Australian thriller writer Michael Robotham talks to Craig Sisterson about the importance of making characters seem real.
There is a moment of truth in writing, when you hear the voice of the main character in your head, they become real, and then everything you do is in that voice, says Michael Robotham. The Sydney-based author, who has twice won the Ned Kelly Award for best Australian crime novel (his latest, Bleed For Me, was also a finalist for this year's award), hears that voice as he writes his psychological thrillers.
But before he turned to fiction, Robotham also felt that moment of truth as a ghostwriter, crafting more than a dozen "autobiographies" for celebrities - a few of which he can talk about. "The magic of ghostwriting is the moment you capture the voice, whether it's Geri Halliwell or Rolf Harris or whoever. There comes a moment when suddenly their voice is in your head. So I could write War and Peace and make it sound like Geri Halliwell."
Robotham laughs. "But that's what it's like," he says, when the voice locks in, and whatever story, fictional or autobiographical, starts to flow.
Robotham became a ghostwriter in the mid-1990s after 14 years as a journalist in Australia, the United States and Britain. He was deputy features editor for the Mail on Sunday in London, when he met a ghostwriter who'd written autobiographies for the likes of badly burned Falklands War hero Simon Weston.
"I had no idea that people like that existed, ghostwriters," he recalls. "I remember chatting to this guy. I'd always wanted to be a novelist and [I was] thinking to myself that this might be the next step. Because there's a big jump from journalist ... where there's no story you can't write in 800 words, to [having] the patience and wherewithal to work on a single story."
Robotham developed that ability over the next decade, becoming one of a select group of "go-to" ghostwriters for major publishers. "Readers and the public don't know who ghostwrote a book, but other publishers do, so the word goes around the industry if a book you ghostwrote is successful."
Robotham watched as books hardly anyone knew he'd written hit best-seller lists and even won awards. Eventually he started writing his own stories rather than other people's, breaking through in 2004 with The Suspect, a thriller featuring Parkinson's-affected psychologist Joe O'Loughlin.
His debut was the subject of an intense bidding war at the London Book Fair, based just on 117 sample pages, and went on to sell more than one million copies and be translated into 22 languages.
Seeing his own book under his own name on booksellers' shelves was a dream come true for Robotham, who says he'd wanted to be an author since he was a teenager growing up in the tiny Outback town of Gundagai in rural New South Wales.
The son of a country high school teacher, Robotham loved reading, especially the science-fiction stories of Ray Bradbury, whose tales inspired many a Twilight Zone episode and Hollywood film.
"At a very young age, I wrote a letter addressed to Ray Bradbury," says Robotham. "Well, it was addressed to Random House, America - there was no address other than that, and six months later a package arrived in the post. It was the five books that weren't available in Australia, with a letter from Ray Bradbury saying how truly thrilled he was to have a young fan on the other side of the world. And I feel that was one of the reasons I became a writer, just because of the generosity of spirit of that man."
Bleed For Me is Robotham's sixth thriller and the third to feature O'Loughlin, an intriguing and complex character struggling with the break-up of his marriage, when an even bigger problem surfaces. His teenage daughter's best friend Sienna turns up late one night, frozen in shock and covered in blood - the blood of her authoritarian father, a retired police officer, who is found in Sienna's room with his throat slashed and skull caved in.
What begins as a court-ordered psychologist's report on a clearly troubled girl morphs into an unofficial - and by many people, unwanted - investigation into a family, the local school, and several people's pasts.
But while Bleed For Me offers a gripping and intelligent storyline, it's much more than a page-whirring plot-fest - a fact that's very important to Robotham as a writer. "I know it's got a plot and it's a mystery thriller, but it's also about fatherhood and bringing up children, and this estranged father who's still in love with his wife, and that whole family story that's behind it. I think that is as powerful as any other element of the book."
Robotham has always been interested in looking at such wider issues and at human behaviour. "To me, the whole idea that when you write thrillers they're just plot-driven, that it's not about character, is just absolute bollocks. To me character is more important than plot." The voice of his narrators can get so strong in his head, they can seem so "real", that he sometimes gets emotional when writing. "I've moved myself to tears, I've made myself laugh ... at times it's quite disturbing."
While finishing The Suspect O'Loughlin became so real that Robotham feared for the perilous state into which he'd put his hero who was about to lose everything - his wife, his career, his freedom.
"I was scared that if I got run over by a bus, no one could save him. He'd go to jail for murder. And I wrote manically for two days to get it finished, which was bizarre, but in my head he'd become so real I thought he would be trapped, so that drove me to keep writing. I can't explain that, but it's a good example of when characters take over your life. You're frightened for them, and you feel for them, and you like them a lot, even though you do terrible things to them."
Bleed For Me (Sphere $38.99)
