Interview with Angela Savage
Situated in an open-fronted bar on the famous Walking Street of Pattaya, the Coconut Club isn’t a place I’d normally inhabit. Especially not alone. Still, after the late afternoon humidity of Pattaya I’m grateful for the chill airconditioning. A slender Thai beauty works her grass skirt and flirtations on the leering blokes, using drinking games and flattery to keep the beer flowing. At the bar PI Jayne Keeney is on a case, looking pale and interesting as she coaxes information from another of the waitresses. She hasn’t spotted me, which is fine, because I’m here to meet her creator, award winning Melbourne writer Angela Savage.
RH: Welcome, Angela Savage! Thanks for meeting me here, in your very own steamy corner of Writers’ Block. I hope you think my recreation captures the spirit of your novels.
AS: Thanks for having me here at Writers’ Block, Rowena. Your evocation is so spot-on, I’m not sure I believe you when you say the Coconut Club isn’t a place you’d normally inhabit.
RH: *laughs* As some of the patrons might say ‘Don’t ask; don’t tell’ *wink*. What can I get you? Beer, whiskey, water? Hopefully I can catch the attention of the bartender, because the girls are otherwise occupied.
AS: I’ll have a beer in this (virtual) weather, thanks. I find a cheerful smile and a 500 baht note will usually get you noticed.
RH: Beer sounds good to me. *Pulls notes from pocket* That’s much better than the twenty bucks it takes in Australia!
AS: Actually, 500 baht is the equivalent of twenty Australian dollars, Rowena. But here, we get change.
RH: *laughs and blushes* Oops!
RH: I’ve really enjoyed my armchair trip to Thailand via Jayne Keeney’s investigations. Other readers feel the same. Your work is praised as being “taut, edgy and vividly realised…”, “a stunningly different kind of crime novel…bursting with moral complexity”, and as having “…dark themes handled with a deft touch”. Your first novel Behind the Night Bazaar won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Unpublished Manuscript and each of your novels has been shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Crime Award. Congratulations! Share with us how it feels to receive such glowing reviews and whether such success helps or hinders your creative process?
AS: Thanks Rowena. I love hearing that readers enjoy the books. I was fortunate to win a Premier’s Award for the first novel I seriously tried to get published (by no means the first novel I’d written), and to have had all three of the books in the series shortlisted for a Ned Kelly Award is very encouraging. I’ll be candid with you: awards, shortlists and glowing reviews haven’t really translated into significant sales for me. But they keep me going through the dark times. They also make it easier for me to talk about my books. I can say to people, ‘You don’t just have to take my word for it that they’re worth reading.’
RH: It’s a pity they haven’t yet translated into sales, because your novels are definitely worth reading.*
RH: We must talk about Jayne Keeney as a character. Tough yet vulnerable, clever and resourceful, Jayne is also her own worst enemy in some regards, particularly with men. She speaks French and Thai and is capable of ‘vanishing’ even though her foreignness makes her stand out. From reading your biography it seems that you’ve drawn very much on your own background in sexual health and international development to shape your stories, so I’m interested in how Jayne developed as character. Did she come to you fully formed or did she grow as you wrote? How much of her character was shaped by the setting?
AS: Readers, especially those who know me personally, think Jayne and I are one and the same, because I made the mistake of giving her dark, curly hair like mine. I should’ve made her a blonde but, at the time, while I could imagine myself inside the head of a Thai cop or an Australian Federal Police Officer, a blonde seemed like a bridge too far…
RH: *laughing* As a fellow brunette I know all about that bridge!
AS: Jayne first appeared in a short story I wrote for the 1998 Sisters in Crime Scarlet Stiletto Awards, called ‘The Mole on the Temple’, set in Bangkok. Winning third prize was enough encouragement to make me think I should have a go at writing crime fiction. Jayne subsequently acquired the surname Keeney (after the friend who suggested it, though I changed the spelling) and came along for the ride.
