{"id":6842,"date":"2019-04-11T13:44:54","date_gmt":"2019-04-11T13:44:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=6842"},"modified":"2019-04-14T14:46:46","modified_gmt":"2019-04-14T14:46:46","slug":"interview-with-finn-bell","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=6842","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Finn Bell"},"content":{"rendered":"

An Interview with New Zealand Crime Writer Finn Bell, by Charles Rzepka, January 9, 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Introduction:<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Whenever my wife and I travel, I make a point of acquainting myself with the crime literature of the countries I visit, and often make new discoveries. Preparing for a recent trip to New Zealand, I discovered Finn Bell.<\/p>\n

Finn Bell is a new name in crime writing, at least relatively speaking, having published his first book, Dead Lemons<\/em>, only three years ago. He\u2019s also flown mostly under the radar of crime writing reviewers, deciding to self-publish his books in Kindle format. Despite that decision and his recent entry to crime fiction, he managed to win New Zealand\u2019s prestigious Ngaio Marsh First Book award right out of the gate, and a clutch of other prizes and awards since. He\u2019s just finished his fourth book, The Lost Dead,\u00a0<\/em>which should be available for purchase on Amazon sometime in April or May.<\/p>\n

As you\u2019ll soon learn, \u201cFinn Bell\u201d is not his real name. He\u2019s had to adopt a pseudonym because much of his material is based on case files from his years as a forensic psychologist, and he is fiercely protective of the privacy of his former clients and case workers. That background has shaped, in ways both obvious and less so, his major concerns, characters, and plotlines. Finn\u2019s books shine an intense light on our ideas of good and evil, free will and compulsion, nature and nurture, and, at the deepest level, what it means to be human.\u00a0They do not really untangle these ideas, but they do help us trace the distinct strands of the knots in which they tie us up.<\/p>\n

Finn Bell was born in 1978, in a small town in a wine-growing region of South Africa before the fall of Apartheid and the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. In the interview that follows, you will learn more about his life growing up there and what brought him to New Zealand, which he now calls home. You will also learn how his work as a forensic psychologist set him on the path to become the crime writer that he is today.<\/p>\n

When I first contacted Finn to ask for an interview, I had little hope of any opportunity materializing. My wife and I, and our two traveling companions, would only be in Dunedin, on the South Island, for two nights, and what were the chances that Finn would be free even for a brief meeting over coffee? I was therefore astonished, and delighted, to receive an invitation from Finn, extended to include all four of us, to join him and Lisa, his partner of 10 years, for a dinner at their home high above the Otago Harbour. Lisa would take my wife and our friends (avid bird-watchers) on a tour of a nearby bird sanctuary while Finn and I sat and talked. The result\u2014besides an excellent dinner of several courses and a pleasant, spirited, and thought-provoking conversation among the six of us afterwards\u2014was an interview of over two hours in length, of which the following is an edited and redacted version.\u00a0 I hope it will serve as a modest token of my thanks for Finn and Lisa\u2019s generous hospitality, and perhaps do something to raise awareness of Finn Bell among crime writers and readers to the level I think he deserves.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Interview with Finn Bell \u2013 Dunedin, New Zealand,\u00a0January 9, 2019:<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

CR [Charles Rzepka]<\/em>: I\u2019d like to begin with your writing, if I may, and get to your life as we go.<\/p>\n

One thing that stands out to me in the three books you\u2019ve published so far is that your plots are full of risks, and you are very good at building tension around them. Moreover, you seem to be fond of taking risks with your writing, too. For instance, in your first book, Dead Lemons<\/em>, you decided to give your fictional protagonist your own name, which naturally raises a lot of questions in the minds of your readers, who can\u2019t have known a thing about you at the time, like, \u201cIs Finn Bell a paraplegic, too? Does he also have substance abuse problems?\u201d\u00a0 Could you talk about what led to that decision?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em> [Finn Bell]<\/em>:\u00a0 First of all, \u201cFinn Bell\u201d is a pen name.\u00a0It\u2019s not my real name. And I chose it, and gave it to the main character in my first book, because I lost a bet with friends about a 1990s film adaptation of Charles Dickens\u2019 Great Expectations\u00a0<\/em>directed by Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n, a Mexican director. He named his lead character \u201cFinn Bell.\u201d\u00a0 I bet that he hadn\u2019t, which meant that I had to make my pen name \u201cFinn Bell,\u201d and furthermore, I had to have the lead character in the book also be named \u201cFinn Bell.\u201d<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 That\u2019s a much less interesting answer than I had hoped for!\u00a0 [Laughter]\u00a0 But it does show that you enjoy taking risks\u2014basing such an important decision on a bet. Still, even if the matching names aren\u2019t intentional, there seem to be many life correspondences between that fictional Finn Bell and you, the real one.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: True. I wanted somebody that to me was flawed, and it was easiest for me to base his flaws on mine.\u00a0 But that was after the fact.\u00a0 I had lost the bet, so I had to give the author and the character the same name, and at that point it started working backwards. I started basing the character\u2019s flaws on my own, of which I have more than enough.\u00a0 So, it was an easy job.\u00a0 [Laughter]\u00a0 Originally, I wrote Dead Lemons<\/em>and Pancake Money<\/em>, my second book, at the same time, as one big book.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 I\u2019m surprised, because each of them seems complete in itself, even though the second is a prequel.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>FB<\/em>: Honestly, it took longer untangling them into two separate books than it did to write the whole thing.\u00a0 But after I looked at the entire story arc, I thought there was too much complexity here.\u00a0 Dead Lemons<\/em>is based on a time-jump narrative, and Pancake Money<\/em>is not, its plot is chronologically straightforward. And Pancake Money<\/em>, which you don\u2019t read until after you read Dead Lemons,<\/em>describes events that take place before Dead Lemons<\/em>. It became the pre-story of Bobby Ress, the retired police detective turned priest, who\u2019s a minor character in the first book, Dead Lemons<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But there was another reason for splitting it up, besides the ungainliness of the first draft. When I began it, I was still working professionally in forensic psychology.\u00a0 By the time I finished, I had come to a realization about my work and my life that made me rethink the whole thing.<\/p>\n

I was binge-listening to a lot of Counting Crows at the time, which was stuff I had listened to in my teens.\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t listened to it for about 20 years, and you know how things can take you back? I don\u2019t know if I started to think or feel like I did back then, but there was this lyric by Adam Duritz, \u201cI\u2019m an idiot walking a tightrope of fortunate things.\u201d<\/p>\n

It stuck in my head. I got more and more obsessed with the idea of an almost divine providence, about this kind of invisible fortune that we all have, how lucky we all are that things don\u2019t go as terribly wrong as they so often can.\u00a0 I think that\u2019s what started moving me towards the end of my work as a forensic psychologist, because in that job you do see the things that can go wrong. People who live beyond their luck.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Can you tell me more about that, your former job?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 It was a combination of profiling, therapy, and lots of lots of core work, which is basically just assessments before a prisoner\u2019s release or next court appearance, which is, I guess, another form of analysis.\u00a0 But, it\u2019s not within the traditional understanding of what therapeutic analysis is for, because you\u2019re trying to assess a resistant client, or put another way – you\u2019re trying to assess whether somebody is ready to be released back into the community.\u00a0 That process can be unkind, can be invasive, as it needs to be, because your client is the community, not the person in front of you.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Was this work that you did here in New Zealand, or in South Africa?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Both.\u00a0It\u2019s work that ended up bringing me here, to New Zealand.\u00a0 About a decade ago, I noticed that very interesting things were starting to happen here.\u00a0 The therapeutic models they were using were fascinating and very far advanced.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 In what way?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 We\u2019re going to get a bit deeper into forensic psych here . . . .<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 I\u2019ve had a mini-course just reading your books.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Ok, so, in my opinion, the Nordic countries are by far and away the best at changing human beings. In terms of forensic reality, not theory, if you want to take a given person, and you want to shift significantly their observable behavior over time, nobody else comes close.<\/p>\n

These people have methods embedded in their communities and systems that are far in advance of most forensic science in terms of therapies and outcomes.\u00a0 They can turn people\u2019s lives around. \u00a0Whether that person wants it or not, they can do it far better than anybody else.\u00a0 And everybody else, I would say, is probably a good decade behind them in terms of the science, and practice.<\/p>\n

New Zealand is this kind of outlier that is getting very close to how they do it there in some aspects, but with significant differences. Most of the Nordic countries are both ethnically and culturally quite homogenous in comparison. We don\u2019t have that here. This is a country built on fusion, and that\u2019s a lever for change that was fascinating to me.\u00a0 It still is.\u00a0 They were doing things here with bi-culturalism nobody else was doing.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 And you heard about it through friends, or through other professionals in South Africa?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: I was working at a South African university at the time. I\u2019d been in and out of prison services then for a good while, and people started saying, \u201cThey\u2019re doing interesting things in New Zealand.\u201d\u00a0I\u2019d read a few articles and had been following some of the research, and the opportunity came so I applied, and I got hired over the phone, which was strange to me.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 They\u2019re probably used to long distance interviews.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: If you\u2019re this far away, you kind of have to be.\u00a0 But I had never had that experience before, being hired sight unseen from half a world away.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 And you fell in love with the country?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Almost immediately.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t meant to.\u00a0 I was honestly coming for the job.\u00a0 I love traveling, always liked to see different parts of the world but I didn\u2019t intend on staying.\u00a0 I thought, let me stay two or three years with this contract, and see what they\u2019re doing, and then move on.\u00a0 And then the story of my life changed.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>: Like the original story in your first book, I guess, where \u201cFinn Bell,\u201d also from Africa, ended up staying. You also began Dead Lemons <\/em>with a pretty overt literalization of a generic terror trope, which is cliffhanging.\u00a0 That was deliberate, wasn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0Look, my books are fiction, and that was a nod to the idea of a \u201ccliffhanger.\u201d However, my books are also based on a scaffold of true crime, which is drawn from old case files and prison interviews, and work I used to do for the police, and court records, just stuff that I used to have to do on the job.\u00a0 All the \u201cindex\u201d crimes —<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>: \u201cIndex crimes\u201d?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: Index crime is a common term in law enforcement for the more serious crimes– murder, rape, theft\u2014that get tallied when serious crime rates are determined, as opposed to non-index, or less violent and less severe crimes. In forensic settings typically we\u2019ll refer to ‘the index crime\u201d when speaking of an individual offender or group of offenders. Here it usually means either the most serious crime an individual or group has been sentenced or charged with, or that has the greatest risk of recidivism that they\u2019re currently being treated for.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>: Thanks. So, all the fictional crimes in your books are based on real index crimes?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: Yes, like that cliffhanger that opens Dead Lemons<\/em>, that really happened.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 So, there really was a person in a wheelchair who was hanging over a cliff?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes and no. I have to respect the privacy of my sources of information, so I do adapt, and I do camouflage significantly.\u00a0 The case in question occurred when a man became aware of the fact that his neighbors were drug dealers.\u00a0 This was down near Invercargill<\/a>[1]<\/sup>.\u00a0 It was a good few decades ago.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think he\u2019s even alive anymore, but I\u2019ll keep the names out of it.<\/p>\n

