someone who will say, very disappointed. If it takes that kind of tone, I might not respond.
Jenny Wheeler: Do you very often agree with the criticism?
Garry Disher: Yes, if it’s fair criticism, I’m happy to take it on the chin.
Jenny Wheeler: Thanks so much, Garry. It’s been great talking.
Garry Disher: Thank you, Jenny.
If you enjoyed Garry Disher you may also enjoy . . .
If you like Garry Disher you may also enjoy Anna Willet’s Nightmare Thrillers.. Anna is a Perth-based thriller writer whose books are based in ‘generic’ bush settings – not specifically Australian, but recognizable as “bush” thrillers.
NEXT WEEK ON BINGE READING…. J A JANCE American mystery writer of multiple series including Ali Reynolds, Jo Brady and Inspector Beaumont series…..
Thanks To Our Technical Support:
The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at dcaudioservices@gmail.com or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with.
Our voice overs are done by Abe Raffills, and Abe’s another gem. He got 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a cameraman/director and also voice artist and television presenter. Abe’s vocal delivery is both light hearted and warm and he is super easy to work with no matter the job. You’ll find him at abe@pointandshoot.co.nz