Tara Moss keeps heads and pages turning

BILLY ADAMS meets international model and crime-writer Tara Moss in a Sydney cafe and learns not to judge a book by its cover girl.

Tara Moss cuts an unlikely bestselling novelist with a fascination for serial killers. She is tall and blond, a statuesque beauty who turns every male head as she breezes into a busy beachside cafe.

The woman with the flowing mane, perfectly applied makeup and figure-hugging top orders a tropical fruit juice. Her little white terrier dog - which never barks - is parked patiently outside.

Moss could be a model. And she is.

If first appearances are anything to go by, this is hardly how one would imagine the latest addition to today's clan of crime writers; a shadowy-sounding bunch who thrive on describing the most gruesome aspects of violent death in lurid, gut-wrenching detail.

So surely the Canadian with the radiant smile can't be one of them.

Some readers of her first tome were equally dumbfounded. Why was an international cover girl writing about a sadistic psychopath with a fixation for stiletto shoes, they asked. More shallow observers wondered why a model was trying to write at all. A model's job, after all, was to look good and refrain from repeating out loud what popped into her pretty little head.

Moss has grown used to the inevitable bimbo comparisons that seem to afflict aesthetically pleasing women who attempt to use the grey matter between their ears.

Even she was surprised by the extent of the disbelief which greeted her first novel, Fetish.

"The reaction was one of, hang on, you're a model, and models don't write books," she says. "Models are dumb, that's what people think. I had people saying to me a year later, 'Look, I thought your book would suck and it shocked the heck out of me because it was actually really good.' And they say it with total surprise."

Moss understood the reaction to a degree. After all, girls who strut the catwalk don't have a great track record as crime-writers.

Other snipers made her really mad. She heard suggestions that the book was only published because of how she looked. One writer even implied a ghost-writer had been involved.

"I wrote a note to that journalist asking her if she could imagine what it was like to work for two years on something really, really hard and then see someone imply that you didn't really do it. It hurts and it makes me angry. I said to her, lock me in a room with no windows, no books, no editors, just a piece of paper and a pen, tell me the names of the characters you want and I will write a story for you ... go ahead, I'm ready for the challenge."

The smile has vanished. She bangs her fist on the table. "If you've worked so hard on something, any implication,no matter how minor or severe, is not acceptable." she says. "Writing is not something that pays well, you don't do it for the money or glory, you do it because you love it. Then to have someone imply you didn't do it ... "

The sentence trails off. She is shaking her head so furiously the perfect blond hair has become a little ruffled. Her face looks like it is about to burst.

Moss says the main character in Fetish, Makedde Vanderwall, is very autobiographical. Makedde carries a kitchen knife in her purse. I am too scared to ask how far the similarities stretch.

Both, however, were born on Vancouver Island and worked as fashion models around the globe before going to Sydney.

When Makedde got there, her best friend was murdered, she fell in love with the cop investigating the case and became the unwitting obsession of a serial killer.

The worst obsession to afflict Moss since she settled in Australia five years ago are the regular invasions of privacy by the local media. She holds the unlikely distinction of a Canadian who is unknown in Canada, but is one the best known faces in the goldfish bowl atmosphere of her adopted city.

She says the gossip columns have linked her, wrongly, with most of Sydney's most eligible men. Recently, many column inches have been devoted to her relationship with Canadian rower Derek Porter, who moved to Sydney after the Olympics.

"I thought I had my little piece of Canada here and we had a wonderful relationship for 10 months," says Moss. "I really thought it would work, but it wasn't to be. He's gone back to Canada. We have separate destinies."

Next month Moss goes to Canada and Europe, where she is hoping to clinch publishing deals. Fetish has only been available in bookstores in New Zealand and Australia, and also on her website - www.taramoss.com.au - since it was released in 1999. Moss hopes wider international acclaim will greet her follow-up, Split, which is out in September.

"It means a lot to me that publishers know I'm not a one-hit wonder," she says.

Which brings us back to the burning question. Just what is a fashion model doing writing about crazed killers and rotten corpses? For someone whose face was the official image of Nivea in Europe and continues to grace the pages of top magazines, it seems an unlikely change of direction. "The extremes of human nature," she says. "That's what I find really interesting."

The story goes that Moss has been a budding writer since the age of 10, when she scribbled down "Stephen King knock-offs." In 1998, after sitting journalism and crime-writing courses, she won an Australian young writer's award for her short story, Psycho Magnet. She was also working on Fetish in her spare time, but never thought it would be published. That changed following an approach by literary agent Selwa Anthony.

At 27, Moss knows the majority of her modelling work is behind her. She has just been featured in the US edition of FHM as one of the world's 50 most eligible women, and has TV and other media projects in the pipeline, but television and the nature of celebrity can be a fickle business. So a full-time career as an author seems the best long-term bet.

There is no doubting Moss' commitment. She has a deep passion for her grisly subject matter.

Authenticity on the intricacies of forensic science and criminal profiling are of prime importance in her work, mirroring the styles used by the modern day crime-writing fraternity she is trying to emulate; authors such as Thomas Harris and James Patterson. Moss describes her style as "Patricia Cornwell in stilettos."

Research has taken her to the FBI's Behavioural Sciences Unit in the States, the base for the agency's criminal profiling work, and to a firing range at LAPD. She loathes guns, but wanted to know just how it felt to fire one.

She enrolled in criminology conferences ("I was usually the only one without a badge"), went on surveillance with police and interviewed FBI consultant Dr Robert Hare, of the University of British Columbia.

The realism of crime drama, and the life and death stakes, excite her most. So extensive has her research been that she firmly believes she can get into the mindset of a depraved criminal.

"Silence of the Lambs was a blueprint for the perfect thriller," she says. "Combine things like North by North West, Dial M for Murder and all that fab suspense with the profiling, and the new genre of crime-writer which involves all this fantastic forensic science, and that to me is the most gripping entertaining read you can have.

"I always loved spooky stories when I was younger. And a serial killer is the modern Nosferatu. We don't believe in vampires and werewolves but we know these people are just as scary."

Moss readily admits books like hers can exaggerate perceptions of violent crime in society. She says she draws the line at glamorising the bad guys.

"Serial killers are interesting characters, and they make for excellent suspense stories. But don't ever glorify them. They are scumbags.

"There are fantastic writers who have glorified a serial killer, and that makes me feel very uncomfortable."