At one point, the criminals next door figured out that he knew, and he figured out that they knew that he knew, and he was wheelchair bound, and they took him for a ride under the pretense of going pig hunting. Halfway to the seaside cliffs he started getting suspicious.\u00a0 So, while they were still driving along in this \u2013what we call a \u201cute\u201d; you\u2019d call it a truck, or a flatbed–he grabbed the steering wheel – he was quite strong in the arms from being in a wheelchair – and wrestled it away from the driver. Because he was panicked, thinking that as soon as they stopped, he would be in trouble. A man in wheelchair – how is he going to defend himself? So, during the struggle they went over the cliff, the ute got stuck, and the driver went through the window, fell, and died.\u00a0 The guy in the wheelchair managed to stay in the truck, and that was the key event.\u00a0 When the police found him \u2013 he was alive; he made it \u2013the whole messy story came out.\u00a0So that was not something I made up. It happened. I don\u2019t think I could have made it up, I don\u2019t think I have a particularly good imagination.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Well, but the cliffhanging part \u2013the whole truck was hanging over the cliff? Not just the guy in the wheelchair, as in the book?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0It became wedged as it went down.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>: It just turned out to be a literal cliffhanger?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 In the book you keep coming back to the scene over and over again with jump cuts between the events of four or five months before and the present scene where Finn is trying to figure out, \u201cCan I let myself just fall on the rocks, and crawl away before the rest of the bad guys show up?\u201d<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: I interviewed this person and at that time \u2013 he was by then much older–and obviously, it was to him a traumatic experience. Being there trapped, not able to leave, injured, hanging there, wondering when this truck is going to fall, and just as in the book, he could see the other guy\u2019s body way down below him. This was not over the water\u2014that I added\u2014but he could see where the body below him was.\u00a0 I had several conversations with him \u2013 this was in prison, quite a bit later, because he had his own set of choices to make in life–and there were moments in the conversations when his mind kept jumping back there and you could see that he never really left it behind even years later.\u00a0 I think we all have a story to our lives, where we are now, and where we were. It\u2019s the story we tell ourselves.<\/p>\n

That experience didn\u2019t fit inside his story.\u00a0It interrupted him, consistently. I was very attracted to that idea \u2013 the idea that something could happen to you that\u2019s so far removed from your sphere of experience and expectation that you had to keep resetting and confronting yourself. That was the basis for the jump-cut narrative in Dead Lemons<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And I remember when I was talking to him, it was captivating; it was captivating to see him try to fit this real thing that happened to him into how he views his life, and what his world is supposed to be. And that repeating moment occurred over many years of his life.\u00a0 It was more than a few decades after the event when we spoke, and still he never really got out of that truck.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 So this character\u2019s predicament is based on someone you knew, but you said that once you had chosen Finn Bell as the name of your protagonist \u2013<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Because I lost the bet.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 \u2013 yes, because of the bet\u2014then he started to assume features of your own life?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes, once I ended up with both of them\u2014the author and the protagonist\u2014named \u201cFinn,\u201d and then like I said, I had that lyric stuck in my head, \u201cI\u2019m an idiot walking a tightrope of fortunate things,\u201d all at once I started feeling, \u201cThat\u2019s me. That character is me without all the good luck. Me without good fortune.\u201d<\/p>\n

I kept thinking, really, how can I have this searing amount of good fortune in my life?\u00a0 How come me, and not the people that I work with? Why am I so special? Because honestly, after a while, you spend enough time in prison to make you realize there\u2019s almost no difference between them and you.\u00a0 People like to think that there\u2019s a difference, that the extremes of depravity and darkness, these things that some people do, are beyond you. You think, \u201cOh, I would never do that.\u201d\u00a0 And then when you spend enough time with them, you realize that that\u2019s just the stuff you tell yourself to sleep at night. \u00a0If you\u2019re hungry enough, if you\u2019re hurt enough, I think you\u2019ll do anything.<\/p>\n

Once I started basing Finn Bell\u2019s flaws on my own, a few things got dragged along.\u00a0 I wanted a character to express experiencing New Zealand as an outsider, because I don\u2019t think anybody born here can really appreciate what they have. How fortunate they are. If you come from Africa, and you come here, you just cannot compare the two.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an unequivocally humbling experience to think that there\u2019s such distance in the world between how people live.\u00a0 How can you have this much when other people have so little? \u00a0I come from that and I wanted something of that in the character.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>: But there are also elements that might seem extraneous to readers, even incongruous, like the Benin twins, who are the twin detectives that just come out of nowhere, except (as far as I can see) your own African experience and knowledge of Africa.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Well, Benin is a lovely place.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 But then, telling us there are more twins in Benin than anywhere else, as though this explains why there are twin African detectives here, in New Zealand? This is what I mean by risk taking!<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Oh, if you\u2019re talking about the writing process, then it\u2019s unconsidered. For me it\u2019s like blinking or breathing.\u00a0 It\u2019s weird when you think about it.\u00a0 I don\u2019t try to think about it.\u00a0 I just do it.\u00a0So, what comes out is what comes out.\u00a0It started as a therapeutic process.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 That was one of my questions, as a matter of fact.\u00a0 Do you want to pursue it?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Sure.\u00a0Look, I wasn\u2019t a very good therapist.\u00a0I wasn\u2019t.\u00a0 I took shit home with me that you shouldn\u2019t.\u00a0 You really should not.\u00a0 But if you\u2019re going to be in forensic psych, you\u2019re going to work in prisons and other hard places, you\u2019re going to see and hear stuff you don\u2019t want to.\u00a0That\u2019s part of the job.<\/p>\n

And I was fine.\u00a0 That was the weird thing.\u00a0 I thought I was fine.\u00a0 There was this tipping point that I reached without feeling it at all, which tells you that I was not in a good space, anyway.\u00a0 It was the most inconsequential thing.\u00a0 I remember it clearly \u2013 but first I need to tell you it\u2019s not like on TV, right?\u00a0It\u2019s not CSI<\/em>, or any of these weird crime shows with colorful offices, and very attractive people bouncing around between crime scenes.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 The characters are always very attractive.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Right, it\u2019s nothing like that.\u00a0 All it mostly is, is quiet, dingy government offices, and e-mails, lots of e-mails with horrible attachments.\u00a0 That\u2019s the job.\u00a0 Nobody anywhere in the world has money for all the exciting ways they do stuff on TV. You don\u2019t hold a crime scene open for all these people to come and stand around in. Usually whichever uniformed guy is on the scene takes photos (usually on a cell phone) and sends it to the working groups.\u00a0 It gets forwarded on along with the rest. Which means down the line your job is looking at e-mails with horrible attachments, just lots of e-mails full of reports and things.<\/p>\n

So, getting back to my answer, by this time I had done crime scene work, a lot of ministry of justice stuff, lots of profiling and prison work. I was in the field a while and it\u2019s like anything.\u00a0 You get used to it. At the time I was – what? \u2013 about ten years in?\u00a0 Fine with most things.<\/p>\n

And then I got an e-mail, just another day at work, and I opened the e-mail, and the case was about a man who had killed his wife, and two children \u2013 twins, young girls \u2013I think around four years old.\u00a0 And him and his lawyer were pushing for temporary insanity due to drug use, nothing special.\u00a0 It\u2019s the kind of stuff that comes across your desk, right?\u00a0 And it had the attachments, as they do, and one of them was a photo of a cricket bat lying on the side of a bed, just kind of sticking over the edge, and where the light met it you could just make out the teeth embedded in the cricket bat\u2019s face.\u00a0 So, he\u2019d used the cricket bat as a murder weapon.\u00a0 And I know that maybe this sounds extreme, but if you\u2019re in the field it\u2019s really not particularly.<\/p>\n

And yet, it was this one inconsequential thing, another-day-at-the-office, nothing particularly tough or special about that one detail, but I went home, and I could not get that cricket bat out of my head. I couldn\u2019t. It was the first time that had ever happened to me.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 And you\u2019d seen all kinds of weapons, of course, and wounds, and \u2013<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes, I\u2019d seen some things. And there\u2019s safety around you, right?\u00a0 You have a therapist while you\u2019re a therapist.\u00a0 You have a supervisor; you have check-ins; you get assessed.\u00a0 So, it\u2019s not that I was irresponsible, or floating without supervision. I\u2019d just reached that point in myself, I think. And that was really it. From then on, I started writing. I think it was about two weeks later.\u00a0 And the writing became a way of sleeping.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 You were having trouble sleeping?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes. For me the stuff at work . . . it\u2019s like you reach a point in yourself where you just can\u2019t go on. It started keeping me awake, and it never had before. I\u2019ve always kept a journal, and kept diaries, but now they shifted more towards the index crimes.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 So this is where the 3:00 a.m. moments come from, in Dead Lemons<\/em>?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes, yes.\u00a0[Laughter]\u00a0 That\u2019s true. And that\u2019s what started the writing, and then over time that developed into \u2013 oh, I wouldn\u2019t call it art, but narratives.\u00a0And it became a way, I guess, for me to wrap some kind of answer around these questions.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 So, when you were journaling, was it a process of creating hypothetical situations in your mind?\u00a0 Did it somehow make the transition into fiction in the journals?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 It literally started with base analysis.\u00a0 I wrote down the specific index crime, or case, or issue that I was unable to sleep on, which was typically just stuff at work. And after a while I started categorizing them, as you would in my job, and started looking at central themes.\u00a0And then I started doing the analysis on myself, which is what I was trained to do.\u00a0 If I was a plumber, I\u2019d try to find the leak.<\/p>\n