My previous attempt at a novel had been a transparently autobiographical account of a twenty-something Australia woman’s experience of Laos in the early-1990s. In order to get away from autobiographical writing, I gave secondary characters in Behind the Night Bazaar some of my traits, like Didier’s workaholism/passion for HIV education (in Behind the Night Bazaar) – traits that Jayne found annoying. This proved a good way to distance myself from my main character.
I’m getting to know Jayne more with each new book. I’ve blogged about whether Jayne Keeney and I would like each other if we met in real life. One reviewer described her as ‘an appealing character, emotional and yet capable of cold-eyed action. She smokes too much, speaks Thai fluently and likes a drink and a shag.’ I figure that’s one reason we’d get along: shared hobbies.
RH: *Tries to cover blush with laughter* Well, I don’t smoke or speak Thai but I reckon she and I would get along too…
RH: One feature I love about the Jayne Keeney novels is the way every character justifies their actions as altruistic in some degree. In Behind the Night Bazaar, Kelly sees his auctioning of children to paedophiles as beneficial to the children because he can ensure they ‘get their fair percentage’, and in The Half-Child the zealot Frank Hardy argues he is doing God’s work by matching ‘unwanted’ children with well-off childless couples. Why is it important to show these conflicting perspectives within your novels? How do you manage to get inside the heads of these characters so thoroughly?
AS: Great questions, Rowena. I studied criminology as an undergraduate at university, never dreaming that one day I would apply what I learned to writing crime fiction. I see most crime as symptomatic of failures in education, health (especially mental health), and economic systems, whereas much crime fiction seems to hinge on the trope of the criminal being mad and/or evil. It’s important to me that characters in my novels have motives for their actions. I want to make it harder for readers to dismiss them as simply mad or bad, and to understand how they are to a large extent a product of their environment. That said, I don’t want to excuse their behaviour either: the warped logic of characters like Kelly and Hardy is designed to send shivers down the reader’s spine.
RH: I certainly shivered! And I was really shocked and angered by the hopelessness of the life in which some of the characters were trapped. Thailand is so alive in your novels that at times I could taste it. In the mid-1990’s, when your novels are set, I travelled through Bangkok and Chiang Mai (the setting of your first novel) so reading your novels has been like being there again. I must confess I didn’t see the side of Thailand that Jayne takes us into. Apart from the sights and sounds of Thailand, your novels offer insight into the socio-political climate of Thailand. Share with us how you manage to balance the inclusion of that contextual information with the pace and tension of the danger Jayne faces in her quest for the truth.
AS: I like the way you put that, Rowena. I love reading books that both entertain and enlighten, so it makes sense that I aspire to write those kind of books, too. No reader – myself included – wants an author to tell them what to think, so part of the challenge lies in presenting the story in such a way that leaves it to the reader to decide. This involves offering multiple and differing points of view – allowing characters to justify their actions, as you pointed out earlier, even when they are at odds with each other – and also leaving some loose threads at the end, although not so many as to leave readers feeling cheated.
The other balancing act for me is to create a vivid sense of place and cultural context without sacrificing pace or plot. To do this, I’ve had to learn to be succinct, specific and prepared to ‘kill your darlings’, as the saying goes: a description might be lyrical, but if it doesn’t create a mood, foreshadow events, advance the plot, or shed light on character or relationships, it’s got to go.
RH: Great advice. And I know how hard it is to bump off those darlings. I’d like to ask you about using multiple points of view to reveal the story. As protagonist, Jayne carries the bulk of the narration, yet several other key characters also narrate scenes. It’s done seamlessly and in such a way that we never become confused about who is who, which can often happen when the characters have unfamiliar names. Why did you decide to tell the story through multiple viewpoints rather than Jayne’s alone or through one or two key characters? How do you decide who tells which part of the story?
AS: Writing from multiple points of view not only enables me to offer readers a range of opinions and experiences from which to draw their own conclusions, but I also get to play with ideas about the ‘self’ and ‘other’ and how this changes according to perspective.
