The View from my Window: Crime writer Vanda Symon on how St Clair Beach in Dunedin inspires her work

Vanda Symon at St Claire Beach, Otago. Photo / Glenn Symon

VIEW FROM MY WINDOW

The view from my window is wonderful. Our house is up on a hill in Musselburgh, overlooking the inner Otago harbour. One of the things I really love about having that view across Dunedin is that every day is different, with the clouds, with how the water looks, just with the mood of the city. I sit at our dining table, where I’ve written at least part of every one of my crime novels, and the view can be everything from restful and calming, to when the weather is really harsh and you’re watching the lightning across the sky, it can be magnificent and brooding and moody.

I particularly love writing in winter, when you’re feeling nice and cosy and warm, sitting at the table there and looking out the window at the wild and woolly weather, creating something.

That’s probably my favourite time to write, just seeing how that changes the whole sense and mood of the city and, of course, with my books, I like Dunedin to be a wee bit of a character in its own right, so I get to sit there and look out across its various different elements, from the water to the hills to the green belt and the actual central city itself. To the far hills where people crest that hill coming from the north and get their first view across Dunedin; we get the reverse of that.

This setting is hugely important to me, for a number of reasons, and when I say setting it’s not just the physical environment, it’s the weather conditions, the social environment at the time, the political environment. It’s all very relevant - setting and how that interacts with your characters.

My heroine, Sam Shephard, for example, comes from small-town Mataura in Overkill over to the Big Smoke in The Ringmaster and she sees Dunedin as an exciting and interesting place where there is potential and so much more scope than where she’s come from. What she sees is very, very exciting, and initially slightly intimidating, but she’s finding her ground here.

I’d already started writing The Ringmaster when we moved here, so that was a bit prescient on my part. It was only going to be a temporary move, but Dunedin does get under your skin. It just seemed such a lovely place to be, so why would you leave?

So, I stayed and sullied it with dead bodies.

It’s been exciting and terrifying all at the same time, writing Expectant, a new crime novel set in Dunedin starring Detective Shephard. Exciting because I love writing about Sam, heck I love writing full-stop. But life and doing my PhD, researching the communication of science in crime writing, meant I had to put novel writing on hold for a decade. Re-editing my older books in recent years for my British publisher meant I had Sam’s voice clearly in my head, though, so it’s been wonderful to reacquaint myself with Sam and continue her adventures.

Following on from Bound, which first came out in New Zealand in 2011, Expectant sees a heavily pregnant Sam investigating a case that hits close to home: the shocking murder of an expectant mother. About to go on maternity leave, she fights to not be sidelined from the case.

Expectant, by Vanda Symon

It’s heading towards 20 years ago that I began writing Overkill, my debut and first Sam Shephard novel, at this very same dining table, though we lived in the North Island then. My boys were toddlers when I wrote the prologue, which was inspired by a mother’s worst fears. They’re big lugs in their 20s now. Yes, the time has flown. They’ve grown, Sam’s grown, and she’s matured as well. Though I don’t know that she’s grown up as much as they have.

Writing about pregnancy and childbirth was certainly a trip down memory lane. I called on my own experiences and those of friends. It was no less intense writing about it this time around.

We’ve turned one of my son’s bedrooms into an office, where I keep items like my certificate for being shortlisted for the CWA Dagger Awards in the UK, and a very large conch shell on a really kitsch base gifted to my father from his village when he emigrated from Fiji to New Zealand. To me that’s very symbolic of my Fijian heritage, and something that stays in this space with me. My dad passed away when I was 10, so my connection with my Fijian roots changed at that time. It’s something I’ve enjoyed rediscovering later in life, and embracing it with my work coming back to university, doing the PhD, and being part of Va’a o Tautai, the Centre for Pacific Health. I’ve got this wonderful Pacific heritage, and it feels properly who I am.

But despite my office, I still like to do some planning and writing on that old dining table.

I feel very privileged and lucky to have that view out my window. It’s not just looking out at the big picture view over the harbour, from my dining table I can see my rose bushes and garden, trees and the environment around me, which, for the way I do things, is really important as well.

I have a fondness for making tea trays to settle myself into my writing, and that can involve going out to the garden and picking a rose and looking at the view and breathing in the air then coming in and making a nice tea tray with the china and the memories that come with a lot of the items I put on the tray. I’m a sentimental girl and I like to have things around me that remind me of others in my life. A milk jug from my mother-in-law. My nana’s tea set. The cute jug the kids bought me that one time. Or, if I need cheering up, I pull out the milk jug that looks like a cow.

It’s all a very important part of my ritual of settling in to write.

As told to Craig Sisterson

Expectant by Vanda Symon (Orenda Books, $27.99), the fifth novel starring Detective Sam Shephard, will have its official Aotearoa New Zealand launch at University Book Shop in Dunedin on Thursday, June 15.