And I guess, from there I just tried in my way to feel safe using my own skill set, trying to understand what it was about these things that I couldn\u2019t leave at work anymore.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Like what bothered you or obsessed you so much about them?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes. I tried to find a way to make sense of what was scaring me.\u00a0 Because none of this was new.\u00a0 I\u2019d done this for years.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Are the books themselves a way of working along the same lines, working things out?\u00a0And do the books represent topics, or themes, or subjects, or characters that are in your mind that you can\u2019t stop thinking about?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes. That\u2019s it.\u00a0 Look, that\u2019s why my titles are weird.\u00a0 Everybody says, \u201cYour titles make no sense.\u201d\u00a0 They make perfect sense to me. They are about things, experiences that I\u2019m trying to find words for.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 For what it\u2019s worth, they make perfect sense to me.\u00a0 You even spell it out for us in Dead Lemons<\/em>\u2014in fact, in every book. I might be wondering about the title as I\u2019m reading along, but at some point, not very far in, I\u2019m going to find out.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Again, for me, it\u2019s the things that bother me.\u00a0 That\u2019s how it started.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 It was therapeutic.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes, it still is, but turning that into writing that other people would read, that was further down the road, and not something we\u2019d really considered.\u00a0 Lisa, my partner, talked me into it.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>: She talked you into writing?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Into journaling, or into writing fiction?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Writing fiction.\u00a0 She said, \u201cYou should put a cover on this.\u201d<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Is she a writer, herself?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 No. She\u2019s not, but she read what I had written.\u00a0 I had shown her stuff, and she encouraged me to take the leap.\u00a0 But honestly, by then, I had accepted too many promotions at work.\u00a0 At some point people are going to offer you steps up that you can\u2019t refuse. I was uncomfortable with the clinical work by the time the offers were made, finding it hard, so I took the promotions to get away from it.<\/p>\n

And I took the next promotion, and the next promotion.\u00a0And by the time I was 34 I was the national manager in our rehabilitation organization, and I had an apartment in Wellington, living and working away from my partner, Lisa, in Auckland. The writing had grown by that point, and I was further and further away from the actual clinical work. But it still bothered me, and does now. Maybe I\u2019m never going to get out of that car hanging over the cliff, either.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 It was lingering. And it\u2019s the inspiration, your artistic \u2013<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Oh, artistic is a big word to slap on what I\u2019m doing.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Oh, I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 I mean, I work on crime and detective fiction, which once upon a time was not very respectable as an academic subject.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: I\u2019m not an artist.\u00a0 I\u2019m just a guy who writes books.\u00a0 I\u2019m not into the whole identity of it.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Frankly, I don\u2019t like making those distinctions between Literature with a capital L and everything else, but sure, go ahead.\u00a0 Whatever you want to call yourself is fine with me.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Anyway, I was working in Wellington, and the whole job had changed by then.\u00a0 I shifted into funding work, which is an evil you unfortunately have to put up with to get the jobs done in the field. And I remember I came home one night, and I realized that I didn\u2019t feel bad about a single horrible thing I did that day.\u00a0 And I really should have.\u00a0 [Laughter]<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the point where I knew it was time to quit.\u00a0It was time to do something different before I completely lost the ability to even sense that I was doing the wrong thing. By then the writing had evolved significantly. I talked about it with Lisa and she said, \u201cWell, you should take the risk, and do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 So, we\u2019re back to risk-taking, aren\u2019t we? You leave counseling entirely behind, no going back, no hedging your bets.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 No.\u00a0I\u2019m writing full-time.\u00a0 This is me; I write books.\u00a0 We\u2019ll see how it goes.\u00a0 I might not write books forever, if the money doesn\u2019tcome in. But we\u2019ve taken the leap, fully.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 It is a full-time job, as far as I can tell, for anyone I\u2019ve ever talked to who makes a living writing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>FB<\/em>: Yes, and it\u2019s early days, still.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been in the market a little more than two years, since June of 2016, when I released Dead Lemons\u00a0<\/em>and Pancake Money<\/em>. Since then, I\u2019ve done the others.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Well, The Easter Make Believers<\/em>is out, but is the fourth one done yet?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Oh, it\u2019s done.\u00a0 We\u2019re just waiting on the release. It should be about April or May.<\/a>[2]<\/sup><\/p>\n

CR:\u00a0 And are you still happy with self-publishing in the Kindle format?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes. But there are a lot of people who are very opinionated about being traditionally published as opposed to independently published.\u00a0 I\u2019m okay if you\u2019re one or the other or both.\u00a0 I started independently just because I thought nobody\u2019s going to publish this.\u00a0 It\u2019s not firmly decided, but I haven\u2019t exactly had publishers hammering down my door either.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Really?\u00a0Given the prizes you\u2019ve won already?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: I think it\u2019s a competitive marketplace, and I don\u2019t know if I write the kinds of things that the most people want to read currently, commercially. We\u2019re maybe past about 60,000-ish in sales, so it\u2019s not big.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 But it\u2019s nothing to sneeze at.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0But I\u2019ve got to eat, so at some point it\u2019s going to need to do better than that, or I might have to get back to my day job.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 That\u2019s one advantage of having an established publisher, I suppose: the publicity machine, and all the rest of it. Book signings.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes, but I do like the freedom of publishing independently.\u00a0 Everything on the page is exactly how I want it.\u00a0 Nobody else edits it; nobody else tells me what I can\u2019t write.\u00a0In Easter Make Believers\u00a0<\/em>there\u2019s a line where the lead character, Nick, pulls a piece of wood from his chest, and he says, \u201cFuck you, you fucking fucker,\u201d which is a real line that somebody yelled at me once during a therapy session. When I wrote that, I thought, \u201cI\u2019m going to publish that sentence,\u201d and I knew right then that this book was never going to be called art, because look what I\u2019ve just put in there. I don\u2019t know if I could have gone to a traditional publisher with that line in there.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>: I don\u2019t think most of them would have a problem these days.\u00a0 I really don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: Maybe, but then I can\u2019t complain about how things have gone as an independent author. Last June [2018] I\u2019d been in the market about a year, and things had gone surprisingly well.\u00a0 There\u2019s no way to say this without sounding horribly arrogant, but at that time I had two books published, and I\u2019d won nine awards and had an Amazon best seller.\u00a0 I felt pretty good about that.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>: You should.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 That\u2019s when Lisa, again, said, \u201cNow, look, we should really try and approach traditional publishers.\u201d\u00a0 She said to get an agent.\u00a0 So, we were responsible.\u00a0 We asked around and did some research, and worked out who the good agencies were, and the relevant agents, and all that stuff and built a list of \u2013 I think it was 40 agents, good agents.\u00a0 Sent them all of it.\u00a0 Every single one of them said, \u201cNo,\u201d which to me was unsurprising.\u00a0 Lisa was quite floored.\u00a0 She said, \u201cBut you won all these awards, and you\u2019ve had all these sales and everybody likes them.\u201d<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 My reaction is Lisa\u2019s–I\u2019m surprised.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: I wasn\u2019t at all. I don\u2019t think what I\u2019m writing is mainstream enough. But I should say that some of the feedback was fascinating.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Such as?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 I had three different agents tell me there\u2019s no way that they could publish this book, which I\u2019m fine with, but the reasoning given was roughly because it\u2019s a male lead character coming from a white Western culture to a bicultural country like New Zealand, and then solving the mystery without any help from characters with other cultural identities, and without any strong female leads. Now I didn\u2019t think that was actually the case in the books at all but I\u2019m sure it could be interpreted that way. So, basically, the feedback was that it was a chauvinist book.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 But the guy\u2019s in a wheelchair, so you\u2019d think the people-with-disabilities advocates. . .<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes, you would. But I quite enjoy the feedback, especially the negative reactions. For instance, when you are cruel to animals in a book, a lot of people, including on Amazon and Facebook, get really upset. I\u2019ve had no end of complaints. There\u2019s actually a term for it \u2013 \u201canimal hurt porn.\u201d<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Which fictional animals are we talking about?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 In Dead Lemons<\/em>, there is one (and only one) scene where the main character\u2019s pet cats get nailed to the front door, right?<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Right.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: There are very vocal people on the Internet who will tell you in no uncertain terms that this is not okay. I\u2019ve tried to point out that I\u2019ve done much more horrible things to the fictional human characters in my books than to the fictional animal characters, and yet that has carried very little weight.<\/p>\n

And, again, that was based on an actual case, where somebody had done that with somebody\u2019s sheepdog.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 To get back to autobiographical topics, when we were e-mailing back and forth, you told me that you were 12 when Nelson Mandela was released, and suddenly everything around you in South Africa changed. I\u2019m wondering if you could tell me more about your family circumstances at that point, and how your family reacted to all of these changes?\u00a0 You said that the next day you went to school, and it was like the country\u2019s whole history had changed.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: It was very strange.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 This must have impacted more people than just you.\u00a0 It must have impacted your whole immediate circle?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 It was a country tearing itself apart.\u00a0 To give you context, I grew up in a very small town in the wine country in the mountains. It\u2019s still there.<\/p>\n