A local will have a very different take on Pattaya’s Walking Street, for example, than a farang (‘foreigner’). At the same time, as a streetwise Australian woman, Jayne Keeney’s take will be different from that of her less worldly Indian friend Rajiv Patel. As well as plot considerations, choosing who should narrate which part of the story depends on what nuance I’m looking for: whether I’m looking to shed light on a setting, a character or a relationship.
I’m also drawn to the challenge of writing from inside the heads of characters who are very different from me. While mindful of criticisms about voice appropriation, I’m aware of the power of fiction to enhance empathy in readers. I think that empathy has to start with the writer and their willingness to take risks. Alex Garland’s novel The Tesseract (1998), in which he writes convincingly from the point of view of a Filipino street kid, was inspirational for me in this regard.
RH: In reading Behind the Night Bazaar and The Half-Child, (I’m itching to get to your third Keeney novel The Dying Beach), I was struck by the extensive research you must undertake for each of your novels—in The Half-Child, for example, you give brief but telling insight into the process of becoming a Buddhist Monk, and you reveal the legalities of adoption by foreigners of Thai children. It’s clear from your acknowledgements that your sources are varied and extensive. Tell us a little about how you go about researching a new story, and when you do the bulk of your research: is it before your first draft or much later in the process?
AS: I tend to research as I go along, stepping away from the manuscript as the need arises, then coming back to it to incorporate what I’ve absorbed into the writing. I conduct research online, in print, over the phone, via email, even through social media these days. But my favourite form of research by far is fieldwork – and not just because it takes me to exotic locations (although that’s a bonus!). What I love is the heightened awareness that comes with being somewhere because you want to write about it, the ways that observation, speculation and memory can work together to inspire that writing (David Almond writes about this in The Creative Writing Coursebook).
To avoid overdoing the research, I follow Val McDermid’s advice: if you have to go back and check details, they probably don’t belong in the book. And I always acknowledge and thank my sources – assuming they’re happy to go on the record.
RH: Abuse in its various forms, but particularly abuse of the young, is prevalent in Behind the Night Bazaar and The Half-Child. In each case, Jayne starts out with an entirely different purpose but her investigations lead her to uncover abuses of children. You certainly tackle some tough subjects. You handle them with sensitivity but don’t shy away from the reality. How much is it a conscious decision to tackle moral and ethical issues as part of your fiction? Is it a function of writing crime or is it more personal than that?
AS: I do make a conscious decision to tackle what I think of as political, as much as moral and ethical issues in my fiction, and crime fiction provides a useful vehicle for exploring these issues. Garry Disher calls it “a barometer of prevailing social tensions, telling us about the world we live in” (in If I Tell You…I’ll Have To Kill You).
That said, I have strong personal reasons for choosing the topics I explore in my novels.
RH: This is thirsty work. Another beer? *decides to let that last comment remain enigmatic and waves another note to signal the barman*
RH: As mentioned, an earlier draft of Behind the Night Bazaar won the 2004 Victorian Premier’s Award for Unpublished Manuscript. It was subsequently published by Text in 2006. Share with us a little about your road to publication—was it a gentle glide on the River Kwai or more like a scooter ride through rush hour in Bangkok?
AS: Actually, the scooter ride through rush hour in Bangkok is the perfect metaphor, Rowena, because it’s stop-start all the way. Just when you think you’ve found a break in the traffic, along comes a bus to block your path, requiring you to zigzag your way around.
I wrote the first draft of what was then called Thai Died in 1999. It was rejected by several publishers, though a few provided readers’ reports, which were helpful for subsequent re-writes. It was the seventh draft that won the 2004 Premier’s Award. One of the judges was an editor at Text and made an offer on the manuscript. Four more drafts later, Behind the Night Bazaar was published. In 2006. Seven years after I started it.
RH: Worth the wait, though that’s probably easy for me to say as I wasn’t doing the waiting. Those reader’s reports are gold, though. Thanks for sharing with us, Angela. I hope this heat—and the second beer—hasn’t made you too languid, because it’s time for your…
RH: What is your all-time favourite book/movie?
