Michael Robotham's wife keeps him grounded, finds Nicky Pellegrino.
It's difficult to like Australian thriller writer Michael Robotham when he starts talking about how easily he became a bestselling novelist.
Actually, Robotham's career is covetable. After a stellar stint as a journalist he turned to ghost-writing celebrity autobiographies and for a while life was all about dinner with Meg Ryan, hanging out at Elton John's place or roller-blading with Geri Halliwell around her West London mansion. And then he knocked out 117 pages of a psychological thriller called The Suspect that publishers went crazy for.
"It was pinch-me territory," admits Robotham when I meet him for tea in a quiet corner of Auckland's Langham Hotel, "and it was frightening, like being backed as a favourite in the Melbourne Cup without ever having run the distance. All these people had faith in me and I had no idea how to finish the book."
Seven successful novels down the track, Sydney-based Robotham is as insecure as ever about his writing. "I'm motivated by the fear of failure more than anything else. With every book or article I've ever delivered I've been convinced this is the one that's going to prove I don't have a clue."
And suddenly it's hard not to like him. He is self-deprecating, charming and with a fund of entertaining anecdotes. There's the one about telling customs officials in Europe that he was researching a novel about smuggling. "They took my rental car apart, every seat and door panel came out," he says.
Fortunately he hadn't gone as far as trying to smuggle for research purposes, but still it is something Robotham takes seriously. The journalist in him feels he needs to walk the streets and visit the places he writes about. So when his wife refused to let him go to Baghdad for research on his latest thriller The Wreckage (Sphere, $39.99) he was horrified. "I had to do a lot of reading for research instead," he says.
The Wreckage is written around real facts. After Baghdad fell, $12 billion in hard currency was flown into Iraq, $9b of which has never been accounted for. Meanwhile at the height of the global financial crisis western banks on the brink of collapse accepted $352b from drug cartels and crime gangs.
This book is Robotham's fictional attempt to explain what went on, hung as much as possible on a framework of real events. It's a big global story but he tells it through the lives of the people affected. Luca Terracini is a the journalist trying to follow the trail of the missing money in Iraq and, in London, regular Robotham character, detective Vincent Ruiz, rescues a woman from a violent boyfriend and realises she's in serious danger for mysterious reasons. Plus there's a heavily pregnant woman whose banker husband has disappeared. It's page-turning stuff about money, politics and power that has bankers as its villains.
"My books are all about motivation," explains Robotham. "Even the villains have reasons for doing what they do - they're never out-and-out bad. Personalities have so many layers - that's something the ghost-writing gave me an insight into. There's this idea we want to create three-dimensional characters when everyone has many more dimensions than that."
Far from being a fanatical plotter, Robotham has no idea where a book is going when he starts writing. This means that more than once he's got 30,000 words into a novel and realised he's written himself off a cliff. Now he has plans to return to one of those abandoned manuscripts, a suddenly much more topical story about the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl.
"My wife won't let me got there for research either," he says mournfully.