This place was a bastion of the old South Africa, of the cultural norms, and the key tenets of apartheid.\u00a0 It was all there.\u00a0 That entire economic system, and the culture that floated on top of it, was ultimately based on a form of slavery. There was no way that they could work the farms and produce that amount of wine and wealth without significant amounts of inequality. \u00a0That was just part of the system.<\/p>\n

Now, I didn\u2019t see these things when I was a kid, not at first.\u00a0 You\u2019re born, and you accept the world you see for what it is, and you believe the grown ups: your parents, and your teachers, and the church, and the minister.\u00a0 They tell you how the world works, and you go, \u201cUh huh,\u201d but then the cracks start to appear, the narrative doesn\u2019t always fit what you see; the map doesn\u2019t always fit the reality that you are confronted with. But back when I was a kid, I just did the same things I saw the grown ups do. I didn\u2019t think about it.<\/p>\n

So, I lived in a tiny little town, with a river running right through the middle of it, and of course, this being Africa, in summer the river is just a bed of rocks.\u00a0 And, this being South Africa, one side of the town was white, and one side was black.\u00a0In the summer, after school, all the boys from both sides would come to the two riverbanks, and we would throw rocks at each other.\u00a0 And we did that because that\u2019s what we did.\u00a0 There was no conscious reasoning to it.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 And how did the adults look at this\u2013 it was just the way things were?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 It was just the way things were. I don\u2019t remember anyone ever stopping us or talking to us about it.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Your parents, too?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes. We were all just a part of our time I think, in as much as I, from the perspective of a child, could understand such things.\u00a0 But I knew as I got a little older that there were changes coming; that something was wrong with the country. There were killings, and bombings, and the black resistance had become more and more active.\u00a0 But a lot of these things happened beyond the sphere of an eight- nine- ten-year-old\u2019s awareness, and then, when I was 12, Mandela was released, and that was a chaotic time.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Please forgive me for asking, but you\u2019re Afrikaans, right? Not British?\u00a0 Aren\u2019t those distinct groups within South Africa?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: It\u2019s broader than that, a little bit more complex. South Africa has 11 national languages, which means back when I was a kid everybody pretty much spoke their own language and also either Afrikaans or English so that you could get along and understand everybody else.\u00a0 But Afrikaans was definitely the legacy language of oppression. People spoke it because they had to, they made you. That\u2019s my language. The language I was raised in. It\u2019s my mother tongue; English is my second.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 You are writing your books using English as a second language?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes. I learned English from books mostly. And even though language mattered back then, it wasn\u2019t the most important thing at the time, with the segregation, the apartheid. The important thing was whether you were white or you were not.\u00a0 Everybody that was not white still belonged to a diverse group of ethnicities, and cultures, but they all shared one thing: they were not white.<\/p>\n

And everybody that was white was \u201cEuropean\u201d \u2013 it didn\u2019t matter what language you spoke.\u00a0 That was how they made that divide, which stems from colonial times, I think.\u00a0 A lot of issues within southern Africa, not just South Africa, in my opinion derive from before \u2018black\u2019 and \u2018white\u2019 even met. I think part of it comes from the fact that many of the tribes prior to European colonialism were nomadic. They had territories but they also moved around a lot. They moved with the rain and they had been moving around for millennia, quite possibly.<\/p>\n

Then the Europeans came, and they had lived in a different way for a long time. They always built settlements, actual structures at key points.\u00a0All of a sudden, there\u2019s a map; there are borders, and lines, and places, and roads, and boundaries and people telling other people \u201cThis is mine now. You can\u2019t come here.\u201d\u00a0 And not dissimilar to most examples of Western colonialism, the expansion was quite rapid. And those two ways of life met and the systems just didn\u2019t work together \u2013 one was about sharing and one was about ownership.<\/p>\n

Our country, South Africa, was an extension of that not-working.\u00a0 It culminated, I guess, with the fall of the regime.\u00a0 I mean, zooming out for me, of course, as I grew older, I realized that there was more to it. Bigger things. There were economic sanctions, and international pressure, and larger timelines, and elements of momentum, but for a child, these things were irrelevant.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t see it.\u00a0 I heard on the radio that Mandela was being released, but nobody I knew had known this was coming and nobody really knew what it meant.<\/p>\n

I remember walking home from school and my friend was walking with me. His house came before my house on the way home.<\/p>\n

And when we got to the turn of the road, where we could see his house, his father was packing very rapidly, in a kind of panic, throwing things in the car.\u00a0 And my friend\u2019s mother saw him, and yelled for him to come, and he ran and they left that day. They only came back several days later.\u00a0 There was such fear. But nothing happened.\u00a0 The fear people had about the world ending didn\u2019t come true.\u00a0There were still killings and violence. In a way it never really stopped, even now, up to the present, that level of fear and uncertainty infects everything. But it was always there, I do remember that. Although I didn\u2019t understand it or have the words for it at the time.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Did your experiences with apartheid, and then with the end of apartheid, play any role in exciting your interest in forensic psychology, or questions of good and evil, or human motivation generally?\u00a0 Was there anything in the way that you were brought up that\u2013<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 No.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 No?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Well, a more accurate answer is, I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 It might be the case, but then maybe I would have been the way I am even if I grew up elsewhere. Nature or nurture, that debate\u2019s open.\u00a0 I remember things bothering me.\u00a0 I saw things that I didn\u2019t understand and wish I did and then also saw things I understood that I really wish I didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Like?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Well once . . . I saw a man who worked for my father \u2013 a black man \u2013 I saw him hang himself from a lamppost.\u00a0 I saw him do it.\u00a0 That was a scary thing.\u00a0 I saw him do it. I had seen people hurt other people before then, but I had never seen anyone do something bad to themselves before.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 How old were you then?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 I want to say seven or eight, because I had just started going to school, and we started going to school at seven back then.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Why did he hang himself?\u00a0 Or wasn\u2019t it explained to you at that time?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 No.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t at the time.\u00a0 But the bit that stayed with me was, I didn\u2019t get the sense that anybody really cared.\u00a0 Even then, I had that moment of realizing that if this was a white man, everything would have stopped.\u00a0 Everything would have changed.\u00a0 But they just cut him down, and I remember it clearly, very clearly, they put him on the back of the ute \u2013 what you would call a flatbed truck.\u00a0 They put him on the back.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t even put a towel or blanket over him, or anything over him, nothing; he was just lying there, face up.\u00a0 I remember that. Then people started working again. And that was one of the earliest times when I thought something about life doesn\u2019t make sense. Something\u2019s not right.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t have the words for it then.\u00a0 But I knew that he was different from me, that if that was somebody white, it would have been an important thing.\u00a0 But they cut him down, and they put him in the back of the ute, and he lay there for a long time, maybe an hour, before they left.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 And you were allowed to stay there, and watch all this, when you were only seven?\u00a0 Or did your parents not know that you were there?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 This was at my dad\u2019s workplace. There were a few people around, and I wasn\u2019t the only kid there but no, nobody said anything to us.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Oh, I see. Oh.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 And I found out later that the black man who hung himself had been accused of stealing by a white man. I don\u2019t know whether that was true or not, but I do know now that if you were accused of stealing in the old South Africa and you were black, then you were going to starve.\u00a0 In that old South Africa, there was nothing for you now. No one would employ you. No one would help you. You were going to starve.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Literally?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes. This is Africa. It\u2019s not like here. Back then, you\u2019re dead. Your family is dead.\u00a0There\u2019s nowhere for you to go. Nothing for you to do. I didn\u2019t understand that then but realized it later on as I got older \u2013 what it meant if a white person accused a black person of something bad. There was nothing left for that person then.<\/p>\n

But look, this all seems misleading.\u00a0 I feel like I shouldn\u2019t give you these big key events, these big moments, because ultimately, they don\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 It\u2019s interesting to me to hear you say they don\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 They don\u2019t. Here\u2019s why: these big, key things, yes, they can disturb the equilibrium of the psyche; they can impact the way we see the world.\u00a0 They can scar you to a degree, but ultimately, what makes you, you, aren\u2019t those big juddering events, it\u2019s the small things that happen over and over again every day. I think the slow accretion of character is much more fundamental to who you are, and how you see the world, than these few big things.<\/p>\n

These big things, whether they are good or bad, we want them to mean something.\u00a0 We want to build a story out of them.\u00a0 It\u2019s natural.\u00a0But if you look at the psyche, it\u2019s the small things that happen over and over again, it\u2019s the countless small accepted traumas of a normal life that will ultimately shift the trajectory, shape you and change you. And I can\u2019t say that I\u2019m free of that.\u00a0 We talk about these big things because they\u2019re easy to remember.Everybody remembers pain; your brain is built to remember pain better than anything else.\u00a0 But it\u2019s all the small things, all the invisible small things that I think end up meaning more.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 I\u2019d like to move on to the question of literary influences, if \u201cliterary\u201d isn\u2019t too big a word to use?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Oh, \u201cliterary\u201d it is!<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 You told me at one point in our earlier discussions that it was your grandfather who introduced you to Sherlock Holmes?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Was this your paternal or maternal grandfather?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Paternal grandfather, Scottish.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Was he a big reader?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: \u00a0He was.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 And a fan of detective fiction?\u00a0 Or just of Sherlock Holmes?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 I think he was a fan of everything.\u00a0 It was difficult to know for sure, as I was young.\u00a0 But definitely he loved books and reading.\u00a0 He was by far my strongest influence.\u00a0 No one else in my family were really readers.\u00a0 But he was a very big reader, was my grandfather, and he was a great storyteller, too.\u00a0 He could tell bullshit stories of the highest order, just all kinds of nonsense.\u00a0 And you know how young kids ask adults how things work, or why does this do this?\u00a0 Well, he would tell you complete and utter hogwash, but he lied in such flawless ways that you bought it.\u00a0 You believed him. You thought this was how it worked.\u00a0 And then, you would innocently pass on his lies to other people who knew better, and they would laughingly correct you.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>: So, he was very persuasive?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: He could spin a rational framework out of complete lunacy, and with a straight face, explain to you, \u201cThis is how this works, and this is how that works, and you see that.\u201d\u00a0 And you bought it. Even after you knew he\u2019d fooled you before. He was so good at it that you fell for it again.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Do you think he had more of an influence on you than just introducing you to Sherlock Holmes, like getting you interested in storytelling\u2014which, after all, is just another word for \u201cmaking things up\u201d–since he had that gift?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 I don\u2019t know. I do know I wanted to be like him.\u00a0 I do know that.\u00a0 I definitely admired him, the kind of person he was.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 What did you admire most about him?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 I\u2019ve thought about that many times.\u00a0 I think he had a kindness to him that, sadly, I don\u2019t find in myself.\u00a0 But maybe kindness is the wrong word. You know how some people have kind of gravity to them; other people want to be around them?<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 And you don\u2019t necessarily know why different people have that same quality.\u00a0 Some of them are loud, some of them are quiet; some of them are funny, some of them are not. But certain people you just feel good being around them, being close to them.\u00a0 He had that.\u00a0 He had that thing.<\/p>\n