AS: First book that comes to mind is The Poisonwood Bible (1998) by Barbara Kingsolver. First movie is The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), directed by Peter Weir. Both are riveting stories set in political tumultuous times, stories that entertain and enlighten. Stories like I aspire to write.
RH: What are you reading now?
AS: A great big pile of books by authors I’m interviewing for the Melbourne Writers Festival, most recently Wild Man: A true story of a police killing, mental illness and the law by Alecia Simmonds. True crime isn’t usually my thing but this book is excellent.
I’m also being kept up at night reading Sophie Hannah’s books in preparation for interviewing her at the Sisters in Crime Davitt Awards on 29 August. As one back-cover blurb puts it, ‘Tension, thy name is Sophie Hannah.’
RH: What is your favourite word?
AS: Ephemera.
RH: What is your worst writing habit?
AS: I’m a slow writer. I can spend ten hours in front of the notebook/computer and come away with 500 words to show for it. I try not to let it get to me.
RH: What is the best bit of advice you ever got (about writing or life in general)?
AS: Just get the story down. All writers know that real writing is re-writing.
RH: Amen to that! Well, I know what’s next for me—I’ve got a date with The Dying Beach—but what about you? What’s next for Angela Savage?
AS: I’m currently working on a novel as part of my PhD in Creative Writing. I’m writing about commercial surrogacy between Australia and Thailand and trying not to make it a crime novel, although that is proving increasingly difficult with each new scandal that arises. The working title – and this is a Writers’ Block exclusive – is Mother of Pearl.
RH: Ooh, thanks for that exclusive! *will definitely be using that in the promo* Thanks for joining us today, Angela. Where can we find your excellent Jayne Keeney novels?
AS: Thanks so much for your hospitality, Rowena. You can find my novels in all good bookstores and through my publisher, Text Publishing:
Buy the Book
For a limited time (5-22 August 2015) Apple are offering the eBooks or Angela’s wonderful novels at the greatly discounted rate of $4.99 Get it on iBooks
Behind the Night Bazaar
Investigating murder, child prostitution, and corruption—all in a day’s work for kickass PI Jayne Keeney. The first in a series of funny, gripping crime novels set in Thailand, Behind the Night Bazaar introduces us to this likeable thirty-something private investigator, working undercover in a place where she can do anything but blend in.
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The Half Child
Maryanne Delbeck was happy and harmless, her father refuses to believe she took her own life. Jayne immerses herself in the case, navigating the backstreet world of Thai ladyboys, monks, strippers, expats and corrupt officials. Maryanne’s death is not the only mystery awaiting Jayne among Pattaya’s neon signs and go-go bars.
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The Dying Beach
As Jayne and Rajiv holiday in Krabi, Jayne can’t stop her mind straying to thoughts of the future: a successful business, perhaps even a honeymoon. Who would have thought she could be so content? But then their tour guide’s body is found floating in the shallows and no one can explain the marks around her neck. Jayne and Rajiv are pulled into a case that the police have already decided isn’t one: a case that will pull at the seams of their fledgling relationships and lead Jayne into grave danger
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About the Author
Angela Savage is a Melbourne-based crime writer, who has lived and travelled extensively in Asia. Her crime fiction novels are set in Thailand and feature Australian expat detective Jayne Keeney. The first book in the series Behind the Night Bazaar (Text, 2006) won the 2004 Victorian Premiers’ Literary Award for Unpublished Manuscript and was short-listed for the 2007 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Book. The second book The Half-Child (Text, 2010), and third, The Dying Beach, were both shortlisted for Ned Kelly Awards for Best Crime Fiction, with The Dying Beach also shortlisted for the 2014 Davitt Award.
Read more about Angela Savage
Connect with Angela
See Angela Savage at the 2015 Melbourne Writers Festival where Angela will be in conversation with two former guests of Writers Block: Honey Brown and Ann Turner. Read more about Angela’s role at MWF
And don’t forget Angela will be in conversation with Sophie Hannah at the Sisters in Crime Davitt Awards
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