Crime writer used to a captive audience

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Minette Walters has written about an old woman, wearing a medieval device designed to stop nags nagging, found murdered in a bath. She has written about cats being tortured, their mouths glued shut with superglue. She has written about a grotesquely obese woman imprisoned for hacking her mother and sister to pieces.

Given such subject matter you might expect that she would attract the odd obsessive fan.

She does. There's a bloke in Australia who has studied her works - all seven bestselling thrillers - and made a minute study of the way her brain works. Walters is at least as intrigued by him as he is by her: she'd like to see his notes. She aims to outwit him.

There's an English guy who has hand-bound each of her books in leather. "I hope you don't mind," he asked, as he presented them at a book signing. She didn't. In fact, she says, she got his card and is thinking she might get him to bind some copies for her own shelves.

But this is minor league stuff. On a Thursday afternoon in Auckland, Walters is doing lunch. It's an intimate occasion, just 103 of Walters' closest fans. Mostly they're the usual suspects: the ladies who lunch, the occasional male, and Gordon McLauchlan (here to interview Walters) who is introduced as a "New Zealand icon." Walters kills off the icon fairly quickly, using him as the example in a "how would we react if we walked in and found Gordon lying dead on the floor?" scenario.

Some of Walters' fans are a little more difficult to get rid of. Two men in suits turned out last time Walters was in town, three years ago. Today they greet her, shall we say, enthusiastically. One kisses her on the lips. He strokes her arms.

The other wants a more lasting reminder. He's snaffled three of the give-away compilation of interviews with writers Dymocks has left on everyone's seat. These are to be signed, on the page her interview appears, one for him and the others for friends. Then he wants her to sign three of her own books, in the same order.

She's valiantly pretending she remembers him - a ploy which fails when she has to ask what his name is for the signing. Which deters him not at all. A photo is what is needed next. Not just any old photo either. It has to be taken in exactly the same pose as the photo he had taken last time they met.

All of this is carried out in an unbelievably businesslike fashion. This is a fan on a mission. He could gaze and gossip (a lot has happened since their last date) for hours.

A genuinely good-natured Walters smiles sweetly even when her hair colour (it's lighter, apparently, than last time) is remarked upon. She's finally rescued by a nice man from Dymocks who acts as a decoy husband, takes her hand and leads her away. She says later that she momentarily thought he was another fan. The real one hasn't quit yet. He chases Walters through the hotel hallway to give her a gold-wrapped package. It's small and feels soft. It turns out to be a woollen scarf.

If you think this is strange (and believe me, it is. At these things people usually line up nicely, say "I've read all your books," get a scrawl and move on), the strangest thing about it is that Walters says it only happens in New Zealand. She's far too polite - and these people buy her books, after all - to hazard a guess as to what might be in the water Down Under.

The most this petite woman in the neat blazer and the sensible shoes, who talks as fast as she smokes, is prepared to say about her antipodean fans is that, "if you appear not to like it, you get much more of it."

What she is not beyond is speculating about those people who appear normal, even charming, but who turn out to be psychopaths and serial killers.

What seethes below the surface is fertile ground for Walters. The favourite trick of the writer of The Sculptress, The Ice House, The Scold's Bridle, is to play with her readers' prejudices, to jolt their preconceived ideas about right and wrong, black and white.

She won't write thrillers which present a "wonderful stable view of society where although people misbehave they will always be arrested and prosecuted. I think if you're going to write crime fiction, you have to reflect the total uncertainty that exists around us." After all, she says, it's not as though "murderers wander around with 'murderer' stamped on their foreheads so that you can recognise them in advance."

Which makes her fictional world a frightening place in which to dally. Her characters are ordinary people with obsessions and secrets, nobody is quite what they seem.

Her aunt once said to her, "Minette, why can't you write a nice little murder?" What, Walters wondered, might be a "nice little murder?"

"You could have," said the aunt, "an old lady and someone could put a cushion over her face."

Hmm, thought the crime writer: "Let's experiment - because she was getting on a bit - and see how nice it would be."

No, Walters is not interested in nice. She was the little girl who grew up reading the Brothers Grimm and revelling in the horror of those gruesome children's stories. Before she was into her teens she graduated to stories about grisly real-life crime. We love shuddering with horror, she says, and "the fact that you shuddered just confirmed your own humanity. You know you couldn't do that horrible thing."

Doing and writing are two quite different things. Her latest book, The Shape of Snakes, does not turn away from the truly horrible. There are the tortured cats, but there are the equally horrifying depictions of racism and dysfunction in suburbia.

Just where, you have to wonder, does she get all this from? Surely not from peeking through the lace curtains in genteel Dorset. But she is "very fortunate" to live in Dorset, she says, "within a 10-mile region there are four prisons." You can bet there aren't too many of her neighbours who regard the proximity of so many prisons with such unbridled enthusiasm. Or that there are too many of them who visit the prisoners inside them - as Walters has for the past 11 years.

She does it, she says, not to get material for her books (although composite characters and stories may well end up in them) but because "you'll never get anybody in life more honest than a prisoner. It's because there's nothing left to hide, so when they talk to you they reveal everything about themselves. And that's so rare in society where we all tend to keep in our departments and only show parts of ourselves at any given time."

Walters is one the genre's most successful writers; her books get made into television series, good ones too; she has fans who go quite strange when she walks into the room.

Her definition of success, though, has nothing to do with any of this. She knows she's made it, she says, because when prisoners in her part of the world are asked whether they'd like a prison visitor they say: "I want Minette Walters." There are a couple of men in Auckland who could relate to that.