Ben Sanders. Photo / Dan Trotter
Structures imagined and real
After a three-year lacuna, Ben Sanders is back with another rip-snorting read. He talks to Craig Sisterson about lessons learned during his first decade as a thriller writer.
Wednesday morning in Hauraki, the sun climbing the sky over Rangitoto. Hump day for many, the midpoint of our working week. For Ben Sanders, it's the same - but different. Wednesday mornings are more of a borderline, the edge between two halves rather than the halfway point. The evening before, he'd headed home from his job as a structural engineer, a short journey from Takapuna to exit one realm of his working life. Now, he'd enter the other.
A decade ago, Sanders was a 21-year-old undergrad at the University of Auckland, juggling civil engineering studies by day and completing his second crime novel by night.
His second published crime novel. His debut, The Fallen – a gritty tale of kidnapping, murder, and police corruption in Auckland – had come out in 2010 and sat atop the New Zealand Adult Fiction bestseller charts for several weeks. One morning before his lectures, he'd had to get up early and head to the TVNZ studios, where he was interviewed by Pippa Wetzell and Paul Henry.
Back then, Sanders told Canvas that he tried to write every evening, except for the night before exams. Writing crime novels, he said, was a creative outlet that refreshed him and provided balance to the "rigid, structured, and scientific" nature of his civil engineering studies.
Now he's in his early 30s, a wunderkind who's experienced the highs and lows of being an author in New Zealand. His seventh novel, The Devils You Know, adds to a resumé amply seasoned with local bestsellers, awards shortlistings, international publishing deals and a Hollywood movie deal that came and went. While the successes could have allowed Sanders to focus on writing full-time, he's chosen to continue his mix of engineering and storytelling.
"When I was at university, I sort of saw engineering as a safe plan B, because I didn't think writing was going to be viable employment, it was always just going to be a hobby," says Sanders, who wrote his first (unpublished) novels while still at high school. "But now that I'm practising engineering, I really enjoy it. I'm genuinely interested in the underlying principles of it and I enjoy resolving an architectural challenge. I find it really fulfilling work."
Sanders works as a structural engineer on Mondays and Tuesdays – designing beams, columns, and necessary systems to support an architect's vision for a building – and as a novelist on Wednesdays to Fridays. A different schedule to his university days of writing novels by night but the same attitude towards living a mix of science and creativity. "I love to have that balance."
He knows he's fortunate he can compartmentalise twin careers in such a way and is grateful for the "lovely bunch of people" at his engineering job. Musing on what appeals to him about engineering and storytelling, Sanders now sees connections alongside the obvious contrasts.
"Both writing novels and structural engineering are under-manned by principles in a way lots of jobs aren't," he explains. "You don't write a novel by having rote-learned a set of rules you have to fulfil. You learn principles of how to put together a sentence that's pleasing, a paragraph that's pleasing, an overall story that has some sort of resonance. They're kind of nebulous but
they're still principles. Structural engineering is the same. You might look up exact formulae or whatever, but in terms of how you understand a problem, it's the language of it and the rules of a physical principle."
Sanders found himself doing a bit of problem-solving while writing The Devils You Know. While it's his seventh published novel in just over 10 years (and he's still younger than modern crime greats Michael Connelly, Val McDermid and Lee Child were when they published their debuts), there has been a three-year gap since his last book. Lengthy in the crime writing world.
"You're right, it is a long time," says Sanders with a chuckle. "But I suppose it sort of came as a consequence of frankly not feeling like I needed to rush. And what happened was while I was writing this standalone, I was about a third of the way through and I got a brilliant idea for my Marshall Grade character. I thought maybe I'd just tug that thread slightly to see where it goes."
Marshall Grade first appeared in Sanders' "US debut" American Blood, his fourth novel that, even before it was published in late 2015, had sparked a Hollywood studio bidding war. An ex-NYPD cop with a price on his head, marooned in New Mexico following a botched undercover operation, Grade stumbles into a rattlesnake den of gangs, drugs, and worse when he tries to find a missing woman. It's easy to see why Warner Bros outbid rivals for the screen rights and Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper was keen to portray Grade. Sanders' hero is a modern take on an Old West enigmatic gunslinger: violence in his blood, righteousness in his heart, conflict in his soul.
Grade reappeared just over a year later, in Marshall's Law and, while the first attempts at a film version eventually fell over – as so much does in Hollywood – the character continued to live on in Sanders' mind, resurfacing as he worked on The Devils You Know. "And so instead of writing one book that took me a year or 18 months, I've written two books over three years," he says.
He's also been working with a different US production company on a possible television series.
The Devils You Know introduces a new hero to Sanders' oeuvre. Vincent is ex-Special Forces but has seen enough of war and guns. He takes a cushy job as head of security for a supermarket mogul Eugene Lamar in Santa Barbara, only to discover his new low-key life of driving, surfing, and reading Martin Amis and Philip Roth may require his shelved skills when things about Lamar's life don't add up. A panic room, weapons stockpiles, dangerous debts. Nasty criminals and Lamar's neo-con daughter touting a pro-war book all complicate things for Vincent.
Sanders delivers another gripping read that plays with character expectations of his genre as it sizzles along with the razor-sharp description and dialogue the young Aucklander has become known for. While the crime and thriller genre may be renowned for twisting storylines filled with intrigue or adrenalin, for Sanders it is character and style that reign supreme.
"Character is primarily why people pick up a book," he says. "Until I was about 25, I probably read exclusively crime fiction. But I've found now that I absolutely love memoirs also, of people I admire, because it's literally a book about character. An investigation of character."
When we spoke, Sanders' current read was Patrimony by Philip Roth. "It's just terrific. Sort of a memoir of him looking after his father in the final stages of his life. It's so insightful and clever."
While he's been a published author for more than a decade and had success and acclaim at home and abroad, Sanders says he feels that in writer terms he's still young, still learning. "I remember that electric excitement of my first book, having written something that was deemed worthy for the public to lay eyes on and might actually make the publisher a little bit of money," he recalls. "It was just a thrilling experience. I suppose now, as pleased as I am with the new book, it's like relief and a little bit of apprehension, because it's my job and I need to do it well."
As he's served his apprenticeship as a crime novelist and grown into his own voice, the words of one of Sanders' crime writing heroes, Elmore Leonard, have resonated. "I remember him saying in an interview that 'the way it was told' was so important. That's where he saw his popularity – people showed up and the great appeal was the quirky manner in which he put it together."
Style, to match the substance.
The Devils You Know, by Ben Sanders (Allen & Unwin, $32.99) is out now.
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