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Six years ago, Greg Fleming interviewed newbie NZ crime writer J. P. Pomare who was picked for big things. Now one of our most renowned crime writers, much has changed in Pomare’s life as he prepares to release his seventh book.
The last time I interviewed JP Pomare he was on his way to Melbourne airport and about to embark on his first promo tour for his breakthrough 2018 debut Call Me Evie. He’d just attained Silver Status on Qantas, something he never thought life as a writer would allow.
Six years on and much has changed for the Bay of Plenty-raised crime writer, not just his choice of airline - he’s switched to Virgin and subsequently racked up the air points - but also how he thinks about his writing.
“My life is unrecognisable. I’ve had a daughter, we’ve moved, and I’ve travelled quite a bit for work. I’ve gone from an excitable, perhaps naive writer to an established one. I also now appreciate the privilege of that and know better how to cope with those oscillations between supreme optimism and paralysing pessimism and imposter syndrome.
“Those oscillations are just tremors now. I never think, ‘Oh this one will be a New York Times bestseller’, but I also never think if this book doesn’t sell as much as the last that I’ll have to get a job in the mines.”
For his seventh novel, Pomare, now based in Melbourne, returns to familiar ground. In 17 Years Later, a young, talented Māori chef is hired by a wealthy British family who settle in Waikato’s Cambridge (a town well known to Pomare, whose father, Bill, is a renowned horse trainer.) When three of the family are murdered, the chef is quickly arrested and convicted.
Fast forward 17 years, and an Australian true crime podcaster stumbles across the case. She reckons it’s a perfect opportunity to add an “indigenous case” to her lily-white resumé and travels to Cambridge to investigate.
Among the usual pleasures of an intricately constructed Pomare thriller - characters who aren’t quite who they appear to be, a narrative that shifts effortlessly between characters and timelines - 17 Years Later is also a damning account of the vagaries of our justice system and pulls no punches on issues of race and identity.
Pomare describes the novel as an accurate reflection of his own coming-of-age in Aotearoa: “When people talk about race and class, their veneer collapses. We all have strong feelings about it. I’m not a sociologist or an expert but I do know my own experience and I have experienced enough racism, as a Māori, to know it when I see it.”
He points out that most wrongful convictions in New Zealand involve Māori, and a quote from the Crown’s apology statement in the Teina Pora case opens the book.
“In this book I wanted to say something about colonialism and the legacy it has given us. So, I jammed in this metaphor of a Māori chef and a British family and a potential wrong conviction, that’s all I needed as a starting point for everything else to unlock.
“I think if you’re telling this story, in this setting and time frame, these themes will always find a way to permeate the text. I do feel quite strongly about the legacy of colonisation in Aotearoa, and the way the effects cascade down each generation but I didn’t set out to explore these themes at the outset. I just wanted to write a great story that reflected my experience and the world I know.”
Pomare is often referred to as the king of the twist and 17 Years Later is no exception as it has a dizzying finale few readers will predict. It’s a skill he’s particularly proud of.
“Yes, I do plot a little bit, but I like to leave space to explore, so I can surprise myself. That’s when I know I’ve stumbled onto a little bit of gold. It’s about letting yourself get really stuck. I like to write myself into a corner and then have to blindly grope my way back out of it.”
While the novel celebrates the power of true-crime podcasting, it also delves into some of the dangers of the genre.
“Oh, there are some absolute ghouls in the true-crime podcast space,” says Pomare. “Sometimes I’ll be listening to one and realise it’s not actually adding anything positive to the discourse. It’s not doing any investigation; it’s just trying to keep people listening as long as possible.
“What’s worse is that some are glorifying horrific crimes that affect family members and victims. Then there’s the inevitable speculation around who really did it - and that’s when lives can really be ruined. You have armies of these obsessive online sleuths harassing innocent people.
“But the flipside of that is that some podcasts do amazing things - like Teacher’s Pet [a 2018 Australian podcast that resulted in the conviction of a man for the murder of a woman in 1982]. So, yes, lots of downsides but also lots of great things.”
Pomare describes the process of sitting down and watching the Disney+ adaptation of his 2020 novel In the Clearing as “surreal”.
“Luck and timing make everything happen in this industry, so really I felt nothing but gratitude when I went to the premiere and got to watch the first couple of episodes. It was always a dream to have something adapted, but I never really believed it would happen.”
The rights to 17 Years Later have already been sold, but all Pomare will say is “more news later”. In the meantime, there’s his next book to work on. Likely titled Random Acts, it is due in early 2026 and in it he returns to a character from his America-set The Wrong Woman, a private investigator called Reid.
Scottish crime writer Val McDermid - who recently toured with Pomare - was instrumental in convincing him to return to the character.
“I wanted to come back to Reid, who’s a queer character, but I had all these reservations, and I began to think I shouldn’t have written him, that this wasn’t my story to tell. When I was touring with Val and Michael Robotham, someone asked me “when are we going to see Reid again?”
“And I said, ‘no, I don’t think he’ll be back.’ Then Val, who had not once said that she liked my books up to that point, hugged me and said at the very end of the trip - literally just as I was off to the airport – ‘You’ve got to write another Reid book. He’s a great character and you’ve got just as much right as me to write him.’
“What I took out of that was you have to block out the noise and lock the ideal reader out of the room while you’re writing. Only when you open the door can you have that self-doubt, but if you’re happy with what you’re doing and you’re doing it respectfully, then there’s no reason not to do it.”
Aspects of Reid were influenced by our own queen of crime Ngaio Marsh and her gentleman detective Roderick Alleyn.
“What I liked about him was he’s a competent, but relatively normal, detective. He wasn’t a genius. I find characters like Poirot or Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe, who have this amazing insight, don’t really work for contemporary audiences and often feel cartoonish. Ngaio Marsh was ahead of her time in terms of how a detective actually operates and how to make him feel real to the reader; competent, insightful but not a magician.”
17 Years Later by JP Pomare (Hachette) is released on Wednesday, July 31.