And maybe kindness isn\u2019t the right term, although he was a very kind man. I just liked him. If you\u2019re a boy, I think you choose your role models, sometimes consciously, sometimes not.\u00a0 He was mine.\u00a0 I wanted to be like him.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know if that carried over into the storytelling.\u00a0 I never intended to be a writer.\u00a0 I never intended to do anything of the sort. Like I said, all of this is a fairly recent development, and in many ways for me it\u2019s nothing more than a belated coping skill.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 You said that he introduced you to Sherlock Holmes with The Speckled Band<\/em>?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 That was the first story of his that I read all by myself. He introduced me to Sherlock Homes way before.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 He read the stories to you?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes. I would be at pains to tell you when it started, because even in my earliest memories it had already happened.\u00a0 He read us books, all kinds of books.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 So not just Sherlock Holmes, but among them Sherlock Holmes stories?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0And he had a great voice.\u00a0 I would fall asleep listening to his voice.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 And The Speckled Band <\/em>was the first one you read on your own?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 On my own, right.\u00a0 That was a great thing. I had read the dumb \u2018Cat in the Hat\u2019 things before then but I had never read a real story about real people up to then. It\u2019s a different experience when you actually read something that you think is true and real by yourself for the first time.\u00a0 It\u2019s cognitive, and it\u2019s immersive, and it\u2019s emotional.\u00a0 And I had heard the story before, and we had discussed it, and he had kind of taunted me, and said, \u201cOh, you can\u2019t really read this.\u00a0 You\u2019re not ready.\u201d<\/p>\n

He did help me with the big words, but I remember that was the first story I read.\u00a0 It\u2019s not a long story, but it\u2019s good.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 The snake? The helpless damsel?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: It really grabbed me. It\u2019s still one of my favorites.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 You said one of your current favorites, or one of the authors who are your favorites besides Conan Doyle, is Cormac McCarthy, especially his No Country for Old Men<\/em>. Do you see any links between these two stories, which are both about having to deal with unmitigated evil?\u00a0 I\u2019m thinking of Grimesby Roylott, who was the incarnation of evil in The Speckled Band<\/em>, the stepfather who murders the one stepdaughter, and then he plans to murder the other one the same way, so he could get hold of their inheritance?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Again, I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 There might be, and it would make a good story, but I can\u2019t consciously say that that\u2019s so.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Ok, but sticking to classic detective influences, what about Golden Age detective writers, like New Zealand\u2019s own Ngaio Marsh, for instance?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: A real favorite of mine, Marsh, even long before I came here.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>: Agatha Christie?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 But look, I\u2019m in no way extremely well read, I read what I read, and I read all over the place, but I feel like a lot of the crime fiction I read these days is less formulaic than it should be, and I think there\u2019s a motive behind that that can be most annoying.\u00a0 I feel like too often writers are trying to be different for the sake of being different, instead of just trying to write a good story. Maybe it\u2019s a sign of the times; maybe it\u2019s because writers are more commercial now, and you have to have these considerations.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 I ask about Marsh and Christie because there are moments in your three books where I\u2019m saying, \u201cThis is almost like something I would have found in Agatha Christie,\u201d despite the dissimilarities in style and subject matter.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 That at least I can say is completely intentional.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 So, for instance, in chapter 43 of Dead Lemons<\/em>, you have someone saying \u2013 I think it\u2019s Finn saying, \u201cAll the pieces have been there all along; we just didn\u2019t see.\u201d\u00a0And that\u2019s exactly what those crossword-puzzle type of classical detective stories —<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes, that speech I can say is completely intentional, because I do love the older method writers.\u00a0 I think that there\u2019s a purity and simplicity in those formulas. And I get why people evolved beyond that, and I\u2019m not saying that you shouldn\u2019t, but a lot of what I\u2019ve seen in the last \u2013 what? \u2013\u00a0 two decades is people trying to be different for the sake of being different.\u00a0 Pushing a boundary because they think that on the other side of the boundary is art, instead of recognizing that the art is in the mastery, and that the formula is not Agatha Christie\u2019s.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t try to invent a formula.\u00a0 She tried to get closer to something pure, something simple in storytelling and the formula was the result. I don\u2019t know. Maybe people need to be less focused on branding, and standing out and being different, and let the story be what the story wants to be.<\/p>\n

But for me personally, absolutely, following those patterns are intentional.\u00a0 And I get criticized for it.\u00a0 People say, \u201cOh, your denouements are too long. You\u2019ve built all this tension, and then you slowly deflate it with this big explanation at the end,\u201d and yes, it\u2019s intentional.\u00a0 It\u2019s not something I want to change.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 And that\u2019s the classic form, isn\u2019t it? The detective figures it out, and then assembles all the suspects in the library, and explains how he or she came to the conclusion, and points to the one who\u2019s \u2013<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Exactly.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 \u2013 and there it is staring us in the face the whole time, but we don\u2019t see how the pieces all fit together.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 See, that\u2019s completely intentional, but people say that I\u2019m too predictable.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 What I enjoy, as someone who studies this genre, is seeing these threads of continuity from one generation of writers to the next.\u00a0 I enjoy being able to say to myself, \u201cOh, this is a cliffhanger,\u201d or, \u201cOh, this reminds me of Miss Marple.\u201d You have a description of a forensic psychologist, Ann Bowlby, in Pancake Money<\/em>.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yep.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 At one point, you describe her as a \u201ctiny, old lady, friendly wrinkled face, and gray curls in a flowery dress with the mind of a serial killer.\u201d\u00a0 And it\u2019s not word for word, but it\u2019s very similar to Christie\u2019s descriptions of Miss Jane Marple in The Body in the Library<\/em>.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes. I know.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 And you know? Sir Henry Clithering tells his friend Conway Jefferson, \u201cSitting in the lobby of this hotel is a spinsterish looking little old lady with\u2026\u201d \u2013 not the mind of a serial killer, but something like \u2013 \u201cwho is familiar with the sink of human iniquity,\u201d and so forth.\u00a0 It\u2019s all there?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: Yes. It\u2019s funny how much flak I get for it from a lot of critics, but too much of what I read these days makes me want to throw the book at the wall, or drown the Kindle. Just because it\u2019s new or different doesn\u2019t make it worth reading. Often, I go back to the older forms. I still read a lot of Sherlock Holmes, and I read all genres.\u00a0 One older book I\u2019m currently reading is \u2018A Good Clean Fight\u2019<\/em>by Derek Robinson. It\u2019s almost 30 years old and it\u2019s not crime fiction. But it captures a snapshot of the time and has a style reminiscent of the older forms.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 When was it written?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 I think it was the early \u201890s, but it is set in 1942.\u00a0 Ironically, another book my granddad gave me.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Please tell me more.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: My grandad was in North Africa during the Second World War, and the book and the way the story is told reminds me very much of how my grandfather used to tell stories.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 And classic storytelling?\u00a0 That\u2019s what it sounds like.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Well, the stories he told me matched this, yes. Both this and Sherlock.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>: Were there other Cormac McCarthy books, like Blood Meridian\u00a0<\/em>that you read?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: Yes, but No Country for Old Men\u00a0<\/em>is probably my favorite, because of Sheriff Ed.\u00a0 I like him.\u00a0There are parts in the book where the way that character says things summarizes, I think, a moment in experience that I just attach to.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know why, but I do. There\u2019s a scene where he sits with his wife, and he talks about seeing his father in a dream.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes, and he\u2019s carrying a light in the darkness.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 It\u2019s such simplicity.\u00a0 It\u2019s a simple scene.\u00a0 There\u2019s nothing dramatic about it, but there\u2019s a humanity that is so easy to connect with. He does that, does Mr. McCarthy.\u00a0 And maybe that\u2019s why I identify with that character. He reflects somebody who\u2019s trying to deal with a world he doesn\u2019t understand.\u00a0 Horrible things are occurring, and he\u2019s trying to fit them into a way of life where he can still be himself.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 His familiar world has just gone over the edge into an abyss, and he doesn\u2019t know where the bottom is.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0Maybe for me that\u2019s the attraction.\u00a0McCarthy writes many good characters, and many good books.\u00a0 But that has always been a very attractive character for me.\u00a0 I am a serial re-reader of good books.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Good.\u00a0Me too.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: I don\u2019t know \u2013 do you think it\u2019s good to re-read books? Because there are so many books you can never get to, after all.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>CR<\/em>:\u00a0 It\u2019s a question of quantity versus quality.\u00a0 There are some books, Great Expectations<\/em>, to name one that I\u2019ve read five or six times, or Middlemarch<\/em>, that demand to be read more than once. But to return to Miss Marple, I see many of her \u201cdescendants,\u201d if you will, in your books. There\u2019s Betty Crowe, Finn\u2019s therapist in Dead Lemons <\/em>and Ann Bowlby, professor of forensic psychology in Pancake Money<\/em>, along with Angus Woo, the crotchety Otago doctor with the man\u2019s name, and Margaret, the mother of Tobe, the older of the two detectives\u2014she\u2019s the psychiatrist in Easter Make Believers<\/em>–they are all older women, wise, tough, independent-minded older women.\u00a0 Are they based on a character in your life?\u00a0 There are a lot of them and they all seem to have the key to what\u2019s going on in the criminal psyche.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Maybe that\u2019s a combination of my own life, and a part of the job I used to have, and my grandmother.\u00a0 [Laughter]\u00a0And so \u2013<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Was this the grandfather\u2019s \u2013<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0My paternal grandfather\u2019s wife, she was South African born.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 He was Scottish and she was South African?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes. She was a very outspoken woman, tough, and very forthright, very direct.\u00a0 I never understood what the connection was between them, because he would spout bullshit constantly.\u00a0 Sometimes you couldn\u2019t get an honest word out of the man.\u00a0And she was harder, humorless at times, frank, straightforward. But it seemed to work.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>: They seem complementary.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 At one point, when I was in my mid-teens, 15 or something, I visited my grandfather and grandmother\u2013 [laughter] \u2013 and when I walked in the back door into the kitchen, I saw my grandfather looking at me from a few steps away. At first, I thought he was nodding at me, but no, he was ducking.\u00a0 My grandmother had thrown a teacup at him, which ended up hitting me instead and spilled all over the floor.<\/p>\n

