The first time “was pretty terrifying”, admits Roger Simpson. The long-time writer-producer, who has been a cornerstone of the Australasian television industry for half a century, isn’t referring to chucking in his job at a top Auckland law firm in the early 1970s to try TV writing, moving abroad with no job, or anxiously waiting for audience feedback.
He’s talking instead about going deeper inside the head of a character he’s known since the early 1990s. A character who looks like a real-life friend and can’t help but remind him of the most important woman of his life. That’s Jane Halifax, a middle-aged psychiatrist in Melbourne. Or Halifax f.p. as she’s better known to millions of television viewers. And now, readers.
“I’ve never before gone inside Jane’s head like I did when writing Transgression,” says Simpson, talking about his first novel starring a beloved character who had already starred in 21 telemovies from 1994-2002, then returned in a new seven-part TV series in 2020.
“When you write prose you’re required to talk about what she’s thinking, but in screen drama you portray it, you don’t say it,” says Simpson. “Because if you say it, that’s exposition, a no-no. You have to imply what she’s thinking by action and dialogue. But in a book you want people to see what’s going on inside her head. So in a way I was now exploring a whole new side of Jane Halifax I hadn’t been obliged to explore before.”
It was an opportunity Simpson never expected but relishes.
He is part way through writing a third Jane Halifax novel. The second, Resurrection, is out this week here and in Australia, the two countries between which Dunedin-born Simpson splits his time each year. He owns a place in the South Island but spends “slightly more time in Sydney, for my accountant”, he says with a laugh.
Now in his seventies, Simpson had slowed his workload in recent years from the frantic heights of working on up to four series a year. So when a publisher approached him with the idea of bringing one of Australia’s most iconic screen characters, a psychological sleuth portrayed by Levin-born actress Rebecca Gibney, to readers, he was intrigued.
And for once he had the time. “During our remake three years ago, which was even more popular than the original, the publisher came and asked, ‘Have you ever thought about books?’”, recalls Simpson. “I said, ‘Frankly, no I haven’t,’ because I’d always in the past been too busy with television.”
Working successfully in television is “a monster that eats up all your time”, he says. “You don’t have time to scratch yourself. You get on this huge production machine, you create it, then you keep feeding it. But my business partner had retired to live in Paris, and I was slowing down. I asked if the publisher wanted me to write one book and see how it went.”
They wanted three. So Simpson “jumped off the cliff again”, as he had as a young lawyer.
Without the publisher’s encouragement, he admits he may not have had the confidence to start something new at this stage of his career. A new storytelling form, that is. Because Simpson knew the character of Jane Halifax very well.
By the time Simpson created Jane Halifax in the early 1990s, he had already worked on more than 20 TV shows, creating several, and won major awards. He wrote biopics on figures like Richard Pearse, Ned Kelly and Nancy Wake, groundbreaking children’s adventures and international hits like Hunter’s Gold and Children of Fire Mountain, and several cop dramas.
“My dream as a young writer was to write Z-Cars and Softly, Softly: Taskforce, great English cop shows, which is probably dating me a bit,” says Simpson, who initially saw his move from Auckland to Australia as a stepping stone. “I’d written a pilot for a drama about mining, but it arrived just as the industry went bust. Appalling timing. I didn’t sell the show, but it did get me a job with Crawford Productions writing cop dramas. My hope was I’d write there for two or three years then get to England on those British cop shows, but that didn’t happen. My career in Australia took off, I was happy with the way it was going so that’s as far as I got on my OE.”
Like Simpson’s first TV gigs, Halifax f.p. grew out of a “no”.
The partners affectionately known as “The Two Rogers” were writer-producer Simpson and producer Roger Le Mesurier, a prolific team that created more than 500 hours of TV from 1982 to 2006, when Le Mesurier retired. Back then, they were making a big-budget serial for Channel Nine called Snowy, about the massive hydro-electric scheme built post-war in the Snowy Mountains that turned a tiny town into a wild new frontier. Gibney starred, following her success in shows like The Flying Doctors.
