Candice Fox’s characters are not for the faint-hearted.
Her characters are crims, ex-jailbirds, people who’ll apply a little (or a lot) of pressure to get what they want.
Fox, one of Australia’s leading crime writers and an international bestseller, says her characters are all different shades of grey and sometimes you don’t really know who to like.
“I don’t think people are fundamentally anything. I think everybody’s got shades of good and bad in them,” she says.
Fox will be speaking about her latest novels High Wire and Devil’s Kitchen, writing crime fiction, and her collaboration with US crime writer James Patterson at a free author talk at the Aldinga Library at 6pm, Wednesday 30 October.
A book signing will follow the talk, with copies of Fox’s books available for purchase on the night.
Fox is the author of 11 solo novels and seven collaborative novels with Patterson, including the Harriet Blue series. She has won Australia's prestigious crime-writing award, the Ned Kelly Awards, three times.
Fox sets her novels across Australia and in the US. Her books Crimson Lake and Redemption Point, featuring ex-con Amanda Pharrell and disgraced ex-cop Ted Conkaffey, are set in north Queensland.
Made into the ABC series ‘Troppo’, smart-mouthed but vulnerable Pharrell and down-on-his-luck Conkaffey face crocodiles and king brown snakes to find the human reptiles murdering locals among the swamps and cane fields.
Given Fox’s background, it’s not surprising that Fox made crime and characters like Pharrell and Conkaffey the subject of her writing.
“I’ve had a life that was surrounded by crime. My dad was a parole officer and my mum was true crime obsessed,” says Fox.
“These questions of what makes people good or evil, why do people commit crime, they are just questions that we will have over the dinner table in my family.
“Shocking crimes are just like bedtime stories for me because I’ve been hearing them forever.”
Her mother had a collection of crime fiction and true crime books – as well as grisly editions of police magazines. Fox started reading them when she was still in primary school.
As an adult Fox has interviewed a serial killer on death row in the US and listens to complete, seven-hour tapes of police interviewing real suspects.
She says that consuming so much crime has in part desensitised her to its horrors, but when she has a strong reaction to a particular crime she analyses why.
"I’ll find a theme in there usually, and I’ll pull that theme out and that’s what I end up writing about,” she says.
Her obsession with crime is shared by people across the spectrum, thrusting her books with Patterson to the top of the New York Times’ bestseller list.
“Most of my fans are women in their fifties. I do a lot of library talks and when you meet them in person they’re really polite,” Fox says. “But when they write to me online, they say the weirdest stuff.”
Fox recalls running a competition for charity, with people bidding for their names to be in her next book.
“So many people were writing in saying can I be murdered, can I be one of the murder victims? I was saying, don’t you want to be one of the detectives or I’ve got the space for a medical examiner?
“One lady wrote in and she said, ‘If I win, can I give the space to my eight-year-old son? Can you murder him, please?’”
Fox’s collaboration with Patterson began when her third book, Fall, was about to come out. By that stage she’d already suffered a raft of rejections from publishers and a book deal had fallen through. Patterson read her first book, Hades, on a flight home from Australia to Florida and decided he wanted to work with her.
For Fox and Patterson, the process of collaboration is highly structured.
“We start with an email conversation about three main things. Who is the protagonist and what’s their major struggle in life. Who’s been killed in the novel by whom and why. And where it is set,” she says.
Once they have that, they create a book blueprint with ever chapter and what happens in each, going back and forth.
“And then we just start writing the thing together and doing it as our schedules allow.”
Her solo books are character-driven whodunnits or thrillers. None of the characters are cups-of-tea, genteel types.
In Devil’s Kitchen, Andy Nearland is a brash operative sent undercover into a New York firefighting team that is both ‘geared to rescue people’ and lights fires to orchestrate million-dollar heists.
In High Wire, a track from Broome to Sydney you only take if you’re desperate or up to no good, two seemingly ordinary travellers find themselves terrorised into undertaking murderous acts.
As in the Crimson Lake series, in Fox’s tales there is always the chance for redemption.
Or maybe not.
Event details
Candice Fox: author talk and book signing
Aldinga Library, 11 Central Way, Aldinga Beach
6pm for a 6.30pm start, ends 7.30pm, Wednesday 30 October 2024
Free; book online to reserve your seat.
This is a licensed event with alcohol available for purchase by the glass on the night.
Thanks to the ABC's Conversations for some interview content.