There was a crack in the floor and suddenly my grandmother started yelling about getting the tea out of the crack, because if it goes into the crack and there\u2019s milk in it (as there was in the tea) it stinks when it dries. I was so shocked–because I wasn\u2019t used to having cutlery thrown at me by my grandparents–I was so befuddled that I just wordlessly grabbed the dishtowel and tried to clean it up while she kept yelling after my retreating grandfather and I kept wondering, \u201cWhat\u2019s happening?\u201d<\/p>\n

When I had finished cleaning, I stood up and handed my grandmother the dishtowel, and she looked at me as if noticing me for the first time and said to me–and I can remember this vividly: \u201cAll women should marry, but not to men!\u201d\u00a0 [Laughter]<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 She\u2019s no longer alive, I take it?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 No.\u00a0They have both passed.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 But it seems she had the same kind of personality that I find repeated with variations in these wiser, older women in your books.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: I can\u2019t say if that\u2019s a conscious choice or not.\u00a0I can say, though, that I\u2019m a very staunch feminist, because of the work I\u2019ve done.\u00a0 There is an undeniable uncomfortable reality if you work in crime, and forensics where you are forced to confront the stark differences between the kinds of crime perpetrated by men and perpetrated by women.\u00a0 That\u2019s just true.\u00a0 So, I don\u2019t know for sure if those early influences from my grandparents got in bed with my later working life, and growing up I saw the damage that men can do to people, to a country, and it was difficult for me to take even before I started working.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>: Your grandmother\u2019s personality\u2014direct, no-nonsense \u2013 is so strikingly present in your books, she must have represented something important to you.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 That\u2019s yin and yang, though, right?\u00a0 If you believe in the negativity of one aspect, naturally, you\u2019ll start believing in the positivity of the other, to create a sense of balance. I think in a way that was how it worked for me, if I sincerely believe that men are capable of terrible things, then maybe I need to believe that women are capable of the opposite.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 If that\u2019s so, then the seat of wisdom will be with an older woman, won\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes. Maybe, naturally we seek some kind of safety, I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 My suspicion is that my strong female characters are a combination of my own past, and the stuff I\u2019ve seen at work.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 You know, you are so aware of and so deeply informed about how environment affects human behavior, and crime, and therapy, and so on, I was surprised to read\u2013 I think it was in the notes you add at the end of Pancake Money<\/em>\u2014that you believe it\u2019s time to bring back the death penalty.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Do you really believe that?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 But why, if you credit the absolute power of chance in determining our fates, and the value of therapy?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Let me say, first of all, that very few people who have been in the field a long time are unlike me, I think.\u00a0 If you\u2019re in the field long enough, you will have seen the kind of suffering that goes on inside most penal facilities, if it is a choice between quality of life or quantity of life, then I\u2019ll choose quality.<\/p>\n

And I would hope that somebody chooses that for me if I can\u2019t choose it for myself.\u00a0 The suffering that we put some of these offenders through is massive, and often we do not have the science to cope with them.\u00a0 We are nowhere near addressing in a tangible way the needs of many of the people we incarcerate.\u00a0 And the scary thing is you can work with them, and spend time with them, and there\u2019s intimacy there.<\/p>\n

And then you start to realize how little choice they had in what they were going to do, that set of crimes, or that index crime, at that moment, was almost inevitable for them.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t even just them.\u00a0 It started with their parents and grandparents, and trauma, and socioeconomic factors, and it accumulates and intersects in this single human being making this single choice. But then as a society we say, \u201cYou \u2013 you the individual \u2013 you alone will now pay the price for the sum of all our pathologies that this one terrible act comes to. You alone, in isolation from everybody else who influenced you, and who influenced them, and so on\u2014from all that intersected in this choice.\u00a0 You, as an individual, we will crucify alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 So you think the death penalty is more merciful.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 In some cases, yes.\u00a0 And I can put the same question to you.\u00a0 If I said to you, \u201cHere are your choices:\u00a0 We could give you a dignified death now, or we could leave you to continue in your depravity and sickness for decades more and then let you die in pain, ashamed, alone in prison.\u201d\u00a0 Which would you choose? And to be clear, a lot of those people do suffer, real suffering.\u00a0They don\u2019t want to do the things they do, but they know they will. They\u2019re \u201cDead Lemons\u201d–the books became a way to describe people like these.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve had people ask me these same questions you are asking now about whether I would support the death penalty or not or about the moral or ethical underpinnings of what we do. Honestly, at first, I gave them the stock, standard answers.\u00a0 Because if you toe the party line, you say what the science says, whatever policy currently demands you say. But then, you get into the field a few years and you start looking at the actual results.\u00a0 You look at what we call recidivism rates, or the likelihood that somebody will reoffend, and you look at what we know, and how little our best efforts currently can help people to change, and how little hope there is in some cases.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 So, it\u2019s not a question of punishment; it\u2019s a question of \u2013<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Mercy. No, it\u2019s not punishment.\u00a0 No, not that. It\u2019s what I would want if that were me, and it could be me, trust me.\u00a0You spend enough time in there, and you realize how little difference there is between people, and how little of what you think is you is really you; how much of your life is created by things beyond you, how random the world can be, how cruel. If that were me in there, if I had no way of changing or being or doing better and hated what I had become, I would want to be afforded the dignity of choosing not only a dignified death but also a moral one.\u00a0 If we actually had the science to help people, to change people, this would be a different conversation, but we don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 But there are psychopathic killers who apparently have no sense of suffering, or remorse, or is that just something that I\u2019ve gotten from too many TV series and movies?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 There are people like that yes. That\u2019s completely fair. But that\u2019s a different conversation from the one about ending suffering or being allowed to choose to live (or end) your own life on moral grounds. If you\u2019re a pedophile, who realizes what you\u2019re doing is wrong, but you can\u2019t stop, and you know that you cannot be released from prison, because the impulse has become too strong and the court declines your request for chemical castration, what do you do? \u00a0You don\u2019t want to be what you are but you can\u2019t change it. What then? What if that person knows that there\u2019s nothing anybody can do to help them be different from the way they are, and they sincerely judge themselves to be not worthy, to be something that they find abhorrent and antagonistic?\u00a0 Do we say, \u201cWell, here\u2019s the treatment model; try this. Maybe it works this time, even though it hasn\u2019t every time you\u2019ve tried it before. Here\u2019s the latest talk therapy; try that.\u00a0 I know it\u2019s not going to work but jump through the hoop anyway and hope.\u201d\u00a0 How is that moral or humane? For, me it\u2019s not a question of punishment.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 The word \u201cpenalty\u201d in the death penalty is the tricky word, then.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: Yes, penalty implies punishment, but for me it\u2019s a question of mercy. Whether that\u2019s right or wrong, or whether people agree with it or not, that\u2019s a different matter.\u00a0 Would I say that I would rather end somebody\u2019s life unwillingly, or allow them the right to end their own life, on terms where they can feel a measure of dignity, an act of morality, where they and we can feel that that is an ethical choice, versus forcing them to continue to deprave and demean themselves often against their own will, and in defiance of what they would want to be?\u00a0 Yes, I would.\u00a0 Would I say that it\u2019s okay to kill a psychopath, because he has no ability to feel remorse?\u00a0 No.\u00a0That\u2019s another question entirely.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 But as it stands in Pancake Money<\/em>, that opinon doesn\u2019t come with all of this explanatory context.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 That\u2019s true.\u00a0But look, the statement still stands, and I still stand by the statement.\u00a0 My thinking behind it, perhaps, is different from what you had assumed.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 In that case, \u201cassisted suicide\u201d might be more accurate than \u201cdeath penalty,\u201d and would prevent confusion.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes, that too, but also the death penalty unchosen. Given the context of my field, there are so many cases where you wish that all this could have ended long before. And we don\u2019t end it, or allow those who are suffering to end it.\u00a0 That is Dead Lemons,\u00a0<\/em>that is the book\u2019s key concept.\u00a0We have these people in our prisons, and they suffer, and they create suffering for others. That is their entire lives. Pain and suffering. I\u2019ve seen that. Sometimes you are assessing a prisoner, and you look at them and you realize if this person gets released from prison they\u2019re going to do it again. This is the end of somebody\u2019s family sitting in front of you.<\/p>\n

Whatever kind of brief reprieve from the anger and the pain that they get in these moments of violence, or sexual release, these stolen moments of intimacy that they use to just find a way to not feel the constant trauma sitting inside them, they know that they are going to crave that for the rest of their lives, it\u2019s all they have. Because there is no way that we can change it, help them be people.<\/p>\n

