Meet P.M. Newton, crime author

Recently, we interviewed crime author Lenny Bartulin, one of the course directors of our Faber Academy crime fiction writing course Armed and Dangerous: The craft of crime fiction.

Now it’s time for his fellow course director P.M. Newton to have her say!

What was the first crime novel or story you can remember reading? How old were you?

It was either Murder in Mesopotamia or Death on The Nile [Agatha Christie]. I would have been very early teens, perhaps younger. The exoticism of the places is what grabbed me.

Name a crime book, a crime movie and/or a crime TV series you’d be happy to be stranded with upon a desert island. Why are they worth re-reading and re-watching?

I read and reread Graham Greene’s The Quiet American regularly. It is the perfect crime novel. When you reach the end you turn back to the opening pages and marvel at what was going on below the surface. Some may not see it as a crime novel but I’d argue it is. In fact it is a long confessional novel by a murderer who is seeking forgiveness, as well as being an achingly perceptive glimpse into what lay ahead for America and her allies in South East Asia. It is sublime. As for a crime TV series – The Wire. The layers, the characters, the humanity and the sheer outrage it channels makes it worthy of repeated viewing for crime writers.

Oh, Omar Little. How we love thee!

When did you realise you wanted to be a writer? Are there any authors in particular who you would cite as inspiration/influence?

I was writing non-fiction, some travel stuff and doing CD liner notes for African music when I tripped into fiction writing. Crime writing came about as a kind of response to being too close to a murder when I was living in India. My way of coping with the event turned out to be fictionalising it. As an ex-cop I hadn’t read much crime for a number of years, so was a bit behind the times. I started to read widely in the genre and found that Sara Paretsky, Ian Rankin, Henning Mankell, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, had the sort of approach I was interested in – the crime novel as social novel.

Tell us when, and where, you do your writing?

Wish I could! I’m not a disciplined “every day, same place and time” person. If I have deadlines and edits I can be in front of the screen for more hours straight than is healthy. When I’m creating, I can be spending a lot of time with a pen and notepad, walking, sitting under a tree by the harbour, down by the pool, doing laps and thinking about characters, plots, making notes in the shade watching the ferries pull up at Luna Park.

If you could meet any historical or real-life person, who would you choose?

Richard Feynman, the American physicist who played bongos in student productions of South Pacific in between winning the Nobel Prize, and I’d ask Carl Sagan along to help me understand the tricky bits – which would be pretty much all of it! I’m a astrophysicist trapped in the mind of a person who struggles with basic maths, it’s tragic.

If you could meet any fictional character, who would you choose?

They say you should never meet your heroes – they can only disappoint. So, I’ll go for Winnie The Pooh, we can just kick back and eat honey.

We think Ms Newton means she'd like 'HUNNY'

You have just been given the green light to develop a movie based on your book. Who would you cast and/or who would you hire to direct?

For Nhu “Ned” Kelly I’d like to think there’s a currently unknown young Australian-Vietnamese actress out there for whom this would be the breakthrough role that makes her a household name! I think Wayne Blair would make a great Marcus Jarrett. As for a director, Khoa Do; his movie Footy Legends was a classic, and he knows the landscape and the people.

What are your thoughts on ‘genre’ writing vs. ‘literary’ writing: are they mutually exclusive? If a book is a story about crime, can it also be literature – or does crime fiction have to work twice as hard to be considered half as worthy?

I’ll quote China Meiville on this as he said it so very well: “I don’t think genre is a muck to be kicked off, I think it’s a set of protocols you can do wonderful things with.” Haikus subscribe to an incredibly strict set of rules – yet I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone suggest it’s not capable of high art, or is anything less than literature. Crime fiction has the potential to succeed as art, as serious literature, just as literary fiction has the potential to fail. It’s interesting how many “literary” writers jump the fence into the crime genre paddock when they have a serious social or political issue they wish to explore, such as Michael Ondaatje did with Anil’s Ghost and Richard Flanagan did with The Unknown Terrorist. However, the twitching of petticoats that took place after Peter Temple won the Miles Franklin, not just in Australia but in Britain as well, indicates that , yes, crime fiction still has to work twice as hard to be considered half as worthy.

What is one piece of advice you wish you had been given before you wrote your first novel?

Only one? Just finish the damned first draft – it doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t even have to be good all the way through, but once you’ve finished a first draft you can roll up your sleeves and really start writing. Learn to love the drafts – you will do more than you can begin to imagine. Then find a good agent, one who loves your work, and listen to them. Before I found an agent I nearly made a serious of decisions about my book which I would have regretted as I was dazzled by the chance of publication. An agent is your champion, is your book’s champion, is the characters in that book that you have come to care and love’s best champion.

And finally, please tell us about your next book and what you are working on now?

Among a few short stories and a project as Writer in Residence for North Sydney Council, I am working on a structural edit of the second book. It takes up very shortly after the end of The Old School. Ned Kelly is on light duties, attached to a new squad when she is sent out to Cabramatta to work on the murder of a twelve year old boy. While everyone around her is focusing on the question of who shot a school boy in broad daylight on the streets of Cabramatta, Ned can’t stop asking “Why?”

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P. M. Newton spent thirteen years in the NSW Police Force before finally having enough of meeting people for the first time on the worst day of the their life. In 2011, her first book, The Old School was shortlisted for an Indie Award, a Ned Kelly Award and was joint winner of the 2011 Asher Award. It was described by Andrew Rule (Underbelly) as “an arresting debut: astonishingly accomplished and as authentic as a .38 bullet wound”. Pam has a Masters by Research from UTS in Creative Writing and has given papers on Crime Fiction at conferences in Australia and the UK. She has taught creative writing at UTS, NSW Writers’ Centre, Queensland Writers’ Centre and appeared at various writers’ festivals.