“Serial television, shows like Succession nowadays, was uncommon and quite risky back then,” says Simpson. “The risk didn’t pay off. We were told the series wouldn’t be renewed for a second season, but they wanted to do something else with Rebecca. It was also at a time when US networks were withholding Sunday night movies, which used to be a feature of television in Australia and New Zealand, because they were going to video instead of TV. So they wanted something for Rebecca Gibney, and something to replace Sunday night films. So we made telemovies.”
The Two Rogers wanted to create an atypical cop show – “a crime fighter without a gun”.
They came up with forensic psychiatrist Jane Halifax, a groundbreaking figure in a male-oriented world. “They wanted six telemovies, standalones that could be screened out of order,” says Simpson. “We made the first six, then 21 telemovies later we’re still going.”
Simpson chuckles about the greater freedom he now has with Jane Halifax in book form. In TV, he says, brief can define content. Because the broadcaster wanted to be able to screen Halifax f.p. stories in any order, any of Jane’s relationships had to start and end within each telemovie.
“Every telemovie had a different cast, we used different cops each time, even her assistant changed, just to make our lives more difficult,” says Simpson, with a grin. “There couldn’t be any continuity of family story or backstory because they wanted to be able to show them out of order. That’s where her serial monogamy started, because it was a factor of the brief. Now, in these books I can have her in ongoing relationships that go across the novels.”
While Simpson has been up close to Gibney’s portrayal of Jane Halifax for decades, including the hit return in Halifax: Retribution, he doesn’t envisage Gibney when writing the books.
“Because I know Rebecca and she’s a friend of mine, and she’s nothing like Jane Halifax,” he says. “It’s a tribute to her as an actor that she plays Jane so well, but when I’m writing Jane I’m not thinking about my mate Rebecca because she would make me laugh too much. She’s a very funny person. I may see the age, shape and mannerisms of her portrayal, but not her face.”
After getting deeper inside Jane Halifax’s head in the first novel, Transgression, a gruesome and gripping serial-killer thriller, Simpson kicks things up a gear in Resurrection in an unusual way. While looking into an old case, Halifax crashes her car and wakes up with amnesia. The underlying idea, says Simpson, was to explore how Halifax could find her way back from such a traumatic brain injury, and in the process have to remember and confront issues from her past, including her relationships with her father and mother in her early New Zealand years.
For young and aspiring writers, Simpson’s advice is to “ask yourself why you’re writing this story – what are you really trying to say beyond the storyline and characters? Why is the story you’re working on worth writing? If you get lost along the way, go back to the original purpose.
“The idea for Resurrection I was hanging on to was how do you get back from something like that? Even if it’s not apparent to readers, I was resurrecting Jane from a blank sheet of paper.”
Halifax’s curiosity and commitment to solving crimes means writing the character has never become stale for Simpson. When Channel Nine asked for a new TV series, he got to write about her being at a different stage of her life. “I realised Jane was in her fifties now instead of her thirties and that refreshed the character for me and gave her a whole new lease of life,” he says. “So we did several hours of television in the new series, now three books. Putting the character aside then coming back when she was older, I was very fortunate in the way that happened.”
Simpson calls himself a write-aholic. He’s addicted to writing, putting down words each day. But the Halifax novels have become something more, a way to occupy himself after the great loss of his wife Sally Irwin, who died in 2021 but continues to play a key role with Jane Halifax.
“I’m a male writing a female character, and I wondered where I got my ‘female insight’,” says Simpson. “I’ve realised a lot of what makes Jane tick came from Sally, discussing the character with her, the stories, just absorbing the way a woman I’d spent such a long part of my life with thought, as opposed to the way I thought. So writing these novels is sort of a way of honouring Sally, mourning her, keeping her alive, and also a way of coping with the loss.”
Writing as therapy. Maybe something Jane Halifax herself would prescribe.