We can\u2019t fix them.\u00a0 We can\u2019t heal them.\u00a0 We can\u2019t make it better. I have had those moments where I\u2019ve sat in those rooms, and I thought if we could kill you now, instead of four decades from now, look at all the suffering we could prevent for your victims, and for you, and for the people who love you.<\/p>\n

And again, it would be a different conversation if I knew we had the science to help people, but we\u2019re nowhere near.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 I wanted to ask about something that could be related to my last question in ways that might emerge. There\u2019s a lot of Catholicism in your books.\u00a0 Were you raised a Catholic?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 No.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 But you\u2019ve got Bobby Ress, an important character in Pancake Money, <\/em>who, it seems, was the basis of the first combined book that you conceived, right?\u00a0Was that great big book originally the story of Bobby Ress, who was a detective, got fed up, reached a point of despair, and became a priest? And if so, what happened to change him?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Well, there\u2019s a story arc you\u2019re skipping over between Dead Lemons <\/em>and Pancake Money<\/em>.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Does it have to do with something happening to Emma, Bobby\u2019s girlfriend, and her daughter, Eva?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: I\u2019m not telling.\u00a0 [Laughter]<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Well, they\u2019re there in the early going, which is in Pancake Money<\/em>, the prequel.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 But they\u2019re not there, afterwards, when he\u2019s the priest in Dead Lemons<\/em>, right?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Well, they\u2019re not characters jn that book, yes.\u00a0 They don\u2019t have any screen time. There\u2019s another book that\u2019s set between those two.\u00a0I don\u2019t want to give anything away.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 That\u2019s a book that\u2019s going to come further down the road?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0When I wrote Dead Lemons\u00a0<\/em>and Pancake Money\u00a0<\/em>at the same time, I untangled them, and the bit that\u2019s left from the untangling, that\u2019s the book in the middle.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 That tells us how Bobby Ress became a priest?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 When I saw that Bobby Ress, the priest in the first book, was formerly Bobby Ress, the detective in the second book, I said, \u201cAha!\u00a0 The beginning of a series detective figure.\u201d\u00a0 But no.In your third book, Easter Make Believers<\/em>, a book that\u2019s tailor-made for religious themes, the lead detective is Nick Cooper, not Bobby Ress. Why not?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 I don\u2019t know. But, again, you can tell that this is not a consciously commercial venture. You don\u2019t publish the third book, then the first book, and then the second, if you\u2019re out to build a fan base.\u00a0 [Laughter]\u00a0But I\u2019d like to answer your question.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Right, why all the Catholicism?\u00a0 Where is that coming from?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: I think religion, in general.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 There are a lot of other religions out there.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: But Catholicism is the most fun.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Well, having been raised a Catholic, I would have to say I disagree with you.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 When I say \u201cfun,\u201d I mean the levers are big, and easy. It\u2019s so fundamentally against what is inside most people. That\u2019s been proved true now to a boringly depressing degree, what with all the cases of child molestation by priests across the world.\u00a0It\u2019s a global phenomenon.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not a member of any specific faith, so I judge them all equally, and equally negatively, if I may say so.\u00a0 I don\u2019t judge people for their beliefs or for their commitments to their beliefs, but I definitely don\u2019t trust any kind of organized religion. I\u2019ve studied how church history developed, it became a bit of a hobby with me, because I was interested in that point where science is born and separates from faith. Where people start disagreeing about what is true and why.<\/p>\n

You think about where truth comes from, where what is right and wrong, and real and true in the world, where it comes from. For millennia, the disciplines were melded. Science was not separate from the religion, and neither was law. It was all just one kernel of wisdom, and there were these caretakers of the wisdom, and they told you everything about how to live.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 It was all divine.\u00a0 All divine wisdom.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 And then, at some point, you have the kind of split where science begins to disagree with the dominant narrative of religion, and then law shifts slightly, and other disciplines follow. In other parts of the world, different examples of the same thing occurred at different times.<\/p>\n

But I was interested in the question, at what point does knowledge become separated from faith?\u00a0 And for me, Catholicism is the most striking example of the struggle to hold them together.\u00a0 Because they tried for centuries to bring knowledge back to faith by burning people, and imposing sanctions and punishments and all sorts of things.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Well, they also tried to rationalize Catholic doctrine.\u00a0 There are no better reasoners in the world than the Catholic theologians.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 True. But what I enjoy most is the Church\u2019s attempts to keep pulling in their errant children\u2014the sciences.\u00a0 You can almost hear the Church fathers of the past saying, \u201cCan\u2019t you all just shut up and stay close to me, so I can keep you under control.\u201d That to me is very human and it probably won\u2019t surprise you to learn that my grandfather hated Catholics.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>: It doesn\u2019t surprise me at all.\u00a0 He was probably a good Scottish Presbyterian.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes, he was, but in his retirement he worked at a Catholic Church as the custodian.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>: A church of believers that he hated.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes. But he was an exceedingly kind man and he had a way of enjoying the hates that he had.\u00a0And I remember as a small boy on school holidays I\u2019d go stay with my grandparents.\u00a0 So, I would go to the church with him, and while he was fixing things, he would tell me just the most ridiculous stories about what Catholics do, and how they are, and because he was such a good bullshitter, I of course believed it all. That may have helped trigger my fascination with Catholicism.<\/p>\n

One time, in his inventive way, he told me his version of Catholic history, and I just remember it being very funny and human. His stories were nothing like the Church I had grown up in, had been made to go to at home when I wasn\u2019t on holiday. Of course, that all changed later when the country changed, when Mandela was freed; then you didn\u2019t have to go to church anymore. Up to that point, the church had gotten government money.\u00a0 Apartheid\u2019s political framework, its rationale, its propaganda, was all explained in church. Stories for kids. They explained to you why white people were \u201cthe chosen people,\u201d and why the black people needed to be helped. There was the \u201cspecial enlightenment,\u201d and the \u201cgeneral enlightenment\u201d that God gives, and he\u2019s given us this special mandate to take care of the land and the people, and how we need to help them. That we are the custodians. They said nothing about oppression.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 But why make Bobby Ress a Catholic priest? Why not a Presbyterian minister?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: When I said that Catholicism was the most fun, I also meant as a literary mechanism. It is tangible and it easily creates tension. Traditional Catholicism is so anachronistic; so at odds with the way that people live now, but I think also in the past.\u00a0 There\u2019s always been such a distance for them between how things are and how things ought to be.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Things of this world, and things of that world?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: Yes. They delineate sacred and profane in such a willful way. That difference between how things are and how things ought to be is what, for me, made Catholicism the most striking example of forcing the gap between them wider and wider while trying to narrow it. For instance, let\u2019s desexualize our priesthood.\u00a0 How has that worked out?<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 But the Catholic priests in Pancake Money\u00a0<\/em>are all generous; they\u2019re helping the people.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 And in Dead Lemons\u00a0<\/em>you have Bobby Ress helping the police.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 None of the Catholic clergy that you create exemplify the abuses that you\u2019re talking about. So what represents how things are in the Catholic Church in the two books where Catholicism is featured, especially Pancake Money<\/em>, the most overtly Catholic of your three books?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 The treatment center for priests who were sexual abusers and Pollo\u2019s experience and attitudes towards them, as well as the tangible symbols and icons of the religion.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 And the way that things ought to be with Catholicism would be represented by the benevolent priests, like Bobby Ress?\u00a0 Is that the source of interest for you?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes. I am attracted, whether it\u2019s from my past, or from my job, or just from me–it\u2019s difficult to untangle any of those–but I am attracted to that distance between how things are and how they ought to be.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Between what people profess, and how they behave?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 That also captures what some people call \u201cideology.\u201d<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes. That for me is tangible in Catholicism.\u00a0 It\u2019s visible.\u00a0 It\u2019s things you can see and touch. It\u2019s in the crucifix; it\u2019s in the prayer beads; it\u2019s in the confessional booth.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Is the concept of sin something that you found interesting, or intriguing? It plays such a big role in Catholicism, where it\u2019s something that can be absolved through the ritual of confession. In Pancake Money\u00a0<\/em>you even bring up its etymology, it\u2019s origin in the idea of \u201cmissing the mark.\u201d<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes. I\u2019ve always been fascinated by the concept of sin and with whether it has an opposite. But also, mostly about whether if sin exists (and I do believe it does) whether it can actually be absolved.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Perhaps it can\u2019t.\u00a0 But I think that\u2019s part of the tension that fascinates you, between what things are and what they ought to be, missing or hitting the mark, if you will.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Which leads us to Buddhism.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>: Yes, in one of our email exchanges you said that for you writing crime fiction is the literary practice of Buddhism.\u00a0 But you also said you couldn\u2019t accept\u00a0Buddhism because it has no concept of sin.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Buddhism is a beautiful thing, and I admire people who align with any ethic, any rubric of understanding that they think is going to make them better people.\u00a0 I respect any person\u2019s commitment to making themselves better. In no way do I judge people for it.\u00a0 But as I said in that e-mail, I\u2019m a man who\u2019s uncomfortable with my own beliefs.\u00a0 I wish I didn\u2019t believe the things I do, but I do.\u00a0 The reason I don\u2019t like my beliefs is because, for better or for worse, I\u2019m married to this concept of believing things that are (to me at least) observably true in reality.\u00a0 Can they be reality tested? Do they explain the world? My former job has led me to believe some horrible things about the world because they are undeniably real, not because I like them.<\/p>\n

Getting back to Buddhism, let\u2019s consider the first two of the eight precepts:\u00a0 the first of them is that you shouldn\u2019t kill.\u00a0 Secondly, you shouldn\u2019t take what\u2019s not given\u2014that\u2019s against stealing, but it\u2019s essentially the same thing, right? To not take something from others. And yet nothing that lives can live without killing, taking another life, whether that\u2019s directly, or indirectly, whether you are physically killing the things that you are using as a food resource, or depriving something else of the resources to live.\u00a0 Nothing that lives doesn\u2019t kill. But for me the concept of not taking life at all (as with many other religious or philosophical concepts) simply fails to explain the world as it is \u2013 whether I would like it to or not is irrelevant.<\/p>\n

A lot of the uncertainties and also certainties that I have, a lot of the things that I can\u2019t seem to put behind me, are the result of logical inconsistencies that I know to be both true and irresolvable in the world.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 You mean in any religious outlook?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: Yes, but sticking with Buddhism, how do you get past these first two precepts? I know that people say, \u201cOh, the precepts can be interpreted in different ways, and there are ways to function within them.\u201d\u00a0I believe that that might be the case for many people, but what I want for myself \u2013 and it\u2019s selfish, childish perhaps, I know\u2013 is something simple. An undeniable belief. A way to understand and explain the world that can withstand my own most cynical scrutiny. I know it may be childish but what I want is something simple and true that can give me peace.\u00a0 Peace without death. And I don\u2019t think the world is going to give me that.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t sound childish at all.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: I want to believe in good things, I can say that\u2019s true. But also, irrelevant. What\u2019s true doesn\u2019t take my wishes into account. I have not seen any tenet of faith in any religion that I\u2019ve encountered (and I\u2019ve looked at a few) that stands up to objective observation, objective reality testing.<\/p>\n

There are many that I would want to be true if I could wave a magic wand.\u00a0 Most of them have beautiful stories, have realities that I would love to be a part of.\u00a0That would be God, and that would be Heaven, and these would be the rules, and how happy we would be.\u00a0 But when I look at the world, at what people do to other people, I cannot explain the bulk of human behavior, including my own, looking at it through the lens of any of the faiths that I\u2019ve encountered.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 You seem to have a rather standoffish attitude towards organized religions.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Very much so.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Okay.\u00a0You seem nonetheless to be unable to not think about these things.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: I very much value the results of organized religion, just not organized religion itself.\u00a0 [Laughter]<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 And yet I would argue that you are a religion-obsessed man, based solely on your third book, The Easter Make Believers<\/em>, which is essentially a book-length secular allegory of the death and resurrection of Christ, which is certainly the creation of a highly organized religion.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Do you know how few people pick that up?<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 I was raised Catholic.\u00a0 Are you kidding?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: But I thought the symbolism would be plain to anybody. Honestly, I thought a lot of people would ping me on it.\u00a0 Almost nobody has, maybe only a handful of people.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>: Rolling the stone away from the mouth of the cave, and rolling it away from Christ\u2019s tomb; a father sacrificing himself for his son, instead of God sacrificing his son for humankind.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 I was sure somebody would pick that up, but so few people have.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 I\u2019m flabbergasted. Look at the title!\u00a0 And it\u2019s set at Easter! You\u2019ve had lots of correspondence with readers about this book, and none of them has said anything about it?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 As I say, there\u2019s a handful.\u00a0 I thought that all the symbolism in there was too overt. Even the timings of events. They\u2019re all in threes, like the Trinity.<\/p>\n

I felt very bad after releasing that book. I had expected that people would easily pick up the themes, because they had in the first two books. I paraphrased the Book of Luke in 22 different places \u2013 22! \u2013 I pretty much retranslated each exact phrase into newer English. But almost no one mentioned it. I felt quite bad about not having that picked up in the feedback, because I know I didn\u2019t do it well.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Were there any reviewers?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: None picked it up.\u00a0 I\u2019ve had maybe four or five people that e-mailed me who are fans of my work and picked up some of it, but that\u2019s it.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 I think the device of the gathering storm, which you return to repeatedly throughout the book, and which literally precipitates a blizzard at the end, is very effective. What gave you that idea?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: I wanted to introduce an element of the unknowable, an element that is almost God-like and that seems random, that seems beyond us, and yet that we are afflicted by, surrounded by, completely vulnerable to it–how things that are seemingly uncaring, and vast beyond us, can impact us.<\/p>\n

I wanted a way to include that sense of vulnerability, the sense of us living our small planned, controlled lives that can be completely derailed beyond our best attempts to hold on to safety and control, which is what the storm, hopefully, conveys.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 It has the same effect as the standard chaos theory illustration of the butterfly\u2019s wings in China resulting in a hurricane, contributing to this terrifying result through an infinite series of tiny, random events.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 I wanted that, but also, I wanted a metaphor for God, and that would be the natural element.\u00a0But I also wanted a natural element that illustrated a dichotomy between–and now we\u2019re back to how things are not how they ought to be\u2014between the sacred and the profane.\u00a0 It\u2019s really hard to find a natural phenomenon that lends itself to a description of something that looks pure but is actually at its center impure.\u00a0 And that\u2019s snowflakes.\u00a0 They\u2019re built around tiny molecules of dirt.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 And is that the purpose of the oil fire at the beginning of the storm, which gets things started?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Yes. I wanted something that looks pure, but at its center is dirt. And yet, the birth of that purity is something that is dirty. That\u2019s the oil, which becomes pure, becomes the core of the snowflake, in fire. I like that circular metaphor.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 It took you awhile to develop these symbols, and I was puzzled until I saw the threads coming together, but then I said, \u201cThis is interesting, it\u2019s working well.\u201d<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 I\u2019m happy to hear you say that.\u00a0 Personally, I don\u2019t know if I succeeded.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 You have for me.\u00a0 I just have one other question and it\u2019s about your relationship to M\u0101ori culture. At the end of Dead Lemons<\/em>, in the author\u2019s notes section, you talk about those who use it as another handy tool to exploit the people around them, and there\u2019s a section at the end of Pancake Money\u00a0<\/em>on the Manga Kahu gangs, M\u0101ori gangs. Did you get some negative feedback about your representations of M\u0101ori characters and culture?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Oh, endless; still do.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 And what is it?\u00a0 That these are stereotypes, or you don\u2019t understand it, or you\u2019re an outsider, so how dare you talk about it?<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 All of the above, but that sort of thing was much more intense in my previous job. After all, I\u2019m a white man from South Africa. The stereotype fits too easily. And I\u2019m confident, or appear to be.\u00a0 I\u2019m argumentative.\u00a0 I\u2019m opinionated. I\u2019m a white man from South Africa who comes into a prison system in New Zealand and sits in judgment about the freedom of M\u0101ori men.\u00a0 On top of that there is a sensitivity and a protectiveness, rightly so, in most colonialized cultures directed against Western European culture.\u00a0 And I probably look like Western European culture. So, I have to wear the white racist hat. And that\u2019s okay. I get much less of that as a writer than I did in my previous job, which is a more politicized arena, to be fair, but it\u2019s still there.\u00a0 People are a lot more permissive, or I guess more ambivalently uncaring, about what happens in the arts, than about what happens in prisons and the judicial system.<\/p>\n

And I don\u2019t blame them even if I don\u2019t agree with them \u2013 Western culture has infected the world. That\u2019s the terror.\u00a0 The terror of the culture that I identify with is that we\u2019ve gone global. We spread, and we turn other cultures into cheap copies of ourselves. So, yes, I have gotten a lot of pushback both for being born white and male in Africa and for coming here to work across cultures and now for writing about it.<\/p>\n

So not only am I a white man coming from South Africa to New Zealand and working in the prisons with the M\u0101ori, but then I write books about this, as if I understand their reality. That\u2019s the general theme of the complaint. Personally, I think the idea that I don\u2019t or can\u2019t understand another person\u2019s reality because I\u2019m different from them, at least at its most fundamental level, is just nonsense. Pain is pain. People are people. You don\u2019t need a cultural lens to understand pain. Or to connect with another human being. Caring isn\u2019t cultural.<\/p>\n

I think, perhaps ironically, that my thinking our likenesses are more important than our differences is more ethically sound than the belief that they\u2019renot.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 But you can see why that position, that we\u2019re really different, would offer the oppressed a defense against the covert appropriation of a statement like, \u201cYou know, we\u2019re really all the same,\u201d which many dominated cultures would interpret as meaning, \u201cWe\u2019re really all white, under the skin. But it\u2019s the skin that matters.\u201d<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: I can understand that, but it doesn\u2019t shift my belief in the fact that people are people, and that everybody\u2019s red\u2014the color of blood–on the inside.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>: You\u2019ve seen enough gunshot wounds to know.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>: True. The fact is, I\u2019ve not met anybody that I can\u2019t identify with regardless of race, color, creed, etcetera.\u00a0 We\u2019re all born knowing fuck-all and we\u2019re all going to die knowing maybe a little bit more.\u00a0 And that\u2019s it.\u00a0 I think when people are at the intensities of their experience, when they\u2019re as happy, as sad, or as hurt as they can be, they\u2019re all the same.\u00a0 I think we all want the same things. None of the rest of it, the stuff that we think makes us who we are or makes us different from each other, is relevant.\u00a0 I don\u2019t believe in those things.\u00a0 I don\u2019t.\u00a0Even when you boundary-test humanity, the outliers all look the same.<\/p>\n

But look, that\u2019s my opinion.\u00a0 I can\u2019t say it\u2019s right or wrong.\u00a0 I just can say it\u2019s mine.\u00a0 I\u2019ll continue to get criticized a lot.\u00a0 That\u2019s ok. I enjoy the conversations, and the comments are thought-provoking.<\/p>\n

CR<\/em>:\u00a0 Well, this conversation has been very thought-provoking, and a real pleasure. Thanks for your patience.<\/p>\n

FB<\/em>:\u00a0 Thanks. I hope it was useful.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[End of Interview]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/a>[1]<\/sup>In the southernmost region of New Zealand\u2019s South Island, the Catlins, where Dead Lemons\u00a0<\/em>is also set.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[2]<\/sup>The Lost Dead<\/em>, originally titled A Pearl For Every Child<\/em>,\u00a0 will soon be available on Kindle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An Interview with New Zealand Crime Writer Finn Bell, by Charles Rzepka, January 9, 2019 Introduction: Whenever my wife and<\/p>\n

Continue readingInterview with Finn Bell<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":779,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6842"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/779"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6842"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6865,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6842\/revisions\/6865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}